Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

He sighed heavily.

“That was before I realized there was a tradition of the Secret stretching back to the beginning of recorded history. It has taken many different forms, but the one which inspired me to start this thing here was the Templars. They had this inner group of twelve Professed Knights who had all been initiated into the Secret. The great task I’ve been entrusted with is to re-create that holy community. I always wanted you to be part of it, Phil, from the very beginning. And now you will.”

He looked out of the window again.

“Let’s go back to the baby that got scalded to death,” he said. “How could God permit such a thing? That’s the question, right? OK, here’s the answer. He didn’t.”

I frowned.

“You mean it never happened?”

Sam leaned forward and fixed me with his intense stare.

“There was never any baby in the first place,” he whispered.

We confronted each other in silence. Sam kept staring at me fixedly, as though trying to will me into acquiescence.

“So what was there?” I asked.

“There was something that looked like a baby and sounded like a baby,” he went on in the same hushed undertone. “Only it wasn’t.”

He relaxed now, pulling back and breaking eye contact, as though the critical moment had passed.

“Think of it as a doll,” he said in his normal voice. “The most advanced doll in the world, a million times more realistic than anything you can buy in the shops. It mimics a baby perfectly, but inside it’s empty. It has no thoughts, no feelings, no capacity for joy or suffering. In a word, no soul.”

I tried to look as if all this made perfect sense, but that there were one or two details I hadn’t quite got straightened out.

“But if we have no way of knowing whether other people have feelings or not, then it’s impossible to distinguish the imitation baby from a real one. So the distinction is meaningless.”

Sam sighed and shook his head.

“You’re still thinking logically, Phil! It’s not just that baby we’re talking about here. It’s also the baby’s junkie mother and the abused wife in the apartment next door and the kid knocked down by a hit-and-run in the street outside and the guy dying of cancer in the hospital across town and the family of ten crushed in an earthquake who called for help for five days before dying. It’s every single victim of evil and injustice and catastrophe in the whole world ever since the beginning of time!”

I wondered if Ellie had brought David yet. Perhaps he was even now just a few yards away from me. But Sam had the gun, and I was increasingly convinced that he might be capable of using it. I had to keep him in play, at least for now. On the other hand, I knew he wouldn’t buy it if I just pretended to go along with everything he said. He had to believe he had convinced me intellectually.

“OK, let’s see if I’ve got this,” I said. “Bad stuff appears to happen, but it may not really, because we have no way of knowing whether the people it happens to are real.”

Sam shook his head vigorously.

“We do know. That’s the whole point!”

“But how? You just got through saying there was no way of telling the difference!”

He made an impatient gesture.

“Listen! If God is love, He won’t let anything bad happen to someone real.”

I shrugged.

“So?”

“So if it does happen to them, it means they can’t be real!”

He stamped his foot on the floor in delight.

“Get it? It’s so simple, so elegant, as only the truth can be!”

His expression suddenly became deadly serious.

“That’s why the Secret can only be revealed to a few chosen individuals. You understand what it means? It means you can do what the fuck you want! You can beat people, shoot them, burn them, torture them, anything at all! Because if God allows you to do it, the victim was never really there in the first place. He was what Blake calls a specter. An emanation, a mere shadow. ‘Why wilt thou give to her a body whose life is but a shade?’ Jerusalem, chapter twelve, verse one.”

He broke off, listening. Then he moved back to the window and reached for the binoculars.

“’Course, this is just the bare theory I’m giving you here,” he said. “To become a full initiate, you have to prove your faith in practice. And I have the feeling you might get the chance real soon.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

He adjusted the focus of the binoculars.

“Jesus!”

“What is it?”

He handed me the binoculars without a word. I raised them to my eyes. Over the tops of the trees, a wide swath of the ocean inlet was visible, a choppy sullen gray. Then I spotted the boat bouncing through the waves toward the island. It was painted blue with some kind of white marking on the side, and was smaller and trimmer than the one on which I had arrived. The man at the wheel seemed to be wearing some kind of a uniform. As the boat slowed and turned, making for the pier, I was able to distinguish the marks on the hull, large white letters reading POLICE.

19

The day after she had spoken to Charlie Freeman, Kristine Kjarstad caught the red-eye to Chicago, arriving at five in the morning. Considering the hour, O’Hare was a hive of activity. It had a buzzy, big-city feel in striking contrast to the quiet, deserted spaces of Sea-Tac the night before. Kristine could remember nothing in between except one glimpse of some town on the prairie, lines and clusters of lights like molten plasma showing through cracks in the black surface crust.

She went into a cafe staffed by two male Hispanics sporting huge gilt rings, and ordered a bran muffin and a mug of coffee that would have put the place out of business in a week back in latte-land. Dawn was just breaking, patches of dark blue sky appearing against the lowering clouds. Living in a city defined by hills and water, Kristine had been amazed by the scale and regularity of Chicago as they overflew the vast grid of streets which seemed to stretch away forever, with highways and railroad lines overlaid on it like cross-hatching.

Here at the airport, it paraded its character in a different way, in the sheer variety of the people around, and in the way they presented themselves. Two paunchy men wearing tractor caps and baggy leisure outfits sat opposite two scrawny women in thick-rimmed glasses, stud earrings and floppy pantsuits. Next to them, a group of businessmen in Italian suits were trying unsuccessfully to ignore a woman making a full-frontal fashion statement in a slinky, skin-tight sheath. There was a hip black dude too cool to look at anyone, a slutty woman of about thirty with heavy makeup and come-on hair, a crop-haired guy with tattoos on his arms and macho-military clothing, women in two-piece suits with a full complement of matching accessories.

It all made Kristine feel dowdy and provincial. Seattle was a pleasant place to live, but it was not a sexy city. No one dressed to impress, there was little eye contact and street life was like her mother’s cooking: bland, wholesome and homogeneous. She was so used to being invisible that it was a shock to find all these people eyeing her, sizing her up, weighing and measuring her. A sense of anxiety came over her, a panicky suspicion that this whole trip was based on a delusion which would instantly collapse under the weight of scrutiny it would be exposed to out here in the real world.

Rather than go through another humiliating interview with Dick Rice, she had taken a couple of days off, parked Thomas with his father and bought the ticket herself. If she came up with the goods, she would bill the department. If not, she was stuck with the tab. But it wasn’t the money that worried her so much as the prospect of being revealed as an unsophisticated, self-important hick, like some small-town genius who keeps bugging the Patent Office with plans for inventions you can buy for twenty-nine cents at any drugstore.

Outside the terminal, she picked up a cab to Evanston. The vehicle was an old Dodge with spongy shocks, a high-pitched whine from the transmission and a tendency to pull to the right when they braked. The backseat was covered in a crocheted afghan, like a sofa in a blue-collar living room. The driver was a Pakistani who had been in the country for two months. He was courteous and voluble, but seemed to have only the vaguest grasp of the local geography.

“Evenstone, Evenstone, Evenstone,” he chanted softly. “Nice town, nice streets, nice people, but is not a good place to go from here. In the city, no problem. I am seeing signs, “Evenstone,” even though I do not myself go there at this time. But from here is very difficult, I think.”

Kristine finally went back inside and bought a street map from which she gave the driver directions. The route turned out to be very straightforward, north a ways on Highway 294 and then east along a street called Dempster running dead straight for eight miles to the shores of Lake Michigan.

The cab let her off in the wedge of shops and offices a few blocks wide which constituted the miniature city’s downtown area. She tipped overgenerously, got a receipt, and then spent about five minutes going over various possible routes back to Chicago. The driver listened with a look of increasing desperation, like a man who suspects that he may never see his family again. Eventually Kristine gave him the map as well, and the Dodge lurched off, leaving a smudge of black exhaust smoke on the still air.

Her appointment with Eileen McCann wasn’t until eight o’clock, and since nothing in Evanston was open yet, she decided to wander around and pick up the feel of the place. The broad, tree-lined streets leading to the lake were lined with brick apartment buildings fixed up like fake castles, with leaded windows, crenellated roofs and turrets with arrow slits, and huge mansions in Tudor or New England style, each standing on a lot big enough to accommodate six houses like her own.

She spent a while walking along the lake, then wandered back under a low iron railroad bridge into a neighborhood of slightly less grandiose properties a few blocks inland. This area may have been on the wrong side of the tracks, but it wasn’t exactly skid row. The houses were spacious and well proportioned, the yards deep and well tended with mature trees, the streets broad and quiet. It was only when she saw the sign reading MAPLE that she realized she had stumbled on the site of the crime that had brought her there.

The house itself was four blocks farther south. She spotted it at once by the FOR SALE sign. The name of the realtor had been changed from Bonnie Kowalski to Evan Krebb. It was a lugubrious half-timbered affair with a ground floor in brick, a fancy arch over the front door, and steeply angled roofs rising to Gothic peaks. After all the unwelcome publicity the property had received, moving this home was going to be a real test of Mr. Krebb’s salesmanship.

Kristine walked on, shaking her head slowly. Of the many questions to which she wanted answers from the wounded gunman in Atlanta, none obsessed her more than the choice of target. Between the Sullivans’ home in Renton and this Victorian pile lay a socioeconomic gulf as wide as the distance between the two towns themselves. What conceivable criterion could bridge such a gap?

There were plenty of other mysteries, of course. The Dale Watson who had been involved in the Evanston case was dead, but another one had appeared in Atlanta. Was this just a coincidence, or was there a generic “Dale Watson” of whom these two were simply examples? Above all, what was the purpose behind such senseless killings? With any luck, Kristine thought as she strolled back to the center of town, she would have the answers to all these questions by that evening. Her connecting flight left at one-thirty, getting into Atlanta three hours later. By five, or shortly after, she would be at the surviving gunman’s bedside.

Despite what Charlie Freeman had said, she didn’t think it would be too hard to make him cooperate. The detail of the Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes clinched it. She felt sure that the man in intensive care in Grady Memorial Hospital was one of the two who had taken part in the Kansas City shooting, where he had stepped in the pink paint hurled in a last act of desperation by Winston Jones, the handyman. And he had also been at the house in Renton, where Jamie had seen the shoes from his hiding place. But their owner didn’t know anything about this. He thought he was safely anonymous, supposedly the innocent victim of an unprovoked street attack. Best of all, he had no idea that Jamie Sullivan had survived.

Kristine had already put together her game plan. She wouldn’t ask questions, she would make statements. She’d start by describing the Renton and Kansas City killings in great detail. Then she’d confront him with a copy of her interviews with Jamie, carefully edited to exclude the fact that the boy hadn’t actually seen the killers. Finally, at the psychologically precise moment, she would drop in the detail of the Nike Air Jordans. That would be enough to make him talk, she calculated, particularly in his weakened condition. The case against him was airtight, and in a death-penalty state. The shock of discovering that his crimes were known, documented and witnessed, added to the prospect of enduring weeks of agony in the hospital only to end up dangling from the end of a rope, would surely be enough to break even the strongest and most stubborn spirit.

At exactly eight o’clock, Kristine Kjarstad presented herself at the front desk of the police station and asked for Eileen McCann. While she waited, she surveyed her reflection in a glass door across the room. With the image she had formed of Eileen McCann in mind, she had given some thought to her own. Finally she had settled for a gray cotton-blend suit, sober but expensive, with a stiff backbone of polyester to help resist the rigors of an overnight in cattle class. Add her executive-style briefcase, and she figured she was a match for anyone.

It turned out she needn’t have bothered with any of these elaborate preparations. In person, Eileen McCann was a sad frump, overweight and out of shape, a chain-smoking fashion victim for whom every day was a bad-hair day. She greeted Kristine coolly and invited her into a small, immaculately neat office. The walls were bare, the papers and books neatly stacked, the furniture modern and functional. Even the cigarette butts in the ashtray were aligned as precisely as they had been in the pack.

“Do you have an interesting life, Ms. Carstad?” McCann asked when they were seated. “Professionally, I mean.”

Kristine shrugged.

“King County is pretty big. It stretches from the ocean all the way up to the mountains, and surrounds Seattle on three sides. So we get our share of the action.”

McCann crushed out her cigarette and laid it beside the others in the ashtray.

“I envy you. Crimewise, Evanston is strictly bush league. The most interesting case I’ve had until this thing was an alleged date rape involving two students from the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. And the only interesting thing about that was trying to figure out which of the parties involved was lying most about what. So yesterday, instead of trying to break through to a new level in the video game which my partner thoughtfully downloaded into our computer, we worked the phones and the fax and contacted four hundred law enforcement agencies and state prosecutor’s offices across the country. Correction, three hundred ninety-two.”