Carrion Comfort (33 page)

“And then what?” asked Natalie. “They can’t be punished. Not by the courts. What happens if we
do
find them for you? What could
you
do?”

Saul bowed his head, adjusted his glasses, and ran shaking fingers across his brow. “I have thought about that for four decades,” he said in a very low voice, “and I still do not know. But I feel that the Oberst and I are destined to meet again.”

“They’re mortal,” said Gentry. “What?” said Saul. “Yes, of course they’re mortal.”

“Someone could walk up behind one of them and blow their brains out, right?” said the sheriff. “They don’t rise with the next full moon or something.”

Saul stared at the lawman. After a minute, he said, “What is your point, Sheriff?”

“My point is . . . accepting your premise that these folks can do what you say they can do . . . then they’re the scariest damn critters I’ve ever heard of. Goin’ after one of ’em would be like searchin’ around for cottonmouths in the swamps after dark with nothing but your bare hands ’n’ a gunnysack. But once they’re
identified
they’re as much a target as you or me or John F. Kennedy or John Lennon. Anybody with a rifle and a good sight could take one of them out easily enough, correct, Professor?”

Saul returned the sheriff’s placid gaze. “I do not own a rifle with a sight,” he said.

Gentry nodded. “Did you bring any sort of gun down from New York with you?”

Saul shook his head. “Do you
own
a gun, Professor?”

“No.”

Gentry turned to look at Natalie. “But you do, ma’am. You mentioned that you followed him into the Fuller house yesterday and were prepared to arrest him at gunpoint.”

Natalie blushed. Saul was surprised to notice how dark her coffee-colored skin could become when she blushed.

“I don’t own it,” she said. “It was my father’s. He kept it at his photography studio. He had a permit for it. There had been robberies. I stopped by and picked it up on Monday.”

“Could I see it?” Gentry asked softly.

Natalie went into the hall closet and removed the weapon from her raincoat pocket. She set it on the table near the sheriff. Gentry used his forefinger to turn the barrel slightly until it aimed away from everyone.

“You know guns, Professor?” asked Gentry. “Not this one,” said Saul. “How ’bout you, Miz Preston?” said Gentry. “You familiar with fire-arms?”

Natalie rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “I have a friend in St. Louis who showed me how to shoot,” she said. “Aim and squeeze the trigger. It’s not too complicated.”

“Familiar with this gun?” asked Gentry.

Natalie shook her head. “Daddy bought it after I went off to school. I don’t think he ever fired it. I can’t imagine he would have been able to shoot at a
person
.”

Gentry raised his eyebrows and picked up the automatic, pointing it at the floor and holding it carefully by the trigger guard. “Is it loaded?”

“No,” said Natalie. “I took all of the bullets out before I left the house yesterday.”

It was Saul’s turn to raise his eyebrows.

Gentry nodded and touched a lever to release the magazine from the black plastic grip. He held the clip out to show Saul that it was empty.

“Thirty-two caliber, isn’t it?” said Saul. “Small frame Llama thirty-two automatic,” agreed the sheriff. “Real nice little gun. Probably cost Mr. Preston about three hundred dollars new. Miz Preston, nobody likes advice, but I feel like I should give you some, all right?”

Natalie nodded tersely. “First,” said Gentry, “don’t point a firearm at somebody unless you’re willing to fire it. Second, don’t ever point an empty gun. And third, if you’re gonna have an empty gun, make sure it’s
empty.
” Gentry pointed to the weapon. “See that little indicator, ma’am? Where the red’s showin’ there? That’s called a loaded indicator, and the red’s tryin’ to tell you something.” Gentry racked the slide and a round ejected from the chamber and fell to the tabletop with a clatter.

Natalie blanched, her skin going the color of old ashes. “That’s impossible,” she said in a small voice. “I counted the bullets when I took them out. There were
seven.
”

“Your daddy must’ve jacked one into the chamber an’ then lowered the hammer,” said Gentry. “Some folks carry ’em that way. That way they can carry eight rounds instead of the usual seven.” The sheriff clicked in the empty magazine and squeezed the trigger.

Natalie flinched slightly at the dry
click.
One glance at what Gentry had called “the loaded indicator” told her that the red was no longer showing. She thought of when she had pointed the gun at Saul yesterday . . . of being so sure the weapon was unloaded . . . and she felt a little sick.

“What’s your point this time, Sheriff?” Saul asked.

Gentry shrugged and set the small pistol back on the table. “I think that if we’re going after these killers, then
somebody’d
better know something about weapons.”

“You don’t understand,” said Saul. “Weapons are useless with these people. They can make you turn the weapon on yourself. They can turn
you
into a weapon. If the three of us went after the Oberst . . . or the Fuller woman . . . as a team, we could never be sure about each other.”

“I understand that,” said Gentry. “And I also understand that if we find them, then
they
are vulnerable. They’re dangerous primarily because no one knows they exist. Now we do.”

“But we do
not
know where they are,” said Saul. “I thought that I was so close. I
was
so close . . .”

“Borden has a background,” said Gentry, “a history, a film production company, associates and friends. That’s a place to start.”

Saul shook his head. “I thought Francis Harrington would be safe,” he said. “A few inquiries. If it
was
the Oberst, he might have recognized me. I thought Francis would be safe and now he’s almost certainly dead. No, I want no one else to become directly involved . . .”

“We’re
already
involved,” snapped Gentry. “We’re
in
this thing.”

“He’s right,” said Natalie.

Both men turned toward her. The strength had come back into her voice. “If you’re not crazy, Saul,” she said, “then these freakish bastards killed my father for no reason at all. With you two or without you, I’m going to find those old murderers and find a way to bring them to justice.”

“So let’s pretend we’re intelligent beings here,” said Gentry. “Saul, did Nina Drayton tell you anything in her two sessions with you that can help us out?”

“Not really,” said Saul. “She did talk about her father’s death. I inferred that she had used her ability to murder him.”

“No talk about Borden or Melanie Fuller?”

“Not directly, although she mentioned friends in Vienna in the early thirties. From her description, it could be the Oberst and the Fuller woman.”

“Anything useful there?”

“No. Intimations of sexual jealousy and competition.”

“Saul,
you
were used by the Oberst,” said the sheriff. “Yes.”

“Yet you remember it. Didn’t you suggest that Jack Ruby and the others were suffering from something like amnesia after being used?”

“Yes,” said Saul. “I think the people that the Oberst and the others used remember their actions— if they remember them at all— as one would remember a dream.”

“Isn’t that consistent with how psychotics remember violent episodes?”

“Sometimes,” said Saul. “At other times, a psychotic’s regular life is the dream and he is truly alive
only
when he is inflicting pain or death. But the people the Oberst and the others used are not necessarily psychotics— only victims.”

“But
you
remembered exactly what it was like when the Oberst . . . possessed you,” said Gentry. “Why?”

Saul took off his glasses and cleaned them. “It was different. It was wartime. I was a Jew from the camp. He knew that I would not survive. There was no need to spend energy erasing my memory. Besides, I escaped of my own volition, shooting myself in the foot, surprising the Oberst . . .”

“I wanted to ask you about that,” said Gentry. “You said the pain surprised the Oberst into relinquishing control for a minute or two . . .”

“A few seconds,” said Saul. “OK, a few seconds. But
all
of the people they were using here in Charleston must have been hurting a lot. Haupt . . . Thorne, the ex-thief Melanie Fuller kept around as a servant, lost an eye and kept going. The girl— Kathleen—was beaten to death. Barrett Kramer had fallen down stairs and been shot. Mr. Preston was . . . well, you see what I’m getting at . . .”

“Yes,” said Saul, “I have thought a lot about this. Luckily, when the Oberst was . . . in my mind, there is no other way to say it . . . then I caught glimpses of his thoughts . . .”

“Like telepathy?” asked Natalie. “No,” said Saul, “not really. Not as it is generally portrayed in fiction. More like trying to capture the fragments of a dream one sometimes half remembers during waking hours. But I sensed enough of the Oberst’s thoughts to understand that his melding with me when he used me to kill
der Alte
. . . the old SS man . . . was unusual. He wanted to experience it totally, to savor every nuance of sense impression. My feeling was that he generally used others with a simple buffer between himself and the pain his victim was feeling.”

“Sort of like watching TV with the sound off?” said Gentry. “Perhaps,” said Saul, “but in this case no pertinent information is lost, only the shock of pain. I sensed that the Oberst
enjoyed
not only the vicarious pain of those he murdered, but in those he
used
to commit the murder . . .”

“Do you think memories like that can really be expunged?” asked Gentry.

“In the minds of those he used?” asked Saul. At Gentry’s nod he said, “No. Buried perhaps. Much as the victim of some terrible trauma buries the experience deep in the subconscious.”

Gentry stood up then, a large grin on his face, and slapped Saul on the shoulder. “Professor,” he said, still grinning, “you’ve just given us the way we can test to see what’s true and what isn’t, who’s crazy and who’s sane.”

“Really?” asked Saul, beginning to understand even as Sheriff Gentry smiled at Natalie Preston’s questioning look.

“Really,” said Gentry, “and by tomorrow we can
do
that test and know once and for all.”

Saul sat in Sheriff Gentry’s car and listened to the rain fall. It had been almost an hour since Gentry and Natalie had gone into the clinic with the old doctor. A few minutes later a blue Toyota had parked across the street and Saul caught a glimpse of a young blond girl, left arm in a sling, eyes dark and fatigued, being herded between a couple dressed in the impeccable but predictable style of young professionals.

Saul waited. It was something he knew how to do well; some skill learned as a teenager in the death camps. For the twentieth time he ran through his rationale to himself for involving Natalie Preston and Sheriff Gentry. The rationale was weak— a sense of arriving at dead ends, a sudden sense of trust toward both of these unlikely allies after years of solitary suspicion, and, finally, a simple need to tell his story.

Saul shook his head. Intellectually he knew it was a mistake, but emotionally the telling and retelling had been incredibly therapeutic. The reassurance of having allies, of others
actively involved
, allowed Saul to sit placidly in Gentry’s county automobile and be quite contented to wait.

Saul was tired. He recognized the fatigue as something more than lack of sleep and the aftereffects of too much adrenaline; it was an aching tiredness as painful as a bone bruise and as old as Chelmno. There was a weariness in him that was as permanent as the tattoo on his inner arm. Like the tattoo, he would take the painful weariness to the grave, surrendering to an eternity of it. Saul shook his head again, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Knock it off, Old Man
, he thought.
Weltschmerz is a boring state of mind. More boring to others than to oneself.
He thought of David’s farm in Israel, of his own nine acres far removed from the orchards and fields, of a picnic he and David and Rebecca had there shortly before Saul had left for America. Young Aaron and Isaac, David and Rebecca’s twins, no more than seven that summer, had played cowboys and Indians among the stones and gullies where Roman legionnaires had once hunted down Israelite partisans.

Aaron
, thought Saul. He was still scheduled to meet with the boy on Saturday afternoon, in Washington. Instantly Saul felt his stomach clench at the thought of another unnecessary involvement in the nightmare. Family this time.
How much did he find out
? thought Saul.
How do I keep him uninvolved?

The couple and the child emerged from the clinic; the doctor followed, shook the man’s hand, and the family left. Saul realized that the rain had stopped. Gentry and Natalie Preston stepped out, spoke briefly with the old doctor, and walked briskly to the car.

“Well?” asked Saul after the heavy sheriff slid behind the wheel and the young woman was in the backseat. “What?”

Gentry removed his hat and mopped at his brow with a kerchief. He rolled his window all the way down and Saul caught the scent of moist grass and mimosa on the breeze. Gentry looked back at Natalie. “Why don’t you tell him?”

Natalie took a breath and nodded. She looked shaken, upset, but her voice was brisk and firm. “Doctor Calhoun’s office has a small observation room off the consulting room,” she said. “There is a one-way mirror. Alicia’s parents and we were able to observe without interfering. Sheriff Gentry introduced me as his assistant.”

“Which, in the context of this investigation, is technically true,” said Gentry. “I’m only allowed to deputize folks in the event of a declared emergency in the county, otherwise you’d’ve been
Deputy Preston.
”

Natalie smiled. “Alicia’s parents did not object to our presence. Dr. Calhoun used a small device like a metronome with a light to hypnotize the girl . . .”