The Axman Cometh (16 page)

"If there're any inside, then . .. they must have a way in I didn't think of."

"While you were busy trying to kick down locked steel doors."

"Maybe—an alley—"

"The only alley in Manhattan is Shubert Alley. They didn't tunnel up from below the street, either."

"I'll...
have another look around."

Papa lays a finger against his nose. "Follow this," he suggests.

"What?"

"Rummy spoor."

"I can't smell a thing."

"Maybe I'd better go with you this time. Tracked a lioness in heat through the rain in the Serengeti. Her spoor was like attar of roses, compared to a rummy's."

"Don't you talk to bears, too?"

"When I happen to run into one. We'd better move quickly now. Your beauty is weakening, and he's stronger. He'll know I'm around. He'll know how to get rid of me, too."

"I don't know why I believe any of this."

"Because you believe in the Axman. She's made a believer of you, all the years you've known her."

"If only I'd married Shannon. I should never have let her get away with jilting—"

She was trying to protect you."

"But he must have died! They found his blood in the house. And after Kansas, there was never a sign of him."

"He's been living in the one place that's safe for him," Papa says.

They are on Eighteenth Street, walking east, toward the rear of the large building. A cab, off duty, hisses toward them, throwing up a wave Don can't avoid. Turning, he sees no one, although Papa has been right behind him. After the cab passes he looks up and is startled to find the author twenty feet down the sidewalk revealed in the counterglow in gleaming rainwear, moon-shaped face pressed close to a wall thickly papered with dilapidated one-sheets promoting opera, ballet, a reunion at Town Hall of folk artists from the sixties.

"Nope," he says, stepping away from the wall as Don jogs soddenly up to him, his expensive shoes full of water. "No rummy spoor here. But we'll find them."

Don sneezes.

"Enjoying the hunt?" Papa asks sardonically.

"I'm an indoor person."

"You haven't had the right exposure. More than once Blixen and I drove a hundred miles in a day and were never out of sight of the herds.
Tommies
, kudu, Grant's gazelle. They go to the rains, which were falling always just out of reach, to the north, to the west. The five senses of man are not enough to appreciate this beauty, a million antelope but space for a million more, or ten million. The lions followed the herds, and we followed the lions. Leopard too. The most difficult of all to kill, if you kill fairly and not by blinding them with lights where they come to feed or drink. They are truly cunning and dangerous because they hunt often in the dark and they themselves are darkness, except for the eyes, which are the true yellow color of a freshly cut key lime."

Don says crossly, "I don't know what that has to do with—"

"It has everything to do with becoming a hunter, which is now more than your obligation; you and your beauty may survive only if you hunt carefully and well. But Axman is the quickest of quarry, and no one has hunted him successfully before. Tell me all you know about him."

"There's not much to tell. If it was the same man, then—he may have killed as many as twenty-five people over a two-year period in four Midwestern states. I did some research after I knew I was in love with Shannon. I took time off and went out there, talked to the police and read all the accounts of the murders I could find. The Cobb family in Briar- wood, Missouri. The
Hanyards
in Crestview, Iowa. The De La
Warrs
in Hendricks, Nebraska. And Shannon's family. September 1962 to June of 1964. There are similarities in each case. Five members in each family, although in Briarwood an au pair girl was also a victim. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old daughter in each household. Blond. He chose families that had only a few or no pets, except for the De La
Warrs
, who raised golden retrievers. But they were in a kennel away from the house. From the variety and type of wounds the FBI concluded he used the same weapon over and over, an ax with a curved blade or blades that he kept razor-sharp. He left an old whetstone in the Cobb house that couldn't be traced. There was a partial footprint in new carpeting at the
Hanyards
'. From that the experts concluded he wore bowling shoes, was about six-one and weighed between one hundred seventy and one hundred eighty pounds. They were also able to tell he was right-handed. Scores of relatives of the four families were questioned, but no links between any of the victims could be established. Apparently they were chosen at random. The Axman left the same message, scrawled in blood on a variety of surfaces with paint brushes he found: 'I like to chop.'

"He, ah, apparently had no bias toward any particular part of the anatomy. He often dismembered victims after they were dead. He did not sexually molest males or females, not in a conventional or detectable manner. He liked to string the bodies up, usually in the cellars, by hammering cement nails into the walls. He used wire, clothesline, fishing line. A flute belonging to
Timmie
Cobb, one of three girls in the Briarwood case, was found next to her severed head. She'd been a flautist in her school band. He left no fingerprints; at least no prints recurred in the four houses he visited. There .. . isn't much else. Shannon survived. Untouched, by the merest stroke of good luck; or, perhaps, it had nothing to do with luck. The boy died before he could speak, so the police never knew what part he may have played in her escape. It's possible he knew the Axman, although they later ruled out the possibility he may have been an accomplice. Unmatched blood samples were found on his knife in the Hill house. The Axman, who obviously was injured, got away, only to die in some place where his remains are undiscovered. But that's speculation, based on the fact that the murders stopped; his
modus operandi
was not repeated after the massacre in Emerson."

"And what has your beauty had to say about her experiences with Axman?"

"Whatever she knows, she's stuck it away in a place with a lot of cobwebs. Shan managed to survive, mentally and emotionally, for four years after the massacre by literally denying her own identity, inventing a different background for herself. Her case has been exhaustively written up in psychiatric journals. She created, in comic-strip format— there are thousands of panels—another family of which she was a member, a fictitious but wholly safe environment in which to live. The
Tafts
of Roseboro, Kansas. The team that treated her at the psychiatric clinic found her artistic imagination very helpful in affecting a reintegration of her shattered personality. When she no longer needed 'Suzy Taft,' Shannon wrote her out of the strip, so to speak. Just as the other
Tafts
—mother, father, 'Suzy's' two brothers—died, nonviolently, and were buried as she came to grips with what really happened to her family."

"Axman was never in the strip. But she's used the same means to try to get rid of him."

"Yes. She certainly tried. But she couldn't draw him. It was frustrating for her. 'If I could get him right,' Shan told me, 'he'll disappear forever.' But who knows if she ever saw his face? He struck in the dead of night, when they—the families—were most vulnerable. Oh, God. Some of her efforts were— disgusting, horrifying. Inhuman. The closer we came to our wedding day, the more compelled she was to draw. She was making
a—a
terrible effort to purge him, to be free and happy. I felt so sorry, There was nothing I could do to help her."

"I believe she has never wanted to see, to draw him truly. Because the consequences were bound to be the reverse of what she hoped she would achieve. Your beauty's creative imagination is a force beyond her control. Her pain is deep. Axman's evil is an image of that pain, which he gave to her. Now Axman has trapped her, in circumstances she has always feared. He is exhausting her in order to seduce her. He has the means. Her only defense is to draw—anything, everything that comes to mind but him."

"She drew
you,
didn't she? She imagines, it's real, like
that.
I had a little taste of what she can do, once, just a taste, and I—put it out of my mind and got damned good and shit-faced in a hurry, because what was the alternative? Believing the unbelievable? Damn it, I have
no
imagination myself, I never have nightmares, for Christ's sake
I—"

"Carnes!"

"What?"

"We have both been drawn," Papa says, frowning. "That will be our greatest danger, as hunters."

"What hunters? We can't even get inside this fucking building! We need crowbars and axes, a rescue squad. I'm going to—"

Papa sniffed twice, alertly.

"Rummy spoor. This is where it is."

"Where what is? You want to know, my experience with Shannon's imagination? Not counting tonight—what with "Man of the Year" honors and then, poof! it's all gone in a cloud of hellfire—tonight's certainly been a pip, but the other time, after we met and . . . and we started making love. One afternoon we did it three times, I've never had orgasms like that before or since. They were the Old Faithful, the Niagara, the Hiroshima of orgasms. But I wasn't tired afterward, I felt— tremendous. Maybe a little, um, dazed, but in a wonderful way. Cheerful and happier than I'd ever thought I could be, just so . . . full of loving. Shan was sitting naked on the window seat in the bedroom, drawing. I asked her what it was and she showed it to me: a cute little bird like those you used to see fluttering around in the old Disney movies when Cinderella or Snow White was down in the dumps.

"She said, 'Watch, Donnie,' and pursed her lips in kind of a funny way, rubbed her fingers and thumb on the pencil she'd been drawing with, and the goddam bird flew right off the paper. Shannon looked at me with big dreamy eyes blue as lakes and that's when I felt, hell, like a kid back when I was growing up in Oswego and a wave of Lake Ontario would come barreling in over me; it wasn't any kind of trick, though, she hadn't dragged the bird in from the window ledge feeder just to fool me—I'm telling you truthfully, Papa,
right
off
the damn paper\
Shannon just smiled as it circled around the bedroom, a real honest-to-God bird, and not at all panicky like birds indoors get. Pretty little bluebird. The bluebird of happiness?" Don honks twice into his soppy handkerchief. "Are you listening to me, Papa?"

"No. I'll need you to give me some help here."

Papa has one foot up on a narrow ledge about three feet above the sidewalk. He is sliding the fingers of his left hand along the margin of a handbill pasted over a rectangle of plywood; suddenly his fingers disappear as if sliced off by a guillotine.

Papa grunts, satisfied. "Thought so." He raises his other hand to pull at the plywood. There is some give in it, a sound of rusty hinges, a narrow space evident despite the dark and the rain.

"Pull!" Papa says, and Don lends his own strength to enlarging the space.

"There was a door here once—little wider—okay, I'll hold it while you step inside. Watch where you put your feet."

Don, prudently, cranes to try to see into the building before offering his body to it The building breathes damply into his face: a tomblike miasma. He shudders.

"Without a light, maybe we shouldn't—
owwww
!"

Don goes sprawling inside from the force of Papa's foot on his backside. He picks himself up off a floor littered with, among other things, sawdust and bits of broken glass. Damn lucky he wasn't cut. He is smarting from indignation. He'd read somewhere that the famous author could be a bully.
Skitterings
in the dark, and Don turns
lumpishly
cold: mice, or, worse, rats. He reaches up to reset his glasses, which are near the end of his nose, shudders again and sneezes. He hears paper tearing. A car goes by in the street and in the narrow space of the doorsill he sees a lit-up Papa, salt-and-pepper whiskers glowing like a Halloween cat. He is ripping a couple of old handbills from the street side of the plywood.

"What are you up to?"

Papa props the heavy rectangle of plywood open with an elbow and twists the stripe of handbills tightly together.

"Those won't burn. Aren't they wet?"

"A little damp. But plenty of glue for fuel. Two of these will give us a good light Fifteen, twenty minutes' worth."