Blow Fly

  The rumor in the pod is that when the doctor sent the fatal cocktail speeding through Pitt’s IV tube like a train through a tunnel, death occurred in exactly two minutes and fifty-six seconds. Three physicians take turns working the executions—again, more stories from the media and from inmates who have returned from Huntsville after stays of execution. There is a pediatrician, a heart surgeon, and a woman who set up a family practice in Lufkin a few years ago. She is the coldest executioner of all. She comes in with her black bag, does her job and leaves, indifferent and arrogant, speaking to no one.

  It arouses Jean-Baptiste to fantasize about a woman doctor invisible in a small secret room, waiting for the signal to kill his strapped-down body. He does not fear the death of his body, for his mind is his soul and cannot be destroyed. He is electric. He is a fluid. He can detach his mind from his body. He is part of God. Jean-Baptiste sighs in his bunk, where he lies on his back, staring up at a ceiling that is incapable of preventing his clairvoyant journeys. Most of the time, he transports his spirit back to Paris and flies unnoticed, acutely aware of sounds in a way he never was before. He visited Paris just the other day, right after a light rain, and tires swished on wet pavement, and distant traffic was surprisingly guttural, reminding him of his stomach growling. Raindrops were diamonds scattered over the seats of parked motorcycles, and a woman carrying lilies walked past him, and he floated in perfume.

  How observant he has become! Whenever his soul visits Paris, the most beautiful city on Earth, he discovers another old building wrapped in green netting, and men blasting limestone with air hoses to clean away centuries of pollution. It has taken years to restore Notre Dame’s creamy complexion. Monitoring the work is how Jean-Baptiste measures time. He never stays in Paris more than a few days, and each night he sets out toward the Gare de Lyon, then to the Quai de la Rapée to gaze at the Institut Médico-Légal, where some of his earlier chosen ones were autopsied. He can see the women’s faces and bodies, and he remembers their names. He waits until the last Bateau-Mouche thrums by, until the last ripple of wake laps over his shoes before he strips naked on the cold stones of the Quai de Bourbon.

  All his life he has braved the murky cold currents of the Seine to wash away the curse of le Loup-Garou.

  The werewolf.

  His nocturnal bathing has not cured his hypertrichosis, the extremely rare birth defect that causes babylike hair to cover his body, and continues its cruelty by adding a deformed face, abnormal teeth and stunted genitalia. Jean-Baptiste immerses himself in the river. He drifts along the Quai d’Orléans and the Quai de Béthune to the eastern tip of the Ile St.-Louis. There on the Quai d’Anjou is the seventeenth-century four-story town house with its carved front doors and gilded drainpipes, the hôtel particulier where his prominent parents live in obscene luxury. When chandeliers are ablaze with crystal and silver, his parents are in, but often they socialize with friends or drink their nightcaps in a sitting room that cannot be seen from the street.

  During Jean-Baptiste’s disembodied travels, he can go into any room of the hôtel particulier. He moves about as he pleases. The other night when he visited the Ile St.-Louis, his obese mother had several more folds of fat beneath her chin, and her eyes were as small as raisins in her bloated face. She had wrapped herself in a black silk robe and wore matching slippers on her stubby feet. She smoked strong French cigarettes nonstop as she complained and chattered to her husband while he watched the news, talked on the phone and went through paperwork.

  Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will. It is no wonder he seeks relief and pleasure in the arms of many beautiful young women and only remains married to Madame Chandonne because that is the way it must be. At a young age, Jean-Baptiste was told hypertrichosis is congenital, but he is certain it was caused by his mother’s alcoholism. She made no effort to curtail her drunkenness while she was pregnant with him and his twin brother, who calls himself Jay Talley and had the good fortune to emerge from their mother’s womb less than three minutes after Jean-Baptiste. His brother was born a perfect specimen of maleness, a golden sculpture with an exquisite body touched by blond hair that catches light, his face formed by a master. He dazzles everyone he meets, and the only satisfaction Jean-Baptiste finds in the injustice of their births is that Jay Talley, whose real name is Jean-Paul Chandonne, does not look like what he is. For that reason, he is worse than Jean-Baptiste.

  It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother’s is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it.

  “Who’s there!” he screams.

  THE CHARLES RIVER reflects the fledgling green of spring along Boston’s embankment, and Benton Wesley watches young men row a racing shell in perfect rhythm.

  Muscles ripple like the gentle current, paddles dip in whispered plashes. He could watch and say nothing all afternoon. The day is perfect, without a cloud, the temperature seventy-five degrees. Benton has become a close companion of isolation and silence, and craves them to the extreme that conversation fatigues him and is weighted by long pauses that intimidate some people and irritate others. He rarely has more to say than the homeless people who sleep in rag piles beneath the Arthur Fiedler footbridge. He even managed to offend the loud, gregarious Max, who works in the Café Esplanade, where Benton on occasion buys root-beer and Cracker Jacks or a soft pretzel. The first comment Benton ever made to Max was taken the wrong way.

  “Change.” That was all Benton muttered with a shake of his head.

  Max, who is German and often mistranslates English and takes umbrage easily, interpreted the cryptic remark to mean that that smart-ass in running clothes and dark sunglasses thinks all foreigners are inferior and dishonest and was demanding the change due him from the five-dollar bill Max tucked inside the till. In other words, the hardworking Max is a thief.

  What Benton meant was that Cracker Jacks at the Café Esplanade are served in bags, not boxes, and cost a dollar instead of a quarter. The toy surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IQ of a pigeon. Gone are the days of Benton’s childhood, when his sticky fingers dug through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know what people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission.

  The irony isn’t lost on him that he grew up to wear a special ring—this one gold and engraved with the FBI crest—and became the champion of decoding the thoughts, motivations and actions of people the public calls monsters. Benton was born with a special gift for channeling his intuition and intellect into the neurological and spiritual abysses of the worst of the worst. His quarry was the elusive offenders whose violent sexual acts were so heinous that panicking police from the United States and abroad used to wait in line to review their cases with him in the FBI Academy’s Profiling Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Benton Wesley was the legendary unit chief who wore conservative suits and a large gold ring.

  It was believed that from reports and nightmarish photographs, he could divine some clue that investigators missed, as if there was a magic prize to be rooted out during sessions inside the dank, windowless space where the only sounds were grim voices, papers sliding across the conference room table, and distant muffled shots from the indoor firing range. Benton’s world for most of his FBI career was J. Edgar Hoover’s former bomb shelter, an airless bunker belowground where pipes from the Academy’s upper-level toilets sometimes leaked on worn carpet or ran in stinking trickles down cinder-block walls.

  Benton is fifty and has reached the bitter belief that psychological profiling
isn’t psychological in the least, but is nothing more than forms and assumptions based on decades-old data. Profiling is propaganda and marketing. It is hype. It is just one more sales pitch that helps rake in federal dollars as FBI lobbyists stalk Capitol Hill. The very word profiling makes Wesley grit his teeth, and he can’t abide the way what he used to do is misunderstood, abused, has become a hackneyed Hollywood device drawn from worn-out and faulty behavioral science, anecdotes and deductive assumptions. Modern profiling is not inductive. It is as specious and misleading as physiognomy and anthropometry—or the dangerous and ridiculous beliefs from centuries past that murderers looked like cavemen and could be unequivocally identified by the circumference of their heads or the length of their arms. Profiling is fool’s gold, and for Benton to come around to that conviction is akin to a priest deciding there is no God.

  No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.

  Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton’s change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the “Scheiße Arsch.”

  He talks about Benton every chance he gets.

  “The other day he buy a pretzel,” Max told Nosmo King, the delivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking divided into No Smo king when double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.

  “He eats his pretzel there”—Max stabbed his cigarette toward a canopy of old oaks—“and schtared up like some schzombie at that schtuck kite”—pointing the cigarette again and nodding at the tattered red kite high in the branches of an oak tree—“like it some schientific phenomenal or a schymbol from God. Maybe a UFO!”

  Nosmo King was stacking cases of Fiji bottled water inside the Café Esplanade kiosk and paused, shielding his eyes from the sun as he followed the line of Max’s cigarette up to the wrecked kite.

  “I remember how that used to piss me off as a kid,” Nosmo King recalled. “Get yourself a brand new kite and five minutes later it’s hung up in power lines or a fucking tree. That sure is life. One minute things are moving along good, the next, the wind blows your ass to ruination.”

  Dark preoccupations and shadows from the past are what Benton feels and sees, no matter where he is or what he does. He lives inside a steel box of isolation that depresses and frustrates him so profoundly that there are moments, hours, days and weeks when he does not care about anything, has no appetite and sleeps too much. He needs sun and dreads winter. He is grateful that this early afternoon is polished so brightly that he cannot look across the Charles or up at the intense blue sky unless his eyes are blacked out, as they usually are, by sunglasses. He casually turns away from the young athletes who rule the river, pained that half a century has passed and he is no longer consumed by courage and conquest but by nonexistence, powerlessness and irrevocable loss.

  I am dead, he says to himself every morning as he shaves. No matter what, I am dead.

  My name is Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland, born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 20, 1955, parents both from Salem, Massachusetts. A psychologist, retired, sick of listening to people’s problems, Social Security number yada yada yada, unmarried, homosexual, HIV-positive, like to eye gorgeous boys eying themselves in the mirrors at the gym but don’t pursue, don’t strike up conversations, don’t cruise gay bars or date. Ever, ever, ever.

  It is all a lie.

  Benton Wesley has lived with falsehoods and exile for six years.

  He walks to a picnic table and sits on top of it, rests his arms on his knees, tightly laces his tapered fingers. His heart begins to beat rapidly with excitement and fear. Decades of a well-meant pursuit of justice have been rewarded by banishment, by a forced acceptance of the nonexistence of himself and all he has ever known. Some days, he can scarcely remember who he used to be, as he spends most of his time living in his mind, distracted by and even content with reading philosophical and spiritual books, history and poetry, and feeding the pigeons in the Public Garden, around the Frog Pond, or wherever he can blend with the locals and tourists.

  He no longer owns a suit. He shaves his thick, silver hair to the scalp and wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, but his body and bearing belie his attempt to look sloppy and older than his years. His face is tan but smooth, his posture military-straight. He is fit and muscular, with so little body fat that his veins run under his flesh like slender tree roots pushing through soil. Boston has many health clubs and places to jog and run sprints, and he is relentless about fitness and staying light on his feet. Physical pain reminds him that he is alive. He does not allow himself patterns for when and where he runs or works out or shops or eats in restaurants.

  He turns to his right as his keen peripheral vision catches the lumbering form of Pete Marino strolling in his direction. Benton’s breath catches. He is electrified by anxiety and joy but does not wave or smile. He has not communicated with his old friend and former colleague since he supposedly died and vanished into what is called a level-one protected-witness program designed uniquely for him and jointly controlled by London’s Metropolitan Police, Washington and Interpol.

  Marino settles next to Benton on top of the picnic table, checking first for bird shit as he taps an unfiltered Lucky Strike from a soft pack and lights up after several sparked attempts with a disposable lighter low on fluid. Benton notes that Marino’s hands are shaking. The two men are hunched over, staring out at a sailboat gliding away from the boathouse.

  “You ever go to the band shell here?” Marino asks, overcome by emotions he strangles in his throat with repeated coughs and loud sucks of smoke.

  “I heard the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July,” Benton softly says. “You can’t help but hear them from where I live. How are you?”

  “But you don’t come down in person.” Marino does his best to sound normal, just like the old days. “Yeah, I can understand that. Me, I probably wouldn’t, either, all those mobs of idiots, and I hate mobs of people. Like in the malls. It’s gotten to where I can’t take shopping malls no more.” He blows out a large volume of smoke, the unfiltered cigarette trembling in his thick fingers. “Least you ain’t so far away you can’t hear the music, pal. Could be worse. That’s what I always say, could be worse.”

  Benton’s lean, handsome face does not register the volatile mix of thoughts and feelings inside his hidden places. His hands betray nothing. He controls his nerves and facial expressions. He is nobody’s pal and never has been, and acute grief and anger heat up powerfully. Marino called him pal because he doesn’t know what else to call him.

  “I suppose I should ask you not to call me pal,” Benton comments in a bland voice.

  “Sure. What the fuck.” Marino shrugs, stung.

  For a big, tough cop, he is overly sensitive and takes the world personally. His capacity for interpreting an honest remark as an insult wearies those who know him and terrifies those who don’t. Marino has a temper from hell, and his fury knows no bounds when he is sufficiently pissed off. The only reason he hasn’t been killed during one of his outbursts is that his physical strength and survival skills are mixed with a strong dose of experience and luck. Even so, chance is never favorable forever. As Benton takes in every detail of Marino’s appearance, he entertains the same worries from the past
. He’s going to be dropped by a bullet or a stroke one of these days.

  “I sure as hell can’t call you Tom,” Marino counters. “Not to your face.”

  “Be my guest. I’m used to it.”

  Marino’s jaw muscles flex as he smokes.

  “You taking care of yourself better or worse since I saw you last?” Benton stares down at his relaxed hands between his knees. His fingers slowly toy with a splinter he picks off the picnic table. “Although I think the answer is obvious,” he adds with a slight smile.

  Sweat rolls down Marino’s balding head. He shifts his position, conscious of the 40-caliber Glock pistol strapped under his huge left arm and his desire to snatch off his bowling team windbreaker. Beneath it he is soaking wet, his heart beating hard, the dark-blue nylon absorbing sunlight like a sponge. He exhales a cloud of smoke, hopes it doesn’t drift in Benton’s direction. It does. Right in his face.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I can’t call you Tom.”

  Marino ogles a young woman in spandex shorts and sports bra trotting by, breasts bobbing. He can’t get used to females running around in bras, and for a veteran homicide detective who has seen hundreds of naked women in his day—most of them in strip joints or on top of autopsy tables—he is surprisingly awed when he sees a female so scantily clad in public that he knows exactly what she looks like naked, right down to the size of her nipples.

  “My daughter ran around like that, I’d kill her,” he mutters, staring at the retreating pumping buttocks.

  “The world is grateful you don’t have a daughter, Pete,” Benton remarks.