“I feel your pain,” Roy said as he drew his pistol.
He shot the man in the head.
His second round hit the woman in the throat, but it didn’t finish her. She fell to the ground, twitching grotesquely.
Roy stepped past the dead man in the wheelchair. To the woman on the ground, he said, “Sorry,” and then he shot her again.
The new silencer on the Beretta worked well. With the February wind moaning through the palm fronds, none of the three shots would have been audible farther than ten feet away.
Roy turned to Eve Jammer.
She looked thunderstruck.
He wondered if he had been too impulsive for a first date.
“So sad,” he said, “the quality of life that some people are forced to endure.”
Eve looked up from the bodies and met Roy’s eyes. She didn’t scream or even speak. Of course, she might have been in shock. But he didn’t think that was the case. She seemed to want to understand.
Maybe everything would be all right after all.
“Can’t leave them like this.” He holstered his gun and pulled on his gloves. “They have a right to be treated with dignity.”
The remote-control unit that operated the wheelchair lift was attached to the arm of the chair. Roy pressed a button and sent the dead man back up from the parking lot.
He climbed into the van through the double-wide sliding door, which had been pushed to one side. When the wheelchair completed its ascent, he rolled it inside.
Assuming that the man and woman were husband and wife, Roy planned the tableau accordingly. The situation was so public that he didn’t have time to be original. He would have to repeat what he had done with the Bettonfields on Wednesday evening in Beverly Hills.
Tall lampposts were spaced around the parking lot. Just enough bluish light came through the open door to allow him to do his work.
He lifted the dead man out of the chair and placed him faceup on the floor. The van was uncarpeted. Roy was remorseful about that, but he had no padding or blankets with which to make the couple’s final rest more comfortable.
He pushed the chair into a corner, out of the way.
Outside again, while Eve watched, Roy lifted the dead woman and put her into the van. He climbed in after her and arranged her beside her husband. He folded her right hand around her husband’s left.
Both of the woman’s eyes were open, as was one of her husband’s, and Roy was about to press them shut with his gloved fingers when a better idea occurred to him. He peeled up the husband’s closed eyelid and waited to see if it would remain open. It did. He turned the man’s head to the left and the woman’s head to the right, so they were gazing into each other’s eyes, into the eternity that they now shared in a far better realm than Las Vegas, Nevada, far better than any place in this dismal, imperfect world.
He crouched at the feet of the cadavers for a moment, admiring his work. The tenderness expressed by their positions was enormously pleasing to him. Obviously, they had been in love and were now together forever, as any lovers would wish to be.
Eve Jammer stood at the open door, staring at the dead couple. Even the desert wind seemed to be aware of her exceptional beauty and to treasure it, for her golden hair was shaped into exquisitely tapered streamers. She appeared not windblown but windadored.
“It’s so sad,” Roy said. “What quality of life could they have had—with him imprisoned in a wheelchair, and with her tied to him by bonds of love? Their lives were so limited by his infirmities, their futures tethered to that damned chair. How much better now.”
Without saying a word, Eve turned away and walked to the Honda.
Roy got out of the Dodge van and, after one last look at the loving couple, closed the sliding door.
Eve was waiting behind the wheel of her car, with the engine running. If she had been frightened of him, she would have tried to drive away without him or would have run back to the restaurant.
He got in the Honda and buckled his safety harness.
They sat in silence.
Clearly, she intuited that he was no murderer, that what he had done was a moral act, and that he operated on a higher plane than did the average man. Her silence was only indicative of her struggle to translate her intuition into intellectual concepts and thereby more fully understand him.
She drove out of the parking lot.
Roy took off his leather gloves and returned them to the inside coat pocket from which he had gotten them.
For a while, Eve followed a random route through a series of residential neighborhoods, just driving to drive, going nowhere yet.
To Roy, the lights in all the huddled houses no longer seemed to be either warm or mysterious, as they had seemed on other nights and in other neighborhoods, in other cities, when he had cruised similar streets alone. Now they were merely sad: terribly sad little lights that inadequately illuminated the sad little lives of people who would never enjoy a passionate commitment to an ideal, not of the sort that so enriched Roy’s life, sad little people who would never rise above the herd as he had risen, who would never experience a transcendent relationship with anyone as exceptional as Eve Jammer.
When at last the time seemed right, he said, “I yearn for a better world. But more than better, Eve. Oh, much more.”
She didn’t reply.
“Perfection,” he said quietly but with great conviction, “in all things. Perfect laws and perfect justice. Perfect beauty. I dream of a perfect society, where everyone enjoys perfect health, perfect equality, in which the economy hums always like a perfectly tuned machine, where everyone lives in harmony with everyone else and with nature. Where no offense is ever given or taken. Where all dreams are perfectly rational and considerate. Where all dreams come true.”
He was so moved by his soliloquy that his voice became thick toward the end of it, and he had to blink back tears.
Still she said nothing.
Night streets. Lighted windows. Little houses, little lives. So much confusion, sadness, yearning, and alienation in those houses.
“I do what I can,” he said, “to make an ideal world. I scrub away some of its imperfect elements and push it inch by grudging inch toward perfection. Oh, not that I think I can change the world. Not alone, not me, and not even a thousand or a hundred thousand like me. But I light a little candle whenever I can, one little candle after another, pushing back the darkness one small shadow at a time.”
They were on the east side of town, almost at the city limits, cruising into higher land and less populated neighborhoods than they had traveled previously. At an intersection, she suddenly made a U-turn and headed back into the sea of lights from which they’d come.
“You may say I’m a dreamer,” Roy admitted. “But I’m not the only one. I think you’re a dreamer, too, Eve, in your own special way. If you can admit being a dreamer…maybe if all of us dreamers can admit it and join together, the world could someday live as one.”
Her silence was now profound.
He dared to look at her, and she was more devastating than he had remembered. His heart thudded slow and heavy, weighed down by the sweet burden of her beauty.
When at last she spoke, her voice was quavery. “You didn’t take anything from them.”
It wasn’t fear that made her words shimmer as they passed along her elegant throat and across her ripe lips but, rather, a tremendous excitement. And her tremulous voice in turn excited Roy. He said, “No. Nothing.”
“Not even the money from her purse or his wallet.”
“Of course not. I’m not a taker, Eve. I’m a giver.”
“I’ve never seen…” She seemed unable to find the words even to describe what he had done.
“Yes, I know,” he said, delighted to see how completely he had swept her away.
“…never seen such…”
“Yes.”
“…never such…”
“I know, dear one. I know.”
“…such po
wer,” she said.
That was not the word he had thought that she was searching for. But she had pronounced it with such passion, imbued it with so much erotic energy, he could not be disappointed that she had yet to grasp the full meaning of what he had done.
“They’re just going out for dinner,” she said excitedly. She had begun to drive too fast, recklessly. “Just going out to dinner, an ordinary night, nothing special, and—wham!—you whack them! Just like that, Jesus, take them out, and not even to get anything that belongs to them, not even because they crossed you or anything like that. Just for me. Just for me, to show me who you really are.”
“Well, yes, for you,” he said. “But not only for you, Eve. Don’t you see? I removed two imperfect lives from creation, inching the world closer to perfection. And at the same time, I relieved those two sad people of the burden of this cruel life, this imperfect world, where nothing could ever be as they hoped. I gave to the world, and I gave to those poor people, and there were no losers.”
“You’re like the wind,” she said breathlessly, “like a fantastic storm wind, hurricane, tornado, except there’s no weatherman to warn anyone you’re coming. You’ve got the power of the storm, you’re a force of nature—sweeping out of nowhere, for no reason. Wham!”
Worried that she was missing the point, Roy said, “Wait, wait a minute, Eve, listen to me.”
She was so excited that she couldn’t drive anymore. She angled the Honda to the curb, tramped the brakes so hard that Roy would have been pitched into the windshield if his harness hadn’t been buckled.
Slamming the gearshift into park with nearly enough force to snap it off, she turned to him. “You’re an earthquake, just like an earthquake. People can be walking along, carefree, sun shining, birds singing—and then the ground opens and just swallows them up.”
She laughed with delight. Hers was a girlish, trilling, musical laugh, so infectious that he had difficulty not laughing with her.
He took her hands in his. They were elegant, long-fingered, as exquisitely shaped as the hands of Guinevere, and the touch of them was more than any man deserved.
Unfortunately, the radius and ulna, above the perfectly shaped carpals of her wrist, were not of the supreme caliber of the bones in her hands. He was careful not to look at them. Or touch them.
“Eve, listen. You must understand. It’s extremely important that you understand.”
She grew solemn at once, realizing that they had reached a most serious point in their relationship. She was even more beautiful when somber than when laughing.
He said, “You’re right, this is a great power. The greatest of all powers, and that’s why you’ve got to be clear about it.”
Although the only light in the car came from the instrument panel, her green eyes blazed as if with the reflection of summer sun. They were perfect eyes, as flawless and compelling as those of the woman for whom he had been hunting this past year, whose photograph he carried in his wallet.
Eve’s left brow was perfect too. But a slight irregularity marred her right superciliary arch, above her eye socket: It was regrettably too prominent, only fractionally more so than the left, formed with barely half a gram too much bone, but nevertheless out of balance and shy of the perfection on the left.
That was okay. He could live with that. He would just focus on her angelic eyes below her brow, and on each of her incomparable hands below her knobby radius and ulna. Though flawed, she was the only woman he’d ever seen with more than one perfect feature. Ever, ever, ever. And her treasures weren’t limited to her hands and eyes.
“Unlike other power, Eve, this doesn’t flow from anger,” he explained, wanting this precious woman to understand his mission and his innermost self. “It doesn’t come from hatred, either. It’s not the power of rage, envy, bitterness, greed. It’s not like the power some people find in courage or honor—or that they gain from a belief in God. It transcends those powers, Eve. Do you know what it is?”
She was rapt, unable to speak. She only shook her head: no.
“My power,” he said, “is the power of compassion.”
“Compassion,” she whispered.
“Compassion. If you try to understand other people, to feel their pain, to really know the anguish of their lives, to love them in spite of their faults, you’re overcome by such pity, such intense pity, it’s intolerable. It must be relieved. So you tap into the immeasurable, inexhaustible power of compassion. You act to relieve suffering, to ease the world a hairsbreadth closer to perfection.”
“Compassion,” she whispered again, as if she had never heard the word before, or as if he had shown her a definition of it that she had never previously appreciated.
Roy could not look away from her mouth as she repeated the word twice again. Her lips were divine. He couldn’t imagine why he had thought that Melissa Wicklun’s lips were perfect, for Eve’s lips made Melissa’s seem less attractive than those of a leprous toad. These were lips beside which the ripest plum would look as withered as a prune, beside which the sweetest strawberry would look sour.
Playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, he continued her first lesson in moral refinement: “When you’re motivated solely by compassion, when no personal gain is involved, then any act is moral, utterly moral, and you owe no explanations to anyone, ever. Acting from compassion, you’re freed forever from doubt, and that is a power like no other.”
“Any act,” she said, so overcome by the concept that she could barely find enough breath to speak.
“Any,” he assured her.
She licked her lips.
Oh, God, her tongue was so delicate, glistened so intriguingly, slipped so sensuously across her lips, was so perfectly tapered that a faint sigh of ecstasy escaped him before he was quite aware of it.
Perfect lips. Perfect tongue. If only her chin had not been tragically fleshy. Others might think it was the chin of a goddess, but Roy was cursed with a greater sensitivity to imperfection than were other men. He was acutely aware of the smidgin of excess fat that lent her chin a barely perceptible puffy look. He would just have to focus on her lips, on her tongue, and not allow his gaze to drift down from there.
“How many have you done?” she asked.
“Done? Oh. You mean, like back at the restaurant.”
“Yes. How many?”
“Well, I don’t count them. That would seem…I don’t know…it would seem prideful. I don’t want praise. No. My satisfaction is just in doing what I know is right. It’s a very private satisfaction.”
“How many?” she persisted. “A rough estimate.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Over the years…a couple of hundred, a few hundred, something like that.”
She closed her eyes and shivered. “When you do them…just before you do them and they look in your eyes, are they afraid?”
“Yes, but I wish they weren’t. I wish they could see that I know their anguish, that I’m acting from compassion, that it’s going to be quick and painless.”
With her own eyes closed, half swooning, she said, “They look into your eyes, and they see the power you have over them, the power of a storm, and they’re afraid.”
He released her right hand and pointed his forefinger at the flat section of bone immediately above the root of her perfect nose. It was a nose that made all the other fine noses seem as unformed as the “nose” on a coconut shell. Slowly, he moved his finger toward her face as he said, “You. Have. The. Most. Exquisite. Glabella. I. Have. Ever. Seen.”
With the last word, he touched his finger to her glabella, the flat portion of the front skull bone between her unimpeachable left superciliary arch and her unfortunately bony right superciliary arch, directly above her nose.
Although her eyes were closed, Eve didn’t flinch with surprise at his touch. She seemed to have developed such a closeness to him, so quickly, that she was aware of his every intention and slightest movement without the aid of vision—and without relying on any of the ot
her five senses, for that matter.
He took his finger off her glabella. “Do you believe in fate?”
“Yes.”
“We are fate.”
She opened her eyes and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
On the trip to her house, she broke traffic laws by the score. Roy didn’t approve, but he withheld his criticism.
She lived in a small two-story house in a recently completed tract. It was nearly identical to the other houses on the street.
Roy had expected glamour. Disappointed, he reminded himself that Eve, though stunning, was but another woefully underpaid bureaucrat.
As they waited in the Honda, in the driveway, for the automatic garage door to finish lifting out of the way, he said, “How did a woman like you wind up working in the agency?”
“I wanted the job, and my father had the influence to make it happen,” she said, driving into the garage.
“Who’s your father?”
“He’s a rotten sonofabitch,” she said. “I hate him. Let’s not go into all that, Roy, please. Don’t ruin the mood.”
The last thing that he wanted to do was ruin the mood.
Out of the car, at the door between the garage and the house, as Eve fumbled in her purse for keys, she was suddenly nervous and clumsy. She turned to him, leaned close. “Oh, God, I can’t stop thinking about it, how you did them, how you just walked up and did them. Such power in the way you did it.”
She was virtually smouldering with desire. He could feel the heat rolling off her, driving the February chill out of the garage.
“You have so much to teach me,” she said.
A turning point in their relationship had arrived. Roy needed to explain one more thing about himself. He’d been delaying bringing it up, for fear she would not understand this one quirk as easily as she had absorbed and accepted what he’d had to say about the power of compassion. But he could delay no longer.
As Eve returned her attention to her purse and at last extracted the ring of keys from it, Roy said, “I want to see you undressed.”
“Yes, darling, yes,” she said, and the keys clinked noisily as she searched for the right one on the ring.