Wilde West Read online

  “Why secretly?” Oscar sipped at his coffee. The stuff was so thick that, after one blew on it, ripples remained for a time on its surface.

  “I recognized the possibility that the person responsible could have been one of the men under my command. It was, in fact, more than a possibility—it was a likelihood. We had been stationed near the town for only ten months, you see, and the attacks had begun some three months after our arrival.”

  Von Hesse sipped at his coffee. “For a month nothing happened.”

  Oscar removed the cigarette case and the box of matches from his coat pocket. No one nearby pulled out a revolver and pointed it at his head.

  “And then,” von Hesse said, “a young girl died. A fall from the family barn. It was a particularly tragic accident, because so easily avoidable, and the reports of her death quickly circulated among the troops and within the town. She was said, this girl, to be very beautiful. She was fifteen years old.”

  Oscar tapped a cigarette against the case, placed it in his mouth.

  “She was buried, I remember, on a Sunday evening. I assigned a squad of men to watch the cemetery that night. No one approached the grave.”

  Oscar lighted the cigarette, exhaled.

  “The next night, I assigned a second squad, rotating them, yes? The same thing happened. Nothing. On the third night, when the first squad returned, there came a storm. The rain fell very hard, so thickly that one could not see one’s own hand before one’s face. The men in the cemetery were gathered together behind a large oak tree. You must picture it, Mr. Wilde. This was autumn, and the tree was empty of its leaves. Its bare branches disappeared above them in the darkness and the torrent. They sat beneath their greatcoats, soaked to the skin and of course very cold. No doubt, among themselves, they cursed me for keeping them there. For it was inconceivable that anyone would go out on a night such as this.”

  Oscar nodded, exhaling. “But you’re about to tell me, if I divine aright, that someone did.” He looked around for an ashtray, discovered (as usual) that none had been provided, and flicked his ash to the floor.

  “Yes,” said von Hesse. “Someone did. By midnight, the men were no longer even attempting to watch the cemetery. They were concerned only with keeping warm. And then, just as midnight passed, they heard an awful scream, a truly terrifying scream. Unheimlich, yes? Unearthly. Like the scream of a demon. I believe that lesser men, having heard that scream, would have deserted their post. But these were brave men, true soldiers. They ran quickly toward the source of the scream. They found an opened grave, and the corpse lying inside the shattered coffin, which was filling up with mud and rainwater. The corpse’s shroud had been torn away, and, lying atop the body, unconscious, they found the man who had been committing these horrible attacks.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “Yes. He had fainted, apparently, at the moment of his ghastly triumph. At the moment of his scream.”

  “And was he one of your soldiers?”

  “Yes. A young corporal. One of my most promising young men. Very brave, very conscientious.”

  “How did he explain himself?”

  “That is the point, Mr. Wilde. He did not. He could not. When he regained consciousness, he had no recollection whatever of attacking the girl. Or of attacking the others.”

  “Or so he maintained.”

  “Mr. Wilde, you fail to understand. This corporal, he was the leader of the second squad I had assigned to the cemetery. You perceive the logical consequences of this? In his conscious mind, he knew that the cemetery was guarded. Consciously, he would never have attempted to commit such an act.”

  “The night was dark. You said yourself that the rain was heavy. Perhaps he persuaded himself that he might escape detection.”

  “And was it to escape detection that he screamed? No, Mr. Wilde. I am convinced that he genuinely could not recall any of the attacks. It was as though his mind had somehow become split, and the hidden part of it had developed a subterranean life of its own. And it was this, this separate and unsuspected semi-being, who committed the attacks. I suspect, too, that such a phenomenon has presented itself throughout history. Perhaps it is to this we might look for an explanation of the stories about demon possession, and the many tales of werewolves.”

  “Werewolves,” said Oscar.

  “You know the legends? They are mythical creatures, half man and half wolf. Outwardly they appear normal. Indeed, for most of their lives, they are normal, completely. And then, during the nights of the full moon, they change. They become filled with bloodlust, with an overriding desire to kill and destroy.”

  “Yes. We have them in England. We call them critics.”

  Von Hesse smiled faintly, sadly. “Ach, Mr. Wilde. You are not serious.”

  Precisely what the critics had said about Oscar’s poetry. “Well, let’s assume for a moment that your theory is correct. That the corporal was honestly unaware of this ‘other being’ within him. But wouldn’t the other being be aware of the corporal? Wouldn’t it—or he, if you like—know everything the corporal knew? And if so, if it knew that the cemetery was being guarded, why would it jeopardize its existence, and the corporal’s, which amounts to the same thing, by committing the attack?”

  “Ah,” said von Hesse, smiling slightly, “you have seized upon, I see, the most interesting question. To this I believe there are only three possible answers.”

  Oscar, who had believed his question so devastating that it might end the conversation, now realized that he was destined to hear all three of these. He disguised a small sigh behind an exhaled cloud of tobacco smoke.

  “First,” said von Hesse, “perhaps the being, this subterranean aspect of the corporal, perhaps it was not aware of the corporal’s existence, any more than the corporal was aware of its existence.”

  Like a pair of lodgers in the same apartment building, Oscar thought. Different floors, different hours. Different interests, as well: one of them produced cadavers, the other swived them.

  “Second,” said von Hesse, “perhaps it was aware, but perhaps the urge to commit the attack was so powerful, so all-consuming, that nothing else mattered. The fact that the attack was committed in a terrible downpour might incline us toward this explanation.”

  It might indeed. Mud, rain, cold. Why not wheel the lady off to a nice warm room, light a cosy fire, open a bottle of amontillado? Romance, alas, was dead.

  “And the third possibility?” he asked. Romance was dead: Really, under the circumstances, that was quite good.

  “Guilt, Mr. Wilde.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Yes. Perhaps at some level this being wanted to be discovered, wanted to be punished. Perhaps it knew that what it did was wrong, and it wanted to be stopped. And perhaps this is why it attacked that night.”

  “Why wouldn’t it simply stop, then, on its own?”

  “Perhaps it could not. Perhaps, as I said before, the attacks came out of a kind of compulsion.”

  “So,” Oscar said. “On the one hand, you maintain, it wanted to commit these attacks. On the other, it wanted to stop committing them. Sounds a fairly muddled sort of being, doesn’t it?”

  “But Mr. Wilde, we are speaking here in metaphors. There was in actuality no creature, no being. There was finally only the mind, the soul, of the corporal. It was divided, yes? Bifurcated. Very muddled, in fact.”

  Von Hesse sipped at his coffee. “The human mind is a great mystery, yes? As mysterious finally as the universe with all its stars and its planets. Perhaps in the distant future, perhaps in a hundred years, we will better understand how it operates, its twists and its turns and its hidden secrets. But I believe this: I believe that at bottom, we are all good. We are all tiny pieces of the infinite, and so we are all connected, each of us, to all the others, and to everything in creation. I believe that deep within us, below the masks we have acquired in our individual lives, we all somehow know this. And I believe that we know that we cannot do violence to another withou
t doing violence to ourselves. The other is ourself. And it is from this knowledge, I believe, that the corporal’s guilt arose.”

  “All right, look,” said Oscar, “even supposing that you’re right, you can’t be suggesting we just ignore the man who’s been killing the prostitutes, in the hope that somehow he’ll discover a sense of guilt?”

  Von Hesse shook his head. “No, no, Mr. Wilde, I suggest no such thing. I merely explain why I thought it possible that one of us could be the killer, without himself being aware of it. It was this you asked me, yes?”

  “And you really believe that one of us could secretly be a madman?”

  Von Hesse frowned, puzzled. “Did I not just say so?”

  Oscar dropped the cigarette to the floor, stepped on it. “You can accept the idea that one of us, someone you thought you knew, has been killing prostitutes? Without even being aware of it?”

  “Accept, yes, of course. What choice have I? It seems to me at least possible.”

  “It seems to me distasteful.”

  “Murder is always distasteful, Mr. Wilde. Would you find it any less so, if one of us were committing the murders deliberately? Consciously? This might also be possible, of course.”

  “Well, at least in that case the murderer might be prevailed upon to stop.”

  “How would one do so? He has already killed four times. Do you believe that you might make him stop simply by asking him? Even if you knew whom to ask?”

  “But we still can’t say with any certainty that the murderer is one of us.”

  “Can you produce a more persuasive explanation than Mr. Grigsby’s?”

  “Grigsby.” Oscar frowned, irritated. “He’s not going to give way on this. He’ll be underfoot forever, interfering with the tour.” Playing Javert to Oscar’s Jean Valjean. Making it impossible to arrange future trysts with Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

  “But it is his job to determine guilt.”

  “I suspect that he’d be happy merely to assign it. To me, for example.”

  “You feel that he is biased against you?”

  “I feel that we got along less than swimmingly.”

  Von Hesse frowned thoughtfully. After a moment he said, “You are familiar with Frederick the Great?”

  Oscar looked at him, smiled. “Not intimately, I confess.”

  “A great tactician and strategist. Somewhere in his Military Instruction he says, ‘It is an axiom of war to secure your own flanks and rear, and endeavor to turn those of the enemy.’”

  “Grigsby being the enemy?”

  “No, Mr. Wilde. Your enemy is this killer. It is his flanks you must endeavor to turn.”

  “By which you mean …?”

  “I mean that perhaps you should attempt to discover, yourself, who he is.”

  “OH YEAH?” SAID O’CONNER. “What kind of a deal?”

  “The first part,” Grigsby said, “is you forget you’re a reporter until I nab this sonovabitch.”

  O’Conner grinned. “I guess,” he said, “you being stuck out here in the sticks, you don’t know much about real reporters, Marshal. We’ve got printer’s ink in our blood. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t stop doing what we do.”

  Printer’s ink wasn’t the only thing in O’Conner’s blood. During the twenty minutes that Grigsby had been in the small, spare room, the reporter had downed two or three ounces of bourbon. The sleeves of his pale yellow shirt folded back, his spine slumped against the headboard, he drank the liquor, straight, from the water glass he held atop his small round belly. While Grigsby sat hunched in the hard wooden chair, O’Conner lazed with his legs comfortably crossed, like a potentate’s, along the bedspread. His feet were naked, bony ankles poking out below the bottoms of his brown trousers. The soles of his feet were gray.

  Grigsby didn’t have any reason at all to like the man—and didn’t expect to find one, even if O’Conner bothered to offer Grigsby a drink. Something that, so far, he hadn’t done.

  “The second part,” said Grigsby, “is that later, after I get the bastard, you get the story exclusive. All the facts, straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  O’Conner shrugged. “That’s if you get the guy.” He didn’t seem too taken by the possibility. “And meanwhile, the public’s being deprived of its right to know. You haven’t read the United States Constitution, I guess. A free press, it says. And as long as the public’s got the money to pay for it”—he grinned and took another sip of bourbon—“they get themselves a free press.”

  Grigsby thought (not for the first time) that one of the good things about an asshole—probably the only good thing about an asshole—was that usually he identified himself as an asshole pretty quick.

  “You write about these killings now,” Grigsby said, “and this tour of Wilde’s is gonna get canceled. The sonovabitch who killed those hookers is gonna take off. And then you and the public don’t get any story at all.”

  O’Conner shrugged again. “Maybe. But before that happens, I’ll sell a shitload of newspapers. Look, Marshal, this is a hell of a story. Sex, murder, mutilation—Jesus, the boobs’ll eat that up with a spoon. ‘Cross-Country Trail of Carnage’…” Fingers spread wide, he moved his hand in a broad swath through the air. He grinned at Grigsby. “How’s that for a headline?”

  “The third part,” said Grigsby, “is that you get to keep lyin’ around your hotel room all day, drinkin’ whiskey and makin’ up headlines.”

  O’Conner blinked, frowned. “Yeah? As opposed to what?”

  “As opposed to lyin’ in a cell at the federal lockup. We don’t serve no liquor there. Just broth and hardtack. On Sundays, you get chicken stew. Some of the boys, after a while, they take a real fancy to the chicken stew.”

  O’Conner laughed—a laugh that sounded to Grigsby a bit hollow. “You’re crazy, Marshal. You can’t arrest me. For what?”

  “Suspicion of murder.”

  O’Conner snorted. “Yeah? On what evidence?” He took a quick swallow of bourbon.

  “You been with the trip since San Francisco.”

  “So has Wilde. So has Ruddick. And Vail, and von Hesse.”

  Grigsby leaned a bit forward in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “But they don’t piss me off.”

  O’Conner’s face was abruptly red with anger. “What is it with you, Marshal? A couple of two-bit hookers get sliced up. One less slut in ‘Frisco. One less slut in Denver. So what? Who cares?”

  Grigsby nodded. “So what you’re sayin’ is, you’re not real fond of hookers.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Marshal. What I think about hookers is none of your goddamn business. You come in here and start threatening me with your bullshit federal lockup. You want to arrest me? Then arrest me. I’m a goddamn reporter, you understand? For the goddamn New York Sun. My editor, he hears about this, he’ll have a telegram on the president’s desk before breakfast. The president of the United States? You ever heard of him? So you go ahead. You arrest me.”

  Seemed like everybody was handing out presidents today.

  Grigsby ran his hand thoughtfully along his jaw. “I reckon maybe you’re right. Maybe the lockup wouldn’t work out. Reckon you don’t leave me much choice.” He reached for the Colt, slid it from the holster, cocked it.

  O’Conner’s face twisted with scorn. “Yeah, sure—”

  The sudden roar of the big Colt was deafening in the small room. Simultaneously—or so it seemed—a flurry of plaster dust sprayed from the wall beside O’Conner’s neck, and O’Conner’s body sprang up, twitching, from the bed. “Jesus Christ!” the reporter shrieked.

  Grigsby stood and stalked over to the bed, the gun pointed at O’Conner, who scurried back along the mattress toward the wall, toes spading at the bedspread. His eyes were open, whites showing all around. His shirt front was wet with spilled bourbon (good couple of shots worth, Grigsby noted regretfully), and bits and flakes of plaster sprinkled his left shoulder like a nasty ease of dandruff. The hand that held the empty glass was trembling.

>   Grigsby said, “You listen to me, you dumb shit. I’m gonna get this sonovabitch. I’m gonna nail his pecker to the wall. You stand in my way, I’m gonna roll right over you. For all I know, the sonovabitch is you. Puttin’ a bullet up your snout, that’d be one good way to find out, now wouldn’t it? And I’ll tell you this, it wouldn’t fret me one little bit. I’m comin’ to think that I might even enjoy it. So you write one word, just one word, about these hookers before I tell you it’s okay, you talk to anybody else about this, anybody at all, and you’ll be goin’ back to the New York Sun at the bottom of the baggage compartment. Am I talkin’ too fast for you?”

  Frantically, O’Conner shook his head.

  “You follow what I’m sayin’ here?”

  “Sure, sure,” said O’Conner, his voice a squeak. He cleared his throat. His Adam’s apple, which resembled his ankle, dipped and bobbed. “Sure I do, Marshal. Absolutely.”

  “Good,” said Grigsby. He holstered the Colt. “Now let’s just start all over again. Let’s just make like we never had this little squabble.” He strode back to the chair, turned, sat down. “I reckon, a couple of sensible hombres like you and me, we can come to some kinda agreement on this business. You don’t write anything till I give you the go-ahead. And then later, after I nab this bastard, you get the exclusive. How’s that sound to you?”

  “Terrific,” said O’Conner, still backed against the wall. “Terrific, Marshal.”

  Grigsby nodded. “Good. Now s’pose—”

  A faint, tentative rapping came at the door to the room.

  Grigsby turned. “Yeah?”

  From behind the door, muffled (as though its owner were standing well away from the line of fire), a voice called out, “Everything all right in there?”

  “That you, Wally?” Grigsby shouted. “Bob Grigsby here. Everything’s hunky-dory. Come along in.”

  After a moment, the door opened and the daytime desk clerk, tall and thin and bespectacled, poked his head around its edge. “You’re sure, Marshal? Sounded like a gunshot.” His face uncertain, his glance darted to the bed and O’Conner.