The Prettiest Feathers Read online

  A man like Wolf feels nothing. He is moved only by vengeance. The destruction he brings to the world is payment for the injustice he has suffered. He believes that only he has endured pain. To be in his mind is to be in a primal black hole of sensory disregard.

  We matter to him only as objects, pieces of his community in need of rearrangement. Murder is his way of imposing order on his world. When you are the reaper, you do not fear the reaper….

  For Philip E. Ginsburg

  The wolf howled under the leaves

  And spit out the prettiest feathers

  Of his meal of fowl;

  Like him I consume myself

  from “The Wolf Howled”

  Arthur Rimbaud

  BOOK ONE

  John

  I’m not going to tell you about any of the others—the aerobics instructor, the lawyer, the teacher, the actress, the housewife, the bartender, the grocery clerk. Not in detail. The list is too long, and it would be a waste of time.

  I want to talk about her, and only her, because she is the exception. If I reveal anything about the others, it will be only to illuminate the ways in which she was different.

  Sarah

  It was an unbearably hot, brilliantly sunny day in the midst of my eleventh summer. We were at the beach, my uncle Donald and I, walking barefoot through the sand.

  We had been talking about nothing, everything, when—for a reason that I can no longer recall—I realized that I had no shadow. This alarmed me. I stopped and stared at the stretch of beach ahead of me and to both sides, but all I saw was the sand, without my silhouette on its surface. I turned slowly, rotating, but nowhere did I see any hint that I was there.

  “I must be dead,” I told my uncle. “I don’t exist.”

  He laughed and said, “Your shadow is beneath your feet, where you can’t see it. That’s what happens at noon, when the sun is directly overhead. When the time is right, you will know that you are alive.”

  Within minutes my shadow returned, moving just ahead of me as we walked down the beach. But I felt no different than I had when it was gone; I still felt dead.

  When the time is right, you will know that you are alive, he promised. And I waited for years for that time to come.

  Then I saw him, the stranger, and I felt a release, an unfolding, like a flower opening in the sun. He gave me both sustenance and substance; he gave me life.

  John

  My art is the art of murder. My instruments, people (women, primarily). And my tools are finely crafted from leather, hemp, or steel. Perhaps, without realizing it, you have seen my work. It has been displayed, unsigned, throughout the metropolitan area to the south of here.

  I am an avid reader, with a taste for T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Rimbaud. But I am not a poet; merely one who appreciates the way words can be woven into pictures. I, too, can create pictures—but in my mind, not on paper. These pictures are elaborate—entire scenes, really, complete with the stage directions, dialogue, soundtrack, and choreography of my art.

  One of my favorite books was written by Farley Mowat. To satisfy his curiosity about wolves, he went to live among them—eating and sleeping as they did, crawling around on all fours. By entering their world, making their behavior his, he learned more than all the science-minded fools who’d spent years watching wolves through the bars and glass walls of cages.

  We have no Farley Mowats for the human predator. No one has ever come to talk with me, ask me questions, discuss poetry, listen to music, spend the night, or accompany me on my excursions.

  What we have, instead, are the ladies and gentlemen of the FBI—the behavioral science experts from Quantico, Virginia—who visit only those who are already caged, administering questionnaires. The specimens they study are bored, with an agenda all their own. They aren’t about to tell the “experts” all the truth; just enough to toy with them.

  No questionnaire, ever, could capture the soul of a man like me. I am not one of those who is careless enough to be caught and caged. No word has appeared in any newspaper suggesting that my missions may be connected. Investigators in the various cities where my work has been displayed have no idea that one of America’s most prolific killers has been operating in their midst for several years.

  Theodore Bundy always selected his victims at random, killing them soon after—almost never developing any sort of relationship with them. How artless. Virtually anyone could succeed—at least for a while, perhaps even a long while—doing it that way. But where is the challenge, the risk, the sense of fulfillment?

  Bundy bores me. He had no sense of variety, no finesse.

  Hasty Hills, the town where I live, is called a bedroom community—an expensive boudoir that’s every bit as pretentious as its haughty neighbor, Greenwich, Connecticut. I’ve lived here for five years. People leave me pretty much alone. No one comes to collect for anything charitable. No Girl Scouts selling cookies or Little Leaguers hoping to improve their wardrobes. I can recall only one unsolicited guest—an attractive young woman who came to my door some years ago, asking to use my phone. She was having car trouble, she said. To help pass the time until the tow truck arrived, I offered her a glass of wine and pleasant conversation. When the truck pulled up at the curb an hour later, I allowed her to thank me and leave. I would never foul my own nest.

  I own a new car, a reliable Japanese model that I drive into the city whenever I require amusement—such as a new film, the latest album from Julian Cope, something decent to read.

  It was on just such a sojourn that I discovered her. It was as if she were waiting for me.

  The bookstore was a quaint and musty little place on the Lower East Side. The sign in black and gold said, Emily and Others. Bronte? Dickinson? Very clever.

  It was surrounded by a Korean grocer on one side, a soul food take-out on the other, and a massage parlor above. When I parked my car—legally—and stepped out onto the sidewalk, a thin, young black man pushed himself away from the wall of the grocery store and sauntered in my direction.

  “Dude can’t park here,” he said.

  His hands were shoved deeply into the pockets of pants that threatened to drop to the pavement. He chewed the remains of a toothpick and worked on a baleful glare that just missed me—glancing off my left shoulder and bouncing out into the street somewhere. It was wasted. So was he.

  I slipped my right hand into my pocket and allowed it to close over my car key. I inclined my head so that I could watch what his hands were doing and, with my left hand, slowly removed my sunglasses. I found his eyes, smiled, and asked, “Do you want to die here?”

  “Say what?” the man said.

  He was still moving like a loose-jointed puppet toward me.

  The car key was for his left eye. The glasses, ready to shatter into both eyes, were for the bridge of his nose. If he remained standing, the palm of my right hand would drive that portion of his anatomy into his brain and drop him instantly. I continued to smile.

  He stopped. Somehow a message-had made it through his crack-clouded senses. His eyes were locked on mine.

  “The building needs you to hold it up,” I said.

  He shrugged, turned, and shuffled back to the wall.

  A brass bell chimed once as I entered Emily and Others. It was dimly lit, dusty, damp. Before I saw her, I knew she was there. I smelled her. It was the delicate scent of a soap only a woman would use. I knew she would be clean and out of place.

  Perfume doesn’t arouse me. It is cloying, fouls the air, makes it difficult to breathe. A lanolin soap seems to bring out the scent of the woman herself, the essence of her. Perhaps it was the distance between us, or the dank atmosphere of the subterranean shop, but at first there w
as no essence; only the smell of the soap.

  Then, faintly at first, I could smell leather, the bindings of old books. The shelf to my left held Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. Early American literature in nonalphabetical order. Shakespeare was to my right, and above him, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Chaucer, Keats, Wordsworth.

  I heard her move behind the stacks into the shadows farther off to my right.

  “There are no Emilys,” I said.

  “There are the others,” she said.

  There was no laughter, not a hint of humor. I expected at least a chuckle, and I’m seldom wrong about these things. “There are no women,” I said. “Were you looking for a woman?”

  “The sign,” I began, then gave it up. “No. Actually I’m looking for Henry Miller.”

  “I understand he had a lot of women,” she said. “Including Anaïs Nin. Is she the one you want?”

  It was humor. Dry and flat and cerebral and funny.

  She moved into view in front of me, but was shrouded in the dust and the dim yellow light that filtered through the shade on the plate glass window. She was slender, of medium height, fit in an athletic sort of way—and wore a black skirt that touched her knees, a white blouse with all the buttons buttoned, and a pageboy hairdo. Late twenties, I guessed. What I could see of her face looked plain, almost austere.

  “Only if she’s featured in The Time of the Assassins” I said.

  “She’s not. That’s his book about Rimbaud. We have a copy. It’s over here with the other New Directions paperbacks. Patchen and Ezra Pound and all of those.”

  She walked to my left toward the back of the store. I followed her.

  “I read Crazy Cock” she said. “One of those old manuscripts they just found and published. It wasn’t very good. I think Miller was anti-Semitic.”

  As I approached, the smell of her soap was more noticeable. I had no trouble hearing the flat, toneless voice almost devoid of inflection. But even when I stood two feet away from her, bathed in the same dust and sickly light that shrouded this woman, I still had trouble actually seeing her. It wasn’t that she was nondescript. It was as if she weren’t totally there—elusive somehow, becoming even more vague the closer I was to her.

  “My name is Sarah … Sarah Sinclair,” she said, as she handed me the book. “It’s a bit battered. The book, not the name.”

  Most of the time when I have been that close to a woman, I’ve slipped something around her neck or between her ribs. It was an odd sensation when, finally, I saw Sarah Sinclair’s eyes. She had no secrets from me. I was surprised by what I read there, but even more shocked by my own feelings. I knew that I would kill her, of course—not right then, but soon—yet there was something else. I wondered if she knew what her eyes were telling me—that she had begun searching the shadows for death a long time ago. I experienced a surge of risk like no other. I was light-headed, slightly dizzy.

  “This book is fine,” I told her. “I’m grateful to find it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “You must have, to come down here.”

  She turned and walked toward the cash register, asking me my name as she moved.

  I still couldn’t see her clearly. I knew that once I left the shop and tried to picture her in my mind, I would fail.

  “John,” I lied. “John Wolf.”

  She turned and, for the first time, smiled. “No wonder you were looking for the women.”

  The brass bell behind me rang. It was the black slouch from the sidewalk with a friend who looked like Mike Tyson with indigestion. This is one of the reasons I hate the city now. Thugs with nothing to do but make life miserable for everyone else. I decided to handle him with a little less subtlety this time. I pulled the .38 special from its holster against my spine.

  I never come into the city without my weapon, which I am licensed to carry.

  I flashed a laminated card with a gold seal that looked vaguely official, though it indicated only that I was a lifetime member of the Total Fitness Health Club.

  “I’m a cop,” I said. “Where do you want to sleep tonight?”

  The big guy started to raise his arms over his head, but the slouch reached up, rapped him on the chest, and gestured with his head toward the door. The bell rang again as they left.

  I turned to explain, and to make my apologies to Sarah for the scene, half expecting her to have retreated again into her shadows. She hadn’t moved. Before I could speak, she said, “You’re not a cop.”

  Because the gun hadn’t bothered her, I knew she’d been around cops. Maybe her father was a career cop with the city.

  “No,” I said. “It seemed necessary.”

  She shrugged.

  I walked to the counter and paid for the book. Close to her again, I experienced the same feeling as earlier—the sense that I couldn’t take her all in, grasp her, understand the quirks of her personality (something that I’ve been able to do, effortlessly, with any other woman). For the first time in many years, perhaps ever, I felt a degree of discomfort.

  “I keep the Emilys and others back here,” she said. “If you’re ever interested.”

  I thanked her and left the store.

  On the drive back I realized that I had been right. I could conjure up no image of Sarah.

  Once, I selected a victim, decided on a plan, and carried it out in less than two hours. The longest I’ve ever been about it was nine days. This time I had no plan. All I knew for sure was that this victim, this woman, this Sarah, would require something different, something more. A slow dance toward death.

  Sarah

  Early on in my therapy, Dr. Street asked me what I would be if I could be anything, anything in the world.

  “A virgin,” I said.

  I think I do pretty well with people, but only until things get physical. When I told Dr. Street that, he asked if I thought that was what went wrong between Robert and me. He’s always bringing up my divorce. But to me, it’s just something that I have, like my diploma or my vaccination scar. It’s there, and in some ways it may be meaningful, but I hardly ever think about it.

  I had never worried that my husband would leave me. To my mind, we were married, and that was that. Then one night he told me that he loved another woman: a rookie cop named Lane. She was tall, with auburn hair, and not exactly pretty. But there was something exotic about her—the shape of her eyes (almond) and the color of her skin (olive). I had seen her when I stopped by the police station the night before he told me about her. She smiled at me, and I believe I smiled back.

  Robert insisted that he hadn’t set out to be unfaithful; it just happened.

  “It was the proximity. The body heat works on you, wears you down,” he said, as if that made it all right. And as if I wouldn’t know about such things.

  I sometimes went to the beauty shop just to be touched—to feel someone else’s fingers massaging my scalp, lifting my hair. I required so little, but he gave even less.

  Robert didn’t leave after he told me about Lane. Not right away. He went on like before, as if the words had never been spoken. As the days rolled into weeks, I waited and watched, wondering when he intended to finish ripping my heart from me. Eventually I realized that the act itself couldn’t possibly be as agonizing as the wait, so I forced the issue. I sent a note to his girlfriend, telling her that I would appreciate it if she would stop by the following Saturday to pack his belongings and move them to her place. Without a word, Robert moved out late Friday night. When I heard the door close behind him, cells throughout my body seemed to shut down, suffocate, die.

  Before Dr. Street, there had been many others: white-coated professionals intent on telling me how well I was doing—but, with each reassurance, I felt more deeply troubled. I wondered why they didn’t see, why they didn’t know how sick I was.

  One Monday morning when I was still married, I awakened feeling thoroughly committed to my hopelessness. I felt that I had to live up to it, prove it true. By ten o’clock I was still in
bed. I was supposed to be at work at nine, but couldn’t decide what to wear. I was certain that whatever I chose, it would be permanent; I would wear it to my grave.

  I hated my work. Hated Mondays. And I hated walking to the bus stop, getting aboard with all those strangers, standing body to body with them all the way to the building where I worked, getting off, going in, pressing for the elevator, riding to the eleventh floor, getting off, turning left, entering my office, hanging up my coat, and sitting down to do nothing of consequence, absolutely nothing, until it was time for lunch.

  That’s why I telephoned the personnel department. I identified myself as my sister and announced that Sarah had died, suddenly, during the night. I was surprised that the woman at the other end of the line was so shaken by this news. She mentioned that she had spoken with Sarah only a few days earlier, on Friday, in the elevator. That was untrue, and I wondered why she had said it. Then I thought that perhaps it was true, and I just hadn’t noticed her or heard her. I was doing a lot of that in those days—tuning out.

  A week later Robert opened an envelope that arrived in the mail. It held my final check (payable to me, a dead woman, making the situation even more surreal), plus a letter from the woman in Personnel. She expressed her sympathy, and repeated the story of how she had talked to Sarah only a few days before the terrible event.

  Robert must have been wondering why I wasn’t going to the office anymore, but he had been careful not to mention it. After the final check arrived, he was unable to discuss the matter for several days. When, at last, he did mention it, he was unable to admit just how crazy he thought my behavior was.

  All he said was, “Why.” But because he had said it more like a statement than a question, I didn’t even try to answer. Except to myself.

  Tonight I felt the opposite of crazy. Almost sane.