"You don"t know what an honor this is for you," said Borchert. "It"s quite a gesture of intimacy. Almost anyone here would kill for it. A shame it"s wasted on you."
"I"ll take your word for it," said Kline.
He took Borchert by the wrist and placed the hand on the butcher"s block. He folded the index finger back into Borchert"s palm, leaving the remaining finger, the middle finger, angled down against the butcher"s block. The burner had warmed now and was glowing red, smoking slightly. He rested his stump just above Borchert"s knuckle and held the finger steady, pushed it down slightly so that he first joint was firmly against the wood.
"Just the first joint?" he asked.
Borchert smiled. "For now," he said.
He lifted the cleaver and brought it down hard and fast, as had been done to him, to his hand. The blade was sharp; there was almost no resistance as it went through the joint, perhaps a slight snap as it chopped through bone. The finger"s nail and the flesh and bone just below it sat on one side of the blade, the rest of the finger on the other. Borchert"s face, he saw, had gone pale.
"Well done," said Borchert, his voice strained. "Now, Mr. Kline, if you would see your way clear of releasing my hand..."
Looking down, Kline realized that his stump was pushing down on Borchert"s hand so hard that Borchert couldn"t move. Blood was sputtering a little out of the finger"s end, weakly. He lifted his stump and Borchert moved his finger away from the blade slightly and blood came puddling up now against the blade. He watched Borchert swing the hand about and, stretching his arm, bring it down onto the burner coil.
The flesh hissed, the blood hissing too, the air quickly filling with a smell that seemed to Kline like the smell of his own burning flesh. Now, he thought, it is time for Borchert to pick up the gun and shoot me through the eye. When Borchert took his finger away, Kline could still hear it hissing a little. And then Borchert turned to face him, his face wreathed in ecstacy, his eye dilated wide.
IV.
He was allowed to go back to his room and rest. He seemed to be the only one occupying the house, despite there being a half dozen other rooms. Gous brought him a tray of food at lunchtime, and Gous sat at the small table with him, querying him gently about what Borchert had said, while he ate. Kline didn"t answer.
"Of course I understand," said Gous. "There"s an order to these things. A one can"t be told much."
"Where"s Ramse?" asked Kline.
Gous shrugged. "Ramse was needed elsewhere," he said. "We"re not glued at the hip."
Kline nodded, cutting into his meat, pork he thought, with his knife, keeping the plate from sliding with his stump. He put down the knife, picked up the fork, speared the meat.
"Do you know Aline?" he asked, once he had finished chewing.
"Aline?" asked Gous. "Everbody knows Aline. Not personally, maybe, but we know him. He"s the prophet. He"s the great one."
"Gous," said Kline. "Don"t take this the wrong way, but how did you get involved in all this?"
"In all what?"
"All this," said Kline, gesturing with his stump. "This whole place." He reached out and took hold of Gous"s stump. "In this," he said.
"Ramse," said Gous. "He got me started."
"He came up to you and said, "Why don"t you hack that off?""
"It"s not something I"m supposed to talk about," said Gous. "Not with outsiders."
"Am I an outsider, Gous?"
"Well," said Gous. "Yes and no."
"Here I am," said Kline. "I"m right here, just like you."
"True," said Gous.
"I"ve talked with Borchert," said Kline. "Have you talked with Borchert?"
"No," said Gous.
"Well, then?"
Gous held his head with his hand. "I"m not supposed to talk about it," he said.
"It"s a secret," said Kline.
"Not secret, sacred," said Gous. He looked straight at Kline. "When you have the call, you"ll know," he said.
"Maybe I"ve already had the call."
"Maybe," said Gous. "It"s not for me to say."
He spent the day thinking. Aline was dead, the cult in crisis. What he was being called upon to do was to investigate, discoverer the murderer, and thus redeem the cult, allow it to go on. Was that right? Yet, according to Borchert he would not be allowed to see the body, would have to ask permission to interview anyone, would be monitored every step of the way. Was he really there to investigate at all, or was he simply Borchert"s concession to someone else?
Near dark Ramse arrived, a basket full of food slung over one of his arms.
"Well, well," he said. "Had a good day?"
"Fair," said Kline. He opened the basket, dished up the food. There were two plates, so he gave some to Ramse as well.
"Borchert"s quite a fellow, no?"
"Yes, quite."
"They don"t make them better than that," said Ramse. "And a twelve too, to boot."
"Thirteen," said Kline. He began eating. Ramse, he noticed, wasn"t touching his food.
"Thirteen?" asked Ramse, looking stricken. "What do you mean?"
"He had me cut off something."
"Leg, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, left arm, finger, finger, ear, eye, ear. What else?"
"Finger," said Kline.
"The whole finger?"
"Just the first joint," said Kline.
"That hardly counts as a thirteen," said Ramse, looking relieved.
"You"re not eating," said Kline.
"No," said Ramse.
"You already ate?"
"I don"t have any hands," said Ramse. "You"ll have to feed me when you"re done."
Kline nodded, began to eat more quickly. When he was done, he pulled Ramse"s plate closer, dipped his spoon in, lifted the spoon to Ramse"s mouth.
"Do you have a picture of Aline?" he asked.
Ramse shook his head. "No pictures," he said. "The man"s a prophet."
"That doesn"t mean you can"t have a picture."
"We"re not Catholics," said Ramse between mouthfuls. "Or Mormons. Besides, we"re concentrating on his absence, not his presence, on what he"s severed rather than what remains."
Kline nodded. He kept shovelling food onto the spoon, lifting it into Ramse"s mouth. Not even the presence of an absence, he thought, but absence as absence proper. It shouldn"t be called a twelve, but a minus twelve.
"Ramse," said Kline, once the food was gone. "How did you get involved?"
"Involved," asked Ramse. "I"m an eight, aren"t I? They can"t withhold everything from me." "Not in the investigation," said Kline. "In the cult."
Ramse stared at him. "First of all, it"s not a cult," he said. "Second, I can"t tell you."
"That"s what Gous said."
Ramse smiled. "Why do you want to know?"
"I don"t know," said Kline. "Curious, I suppose."
"Just curious?"
"I don"t know," said Kline. He sat running the edge of his stump along the grain of the table.
"What did Borchert have to say?" Ramse asked.
"A great guy, Borchert."
"You shouldn"t make fun."
"Who says I"m making fun? He told me not to talk about it."
"I"m an eight, aren"t I? You can talk to me. You don"t have to keep a secret from me."
Kline shook his head, smiled. "It"s not secret, it"s sacred," he said.
"You shouldn"t make fun," Ramse said again. "You should tolerate other people"s religious beliefs. Besides, I already know a few things about it."
"Oh?" said Kline. "Why don"t you tell me what you know?"
"t.i.t for tat," said Ramse. He slashed his stump bluntly past his face. "My lips are sealed," he said. "Besides, I"ve come on an errand. I"m supposed to conduct you to the scene of the crime."
The crime scene was in the same building that Borchert had been in. Ramse tried to follow him up but the guard instead locked Ramse outside on the porch, led Kline up alone.
"What do you know about this?" Kline asked.
"About what?" the guard asked.
"About the crime."
"What crime?"
"The murder."
"What murder?"
Kline stopped asking. On the third floor they pa.s.sed the first and second doors, stopped at the third. The guard gestured to it.
"I"ll wait here," he said.
"You don"t care to come in?" asked Kline.
The guard said nothing. "Whose room is this?" asked Kline. The guard said nothing. "Aline"s room?" asked Kline. The guard still said nothing.
"You"re not allowed to come in?"
"I"ll be waiting," said the guard. "Right here."
Kline sighed. Opening the door, he went in.
Inside, the room looked much like Borchert"s room: a simple bed, a chair, a bare floor, little more. On the floor near the bed was a large irregular bloodstain, perhaps three times the size of Kline"s head. The wall nearby was spattered with blood as well. Someone had drawn a figure in chalk on the floor, though it took Kline a moment to realize that was what it was. It looked like a simple blotch at first, but in a moment he realized what he was seeing was the outline of an armless and legless torso.
"Good Christ," he said.
He got down on his knees and looked more closely at the chalk figure. It must have been drawn wrong, for the head didn"t fit snugly into the pool of dried blood that had spread out of it. He got up, brushed off his knees, went over to look at the nearest wall. Blood was fanned all along it but in no regular pattern, as if spattered from eight or ten different blows. No blood on the other walls. It was as if the killer had struck the limbless torso once and then had hauled it a few feet away to strike it again, and so on. Surely a man missing his arms and legs wouldn"t be able to move far while being stabbed, no?
He had stared at the wall for quite some time before it struck him that something else was wrong. He didn"t have to bend over to see the spatter. He knelt down again beside the chalk torso and measured it roughly with his arm. It was slightly shorter than the arm itself. The spatter should be quite a bit lower on the wall.
Maybe, he thought, Aline had been in chair. But the only chair in the room had no bloodstains on it. Maybe, he thought, whoever killed Aline did so while holding him in their arms, perhaps dancing or spinning as he stabbed. He could imagine the limbless torso stiff, rigid, struggling.
But that didn"t strike him as quite right either. True, he had been trained to infiltrate; true, his experience with crime scenes was far less than most of his former colleagues. Perhaps the killer had struck upward each time, as if carrying a golf swing through? Perhaps that would account for the odd spatter and the decreased amount of blood on the lower part of the wall?
But why? he wondered. Why strike that way at all?
And what was the instrument? From the way the spatter was slung he would have guessed a knife, some kind of blade. Without seeing a photograph of the body it was difficult to be sure. It hardly seemed likely that one would attempt to use a knife as if it were a golf club. Something was wrong.
He regarded the chalk torso, the way the blood had pooled uncovincingly out of the chalk head. It had been drawn wrong somehow. He reached out to touch the surface of the pool of dried blood. It looked almost lacquered. It was slick in some places, cracking on the surface in others, darker and thicker in the center. The light from the ceiling shined off it in a kind of busted nimbus, the shape not unlike that of a broken jaw.