289. Most of Machu Pichu

Most of Machu Pichu was now hidden from view by the fog, that had rolled in from the surrounding mountains. From it, the thin silhouette of Richard Graham emerged, impeccably clad in a white Italian suit.

“You can run from murder, mister Highsmith, but you cannot hide from it.”

 

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285. Life on the riverboat

Life on the riverboat never was more gay than in that spring of 1896. A troupe of singers had come aboard in Macapa for the long journey to Manaus, where they would perform La Gioconda at the newly constructed opera house.

Among them was Rigoberto Tuccini, the Italian baritone, who was to play the role of Barnaba, spy of the Inquisition. It was a part he was born to play, some claimed, as wherever he plied his trade some months later the Italian government got a foothold on the local trade. That now he was to visit a city that had flourishing from the rubber trade could not have been less of a coincidence.

But political intrigue hardly was felt on the boat ride up the jungle. Nary a night went by when there wasn’t an ebullient party fuelled by stroh rum and whisky. The singers would all come on deck and burst into song while scarcely clad girls shook their behinds to intoxicating salsa beats.

All singers? No. Missing was always Rigoberto Tuccini, who – citing his volatile vocal chords – would early in the evening withdraw to his quarters. None knew that I was waiting in his bed each time, bare-naked, to consummate our forbidden tryst.

Rigoberto was prone to let down his guard in these moments, letting slip intimate details of his double life and decrying the elaborate mistrust that was part and parcel of the spying game.

Not until he reached that emotional high note of anguish and betrayal on the Manaus stage did I realise why he had let me in on his innermost, darkest secrets during those nights.

Like all great performers, Rigoberto Tuccine was prepared to suffer for his art.

I, the naive cabin boy he threw to the Amazon crocodiles, had been his muse.

 

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273. Gunsmoke

Gunsmoke tickled his nostrils as the smell of death slowly filled the room.

The damping hole in her head actually improved her looks, the cop that found her on the floor in an expensive pink dress would claim. Chuck Napier agreed. The gal had fallen hard from the ugly tree. Didn’t mean she deserved a bullet through the head, though. If only she hadn’t stuck her nose in his business.

He hadn’t noticed her when a money transaction had ended with three stiff Dagos in a dimly lit New York alley. No looks meant no husband. And no husband spelled no money. So she started blackmailing him. Putting the screws on Chuck Napier, page one detective and famed consultant to the NYPD.

“What would the public think about you dabbling with the mob?” she had asked.

The public. Not the police. She knew he was hardened enough to endure a couple of years in Sing Sing. But he would never cope with negative copy in the Examiner.

For two years he paid her off with ten-dollar bills in a brown envelope in an anonymous post box. By year three she was asking for hundred-dollar bills and Charles Napier wasn’t planning on indulging her greed any more.

Luckily an ugly girl’s weakness was easy to spot. When he shot her through the head the potatoes were boiling on the stove and the roast she’d prepared all day was nearly done. The dinner table was laid out beautifully with her best plates and two burning red candles. The only thing she’d messed up was her dress. Blue dots were hardly fitting for a first date.

For the first time since she started blackmailing him, Chuck Napier took pity on her.

“I bet you’d look good in pink, gal,” he told the corpse.

 

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263. My dalliance with the devil

My dalliance with the devil started in the London sewers, when I disembowelled a vagrant, his guts tumbling in the black water, dragging the stinking remains of its owner with them.

Since, my knife has hardly been a week without blood. I have slit the throats of syphilis whores, punctured bellies of garbling drunks and unmanned underage rapists. Because the poor are flooding Chelsea, burgling our homes, robbing our merchants and corrupting our children.

Today I once again dipped my knife in crimson. A vendor of meat of dubious origins, who had sat up shop at the corner of Kensington Gore. I killed him in plain daylight, blinding him with the sun’s reflection on the blade, then plunging it in his throat. By the time I was done with him, his head had been severed from his body.

Hiding my blood-soaked shirt under my coat, I returned home more self-assured than ever.  In the hallway mirror I saw not a man, but a god wiping sin from the face of the earth.

Sweeping clean our streets has given me more pleasure than I had anticipated. There is an unbridled ecstasy in taking the lives of bottom-dwellers. The more pain I inflict, the more I enjoy it.

And there’s the rub. The euphoria lasts less long each time. But I cannot kill more. Not without the lust for blood consuming me totally. Not without drawing attention to myself.

So I will bide my time by reliving the murders in this penny dreadful.

If blood cannot drip from my knife tomorrow, it will drip from my pen.

 

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250. Certified bullshit

“Certified bullshit. Guaranteed to last a minimum of seven days.”

The vendor pushed an aluminium, ribbed cylinder with a bold-coloured label and an eight-shaped lip her way.

“That’s our standard package. If you need your bullshit to last longer, we do have an upscale range.”

“No, seven days is fine,” she said.

By Thursday she’d be out of the country anyway.

“And how does this work?”

“You just open the can, bring it to your mouth and suck the bullshit in.”

“That sounds gross.”

“We are FDA approved. You can give it a try. It’s just a sampler. Nothing major.”

Hesitantly she tore off the lip, brought the can to her lips and inhaled.

“I am now going to ask you a simple question. Answer honestly. At what time did you get up today?”

“I didn’t. I’m still sleeping.”

Evidently, that was bullshit, though strangely, she actually believed what she was saying.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” the vendor gloated.

It was exactly what she needed.

“So I’m guessing you’re the one who fabricates the lie?”

“I fabricate the bullshit. We don’t like the word lie. Sounds too dishonest. But yes, I’m the one who puts it in the can.”

“So you are aware of the bullshit? You can see right through it?”

“I can. But I’m the only one in the world.”

That didn’t comfort her.

“In that case I’d like to buy two cans, please. You can make them here? Immediately?”

“Absolutely. What would you like your first piece of bullshit to be?”

“I did not shoot the president.”

The vendor looked worried.

“And the second one?”

“Why don’t you concentrate on this one first,” she said.

“Then we’ll do the second one. I assure you, it’ll be quite similar to the first.”

 

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236. The corruption of Alexandra

The corruption of Alexandra started at the age of six when her brother dared her to take candy from a baby. Soon she was spiking the home-made lemonade she sold to church pensioners on Sunday and kicking kids for no particular reason. She was dropping f-bombs on unsuspecting passers-by and nicking money from her little sister’s piggybank.

Had she been older than six, she would have been called a liar, a fraudster, a bully, a cunt. Now her parents just branded her a ‘difficult child’ and sent her into therapy.

“That’s the fun of being corrupted at my age,” Alexandra told her shrink on the living room sofa, while in the kitchen the family dog started licking the translucent liquid in its water tray.

“I could get away with murder.”

 

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232. The news from Baltimore arrived in a hearse

The news from Baltimore arrived in a hearse. Cornelius Francis Poehler was dead. And not a single relative that guided him to his final resting place would shed a tear for him. Not even when the coffin was lowered into the ground, and amid the soothing rustling of autumn leaves, the persistent anxious thumping from inside the wooden box was clearly audible.

 

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228. The letter broke off abruptly after the words ‘I love you’

The letter broke off abruptly after the words ‘I love you’, depriving detective Snodgrass of his only clue in the grisly murder case.

Sarah Pembrooke had been slaughtered, there was no other word for it. Not a drop of blood was left in her mangled body. The crimson liquid had oozed from her wounds, seeping into the Australian chestnut of her bedroom floor. The stickiness reminded Snodgrass of the time he had spilt a bottle of maple syrup on the kitchen floor as a boy. Her blood almost smelt as sweet as well, he thought.

The police photographer’s flash evoked images of what had happened here. Sarah Pembroke, a high-class prostitute had brought a client to her apartment. They had fucked. He had cummed in her every orifice. And then he had butchered her with a hacksaw. Bluntly, yet meticulously, like a toddler removing pieces from a wooden puzzle.

Every trace had been carefully expunged. Fingerprint were wiped and there wasn’t a hair follicle to be found in the entire apartment. As for the semen he had dumped in his victim, he had poured bleach all over it, assuring no DNA would be uncovered. The whole crime scene was one giant ‘fuck you’ to the police.

Which made it all the more puzzling that he had left the letter, written by a woman in love to one of her clients. A person she named, but whose identity was removed by a frustrating rip in the paper. Snodgrass grazed the rip but was surprised by its sharpness, which extracted a drop of blood from his thumb. The drop clung to the edges of the rip for a second, then rolled along the paper.

Right to left.

Snodgrass smiled.

Fuck the killer’s games. There always was a clue.

He was left-handed.

 

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217. The traffic light flashes to a lighter shade of grey

The traffic light flashes to a lighter shade of grey as she takes a right turn, into the cul-de-sac lined with ashen trees.

She hasn’t been here for fifteen years. Back when the grass was green and the doors of the white-gated houses the deepest of reds. She was happy here once. Long ago.

Somehow, dipped in grey, the neighbourhood has more class . She half expects Clark Gable to come jogging by or seeing Jean Harlow loading the groceries out of her convertible. Life in shades of grey lends itself to that kind of nostalgia, she has found.

It does not make her task any easier. She hasn’t returned to Sweetgum Lane to dip her toe in a sugar-sweet past. She is here to bury the ghosts once and for all.

The mansion at the end of the cul-de-sac still looks immaculate, surrounded by trimmed rose bushes, with ivy crawling along the edges of its walls. You’d never guess it is the same house that has haunted her for the best part of two decades.

As she rides up the driveway her spine tingles. She has long fantasized about this moment. She has planned it in minute detail. The words she’ll say. The image she wants to burn onto his retina for an eternity in hell. But now, on the cusp of execution, she hesitates. She suddenly doubts whether this gruesome deed will procure a less troubled future.

Yet she walks the final couple of yards to the front door with pride, her sweaty palm clenching the gun.

Fate may have made her an inhabitant of a world with nuances of grey now the cones in her eyes have dwindled to a handful and taken the colour out of her life.

But today black and white will suffice.

 

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198. You are empty

You are empty. A hollow image. A figment of the universe’s trickery.  When you look into the mirror there should be not reflection. Hell, there should be no mirror. For you and everything around you is a void, only broken by a handful of scattered, lonely atoms.

Those words, uttered by the then holder of the Newtonian chair at Oxford, would haunt Li Xia for five decades. They spurred her on to find meaning in the emptiness, to search for mass where physics said there was none, to delve deep into the obscure world of dark matter and even darker energy.

It was a non-conventional field she operated in, one where there was no safety net. Each experiment could yield a result that would either turn the world upside down or downright destroy it – and not just figuratively. There was danger in every move. Disaster lurking round every corner. And though she did everything in her power to conceal it, it was precisely that nebulosity that kept Li Xia coming back to the laboratory every day for fifty years.

When after half a century her quest was taken from her, by younger and more ambitious researchers, that reminded her of herself at that age – only less scrupulous – she feared her dalliance with dark matter would be over for good.

She was wrong though. She had been wrong all the time. For it was not up to Li Xia to find the darkness in the universe. It was up to the darkness to find her.

And it did.

She returned to the lab. And when she left it again it was empty. A void. A handful of scattered, lonely atoms in pools of crimson.

 

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