Legion, Page 7

  Kinderman looked down at his tea and shook his head. “It’s no use. You’ll find nothing. It makes my mind cold. Something terrible is laughing at us, Atkins. You’ll find nothing.” He sipped at the tea and then murmured, “Succinylcholine chloride. Just enough.”

  “What about the old woman, Lieutenant?” No one had claimed her as yet. No traces of blood had been found on her clothing.

  Kinderman looked at him, suddenly animated. “Do you know about the hunting wasp, Atkins? No, you don’t. It isn’t known. It isn’t common. But this wasp is incredible. A mystery. To begin with, its lifespan is only two months. A short time. Never mind, though, as long as it’s healthy. All right, it comes out of its egg. It’s a baby, it’s cute, a little wasp. In a month it’s all grown and has eggs of its own. And now all of a sudden the eggs need food, but a special kind and only one kind: a live insect, Atkins—let’s say a cicada; yes, cicadas would be good. We’ll say cicadas. Now the hunting wasp figures this out. Who knows how. It’s a mystery. Forget it. Never mind. But the food must be alive; putrefaction would be fatal to the egg and to the grub, and a live and normal cicada would crush the egg or even eat it. So the wasp can’t drop a net on a bunch of cicadas and then give them to the eggs and say, ‘Here, eat your dinner.’ You thought life was easy for hunting wasps, Atkins? Just flying and stinging all day, jaunty jolly? No, it isn’t so easy. Not at all. They have problems. But if the wasp can just paralyze the cicada, this problem is solved and there’s dinner on the table. But to do this, it has to figure out exactly where to sting the cicada, which would take total knowledge of cicada anatomy, Atkins—they’re all covered with this armor, these scales—and it has to figure out exactly how much venom to inject, or else our friend the cicada flies away or is dead. All this medical-surgical knowledge it needs. Don’t feel blue, Atkins. Really. It’s all okay. All the hunting wasps everywhere, even as we sit here, they’re all singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ and they’re paralyzing insects all over the country. Isn’t that amazing? How can this be?”

  “Well, it’s instinct,” said Atkins, knowing what Kinderman wanted to hear.

  Kinderman glared. “Atkins, never say ‘instinct’ and I give you my word, I will never say ‘parameters.’ Can we find a way of living?”

  “What about ‘instinctive’?”

  “Also verboten. Instinct. What is instinct? Does a name explain? Someone tells you that the sun didn’t rise today in Cuba and you answer, ‘Never mind, today is Sun-Shall-Not-Rise-in-Cuba-Day’? That explains it? Give a label and it’s curtains now for miracles, correct? Let me tell you, I am also not impressed by words like ‘gravity.’ Okay, that’s a whole other tsimmis altogether. In the meantime, the hunting wasp, Atkins. It’s amazing. It’s a part of my theory.”

  “Your theory on the case?” Atkins asked him.

  “I don’t know. It could be. Maybe not. I’m just talking. No, another case, Atkins. Something bigger.” He gestured globally. “It’s all connected. As regards the old lady, in the meantime…” His voice trailed away and a distant thunder rumbled faintly. He stared at a window where a light fall of rain was beginning to splatter in hesitant touches. Atkins shifted in his chair. “The old lady,” breathed Kinderman, his eyes dreamy. “She is leading us into her mystery, Atkins. I hesitate to follow her. I do.”

  He continued staring inwardly for a time. Then abruptly he crumpled his empty cup and tossed it away. It thudded in the wastebasket near the desk. He stood up. “Go and visit with your sweetheart, Atkins. Chew bubble gum and drink lemonade. Make fudge. As for me, I am leaving. Adieu.” But for a moment he stood there, looking around for something.

  “Lieutenant, you’re wearing it,” said Atkins.

  Kinderman felt at the brim of his hat. “Yes, I am. This is true. Good point. Well taken.”

  Kinderman continued to brood by the desk. “Never trust in the facts,” he wheezed. “Facts hate us. They stink. They hate men and they hate the truth.” Abruptly he turned and waddled away.

  In a moment he was back and ransacking pockets of his coat for books. “One more thing,” he said to Atkins. The sergeant stood up. “Just a minute.” Kinderman riffled through the books, and then he murmured, “Aha!” and from the pages of a work by Teilhard de Chardin, he extracted a note that was written on the inside of a Hershey Bar wrapper. He held it to his chest. “Don’t look,” he said sternly.

  “I’m not looking,” said Atkins.

  “Well, don’t.” Kinderman guardedly held the note and began to read: “ ‘Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with feelings, is the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.’ ” Kinderman breasted the note and looked up. “Who wrote that, Atkins?”

  “You.”

  “The test for lieutenant is not till next year. Guess again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Charles Darwin,” said Kinderman. “In The Origin of Species.” And with that, he stuffed the note into his pocket and left.

  And again came back. “Something else,” he told Atkins. He stood with his nose an inch away from the sergeant’s, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his coat. “What does Lucifer mean?”

  “Light Bearer.”

  “And what is the stuff of the universe?”

  “Energy.”

  “What is energy’s commonest form?”

  “Light.”

  “I know.” And with that, the detective walked away, listing slowly through the squad room and down the stairs.

  He didn’t come back.

  * * *

  POLICEWOMAN JOURDAN sat in shadow in a corner of a room in the holding ward. The old woman was bathed in the eerie rays of an amber nightlight above her bed. She lay motionless and silent, arms at her sides, and her eyes stared blankly into her dreams. Jourdan could hear her regular breathing, that and the patter of rain against a window. The policewoman shifted in her chair, getting comfortable. She drowsily closed her eyes. And then suddenly opened them. An odd sound was in the room. Something brittle and crackling. It was faint. Uneasy, Jourdan scanned the room, and didn’t know that she was frightened until she instinctively sighed with relief on discovering the sound had been caused by ice cubes shifting in a glass beside the bed.

  She saw the door pushing open. It was Kinderman. He quietly entered the room. “Take a break,” he said to Jourdan.

  With a feeling of gratitude, she left.

  Kinderman stared at the woman for a time. Then he took off his hat. “Are you feeling all right, dear?” he asked her gently. The old woman said nothing. Then abruptly her arms came up and her hands made the patterned, mysterious movements that Kinderman had seen in the Potomac Boathouse. Kinderman carefully picked up a chair and then put it down softly beside the bed. He smelled disinfectant. He sat in the chair and started watching intently. The movements had a meaning. What was their meaning? The hands were casting shadows on the opposite wall, black spidery hieroglyphs, like a code. Kinderman studied the woman’s face. It had a look of sanctity about it, and in her eyes was something curiously like longing.

  For almost an hour Kinderman sat in the strange half light with the sound of the rain and his breathing and his thoughts. Once he brooded on the quarks and the whispers of physics that matter was not things, but merely processes in a world of shifting shadows and illusions, a world in which neutrinos were said to be ghosts, and electrons were able to go backwards in time. Look directly at the faintest stars and they vanish, he thought; their light strikes only cones in the eye; but look beside them and you see them: their light hits the rods. Kinderman sensed that in this strange new universe he must look to the side to solve his case. He rejected the old woman’s involvement in the murder; yet in some way that he could not explain, she somehow embodied it. This instinct was puzzling, yet strong, whenever he looked away from the facts.

  When the old woman’s movement
s had finally stopped, the detective stood up and looked down at the bed. He held his hat by the brim in both hands and said, “Good night, miss. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” With that, he walked out of the room.

  Jourdan was smoking in the hall. The detective approached her and studied her face. She seemed uneasy.

  “Has she spoken?” he asked her.

  She exhaled smoke and shook her head. “No. No, she hasn’t.”

  “She ate?”

  “Yes, some oatmeal. Hot soup.” She flicked an ash that was not there.

  “You seem troubled,” said Kinderman.

  “I dunno. It just got a little creepy in there. No reason. Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “You’re very tired. Please go home,” the detective told her. “There are nurses.…”

  “All the same, I hate to leave her. She’s so pathetic.” She flicked another ash and her eyes were slightly darting. “Yeah, I guess I’m pretty beat, though. You really think I should?”

  “You’ve been wonderful. Go home now.”

  Jourdan looked relieved. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Good night.” She turned and walked away quickly. Kinderman watched her. She felt it, too, he thought, the same thing. But what? What’s the problem? The old lady didn’t do it.

  Kinderman watched an old scrubwoman working. On her head was a soiled red bandana. She was mopping up the floor. That’s a scrubwoman mopping, he thought, that’s all.

  Again in touch with normality, he went home.

  He ached for his bed.

  Mary was waiting up for him in the kitchen. She was sitting at the little maple table, dressed in a pale blue woolen robe. She had a sturdy face and mischievous eyes. “Hello, Bill. You look tired,” she said.

  “I am turning into an eyelid.”

  He kissed her on the forehead and sat.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked him.

  “Not a lot.”

  “There’s some brisket.”

  “Not the carp?”

  She giggled.

  “And so how was your day?” she asked.

  “Good times, as usual, gambling.”

  Mary knew about Kintry. She’d heard it on the news. But they’d agreed years before that Kinderman’s work was never to enter the peace of their house, at least not as a subject of conversation. The late night calls could not be helped.

  “So what’s new? How was Richmond?” he asked.

  She made a face. “We had a late breakfast there, some basted eggs and bacon, and they brought it with grits, and Mama said right out loud at the counter, ‘These Jews are crazy.’ ”

  “And where is she, our venerable mavin of the river bottoms?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Bill, be nice. She can hear you.”

  “In her sleep? Yes, of course, love. The Phantom of the Tub is ever vigilant. She knows I might do something really crazy to that fish. Mary, when are we eating the carp? I’m very serious.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “So tonight there’s no bath again, nu?”

  “You can shower.”

  “I want a bath with lots of bubbles. Would the carp mind some bubbles? I’m willing to negotiate a rapprochement. Incidentally, where’s Julie?”

  “At dance class.”

  “Dance class at night?”

  “Bill, it’s only eight o’clock.”

  “She should dance in the daytime. It’s better.”

  “Better how?”

  “It’s more light out. It’s better. She can see the pointed shoes. Only goyim dance well in the dark. Jews stumble. They don’t like it.”

  “Bill, I’ve got a little news you’re not going to be crazy about.”

  “So the carp had quintuplets.”

  “Close. Julie wants to change her last name to Febré.”

  The detective looked numb. “You’re not serious.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re joking.”

  “She says it might be better for her image as a dancer.”

  Kinderman said tonelessly, “Julie Febré.”

  “So why not?”

  He said, “Jews are farmischt, not Febré. Is this what comes of all this packaging we see in our culture? Next comes Doctor Bernie Feinerman to spritz up her nose so it matches her name, and after that comes the Bible and the Book of Febré and in the Ark there will be nothing that looks like a gnu, only clean-cut-looking animals named Melody or Tab, all WASPs from Dubuque. The remains of the Ark someday they’ll find in the Hamptons. We should only thank God that the Pharaoh isn’t here, that goniff—he’d be laughing in our faces this minute.”

  She said, “Things could be worse.”

  He said, “Maybe.”

  “Does the Ark stop at Richmond?”

  He was staring into space. “The Psalms of Lance,” he murmured. “I’m drowning.” He sighed and let his head droop down to his chest.

  “Honey, please go to bed,” said Mary. “You’re exhausted.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I’m tired.” He stood up and came over and kissed her cheek. “Good night, dumpling.”

  “Good night, Bill. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He went upstairs and was asleep within minutes.

  He dreamed. At first he was flying over countrysides that were brightly colored and vivid; then soon there were villages, and then cities that at once were both ordinary and strange. They looked just as they should but were somehow alien, and he knew that he could never describe them. As in any other dream, he had no sense of his body, and yet he felt vigorous and strong. And the dream was lucid: he knew he was asleep in his bed and dreaming, and had total recollection of the day’s events.

  Abruptly he was standing inside a titantic building made of stone. Its walls were smooth and of a soft rose color, and they vaulted to a ceiling of breathtaking height. He had the feeling of being in a vast cathedral. An immense expanse was filled with beds of the kind found in hospitals, narrow and white, and there were hundreds of people, possibly more, engaged in various quiet activities. Some were either sitting or lying on their beds, while still others walked around in pajamas or robes. Most were reading or talking, though a group of five of them near Kinderman were gathered at a table and a radio transmitter of some sort. Their faces were intent and Kinderman could hear one saying, “Can you hear me?” Odd beings walked around, winged men like angels wearing the uniforms of doctors. They moved among the beds and the columns of sunlight that were shafting through circular stained-glass windows. They seemed to be dispensing medication or engaging in quiet conversation. The general atmosphere was of peace.

  Kinderman walked along rows of beds that stretched as far as he could see. Nobody noticed him except, perhaps, for an angel who turned his head and gazed at him pleasantly as he passed, and then returned to his work.

  Kinderman saw his brother Max. He’d been a rabbinical student for years until his death in 1950. As in ordinary dreams, where the dead are never perceived as such, Kinderman walked to Max unhurriedly and sat down with him on the bed. “I’m glad to see you, Max,” he said. Then he added, “Now both of us are dreaming.”

  His brother gravely shook his head and answered, “No, Bill. I’m not dreaming.” And Kinderman remembered that he was dead. Along with this sudden realization came an absolute certainty that Max was not an illusion.

  Kinderman peppered him with questions about the hereafter. “Are these people all dead?” he asked.

  Max nodded. “What a mystery,” he said.

  “Where are we?” asked Kinderman.

  Max shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re not sure. But we come here first.”

  “It looks like a hospital,” Kinderman observed.

  “Yes, all of us are treated here,” said Max.

  “Do you know where you go after this?”

  Max said, “No.”

  They continued to talk, and finally Kinderman asked him bluntly, “Does God e
xist, Max?”

  “Not in the dream world, Bill,” Max answered.

  “Which is the dream world, Max? Is it this one?”

  “It’s the world where we meditate ourselves.”

  When Kinderman pressed him to explain his answer, Max’s statements grew vague and diffuse. At one point he said, “We have two souls,” and then he again grew dubious and uncertain, and the dream began melting around the edges, growing more flat and insubstantial, until finally Max was a phantom talking gibberish.

  Kinderman awakened and lifted his head. Through a crack in the drapes in front of a window he saw the cobalt light of dawn. He let his head drop back onto the pillow and thought of the dream. What did it mean? “Doctor angels,” he murmured aloud. Mary shifted beside him in her sleep. He quietly eased himself out of the bed and went into the bathroom. He fumbled for the light switch, and when he had found it, he closed the door and turned on the light. He lifted the toilet seat and urinated. As he did, he glanced over at the bathtub. He saw the carp lazily finning around, and he looked away and shook his head. “Momzer,” he muttered. He flushed the toilet, lifted his robe off a hook on the door, turned off the light and went downstairs.

  He made some tea and sat at the table, lost in thought. Was the dream of the future? An augury of his death? He shook his head. No, his dreams of the future had a certain texture. This one didn’t have it. This one was unlike any dream he’d ever had. It had affected him profoundly. “ ‘Not in the dream world,’ ” he murmured. “ ‘Two souls.’ ‘It’s the world where we meditate ourselves.’ ” Was the dream his unconscious providing him with clues to the problem of pain? he wondered. Maybe. He remembered “Visions,” an essay by Jung describing the psychiatrist’s brush with death. He had been hospitalized and in a coma when he suddenly felt himself out of his body and drifting many miles above the planet. As he was about to enter a temple floating in space, the form of his doctor shimmered up to him in its archetypal form, that of a basileus of Kos. The doctor upbraided him and demanded he return to his body so that he could finish his work on earth. An instant later, Jung was awake in his hospital bed. His first emotion was concern for his doctor, because he had appeared in his archetypal form; indeed, his doctor fell ill weeks later and soon was dead. But the dominant emotions Jung had felt—and continued to feel for the next six months—were depression and rage at being back in a body and a world and a universe that he now perceived as “boxes.” Was that the answer? Kinderman wondered. Was the three-dimensional universe an artificial construction designed to be entered for the working out of specific problems that could be solved in no other way? Was the problem of evil in the world by design? Did the soul put on a body as men put on diving suits in order to enter the ocean and work in the depths of an alien world? Did we choose the pain that we innocently suffered?