Jake was reminded of her own work in the field of male sexual psychology with the EBI, before a career at Scotland Yard had beckoned. Sometimes she was asked why she had joined such a male-dominated institution as the Yard, especially when men were so obnoxious to her. For Jake the answer was simple: with so many women falling victim to male criminals it did not seem politic to entrust the protection of women exclusively to men. Women had the responsibility to help protect themselves.
When at last she put Gleitmann’s book down, having read almost half of it, she was amused to discover that he had previously signed it.
That, she told herself, was just men all over.
Be patient. I’ll describe the next execution in just a minute. In Cold Blood, as Truman Capote would say. First, let me quickly mention the last factor in my life’s new gestalt.
After my night on the computer and my idea about those other men who tested VMN-negative, I kept the appointment I had made before the test with my analyst, Doctor Wrathall.
You will ask why I was already seeing a psychoanalyst. Actually, I’m a bit of a neurotic and I’ve been having a weekly session for almost two years now. My relationship with Doctor Wrathall has really helped me a lot. (This is all so imprecise, but it can’t be helped.) Much of what he and I discuss relates to my own feelings of personal dissatisfaction.
The world is independent of my will, at least in so far as my will is essentially the subject of ethical attributes, and of interest as a phenomenon only to people like Doctor Wrathall. So it is easy to see that by discussing the phenomenon of my will in this way, I was attempting to determine the limits of my world and how these might be altered.
So straightaway I asked Doctor Wrathall if a man who suddenly perceived his real duty in life should risk everything to achieve it. I was not referring to the kind of duty one owes one’s fellow motorists. Nor the kind of duty one has to honour one’s father and mother. No. I was of course referring to the greatest duty one can ever owe, which is the duty one has to oneself, to the ‘creative demon’.
Doctor Wrathall hummed and hawed and finally said that by and large he was himself of the opinion that in life it was good to take a few risks now and again. A sense of mission and purpose was what made it worth living.
It would be wrong to add a structure to what was said. Doctor Wrathall is a simple soul and, like most analysts, he is not able to articulate much that is of any real consequence. Usually it is quite enough for me that he has listened, albeit uncomprehending. And so this question was a comparatively rare phenomenon, occasioning an even rarer response. Indeed, Doctor Wrathall was moved to ask a question or two himself, as to the nature of this ‘creative demon’. By the tramline-thinking of his profession he even made the predictable enquiry as to why I thought I had used the words ‘duty’ and ‘demon’. I lost the poor devil when, by way of an answer, I asserted that the issue was metaphysical rather than empirical. What untidy minds some people have!
By the time I reached home again I was convinced not merely that I should follow my impulses with regard to my brother VMNs, but that I had a moral obligation to do so. Look at Paul Gauguin for instance: he threw up everything — wife, home, children, job, security — because he had a passionate, profound, intense desire to paint pictures. That’s the sort of man to be.
Perhaps you will say that killing isn’t much of a vocation compared with painting. But I ask you to look beyond the conventional moralities and consider the phenomenology of the matter. I blush to use a word like ‘existentialism’; however, that is the essence of what I am describing. Think of the character of Meursault in L’Etranger and you have it. Only the prospect of death — one’s own, or of others, it makes no difference — makes life real. Death is the one true certainty. When we die the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Death is not an event in life. But killing... killing is.
Consider then the concept of killing: the assertion of one’s own being by the denial of another’s. Self-creation by annihilation. And how much more self-creating where those others who must be destroyed are themselves a danger to society in general. Where the killing is done with a very real purpose. Thus, the taint of nihilism is avoided. The authentic act of pure decision is no longer committed at random with scant regard to meaning. All this provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism.
My next victim, codename Bertrand Russell, was an art lover. In all else he was unpredictable. So unlike his illustrious name-sake with his mathematical logic. Russell left for work at different times of the morning and returned home at different times of the evening. I imagine he was on flexi-time or whatever it is they call it. He was employed in an office on the Albert Embankment in some minor sales and marketing role for the company that makes a brand of caffeine-plus beverage called Brio: ‘Coffee’s never been so full of beans’.
But every lunchtime at precisely 12.45, Russell would cross over Vauxhall Bridge and walk up Millbank to the Tate Gallery, where he would eat a sandwich in the café downstairs (I don’t think I ever saw him drink any coffee), and then spend approximately thirty minutes looking at the pictures.
He was an odd-looking fellow, although he seemed to blend in well with all the art-students that the place attracts. There was something gnomic about his features: the ears too large and too prominent, the chin too recessive, the nose too bulbous, the eyes too small, and the head too large for his scrawny neck. You could have used him as the cover illustration for any gothic fantasy novel. This effect was. enhanced by the long, grey coat he was wearing which seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and which put me in mind of Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And yet there was nothing benign about this peculiar creature. Russell’s was a wicked face of the kind that guest-star in children’s nightmares. If ever a man looked like a potential killer it was Bertrand Russell.
Following him around the gallery (he seemed to be particularly fond of the Pre-Raphaelites, which, in itself, is a good reason to shoot anyone) I wondered how much he knew about the Cambridge philosopher whose Lombroso-given name he bore. When you think about it, I ought to have introduced myself. I could have made some caustic remark about the Principia Mathematica, or even disputed the value of his attempt to arrive at atomic propositions. Not that it really matters. We never really got on, he and I. I always thought that he was a bit of an old fraud.
Of course none of this crossed my mind as I trailed after him, awaiting my opportunity to grant him the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, assuming that such a thing exists. I must confess that I was just a little nervous about (and contrary to my usual practice) the prospect of killing in a public place, in broad daylight. So I said nothing at all. Just watched.
Did he sense something perhaps? Was there, in the ether between us, a picture of a deadly thought that slowly transferred itself from my mind to his? Because there was one moment — I think it must have been while he was bending over a glass case to inspect some watercolours painted by William Blake — when he looked up and, catching my eye, smiled at me. I cannot say what I might have looked like. Nevertheless, I have the impression that I must have appeared comic somehow, or perhaps my jaw dropped dramatically, because he laughed. He laughed as if I had been a small child saying something impossibly cute.