“Must you?” I asked.
She shrugged. If I wasn’t a real Beetle enthusiast then it seemed I wasn’t entitled to her company. I went to bed but I slept no better than I had earlier. I heard the same sounds as before, though now they seemed much stranger. Some of them were definitely human voices: it could have been the sound of partying, of people whooping it up and having a good time, but it could just as easily have been the sound of angry people arguing and shouting at each other. And sometimes it didn’t sound human at all, as if it might have been dogs or wolves, or for all I knew, velociraptors.
Seven
The Cannibal Beetle
Joachim Kroll was known as the Cannibal Killer, but not always, obviously. It took the German police over twenty years to work out that he was either of these things. For most of his life he was known around his hometown of Duisberg as a likeable man with an IQ of 76 who kept a collection of dolls in his apartment and invited little girls from the neighbourhood in to play with them. What could be more innocent? He had other dolls in his apartment too, full-size female sex dolls on which, among other activities, he practised his strangulation technique.
Between 1955 and 1976, according to his own confession, he raped and murdered at least fourteen females. There may well have been others: he admitted that his memory was vague on some of the details. At least two of the victims were under five.
Kroll’s motives for the killings were primarily sexual, and in general he had no interest in murdering men. However, on 22 August 1965, by the lake in Grossenbaum, a few miles south of Duisberg, Kroll encountered the unfortunate Herman Schmitz who was with his girlfriend, generally known as ‘Rita’ in the literature, though that is not her real name. The couple was having sex in the front seat of Schmitz’s Volkswagen Beetle, unaware that Joachim Kroll was standing hidden outside, looking in through the window of the car and spying on them.
After a while Kroll’s voyeurism caused him to become uncontrollably aroused and he felt the urgent need to rape and murder ‘Rita’. He seems to have been concerned with Schmitz only in so far as he wanted to get him out of the way. And so, improbably and unpractically, Kroll crawled along the ground, unseen, and jammed a knife into the Beetle’s front tyre, which exploded with a loud bang.
Kroll had presumably expected Schmitz to get out of the car to investigate, but instead of doing that Schmitz started the engine and began to drive away. He didn’t know the area, however, and drove in the wrong direction, into a dead end, giving Kroll time to catch up.
Schmitz turned the Beetle around in the dead end and was heading back the way he’d come when Kroll leapt in front of the car, waving his arms, begging Schmitz to stop. Even more improbably Schmitz now decided that Kroll was a harmless passer-by in need of help. He stopped the car and got out to talk to Kroll and offer assistance, leaving ‘Rita’ inside the car, from where she was able to watch as Kroll now stabbed her boyfriend in the stomach with his knife. Schmitz collapsed in agony.
‘Rita’ seems to have been rather smarter than her boyfriend: she got behind the wheel of the Beetle, set it in motion and tried to run Kroll down. She failed, and Kroll escaped through the woods. Herman Schmitz died of his injuries a few days later. He was Kroll’s only male victim. The police saw no connection between Schmitz’s death and those of the women who had been raped and murdered in the area. Kroll would be able to enjoy another twelve years of murderous liberty.
Eight
The next day in Fontinella started much as the previous one had, and it threatened to go on in precisely that same dull way. I couldn’t face it and so I decided to go for a walk. There weren’t, in the ordinary sense, many places near by to go walking. The agglomeration of freeway, junk yard and now no longer abandoned speedway didn’t look like obvious walking territory, but the fact is I’ve always been attracted to disuse and decay, to industrial ruin; and I actually found it intriguing.
I left the trailer park. There was a security guard on the gate, and his uniform made him look a lot like a cop, but a closer inspection of the shield-shaped badges on his arms, revealed that he worked for Celluloid Security, a name that I thought rather blew his credibility and authority. I nodded to him on the way out and he moved his head just enough to suggest that he might possibly be nodding back.
I began my walk, and found that the distances involved were much longer than I’d imagined. The trailer park itself covered a surprisingly large area, and the grounds of the speedway, mostly consisting of parking lot, were huge. Walking once around the perimeter of the two would take up a lot of time, and that was good: I wanted my time taken up.
Even though the speedway was now occupied, it still had an overall look of careworn neglect. There were great potholes in the entry road, and the few portable office buildings were falling apart. The only thing in good shape was the fence, enough to keep out any but the most determined trespassers. It wasn’t obvious why the people inside needed so much protection, and it still wasn’t even clear to me what they were actually doing in there, but as I walked past a side-entrance gate, I got a few clues.
I’d thought Josh Martin had been speaking metaphorically when he called the people next door a freak show, but in fact they were, or at least claimed to be, the real thing. There was a sign attached to the gate that said, ‘Motorhead Phil’s Famous Automotive Freak Show’. That in itself begged as many questions as it answered, but it came with an illustration, a painted fairground sign that made things just a little clearer. It was a garish illustration of an airborne car, flying over a gorge of terrifying depth. The vehicle was on fire and a tail of devilish flames trailed behind it. It was a rather generic illustration of a car, but it could very well have been a Volkswagen Beetle, and perhaps it would have been if the painter had been more skilled.
I was surprised to find the gate unlocked and open just a little, and although it wasn’t exactly welcoming, it allowed me to see a few Beetles lined up inside. And again it struck me as odd that there was such apparent antagonism between the movie folk and the speedway people. Surely a shared taste for Volkswagen Beetles ought to be enough to enable them to get along, at least temporarily. It even occurred to me, though I knew it was totally none of my business, that it might be a help if Josh Martin invited some of the freak show crew to be involved with the movie, maybe as extras: they were certainly an eye-catching bunch.
I peered at the row of Beetles inside the gate, and I could see they were mostly wrecks, but one of them at least was in interestingly distressed condition. In the way that I enjoy industrial ruin, I also like things that have some patina to them: houses, furniture, music, people. And especially cars. This Beetle fitted the bill nicely.
It looked as though it must once have been something very nice indeed — Cal-look, unostentatiously customised; lowered, dechromed, bumpers and running boards removed. The paintwork had apparently started out as a thick, melting shade of pale sky blue, and then a hot sun had burned it paler still. After that, if I’d had to guess, I’d have said the car had spent some time at the coast where it had been splattered by giant waves of salt water that had given it an overall rash of rusty pockmarks. Add to that all the scrapes and scratches, prangs and dings and dents that bodywork is heir to, and you were left with the thing at which I was now looking, a uniquely and elegantly beat up Volkswagen Beetle. I thought it was magnificent.
I slipped inside the gate to have a closer look, and then I saw there was a man sitting behind the wheel of the car, a fat man, a very fat man indeed. I stopped in my tracks: I didn’t want to look like a trespasser. But he saw me and waved and beckoned to me in an all too demanding way. Reluctantly I went over to him.