“I’ve been thinking about the job,” she said.
Kling had been thinking about the job, too. Kling had been thinking that the hangings up there in the Eight-Seven were the work of the Deaf Man.
“I’m not talking about this particular job,” Eileen said. “This business of masquerading as Mary Hollings.”
“The rape victim, right,” Kling said.
“I mean the job itself.”
“Being a cop, you mean?”
“Being a particular kind of cop,” Eileen said.
It has to be the Deaf Man, Kling was thinking. It fit with the Deaf Man’s M.O. They hadn’t heard from the Deaf Man in a long time, but this sure looked like the Deaf Man. Why else would anybody have bothered to make identification of the victims so easy for them?
“A decoy, I mean,” Eileen said.
Kling was thinking back to the first time the Deaf Man had put in an appearance. That had been the most difficult time for the Eight-Seven because they hadn’t known then what they were up against. All they’d known was that somebody was trying to force a man — what had his name been, anyway? Meyer had caught the initial squeal, a guy who’d grown up with his father, came to the squadroom to tell him — what the hell had his name been? Haskins? Baskin?
“I’m beginning to think it’s demeaning,” Eileen said.
“What is?” Kling asked.
“Being a decoy. I mean, aside from the fact that it smells a lot like entrapment...”
“Well, it’s not exactly entrapment,” Kling said.
“I know it isn’t, but it feels like it is,” Eileen said. “I mean, I’m out there hoping some guy will rape me, isn’t that what it is?”
“Well, not rape you, actually.”
“Try to rape me, okay?”
“So you can stop him from raping somebody else,” Kling said.
“Well, yeah, that,” Eileen said.
Raskin, Kling remembered. His name was David Raskin. And somebody had been trying to get him to vacate a loft on Culver Avenue, crumby little loft Raskin used for storing dresses, guy was in the dress business, right, David Raskin. First he started getting calls threatening to kill him if he didn’t move out of the loft. Then the guy heckling him on the phone — they hadn’t known it was the Deaf Man at the time — began sending him stationery he hadn’t ordered, and then a catering service delivered folding chairs and enough food to feed the Russian army, and then an ad appeared in the two morning dailies advertising for redheads to model dresses, and that was when they tipped to what was going on: someone was referring them to Conan Doyle’s The Red-Headed League, and the someone had signed himself L. Sordo, which was Spanish for the Deaf Man, and he was trying to help them dope out in advance what he was planning to do.
Only he hadn’t been trying to help them at all. He was using them the way he’d been using Raskin, misdirecting them into believing he was planning to hit the bank under Raskin’s loft, when he had another bank in mind all along. Playing with them. Making them feel foolish and incompetent. Leading them a merry chase while he masterminded his break-in, probably laughing to himself all along.
Carella had got himself shot that first time the Deaf Man made himself known to the 87th Precinct.
If the Deaf Man was now responsible for the two hangings...
“It makes me feel like some kind of sex object,” Eileen said.
“You are some kind of sex object,” Kling said, and playfully tweaked her nipple.
“I’m serious,” she said.
And while she went on to tell him that she wouldn’t have been picked for this particular line of police work if she wasn’t a woman, which in itself was demeaning because nobody on the force would dream of putting a male cop in drag to lure a rapist — had he really been listening, Kling might have protested that male cops had been used on such jobs — and which was entirely against the whole psychology of the rapist, anyway. A rapist wasn’t interested in tits and ass, he wasn’t interested in a show of leg or thigh, he was interested in satisfying his own particular rage, which had nothing whatever to do with sex or lust. But the sexist meatheads in the department put her on the street to parade like a hooker in the hope she would trap — yes, trap — some lunatic out there into dragging her in the bushes where she’d stick her gun in his mouth; it was all degrading and it made her feel slimy at night when she took off her clothes, made her feel like scrubbing herself three times over to get the filth of the job off her. What the hell was a lady like Annie Rawles doing on the Rape Squad when she’d already blown away two guys when she was with Robbery, what was that if not taking the sexist view that a woman cop was suited only for a certain kind of police work while a man cop had his choice of whatever the hell job he wanted?
“What job do you want?” Kling asked.
“I may ask for a transfer to Narcotics,” she said.
“Same thing,” he said. “Only then you’ll be a decoy for pushers.”
“It’s not the same,” Eileen said.
But Kling was still thinking about the Deaf Man.
He had blown up half the city.
That was the first time.
He had set both incendiary and explosive bombs all over the city, to divert the police, to cause panic and confusion while he went about the business of robbing a bank. Not a thought in his head of the havoc he was wreaking or of the lives lost because of his clever little escapade.
That had been the first time.
Carella tended to block out that first time because that was the time he’d been shot. He did not like to think about getting shot. He’d been shot once before then, by a pusher in Grover Park, and he hadn’t enjoyed that particular fireworks display, either. So whenever he thought about the Deaf Man, as he was doing tonight, he tended to remember only the second and third times the Deaf Man had come around to plague them. It seemed incredible to him that there had been only three times. The Deaf Man, in his mind and in the minds of most of the detectives on the squad, was a legend, and legends were without origin, legends were omnipresent, legends were eternal. The very thought that the Deaf Man might already be back yet another time sent a small shiver of apprehension up Carella’s spine. Whenever the Deaf Man arrived — and surely these hangings bore his unique stamp — the men of the Eight-Seven began behaving like Keystone Kops in a silent black-and-white film. Carella did not enjoy feeling like a dope, but the Deaf Man made all of them feel stupid.
He thought it a supreme irony of his life that the man who was the nemesis of the 87th Precinct advertised himself as being deaf — if, in fact, he was — while at the same time the single most important person in his life, his wife Teddy, was truly deaf. Nor could she speak. Not with a voice, at any rate. She spoke volumes otherwise, with her hands, with her expressive face, with her eyes. And she “heard” every word her husband uttered, her eyes fastened to his lips when he spoke or to his hands when he signed to her in the language she had taught him early on in their marriage.
Teddy was talking to him now.
They had just made love.
The first words she said to him were, “I love you.”
She used the informal sign, a blend of the letters “i,” “l,” and “y,” her right hand held close to her breast, the little finger, index finger and thumb extended, the remaining two fingers folded down toward her palm. He answered with the more formal sign for “I love you”: first touching the tip of his index finger to the center of his chest; then clenching both fists in the “a” hand sign, crossing his arms below the wrists, and placing his hands on his chest; and finally pointing at her with his index finger — a simple “I” plus “love” plus “you.”