“But why? Why would he want to attack a woman that reminded him of his own wife?”
The question hung there a moment, the noise of the train clattering in to fill the void; deep down, O‘Kane already knew the answer.
Hamilton sighed. He rocked on the edge of his bed, spewing smoke and wearing a faint thin-lipped smile. “Psychopathia Sexualis,” he said.
O‘Kane couldn’t be sure he’d heard him, what with the sacerdotal rasp of the Latin and the uncontainable rushing silence that magnified every nick and fracture of the rails till it roared in his ears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”
But instead of repeating himself, Hamilton set down the pipe and bent over to slide a suitcase from beneath the bed. He unlatched it and threw back the lid and O‘Kane saw that it was filled with books. The doctor fumbled through them a moment and fished out a thick volume bound in leather the color of dried blood. “Krafft-Ebing,” he grunted, dropping the book in O’Kane’s lap. “Here, Edward — educate yourself.”
The night rolled on toward morning. Buffalo came and went. O‘Kane, fortified by three quick whiskies and as many beer chasers, sat by the glow of the gaslamp and studied the wooden form of his employer. Mr. McCormick was blocked again, frozen and immobilized and no more harm or trouble than a gargoyle or bookend, but he was in a more restful position now, held in place by the sheets like an Egyptian mummy that would fall to pieces if it weren’t for its wrappings. It was sad, though, as sad as anything O’Kane had seen at the lunatic asylum in Boston or in his two years at McLean. Mr. McCormick was a fine figure of a man, really, as handsome as any stage actor or politician — if you could get past the bughouse look in his eyes, that is — and here he was, in the prime of his life and with all his wealth and education and a wife like Katherine, reduced to this. He was no better than an animal. Worse. At least an animal knew enough to keep itself clean.
O‘Kane watched his employer’s face for signs of life — the clamped lips, inflexible jaw, the nose like a steel rod grafted to his face and the pale blue gaze of the eyes focused on nothing — and wondered what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all. Did he know he was traveling? Did he know he was going to California? Did he know about oranges and lemons and the kind of money a man could make? But then what did he want with money? He had all the money any hundred men could ever want, and look at all the good it did him.
For the past hour O‘Kane had been reading, but he wasn’t reading aloud and he wasn’t reading The Sea Wolf either. No, the book spread open in his lap was the one Dr. Hamilton had given him, and it took his breath away. It was nothing short of an encyclopedia of sexual perversion — and never mind the title and degrees attached to the author or the resolutely clinical tone. A parade of sexual cannibals, pederasts, satyrs, urine drinkers and child molesters the likes of which no human fancy could have invented marched across the page, rank upon rank, each filthy obsession leading to a yet filthier one. It was scandalous, is what it was, though all the climactic moments were rendered in Latin to mask the shock of it, and O’ane had to rely on context, a vivid imagination and his early training as an altar boy to piece it out.
He’d been deep into a section called “Lust Murder (Lust Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous Lust Extending to Anthropophagy),” the alcohol working in his brain like a chemical massage, totally unconscious of where he was or what he was doing, when Mr. McCormick suddenly made a noise deep in his throat. It was a croak or groan, the sort of deep regurgitant sound a dog makes when it’s working up a puddle of vomit. But then, just as abruptly as it arose, the noise ceased, and Mr. McCormick never moved a muscle the whole time, his eyes still fixed and his head frozen over the pillow like the high dive at the city pool that never got any closer to the water.
Suddenly he groaned again and his lips parted. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,” he said.
“Mr. McCormick? Are you all right?” O‘Kane reached out a hand to touch his shoulder and reassure him.
This gave rise to a vibrato ratcheting, like a door opening on un-oiled hinges: “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
“It’s all right. I’m here with you. It’s me, O‘Kane. Lie still now — you need your rest.”
“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
The eyes hadn’t moved, not even to blink. The teeth were clenched tight and the ratcheting, creaking, back-of-the-throat rasp seemed to be forcing itself right through the bone and enamel. “There, there,” O‘Kane murmured. “Would you like me to read to you, is that it?” And he was leaning forward to set down Krafft-Ebing and pick up Jack London, when he caught himself. Sea stories were such a bore — all those spars and jibs and tortured cockney accents. He hated sea stories. He’d always hated them. It was then that an idea came to him, a wonderful golden perverse inspiration. What the hell, he thought, the whiskey barreling through his veins on its admirable journey to his brain and his tongue and the fingertips that turned the pages. Educate yourself,Edward.
“Let’s see,” he said, leafing through the big volume in his lap, “ ‘Koprolagnia, Hair Despoilers, Mutilation of Corpses,’ ah, here we are. Oh, you’ll like this, Mr. McCormick. You’ll really like this.” And then, in the precise, well-modulated voice the nuns had dredged out of him fifteen years earlier, he began to read aloud as the train beat through the night and his audience of one lay rigid and enthralled: “ ‘Case 29, the Girl-Cutter of Augsburg.’ ”
4. FALSE, PETTY, CHILDISH AND SMUG
All her life Katherine Dexter had been disappointed in men. Men had failed her in more ways than she could count — some actively and with malice aforethought, others passively, through no fault of their own. They’d let her down when she most needed them, broken her heart, stood in her way, barred the door and thrown up the barricades. She didn’t like to generalize, but if she did she would find the average man to be false, petty, childish and smug, an overgrown playground bully distended by nature and lack of exercise until he fitted his misshapen suits and the ridiculous bathing costume he donned to show off his apelike limbs at the beach. He was unreliable, loud, demanding, clannish, he defended his prerogatives like a Scottish chieftain, and he expected the whole world to bow down to him and fetch him his pipe and newspaper and coffee brewed just the way he liked it, with cream and sugar and the faintest hint of chicory. And why? Because men were the patriarchs and providers of the earth and obeisance was their due, and that was the way of things, ordained by God, Himself a male.
She let out a sigh. She was tired, cranky, disoriented, her nose had begun to run and she could feel a headache coming on. She’d wrapped up her affairs on the East Coast in a sustained frenzy of list-making, shopping and packing, her mother more a hindrance than a help, and she’d been stuck on the train for six days on top of that. And now here she was, seated on the divan in the reception room of her suite at the Potter Hotel in palmy Santa Barbara, with an invigorating view of the brown-sugar beach and the naked glaring belly of the ocean, in the process of being disappointed all over again.
The men in question this time were Cyrus Bentley, a beaky glabrous little functionary of the McCormicks who never seemed to stop talking, even to pause for breath, as if it were some sort of trick, like fire breathing or sword swallowing, and his accomplice, Dr. Henry B. Favill. Dr. Favill was a tall, elegant and icily imposing man who was inordinately proud of his dog-eating Indian ancestors, unhappy in marriage and stuffed to the eyeballs with McCormick money. They were the family attorney and physician, respectively, solid men in their late forties, universally admired and petted and accustomed to getting their own way. The theme of their little gathering was Stanley. Stanley had provided the context for all previous relations between these two gentlemen and Katherine, and they always took care on these occasions to refer to him by his Christian name and never “Mr. McCormick,” “your husband” or even “the patient,” by way of asserting previous claims. They’d been looking after the family’s legal and medical interests since she was a girl at Miss Hershey’s School in Boston, and they made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she was the interloper here.