When he tried to engage her in conversation, she answered in monosyllables without looking up. Each time she spoke, Rolf would pause in his talk with Joss, stiffen, and relax only when she finished. Finally Burt asked:
“Where did you work, Mrs. Keener, before you were married?”
Nobody moved, but Burt could feel the air stretch taut like a balloon about to burst. Rolf pushed back his plate and asked with a half-smile:
“Tell me something, Burt. How does it feel to arrest a man?”
Joss looked annoyed at this abrupt diversion of Rolf’s attention. No doubt, to her it was normal dinner conversation, everybody friendly and on a first-name basis.
“That depends, Rolf. Thieves, embezzlers, forgers, I just feel relieved. Here’s another man put out of the way before he gets dangerous, one more man stopped short of murder.”
“Murder? You think all crime leads to murder?”
Burt put his knife on his plate and weighed his words carefully. “Put it this way, Rolf. Murder is insanity. Crime of any kind is a small dose of the same thing.”
“Oh, I don’t agree. The profit motive—”
“—is an excuse they give themselves. Show me a financially successful crook, and I’ll show you a man who could have made just as much money in, say, the used-car business. Why did he turn to crime? Social protest. The hell with everybody, he says, I won’t play their stinking game. So he commits a crime and gets away with it. Why don’t they catch me? he wonders. He commits another, then another, getting bolder and bolder until he’s finally caught and tossed in the pen. Then he’s relieved as hell. See, he says to himself, I was right. Everybody’s out to get me.”
Rolf was smiling. “And if he isn’t caught, I suppose he finally commits murder.”
Burt shrugged. “That’s the biggest social protest of all.”
“Yes.” Rolf pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Interesting to meet a philosophical cop. How do you feel when you get a murderer?”
“I feel good, Rolf. Damn good. I feel I’m saving a life, maybe several. Because they don’t generally stop at one. It’s like getting an olive out of a bottle, the first one’s the hardest. After that it becomes a simple and final solution to everything. Even the simplest irritation, a waitress spills a drink on your lap and your first thought is, kill her.”
“Burt,” said Joss. “That’s insane.”
“That’s my point. A sane man might, under very pressing circumstances, commit one murder. But he wouldn’t stay sane long. Murder’s too big a load to carry. Even your Nazi friends, Rolf, had to keep telling themselves they were just following orders.”
“And when a cop kills?” asked Rolf softly.
Burt felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what kind of fiction does a cop provide himself with when he kills—”
Joss cut in quickly. “Rolf, I want to show you something.”
Rolf ignored her. He leaned-forward and fixed his eyes on Burt. “I know what they tell themselves. They say it was an unavoidable accident. I aimed for his legs but somebody jostled my gun. I fired over his head but he jumped up and caught the bullet. He was trying to kill me and I had to stop him.” He leaned back, looking pleased with himself. “I have a theory about cops, Burt. They know, when they go into the racket, that eventually they’re going to find themselves in a position to kill legally—”
Joss rose. “Rolf, come over here a minute.”
“Let me finish,” said Rolf with sudden peevishness. “You see what I’m getting at, Burt?”
Burt felt sticky perspiration beneath his clothes. At the beginning of Rolf’s soliloquy he had thought, Well, so Rolf’s hobby is cop-baiting. He’d been over this route before and, rather than anger, had felt only a faint boredom. But now the man was dealing with the subconscious motives of a policeman who kills, and these were the precise questions Burt had been asking himself.
“Rolf, joining the police doesn’t get you a license for killing—”
“How many cops have burned for it?”
“Rolf, I want to talk to you,” said Joss.
Rolf sighed and stood up. “My theory is that cops are instinctive killers who’ve found a socially accepted way of going about it. Think it over.”
Burt watched Rolf and Joss walk over to the edge and pretend to be looking through the telescope. Joss would no doubt tell him about the boy, and Burt would have preferred that she mind her own business. But of course Joss would say it was her business to see that no misunderstandings arose between guests.
Well, unfinished business, Mrs. Rolf Keener. “Could I borrow your comb?” he asked.
She looked up in surprise. “Sure.”
She delved into her little handbag and came up with a sequinned comb. She wiped it with a napkin and gave it to him. He saw with dismay that it was clean of hair. Scratch one effort...
He combed his hair and gave it back. “The temperature has cooled since last night,” he said casually.
And just as casually she replied, “I threw you the ball and you dropped it. You want to pick it up again?”
He had only to stir the ashes.
“I just wanted to say, if you need help with anything, tell me before he gets back.”
He’d been thinking about the letters, but she pointed a finger at the untouched pigeon on his plate. “You can. Slip that under the table to me, quick.”
There are times when a man gets involved in a scene so bizarre that he must freeze his intellect, numb his mental process, before he can act. It was in this way that Burt passed her the pigeon and sat listening to the hidden crackle of tiny bones and the juicy sound of her mastication. She ate with her head lowered, devouring the entire pigeon in the time it took to rip off the meat and convey it to her mouth. Burt sat with a growing conviction that he was the only sane person at the table. Finished, she touched a napkin to her mouth with such incongruous delicacy that he burst out laughing.
She frowned toward Rolf, then leaned confidentially across the table. “Don’t tell Rolf. He’s trying to enforce my diet.”
A bright light flashed in his brain. “Oh, you’ve put on weight recently?”
“You think I’m getting fat?”
“I see nothing wrong with your shape, if your clothes only fit—”
“Oh, that’s part of it, don’t you see? He’s got this idea that people go through life trying to balance out their various urges. I’ve got an urge to eat, but I’ve also got this urge to wear nice things. He decided that the urge to dress well was strongest. So he went out and bought me a raft of lovely clothes for our trip, only they’re two sizes too small. He figures I’ll diet in order to be able to wear them; meanwhile I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown because I’m afraid something’s going to burst out any minute.”
Burt managed a faint smile. The whole ridiculous story fitted Rolf’s weird logic. Unfortunately, one of the main props in his theory was that the clothes weren’t really hers...