It was, Retzak concluded, “a fine birthday present.”
Isaac’s throat had gone dry. His hairline ached. Swallowing and gulping, he tried to stimulate saliva.
Klara said, “This has to be it.” Her voice was thick.
He nodded. But he was thinking something else:
June 28 had been a double anniversary for Otto Retzak. Commemoration of his birth and the date of his first murder.
His first victim, a common-law wife.
The L.A. killer had begun in 1997. Commemorating the centenary of Retzak’s birth.
His first victim, a wife.
Marta’s friends were sure Kurt Doebbler had killed her. Sometimes things were just as they seemed.
Isaac turned the page.
Upon finishing the drawing of Ilette Flam’s mangled corpse, Retzak wrapped it in a bloody sheeting, packed a duffle, walked to Honolulu Harbor, and got himself a job on an oil tanker bound for Venezuela.
“All the way there, the memory of what I’d done to the sow burned in my brain like a sacrament. The ability to extinguish the flame, the power. As I swabbed decks and emptied slop buckets, I barely thought of anything else. I was much more than a deckhand. I had danced a dance few men can hope to know. At night, as I lay in a bunk surrounded by snoring swine, it was all I could do not to bash them all. But cunning prevented me from such rashness for the ship was a prison at sea, with no chance of escape. It was on shore in Caracas, months later, that I allowed myself the next delicious indulgence. The proprietor of a beer-house, a foul-mouthed old Mestizo, got on my wrong side and I decided he’d be the one. Waiting until he’d closed for the night and retired upstairs to his personal lodgings, I snapped the latch on the rear door of his establishment and surprised myself to find him awake and eating a late supper of pork and rice and some such swill. As he started to curse, I picked up a frypan resting atop the stove. A lovely cast-iron implement it was, with agreeable heft and a stout handle. Within seconds, gray half-breed gelatin had leaked into that Hispanical dinner. No different did it look from the sow’s and as I sketched the scene, I got to thinking that all persons are but pathetic sacks of flesh and gristle and disgusting fluids. Our delusions of cleanliness and nobility are the basest of lies, the world teems with hypocrisy and falsehood and loosing the pitcocks of humanity in order to free the fluids is the greatest honesty of all. It was my destiny, I decided, to bring about Truth.”
Once again, Retzak jumped ship and hid out in South America for several months. Eventually making his way back to the States, he tramped across the country stealing and doing odd jobs, finding employment as a menial laborer, a short-order cook, or a night clerk at shabby hotels. His off-hours were spent brawling, overindulging in alcohol, opium, marijuana, and patent medicines, seducing and raping prostitutes, sneak-thieving, butchering wild and domestic animals at whim.
Murdering five more human beings.
The third victim: a matron walking her dog in Le Doux, Missouri, an affluent suburb of St. Louis. Nocturnal walk; she’d been surprised by a handsome, strapping fellow with a mutt in tow.
“I’d watched this one for days, a sturdy sow she was, and I admired her form and her walk, believed her someone I’d enjoy knowing in the biblical sense. But then the urge came over me to go beyond that merest intrusion and I stole an old yellow cur from a front-yard in her neighborhood, a wretched mongrel so old and blind that he put up no resistance when I lifted him over the fence. Fashioning a leash from a length of rope, I set out to see if he’d cooperate and he did, though in a clumsy, halting manner. I offered him a slab of meat and he regarded me as a religious fool might regard a Savior. That night, I stationed myself outside the sow’s house and she emerged, as always, at nine p.m. with her fluffy little annoyance tethered by a satin cord. As she strolled from her house, she began humming a jaunty tune and that inflamed me further. I followed her at a distance until she entered a dark section of her street, then hurried after her, carrying my borrowed mongrel. When I was sufficiently close, I set the dog down, walked past her, stopped several yards ahead and pretended to be tending to the cur. My possession of a canine companion caused her to see me as trustworthy and she approached without hesitation. Within moments we were chatting idiotically and I sensed that she found me gentlemanly. After an exchange of polite utterances, she turned to leave and down came the ax handle I’d secreted in my coat. The gelatin! Her little fluffy thing began whimpering and for dessert, I stomped it. Its gelatin appeared no different to my eye than hers and I found that quite amusing. When I was finished recording the scene in my tablet, I picked up the yellow mongrel, carried it a half mile away, to a wooded place. It looked up at me with affection as I twisted its neck. After inspecting its vitals, I kicked it under a tree.”
Isaac exhaled. Klara’s breathing was audible and minty. He hesitated before turning the page, knowing what would follow.
Number four: A “nigger sailor” stalked, accosted, and bludgeoned in a Chicago back alley.
Five: “An insolent prostitute, skinny as a young girl but syphilitic and insolent,” brutalized in a New Orleans park.
Six: “An abominable Nancy Boy living in the same hotel as myself in San Francisco pursed his lips at me in a disgusting manner and repeated the insult the following day. I pretended to enjoy his attentions, waited until a moonless night and followed him when he went out to prowl the streets in order to accomplish what that ilk accomplishes. Accosting him in a quiet alley, I agreed to grant his request. He bent and looked up at me, much as the yellow dog had. I told him to close his eyes and proceeded to dispense the Sodomite with energy and efficiency using the handle of an ax I’d stolen that very morning. Visiting ministrations of my unique design to his perversity-filled cranium was a special joy. His brain resembled that of a normal man in every way.”
Perfect match.
But Retzak hadn’t stopped at six.
Hitchhiking from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the itinerant killer decided he was now capable of drawing the human figure and face. Setting up an easel near the central railway station, he tried to earn a living drawing caricatures of tourists.
“However,” wrote Superintendent Teller, “whatever technical ability he did have was over-ridden by a tendency to depict others as leering, saturnine creatures. His rendering of the eyes, especially, was upsetting to those who sat for him and payment was often refused. Retzak kept the unsold drawings and these works have provided much fodder for analysis by alienists of both the Boston and the Vienna Schools.”
When his artist’s career failed to materialize, Retzak resumed his pattern of thievery and transitory labor, working as a ditchdigger, a cook, a janitor at a school, even a foot-courier for a small independent bank. Careful never to pilfer from the money satchels, he was found stealing paper and pens from the financial institution and dismissed. It was summertime, and rather than pay for lodgings, Retzak began sleeping outdoors, near railyards and in parks. His wanderings took him to Elysian Park, where “a sanitorium for tubercular war orphans and other sick children had existed for decades in that tree-shaded and verdant place. Retzak, always careful to present himself in a clean and acceptable manner, attracted the attention of the staff by sitting on a bench near the children’s rest area and drawing. Curiosity brought the young ones and their caretakers over and soon Retzak was creating pictures for them. They began regarding him as a friendly, wholesome young man. That, of course, was the falsest of false impressions.”