Shudder (27 page)

Another day. More rain. Two o'clock. Dave tried to while away the time with the TV, but it was even more depressing than usual.

At this time of the day all there was to see on almost two hundred channels was about forty soap operas, sometimes even the same ones but different episodes, almost as many reality shows concerning ordinary people becoming celebrities and celebrities rubbing shoulders with ordinary people, commercials of washing powders and politicians, and the occasional cheap old movie like
Avatar
or
Pearl Harbor.

He looked through the dozen paperbacks scattered around and below Anton's sofa. He tried reading a book by some V. Sorokin, but gave up two hours later, around the middle of the story. He simply couldn't focus on anything outside the situation he was in and its numerous loose ends.

Dave went to the kitchen, made himself a cup of coffee and took his place in front of the computer. He watched the swastikas, or rather, the ‘swavastikas', revolve for twenty minutes and then there was a sound of someone trying to open the front door.

Dave shot out of his chair immediately and ran to his coat. He whipped out his Walther and dropped to one knee by the threshold of the corridor, covering the door with the gun's muzzle. He steadied his gun arm with his left one.

The lock clicked. The door swung open.

Dave let out a sigh of relief.

“Get dressed, cowboy,” Anton said excitedly, “we're going in for the kill.”

“What, what do you mean?” asked Dave sheepishly as he put the gun back into his coat.

“We cracked the code. Well, good old Deus did,” Anton danced in agitation, even acting out part of his words, his fingers fluttered in the air when he said ‘cracked the code'.

Dave nodded, although he still wasn't quite sure what they were talking about, but he was immediately infected by the albino's enthusiasm.

“We know exactly to the building where the videos of the kiddie porn are being uploaded from,” continued Anton quickly. “Special forces from Ivanoff and Goldman are already monitoring the situation there, neighbors have been subtly questioned. There's definitely someone living there; various expensive vehicles do stop there at night.”

“Great, congratulations.” Dave was sincere. “What has that got to do with me?”

“Ah—” Anton raised a finger, his forehead creased by manic glee. “The apartment itself is rented as brainstorm office space by Quasar Works.”

Anton jammed a hand into his raincoat's pocket and took out a crumpled piece of paper. He smoothed it out, eyes running over whatever was written on it. “Right, Quasar Works, which is a subsidiary of Arctic Neo Inc., which in turn is jointly owned by two firms, one of which is ‘Import Export Investment Services', and is ran by who?”

“Who?”

“By old Eysenck.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. Let's go.”

* * * *

Anton's Moskva Opel reached the target neighborhood in under half an hour. Luckily the streets were not that clogged at this time of the day.

It was an up-market neighborhood, with sprawling two, three, and four story houses with well-maintained front gardens, and no doubt back gardens too.

In front of one of the houses, three white vans were parked. All three had the logo of a furniture transportation firm. Dave's attention was immediately attracted by the vans. He glanced at Anton, the albino was also looking at them.

“These our people?” asked Dave.

“Yeah, one mobile crime-lab and two special forces vans.”

“And the police proper?”

“They are two minutes away, they'll be here once the signal is given.”

“When does it begin?”

Anton looked at his phone. “In two minutes.”

Immediately two of the vans moved over to another house and about a dozen of people in body armor piled out. Anton scowled at his phone, “Dammit, bitch is running slow again.”

Dave watched the action. The Ivanoff and Goldman people were efficient. Five of them ran for the front door and two of them ran for the windows. The front door of the house went down with a muffled explosion, which produced a small cloud of smoke.

At the very same moment, the two men near the windows broke the glasses with their guns and disappeared into the innards of the house.

Anton lighted a cigarette. Dave watched transfixed as nothing happened for one minute, for two minutes.

The wisps of smoke around the gaping doorway had dissipated.

Two old ladies walking by stopped and ogled the remaining four armored figures in front of the house.

Then three police cars appeared with sirens wailing. The officers jumped out and erected a crime scene barrier around the house.

“They must have been given the signal,” Anton said. “Time to go see how things are.”

Dave flashed his city detective ID at the police officers, Anton showed them his N.M.H. card and they went into the house.

One of the Special Forces officers was just coming out, a trifle unsteadily, his black boots looking very out of place on the yellowish parquet.

“What's the situation?” Anton asked with a surprisingly firm and commanding voice.

“Fucking hell is the situation,” replied the trooper hoarsely and continued on his way.

“Where?” asked Anton.

“Second floor,” said the man and then, after going down the steps, he finally let go and quietly vomited into a batch of flowers in the front garden.

Dave and Anton walked up stairs covered by a worn and dusty dark green carpet. Another trooper going down passed them without meeting their eyes. Only one of the doors was open on the second floor. Male voices came from there.

The two friends braced themselves and entered.

The walls of the room had rainbows, ponies, teddy bears, and flowers painted on it. A large splotch of blood and brain matter covered the upper part of a painted teddy bear.

It wasn't the teddy bear's head that exploded. It was the head of a grown man who lay on the floor, legs in striped stockings and disproportionate clown shoes entangled in a wooden chair, a shotgun lying on the floor by his side. There were tufts of rainbow wig mixed with the sickening mess that previously was a human head.

Dave counted a total of eight little bodies in the room. He pointed an unsteady hand at one of the small corpses. “How?” he asked a nearby commando.

The man looked at him, his eyes glinting with a touch of madness through the eyeholes of his black mask. “Don't know yet. Docs will say. Looks like he either poisoned them or gave them some sort of overdose. Then he blows his face off.”

The commando looked at the nearest small body, “Bastard should've killed himself first.”

Natalie walked into Eberstark's office. She was now quite used to this shabby lair. It had little of the good taste with which old Blonksi had furnished
his
lair though.

Here were the obligatory cliché framed diplomas, most of them of various ‘master courses', photographs of Eberstark shaking hands with important-looking people, a small statue representing the party's logo perched on his desk, a five inch metallic pentagram near the eagle...

“Natalie,” Eberstark said, throwing up his hands to indicate the high levels of joy he was experiencing. His white shirt rippled with the movement and since one of the buttons was not buttoned, Natalie caught a glimpse of a hairy belly, before the green tie fell into place and hid the lack of T-shirt, A-shirt, I-shirt, anything, which would conceal the flabby skin.

“Natalie,” he repeated, “I saw the report you had prepared for me. Blonski was right, you
are
working miracles.” He winked at Natalie, including half of his face in the process.

Natalie smiled a polite smile and sat at the chair in front of Eberstark's desk. The synthetic upholstery squeaked as she found the best position for her buttocks. “Things are not at all rosy, Mister Eberstark,” she said.

“But they are definitely looking up,” her new boss insisted. “You have written here...” his finger tapped some papers on his desk. “Sixty-four percent of those asked already know who the National Patriots are and sixteen percent of undecided voters plan to vote either for us, or for another right-wing party.”

“Yes, and even four percent of left-wing sympathizers are in the same dilemma,” agreed Natalie, “but there are still only three percent who say that they are committed to voting for us in the elections.”

“Three percent is not negligible,” winked Eberstark again and smoothed out his hair with a pudgy beringed hand. “If only half the eligible voters vote, as projections are, then our three percent turn into six percent, right?”

Natalie suppressed the desire to roll her eyes. For some reason every politician applied this logic only to his party and not to the competition. She changed the direction of the conversation, “The interview went very well, Mister Eberstark.”

“Ah, yes, it did, didn't it?” The leader of the National Patriots beamed.

Natalie saw, that in spite of the data from the brain scans shaping his clothes and haircut, gesticulations and tone of voice, in spite of having his answers for the interview prepared beforehand by Natalie and her team, in spite, in short, of looking, dressing, and talking according to a specific program designed by other people, Eberstark was basking in the knowledge of his personal glory.

Of course, that's how it always went. A victory is the victory of the politician. A loss is due to the mistake of someone else down the line.

Little moron
, Natalie thought calmly.
This was a neutral TV host who asked you mainly what we begged her to ask you. Unprepared and in front of a hostile interviewer you would be crying for your mummy in two minutes flat
.

She opened her notebook with determination and waved her pen at the leader of the National Patriots. “Slightly more than a month is left before the elections, Mister Eberstark.”

Eberstark nodded at this undeniable truth, “You have something in mind, Natalie?”

“Yes, sir—a few things. For one, I think it's time we deny some rumors about the party.”

“How do you mean?” Her client leaned forward with practiced attentiveness.

“Well, there is always a periphery of radicalized voters out there. They want crazy things, like legalizing smoking on the streets, or the deportation of all minorities, or bringing back punishment against homosexuality, you get the idea.”

Eberstark nodded with a solemn face to show that he got the idea.

Natalie already knew that this solemn nodding face was a mask behind which Eberstark hid. When he did that, it was difficult to know what he really understood and thought.

She plodded on, “Obviously, we can't risk alienating the majority of the voters by subscribing to the agendas of the loony fringe. What we
can
do is spread some unprovable gossip about ourselves.” She realized that she was underlining her words with gesticulations just like her Dad, and that this didn't make her feel bad in the least. “Stuff like for example that we're going to send all transvestites to labor camps.”, she said deadpan.

Eberstark gave her a look. “You are suggesting we spread rumors that the National Patriots have a hidden agenda to send all cross-dressers to build roads?”

“Yes, sir.”

“To what end?”

“So we can then deny it, Sir. We will deny it successfully, since this really is not our agenda, but we will get the attention of the anti-transvestite loony fringe, and perhaps their sympathies as well. Or the sympathies of their enemies.”

Natalie looked at Eberstark and drew a doodle in her notebook while he thought. She practically heard his mind struggle to understand what she was saying.

I should have prepared this in power point,
Natalie told herself.

Then the complicated mental alchemy inside the leader's skull reached the point of turning the lead of confusing information into the gold of concepts that he could understand.

He smiled broadly and rewarded Natalie with yet another knowing wink, “Natalie, with someone like you on our side, we can't lose.”

Natalie shrugged with a tight-lipped smile. A compliment like this meant only one thing.

If we lose—it's all your fault.

Anton and Dave sat inside the cafeteria of the precinct with half a dozen empty plastic coffee cups lined up on their grubby plastic table.

Every fifteen minutes or so Anton popped outside for his nicotine hit and at those moments it was up to Dave to try to handle the residue of the scene at the pedophile house with his own resources.

He was absentmindedly picking at the hardened remains of spilled drinks when Anton reappeared. This time he was not alone. “Remember Sam?” he asked.

The plump, melancholy man nodded his mustache at Dave and sank into a chair at their table.

This was Sam who had told him about Andy's death. Dave returned the nod and looked away.

“So, what are the developments?” asked Anton.

Sam looked around and answered in a low voice, “Well, the body is Joshua Eysenck all right, total DNA match. Kids have been done by Kriosis overdose. Daddy is asking us to keep it under wraps. Joshua is dead, kids are without families, case closed. He'll fork out for the next year budget and will try to pass a bill to rebuild some of the outsourced parts of the force.”

“And?”

“It looks like this is what we'll do. The Chief ain't happy, but I think she's gonna swallow it.”

“Dave and Andy?”

“Denies everything, will provide for Andy's widow. As far as we know—everything's over.”

“Okay, thanks a lot, buddy. I needed that info.” Anton squeezed Sam's shoulder and gave him an earnest male bonding expression.

“Hey, I owe you, Tony.”

As Sam got up and moved to another table, Anton and Dave looked at each other. “Let's go have real lunch somewhere,” Anton said and broke into a grin.

“I'm all for it,” replied Dave. Suddenly his stomach was in much better spirits. For the first time in forever he actually wanted to eat something tasty.

* * * *

After a five minute drive in Anton's car, they sat in the closest representative of the Lugo pizzeria chain. Anton quickly sucked up two cigarettes one after the other before going in, and now sat contentedly without having the smoker's jitters.

Their pizzas were brought by a pale girl, whose uniform shorts showed splendid, plump, milky thighs. Dave noticed that he noticed her thighs. He must be getting back to normal after all the crazy shit. He wondered whether her breasts were also plump and milky. He hoped so. Maybe they even had the tiny blue veins.

“So, looks like it's all over,” Anton said.

“Yeah,” agreed the detective with relief lighting up his eyes, “all over. Hey, thanks a lot, man. You saved my bacon.”

“It was no hustle, Dave. I love you. It's cool. I'm glad we nailed the fucker.”

“Well, he nailed himself, but yeah...but the kids man...the kids...”

Again, the images flooded into Dave's mind. He blinked and tried to rid himself of them.

A somber expression also flickered for a moment on Anton's face. “I know,” said the albino. “The stuff of nightmares. At least the bastard's dead now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, at least he's dead.” Dave tried to concentrate on that and immediately brightened up again.

The calming rumble of scores of voices intertwining with the softly beating music, the clutter of cutlery, the smell of greasy food, the sight of their hot pizzas—these elongated strands of melted cheese tapering away forever before breaking off—all that helped the two friends, especially Dave, to begin pulling themselves back into the normal everyday reality.

Of course, the cynical albino wouldn't have been himself, if he didn't ruin it with an untimely remark, “In a way, if I understand your intentions correctly,” Anton said, “you are now out of the frying pan and into the fire, right?”

Dave stopped chewing, “Just what do you mean by this worrying sentence?”

Anton gesticulated with half a slice with a piece of pineapple on it as he elaborated, “I mean, now you plan to follow through with the season girl investigation, which is also supposed to be dangerous for one's health.”

Damn that man.
Dave had just begun to allow himself to chill out. He took a drink from his beer and suppressed a belch, “Yeah, you're right. You know, while we are on this subject, the things which happened to Andy and almost happened to me, they sound just like the things which happened to all those detectives who were investigating the Season Girls.”

Anton frowned in agreement, “I was thinking along the same lines. Do you think they may have been done by the same players?”

“I don't know,” Dave said, “but the signature seems if not the same, then very similar.”

Anton puffed his cheeks. Then he reaching into his pocket, remembered that he can't light up, and pulled his hand back out with a hint of unhappiness.

“All right, then we have two basic possibilities. Either the force behind the season girl curse and the Eysenck incident is the same, or it isn't. I suggest we use the principle of Occam's razor. The explanation requiring the least number of elements is normally closer to the truth.

“Both phenomena have happened in the same city and both as cover-ups of people connected to sex crimes. To serial killer sex crimes in fact. Therefore it is logical, that there is a relation between the season girl curse and the aforementioned Eysenck incident.”

“Well, that's probably academically sound,” Dave said, trying for some reason to match Anton's bursts of teacher-speak, “but the season girl thing has been going on for decades, while the person responsible for the Eysenck incident is Eysenck.”

“Not only one Eysenck, two Eysencks,” Anton said. “Where there's two, there may be a dozen.”

“That's a bit cryptic.”

“Let's count them then,” Anton said, and began counting on his fingers. “There's Eysenck junior, the killer. There's Eysenck senior, the cover-upper. Eysenck senior has used the services of parties unknown to get Andy and to try to get to you. I doubt he used one person. So therefore, there is a group X, which was used by him. That's Eysenck senior.

“Eysenck junior, he had customers for his child porn, right? So, he is also in a web of relations with a group Y and since he cannot have operated alone, least of all he needed children providers and the like, there is also a group Z, somewhere in the equation. So, when we think about it, the players in the Eysenck incident are not only the Eysencks themselves. There are at least three more groups involved.”

“Maybe four,” Dave said, catching on to the logic of tracing hypothetical webs of connections.

“What's the fourth?”

“You told me yourself, that the house was bought by some branch or other of a Eysenck enterprise.”

“Right, exactly, good point. So, there is a chunk of the Eysenck senior empire, which was used by Eysenck junior. This is group N and this is where the paths of the two Eysencks intersect directly.”

The clamor of customers and cutlery, and the smell of fried greasy stuff were soothing medicine for Dave no longer. It was all now demoted to mere background debris. He felt acutely that together with Anton they were feeling their way towards something highly unpleasant.

He finished his beer, “So,...you think Eysenck senior didn't know what Eysenck junior was using the house for?”

“Sounds unlikely, now that you mention it,” Anton said in his typical aloof manner.

Dave remembered the tufts of colored wig stuck in the remains of Joshua's head. “In the end, Daddy Eysenck must have been against the whole thing.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He left junior to blow his head off,” Dave looked into Anton's eyes. “Perhaps he even helped him somehow.”

“Could be, could be. To save the family name or something,” Anton got up. “Look I'm going for a smoke. I can't think like this. I'll be back in a minute.”

“Okay, man.”

As Anton left, Dave gestured to the waitress and ordered another beer. Then he looked around.

People were enjoying themselves, jovial families with gyrating chattering children, young couples and also mature but down-market couples looking into each other's eyes over spaghetti, lasagna, and salads, the odd single gentleman or lady eyeing the other customers, or lost deep in n-pad.

Dave looked at the tablecloth in front of him, which he had already covered with crumbs, flakes of cheese, and drops of beer.

He sensed the defeatist slope of his shoulders and squared them, rigidifying his arm and chest muscles as well. “I can do it, I can do it,” he said quietly to himself through his teeth, “I can handle this shit, I'll show them all.”

“You look like you've swallowed a cane,” Anton said conversationally, as he slid back into his chair,.“ What are you muttering?”

Dave let out some of the air he had inhaled and deflated a little, “I was muttering ‘I can do it', and ‘I'll show them all'.”

“Ah, quite right,” Anton agreed. “You
can
do it, and you
will
show them all. Now,” he continued, visibly refreshed after his nicotine hit, “I remember that the three explanations you could come up with to account for the Season Girls, was either each generation having a killer who chooses his direct successor, or an old doddering policeman maniac, or, as you called it, ‘an evil cabal'.”

“Yeah?” Dave picked up a few crumbs and put them into his plate.

“Well, since we also have the shit-strangler curse, I would say that the evil cabal sounds increasingly probable.”

“Yeah”? Dave picked up a cheese particle and chewed on it.

“Yeah. When there are groups involved, you have some sort of organization. An organized group can be short-lived or it can be long-lived. If it's long-lived, it can operate for decades. Centuries even. Therefore,” Anton halted for a second, as if trying to organize internally what he was trying to say, “therefore, it is far from impossible, that the Eysencks, or to be more precise, a group, or a cluster of groups, of which one or more Eysencks are part, are the power behind the season girl curse and the Eysenck incident.”

With that, Anton leaned back with the air of Descartes who had just proven decisively that he exists.

Dave stopped collecting crumbs and smoothed out the tablecloth neurotically.

The waitress appeared and gave Dave his next beer. As she left, Dave met Anton's gaze, “All that sounds like a philosophical proof by some ancient Greek. Unfortunately, I understand what you're saying. Eysenck junior is dead, but a larger group of killing bastards, of which his Daddy is probably a part, is still out of there.”

“This is what logic points to.”

Dave saw a kid on a nearby table entertain his friends with the immortal joke of putting fries up his nose. This struck Dave as outrageously indecent behavior, and he himself was perplexed at his instinctive reaction, until he suddenly remembered the sex shop.

Seemingly a lifetime away, when he was on a childish case like the toy-basher. The fries up the kid's nose triggered memories of the skull dominator, and to be more precise, the ridiculous thin soft tentacles, which were supposed to be nasal dildos.

“What?” asked Anton expectantly. He had seen Dave's expression change into a sheepish one, and wanted his share of the fun.

Dave obliged, “Well, remember that sex shop I was in to buy a sex toy as bait..?”

“Yes, of course,” answered Anton, “I remember they were being phased out, and replaced by gene-vat tits and whatnot.”

Dave's hand opened without warning and his glass of beer hurtled downwards by the table's edge. He made no effort to catch it and did not even appear to notice what had happened.

The glass exploded on the floor.

Dave looked at it slowly, then looked up at Anton with an odd expression.

“Hey? What's the matter, Dave?” asked a worried Anton.

“I just thought,” the detective said in a level voice, “that in a world where there are gene-vat tits for squeezing and gene-vat asses for fucking.” His mouth twitched. “There certainly must be gene-vat Eysenck bodies for suicide scenes.”

Anton stared at him. Then, without taking his eyes off Dave, he summarized. “Shiiit.”