Colleen McCullough - Too Many Murders

Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.

He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I abominate obscenities, but she is a bitch-a stringy, fawning female dog. Six days ago she came to me in hysterical tears to tell me that Desmond had finished with her services as a fellatrix-he’s going back to Philomena. Oh, the tears! The grief! ‘But I love him, Phil, I love him!’ So what? was my answer. You continue to do your patriotic duty! You will be nice to him, you will feed him business inspirations that I have fed you, and he will be grateful, he will be impressed, he will advance you even higher. All that and more I told her while she shivered and howled, the stupid bitch.

“Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.

“I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…

“Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’

“I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it-convincingly. I have my lever!”

What a world you live in, Mr. Smith, Carmine thought, the book dropped as he poured himself another mug of coffee. What a world you live in! Dog-eat-dog is too kind. Snake-eat-snake, more like. It’s Smith who is the financial genius, not Desmond Skeps, not Erica Davenport. They were his pawns, he used them to build that company ever upward. More and more secrets. And that’s how come he could finally dispense with Erica-a written confession for Moscow, himself the head honcho of Cornucopia. He didn’t fear her Moscow bosses anymore.

His plans were made with KGB thoroughness.

An entry on the tenth of December read: “Not a peep about Ulysses the master spy as yet, but I have been thinking, and thinking hard. If there is a peep, I must be ready to move as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and with the same devastation. It won’t be Desmond who makes the accusation-I’ve spoken to him many times since the banquet, and he suspects nothing. All he feels for me is gratitude that I gave him my special hangover cure. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he brought Dee-Dee Hall, and when I asked him why he had, he looked utterly blank. In the end he said it must have been a combination of booze and her ability to perform fellatio-he was missing Erica’s attentions in that department, but Philomena had insisted that Erica must go, and he was desperate to get Philomena back. I believe him on that point; he showed me a suite of pink diamonds he had bought her-a million dollars! Coming from Desmond, that’s desperation. He’s an inveterate miser. It must have been Dee-Dee who told him about Anna, and asked him to take her to the banquet just to torment me, the whore gone sanctimonious.

“Erica won’t say anything, that is a given. Therefore the accusation, if it comes, will be from someone else at the table-someone not too drunk to remember. I do not believe Erica’s protestations that her voice was too low for anyone save Desmond to hear. However, were it to be made in a spirit of patriotic zeal, I think it would already have been made, and loudly. That it has not predisposes me to think it will come as blackmail, either to Erica or directly to me. I have alerted her, which terrified her anew, the silly bitch. All I do is clean up the messes she makes.

“Naturally I have observed all the people attached to the table, so I have a fairly good idea whence the blackmail will come, if come it does. Blackmail is a two-edged sword, and Stravinsky agrees with me there. We have concluded that, if a blackmail threat does arise, all eleven people will have to die.

“If I commenced now, I could kill them one by one over time. The local police are surprisingly good, but not of KGB excellence. On the other hand, I confess that I am intrigued at the prospect of killing all eleven en masse. Such a coup! It would do more than merely confuse the local police-it would bamboozle them. And the exercise in sheer logistics is very appealing. Stravinsky demurs, but Stravinsky will obey orders. All good tools do, and Stravinsky is a good tool. A dream project! I am so bored! I need the stimulus of a completely new and novel project to lift me out of my doldrums, and this particular project is feasible. Stravinsky is forced to concur. Who would ever suspect one hand at the back of eleven deaths, if the way each person dies is utterly different? Oh, what a challenge! I am wide awake at last!”

And there you have it, Carmine thought. Ulysses had his espionage work down to such a fine art that he was bored, needed a fresh stimulus. A nice backhanded compliment for the Holloman Police- we’re surprisingly good, though not the KGB. I thank whatever gods there are for that!

“I’ve discovered that two of the men at the table have wives who can be tricked,” wrote Smith on the nineteenth of December. “Mrs. Barbara Norton is quite insane, but hides it well. Disguised as a bowler named Reuben, Stravinsky struck up a conversation with her. An empty gourd where her brain should be. Norton the fat banker terrorizes her, and she’s ripe for murder.

“The same can be said of Dr. Pauline Denbigh, though I will appeal to her personally, as one snob to another. Her husband beats her sadistically-what scum! She showed me those of her wounds that can decently be exposed. A mind of her quality, scorned for adolescent sluts! I’ll leave her a jar of cyanide. She’ll do the rest without prompting, except that I’ll force her to act on the date of my choice. She’d resist all bribes except a Rilke original. I’ll let her see it, and arrange that she’ll have it after she’s acquitted. I’ll pay Bera a fortune-anonymously-on condition that he gets her off. He will!”

That would do it, Carmine thought. I doubt anything Smith has said in here would alter the jury’s verdict, either. It’s the mention of her wounds that will matter, not the date. A Rilke original! Man, the guy must have some contacts! Not that the jury would ever see this diary. Bera would find some way to have it struck from evidence.