Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

“What advice, Deels?” Carmine pulled the fur flaps of his Russian hat down; it was way below freezing outside.

“I told her not to have a white carpet.”

There was a further job to do that could have been done from Helen’s apartment, but Carmine waited until he was back in his office. He picked through the contents of her bag, surrendered as part of the investigation, and found her private notebook. Dagmar’s phone numbers were under F for Fahlendorf; he hadn’t expected Helen to get that wrong, nor had she. Eyes on the railroad clock, he decided Dagmar might have opened her office. The workload must have increased after Josef’s death, unless he had done a literal nothing for his fat pay check.

She answered with her first name: a very private line.

“Frau von Fahlendorf, this is Carmine Delmonico of the Holloman Police.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“I’m very much afraid I have bad news, ma’am. Your brother, Kurt, died a short time ago.”

When he ceased to speak, only the curious wrongness of the silence told him she was still listening; a broken connection was different, deader.

“Frau von Fahlendorf?”

“Yes, I am here. Kurt died? Kurt ?” The incredulity was very apparent. Then, “My little Kurtchen? How?”

“He was shot, ma’am, trying to kill a police officer.”

“You imply Kurt was trying to commit murder?”

“He had already murdered, ma’am. Professor von Fahlendorf was the rapist-killer known as the Dodo,” Carmine said.

Another silence ensued, one Carmine for the life of him couldn’t find words to break; it stretched on and on.

At last she spoke. “Are you sure the name is Dodo? Are you sure Kurt and this Dodo are one and the same?”

“Positive, Frau von Fahlendorf. Positive.”

“How strange that Kurt would choose Didus ineptus! That is the bird you mean by dodo?”

“Yes, it is. Why is it strange?”

“When Kurt was a dunce at chemistry, our father always called him a dodo, too stupid to prevent his own extinction. He meant that Kurt was too stupid to perpetuate the family.”

No use! Carmine was thinking. Kurt’s psychopathology dates from an earlier age than his teens and chemistry. But I’ll ask.

“How old was Kurt at that time?”

“Three-four. He had a brain, we knew that, but Papa was convinced his destiny lay in chemistry,” said Dagmar.

Too flip, far too flip. Why is she lying?

“And that’s it, Frau von Fahlendorf?”

“It is all I can think of.”

He cleared his throat. “Er-the funeral, ma’am. Do you wish the body sent home?”

“I will make the arrangements, Captain. Privacy is all.”

The most intriguing thing he had learned was that the Frau hadn’t really been surprised. Grief showed, then flickered out; Kurt’s sister had been waiting for news like this since-when? His flight to Chubb? Or the chemistry dunce? Though the question that plagued Carmine most was why Kurt the Dodo had attacked Helen.

As always, his only confidante would be Desdemona.

The guest annex at Kurt von Fahlendorf’s house was not where he stored his operational gear; when it was searched at the time of his kidnapping it must have had the Dodo’s souvenired books on display, but no one had known their titles, so their significance wasn’t understood. Now they were joined by a glass paperweight and the glass teddy bear, both exhibited against a black background.

“I wonder why he stole the teddy bear?” Delia asked. “He had no intention of selling it, did he?”

“His original intention was simply to remove it from any location where Helen could see it,” Carmine said. “None of us knew exactly how friendly Helen had become with Amanda Warburton, but Kurt knew. Don’t forget too that he read her journals, in which she admired the glass teddy bear enormously. She was very proud of her skill in discovering the nature of its eyes.”

“But we did know how friendly she was with Amanda,” Delia objected. “She acted under your instructions.”

“Maybe I instructed her, but the friendship wasn’t counterfeit. Kurt was insanely jealous, so much so that his imagination turned her journals into diaries written in a code he couldn’t crack.”

“But they weren’t diaries in a true sense!” Delia cried.

“No code either. Just the tortured thinking patterns of a madman. By the time he broke into the glass shop to steal the teddy bear he was hardly able to keep up a front of sanity. I had his boss, Dean Gulrajani, on my phone at the crack of dawn this morning begging for help. He put the change in Kurt down to the kidnapping, but then admitted it had started when Jane Trefusis, a woman physicist, joined the lab. Kurt hated her.”

“Why murder those two nice, harmless people?” Delia asked.

“My theory is that he thought Amanda was really Helen, and Hank Murray was a new boyfriend. He’d read Helen’s early notebooks, where she’d raved about the glass teddy bear.”

“I know he squired Helen around,” Nick said, “but did he honestly love her? Was he capable of that much reality?”

“No, but he thought he was. His fixation on Helen was multi-layered, and a big section was devoted to his family, how they would react to an American wife. Helen was the only one who fitted. By definition, the teddy bear was hers.”

“Then who was the Vandal?” Nick asked.

“Hank Murray. It couldn’t have been anyone else. He used the Vandal to establish a friendship with Amanda, to whom he was strongly attracted. The trouble was, he had nothing to offer her financially, and his past was shady-no one seems to know whether he took a knife to his wife, or she took it to him. It does seem that he was scared stiff of a trial and its verdict.”

The three of them emerged from Kurt’s house to find Robert and Gordon Warburton lying in wait for them.

“We hear Kurt’s as dead as a dodo,” Robbie said, giggling.

“That joke is worn out by now,” Carmine said wearily.

“Is it true? Is it really true?” Gordie squeaked.

They look like gnomes, Carmine thought, though they aren’t small, or ugly, or misshapen. Other-worldly? No, more sub-wordly. Then it hit him: they were from Mars.

Since it would be on the news, Carmine nodded. “Yes.”

“Didn’t I always tell you?” Gordie asked Robbie. “A villain! A dyed-in-the-wool villain!”

“A dyed-in-the-synthetic villain, from that background.”

Carmine had to smile: they were witty.

“A professor of physics named Kurt

Played with radioactive dirt;

Even God on high

Got some in his eye,

And cast Kurt into Hell for the hurt,” said Robbie.

“You’re probably right about Kurt’s ultimate destiny,” Carmine said. “Do you coin your limericks on the spot?”

“Of course,” said Robbie. “That’s why ‘radioactive’ doesn’t scan properly. Never mind, never mind!”

Gordie rushed into speech. “Captain, Robbie and I had this genius idea for an original screenplay!” The greenish eyes slid sideways in a remarkable suggestion of cold and ruthless passion; a quick glance at the other twin revealed the identical look. “Even now it’s finished and copyrighted, a few weeks can see a stolen version out before we could get ours off the ground. We don’t know any real moguls!” Now there was a hint of persecuted desperation in his voice, and his eyes were wild with fear; the other twin’s look was identical. How do they do it?

“Oh, shut up, Gordie!” Robbie said irritably. “Not that Gordie’s picture is too pessimistic, Captain, it isn’t. It’s more that he bewilders rather than enlightens.”

“Correct,” said Carmine, settling to enjoy the situation. “Enlighten me, Robert-if indeed I address Robert?”