Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

But Nan Koslov falls completely outside this pattern, thus voiding my comfortable generalization. She is disconcertingly complete within herself. I can detect in her no yen for any kind of security or stability. She was content to wander, to stake no claim on any man, to take what she was given and make do with it.

It is only logical to relate this to her sexual attitude. I realize that every culture has its own violent superstitions about sex. The incestuous practices of the ancient Egyptians appall us. We are sickened when we learn that the dynastic line was maintained through the offspring of father-daughter copulation. We feel utterly superior to primitive races, and call their sex play “dirty habits.” Even in our own times, we cannot comprehend the frank, uncomplicated, casual attitude of the Scandinavian countries toward unregulated sexual promiscuity. Even as we condemn their young people, they condemn us for what they term our “obsession” with sex. They think we are the twisted ones. They smile and say it just does not have the importance we give it.

Perhaps we are twisted, but I personally find it a suitable way to live. I respect continence. The sexual act in its purest sense should be a sacred act, an act of devotion, a ceremony of love. A coin passed too often from hand to hand loses its mint-sharpness. The inscription can no longer be read. If it is agreed that life should contain acts or symbols of value, is not the sexual act a suitable thing to be so acclaimed? If nothing in life has great meaning, then life itself is denigrated.

To Nanette Koslov, the act of sex has no emotional significance. It is, to her, a way of achieving a mild, unselective pleasure. For several years she has been, to the men around her, an uncomplicated convenience — like a free lunch in the old-time saloons. If the man who was housing and feeding her preferred that she reserve herself for him, either through some emotional quirk, or through that same fastidiousness that prevents the sharing of a toothbrush, she was agreeable. Should he wish to share her, she was co-operative. Love talk bored her. Jealousy was an emotion she could not comprehend. She wanted men to want her. It was the only sort of reassurance she seemed to need. She could have followed the legions of the Romans on remote campaigns. The life would have suited her.

Thus, to me, she is an uncomplicated evil, and a new thing in the world — a denial of most of what we mean when we say Woman. From what she has told me, I now believe that she is one of a multitude. This is a terrifying thing to contemplate. It is more than a revolt against the puritan aspects of our culture. She does not feel that she is in revolt. She feels that she is honest and natural. If she is legion, what is happening to us all? What is happening to a familiar world? She has reduced the magic of life to a low and dirty denominator, made of herself an idle receptacle, and feels neither shame nor regret. She is, to use a word she could not comprehend, godless.

It is unprofessional of me to feel satisfaction in knowing that she is now very afraid. She is afraid of death, the way an animal is afraid. She does not have the imagination to fear life imprisonment.

She asks me many questions. She bites her thick lip, and then asks if you feel anything when you are electrocuted. I tell her it is very sudden. She asks if I can get them off. I tell her I will try. And she asks me again if it will hurt. She asks the way a child might ask about a whipping.

The four of them, during their brief career, were a strange, interrelated group. She was Sander Golden’s from the beginning. I have learned that his use of her was as unimportant to him as to her, and it was infrequent, as might be expected in a man whose vital energies have been depleted by years of abuse. Though she was of no importance to him, he would not let Hernandez have her. This was a game Golden was playing, a cruel and rather dangerous game. Hernandez wanted her badly. Golden apparently wanted to prove to himself that he could control Hernandez even with this additional strain upon their relationship. He flaunted his possession of the Koslov girl, and blocked every effort Hernandez made to possess her. The girl was aware of the game, and idly amused by it, and increased the tension by flirting with Hernandez, teasing him the way one might tease a caged bear. Hernandez was caged by his great regard for Sander Golden. Sander had to learn how stout the bars were.

After Kirby Stassen joined them, Sander Golden was able to increase the pressure on Hernandez by sharing the girl with Stassen. This had the effect of directing all Hernandez’ sullen rage at Stassen, rather than Golden. I feel that Hernandez would have murdered Kirby Stassen sooner or later, had not the tension been broken by the acquisition of Helen Wister.

Of course, the first I knew of the invasion of our county by this foursome was when, on Sunday morning, I read the front-page account of the murder of Arnold Crown and the abduction of Paul Wister’s daughter. As a matter of professional interest, I had been following the news stories of their track of violence. Until the murder of Crown the authorities were not certain whether it was two men or three men or four men and a girl involved. It was a stroke of luck that the Crown murder had occurred in front of unseen witnesses. As yet no positive identification of any of them had been made. I had expected to read that Sunday morning of their having been trapped and captured. Their luck was incredibly good. Their crimes had the mark of the amateur, plus that curious frenzy of the unbalanced mind. Individuals have run amuck in every society the world has known, and will continue so to do. It is unusual for four crazed ones to join forces.

Back on that twenty-sixth day of July, on that hot still Sunday morning, I had no idea that I would find myself defending them. The authorities were tackling the problem with great energy...

By ten o’clock on Sunday morning, July 26, the provisional headquarters of the FBI team assigned to the Wolf Pack case had been transferred from Nashville to Monroe. The FBI had come into the case as a result of the previous kidnap-murder near Nashville. Several agents remained in the Nashville area locking up the details of that investigation. The Special Agent in Charge was Herbert Dunnigan, a tidy, tailored, rather nondescript-looking man with graying auburn hair and a very slight stammer. He arrived by plane at the Monroe airport along with four agents just twenty minutes before the three more agents he had requested arrived from Washington headquarters.

He took over three offices on the third floor of the Monroe National Bank Building, adjacent to the offices occupied by the small FBI staff resident in Monroe. He called in city, county and state law enforcement officials and made it quietly clear to them that he was in charge of the case. He requested their co-operation, and stated that any information released to the press would be released through him.

Herbert Dunnigan, as a roving specialist in kidnap cases, was the first to admit that this case was far outside the usual pattern of such crimes. No one was taking a cold risk for fat profit. This was like trying to shoot mad dogs.

And, in talking to the local officials, he had felt considerably less brisk and confident than he had sounded. Of late he had begun to feel that his public personality was like one of those movie sets where only the fronts of the buildings are erected. But the two-dimensional fronts were tilting and sagging in a high wind, and Herbert Dunnigan was racing back and forth, out of sight of the camera, strengthening the braces, tightening the guy wires.

He had gone into the bureau right from law school, back when it had seemed a bold and satisfying adventure. But over the years he had tired of both bureaucracy and violence. The criminals were always the same — vicious, stupid, subhuman. The victims were uniformly hysterical, or irreparably dead. The newspaper people were tiresome and repetitious. Violence had so little meaning. It was a little area of decay in the great soft body of society, a buildup of pressure, and then a gaseous belch.