Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“In the flesh, you mean?”

“Yeah. By the time this is over, I’ll know more about that man than I knew about my first boyfriend, but I’ll never actually see him in person,” mused Linda, opening the envelope from the Fresno PD and placing a stack of color photographs on her desk.

“Unlike that poor gal,” said Pool, pointing to the print on the top of the stack. Taken from a bathroom doorway, it showed a nude woman sitting up in a bathtub, her heavy breasts lolling to the sides, her head thrown back so far that her long dark hair cascaded over the back of the tub; her eyes were closed and her lips parted in what might have been ecstasy.

Mara Agajanian, of course-and despite appearances, the picture was not soft-core porn, but evidence, as the rest of the photos (the pink-tinged water, the close-ups of the slashed wrists) made clear. But as she shuffled through them, Linda kept coming back to that first one. It was the old what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? game-she got it on the third pass.

“Look at that,” she said to Pool, pointing to the long dark spill of hair draped over the back of the tub. “Wouldja look at that.”

Pool, to her credit, got it right away. “He brushed her hair,” she said. “The s.o.b. brushed her hair.”

Say this about the upper Midwest: they had some terrific classical music stations. Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota-as one station faded out, another would kick in down at the bottom of the dial where public radio lived. And not just the usual suspects either, Vivaldi, Mozart, the three Bs, but a smorgasbord of off-brand baroque composers, the Albinonis and Stradellas and Guerrieris of the world. It was a musical education for Simon-as he drove, he kept making mental notes of CDs he’d be wanting to order for his collection, next time he was on-line.

Except, of course, that he didn’t have a computer any longer-or a CD collection, or an address. It was a strange dual state of mind Simon found himself in, as the Volvo rolled across the great iron bridge spanning the Mississippi above La Crosse. He was an intelligent man, and as Sid Dolitz had pointed out to Pender only five days earlier, his manie was decidedly sans delire: on one level, he understood that life as he’d known it was over. He was a fugitive now, condemned to a short, harried existence and a violent end, either at his own hands or those of law enforcement.

But on another, deeper level, down where the personality takes root, Simon’s grandiose sense of himself, the preternatural confidence of the psychopath, and the inability to empathize with others (Missy didn’t count, Sid would have said; psychologically, pathologically, to Simon she was not an other, but an extension of his self ) or to appreciate that others lived on the same plane of consciousness as himself, with the same interior life, all combined to render Simon constitutionally incapable of imagining the universe continuing after his death. In this regard, for all his intelligence and awareness, Simon was like an infant, unable to establish any boundaries between itself and the outside world, to say this is where I end and the world begins. Simon was the universe and the universe was Simon, unable to comprehend the inevitability of its own nonexistence.

And yet here he was, hurtling toward a certain bloody death.

Instinctively, without being consciously aware of the problem, Simon knew the solution: purpose, focus, concentration. Whenever he found his thoughts drifting as he drove (and he’d been driving since 6 A.M.), whenever the riotous autumn colors, the lush music, or the elemental joy of highway speed failed to hold his interest, he turned his thoughts to Pender.

Pender, who was responsible for Missy’s death. Pender, who was responsible for Simon’s own exile. Pender, Pender, Pender: Simon kept the image of that bald, scarred melon of a head, those ridiculous clothes, that fatuous grin, in front of him always as a lodestar. Every mile he put behind him, he told himself, brought him another five thousand two hundred and eighty feet closer to wiping the smirk right off that fat face, and replacing the dull, self-satisfied expression with one of pure, sweet fear.

“Don’t move,” called Dorie when Pender opened his eyes.

“Why not?” He’d been dozing on a picnic blanket spread out under a wind-sculpted cypress tree at Lovers Point while Dorie painted; now he opened the other eye and saw that she’d moved back another fifteen yards or so and had swung her chair and easel around to face him.

“You’re in the picture now.”

“Wait.” Pender, feeling the breeze on his scalp, assumed his beret must have slipped off. He started to look around for it. Dorie called to him not to move again. “But my hat, I need my-”

“It’s over here.” She was seated behind and slightly to the right of her easel, glancing back and forth between subject and canvas, painting rapidly with her left hand. Even at this time of day, the light was constantly changing; take too long and you find yourself finishing a different painting than the one you’d started. “I had to take it off.”

“What do you mean you ‘had to take it off’?”

“The brown just bled. Into the tree trunk. Behind you,” she called between brushstrokes. “I needed the splash. Of pink. For the composition. Now quit. Fidgeting.”

“I want my hat.”

“Think of it. As a sacrifice. To art.” But much as she hated to interrupt her work, Dorie could sense from the growing tension in the reclining figure that a little TLC oil was going to have to be applied to the subject. She put down her brush and crossed the lush green lawn, knelt on the edge of the blanket. Pender, lying on his left side, his right arm suspended in a clean sling (a trapezoidal patch of white in the painting; another reason why she needed the whitish-pink of the scalp for balance), started to sit up. She touched his shoulder lightly. “Pen, please-this is important to me.” Pen was her own private nickname for him; somehow, he just didn’t feel like an Ed to her. “It’s been years since I last tried putting a human figure into one of my paintings.”

“The mask thing?”

She nodded. “The faces-I couldn’t finish a face and I couldn’t leave one blank.”

“Well, you picked a hell of a one to start with.”

“It’s only this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “Please, Pen? I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

And after a brief, whispered lovers’ conference, during which they discussed just how she might make it up to him, Dorie returned triumphantly to her easel and Pender to his nap. When she’d finished, she packed up her gear, crossed the green again, slipped his beret over his scarred scalp, and lay down next to him.

“When do you have to be back in Washington?” Much as she treasured both her independence and her privacy, with Simon still on the loose Dorie wasn’t exactly looking forward to sleeping alone again.

“I have a meeting with my ghostwriter on Friday. I’m supposed to be taping my memoirs for him. Funny little guy named Bellcock-you’d like him. He says he’s cowritten so many books his friends think his first name is As Told To. He loaned me a Dictaphone, told me just start talking, tape is cheap, he’ll sort it out later. Then he said don’t censor myself, he’s heard it all. And I’m thinking, my friend, you have no idea.” Pender shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of a quarter century of serial killers-the rippers, ghouls, collectors, and necrophiles that comprised his all.

“So Thursday?” asked Dorie, nestling close against him.

“At the latest. Abruzzi could probably use a helping hand, too.” He slipped his good arm under her head for a pillow, and they lay together listening to the raucous seagulls, the barking seals, the waves breaking gently against the rocks at the tip of the point. “I could sure get used to this, though,” he added after a few minutes.