Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

Kadar placed the last basket on the floor beside the deep freeze, then looked back into the unit. Nothing had changed since his last inspection, which was reassuring if scarcely surprising. He didn't really expect the occupant to be found munching frozen peas or to have grown a mustache to while away the time. Frozen corpses tended to be low on the activity scale. Kadar leaned on the insulated rim of the freezer and spoke encouragingly. "Your time will come, have no fear." He smiled for good measure.

Inside the deep freeze, well frosted over, Paul Straub lay unmoving. The expression of horror, panic, despair, and downright disbelief on his face, frozen into perpetuity, indicated his general lack of enthusiasm for his fate. He had been drugged, bound into immobility, then place alive in the deep freeze. His last sight before the lid and darkness descended was of a basket of frozen chickens. As a vegetarian he might have particularly objected to this. He had been frozen to death, his only offense being a certain similarity in height, weight and general physiognomy to Kadar – and the fact that he had been a patient of Dr. Wenger's.

Kadar leaned farther over, reached into the freezer, and tapped the corpse. It felt reassuringly solid. The refrigeration was working fine. He had considered using supercold liquid nitrogen, which would minimize tissue destruction – it was used for semen and strawberries, to name but two critical applications – but when he considered what was going to happen to the corpse, Kadar settled for a more conventional solution.

He straightened himself and began replacing the baskets. Just before he replaced the last one, he looked at the late Paul Straub's frozen head. The eyes were frozen open but iced over. "Don't blame me," said Kadar. "Blame that damn pheasant." He dropped the basket into place. He felt quite satisfied as he left the room and heard the locks snap into place behind him. All in all, given the imperfections of the material he was working with, things were going quite well.

As originally conceived, Project K was to be a low-key support operation, close enough to the people at the sharp end to cut out bureaucratic delay but modest in scope and scale. The killings in Lenk changed things overnight.

Convinced that time was running out, Charlie von Beck had turned Fitzduane's apartment into an around-the-clock command center. When Fitzduane found that a Digital Equipment Corporation multiterminal minicomputer was being installed in his bedroom, he took the hint and moved into a spare room in the Bear's Saali apartment. It didn't have black silk sheets and a mirror over the bed, but the Bear's cuisine would have merited three stars from Michelin if ever its reviewer had dropped in, and besides, the Bear had bought himself a bigger gun – which, the way things were going, was comforting.

Von Beck had encountered some opposition to basing Project K in ‘nonofficial premises,’ but he had countered with the comment that if Brigadier Masson could run the Swiss intelligence service during the Second World War from a floor in Bern's Schweizerhof Hotel the secluded apartment off Kirchenfeldstrasse was good enough for him.

The occupants of the other three apartments in the small block – wholly owned by Beat von Graffenlaub – were amicably moved out by appeals to their patriotism and their pockets. Once the last of them left, von Beck tightened security still further.

As Fitzduane, the Bear, and, from time to time, other members of the Project K team spoke, Beat von Graffenlaub began to look increasingly disturbed. As always, the lawyer was immaculately tailored, but the elegance of his clothes no longer seemed integrated and he had lost weight. The arrogance of wealth was no longer so apparent in his manner.

"And what do you call this man, this corrupter of lives?" he said in a low, angry voice.

Henssen indicated that he would answer. "When he was nothing more than a statistical anomaly, my cynical colleagues in the BKA christened him the Abominable No-Man. Now that is not so funny anymore."

"The Hangman," said the Bear. "We've given him the code name ‘the Hangman’"

Von Graffenlaub looked at Fitzduane.

"We believe the Hangman exists," said Kersdorf quietly, "but it would be idle to pretend that our view is widely held. Conventional investigations parallel the work we are doing. Even your own Chief of Police is skeptical."

"In strict legal terms," sand von Beck, "we have very little proof." His rather formal tone was counterbalanced by his attire. He was wearing a pink sweatshirt labeled SKUNKWORKS. The group of snoozing skunks stenciled on it all wore bow ties.

"And if your heuristics – your intelligent guesses – are wrong," said von Graffenlaub, "you have cumulative error in your deductions increased by the massive power of your computing system."

"Those are the risks," agreed Hanssen.

"The only thing is," said Chief Inspector Kersdorf, "nobody else has come up with any coherent explanation of what has been happening."

Von Graffenlaub drank some Perrier. His hand was shaking slightly as he drank. He put the glass down and bowed his head in thought. The group around him remained silent, and they could hear the faint hiss of bubbles bursting. He raised his head and looked at each man in turn. His gaze stopped at Fitzduane.

"This man, a stranger, was concerned enough to want to know why a young man should die so horribly," he said. "Rudi was my son and, with his twin sister, Vreni, my lastborn. I can assure you that I'm not going to back out now. You'd better tell me everything – both what you know and what you suspect. Don't try to spare my feelings. You had better start with Rudi's involvement with this – this Hangman."

"And your wife's," said Fitzduane.

"Erika," said von Graffenlaub. "Yes, yes, of course." He was whispering, and there were tears running down his cheeks.

Fitzduane felt terribly, terribly sad. He was looking at a man being destroyed, and there was no way anymore to stop what would happen. He put his hand on von Graffenlaub's shoulder, but there wasn't anything he could say.

As if by agreement, the others left Fitzduane alone with von Graffenlaub. What had to be said was unpleasant enough without the embarrassment of having the entire group present.

"I'll be as brief as I can," said Fitzduane, "and I'll concentrate on conclusions rather than reasons. We can go through the logic of our reasoning afterward if you wish. We've already told you about the Hangman, and we'll come to what we know about him – and that's quite a lot – later, but right now I want to focus on one point, the Hangman's method of operation. His objectives seem to be financial rather than ideological – mixed, I suspect, with a general desire to fuck the system and a macabre sense of humor. His method seems to be to tap into, and harness, the natural energies and causes that already exist. He doesn't need a coherent ideology. Each little group is built around its own obsession, and the Hangman creams off the financial result.

"He likes dealing with impressionable people. Many of his followers – and most of them wouldn’t think of themselves as his followers but as members of some specific smaller group – are young and idealistic and sexually highly active. He uses what's available, and we have reason to believe that sexuality is one such tool. It has long featured in secret rites and initiations and is a classic bonding and manipulative lever. Consider, for example, sexuality in satanic rites or pre-Christian ceremonies, or, inversely, the absence of sex in the Catholic orders.

"In addition to his use of sexuality as a manipulative tool, and perhaps as a consequence of it, we believe that the Hangman has sexual problems of his own. He seems to have both heterosexual and homosexual inclinations, and these are mixed up with pronounced sadomachistic behavior of the most extreme sort."