Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Take Mr and Mrs Suicide, Vincent and Sylvia: what would their reputations have been had they not killed themselves? Both were completely unknown at the time of their deaths. But after that dread act, not only does their work become famous, but also a certain poignancy attaches to it. They achieve the status of artistic martyrdom. Their works become icons.

No such delusions on my part need detain us here. Nor is my self-slaughter referable to my recently concluded philosophical dialogue with Professor Sir Jameson Lang. His arguments, strongly reminiscent of something Kierkegaard once wrote, were already familiar to me. Indeed I hold his truths to be self-evident.

The fact is that it was already in my mind to kill myself and it might just as well be done now as later on. Especially as my mind is clear and equal to the task of the great philosophical discourse with the terrible nameless one which will follow the big sleep.

How then, am I to tell you of the circumstances of my death?

Do you wish to be told plainly that I returned home and hanged myself? Even if it were true, it would not be much of an end to my life’s story. To say only what is true is as dull as it is to say nothing except what can be said, that is, something that has nothing to do with philosophy. Although this method is the only strictly correct one, I suspect it may not be satisfying to you. Naturally you require something more, something metaphysical perhaps. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. No doubt you would have preferred some story of the way I killed myself, and what happened immediately after my death. Some story which might serve as an explanation for everything that has gone before.

But my stories only serve as explanations in the following way: anyone who understands these stories eventually recognises them as nonsensical when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them. Just as, in a few minutes, I will use some steps to climb up and put my head in a noose. Like me, you must also, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up it. You must transcend the story as a mere proposition, and then you will see the world aright.

I regret that circumstances prevent me from saying any more than this, however what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

The switchblade was still open in her hand, the blade a razor-sharp, silver thumbnail protruding from her clenched fist. She held it by her side, at an arm’s length, like one of the Sharks or the Jets in West Side Story, ready for the rumble. Only the rumble was over. Even now the two ambulancewomen were manoeuvring the man’s body on to the trolley. They strapped him down as if he might have preferred to get off and walk. Not much chance of that, Jake thought. Not with a crushed windpipe.

Pleased with the way the knife had performed she lifted it up to inspect it more closely. She had bought it on an impulse, while holidaying in Italy the previous year. Just something to put in her shoulder bag and make her feel a bit safer, when she wasn’t carrying her gun. She was almost surprised that she should have used it in the particular way she had.

The two ambulancewomen lifted the top of the trolley clear of the wheels and then steered the man by remote control, out into the corridor outside the apartment and towards the lift door, like a toy she had once had as a child. Not a toy for a girl, her father had said. Better than a toy for a girl, Jake thought.

Downstairs, in the lobby, the doorman did what he was supposed to do and held the door open while they steered the man out into the car-park. The trolley collided with the back of the ambulance rather too vigorously, it seemed, and automatically engaged the electronic lift. This picked him off the tarmac like a binful of garbage and drew him inside the long body of a vehicle that was covered with advertisements for Lucozade and Elastoplast. At the very second the door closed beside him, the blue laser light on top of the roof started to flash in all directions like random bolts of lightning.

The two ambulancewomen regarded Jake and, more especially, the knife that was still in her hand, with some uncertainty. One was about to say something but then her colleague caught her eye and shook her head as if to indicate that it was probably best if they didn’t ask any questions. Their job was just to collect their fare and take him to hospital. Nothing more. But the woman holding the knife spoke to them.

‘Where are you taking him?’ she said. ‘Which hospital?’

One of the ambulancewomen shrugged and held up the man’s identity card.

‘Depends on his ID,’ she said. ‘I haven’t stuck it into the computer yet. As soon as we do, his bar-code’ll tell us where he’s registered, and that’s where we’ll take him.’ So saying, the woman holding the card climbed into the driver’s seat.

Jake pointed out two men sitting in a nearby police car.

‘See those cops?’ she said to the second woman.

‘I see them.’

‘They’ll be following you. So try not to lose them.’

‘Sure, anything you say, lady.’

Jake watched them drive away, Stanley following in the police car, two sirens whistling like sex-mad construction workers. When they were out of sight she went back inside the door of Winston Mansions and up to the seventh floor where a motorcycle cop, who had arrived on the scene at the same time as the ambulance, was already restraining those other residents of the building who were curious to see what had happened. The door to Esterhazy’s flat stood open. Jake walked into the apartment, picking her way carefully across the pile of shattered glass that had been one of the windows, and surveyed the scene.

The apartment was simply, even starkly furnished, with none of the sensational features that might have delighted some tabloid newspaper intent on depicting the mind of a serial killer as an aspect of interior decoration. There were no heads parboiled in pots still hot on the cooker, no torture chamber, no paintings or photographs of dead bodies, no collections of women’s underwear, no human skin hanging on a tailor’s dummy awaiting a needle and thread, no glass case with guns and knives displayed like so many insects and spiders. There was only one picture — a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill which, matching the mural in the lobby downstairs, Jake suspected had been there since the time Winston Mansions was built. Esterhazy’s own peculiar gun was still in its shoulder-holster, which hung from the back of a chair.

It was true that Jake found the colour scheme in Esterhazy’s apartment was not to her own taste: a royal blue carpet, black woodwork, and yellow walls. Blue and yellow were classic opponent-process colours, mutually antagonistic to each other as neural sensory experiences, but that was hardly an indication of homicidal mania. The plain fact was that Esterhazy’s apartment seemed to provide no more obvious insight as to what had turned him into a mass-murderer than might have been obtained from the leaves in his tea cup, or a selection of Tarot cards. How ordinary it all seemed, and then all the more extraordinary, because of the nature of the man who lived there.

It was not the first time that Jake had encountered this phenomenon. She was quite used to the idea that mass-murderers could live what were outwardly quite ordinary lives. It was the thoughts in their heads that you had to worry about, not the pictures on their walls or the trophies in the display cabinets. Real evil, she knew, did not always adorn its home with black velvet curtains and human skulls for ashtrays. The most unusual thing in the whole place was the severed end of the rope tied round one of the beams, from which Esterhazy had tried to hang himself, and the fallen step-ladder he had used to climb up to the noose, and which he had then kicked away: the ladder which, no more than a minute or two afterwards, she herself had used to climb up and cut him down. It was Jake who had given Esterhazy the kiss of life. The taste of him still lingered on her lips. It was strange, perhaps because of what he was, something dangerous, something alien to her, but somehow she had almost enjoyed breathing the life back into him, as if he had been some drowned sailor, or Don Juan washed up on her island.