Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

But the strangeness of the office was just a minor aberration compared with the eccentricity of the Inspector himself. There was the anachronistic dress uniform he insisted on wearing — a stiff, double-breasted, high-collar garment with garish brass fittings that the rest of the department had abandoned a generation ago. And the small, rimless green spectacles that he favored even inside and at night. The rust-colored Magdalena cigars he chronically fingered and pointed with. And the tiny, pink plastic hearing aid always secured behind his left ear with a coiled tail that snaked down his over-starched collar and, in fact, was connected not to any sound enhancing device but to a miniature tape machine that was forever playing loops of interrogation sessions.

With his image and his office established, Lacazze began to choose what he hoped would be a very select cadre of officers whom he planned to train in his unique and complex systems of analysis to be part of what he christened, not without a trace of humor, the Eschatology Squad. The exact purpose of this unit was left undefined to all but the Inspector. The most he would tell Bendix was that the E Squad would assist him in implementing the Methodology.

This begged the question, in the Chief’s vernacular, “What in the name of sweet Jesus is the Methodology?”

And Lacazze was forced to sigh with the long-felt futility inherent in explaining his theories to deficient intellects.

Lacazze’s Methodology was a radical and multifaceted system of critical inquiry, he explained to Bendix’s already deaf ears and glazed eyes. The system could be utilized in any number of problem resolution capacities, but, surprisingly, it was in the old-fashioned logic-driven art of criminal investigation that it now seemed ideally, perhaps organically suited. Would it be overstating the case to say that Lacazze’s Methodology, when used correctly, would possibly prove to be the most effective interrogation technique in the history of criminal pursuit?

Lacazze didn’t think so. And on an apprehensive nod from Chief Bendix, the new baron of 33 Dunot Boulevard began putting his squad together. A small sampling of possible recruits was given a test — brought into the precinct house and left in a small, windowless room, barren but for dozens of radios tuned to various stations. After a time, Lacazze would question the applicants as to how many sounds they were able to isolate. This questioning could be either gruff or good-natured and might or might not take place over a game of chess. In some cases, Lacazze, without explanation, would begin speaking in another langauge. In others, he might suddenly break off any queries regarding noise differentiation and begin probing, with deeply embarrassing questions, into the candidate’s sexual history. There was one rumor that he requested a certain narcotics officer remove all her clothes and waltz with him. No one understood the scoring method of these screenings, but the results were disheartening as to the viability of the project: out of two dozen officers tested, only Detective Ceil Gilrein managed to fulfill the opaque specifications.

The question might be asked, did Ceil ever come to fully understand the nature of Lacazze’s Methodology? Before her death, Gilrein ached to know. It was never quite that he wanted his wife to pass on her information, to make the apprentice betray the mentor. It wasn’t a matter of desiring the arcana itself, but more a question of simply knowing Ceil as fully and deeply as possible.

After Ceil was killed, it occurred to Gilrein, just once, to dig out some of her casebooks, read through her field notes and see if they revealed some hidden side of the woman. But he could never bring himself to do it. Somehow looking at Ceil’s notebooks would be risking a pain that he knew could go deeper into him than even the fact of her death. The thought of her handwriting on the white page, like some lingering aftereffect of a life that was no longer, would be a measurement of the immensity of his loss, a signal of a forfeiture too enormous to sanely bear.

What he had, couldn’t avoid, were memories of conversational scraps, the kind of verbal minutiae that becomes a binding force in marriage, husband-and-wife noise, some of which contained incomplete and not always logical recollections of those rare occasions when Ceil let down her guard and discussed her work with the Inspector. Gilrein had never been able to think of what his wife did in terms as common as work. In his mind it was more like a mission of alchemy, a calling to a mystery religion that was cloaked by curtains of fear and superstition.

Ceil spoke of how Lacazze often stayed up all night in his office after an interrogation, writing incessantly on his blackboard, chalk dust everywhere, like some crazed researcher working on a millennial breakthrough, symbol after symbol, some looking vaguely recognizable, like letters of the alphabet that were in midprocess of mutating into something else. By dawn, when Ceil arrived, Lacazze’s hands might be trembling like a reprobate caught at the height of his DTs. The Inspector would have to swill a load of laudanum for breakfast, then bring himself back to competence with a dose of Bangkok street speed. But when it came time for the next interrogation, Lacazze would transform himself into nothing short of Quinsigamond’s own grand inquisitor, his uniform impeccable and his eyes unblinking behind his mod glasses.

The suspect would always be brought to Dunot by one of the more roguish night-duty rookies. The prisoner would be manacled to the shoe-fitting stool and then left alone with Lacazze. Ceil remained close by in the cavernous squad room, in case of the unlikely event that the Inspector needed some assistance. Lacazze would commence scribbling on the blackboard, ignoring the suspect’s always worried pleas for explanations and attorneys. At some inner-designated moment, the Inspector would flip the blackboard to reveal the reverse side was a mirror, and not an ordinary mirror but one that magnifies and bends as well as reflects. Then the lights in the room would be lowered as the Inspector lit a fat, squat liturgical candle inscribed with Latin — VERBUM INCARNATUM EST — and placed it atop a pedestal, directly behind the suspect’s head, composed of dozens of enormous spine-broken dictionaries. On the desk between them, Lacazze placed his own red, bejeweled chalice from his days as a Jesuit. The chalice was filled with what the Inspector referred to as Spanish sherry. “In case you get thirsty,” he would mumble to the prisoner, indicating the cup. Finally, Lacazze would ease into the seat behind his desk, elevated above the level of the suspect’s eyes, and the pair would spend some tense moments staring at each other. Behind Lacazze, the suspect couldn’t help but start to glance at his own enlarged and warped image made even stranger by the glow of candlelight from behind his head.

And then Inspector Lacazze would launch into a series of rapid-fire word associations, throwing out, void of any instruction, every known part of speech, but after a time honing in mainly on the verbs— want, push, take, use, will, kill, run, hide, wait —until the suspect finally caught on and began to reply, often in the hope that cooperation would end these proceedings sooner rather than later.

Lacazze dealt with all manner of alleged transgressors — dealers, extortionists, arsonists, rapists, murderers. From simple but annoyingly persistent pickpockets up to sociopathic and wildly dangerous, most would say unredeemable, serial criminals, abusers and killers and roving, conscience-deficient madmen whose only motivation left in this life was to be the initiator of widespread chaos and terror.

The Inspector handled them all the same. “The criminal bends to the Methodology and not the other way around,” he once told Ceil, then added, “though I must say, I love the schizophrenics the best. Their language is not only unique to themselves. It is also chronically shifting, changing even as it is born.”