David Malouf: The Complete Stories

Puma.

Could the prowler be a Gemini?

When they had learned to enter into the spirit of the thing, and felt properly confident, the investigators would apply this method of questioning to some of the victims. It would be interesting, anyway, to see what might emerge.

15

There are those of us, I think, for whom the final identification of the prowler would be a terrible disappointment. He has become a kind of hero. Jokes that used to be told about a commercial traveller or the milkman invariably begin these days: "Have you heard the one about the prowler?” Not only is he endowed with a quite fabulous member and a back, as one of our great writers once put it, "to encounter a hundred in a night,” he also, it seems, has a social sense (he is the Robin Hood of the boudoir) and a sense of humour. “I hope the prowler gets you!" a four-year-old hisses at his mother, who has denied him a second slice of chocolate cake in a department-store caf. Bogey man, outlaw, sexual athlete, violator of middle-class security, hero of Husband's Lib — who could possibly want to see all this reduced to the inevitably smaller and commoner dimensions of the truth?

Besides, if the man were identified at last as the one and only prowler, his crimes too would be identified — the real ones — and the rest would be revealed as fantasy, crimes of the mind. Rumours would immediately fly about that he wasn't the real prowler at all but a scapegoat, and that the real prowler was still loose. Women would refuse to recognise him. “No. My attacker was quite different. Taller. More brutal looking. It's not him at all.” The police would be accused of a cover-up of their own inefficiency. And sure enough, the attacks would immediately resume. If the prowler ceased to exist we would have to re-invent him. Perhaps he has already been re-invented several times over.

The police, of course, are well aware of the difficulty. They have to catch the prowler but also to put a stop to the assaults. The first is still a possibility, the second is not. “You can arrest a prowler, but how do you arrest an epidemic?”

This little joke is attributed to Senior Detective Pierce; who also, it seems, has a sense of humour.

16

And what are his thoughts, the prowler, when eavesdropping in the supermarket on the endless speculations about his identity, or consulting the headlines in McAllister's newsagency to discover where it was precisely, in the maze of suburban streets, that he made his appearance the night before, waiting — perhaps for the newspaper to confirm that he was there after all and to provide details he failed to collect in the confusion of the event itself — the woman's age, whether or not she was married, the number of her children — what does he think when, searching the pages for a full account (for public interest has waned, he has been relegated to page seven), he finds that assaults he never committed are now being attributed to him and others that he did commit have been distorted out of all recognition, either by the woman's account of his activities or the newspaper's reporting of them? Has he begun to realise that the real acts have long since been stolen from him, that events to which he brought his whole body and a lifetime of passionate fantasy have passed out of his hands into the public imagination and been stripped there of all the details that made them significant (for the attraction of the ritual lay in a secret order that made no sense to others), decked out instead with journalistic clichs and given a spurious shape that reflects only the moralism of our newspapers, their preference for the monstrous, and their dependence on the rhetoric of romantic novels, television serials, and softcore pornography? He has become a victim of the newspaper's hunger for events, but only for those events it has already created in its own dream-factory How could he ever break through and make them report one of his crimes as he sees it, as it really is? Meanwhile he feels used, manipulated. In his passage across strange gardens, through strange rooms and the bodies of unnamed women, he is no longer pursuing his own will, or even his own fantasies, but acting out a scenario whose lines have already been determined by the newspaper and its readers and will be fully revealed to him, the actor, only in the dirty black-and-white of a few paragraphs of print.

Does he long now to be caught at last, our outlaw, and released from the burden of other men's compulsions, other men's dreams?

17

The CIB has decided to take further measures. The Incident Squad, retitled the Special Assaults Section, is to be increased from three to seven and will have access to a computer.

Of course bureaucracy tends to increase quite independently of demand, but this new move does seem to be justified. The number of assaults has reached triple figures.

Budgetary considerations, the Minister announces, will allow for a second expansion at the end of the financial year, "should eventualities require it.” And of course they will.

18

Now that the number of victims has reached the magic figure of a century there are seven identikit pictures, and the strange thing is that they are no longer the clichs of three months ago; each of them has now developed a distinctive character. What we are faced with, it seems, is seven prowlers, all working in the same strictly defined area and using the same methods.

This surely is too much of a coincidence. The work of the prowler begins to look like the cooperative efforts of a gang; except of course that by their very nature these crimes are private and solitary. Or perhaps a club has been formed to act out the attacks as they have been described in the newspaper. A bizarre notion! Who would devise such an entertainment and why? Still, imitators there are, and more than one of them. Of this the police have no doubt.

And how does the prowler himself feel about this, the original prowler, I mean, the initiator, whose integrity consists in his commitment to his own crimes? How strange if his path should cross that of one of the others, if they should meet face to face over the body of a victim; or stranger still, if two of the false prowlers should meet, each just sufficiently like the original to be recognizable but each seeing in the other enough that is different to make clear how much of themselves they have allowed to creep in, to what an extent they are no longer imitators of the prowler but significant variants. If two of the false prowlers were captured would there be enough in common between them for the real prowler to be identified? And supposing all seven to be taken, would it be clear which of them was real? All seven, as the police know, would lay claim to the first attack, might even create a prior one, in order not to be deprived of the rest. (Perhaps one might guess that the least insistent of them, assured of his authenticity, would be the true original.) This is clear from the large number of men who have already come forward and confessed to the crimes. Men of all ages and occupations, from a fifteen-year-old schoolboy to a retired shipbuilder of seventy-seven: widowers, pensioners, young men newly married, metho-drinkers, known homosexuals — all desperate, it would seem, to have the prowler's acts define them.

Some of these men simply want to draw attention to themselves. Others have become obsessed with the assaults and long to be their perpetrator, to appropriate to themselves the daring, the fierce aura of sexuality they believe the prowler must be possessed of, his deep sense of relief when, returning to his own house, he stands naked before the mirror and says, "Yes, I am the prowler,” or, concealing his violence behind a front of patient domesticity, slips in quietly beside his wife.