Swimsuit

“We've got to cover a lot of ground tonight,” he said.

I was thinking that by noon of the next day, I could be in Venice Beach watching the bodybuilders and the thong girls, the skaters and bikers on the winding concrete paths through the beach and along the shore. I thought of the dogs with kerchiefs and sunglasses, the toddlers on their trikes, and that I'd have huevos rancheros with extra salsa at Scotty's with Mandy.

I'd tell her everything.

Henri put a burger and a bottle of ketchup in front of me, said, “Here ya go, Mr. Meat and Potatoes.” He started making coffee.

The little voice in my head said, You're not home yet.

Chapter 88

The kind of listening you do when interviewing is very different from the casual kind. I had to focus on what Henri was saying, how it fit into the story, decide if I needed elaboration on that subject or if we had to move along.

Fatigue was coming over me like fog, and I fought it off with coffee, keeping my goal in sight. Get it down and get out of here alive.

Henri backtracked over the story of his service with the military contractor, Brewster-North. He told me how he'd brought several languages to the table and that he'd learned several more while working for them.

He told me how he'd formed a relationship with his forger in Beirut. And then his shoulders sagged as he detailed his imprisonment, the executions of his friends.

I asked questions, placed Gina Prazzi in the time line. I asked Henri if Gina knew his real identity, and he told me no. He'd used the name that matched the papers his forger had given him: Henri Benoit from Montreal.

“Have you stayed in contact with Gina?”

“I haven't seen her for years. Not since Rome,” he said. “She doesn't fraternize with the help.”

We worked forward from his three-month-long romance with Gina to the contract killings he did for the Alliance, a string of murders that went back over four years.

“I mostly killed young women,” Henri told me. “I moved around, changed my identity often. You remember how I do that, Ben.”

He started ticking off the bodies, the string of young girls in Jakarta, a Sabra in Tel Aviv.

“What a fighter, that Sabra. My God. She almost killed me.”

I felt the natural arc of the story. I felt excited as I saw how I would organize the draft, almost forgot for a while that this wasn't some kind of movie pitch.

The murders were real.

Henri's gun was loaded even now.

I numbered tapes and changed them, made notes that would remind me to ask follow-up questions as Henri listed his kills; the young prostitutes in Korea and Venezuela and Bangkok.

He explained that he'd always loved film and that making movies for the Alliance had made him an even better killer. The murders became more complex and cinematic.

“Don't you worry that those films are out in the world?”

“I always disguise my face,” he told me. “Either I wear a mask as I did with Kim, or I work on the video with a blur tool. The software that I use makes editing out my face very easy.”

He told me that his years with Brewster-North had taught him to leave the weapons and the bodies on the scene (Rosa was the one exception), and that even though there was no record of his fingerprints, he made sure never to leave anything of himself behind. He always wore a condom, taking no chances that the police might take DNA samples from his semen and begin to link his crimes.

Henri told me about killing Julia Winkler, how much he loved her. I stifled a smart-ass comment about what it meant to be loved by Henri. And he told me about the McDanielses, and how he admired them as well. At that point, I wanted to jump up and try to strangle him.

“Why, Henri, why did you have to kill them?” I finally asked.

“It was part of a film sequence I was making for the Peepers, what we called a documentary. Maui was a big payout, Ben. Just a few days' work for much more than you make in a year.”

“But the work itself, how did you feel about taking all of those lives? By my count, you've killed thirty people.”

“I may have left out a few,” Henri said.

Chapter 89

It was after three in the morning when Henri told me what fascinated him most about his work.

“I've become interested in the fleeting moment between life and death,” he said. I thought about the headless chickens from his childhood, the asphyxiation games he played after killing Molly.

Henri told me more, more than I wanted to know.

“There was a tribe in the Amazon,” he continued. “They would tie a noose high under the jaws of their victims, right under their ears. The other end of the rope was secured around the tops of bent saplings.

“When they cut off a victim's head, it was carried upward by the young tree snapping back into place. These Indians believed this was a good death. That their victim's last sensation would be of flying.

“Do you know about a killer who lived in Germany in the early nineteen hundreds?” Henri asked me. “Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf.”

I had never heard of the man.

“He was a plain-looking guy whose first kill was a small girl he found sleeping while he robbed her parents' house. He strangled her, opened her throat with a knife, and got off on the blood spouting from her arteries. This was the start of a career that makes Jack the Ripper look like an amateur.”

Henri described how Kurten killed too many people to count, both sexes, men, women, and children, used all kinds of instruments, and at the heart of it all, he was turned on by blood.

“Before Peter Kurten was executed by guillotine,” Henri said to me, “he asked the prison psychiatrist – wait. Let me get this right. Okay. Kurten asked if, after his head was chopped off” – Henri put up fingers as quotation marks – 'If I could hear the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck. That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.' ”

“Henri, are you saying the moment between life and death is what makes you want to kill?”

“I think so. About three years ago, I killed a couple in Big Sur. I knotted ropes high up under their jaws,” he said, demonstrating with the V between thumb and index finger of his hand. “I tied the other end of the ropes to the blades of a ceiling fan. I cut their heads off with a machete, and the fan spun with their heads attached.

“I think the Peepers knew that I was very special when they saw that film,” Henri said. “I raised my fee, and they paid. But I still wonder about those two lovers. I wonder if they felt that they were flying as they died.”

Chapter 90

Exhaustion dragged me down as the sun came up. We'd worked straight through the night, and although I heavily sugared my coffee and drank it down to the dregs, my eyelids drooped and the small world of the trailer on the rumpled acres of sand blurred.

I said, “This is important, Henri.”

I completely lost what I was going to say – and Henri prompted me by shaking my shoulder. “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”

It was the question that would be asked by the reader at the begi

Then I put my head down on the small table, just for a minute.

I heard Henri moving around the trailer, thought I saw him wiping down surfaces. I heard him talking, but I wasn't sure he was talking to me.

When I woke up, the clock on the microwave read ten after eleven.

I called out to Henri, and when he didn't answer I struggled out of my cramped spot behind the table and opened the trailer door.

The truck was gone.

I left the trailer and looked in all directions. The sludge began to clear from the gears in my brain, and I went back inside. My laptop and briefcase were on the kitchen counter. The piles of tapes that I'd carefully labeled in sequence were in neat stacks. My tape recorder was plugged into the outlet – and then I saw the note next to the machine.