chapter forty

The Pepper Mill

Mühsam never announced his coming with anything as discrete as a tap on the door. Glassware threatened to topple in response to the crashing entry. Papers spiralled to the floor.

“How is the work progressing, Herr Kørner? Are you managing to isolate the defective genes from the samples?”

“I have some interesting results, but as to which results are more interesting than others I am not yet sure. I really need more samples from confirmed cases,” replied Frank, removing his breathing mask with feigned difficulty in order to give himself time to hide his irritation.

“Well, that is exactly the substance of my visit, Herr Kørner. Intelligence has located a veritable nest of these degenerates, and I have decided that you are the best person to engage in some hands-on research. Field work; empirical evidence; the stuff of science is it not? I am sure you are excited by this prospect.”

Frank was far from excited by the prospect, since he believed that any opportunity he was to be offered here was only an opportunity to make himself a victim of the inhuman processes that were carried out daily in the camp. He had seen the bodies being removed to the ovens and knew that the appetite of the flames was insatiable. Nevertheless his survival depended on living up to the expectations of the authorities.

“It sounds fascinating, professor. I look forward to designing the research.”

“The design is done, Herr Kørner. All you need are some new clothes, which have been already requisitioned for you. The first stage is to get you into the nest itself. Look at these photographs please.”

The professor dropped a thin stack of large prints onto the desk. The first showed a male and female couple standing at a hotel bar. In the next the man was sitting at a typewriter.

“Who is this?”

“This is the son, and that is the daughter, of a celebrated German novelist. He is presently employed as a journalist. Here is some of his so-called work.” A more substantial pile of newspaper clippings followed the photographs onto the desk. “And here are his published novels to date; the latest is, I believe, a kind of autobiography.” Four books flattened the papers.

“Am I to read all this before beginning the project?” Frank had avoided fiction for years, and was sure that Mühsam would frown upon his childish love of Dickens.

“Unfortunately we do not have the luxury of a period of preparation. Just make sure you can recognise him and his sister and can make conversation about his work. You leave for Berlin inside the hour,” and with that Mühsam strode from the office, leaving Frank to come to terms with the fact that he was, in some sense, getting out of the camp. He opened the autobiography and within a few pages had understood two things: the identity of the author and his similarity in many respects to Frank himself.

The Fuhrer had set him to work hunting down people like himself; that is to say the homosexual offspring of genius. It was elegant and terrifying at the same time, but it gave him back his power and it would get him into a less oppressive place than this camp. He went in search of coffee and the promised clothes. The camp coffee caused intense pain in the head and stomach which only abated slowly as the car sped towards Berlin. On the other hand Frank was more than satisfied with his new clothes, generous in fit, sumptuous in fabric and, above all, French. He had also been provided with a wad of fifty million mark notes and instructions to spend them on buying alcohol and drugs for the object of the study. Life had suddenly taken a dramatic turn for the better.

The car stopped outside a cabaret: The Pepper Mill. The driver opened the door for him, giving the appearance of a wealthy businessman and his chauffeur, but the brief conversation was chilling. “We will know when you are ready to be collected, Herr Kørner. You will not be alone in there.”

Frank gathered the city air into his chest, countless fragments of the complex lives of its inhabitants. It tasted good. He lit a cigarette and entered the new world; his old world.

chapter thirty-nine

The Wyckham Arms

The Public Library is a wonderful institution. Founded by a Victorian philanthropist, the one which Kay passed on her way to work had enabled the education and entertainment of generations in this seedy end of South East London. However to Kay it represented something far more focussed than the benevolence of its patron; it had enabled her to discover Frank’s address, and had given her the opportunity of observing him on a daily basis. He would not be there yet; Frank did not arrive until after ten and she clocked on at nine, but she would make it her business to devote some of her lunch hour to watching him sitting at a monitor. At this stage she did not know exactly why she was intent on keeping such a close eye on Frank. He had announced his presence with the grisly remains of her friend in Listowel. She was determined not to be surprised by him as Trisha had been.

Yet behind the logic of that argument she was aware of an uncomfortable, savage pleasure. Like a cat she enjoyed the silent, careful stalking of the prey. Like a cat she anticipated the game of toying with her victim; then the ecstasy of crunching his bones and licking out his entrails.

Shocked at her thoughts and the dampness in her cunt she looked into the grey London sky before entering the betting shop and clocking on. The pale faced punters were already shuffling about the room, their flesh the colour and texture of the racing papers, their smells tobacco, alcohol and coffee. The lost and hardened losers rarely ate, and seemed to contain famine within their cheap clothes. Kay felt sometimes that she gave out the scraps of paper detailing bets as a priest administers the host: her punters retiring to bars and coffee shops to silently digest their hopes, and to pray for their own salvation.

The odds meant nothing to her. In this way she was immune to the contagious flow of ratio that fed the cancer in her customers. She checked off slips concerning probabilities for horses, dogs, football teams and even aspiring singers without the slightest desire to know of the realities they in some way described. Her only concern was the balance between the chances of her survival or Frank’s. There was no possibility of a no-score draw in this encounter.

Her colleagues had aspirations of understanding the relative prowess of the punters, and when certain customers placed bets would rush to a neighbouring establishment to replicate a wager that was guaranteed to be “golden”. Kay had already learned that this practice was a sign of co-dependency and had made the bet-takers as hollow as the bet-makers. Theirs was a virtual life, fed by half comprehended details of an event somewhere else. She, on the other hand, was living the contest, backing herself to survive, and she was likewise forced to do the study of form that would secure her victory.

But Frank was a horse of a different colour. His ability to survive had been clearly demonstrated to her, and she had seen his ruthlessness and pride at first hand. She would have to prepare thoroughly, and that meant careful observation of his behaviour wherever she could find it.

Thus, at one a.m. she checked out for lunch and, pausing only to pick up a bottle of water and a packet of crisps from a corner shop, headed for the library where she would be sure to find him.

To her astonishment she saw Frank leaving the library and walking rapidly along Brockley Rise. The determination of his step in contrast to the lethargy she had observed over the previous weeks sent alarm bells ringing in her brain. He knew something and was acting. Kay tried to reason that this probably had nothing to do with her, but the images of her customers’ faces told her the truth: he knows something that you don’t. She opened the water and rinsed her mouth. Air came in but she didn’t feel it. She ceased to respire and decided to act.

And Frank entered the Wyckham Arms.

Pubs at lunchtime in south east London were not the natural environment of young women unless they had business to conduct. Kay found that business being conducted along with many others, equally unregulated by the government. Then she found Frank, clear spirit in one hand and Guinness in the other moving to a table near the darts board. His target was an Irishman in his forties, obviously employed in the building industry. She took in the overalls, the spits of plaster on the boots, the heavy hand supporting the forehead as Frank passed in front of him, placed the Guinness on the cheap table and settled himself. She wanted to move closer in a risky, possibly fatal attempt to overhear the conversation, but a sudden jarring bolt of recognition paralysed her. She knew this man. He had been Trisha’s next-door neighbour in the Ash Field.

One glance in her direction an Anthony, for that was his name, would jump up and greet her, whole-heartedly welcome her and invite her to meet his new friend, for she knew his nature. If this happened she would not survive her lunch hour. Striving for South East London anonymity she gently turned and headed for the ladies.

She crouched in a booth helplessly reciting the scratched obscenities on the toilet door and trying minimise her inhalation of excrement and stale supermarket perfumes. The few women in the bar meant that she had a generally solitary residence, although she had to feign illness to avert the concerns of one who used the lavatory as an office to set up her afternoon appointments, the details of which Kay wished she had not overheard. Some men had unusual ways of finding relief. Eventually she accepted the culture of her temporary cell and emptied her terrified bowels into the lavatory.

She stopped breathing for too long, but then refused to gulp in the fetid air. Instead she controlled the passage of gasses, and this produced a glacial calm. She stood, adjusted her clothing and rinsed her face and hands. The bar was quiet now. Frank and Anthony were gone. The bar tender was intent on studying the racing pages, although he must use a rival bookies. The tables had not been cleared and Kay went to the one that Frank had occupied, just to know she could bear to do it. Nestling under the Guinness glass, stained now with the sienna alcohol was a rectangle of decomposing paper. She lifted the glass and gently turned the paper.

It fell apart against her fingers, but that meant nothing. The blood pulsed in her veins, her saliva ran hot and tension dissolved in a suppressed orgasm. It was the voucher for the seaweed baths in Ballybunion; her bait, the first speculative step in her counter attack on Frank. The bait had been taken; now she had to set the trap.

chapter thirty-eight

“Norway”

A virus is a system that exists somewhere between an inorganic chemical and a living cell. It’s approximation to the processes common to all living things can only be approached by the penetration of an organism and by a parasitic and debilitating relationship with the host. It was for this reason that Frank had named his sequence of proteins, enzymes and some modified sections of RNA “Spong”. The thrilling thing about working outside of the nationally controlled academies of chemistry or biology was that you could be genuinely creative and take risks; massive risks.

Frank despised the conventions of academic scientific behaviour. He knew that in the first place this was because his father had brought his family up inside the Arctic Circle, rejecting all comforts of civilisation save for those he chose to create himself, and that maverick spirit was something he had from both nature and nurture. In the second place he despised conventional science because he had seen the finest minds prostitute themselves time after time to political agenda or commercial interests. He had always taken the view that both commerce and politics should pay for his services, and to date he had managed a long and lucrative series of lives by holding to that philosophy.

He moved to the balcony of his Manhattan penthouse and lit up a Lucky. He felt the rough smoke rip into his lungs and gently coughed. Here was another example of scientific prostitution: it was evident that tobacco smoke had a deleterious effect on the lungs and hence on the respiratory system. Of course it meant nothing to him; he could defeat a thousand cancers or cardiac arrests; but every day doctors were seen to be advocating the health benefits of tobacco and denying the harmful effects. Scientific whores, secreting their money and frustration as they watched the tumescent structure of the Stock Exchange spill its load of profit across the distended bellies of the tobacco companies.

The smoke glittered, rose and fell towards the seething dark core of Central Park. The fact was that now he was into his fourth phase of existence, he was able to make some comparative judgements; and he surely judged this life, in New York towards the end of the fifties as being in every respect superior to those phases he had experienced before. He had despised the hypocrisy of all societies in comparison to the frozen Eden of Edgeøya. Here, now, the driving muscle of industry, particularly chemical industry was balanced by a thriving aesthetic culture. Frank regarded himself as a renaissance man; Shakespeare, Leonardo and Copernicus were of his kind, though obviously not his equal, since they had succumbed to mortality. Here he could taste it all: wealth, science, art, immortality.

And sex. He ground the white butt into the granite floor, orange particles expiring on the jet plane. Jack and he were perfect; had been perfect. For lives he had remained aloof from the pathetic attempts at gratification that drove those around him, and at last he had found an artistic soul that mirrored his. They were almost axial images of each other, even down to the hairline. Frank had considered giving Jack the gift of the nutriment and eternal, episodic life. Spong had destroyed that dream. Spong the hanger-on; Spong the one who had offered to prostitute himself for a cigarette in the dark park below only a few days ago. The virus was named for, and a gift for Spong.

America told itself that it retired early and set off for work before dawn. That may be true in Maine, but it certainly didn’t hold in Manhattan. Those that prowled the Jazz Clubs at two a.m. either slept in or rose to work fuelled by chemical stimulants. Seeking the stimulation of jazz rather than chemistry, Frank left the apartment and headed for the Village.

“There’s new, and there’s too new. That was just too new for me,”

“Well, it’s kind of interesting the way he uses the piano like eighty-eight tuned drums.”

“Eighty-eight un-tuned drums in my book. Give me Davis any day.”

“God, Seth, you Northerners just have to be so cool all the time.”

Frank stood back for the exodus of villagers and then descended the fifteen uneven steps into the miasma of coffee, bourbon and weed that was the living atmosphere of the club. Taylor was one of his favourites; tight, percussive and unexpected, rather like himself. He settled into a table away from the band, behind a wood and glass partition. The notes; piano drum and trumpet came over the physical wall in waves, each of which calmed his arctic soul. It was only once calmed by this and vodka that he began to recognise words and accent. Spong was here with a woman.

“...fantastic. Andy just filmed us doing anything!”

“What do you mean, Bennett? What’s anything?”

“Like, just anything! He filmed me giving head.”

“What did Jack think of that?”

“He loved it. He say’s I’m to head what Warhol is to tomato soup. I make it art!”

“Oh God, I wish I could wrote that in the New Yorker, but my editor would fire me straight out.”

Frank took a long pull on his vodka and tapped out a Lucky. He knew exactly who this woman was: one of the most influential art critics in town; only Greenberg’s opinions carried more weight than hers, and that balance was swinging in her favour.

“You know that Norwegian that Jack was knocking around with; Frank something?”

“Yes, he does perfumes. I have some. They’re great.” The notes cascading from the piano fought equilibrium battles with the drums in the thickened air. It was beautiful, but Frank could only hear the damning conversation.

“Well Jack says there are two kind s of head: I do it the best way and Frank did it the Gnaw way! He said he had sores on his dick for weeks. Norway, Gnaw way: get it?” The critic coughed laughter into her martini. Frank carefully rose from his table and left the bar. Spong was already dead.

chapter thirty-seven

Taylors Hill

Kay’s mother’s form was framed by the reception hatch, her black raincoat and matching wide brimmed hat, already slightly dated, but purchased from Harrods so therefore to be worn at any hint of precipitation. Kay let her gaze flutter over the comics and infantile crayonings on the coffee table. She noticed a paperback amongst the copies of Beano and Bunty and extracted it: “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. Comforting, but read at least twice already. She felt like Eustace, imprisoned in a monstrous body for doing something of which she was unaware, and she supposed she felt a certain hope that this clinic might help her in some way. Pages flew from the table as her mother settled onto the undersized seat beside her.

“The doctor is sending his nurse down to collect us. How are you feeling now?”

Kay’s eyes met her mother’s, which tried to flicker away, but then, through an effort of will, returned, almost nervous, as if she were the child and Kay the adult. “I’m hopeful,” said Kay, with little conviction. To the relief of both the nurse arrived, the uniform like the dragon’s skin, concealing the person within, producing a function alone.

They ascended the wide staircase, which may once have been almost stately, the windows on the Western walls giving increasingly panoramic views of Salt Hill; the church tower, the amusement arcades and the sea beyond; even the faint humps of the Aran Islands. “The doctor would prefer to talk to you first,” said the nurse, addressing Kay’s mother. “Kay can wait here,” and she indicated a long bench with another coffee table, this time loaded not with comics and drawings by children, but with medical journals and copies of National Geographic Magazine. This was much better. Kay settled to an account of a sailing trip around the Arctic Sea while her mother entered the office. She was examining a grey photograph showing a hill on the Island of Edgeøya when the sub-zero temperature seemed to ooze out of the page and squeeze her heart. It was an anxiety threatening to spill over into blind terror.

The voices came from within, one calm, male yet light, accented strangely, doing most of the talking; her mother almost whispering, far from her normal strident, gin-tinged overconfidence. The voices were from within both the room and Kay’s own head; so deeply within that they had almost no objective claim on reality, but she listened, freezing.

“..that these dreams, well, they are always nightmares, are taking over her life completely.”

“Such dreams do have the power to do this; to send your daughter mad. Freud has written much on this as you may be aware. In fact it is probable that your daughter is already mad, in a clinical sense; but do not despair, Mrs Macnamara; it is for this reason that the Taylor’s Hill Centre exists. I am sure my colleagues and I will be able to halt this distressing slide into the abyss and restore to you the lively, happy girl you once knew.”

“I’m not sure I ever did know Kay as that, but it would be wonderful. My husband and I are so worried.”

“I must warn you that sometimes the idea of admission to such a hospital facility as this can upset a person, especially a child of only nine years. She may even lash out or make ridiculous claims, so my nurse will sedate her if this should happen. You don’t have to be here if that would upset you.”

“I think I’ll be alright... Do you want to see her now?”

The door opened and the nurse presented an empty functional smile and led her into the office. Three tall windows filled the wall behind the desk and Kay was dazzled by the assault of light. The thin figure of the doctor coalesced from the brightness, assuming breadth and detail. It was at that moment that she burst like a cloud, flinging herself at the desk in an effort to attack before it was too late, but it was already far too late. Frank smiled as he watched her mother hold her down while the nurse administered the sedative. The treatment had begun.

chapter thirty-six

An Easter Offering

The large glass sphere wobbled slightly as Frank opened the tap that allowed the vaporous product of two exotic and modified volatile liquids to rise into the condenser that fed it. Gentle heat would now promote an equilibrium reaction, the results of which could be harvested to provide the raw material of the bone gas. The addition of Sulphuric Acid to this in the presence of oxygen initiated the action of the gas; its rapid expansion into the atmosphere and penetration of the flesh of the victims. Frank had designed the gas so that breathing it resulted in a relatively quick “death”, if one could refer to the state of being without bones “death”. Actual death was caused by suffocation primarily, since the lungs had no rigid chamber within which to expand and contract. Breathing in gave the gas ready access to the capillaries in the mouth, and then the lungs and thus the effect was rapid. In order to give the user of the gas a measure of protection Frank had designed it so that it penetrated the epidermis more slowly. It was thus possible to use the gas as an offensive weapon in close combat as long as one could make a retreat before taking a breath.

He let his left first and second fingers rest against the large sphere for five seconds to gauge the temperature, a trick he had learnt from his mother in regard to cooking, and to Frank this chemical process, although more dangerous, was no less a matter of art and subjective judgement. The bubbles began to rise in the liquid, which was now attaining the required chrome green colour, so he began to run cold water through the Liebig condenser in preparation for the collection of the raw gas in a series of large and very thick glass cylinders. His attention was broken by the sound of the outer door to the laboratory being pushed open and Professor O’Connell’s rather tuneless and wordless singing.

“Good afternoon Mr Kørner. What a beautiful day: Good Friday, the tragic death of our Lord, but a temporary death that led to salvation for us all. I have just attended a splendid performance of sacred music by Handel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I must say it has enabled me to put all this talk of spies and compromise behind me. With your gas we are assured of victory over the English oppressors, and so I am going to press Pearse and Connolly to go ahead. This is indeed the dark vigil before the rebirth; the rebirth of our Lord and the rebirth of our people!”

“I am glad that my contribution will be so decisive. I can assure you that, used correctly, the effects will be exactly as I described to the committee.”

“And we will owe you a debt of gratitude Mr Kørner,” and here the professor paused for a moment to remove his heavy tweed coat, “although it will have to be expressed tacitly, I have found that de Valera has made commitments to the bishops in regard to our constitution that may make your position.... difficult.”

“In what respect?” asked Frank, hardly noticing the words, but sensing the weight behind them, as he followed the progress of the tiny green drops into the collecting jar.

“The bishops, and of course the people, bear a great deal of resentment towards the English in regard to their suppression, some might go so far as to say, attempted destruction, of our faith and language. De Valera tells us that this resentment will help unify the people behind our cause, and no doubt it will, but the bishops have made certain demands.”

Frank slid a weighty glass disc over the first collecting cylinder and rapidly positioned the next. He wondered for a moment if the fact that the gas was a little heavier than air was an advantage or a disadvantage before turning to make a greater engagement with the professor.

“What kind of demands can the bishops make of a government that does not even exist?” he enquired. “They can hardly make attendance at church compulsory, that would be as bad as the controls on liberty that you are striving to remove!”

“Not in the view of the bishops, and neither in the view of de Valera, I am told.” The professor sat and withdrew his battered pipe. “State and church will be as one. This means that your particular affections will not be tolerated. The role of the male is to head the family and father children; Catholic, Irish-speaking children. Mr Kørner, I am sure you are aware of the distaste I have for the unnatural acts in which you indulge; but I feel that this proposed unity of church and state may not lead to the liberty of our people that most of the committee so strongly desire.”

Frank smiled gently, and considered the countless acts of debauchery he had witnessed in Paris. Catholic bishops had been amongst the most enthusiastic participants in these dazzling exhibitions. The hypocrisy had always been there, but to found a nation on such hypocrisy was more than he was prepared to countenance. He smiled again.

“Do not concern yourself, professor. The important thing is that the rising is both swift and decisive, is it not?”

“Yes, yes; of course. The rest is politics.”

“In God, we trust,” said Frank, as he removed the Sulphuric Acid from the bench. His bone gas would take no part in the establishment of such a state; besides, by tomorrow O’Connell would be dead and he would be on his way to the Arctic Circle with the Irishman’s cerebral foam safely packed for the transfer.

chapter thirty-five

William Hill

It had been at some stage after leaving the gallery and before turning the corner from the Convent Road into Ashfield that Kay had sensed Frank’s presence. She felt it as an infection in the air that penetrated her lungs and the lymph system. She stopped for a moment and placed both palms, crossed, over her heart and then let her second fingers run forward to her eyebrows from each temple. There was no point in turning back: since Frank was here already there was nowhere to go. It was odd, because although she knew she had killed him, she still felt terrified at the prospect of meeting him. This was not irrational of course. He could, and probably would try to harm her, but it was the legacy of the decade and more of psychological control and chemical abuse that really fed her terror. She looked up into the night sky, now clear of the heavy clouds that had dulled the day, and heard the freezing moisture crack underfoot.

Reality echoed that rupture as she crunched the new-born ice all the way to Trisha’s front door. By the time she stood before the door she was empty of self and so ready for Frank. She pushed the door into the caesura between the streetlight and the icy radiance from the garden that crept into the kitchen and studio. She waited to smell Frank, lurking with some antique weapon; his sweat, his American aftershave, his corrupt cells, but that presence, the quick and the dead of Frank, was absent. She closed her eyes and the after image of the studio remained and began to take shape, and at the same time there was a scent of Frank too, a strange, almost gluey scent. She identified the scent as his come at the same time as her retina made out the body surrounded by the one hundred and forty four plaster cast elves.

She squatted down in the dark beside the ritual circle and considered the black hole in the chest that was the origin, here still encrusted with the plastic crimson of her friend’s blood. Frank had always held himself aloof from her father’s cannibalistic perversions, so he had done this simply to communicate something. She picked up one of the cast models of Douglas. Why the circle? Why on earth had Frank bothered to carefully make this circle of sightless figures face towards the site of his mutilation?

She heard something as if in reply to her thoughts: the thumping of bare feet on colder earth, and an unintelligible incantation in vowel rich words. She sensed a distance and a place in Northern latitudes, and an equivalent distance in time. God, she was getting too close to Frank. This was nonsense.

She stood abruptly and hit the light switch, turning away from the body. She shut out the connection to Frank and squeezed the little model in her hand to confirm herself in the present. This was her business now, selling pictures to tourists and models to children. She let the words cross: “pictures to children and models to tourists”. And then she had it. Frank wanted her to find him, and this was the reason for the circle. She had sold one model to a tourist a couple of weeks ago, and that had been to a German sculptor, living in Dublin, who had left her card at the gallery.

Ten minutes later she had the card from the desk in the Blue Gamp Gallery and made the call. She described Frank to the sculptor.

“He came down here looking for more elves, but I missed him,” she said.

“I know him to see,” replied the sculptor, and then to those around her “Did any of you see Frank recently?” Kay could make out a buzz of conversation and the thump of salsa music, then the German voice returned.

“Pat spoke to him a couple of days ago. Here, I’ll put him on the line.”

“Howya? That Frank, he is a crazy character alright. He told me he’s going to visit a brother in London, Forest Hills I think he said, but I don’t have an address exactly.”

“Thanks, you’re a star,” said Kay. “If you are talking to him, tell him Kay is looking for him; here’s my number...”

After disconnecting, Kay searched Forest Hills on the internet, and quickly discovered the area was actually called Forest Hill. But how to find Frank? She had to be careful; he was leading her in some way, and his murderous intent was clear. Frank needed to be in control; he never gambled.

Twenty four hours later she had a job organised for herself in the safest place in Forest Hill; a bookmakers called William Hill on Devonshire Road.