chapter twenty

Buchenwald

 

Boys not much older than fifteen marched along the Ringstrasse in the cool March evening. Their legs and arms bare, stiffly mechanical in the brown shorts and shirts, their faces, pale from the long winter, blotched now with a flush of exertion. Their commander, hardly a year senior, carried the only gun, bearing it like a sceptre as the pedestrians gave way, mostly silent but occasionally moved to clap, salute or even offer a “Heil Hitler!” Frank waited a discrete few seconds and then sank into a chair outside one of the few cafés to have survived the fierce economic depression of the preceding years. He ordered a tiny coffee in the popular Italian style and a slice of apfelstrudel. Such a snack would have cost him a penny or so in Ireland, could he have obtained it there, but here he found himself handing over a large sheet of paper with more zeroes printed on it than even he could count at a glance.

 

Of course he had a good job in a protected industry and a strong connection to the local National Socialist leadership. He had impressed them last week; given them enough to suggest that he could help them engineer the qualities of The Race in exactly the way they wanted; that he had skills in biological chemistry that would impress even the chancellor himself. He brushed a few crumbs of pastry from his charcoal pleated trousers and looked for a newspaper, the patina of coffee drying on his teeth. As he reached to the table beside his for a tissue a leather gloved hand impeded his action, plucked the tissue from the dispenser and failed to muffle its owner’s almost flatulent nasal eruption.

 

“Herr Kørner, you will come with me.” It was not a request. Frank knew enough about survival to take in his surroundings without letting his eyes move from the face of his abductor. There were two others in addition to the speaker and the black Mercedes, one the driver and the other a senior member of the SS. His holster was empty, so Frank knew he had the Luger primed in one of the two hands held behind his back. Thanks to the cerebral contribution of Professor O’Connell, an early expert on the dominance of brain functions by hemispheres, he also knew by observation that he would shoot with the left hand. Frank assessed the odds; not just of escape but of how his greater plan might need to be modified in the context of his becoming an enemy of the state and decided to be polite, elegant, but not exactly docile.

 

“I am delighted to accompany you,” he replied in perfect formal German, “but to whom do I owe the honour?”

 

“Herr Von Schröder is awaiting you. It is a fairly long journey, so we must not delay, yes?”

 

Frank noticed that the troop of Hitler Youth had paused at the turn of the Ringstrasse and were showing an interest in this quiet drama. He knew where that could lead, so he nodded gracefully and slid into the spacious backseat of the saloon. Herr Luger sat to his left and Herr Handkerchief to his right. An oppressive silence filled the cabin, separated from the driver by a glass and mahogany partition. The man with the gun said nothing, glancing from time to time at the bare spring trees or fields full of sheep and their young. The kilometres were otherwise punctuated by the ritual of the snuff tin and the disgusting explosive sneezes from the right. Should he get the opportunity, and he sincerely hoped he would; Frank resolved to liquidise the brain of this offensive oaf: not because he needed the cerebral foam, but because it would be a way of fatally fucking him up the nose. He smiled involuntarily at his vulgarly phrased thought and immediately froze his facial muscles.

 

He swallowed the saliva of his mounting anxiety as the car turned East: Göttingen, Buchenwald. He had heard rumours about what went on there. How could they know? He had been meticulous about his behaviour ever since O’Connell had tried to blackmail him by threatening to unmask his homosexuality. He now possessed O’Connell’s talents in understanding behaviour. Not even Freud could spot the slightest homosexual tendency from his behaviour. Did they think he was a Communist? Jewish? The paranoia of the times was getting to him, he knew it; but sitting in a car heading for Buchenwald with the SS and no choice tended to maximise the paranoia. He decided to gently test the waters.

 

“I need to find a bathroom… the coffee you know.”

 

Luger looked at Handkerchief. Handkerchief tapped the lid of his snuff tin twice. “We do not stop, Herr Kørner.” Frank felt the urine crystallise within his bladder. He had seen the freight trains pulling their human cargo to the camps, seen the piss run under the slats as the trains took the bend near his apartment. He could imagine the prisoners, stained with excrement, stripped of their clothes and sent to a shower block from which they would never return. He knew people in the party, knew about the gas and the ovens and the trenches full of toothless pale carcasses.

 

An infancy conducted below zero degrees Celsius and between his father’s intellectual zeal and mother’s pagan terror had many benefits for Frank; not least of which was an ability to suppress his anxiety and formulate a clear, if rather desperate plan of action. Unfortunately he lacked a detailed knowledge of the degree of security afforded to the concentration camps, and so was unable to prevent himself being driven within three rings of barbed wire fencing and ushered from the saloon with at least two hundred rounds of ammunition primed to cut him down should he make the slightest unexpected move.

chapter nineteen

Tiny Tim

 

It had only taken his mother a few hours of pacing to draw the compass. She had tied a ten metre length of rope to an ice-axe embedded in the ground and had then begun the long walk. Frank had rather uncharacteristically failed to take note of the exact number of revolutions she performed, but he estimated it to be between fifty and seventy five, and had therefore covered a distance of between 3141.59 and 4712.39 metres in stepping the circle into the frozen earth. She then retired to the central point and waited for the moon to rise. As it leaked the smallest arc of reflection across the black chord of ocean she laid the rope as a radius to the distant light and placed the logs where it touched the circle. This representing a lunar north she crossed the circle and placed other logs at the cardinal points.

 

The incantations had begun. Frank’s father joined him at the window; the boy not yet six years of age perched on a cushioned ledge below the sill, the man leaning across him and letting his huge forehead rest on the condensing glass. Neither of them could hear the Sámi words from within the house, but the ritual was familiar in two ways; because it was repeated at every winter solstice and because it touched some prehistoric unconscious, some unremembered memory of shared beliefs.

 

 

Oscar Kørner returned to his maps and more conventional compass points. Frank picked up his book, an illustrated edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Since his father’s library was eclectic in topic and language the five year old Frank could read well in French, German, Russian and Latin as well as his native Norwegian. He allowed it to fall open and of course found himself looking at his favourite page, one carrying a plate of the Cratchit family celebrating around the Christmas tree with the invalid child on a three-legged stool, content in the bosom of his family.

 

Frank’s father was an enthusiastic reader of Dickens, approving of his egalitarian views and Hard Times had been Frank’s nightly story when he was not yet able to read for himself. Oscar Kørner had even met the author in Switzerland in 1846 and claimed, not without justification that the characters of Florence Dombey and Captain Cuttle were based upon himself and his new bride Sylvia; “a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book”.

 

His absorption in the illustration was disturbed now by the same wandering princess producing a wild ululation and stamping as she lit each of the four piles of logs around her lunar circle. He felt the pagan energy, and looking up he saw that his father felt it also, but it was a cold energy; an energy born of the vacuum that was before Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. It was of the same ethereal stuff as Tiny Tim’s empty chair. He looked again at the plate and saw the frigid heart of his own family exposed utterly by contrast. He closed the book forever and gazed with numb disinterest as his mother screamed her terror into the longest night.

 

chapter eighteen

The Isolation Hospital [2]

 

“Ta failte romhat, please have a seat.” Professor O’Connell leaned back in his maroon leather-bound chair and observed Frank through the lower halves of his reading glasses. “That’s a form of welcome in our native tongue. Do you have any Irish? You are, I understand, something of a polyglot.”

 

Frank made a gesture by opening the fingers of both hands slightly, palms upwards as if to suggest that his personal store of language was unfortunately empty of Irish. In fact his mind was taking in the academic paraphernalia that littered the room: heavy tomes in German mostly concerned with behaviour and the physiology of the nervous system, diagrams of the brain and main sensory organs in dissection and most appealingly, the instruments used for carrying out such dissections held in a large case mounted on the wall beside an ill-hung portrait of the British monarch.

 

“We have been taking a close interest in you, Mr Kørner, for some six weeks now. You are an interesting man, Mr Kørner, an educated man, even a brilliant man; therefore I propose to share my opinions with you. Mr Kørner; this is not something I am in the practice of doing with my patients, and I hope you will soon see why I have chosen to do so.”

 

“You said ‘we’,” Frank interjected, “To what others are you referring?” He sensed the presence of some kind of forbidden society in the room. This had been Browne’s weakness; but it was not the perverted appetites of the flesh that he felt connected the professor to some others, it was something more structured; there was intellect behind it.

 

“The police, of course,” replied O’Connell, a little too hastily. “You know that they were sure you were involved with five deaths, including that of the eccentric Browne. That number has, by the way, increased. Two of their officers were examining the cargo that Browne’s barge was carrying and suffered a similar fate to the landlord himself.” Frank tried not to smile “And are they persevering in trying to link me to these unfortunate deaths?”

 

“Let us just say that they are putting a great deal of time into persuading me to find you dangerously unbalanced. They do not want to see you leaving this institution alive.”

 

Frank felt the tension leave his body. It was now clear that the professor had it in mind to do more than share opinions with him. An offer was about to be made and since his intuition had already detected some clandestine purpose, O’Connell was about to hand Frank the keys to his soul. The professor bent forward over the desk and lowered his voice, seeking eye-contact above the lenses; man to man without any barrier save the gaseous molecules and microscopic debris that comprised the air. “Mr Kørner; I do not think you have a dangerous mental condition aside from genius and an unfortunate form of hysteria which misguides your affections. You know of what I speak?”

 

Frank cast his eyes down in a look of shame which he hoped would convince the professor of the accuracy of his diagnosis. O’Connell relaxed; he felt he had discovered a secret which Frank would strive his utmost to keep from general knowledge. “I see we understand each other,” the psychiatrist continued. “Many in the more intellectual or theological levels of society share your weakness Mr Kørner. We regard it as a developmental aberrance caused by trauma in the early years, but we are scientists. Society at large has a more brutal way of characterising your disgusting sexual practices, and punishes your type accordingly. Discretion is a noble quality, do you not think?”

 

The image of O’Connell being consumed by the bone gas vied in Frank’s mind with that of the former being subjected to a particularly violent anal assault by a memorable performer he had witnessed in Browne’s company in Paris. Again he smiled and again the professor took this as a sign of complicity.

 

“Splendid. You are aware. No doubt, that this country has been repeatedly ravished by the British,” said O’Connell, pausing whilst Frank reached for his handkerchief to disguise his humour as he visualised a team of massive British naval personnel buggering the professor serially and without mercy. “Yes, it is a tragedy; and from time to time your European confreres have attempted to come to our aid. Mr Kørner, I believe that the seven deaths I referred to before were indeed caused by you. I believe that the cargo impounded from Browne’s barge by the police constitutes some kind of deadly weapon. I believe that you know how to use this weapon and I further believe that you have the ability to reproduce this weapon, given the appropriate resources. Am I correct?”

 

The ticking of a pendulum clock filled the hiatus. Frank was impressed by two things: the accuracy of the professor’s grasp of the bone gas, and his stupidity in revealing his knowledge such a naïve manner. If it wasn’t sex that was driving O’Connell it must be politics. The psychiatrist stood and walked to the angled picture of the king. He opened the back of the frame and took out a sheet of paper. “I would like you to read this draft.”

 

THE PROCLAMATION OF

POBLACHT NA H EIREANN

---

 

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE
IRISH REPUBLIC

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations…

 

He held the text in sightless eyes. This was his freedom, this was his passport, this was his blank cheque. Frank’s immortality was again assured. He looked up. O’Connell’s death was now inevitable, his brain already foam.

 

 

 

chapter seventeen

No resemblance to actual post abstract expressionists intended...

Saluting The Flag

New York in 1955 was a long way from how it had been when he arrived in ‘45, and that itself had been light years from the petrified structures of blood and dust that was all then left of Dresden. Making money was easy, as usual. The authorities had shipped him out of Germany because intelligence had identified him as a scientist they could use; in fact he had shared a cabin for a couple of days with Werner Von Braun; but whereas Operation Paperclip gave the latter a major role in the frantic Space Race, Frank’s biological breakthroughs were of little practical interest to America, and he had soon been allowed to find work in the private sector. Americans had money; American women had money and what they wanted to spend it on was themselves. The early days in Cologne opened doors and Frank was soon designing perfumes for the middle classes who could never aspire to the European classics. It was only a couple of months since Von Braun had got American nationality, whatever that meant, and Frank was delighted to think of him in Huntsville Alabama, working twelve hours a day, shooting at the moon, while he spent an hour or two in is penthouse office, scribbled down a few chemical recipes, and spent the rest of his hours doing whatever he pleased.

Frank was not so dull as to miss the fact that self aggrandisement was one of his two vital principles, the other being elegant cruelty. For this reason he was delighted to find himself sitting on an improbably long velvet sofa with the cream of the art and fashion world waiting to be photographed and interviewed for the New Yorker magazine. He recognised many of his so- called contemporaries, although he was in his nineties in some real sense: Warhol, Pollock, Greenberg; about a dozen more. Two of the men, one about twenty five and the other five years or so older, caught his eye, and as the assistant editor finished her introduction to the afternoon’s work and coffee arrived he decided to introduce himself.

“Kørner, Frank,” he said, shaking the hand of the older man, “I’m in perfume. I haven’t met you before”.

“Robert. No I’m from out of town, Texas, as if you couldn’t guess from the accent, and this is Jack, well Jasper really.” Jack smiled and shook Frank’s hand. Frank breathed quietly and held the second; something unfamiliar was happening.

“What are you in?” he enquired.

“God knows,” Robert spoke quickly, as if he were protecting his friend from the difficulties of social intercourse. “We’re artists, we have studios in the same brownstone. Someone told Miss New Yorker over there that we are the new hip thing.”

“I’m in the groove Jackson!” At last Jack spoke and they tried fairly unsuccessfully to stifle their laughter since Pollock was only standing a couple of yards away, manifestly failing to enjoy the coffee. Frank caught what he thought was a triple meaning and smiled with what he hoped might be taken for camaraderie. He dropped his card and scribbled down their studio address, which turned out to be their apartment also. It was agreed that he would visit later in the day to see the work which the New Yorker claimed was the Next Big Thing after abstract expressionism.

Frank had to admit to himself that he was a couple of dry martinis ahead of sober when he arrived at the studio, but Robert had left him at the starting line. He sat on a hinged wooden ladder and swung his arm around, spilling rye over the surrounding canvasses.

“Fuck the gesture, Frank. It’s all about the real images in the real world, not the psyched up shit that makes you throw Prussian Blue here or black fucking housepaint there. Goddamn it, why paint flat? You can’t deny that paintings have three dimensions, four if you count the making time. Photographs, objects, film… This is what the new art is.”

Frank surveyed the evidence of his host’s assertions. He had always been a bit of a Klimt man himself, and he really was a contemporary. This parade of modern debris was ugly, but it was also exciting. “And what is the new art about?” he asked.

“Everything, nothing. America.” Robert took a large swig of rye “Fuck it, I’m steamed Frank. Jack knows. He has beer and paint and the flag.”

Frank was surprised. He had hardly expected the symbol of a conservative nation as a subject for these radical artists. Most people, himself included, didn’t get abstract expressionism, so something even more radical was bound to be alien.

“What does he mean; the flag?” He asked Jack.

“It’s in my studio on the other floor,” Jack spoke hesitantly and checked Robert for support. Unfortunately Robert was snoring atop the ladder, a mixture of bourbon and piss staining the leg of his blue dungarees. “Would you care to look at what I have so far?”

“Of course,” replied Frank, leading the way to the door, “I would love to see what you’re working on.”

Jack’s studio was calm where Robert’s was riotous. Frank now felt a coolness of thought which reminded him of himself in Svalbard. He touched the waxy surface of the paintings and then the cheeks of their creator. They kissed, and later that night he woke to find himself fellated before the multiple flags that hovered in the studio’s gloom.

chapter sixteen

some nostalgia

Google Earth

Kay sat on the white chair she had bought for €5 in a charity shop despite the fact that the Blue Gamp Gallery presently held an exhibition of beautifully crafted furniture made from bog-oak; thunderously silent, possessing hundreds of years of solidity and loved by the artist until inexpressibly smooth and justifiably expensive. The creaking white chair was hard, of the kind one found in sour waiting rooms fifty years ago, before plastic, MDF or design were considered appropriate for clients or patients, but to Kay it was a throne. When the memories had returned, inasmuch as they ever had, and her father, Douglas and the dwarf were permanently detained in prison or psychiatric institution, she had decided that she had to remake her world: she was the Queen and recreator; hence the throne and the art.

Christmas was coming but she had nothing important to do. There was an optimistic quantity of Douglas elves, 288 in fact, standing on a table in Trisha’s house ready for sale and there would be no customers until the mothers and grandmothers of Listowel had respectively recovered from the school run or finished an eleven o’clock cappuccino. Kay spun the planet on the laptop until she estimated London to be at the centre of the window. She zoomed in slowly, respecting her anxiety and the microcircuits under her fingertips. The generalised green haze shifted towards urban grey and the blue worm of Thames likewise greened and greyed. Now buildings, vehicles and street furniture could be observed. This was an image built yesterday afternoon; if it were from earlier today the streets would be jammed with red buses and the pavements thronged with commuters. She selected points of interest and little markers indicated galleries and municipal buildings. There was Southwark Cathedral and Tate Modern, casting shadows Eastwards over the sluggish water of the river. She stilled her heart and clicked in again. Here were individuals and newspapers motionless on the pavements that led to The Clink and what had been Frank’s Café.

Although the images could not represent movement she felt herself leave the backdoor of the ancient pile, pushing the heavy plastic bin to the end of the paved area and then dragging it over the earth path that led to the stream. It tipped and she was by now adept at balancing the weight and fixing the wheels as it disgorged the bones and viscera into the black stream. She knew every nettle and twist of barbed wire in that vile cul de sac. Once she had dared to send a bottle loaded with a dismal plea for rescue into the water, imagining it bobbing through the filth to some estuary where a man with a metal detector or a child seeking crabs would find it and alert the authorities.

She zoomed out and felt the gallery close about her. She followed the Thames under bridges and as it slipped by the horizontal vertebrae of the flood barrier, Barking, new estates on reclaimed marsh, fields and mudflats to that wide estuary. Here was the spot where she imagined her bottle still lay under a decade of detritus. The Ford cars and trade vans squatted discretely separate in the semicircular space between the track and the slime. The lower classes of Essex were unknowingly frozen within their vehicles, trading their drugs, making calls they could not make at home or attempting sex while her satellite eye hovered.

She jabbed the mouse pad and the planet fled; momentarily atomised before adopting its waiting position. She thought about time and work and calling Trisha, but only out of a faint sense of duty to her constructed sanity, because what she really needed to do was go see her father. The planet turned about nine degrees to the East and she stabbed the zoom button into the heart of the secure wing of the psychiatric hospital. Frank had ruled here, and had even tried to lock her away here forever once he had sensed his plans beginning the unravelling. She knew her father was here, imprisoned physically and mentally, able to only rock, moan and shit. She could never visit him; it would be far too dangerous, but this way she could get close. This way she could almost stare into his empty eyes and smell his emptying bowels.

Something caught her attention and she tried to get in closer, but Ballinasloe was not London and the satellites were nowhere near as generous with their pixels here. A white dot shimmered on dark green inside the high wall surrounding the secure wing. She touched the screen of the laptop, stroked the dot with immense tenderness. At that moment, some time last evening, a white cat could see her father in his abysmal padded nowhere. Her smile guided the tear between her lips. Frank didn’t matter any more.

chapter fifteen

A pretty clear indication of that which is truely evil in Frank. Thanks to Fionn for most of this...

Los Cardales

Following the rigid infrastructural architecture of Germany and the sophistication of the New York public transport network Frank was taken aback by the extreme casualness whereby the railway line here was defined by a slight decline, as if encouraging drunks or cycling children to roll onto the tracks. He stepped onto the orange earth and summoned a mozo to collect his luggage. He calculated that there was about an hour of sunlight left and the heladería was cut by sharp diagonal shadows; enormously elongated trees, buildings and people. Iglesias sat in a bright parallelogram, his three bodyguards suited and black on black beside him. “Venga, Frank, tomarás un mojito?” The silhouettes shifted stoically, and Iglesias spun a light aluminium chair into the suddenly pink light. The fat man’s cigar smoke dragged against gravity.

“Hombre, no tengo ningun idea por qué este cabrón quiera encontrarnos en esta cochambre, pero el cabrón y yo chingón..” Iglesias slapped a fly onto the table top and incinerated it with the end of his Cohiba. Frank was unfamiliar with the almost infinite richness of South American slang, but nodded in agreement with the general idea. “Qué tal el viaje?”

“Long, but interesting,” replied Frank. “The train had an almost imperial splendour, although faded, and the commission expected from even quite minor employees was… excessive.”

“If they knew it was Alejandro Iglesias paying their sobornos those tíos would keep their hands in their pockets.” He laughed and turned to his bodyguards to make sure that they had properly appreciated his joke, but at that moment all three tensed and slipped their hands inside their jackets. A long black Pontiac Grand Am sedan pulled up in a haze of dry orange dust, two less flamboyant saloons following and a slight man in his thirties, formally dressed, with a tight moustache and even tighter gelled hair emerged. He made a gesture to the vague but immense figures leaving the other cars and stepped almost casually towards Frank and Iglesias. Frank immediately realised that his party was outnumbered and despite the evening heat in this out-post of Buenos Aires he felt the Arctic in his blood and bones. The calming ice stilled his nerves; things were undoubtedly going to become extremely unpleasant but he was utterly confident in his ability to survive. He took his father’s geological case from his luggage as Iglesias stood and attempted a fraternal embrace of the new arrival. The bodyguards on both sides shifted their shoulders uneasily and let their fingers touch the reassurance of gunmetal or balls. Frank palmed two dice charged with the bone gas from his father’s case and then remove a bag of his genetically modified cocaine. At 100% purity as it was here it was almost instant death to ingest the white powder. Frank was confident that it would account for some of these new arrivals; the factor that he could not control was how much damage they would do to his plans before they died.

“Frank, I want you to meet Angel Corrales, he is interested in doing business with us,” said Iglesias, using perfect English due to the focussing nature of the terror he was feeling. For a second Frank considered altering his plans and letting Iglesias die in the inevitable blood-bath, but then his aesthetic sensibilities returned along with his greed. He had decided months ago that Iglesias was going to contribute the cerebral essence that would allow Frank VI to commence later in 1983 and he was not going to let a local gang-land feud get in the way. He conjured up the most offensive aspects of Iglesias’s character in order to convince himself that it was worth the extreme risks he was about to run in order to be the one who turned this fat criminal’s brain into a light grey foam. It was touch and go between his bravura use of castellaño and his lack of respect for Vega Sicilia, but in the end it was the memory of the man sloshing the red wine into the glass and then into himself without the slightest appreciation of the complex biochemistry that made it the pinnacle of Spanish viniculture that saved his life that day. Satisfied with his decision Frank shook Angel Corrales’s hand knowing it would soon be cold, and let himself be led into a back room. Iglesias followed but as they were about to enter the room behind the bar Corrales lifted his eyebrow and a huge bodyguard stepped out of the miasma of coffee and boiling oil. “I need to talk with Professor Kørner a solas.” Frank saw Iglesias slump. He knew what was coming; ever since Corrales had arrived with such a large party of armed thugs he had known that he was going to die, but he had clung to the hope that he could somehow use Frank to survive. That hope ended the second that Frank entered the room alone with Corrales.

The room was small. There were two stools and an antique card table with what was once inlaid baize but was now a brownish green depression, slick from the passage of every coin that had passed over the bar in the last thirty years.

“You are aware of course that Iglesias has already ordered your coffin, Señor Kørner.” It was a pathetic opening gambit and Frank had some difficulty in parading the appropriate emotions across his face. He took the die from his pocket and played with it as if he were contemplating life as a game of chance.

“If you were a gambling man, señor, I’m sure you would bet on Corrales rather than Iglesias at this somewhat difficult juncture.”

Frank breathed deeply, as if coming to terms with a tough decision, but actually to give himself the maximum protection from the gas. “I dislike chance,” he muttered, slamming the die down on the leathery table top, the one up, letting the invisible gas escape. He let his head fall into his hands, defeated and trusted to the latino character that Corrales would reach over with some physical expression of sympathy. There it was; the hand on the shoulder. Frank held his breath for a few seconds, felt the hand slip away, and then he looked up to see the eyes fall out of the gangster’s skull.

The bone gas had dissolved the majority of Corrales’ ribs as well as the skull and upper vertebrae before Frank had managed to leave the room. Outside things were worse than he had expected. Most of the body guards of both gangs were slumped over the tables, but one giant of a man remained standing, and he was at that moment engaged in the last seconds of the garrotting of Alejandro Iglesias. He had one more die loaded with bone gas, but it would not kill the thug before the wire had completely severed the victim’s head from the body. Already the blood was hitting the canvass with arterial force, obscuring the Quilmes Cerveza logo. Frank prized an Uzi from the stiffening fingers of the nearest minder and let approximately thirty rounds transform the assassin’s head into a creamy patina upon the further wall.

Iglesias was beyond saving by the means of conventional medicine. His throat was gaping and the jugular, although not completely sectioned, was emitting blood at a frightening rate. Frank reached over the counter and ripped a length of plastic piping from the Quilmes tap. He thrust it into the fat man’s windpipe, pushing it down into the lungs. The black blood frothed up. Franks sucked out a couple of mouthfuls and then began to pump in his own quickly inhaled air. His fingers pinched the jugular and as soon as the chest expanded, gasping for life, he flipped open his father’s case and extracted a phial of the nutriment. He smeared it around the edges of the wound, reflecting that such liberal use would mean revisiting Edgeøya three months ahead of schedule, and then fashioned a bandage from a ragged length of curtain.

He stood in the cooling air outside the heladeria and thought about paintings; vast abstract paintings with runs of paint the product of the artist’s will and Newton’s gravity. This was the nearest thing to happiness he could imagine: recollecting how in a hurt second he had killed millions just as he had risked his own life and given of the nutriment to save an Ecuadorean gun-runner and drug dealer he despised. Iglesias coughed and Frank let the moment go. They would return to Casa Branco in the Grand Am and they would be newly feared and respected.

chapter fourteen

The Ash Field

Douglas stood, frozen in a slight forward stoop that was at first glance one of supplication, but over time eroded towards a calcified heart of calculated menace. The ranked repetition; twelve in a line, twelve tiers produced the appropriate collective noun. Two gross blue-green eyes surveyed the drizzle, thickening to sleet as it fell on the stuttering development of the semi-designed, fully detached houses which now covered the Ash Field. Beside the trestle table stood an easel supporting a canvass. The painting only half worked in acrylics depicted Kay Macnamara as a troubled dark nymph, emerging from a Celtic knot of eternally damp roots and fungi.

Frank inhaled the studio smells with a deep satisfaction. He remembered blissful days in New York in the 1960s when vengeance was his drug of choice. He had gone too far then of course, and the world was still lacerated by his spite. You save the grandest gestures for love, he reflected, but this time it was his own death that had to be avenged and it would be private but poetic. He placed an antique leather bound box on the window ledge and methodically opened the two buckles. This was his father’s geological kit-box. Frank lifted the steel tube with another within it used for extracting samples. He set it on the ledge where it hungrily reflected the pale grey light after more than a century of blind box-bound lethargy. Now he felt the weight of the hammer, imagined his father cracking open balls of silica in the monochrome Arctic; then using the sharp claws behind the head to scrape rich orange mineral from the million drab whites while he, the infant son, amused himself with probability or the wide vowels of the Sami language.

He dropped the hammer into his pocket and felt the immaculate Italian material drag at his shoulder as it accepted the weight. He moved to his chosen spot behind the door and waited for Kay to return home following her day in the gallery. It had been so easy to find her. He could not let her see him of course, and so had picked his moment to enter the gallery and express admiration of her childish models. The temporary assistant possessed all the enthusiastic naivety of the young and artistic and had readily provided him with her address. Now he was only minutes away from what he had termed his final performance; a swan song of elegant murder with a heady entr’act of torture. She had killed him but she was going to make this margin of his life feel good.

The key scraped against the lock before finding its way in and Frank stopped breathing and felt his penis swell with expectation. He heard her drop her coat in the hall and fill the kettle. She lit a cigarette and opened her mail. The suspense and the erection were painful. He followed the ritual of tea-making, the stubbing out of the cigarette, the opening of the newspaper. His fingers caressed the thin metal tube, letting the inner tube run in and out of the outer sheath. He detested masturbation, but this was different. A hot drop squeezed ecstatically from the urethal opening. At last she, too, was coming.

The hair was darker, longer, wilder than he remembered; but of course she would have changed such aspects of her appearance as she built a new life. She stood sharing the ceramic gaze of the one hundred and forty-four elves. Frank calculated the angles of incidence and reflection, respecting the terrifying memory of her retina. He moved silently, yet she had detected something for there was a brief gasp before the metal tube slipped into the skull where the spinal column began and she slumped, paralysed over the groaning table. Frank allowed the weapon to jut from the back of her head as he pulled her backwards into the bathroom. It was only when he rolled her gently onto the floor that he saw that it was not Kay who stared at him with impotent terror. The sexual tension evaporated leaving a grimy discomfort. He had two choices; let this woman live, albeit with permanent paralysis and some brain damage, or improvise. Ever the showman, Frank decided to improvise.