“Objections?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Good.” Bollinger swallowed half of his drink. “Because I’d do it even
if you had objections.”
The captain came to the table and asked if they would like to hear the
menu.
“Give us five minutes,” Billy said. When the captain had gone, he said,
“When you’ve killed Harris, will you leave him like the Butcher would?”
“Why not?”
“Well the others have been women.”
“This will confuse and upset them even more,” Bollinger said.
“When will you do it?”
“Tonight.” Billy said, “I don’t think he lives alone.”
“With his mother?” Bollinger asked sourly.
“No. I believe he lives with a woman.”
“Young?”
“I would imagine so.”
“Pretty?”
“He does seem to be a man of good taste.”
“Well, that’s just fine,” Bollinger said.
“I thought you’d see it that way.”
“A double-header,” Bollinger said. “That just adds to the fun.”
He grinned.
“Detective Preduski is on the line, Mr. Harris.”
“I’ll talk to him. Put him through. Hello?”
“Sorry to bother you, Graham. Can we be less formal than we’ve been?
May I call you Graham?”
“Sure.”
“Please call me Ira.”, “I’d be honored.”
“You’re very kind. I hope I didn’t interrupt something.”
“No.
“I know you’re a busy man. Would you rather I called you back later? Or
would you like to call me back at your convenience?”
“You didn’t interrupt. What is it you want?”
“You know that writing we found on the walls of the Mowry apartment?”
“Too clearly.”
“Well, I’ve been trying to track down the source for the past few hours,
and-”
“You’re still on duty at two in the afternoon?”
“No, no. I’m at home.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I wish I could. I haven’t been able to sleep more than four or five
hours a day for the past twenty years. I’m probably ruining my health.
I know I am. But I’ve got this twisted brain. My head’s full of
garbage, thousands of useless facts, and I can’t stop thinking about
them. I keep picking at the damnedest things. Like the writing on the
walls at the Mowry apartment. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about ‘ it.
”
“And you’ve come up with something?”
“Well, I told you last night the poetry rang a bell. ‘Rintah roars and
shakes his fires in the burden’d air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.”
As soon as I saw it I said to myself, ‘Ira, that’s from something
William Blake wrote.” You see, when I was in college for that one year,
my major was literature. I had to write a paper on Blake.
Twenty-five years ago. You see what I mean about garbage in my head? I
remember the most useless things. Anyway this morning I bought the
Erdman edition of Blake’s poetry and prose. Sure enough, I found those
lines in ‘The Argument,” part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Do
you know Blake?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“He was a mystic and a psychic.”
“Clairvoyant?”
“No. But with a psychic bent. He thought men had the power to be gods.
For an important part of his career he was a poet of chaos and
cataclysm-and yet he was fundamentally a table-pounding optimist. Now,
do you remember the line the Butcher printed on the bedroom door?
“Yes. ‘A rope over an abyss.”
“Do you have any idea what that’s from?”
“None.”
“Neither did I. My head is full of garbage. There’s no room for
anything important. And I’m not a well educated man. Not well educated
at all. So I called a friend of mine, a professor in the Department of
English at Columbia. He didn’t recognize the line either but he passed
it around to a few of his colleagues. One of them thought he knew it.
He got a concordance of the major philosophers and located the full
quotation. ‘Man is rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a
rope over an abyss.”
“Who said it?”
“Hitler’s favorite philosopher.”
“Nietzsche.”
“You know his work?”
In passing.”
“He believed men could be gods-or at least that certain men could be
gods if their society allowed them to grow and exercise their powers. He
believed mankind was evolving toward godhood- You see, there’s a