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Karen Barbour

Op-Ed | Summer Thrillers

Body of Work

June 14, 2009
The New York Times
By DEAN KOONTZ

THE scrabble of rodents on the roof is only mimicry, the work of wind and weeping willows.

James Brecht thinks the sound is made by slithering ropes dangling from a hovering helicopter. He fears a SWAT team might soon descend.

When I note that we can hear no engine noise or rotor blades, Brecht says, “You guys have stealth choppers. Hush-mode flight. Quiet as dirigibles. I know all about it, Harry.”

I have told him my first name, in hope of establishing a bond.

Now I risk stoking his paranoia. “But we have stealth ropes, too. Made of frictionless nanofiber. You’d never hear them.”

“Frictionless? How do you hold onto them?”

“Very tightly, Jim. And with nanofiber gloves.”

People believe anything if you use words like nano and quantum.

On the sofa, Nora Sparrow believes none of it. Her gimlet-eyed stare conveys her wish that I would be more earnest, more solemn, less myself, more Denzel Washington. But she says nothing.

My conversation with Brecht rivets her. Of course, she is allowed no other entertainment, restrained as she is by the chain that links her left ankle to a ringbolt in the floor.

Brecht sits in an armchair, dressed in black, hair as overstyled as that of the more exuberant contestants on “American Idol.” I could take him out in two seconds, if he did not remain so diligent about keeping a thumb on the BOOM button of the remote detonator.

Nora’s gaze never strays to her kidnapper’s right hand. She wears a vest packed with enough explosives to take the house off the real-estate market forever.

In the armchair across the coffee table from Brecht, I say, “This is just a date gone bad, Jim. I’ve had dates turn out worse.”

I am so alive, as I will never be again. His thumb is on the button, and I am so alive.

He is concerned about my bona fides. “So you do nothing but hostage negotiations?”

“I’m a homicide detective first, a negotiator as needed.”

He pretends calm, but his eyes shine with a desperation as poignant as that of a politician hooked up to a polygraph. “Homicide detective? I haven’t killed anyone.”

Raising my eyebrows, I point to the naked dead woman standing in a corner of the living room, supported by a metal armature.

“Not tonight,” Brecht says. “I haven’t killed anyone tonight.”

“Which puts you in a strong negotiating position,” I assure him. “As long as no one dies tonight, you’re holding all the cards.”

Post-mortem, the blonde in the corner had been treated with antibacterial solutions and preservatives before being submerged in a polyurethane bath that sealed her in an airtight glaze. Brecht had been enchanted by an exhibition of cadaver art in a city museum. He thought he might be talented enough to create better work than he saw in that display — and if not better, at least more erotic.

An equally glossy and dead brunette is wired to a straight-backed chair to one side of the fireplace.

“Why don’t I take the vest of explosives off Ms. Sparrow,” I suggest, “and wear it myself? You let her go, earn some good will.”

Suspicion narrows his eyes. “Maybe you want to die. If you want to die, then you’re no good as a hostage. I know Nora here doesn’t want to die.”

Nora Sparrow remains silent.

Brecht had overpowered her in a parking lot, subdued her with chloroform brewed from an Internet recipe, and brought her to his home. While he was out of the room, Nora regained consciousness on the sofa, chained to the ringbolt.

On the coffee table had been a few magazines, two of which featured mailing labels with his name and street address.

When Brecht reappeared, he had Nora Sparrow’s purse, through which he’d searched for a cellphone and for items that might be used as weapons. Returning it, he directed her to repair her makeup, which had been smeared during the parking lot struggle.

He left the room again, to change from his abduction clothes to an outfit more conducive to romance. As he told me, “I begin with them on the sofa, then move them to the bedroom.”

Although a smooth seducer, Brecht was not hip to the latest telecom gear. Nora’s compact, complete with powder puff and mirror, was also a phone, a camera, a text-messaging device, and most likely a nose-hair trimmer. Left alone, she alerted her husband to her situation and location. Brecht caught her at it, but too late.

As police cars arrived, Brecht strapped the vest on his captive. “Usually,” he had revealed to me, “I put it on them if they’re uncooperative. It’s an attitude changer.”

When he allowed me to enter his house, instead of continuing to deal by phone, I hadn’t known if he wanted to live. Sometimes an ordinary psychopath asks for a face-to-face meeting only because I’ve gotten under his skin, and he wants me to die with him.

On his walls, prints of famous paintings tell me that he wants to live. “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” by Vermeer. “The Redeemer” by Leonardo da Vinci. “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein. Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus.” They are masterworks and transgressive. The naïve art lover might admire these paintings for the brilliance of composition and technique, but the architects of Auschwitz would recognize and approve of the intention behind each.

I say, “You must have Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Étant Donnés.’”

He is not surprised. His kind often sense that I know them by their spoor. “I have a book, 160 photographs of ‘Étant Donnés,’ every detail in extreme close-up.”

Nora Sparrow remains silent, and I am so alive.

Those serial murderers who are drawn to deathworks, from literature like “Finnegans Wake” to the art of Picasso, are certain that life is mere chaos, out of nothing into nothing. They kill for pleasure and as a statement of their freedom from meaning, but the meaninglessness of life does not inspire in them a wish to be released from it.

If they are less educated than Brecht, their décor might feature posters from bloody horror films and a Nazi flag. Or a peace symbol, an image of an ascending dove, always ascending, idyllic paintings of fantasy landscapes. Each of them reduces the complexity of life to an ideology fully expressed in a single word. For the guy with the film posters and swastika, the word is horror. Life is horror. For the one with the rising dove, the word is peace. He brings peace to his victims. For Brecht, with his highbrow art, the word is void.

Those with nothing on their walls, those who make no effort to justify their actions with faux philosophy, are the most dangerous. They have internalized the void and do not fear death.

Outside, sudden rain falls with a mad-crowd roar.

Brecht glances at the ceiling. I watch his Adam’s apple move as he swallows, swallows.

Nora remains silent, watching me. She knows she has no role in this because to Brecht she is not a person; she is a thing.

Lowering his gaze, he looks at neither of us, but at the preserved blonde in the corner. His expression might be mistaken for depraved desire, but it is something else.

“What will happen to my girls?” he asks.

“How many are there?”

“Five in other rooms, seven in all.”

“You won’t be allowed to decorate your cell with them.”

The offense he takes is obvious in his tight lips, his silence, and now I know him. His thumb is on the button, but I know him.

“I can almost guarantee the university will display them for awhile. If not the school, then the museum where you saw the others, and in conjunction with a sampling of images by Marcel Duchamp. I’ll make it happen.”

His eyes meet mine. “Why would you?”

“Because we live at a pivot point in history, and too many make their choice without knowing the stakes. I’m all for showing them what’s at stake.”

His smile belongs to a carved god in a stone temple. “More will choose with me than with you.”

“You may be right,” I say, “in which case you’ll be a prince in prison, with adoring correspondents.”

He regards his captive. “You think Harry’s sincere?”

THE blinded windows cannot reveal the lightning bolt. Thunder comes not in a roll but in a crash that rattles the house.

Nora Sparrow remains silent, knowing that the wrong word can shake Brecht like thunder shook the night. She merely shrugs.

To me, Brecht says, “What a coincidence, I get an educated hostage negotiator.”

“There are no coincidences, Jim.”

“Oh, Harry, on the contrary, that’s all we have. In the chaos and calamity, sometimes a beneficial coincidence. Will you write the program notes for the exhibition of my girls? I’ll want approval.”

“You’re the art professor, Jim. You should write it yourself.”

His thumb is on the button. Nora remains silent. I am so alive, as I will never be again.

“It would be something, wouldn’t it, Harry?” he whispered. “Such an exhibition.”

He is all appetite and pride. Nothing else is left in him. He is one of the hollow men, with his scampering-rat, dry-grass whisper.

“It will be something, Jim,” I promise. “It will be.”

Nora remains silent. I do not ask, Are you ready? But she nods.

“How do I know you’re not lying to me, Harry?” Brecht wonders.

“A hostage negotiator depends on trust. Lying is too risky. You’d hear the lie, Jim, you’d know. You wouldn’t have to wonder.”

I rise from my armchair.

His thumb is on the button. “Will I be at the exhibition?”

“No, Jim. You’ll be in prison. But you can read about it in the newspapers. Big news.”

The world turns, but we are at the still point where past and future meet, and there is only the moment, and the decision of the moment, and the consequences of the decision.

I ask for the key. Brecht throws it. I snatch it from the air.

He is appetite and pride, both insatiable. Death offers him no nourishment, but prison and notoriety can be an endless banquet.

Kneeling at the ringbolt, I free Nora Sparrow from the shackle.

She rises as I rise. I remove from her the vest of explosives.

I tell her, “Leave.” When she hesitates, I slip into the vest.

She remains judicious in her actions, but she does not turn away from me. She moves backward to the door, opens it.

I shout, “Hostage coming out!” She repeats it in a shout.

When I tell her to close the door behind her, she reluctantly obeys, in respect of my experience.

I turn to Brecht, giving him one more chance to do the deed, proof of my sincerity. He rises, gives me the remote detonator.

I open it and remove the batteries. Then I handcuff him.

Outside, as I escort the prisoner to the porch steps, one of the approaching officers says to me, “Great job, Detective Sparrow.”

Brecht gasps at this revelation.

“She’s a successful painter,” I tell him. “You wouldn’t know her name. Her work is too life-affirming for your taste.”

He has snatched a woman who knows what a hostage must do to survive, and whose husband possesses the skills and the knowledge of art necessary to negotiate her release.

They lead Brecht away to contemplate whether there are only coincidences or none at all.

After bomb squad officers take my vest, I meet Nora in the rain. Soon, torrents of words will come from her. Now she remains silent.

I am drunk on life. But I do not feel so electrically alive as I felt when all I love hung in the balance. I hope I will never feel as alive as that again.

After a kiss, she says, “There won’t really be an exhibition?”

“No. Funerals, burials and prayers, but no exhibition.”

A rattle, as of a legion of skeletons, is only the wind in the weeping willows. The end is our beginning.

 

Dean Koontz is the author, most recently, of “Relentless.”

    Body of Work, NYT, 14.6.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14koontz.html