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What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? —Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
perspicacity
the quality of having a ready insight into things; shrewdness
gamine
a girl with mischievous or boyish charm.
As Angel had promised, a revised rental agreement was waiting for him when he got back to the office. It wasn’t until he was emailing a countersigned copy back to Aimee Price that he noticed the agreement had been sent at 8:15 a.m., when he was still on his way to meet the men called Angel and Louis. Bobby Soames had just been railroaded. Four days later, Charlie Parker arrived in Boreas.
misunderstandings that might arise from any personal contact. Now, while Parker sipped his Americano, and flipped through
Larraine watched the detective. He had put down his newspaper and was staring out the window at the stream. She could see the reflection of his face in the glass. She thought that, if she were ever to be attracted to a man, it might be one like him. He wasn’t handsome, not exactly, but he had depths. What swam through them, though, she could not tell.
Ruth opened the envelope. Inside was a man’s wallet. She removed the driver’s license from it and read the name: Bruno Perlman. A yellow Post-it note, folded in half, was stuck to the interior of the wallet. She opened it up. In the same block capitals as the name on the envelope, it read KEEP QUIET
“I saw someone,” said Amanda, turning away from the black sea, weeping into her mother’s breast. “I saw a Jigsaw Man.”
“Would you mind if I took a look at his car?” “Why would you want to do that? And why are you so interested?” “It used to be my job,” he said. “And now?” He looked at her, and she felt the full force of his gaze. “Call it my vocation,” he said. “I’m out of practice. Indulge me, Chief Bloom. After all, what harm can it do?” But those last five words came back to Cory Bloom later, as it all blew up, as she felt her life draining away, and she knew that she would take them to her grave.
“Thank you,” he said. “For what? For letting you look at a dead man’s car?” “For not telling me to mind my own business.” “If you do turn out to have killed him, I’m going to be real upset with you.” “If you pin it on me, I’m going to be real upset too.”
His bare skull was misshapen, as pitted with concave indentations as the surface of the moon. His brow was massively overdeveloped, so that his eyes—tiny dark things, like drops of oil in snow—were lost in its shadow, and his profile was suggestive of one who had slammed his forehead into a horizontal girder as a child, with the soft skull retaining the impression of the blow as it hardened. His nose was very thin, his mouth the barest slash of color against the pallor of his skin. He breathed in and out through his lips with a faint, wet whistle.
“I went around to Ash’s house, and I asked if he wanted to go down to the river with me. I told him what had happened, because I looked like hell after what they’d done to me. So me and Ash went down to the river, and I got a stone, and I hit Ash with it. I hit him so hard in the face that I was sure I’d knocked his nose into his brain. I thought I’d killed him, but somehow he stayed conscious. Then I threw the stone away and used my fists and feet on him, and I left him by the river in a pool of his own blood, spitting teeth, and I never heard from him again, because he never came back to
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There are those who say that all crimes can be ascribed to one of two motives—love or money—but I don’t believe that. In my experience, everything we do is predicated on one of two other things: greed or fear. Oh, sometimes they get mixed up, just like my brandy and milk, but mostly you can keep them separated. We feel greed for what we don’t have, and fear because of what we might lose.
sibilant,
Sounded with a hissing effect
Evil is the avoidance of responsibility. It doesn’t explain. You might even say that it excuses. To see the real terror, the real darkness, you have to look at the actions of men, however awful they may appear, and call them human. When you can do that, then you’ll understand.”
adumbration.
Report
“As for you, well, I can’t promise anything other than, if you’re honest, you won’t be aware of your own dying, and you’ll have saved your wife in the process. Are we clear?” Lenny was now sobbing loudly. Steiger reached out and slapped him hard across the side of the head. “I said, are we clear?” “Yes,” said Lenny. “We’re clear.” “Good. I have only two questions for you. What did the Jew named Perlman tell you, and who else knows?”
They had rented an apartment in Portland’s East End, once again in order to be near Charlie Parker. When first they’d done so, he had seemingly been dying in a hospital bed. Now he was recovering in Boreas. They had considered finding somewhere closer to him, maybe even in Boreas itself, but he’d made it clear that he didn’t want them hovering over him like a pair of demented Florence Nightingales.
Then there was also the question of what kind of man he would be. He had nerve damage to his left hand. One kidney had been removed. They had dug so many shotgun pellets out of his skull and his back that the surgeons had filled two glass dishes with them.
“If you think about it,” said Parker, “every murder is some kind of hate crime.”
Then again, he wasn’t a professional, not like Steiger. He was simply a fanatic. It was odd how these things came around: Steiger’s accomplice had killed Ruth Winter’s lover, the father of her child. Now, if no other option presented itself, he might have to kill Ruth as well.
When her German-born fiancé was killed on the Eastern Front, she fell under the spell of Max Koischwitz, the program director in the USA Zone for RRG, who broadcast anti-Semitic and anti-British propaganda under the name Doctor Anders. Gillars and the married Koischwitz became lovers, and worked together on a show called Home Sweet Home, designed primarily to arouse feelings of homesickness in American troops fighting the Germans in North Africa. Thus Gillars became the original Axis Sally.
She had confronted Barbie during the pretrial proceedings—what the French call l’instruction—and when he was asked if he recognized her, he said, “When you have been in prison for seven months it’s always agreeable to see a desirable woman.” When Simone Lagrange said that his remark insulted her, he said, “The trouble with you is you can’t take a joke.” —Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” in exchanges with Simone Lagrange, who, at the age of thirteen, was beaten and interrogated by him at Gestapo headquarters in Lyon before being sent to Auschwitz (from “Voices from the Barbie Trial” by Ted
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The first name he had given them was that of Marcus Baulman. Baulman was not who he claimed to be, according to Engel. No, Baulman was really Reynard Kraus, who had learned his trade with a one-month assistantship to Mengele at Auschwitz before moving to Lubsko. Under Mengele’s careful tuition, Kraus had learned how to euthanize children: an intravenous injection of the barbiturate Evipal into the right arm to put the child to sleep, followed by 10 cc of chloroform injected directly into the left ventricle of the heart. The children barely twitched before they died. Now the HRSP wanted Marcus
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In the darkness, Sam awoke. The dead daughter stood at the end of her bed. Sam rose on her elbows. She looked at the being in the shadows and yawned. She had been dreaming. It was a good dream. “You don’t have to stay,” she told the dead daughter. “I’m here now. I’ll keep him safe.” She fell back on her pillow and was instantly asleep again. The dead daughter turned away, and was gone.
The identity of the man living next to Ruth Winter was now known to him, and Steiger was troubled by his presence there. His instructions were to observe and not to intervene, not yet, but this man Parker was potentially dangerous. Who knew what the Winter woman might be sharing with him? Nevertheless, Steiger’s attempts to convince the one Amanda Winter knew as the Jigsaw Man of the risks involved in leaving Parker alive had proved fruitless.
The central issue—Winter’s daughter, Amanda—had not been resolved, which meant that, ultimately, either the mother would act, which would present enormous difficulties, or someone would be forced to move against her before that happened.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph over evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia. —Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
all humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not. The wager is not a matter of choice. By the act of living, we place the bet. A rational person, according to Pascal, lives as though God exists, for if He does exist, then the rewards are infinite, and if He does not exist, then the sacrifices made in life based on erroneous belief are finite.
Louis and Angel missed Parker’s company. They had grown so used to being part of the investigator’s existence, and the investigator being part of their own, that the months since his shooting seemed strangely empty, as though they were being held in stasis, waiting for Parker to return to them. All Louis could say for certain was that when he looked into Parker’s eyes he saw a man in the process of reformation, and he had an image of a sword melting in a forge, there to be molded into a new instrument, although if that was to be a weapon remained to be established.
No, what he kept coming back to was the look of surprise on Steiger’s face as the dune collapsed beneath him: shock at the disappearance of the ground from under his feet, but also a kind of astonishment that Death could have found time in his busy schedule to come calling at last, and in such a form.
She did it. My daughter willed him dead, and he died. My daughter. What is my daughter?
‘plurality must never be posited without necessity,’ and only in a limited context.
He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it.
parsimony
extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources
shylock
a Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, who lends money to Antonio but demands in return a pound of Antonio's own flesh should the debt not be repaid on time. II. (as noun a Shylock) — ‹offensive› a moneylender who charges extremely high rates of interest.
Scheisse?
Shit
The night before was lost to them now: it had been a small consecration, a minor epiphany, and no more than that, but sometimes such moments are all that we are given, and they are enough to fuel us, and give us hope that, somewhere down the line, another might be gifted.
Angel and Louis had spoken of Parker the night before. Yes, thought Angel, Louis was right: he is different. He has a certainty to him that was not there before. He should be dead, yet he is more alive, and more dangerous, than ever. God help anyone who went up against him now. God help them all.
incorporeality,
Having no physical existence
No, that was not true. He had caught hints of it in others, in men and women who were—and this, too, was easier to deny in daylight than darkness—infested by entities, by supernatural agencies. They had an otherness to them, and he had caught a hint of that same essence in his own daughter as she caused the death of Earl Steiger. There: it was said. It was what he believed. His daughter was not what she appeared to be. She was carrying something inside her of which she might not even be aware.
Had I turned into a soulless person, a wicked man, a murderer? I went on plying my conscience with questions. Had I done anything in the war but my duty and my obligations? Had I done anything but remain loyal to my oath and obedient to my orders? And my conscience answered me reassuringly. No, nothing else. Had I killed defenseless people, or ordered them to be killed? No, no, no. What in the devil’s name did they want of me? Extract from the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, published in The People newspaper, 1961
dotage,
the period of life in which a person is old and weak
Falangist
is a member of the fascist political party governing Spain after the civil war of 1936—39.
Ustasha
fascist movement that nominally ruled the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. In 1929, when King Alexander I tried to suppress the conflict between Croatian and Serbian political parties by imposing a personal dictatorial regime in Yugoslavia, Ante Pavelić, a former delegate to Parliament and an advocate of Croatian separatism, fled to Italy and formed the Ustaša (“Insurgence”) movement. Dedicated to achieving Croatian independence from Yugoslavia, the ustaše modeled themselves on the Italian Fascists and founded terrorist training centres in Italy and Hungary.
Die Kacke ist am dampfen.” The shit is steaming:
Mittelbau-Dora,”
Arthur Rudolph,
“Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s announcing his presence here, letting people like Bobby Soames know that he’s taking a professional interest in what happened to Ruth Winter, and by extension Bruno Perlman, and the Tedescos down in Florida. Whoever ordered their deaths is going to hear about it, and is going to know that Charlie Parker isn’t like the cops, or even the feds. He’s single-minded, he follows things through to their conclusion, and he won’t give up. I don’t think he ever gives up.” Preston still looked confused. “He’s staking himself out, Mary,” Stynes explained. “He’s going to
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Balkenkreuz,
