“I can't argue with you there,” replied Jessica, thinking how true Father Luc Sante's words were. Quoting from Luc Sante's book, she said, “ 'And what are we to do with evil when their masquerade of sanity is so damnably successful, their destructiveness so… so…”
“
“Bloody normal,” he finished for her.
“Exactly.”
“They take on the roles society provides-the evil elves of Satan become the fathers, the mothers, the providers, the loving caretakers for the world to be lulled into a sense of faith in them before they strike. Like the faith we all put in a uniformed security guard, and yet half a dozen killers in as many years have worked at one time or another as security guards.”
She thought of the helpful young security guard at Scotland Yard that morning. The thought he might be the Crucifier as well as anyone flitted through her mind. “So, relating this to the Crucifier…?” she asked.
He stopped to again sip at his tea, the tinkling of the chinaware a counterpoint to their conversation. “Whoever is doing these killings, he's grown up as a twisted soul, but also as a well-trusted soul. Mark my words…”
She gulped her tea, thinking deeply about what his words entailed. A twisted monster whom the community at large believed in, put their faith in, trusted wholly and completely. “What do we do then, Father?”
He sighed heavily, putting his tea and half finished crumpet aside, the noise he now made a staccato aberration of the earlier tinkling sounds. “First we must stop buying into the masquerade, allowing ourselves to be so easily deceived by the pretense. Question is, can we do that?”
She raised her shoulders. “Can we?”
“Will we ever learn to detect the pretense of the cunning and clever? Of the evil among us?”
“In your book, if I've interpreted correctly,” she began, “you're of the opinion that although evil is antilife, it is itself a form of life.”
“Precisely. A form of life that must itself be destroyed, but in the destroying of that life”-and here he held up an accusatory finger-”evil though it may be, we destroy something of ourselves in the destroying of it.”
She bit her lower lip and then replied, “I've heard that argument.”
“As someone who has taken life, don't you agree?”
“I don't kill for sport.”
“No, only as your means of livelihood?”
She grimaced.
“I don't mean to pick on you, Jessica, but don't we all temper our own evil with words of justification, even denial? Society does so when it executes one of its members. And for the brief moment the switch is thrown, and people feel safe, insanely so, in their homes at night. When in fact, in your country and this, a minuscule percentage of death-row inmates are actually put to death, and most men on death-row are far safer there than in the neighborhoods where they once lived.”
She had to nod in agreement to this fact. “And if we sane intellectuals can justify a killing… If we can justify a killing, it makes it all right in our soul of souls. Apparently, that is what the fellow this morning's newspapers are calling the Crude Crucifier has done.”
“Crude now is he?” Luc Sante smiled.
For Jessica, Luc Sante's words on the nature of evil brought back images of the fiery end of the madman she'd chased just the year before, a maniac who had had frequent conversations with Satan. Jessica told Luc Sante the story, finishing with, “Satan was his justification for murder,” she explained. “Satan spoke to him, told him to kill nine people, the ninth was supposed to be me.”
“Apparently he missed his mark.”
All of the conversation led to a supposition in Jessica's mind, one which she now shared with Luc Sante. “Okay, suppose our killer here in London is hearing voices, too, but not Satan's voice. No… Rather, he's hearing Christ's voice. What if he's following some prescription laid down by the voice in his head, and the voice is that of Christ so far as he is concerned?”
“Imagine the power of such a voice if one believed wholly in it,” replied Luc Sante when a knock preceded young Martin Strand's peeking through the door, asking if Father Luc Sante would excuse his rudeness. “I have those books you wanted, sir.” Strand stepped through and put four books on the old man's desk. “Is there anything else I can get you before I leave?”
“Why don't we ask Strand?” Luc Sante replied to Jessica. “Strand, sit a moment. Listen to this.”
Strand was then subjected to Father Luc Sante's wilting scrutiny. “Martin, my boy,” the older priest began, “do you suppose that this killer who is crucifying people in our city, do you suppose that he may be listening to some prescriptions from God or Christ? Or that he thinks himself Christ, and is in an effort to decipher how to reinvigorate himself in order to make a second appearance before us all, to create his own Second Coming?” Luc Sante laughed at his own irreligious remarks, while Strand rocked a bit nervously in his leather chair, feeling doubly awkward at the old minister's words.
“Strand is confused by the question,” attacked Luc Sante. “Still, he buckles to it, tackles it, grapples with it up here.” He pointed to his head. “As he might a question of theology. Quite serious young man. Right, Martin?”
Strand returned to his feet so as to tower over the old man. He rocked a bit on his feet, then began pacing and finally erupted with, “Well, if we attempt to understand the killing mind-”
“There you're already wrong, man.” Luc Sante verbally shook his protege. “We're all carrying about in our pea-brained heads the killing mind. It's not something apart from you, Strand. That you must attempt to understand from afar. Look in the bloody mirror. Part of our makeup, our nature. Strand…” He lost his concentration, showing further signs of the fatigue and pain in his joints, but he didn't want to give up the floor any more than the office, his ministering, or his psychiatric pracdce. Hence his cutting of poor Strand left and right and back again. “We must,” Luc Sante started anew, “we must ask after his motivations, his rationalizations. If they are religious in nature, then perhaps it is a religion of one and taken to extreme, as history has shown us: Evil can evolve from too zealous a nature, and as anyone knows a Christ complex is too zealous.”
“I think it's time for you to retire for today. Father,” Strand said to him, emphasizing the word “retire” ever so slightly, but enough to pinch the old man's ego. “Strand did not help me to write my book,” he countered. “Can you tell?” he asked Jessica. Then back to Strand, he directed a new barb. 'Too bad, Strand. Such a book attracts lovely young ladies here to my lair, someone as beautiful as Dr. Coran, here, at St. Albans. See what you miss?”
“Father, I truly feel you've overtaxed yourself, today,” Strand said. “Won't you rest before dinner?”
Luc Sante laughed a light laugh. It sounded like resolve escaping him. But he ignored Strand's request and the hand the younger man presented him. Instead the old man turned to Jessica again. “Well, to return to your earlier question, Dr. Coran-or was it my question? Ahh, either way, if we do-gooders kill evil people, do we not ourselves become evil in doing so? And so by definition killers ourselves?”
“Evil is in the eye of the beholder,” she countered. “When McVeigh was given the death sentence, some called it justice, others called it a gross evil.”
“And where did you stand on the issue?” Strand asked her.
“On the side of the children McVeigh wantonly murdered, on the side of justice served. I've seen too many serial killers and mass murderers on death row and in asylums where they are treated like celebrities to wish to see another situation like Richard Speck occur. Actually execution is too easy, too good for McVeigh's kind. He should be maimed and allowed to slowly die in agony, as did many of his victims in the rubble of the explosion he set off. A bombing like that, to me, is the most cowardly act of all.” Strand's voice rose in reaction to this. “But if our only way to deal with evil is to destroy it, then we end up destroying ourselves-spiritually if not physically. And isn't that where you are at this moment in time, Dr. Coran? Wondering what particle of soul you've been able to salvage over the years of your career?”
She bit back her lower lip, contemplating Strand's incisive words and the sharpness of his characterization of her. She also saw that Luc Sante's half smile said that he agreed with his junior partner. Did Luc Sante mean to hurt her as much as Strand's words did? she wondered.
She then spoke to the room, her whiskey voice filling it. “Sometimes, I fear that I've overstepped… That is stepped over the line… I mean that who we are becomes who we were, what we've said and done, where we've been and how we've gotten there, and how we've acted and reacted becomes us.”
“That the current self is an amalgam of our past selves, perhaps?” asked Luc Sante.
