No DVLL.
I came upon a shelf of academic texts, mostly philosophy and history. Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, a Frenchman named Bataille.
Shelves of practical paranoia: how-to primers on bomb-making, wiretapping, exacting revenge, getting away with slander and libel, dirty tricks.
Fetishism, bondage, coprophagy. Step-by-step photo-essays cobbled from operating-room videos: sex-changes, face-peels, brain-tumor removals, liposuction, autopsies.
A big black-covered thing called
A pictorial history of the Chinese Revolution, devoted to carnage. Its centerfold was a double-width sepia print from the twenties showing a royalist scholar being torn to pieces by a mob, chunks of his flesh gone, ribs and viscera exposed. Fully conscious. Screaming.
Einstein's theories alongside astrology.
Slavic dictionaries neighboring
Computer science. The I ching, hypnosis,
The collected works of George Lincoln Rockwell; erotic aromatherapy;
The organizing criterion seemed to be Stuff Other Stores Won't Carry.
Nothing on DVLL.
On the last rack was a collection of solemn-looking hardcovers from a well-respected scientific publishing house: forensic pathology, homicide and rape investigation, gunshot wounds, crime-scene techniques, toxicology.
Densely worded manuals for police detectives, eighty bucks each.
Had someone considered them primers, as well?
I pictured Wilson Tenney or some other cruel loner up here, browsing, maybe even buying.
I opened the book on homicide procedure.
The usual cop mix of detached writing and close-up views of the destruction visited upon human flesh by shotgun, blade, blunt instrument, strangulation. Toxicology and lividity charts. Rates of putrefaction. Victims, sexually posed, mutilated; the blank, helpless face of death.
The
Patterns to be broken?
Replacing the book, I returned downstairs. The clerk had switched to a cigar and was trying to create his own toxic cloud.
He stared at me for a second, leaned forward, twisted something, and Stravinsky blared well above the ear- bleed range.
Not into user-friendly.
I used, anyway.
The first floor started off as more of the same brutal eclecticism and I skimmed, trying to look casual.
Then I found the eugenics books and slowed down.
The publisher's address, St. Croix. The Virgin Islands.
Another Loomis venture?
The book was nothing more than what it claimed to be.
Next came Dr. Charles Davenport's 1919 report to the Cold Springs Eugenics Society. Hereditary charts of patients whose “degenerative spawn” had been curtailed by sterilization.
Annotations at the bottom by Dr. Arthur Haldane, resident scholar at the Loomis Institute.
I checked this one out carefully.
Published five years before
In it, Haldane remarked upon the relative unsophistication of turn-of-the-century science but reaffirmed Davenport's thesis: society was doomed unless “genetic restructuring utilizing advanced technology” became public policy.
I flipped to the index.
Still no DVLL.
Nothing on Meta, either.
I found six more books on selective breeding and quality-of-life issues, one by the Australian ethnicist who'd recommended killing retarded babies. Same old crap, nothing new.
The stench of the clerk's cigar had enveloped me and I looked up and realized I was fifteen feet from the register. No insights, no Zena Lambert. Mr. Tattoo was reading something called
Then, just as I was about to give up, I found one more nugget: a fifty-page pamphlet, that same laser-printer look under brown paper covers.
An expanded version of the article from
Dry as a legal brief.
Lawsuit against the disadvantaged…
Sanger ended with a call for “the brutally efficient elimination of mind-set censorship of indisputably valid areas of research simply because certain elements with vested interests are offended or justifiably frightened of what can only be regarded as the logical conclusions of carefully tested hypotheses.”
Golden prose. Pity the poor judges who had to read his work-product.
Twenty-two-dollar price tag. I tucked the book under my arm, returned to the Galton book, and took that, too.
The door at the back of the store opened and Zena Lambert came out.
46
She'd dyed her hair black and grown it to shoulder length, with thick bangs that covered her brow and a Doris Day flip. But the face was the same, narrow and pale. The same black eyeliner. In real life, less Kabuki than bone china. Clean, balanced features, the nose small and straight, the lips narrow but full, glossed pink. Prettier than in the photo.
The kind of guileless, all-American face favored by casting directors for detergent commercials.
Sally Branch had said she was small but that was an understatement. Maybe five feet, no more than ninety pounds, she was a child-woman with small, sharp breasts and thin but supple-looking arms exposed by a sleeveless
