them raped her. On the ground, the woman had turned her head and, between the Russians’ boots, she gazed out at the GI’s. Her face was impassive, a mask which shook with the rhythmic jarring of her rapist’s pumping hips. Joe took a step but his buddies held him back. Leave it alone, Joe, not our fight, fucking bastards, too late, happens every day in this fucking place… So they stood there. They let it happen. They were in the British sector, ducking the MP’s outside a club that had been declared off limits; they didn’t want trouble, not when they were so close to shipping out. Still, they could have stopped it. Maybe they figured there was a kind of justice in it-who were the wolves now and who the niggers? But Joe did not see it that way. He was still a cop’s son, and he figured Berlin was where you glimpsed the truth of things, of life unpoliced, and all he wanted was to get the hell out.
Almost twenty years later, Joe could see that woman’s face as clear as day and still feel ashamed.
“Hey, cop.”
On a corner near Cambridge Street a half dozen kids loitered. A few city blocks still survived here, just north of the police station, the city reemerging, knitting itself back into existence after the void of the empty West End site.
Joe had been feeling addled by the morning’s events, the smashed-up shop, the suggestion that cops had been complicit somehow in the West Enders’ betrayal, and the fog of memories from the war. But those punks, those two words-“Hey, cop”-belted him back into the here and now.
“Who said that?” he demanded.
The kids smirked. They wore jeans and short jackets. A couple smoked.
“Who said it?”
“I did,” one responded. He was the biggest of them. He had a swagger. “What, you can’t even say hello to a cop anymore?”
“You the tough guy? Is that it?” Joe was bigger than any of these kids, but they seemed to feel there was safety in numbers. “All tough guys, huh?”
No answer.
“Who’s the toughest guy here?”
After some wordless discussion, they nodded in unison toward the first kid.
“You?” Joe pulled out his pistol. He leveled it directly at the tip of the kid’s nose. “Now I am.”
The kid’s eyes bulged.
“My name’s not ‘cop.’ From now on you call me Detective Daley or Lieutenant Daley or Sir, you got that?”
Nod.
“Answer me.”
“Yeah.”
“You know that guy Moe Wasserman with the deli over near the Garden?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a friend of mine. Somebody broke up his store. I want to know who.”
The kid’s eyes were slightly crossed from staring at the tip of the gun. “I, I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“Okay.”
Joe put the gun away. “Give me your wallet.”
The kid pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and handed it over. The wallet was warm and ass-shaped. Joe felt queer holding it. But he found the kid’s license and confirmed the name, just in case.
“What’s my name?”
“Daley.”
There was an audible whish from the kid’s lungs, and he doubled over onto Joe’s fist, and Joe looked down at him with something like relief at having thrown a punch, finally. Joe kept him from falling, held him up with a fist still clutched under the kid’s belly. He could feel the lungs spasm. “Breathe,” Joe counseled, “breathe.” He held his right arm locked at a ninety-degree angle while the boy hung over his fist like a magician’s cloth, to be whipped away revealing a bouquet or a rabbit.
“What’s my name?”
“Detective Daley.”
This was how you dealt with wolves.
16
Boston State Hospital, Mattapan.
Seated at his desk, the psychiatrist pondered a photograph. His index finger went to his upper lip and swept back and forth, back and forth, over a brushy mustache. “No,” he decided. He set the photo aside and picked up the next one, another head-and-shoulders photo of an old woman.
His name was Dr. Mark Keating. He was chief of psychiatry at this public mental hospital, which was set in a sprawling woodsy campus in Boston. He had an air of slovenly cultivation: a froth of gray curls that still bore the impression of a hat, snaggled teeth, spectacles rotated a few degrees off horizontal. Michael equated that sort of Einsteinish sloppiness with purity of intellect, or of purpose, or courage or simple eccentricity, or all of these, because Michael knew full well that his own sensible, conformist appearance-the bag suit from Brooks, the brogans which he polished regularly with an old pair of underpants-signaled the opposite. The psychiatrist seemed to take Michael’s visit in stride. He had been treating Arthur Nast and talking to policemen about Arthur Nast for nearly ten years, on and off.
“This was the one, I think.”
The doctor handed the photo across the desk to Michael.
“Helena Jalakian,” Michael said. “She was fifty-six.”
“She looks older.”
“She lost her parents in the Armenian genocide. She was just a child, of course.” Michael frowned. “She lived on Gainsborough Street in the Fenway, so she could walk to Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall. Classical music buff.”
“This was the picture.”
“I don’t understand. She was the first victim. But you said you called the police on August”-Michael checked his notes-“twenty-third, in ’62. There were already seven women dead by then.”
“This picture was in the newspaper. Or a picture just like it, I don’t know. But it was this woman. Until then I wasn’t sure.” He riffled through a bristling file folder, his head shaking. He came to a form with a photo paper- clipped at the corner. He tugged the picture free and laid it beside the first. “You see? This is Arthur Nast’s mother.”
Michael compared the two. The similarity was striking.
“And look,” the doctor said. He arranged three more pictures from Michael’s collection around the tiny shot of Nast’s mother so they formed a cross.
Michael recited, “Ina Lanzmann, Mary Duffy, Jane Tibodeau. Look at that. Amazing.”
“They are all, at least they appear to be, between fifty-five and seventy. Arthur’s mother was fifty-eight when she died.”
“So why did you wait so long to call the cops?”
“All I had was the resemblance of the pictures. I needed more. You understand, I’m bound by patient confidentiality. Generally, anything Arthur tells me, I’m forbidden to repeat. I could not come forward until I was convinced Arthur might really be murdering these women. Even then, many of my colleagues would not agree with my telling you these things. If it ever comes out that I revealed all this to you…”
His finger agitated the bristle-ends of his mustache again.
“Look, I’ve had my suspicions about Arthur for a long time. Arthur is not confined here. We do not have the resources to monitor his movements, and he has ground privileges, which means he can leave the campus almost any time he wants. So he has a history of wandering off. And of course he tends to get in trouble on these rambles. Arthur is rather odd looking and quite a large man; people tend to be alarmed when they find him rustling around in their backyards. He’s been arrested several times for breaking and entering, trespassing, that sort of thing. Usually
