the faceless ghoul, Becker reached out to crumble the bit of newsprint and its cryptic holes when he stopped, arrested suddenly by the date on the newspaper. There was nothing special about the date itself-, it rang no bells; Becker could recall nothing unusual about the day; but its very presence was strange. The man had cut away everything else from the paper that was irrelevant. Why had he left the date? The obvious answer was that the date was not irrelevant.
'i know who' meant he knew something about someone who did something on that date. And in that newspaper? The New York Times was a large newspaper; where was Becker supposed to find the 'who'? The dots had to be a page number. The correspondent wanted Becker to solve this code, after all. He was trying to say something and he wanted to be heard, even if his listener had to work a bit first. He is confident that I will take the trouble, Becker reasoned, so he must be equally confident that I can break the code'. It can't be that much of a mystery. The punctured letters didn't amount to much of a code after all, just enough to avoid a cursory inspection.
Whatever the writer was trying to hide, he wasn't trying so hard that someone of average intelligence couldn't find it, Becker thought. The code was meant to be a puzzle, not a mystery, and puzzles, by their nature, can be solved.
Becker walked the mile and a half to the library, a stroll he took frequently to clarify his thoughts. He had replaced the masthead in its envelope and carried it with him in his pocket, feeling as if he were transporting something smelly and indecent. Traveling the clean, tree-lined sidewalks of Clamden, Connecticut, Becker felt like a dirty old man with pornography in his possession, as out-of place in this verdant patch of suburbia as a flasher in his trench coat.
Don't pursue this, he berated himself Whatever it is, it's no good for you, no matter how little you involve yourself. Alcoholics don't sip wines just to determine the source of the grapes. It's a quagmire, your entire association with that past life. Put a toe in to test the surface and you'll get sucked in again, right up to the neck.
Becker removed the envelope from his pocket and dropped it on the ground, then turned abruptly and walked back home, quickly, as if someone were after him. He had gone only a few hundred yards before he realized he was brushing his hand against his pant leg as if to cleanse it of something clinging to his fingers, like the slime trail of a garden slug.
At home Becker swept the Scrabble tiles into the box with his cupped hand and forearm and replaced the game in the family room. He straightened the kitchen once again, took out his well-worn copy of The Chinese Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee and leafed through it in search of a recipe for the evening's meal.
He felt clean, he felt virtuous, like a former addict who has passed up a fix; he had been tested and found strong.
Ten minutes later Becker found the envelope where he had dropped it. He picked it up and continued his walk to the library, where he found a primer on computers and refreshed himself on binary code.
Counting with a base of two rather than civilization's customary ten was simple enough once the method was understood. Becker remembered it from the years when he had devoted himself to computers, but felt it wise to check his calculations against the book.
Assuming the two dots aligned vertically meant 1 and the dots that stood alone represented zero, the number in binary code was: 10011 In the decimal system, the ones and zeros translated to the number 19.
The librarian at the information desk, identified by the brass plate in front of her as June Atchinson, showed Becker how to operate the microfilm machine and where to find the files of film of back copies of The New York Times.
She knew Becker-most people in Clamden knew him or knew of him-but only a few were able to differentiate between the man they saw and the man they had heard about. To June he seemed a pleasant, unfailingly polite and frequent visitor to the library, but when she looked at him it was impossible for her to dismiss the stories she had heard. The FBI agent with too many deaths to his credit-if credit was the right word. A man whose talents were too much like the predilections of those he hunted.
It was all rumor, of course, but it stuck to his image all the stronger because of that. June chided herself for crediting the rumors-she liked to think of herself as a better person than that-but the stories were too persistent to ignore. He was a good-looking man, virile, with the appearance of strength despite middle age, but with nothing about him to suggest a hidden and rapacious bloodlust.
She watched him with open curiosity as he worked the microfilm machine.
Becker was aware of her attention as he was normally aware of most of what went on about him, the habit of watchfulness never having left him, The FBI had taught him a form of reasonable paranoia, and Becker had refined it with an attention to nuance that had made him extraordinarily effective. He was also conscious of his reputation and was glad the real story was not known. The truth was worse than the rumors and was known only by his therapist, and then only in part. Even Becker did not know the whole truth about himself, although he worked at it with a diligence made possible only by his high tolerance for psychic pain.
He found the Times that matched the date on the masthead and turned the knob of. the machine, watching the blurred catalogue of the day's events flash by until he reached page 19.
There were stories about the apple industry and the suicide doctor, but the item sought by Becker leaped at him from a tiny box in the lower left corner, a throwaway story sent over the AP wire and beloved by editors because it was just the right size to fill small holes in the page's layout. The headline read, 'Body Found in Coal Mine.'
The dateline was Hendricks, West Virginia, and the story told in terse journalistic prose of the discovery of the body of a twenty-year-old woman in a branch shaft of an abandoned mine. The woman had been identified by her dental records as a local girl who had been reported missing nearly three years earlier. No details were given concerning the cause of death, and Becker could imagine that after three years in a mineshaft there would be little soft tissue remaining on which to perform an autopsy. The story went on to say that foul play was suspected- although no reason was given for the conclusion-and that a broader search of the mine was to be undertaken.
Becker lifted his head from the black and white of the microfilm and widened his eyes as if trying to awaken from a sleep. He did not know how long he had been staring at the newspaper article, but his mind had leaped through the machine and into the darkness of the West Virginia mine where a girl's body lay on the gouged and routed floor of rock. He did not see her as she must have been found, a pile of bones encased in rags, but as she must have died, a living person, fearful, panicked, in pain.
In his imagination she had just been killed and Becker was there beside her, feeling the last warmth of her body, her final breath still hanging above her, still distinct amid the chilly ambient air of the mine. The sound of her final cry faded away in the vastness of her grave and over it Becker could hear another, frightening sound. It was her killer's breathing, rapid, excited, orgasmic. Becker could sense the man behind him, looking at the girl over Becker's shoulder, leaning in close, as close as Becker himself, savoring the death. Becker was aware of the man's leering smile, his dancing eyes, his nostrils flared in the effort to suck in the girl's last breath. Without turning to look, Becker knew the light was already fading from the killer's eyes, the climactic feeling passing from his soul. Whatever he had done to her, however long it had taken, however much trouble it had caused him, it had been worth it. The killer had what he wanted and Becker could feel his final trembling sighs of satisfaction ruffle the air them both. The purr of a monster.
Becker returned to the present with a shudder and saw the librarian quickly dipping her eyes back to her own desk. The colors of the day swept back to him, the relaxed quiet of the library replaced the deathly stillness of the mine, the humid cold of underground gave way to the gentle warmth of the building. He was among the living, sitting among the ordinary, surrounded by the comfortably mundane. There were no monsters in the library. Except himself.
The librarian looked at him quizzically, then rose and crossed towards him. Becker realized he had been staring blankly in her direction.
'Everything all right?' she asked.
Becker regarded her quizzically for a moment before he understood that she was referring to his use of the microfilm viewer.
'Oh, yes, fine.'
'It's kind of an old system now,' she said. 'But it still works.'
'Is it common?' Becker asked. 'I mean, storing The New York Times. Do most libraries do it?'
