Mortal Fear

go around me, but I blocked her path. She slashed me with her knife and I went down.” He rolled on the floor and came up into a half crouch. “Both women were screaming. Erin had already struck Kali twice with the sword.” Berkmann leaped to the center of the office, where the bloody circus of footprints had been the night before. “They fought here. It was magnificent! A scene worthy of Michelangelo. The Western woman untrained but genetically superior, armed with a sword. The Eastern woman a perfect killing machine, armed only with a knife. It happened in the time it took me to load a second dart from the case in my pocket. Kali struck again and again, but Erin repelled every blow, parrying like a fencer. As soon as I had a steady shot, I fired into Kali’s neck.” Berkmann made a pffft sound with his lips and teeth. “It was a mistake. The shot stunned both women. Then Kali lunged for the kill and Erin ran her through. They stood locked together like embracing lovers, and I thought the battle done. Then Kali buried her knife in Erin’s back. Erin managed to shove her away, then collapsed herself.”

Twisting to imitate the climax of the duel, Berkmann ceased motion with his knees slightly bent, like a crazed Fred Astaire looking into the camera while dipping an invisible partner. “She died in my arms, Harper. Sorrow and pity.”

As if someone had yelled “Cut!” he rose casually and stood centered in the frame again. “I tried to save her. But Kali had hit the heart. It was hopeless.”

I looked at my watch then. The tape had been running for more than three minutes. I couldn’t believe Berkmann had the nerve to stand there making this documentary of depravity, knowing that someone could walk in on him at any moment. Buckner’s men, the FBI, me, Drewe-

A wave of sweat suffused my skin as I realized just how narrowly Drewe must have missed him.

“Once I saw how things stood,” Berkmann said, “I took a little stroll round the place. I had the run of it, after all. And such an interesting time I had, going through this peculiar little house. So many mementos. This, for example.”

From his inside coat pocket, he brought out a folded eight-by-ten photograph, which he opened. Bob Anderson had shot the picture about four months ago at one of the family barbecues. In it, Drewe and I stand beside Bob’s mammoth grill, a little apart, while Patrick rests a proprietary arm on Erin’s shoulder. Erin is wearing a yellow sundress and sitting in a white lawn chair. Holly, dressed in a matching sundress, stands with Victorian gravity, resting an arm across Erin’s tanned knees.

“I feel like part of the family, ” Berkmann crooned, leaving the photo suspended from one hand and walking around to study it with the physical genius of a mime. “Hmmm… let’s see.” His finger danced along the paper until it stopped at my face. “Here you are, yes? Handsome enough chap, I suppose, though a little doughy for my taste. Not at all like your friend Miles.”

While I squeezed my knees in fury, the finger moved again and lighted on Erin’s face. “And here we have the sublime earth goddess I so foolishly believed I was communing with via EROS. So much darker than you led me to believe. She could almost be Kali at twenty-five.

“And behind her-can it be? The cuckolded husband? How could Erin ever have convinced herself that this mooncalf would be enough for her? Of course, she might have been a perfect match for him. I’ve given a lot of thought to that these past few minutes. Was Erin the woman you played her as? Or did you inject some of yourself into her-pardon the pun-as writers are wont to do in novels? How thrilling it must have been, playing both roles as you doled out your naughty little secret. You gave Erin a voice, didn’t you? One she never had in real life, I’ll wager.”

Berkmann’s finger slid down Erin’s chest to Holly. “And here, the little love child. But a daughter, not a son. Our own little Pearl. Any fool can see you’re her father.”

As he spoke, Berkmann moved his head upon his neck with serpentine suppleness, as if to hypnotize me by motion alone. “But I’m leaving someone out, aren’t I? The alpha female of the family. As I teased at my meager facts, it came to me that there was someone else in this house far superior to both you and your earthy paramour. You painted her as the perfect sister, the ideal wife, but she’s much more than that, I think. I’m speaking of this woman, Harper. This woman here.”

The finger lighted on Drewe’s chest.

“This is beauty, my duplicitous friend. What a fortunate boy you are. What a delicious arrangement. You had the carnal Erin for sex, and this noble lady for a wife. More than any man deserves, I should think. Oh, yes.”

Berkmann refolded the photo and slipped it back into his inside pocket. “But your day is coming, Harper. Be assured of it. I’m going to disappear for a while. Not my first choice, but then I don’t have a choice, do I? Please tell Daniel Baxter not to waste any more public funds searching for me. I’ve been planning for this day a long time. Even had my work succeeded, I could not have remained in America. Appreciation of genius takes time. But… there’s a wide world out there, and I know it well.”

Without warning or explanation, Berkmann suddenly slipped off his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m a free agent now,” he said, almost to himself. “So liberating.”

Both jacket and shirt fell to the floor.

While I stared, looking for the huge scar Miles had mentioned, he raised both arms high above his head, like a gull spreading its wings. If he had risen two feet into the air, I would not have been surprised. As his right arm lifted, I saw a dark line transecting the ribs, maybe five inches long. It took a moment to realize I was looking at sutures. They were weeping blood. Kali had stabbed him. And the son of a bitch had stitched himself up.

“I appear to be leaking,” he said in an almost embarrassed voice. “Notice the Christlike position of the wound?”

He laughed, then dropped one arm and traced a line beneath his sternum and along his ribs, and I finally saw it. A massive chevron-shaped scar, probably twenty inches long, with its midpoint beneath his breastbone and extending outward in both directions. It was an old scar, faded white, with the dotted pattern of staples rather than the hash marks of sutures. It looked as though someone had opened Berkmann’s entire abdomen for some reason.

“You see this one?” he asked. “This is where it all began.”

In that moment all the levity went out of him. He stared into the lens with mesmerizing power, his latissimus dorsi muscles flaring beneath his armpits like the hood of a cobra.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Harper. The healthy and the sick. Actually, they inhabit two different worlds. The world of shadow and the world of light. The door between those worlds opens only in one direction. And I was born on the wrong side of the door.

“I did all I could to remain strong, as you know. But when AIDS entered the blood supply, my hemophilia became a potential death sentence. Then it was discovered that hemophiliacs who received liver transplants for viral hepatitis miraculously regained their clotting ability. For me it was a revelation. The door could open in the other direction. Hemophiliacs as a class weren’t given transplants, of course. Not enough livers to go around. And their symptoms could be controlled with clotting factor. But clotting factor carried AIDS, didn’t it? I wasn’t about to die for the willful ignorance of my government. I never even hesitated. Kali helped me find the surgeons I needed, she bargained with them. They could barely speak English, after all. It caused them no end of difficulty obtaining American credentials. But they had good hands, and they liked money. The only problem was convincing someone to make the required donation.” Berkmann’s lips flattened into something like a smile. “But Kali helped me there too. She was quite indispensable.”

He tapped the transplant scar lightly. “It was a traumatic experience. Suppressing my immune system to accept the organ, all the rest. But I survived. And I was cured. Once we’d accomplished the liver transplant, well… you can see what a natural progression it was to further research.”

He looked down at the scar again, then raised his right hand and pointed at the camera. I felt he was pointing through the lens, right at my heart. “But now Kali is dead. My best assisting surgeon is dead. Erin is dead. Yet you are alive.”

I tasted bile in my throat.

“Remember the mills of the gods, Harper. You know the reference? Of course not.”

While I stared in disbelief, Berkmann unbuckled his pants, dropped them to the floor along with his underwear, and stepped out of the disordered pile.