153/398
♫ Sloe Season ♫
153/398
I enter the corridor at the station, clutching the stack of copies containing the writings of the triple murderer—texts literally stained with blood. The blood of illegal clones?
Albo is engrossed in his files. I skip the pleasantries: “Is there such a thing as identical quadruplets?”
Albo looks up. “Just had some in Leipzig recently. Damn rare, but not impossible.”
I grab a coffee. No sugar left.
Albo keeps his eyes on me. “Why do you ask?”
“Because then it might finally be over.”
Albo laughs bitterly. “Over? I have to catch a killer, regardless of what happens in fifty days!”
“—Forty-eight,” I correct him. Albo gives me a look that wouldn’t pass daytime TV censorship.
“Ray Bradbury,” he says then. I look at him, slightly confused. “American author,” I say.
Albo nods. “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine.“
I shrug. Albo tosses me a thin, worn paperback: Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric! “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s…” is one of the stories listed in the table of contents.
“You read stuff like this?” I ask, surprised.
Albo shakes his head. “One of our forensic guys put me onto it. There’s a guy in there who thinks he’s Charles Dickens but can’t put anything worthwhile on paper. He buys six dozen typewriters and writes like a madman…” With that, he stands up, walks over, and takes the slim volume back from my hand. He flips it open, finds the spot, and quotes: “The poem. The essay. The play tragique. The farce. The short story. And it was all bad.“
“What are you trying to tell me, Albo?”
“That’s him, don’t you see? The typewriters, the different texts. And then he sits…” Albo taps the booklet. “…at the back of a train and throws all the pages out one by one, and they flutter away. Thousands of them.”
“But that’s just a story, Albo. We have three dead bodies and a serial killer.”
Albo slams the book onto his desk. “Just a story, you say? But these are all stories, too! The typewriters—don’t you get it? He knows the Bradbury story and identifies with it!”
“Take it down a notch, Albo. He identifies with everything and nothing. That’s precisely our problem. He’s a shape-shifter, and we can’t get a grip on him. One minute he’s ‘integral,’ the next he’s surrealist. We don’t grasp him, get it? You can’t just pick out one facet and call it a day. Not here. Not with him. And six dozen typewriters aren’t fifty.”
Albo looks like he’s on the verge of blowing a fuse. He must have latched onto this Bradbury thing out of sheer desperation. I don’t give him room to breathe: “Number 122 is another one of those. Incomprehensible gibberish…”—I pull the sheet from my copies—”…until you find the original.”
“Which original?” Albo asks, frowning at the page.
“A Braulio Arenas is mentioned, right? Chilean poet. Just so happens he wrote a poem titled ‘Errata’ that lists a bunch of printing errors found in an unnamed text. A surrealist poem.”
“And?”
“Number 122 is that text. It contains every single error listed. For example, in the poem, it says, ‘Instead of making two hits with one shot it should be making two lips with one mouth.’ Sound familiar? Or ‘Instead of the youth the beauty the mill it should be the mill the beauty the youth.’ Ultimately, it was the missing commas that tipped me off that his text was built on that poem.”
Albo looks at his copy, rubs his stubble, and thinks it over. Finally, he asks: “Does it make any sense?”
“None,” I say. “It’s just—and I quote—’a grotesque parody of something that is already absurd.'”
“Uh-huh,” Albo says.
I tap his copy. “There’s one error missing, by the way.”
Albo’s brow furrows.
“One line reads: ‘Instead of I love you it should be I love you.'”
“Where’s the error?”
“That’s the whole point of Surrealism. And the same goes for the killer. He’s no more Braulio Arenas than he is Charles Dickens!”
Albo nods without looking up. “So how do we nail him?”
“Let’s talk about someone who decided to stretch his bizarre mind games so far into reality that the homicide squad has to deal with them,” I say, holding up the copies. “Let’s talk about incompatible claims and collapsing belief systems.”
Albo looks up. “Always a good idea,” he says. Do I spot a wry smile tugging at the corners of his mouth? Maybe it feels to him, too, a bit like thirty or forty years ago, when we used to sit up all night debating life, God, and the universe—and all the insanity we humans inject into it.