Exquisite Corpse Read online

  I felt inside Sam’s coat and pulled out the brown leather wallet I’d seen earlier. It held a driver’s license issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia, a student ID, three credit cards, a condom, and a sheaf of crisp fifty-pound notes with some smaller bills folded around them. In the same pocket of his coat was a passport folder. The passport had been issued in 1989, and the smiling face in the photo was thinner, the hair shorter, the aspect generally scruffier than that of the well-groomed American tourist I had met tonight.

  I thought I could easily pass for the man in the photo. My name was Samuel Edward Toole, and I hailed from a place called Charlottesville. I kept the entire wallet. The less identification was found on Sam, the more it would look as though he’d been murdered and robbed. Which of course he had. Upon reflection, I took the black plastic Swatch from his wrist and fastened it around my own. Sam may have considered time a relative concept, but I had to catch the tube to Heathrow Airport before midnight, and it was already half past nine.

  I backed out of the stall, glanced at my pale bespectacled image in the filthy mirror over the sinks, wiped a smudge of blood off my chin and pushed back a sweaty lick of hair that had fallen into my lace. What am I forgetting? I wondered. How have I left my stamp on this scene, my signature on Sam’s poor outraged body? I could think of nothing.

  Something was seeping into one of my socks, oozing warmly between my toes. I glanced down at my feet and swore. A small lake of blood was already spreading out from the stall, shiny as black lacquer in the dismal light. The bottoms of my shoes were foul with it. I’d tracked his blood all over the floor, and the prison knew my shoe size. But I couldn’t risk taking the time to wipe up the footprints.

  The sink farthest from the door already sagged loose from the wall, probably as a result of men leaning against it with their flies unzipped I threw all my weight onto it, sat on its edge and bounced up and down, felt it loosen further, then give. The metal shrieked as it ripped away from its moorings. The ancient plumbing gave a great rattling groan. The sink toppled to the floor and broke in half. The orphaned pipe began to spew water in great whirling arcs.

  Within seconds the floor was covered with a thin film of dirty pink-tinged water, which I trod in to clean my soles. I had a last look at Sam, offered him a silent apology for not being able to linger, for leaving him alone here. Your life collided with mine, I explained, and you simply failed to survive the wreckage.

  Then I hurried up the cement stairs and left that dreary place forever. Suddenly I was a great one for leaving dreary places, it seemed.

  I only hoped I would find somewhere I wanted to stay.

  · · ·

  At Painswick there had been (and likely still was) a petty thief and occasional rapist called Mason. I met him on Christmas Day, one of the few times I was allowed out of my cell to visit the television lounge. One of the holiday programmes announced a string quartet playing a piece by Mozart. Before anyone could change the channel, Mason hurled himself in front of the telly and turned the sound as far up as it would go.

  He was an unimpressive, weaselly little fellow, and a great grunting murderous yob soon tossed him aside and switched over to repeats of rugby playoffs. Mason spent the rest of the day in my corner, explaining to me the kinship he felt with Mozart. He’d seen the film Amadeus seven times. He considered himself a blazing talent unrecognized in youth, left to rot on the vine.

  “What kept you from fame and fortune, then?” I asked him once.

  His answer astounded me. “My mum ’n’ dad wouldn’t let me have piano lessons.”

  So it was with murderers, I often thought. There were would-bes and would-nevers, and those who killed accidentally or thoughtlessly. But how many people had experienced an actual need to murder, a need to appreciate someone else’s death?

  Some may think killing is easy for men like me, that it is a thing we murderers do as casually and callously as brushing our teeth. Hedonists see us as grotesque cult heroes performing mutilations for kicks. Moralists will not even grant us a position in the human race, can only rationalize our existence by calling us monsters. But monster is a medical term, describing a freak too grossly deformed to belong anywhere but the grave. Murderers, skilled at belonging everywhere, seed the world.

  Thumbing through Sam’s wallet on the train, I had a nasty flash of alarm. My plan had been to visit the automatic bank machines at the airport, withdraw the largest cash advances Sam’s three credit cards would allow, and use the cash to buy a ticket on the first flight that caught my fancy. But as I handled the stiff plastic rectangles, I remembered the Barclaycard I’d had in my other life. A machine would give you all the cash you liked—as long as you’d memorized your four-digit access number. That was what kept people like me from knocking you over the head, taking your card, and withdrawing all your money.

  I could hardly go back and ask Sam what his PINs were. I supposed I would have to buy a ticket with one of the cards, but if Sam’s body were identified and his death connected with me, there would be a perfect record of where I’d gone. Of course, I wouldn’t stay where I landed. But it would give them a place to start looking for me. I didn’t want them to have even that much.

  I tipped the card marked Visa back and forth in my hand, making the hologram of an eagle flutter and take wing. I rubbed my finger across the nubbly raised letters of Sam’s name, trying to absorb his identity, his memories. I thought of his brain dying back in the loo, the cells turning to rancid slush, the cells that held the knowledge I needed. Just this morning I’d been dead too. I wished there were some sort of information interchange beyond the grave, some ghostly data bank listing the vital statistics of no-longer-vital souls. But if there was, I hadn’t stayed long enough to tap into it.

  I would buy a different ticket with each card, I decided, and use some of Sam’s cash if necessary. At least that way they would have to start looking for me in four places instead of one.

  Heathrow Airport just before midnight is a cacophony of shoving, hurrying travellers, disembodied voices, stroboscopic lights. There are breakfast bars and snack stands, rocklike sticky buns collaborating with tea of inferior vintage to mount an assault on the taste buds and the stomach lining. There are bookstores and caviar kiosks and luggage carts and escalators and duty-free zones. And everywhere there are boards announcing imminent departures, exhorting you to go any of a thousand other places, anywhere but here. Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world. A flight leaves every forty-seven seconds. No one can watch them all.

  Bangkok. Zaire. Tokyo. Salt Lake City. The names whirled and clicked about my head, tempting, confusing, seducing me. Tangier, I knew, was full of adorable young boys lounging on soporific sands, begging to be interfered with. Singapore was the gourmet capital of the world, but had a brutal police system. Anyone could get lost in the backstreet mazes of stinking Calcutta. And this was only one terminal.

  In the end I bought tickets to Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Cancün, and Atlanta. All four flights left within the hour. Whichever gate I arrived at first, that was where I would go. Once I had the tickets, I went into a men’s loo and shoved Sam’s credit cards deep into a rubbish bin. They were of no more use to me. Then I took the cassette from Drummond’s tape recorder, pissed on it, and flushed it.

  I walked past a news vendor and glanced at the front page of the Evening Standard, and the core of my heart went cold.

  GAY HORROR KILLER MISSING!

  Below that, in type almost as large, my name. Better, my names: the one I had been given, the one I had earned.

  ANDREW COMPTON—LONDON’S ETERNAL HOST

  And that same blurry photograph, more than six years old now, my hair tumbling over my brow, my lips so white they all but disappeared into the surrounding paleness of my skin. Nothing like how I looked now, but making people think of me nonetheless. Making them wonder where I would turn up.

  Every policeman in England would be looking for me, I realized, and any curious sod who
happened to read the papers as well. Heathrow Airport must be crawling with such people.

  I had to know everything they knew. I bought a paper, trying to examine the Pakistani vendor’s reaction without looking him in the eye. He was cleaning his fingernails with a wooden toothpick and didn’t appear to take any notice of me. I scanned the article.

  Andrew Compton, convicted in 1989 of 23 London murders …

  “… signed his death certificate,” said Dr. Selwyn Masters, “There couldn’t be any mistake, I’m sure.” (I felt a twinge of affection for the incompetent old man.)

  Police declined to say whether the morgue showed evidence of a break-in …

  … doctors savagely murdered …

  “What sick purpose could be served by stealing the corpse of a notorious …”

  THEY STILL THOUGHT I WAS DEAD!

  I felt like doing a triumphant dance in the middle of the thronged corridor. Instead I surged along with the crowd, reading a sidebar about famous grave robberies but making no sense of it, marvelling at my insane luck, feeling very proud of my convincing imitation of death. Did I say imitation? I should call it my intimate acquaintance with death, for surely no imitation could have fooled everyone so well.

  But of course collaboration requires an intimate acquaintance, if not necessarily a comfortable one. And what was I if not death’s ghostwriter?

  The departure lounge loomed ahead, a long bright hall receding to a chaotic point, latticework of escalators crossing high overhead. Passing through the metal detector at the security check, I had a sudden horror of these kindly, efficient ladies finding the bloody scalpel still taped to my leg—but the scalpel was resisting rust at the bottom of the Thames, and the latex gloves were balled up in a vomitous-smelling rubbish bin somewhere in Soho. I had no metal on me, not even a key or a pen nib.

  I looked at my four tickets, looked at the gate numbers. The plane to Atlanta was taking off in five minutes not ten feet away from where I stood. “Final boarding call,” a whore-eyed Greek steward was saying into a microphone, “final call please for Atlanta, Georgia.”

  I imagined myself lounging on the porch of an old Southern mansion turned country inn, gnarled oaks arching over the carriageway, a mint julep in my hand. The day was clear and warm, with just a crackling hint of autumn. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what went in a mint julep except bourbon, which I didn’t like, and I suspected even Georgia might be cold in November. But none of this mattered. I would decline to give a damn.

  I gave the Greek boy my ticket. He let his fingers touch mine as he handed it back, and for an instant I ached to slit his throat, let him cool, press my steaming stinking flesh into the lovely calmness of him. The feeling never quite passed, only ebbed to a low-grade discomfort. I’d created three corpses today, and hadn’t had a quiet moment with any of them.

  I walked down a telescoping tunnel to the plane. A flight attendant directed me to my seat, the lovely window seat my ticket had promised, the seat Sam would never have to pay for, saved for me just as if I deserved it. Then the heavy doors were sealed shut, the plane was pulling away from the terminal, taxiing down the runway, lifting into the air. London unfurled below me, a shimmering net of lights cast adrift on a sea of darkness. In less than a minute we had risen above the gray matting of cloud that always hangs over London, and I left the city behind me forever.

  Soon we were over the Irish Sea heading out across the Atlantic Ocean. From my window it looked as if there were nothing below us at all, or above us either. The killer with a thin scrim of blood still greasing his nail beds, the unsuspecting fellow travellers clutching their briefcases and infants and fat paperbacks like talismans guaranteed to bring them safely back to earth, the fragile metal tube that cradled us—all might have been suspended motionless in some viscid black pudding. I felt as vulnerable yet protected, as edible yet impervious as an oyster in its shell.

  I liked the idea so well, I decided to have a plate of oysters when I landed in America. I’d heard they were eaten raw there, particularly in the South. I couldn’t imagine a raw oyster in my mouth, oozing between my teeth, sliding slickly down my throat. But I resolved to try. I would learn to enjoy the feel of an undifferentiated mass of tissue on my tongue, the flavour of briny glue seeping into my taste buds. It would be a part of my rebirth.

  As it turned out, oysters were the least of what I had to learn.

  5

  Jay was curled up in a voluminous black leather chair in his library, the angles of his naked body swathed in a soft angora blanket. The first tinge of dawn turned the window glass purple and sent a watery shadow across the floor. He paged through the color plates of a surgical textbook his father had acquired at some point, for what reason Jay could not even begin to imagine.

  He’d stolen the textbook last time he visited the ancestral manse on St. Charles, where his cousin, Daniel Devore’s son, lived now with his family. Mignon had bequeathed the house to them in return for Daniel’s help in business. She’d known her son Jay would never want to live uptown.

  He stared at a colorful cross section of prostate surgery, a pair of hemostats inserted through an incision in the scrotum to clamp a small vein, a gloved finger sneaking up the rectal cavity, caressing the diseased gland, then puncturing it with a scalpel and letting its sweet juices escape through the muscle wall into the intestine. The prostate looked like a dark wrinkled walnut. The walls of the rectum undulated in slick pink waves around the stainless steel blade. Jay found himself thinking of Tran, the Vietnamese boy he’d scored the sheet of acid from yesterday. Tran’s young prostate would be smooth and fine, no larger than an almond.

  The spine of the heavy book pressed painfully against Jay’s crotch. He realized he had a boner again, as if the night had not been enough to exhaust him. There was a hollow at the top of the rectal canal, just above the prostate, where any number of objects fit so beautifully …

  He pushed himself out of the chair, slid the book back into its space on the crowded shelf, and left the library. The house was silent but for the occasional drunken laughter of revelers still roaming the Quarter. On an ordinary night, Jay would have been reading, watching a video, or doing his accounts; he loved math for its exquisite symmetry. But this was no ordinary night. He had a guest.

  No, he reminded himself, not a guest this time. A pet.

  The luminous dial of the grandfather clock in the hall read ten to five. Strange shadows moved like ghosts trapped behind the barbed design of the gold-flocked scarlet wallpaper. Jay entered the parlor, a baroque fantasy of draped velvet and satin tassels and dark carved teak, syrup-smooth hardwood floor covered with an enormous Chinese rug. The dominant colors of the room were purple, rose, and gold; in daylight it had the aspect of a gilded womb.

  Taking up most of one wall was a fireplace of pink marble inlaid with art deco plumes of malachite, carnelian, and jet, an exquisite piece of stonework. Its beauty was obscured beneath a layer of greasy black ash that would not yield even to a wire scrub brush soaked in industrial-strength bleach.

  Jay paused as if at loose ends, then lifted a delicate china teacup from a claw-footed table and drained its dregs. A slow shudder ran down his spine like notes on a xylophone. The tea was spiked with cognac and LSD. He had been sipping this potent brew all night, since he brought his new pet home.

  The boy from Café du Monde had come docilely, keeping a few respectful paces behind, just close enough so all the tourists and Jackson Square hustlers could see that this beautiful creature was with him. Normally Jay was cautious about such things, but this time he felt just as if a prize greyhound or some other valuable sleek animal were voluntarily following him home.

  Prize greyhound. That was a laugh. If Fido really was a dog, he’d be a street cur with an appealing face but a dirty coat. Luckily, his coat came off. As did his boots, his grubby T-shirt, his filthy jeans, his stinking socks, and his unspeakable underwear. Underneath it all, Fido could be made clean.

  Wire brush a
nd bleach hadn’t worked on the marble fireplace. But boys were made of softer stuff.

  As Jay glided through the parlor, he caught sight of his reflection in the enormous mirror that stood in one corner, heavy gilt frame succulent with carved fruit and vegetation. He was a silver-white specter awash in the waterlight of dawn, his naked flesh luminously pale. His chest and abdomen were crisscrossed with dark spray patterns of blood, delicate as sea foam. His hair was stiff with it. His eyes were wide and wild, glittering.

  He entered the bathroom. The dazzle of light on black and white tile was relieved by glistening scrawls and blots of red, like handfuls of rubies thrown about. The boy was curled upon himself in the bathtub, trussed at the wrists and ankles and tightly round the skinny smooth thighs, his eyes bright with acid and hideous awareness. His body was scoured, scraped away to raw nerve. Over the sharpest points of his body, cheeks and knees and hips, Jay could see the blue-white gleam of bone. The bleach had raised angry chemical burns on what little skin he had left. His cock was as wet and shapeless as a spit-out mouthful of food. At some point his stomach had been partly slit open, the layers pulled apart and a shiny bubble of intestine exposed.

  Jay smiled. The boy smiled back. He had to; most of the flesh around his mouth had been scraped or burned away, and his smile was a rictus of bleach-white teeth set in bleeding gums. Jay supposed he hadn’t taken care of his pet very well. No doubt the ASPCA would be pounding on his door any minute now.

  The revelers could howl in the streets all they liked, but the French Quarter did not belong to them. Tomorrow, next week, next year they would be gone, their passage as ephemeral as the wake that swirled behind a ship on the river. Jay would be here still. The Quarter was his, its gaslit nighttime streets, its sordid alleys and neon-starred byways, the secret courtyards swathed in leaflight and shadow, the huge purple moon that hung above it all like a bleary eye. It delivered offerings up to him, and he accepted them gratefully, voraciously. Jay did not mind the noise of the revelers. But in here, it was a night of revelry for him too.