Age of Desire Read online

  The side gate had been left open by Dooley. Boyle advanced up the side passage, glancing through a window into an empty living room before heading around to the back door. It was open. Dooley, however, was not in sight. Boyle pocketed the photograph and the list and stepped inside, loath to call Dooley’s name for fear it alert any felon to his presence, yet nervous of the silence. Cautious as a cat on broken glass he crept through the flat, but each room was deserted. At the apartment door, which let on to the hallway in which he had first seen the figure, he paused. Where had Dooley gone? The man had apparently disappeared from sight.

  Then, a groan from beyond the door.

  “Dooley?” Boyle ventured. Another groan. He stepped into the hallway. Three more doors presented themselves, all were closed; other flats, presumably. On the coconut mat at the front door lay Dooley’s truncheon, dropped there as if its owner had been in the process of making his escape. Boyle swallowed his fear and walked into the body of the hall. The complaint came again, close by. He looked around and up the stairs. There, on the half-landing, lay Dooley. He was barely conscious. A rough attempt had been made to rip his clothes. Large portions of his flabby lower anatomy were exposed.

  “What’s going on, Dooley?” Boyle asked, moving up to the bottom of the stairs. The officer heard his voice and rolled himself over. His bleary eyes, settling on Boyle, opened in horror.

  “It’s all right,” Boyle reassured him. “It’s only me.” Too late, Boyle registered that Dooley’s gaze wasn’t fixed on him at all, but on some sight over his shoulder. As he pivoted on his heel to snatch a glance at Dooley’s bugaboo a charging figure slammed into him. Winded and cursing, Boyle was thrown off his feet. He scrabbled about on the floor for several seconds before his attacker seized hold of him by jacket and hair and hauled him to his feet. He recognized at once the wild face that was thrust into his — the receding hairline, the weak mouth, the hunger — but there was much too he had not anticipated. For one, the man was naked as a babe, though scarcely so modesty endowed. For another, he was clearly aroused to fever pitch. If the beady eye at his groin, shining up at Boyle, were not evidence enough, the hands now tearing at his clothes made the assailant’s intention perfectly apparent.

  “Dooley!” Boyle shrieked as he was thrown across the hallway. “In Christ’s name!

  Dooley!”

  His pleas were silenced as he hit the opposite wall. The wild man was at his back in half a heartbeat, smearing Boyle’s face against the wallpaper. Birds and flowers, intertwined, filled his eyes. In desperation Boyle fought back, but the man’s passion lent him ungovernable strength. With one insolent hand holding the policeman’s head, he tore at Boyle’s trousers and underwear, leaving his buttocks exposed.

  “God…” Boyle begged into the pattern of the wallpaper. “Please God, somebody help me…” But the prayers were no more fruitful than his struggles. He was pinned against the wall like a butterfly spread on cork, about to be pierced through. He closed his eyes, tears of frustration running down his cheeks. The assailant left off his hold on Boyle’s head and pressed his violation home. Boyle refused to cry out. The pain he felt was not the equal of his shame.

  Better perhaps that Dooley remained comatose; that this humiliation be done and finished unwitnessed.

  “Stop,” he murmured into the wall, not to his attacker but to his body, urging it not to find pleasure in this outrage. But his nerve endings were treacherous; they caught fire from the assault. Beneath the stabbing agony some unforgivable part of him rose to the occasion.

  On the stairs, Dooley hauled himself to his feet. His lumbar region, which had been weak since the car accident the previous Christmas, had given out almost as soon as the wild man had sprung him in the hall. Now, as he descended the stairs, the least motion caused excruciating agonies. Crippled with pain he stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and looked, amazed, across the hallway. Could this be Boyle — he the supercilious, he the rising man, being pummeled like a street kid in need of dope money? The sight transfixed Dooley for several seconds before he unhinged his eyes and swung them down to the truncheon on the mat. He moved cautiously, but the wild man was too occupied with the deflowering to notice him.

  Jerome was listening to Boyle’s heart. It was a loud, seductive beat, and with every thrust into the man it seemed to get louder. He wanted it: the heat of it, the life of it. His hand moved around to Boyle’s chest and dug at his flesh.

  “Give me your heart,” he said. It was like a line from one of the songs.

  Boyle screamed into the wall as his attacker mauled his chest. He’d seen photographs of the woman at the laboratories; the open wound of her torso was lightning-clear in his mind’s eye.

  Now the maniac intended the same atrocity. Give me your heart. Panicked to the edge of his sanity he found new stamina and began to fight afresh, reaching around and clawing at the man’s torso. Nothing — not even the bloody loss of hair from his scalp — broke the rhythm of his thrusts, however. In extremis, Boyle attempted to insinuate one of his hands between his body and the wall and reach between his legs to unman the bastard. As he did so, Dooley attacked, delivering a hail of truncheon blows upon the man’s head. The diversion gave Boyle precious leeway. He pressed hard against the wall. The man, his grip on Boyle’s chest slick with blood, lost his hold.

  Again, Boyle pushed. This time he managed to shrug the man off entirely. The bodies disengaged. Boyle turned, bleeding but in no danger, and watched Dooley follow the man across the hallway, beating at his greasy blond head. He made little attempt to protect himself, however. His burning eyes (Boyle had never understood the physical accuracy of that image until now) were still on the object of his affections.

  “Kill him!” Boyle said quietly as the man grinned — grinned! — through the blows. “Break every bone in his body!”

  Even if Dooley, hobbled as he was, had been in any fit state to obey the imperative, he had no chance to do so. His berating was interrupted by a voice from down the hallway. A woman had emerged from the flat Boyle had come though. She too had been a victim of this marauder, to judge by her state. But Dooley’s entry into the house had clearly distracted her molester before he could do serious damage.

  “Arrest him!” she said, pointing at the leering man. “He tried to rape me!” Dooley closed in to take possession of the prisoner, but Jerome had other intentions. He put his hand in Dooley’s face and pushed him back against the front door. The coconut mat slid from under him; he all but fell. By the time he’d regained his balance Jerome was up and away.

  Boyle made a wretched attempt to stop him, but the tatters of his trousers were wrapped about his lower legs and Jerome, fleet-footed, was soon half-way up the stairs.

  “Call for help,” Boyle ordered Dooley. “And make it quick.” Dooley nodded and opened the front door.

  “Is there any way out from upstairs?” Boyle demanded of Mrs. Morrisey. She shook her head. “Then we’ve got the bastard trapped, haven’t we?” he said. “Go on, Dooley!” Dooley hobbled away down the path. “And you,” he said to the woman, “fetch something in the way of weaponry. Anything solid.” The woman nodded and returned the way she’d dome, leaving Boyle slumped beside the open door. A soft breeze cooled the sweat on his face. At the car outside Dooley was calling up reinforcements.

  All too soon, Boyle thought, the cars would be here, and the man upstairs would be hauled away to give his testimony. There would be no opportunity for revenge once he was in custody. The law would take its placid course, and he, the victim, would only be a bystander. If he was ever to salvage the ruins of his manhood, now was the time. If he didn’t — if he languished here, his bowels on fire — he would never shrug off the horror he felt at his body’s betrayal. He must act now — must beat the grin off his ravisher’s face once and for all — or else live in selfdisgust until memory failed him.

  The choice was no choice at all. Without further debate, he got up from his squatting position and began up the stairs.
As he reached the half-landing he realized he hadn’t brought a weapon with him. He knew, however, that if he descended again he’d lose all momentum.

  Prepared, in that moment, to dir if necessary, he headed on up.

  There was only one door on the top landing. Through it came the sound of a radio.

  Downstairs, in the safety of the hall, he heard Dooley come in to tell him that the call had been made, only to break off in mid-announcement. Ignoring the distraction, Boyle stepped into the flat.

  There was nobody there. It took Boyle a few moments only to check the kitchen, the tiny bathroom and the living room. All were deserted. He returned to the bathroom, the window of which was open, and put his head out. The drop to the grass of the garden below was quite manageable. There was an imprint in the ground of the man’s body. He had leaped. And gone.

  Boyle cursed his tardiness and hung his head. A trickle of heat ran down the inside of his leg. In the next room, the love songs played on.

  For Jerome, there was no forgetfulness, not this time. The encounter with Mrs. Morrisey, which had been interrupted by Dooley, and the episode with Boyle that had followed, had all merely served to fan the fire in him. Now, by the light of those flames, he saw clearly what crimes he had committed. He remembered with horrible clarity the laboratory, the injection, the monkeys, the blood. The acts he recalled, however (and there were many), woke no sense of sinfulness in him. All moral consequence, all shame or remorse, was burned out by the fire that was even now licking his flesh to new enthusiasms.

  He took refuge in a quiet cul-de-sac to make himself presentable. The clothes he had managed to snatch before making his escape were motley but would serve to keep him from attracting unwelcome attention. As he buttoned himself up — his body seeming to strain from its covering as if resentful of being concealed — he tried to control the holocaust that raged between his ears. But the flames wouldn’t be dampened. His every fiber seemed alive to the flux and flow of the world around him. The marshaled trees along the road, the wall at his back, the very paving stones beneath his bare feet were catching a spark from him and burning now with their own fire. He grinned to see the conflagration spread. The world, in its every eager particular, grinned back.

  Aroused beyond control, her turned to the wall he had been leaning against. The sun had fallen full upon it, and it was warm; the bricks smelled ambrosial. He laid kisses on their gritty faces, his hands exploring every nook and cranny. Murmuring sweet nothings, he unzipped himself, found an accommodating niche, and filled it. His mind was running with liquid pictures: mingled anatomies, female and male in one undistinguishable congress. Above him, even the clouds had caught fire. Enthralled by their burning heads he felt the moment rise in his gristle. Breath was short now. But the ecstasy? Surely that would go on forever.

  Without warning a spasm of pain traveled down his spine from cortex to testicles and back again, convulsing him. His hands lost grip of the brick and he finished his agonizing climax on the air as he fell across the pavement. For several seconds he lay where he had collapsed, while the echoes of the initial spasm bounced back and forth along his spine, diminishing with each return. He could taste blood at the back of his throat. He wasn’t certain if he’d bitten his lip or tongue, but he thought not. Above his head the birds circled on, rising lazily on a spiral of warm air. He watched the fire in the clouds gutter out.

  He got to his feet and looked down at the coinage of semen he’d spent on the pavement.

  For a fragile instant he caught again a whiff of the vison he’d just had; imagined a marriage of his seed with the paving stone. What sublime children the would might boast, he thought, if he could only mate with brick or tree. He would gladly suffer the agonies of conception if such miracles were possible. But the paving stone was unmoved by his seed’s entreaties. The vison, like the fire above him, cooled and hid its glories.

  He put his bloodied member away and leaned against the wall, turning the strange events of his recent life over and over. Something fundamental was changing in him, of that he had no doubt. The rapture that had possessed him (and would, no doubt, possess him again) was like nothing he had hitherto experienced. And whatever they had injected into his system, it showed no signs of being discharged naturally; far from it. He could feel the heat in him still, as he had leaving the laboratories, but this time the roar of its presence was louder than ever.

  It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, through frightening, exulted him.

  Not once did it occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life should, in time, demand a new kind of death.

  Carnegie had been warned by his superiors that results were expected. He was now passing the verbal beating he’d received to those under him. It was a line of humiliation in which the greater was encouraged to kick the lesser man, and that man, in turn, his lesser.

  Carnegie had sometimes wondered what the man at the end of the line took his ire out on; his dog presumably.

  “This miscreant is still loose, gentlemen, despite his photograph in many of this morning’s newspapers and an operating method which is, to say the least, insolent. We will catch him, of course, but let’s get the bastard before we have another murder on our hands—“ The phone rang. Boyle’s replacement, Migeon, picked it up, while Carnegie concluded his pep talk to the assembled officers.

  “I want him in the next twenty-four hors, gentlemen. That’s the time scale I’ve been given, and that’s what we’ve got. Twenty-four hours.” Migeon interrupted. “Sir? It’s Johannson. He says he’s got something for you. It’s urgent.”

  “Right.” Carnegie claimed the receiver. “Carnegie.” The voice at the other end was soft to the point of inaudibility. “Carnegie,” Johannson said, “we’ve been right through the laboratory, dug up every piece of information we could find on Dance and Welles’s tests—“

  ”And?”

  “We’ve also analyzed traces of the agent from the hypo they used on the suspect. I think we’ve found the boy, Carnegie.”

  “What boy?” Carnegie wanted to know. He found Johannson’s obfuscation irritating.

  “The Blind Boy, Carnegie.”

  “And?”

  For some inexplicable reason Carnegie was certain the man smiled down the phone line before replying: “I think perhaps you’d better come down and see for yourself. Sometime around noon suit you?”

  Johannson could have been one of history’s greatest poisoners. He had all the requisite qualifications. A tidy mind (poisoners were, in Carnegie’s experience, domestic paragons), a patient nature (poison could take time) and, most importantly, an encyclopedic knowledge of toxicology. Watching him at work, which Carnegie had done on two previous cases, was to see a subtle man at his subtle craft, and the spectacle made Carnegie’s blood run cold.

  Johannson had installed himself in the laboratory on the top floor, where Doctor Dance had been murdered, rather than use police facilities for the investigation, because, as he explained to Carnegie, much of the equipment the Hume organization boasted was simply not available elsewhere. His dominion over the place, accompanied by his two assistants, had, however, transformed the laboratory from the clutter left by the experimenters to a dream of order. Only the monkeys remained a constant. Try as he might Johannson could not control their behavior.

  “We didn’t have difficulty finding the drug used on your man,” Johannson said, “we simply cross-checked traces remaining in the hypodermic with materials found in the room. In fact, they seem to have been manufacturing this stuff, or variations on the theme, for some time.

  The people here claim they know nothing about it, of course. I’m inclined to believe them.

  What the good doctors were doing here was, I’m sure, in the nature of a personal experiment.” “What sort of experiment?”

  Johannson took off his spectacles and set about cleaning them with the tongue of his red tie. “At first, we thought they were developing some kind of hallucinogen
,” he said. “In some regards the agent used on your man resembles a narcotic. In fact — methods apart — I think they made some very exciting discoveries. Developments which take us into entirely new territory.” “It’s not a drug then?”

  “Oh, yes, of course it’s a drug,” Johannson said, replacing the spectacles, “but one created for a very specific purpose. See for yourself.” Johannson led the way across the laboratory to the row of monkeys’ cages. Instead of being confined separately, the toxicologist had seen fit to open the interconnecting doors between one cage and the next, allowing the animals free access to gather in groups. The consequence was absolutely plain — the animals were engaged in an elaborate series of sexual acts.

  Why, Carnegie wondered, did monkeys perpetually perform obscenities? It was the same torrid display whenever he’d taken his offspring, as children, to Regent’s Park Zoo; the ape enclosure elicited one embarrassing question upon another. He stopped taking the children after a while.

  He simply found it too mortifying.

  “Believe me,” Johannson smirked, “this is mild by comparison with much of the behavior we’ve seen from them since we gave them a shot of the agent. From that point on they neglected all normal behavior patterns. They bypassed the arousal signals, the courtship rituals. They no longer show any interest in food. They don’t sleep. They have become sexual obsessives. All other stimuli are forgotten. Unless the agent is naturally discharged, I suspect they are going to screw themselves to death.”

  Carnegie looked along the rest of the cages. The same pornographic scenes were being played out in each one. Mass rape, homosexual liaisons, fervent and ecstatic masturbation.

  “It’s no wonder the doctors made a secret project of their discovery,” Johannson went on.

  “They were on to something that could have made them a fortune. As aphrodisiac that actually works.