Lullaby

Chapter 10

Back at the newsroom, everybody's quiet. People are whisper ing around the coffeemaker. People are listening with their mouths hanging open. Nobody's crying.

Henderson catches me hanging my jacket and says, «You call Regent-Pacific Airlines about their crab lice?»

And I say, nobody's saying anything until a suit is filed.

And Henderson says, «Just so you know, you report to me now.» He says, «Duncan's not just irresponsible. It turns out he's dead.»

Dead in bed without a mark. No suicide note, no cause of death. His landlord found him and called the paramedics.

And I ask, any sign he was sodomized?

And Henderson jerks his head back just a trace and says, «Say what?»

Did somebody fuck him?

«God, no,» Henderson says. «Why would you ask such a thing?»

And I say, no reason.

At least Duncan wasn't somebody's dead-body sex doll.

I say, if anybody needs me, I'll be in the clipping library. There's some facts I need to check. Just a few years of newspaper stories I need to read. A few spools of microfilm to run through.

And Henderson calls after me, «Don't go far. Just because Duncan's dead, that don't mean you're off the dead baby beat.»

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.

According to the microfilm, in 1983, in Vienna, Austria, a twenty-three-year-old nurse's aide gave an overdose of morphine to an old woman who was begging to die.

The seventy-seven-year-old woman died, and the aide, Waltraud Wagner, found she loved having the power of life and death.

It's all here in spool after spool of microfilm. Just the facts.

At first it was just to help dying patients. She worked in an enormous hospital for the elderly and chronically ill. People lingered there, wanting to die. Besides morphine, the young woman invented what she called her water cure. To relieve suffering, you just pinch the patient's nose shut. You depress the tongue, and you pour water down the throat. Death is slow torture, but old people are always found dead with water collected in their lungs.

The young woman called herself an angel.

It looked very natural.

It was a noble, heroic deed that Wagner was doing.

She was the ultimate end to suffering and misery. She was gentle and caring and sensitive, and she only took those who begged to die. She was the angel of death.

By 1987, there were three more angels. All four aides worked the night shift. By now the hospital was nicknamed the Death Pavilion.

Instead of ending suffering, the four women began to give their water cure to patients who snored or wet the bed or refused to take medication or buzzed the nurse's station late at night. Any petty annoyance, and the patient died the next night. Anytime a patient complained about anything, Waltraud Wagner would say, «This one gets a ticket to God,» and glug, glug, glug.

«The ones who got on my nerves,» she told authorities, «were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good Lord.»

In 1989, an old woman called Wagner a common slut, and got the water cure. Afterward, the angels were drinking in a tavern, laughing and mimicking the old woman's convulsions and the look on her face. A doctor sitting nearby overheard.

By then, the Vienna health authorities estimate that almost three hundred people had been cured. Wagner got life in prison. The other angels got lesser sentences.

«We could decide whether these old fogies lived or died,» Wagner said at her trial. «Their ticket to God was long overdue in any case.»

The story Helen Hoover Boyle told me is true.

Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride.

She said, «Even absolute corruption has its perks.»

She said to think of all the people you'd like out of your life. Think of all the loose ends you could tie up. The revenge. Think how easy it would be.

And still echoing in my head was Nash. Nash was there, drooling over the idea of any woman, anywhere, cooperative and beautiful for at least a few hours before things start to cool down and fall apart.

«Tell me,» he said, «how would that be different than most love relationships?»

Anyone and everyone could become your next sex zombie.

But just because this Austrian nurse and Helen Boyle and John Nash can't control themselves, that doesn't mean I'll become a reckless, impulsive killer.

Henderson comes to the library doorway and shouts, «Streator! Did you turn off your pager? We just got a call about another cold baby.»

The editor is dead, long live the editor. Here's the new boss, same as the old boss.

And, sure, the world just might be a better place without certain people. Yeah, the world could be just perfect, with a little trimming here and there. A little housecleaning. Some unnatural selection.

But, no, I'm never going to use the culling song again.

Never again.

But even if I did use it, I wouldn't use it for revenge.

I wouldn't use it for convenience.

I certainly wouldn't use it for sex.

No, I'd only ever use it for good.

And Henderson yells, «Streator! Did you ever call about the first-class crab lice? Did you call about the health club's butt-eating fungus? You need to pester those people at the Treeline or you'll never get anything.»

And fast as a flinch, me flinching the other way down the hall, the culling song spools through my head while I grab my coat and head out the door.

But, no, I'm never going to use it. That's that. I'm just not. Ever.