Twisted

CHAPTER 45

Klara left first, exiting the building to make sure Lucido was gone. Isaac waited in the hallway and moments later she stuck her head in and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Enjoying the adventure.

They walked back to Doheny, blending with student traffic. A girl in shorts and bikini top lay on the lawn of the five-story building reading philosophy. A couple of male students hurried by wearing sweatshirts that read “LSU Sucks, Tenn. Swallows.”

Klara wore a beatific smile.

Once they were inside, instead of descending to the subbasement, they climbed two floors.

The Rare Book Room. A series of locked chambers and brief, hushed corridors. Klara had all the right keys.

Inside, the central reception area was cozy, hushed, paneled in new, beautiful oak stained oxblood, discreetly lit by milk-glass lamps and chandeliers that hung from a white, coffered ceiling bordered with turquoise. Green leather chairs, oak tables. Off to the left side, a few administrative offices.

No one in sight. Lunch hour?

Klara led him to a room marked “Reading.” Inside was a medium-sized conference table, a photocopy machine, a small desk sided by an armchair.

“That’s for the student monitor,” she explained. “Someone sits and watches when you read the really rare material. I told her to take an early lunch.”

“I spent some time here,” said Isaac. “Researching Lewis Carroll for an English class. Pencils, no pens, white linen gloves when necessary.”

“We have a wonderful Carroll collection. Sit. We’ve got an hour.”

He pulled up to the table, expecting her to leave and return with something. Instead, she settled next to him. Unclasped her purse.

Out came a book- a booklet- brown-paper cover printed in rough black lettering. Wrapped in a zip-sealed plastic bag.

She said, “I was a very bad girl, taking it out of here. I did it just in case that Lucido person was still skulking around and we were unable to return.”

He took her hand and kissed it.

She laughed, smoothed out the plastic, removed the booklet carefully. “Talk about esoteric. I found it in the Graham Collection. It wasn’t even cataloged in the main collection. It was in one of the appendices.”

Out of her purse came a pair of soft, white gloves. “Speaking of which,” she said, rotating the booklet so the title faced Isaac.

He gloved up. Read.

THE SINS OF THE MAD ARTIST

AN ACCOUNT OF THE HORRIBLE DEEDS

OF

OTTO RETZAK

RECOUNTED BY

T. W. JOSEPH TELLER, ESQ.

FORMER SUPERINTENDENT OF THE MISSOURI STATE

PENITENTIARY

AND PUBLISHED BY HIM IN ST. LOUIS

A.D. MCMX

The brown cover was cardboard, acid-burned brown at the borders, brittle. Isaac lifted it gingerly, flipped, began reading.

After covering a single paragraph, he turned to Klara. “You’re brilliant.”

She beamed. “So I’ve been told.”

Otto Retzak was the son of Bavarian immigrant farmers who’d come to America in 1888 and ended up on a scratchy patch of rock-strewn land in the southern Illinois region known as Little Egypt. The sixth of nine children and the youngest son, Otto had been born on American soil.

Born June 28, 1897.

One hundred years to the day, before Marta Doebbler’s murder.

Isaac’s hands started to shake. He steadied them and hunched over the crudely printed text.

Retzak was eight when his drunkard father abandoned the family. Considered extremely bright but uneducable due to “a frightfully overactive and heated temperament,” Otto displayed a precocious ability to “wield charcoal stubs in a way that created faithful images.” His artistic talent went unappreciated by Otto’s drunkard mother, who routinely beat him with switches and kitchen implements and left him to the mercies of his older brothers. With great enthusiasm and teamwork, the elder siblings sexually abused the boy.

At age nine, the illiterate Otto burgled a neighboring farm of twenty-nine cents hidden in a flour jar and a “plump laying hen.” The money was traded to another farm boy for a rusty clasp knife. The bird was found off the pitted dirt path that led to the decrepit Retzak homestead, gutted, its eyes scooped out, its head yanked off manually.

When confronted, Otto admitted his guilt “with no sense of childish shame, on the contrary, he boasted.” Beaten by his mother with special severity, he was turned over to the neighbors, who added their own lash-work to his tender back and worked him as a barn-hand for a month of fourteen-hour days.

The day after returning home, Otto stabbed his younger sister in the face without apparent provocation. As Superintendent T. W. Joseph Teller recounted: “A cold eye, even a sly smile, he did present to all those in attendance as the girl shrieked and wept and bled.”

The local sheriff was called in and Otto was locked in a cell with adult miscreants. Two months later, the boy, bruised and limping, was brought before an itinerant magistrate who warned him about “substantial characterological degeneracy” and sentenced him to five years in a state reform school. There, Otto claimed to have learned that “mankind is not glorious nor good nor fashioned in God’s image. Rather it is a dung-heap of stink and sin and hypocrisy. The hatred that was to drive me for the entirety of my accursed life took hold and was fed in that dark place. The outrages that were done to my person and mind in the name of spiritual cure were of benefit to me in a manner that could not be predicted. They turned my belly to iron and my mind toward revenge.”

Bound over for two extra years because of chronic disciplinary problems, sixteen-year-old Otto, now strapping and hard-muscled, was released. “Of a surprising pleasant countenance when not enraged, Retzak presented the thoughtful mien and demeanor of a man in his twenties. Yet all that could change in a trice.”

During his stay in the reformatory, the boy had been befriended by the wife of one of the guards, a woman named Bessie Arbogast. Impressed by Otto’s drawings, she brought him paper and charcoal sticks and it was to her house that he headed on his initial day of freedom.

“Once free of his bonds, the incorrigible repaid Mrs. Arbogast’s kindnesses by entering her bedroom through an open window.”

What commenced was described in Retzak’s alleged words, though the flowery language made Isaac wonder if Teller had taken substantial literary liberties.

“In the chamber of her common little snuggery, enriched by the pleasure of violating her worm of a husband, as well as her flabby person and dewy-eyed soul, I used a wooden hairbrush in plain sight to bash him energetically about the head. Feeling quite fond of myself, then had my way with her in manners all the more pleasurable to me for their unspeakability.”

William Arbogast survived the beating as a cripple. His wife’s trauma rendered her “virtually mute.”

Retzak escaped on foot and avoided capture. Traveling the country by hopping freight trains, he survived by eating pilfered domestic animals and produce, and meals donated by kindhearted housewives. Often, he repaid them by doing odd jobs before moving on. Sometimes he left them drawings that were “universally appreciated. The young man was capable of capturing garden scenes and furniture with utmost accuracy. It was only the portrayal of the human figure that posed technical problems for him.”

“Interestingly,” Teller went on, “during this period, Retzak did not choose to inflict similar punishments upon these altruistic women as he had upon Mrs. Arbogast. When I inquired as to the cause of this discrepancy, Retzak seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I do not know why I do what I do. Sometimes I have the urge and other times I don’t. Sometimes my brain remains cool and other times it boils like a cauldron of lard. I am not controlled in my impulses as are most men and I do not regret the lack of restraint in my soul. I have been anointed by Satan or howsoever you recognize The Dark Angel to behave in the way that I do and I have obeyed my Master with the same mechanic idiocy as the fools and worms who squander their wretched little lives kneeling before the altar of some blabbering lying Diety.”

It was, Teller concluded, “a great puzzle of medicine and characterology, in that Retzak’s entire anatomy, including his brain, has been examined by learned physicians and found unremarkable. This has included detailed measurement of his cranium by practitioners of the discipline called phrenology, now considered of questionable scientific merit by some, but employed in the hope of ascertaining basic truths about the fiend. That analysis deciphered nothing out of the ordinary, as did all other analyses. One can only hope that exposure to the twisted workings of this monster’s soul as put forth by this humble tract will benefit mankind. That is, in fact, the purpose of The Author.”

At the age of eighteen, Retzak made his way to San Francisco, where he was hired as a deckhand aboard the steamer Grand Tripoli bound for the Orient. The ship made a stop in Hawaii, where Retzak took shore leave and abandoned his post.

“In Honolulu, Retzak embarked on a course of drunkenness and debauchery with numerous women of ill repute. Soon, he was living in common law with a prostitute, a fallen Alsatian girl named Ilette Flam, spectral and pasty as such types tend to be, and an opium addict. Retzak appointed himself Ilette’s procurer and for a period of nearly one year, sustained himself with her ill-gotten earnings.”

On Retzak’s nineteenth birthday, Ilette threw a party for him at a waterfront dive. During that celebration, she made an offhand remark that annoyed Retzak and when the two of them returned to their flat, an argument ensued. Retzak claimed not to recall the precise manner in which Ilette Flam had offended his sensibilities. However, when challenged by myself on this point, he owned up that “it was something about my being lazy. The sow was hazy with dope and booze and believed my intake of rum would dull my thinking and allow her to insult me with no consequence. Just the opposite! My senses were heightened and every stupid remark from her flapping sow lips served to inflame me further! When she uttered another taunt- perhaps it was something that challenged my intelligence- a definite thought crossed my field of vision like a beacon: your sow brain is that of a mindless animal.”

Waiting until Ilette had fallen into a drugged stupor “because she’d earned me a fair bit of money and for the most part she wasn’t all-bad,” Retzak put her to bed, turned her on her stomach, picked up an iron pry bar and bashed the back of her head.

“The skull cracked like an egg and gobbets of brains seeped out, accompanied by a clearish liquid, then some blood. The sight of it thrilled me as nothing had thrilled me before. New feelings took hold of my mind and I maintained a focused wielding of bar against bone. Specks of the tissue sprayed out like the finest mist and adhered to the walls. When a large brainy clot slipped down the back of her dress, I stared at it, amazed that this ugly grayish pink gelatin might very well house what Christian fools considered the seat of the soul. Could there be anything more hideous? Just one look at the cloudy mucus would inform any logical man that religion is rot. Suddenly, I was awash in calm and sat gazing at my handiwork with rapture. It was a new feeling and I quite liked it. I fetched my tablet of drawing paper and some pens I’d stolen from Berringer’s Department Store in Waikiki. As the sow lay there, leaking and seeping and Demonstrably Dead, I drew her. For the first time I was able to capture the human form with a degree of accuracy.”

It was, Retzak concluded, “a fine birthday present.”

Isaac’s throat had gone dry. His hairline ached. Swallowing and gulping, he tried to stimulate saliva.

Klara said, “This has to be it.” Her voice was thick.

He nodded. But he was thinking something else:

June 28 had been a double anniversary for Otto Retzak. Commemoration of his birth and the date of his first murder.

His first victim, a common-law wife.

The L.A. killer had begun in 1997. Commemorating the centenary of Retzak’s birth.

His first victim, a wife.

Marta’s friends were sure Kurt Doebbler had killed her. Sometimes things were just as they seemed.

Isaac turned the page.

Upon finishing the drawing of Ilette Flam’s mangled corpse, Retzak wrapped it in a bloody sheeting, packed a duffle, walked to Honolulu Harbor, and got himself a job on an oil tanker bound for Venezuela.

“All the way there, the memory of what I’d done to the sow burned in my brain like a sacrament. The ability to extinguish the flame, the power. As I swabbed decks and emptied slop buckets, I barely thought of anything else. I was much more than a deckhand. I had danced a dance few men can hope to know. At night, as I lay in a bunk surrounded by snoring swine, it was all I could do not to bash them all. But cunning prevented me from such rashness for the ship was a prison at sea, with no chance of escape. It was on shore in Caracas, months later, that I allowed myself the next delicious indulgence. The proprietor of a beer-house, a foul-mouthed old Mestizo, got on my wrong side and I decided he’d be the one. Waiting until he’d closed for the night and retired upstairs to his personal lodgings, I snapped the latch on the rear door of his establishment and surprised myself to find him awake and eating a late supper of pork and rice and some such swill. As he started to curse, I picked up a frypan resting atop the stove. A lovely cast-iron implement it was, with agreeable heft and a stout handle. Within seconds, gray half-breed gelatin had leaked into that Hispanical dinner. No different did it look from the sow’s and as I sketched the scene, I got to thinking that all persons are but pathetic sacks of flesh and gristle and disgusting fluids. Our delusions of cleanliness and nobility are the basest of lies, the world teems with hypocrisy and falsehood and loosing the pitcocks of humanity in order to free the fluids is the greatest honesty of all. It was my destiny, I decided, to bring about Truth.”

Once again, Retzak jumped ship and hid out in South America for several months. Eventually making his way back to the States, he tramped across the country stealing and doing odd jobs, finding employment as a menial laborer, a short-order cook, or a night clerk at shabby hotels. His off-hours were spent brawling, overindulging in alcohol, opium, marijuana, and patent medicines, seducing and raping prostitutes, sneak-thieving, butchering wild and domestic animals at whim.

Murdering five more human beings.

The third victim: a matron walking her dog in Le Doux, Missouri, an affluent suburb of St. Louis. Nocturnal walk; she’d been surprised by a handsome, strapping fellow with a mutt in tow.

“I’d watched this one for days, a sturdy sow she was, and I admired her form and her walk, believed her someone I’d enjoy knowing in the biblical sense. But then the urge came over me to go beyond that merest intrusion and I stole an old yellow cur from a front-yard in her neighborhood, a wretched mongrel so old and blind that he put up no resistance when I lifted him over the fence. Fashioning a leash from a length of rope, I set out to see if he’d cooperate and he did, though in a clumsy, halting manner. I offered him a slab of meat and he regarded me as a religious fool might regard a Savior. That night, I stationed myself outside the sow’s house and she emerged, as always, at nine p.m. with her fluffy little annoyance tethered by a satin cord. As she strolled from her house, she began humming a jaunty tune and that inflamed me further. I followed her at a distance until she entered a dark section of her street, then hurried after her, carrying my borrowed mongrel. When I was sufficiently close, I set the dog down, walked past her, stopped several yards ahead and pretended to be tending to the cur. My possession of a canine companion caused her to see me as trustworthy and she approached without hesitation. Within moments we were chatting idiotically and I sensed that she found me gentlemanly. After an exchange of polite utterances, she turned to leave and down came the ax handle I’d secreted in my coat. The gelatin! Her little fluffy thing began whimpering and for dessert, I stomped it. Its gelatin appeared no different to my eye than hers and I found that quite amusing. When I was finished recording the scene in my tablet, I picked up the yellow mongrel, carried it a half mile away, to a wooded place. It looked up at me with affection as I twisted its neck. After inspecting its vitals, I kicked it under a tree.”

Isaac exhaled. Klara’s breathing was audible and minty. He hesitated before turning the page, knowing what would follow.

Number four: A “nigger sailor” stalked, accosted, and bludgeoned in a Chicago back alley.

Five: “An insolent prostitute, skinny as a young girl but syphilitic and insolent,” brutalized in a New Orleans park.

Six: “An abominable Nancy Boy living in the same hotel as myself in San Francisco pursed his lips at me in a disgusting manner and repeated the insult the following day. I pretended to enjoy his attentions, waited until a moonless night and followed him when he went out to prowl the streets in order to accomplish what that ilk accomplishes. Accosting him in a quiet alley, I agreed to grant his request. He bent and looked up at me, much as the yellow dog had. I told him to close his eyes and proceeded to dispense the Sodomite with energy and efficiency using the handle of an ax I’d stolen that very morning. Visiting ministrations of my unique design to his perversity-filled cranium was a special joy. His brain resembled that of a normal man in every way.”

Perfect match.

But Retzak hadn’t stopped at six.

Hitchhiking from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the itinerant killer decided he was now capable of drawing the human figure and face. Setting up an easel near the central railway station, he tried to earn a living drawing caricatures of tourists.

“However,” wrote Superintendent Teller, “whatever technical ability he did have was over-ridden by a tendency to depict others as leering, saturnine creatures. His rendering of the eyes, especially, was upsetting to those who sat for him and payment was often refused. Retzak kept the unsold drawings and these works have provided much fodder for analysis by alienists of both the Boston and the Vienna Schools.”

When his artist’s career failed to materialize, Retzak resumed his pattern of thievery and transitory labor, working as a ditchdigger, a cook, a janitor at a school, even a foot-courier for a small independent bank. Careful never to pilfer from the money satchels, he was found stealing paper and pens from the financial institution and dismissed. It was summertime, and rather than pay for lodgings, Retzak began sleeping outdoors, near railyards and in parks. His wanderings took him to Elysian Park, where “a sanitorium for tubercular war orphans and other sick children had existed for decades in that tree-shaded and verdant place. Retzak, always careful to present himself in a clean and acceptable manner, attracted the attention of the staff by sitting on a bench near the children’s rest area and drawing. Curiosity brought the young ones and their caretakers over and soon Retzak was creating pictures for them. They began regarding him as a friendly, wholesome young man. That, of course, was the falsest of false impressions.”

“I was able to impersonate the character of a sound, conventional, stupidly amiable man with laughable ease. All the time, even as I smiled and nattered and sketched the wheezing piglets, the fire burned in my brain. I contemplated luring one of them away from the trough, dashing its little brains upon hard ground, then watching the gelatin seep into the sand. It had been some months since I’d indulged myself in my favorite game, for there were periods when I did try to abstain. During those arid days, memories of my exploits served to amuse me. But of late, I had grown weary of mere nostalgia and knew that something new and fresh- a fine challenge- was called for. I’d learned what I could about brain-jelly and decided that nothing short of a complete medical exploration, from cranium down to the toes would suffice. A composite of humours, a veritable flood of release would elevate me to new heights of devilry. Not piglet humours, something mature.

“It was then that my eyes settled upon the smiley, chanting starchy-white nurses who attended to the little gaspers. My favorite was one sow, in particular, a Dago-looking type, of fine form and dark eyes. Of apparent cold nature, she had not joined the others in inspecting my sketchwork. Quite the opposite, she maintained a careful distance, gazed at me with impudence, seemed to harbor a disdain for Fine Art.

“Such rudeness could not be countenanced. I was determined to teach her a hard lesson.”

Klara stretched. “It’s dreadful stuff, no?”

“When was the book donated?” said Isaac.

“Thirty years ago. Dr. Graham was a forensic psychiatrist. He died in 1971. His sons were wealthy bankers and they gave us his books as a tax deduction.”

“I need to know everyone who checked this out.”

“That would be a violation of constitutional rights.”

“Unless the F.B.I.’s looking for terrorists.”

She didn’t answer.

“Please,” said Isaac. “It’s essential.”

“Finish reading.”

When he did, she made him a copy of the booklet, then led him out of the reading room. He followed her down to her desk at the reference counter. One middle-aged woman spooled microfilm, her back to the desk. No sign of Mary or any other librarians.

Klara said, “Walk away. Over there.” Pointing to a stack of periodicals.

Isaac obeyed, pulled out a copy of The New Republic, and pretended to read as Klara sat down at her computer, put on half glasses. Typed. Brought something to the screen.

Pursing her lips, she touched her right temple. Looked around. Returned to Isaac.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’ve just gotten the worst headache. Time to find myself an aspirin before it gets out of hand.”

She left, wiggling prettily.

Isaac stepped forward.