Word Made Flesh

7

Moving down Granada Street, walking faster than his age and condition should allow, the Inspector has a moment of mild satori, understands in a flash of enlightenment that what he is feeling is a common but over-whelming fear. It is not an emotion with which he has had a great deal of experience and there is no way to tell whether it has been triggered by his suspicions regarding the status of his health or his exposure to the ravings of the old cabdriver, the ever-expanding myth he has come to think of as Otto’s Tale. As if it were already a long-held oral tradition. The kind of story that over time transforms itself into the best definition of a race of people.

He hates the old cabdriver and he hates the myth he is forcing himself to endure, several times a week, as a kind of penance. He is beginning to believe the old man’s insane story is the very thing that is making him sick. As if the story could be a virus or an infection. But the truth is, the fear currently flooding his body — the elevated heart rate, the shortness of breath, the tidal perspiration — probably has more to do with finding himself visible and vulnerable on a street filled with people he has spent a brief career terrorizing.

He stops for a moment beneath a shattered streetlamp and reaches into the breast pocket of his tunic, withdraws a crumpled scrap of paper that bears a name and a location. He stares at the paper as he catches his breath, then throws the scrap away, lets the wind carry it south, and moves around the corner onto Voegelin where a krewe of Bedoya’s whores are waiting to ambush him.

They descend like overly perfumed locust, propositioning him bilingually in a chorus of lewd suggestion. He pushes away what hands he can, lets the rest pull money from his pants pocket.

“Célibe, célibe,” he cries. “Soy un hombre de Dios.”

The women, and the few transvestite moles, get a great kick out of this, and Voegelin fills for a block with the cackle of junkie laughter. But the Inspector’s pleas work after all. These are merchants who will accept amusement if it’s the only currency offered and in a moment they’ve turned their hive-attention to a pair of stretch limousines rounding the corner and rolling to a stop for some appraisal and bartering.

Technically, the Inspector has told the whores the truth, a kind of Jesuitical veracity. But though he has not known a woman sexually in over forty years, he has given himself away in what he considers a more intimate manner, a consummation more perfect in its carnal purity, a union still unbridled if not physically erotic.

Her mind and her soul belonged only to me, he thinks as he scans the storefronts of Latino Town looking for a meat dealership called Brasilia Beef. It’s a stale mantra, an old balm that he uses out of habit, a justification that he can’t seem to stop employing, though it has never assuaged even a portion of his loss or lessened the burden of his many transgressions. All you had was her body, Gilrein.

He spots the beef shop and makes his way down the adjoining alley. At the far end is the promised Chevy van, twenty years old and perched on concrete blocks, painted a dull pumpkin orange but for the front end, which is charred black from a long-ago fire-bombing. On the side of the van, in faded but still-legible glitter paint, reads the pronouncement DAMASCUS OR BUST. The Inspector approaches the rear double doors with little caution. If it’s filled with his old enemies, he decides, their attack could only be called an act of mercy at this late hour.

He gives a weak knock on a spray-painted window, hears some movement inside, and the doors swing open to reveal an emaciated individual dressed head to toe in filthy denim. It’s impossible to estimate this man’s age. He’s missing full tufts of hair as if his skull has sported some analog to canine mange. He’s also missing half a dozen teeth and the ones left rooted are all variations on a caramel tone. His face is death-camp gaunt and zombie white but his neck features some sort of raw, scarlet rash that glistens a bit before disappearing down into his mechanic’s coveralls.

“Can I help you?” he says, and though his voice is choked with the ongoing paranoia of a lifelong methedrine shooter, there’s the definite ghost of a French accent.

The Inspector sighs and looks down at the ground, wondering why he’s come. He looks up and says, “Are you Mr. Clairvaux?”

“You here to be tested?”

The Inspector nods, unfastens several buttons on the tunic, reaches to an interior pocket and withdraws a bill so old and thin it resembles tissue paper.

Mr. Clairvaux takes the money, shoves it up a sleeve and offers a shaking hand to his newest client. The Inspector ignores the assistance and pulls himself inside the van, secures the doors behind him without being asked. The interior is dark and musty. The floor is covered by a multicolored shag rug, white and orange with flecks of brown and crusty in spots. The rug, in turn, is covered with heaps of what appears to be medical equipment — loose syringes, drug vials, tongue depressors — tangled indiscriminately with typical junkie refuse — old potato-chip bags, discarded clothing, crinkled balls of dollar bills. The walls are lined with used and split mattresses, a cheap attempt at soundproofing. The Inspector forces himself into a sitting position, legs folded painfully into a broken lotus. There’s a heavy smell, something like a mix of garbage and sweet incense. He glances toward the front of the van where the bench seat has been removed. There’s no steering wheel. The cab has been transformed into something resembling the nest of an enormous and slovenly bird. Door to door is packed with an eclectic and copious pile of trash — plastic wrappings and soda bottles, yellowed newspapers and orange peels, rubber tubing, bubble-gum cards, corroded battery casing. And there’s a low-grade rustling sound emanating from the nest’s interior. As if a small creature is buried in its core and has found a way to move through this maze of debris but never to exit.

“So you think you got the Grippe,” Mr. Clairvaux asks, not a question, simply words to fill the air as he lights a flame in a Sterno rig, then slides a series of IV needles out of his coverall pocket and into a dented coffee can resting on a cake rack above the burner.

“That’s what I’m here to find out,” the Inspector says, losing enough control so that he peeks into the coffee can and, seeing the bubbling green solution within, catching the aroma of sour wash water, immediately regrets it.

“You can call me Armand,” the doctor says, friendly now, his version of a bedside manner. “How’dyou find out about me?”

The Inspector can’t help but smile.

“Your reputation is widespread,” he says as the tester wipes his nose absentmindedly on his sleeve and pokes at his makeshift sterilizer with a snapped-off car antenna.

Armand nods as if he couldn’t care less about the response and picks up a package of store-bought cupcakes from the floor of the van. He tears open the package with his teeth and extracts a pastry, takes an enormous bite, smearing his face with chocolate and a dab of marshmallow.

After a moment, and as if realizing for the first time that there’s someone sitting opposite him, Mr. Clairvaux holds the half-eaten cupcake in the air and says, “Want some?”

The Inspector shakes his head no, looks down at his aching and trembling hands and can’t keep himself from inquiring, one more time, where it was he went so utterly wrong.

The smart money has always said that, had he wanted it, Emil Lacazze could have taken the chief’s commission. The smart money may well be right. But that doesn’t mean it knows anything more than anyone else about what is true and what is false within the many legends regarding the man whom everyone, whether fellow officer, politician, gangster, or Jesuit, has come to know simply as the Inspector, as if there were no others.

You would think that Gilrein would know more of the rumors than anyone else and that he might even be able to confirm or deny some percentage. After all, he was Ceil’s husband and from the time Lacazze was given the Dunot precinct house, Ceil was the only detective to meet the unknown qualifications for serving on the Inspector’s fully autonomous squad.

In this regard, however, Ceil kept Gilrein as much in the dark as the rest of the force. Most of the old bastards, who’d seen everything and then an encore, said that even Chief Bendix himself wasn’t aware of half the operations Lacazze was running out of Dunot. But, like everything else, that was before the Rome Avenue Raid. Before Ceil’s death and the Inspector’s tremendous fall from grace.

Ironically, Gilrein had heard Lacazze’s name years before he actually met the man, long before the Inspector even was the Inspector, before Emil the Proud, as the Trinity secretly called him, had been stripped of his soutane and his beads and marched out the front gates of St. Ignatius, a traitor to the black robe, a turncoat shaken from the folds of the Society of Jesus itself.

Lacking spousal affirmation, the version of the legend Gilrein chose to believe went something like this: Emil Lacazze was born in the rear of Hotel Dieu Nunnery, or “the night convent,” as it was more commonly known, a specialty brothel on the west side of Paris. His mother was a profoundly beautiful call girl who was murdered while Lacazze was still an infant. Though it was never confirmed, his father was said to be a lecturer at the Sorbonne, a famed French cryptographer who was rumored, when the mood and the price moved him, to consult with assorted ministries around the planet during various political tumults. The child never met the father, however, and was raised by Maria LaMonk, his mother’s madame, with assistance from the ladies of the house. It was said he was so adored by the women of Hotel Dieu that he caused more than a few vicious rivalries that lasted to the grave.

When the boy’s extraordinary intellectual capabilities became apparent in his youth, Madame LaMonk made the heartbreaking decision, for the good of her charge and over the vehement protests of her minions, to place the boy in L’Abbaye de Hanxleden, whose seminarians in those days were among the nunnery’s best customers.

Though Lacazze sorely missed his home among the sisters of mercy, he adapted well to the abbey and was soon recognized as a prodigy of varying media. By his teen years he mastered Thomistic theology alongside quantum physics, and the black robes of Hanxleden split into a multitude of factions, each of whom thought they had divine knowledge as to the appropriate life course for the boy. This bickering, it is said, often incidentally, may have been what triggered Lacazze’s first experiments with laudanum, and, subsequently, his periodic and tumultuous struggles with a variety of opium-based addictions. It has also been noted that this was likely the start of his passion for those seven-inch, purple-banded Magdalena cigars that the Society had shipped in straight from the El Laguito rolling house of Havana.

Eventually, sometime during a stormy adolescence that saw him flee the abbey more than once and take refuge among the branchés of Rue de Lombards, Lacazze fell into his natural passion — linguistics, tempered and guided by deep and broad readings in cultural anthropology. When he published a highly controversial treatise on a linguistic theory of criminality in the notorious journal Conspirateur, the word came down, possibly from as high as the Father General, to move the young man safely to the confines of research and mediation in the murky cellars of a Rome the general public would never see. Here he spent innumerable hours in the bowels of the Registra Vaticana, possibly even in these early years already beginning to formulate what came to be known, across a broad spectrum of not always sympathetic disciplines, as Lacazze’s Methodology.

Mr. Clairvaux finishes his cupcake and methodically sucks the last traces of goo from his fingers. Then he looks the Inspector up and down and says, “We all set here?”

The Inspector says, “You tell me.”

Getting down on hands and knees, Mr. Clairvaux begins searching the van until he comes up with a single work mitt, a worn and filthy canvas gardening glove decorated with a floral design. He makes a show out of fitting the glove onto his right hand, then fishes inside the bubbling soup of the coffee can and withdraws a needle. It looks more like a knitting tool than a surgical instrument. It’s at least five inches long and its width increases up the barrel. Steam is coming off the steel and boiling liquid is dripping onto the floor.

“We’ll give it a second to cool,” Mr. Clairvaux explains.

“How thoughtful of you,” the Inspector says, and the words come out more sarcastic than he’d intended.

“You do know this is a fairly painful procedure?”

“I’ll survive.”

“You’ve never been tested before, have you?” with the smile of a man who truly enjoys his work.

“I’ve never had the pleasure.”

“The pleasure,” Mr. Clairvaux repeats, holding the needle up near his head and snapping a finger at it to flick away some of the cleansing solution. “Well, I’m probably the best street tester in the city, but I’ve had people jump out of the van with the first prick.”

“I’m sure I’ll control myself,” the Inspector says, wishing they could begin in silence.

“It’s just that the tongue is a very sensitive organ. Lot of nerves in there, you know. You ever burn it really badly? The pain lasts awhile.”

“How quickly will you have the results?”

Mr. Clairvaux shrugs and slips a precautionary mask over his mouth which gives his face the appearance of a starving albino Pig.

“Give me three to five days and—” He breaks off and says, “Christ, I almost forgot,” then crawls to a corner of the van and rummages through a pile of trash, repositioning cotton swabs and pornographic magazines and mismatched tennis shoes until he discovers and pulls free what he’s looking for. He shuffles back to position holding a pair of handcuffs and says, “If you’d just slide these on, we can get started.”

The Inspector stares at the manacles. They’re not police issue. Probably imported.

“No one said anything about handcuffs,” he says, but Mr. Clairvaux goes into a furious head-shaking spasm.

“No cuffs, no test. House rule. No exceptions.”

“But I—”

“Look, I’ve had people go crazy in the middle of the procedure, all right? Had a woman bite straight into my shoulder. Now, luckily she wasn’t a carrier. But I won’t take that chance again. So if you want me to check you out, kneel down, sit back on your ankles, and lock the bracelets in place.”

The Inspector considers calling the whole thing off, then takes the cuffs, fastens his left wrist, fumbles a bit but manages to secure the right.

Mr. Clairvaux inspects and says, “Thank you. I wish it wasn’t necessary but you have to understand. This is a very unorthodox practice. I never know who is coming through that door.”

The Inspector nods, closes his eyes, tries to concentrate on past history. Then he opens his mouth as wide as he can.

Upon taking his initial vows of the Society of Jesus, Emil Lacazze was dispatched on his virgin mission and began traveling to the more remote island tribes around the globe. Armed with only his rigorous intellect and a beautiful but rugged Nagra tape recorder, he was charged with developing a study of myth stories and rituals in the native tongue of each culture under investigation. But halfway through his assignment — lodged at St. Leon’s Parish in the heart of the Palmer Peninsula, and in the middle of recording the startling sounds of a village folk chant that depicted the raunchy intricacies of a particular breed of penguin’s mating dance — Lacazze received word he was being redeployed to America. And so he came to reside in the comfortable if less challenging confines of St. Ignatius College in Quinsigamond, where his miles of audio tape were to be transcribed, analyzed, and archived.

Disappointed but surprisingly obedient, Lacazze shouldered his new duties as special-collections curator in the Horwedel Library. Paradoxically, it is at this juncture, when the story transports to a local milieu, that the rumors mutate and become hazy. According to some accounts, upon his arrival at St. Ignatius, Lacazze developed an obsessive interest in administrative power. Over time, some would say this interest became pathological. Other, more reasoned sources claim that Lacazze was simply a convenient scapegoat, that he threw his meager support to the wrong side in a vicious coup to unseat the Trinity, the trio of Jesuit fathers that jointly presided over the college. Whichever the actual case, the results were the same — the Trinity slapped down the insurrection with their standard and brutally effective talent for suppression. In a post-midnight purge, Lacazze quite literally found himself out on his ass, thrown roughly into the backseat of a chauffeured Rolls Royce Silver Spur alongside his prepacked black duffel bag, wondering in four languages how he could have been so mistaken.

The beauty of the purge became evident later, when it was understood that simultaneously across town at police headquarters, the commissioner’s office was having its own family squabble. A power climber named Waldegrave, who’d been promoted too far and fast up to Internal Affairs detail, began nosing into a series of alleged ties strung awkwardly between the department, City Hall, various neighborhood mayors, and even St. Ignatius College. Before the stupid bastard could write the first page of his IA briefing notes, one of Chief Bendix’s shadow creatures from Bangkok set up a classic prisoner swap. As if delineated by the semiotics of some edgy cold war spy movie, representatives from the blue shirts and the black robes met at a designated early-morning hour in a gritty chamber inside Gompers Station. The Jesuits took Waldegrave back up the hill with them. And the department was handed Emil Lacazze.

“Just what we need,” Chief Bendix is supposed to have remarked, “a horny smart guy in a black suit. Does anyone know, can he type?”

Rarely if ever in the whole of his wildly blessed career had Bendix ever been more off the mark. After the prisoner swap it was assumed that Father Lacazze would hang on till pension time as a pathetically overqualified file clerk and substitute secretary, rotating forever between traffic reports and the dispatch desk, maybe cataloging over in the evidence locker, a position that sometimes utilized competent spelling skills.

But Lacazze had learned a dear lesson at St. Ignatius concerning the ways and means of power grabs. He courted the chief like an obsessed lover and offered his unique intelligence at the department’s disposal round the clock, playing Joseph to Bendix’s pharaoh. Even a bloody hack like the old chief soon came to see what a natural resource Lacazze could be, and Lacazze was made the chief’s aide-de-camp, advising on everything from restructuring mob payments to improving public relations. As his fortunes rose, Lacazze’s position and title and duties became vague and finally unknown. He was seen as a one-man think tank, a policy interpreter who never revealed his own opinion, a close reader of the daily Zeitgeist and a compromise broker whose commission of privilege went unspoken. If, in the beginning, he was a conduit of varying power bases, in the end he became an entity unto himself, a force that orbited the common arrays of rank and influence and took from each what he needed. A free agent of sorts, he turned himself into the department’s Rasputin, until no one really knew who, if anyone, he reported to.

He can feel the tester’s breath on his face. Can smell sugar and bong water.

Mr. Clairvaux’s fingers come to the sides of the mouth, push in and dimple the cheeks, as he says, “Whatever happens for the next few minutes, try to continue breathing regularly.”

The Inspector feels the needle penetrating the tongue, piercing the mucous membrane, exploding through the sea of epithelial cells and forcing, cutting its way into the networks of striated muscles, ripping through fat and nicking its way past salivary glands, inexorably rooting toward a place just short of the hyoid bone.

It begins as the bite of a viper, the fang piercing into the soft meat of the tongue like a fat razor. Then it changes to an insect sting. From an enormous and hideous wasp, a wasp mutated to the size of a falcon. And then the sting grows into a burn. As if the tongue has been taken from the head and pinned to the red heating coil of an electric stove. As if it has been swaddled in jellied gasoline the way you might engulf a frankfurter in ketchup.

This is a different kind of pain, rarer than one can imagine, working its way, in a geometric progression, to some level of torture without demarcation. This pain breeds, births smaller versions of itself and dispatches them downward to the heart and to the groin on their own missions of agony, but never diminishes at the source. And when the distress can’t seem to grow any worse, it finds brand-new planes of excruciation to colonize.

His resolve vanishes and the Inspector begins to scream.

Emil Lacazze’s unique status was cemented into unheard-of entitlement when he was allowed to annex the ancient, abandoned, and vermin-ridden station house on Dunot Boulevard, at the border of Bangkok Park. With funds left uninked in the line items of the police budget, he turned it into his own home and office. He set up a single room as living quarters on the second floor, a spartan studio more suited to a cloistered Trappist than a once-worldly Jesuit.

Downstairs, in the former precinct commander’s office, he invented a chamber that was part analyst’s study, part priest’s confessional, and part inquisitor’s sweatbox. Lacazze kept a generic gunmetal desk in the center of the room. Behind the desk was a slat-back schoolmaster’s chair on rollers and behind the chair a wood-frame, grammar-school-style chalkboard that could pivot on a center axle and swing wholly over to its opposite side. In front of the desk was a small shoe-fitting stool, a low, vinyl-covered seat attached to an angled rubber pedestal that slanted to the floor. The walls of the room were left bare, in places showing cracked horsehair plaster, but the floor was littered with reams of stacked notepaper, all of it filled with what was either Lacazze’s illegible handwriting or some sort of idiosyncratic shorthand or code. Many of these piles reached two feet high and were weighted in place by a variety of red-painted wooden apples fitted with rawhide wicks for stems.

But the strangeness of the office was just a minor aberration compared with the eccentricity of the Inspector himself. There was the anachronistic dress uniform he insisted on wearing — a stiff, double-breasted, high-collar garment with garish brass fittings that the rest of the department had abandoned a generation ago. And the small, rimless green spectacles that he favored even inside and at night. The rust-colored Magdalena cigars he chronically fingered and pointed with. And the tiny, pink plastic hearing aid always secured behind his left ear with a coiled tail that snaked down his over-starched collar and, in fact, was connected not to any sound enhancing device but to a miniature tape machine that was forever playing loops of interrogation sessions.

With his image and his office established, Lacazze began to choose what he hoped would be a very select cadre of officers whom he planned to train in his unique and complex systems of analysis to be part of what he christened, not without a trace of humor, the Eschatology Squad. The exact purpose of this unit was left undefined to all but the Inspector. The most he would tell Bendix was that the E Squad would assist him in implementing the Methodology.

This begged the question, in the Chief’s vernacular, “What in the name of sweet Jesus is the Methodology?”

And Lacazze was forced to sigh with the long-felt futility inherent in explaining his theories to deficient intellects.

Lacazze’s Methodology was a radical and multifaceted system of critical inquiry, he explained to Bendix’s already deaf ears and glazed eyes. The system could be utilized in any number of problem resolution capacities, but, surprisingly, it was in the old-fashioned logic-driven art of criminal investigation that it now seemed ideally, perhaps organically suited. Would it be overstating the case to say that Lacazze’s Methodology, when used correctly, would possibly prove to be the most effective interrogation technique in the history of criminal pursuit?

Lacazze didn’t think so. And on an apprehensive nod from Chief Bendix, the new baron of 33 Dunot Boulevard began putting his squad together. A small sampling of possible recruits was given a test — brought into the precinct house and left in a small, windowless room, barren but for dozens of radios tuned to various stations. After a time, Lacazze would question the applicants as to how many sounds they were able to isolate. This questioning could be either gruff or good-natured and might or might not take place over a game of chess. In some cases, Lacazze, without explanation, would begin speaking in another langauge. In others, he might suddenly break off any queries regarding noise differentiation and begin probing, with deeply embarrassing questions, into the candidate’s sexual history. There was one rumor that he requested a certain narcotics officer remove all her clothes and waltz with him. No one understood the scoring method of these screenings, but the results were disheartening as to the viability of the project: out of two dozen officers tested, only Detective Ceil Gilrein managed to fulfill the opaque specifications.

The question might be asked, did Ceil ever come to fully understand the nature of Lacazze’s Methodology? Before her death, Gilrein ached to know. It was never quite that he wanted his wife to pass on her information, to make the apprentice betray the mentor. It wasn’t a matter of desiring the arcana itself, but more a question of simply knowing Ceil as fully and deeply as possible.

After Ceil was killed, it occurred to Gilrein, just once, to dig out some of her casebooks, read through her field notes and see if they revealed some hidden side of the woman. But he could never bring himself to do it. Somehow looking at Ceil’s notebooks would be risking a pain that he knew could go deeper into him than even the fact of her death. The thought of her handwriting on the white page, like some lingering aftereffect of a life that was no longer, would be a measurement of the immensity of his loss, a signal of a forfeiture too enormous to sanely bear.

What he had, couldn’t avoid, were memories of conversational scraps, the kind of verbal minutiae that becomes a binding force in marriage, husband-and-wife noise, some of which contained incomplete and not always logical recollections of those rare occasions when Ceil let down her guard and discussed her work with the Inspector. Gilrein had never been able to think of what his wife did in terms as common as work. In his mind it was more like a mission of alchemy, a calling to a mystery religion that was cloaked by curtains of fear and superstition.

Ceil spoke of how Lacazze often stayed up all night in his office after an interrogation, writing incessantly on his blackboard, chalk dust everywhere, like some crazed researcher working on a millennial breakthrough, symbol after symbol, some looking vaguely recognizable, like letters of the alphabet that were in midprocess of mutating into something else. By dawn, when Ceil arrived, Lacazze’s hands might be trembling like a reprobate caught at the height of his DTs. The Inspector would have to swill a load of laudanum for breakfast, then bring himself back to competence with a dose of Bangkok street speed. But when it came time for the next interrogation, Lacazze would transform himself into nothing short of Quinsigamond’s own grand inquisitor, his uniform impeccable and his eyes unblinking behind his mod glasses.

The suspect would always be brought to Dunot by one of the more roguish night-duty rookies. The prisoner would be manacled to the shoe-fitting stool and then left alone with Lacazze. Ceil remained close by in the cavernous squad room, in case of the unlikely event that the Inspector needed some assistance. Lacazze would commence scribbling on the blackboard, ignoring the suspect’s always worried pleas for explanations and attorneys. At some inner-designated moment, the Inspector would flip the blackboard to reveal the reverse side was a mirror, and not an ordinary mirror but one that magnifies and bends as well as reflects. Then the lights in the room would be lowered as the Inspector lit a fat, squat liturgical candle inscribed with Latin — VERBUM INCARNATUM EST — and placed it atop a pedestal, directly behind the suspect’s head, composed of dozens of enormous spine-broken dictionaries. On the desk between them, Lacazze placed his own red, bejeweled chalice from his days as a Jesuit. The chalice was filled with what the Inspector referred to as Spanish sherry. “In case you get thirsty,” he would mumble to the prisoner, indicating the cup. Finally, Lacazze would ease into the seat behind his desk, elevated above the level of the suspect’s eyes, and the pair would spend some tense moments staring at each other. Behind Lacazze, the suspect couldn’t help but start to glance at his own enlarged and warped image made even stranger by the glow of candlelight from behind his head.

And then Inspector Lacazze would launch into a series of rapid-fire word associations, throwing out, void of any instruction, every known part of speech, but after a time honing in mainly on the verbs—want, push, take, use, will, kill, run, hide, wait—until the suspect finally caught on and began to reply, often in the hope that cooperation would end these proceedings sooner rather than later.

Lacazze dealt with all manner of alleged transgressors — dealers, extortionists, arsonists, rapists, murderers. From simple but annoyingly persistent pickpockets up to sociopathic and wildly dangerous, most would say unredeemable, serial criminals, abusers and killers and roving, conscience-deficient madmen whose only motivation left in this life was to be the initiator of widespread chaos and terror.

The Inspector handled them all the same. “The criminal bends to the Methodology and not the other way around,” he once told Ceil, then added, “though I must say, I love the schizophrenics the best. Their language is not only unique to themselves. It is also chronically shifting, changing even as it is born.”

There is no way to know the exact schematics of how Lacazze determined guilt and innocence, motivation and mechanics. He would word-associate with the suspect until the handcuffed detainee was ready to drop. The Inspector never flagged. His ability to go hour after hour without food or sleep or break from the procedure was close to frightening. More than one interview produced confessions without the need for analysis, the criminal breaking down and explicating all from the sheer pressure of verbal bombardment. This, invariably, was disappointing to Lacazze, left him depressed, as if he’d been cheated of a promised reward at the end of exhaustive labor. Because it was the analysis that gave him his juice. The criminal and the crime, at that stage, were almost incidental. It was in enacting the system he had spent the bulk of his life constructing and tinkering with that he received the majority of his meaning.

The analysis consisted of tedious hours, sometimes days, of listening. Simply turning on the pink earpiece and activating the tape player and settling into a state of being whose sole activity was focusing in, deeper and deeper, on the sounds of the preceding interrogation. Lacazze would walk through the necessities of life — the breathing and eating and evacuating — as if they were secondary and annoying endeavors. All the while he would be locked into another realm, a dimension comprised solely of sound, the noise of words traded back and forth like Ping-Pong balls. The Inspector’s voice, followed by the suspect’s voice, followed by the Inspector’s voice, until the two voices became one unit, a note that would in time give up its secrets and reveal the nature of the mind of the accused.

And eventually, after hours of relistening to sound after sound, replayed over and over, looping around the same track, gutturals and dentals and moans void of significance whispering endlessly into his ear, Inspector Lacazze would feel the pressurized rush of an approaching epiphany. His concentration at this point would reach its maximum expanse and finally, he’d feel a burst of cold pain across his forehead, as if he’d bitten into a block of ice, and his vision would fade out for just an instant, an ache would course through his body from groin up through stomach and into his chest, the analytical climax that would become manifest in the birth of the solution, the big bang, the second coming of truth. The answer would congeal, birth itself into the world of Lacazze’s consciousness. And he would turn off the tape player, remove the hearing aid, call Ceil into his office and reveal the what, the how, and even the why of the suspect and his particular crime. What happened to the criminal at this point could not have mattered less to Lacazze. His part in the drama was over. The guilty party could be executed or unconditionally pardoned for all the Inspector cared. From Lacazze’s perspective, the only interesting aspect of the case was concluded. As much as it was genesis, each epiphany was also a small death. Invariably, each conclusive solution brought about an interval period of intractable depression that lasted until the next, seemingly inscrutable suspect was led down to Dunot Boulevard.

The needle begins to withdraw, the retreat as fierce as the insertion.

The Inspector quiets and opens his flooded eyes in time to see Mr. Clairvaux hoist the instrument to his nose and sniff it like a dog on a chase.

“Is anything ever as bad as we fear?” Armand asks, grabbing a rag from a rear pocket and handing it to his patient.

The Inspector looks down at a threadbare Rorschach of stains and realizes it is actually the remnant of what was once a pair of boxer shorts. He shakes his head and extends his hands to indicate that he wants the cuffs unlocked.

Mr. Clairvaux complies and the Inspector immediately throws open the van doors and jumps down into the alley, both hands covering his mouth.

As the patient breaks into a stumbling run toward the street, Armand Clairvaux is forced to yell his prescriptions out into the world.

“Get some ice on that as soon as possible,” he hollers. “You’ll be able to talk again in an hour or so.”