Masters of Illusions (19 page)

He was talking about the final housing project to be built in Hartford, on the site of the last circus tent ever raised in
the city. He laughed an especially grating laugh. “My mother still lives there; she’s… let’s see… about here… on the aisle,
tenth row.”

He moved along the picture, absorbing it. They watched him the same way they’d watched him stir his coffee, authority and
confidence flowing from every gesture. He reminded Margie a lot of Martha. She also thought he reminded her of General Schwarzkopf.
But then, so did Martha. He said, talking to the Map, “We can’t come up with an arson case against a guy torching a circus
fire—let’s see—over forty years ago. Statute of limitations. ’Course there’s no statute of limitations on murder.” He turned
and looked at Charlie. “But I know, and I know you two know,…” (meaning Chick and the detective) “… that arson-murder was
not a crime in Connecticut in 1944. You set a fire, someone gets killed, it’s an accident. Like when a drunk in his banged-up
Chevy mows down a kid on a bike. An accident.”

Charlie said, “Intention.”

The marshal’s laugh was even more harsh than before. “Intention? Arsonists don’t set fires to kill people. They do it—excuse
me, ma’am—to get their rocks off.”

Charlie said, “This one did it to kill people.”

Hightower walked over to the table, leaned over it opposite Charlie, and glared into Charlie’s face. “You are a joke in the
department, man, and you know it. I don’t like jokes. I’m too busy. No way anybody’s going to prove some guy wanted to kill
six thousand people. The guy wanted to watch a burn. He sure as hell got what he wanted. But that’s all he wanted. He didn’t
want to kill kids and tigers and clowns, and nobody in any court of law will prove otherwise.”

Charlie, steady as a slab of concrete, said, “If he’d lit the tent half an hour earlier, nobody would have been in it.”

“You think you’ve got premeditation? How many arsonists have you talked to?”

“A few.”

“I’ve talked to a thousand. Maybe more. I spent ten years in New York, where arson is a high-paying job. Arsonists premeditate
all right. They watch to make sure no one’s in the building. Or else the landlord who hired ’em will dock ’em.”

“What about a few years ago? In the Bronx.”

“The social club?”

“Yeah.”

“That piece of dog turd didn’t want to kill anybody. Not his girlfriend, that’s for sure. He wanted to impress her is all.
And he sure as hell did impress her. Trouble was, he impressed himself while he was at it. Too much of a wimp to think he
was capable of killing a cockroach, let alone all those people. He kept saying, ‘I didn’t kill anybody, sir.’ Called everyone
sir. ‘I just set the fire—that’s all I did. I didn’t kill anyone. I just set it.’ Shit.” Hightower stood up straight and rubbed
his back. “All arsonists claim the fires are what killed people, not them. Incredible.”

The police detective was getting anxious. Margie could see he hadn’t bargained for more than just a simple little payback
for Chick. Quick trip to Canada and home again. He kept glancing back and forth from Charlie to the fire marshal. Neither
Charlie nor Hightower was about to back off. So the police detective finally couldn’t take anymore and said, “Well, maybe
one of them soldiers on leave took some crackpot’s girlfriend to the circus. Pissed him off enough so that he did something
… uh… stupid.”

Hightower looked at the detective as if he were seeing more dog turd. The marshal said, “He’d have confessed, or he’d have
let himself get caught. If the idea is to impress someone, how do you impress that person if she doesn’t know you did it?”

Margie said, “Maybe she died.”

He didn’t look at Margie like she was dog turd, but he was still pretty disdainful. “ma’am, there was one person at the social
club in the Bronx, New York, that the Cuban goofball made sure was safe—his girlfriend. She was at the doorway when he torched
the place. If that’s the scenario at the circus, the guy would have waited for the girlfriend to get out of the tent—waited
for her to go out and buy a dog, or go to the toilet. An arsonist is not interested in impressing dead people, understand?”

“Yes,” Margie said. “Sorry.”

He looked into her eyes. “No need to be sorry. What you said made more sense than anything so far.” He lifted his shoulders
up and down to relieve the tension. They waited for him to keep going. He did. “Listen, friends, we got this psycho up there
in Canada we’re planning on chitchatting with, and that oughta be rich, believe me. He puts people in sheds and then torches
the sheds. But that ain’t all he does. They let the pros—me—look further than they let the amateurs—you. This guys hurts his
victims first. Hurts them good. He fires them—still alive—one, to cover up what he did, and two, because it’s almost as much
fun as the other stuff he’s done to them already. This guy isn’t an arsonist, he’s a sociopath. Father was a drunk, his brothers
beat him up all the time, and his mother was borderline retarded, same as him.”

Charlie said, “Which is why he ran away with the circus. Our circus.”

“Yeah. Your circus. So we got a convenient little coincidence here. So what.”

“He disappeared after the fire.”

“So did everyone else. There was no circus after that fire. Just the top brass who flew in to salvage a real big mess. But
the rest of them—they were all out of there as fast as they could get, from the manager to the pack of transients who did
the dirty work. Including our boy in Canada. Gone.” He snapped his fingers.

Now Hightower came over and sat down. Margie had been wondering if he ever would. He put his empty coffee cup on the table.
He was still looking at Charlie. Margie poured him some more coffee. He said, “Thank you, ma’am.” He took a few sips. He didn’t
put in any cream or sugar this time. He said, “Who’s got the file?”

The detective had it. Margie had read it already, standing up, as soon as Chick had handed it to her. The file said that Henry
Maxson had been confessing to the Hartford circus fire for the last twenty years. But he’d also confessed to kidnapping the
Lindbergh baby and to sabotaging the
Hindenburg,
which had taken place before he was born. So the authorities hadn’t paid much attention to him. They had enough to do paying
attention to finding the bodies of the people he had killed—in culverts, in hollow tree trunks, in deserted houses, in barns
and under boardwalks, and in boats, too. Charred bodies, all of them.

Charlie said, “Listen, Hightower. Nobody knew till now that this guy was on the Barnum and Bailey payroll.” That was the fact
that had grabbed Charlie.

“Besides,” Margie chimed in, “even if he didn’t do it, he might have seen who did. Charlie’s point is, he was there. So Charlie
wants to talk to him. That’s what Charlie does.” Margie listened to herself defending the actions she had so recently attempted
to stop.

So now all their eyes swiveled to her. The fire marshal said, “And you were there, ma’am.”

“Yes.”

“You make good coffee.”

Margie said, “Thanks.”

They all sat quietly, drinking their coffee and thinking. Then Margie said, “I believe the Sox are playing the Blue Jays this
week. Away.”

She got four blank stares.

“I checked the atlas. Brampton is a suburb of Toronto.”

They kept staring at her while their brains reregistered. Chick’s brain settled in before the others. He said, “How many games
we out?”

The detective said, “Six.”

Margie said, “Five in the A.I.L.C.”

Hightower said, “What the hell is that?”

Margie said. “The All Important Loss Column. What’s the matter? Don’t you like baseball?”

A grin broke out. He roared. He did know how to act human, Margie was relieved to see.

They flew out to Toronto the next day. Margie noted that Clemens would be pitching that night—a little bonanza. Hightower
said, “I saw that in the
Courant
this morning.” Margie brought something to read on the plane, the new paper edition of
Presumed Innocent.
The fire marshal brought a book, too. The same one as Margie’s.

F
irst the warden showed them a picture of him; it was a photo of a madman. The word
stereotype
came immediately to Margie’s mind. But in addition to his wild eyes and an Albert Einstein shock of hair, he was scarred.
His arms and his face were almost all scar tissue, and the gaps in his hair showed shiny white patches. The warden said, “Whenever
he gets near a match, near a stove, near anything that burns, he tries to set fire to himself”

Margie said, “Don’t you have hospitals for people like that in this country?”

The warden said, “You’re in it. Hospitals for the criminally insane are also called prisons.”

The warden had led them through a series of locked doors, through a maze of corridors, and down flights of damp staircases,
and Margie figured they were at least three floors below ground when the warden said, “He’s just down this hall.”

Hall
is not what Margie would have called the grim and dirty cement tunnel they were in, the echoes of their footfalls a lot louder
than the footfalls themselves. Margie whispered to Charlie, “You know who else is in this basement, don’t you?”

The Hartford detective heard her. He said, “Who?”

Charlie whispered, “Hannibal Lecter.” He’d seen the video.

The detective said, “Who’s he?”

The fire marshal smiled. He whispered, “Not to worry. He’s in Rio.”

Margie said to Charlie, “I
told
you it was Rio. It just
looked
like Jamaica.” She said to Hightower, “You read the book, right?”

He said, “I only read the book.”

No wonder I like him, Margie thought.

Chick said, “Can it, you guys.”

When death has been a major part of your day-to-day living, you develop a sick sense of humor. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Margie
thought. Chick put the hobbles on them because the warden kept eyeing them—the way they were whispering and giggling, their
nerves jangled. Hightower and Margie had become conspirators, suddenly, and she was wired. Hightower composed himself. He
said to the warden, “Frankly, I’ve never heard of an arsonist who likes to set fire to himself.”

The warden said, “Count your blessings. Wish I never heard of any.”

Henry Maxson was in a lounge. It wasn’t really a lounge; it was some sort of all-purpose room. Nonpurpose room was what Margie
thought. Now it had been cleared out for people needing a meeting. The walls were cement block, unpainted, the floor was cement,
too, and there were chairs and a table with a phone. The phone didn’t have any sort of dialing mechanism. Henry Maxson was
handcuffed, wrists and ankles, to a chair. A state psychiatrist was in another chair. The warden said, “This is Dr. Glass.”
Dr. Glass nodded. Everyone nodded back, including Henry Maxson. The warden didn’t introduce anyone to Henry Maxson. Instead,
the warden said to him, “Well, Henry, here are the people I told you about.”

Henry remained relaxed, except that Margie could see the tendons sticking up from his wrists. He was exerting tension on his
wrist and ankle restraints, but managed to make the rest of his body slack. Once when Margie had gone to a La Leche League
meeting, hoping someone would be able to show her how to go about breast-feeding, a woman was there who said that when her
baby took the breast, the first few seconds of sucking hurt her nipples. The La Leche leader said to treat her tender nipples
with ice, but until her nipples toughened up she should grit her teeth, grip the armrest of her chair with her free hand,
and relax the rest of her body so the baby wouldn’t feel the tension. Until this day at the Canadian prison, Margie couldn’t
see how a person could possibly manage such a feat. Or why. You can’t protect babies from tension, anyway. But Henry needed
to hide his tension so they’d believe whatever it was he intended to say.

There were two empty chairs facing Henry, and three in a row behind those two, and then two more behind them. Margie was reminded
of the flight deck of the
Challenger.
The shrink was in the last row. She took the chair next to him. She thought: Christa McAuliffe’s. The warden and Charlie
sat up front, and Chick, the detective, and Hightower were in the middle. Charlie opened the briefcase he was carrying. He
unrolled a miniversion of the Map, reached over, and laid it across Henry’s lap. Henry didn’t look down at it. Instead, his
eyes took in everyone assembled in front of him, and he said, “The devil come riding on his red horse that day. The devil
come riding.” He paused. He spoke like a third-grader reciting the lines of some mediocre poem deemed suitable for children
to memorize. Then he said, shifting his face toward Margie, “When the devil come on his red horse, I gotta set a fire.”

The psychiatrist said, “He’s talking about masturbation.”

The men turned to look at the psychiatrist. Margie just glanced toward him, but then went right back to Henry. She was mesmerized
by Henry Maxson. The psychiatrist continued in his monotone, “When he masturbates he is usually unable to ejaculate, so when
he becomes aroused, he looks for something to kill. His first choice is a female, young or old, he doesn’t care. But he kills
men and boys, too. He kills each victim by setting them on fire. Foreplay consists of torturing them—well, usually
her
—first. Then he’s able to ejaculate while he watches, and of course listens, to the begging and pleading, and finally the
screaming. In the cases of animals he’s burned, I don’t know what he’s listening for.”

The men looked back to Henry. The whites of his eyes were red. Margie wondered what they had him on. Henry said very quietly,
“I only kill people that are happy.”

Charlie, calm as stone, said, “Why is that?”

Henry said, “Because I didn’t ever know a happy day in my life.”

The psychiatrist cleared his throat. Everyone looked back to him except Margie and Henry. “His father and brothers would take
turns beating him at night. They’d hit him every time he managed to fall asleep. Actually, the father forced the brothers
to help. A child tortured in his sleep—so that he
can’t
sleep—is a human being in such torment that there is simply no telling what that torment will lead to.”