Finishing touches, p.15
Finishing Touches, page 15
Nordhagen was waiting for us in the library of his house. The walls were crammed with books, but there was enough dust around to suggest the place wasn’t much used. Aside from a small circle of chairs around a coffee table, the only other furniture consisted of a large bar in one corner, which did look as if it saw use, a desk at the back of the room, and a small table with a chessboard set up, a lamp, and an open chess book. On second glance, I saw that the chess pieces, apparently positioned in the middle of a game, were also dusty. Nordhagen must have read my thoughts, because he smiled at the table.
“One of Fischer’s early games,” he explained. “I found a forced win ten moves before he finally hammered it out for himself. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to change the position or tackle another game.”
“Like retiring undefeated,” I said, looking at the mass of undecipherable handwriting scribbled all over the page of the chess book.
“Something like that,” Nordhagen agreed proudly.
He served drinks that measured up pretty well to the dosages administered at the Feathers. Once we were seated, I was surprised at the little doctor’s appearance. The past few weeks had not been kind to him. His whole face seemed to have sagged, and he looked very tired. The lines were deeper, and there were brownish patches on his cheeks, giving him the look of a withered russet pear. I don’t know if it was the pill Lina had given me, or Nordhagen’s appearance, but for the first time I felt positively serene in his presence. More than that, I felt somehow superior, as if I were seeing his mortality take control of him, and that one coincidental by-product of it was a subtle strengthening of my position.
“This is an old, old site,” Nordhagen told me. “From the outside it looks like any other converted mews, which it is. But it goes back a good deal further than that. It was used as stables in Victorian times, but before that, sometime in the eighteenth century, it gets lost. History does not relate. Now that might not surprise you, an American, but take my word for it, it is unusual. London is such an old city, Tom, that every square inch of it has been measured, observed, recorded, time and time again, throughout the centuries. Virtually all the way back to when it was largely swamp and various tribes fought one another for position.”
“Hmm.” I tried to sound interested. I knew Roger regarded it as bad taste to come quickly to the point.
“It’s not unusual to be able to trace the history of any given piece of land in central London for several centuries. But this site seems to vanish a little over two hundred years ago. I’ve been unable to learn anything about what was here earlier.”
“Maybe nothing,” I suggested. “Maybe it was just open ground.”
“No.” Nordhagen smiled indulgently. “No. There was something here, as will become clear to you, dear boy, soon enough. But what it was remains, alas, a mystery. And I’ve made quite a study of it.” He gestured idly toward the wall of books. “One of my special projects has been digging up the history of this part of London. This slightly less than half an acre is the only blank spot in the area.”
“Hmm,” again.
Nordhagen smiled ruefully, as if it amused him in some sad way that he could improve on Bobby Fischer but not do a thorough title search on his own property. He was sitting back comfortably, but I noticed that his eyes darted about nervously, evasively, and his fingers worried the arm of his chair. The more I watched him, the clearer it became to me that he was in a state of considerable anxiety and making an effort to contain it.
“My own theory,” he went on, “is that something – let us say, rude – went on here a long time ago. Some sexually outrageous activity? Perhaps, but not likely, since many instances of that survive in the histories. Some murderous deed? I doubt it. Murder has its own charm, and again we find many examples of it in the area, dating far back. Something political, involving royalty? No, that’s even less likely, as every dark royal secret has been duly noted through the centuries, no matter what the scandal, and by numerous sources. So, what it comes down to, in my theory, is something else. Something like cabbalism, some degenerate holdover from the Middle Ages.”
“You mean witchcraft?”
“No, not really. Cabbalism: numbers, symbols, alchemical explorations – including nonsense like turning lead into gold, you know, the search for the philosopher’s stone, and resurrecting the dead. That is cabbalism, not witchcraft.”
I appreciated the use of the word nonsense. But I still wasn’t very interested in ancient history.
“Cabbalism could explain it,” Nordhagen continued. “Bad enough to come to a bad end, but secret enough to escape the histories. Perhaps what happened here left a nasty aftertaste, and those who knew about it simply let the memory die.”
“Could be,” I allowed. But I was finding it more interesting to watch Nordhagen. Maybe he was talking to distract me. I noticed a distinct tremor in his hand every time he lifted the wineglass to his lips. Oh, yes, I thought, this man has closed his surgery because his hands are gone. He really is finished.
“Well, let’s go, shall we?” Nordhagen rose. “It’s time to show you round – yes?” He looked hard at Lina, as if some sign from her could still abort things, but no such sign was given.
We left the library and walked along a narrow hallway toward the rear of the building. Nordhagen unlocked a low door tucked under the stairs.
“Cellar,” he said. “The first clue. There were no cellars in stables. When I bought these buildings they were just a row of ramshackle garages for automobiles. I built up and back. And when we ripped out the old floor, we found this cellar. Let’s go now.”
Nordhagen was becoming so agitated I wondered if he wasn’t about to suffer some kind of collapse or breakdown. I felt Lina’s hand on my arm as we went down the winding stone stairs into the cellar. It seemed quite deep, and I was impressed. I had expected a small, cramped root-cellar kind of place, but this was large. We arrived in an anteroom that had been created out of cinder blocks. Nordhagen’s work. He hesitated again before a massive oak door and looked at Lina.
“Are you all right, my dear?”
“Yes,” she said.
Nordhagen gave a queer smile, and then he was fumbling with some keys. He had so much difficulty getting the key in the hole that I wished Lina would take it from his shaking hand and unlock the door. But finally the door swung open, and we went into a dark room. I knew at once it was huge, in spite of the darkness, because I saw flickering lights in the distance.
Then I saw Laurence Harvey.
“Oh, dear,” Nordhagen muttered in irritation. “I forgot I put on Expresso Bongo.”
I nearly laughed. He had a movie theater down here. The screen at the far end of the darkened chamber was showing a 16-mm print of some black-and-white movie starring Laurence Harvey.
I heard Nordhagen doing something, then the film went off and the room lights began to come on slowly Very slowly. Lina’s hand held mine more tightly now, and she pressed her body close to me. She had the same look on her face that I’d seen outside the door on the top floor of her house. Then she let go of me and moved back a step, and I turned and walked into the gradually brightening room.
It was very large. Beneath the movie screen on the back wall were an easy chair and a chesterfield, along with an executive swivel chair and some kind of table or console. But most of the rest of the floor space was taken up by a long, semicircular table. It was more than a table. The legs, every six feet or so, were solid blocks cut from thick wooden beams. The tabletop was made of oak planks nailed to a solid frame of doubled two-by-fours. Beneath this makeshift table was a maze of pipes and tubing that snaked up and down the full length of the structure. On top of the table were twelve (I counted them later) wooden cabinets, evenly spaced. They were an extraordinary sight. I walked toward them. I could sense Lina staying close behind me.
There was a narrow break in the middle of the table, and I slipped through it into the semicircle. It was darker there. I actually hurried toward the chairs on the raised platform at the back. I didn’t stop to look around. I was positively terrified now. It was not fear for myself, although that might have been a footnote to the larger terror that engulfed me. But I knew I was standing in the middle of Roger Nordhagen’s secret, and that it was the blackest, most impossible nightmare, something that blew to smithereens the most primitive notion of humanity.
I spun around sharply, and my eyes locked on Lina. It was a delay to focus on her, blotting out anything else. My peripheral vision shut down by itself. I wanted to find something in her face, an emotional touchstone, anything. But her look was one of a ferocious intensity that said nothing. Or everything. Now the lights came up here too, as I looked slowly around.
In each glass-doored cabinet was a living person. Lights came on over their heads, creating grotesque halos. They hung in special harnesses, and they swayed slightly, some of them, like giant Christmas-tree decorations in hell. They were naked, and they had black rubber cups that fit them like diapers.
They had no arms or legs. Forty-eight limbs expertly amputated. Gone. The work of a master craftsman.
Their faces. They were the faces of the damned in living hell, hideous with agony. Not physical pain, though they may have felt that too, but something worse. Some of them made weak moaning and whispering noises, muffled by the glass. Some twisted ineffectually in their harnesses, but most of them hung motionless in despair.
I don’t know how long I stood there, gaping. I lost all track of my own body, as if I had been instantly disincarnated. I felt like a pair of eyes attached to a brain floating like a balloon in the deadened air. When it seemed I was about to fly away and vanish like a spray of vapor, I felt Lina touching me again, and I began to fall back into my body.
Nordhagen edged through the break in the table and joined us, nervous as a frazzled terrier. He was watching me, but in a rapid-fire series of short glances, not directly. I stared at him as if I were seeing him for the first time. All that I’d learned about the man meant nothing now, not in the face of this monstrous display. Here was the real Roger Nordhagen. My little puzzle. The mystery I’d hoped to solve. He was a self-made god – and obviously quite insane. Still, it was impossible for me not to confront him.
“Why?” I asked, startled by how deep and firm my voice sounded in that huge chamber.
“Why? Ha-ha!” Nordhagen yapped, then shook his head, smiling in disbelief. “Why? Why? What am I supposed to do, hire a fleet of mini-cabs and send them all home?”
“Why are they here at all, like this?”
“Why, why, why.” Nordhagen’s face brightened with interest. “You might as well ask why the Mayan civilization collapsed, why Kennedy rode in an open limousine in Dallas, why we came down out of the trees. What is why? There is no why; there is only now, and this – ” waving at the array of boxed people – “this is now. This is the only fact that pertains. You don’t start with why; you start with now. And this is a fact of your life now.”
I was dizzy, but part of my brain was working abstractly on its own, noting that the group seemed about evenly divided between men and women. Most were middle-aged, one or two younger or older.
“Mad?” Nordhagen ranted on. “Does the word madness come to mind? That’s all right. I don’t mind. Read your Yeats, young man. Yeats said, ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ It all comes to this: there can be no other possible conclusion. But ‘Young men know nothing of this . . .’ and you have to learn ‘why an old man should be mad.’ Well, Thomas, think of it, if you will, as your apprenticeship.”
Nordhagen waited, but there was nothing for me to say. Let him rave and rave. He was beyond me, beyond my help. He took my arm and started pointing things out to me.
“Look here,” he said, “they’re washed, flushed, cleaned, all taken care of. And there, see the IVs? Food, all the essential nutrients. No one can choke to death!” This last with a kind of hysterical pride. “Oh, yes, they’re all taken care of and looked after. Protected. These are my people.”
What I saw were people who wanted to die, longed to, but who were being kept alive in Nordhagen’s cruel heaven. I saw the chafing sores, the slack, pallid skin, the crusted eyes and mucus-gummed mouths. I saw torsos and skulls covered with electrodes.
“Here is – well, you can’t be expected to learn everyone’s name right off, but we have some lovely people,” Nordhagen chattered on, manic, proud.
We came to one man who was struggling to make himself heard. His eyes were bright with anger. Nordhagen opened the glass door.
“Yes, Reverend?”
“You’re sick, morbid, twisted – ” the wretched prisoner croaked, and the effort seemed to exhaust him.
“Yes, yes,” Nordhagen agreed cheerfully. “I’m doing the best I can with the sick, morbid, twisted mind your God gave me.”
“Don’t dare blame God,” the other protested feebly.
“No? Very well,” Nordhagen said. “Te absolvo Domine.”
He closed the glass door, and steered me on.
“Oh, here’s someone,” Nordhagen said, stopping me again. “You probably wouldn’t know, being American and new to this part of the world, but he’s famous in a minor way here. Did in the wife and nanny, and then came to me for a change of appearance to go with a proposed change of scene. I was happy to oblige on both counts. Confidentially, he is, in Dostoevsky’s splendid phrase, a man who has almost returned his ticket to God. But then, so am I.”
Nordhagen was almost back to his jolly old self now. He had that mischievous, twinkling smile, as if all this around us came to nothing more than an elaborate student’s prank. But now that I knew what to look for, I could see how much effort it took for him to maintain the façade. Nordhagen did it, somehow. He was a thoroughly competent madman.
“Films? I show them films all the time,” he said, lest I question their entertainment quota. “I’ve spent years compiling a decent film library. Expresso Bongo is a real favorite, and so is Beat Girl – the clash of generations is always stimulating, don’t you think? What else? Oh, The Brighton Strangler, Room at the Top. Oh, I have hundreds. We can’t neglect their minds, can we?”
How much time do you have to spend in the mad kingdom to belong there, I wondered. I turned to Lina.
“And what’s your favorite film, little girl?” I asked, my voice sounding foreign to me.
“River of No Return,” she answered immediately. “More than any other moment in any other film, I love it when Marilyn Monroe says, ‘The longer you last, the less you care.’ ”
Nordhagen smiled madly.
Lina smiled with love.
I looked from one to the other, then slowly around the deep stone chamber and its gallery of mutilated, force-fed bodies. Welcome to the floor of hell. Nordhagenville.
I grinned back at them, the way certain animals do in acute circumstances.
ELEVEN
The tour was far from over. Nordhagen took me around to each cabinet, telling me something about the various people, but I couldn’t follow what he was saying, so powerful and numbing was the mere sight of this folly. I got the impression that most of his people, as he liked to call them, had been complete strangers to him. They were vagrants, drifters, street people. There were exceptions: the Reverend, the man who’d killed his wife and nanny – I think his name was Lucan – and a psychiatrist who had written several books and then, one day, disappeared mysteriously. He was one of Nordhagen’s captive population, and apparently he never missed a chance to explain that Nordhagen suffered from acute narcissistic personality disorder. This delighted Nordhagen.
He took special pride in his control booth. Here he could change films, play music, control the food input, monitor the automatic functions, or plumbing, as he put it, and maintain a check on the physical health of each prisoner. I had seen the electrodes pasted to their bodies. It was his own comprehensive health system, Nordhagen explained proudly. The console beneath the movie screen was an alternate control system, simpler but located for convenience.
It was all undeniably impressive, a monumental tribute to the lengths unbridled obsession will go. Before we left the booth, Nordhagen put on some music to soothe his assembly. It might have been taped from a television broadcast, for the first thing that came out over the speaker system was the sound of a live audience and a voice introducing Max Bygraves, who sang “Underneath the Arches.”
Next to the control booth was a tool storage room, then Nordhagen’s changing room. It had a closet full of clean white lab jackets and aprons, a bath and shower, a toilet, a day bed, and a supply of linens. Next to that room was a small pharmacy. This was no larger than a walk-in closet, but it was lined with shelves, floor to ceiling, and they were full of bottled drugs and chemicals. The last room was an operating theater. Not the largest, best-equipped, by any means, but adequate for Nordhagen’s purposes. I paid little attention to the familiar medical gear, because I saw at once the large drain in the stone floor and the garden hose coiled up on the wall, attached to a tap. Those two things said it all about this place.
Nordhagen had obviously devoted an enormous amount of time, work, and money to his black fantasy. Judgment seemed beside the point. Here was a scenario of enactment that beggared anyone’s imagination. Almost anyone’s, that is. I was in the company of the architect. No matter what finally happened, Nordhagen couldn’t lose. Not by his own lights. He had already achieved so much, built his mad dream literally piece by piece. It seemed an almost trivial aside, albeit unfortunate, that other people had to be caught up in it. But then, they were also the entire point. All of this existed for them, and they for it.
“Well, I must leave you for a while,” Nordhagen said when we came out of the operating room. “I’ll just give them all a martini, and then I have to see to some paperwork upstairs. I’ll leave you with Lina.”
