Dark Maze

shrugged. “You go around to the right there, past the Tilt-a-Whirl,” he said. “Then cut yourself another right, go down the lane and you’ll find your dark maze right over by the Unicef Pavilion. You can’t miss it.”
    We thanked him and he said, “You know, that attraction’s all closed up nowadays.”
    I folded the handbill and put it in my back pocket. Then Ruby and I took a right, and another right to the lane just past the Tilt-a-Whirl.
    The dwarf was right. We could not miss it.
    Ruby covered her mouth with both hands and said, “Oh, Hock. Oh, my God.”

SEVEN

    Well, sure I sent it. Said I would, didn’t I? Don’t I always do like I say? Damn straight I do.
    Sent it the day before yesterday, so he’s either got it, or he gets it today. Ho, ho, will he get it!
    Ought to get his attention real good, boy. Ought to scare him damn good, too. Haw! Scare him so bad he’ll wet his pants. Yeah—and try ignoring that!

    When murder is a lifetime in the creation, the killer is more fatally wounded than his victim. The dearly despatched may—or may not—be mourned before he is forgotten. But the survivor left holding the smoking gun or blooded knife or throat-warmed rope has already suffered a long delirium of rage and sorrow. Now he knows only the additional regret that nothing, really, has been settled after all.
    Was this, after all, why Celia Furman’s dead face registered no surprise?
    The finer, nastier meanings behind so much of the business of homicide are not found in the mere facts of a newspaper story or a detective’s report. Journalists are no more qualified to trouble themselves with the mess of the whole and lengthy truth of life and death than are their readers. And it pains me to say that while cops may be a suspicious lot, precious few are cursed with strong curiosity. Which is why there is poetry and theatre and literature - and painting - to help us consider the unthinkable, if we must.
    Which I could hardly fail to consider on that Coney Island! morning, standing beside poor, pretty, horrified Ruby; the two of us there, face-to-face with Picasso’s self-proclaimed; masterpiece—the great obscure work of an artist with a cancer on his heart.
    And was his masterpiece, after all, the mark of a wounded killer?
    Dr. Reiser had been shrewd to leave unspoken the shock and sickness he must have felt on seeing this work. He had recognized me as a rarely cursed cop, had he not? He had tipped me to the Fire and Brimstone, figuring I was the type who could not resist a visit to Brooklyn to see it for myself. Right he was.

    Picasso had painted a mural the size of a small bam. His canvas was a two-storey, sectioned steel facade surrounding! the dark, narrow doorway of Fire and Brimstone. There was a theme to the work, I discovered, as I viewed downward from the top right and left-hand sides of the ugly thing.
    First, there was a satanic figure with a face like a tree stump and a great lashing split tongue who was feeding epsom salts in solution from a bottle to cringing nude men seated on overflowing toilet commodes. Below this, naked frightened women in chains drank from curling tubes connected to the commodes above. They, in turn, were seated on toilets that drained into a brown river clogged with gagging men, women and children and whole rafts of dead bodies.
    Opposite the first satanic figure was another, this one playing a piano from sheet music whose title read, “Andante Shake & Hammer Blow Struck.” Rising from the top of the piano were two gnarled hands controlling chains that were shackled to the bleeding arms and legs of hugely pregnant women.
    At the center of the carnage, seemingly presiding over it all, was a white-haired demon with four arms and four hands, steam billowing out from manhole-size nostrils. He used two hands to toss fireballs into the already flaming and defoliated scenery; with the other two, he twisted a thick, hairy tail that snaked down between long legs. A buxom she-devil was sprawled at his feet, stroking the pointed tip of his tail; lesser endowed she-devils crowded about her, sinking their impressive fangs into her bare back and buttocks.
    Ruby, meanwhile, dug her fingers into my arm the way panicky types maul their seatmates on airplane takeoffs. “It’s the middle of a sunny morning and I’m standing next to an armed cop, and this thing I’m looking at is giving me the shaking creeps!”
    From the nearby Unicef Pavilion came carillon music