Silent Prey

his watch. He’d been gone five minutes; he must have been an odd sight, a reader frozen, absolutely unmoving, unblinking, for five minutes or more.
    Better leave. Bekker walked to the counter, head down, and pushed the book across. He’d trained himself to speak as little as possible. Speech could give him away.
    “Sixteen-fifteen, with tax,” the counterman said. He glanced at the book’s cover. “Pretty rough stuff.”
    Bekker nodded, pushed seventeen dollars across the counter, accepted the change.
    “Come back again,” thumb-face called, as Bekker went out into the street. The bell above the door tinkled cheerily as he left.
    Bekker hurried home, saw his name on the front of a newspaper, and slowed. A picture, a familiar face. What?
    He picked up a half-brick that held the newspapers flat. Davenport? Christ, it was Davenport. He snatched up the paper, threw a dollar at the kiosk man and hurried away.
    “Want yer change?” The dealer leaned out of the kiosk.
    No. He had no time for change. Bekker scuttled down the street, his heels scratching and rapping, trying to read the paper in the dim ambient light. Finally, he stopped in the brilliantly lit doorway of an electronics store, the windows full of cameras, fax machines, tape recorders, calculators, disc players, portable telephones, miniature televisions and Japanese telescopes. He held the paper close to his nose.
 . . . controversial former detective from Minneapolis who is generally credited with solving Bekker’s first series of murders and identifying Bekker as the killer. In a fight at the time of the arrest, Bekker’s face was badly torn . . .
     . . . could have shot him,” Davenport said, “but we were trying to take him alive. We knew he had an accomplice, and we believed that the accomplice was dead—but unless we took Bekker alive, we’d never know for sure . . .
    Liar. Looking up from the paper, Bekker wanted to scream it: Liar. Bekker touched his face, hidden beneath the layers of special cosmetic. Davenport had ripped it. Davenport had destroyed Beauty. Bekker froze, was gone . . . .
    A bum came up, saw him in the doorway.
    “Hey,” the bum said, blocking the sidewalk, and Bekker came back. The bum was not particularly large, but he looked as though he’d been hit often and wasn’t afraid to be hit again. Bekker wasn’t buying it.
    “Fuck off,” he bawled, his teeth showing. The bumstepped aside, suddenly afraid, and Bekker went by like a draft of Arctic air. Cursing to himself, Bekker turned the corner, waited for a moment, then stepped back to see if the bum was coming after him. He wasn’t. Bekker went on to the Lacey building, muttering, growling, crying. He let himself in the front door, hurried down the basement, dropped into his reading chair.
    Davenport in town. The fear gripped him for a moment and he flashed back to the trial, Davenport’s testimony, the detective staring at him the whole time, challenging him . . . . Bekker lived through the testimony, mind caught, tangled in the random sparking of his mind . . . . And he came back, with a sigh.
    What? He had a package on his lap. He looked at it in puzzlement, dumped it. The book. He’d forgotten. Final Cuts: Torture Through the Ages. The book was filled with illustrations of racks and stakes, of gibbets and iron maidens. Bekker wasn’t interested. Torture was for freaks and perverts and clowns. But near the end of it . . .
    Yes. A photo taken in the 1880s. A Chinese man, the caption said, had assassinated a prince, and had been condemned to the death of a thousand cuts. The executioners had been slicing him to pieces as the photo was taken.
    The dying man’s face was radiant.
    This was what he’d sought in his own work, and here it was, in a century-old photo. This was the light, the luminance of death, pouring from the face of the Chinese man. It wasn’t pain—pain was disfiguring: he knew that from his work. He’d been doing his own photography, but had never achieved anything like this. Perhaps it was the old black-and-white film, something special about it.
    Bekker sat and gnawed his thumb, Davenport forgotten, obliterated by the importance of this discovery.Where did the aura come from? The knowledge of death? Of the imminence of it? Was that why old people, at the edge, were often described as radiant? Because they knew the end was there, they could see it, and understood there was no eluding it? Was the knowledge of