Chapter 20: Golden Rain 02
Hestal was silent for a moment, then flashed Albanino a fake smile.
“Is it Titian’s Danaë, or Rembrandt’s Danaë?” Hestal asked in a low voice.
A soft breath of air escaped Albanino’s throat. He shifted forward slightly and pressed his lips to the corner of Hestal’s mouth. Perhaps because he had just passed through the curtain of rain, his skin was so cold.
He murmured against Hestal’s skin, softly and joyfully: “It’s Klimt.”
And the blade still rested against his neck, steady and unwavering, but Albanino truly did not care much about it—he had read in the other’s eyes a darkness thick enough to drown a person, and it was precisely this gloomy color that showed him the way. The sound of rain outside the window was loud enough to almost drown out voices and heartbeats. Albanino gave him a provocative smile, and then once again knelt at his feet.
This scene was like the night Hestal went to see Martin Jones, in front of that factory’s cold, dilapidated walls—except this time Hestal probably wasn’t as surprised as before. When he knelt, the blade stayed pressed against his skin, barely wavering at all; the other man’s hand was steady to an almost unnatural degree.
Albanino looked up and could see Hestal sizing him up with that weighing expression, as if torn between stabbing him to death with a single thrust or sending him to a mental institution. It made Albanino want to laugh. With practiced ease, he felt along Hestal’s left ankle—sure enough, a knife was still strapped in the same spot as last time.
“I hope we can both be a little more honest with each other, seeing as we’ve already communicated so many times.” Albanino spoke slowly, his fingers flicking open Hestal’s pant leg. This time he finally reached inside, slowly feeling his way up from the ankle: it was a very short dagger, concealed well enough that it wasn’t conspicuous even under dress pants.
“‘Communicated,'” Hestal clearly scoffed at the word—given that the communication Albanino referred to was presumably leaving corpses for each other and using those corpses to mock one another. “I recall I never asked for that kind of communication. Or is that some trendy artist’s fashion in your eyes?”
Albanino had already found the strap of the knife sheath, his fingers locating the buckle on his leg. Herstal’s skin felt incredibly smooth—he couldn’t tell whether the man was naturally the type with sparse body hair, or whether his obsessive-compulsive self-discipline had extended all the way to hair removal. Albanino was surprised by neither possibility. Really, just look at the man’s apartment—he lived in an elegantly designed flat, beautiful enough to be a designer’s showroom, yet utterly devoid of any sense of human habitation.
Somewhere in the middle of these absurd thoughts, Albanino found himself involuntarily wanting to smile. He undid the buckle with his fingers and with some difficulty removed the dagger and nylon strap from Herstal’s leg, laying them flat on the floor. At the same time, Herstal’s knife moved away from Albanino’s neck and shoulder, the blade coming to rest lightly against Albanino’s face.
Herstal patted his cheek with the flat of the blade: “Courtesy demands reciprocity.”
Albanino smiled at him and slowly unzipped his jacket, revealing the shoulder holster concealed beneath it.
“So this is the ‘daily necessities’ you went back to the Forensics Bureau to get?” Hestal asked.
“I do have a concealed carry permit, after all, so why not?” Albanino countered easily. He seemed entirely unbothered as he peeled off his still-dripping clothes and piled them all on top of the leather of the holster. The steadily dripping leather would soak and warp the wooden floor entirely, but neither of them seemed to actually care.
Hestal looked down at Albanino, who knelt sopping wet and unguarded at his feet, his hair appearing pitch-black after being soaked by the rain, the faint hint of skin visible beneath his drenched shirt. He certainly wasn’t foolish enough to think this was a display of weakness, nor would he assume he held the upper hand just because the blade was still pressed against the other man.
Albanino’s hand still rested on his ankle, and from there it slowly, erotically slid upward—whether the intent was as simple as his outward appearance suggested, or whether he was searching for other hidden weapons: after all, with his suit jacket removed, he had nothing left but a shirt and vest, leaving him completely exposed to view.
“I didn’t know it was this kind of game when I first joined,” Hestal pointed out in a low voice.
“It’s no more dangerous than stringing up the part of Bob Landon that you gutted and hung on the wall, and besides, I thought you were enjoying yourself too.” Albanino looked up, his voice nearly innocent, the gleaming blade resting just below his jaw, looking like a beam of light in the darkness.
Albanino’s fingers were like white larvae breaking from their shells in the dark. His fingers moved slowly and gently, the rustle of fabric curling at his fingertips, creeping slowly across Hestal’s leg. Then, he slowly moved his fingers toward the bulge between Hestal’s legs, pressing the heel of his palm against that patch of cloth, heated to steaming by the friction.
“Sadist, orgiastic killing… right? That’s what the FBI profilers would say.” Albanino said lightly. “I don’t know how you started, but obviously at this point, even if you wanted to stop, you couldn’t anymore. You’re driven by a passion that is foreign and uncontrollable to me. From that perspective, you’re more likely than I am to take a wrong step.”
His fingers were slowly undoing Halstead’s belt buckle, pulling the entire belt out. Halstead watched Albanino and the blade’s reflection on the small patch of skin that illuminated the corner of his lips, and let out an incredulous sneer.
“Most people probably wouldn’t describe the two of us that way, considering that everything we’re facing right now was started by you.” Halstead replied. He meant this sincerely: Albanino Bacchus’s enthusiasm came surging and swift—just think about it, it was only last month that he realized Halstead might be the Westland Pianist, and now they had already progressed to this point.
Albanino smiled with tolerance: “But I know how to stop.”
(Olga Morozov once said: “The Sunday Gardener is perfectly capable of stopping his killings, but he simply chooses not to. He just doesn’t care—can you imagine that?”)
“By killing me, you’ll put an end to all this?” Hestal said mockingly. He didn’t believe that what they were doing now—whatever it was, he couldn’t fathom what was going on in Albanino’s thoroughly insane head—could end in a peaceful way. What he was doing could never end peacefully.
Except Albanino was indeed right—he really couldn’t stop.
Albanino placed his belt on the floor as well, maintaining that posture that was enough to make his legs go numb, his hands gripping Hestal’s hip bones.
“Many ways—every way you can think of, if you have a little imagination.” Albanino spoke slowly, licking his lower lip with the tip of his tongue in a transparent attempt to cover up, his mint-green eyes filled with something dark and aggressive. “Alright, Mr. Armalite, if you’re willing to put down that knife, I can lick your cock the same way I licked your fingers.”
His choice of words was somewhat beyond Hestal’s imagination—the gang lawyer had of course encountered plenty of foul-mouthed people in his work, all of them far cruder than Albanino, but he truly hadn’t expected Albanino to phrase things so easily.
“Your recent behavior—especially the provocativeness so intense that I’ve begun to suspect you have histrionic personality disorder, Albanino.” Hestal said, seemingly making no effort to conceal the hoarseness in his voice.
“Don’t condemn me to make it seem like you don’t want it.” Albanino smiled back at him. “We both know this fact: the Westland Pianist never sexually assaults his victims, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a sadist, and it doesn’t mean he isn’t a sexual deviant. Logically sound, isn’t it?”
Albarino leaned forward and slowly pressed his lips against his groin, lasciviously using his chin to press against the hard, hot bulge in Herstal’s crotch—Herstal let out a short, warning breath, mainly because he hadn’t immediately realized Albarino would make such a move, and the blade left a small scratch above Albarino’s throat.
That was a silent, interminable second. Albarino’s lips moved suggestively in circles against the fabric of the dress pants, beginning to wet that patch of dark cloth with the tip of his tongue; meanwhile, Herstal stared at the tip of the knife: still pressed firmly into the skin, a thin line of blood slowly trailing down along the blade.
“Think of that coyote, Herstal.” Albarino’s voice was muffled against the fabric, but Herstal could still discern the delighted amusement in it. “Compared to that, burying your hand in Bob Landon’s chest cavity gets you more aroused, doesn’t it?”
He paused, and the next sentence came out of his lips like a breath: “Or would it feel even better when you drive the knife into my throat?”
In that instant, two things happened almost simultaneously—
The knife in Hestal’s hand clattered to the ground, and his hands tangled into Albanino’s wet brown hair; at the same time, Albanino, with that provocative smile, gripped Hestal’s waist and used his teeth to pull down Hestal’s zipper.
This inevitably brought to mind the night Hestal went to pay the ransom to the kidnapper, when Albanino knelt on the ground and asked, “Would you be more surprised if I pulled down your zipper with my teeth right now?”
—And now the answer could be given: he wasn’t.
Hestal didn’t feel particularly surprised. He didn’t know whether it was his subconscious telling him that if you got involved with a lunatic like Albanino, this kind of thing was bound to happen sooner or later; or whether something else had squeezed the emotion of surprise right out of his mind—mainly, Albanino’s lips.
The way Albanino unbuttoned a man’s pants was so skilled it was almost suspicious. But, well, plenty of people had said in front of Hestal that this man had a “colorful nightlife.” Who knew how many times he’d done this.
“Where’s that AIDS test report you promised?” Hestal squeezed out a mocking breath from his throat. He just had a way of displaying that dismissive tone no matter what he was doing.
At that moment, Albanino was letting go so that Hestal’s dress pants could slide naturally down to his knees. He clicked his tongue. “Sarah doesn’t have AIDS. If she did, it would’ve been in the autopsy report—besides, last time I also mentioned something about ‘three dates’ and such. Is the AIDS line the only one you’re latching onto?”
Alright, the two of them were clearly the type to discuss AIDS and Albarino’s dead ex-girlfriend before going for another round of hot oral. Albarino, fighting back laughter, reached out to unclip Herstal’s shirt garters: shirt garters, good God, three clips on each side, with the lower straps fastened to black nylon bands around his thighs—the contrast between that pale skin and black fabric was dizzying.
He undid the clips, letting the straps dangle loosely against Herstal’s legs, his fingers testingly pinching his thigh. This man definitely had solid muscle—otherwise he couldn’t have hoisted someone as big as Richard Norman onto a stake—but the flesh at the inner thigh was still soft.
He made no effort to hide that toying attitude, while Herstal’s fingers curled into his hair and tugged slightly, sending a sharp sting through him. Herstal’s voice still sounded cold, as if his erect cock weren’t brazenly poking at someone’s nose through the fabric, and he said, “You’ve already eaten more than three meals with me.”
Albarino detected a note of urgency in that voice. Normally Herstal would never be like this, but apparently for a sadistic killer, a hunting night like this was very… thrilling. He could just picture the fanatical gleam in those blue eyes when the other man gutted a victim, so he smiled and pinched the other’s thigh—hard enough to leave a bruise—and amid the other’s sharp intake of breath, freed Herstal’s cock from its fabric restraints.
Albanino looked up at the other man again. Hestal was gripping his hair, his thumb slowly tracing across his cheekbone. The dark hue in the Pianist’s eyes was worth remembering, captivating. Albanino mentally trimmed and revised his list of flower varieties, adding new entries to his notes—nothing suitable was worthy of these eyes.
Then he took the head of that organ between his lips and slowly slid it into his mouth.
Albanino tasted a hint of salt from sweat and bodily fluids. The other man’s skin had no particular flavor—then again, this guy was either a clean freak or had OCD; he had already sensed that from the layout of Hestal’s apartment and office.
What enveloped him even more was the smell of blood, emanating from Hestal’s hand gripping his hair, from the blood-soaked cufflink of his shirt. Beneath that fabric were pale self-inflicted scars, and on this man’s throat was a bite-mark-shaped scar; the cautious form of his three-piece suit buried his secrets—not every mentally ill serial killer started out that way, and Albanino knew this all too well.
Now he tried to swallow that organ, carefully relaxing himself and drawing back his teeth to avoid scraping the fragile skin of the penis with his dental ridge; it was never very pleasant, especially the struggle against the gag reflex. Even so, it was hardly a rational way to get close to another person’s core.
But he could still see traces of the cracks flickering across Herstal’s steel mask. In such a dead-silent, private moment, he finally allowed himself to release his true nature from his eyes: the monster hidden deep beneath his human-skin coat.
The look in his eyes as he gazed down at Albanino’s movements was gloomy and fanatical—the expression of the one who had attacked, tortured, and finally strangled the victim with piano wire, like lightning and a viscous river of blood.
The faint, secret sounds of water were entirely drowned out by the rain outside and the occasional muffled thunder. Amid the clamor (and simultaneously a strange quiet), Albanino provoked the other with his gaze, wanting to see what would emerge from the cracks in that mask.
And Hestal, to some extent, satisfied his curiosity: the other man grabbed his hair, pushed his head forward with force, and roughly fucked into his mouth. Albanino unceremoniously dug his nails into Hestal’s skin, able to feel saliva slowly trickling down along his jaw. Even amid the illusion of gagging, he still took the other man deep, the muscles of his throat trembling as they wrapped around the other’s sex.
He extracted a low growl from Hestal’s mouth with deep satisfaction. Albanino moved one hand away from Hestal’s hip bone, sliding it somewhere more intimate, kneading and pressing his testicles and the soft muscle of his perineum, until the other man uncontrollably thrust forward and came into his mouth.
Despite being mentally prepared, he still choked a little. Albanino adjusted his center of gravity, sitting on his own numbed ankle, and swallowed the semen without any qualms.
He knew what he looked like right now, especially since those final few thrusts had nearly brought tears to his eyes. Albanino didn’t mind looking up at Hestal from beneath his wet lashes, nor did he mind showing off the curve of his neck and the movement of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.
He had written so much provocation into his gaze and the curve of his lips that Hestal, of course, saw right through him.
Hestal’s legs were still trembling. He had not bothered to support his own body at all, and just slowly, sloppily slid down onto the floor. His hand was still gripping Albanino’s hair, and he gave it a rough yank forward. The other man crawled onto his lap between chuckles, and in that position leaned in to kiss his lips.
Between their lips there was a lewd saltiness, along with the lingering trace of blood. Hestal relaxed his fingers, his fingertips slowly stroking Albanino’s half-dried curls, then pressed down on the back of the other’s neck and pushed his lips against his neck.
The tip of his tongue touched the shallow knife wound on Albanino’s neck, his teeth scraped across the other’s Adam’s apple, squeezing more drops of blood out of that cut. A string of laughter escaped Albanino’s mouth, the skin of his neck rising and trembling.
“I’m thinking now,” his voice was slurred and delighted, “if you really drove the knife into my throat, would it bring you the most earth-shattering orgasm of your life?”
“If you keep talking this much, I’ll consider doing just that,” Hestal said dryly, his teeth giving one last punitive nip at his Adam’s apple. “I think you’ve made the current situation more complicated, Dr. Baks.”
As he spoke, he pulled them apart. A large red patch had bloomed on Albarino’s neck, and that wound looked even worse than before.
“What aspect of the situation? Is it ‘we’re trying to murder each other,’ ‘serial killers are having a killing competition,’ or ‘we’re fucking’?” Albarino said with a smile. He playfully kissed the corner of Hestal’s mouth, but didn’t pull away immediately.
Hestal unconsciously held his breath.
“I would be delighted to sleep with you, Mr. Armalite,” he whispered happily into the lawyer’s ear, “but as for the Westland Pianist, he hasn’t won me over yet.”
Note:
[1] “Those reading pirated copies, please delete the document immediately. This text prohibits piracy. If you do not comply, you will receive a box containing an old wooden puppet with peeling paint the next time you accept a delivery. Not long after, you will discover that this grotesque-faced puppet seems to inexplicably shift positions after you leave home, and may even turn its head on its own to follow your movements around the room…”
[2] Regarding gun licenses:
In the setting of this article, in the state where Westland City is located (I don’t even know which state it is), as long as you have no criminal record, you can legally purchase firearms. In this state, open carry is permitted and does not require a permit, but if you want concealed carry, additional training and testing are required.
Note: Open carry means that all three sides of the firearm must be visible to others; even covering a single corner is not allowed.
[3] Continuous killing driven by addiction is referred to in the FBI’s theoretical framework as “excitement/spree killing.”
(The above sentence is quoted from the Zhihu article “Criminal Psychology Lecture: An Explanation of the ‘Addiction Knot Theory’ Applied to Serial Killers’ Addictive Killing”)
[4] Regarding paraphilia:
Hestal belongs to a subtype of paraphilia (now called sexual deviation) known as “paraphilic disorder,” which can basically be described as: “satisfying one’s own sexual desires through means that ordinary people would not adopt/rarely adopt/cannot satisfy sexual desire at all.”
[5] The DSM-IV diagnostic description for histrionic personality disorder is: a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
① Feels uncomfortable in situations where he or she is not the center of attention;
②Frequently engages in inappropriate sexual seduction or provocative behavior when interacting with others;
③Emotional expressions shift rapidly and are shallow;
④Always uses physical appearance to attract others’ attention;
⑤Speech style is excessively aimed at impressing others while lacking concrete details;
⑥ Displaying exaggerated self-dramatization, theatricality, and emotional expression;
⑦ Being highly suggestible, that is, easily influenced by other people or the environment;
⑧ Believing that relationships with others are closer than they actually are.
(↑Baidu Baike)