Chapter 40: Dance, Dance, My Doll 04
On Wednesday night, fine snowflakes were falling from the sky, glimmering beneath the canopy of heaven like tiny ice crystals. Hestal and Albarino sat inside a rented car. Heaven only knew where this lawyer had found a place that would rent a car without requiring a driver’s license registration, but after all, this was Westland—it was no surprise to find people here doing any kind of business.
They had been parked in a blind spot of the surveillance cameras for a while now. A thin layer of snowflakes had accumulated on the windshield, distorting the scenery outside into strange shapes. It was a very old-model SUV, and the heating system wasn’t very effective either. To keep the windows from fogging up, Hestal simply hadn’t turned on the air conditioning; the car had only been stopped for a short while, and Albarino was already beginning to feel his fingers going stiff from the cold.
“I’m so bored.” He complained lazily.
“Since you invited me to ‘sing that song together,’ it more or less means that under the right circumstances, you also agree to follow my pace—unless I misunderstood your meaning from the start.” Hestal answered him in a stern voice.
“And apparently your pace also includes the part about slowly freezing to death in a beat-up car,” Albanino muttered. “I didn’t sign up for that at the beginning.”
Hestal scrutinized him, as if to confirm whether he would actually freeze to death. Then he deigned to reply: “That’s because after Anthony Sharp lost his job, he lived in one of the worst neighborhoods in all of Westland. I’m guessing you don’t want to make too much noise in a slum with such poor soundproofing that neighbors with double-barreled shotguns come rushing into the street—so yes: you’ll have to stay here a while longer, until I’ve figured out when and where it’s best to make our move—and I hope that before then, you won’t actually be so fragile as to freeze to death.”
“If you had chosen to kill Riohard Shihaibo, you wouldn’t have ended up having to stake out a target in a neighborhood like this.” Albanino retorted.
“That journalist didn’t meet my standards. If you hadn’t insisted on watching me do it, you could have gone and killed Shihaibo yourself.” The mockery in Hestal’s voice was practically overflowing.
Because it was obvious: the Westland Pianist killed like a cat slowly toying with its prey. He had to take the person he had chosen to a place safe enough to slowly torture and dissect them, which meant he had to take the victim away alive. Without inflicting fatal harm on the other party, this inevitably involved a struggle.
So when the Pianist committed his crimes, he had to carefully choose the environment, at the very least ensuring that even if some loud commotion was made, it wouldn’t be discovered. He was still at the surveillance stage now. Only after he confirmed his target’s daily routine would he finally decide how to make his move.
The Sunday Gardener was different, however. The Sunday Gardener killed people like he was out shopping; the main reason he killed those people was that he needed their corpses, so the whole process was quick and clean—a single slash to the throat. So sometimes he would even stop a victim directly in an empty alley, attack them, and kill them on the spot; sometimes there were other pedestrians passing by just a few dozen meters away, and he would hide in the shadows together with the bloodied corpse at his feet, never once discovered.
So that was the situation now. Since Albanino insisted that Herstal be the one to do it, and whatever Sharp had done had clearly touched some hidden wound in Herstal’s heart, the other party did not refuse the proposal either. But that meant they would need to do a considerable amount of preparation for this matter.
“What’s the fun in that?” Now, Albanino retorted frankly, “You’re far more interesting than that journalist.”
Herstal let out a heavy sigh.
” What? Are you starting to regret agreeing to do this with me?” Albanino asked.
“I don’t regret it, because there’s no point in regretting. I long anticipated that something like this would happen sooner or later,” Hestal stated calmly.
Albanino looked at him, trying his best to make his gaze seem as if it were conveying a question. But as Hestal looked at that face illuminated by the lights outside the car window, all he felt was that the other man seemed smug. Hestal still wanted to sigh, and he gradually realized that the feeling in his heart when he wanted to sigh was closer to that of an exhausted owner coming home to find the sofa torn apart by the dog, rather than the irritation of being unable to tear open the other’s throat.
“You see,” he replied, as if this answer could explain everything, “—I still haven’t killed you.”
So it was bound to happen sooner or later: whether it was the mad love he had long foreseen, or the shared hunt, or even—in the end—the tragic destruction that would burn everything to ashes, it would all happen sooner or later. Hestal didn’t know whether he would actually go through with killing the other, or whether he had already missed every opportunity, and it was all too late.
(He sometimes told himself, just wait one more day—one more day and he would make his decision. But he didn’t.)
—And Hestal caught a dark smile at the corner of Albanino’s mouth, so perhaps that answer really did explain everything.
It was at this moment that they saw Anthony Sharp—the life counselor who had already been fired by the school, a tall, thin man with ginger hair—pull his coat tight around himself and walk out of the small apartment where he lived.
His steps were unsteady, and he looked as if he had been drinking. Through the windshield, they watched the man get into a battered Volkswagen Beetle parked at the side of the street, start the engine, and slowly drive away. Hestal did not start his own car until the other man was almost at the end of the street, then followed from a distance.
Hestal was very busy with work, so if he wanted to tail someone, he could only try to pick weekends and weekday evenings. Given how intensely he divided his own time, Albanino truly admired that the Pianist could still maintain a frequency of one case every three or four months. During nearly half a month of surveillance before this, they had found that this Sharp rarely went out after losing his job—except for his unwavering trips to the bar to get drunk, and to collect unemployment benefits—so this was the first time Hestal had seen him go out at this hour of the night after observing him for so long.
“I actually know why you didn’t choose that journalist.” Albanino suddenly spoke up amid the noise of the engine, and he was somehow able to make his tone sound very understanding. “It’s not entirely because Schheib hasn’t committed a crime yet and doesn’t meet the Pianist’s criteria for choosing victims—you only have to look at him to know that one day he’ll cause a huge disaster.
“What truly matters is that the mistakes Riohard Shihaibo might make or has already made won’t provoke the pianist’s inner raging impulses. You have no desire to do violence to him… but Anthony Sharp is different. Hestal, you empathize with that kid named Billy from the Anonymous Mutual Aid Group, don’t you?”
“Besides being a forensic pathologist, are you now moonlighting as a psychologist too?” Hestal retorted sharply.
“You’re evading the question,” Albanino pointed out lazily.
“So what if I am?” Hestal said coldly. He clearly didn’t care much for this topic—not surprisingly, anything related to the tragedy of his childhood always provoked a fierce reaction from him. It was only when these matters came up that Albanino could easily tear off that sarcastic mask of his. This was probably why he kept harping on this point.
That was the kind of thing Albanino would do. Though he appeared so likable in front of everyone, his true face was exactly like this: he never cared what harm his actions might bring to others. Those warm, understanding gestures were merely a mask he maintained in the unavoidable social life, and the current recklessness was his true self.
—There is someone in this world who understands your heart so well, yet never cares about the damage their words inflict on it. That is the tragedy of reality.
By now, the car had driven through many streets, still trailing far behind Sharpe’s Beetle. The other party seemed not to have noticed them. Everything was going smoothly, and it was precisely this calm that made the silent atmosphere all the more unbearable.
Clearly, Albanino chose to continue speaking.
“Running from the problem says a lot of things. I guess it doesn’t just mean you’re unwilling to recall miserable memories. You’re not the type who can never walk out of the past—it would haunt your nightmares, but it wouldn’t stop your steps. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have become who you are today.” Albarino answered, “You empathize with Billy, but you don’t like Billy, do you? You even detest him. You detest his weakness the same way you detest the version of yourself back then who was powerless against everything.”
Hestal’s lips pressed into a thin line. Albarino almost suspected he would stop the car and punch him in the face—but he didn’t, because he obviously wouldn’t rashly stop the car in the middle of tailing someone.
Since he didn’t answer, Albarino was able to stare at him with perfect justification, watching this man’s profile steeped in the hazy glow cast by the streetlights.
Hestal was very handsome, but not in a way that fully conformed to mainstream standards. In such a dimly lit environment, it made his eye sockets appear too deep, his brow ridge somewhat too high, his eyelids entirely submerged in pitch-black shadow; add to that his slightly thin lips, and his face naturally appeared cold and harsh.
But his essence was not like that—given that he was the Westland Pianist, the fact that his essence was not like that was truly a miracle.
Finally, perhaps Hestal had grown tired of his gaze and simply replied, “Do you get some kind of pleasure from digging up my sordid past?”
“That’s not it. Schhaib and I are not the same type at all,” Albanino answered bluntly, his smile sounding strangely warm. “Rather: for now, I am deeply fascinated by everything about you—both the parts you can still accept about yourself, and the parts you deeply loathe.”
“Is that how you seduce one bedmate after another with your sweet talk?” Hestal clearly did not believe a single word. He shot back stiffly.
“For a bed partner, all you need is to appear gentle and considerate, and spend generously enough. If you’re handsome enough and good in bed, that’s certainly a bonus.” Albanino narrowed his eyes, his voice lifting with a slightly flippant tone. “You’re worth someone racking their brains over, Pianist.”
Hestal let out a cold snort and made no comment on that remark. At the same time, they saw Sharp’s car pull over on a street. Hestal followed closely behind, deftly turning the wheel and backing the car into a nearby alley. That way, sitting in the car, they could still vaguely make out Sharp’s every move past the corner of the alley entrance.
Sharp got out of the car quickly, his steps unsteady, and somehow he seemed furious. But that was hardly surprising—the man had not only lost his job, but was said to have gone into considerable debt to hire himself a good lawyer. In the end, although he hadn’t been imprisoned on any charges related to sexual assault, he still had a large sum of debt to repay, and the charges that did stick essentially meant he could never find work at any educational institution again.
For Anthony Sharp, life was growing increasingly difficult, and the days of drinking to escape reality had left his expression more and more dispirited.
They watched as the man climbed the steps one by one to the entrance of an apartment by the roadside and began persistently ringing the doorbell. When the doorbell gave no response, he impatiently pressed it several more times, then simply started pounding on the door.
Sharp kept knocking persistently for a while, until a neighbor impatiently opened the door of the adjacent apartment and angrily shouted a few words at Sharp. It was already nearly one in the morning, so the neighbor’s fury was understandable, and Sharp responded by casually flipping the neighbor off.
The furious neighbor cursed and slammed the door shut heavily. A dozen seconds later, a window on the ground floor of the neighbor’s apartment that had originally been open was angrily closed by someone, serving as a silent protest against Sharp’s rudeness.
Just as Sharp was clearly about to start a second round of knocking, the apartment’s resident finally, overwhelmed, opened the door.
That was—
“Billy?” Albanino spoke up, his voice betraying more or less a hint of surprise.
Indeed, the pale, disheveled face peeking out from the doorway was none other than Billy, whom they had previously met at the anonymous support group for sexual trauma survivors. He said a few words to Sharp, but since they were too far away, the two sitting in the car could not make out anything at all. However, judging by Billy’s body language, he seemed to desperately want to hide deep inside the house, or to make Sharp leave right now.
—Neither of those wishes came true, because Sharp suddenly reached out and shoved Billy, stepping through the door, and both figures vanished from the entranceway.
The car was silent. Albarino was still watching Hestal with great interest, as if he had no interest whatsoever in the other two fellows, and the Hestal before him was a puzzle more challenging than the Goldbach Conjecture.
Hestal wasn’t looking at him, only gazing toward the doorway: the apartment door still hadn’t been fully closed, leaving a crack through which the interior light shone out, casting an ominous glow along the gap.
The choice Hestal was facing seemed quite obvious now: it was a row of two-story apartments along the street. Who knew how soundproof they were, or whether Billy lived alone or shared the rent with others. Clearly, every aspect of the situation was problematic. Now was not a suitable moment for Hestal—or the Westland Pianist—to make an appearance.
Albarino quietly waited for the other to make his choice. Hestal must have considered all these details in his mind as well, but in the end, he still heard Hestal curse under his breath and jump out of the car.
Albanino smiled, got out of the car after the other man, and put on the gloves he had kept in his pocket as he ran toward the apartment—what was happening inside the apartment, as well as the condition of the street itself, would affect how things played out next. Albanino glanced around and noticed that the surveillance cameras on the street had long since been destroyed, which was very common in the gang-ridden city of Westland.
He slowly smiled. That meant there was a great deal of room to maneuver.
The two of them pushed open the ajar door and quickly entered the interior. By this point, the second question Albanino had considered earlier was answered: the apartment was indeed two stories, but clearly Billy had only rented the second floor. The first-floor rooms were unoccupied, with all the furniture covered in white cloths.
Light shone down from the top of the stairs to the second floor, and the sound of people arguing spilled down continuously as well.
At this moment, the answer to Albanino’s first question was also about to reveal itself. “The soundproofing in this apartment is excellent. Once they entered, they would discover that the arguing was very loud, but even with the door only ajar, standing outside, one could barely hear any sound from inside.
From this, it seemed that the neighbor earlier had been able to hear Sharp’s knocking because a window next door was open. This also explained why, despite Sharp knocking for so long, only one neighbor had come out to protest.
—That could mean a lot of things.
So, when Hestal looked toward the second floor, Albarino stood behind him, silently closing the apartment’s front door and locking it.
Meanwhile, they could both hear Billy’s voice, nearly breaking down, shrieking: “Stay away from me! Don’t ever follow me again! Get out of this room right now, or I’ll—”
“What will you do? Stab me with that little knife in your hand?!” Sharpe roared furiously. “You ruined everything—don’t think I won’t—”
There was no need to keep listening to them any longer. Knowing that the situation upstairs was tense and that a young man utterly incapable of protecting himself was holding a weapon was enough. Before making his move, Hestal still glanced at Albarino, who nodded at him with full understanding, and then the two of them rushed upstairs.
Hestal had indeed simulated multiple possibilities in his mind, along with the corresponding ways to handle them and the means of cleaning up afterward. He never faced any situation unprepared, yet he still felt a faint sense of unease. That unease came from the scars he had seen beneath the wide cuff of that young man named Billy on that Saturday morning at the support group.
And that unease came true.
When they rushed to the second floor, they happened to see Billy cornered against the wall of the room by Anthony Sharp, his face filled with despair, tears streaming down his white-scarred face. The look in those eyes clearly told others that he understood what was about to happen to him—and when such a thing was about to happen—
When this kind of thing was about to happen, Billy suddenly raised his hand, and in his hand was a small fruit knife—not very long, but still sharp.
He slashed this knife toward his own neck, just as when he had decided to submit to this world, he had tried to use a knife to cut the blood vessels in his own wrist.
But for whatever reason he had failed before, but at this moment—at this moment, Anthony Sharp cursed in shock; at this moment, Albanino and Hestal stood at the top of the stairs, but it was already too late; at this moment, fresh blood gushed from the wound on this haggard young man’s neck, because flesh and blood vessels were so fragile, so soft.
Blood suddenly sprayed onto Sharp, who stood frozen in place from the sudden turn of events, sprayed onto the faded wallpaper and the old floor. The long streaks drawn across the ground and walls were like brightly colored little flowers, and the heat gradually dissipated into the night.
Blood gushed from the young man’s neck in a frenzied manner, even more unrestrained and more indomitable than the impression he had always left on others—the exact opposite of the impression Billy had left on the other members of the anonymous support group. The young man’s fingers trembled as they opened, the knife clattered to the ground, and his lips moved, but no sound came from his throat.
He slid slowly, slowly down the wall.
At the same time, Albanino reached out and placed his hand on his companion’s shoulder. Hastur’s shoulder was taut, and he could practically feel the furious tremor of those muscles.
Albanino reminded him in a low voice: “Pianist.”