The Innocent (25 page)

He drew the saw across the crook of Otto’s knee. It snagged immediately. It was the cloth, and below that, stringy tendons. He lifted the saw out and, without looking at the teeth, put it in position again and tried to pull it toward him. The same thing happened.

“I can’t do this,” he cried. “It won’t go, it doesn’t work!”

“Don’t push down so hard,” she said. “Do it gently. And do the first few strokes toward you. Afterward you can go backward and forward.”

She knew about carpentry. She could have made a better shelf in the bathroom. He did as she suggested. The saw was moving with lubricated ease. Then the teeth snagged again, this time on bone, and then they were engaged. Leonard and Maria had to tighten their grip on the leg to keep it still. The saw made a muffled rasping sound.

“I have to stop!” he shouted, but he did not. He kept going. He should not have been going through bone. The idea was to get into the joint. His idea of it was vague, derived from roast chicken Sunday lunches. He angled the saw this way and that, and went at it hard, knowing that if he stopped he would never resume. Then he was through something, then it was grating bone again. He was trying not to see, but the April light exposed it all. The upper leg was oozing almost black, covering the saw. The handle was slippery. He was through, there was only skin below, and he could not get at it without sawing the table. He took the linoleum knife and tried to scour it with one stroke, but it puckered under the blade. He had to get in there, he had to put his hand into the chasm of the joint, into the cold mess of dark, ragged flesh and saw at the skin with the blade of the knife.

“Oh no!” he shouted. “Oh God!” And he was through. The
whole of the lower leg was suddenly an item, a thing in a cylinder of cloth, with a bare foot. Maria was ready for it. She rolled it tight in the square of waterproof cloth she had prepared. Then she glued the ends and sealed them. She tucked the package into one of the cases.

The stump was oozing heavily; the whole table was covered. The newspaper was sodden and disintegrating. Blood was seeping down the table legs and was already all over the paper on the floor. The paper stuck to their feet when they walked over it, exposing the carpet underneath. His arms were a uniform reddish-brown from the fingertips to above the elbow. It was on his face. Where it was drying it itched. There were spots on his glasses. Maria’s hands and arms were covered too, and her dress was smeared. It was a quiet time of day, but they called to one another as though they were in a storm.

She said, “I’m going to wash myself.”

“There’s no point,” he said. “Do it at the end.” He took up the saw. Where it had been slippery, it was now sticky. This would aid his grip. They took hold of the left leg. She was on his right, this time steadying the lower leg with both hands. It should have been quicker, this one, but it was not. He began well enough, but the saw stuck halfway through, wedged tight within the joint. He had to get both hands on the saw. Maria had to stretch over him and steady the upper leg as well. Even so, as Leonard struggled with the saw, the body jerked from side to side in a mad face-down dance. When the blanket dropped away, Leonard kept his eyes off the skull. It was at the edge of vision. Soon it would have to be dealt with. They were sodden now from the waist down, from where they were pushing up against the table. It no longer mattered. He was through the joint. It was the skin again, and he had to put his hand in with the knife. Would it have been easier, he thought, if the flesh had been warm?

The second parcel was in the case. Two rubber boots side by side. Leonard found the gin. He drank from the bottle and handed it to Maria. She shook her head.

“You’re right,” she called. “We must keep going.”

They did not discuss it, but they knew they would do the arms. They started with the right, the one Leonard had tried to wrench. It was crooked and stiff. They could not pull it out straight. It was difficult finding a way in, or a place to stand to get the saw into the shoulder. Now that the table and the floor, their clothes and arms and faces, were bloodied, it was not that bad being near the skull. The whole of the back of it had collapsed inward. There was only a little brain to be seen, pushed up along the line of the fractures. After red, gray was easy. Maria held the forearm. He started in the armpit, straight into the Army jacket and the shirt underneath. It was a good saw, sharp, not too heavy, just supple enough. Where the blade met the handle there was an inch or two not yet obscured by blood. The maker’s crest was there, and the word
Solingen
. He repeated it as he worked. They were not killing anyone here. Otto was dead. Solingen. They were dismantling him. Solingen. Nobody was missing. Solingen, Solingen. Otto is disarmed. Solingen, Solingen.

Between the arms he drank the gin. It was easy, it was sensible. An hour’s mess, or five years in prison. The gin bottle was sticky too. The blood was everywhere, and he accepted it. This was what they had to do, this was what they were doing. Solingen. It was a job. After he had given Maria the left arm, he did not pause. He got his hands behind Otto’s shirt collar and tugged. The vertebrae at the top of the spine were designed to hold a saw in place. He was through the bone in seconds, through the cord, neatly guiding the flat of the saw against the base of the skull, snagging only briefly on the sinews of the neck, the gristle of the windpipe, and through and through with no need for the linoleum knife. Solingen, Solingen.

Otto’s banged-up head clunked to the floor and settled among the crumpled pages of the
Tagesspiegel
and
Der Abend
and offered up his long-nosed profile. He looked much as he had done in the wardrobe—eyes closed, skin unhealthily pale. His lower lip, however, was no longer giving him trouble. What was on the table now was no one at all. It was the field of operations, it was a city far below that Leonard had been
ordered to destroy. Solingen. The gin again, the sticky Beefeater, then the big one, the thighs, the big push, and that would be it, home, a hot bath, a debriefing.

Maria was sitting on a wooden chair by the open cases. She took each part of her ex-husband onto her lap and patiently, with an almost maternal care, set about folding it away and sealing it and packing it carefully along with the rest. She was wrapping the head now. She was a good woman, resourceful, kind. If they could do this, they could do anything together. When this job was done, they would start again. They were engaged, they would resume the celebrations.

The saw blade rested snugly along the line of the crease where the buttocks met the leg. He would not aim to find the joint this time. Straight through the bone, a sturdy piece of two-by-two, and a good saw to cut it with. Trouser, skin, fat, flesh, bone, flesh, fat, skin, trouser. The last two he took with the knife. This one was heavy, dripping at both ends when he took it to her. His carpet slippers were black and heavy. The gin, and the other leg. This was the order of things, the order of battle: everything twice, except the head. The big lump that remained on the table to be wrapped, the cleaning up, the washing and scrubbing of skin, their skin, the disposal of things. They had a system, they could do this again if they really had to.

Maria was gluing the cloth around the second thigh. She said, “Take his jacket off.”

That was easy too, what with no arms to mess with. It just lifted off. Everything so far was fitting into one case. The torso would go in the second. She packed the second thigh and closed the lid. She had a dressmaker’s tape measure. He took one end and they laid it along the piece on the table. One hundred and two centimeters from gaping neck to stumps. She took the measure and knelt down by the cases.

“It’s too big,” she said. “It won’t go in. You’ll have to cut it in half.”

Leonard came down, he emerged from a dream. “That can’t be right,” he said. “Let’s measure it again.”

It was right. The cases were ninety-seven centimeters long. He snatched the tape and took the measurements alone. There was surely some means of bringing the figures closer.

“We’ll squeeze it in. Wrap it up and we’ll squeeze it in.”

“It won’t go. It’s a shoulder bone here, and the other end is thick. You have to cut it in half.” It was her husband, and she knew.

Arms and legs, and even the head, were extremities that could be lopped off. But cutting into the rest was not right. He fumbled after a principle, some general notion of decency to support his instinctive certainty. He was so tired. When he closed his eyes he felt himself lifting away. What was needed here were some guidelines, a few basic rules. It simply was not possible, he heard himself telling Glass and a handful of senior officers, to make abstractions and define general principles when you were right in the middle of a job. These things had to be thought through beforehand, leaving the men free to concentrate on the work itself.

Maria had sat down again. Her sodden dress sagged in her lap. “Do it quickly,” she said. “Then we can get cleaned up.” She had found the pack with the three cigarettes inside. She lit one, took a drag and passed it to him. He did not mind the red smudges all over the paper, he honestly did not care. But when he went to pass it back to her, the cigarette stuck to his fingers.

“You keep it,” she said, “and let’s start.”

Soon he had to change his grip to avoid burning his fingers. The paper came away and the tobacco spilled out. He let it all fall to the floor and stamped on it. He took up the saw and untucked Otto’s shirt, exposing the back just above the waistband of the trousers. Right on the spine was a big mole. He felt squeamish about cutting through it and positioned the blade half an inch lower. His saw cut now was the whole width of the back, and again the vertebra kept him on track. He was through the bone easily enough, but an inch or so further in he began to feel that he was not cutting through things so much as pushing them to one side. But he kept on. He was in the cavity that contained all that he did not want to see. He was keeping
his head raised so that he did not have to look into the cut. He looked in Maria’s direction. She was still sitting there, gray and tired and not wanting to watch. Her eyes were on the open window and the big cumulus clouds that drifted over the courtyard.

There was a glutinous sound that brought him the memory of a jelly dessert eased from its mold. It was moving about in there; something had collapsed and rolled onto something else. He was through to the bottom, and now he faced the old problem. He could not cut through the belly skin without sawing into the wood. It was a good table, too, sturdily constructed of elm. And this time he was not reaching his hand in. Instead he turned the carcass through ninety degrees and pulled it forward by the front half, so that the saw cut was in line with the table’s edge. He should have asked for Maria’s help. She should have foreseen the difficulty and come to his rescue. He was supporting the top half with both hands. The lower half still rested on the table. How then was he supposed to use the knife to cut through the belly skin? He was too tired to stop, even though he knew he was attempting the impossible. He brought his left knee up to bear the weight and stretched forward for the knife, which was on the table. It might have worked. He could have held the upper body with his knee and his hand, and with his free hand he could have reached under and cut through the skin. But he was too tired to be balancing on one leg. He almost had the knife in his hand when he felt himself toppling. He had to put his left foot down. He tried to get the free hand back in time, but the whole thing fell from his grasp. The top half swung on its hinge of skin toward the floor, exposing the vivid mess of Otto’s digestive tract and pulling the bottom half with it. Both tipped to the floor and disgorged onto the carpet.

There was a moment before he left the room when Leonard suddenly had the measure of the distance they had traveled, the trajectory that had delivered them from their successful little engagement party to this, and how all along the way each successive step had seemed logical enough, consistent with the
one before, and how no one was to blame. Before he made his run for the bathroom he had an impression of liverish reds, glistening irregular tubing of a boiled-egg bluish-white, and something purple and black, all of it shining and livid at the outrage of violated privacy, of secrets exposed. Despite the open windows, the room filled with the close stench of musty air, which itself was a medium for other smells: of sweet earth, sulfurous crap, and sauerkraut. The insult was, Leonard had time to think as he stepped hurriedly round the upended halves of the torso that were still joined, that all this stuff was also in himself.

As if to prove it, he gripped the edges of the toilet bowl and brought up a mouthful of green bile. He rinsed his mouth at the basin. The contact with clean water was a reminder of another life. No matter that he had not yet finished; he had to be clean—now. He kicked off his slippers, removed his shirt and trousers and added them to the pile under the basin and got into the bath. He crouched down and washed himself under the running taps. Dried blood was not easily removed in icy water. The pumice stone was the most effective, and he scrubbed his skin with no other thought for a long time—half an hour, perhaps twice that. By the time he had finished, his hands, arms and face were rubbed raw and he was shaking from the cold.

His clean clothes were in the bedroom. He had forgotten everything, it had left him for the period of his ablution, and now he would have to walk back through there in his clean bare feet, past his uncompleted work.

But when he arrived in the living room with a towel around his waist, still dripping, Maria was lifting the largest of the sealed parcels into one of the cases.

She spoke as though he had been there all the time and had just asked a question. “It goes like this now. Lower body, arm, top and bottom leg, and head in this one. And in this one, upper body, arm and top and bottom leg.”

By the table was a dustpan and a bucket. The rest was in there. He helped her close the cases up, and then, while she sat
on them, he secured the canvas straps as tight as they would go. He lugged the cases over to the wall. Now there was only luggage and a certain degree of residual mess, which could easily be cleaned up. He noticed she had a kettle and saucepans heating on the stove for her wash. He went into the bedroom, planning to dress and then snatch ten minutes’ sleep while she was in the bathroom. He wasted time looking for his shoes before he remembered where they were. He lay down and closed his eyes.