The Scorpion's Tale (39 page)

“Do you recognize anyone in this
photograph?”

Steven studied the picture. “My father.”

“You have also met the other two men in the
photograph.”

Steven looked up at James, down at the
photograph and back again at James. “I’m going to do the same thing
you did, so don’t get nervous. I am retrieving
my
wallet,”
Steven said. He opened it and pulled out a picture, which he held
up next to the photo James gave him. Steven cracked a barely
perceptible smile as he compared the two and pointed. “That’s you,
correct?” He then handed the picture to James.

“Yes,” James answered, as he scrutinized the
photograph from Steven’s wallet. It was a black and white picture
of James and Tomasso seated on a bench.

“You’re not wearing a disguise right now, are
you?”

“No, I am not. This is what I look like.
Where did you get this photo?” James asked.

“I found it in my father’s desk after his
death. Who is the other man in your photograph?”

“A younger and handsomer version of
Joaquin.”

“When and where was this photograph taken?”
Steven asked.

“A nightclub in London. Your father and I
were in our early twenties. We were both working with Joaquin, who
was our mentor.”

Steven remained quiet for a few minutes.
“You’re telling me Joaquin trained you and my father to be
assassins?”

James nodded. “Your father and I learned a
great deal from Joaquin.”

Steven remained silent. James seemed to be
reading his thoughts.

“It is all beginning to make sense to you:
why the police were not interested and why nobody ever had a clear
and convincing version of your father’s death?”

Steven did not reply.

James leaned in toward Steven. “This is where
your life becomes interesting and where you must accept or reject
your fate. I will tell you a story and all you have to do is
listen.”

“I was created and bred to be a killer. I am
the living product of a social experiment. I am such a successful
killer because that was the sole purpose of my existence. My
father, Klaus VonKirkheimer, was Austrian. Leading up to World War
II, his family was middle class. Then his father, Karl, had the
excellent fortune of finding a new source of income. Karl was in
the textile business and had clients all over Europe. With the rise
of the Nazis, many of his clients and other business contacts were
looking for an emergency escape plan. Karl became the facilitator.
In the early years, he collected a modest fee to liquidate assets
and businesses. As the European Jewish community became more
threatened, his services in turn were more difficult to secure. It
was not because Karl did not like the Jewish people; in fact, many
were his friends. It was simply a matter of supply and demand. When
Jewish travel was restricted, he obtained transit documents on the
black market. There were not enough buyers for the jewelry,
artwork, furniture, and other valuables, so Karl kept these
treasures in exchange for facilitating the escape of his desperate
clients. By the time the war ended, Karl’s wealth was
immeasurable.

“Unfortunately for Klaus, the kindness and
help Karl extended to strangers was never directed toward his own
son. In fact, for reasons unknown, Karl despised his son. If it was
not for his mother’s intervention, Klaus was certain he would have
been thrown on the street like human refuse. As it was, Klaus lived
at home as an only child with a loving mother and a father who
ridiculed him. Klaus desperately wanted to kill his father, but he
could not bring himself to do it. At the end of the war, Klaus left
home and moved to South America. He studied psychology and biology
at the university, in hopes of discovering why he hated so deeply
yet was unable to kill the object of his hatred. Unfortunately, his
studies left him unfulfilled and empty.

“Klaus’ life was changed forever when he
received a telegram that his parents had been killed in an
automobile accident. While he mourned the loss of his beloved
mother, he was now free of his father and fabulously rich, to boot.
He decided to set up a human experiment to see if variables could
be adjusted to create a man with no conscience, who could and would
kill anything and anyone. Someone the real world would call a
sociopath.

“He purchased a small, uninhabited island
near South America and set to work designing his experiment. He
assembled a group of thirty women, mostly Europeans, who would be
the mothers of his children. To keep one variable constant, he
personally fathered all the subjects. Eighteen boys were born;
twelve were brought to the island while the remaining six lived on
the mainland to be raised by their mothers.

“I was raised on the island. As I grew older
I learned how isolated and fortified my world was, designed for
this utterly bizarre and inhuman experiment. My father had made
extensive arrangements that insured no trespassers could have
access to our hidden world. The rare, uninvited visitor received
swift and lethal elimination. I never knew my mother; actually none
of us did. I did eventually learn that her last name was ‘Mateuse’,
hence the name of the priest. That was one of my father’s burning
questions: how far did a mother’s love go in shaping her son’s
conscience. As babies and toddlers, we were raised communally, by
all the men on the island. At the age of five, we were assigned to
an individual instructor responsible for all facets of our lives.
Destiny chose Joaquin as mine. My father played no role in my
upbringing and for all intents and purposes, Joaquin was my father.
I neither needed nor desired anyone else.

“Then Joaquin lied to me about your being
raised in the Amazon by Benedictine Nuns?” Steven said.

The Scorpion smiled. “Yes, he did. That was a
story I asked Joaquin to tell you.”

Steven felt betrayed by someone he had
trusted.

“We all resided in a castle which had been
restored and converted into living quarters for us, with all the
amenities of modern living. My father insisted on keeping the
dungeons with their inherent discomforts and cruelties intact, a
lab of sorts, for his experiment. The edifice was intimidating, but
also intriguing. It had four floors and endless hallways with
secret passages running throughout. Many of the rooms were kept
locked, which stimulated our imaginations of what lay behind the
closed doors. But for all its grandeur, the castle was nothing more
than a prison.

“The back of the castle rose straight up from
the cliffs overlooking a fierce ocean. We were required to rotate
rooms at the whim of our father to keep us from having any feeling
of security and stability. When my apartment was near the ocean, I
would spend hours gazing out the window, watching the storms with
their magnificent lightening displays, contemplating the waves
endlessly crashing against the huge boulders. That was my
‘telly’”.

“Telly?” Steven asked.

“Television.” He continued with heightened
animation: “When we were young, we ate our meals together, and I
laughed and joked with my brothers. But as we reached adolescence,
that little joy was ripped away and we were forced to dine alone in
our chambers. Looking back, it is clear that the initial
socialization followed by dissociation was essential to the
experiment.

“My life was reduced to a fevered pursuit of
physical and mental perfection, as well as the mastery of a variety
of weapons, including my body. I spent my time with Joaquin and my
teachers, who were specifically brought to the island to provide
training in areas where our mentors did not have the requisite
expertise. We needed to apply our skills for survival and test them
on each other. Ultimately, we were trained to find our place in the
group, trained to fight each other until only one was left
standing. My favorite pastime was a morbid ‘hide-and-seek’ in which
we would go on a manhunt to find each other. The game was limited
to a defined portion of the island and trainers would strategically
position themselves to watch the hunt develop. The hunted would get
points if he could surprise a member of the predator team. I would
climb trees or hide in a crevice, waiting for the perfect
opportunity to capture my would-be captor. I have no memory of
losing.

“A large part of the entertainment for our
mentors was wagering on our events, much like gamecock fights. A
winning mentor was elated, ensuring rich rewards for his pupil. A
defeated mentor was unbearable and retribution for loss was swift
and severe. We were taught early to gain every possible advantage
against our adversaries; there were no rules. Joaquin had instilled
in me that it was critical to “kill or be killed”. Machiavellian
competition was expected. We were trained to be the alpha-males of
the pack, which meant we were not only the strongest and swiftest,
but also the most intelligent and resourceful. There was no room
for weakness, mercy, or hesitation. Fear and failure were rewarded
with punishment and pain, while success, strength, and cunning were
rewarded by praise, gifts, and the bitter envy of all. Competition
fueled a subtle yet continual, mounting hatred and distrust amongst
us, which was the major psychological strategy in our
upbringing.

“A particularly cruel mode of punishment was
‘solitary confinement’, where we would be placed in the dungeon’s
dark, windowless room with cold, stone floors. Over time our father
learned our deepest fears. In the dungeon, he would play upon our
phobias and introduce them into the room. My first and only
encounter with this torture afforded me the opportunity to share my
quarters with scorpions, the only things I truly feared. As I sat
naked on the floor, I felt crawling sensations on my foot, up my
leg, across my stomach and chest, and ultimately onto my neck and
face. All the while I was barely breathing, remaining perfectly
still, unsure what was crawling on my body. I touched one and
instantly realized what it was. I screamed with fear as I swatted
it off my face. When I placed my hands on the floor to push myself
off of the ground, I realized that my cell was teeming with
scorpions. I went into a primal rage, stamping out the symbol of my
fear with clenched fists, breaking them apart with my bare hands
and teeth, screaming until I could no longer produce a sound.
Joaquin found me the next morning, unconscious on the floor amidst
the carcasses of the dead scorpions. I emerged from that hell hole,
pure hate enveloping my naked, bitten body. My nom de plume was
what I conquered, the Scorpion. In the dank, darkness of that tomb,
my soul died with any childhood innocence I had left. I was reborn,
cold and callous, a survivor who could kill anything. From that day
forward, fear was my weapon, not my weakness.

“Gradually,” he continued, “our competitive
nature and jealousy made us narcissistic and unfeeling. Our life
motto became triumph at any cost. We were oblivious to our final
purpose; all we knew was that this was our life. With nothing to
compare it to, it was normal. I was very content and comfortable in
my solitude.

“I became fluent in seven languages and had
the finest tutors in the arts and sciences. Although I excelled in
academics, hunting was my passion. I mastered weapons from the gun
to the bow; however, the greatest weapon was my mind.

“By my teens, the hunt became more physically
stimulating and mentally challenging. When I turned fifteen, the
stakes were raised and my father imported a variety of predators
including wolves, tigers, and lions. We were given weapons, no
provisions and sent on our way. We gathered twice to mourn the
deaths of four brothers, who were ignominiously thrown into the sea
for their failure. I bear the scars of every hunt both physically
and mentally. It was the mental component that propelled me to the
pinnacle of our slaying fraternity.

“Our training culminated in a stimulating
event. A few days before my sixteenth birthday, I was given a
photograph of a man as I prepared for safari. I immediately
understood. Joaquin explained my quarry was a notorious war
criminal that had murdered hundreds of people and then bought his
freedom. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the men we
hunted were actually poor victims, randomly rounded up. I was
warned that if the man survived twelve hours, he would gain his
freedom and I would be killed. Only one of us could survive.”

“Why didn’t Joaquin tell me this story?”
Steven asked. “Why did he lie to me?”

“It wasn’t his story to tell. Nobody except
Joaquin and I are still alive. He swore an oath to me in blood that
he would never repeat it. My first human kill,” James continued,
unfazed by the dulled expression on Steven’s face, “it was an
exhilarating experience. Tracking the man was easy, but I was more
cautious and meticulous than ever. I ascribed to him a superior
intellect, assuming that he was older, wiser, and more experienced
than I. I assumed that most human beings were as logical,
calculating and analytical as I. Nothing could have been further
from the truth. He was totally ordinary, predictable, and easier to
track than the animals. When I found him, he had a rifle in his
hand. We could see each other’s faces and he smiled when he
realized I was only a teenager. He fired twice but his shots were
off target and he quickly ran. I caught up with him when he emerged
from the jungle and approached the edge of a cliff. He was
searching for an avenue of escape, but I knew there was no safe
harbor for him. I fired my rifle and watched him drop to the
ground, knowing I had shot him perfectly between the eyes. The kill
was intoxicating, almost sexual. I wrapped his body in a burlap
sack and dragged him back to the castle where I was richly rewarded
for my success. Giving chase became effortless, so I made sport out
of the people by mentally torturing them. I prayed I would receive
a worthy adversary, but I never encountered one. The result was
always the same–a body in a burlap sack. It became a bore. That
year, another brother joined the unfortunate and lost. Now, seven
remained. Have you heard enough or shall I go on?”