Max by Peter Berczeller

Author:Peter Berczeller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Max: It Should Only Be
ISBN: 9781910924679
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EXPERIMENTING WITH PRIMATES

Late June, 1984

I was going to do the four local boys first, keep Weissensteiner for dessert. The decoy SLR was ready to roll, all charged, courtesy of the transformer I brought along to convert the current to two hundred twenty volts, which is what they use in Austria. Louie Rosenkrantz, my unsuspecting accomplice, left the viewfinder in the camera when he took out the part that takes the pictures. That way, I could focus exactly where I wanted to shoot the laser beam. On the rats, I’d found out the best place to hit was a spot behind the right ear. That was where my human subjects were going to get it too. No reason why I shouldn’t hit the right locus ceruleus straight on, like I always did; I’d had a lot of practice by then. Tickle the spot in the suicide center where it likes to be tickled. The rats did it. So could a few Nazi primates.

The first day, I was just getting oriented when I spotted him. Hochberger, the butcher turned cook for the Luftwaffe, sitting on a bench outside his old store. He didn’t look all that changed from the picture I was carrying around with me. Narrow little eyes, round, reddish face. Short-brimmed hat, a feather sticking out of it, on top of his head; a cane propped up next to him. I could see a woman behind the counter, serving customers. Figured it was his daughter Anny, according to the CFDC info.

He looked like he was just starting to doze off. That meant he wasn’t going to be moving much, which would make my job easy. There was a fresco, two angels juggling another one – or vice-versa – over the entrance to the building. I made a big show of focusing on the fresco, and only at the last second moved the focus down and over a little bit, until I had old Hochberger in the picture. From about twenty feet out, I shot the laser at the right side of his head, just behind the ear. No muss, no fuss. Just the usual little clicking and hissing sound. Different, but not too different, from what you hear when somebody takes a picture with a fancy camera. I detected a faint smell of something burning. But on the street, who was going to notice?

As soon as I’d pulled the trigger, and closed the camera, I felt let down. Post coitum omne animal triste. No big surprise. I’d been working my way towards this moment most of my life. If I had killed Hochberger outright, for sure I would have felt an instant sense of catharsis, of release. But here it was more like I swallowed a cathartic. Your insides take their own sweet time when you ask them to do a job for you. I’d just have to wait it out.

After moping around for a while, I started looking at the bright side, thinking about what I’d already pulled off.

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