A Confession For Persephone 05

The next week went mostly well for Herstal.

"Mostly" was a very vague term. When you've had two of your largest clients murdered, been involved in a shooting, and then wrestled against a tasteless ransom kidnapper in an abandoned factory in the previous seven days, even the day-to-day business of a mob lawyer was pretty comforting and smooth.

Officer Hardy and his "group in charge of the serial killer case which only bought harm[1] for law enforcer's mental health" were probably so worried about Herstal's situation that Olga and Albarino literally took turns being in his sight every day as he limped to work at A&H law firm; even CSI's Bates Schwandner made an uncomfortable visit to his office once.

[1]有弊无利, only bringing harm and detriment to something without any positive sides to it

Albarino usually showed up at lunchtime with his glass tupperware. The forensic pathologist was tight-lipped about what inappropriate comments he made on the night of the Jones' case, and what accusations he made to Herstal in a convoluted[2] way. He just had the ability to innocently simplify everything to "oh, I really just wanted to flirt with you" that kind of intention.

[2]迂回曲折, lit. meandering and circuitous, meaning in a very complicated, indirect way

Herstal didn't know what to say. In fact, it was an unsolved mystery as to why he hadn't put this guy on the list of visitors he refused to see. He refused to admit that he was nearly accustomed to hearing the frivolous laughter of the other man talking and laughing with Emma at the door when he went out at noon, or the way the other looked at him while kneeling made his fingers itch.

Miss Olga Molozer, who taught at Westland State University, came at a more irregular time, picking times when she didn't have classes to teach at the university, occasionally sharing lunch or dinner with Herstal.

Unlike Albarino, she tended to take Herstal to lunch at the kind of place located near the A&H law firm, where prices repeatedly fluctuated between unacceptably cheap and unacceptably expensive.

On Friday night, Albarino was reportedly working overtime at the Forensic Bureau, so Olga gave up her plans for a night at the bar and stubbornly dragged Herstal to a ridiculously expensive French restaurant.

Actually, Herstal had never met anyone like Albarino and Olga before in the first half of his life. He rarely had personal connections with his colleagues and clients, and almost never went out to eat with anyone except for parties he had to attend. Just for this week, he had eaten with others almost as many times as the total amount of times he attended dinner parties last year.

On interpersonal distance, Albarino Bacchus... had absolutely no control over it. Herstal heavily suspected that it was a personality defect at birth, or else it could only be said that Albarino existed to torment him.

As for Olga, she was a completely different type, just like how she had picked this restaurant at this moment: people sitting around them were all couples who were ill at ease, adulterous men and women flirting, and businessmen with deceptive smiles[3]. For a lot of people, after entering a restaurant of this caliber, the word "dinner" had become tainted by the mission of socializing.

[3] 笑里藏刀, lit. to hide a knife behind your smile. Meaning: friendly manners hiding bad intentions.

But Herstal was certain that the only reason Olga would bring him to this restaurant was because she thought the food was good. Just sitting here, they would be mistaken for a couple by all the customers and waiters, but the person in front of him looked at him with a genuine, impersonal gaze.

When Olga looked at someone, that kind of expression would always spill out of her eyes involuntarily: it was like she was looking at a cat or a lion in a cage. She was not interested in what kind of species they were; she was just quietly waiting to see what they would do. She had no intention of breeding them, and also didn't reach out to stroke their heads; she was just watching the moment when their sharp teeth bit into someone else's neck.

"So," in the time it took to eat dessert, Herstal's thoughts flowed through all of the above like running water; the topic they were talking about just now slipped past his mouth, "the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener. Which of them do you think is more dangerous?"

–They had nothing else to talk about, of course. To put it bluntly, these people took turns appearing at Herstal's side only because Hardy was worried that the Sunday Gardener was onto him. All they could do when they met was talk about their work trying to avoid awkwardness, and thankfully Olga's work was actually really interesting.

Olga absentmindedly poked her fork at a small piece of dacquoise in front of her, which seemed sweet as hell just by looking at it. She was silent for a moment, then said, "The average person will generally think it's the Pianist who's scarier because he's more ... ruthless and crazy; they would think that."

"They would think that?" Herstal pointed out, reading between the lines[4].

[4]弦外之音, lit. the sound outside of the string. Meaning: something that is implied but not outright stated.

Olga glanced at him, but then it was like she wasn't looking at him completely. Her gaze skimmed lightly over somewhere unknown. Half of her mind was tied to the dacquoise in front of her, but the other half was drifting off to who knows where.

"What drives him is his inner desire," Olga inserted a small piece of cake into her mouth and chewed it slowly, her other hand propping up her chin sloppily. "either he submits to his fate to slaughter them, or he is consumed completely by his desire. – This is not a matter of choice for the Pianist. But that's not the case for the Sunday Gardener."

"Do you mean that the Sunday Gardener has a choice? I thought, pathologically speaking, they were all psychopaths." Herstal raised an eyebrow.

"Pathologically speaking, yes; but they're different types." Olga pierced another small piece of cake and ate like a chick pecking at rice. "The Gardener ... how should I put it; he knows that what he's doing is a criminal offense in a legal sense, but he can choose to do or not do it. There isn't any childhood trauma that compels him to necessarily do something; he won't be like some patients, who would be forced to a dead end by their completely collapsing mind.

She paused, then put her fork on her plate and looked up.

"If you ask me, the Sunday Gardener is perfectly capable of stopping his crimes, but he just doesn't want to do so." Olga revealed a lighthearted smile. "He just doesn't care. You can imagine that, right?

"To the kind of psychopath like him, there's no particular significance to those victims living or dead, like how there's no intrinsic difference between picking you or me as his victims. To him, we're not human, or at least not creatures equal to him; instead we're tools and objects for him to choose from. He does not select his victims according to some kind of compulsive psychology, so Hardy and the others cannot grasp the pattern of his choice of victims: precisely because he has no pattern. He completely follows his heart's desire."

"Then why must he kill those people, decorate them, and then display them? Isn't that a sign of compulsive psychology, like most serial killers with a track record?" Herstal asked.

Olga looked at him as if he had asked a very interesting question. Then she smiled, "Because he thinks that it's beautiful, because he wants to do that, because he can do it – that's it."

"That's ... a statement which leaves a deep impression." Herstal replied, weighing his words.

He thought of the body hanging upside down in the water, those bloody flowers in the hollowed hole of the man's chest. Abel, an echo of the Westland Pianist's work, an opportunity for provocation. The Gardener hadn't had to do that at all; they had never even been in touch.

Just because he wanted to.

"That's the problem: because he is still very young. And I suspect that perhaps there is still room for changes in his preferences." Olga continued, but she wasn't looking worried. "Maybe he'll suddenly think one day that it would be interesting to create things with similar themes to the Pianist, then we might find that he'll suddenly start to choose criminals as his murder targets too. Or maybe, he'll think that it's good to put flowers into living people, then he might not kill his own victims next time... Most serial killers follow an inherent pattern, and while he has a pattern to follow for now, I suspect it wouldn't last long."

"Because you said that he's not selecting his victims through compulsive psychology," Herstal said softly.

"Exactly, so he might suddenly transform into a sadistic killer next time, or something else – as long as he wants to, and as long as he thinks it's interesting enough. The Sunday Gardener is generally considered to have been a killer for ten years, but there's another possibility: maybe he was actually a serial killer under a different name ten years ago. In his case, it depends on where his interest has developed." Olga shrugged, "And people's interests change a lot, which is why Bart is so worried."

Herstal gave her a sharp look. "Because of me?"

"Because of you." Olga agreed, sizing up Herstal with the same kind of gaze she used to observe feline predators, "Recently, there's been some shifts in his patterns that occurred around you. Since we can't easily predict him, we don't know what these changes mean."

"Maybe he just wants to plant larkspur in my eye socket." Herstal's lips curled coldly in a snicker.

"Indeed, that's the best idea." Olga broke into a laugh as she picked up her fork once more. Bright light flashed from the silver cutlery between her fingers, as if she was holding a sword that could take a life.

Then the profiler said in a scary tone of voice, the kind just to frighten others, "Or maybe he's had a change of heart. He plans to kidnap you and then cut you up and eat you piece by piece, putting out a real-life version of the Silence of the Lambs right before our eyes – like I said, anything is possible; as long as he wants it, and as long as he can do it."

Herstal gave the other a polite smile. "I look forward to that."

Sunday.

In retrospect, insurance providers at Westland City could have launched a new product called "Sunday Insurance" to comfort the minds of every police officer in the Westland Police Department who was tormented by the Sunday Gardener, obviously headed by Bart Hardy.

It was hard to imagine the pressure Officer Hardy was under: his team was responsible for all the serial killings committed by the Westland Pianist and Sunday Gardener, basically being sent to fight a battle they would definitely lose. When Albarino Bacchus once again appeared at the door of the A&H law firm, the defeated, yet honorable general stood wearily outside the police line.

– The firm's offices were surrounded completely by the police line, for the second time in a week. Really, what the hell?

Standing next to Officer Hardy was a fat man with a smile always on his face, but of course he wasn't smiling now. He was wiping sweat tremblingly from his forehead with a handkerchief. This was Herstal's law firm partner, Mr. Holmes.

"How could this happen," Albarino heard Mr. Holmes say, as he walked past the other with his forensic pathology toolbox, "I only went on a business trip to Europe? How could this happen – Armalight called me the other day to talk about the incident with Davis, so I thought everything would be fine once the kidnapper was taken care of… can we still do business like this?"

This was probably the question that everyone who worked at the firm wanted to ask, and Albarino walked over, completely ignoring the miserable[4] Mr. Goody-goody, and asked Hardy directly, "Is it the Gardener?"

[4]凄风苦雨, lit. bleak wind and icy rain, meaning hardships.

Hardy looked at him with a dreadful ashen complexion and his lips moved once.

"Armalight came to the office today to work overtime, and then he saw it– he called the police at once, of course; it was horrible!" On behalf of Hardy, Mr. Holmes said that with vivid emotion[5].

[5]声情并茂, to describe someone who are excellent in voice and expression when they are singing/speaking etc

"Go in and see for yourself," Officer Hardy said to Albarino, his voice hoarse and bitter as if he had just swum a lap around the Pacific Ocean, "... damn it, I shouldn't be too surprised. This is the kind of thing he would do."

But apparently he was still astonished; both astonished and furious. Albarino uselessly and reassuringly patted Officer Hardy's shoulder, leaving him and the firm's partner, who had only been repeatedly saying "what should I do", behind. He nimbly pulled up the police tape and bent down to get inside.

He walked with ease to Herstal's office. The scene was still familiar: the CSI in a blue protective suit, yellow evidence markers, the flash of the cameras in the hands of the police officers, Bates and Olga.

And of course there was Herstal Armalight, coldly dressed in a tightly covered three-piece iron-gray suit, pocket adorned with a blue cravat that complemented his eyes, hair neatly combed. His outfit's level of formality was somewhere between working in a law firm and attending an international conference.

And these few people were standing in front of Herstal's desk, in a solemn semicircle: that thing was on Herstal's desk.

– "That thing" was a skull, placed upside down on the desk, with the frontal bone facing downward, maintaining a delicate balance in order to stand still on the neat and clean desk. Since the lower jaw's bones were missing, the skull's incisors looked strangely protruding and jagged. The empty space was decorated with flowers.

The skull looked abnormally white, probably bleached by some special means. The lower edge of the skull's eye socket, the sharp edges of the canine teeth, the external auditory canal and some parts of the mastoid process were all decorated with gold leaf in a careless yet neatly ordered manner.

Looking in from the position of the skull's eye sockets, one can see the entire skull being filled with red granules, hideously overflowing from the skull's eye sockets as if they were blood still rapidly flowing, or rows upon rows of neatly-lined red worm eggs. Yet the flower bouquets that were inserted into the skull were all pure white; they were a bouquet of wheat bleached to white and pure white daffodils.

Except for the blood-red color coming out of the skull's eye sockets, the skull and flowers were all flawlessly white. The artfully decorated white awns were like a bird's open feathers. The yellow stamens[6] of the daffodils and the specks of gold leaf scattered around like stars adorned the midst of the chaotic snowy white.

[6]花蕊, both the female and male reproductive part of flowers; both stamen and pistil

– Evidently, it was a gift for Herstal.

With the sound of Albarino's approaching footsteps, Herstal took a deep glance at him. His lips seemed merciless but soft, as if he were about to spit out a lot of words, but strangely he kept his silence.

Olga stood just a little closer than Herstal to make room for the forensic pathologists and trace examiners. Albarino greeted them, put the toolbox down, and began to put on latex gloves.

"I don't see much room for me to utilize my abilities," Albarino said, carefully examining the skull, "The skull looks very clean, so there is no way to determine the time of death. With only this part of the body, the gender can't be determined too. The best hope is to find the corresponding dental records through the dental impression."

Male, around forty years old. He died this Monday, the night Herstal went to confront the kidnapper Martin Jones. The Sunday Gardener had slit his throat from behind. When they were in that abandoned factory, the body was lying in the trunk of a Chevrolet outside the factory.

At that moment, Officer Bart Hardy was no more than five meters away from the body, but he would never know.

"Or expect the DNA to match with one in the police department's gene database." The man who had a desk with a skull bouquet placed on it said calmly. His level of calmness definitely deserves the admiration of the majority of the world from the bottom of their hearts, and the extreme boredom of the remainder.

"Have the Sunday Gardener started killing criminals too?" Albarino gazed at Herstal, and smilingly asked a rhetorical question.

Herstal's gaze was still cold when he met his eyes; either because he had never gotten over the episode just after Monday's kidnapping, or because he was more angry about something else (like the skull on his office desk). Sometimes, that gaze made it seem like he saw through everything: "His interests change – because he's not a person with lasting affection, right?"

Albarino smiled and didn't say anything more.

By then Bates had finished taking photos and carefully extracted the flowers, which were impeccably white from head to toe, like a handful of light, fluffy snow.

Bates' voice was quite certain, apparently feeling very confident[6]: "Although I don't know what the murderer used to bleach the skull, overall speaking, the bleaching and the method of the decorative gold leaf is very similar to the Sunday Gardener's 'Bride's Boat' case. – Although no further lab tests have been done, it looks like the work of the Sunday Gardener to me."

[6]成竹在胸, lit. have a bamboo in his chest, have confidence or is certain about something.

He spent several nights applying the gold leaf, to make sure they were all flat and the edges were smooth. He always separated this part of his private life from his work well, so he did not cut short his overtime work during the day, which he somewhat regretted after a few dizzying[7] night drives.

[7]頭昏腦脹, feeling mentally and physically unwell

On those nights, the wilderness outside the house was nearly silent; he owned the house and the acres of land outside, which were purposely not planted with anything. After nightfall, foxes and coyotes roamed here, these beasts howled in the darkness; the gold leaf was glittering like stars between his fingers, while other beasts lurked inside the blue eyes of Herstal Armalight.

He wanted to get close – to touch the wild beast's fur, to tear open his flesh and drink his blood as much as he wanted.

He loved things which were challenging and beautiful.

Bates carefully removed the flower and put it away, the skull still half-full of something red inside. Albarino reached out, grabbed the skull between his fingers and shook it. With a few muffled thuds, several small red particles fell out of the skull's eye sockets and landed on the table like drops of blood.

"Pomegranate." He said.

At the same time, Olga too said, "Persephone."

The others looked at her together, more or less confused. Olga let out a triumphant hum and reached out her hand to point to those things taken out by Bates: "Wheat, Persephone is the goddess of grain in Greek mythology; daffodils, the Theogony states that Persephone was taken captive by Hades after she picked daffodils and became his Queen of the Underworld; and pomegranates, as everyone knows– "

"Persephone ate the six pomegranate seeds that Hades gave her," Albarino said lightly, and Herstal looked at him; he gazed into those blue eyes as if the hunter's iron sight were aimed at a deer wandering in the woods. "And so, she had to stay in the Underworld for six months each year."

Herstal revealed to him a sharp smile, then moved his gaze away.

"So," he said mockingly, "I am now caught up in a sick metaphor related to the Queen of the Underworld? And with the Sunday Gardener narcissistically referring to himself as Hades, the King of the Underworld?"

"To be precise, you are the innocent maiden forcibly robbed by Hades, Bernini's the Rape of Proserpina. Everyone can picture that in your head, right?" Olga let out a laugh. For some reason, she sounded like she was rejoicing in the other's misfortune, as if they weren't talking about a psychopathic killer. "But if you eat this amount of pomegranate seeds, you'll probably stay in the underworld for the rest of your life and never come back."

"Olga!" Bates – the only one among them with a conscience warned, and the only one who remembered to bring the discussion back to the subject. "So, was Mr. Armalight courted by the Sunday Gardener?"

They were quiet for a few seconds, like primary school students squirming at a teacher's question, no one willing to give the answer that everyone was well aware of.

Albarino observed Herstal, the other man standing undisturbed in place, his brow furrowed, but that was all; he was a little too calm for someone who had been caught up in a subject of this degree.

"'Courted' is a rather heavy word," Olga mused, her eyes darting between the plants on the table and the pomegranate seeds. "Although the present before our eyes is also exquisite – may the dead rest in peace, of course – overall I feel that if things had risen to the level of 'love' for the Sunday Gardener, he would have made the scene a little more extravagant. "

Herstal said dryly, "... I'm sorry?"

"Meaning he'd probably kill every judge who ruled against you, stack a giant pile of bones on your desk for you, and plant cornflowers and larkspurs as blue as your eyes between their ribs," Albarino grinned, the words flowing unhesitantly from between his lips as if he had been thinking about it for a long time.

"Just stop it, that's disgusting." Bates groaned.

Olga said with an unchanging expression, "We're talking about love."

"Okay, so you don't think it's courtship. That's such a relief to me." Herstal concluded in that sarcastic tone. He just couldn't learn how to speak nicely.

Olga shook her head seriously.

"Not to discourage you, but I don't think things are as good as you think," she said in a low voice, slowly pulling her own hair. "It's a metaphor based on Greek mythology; we know that in the myth Hades forcibly stole the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, and forced the other to become his queen. Rather, I think the analogy the Sunday Gardener used was... quite disrespectful, but that's probably where his real intentions lie."

Herstal grunted coldly, as if he had understood something. Albarino lowered his eyes to the pomegranate seeds that had fallen onto the table, suppressing the smile at the corners of his mouth.

"This isn't love; he didn't give you roses. If we didn't know why the Sunday Gardener contacted you specifically when Thomas Norman died, we can probably see some indications of that now: he's harassing you."

Olga ended the bizarre conversation with this:

"Herstal, consider yourself patted on the ass by the Sunday Gardener."

...

Author's Notes

1. Dacquoise: a type of meringue with chopped nuts added, similar to that of macarone.

2. the Rape of Proserpina by Bernini: (T/N: Proserpina is the Roman name of Persephone)

"The harmonious daily life mini theater for psycho serial killers"

Al: If I fell in love with you, I would kill every single judge who ruled against your cases and use them to stack up a pile of bones on your office desk. Then, I would plant cornflowers and larkspurs as blue as your eyes between their ribs – this is the confession from the Sunday Gardener.

Herstal: Are you that kind of bird who would decorate their nest colorfully with flowers and plants during mating season?