LEON KAUFMAN WAS no longer new to the city. The Palace of Delights, he’d always called it, in the days of his innocence. But that was when he’d lived in Atlanta, and New York was still a kind of promised land, where anything and everything was possible.Now Kaufman had lived three and a half months in his dream-city, and the Palace of Delights seemed less than delightful.Was it really only a season since he stepped out of Port Authority Bus Station and looked up 42nd Street towards the Broadway intersection? So short a time to lose so many treasured illusions.He was embarrassed now even to think of his naivety. It made him wince to remember how he had stood and announced aloud:‘New York, I love you.’Love? Never.It had been at best an infatuation.And now, after only three months living with his object of adoration, spending his days and nights in her presence, she had lost her aura of perfection.New York was just a city.He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men from between her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair. He had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages.It was no Palace of Delights.It bred death, not pleasure.Everyone he met had brushed with violence; it was a fact of life. It was almost chic to have known someone who had died a violent death. It was proof of living in that city.But Kaufman had loved New York from afar for almost twenty years. He’d planned his love affair for most of his adult life. It was not easy, therefore, to shake the passion off, as though he had never felt it. There were still times, very early, before the cop-sirens began, or at twilight, when Manhattan was still a miracle.For those moments, and for the sake of his dreams, he still gave her the benefit of the doubt, even when her behaviour was less than ladylike.She didn’t make such forgiveness easy. In the few months that Kaufman had lived in New York her streets had been awash with spilt blood.In fact, it was not so much the streets themselves, but the tunnels beneath those streets.
‘Subway Slaughter’ was the catch-phrase of the month. Only the previous week another three killings had been reported. The bodies had been discovered in one of the subway cars on the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS, hacked open and partially disembowelled, as though an efficient abattoir operative had been interrupted in his work. The killings were so thoroughly professional that the police were interviewing every man on their records who had some past connection with the butchery trade. The meat-packaging plants on the water-front were being watched, the slaughter-houses scoured for clues. A swift arrest was promised, though none was made.This recent trio of corpses was not the first to be discovered in such a state; the very day that Kaufman had arrived a story had broken in The Times that was still the talk of every morbid secretary in the office.The story went that a German visitor, lost in the subway system late at night, had come across a body in a train. The victim was a well-built, attractive thirty-year-old woman from Brooklyn. She had been completely stripped. Every shred of clothing, every article of jewellery. Even the studs in her ears.More bizarre than the stripping was the neat and systematic way in which the clothes had been folded and placed in individual plastic bags on the seat beside the corpse.This was no irrational slasher at work. This was a highly-organized mind: a lunatic with a strong sense of tidiness.Further, and yet more bizarre than the careful stripping of the corpse, was the outrage that had then been perpe-trated upon it. The reports claimed, though the Police Department failed to confirm this, that the body had been meticulously shaved. Every hair had been removed: from the head, from the groin, from beneath the arms; all cut and scorched back to the flesh. Even the eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked out.
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