The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [25]
“Perhaps they ate somewhere else.”
“The ME’s report estimates they ate the Chinese food no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before they … did to each other what they did.”
“And the sign-in book in the annex shows they were each there at least an hour before they died.”
“Right.”
The officer rose to go. He put on his trench coat and the sharp trilby that makes him look every inch a detective. “We’re going to announce it just before the evening news. That will give you a chance to alert people, control the damage.”
“Many thanks, Lieutenant,” I said. “It isn’t just the bad news that bothers people, it’s how they hear it. I’ll make a few phone calls.”
“Keep your ear to the ground, Norman. This is definitely murder.”
Murder, I thought afterward, trying to grasp in my mind what it means to take the life of another. Why was it so prevalent among our species? Murder for hate, for love, for gain, for politics, for its own sake. It brought back last evening when I had what might be called a night out with the boys. Actually, I met Izzy Landes and Father O’Gould for dinner at the Club. We got into our cups — Izzy came up with a fine Australian Shiraz. We also grew just a bit morbid as the evening wore on. I mentioned Penrood’s remark about how we may be the last generation to die. Izzy remarked that perhaps he and S.J. ought to do a book together on the history of death — before people forgot what it was.
We moved into the comfortable common room, and over coffee and a small brandy the good priest confessed how he privately lamented the memorial being erected on the Seaboard Common by the local Irish community to commemorate the Great Famine. “I fear that the Irish in America suffer from a kind of Holocaust envy,” he said in his soft Cork accent. “Sure, will it not only add to the spirit of competitive victimization into which we all seem to have fallen. In the end is it not a divisive thing? Does it not keep us apart?”
I was a little surprised to hear Izzy say that he differed very much with Father O’Gould. “I would agree,” he said, a world-weary look coming into his kind eyes, “that there is altogether too much made of the Holocaust. To dwell so disproportionately on that catastrophe is to imply that the other millions murdered in the twentieth century are less worthy of our compassion. As a tragedy for the Jews nothing and not enough can be said about the Holocaust. As a tragedy for humankind it needs be put into the context of all the other genocides of the twentieth century. Otherwise there is the danger that it will become a geek show, one that pathologizes the history of the Jews.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.
Izzy shook his head slowly. “I mean that the deliberate Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others is the singular, most horrific mass murder of the past hundred years. But it is by no means the only mass extermination or the even the largest one. The Communists murdered tens of millions, perhaps a hundred million in all, in Russia, China, and Cambodia. If we are going to erect memorials to victims of twentieth-century genocides, we need include those victims as well.”
“But in that case are we not then pathologizing human history itself?” Father O’Gould asked.
“Perhaps. History is the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake, after all, to quote the conscience of your own race, S.J. We need more, not less, memorials to what we have done to one another.”
“To remind ourselves,” I said.
“Exactly. Because we like to think it was done in the past by people not like us. But that is a mistake. The genocides have continued, haven’t they? In Uganda, in Rwanda, in northern Iraq, in the Balkans, in Darfur. We need to remind ourselves of what humankind is capable of. We need to remember that we are all at risk.”
“But are you saying, Izzy, that we should look upon murder, even mass murder, as a natural phenomenon?” asked Father O’Gould,