Final Sins Read Free

law. Say no, and she must bow to the law—and in the eyes of the law, Peter Faust was a free man.
    “I decide who I’m going to work for,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “and who I’m not. Right now, you and your main squeeze are in the second category.”
    “Main squeeze?” Faust was unfamiliar with the expression.
    “Your honey, your Kewpie doll, your death groupie. ‘Squeaky’ Fromme over here.”
    It was the girl’s turn to look puzzled. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme , a member of the Manson clan, had been before her time.
    Faust understood the reference. For the first time, he looked displeased. She saw his Adam’s apple jerk, a common response to stress. The Adam’s apple, its muscles mediated by the vagus nerve, often served as an indicator of emotional changes.
    “You should not compare me with him,” Faust said.
    Manson, he must mean. “With Charlie? Why not? You two have loads in common. Admittedly, you’re better dressed, and you do a better job of hiding your craziness—”
    “There is nothing to hide. Mr. Manson is insane, just as you say. And his followers and admirers—there are some, even now—are sadly deluded. They have given over their lives to a madman. They are lost children.”
    “While your followers, on the other hand, are models of mental health.”
    “I have no followers.”
    “Your fans, then.”
    “Fans. I abhor the word.”
    “You’re a celebrity, whether you like it or not.”
    “Fame means nothing to me. I have no need of it, no desire for it. I am indifferent to such things. I have never sought a following. Those who admire me are drawn to my truth.”
    “I don’t think you and truth go together real well.”
    “There you are wrong. I do know truths, and I speak them. And others—a few enlightened souls—hear what I say.”
    “What do they hear?”
    “That modern life is a lie. Our deepest, most primal instincts are denied. We are cut off, alienated, from our animal selves. For we are animals, you see, and little more. The Romans knew it when they crowded into the Circus Maximus to see weaklings torn limb from limb for an afternoon’s amusement. They knew it when they pinned their vanquished foes to crosses that lined the Via Appia , each sacrificial victim squirming in exquisite pain like a bug on a pin. Think what a spectacle it must have made.”
    “Yeah,” Abby said. “Good times.”
    “Indeed they were. The old pagan ways were incontestably superior to the thin gruel of love-thy-neighbor. The ancients were ahead of their time. They were Darwinists two thousand years in advance of the Beagle ’s voyage. They understood nature, red in tooth and claw. They admired power. They did not flinch from inflicting pain. They did not avert their eyes from cruelty. They reveled in it.”
    “Like you.”
    He nodded. “I am a throwback, if you will. Or perhaps a bridge to the new age to come.”
    “You’re looking more like Manson every minute.”
    “Only to one who cannot see. I am no madman. I am, perhaps, a visionary.” His eyes narrowed. “An artist,” he added in a lower voice.
    His change of tone and expression made her wary. She wondered if he was serious or just shining her on.
    “What is art,” he continued softly, “but reassembling reality on our own terms? All creativity consists of the manipulation of things in the world to create new combinations, new arrangements.”
    “Things, not people.”
    “People, things ...” He shrugged, and in his sublime indifference she knew she was facing a pure sociopath. “To take the elements around us and remodel them along the lines of our thought, our will. I took a living human being and made it a corpse.” Abby noted the word it . “In so doing, I re-created the world.”
    “You didn’t create anything. You destroyed—”
    “Destruction and creation are the two faces of Janus. There is not one without the other.”
    “Tell that to Emily Wallace.”
    His nostrils flared, a sign of