Page 84 of The Devil's Advocate

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

KORN

Korn gently rested the needle on the record. The familiar burst of ticks and scratches came from the speakers, and then Korn’s favorite piece of music – Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor, opus 111, performed by Jorg Demus on Beethoven’s own Graf piano. The piece was recorded live, in Bonn, in 1970, to mark the 200thanniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

When he first heard the piece, as a young boy of eleven, he had hated it.

The piano sounded tinny, and strange. It wasn’t until a year or so later, when he learned the piano was made by Conrad Graf especially for Beethoven, that he began to listen more carefully to the piece. Beethoven was almost totally deaf at this stage of his life, and Graf made every effort to intensify the sound from the piano, including adding an extra string to the upper register. Parts of the piece require the keys to be struck with incredible force and speed. Korn liked to think of Beethoven hammering those same keys, desperately trying to hear the same sound that Korn heard on the record, knowing that the composer had been cruelly robbed from experiencing his own gift.

And that was when Korn fell in love with it. In the same music that caused others so much joy, Korn heard only Beethoven’s anguish and pain. And he reveled in it.

That’s when he knew he was different. It wasn’t entirely his father’s influence. And in some ways he was lucky, in that he knew himself at an early age. Nothing gave him more pleasure than suffering.

He didn’t own a TV. Occasionally he listened to the radio in the car, but not often. He sometimes felt that he was a man born in the wrong time. He read his books, listened to Beethoven, Mahler and Wagner, and that was mostly enough for him.

Korn went upstairs, into his bedroom. A single lamp burned in the dim room, barely penetrating the darkness. He took off his suit jacket, hung it carefully in his closet. Then his tie. He placed his shirt in the laundry along with his socks. He took off his shoes and polished them with a brush and a cloth for five minutes, then placed them in their spot in his huge closet.

He sat on the bed. Took deep breaths. Lay back on the sheets, his legs dangling off the edge as he worked himself up to the job.

He unbuttoned his pants, slid them down to the top of his thighs then stopped. He sat up, and then, very carefully, he pulled his pants down to the floor and shuffled his feet out of them.

The smell hit him immediately.

Even with the tight, clear plastic wrap on his right thigh, the odor came through. He sometimes thought that others could smell it. Not that Korn cared what others thought of him personally.

He found the end of the wrapping and pulled it. There was a flash of pain as he yanked it free.

No, it would be way too painful to take it off in this manner. He found scissors on the bedside table and cut away the plastic wrapping to reveal the bandage. Now the smell was powerful. He cut away the bandages, wet with blood.

The leather garter, right around his thigh, would need to be soaked in bleach again. It was almost ruined. He had a new one in his safe, but he didn’t feel like using it. Not yet. Not until he could rid himself of the infection. He reached under the belt, undid the clasp and peeled away the garter from the back of his thigh, slowly. This had to be done inch by inch.

Because of the pins.

The belt had left an indentation on the skin because it was on so tightly. The five steel pins on the underside of the belt had clotted in the puncture wounds they’d left on the front of his thigh. He had to yank each one out.

The five pin holes in his flesh were red, angry and clearly infected. The smell from his leg was almost making him gag, and it didn’t look much better. He took the iodine from the bedside cabinet and applied it to the wounds, sucking on his lips, gasping with each dab from a cotton bud.

When he was done, he took a shower, used more disinfectant on the leg and then took his daily dose of antibiotics. He wondered whether they were having any effect. He had been taking them for so long now it was possible he was immune. Perhaps he needed to up the dose or change the meds again.

Korn lived alone. Always had, from the day he moved out of his father’s penthouse apartment in the Upper West Side. Pain was the only companion he needed. And it had served him well. Driving him, giving him that little electric boost every few minutes to remind him that he was alive.

He thought about the events of the evening. When he had visited Lomax he did not expect that he would have to kill him. In the past he had wondered about the man. It had taken little to corrupt him. Money. Something so simple. Something that Korn had in abundance and so many others did not. It had started small, and of course Korn had poured poison into Lomax’s ears constantly – reminding him of their mission. Justice and retribution for those hurt and killed by the evil in this world. Lomax had bought it at first. He thought he was on a mission to tip the system in their favor. The system that benefitted rapists and murderers, giving them a court-appointed lawyer and presuming that they are innocent.

They’re all guilty.

Korn knew it. And it didn’t take a whole lot to persuade Lomax.

That damned wife of his never liked Korn, that was true enough. Still, he had been able to wear Lomax down. Slowly increasing the seriousness of the actions Lomax had to take in order to secure a conviction. Taking drug money for himself, or losing evidence vital to the defense, soon turned into Lomax ignoring witnesses who could exonerate defendants, even quietening them. It didn’t take long for Lomax to become beholden to Korn. Korn’s own corruption infected Lomax, and there was no amount of iodine and penicillin to clean that wound.

He thought about killing Lomax that night and found it curious that he didn’t feel any thrill when he had shot him in the head. Korn thought about his old man – Nicholas Korn. Korn Equity and Investments started trading in the sixties, and by the eighties his father had become obscenely rich. He was smart, and knew how to play the market, but the secret of his success was his ruthless streak. He was prepared to do what even the worst of the Wall Street wolves would not.

You can’t become a billionaire without hurting people. Not in the world of finance. And Nicholas had a lot of enemies. Korn remembered sitting in his father’s study, on Christmas Day, when he was sixteen and having his first glass of Scotch with the old man. His father had been in an unusually good mood that day. He hated Christmas, wouldn’t allow decorations in the house. The holiday season was never a joyous one in that home, not since Korn’s mother passed away when he was ten. So that evening was special. Korn remembered the fire in his throat from the liquor, the smell of his father’s cigar as he sat the young man down and told him why he was in such great spirits. It was little to do with the holidays.

His father’s greatest rival had been put out of business one month before. The man had crossed Korn senior and he had never forgotten it. Korn’s father had an opportunity to buy a company in which his rival had invested a huge portion of his wealth. A good company. Retail. Thriving in the booming early eighties. Korn senior bought up their suppliers, one by one, then cut off the retail chain. Its stock plummeted, and Korn bought the company, with a promise to rescue it. He closed the business down the next day. It had cost him close to a hundred million dollars, but that was money he could easily afford to lose.

The rival was destroyed. The rest of the rival’s investments suddenly didn’t look so good, and his fellow investors saw that the man had a Korn-shaped target on his back.

‘So where is this man now?’ asked Randal. ‘Plotting his revenge?’