Thirty-seven
Twisted Ropes
LOUIE KNEW NOTHING OF THE DEATH OF THE BIRD. WHEN the bodies were found on Mount Mitsumine, he was in Hollywood, falling to pieces. He was drinking heavily, slipping in and out of flashbacks, screaming and clawing through nightmares, lashing out in fury at random moments. Murdering the Bird had become his secret, fevered obsession, and he had given his life over to it. In a gym near his apartment, he spent hours slamming his hatred into a punching bag, preparing his body for the confrontation that he believed would save him. He walked around every day with murder in his head.
Throughout 1947 and 1948, Louie jumped headlong into scheme after scheme to raise the money to get back to Japan. When Cynthia’s brother Ric visited, he found Louie encircled by fawners and hangers-on, all trying to exploit him. One of them talked Louie into investing $7,000 in a plan to purchase and resell earthmoving equipment in the Philippines, promising to double his money. Louie signed the check, and that was the last he saw of either the investor or his money. He formed a Tahitian passenger-boat company in partnership, but creditors took the boat. A deal to found a movie production company in Egypt met a similar end. He even considered working as a mercenary bombardier in an attempted coup in a small Caribbean country, and was still thinking it over when the coup was called off. He and a partner made a verbal agreement with Mexican officials, giving them sole authority to issue fishing licenses to Americans. As his partner drove down to ink the deal, a truck hit him head-on, and the deal died with him. Each time Louie got some money together, it was lost in another failed venture, and his return to Japan had to be put off still longer.
Drinking granted him a space of time in which to let it all go. Slowly, inexorably, he’d gone from drinking because he wanted it to drinking because he needed it. In the daytime, he kept sober, but in the evenings, as the prospect of sleep and nightmares loomed, he was overcome by the need. His addiction was soon so consuming that when he and Cynthia went to Florida to visit her family, he insisted on bringing home so much liquor that he had to take out his Chevy’s back seat to fit it all in.
He had become someone he didn’t recognize. One night at a bar on Sunset Boulevard, he parked himself on a stool, drank all evening, and wound up stinking drunk. A man passed behind him, ushering his date past. Louie swung around, reached out, and groped the woman’s bottom. The next thing Louie knew, he was on his feet, outside, being half-carried by a friend. His jaw was thumping with pain, and his friend was chewing him out. He slowly came to understand that the woman’s boyfriend had knocked him unconscious.
On another night, he left Cynthia at home and went to a restaurant in Hollywood with two friends from his running days. Sometime in the early evening, after drinking what he would remember as only a single beer, he felt oddly light and excused himself to step outside. Then time broke into disconnected segments. He was in his car, driving, with no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there. He wove through the streets, disoriented, and came into a hilly neighborhood of mansions and broad lawns. His head spun round and round. He stopped the car and rolled out. There was a tree in front of him, and he relieved himself against it.
When he turned back for his car, he couldn’t find it. He stumbled along in a soupy darkness and mental fog, searching in vain for something familiar. He walked all night long, scared, lost, and vainly grasping at lucidity.
As sunrise lit up his surroundings, he realized that he was standing in front of his apartment building. Opening the door, he saw Cynthia, frantic with worry. He toppled into bed. When he woke up and dressed, he had no memory of the night before, and couldn’t understand why the heels of his new shoes were worn down. He went outside and looked around, but he couldn’t find his car, so he called the police and reported it stolen. Two days later, the police called to tell him that they’d found the car in a wealthy neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills. He went up to where they had found it, and memories of his night came back to him, carrying the ethereal quality of a nightmare.
Cynthia Zamperini. Frank Tinker
Cynthia pleaded with Louie to stop drinking. It did no good.
——
The further Louie fell, the less he could hide it. Ric Applewhite noticed that he was manically germophobic, washing his hands over and over again, and each time, scouring the faucet and handles on the sink. Some of Louie’s friends spoke to him about his drinking, but their words had no impact. When Payton Jordan saw Louie, he recognized that he was in trouble, but couldn’t get him to talk about it. Pete, too, was worried about Louie, but knew only of his financial woes. He had no idea that Louie had slid into alcoholism, or that he had hatched a wild scheme to kill a man.
Cynthia was distraught over what her husband had become. In public, his behavior was frightening and embarrassing. In private, he was often prickly and harsh with her. She did her best to soothe him, to no avail. Once, while Louie was out, she painted their dreary kitchen with elaborate illustrations of vines and animals, hoping to surprise him. He didn’t notice.
Wounded and worried, Cynthia couldn’t bring Louie back. Her pain became anger, and she and Louie had bitter fights. She slapped him and threw dishes at him; he grabbed her so forcefully that he left her bruised. Once he came home to find that she had run through a room, hurling everything breakable onto the floor. While Cynthia cooked dinner during a party on a friend’s docked yacht, Louie was so snide to her, right in front of their friends, that she walked off the boat. He chased her down and grabbed her by the neck. She slapped his face, and he let her go. She fled to his parents’ house, and he went home alone.
Cynthia eventually came back, and the two struggled on together. His money gone, Louie had to tap a friend for a $1,000 loan, staking his Chevy convertible as collateral. The money ran out, another investment foundered, the loan came due, and Louie had to turn over his keys.
When Louie was a small child, he had tripped and fallen on a flight of stairs while hurrying to school. He had gotten up, only to stumble and fall a second time, then a third. He had risen convinced that God himself was tripping him. Now the same thought dwelt in him. God, he believed, was toying with him. When he heard preaching on the radio, he angrily turned it off. He forbade Cynthia from going to church.
In the spring of 1948, Cynthia told Louie that she was pregnant. Louie was excited, but the prospect of more responsibility filled him with guilt and despair. In London that summer, Sweden’s Henry Eriksson won the Olympic gold medal in the 1,500 meters. In Hollywood, Louie drank ever harder.
No one could reach Louie, because he had never really come home. In prison camp, he’d been beaten into dehumanized obedience to a world order in which the Bird was absolute sovereign, and it was under this world order that he still lived. The Bird had taken his dignity and left him feeling humiliated, ashamed, and powerless, and Louie believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the grip of his hands. A once singularly hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder.
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.
——
One night in late 1948, Louie lay in bed with Cynthia beside him. He descended into a dream, and the Bird rose up over him. The belt unfurled, and Louie felt the buckle cracking into his head, pain like lightning over his temple. Around and around the belt whirled, lashing Louie’s skull. Louie raised his hands to the Bird’s throat, his hands clenching around it. Now Louie was on top of the Bird, and the two thrashed.
Louie, after the war. Frank Tinker
There was a scream, perhaps Louie’s, perhaps the Bird’s. Louie fought on, trying to crush the life out of the Bird. Then everything began to alter. Louie, on his knees with the Bird under him, looked down. The Bird’s shape shifted.
Louie was straddling Cynthia’s chest, his hands locked around her neck. Through her closing throat, she was screaming. Louie was strangling his pregnant wife.
He let go and leapt off Cynthia. She recoiled, gasping, crying out. He sat in the dark beside her, horrified, his nightclothes heavy with sweat. The sheets were twisted into ropes around him.
——
Little Cynthia Zamperini, nicknamed Cissy, was born two weeks after Christmas. Louie was so enraptured that he wouldn’t let anyone else hold her, and did all the diapering himself. But she couldn’t cleave him from alcoholism or his murderous obsession. In the sleepless stress of caring for a newborn, Louie and Cynthia fought constantly and furiously. When Cynthia’s mother came to help, she wept at the sight of the apartment. Louie drank without restraint.
One day Cynthia came home to find Louie gripping a squalling Cissy in his hands, shaking her. With a shriek, she pulled the baby away. Appalled at himself, Louie went on bender after bender. Cynthia had had enough. She called her father, and he sent her the money to go back to Miami Beach. She decided to file for divorce.
Cynthia packed her things, took the baby, and walked out. Louie was alone. All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Améry would write, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”
——
On the other side of the world, early one evening in the fading days of 1948, Shizuka Watanabe sat on the lower floor of a two-story restaurant in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Outside, the street was lively with shoppers and diners. Shizuka faced the door, watching the blur of faces drifting past.
It was there that she saw him. Just outside the door, gazing in at her amid the passersby, was her dead son.