Behind the Killer Smiles

摘要

Each night the man and the boy sat hunched over the same table, playing chess in Stuart's Coffee House in the seaside town of Bellingham, Wash. Sometimes they would play until midnight. The man, John Allen Muhammad, 41, did what little talking had to be done. The boy, 17-year-old Lee Malvo, listened. Whenever cafe employees intruded with small talk, he would glance to Muhammad, as if for permission, before answering. They drank only plain coffee, as the college students and patrons around them indulged in smoothies and tarts and poetry readings. And each game ended the same way: with Muhammad winning. Everywhere they went last summer, people assumed the pair were father and son. It was a myth that Muhammad would actively perpetuate over the next several months as the two made their way across the country. He would also tell people he was a music producer or a fitness-club owner. In reality, Muhammad had had trouble finding work of late. And he had lost custody of four of his children in a series of noxious legal battles. But together with his imagination, his Army-style duffel bag and his well-mannered "son," Muhammad had apparently cobbled together a world for himself―one that, for a time at least, obeyed his will. "I always thought of them in an endearing way," Peter David, one of the coffee-shop workers would later say. "How often do you see a teenage son with his father? There was such respect."