Girls of Yellow

by Orest Stelmach

  The sound of perfect Arabic words coming from her sister’s mouth stunned Elise. She had expected Valerie to speak Arabic, of course, but a human being dreamed in her native language. In Elise’s dreams, she and Valerie spoke English. This was the first moment where Elise’s dreams had merged with reality. And in reality, they were going to speak Arabic.

  “What makes you think I’m the morality police?” Elise said.

  “I heard you introduced that way. In the classroom.”

  Elise folded her arms over chest. “That’s right. I’m an officer with the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue.”

  Valerie’s voice cracked. “And Prevention of Vice.”

  “Oh, yes,” Elise said, in a tone that implied the cigarette thief was in big trouble. “Most definitely. What’s your name?”

  “My name … is Safa.”

  “Safa,” Elise said. “I’m going to remember that. My name is Miss Kawlah.”

  Valerie swallowed hard. “Are you … are you going to arrest me?”

  She sounded mortified, which pleased Elise. So did her sister’s gumption, however misguided.

  “That depends,” Elise said.

  “On what?”

  Elise nodded at the tea can. “Is there another one of those in there for me?”

  Valerie’s jaw dropped. She thrust her hand into the tin and almost knocked it over to pull out another smoke. She offered the cigarette to Elise, fingers shaking, eyes wide open.

  Elise stepped forward. She made sure not to touch Valerie’s fingers to avoid creeping her out, though she desperately wanted to do so. Instead Elise, snatched the cigarette, sniffed it, and let it hang between the second and third fingers of her right hand. All the while, she never took her eyes off Valerie’s.

  “Do you do this every day?” Elise said.

  Valerie pursed her lips.

  “See you tomorrow then. Same time. Be here or you’re in trouble. Now scram,” Elise said, nodding toward the window.

  Valerie hesitated for a second. Then she pocketed her cig and vaulted out the window all too gracefully, leaving no doubt that this was not the first smoke she’d pilfered.

  Elise sealed the tin can and placed it back in the cupboard among the other teas. She hid the cigarette Valerie had given her in a pocket and took a seat beside the water cooler to wait for Miss Mona.

  In another time and another place, if she’d had a lighter, she would have been smoking already, savoring the rush from the nicotine and the memory of what had just transpired.

  CHAPTER 11

  No man-made structure inspired Ali quite like Budapest’s Chain Bridge. Its roadbed hung suspended over the Danube from iron chains connected to two stone pillars. At night the pillars were illuminated green and the gigantic steel bolts that secured the roadbed to the river pier glowed black beside them. When it was created in 1849, the bridge was considered one of the engineering marvels of the world and a source of great pride, not only within Hungary, but in all of Europe as well. It was the first permanent bridge to connect Buda to Pest, and as such, it symbolized a desire for closer relations between Eastern and Western Europe. Now it served as a metaphorical link between old Europe and the new Ottoman Empire.

  When his car turned left onto the entrance to the bridge, Ali forced himself to look past the abutment. Lion-head capstones with the coat of arms of the country formerly known as Hungary had once greeted drivers and pedestrians. In his infinite desire to wipe out all traces of anything but Islam, the Caliph had ordered the capstones destroyed. In their places, the abutments on both sides of the bridge now featured slabs of granite painted red with the white star and crescent symbol of many of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire. The star and crescent also had become symbols of Islamism in the late twentieth century. Ali didn’t understand why Caliphs felt compelled to destroy beautiful and historic things just because they’d been built by other people.

  Ali parked his car beside a cruiser that belonged to the cop who was providing protection for the construction crew on the bridge. The bored veteran recognized Ali, saluted wearily, and nodded at the compact mobile home that served as construction headquarters.

  “Heads up,” he said. “The supervisor’s a real bastard.”

  “Why’s that?” Ali said.

  “He’s the Caliph’s nephew, or cousin, or some such shit.”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “What,” the veteran said, “a real bastard?”

  Ali pointed at his colleague with appreciation as he walked away. There was a man who understood Eurabia, which is why they had him guarding a mobile home.

  When he got to the door, Ali decided to announce himself in a manner that would resonate with an entitled man. He burst inside without knocking.

  The supervisor, with no more than five whiskers that needed shaving, glared at Ali. “Who are you?” he said. “And why didn’t you knock?”

  “You have a man named Peter Noel working on the Bridge today?” Ali said.

  According to Florence, the priest’s name was Petra Noel but she lived incognito as a man to generate a second income and help her family pay the dhimmi tax and survive in Budapest.

  “I have four men working on the bridge,” the supervisor said. “And you didn’t answer my question. Who are you and why didn’t you knock? Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”

  Ali flashed his ID. “I’m here investigating a major crime. Would you please tell Peter Noel to come down from the Bridge so that I can talk to him?”

  “No,” the supervisor said. “Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s still welding repairs to the iron saddles. That was supposed to be done over an hour ago. It would take ten minutes to get him down, another ten to get him up, plus whatever time it takes for you to question him. I can’t fall behind schedule. It’s out of the question.”

  “It’ll only take me five minutes,” Ali said.

  “No, it won’t. Even if you only speak to him for a second, the whole thing will take more than twenty minutes because we have to get him down and back up again.” The supervisor measured Ali. “You’re not too smart, are you?”

  Ali had at least fifteen years on the kid but the punk couldn’t have cared less. The cop providing protection outside hadn’t been joking. The kid really was a bastard.

  Ali laughed as he always did when they made fun of him at the station. “Nope. I’m not. They say my brain is in my fist.” He raised his right hand and curled his massive fingers. “How about if my brain meets your brain so they can get to know each other better?”

  The supervisor blanched.

  “Look, I get it,” Ali said. “You have a deadline. You’re the man. It’s all on you. You have a reputation for getting stuff done which is why you were given all this responsibility at such a young age.”

  The supervisor shrugged.

  “But do you really want me to call the General and tell him you refused to cooperate on a matter of national security? Then what? Maybe you make your call and we see who’s yanking on the bigger chain. If it’s me, maybe my father-in-law will have mercy on you and not have you banished to Transylvania.”

  It was the moment of truth. If the supervisor was really connected to the Caliph, Ali might have made a catastrophic mistake. That’s all it took in Eurabia. One wrong word from the wrong man.

  “I’ll compromise with you,” the supervisor said. “I can’t afford the time to bring him down, but I can send you up to talk to him.”

  Ali glanced at the scaffolding, his palms instantly sweaty, and then looked up at the top of the bridge. The men were so high up he couldn’t see them.

  “This is my best and final,” the supervisor said. “Otherwise we reach for our phones, and may the man with the most pull win.”

  Evidently the little bastard was connected, Ali thought. Ali couldn’t admit to his fear of heights because it would have been seen as a weakness and caused him great shame. His only choices were to f
ace his fear or wait to speak to the priestess once she descended. But Ali couldn’t afford the delay. The longer he waited the greater the opportunity for the killer to cover his tracks, create an alibi or disappear. That’s why the first twenty-four hours were so critical to any murder investigation. At least that’s what real murder police who closed cases and actually found the killers had told him.

  Ali climbed on the scaffolding before he could convince himself to do otherwise and watched as the supervisor started the engine that would lift him up.

  “Have a safe ride, Major,” the supervisor said.

  Ali hated all venues that exposed him to great heights—helicopters, planes, seven-foot ladders, even hills masquerading as mountains. Once, during police training, he’d run ten kilometers up Jabal Ram mountain in Jordan with his fellow cadets. When they arrived at the summit, their instructor told them to gather at the mountain ridge to see the valley below. Ali tried to hide behind some of the men but the instructor insisted they form a line along a strip of land barely wide enough for their feet. While the instructor compared the ground upon which they were standing to their integrity as future police officers—one false move led to a slippery slope and swift decline—Ali did all that he could to forestall a full-blown panic attack.

  He kept his eyes level as he rode the scaffolding and focused on his breathing. The next five minutes seemed like twenty until the roadbed finally came into view directly before him, and for a moment the pounding in his heart subsided. But his relief was short lived because the scaffolding never stopped—he was only halfway to his destination. By the time the other two scaffoldings appeared overhead to the right, Ali was sweating profusely. He measured each breath to make sure the length of his exhalations matched those of his inhalations.

  As his scaffolding continued to rise to the height of the other two, eight pairs of legs came into view. Three of the sets of legs were lined up in a row facing the fourth pair, as though the leader was issuing instructions. Ali stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck just enough to see that all four men had removed their hard hats, and the leader wasn’t conducting a meeting. She was making the sign of a cross with her right hand before slipping a wafer into the open mouth before her. Then all four workers put their helmets back on and hurried back to work, three of them stepping over a railing and moving on to a parallel scaffolding.

  Making the sign of the cross in public was enough to get a person’s hand cut off. Practicing a Christian service in public, especially one that involved the priest sharing the so-called Holy Sacrament with others, would surely result in the death penalty for all those involved.

  This brazen breach of Sharia law distracted Ali from his anxious state. Images of shackling the priestess flitted in and out of his mind as the scaffolding came to a halt parallel to the other two. He would arrest the priestess after he extracted the information he needed, and call for back-up to take down her followers. The balls on this Christian, Ali thought, to disregard the law of her land. And it was her land because she paid the dhimmi tax and refused to leave it.

  When the priestess laid eyes on Ali she did a double-take, no doubt shocked to see a man other than the supervisor approaching. Then she lifted her long legs and straddled the two scaffoldings to climb from hers to his.

  A tremendous gust of wind blew Ali’s scaffolding backward, away from the bridge. He took his eyes off the priestess and looked forward, grasping the handrail even tighter. The scaffolding swung back and crashed into the bridge before another gust of wind sent it flying even higher in reverse. The sequence repeated itself two more times, and by the fourth swing backward Ali could sense the fear in his belly, the clamps closing down on his lungs. He commanded himself not to panic, told himself that he refused to lose his composure, and as was inevitably the case when he desperately wished for something, the exact opposite occurred.

  His breaths shortened. He envisioned himself fainting on the scaffolding and requiring assistance, the emergency medical technicians later recalling the incident to Zaman and a bunch of other cops, all of them laughing so hard they spit coffee and bits of baklava from their mouths. When black splotches began to mar his vision, Ali knew he was going down and that it was just a matter of time before he fainted.

  And as the scaffolding swung wildly back and forth, he did what he detested more than anything, which was look for help from another human being. In this case there was only one person nearby, and she was moving toward him as though she were standing on flat land, strangely unaffected by the seesawing planks beneath her feet …

  • • •

  The next thing Ali knew he was gazing at patches of white clouds rolling through a clear blue sky with the sun peaking out from behind them. He didn’t understand how he could be gazing upward if he was standing on his feet, until he realized that he wasn’t standing at all. He was lying down.

  A hand touched his shoulder.

  An androgynous face crisscrossed with premature age lines and sun damage peered down at him.

  The priestess, Ali remembered. The priest was a woman because no man wanted the job.

  “Are you all right?” she said, with a strange sense of joy that didn’t reflect the circumstances.

  Ali tried to scramble to his feet but his head swirled. The best he could do was sit up. His face burned from the humiliation of remaining in a subordinate physical position to a dhimmi. And not just a dhimmi. A dhimmi woman.

  “Some water will help,” the priestess said. A thermos materialized out of nowhere. “Here,” she said, extending a long arm toward Ali’s mouth. “Drink from my cup.”

  Ali turned away, disgusted by the thought of a cup that had touched the dhimmi’s lips.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been fasting. My lips haven’t touched my thermos all day. It’s the same one that I wash thoroughly every night with fine Eurabian water. Straight from the tap.”

  Ali drank from the thermos and then managed to stand up. His ego soothed by having done so without a dhimmi woman’s help, he recalled his agenda.

  “I know who you are,” Ali said. “I knew even before I saw you giving your Holy Sacrament to the others.”

  The priestess hesitated but the joy never left her face. “There’s no one but the faithful up here,” she said.

  “We don’t share the same faith.”

  “Actually, we do. It’s what binds us together more than any other couple in Eurabia.”

  Ali glared at her. “And what exactly is that?”

  “Faith in scaffolding,” the priestess said.

  Ali chuckled. He hadn’t been expecting humor, only sanctimonious Christian bullshit.

  “I need your help,” he said. “I’m investigating the murder of Greta Gaspar.”

  The priestess considered his statement before answering. “If you came all the way up here with your …” She appeared on the verge of mentioning Ali’s fear of heights but then found a way to help him save face. “… questions, then you must be serious.”

  “The dhimmi witness said the killer handed him a tin to give to you,” Ali said. “He said the tin contained money.”

  “For a funeral service.”

  “I don’t care about the money. I’m interested in the man who gave you the money. How did he know your name?”

  “I don’t know,” the priestess said. “I asked myself that same question when he gave me a tin the first time.”

  “The first time? He gave you another tin?”

  The priestess nodded. “When the first girl was killed.”

  Ali grasped the handrail.

  The first girl.

  How could another girl have been killed earlier and he not know about it? He desperately wanted to ask the priestess everything she knew about the first girl but the humiliation of admitting he didn’t know what was happening in his own department stopped him.

  The priestess, however, saw right through him. She told him the girl’s name, Hanna Kalmar, and the date her body was discovered, three weeks earlier.<
br />
  Ali dispensed with his pride without any further thought. He wanted all the information she had and to hell with everything else.

  “Do we … do the police know about the first tin?” he said.

  “If you … if the police knew about that tin, that would mean they know about me. If that was the case, would I be standing up here now?”

  The only question was whether she’d still be vertical at all, Ali thought.

  “And you saw the killer that first time?” Ali said. “Yourself?”

  “I saw him the way the caretaker saw him. Face and body covered, you couldn’t even see his eyes. He spoke in perfect Arabic, handed me the tin and left.”

  “He said the money was for a funeral service?”

  “He said it was for all my troubles. But I knew what he meant.”

  Ali tried to think of more questions to ask but none came to mind. His frustration almost boiled over. He wished he’d conducted a real investigation before. Twelve years on the force and he felt like a rookie.

  “Is there anything else you know that could help me?” he said,

  “It’s unusual for a Eurabian cop to care about a dead dhimmi girl. Why is this girl so important to you?”

  Ali opted for the truth in hopes it might encourage her to answer his question honestly. “She reminds me of someone I used to know.”

  “Someone from your childhood, no doubt,” the priestess said. “Someone who’s part of the trauma that’s left its mark on you forever.”

  “What mark?”

  The scaffolding swayed back and forth, and the priestess let his question slide to let him save face again. Instead of humiliating him by mentioning his panic attack, she merely smiled with compassion.

  “The man … the killer,” she said. “When he handed me the tin, he had a smell about him.”

  “A smell?” Ali said. He’d never heard a witness detect a smell, but then again, he hadn’t met many cooperative witnesses in Eurabia.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  “Curry,” the priestess said.

  “You’re kidding me.”