Girls of Yellow

by Orest Stelmach

  A young woman in her late teens or early twenties with dark circles under her eyes told him to sit anywhere he liked and brought him a menu. She was pleasant and polite but sounded so weary that Ali had to strain to hear her. He ordered a mint lemonade and the girl told him someone would come by to take his order shortly.

  Ali looked around the restaurant. Take-out appeared to be the establishment’s primary business. Only one other person was eating at a table. Ali could hear the pensioner chewing three tables away. The confines were tight, too, suggesting the staff might have overheard diner conversations.

  Five minutes later, an older woman with a hunched back came by to take his order. She held a pencil and pad and had a maternal air about her. To Ali, that smelled like opportunity.

  “I want to try a curry,” Ali said, “but I’m not sure which one. I need a quick lesson.”

  “You want a lesson in curry?” she said. “That’s like saying you want a lesson in language. It’s all a matter of local custom and tradition. They make it different in the place they used to call Nepal than in Sri Lanka, and in the country that used to be known as India there are hundreds of kinds depending on where you are. Where do you want to go? Tell me where you want to be transported, and I’ll tell you what curry you should get.”

  Ali considered the question. “I want to be transported to a safe place.”

  “Why? Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  “I’m in trouble with my wife.”

  The hunchbacked woman’s eyes lit up. She tucked her pencil behind her ear. “What have you done?”

  “That’s the thing. I haven’t done anything.”

  “That’s what they all say. But what have you really done?”

  “Nothing. Really.”

  The hunchbacked woman shrugged. “Then maybe it’s your karma. Actions have consequences. People are accountable for what they do and punishments are inevitable.”

  “Here?” Ali said. “In this world?”

  “In our lifetime,” she said.

  “So if it’s my karma that my marriage fall apart, that would imply that …”

  “You brought mayhem and destruction to other relationships.”

  In the time it took him to blink, Ali was sixteen years old and back in the country formerly known as Turkey, struggling with his algebra homework. As was often the case, he wasn’t home alone even though his parents worked. They always seemed to have visitors. This particular bunch was the most vile of all. They were filthy, ignorant and rude thugs. They prayed, watched television and made fun of him all day. Their rucksacks lined the wall of whatever room they happened to be occupying, never out of their sights. The bags were reinforced with rebar hidden in the canvas and could have supported schoolbooks made of steel. Ali hated them almost as much as he wished he were one of them at the time.

  “Did you?” the hunchbacked woman said.

  “Did I what?” Ali said, still distracted by his memories.

  “Bring mayhem and destruction to other people’s relationships.”

  Ali pushed the image of the rucksacks further from his mind.

  “Of course I did,” he said. “I’m a cop.”

  Disdain flashed in the hunchbacked woman’s expression. She pulled her pencil from behind her ear. It shook in her hand as though she were dying to write his order and get away from him.

  “You wanted a lesson in curry? You got one. What can I get you, officer?”

  “Major,” he said.

  “What kind I get you, Major?”

  “Information.”

  The hunchbacked woman looked around furtively before glancing at Ali with disgust. “I’m just a waitress. I don’t know anything about anything.”

  “I’m looking for a man who either ate here or ordered take-out during the last two weeks. Possibly twice, or more.”

  “That narrows it down.”

  “I even have the dates.” Ali pulled out his own notepad and gave her the dates when the two girls had been killed.

  “How am I supposed to remember—”

  “He ordered a particular dish. I’m told it’s not that popular.”

  “I don’t remember him,” she said.

  “I haven’t even told you what the dish is.”

  “Trust me. After you tell me what it is, I still won’t remember him. Now, do you want some curry or not? I have other customers I need to take care of.”

  Ali looked around the joint. Other than the man slurping the soup and the people waiting for takeout, it was empty.

  “Listen,” Ali whispered. “How many times has a detective—and a major at that—come in here in plainclothes and told you he’s investigating the murder of a Christian girl and that he needs your help?”

  The hunchbacked woman frowned but didn’t say anything.

  Ali was certain she knew about Greta Gaspar’s death, as did everyone else in Dhimmi Town by now. She probably knew that another girl had been murdered before her, too.

  “Greta was fourteen years old,” Ali said. He nodded at the young woman at the counter who’d seated him. “Is that your daughter?”

  The hunchbacked woman glanced at the young woman at the register in a possessive way.

  “Look at me,” Ali said. “I’m not threatening you and I’m not trying to be clever. I don’t even know how to be clever. Some people would say that I’m not that smart. But I’m trying to do the right thing here. I’m trying to do my job.”

  The hunchbacked woman studied Ali. “Don’t sell yourself short. When you tell someone you don’t know how to be clever, you’re being clever.” She glanced at her daughter again. “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t have much detail there. He was of average height and weight, and probably wore a black robe that covered his head to keep his face concealed. He would have spoken perfect Arabic.”

  “Are you joking?” she said. “You just described half the men in this city. What did he order?”

  “Spicy curry made with peanut powder and mutton.”

  The hunchbacked woman narrowed her eyes. “You’re right. We don’t get too many orders for that here. They make it in Maharashtra, in Malegaon, a former Islamic stronghold in the Kingdom of Hindu.”

  “Do you remember serving it recently?”

  “No. And I sure would remember if I had. Let me ask the cook. He would have had to unfreeze some mutton. He’d remember, too.”

  The hunchbacked woman disappeared into the kitchen.

  A boy delivered a glass of lemonade to his table and Ali drank some of it. Being honest left him thirstier than lying.

  The woman returned less than a minute later with her daughter.

  “Tell him what you saw,” the hunchbacked woman.

  The young woman appeared more likely to spit in Ali’s eye.

  “Tell him,” the mother said.

  “I served a man spicy curry with peanut and mutton,” the young woman said. “Could have been on the same days you’re talking about. Sounds right, but I don’t really remember.”

  “Did you see his face?” Ali said.

  The girl shook her head. “No. That’s one of the reasons I remember him. His head was covered up and he kept his face down the entire time. But I saw her face.”

  “Her face?”

  The young woman nodded. “He was with a woman. She ordered Arabic chicken curry with noodle rice.”

  Ali opened his notebook. “And you saw her face?”

  “Well, sort of,” the young woman said. “She was wearing a niqab.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Old,” the young woman said. She glanced at her mother and nodded with conviction. “Not like my mother. Like, real old.”

  “Like a grandmother?” Ali said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” the young woman said.

  Ali guessed the hunchbacked woman was in her mid-forties. To a woman as young as her daughter, someone in her fifties was really old.

  “Did you get a look at her eyes?” he s
aid.

  “Yes.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Fat and old,” the young woman said.

  “Fat and old eyes. That’s a new one.”

  “She had folds of fat and wrinkles under her eyes. And I got a look at the list she was showing him.”

  “What list?” Ali said.

  “It was a list of girls. I remember because of the pictures and because of the heading at the top of the list. It said ‘Girls of Yellow.’”

  Ali wrote down the phrase in his notebook.

  “There were pictures of girls on the page,” the young woman said. “All the girls had numbers next to them. They all looked really young, like teens or something. I don’t know. I can’t tell those ages apart. But they were all girls of yellow.”

  “What do you mean, girls of yellow?”

  “They were all very beautiful. And they all had blond hair.”

  Ali jotted that down, too.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “I’m so grateful to both of you. Is there anything else about the woman—or the man—that you can remember?”

  “Just her garment bag,” the young woman said. “I remember it because it had the name of a school printed on it.”

  Ali wanted to cry with joy. “What was the name of this school?”

  “It was a dressmaking school,” the young woman said. “It was the Persian School of Dressmaking.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The hookah pulled Elise toward it like a living, breathing thing that targeted the weak, attached itself to their brains, and wouldn’t let go.

  The more she thought of it, the more she insisted that she wouldn’t succumb to its temptation and put her professional and personal missions at risk, the more she knew, deep down, that she was going there and going there now, with no further adieu. And as she navigated the streets and sidewalks on her bicycle, the anticipation of the high, the numbness, and the sweet relief that would soon be hers filled her veins with a rush unlike any other, so much so that by the time she’d arrived at the hookah bar she would have chewed through a window and swallowed the glass to gain access to her medication of choice.

  The place was to lounges as dive bars were to five-star hotel taverns, filled with vagrants, addicts, prostitutes, transients and any human being bent on personal destruction. Women and men entered through the same door, but once they paid they were escorted into separate facilities, mingling only in the lobby area. The room for women was an assortment of nooks and crannies where a person could sprawl on a dilapidated sofa retrieved from a junkyard and smoke and toke her way into oblivion.

  Elise paid for a large order of cannabis and four hours of refuge. She told the fearsome Arabian manager behind the iron bars at the front desk to be sure to roust her when her time was up. She was a fool for entering a place where she could be mugged, robbed of her fake ID, and assaulted, but she wasn’t a complete idiot. She was translating the Eurabian Minister’s speech regarding the Caliphate’s peaceful intentions at tomorrow morning’s session of the Intertheocratic Conference. The Cardinal—also the Foreign Minister of Christendom—would be depending on her to capture the meaning of all the inflections, pauses and nuances of the Eurabian Minister’s speech that comprised a true translation. Elise had no intention of letting him down.

  After the first half hour of smoking weed, Elise was able to calm down. Being a member of Christendom’s diplomatic corps and one of its finest translators only helped with her clandestine responsibilities as a spy. In addition to the requisite language skills—her gaffe with Qattan notwithstanding—she also benefited from being a delegation fixture. No one at immigration at any of the kingdoms’ airports ever questioned the purpose of her visit when she crossed borders. No one had reason to suspect that she was actually a spy.

  It was her duties in this role that she focused on once her medication of choice soothed her nerves. She replayed her meeting with the man in the wheelchair and felt good about her mission. She had reported the details of the meeting to her superiors in the hotel and received the go-ahead. She would acquire the diamonds at the hotel tomorrow afternoon and consummate the deal with the man in the wheelchair at the agreed-upon time.

  After her second half hour at the hookah bar, Elise drifted to that glorious border of unconsciousness. Wasn’t it great to be alive? she thought.

  Two hours later, upon waking up from a brief nap, she wished she were dead. Proof of God? She laughed at the thought. If ever there were a waste of money, this would be it—paying for proof of something that didn’t exist.

  How could there be proof of God when there obviously was no such entity? What kind of God would allow a soulless woman to sit and watch her own sister be given away to a life of slavery and do nothing about it? For she, Elise De Jong, was the living embodiment of callous disregard for all that truly mattered in life—one’s family. She hadn’t wanted to compromise her life to take care of a sibling, hadn’t wanted the financial burden, or the daily toil. It was so hard to function in this world. It was such a challenge to maintain the will to survive. She simply hadn’t had it in her. How pathetic, Elise thought.

  If God existed, he wouldn’t have wasted his time creating such a miserable bitch as herself in the first place.

  Elise rolled around the couch and flitted in and out of sleep for another hour, finally rising when her time was up. She gathered her things, vowing never to return and suffer through such misery again.

  As she left the room, a barn-like door slid open in the wall that separated the sexes, and Elise caught a glimpse of several men. Among them was a man holed up in a private alcove. He looked fitter than all the others, in a button-downed shirt and charcoal dress pants accompanied by black combat boots. When his eyes met Elise’s they appeared to be glowing, and as she left the building Elise wondered what such an interesting-looking man was doing in such a shithole.

  CHAPTER 15

  That evening after dinner, Ali accessed Eurabian business records via the Eurabian police database through his home computer and identified the owners of the Persian School of Dressmaking. Their names were Mona and Daniel Rahbar, ages fifty-seven and sixty-nine, of Budapest, Eurabia. They also owned a retail store called Reza Couture. Both businesses shared a space in Pest’s commercial center.

  Ali slept fitfully that night, shots of adrenaline waking him up intermittently, encouraging him to glance at his clock to see if the work day was upon him yet. When morning finally came, he left an hour earlier than usual and stopped at a Eurabian diner on the way to the station. It featured a traditional Arabic breakfast buffet, a massive table filled with small platters of delicious goodness. Ali always woke up famished after a night of indulgence at the hookah bar and this morning was no different. He dunked warm pita bread in fava bean and eggplant dips and scooped dollops of hummus, too. He chased them with warm sweet tea and even enjoyed a serving of Kanafah, a breakfast dessert that consisted of cheese pastry soaked in syrup. It too, dated back to the Ottoman Empire.

  Ali ate and drank with unusual gusto and enthusiasm. Ismael had left him a text message in the middle of the night to meet him in the bowels of the station before the day shift began. That meant he’d discovered something pertinent to the murders via Arabiapol.

  Ali found Ismael waiting for him in the station’s sub-basement beside boxes of old police uniforms that had been worn before the most recent Muslim conquest of Budapest.

  “What do you call seven dead dhimmi girls?” Ismael said.

  Ali rolled his eyes. “You’re relentless. I’ll give you that.”

  Ismael, however, didn’t give him the smug look that always preceded his religious barbs. Instead, he drew a straight line with lips.

  “No, Sami,” he said. “What do you call seven dead dhimmi girls?”

  The words reverberated in Ali’s head. “You found seven more?”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  In fact, he wasn’t even thinking about it. Ali was to
o busy picturing the killer at work, strangling dhimmi girls all over Eurabia … and Ali had a beat on him. A woman had met him with some sort of list at the Curry House. And he knew where she worked.

  “What do you call seven dead dhimmi girls?” Ismael said.

  Ali focused on what his friend was saying and shook his head.

  “Not a good start,” Ismael said. “A bad ending. A bad ending for us, A. If the higher-ups wanted this case investigated, they would have been on it. But they don’t. They don’t want anyone to know there’s a killer out there but now we do and that means this shit is going to end bad for us, A. Real bad.”

  “What did you find out?” Ali said.

  “Seven dhimmi girls murdered in the last six months. And that excludes the two we have here. Copenhagen, Bruges, Nice, Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, and Bern.”

  “Nine murders.” Ali listened to his echo. “No two murders in the same city. Except Budapest.”

  “All cases closed almost immediately.”

  “Lack of evidence?”

  “Look who’s the detective.”

  “What do you know about the dead girls?” Ali said.

  “All between the ages of thirteen and sixteen—”

  “Eyeballs intact,” Ali said. “And all of them had blond hair.”

  “How did you know about the hair?”

  “Were all the bodies found in Christian churches?”

  “No,” Ismael said. “Two of them were brought to the Salvation Army. Which I looked up. It was originally known as the East London Christian Mission.”

  “Nice. Anyone see the killer? Any money left for the priest?”

  “I didn’t reach out to anyone local. I didn’t dig that deep. I just ran it through the computer to start. I figured that if I start asking questions about cases that closed really fast before any real investigation took place … ”

  At first, the magnitude of Ismael’s fear surprised Ali. They’d formed a bond because they were both crusty cynics who knew their place in a system that rewarded loyalty and those that shielded their superiors from accountability. But then Ali understood his friend’s attitude all too well. Ali was the one experiencing an epiphany. He was the one pursuing the dhimmi girl’s killer.