Damage Time

by Colin Harvey

  "I've got to go," Leslyn said. Shah stared. That wasn't formula. Before he could ask what was wrong, Leslyn said, "Your girlfriend was on the newsfeeds today. I assume she was your girlfriend. Unknown blonde fished from harbor still unnamed. No mention of you, and I didn't get a very good look at her when you smuggled her in, in the small hours of Saturday."

  "I'll bring her into the bedroom next time and introduce her." As soon as he said it, Shah knew he should just have let it ride. "Sorry."

  "I wouldn't have thought she was your type at all," Leslyn said, the acid in her voice shriveling Shah's testicles.

  "I'll try to be quieter in future."

  "Actually, although you were being sarcastic, introducing us wouldn't have been such a bad idea." Leslyn stalked inside.

  It was one of their nights together tonight, but somehow Shah didn't think Leslyn would be in the mood. She rarely is nowadays. They had always had an open relationship, and as the years passed, open had become a yawning chasm.

  "I'll be back after midnight," Leslyn said in something nearer to her normal tone, giving them both a peck on the forehead as she passed each in turn. "Don't wait up."

  "OK," Doug said.

  "See you later," Shah added, and flashed her a wan smile.

  Leslyn gave him an equally washed-out one in return. "I changed the beds today," she said. It was a peace offering, by her standards.

  "Thank you." Shah had given up saying, "You didn't need to do that," or "I was going to do that tonight." Leslyn worked to her own timetable.

  When she had left, the men sat in silence for several minutes.

  Doug said, "Bad day?"

  "They're all bad days at the moment Doug. I get these sideways looks from people at the precinct. They're obviously wondering how true the allegations were. Not everyone, but enough of them to make me wonder what I'm doing there."

  "You want a beer? Alcohol free…"

  "Yeah, go on, then." Shah sighed. "I dunno, Doug. Things'll get better tomorrow. It has to get better tomorrow, doesn't it?"

  Doug returned with two bottles, Shah's non-alcoholic, Doug's whatever locally brewed muck he was currently drinking.

  "What the hell was that all about?" Shah wondered aloud, then took a swig. "Leslyn's never been jealous before. She knows they're strictly temp."

  "Ever bring home a six-foot supermodel less than half her age before?"

  Shah barked a laugh. "Haven't heard that word in years. That's all it's about?" It was unusual for Doug and him to talk about Leslyn. Usually it was him and Les discussing Doug, and he guessed Doug and Les did the same – she acted as messenger for them, bringing them to some sort of consensus when their aging pride wouldn't allow them to talk to each other. Shah had heard that some trinaries and quads had all the partners in bed together, but he and Doug were too old, too hetero and too zipped-up for that.

  "Is that all it is?" Shah said, belatedly realizing that he'd interrupted Doug in full flow. Oops. "Is it just that Aurora's so much better looking than any of the previous ones?"

  "All?" Doug spluttered. "Is that all?"

  "Les has never been the jealous type before, and she was the one who opened that Pandora's Box."

  "What? So you're getting her back for wanting more than just you? Shah, you are such a jackass. You left her on her own for days, weeks at a time, and instead of dumping you, she tries to compromise by opening out the relationship. So you decide to punish her?"

  "That wasn't what I meant! Dammit, Doug, stop twisting everything! She never discussed opening it out beforehand!"

  Doug didn't answer but went inside for another beer, and in disgust, Shah stomped out.

  Shah had always found that walking eased his frustrations, like opening a safety valve on a pressure cooker. His walk downtown took him past the mosque near the Meatpacking District. On an impulse he stepped inside, into coolness and shade, and away from the stink of ruptured sewers tainting the air outside. Dozens of male heads were bowed in the Asr, pre-dusk prayer and the Imam's voice called out the Azan, the call to prayer for the sluggards.

  Afterwards Shah hung around, still troubled by his need to talk about Aurora to someone who might understand what was bothering him.

  The Imam who approached Shah with a "Good evening" was younger than Shah's son Rex, but had the dignity of a man fully aware of his responsibility. Shah was surprised to see that he was almost clean-shaven. "Beards out of fashion this season?"

  The Imam smiled slightly. "I find it uncomfortable – itching constantly. You are a stranger, but your accent is local."

  "I– I guess, I'm sort of lapsed."

  "We are of course pleased to see you. Have you come for a reason?"

  "I guess, I'm–" Shah stopped. "I'll try again," he said. "I need to talk to someone who'll understand me." Slowly, hesitantly, then with greater fluency as he got into his story, Shah told the Imam about the events of Friday night and Saturday morning.

  "So why have you come?" The Imam said. "For Tawbah?"

  "Repentance?" Shah guessed, dredging his memories of the Qur'an.

  "Not exactly. It refers to the act of leaving what God has prohibited and returning to what He has commanded. In this case, a return to rightful sex – within marriage, perhaps – from this sort of experience?"

  "This sort of experience? So she's what… an abomination?"

  "Not at all," the Imam said with a chuckle. "I meant casual sex, rather than her gender. Hard to believe perhaps, but there are Islamic laws for intersexuals."

  Shah lifted an eyebrow.

  The Imam continued, "Intersexuals are called khuntsa in Islam, and have their own rituals and rules which are completely different from those applying to women and the ikhwan applying to men."

  "Hang on," Shah said. "You're saying that there are three genders in Islam?"

  "Effectively," the Imam said with a smile. "Khuntsa, akhwat, and ikhwan – Intersexual, female, and male. Khuntsa are allowed to marry either men or women. They're allowed to live as women or men, but we suggest that they wear clothes that are 'in-between'. During prayers, a khuntsa prays between the males and the females. A khuntsa has most of the obligations of males and most of the obligations of women – and all of the rights of both."

  "Holy crap," Shah breathed. He added hurriedly, "Sorry, sorry."

  The Imam raised a don't worry hand. "The Prophet Muhammad created the khuntsa concept because in his life an intersexual – perhaps even a true hermaphrodite – lived in a nearby village. Shee-hee wished to join Islam, but was confused over the rules. The Prophet then told hir all the rules Shee-hee needed to be a good Muslim intersexual."

  Shah exhaled.

  The Imam nodded a few times. "There were many transsexuals in Malaysia at one time," he said. "We have had to learn to address the question without alienating our people." He caught Shah's look of surprise and smiled. "Food for thought?"

  "Absolutely," Shah said. "I still couldn't ever… you know, with hir or whatever the term is… but I feel bad for treating her so rough. I thought I'd get fire and rage from you over the whole situation."

  "Only for the disrespectful way you treated your partner," the Imam said. Now Shah looked at him, he did look Malaysian or from some other part of South East Asia. Probably a refugee from the Pan-Islamic purges, or the Asian Wars or something. Shah made himself concentrate. "Islam wasn't always such a repressive, patriarchal religion," the Imam said. "It's been hijacked, as have so many things, by intellectual thugs."

  "Unfortunate choice of phrase," Shah said. "But thank you… Pedar." It still seemed odd calling a man younger than Rex, "Father", but Shah guessed he was out of practice at dealing with clerics.

  "May the peace of Allah be with you at all times," the Imam said with a smile, as if reading Shah's mind.

  XIII

  Thursday

  "Come on." Shah pushed back his chair. "Let's go kick some doors in, roust some perps, shake down the bad guys."

  Marietetski stared at him. "You be
en drinking too much coffee? Or just stir crazy?"

  "Cabin fever. Two more pointless days of looking at downloads, and I have had enough. My ass is spreading like lava down a mountainside."

  "Before we go," Marietetski held up a hand. "Look at this."

  Shah ambled around the desk, narrowly missing dislodging a small hill of prints.

  Marietetski said, "I've found this on a random trawl. It's a rip."

  'It' featured fists pounding into a young woman's face on Marietetski's screen. Shah felt his stomach lurch. For a moment he'd thought that the woman was her, but though the face was bruised – and even more bruised as by the time the fist thudded into her face for the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time – it wasn't Aurora.

  "Cap," Marietetski said into his piece, "I'm sending you a clip. I reckon it's the dead girl. You can see that the hand clearly isn't Shah's. It looks… I hesitate to say Indian, but it sure isn't Caucasian – say Asian or mulatto. Yeah, Shah's going to be watching this a lot today." He grinned as he cut the connection. "Cap says to take the damn thing apart."

  Shah did:

  It was dark in the clip, but Shah got a sense of space. A warehouse? he thought. The woman had done something wrong, but either she wasn't thinking about it, or she genuinely didn't know, or most likely that part had been cut out. Now someone was on top of her, in her, hurting her. As she always did when she was working, she blanked her mind – think of nothing, or – then the clipped memory jumped to the fist smashing into her mouth, the sudden taste of blood, the adrenaline spike of fear, but she couldn't move, although she tried to wriggle out from underneath him. The memory jumped again, and she was crying and begging for mercy from lips already swelling with bruising. Her sobbing almost – but not quite – drowned out her assailant's ragged breathing. Jump. "–w," another voice said, higher pitched than the first, before everything went dark for the last time.

  Shah frowned. He played it again, reaching the point at which Marietetski had shown him the clip; one hand holding her head in place while the other fist landed blow after slow metronomic blow, gradually speeding up into what ended as a frenzy of fists, the whiff of cologne or something on them. Ragged breathing almost matching hers as it degenerated into sobs. Fists slowing then stopping, and as the sense of the world faded with oncoming unconsciousness, the sting of someone clipping a probe to the victim's scalp, and simultaneously hands wrapping around her windpipe. The girl was too beaten down to struggle for more than a moment – even as her fingers dug into her killer's gloved hands, the world slipped away…

  Shah broke the connection. "I can't get into the sense of this like I could with an un-chopped memory. The discontinuity keeps throwing me out."

  "What did you get?"

  "There were two of them at least. Normally memories from immediately pre-death involve a fractional gap as the killer pauses to fit the probe before delivering the kill. This time they were simultaneous."

  "Not even an almost imperceptible gap? Some of these guys are very practiced. The gap can be tiny."

  "No, nor was anything chopped to reduce the gap. The two happened together. I'm going back under." Shah ran it again, this time concentrating on smells; the cologne, or whatever it was. Stale dust. A metallic smell. Water. Shah stopped it, and thought. He re-started it. River water, that's the smell – mud. A heavy tang, of metal. Storage drums? Or something industrial?

  Shah ran and reran the memory, each time concentrating on a different sense; any taste was all but obliterated by blood, and the fear that blotted out almost everything else. It was hard to get past the forebrain and the terror, knowing that she was in trouble, and that she was going to die. But below the limits of conscious thought and what the killers had obliterated, there were a few sensory clues. Occasional faint voices, of people passing nearby. The feel of rough clothing against her skin. The bulk of the man, pressing down on her, his cock inside her, the taste of his salt sweat where her lips inadvertently brushed his skin.

  "They've cut it about pretty badly," Shah said when he finally conceded he could wring no more meaning from the clip. "But we got a few pointers." He blinked widely, trying to refocus on the here-and-now, the taste of water suddenly unfamiliar in his mouth. Deep probing always made the real world strange on re-emergence. He outlined what little he'd gleaned from the memory, allowing a pause between each point to allow Marietetski to recite it loudly and clearly into the vocal function of his eyepiece and from there into an official note to be circulated to all precincts.

  "While you were under," Marietetski said when they had finished, "a call for you was routed through to me: the FBI. An unrelated investigation has turned up something. An NYPD data code tester who admitted to falsifying information. She had access to all the files, including those concerning the dead girl."

  "Yes!" Shah hissed, feeling the exultation of the hunt for the first time in a long while.

  "She was working the morning that body was found, and while she's erased a lot of her traces there's enough to show a correlation." Marietetski paused. "Trouble is, she was killed in a prison riot before she could be turned."

  Shah groaned. "Coincidence?"

  "Maybe – maybe not. It's a start, anyway. More to the point, it's looking like it may be more appropriate to pass it over to Organized Crime Division."

  That's supposed to make me feel better? Shah thought. Marietetski was always doing this, taking the aloof, disinterested view, what was right for the good of the whole NYPD and the Justice system, rather than thinking about actually solving the case that they'd spent days or weeks on. Shah knew his colleague's game. Marietetski was more interested in furthering his damn career by being viewed as a 'team' player, one who could suborn his personal ambition to the lofty ideals of the whole system, whereas what he was really doing was using those ideals in an apparently disinterested way.

  "That's good," Shah said, but Marietetski seemed to miss the sarcasm.

  It took the shine off of what could have been a very good day, so Shah finished early. He strolled across to the Bellwether Institute and gave his name to the same receptionist who had been on before. "The last day of my shift pattern," the man said in response to Shah's pleasantries. "I get a couple of days off then I go on onto a block of nights." He pulled a face to show what he thought of nights. His eyepiece chimed. "He'll be down in five minutes."

  It was more like ten, and when Tosada did appear, he had company.

  "Officer Shah," Kotian said. "What a surprise!"

  "We have some surprising mutual acquaintances, Abhijit." Tosada's explanation to Kotian sounded more than a little defensive.

  Shah bared his teeth in what he hoped looked like a friendly grin.

  "You can never have too many acquaintances, Ero," Kotian replied. The slight lilt only enhanced the rich creaminess of his voice with its hint of upper-class Britishness – or so it seemed to Shah, who had never actually met a Brit.

  "Except when bad things happen to them," Shah said, provoked despite himself.

  "Officer Shah," Kotian waved a beringed finger, and as they stepped closer, Shah caught a waft of expensive aftershave, and he thought a hint of spices, cloves, cinnamon and garlic. "My lawyer is continuously having this conversation with you: I have a huge network of people, and these people don't just work for me – I am only one of many businessmen who subcontract. The days of tycoons behaving like European medieval lords have long passed us by. This is the Third Millennium, after all. Please do not make me call my lawyer again to protest harassment against your insinuations."

  "Apologies, Mr Kotian. I actually came to see Professor Tosada. I can wait, though."

  "I am just going anyway," Kotian said. "Perhaps one day we can have a talk without us being some sort of adversaries. We have a common background, both coming from Asia. Isfahan and Bangalore are closer than New York and Seattle, after all." He was a few centimeters taller than Shah, but seemed to look down from a greater height than that. Shah had the impression his princely oppon
ent had got through life on looks and charm, especially as he grew older.

  "Maybe." Shah stepped away as Tosada and Kotian said their goodbyes.

  When Kotian had gone Tosada waggled a finger in reproach. "Please don't embarrass me like that again, Pervez."

  "Apologies, Erokij," Shah said. "I came to ask you a few questions, but if you feel that it's not possible…"

  "Absolutely not!" Tosada looked a little sheepish. "He admits that he sailed close to the wind, especially when he was younger, but now he wants to repay his debt to society for making him wealthy." Tosada hesitated. "He's one of several wealthy people I've approached to keep funding going, ever since our government indicated they intended to prioritize other works. He's agreed to underwrite the research, in return for receiving any benefits."

  In other words, he wants to go legit, Shah thought but said nothing.