“Does it concern what we see on the table?”
“No.”
“Then don’t tell me about it.”
“Just saying, nothing surprises me here.”
“Not even this?” The Detective said pointing to Tammy’s mutilated corpse.
“Well, it’s a curveball, a sick fucking curveball. That’s for sure. Now, are you gonna let me tell you what happened last night or not?”
“Okay, spill.”
“Well…”
THREE
The night before
SEBASTIAN BELL looked at the spread on the table.
It didn’t look good.
Danny, his opponent, had one arm. Only one. The other he had lost in an industrial accident, the claim paid for his existence in the land of sin. A nice little disability, thank you very much. 7k a month. U.S. Dollar. Life taught him how to make do. Life taught him to accept what he had. Circumstance had thrown him to a city where women were cheap and easy. Life was great, he woke up in the afternoon, normally with a pair of brown thighs wrapped around his like an appendage, a pair of legs which would remove itself following the exchange of hard currency. Danny liked everything about the town.
The bright lights.
The dark city.
It was like coming home.
Who needed two arms when you quit choking the chicken the minute you stepped off the big bird? When you had those brown thighs, thousands of them, walking up and down the bars and in and out of your hotel room, yes, Danny had come home.
Danny had a shaved head and no neck to speak of. His face was large and strong like that of a formula one racer. He had tattoos and he had good cuing action for a man with one arm. Strange how the human body compensates for its losses, the blind gifted with excellent senses of smell, the wheelchair basketball player, the runner with prosthetic legs. Danny used his chin to steady a shot off the rail and followed up by spearing with his only arm. The cue ball sailed down the middle. The black ball sunk in the bottom left. The crowd cheered. Bell swore. The bargirl racked the next game. Sebastian remembered the away leg. It was flea-bitten six-foot bar box thrown inside a shit-hole beer bar on the dark-side of Fun City. Danny used his one arm to break the pack and he took the game and the one after that.
Sebastian was left for dust.
Slim Jim’s team were sitting in fourth to bottom place of the Fun City Monday night pool league. Sebastian looked at the spread on the table. It didn’t mean that much to him. Sebastian had a system. Always go for the pot. Tammy racked up the balls. He watched her graceful movements. He licked his lips, tenderising her in his mind. Her lips pouted as she lifted the triangle and positioned the balls, her bent legs were long and slender. She had a tattoo on her left ankle. Sebastian couldn’t understand the exotic script. She came from some backward village near the border of a neighbouring country. Spoke tribal, regional, and central dialects as well as the bar English. She was just like the rest, maybe worse. Played a few games of pool, hit a few clients, and went back and faked an orgasm. If he smelled like money, fake two. She knew about his mother and the house on the hill. Sebastian watched the one armed man clear up the table. Danny racked the cue and walked over to Sebastian, clapped him on the shoulder with his one hand. “Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said. “I’m sure you will have many more disappointments to come. Watch that bitch, Tammy. I hear she carries a blade. A fucking fruitcake by all accounts. Watch yourself with that one, son. Mark my words. She’s not right in the noodle.”
“Right,” Sebastian mumbled. He hated the jealous, cynical type. What did Danny know with his one arm?
Slim Jim’s team lost the race to seventeen games. Sebastian paid the bar, rang the bell, and bought Tammy a bottle of Heineken, and a glass of coke for himself. He had to be straight to enjoy it, alcohol blurred experience, gave him a headache the following day. With the headache often came feelings of guilt and remorse, negative emotions were a symptom of intoxication. Fun City with alcohol made a man paranoid and regretful; both the city and the bottle sapped away energy and ambition.
“Thank you,” Tammy said, raising the bottle towards his glass. “I haven’t seen you in many weeks. Where you going?” she sang the usual bargirl patter.
“I wait you,” Sebastian said. He had learned how to communicate with the bargirls after the first few months. Simplify tense to present, erase all adverbs, ditto articles. Speak back to front. Use your hands. Smile. Never frown. The language of the bars wasn’t a difficult language to get to grips with. It was neither English nor local, yet it was the bastard child of both. The real language was, of course, money. Money and sex. The ultimate transaction. What was commerce if it wasn’t people in places they didn’t want to be doing shit that they didn’t want to do.
“You want go with me, huh?” she said.
Sebastian felt the old excitement welling up. It was too easy most of the time. “Yes. You are beautiful.”
A motorbike ride, an apartment block, three flights of stairs. A door. Sebastian opened it to reveal an untidy room. Clothes were thrown across the floor and the bed was unmade. A computer on a desk, he walked over to it and Sebastian clicked the mouse. The screen flashed on and Tammy winced at the image. Sebastian smiled showing his pointed little eye teeth and scrolled through the portfolio. With each new picture, his smile widened a little more. His lips wet with excitement. Tammy watched, open mouthed, over his shoulder at the computer screen. Police crime scenes, suicides, balcony jumps, a woman being roasted on a spit above an open fire. Images worse even than the pictures published in the Fun City Express. She turned and sat on the bed, gripping a section of the duvet and squeezing it in the palm of her hand. She fought back the urge to cry, her fingers massaged the bridge of her nose. She opened her handbag, took out her mobile telephone and sent a message. She turned off the telephone as the thin man turned around to face her.
“Who are you calling?” he asked.
“Nobody.”
“I expect it’s your boyfriend or your pimp. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.”
She forced a smile as he stood up from the chair.
Why couldn’t somebody give her a decent customer? One who dressed in smart clothes, spoke politely. Somebody normal. Somebody who had a job. Had a good job. Any job. Direction. Dreams. The answer was simple. Men like that didn’t need to go with women like her. They didn’t need to go to Fun City. They went with women who had gone to university, who had bettered themselves and had gone to work in offices high up in the nation’s capital sky. Tammy had only the street to work with. And the scum that used it were just that. This was work. Fucking work. She insisted, as all the girls did, that he showered first. To get rid of the smell, the dirt, the disease, the him, the person, the Sebastian. The act of showering made it acceptable to have an old, fat, skinny, diseased, retarded, wrinkled, violent, suicidal, paranoid, sensitive, artistic, autistic, deranged, remote, cynical, unholy, sadistic, crazed, socially awkward, mother-hating body inside yours. She had had all types. All shapes and sizes. She kept things remote and business like.
The customer had to shower.
The shower gave her time to check the room for weapons, video devices, bankbooks, cash, credit cards, photographs of competitors. Yes, the act of showering was always a prerequisite. It was just fucking work. “You shower first, okay, I wait you here,” she watched him pull off his shirt. He was the skinniest man she had seen. Like one of the beggars that sat on Beach Road. Countable ribs. Pronounced anatomy. Skeletal. His chest sunken. He dropped his pants and she looked away. Then she watched him walk into the bathroom. She listened to the sound of water splashing on his insect-like body. She opened her bag. The knife and the pepper spray were inside. Also, a pack of three condoms, some mouthwash, a pack of cigarettes and her mobile telephone. A bottle of pills. She opened the bottle and took two. She took out the pack of three. She placed one condom under the pillow of the bed the other two she hid in her bag. She checked his cupboards, drawers, ba
gs. Her heart hammered inside her chest as she heard the bathroom door unlock.
“There you are,” he said, his eyes widening.
FOUR
FUN CITY EXPRESS
December 6th.
Early this morning, a female casual migrant worker was found dead atop of a pool table on the upper road. The bar, known locally as Slim’s, has been closed to allow forensic investigations and detective investigations to be led by B.I.B Chief Kult. The woman known locally as Tammy, has been identified as twenty-four year old, Tammy YU, her address registered in New Town province. The woman with no fixed employment record is reported to have been hustling in the red light zone. Police have reported this as an isolated incident and have confirmed that they are following leads that point towards the arrest of the prime suspect, a foreign man living locally and known to frequent the local nightlife zones. Onlookers surrounding the scene this morning were too shocked to comment with any coherence.
FIVE
TAYLOR looked older than his fifty-two years, and put this down to a cocktail of nervous exhaustion, a ten-year coke habit, and the five fiction manuscripts, half-started, half-hearted, half-hated, half-loved, and half-baked, slowly deteriorating in a drawer in the tropical heat that his fan cooled room did little to abate. Then there was the houseboat, another lifetime ago. A houseboat in a town in the Kentish countryside, the memories were cruel, kind, and comforting. He had a mane of curly brown hair, constantly matted with sweat, a pronounced roman nose and lips that would have been seductive if not for the tobacco stained yellowing teeth behind them.
Like most expats, Fun City had become his home by a conjuncture of circumstances that were both complex and commonplace. The dissatisfaction with the materialism of the western world, bored of the western rat race, a tragic loss, and seeking a new spiritual awareness he had unknowingly slid into the most material stretch of land on the face of the earth. A spiritually dead city with rattraps as far as the eye could see. Tragic loss was everywhere. Fun City was a rude peninsular that was mocked by the rest of the world as being the very thing it was: the most corrupt, vile metropolis in human history.
It was home.
At first, he had dreamed of the city, a special faraway land with twenty-four hour neon bars, strange reptiles, palm trees, exotic creatures, a city with millions of mirrors and smoke bellowing from dry-ice machines. A city of arcades, plazas, and dusty squares where cockfights were held before women who scratched out each other’s eyes in competition for foreigners. This dreamlike city where all women had fine teeth, rode motorcycles, played pool and cards for impossible stakes. Once Taylor had arrived, it was as if he had set foot in a dream, or a dream within a dream if that was how the fortune cookie crumbled.
The Express paid by the word. He wrote excellent book and restaurant reviews for publishers and restaurateurs who paid the newspaper, and unfavourable reviews for those that didn’t play ball. He wrote articles that were thinly disguised as advertisements for local businesses, he wrote the horoscopes, and covered the news. The editor, an overweight-right-wing-cigar-smoker, routinely used the paper to extort money from local businesses who he threatened to expose as illegal or unethical. Taylor’s talent for fiction was not wasted on the Express, although it was in a period of stasis. His true talent such as it was, was waiting to hatch out when the inspiration or the right publisher made the right sounds. The mutilations led him to believe that the killer would strike again. The editor had told Taylor to follow the story like a bloodhound on steroids.
The recent murder had pushed the envelope, widened the goal posts. He was glad of the chance to cover something of international interest, more killings were sure to follow the first. He had an idea about a connection with a serial killing in London. Like most armchair historians, his own past was a murky one, yet no matter how much he played over the loss of his son and wife, he could not turn it into something useful. It was his idea to buy the houseboat. Faith had fought over the decision, told him it was dangerous for Jimmy. However, she relented as she always did after the eighth gin and tonic. The coroner had told him she had been drinking heavily that morning; the morning she took Jimmy out in his pram. The morning she had drunkenly let go of the pram while lighting a cigarette. The morning she opened her eyes and watched the pram, along with the child, splash into the canal. The morning she had dived into the canal to try and save Jimmy, six months old, with the world ahead of him, the sunken infant took it with him. All of it. The day that they both died in the Tonbridge canal. He recalls much weeping. He started writing his novel again in a futile effort to rewrite history. It was the little reminders that hurt the most, the unpaid telephone bills, her books left around the houseboat, half-read, gathering dust. She had read his manuscripts and had made pencil notations, corrected grammar and spelling. She had urged him to move forward and write the two thousand words a day. He sold the houseboat, took what he could carry on a flight and gave the furniture, Jimmy’s crib, and the baby clothes to the local charity shop.
A new life.
The journalist’s name was Taylor, he was the only one left in his family with that name. His parents had died young; mother from cancer of the brain, father from the prostate. If he were to disappear suddenly, then nobody would care and nobody would be there to write about it in the newspaper.
He had once written a novel that had caused a stir. He had once been a practising psychiatrist, now he was getting older, his readers had moved on.
Now if he had a novel he could sell, a new book, which might just make it worth brushing his teeth, eating breakfast, and perhaps letting somebody new into his life. The money to return to the west and confront the ghosts that awaited him. The ghosts here were closing in, fast and hungry.
SIX
HALE LOOKED directly at the Detective and spoke. “He was the hooker’s last client. I was at his place the other night. You should see the state of it. Dirty clothes, old pizza boxes, beer cans. The boy needs to get himself a cleaner or a decent bird. He showed me some of the shit he looks at on his computer. You should see what he’s into, mate. Saw some real sick imagery on there, mate. Women sliced up. Dead bodies, thousands of dead bodies. Each one in a more gruesome condition than the bloody last.”
“Who is this guy?” Joe asked.
The bar was a corridor bar on the seventh road. It was mid-morning. The place smelled of bad perfume and pungent salad. Two middle-aged men sat nursing bottles of beer inside domes of vice and desire. Trying to replay the drunken night to see if any of it made sense in the morning. Topping up the alcohol levels, extending the Fun City dream, until it reached the edge and tipped over into a nightmare.
“Balcony jumpers,” Hale whispered gazing over at the pair. Joe knew the type. The Fun City skydivers club had seen hundreds of victims over the past couple of years. Their bodies spread out across the concrete like man-sized pizza. Suicides, the Boys in Brown said. The Boys in Brown were probably right some of the time. Fun City was not the place to run out of money with no ticket home. Especially if there was no home to go back to. Hale took a seat at the bar and ordered a bottle of beer. Joe sat and ordered a soda water. Hale said, “Listen. There’s a Sebastian Bell in every country. He’s a stick-insect, nourishes himself on sweets, lives offa chocolate bars and energy drinks. He has two cars and two apartments, his mother lives up in the hills.”
“Describe his face.”
“He has a face that only a mother could love. No doubt, he was sucking on the mummy’s milk until he was fifteen years old. I know I would ‘av if I were him. He’s never worked a day in his fecking life yet he knows everything about the bubble. Went to some private school in the city. And in his spare time, he enjoys slicing up hookers.”
“He’s educated?” The Detective asked.
“Bell? Educated? Perhaps? But in what? He rarely makes two racks in a fecking row. He can’t see past the next shot. Skinny as a wet whippet, massive hooter, like a beak, strange way of moving, like an insect. Funny thing is,
he doesn’t know it. The boy is fecking stupid. His mother has been coming here since ’88. He’s obviously the son of a fecking Boy’s Town rent boy. The local barflies don’t like him. Nobody does. We keep him on the team because he pays the bills and speaks fluent lingo.”
“The kind of person that everybody would like to see disappear?”
“Yeah.”
“The kind of kid who would be easy to fit up in a murder wrap?”
“I see where you’re going, Sherlock, but it won’t be that easy. He has a mother.”
“Most people do.”
“She came down once to watch him play.”
“He plays on your pool team? Why do you let someone like that on the team seeing as how you rate him?”
“Look, Joe. This Muppet is a fecking lemon, but he has money and to be frank, most of us don’t. When he walks in the door, it feels like somebody just left the room, but when he leaves the room, he has made a few people a little richer, financially. People like Slim, and the hookers.
“These people drift towards Fun City and get swallowed up by the vibe. You know what I’m saying? Detestable silver-spoon scum. They leave a trail of disgust and hatred like the way a snail, or a slug leaves a sticky silver trail of pus over the crazy paving in the morning. They also leave their trust-fund fortunes to the whores and the bar-owners who detest them. They pay for everything and take it back in abuse. Their parents pay them enough money to make it through the month. Never enough to cause too much trouble. Could Bell cut up a woman? Why not? My guess is he sliced the bitch from head to toe like the pictures on his computer. Joe, the kid’s a fecking sicko. And you know what?”
“What?”
“The Boys in Brown are looking into him.”
The White Flamingo Page 2
