The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  “We’re trying, Mister Kannis, we’re—”

  The horse struck the man’s thigh a glancing blow, and he yelled in pain.

  Kannis shook his head. “Idiots. I’ve told them adrenaline makes the meat bitter.” Another hoot of pain from the floor made Kannis grimace. “Excuse me, Oscar.”

  Oscar watched Kannis jump the rail and stride into the melee. Kannis took the pistol from the man without a rope. The mare pulled harder, and her hooves scraped against concrete wet with her own reeking urine.

  “Mister Kannis, watch out!”

  The mare twisted her head, pulling one man off balance, and rose on her rear legs. Kannis stepped nimbly under the rope, pointed the pistol at the animal’s head, and pulled the trigger. The gun’s report was not much louder than a large book dropped on the floor. The mare’s momentum carried her up so she held gracefully in midair for a moment, then collapsed on the concrete. Oscar heard a horrible snap as the dead creature’s skull hit the hard floor.

  Kannis handed back the gun. Two of the men immediately began looping a chain around the mare’s rear legs, and one went to fetch a hose. Oscar fought to keep his face from betraying how sickened he was by the terrified animal’s slaughter.

  “I apologize.” Kannis stepped back under the rail, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Now, Oscar, are you here on business or on business? I must warn you, if it’s your business, my permits are in order.”

  “I’m not even here,” Oscar replied.

  Kannis grinned. “My kind of business.”

  The butcher’s office was a small affair constructed in the space between cold rooms. Across the plain concrete corridor was the staff entrance into the butcher storefront. From somewhere came the steady clank of a chain block and the mad wasp whine of a band saw. Kannis motioned for Oscar to sit. There were perhaps thirty framed photographs on the wall of the tiny office. Most featured Kannis on the backs of boats, holding aloft large fish. But Oscar’s eyes were drawn to a photo without Kannis that was decades old, faded to blues and greens. One of the two men in the picture could have been Kannis’s twin: it was his father. Oscar knew this because the man next to Kannis Senior was Sandro Mariani.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you here,” Kannis said. He offered a cigarette. Oscar declined. “Six months? Eight? Are you getting your father’s rabbits from somewhere else?”

  “I’m in a bit of a rush.”

  Kannis nodded inside his cocoon of smoke. “Time. The curse of the honest man, eh? So, small talk, fft—gone. What do you need in such a hurry?”

  “Space.”

  “How much? For storage? For living?” Kannis’s eyes widened and he tapped his nose slyly. “Ah, you finally have a mistress! I have a nice single bedroom in Albion—no view, but who wants to stare at trees when you can look at a bush?” He opened a drawer.

  Oscar shook his head. “Here.”

  “Here what?”

  “Here, behind your shop.”

  Kannis laughed. “You’re not serious.” He saw Oscar’s expression and sobered. “I have no space here. Every cold room is full.”

  “The one nearest the steel gate has dust on the handle,” Oscar said. “No one’s been in or out in at least a week.”

  “Frozen goods,” Kannis explained.

  “The compressor motor’s stone cold. It’s empty.”

  Kannis sighed, leaned back in his chair, eyes never leaving Oscar.

  “Why does an honest cop need a cold room?”

  “Why does a dishonest butcher care?”

  Kannis watched Oscar for a long moment. “A cold room like that—she’s premium space.”

  “Dead space. I’d be doing you a favor.”

  “My men might get nervous knowing there’s a detective swimming about the place. It might affect the quality of their work.”

  After seeing three men fail to humanely execute a single dumb animal, Oscar wondered what quality there was to compromise.

  “I thought you liked to help your friends in the service.”

  “Oscar,” Kannis said, smiling sadly, “you’re no one’s friend.”

  Oscar reached into his leather satchel and unwrapped the carton of Camel soft packs he’d picked up from home. He placed them on the desk. Kannis’s dark eyes licked over the pristine wrapping, inspecting it for flaws and calculating its street value.

  “Serious stuff.”

  “For a week,” Oscar said. “And if we go into a second week, another two.”

  Where he would get another two cartons of Camels, he had no idea. But he could tell from the sparkle in Kannis’s eye that he had a deal. Kannis leaned forward and offered Oscar his hand. Oscar took it and shook.

  “My dad always liked your father. Said he was infuriating. ‘Sandro Mariani only wants what he wants—he takes nothing for nothing and you can’t change his mind.’ ”

  “We are notoriously stupid,” Oscar agreed.

  Kannis stood and pulled a key off a series of hooks. “I can have it running for you tomorrow morning.”

  Oscar shook his head. “Now.”

  In the parking lot, Oscar pulled up Neve’s number and hit Dial. The call rang through for twenty seconds, then was rejected. He put the phone in his pocket, opened his trunk, and lifted the girl’s white, heartbreakingly light cadaver bag from the cardboard casket. He carried it through the gate and into the small white cold room. The air was already chilling, and his breaths condensed into ephemeral clouds under the greenish fluorescent light. He’d pulled two sets of bare galvanized-steel shelves from the walls and set them side by side in the middle of the concrete floor to form a table, then laid the cadaver bag on them. He pulled on latex gloves he’d taken from the morgue and unzipped the white plastic. A faint but foul sigh of wet hair and blood and diluted feces puffed out at him. A dribble of dark blood threatened to escape the white plastic—he hurriedly lifted up the edge to catch it.

  The girl’s flesh was warm, and an instinctive thrill of doubt raced up from Oscar’s gut. She’s alive! But of course she wasn’t; she’d just been out of storage for hours.

  In the harsh light, the savaging by the auger blade was horribly clear. Exposed, her body looked even smaller: a fragile, twisted thing, uncomfortable even in death. Her torso had been opened to the spine, and the slick gloss of organs reflected the light between broken ribs. The limbs that hadn’t been hacked open or wrenched out were lightly muscled. One thigh was opened up its outside by a wound that was a canyon down into bone; the bone itself was split open like a sapling. The whole leg was at odds with the body, yanked clockwise by the wrenching metal blade. Her vaginal opening had been gouged and mangled, and another raw wound opened up across her navel; Oscar could see the cross-sectioned strata of pale skin, creamy belly fat, and red muscle. One arm had been severed at the shoulder and now rested between her legs—pooled blood had seeped up the skin and stained the hairs. In the harsh, clean light, Oscar could see faint bands of purplish skin around the girl’s wrists and ankles. She’d been restrained. Torture and murder.

  The girl’s dank hair was shoulder-length and brown. Where her face had been torn away, the exposed pink-white skull shone like dirty china. The lower jaw had snapped and was cocked to one side in a ghastly grin. One of the girl’s eyes had been punctured by the blade that had torn her face from her skull, but the other was whole. Oscar leaned close and looked into it. The cornea was flat and lifeless, turning cloudy. The pupil was a black moon in a copper sky. Hazel eyes.

  He leaned back and looked at the broken body. No neat saw cut around the skull, no Y-shaped incision, no rough sutures. The girl had not been autopsied at the morgue.

  He realized that he’d been avoiding looking at the wound on her belly. He took a step down the makeshift table and saw that the hairs were standing up on his arms. The cold, he told himself, but he knew that wasn’t true. It was the symbol itself. It was at once fascinating and repulsive, like watching footage of an execution—hideously powerful and fundamentally si
nful. Oscar forced himself to examine its component parts.

  As Gelareh had noted, the star had seven long points, and each triangle had something different carved inside it. Behind the star was the cross, filled with diamondlike grids. He noticed now that each little diamond had its own symbol sliced within it. The vévé. How had Gelareh described it? A lighthouse for the spirits. Was it still calling them? Oscar suddenly wanted to be out of the room. He pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket and probed the incisions. They were almost uniformly deep, four or five millimeters. How long had this taken to carve? Thirty minutes? An hour? Had the girl been alive while the scalpel sliced hundreds of times into the skin of her belly? The pain would have been unbearable. So would the screaming. Around the vévé, more arcane glyphs: skulls, birds, arrows, swordlike shapes, and two figures that looked as if they might have flames growing from them. Oscar peered closer. Flames? Or wings?

  Something scratched on the roof, and Oscar felt his shoulders jerk and the flesh above his kidneys crawl. He listened.

  Silence.

  “Enough,” he told himself. He pulled out his camera, pressed a button. The musical notes of its start-up melody were shrill in the small, quiet room. He straightened and opened the girl’s broken jawbone and photographed her teeth, but even a quick look revealed no fillings. He took thirty or more photographs of her ruined body and of the symbol. He took photos from both sides. He saved her faceless skull for last. He desperately wanted to leave. Instead, he forced himself to lean in to focus on the girl’s sightless eye. The sunken orb became sharp in his viewfinder, and his finger pressed the shutter button. As the flash sparked, the skull seemed to jump toward the lens.

  I have opened the curtain of bone.

  Oscar jolted upright, his body electric.

  The words had come unbidden into his head, and were as clear as a whisper in his ear.

  The girl was motionless, staring emptily at the pressed-steel ceiling. The room was filled with an awful, waiting silence.

  Oscar listened. Outside, the wind moaned in metal eaves. Something, somewhere, scratched.

  He realized that the camera he held was shaking with the fast, steady pulses of his racing heart.

  “Idiot,” he said aloud. He made himself take one last photo of the unblinking eye, then put the camera away. But the words remained in his mind like a fishhook.

  I have opened the curtain of bone.

  He shook the thought away and produced a fingerprint kit he’d taken from Hyde’s desk. He inked the fingers of the girl’s right hand and rolled each onto a cardboard blank. Her fingers were cold, but the flesh felt strangely supple. An image forced its way into his mind: her fingers twitching and opening, grabbing his own wrist in a grip shockingly strong, and drawing him down toward that skull, that broken grinning jaw, which would open wider, much wider than a human mouth could, and—

  Fool! he thought, snapping at himself.

  He took a step back. It was just a body; just a poor murdered girl’s body. And he had a job to finish. He produced a clean card and delicately picked up the severed arm. Printing the fingers of this limb was easier, but it made his stomach convulse. He swallowed dryly and concentrated as he got the last prints down, then wiped all ten digits clean.

  Finished. He leaned back and placed the loose arm beside her body. And frowned. He bent closer and gingerly touched the cold skin again. On her wrists and forearms were fine, pale hairs, but they vanished just before the elbows and then reappeared on her upper arms. It was almost as if waxing strips had been run right around both forearms. He pulled out the camera again and took another few photos.

  Time, he thought, and rezipped the cadaver bag. As the plastic closed over the carved symbol, he felt relief, as if the lids of a staring eye had finally shut. He gazed at the white, tough plastic and realized that he was waiting to see if it would move, expand out with a breath or suck in with a hungry inhalation.

  Idiot.

  He went to the door and reached for the rubberized light switch beside it.

  I have opened the curtain of bone.

  He turned around. The cadaver bag was still. His breaths plumed in tiny, hurried puffs, and the hairs on the back of his neck were stiff as spears.

  Oscar clenched his jaw and switched off the light, then stepped out quickly. He fumbled to put the large brass padlock through the clasp and hurried out onto the wet road.

  Oscar parked outside a huge knuckle of a building. The former convent was red brick and dark windows, ugly and forbidding. The steel security gate was unlocked. He climbed a set of austere concrete stairs, then walked along the second-floor brick veranda. The open walkway looked over an asphalt courtyard that struck Oscar as strange, and it took him a moment to realize that it was because the space wasn’t edged in rubbish and debris. He found the door he wanted and knocked. As he waited, he turned his back to the night sky. Suddenly, the skin over the small of his back felt cold and dreadfully exposed to silent things with sharp claws. He took a step toward the wall and knocked sharply again.

  The door opened a few centimeters before a chain clacked taut. A young woman with thin lips and a boxer’s jaw looked out through the gap.

  Oscar showed his badge. “I’m Mariani.”

  The young woman’s lips crushed to a tighter line.

  “Who is it?” Neve’s voice came from somewhere in the apartment.

  “Your partner,” the girl answered coldly, her eyes locked on Oscar. Her hand tightened on the door, ready to close it if Neve said to.

  “It’s okay, Alex,” Neve called after a pause. “Let him in.”

  Alex hesitated, then unlatched the chain and stepped aside for Oscar. She was low-set and looked powerful enough to carry a goat up a muddy riverbank. She watched Oscar with unreserved dislike.

  “Tell him to wait,” Neve called from down the narrow hallway.

  Alex raised her eyebrows at Oscar. He nodded and looked around.

  The former nuns’ quarters were compact but comfortable. Small touches gave it warmth: placemats on the old coffee table, a tiny vase holding nasturtiums, a Chinese table runner over the sideboard. By comparison, Oscar’s house looked like a ransacked crypt. On the breakfast bar were three small stacks: envelopes, cover letters, and résumés.

  “In here,” Neve called.

  Oscar looked around at Alex; she pointed permission with her solid chin.

  Oscar passed through darkness toward the orange glow of a kerosene lamp; it made a billow of steam glow like smoke above a lively bonfire. Working hot water. The door was open.

  “Come in.” Neve’s voice was clipped by the deadening steam.

  Oscar entered.

  She sat on the toilet lid wrapped in a towel. Her legs were bare from the thigh down. Oscar felt awkwardly drawn to look at them and fought to keep his eyes on hers. Her jaw was set and her expression was difficult to read.

  “I don’t like you coming to my home,” she said.

  “I called,” he replied.

  She kept watching him and said nothing. He felt a twinge of pride—she’d learned well in the past twelve months when to ask questions and when to use silence to rattle the interviewee. She was a good cop.

  She pulled a damp strand of hair behind one ear, and the towel around her chest shifted a centimeter lower. Oscar didn’t know where to look now, so he picked the drain grate on the floor. “Moechtar gave me your transfer request.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her muscles twitch. “I wanted to tell you this morning,” she said. “But you were busy.”

  Oscar nodded.

  “He also told me we’re offline,” Neve continued. “It would have been nice to hear it from my so-called partner.”

  “I just stole a body.”

  She blinked. “You what?”

  He told her about the visit to Dianne Hyde, the race to the crematorium, the installation of the body in Kannis’s cold room, the discovery that no postmortem had been performed—and that the dead girl had hazel ey
es. By the time he finished, the steam had vanished and the bathroom was cold. Neve was staring at him.

  “Do you have any idea how many parts of the Crim Code you’ve violated?”

  “A few. Nothing serious.”

  She shook her head. “You have to take it back—”

  “Were you listening?” he interrupted. “Someone wanted the body gone. Someone with clout enough to spook a career pathologist. If we take it back to the morgue, the same thing will happen.”

  She watched him warily. “What are you thinking?”

  “It stinks of Haig.”

  “Oh, Oscar.”

  “Haig has a rep for making this kind of stuff happen. He wanted Moechtar to have me hand the case over to Homicide.”

  “Then tell Moechtar.”

  Oscar snorted. “He’s an accountant.”

  “He’s our boss.”

  “He won’t care,” Oscar said. “He’ll take the path of least resistance and say give it to Homicide.”

  “Ethical Standards, then.”

  “They’re idiots.”

  “Since you left.”

  Oscar shrugged.

  Neve rubbed her face, frustrated. “So, what then? What’s your grand plan?”

  “Let’s find out who she is, then we can go to Moechtar. Once we have her identified, we’ll have a better idea of why Haig wanted her to vanish.”

  Neve stared at him. She wore an expression that Oscar couldn’t quite pin down. It looked hurt and pitying and confused. He watched her stretch a finger up toward his arm, but before she touched it she drew back and clutched the towel tighter around herself. The skin on her legs and arms was goosepimpled.

  “There is no ‘we,’ Oscar.”

  Oscar’s jaw was so tight it hurt. “I need your help.”

  “You need help,” Neve agreed, “but not from me.” She looked up at him, her face set harder now. “I won’t report you, Oscar, but I’m sure as hell not signing up for this Jonestown jaunt of yours.” She looked down at the damp tiles. “I’m sorry.”