The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  He refilled the glass again.

  Halfway down it, he dialed the hospital. The line rang a dozen times before it was answered. The reception nurse said valve-replacement surgery was scheduled for that afternoon. What time? They would let him know. You were supposed to call back yesterday. We’re very busy. Could he call back later? He could please himself about that. He ended the call, exhausted. His empty stomach was absorbing the alcohol like a sponge.

  He rose unsteadily and fetched from his fireplace cache a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. He broke two matches lighting his smoke; he got it fired on the third. He dropped the match on the clear cellophane cigarette wrapper and watched it shrivel and twist. Is that how little Penny’s lifeless body had shifted and shrugged as the cold room became an oven? He caught sight of the nasty welts on his wrist, the cuts from Haig’s car door.

  Haig. Haig. Haig. He was never far away.

  Haig knew if he said to stay away from Chaume’s party, you would go. He played you like a marionette, pulled all the right strings to keep you out of the way while Kannis’s was torched.

  Neve was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It should have been you, Oscar thought. It would have been. He drank.

  Three dead matches. Three missing girls. Frances White, missing almost a month, surely dead. Penny Roth, a stack of black bones back at Forensic Services. Taryn Lymbery, missing.

  The thought of Taryn’s photograph made his throat go tight—a beautiful, simple thing with thick glasses and a trusting smile. Would she turn up, like Penny Roth, with a hideous symbol carved with an artist’s hand into her belly? No. Penny’s discovery in the auger was a mistake. Haig wouldn’t let that happen again. Taryn’s body would simply disappear.

  And Paul Roth? Even Chaume, his richest client, disliked him.

  Haig had means. Roth had money. Yet neither had motive. He could picture neither researching the gods of ancient Persia that birthed the foul symbol carved on Penny Roth’s belly. And neither fitted the description of the old man with the ponytail who commissioned the sculptress Florica to make the grotesque idol. With Penny Roth’s flesh now crisped and cindered, the hideous clay idol—now broken just as thoroughly as Penny had been—was the last, tenuous link bearing the symbol.

  He thought about the studio behind the incinerated brothel. There had to be more clues. There had to be something he’d missed.

  Oscar stubbed out the cigarette, poured his unfinished wine back into the bottle, and grabbed his keys.

  It took imagination and some stubborn staring to picture the street as an exclusive row of doctors’ offices and boutique art galleries. In crisp daylight, the narrow lane looked smaller than it had at night, its buildings more conspiratorial, the rubbish slumped on its footpaths and caught in rusting fence wires more rotted and offensive. Even the sodden pile of ash mud where he’d found the idol seemed unremarkable–just another building, like hundreds in the city, that had burned to the ground.

  He parked his car and found curved triangles of glass at the spot where Dalmar had smashed the bottle into his head. He walked slowly to the middle of the lane and looked around, squinting against the rare sunlight. He felt like a man in a small canyon, flanked by gully walls and washes. He turned slowly, a full circle. Nothing moved. Windows were closed or boarded up. No one came out to ask him for money.

  Oscar knocked on half a dozen doors. No answer.

  He went back to the car and leaned, his arms resting on the roof and his chin nestled on his hands. He cleared his mind and let his eyes roam where they wished.

  Just a narrow street. Dark buildings, dirty fences. He forced his body to remain still, his mind to fall quiet. Just look.

  Details began to become clear. Someone had jammed a rock up the storm-water pipe in the gutter, and leaves and twigs had accreted behind it. A nail had been driven into the mortar of a nearby building, and a bottle cap hung off it. Tiny white bones, maybe a rat’s, lay picked clean near a sooty patch tucked in a doorway—someone’s fire spot, out of the wind, where they’d cooked dinner.

  Blink.

  Oscar felt his heart skip.

  He looked up. Something at the top of his vision had blinked red.

  He stared, forcing himself to be patient.

  Blink.

  And there it was.

  Twenty-five feet off the ground, a galvanized-steel arm struck out from a light pole. At its end was, of course, a streetlamp—its Perspex cover hung loose, its bulb gone. But there was something else attached to the galvanized arm: a tiny inverted dome, tinted a dark gray. A CCTV camera. Oscar stared at the dome.

  Blink. A tiny red light.

  Most of the cameras in the city had been taken down—there were simply no municipal funds to monitor or service them.

  Blink.

  It was working.

  A nearby terrace house had a window nearly the same level as the camera. He went to that building’s front door. It had a frosted-glass panel, etched with the logo of a now defunct graphic-design company. He knocked on the glass and waited. No answer. He knelt and peered through the letterbox slot in the door. It looked directly onto a set of carpeted stairs rising into semidarkness. On the stairs was the shadowed form of a large dog.

  “Hello, puppy,” he called nervously.

  The dog didn’t move.

  Oscar found his flashlight in his jacket and shined it through the brass slot. The light glistered off the glazed surface of the ceramic Doberman. He imagined a dozen would-be thieves doing just as he’d done, only without the flashlight, and being dissuaded from entering by the shape of the guard dog.

  Oscar pulled out his plastic library card, leaned his weight against the door, and jiggled the bent plastic against the lock tongue, hoping the owner hadn’t deadbolted the door. With a satisfying click, the lock tongue cleared the mortise and the door opened.

  Oscar stepped onto a pile of letters, the bottommost yellow and curled with age. The ground floor was office space: two desks, a small meeting table. Bars on the windows. Oscar climbed the stairs and went through a blue door. A narrow living room; flat-screen TV; bookshelves with brassware, including a sextant and a diving helmet; a ghost-faint tang of spoilage coming from the kitchen, where a puddle in front of the fridge had crusted and peeled. He climbed an even narrower set of stairs to the third floor. A bathroom, a linen press, and a bedroom overlooking the street. The bed was unmade: a rumpled mess of sheets that were once white but were now cobweb-gray under fine dust. A drinking glass on the floor, and three empty blister packs of tablets. Ahead was the window Oscar had seen from the street. A pair of curtains hung lank, parted just enough to allow light to fall on the mummified remains of a woman. She sat in a chair, her hands on her lap. Her hair cascaded over her shoulder, and her sunken, dry face peered up at a water stain on the ceiling. Her legs were thin leather over dangling bone. As Oscar got closer, he saw something that made his heart sag. Off the bedroom was a walk-in wardrobe; on its doorway architrave hung a baby bouncer: a clamp from which suspended a lightweight chain, a spring, and a harness. In the harness was a tiny little skeleton, dressed in pink.

  Oscar went to the window and drew wide the curtain.

  From here he had an almost clear view of the lot. The light pole was only a few yards away, and the window was almost level with the lamp arm and its gray teardrop camera housing, shiny as mica.

  Blink.

  Oscar hurried downstairs to the bookshelves. Among the nautical bric-a-brac was a replica ship’s telescope. He held it to his eye and saw a disorienting, enlarged view of the reversed window logo. He returned to the bedroom window, extended the eyepiece, and focused on the security camera.

  Tiny print was wrapped around the top of the Perspex dome: “Astor Security Pty Ltd. For service or repair …”

  Oscar wrote down the address.

  Chapter 25

  A matter-of-fact chrome plaque declared this to be the address of Astor Security. The gray building was squeeze
d between a boarded-up nightclub and a boarded-up electrical wholesaler.

  There were two doors: a painted steel entry door and a closed shutter just wide enough to admit a car. Oscar ran a shoe sole over the doorstep. It made no mark. Compared with the patina of dust on the nightclub’s step, Astor’s front stoop was spotless. Someone was going in and out. Beside the plaque was an intercom panel with a glass lens. He pressed the button.

  There was a long pause. Then a deep voice: “Astor Security.”

  Oscar showed his badge to the glass lens.

  Another pause.

  A buzz. A click. He pushed inside.

  “Oh, God, please don’t tell anyone.”

  The man’s name was Stuart. He was short, had a melon belly, and his hair had been dyed an unnaturally vigorous brown and was frozen by mousse into an architectural cantilever over his round face. Stuart’s eyes were a freakish violet—contact lenses, Oscar realized—and were wide with apprehension so sharp that it bordered on terror.

  “Why not?” Oscar said. “You answered the door.”

  “Yes, but no one’s rung the door in years.” Stuart waddled along rich, charcoal carpet through a reception paneled in brushed stainless steel and granite and into a control room that smelled of good coffee. A bank of LCD monitors surrounded the desk. In a far corner was a very comfortable-looking single bed.

  “Well, idiots have rung,” Stuart corrected himself. “At first, all the religious nuts. Then the anti-religious nuts. Then the looters. I’m not worried, the door is steel. But if I am worried—” He leaned into a microphone and hit a switch; his voice boomed out of hidden speakers in a gravelly basso: “Leave right now or I’m authorized to remove you from the premises.” Stuart switched off the mic. “And if I’m really worried, I have this.” He opened a drawer and let Oscar peek inside. Beside a set of keys and a small box of tissues was a huge chromed revolver.

  “Forty-four Taurus,” Oscar said. “Very Clint of you.”

  Stuart shrugged, pleased. “Coffee?”

  “Real coffee?”

  “Of course.”

  While Stuart poured, Oscar studied the security-camera monitors. There were five large screens, and each was divided into quadrants showing views from different cameras. The images scrolled through, sometimes coming up with black rectangles where, Oscar guessed, the camera had broken down or been ripped out.

  “So, Stuart,” Oscar said, “does Astor Security know you’re here?”

  The small man laughed nervously.

  “Well, you could say they do. You could argue it.” He handed Oscar coffee. It smelled divine. Stuart sat in his Herman Miller chair, and Oscar noted that the fellow wore expensive trousers, Italian boots, and a pinkie ring.

  “They keep paying you,” Oscar said. They didn’t just keep paying him: they kept paying him well. “An oversight?”

  Stuart’s neck grew red. “I’m doing my job. It’s not my fault if they can’t keep their paperwork straight.”

  The average wage fell by more than seventy percent over the six months following Gray Wednesday, and never recovered. If slip-through-the-cracks Stuart was being paid at his old rate, he was raking in a small fortune.

  “And what happens if you see a crime?”

  Stuart reached for a telephone. “I dial the Mobile Support Team.”

  “And do they answer?”

  Stuart blushed and slurped his coffee.

  Oscar pulled out his notepad and showed Stuart the number he’d transcribed from the side of the CCTV camera overlooking the burned-down brothel. “Is this camera still up?”

  Stuart flicked a switch and a tiny beam of light shone down onto his keyboard. He moved the notepad into the light and typed in the number.

  On the center monitor appeared the streetlamp’s view of the street Oscar had not long left. The camera was framed primarily on the auction house but also captured a good view of the cinder-covered block next door.

  “Oh, yeah.” Stuart nodded, recognizing the image. “I used to like this one.”

  Because it had afforded the occasional licentious glimpse of call girls, Oscar guessed.

  “How long do you keep the tapes?”

  Stuart shook his head. “No tapes. All digital.” He cracked tiny knuckles. “The whole system has a capacity of about four months. Then the oldest files are overwritten automatically.”

  Oscar said, “Let’s go back five weeks.”

  Stuart glanced at Oscar. “I hope you don’t expect hi-res goodness. Our cameras’ default sample rate is one frame every three seconds.”

  Stuart pressed buttons, and suddenly the image onscreen changed. Where before there had been black mud and burned posts, there now stood a two-story Colonial building with a set of stairs, filigree iron tracework on an upper balcony, and a narrow lane running down one side. To Florica’s workshop, Oscar thought. A red glowing sign above the brothel door proclaimed: 1001 NIGHTS. The shop window next to that door was whitewashed, but Oscar could still read the word “Gallery.”

  “Now what?” Stuart asked.

  “Play it through a bit.”

  Stuart’s fingers moved. The image onscreen shifted, and figures moved even faster than the black-and-white jerkings of an old silent movie. Men sauntered at comic speed, some arriving, some loitering, some leaving. The footpath would fall empty, then someone might run through like a flash. Car headlights came and went like tiny meteors. The door to the brothel would wink, revealing a ruby glow inside and the curved shapes of women in short dresses and high heels.

  “Remember the fire?” Oscar asked.

  Stuart nodded morosely. “That was a shame.”

  “Take us forward to it.”

  The image changed speed, time lapse now: the figures whirred as quickly as dragonflies, little more than blurs. Night brightened to day, and shadows stretched one way, shortened, then lengthened the other. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. And a sudden furnace flare of brilliant orange.

  The image froze. The pretty little two-story building now resembled a black mask with billowing orange ribbons gouting from the eyes of its windows and the door of its mouth. It was night, but the camera automatically adjusted for flames as bright as daylight.

  “Back it up,” Oscar said.

  Stuart pressed more keys, and the flames began to suck back into the building, getting smaller. Soon there was just a glow coming from inside the top right window, and women in dressing gowns and scanty clothes and next to no clothes ran in odd, crane-awkward steps back up the stairs and into the building. The glow of fire stopped. The red-lit sign came back on.

  “Slow it,” Oscar instructed.

  Keys tapped. The images slowed.

  A man reversed into the brothel doorway, head down. Cars reversed up the street. One reversed up, disgorged a fat man with a walking stick, then kept reversing. A large woman with short-cropped hair rolled with a docker’s gait back up the stairs and into the red glow. A dark sedan reversed up, slightly forward of the brothel entrance, and its headlights extinguished.

  “Slower now,” Oscar said.

  The passenger-side door of the sedan opened and a small figure eased himself back out of the car. He walked backward across the footpath, carrying something carefully with both hands. His head was down. He stepped backward not up the stairs to the brothel but down the lane beside it. Oscar felt a strange shiver of certainty wash over him.

  That’s him.

  “Play it forward,” Oscar said. “Real speed.”

  Stuart hit a key.

  Each frame lasted three seconds. An empty lane, all shadows. Then a shadow within the shadows. The man emerged onto the street, backlit by the brothel’s lights. Onto the footpath—he wore a pea jacket and dark pants, his face turned to the dark sedan parked at the curb. At the car door, he lifted the object gingerly onto the car roof and looked up the street, presenting the camera with his profile and his silver ponytail.

  “Stop,” Osar said.

  Stuart hit a key.

&n
bsp; Oscar leaned in toward the screen.

  The object on the car roof was wrapped in string and brown paper, but its vaguely humanoid form was clear. The idol.

  “Can you zoom in?” he said.

  Stuart waggled his round head. “About fifty percent.”

  He reached for a mouse and clicked it on the face of the man with the ponytail. Another click, and the image zoomed instantly in.

  The picture was pixelated; the light was low, the man’s face was lit mostly by reflection from the brothel’s sign in the car’s glossy flanks. But Oscar could make out his face. An older man, sixty or sixty-five but trim and well kept. A small goatee. Dark pixels suggested lines up each cheek. Eyes level and looking carefully up the street as he kept a grip on his precious idol. It was a face that Oscar had never seen in the flesh, and yet it was familiar. He’d seen it before.

  He turned to Stuart. “Can you print that?”

  Stuart nodded. “It’ll take a few minutes to warm up.”

  He hit a couple of keys, and somewhere in the dark room machinery hummed alive.

  Oscar watched the screen, eyes locked on the ponytailed man.

  “Can we move while it’s printing?” Oscar asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Reverse us, please. Triple speed.”

  The ponytailed man walked his disturbing parcel backward down the lane. A girl in a puffy pink anorak and bare legs reversed her way back into the brothel. A thin young man in stovepipe jeans emerged from the brothel door and chicken-walked back down the street. A dog wandered into the corner of the frame, sniffed around, wandered out. Then the man with the ponytail emerged back-first from the alley and reversed, empty-handed, to the black car. He hesitated, looked up and down the street, then eased himself into the sedan. Its lights blazed and the car reversed out of frame. Two girls, arm in arm, walked back into the brothel. Another figure emerged from the lane, walking backward into the street.

  “Slow.”

  The procession of images went to normal speed, a frame every three seconds. The woman reversed to the footpath, then started to move in slow circles, looking up and down the street, waiting for someone. She had long hair in cornrow braids, black lipstick, a silver necklace, and the biggest earrings Oscar had ever seen.