Necropath [Bengal Station 01]

by Eric Brown

  “So someone just flew by, sighted him, and blew him away?”

  “Something like that, sir.”

  They came to the eastward edge of the Station and Chandra exited the fast-lane, slipped into a blue slow-lane, and turned the flier in a tight, downward loop. The fa ç ades of the upper-deck buildings flashed by. The open-ended third level came into view: a spacious, floodlit plaza surrounded by multi-level gardens and pyramidal apartment buildings. Chandra brought them past the Sapphire complex, reducing airspeed.

  “The killer probably came in this close,” Vishi said. “All the assassin had to do was lean out of the window, aim and fire.” He pointed to the lighted square of a French window, open to a trim lawn on the shoulder of the pyramid. The room was full of officials going about the business of investigation, the efficient machine of law enforcement at work.

  “Any witness reports of fliers passing at the time?”

  “There was a constant progression of traffic going through this way just before midnight, when the killing occurred. We’re tracing them on surveillance cams.”

  Chandra nodded. They landed in the plaza below the Sapphire building. Already reporters and vid-film crews were encamped on the sidewalk beneath the blue and white striped awning. Chandra pushed his way past the melee, ignoring questions. They crossed the foyer to the central elevators and rode to the penthouse level.

  “Do you know if Bhindra had any enemies in politics, Vishi? Opponents who wanted him out of the way? Vested interest groups he might have been opposing?”

  Vishi shook his head. “He was a well-liked and respected member of the centre-left opposition. One of those politicians whose celebrity got them into power, but who then worked hard to justify his position. I think the phrase is that he was a ‘man of the people.’“ Vishi paused. “Of course, we’ve yet to conduct a thorough investigation of his affairs. Something might turn up, then. We usually find dirt if we dig deep enough.”

  “You remind me of an old acquaintance of mine.”

  The elevator doors swept open and Chandra stepped into the corridor. Bhindra’s apartment suite was cordoned off by officers. A small crowd of residents, shocked but nevertheless curious, blocked the corridor. Chandra eased his way through, nodded to the salutes of the attending officers, and entered the apartment.

  The suite consisted of half a dozen spacious rooms, any two of which would have contained Chandra’s own humble dwelling. The lounge beyond the hall was the focus of attention: the troupe of forensic officials, ballistic experts, and photographers engaged in a careful post-mortem choreography around the corpse.

  “Go in there and collate whatever information’s to hand, Vishi. I’ll join you later. I’ll just wander about.”

  Chandra moved from room to room, more to kill the time before the experts packed up and left than to look for crime-related evidence.

  The first three rooms were what he expected to find in a residence this exclusive: two tastefully decorated bedrooms and a bathroom the size of an average lounge. The rooms spoke of wealth without too much ostentation, giving no clues at all to the character of the owner. The fourth room, a study, was more personal. The walls were lined with racks of science and space-exploration discs, and photographs and graphics occupied the few remaining spaces. The visuals showed landscapes of a dozen planets, most with a uniformed figure in the foreground: Bhindra, presumably, in his exploration days. From the ceiling, in a touch at once juvenile and affecting, hung half a dozen model voidships, everything from small three-man exploration vessels of fifty years ago to modern superliners.

  The desk was loaded with the mementoes of a lifetime: alien rocks, exotic insects encased in solidified resin, holos of extraterrestrial landscapes— and the glove of a spacesuit, mounted on a plinth, like a forlorn wave.

  The treasured objects of the dead, collected over years, always spoke to Chandra of their owners’ too fond attachment to the physical, which they were now without. The sheer redundancy of the objects themselves made a mockery of man’s materialism.

  Chandra had long ago learnt to attach no importance to material possessions. He owned nothing other than the necessities of life. Unburdened by objects, unbeguiled by the physical, he told himself that he was closer to the next life—and therefore more accepting of the fact that this life was only temporary.

  He was about to leave the study when he saw, on the desk, a solid-looking rectangular object—that increasingly rare artefact, a book. He picked it up, turned the weighty object in his hands. No wonder they had fallen out of favour over the years, superseded by the screaders. Books were heavy, awkward objects—yet at the same time they had a certain... authority.

  Chandra read the title: The Stars Beyond, by Rabindranath Bhindra. The cover showed three explorers in some exotic jungle landscape. On the back, Bhindra’s jovial smiling face stared out at the world, a face of wisdom and experience.

  Chandra replaced the book and left the study.

  The various experts had packed up their equipment and were filing from the lounge. Chandra waited until the last of them had left before venturing a glance at the scene of the murder. He might have prepared himself mentally for the sight, told himself that the body in there was just a vacated shell, but he wished he could have communicated the same logic to his stomach.

  The scene was particularly messy.

  Chandra joined Vishi in the centre of the room, cast a quick glance at the corpse, then looked away and kept his gaze resolutely averted. Bhindra had been sitting in an armchair by the open French window when the assassin struck. The body had retained in death the position it had last adopted in life: seated upright, feet crossed at the ankles, hands placed on lap. What made a mockery of the body’s posture was the absence of its head. The dark orifice of the windpipe and a notched stub of backbone showed in cross section. The impact of the projectile had blasted the skull and its contents in a liquidised spray across the room and against the far wall.

  “Where’s his widow?”

  “She was taken to hospital suffering from shock.”

  “So she was here when it happened?”

  Vishi nodded to a vacant armchair. “Right there.”

  Chandra sighed. “Okay. I want you to question her, find out if she noticed anything. Talk to the neighbours. You know the routine. I want a report ready by the next shift. Did the experts come up with anything?”

  Vishi passed him a screader. “Everything’s in here.”

  There was a tap at the door. A white-coated Indian poked his head into the room. “The clean-up boys,” Chandra said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  On the way back to headquarters, Chandra put the screader on read-out and listened to the monotonous computer voice as it reeled off the gruesome statistics. In his office, he downloaded the contents of the screen into Sinton’s files, added a brief report of his own, and sat at his desk for a minute.

  He was about to leave for home when he recalled Vaughan.

  He tapped the telepath’s code into his handset. It was almost four, and the first light of dawn was making grey rectangles of his office window. If Vaughan kept to his old routine, he should still be up.

  He got through to Vaughan. The telepath looked tired beyond words, haggard and desperate—the type of character you would not wish to establish eye contact with in a crowd.

  He told Vaughan about Weiss, then signed off, quit his office, and took the flier home. First, he would grab a few hours’ sleep, then enjoy a leisurely breakfast. Sumita was due back from the university at noon today, and he’d promised to take her out that afternoon.

  As he piloted the flier towards the blood-red dawn, he considered his wife and tried to push images of the dead man to the back of his mind.

  * * * *

  FOUR

  DEAR SISTER

  Another Bangkok night.

  Sukara’s day started at eight in the evening. Her ancient Mickey Mouse alarm clock detonated on the table beside her bunk, drilling its din into h
er dream-filled sleep. Half awake, she swung her legs out of bed, searching for her sandals with her toes. She smacked the clock silent and hung her head between her knees. All the alcohol she’d consumed last night had not made her drunk, but she had a throbbing headache and her mouth was dry and sore. She reached out and opened the door of her cooler, dragged out a bulb of orange juice and drank.

  Her room was just a little wider than the narrow bunk it contained; from the bed, she could reach everything she needed: cooler, cooker, vid-screen, the spirit-house in the corner and the shelves that held her clothes, the knick-knacks and ornaments her customers had bought her over the years. She’d rented the room six months ago, paying a thousand baht for the year’s lease. Before that she’d lived with three other girls in a damp room over the Siren Bar, but every other night she’d fallen out with the girls and sometimes they’d put things in her bed: a live toad, a dead rat, a mirror, and, once—this was what had finally driven her out—a small, perfectly curled human turd, which Sukara had nearly poked with her toes as she was climbing into bed. She’d hurried downstairs to Fat Cheng, the Chinese owner of the bar, and yelled at him in pain and frustration.

  Fat Cheng had heard her out, then said in English, “You good girl, little Monkey. I tell other girls they no good. Any more, they go.” He shook his head. “First this, then that.”

  “Other girls, they no like little Monkey! It no good you just tell them. I go, find own place!”

  And she’d taken her belongings and tramped the streets for two days before she found a room for rent on the other side of the city. Its size, when she had finally dragged all her possessions up the five flights of stairs, had almost made her weep. But she’d made shelves and stacked things on top of other things and covered the walls with graphics of alien worlds, and in a couple of days the room was comfortable and cosy and somewhere she could call home.

  No more bitchiness from the other girls, no more unpleasant things in her bed, no whispers from the other side of the room when she undressed and they saw the strange, sucker-shaped markings on her torso.

  Not that this room was a palace. The electricity stopped just when she needed it, and the noise from the traffic in the street below at dusk and dawn was deafening, and it took her two hours to get across the city to the Siren Bar, and that was travelling on the metro. But it was her own place she could come back to in the morning after a hard night, and fall asleep watching films on the vid-screen.

  All in all, for a working girl just turned twenty-two, she had done well for herself.

  She pulled a basin of water from under the bunk and splashed her face, took off her T-shirt, and washed beneath her arms. She turned on the vid and listened to the news while she dried her legs and feet—just to get the grime off her body. She’d get a proper shower when she got to work.

  The news report turned to politics and she turned off the screen. A politician’s fat face was replaced by her own reflection, and she turned her head away and closed her eyes, gasping. There were no mirrors in her room. She had thrown out her mirror three years ago, after the madman had attacked her with a knife. He had shouted he wanted to cut her open from the top of her head right down to her crotch, like a mango, but he had only got part of the way. She had been so close to being dead. She wondered if her picture would have been on the vid-news. “Working girl Sukarapatam sliced from top to bottom like a ripe fruit!”

  Fat Cheng had been good about it. He’d had her rushed to a people’s hospital, and had paid half the bills—the other half he’d taken from Sukara’s wages. He’d even come to see her in the hospital. He’d grabbed her chin, turning her face this way and that. “Damage goods, little Monkey. Who pay for you now? Always in trouble, this and that.”

  “You pay top surgeon, he mend face. Make beautiful.”

  And Fat Cheng had roared with laughter. “Beautiful! Wise man says, ‘Can’t turn frog into songbird.’ You too dark, have monkey face, little Monkey. Now you scarred good.”

  “You throw me out, Fat Cheng?”

  He’d turned her head painfully, right and left, scowling. “You do, little Monkey. Some men, they like damage goods.”

  Sukara pulled on a short black skirt, a clean red T-shirt. She flicked on her lighter, opened the glass door of the spirit-house, and lit a candle, placing a piece of banana beside it as an offering. She tipped her head forward and murmured a short prayer. “No violence today, no bad things. Spirits guide me, I promise to be good.”

  She found her mask, to keep out the filthy city air, and slipped it over her head. She preferred the type that fitted over her nose and mouth, covering more of her scar than just the mouth-masks. With her long hair falling over the rest of the face, she hoped that people wouldn’t notice.

  She turned off the light in the room, locked the door behind her and hurried down the dark stairs. The street was a solid caravan of cars and trucks, fumes hanging low. Advertising lights were coming on in the dusk. Overhead, fliers screamed like wronged spirits, tail lights blurred in the pollution.

  She made it in good time to the station and caught the trans-Bangkok express to the station closest to the Chao Phraya river. Sukara hung on a strap, squashed between two fat men. The trip took just over two hours and she wished she’d brought along a comic to pass the time. Instead she closed her eyes and thought about her sister, and invented a fantastic future in which her sister met a rich, handsome man who took her to a colony planet and they had lots of children and were happy. She ran this fantasy almost every day, with variations, and the variation she played today was that her sister visited Earth and found Sukara and said, “Come back and live with us.” She smiled to herself, both at how wonderful that would be, and also how unlikely. She told herself that she should not think of herself in these fantasies—they were fantasies for her sister, and if she wished too hard for things to happen for herself, then they might not come true for her sister.

  And then the train reached the Chao Phraya, and Sukara struggled out and up the escalator to the street.

  Lights advertised bars and strip clubs and brothels. The street was full of strolling men, the occasional working girl in heels and strip rags and little else. No one glanced twice at Sukara as she hurried down the street, and she felt safe, anonymous. These were the times when she was glad she wasn’t beautiful, when her beauty would have attracted the eyes of the cruising farang men.

  She came to the entrance of the Siren Bar and climbed the rickety wooden stairs. The bar and dance floor and the other rooms, the mirrored rooms and the cubicles and the poolrooms, were built out over the river. Sometimes, in the early hours when business was bad and the music stopped, she could hear the scummy water of the river sloshing about under the floorboards, and Sukara would play the fantasy that she was aboard a boat sailing downriver into the bay of Bangkok.

  Fat Cheng was in his usual seat at the bar. He swivelled when he saw her, great bulges of white-shirted fat pressed through the chromium struts of the barstool. She wondered how his slit eyes could see through so much flesh.

  “Little Monkey, you late, girl.”

  She pulled off her mask. “Train slow, Fat Cheng.”

  “Hokay. You go get shower, customer waiting.”

  Sukara felt a quick disappointment that she would have no time to herself, then a surge of curiosity. “Who, Fat Cheng? You know him?”

  “Regular, little Monkey. Ee-tee.”

  “Which Ee-tee?”

  “I don’t know which Ee-tee. I didn’t ask name. Now you go get shower, hurry up.”

  She ran through the bar. One of the girls, the tall, beautiful, sophisticated women who chatted to businessmen and politicians about world affairs— then ended up flat on their backs getting fucked like every other working girl—saw Sukara and hissed in imitation of some leering extraterrestrial.

  Sukara ignored her and scurried to the showers.

  While she soaped herself, luxuriating beneath the pounding needles of hot water, she remembered the standpi
pe under which she and her sister had washed when they were little girls. Stripped down to their knickers and sharing a cracked sliver of soap between them, they had laughed and played under the great surging column of cold water. Those had been good times, life in a small village on the border with Cambodia, and she wondered how it had come to this. So many things might have happened to make things different. Their mother had died when Sukara was five, and she had looked after her sister while their father worked in the fields. She took Pakara to school with her in the mornings, a little sleeping bundle strapped to her back, and then worked in the fields with her father in the afternoons. Later, when Sukara was twelve, she worked in a small factory in a neighbouring town, sewing dresses for the city while Pakara worked with her father. She wished that she could have worked in the fields instead of the factory, but her father said that they needed the money. Sukara resented her sister the privilege of being with her father in the afternoons, and grew jealous of the close relationship that had developed between her father and Pakara over the years. Her little sister was the pretty one, lighter skinned than Sukara and with big, round eyes, unlike Sukara’s Chinese eyes. She was her father’s favourite; that much was obvious. He said that she reminded him of her mother. Sukara told herself that it was not her sister’s fault, and that she should not feel jealous because of it.