The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “Okay, Miller.”

  Tim walked back to the car and didn’t say a thing as he slipped inside and buckled his seatbelt.

  “If people knew what the Booth did to Leary…” She paused, seeming to gather her thoughts. “God damn that bastard for making me pity him.”

  “Yes,” muttered Tim quietly.

  “Even Wildman pitied him.”

  “Yes. Yes, he did.”

  “These machines,” she said. “These bloody machines can’t be good for humanity.”

  Tim nodded, and he let his voice drop like a hammer. “Then destroy the one we found. The SAS have it. It’s in your jurisdiction—let’s walk back there now, and you tell them to smash the thing, bust it up so that it will never work again. There’s one in London, sure, but there can be one less of those things in the world.”

  “I… I don’t know, Tim. I don’t think I have the authority.”

  “Crystal, the only authority needed to stop a bomb from going off is a human being with a sense of decency. Tell them Leary planted a hidden explosive, and we just learned of it now. Make something up. Any excuse. I’ll back your play.”

  He waited. She stared straight ahead, and then she clapped a hand on the steering wheel decisively and opened her door. They trudged back together towards the warehouse, their steps slowing as they got closer. Neither of them wanted to go back in there, but it was necessary. They would need to see this task done, witness it being obeyed. Crystal flagged down the team leader of the strike force, holding her phone out as if she’d just got a call. Tim wandered a few feet away, only half paying attention to their conversation. She was reminding the SAS man that, according to Whitehall, she was still in charge.

  “Listen to me, Captain,” she was saying. “I need you to put a flamethrower to that device. A controlled demolition, however you want to do it, but do it fast.”

  Cold out here, thought Tim. The wind slashed at his cheeks.

  “We have new intel, that’s why…”

  The captain finally accepted the order, and they all went into the warehouse.

  The unworldly stench was still there, still in this lonely place.

  The corpse of the thing that used to be Leary was still there, still lying on the floor.

  Tim noticed Crystal hovering close to him, but it wasn’t for protection or comfort. Her eyes were dry, and she was once more calm, contained, a professional. She stayed close, but it was almost as if she stood ready to protect him in case some new danger—a missed member of the terrorist cell, something else horrible from the equipment—leapt out to confront them. She’s so strong, he thought. This is a strong woman. She’s seen astonishing, terrible things even before tonight’s nightmare, and here she is, not bolting, not shirking—staying on the job. It had taken him years to get past what he saw in India, and she had seen more in the space of days, and she was planting her feet by his side. Amazing.

  The soldiers prepared to destroy the booths.

  As they got on with the job, everyone was on edge again. No one touched the control panel, and yet everyone half-expected that the booths might glow and pulsate…

  They didn’t. Dark, lifeless metal and glass.

  The SAS men took their time setting up, moving about and measuring at an excruciatingly slow pace, carrying out chores beyond Tim’s understanding, and then one of them loaded base charges around the chambers. Suddenly, the captain was shouting for them all to clear out, get some distance. Tim and Crystal were rudely shoved towards the door, told to run down the hill, and by the time one of the soldiers informed them that was far enough, they turned, and there was an orange-red blast, a roar that must have woken up farms miles away.

  Smoke cleared, and they went in to inspect the rubble. The metal panels of the booths were blackened and twisted, looking a lot like plane wreckage, but there was a surprising lack of electronic debris.

  “I thought there’d be more,” said Crystal.

  Tim had thought so as well. The lack of pieces, of parts, bothered him.

  They drove back to Belfast, and when she pulled up in front of their hotel, he asked her if she felt uncomfortable with her decision. She asked him back if he felt guilty for pushing her into it. Not at all.

  “Me neither,” she replied.

  A day later, they learned that the SAS men had taken away the misshapen, cackling Leary-thing that shambled out of the Booth, now mercifully dead, in a large biohazard bag intended for agricultural disposal. Crystal said it was horrible to think it would be preserved somewhere. Like a deformed pig in a jar of formaldehyde. Tim told her it could never be anyone’s idea of an exhibit. It would be, even in death, a grotesque warning. Only they didn’t know yet of what.

  They went back to Paris, the three of them. Tim, Crystal and Miller. Miller’s way of coping was to announce loudly that he was going to work his way through the minibar in his new suite, two floors down from the ones for Timothy Cale and DI Anyanike. When Tim went to check on him, he found the neurologist was in his room, but he wasn’t drinking. Miller sat on the edge of a chair, deeply focused on the wooden pieces for his model of the battleship, Missouri, resting on a glass coffee table. Tim watched him for a long moment.

  “Must have been great,” Miller told the glue stick in his hand.

  “What? Being in the navy back then?”

  “No…”

  Tim waited for more. Miller applied a wooden panel to a tiny gun on the stern.

  “Knowing so little, having everything to look forward to,” said Miller, studying his battleship. “Better microscopes, the invention of lasers, polio vaccines… Did you know they didn’t even discover Pluto until 1930? Gary told me. There was still bad shit, like famines and racism, sure, but this is as bad as it could get. Planes and ships. You could destroy a country, but you couldn’t break the world.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You—you just couldn’t. It means in theory, you could run away, you could find some place to hole up, change your name if you like, start over. Wait for the world to get its shit together.”

  “You find the right place, and yeah, you’d be okay,” said Tim, playing along. “Switzerland, Portugal if you kept your head down. You could, sure.”

  “And now you can’t.”

  “No.” Tim didn’t take him for being nostalgic.

  Miller’s hand brushed along the selection of wooden struts. His chest lifted, and he let out a long sigh. “And now you get to put me in my place. The biggest ‘I told you so’ ever. Because there’s nowhere to run, and it’s our fault, right? Science. We never learn our lesson. Dynamite, atom bombs—we keep taking it to the brink.”

  “Andrew, that’s not what I’ve—”

  “Only you’re wrong,” said Miller, his voice calm, almost dead of feeling. “That psycho didn’t know science, he didn’t know physics or engineering, he didn’t know anything. He was just a nutcase who found a big gun and blew himself in the head. And him running off with a Booth doesn’t make you right.”

  He was gripping another wooden panel so tightly, his forearm shook.

  Tim was getting concerned. Miller, finally conscious of what he was doing, put the tiny piece down on the table. He flexed his hand, checked it with an index finger to make sure he hadn’t cut into his own palm.

  “Sorry,” said Miller.

  Tim waved that away. Nothing to be sorry for at all. They were all trying to cope. He said goodnight and left the young doctor to his model.

  Back in his own room, he must have stood a full forty-five minutes under his shower, good and hot, as if the pelting beads of water could wash away the images from that warehouse. He had just slipped into one of the hotel’s plush cotton robes and had switched on the large flat television screen when there was a knock at the door. It was Crystal. Her hair was up, and she wore a London Met sweatshirt and black leggings, padding around the hallway barefoot. Well, they did keep the carpets scrupulously clean here.

  “Oh, I thought you’d still be up,” sh
e said apologetically.

  “I am. It’s okay.”

  “I—I didn’t mean to disturb—”

  “No, it’s fine,” he said, motioning her in. “I was only going to switch on a movie. You can get a few English channels on their satellite package here.”

  “Oh, wish I’d known that,” she chuckled. “I can barely figure out the remote.”

  “I can show you how to work it,” he said, scooping it up from the coffee table. “Sorry, what’s up?”

  “Nothing,” she said with a shrug. “I… I just didn’t feel like being alone. What were you going to watch?”

  He was suddenly conscious that he was in a bathrobe. He ran his fingers through his still-wet hair, switched the TV to a movie channel and said quickly, “You choose, I’ll be right back.”

  Then he ducked into the bedroom and flipped through his bag. He kept a couple of T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants for just being comfortable if he wanted to read or work at his laptop, but now he realized the state they were in. He didn’t want to wear these ratty clothes in front of her. So he put on a dress shirt with rolled-up French cuffs and a set of Armani trousers without a belt. As he walked back in to join her, her face broke into a wide grin of happy bewilderment.

  “You’re joking,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t possibly wear that for when you want to relax.”

  Busted, he thought. Now he was actually embarrassed. “I don’t… But my usual dress-down clothes are kind of sad and torn and…”

  “Go change,” she ordered.

  “Yes, Ma’am!”

  He went and put on the sweats, and when he returned, she nodded her head and snapped, “Better.” And so they sat watching a six-month-old Hollywood thriller. They didn’t talk, not even to comment on the film. It was comfortable enough—no awkward tension, both of them needing each other’s presence but still feeling subdued after Derry.

  He was half-asleep on the couch when he felt more than saw her leaning over him, squeezing his shoulder in an improvised goodnight. Then there was the click of the door as she left.

  He looked for her at breakfast down in the hotel’s restaurant, but she wasn’t there as usual. He eventually found her in a patisserie around the corner from the hotel. They exchanged good mornings, and he watched Crystal thank the lady behind the counter, pocketing her change and offering him a newly bought croissant. They stepped out of the shop and by silent agreement began to stroll the boulevard.

  He saw her expression darken and ventured a guess. “Please tell me you’re not still thinking about Northern Ireland.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to think about what happened in Derry.”

  “Then what’s on your mind?”

  “Mary Ash.”

  Tim nodded, waiting.

  “I have a theory. I don’t know which is more terrible: if I’m right or if I’m wrong.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve been racking my brains on how to test it.”

  “Tell me, and then we can come up with something together. Or I can get Weintraub to look into it.”

  “You remember your basic physics?” she asked. “Yes, I know, it seems as if it’s all gone pear-shaped, but what if they still apply? The rules, I mean. What if we’re afraid to look at how they’re actually working here? The law of conservation of matter says it can’t be created or destroyed, only rearranged.”

  “Okay, but I don’t know where you’re leading me.”

  Crystal bit her bottom lip, furrowing her brows as she started again. “Don’t you see? Forget for a moment whether there’s an actual soul for each individual, where did the mass come from for a physical body? I read the reports. That police officer, Daniel Chen, was cremated. Mary Ash was in a funeral plot and must have decomposed down to bits of flesh on bone by the time they fried Nickelbaum. I can’t pretend I know exactly what’s going on, but the Booth works because a murderer goes through, yes? We can’t just summon a victim out of thin air by putting his killer in proximity to the device!”

  “No. We can’t.”

  “What if… what if something from the murderer comes back as part of the resurrected victim?”

  At first, Tim took the chill down the back of his neck as a signal there could be truth in Crystal’s notion. And she was right; it was horrible to contemplate. There was something disturbing, he’d always thought, in the enigmatic behavior of Mary Ash, of the boy that was once supposed to be Daniel Chen, the others, and the things they could do now. God, how revolting it would be if Mary Ash carried a piece of Emmett Nickelbaum’s charred soul in her.

  Except it could not be true.

  “Why not?”

  “Our flapper wandering the City of Light,” Tim reminded her. “Emily Derosier. There was no execution in the Paris Karma Booth before she walked back into our world.”

  Crystal countered that if the rules of physics had to be thrown out, they could hardly maintain firm belief in DNA. Maybe she wasn’t the Derosier woman. Maybe there was another factor that resulted in a delayed resurrection. Maybe the reason had to do with a million other speculative things; but her pained expression suggested that she knew it was a weak argument.

  No, thought Tim, it was Emily Derosier who had staggered out of the prison in Montparnasse. It had to be. And whoever had killed her must have died almost a century ago.

  Crystal’s “murderer ingredient” theory, he suspected, was his new partner’s way of preserving her Christian faith. After all, if it were the Booth’s fault—bringing back human beings but getting them wrong from borrowed pieces of killers—then the alternative would have to be rejected. The shattering idea that there are other levels of existence, and that we’re possibly recycled back into this plane. He had his own problems with accepting that.

  But it was one thing to intellectually entertain the concept, quite another to have a scrap of possible proof. Life after life… You assume there would be rules, conventions. And so far, they could find none of any comforting certainty. Damn it, he thought, what if the other worlds were just as defiant of explanation, wonderful and tantalizing yet with new inexplicable horrors and pains and beauties and pleasures all their own? But no simpler, no clearer. Because who the hell could promise that the next world equaled the truth?

  And if the Booth was tearing down the Gates of Saint Peter then who could keep their head in the clouds?

  If it were true.

  They went on with their separate chores of research during the day, but that evening, Tim left a note for her with the hotel concierge. Crystal was to step into a booked shuttle sedan that would take her to a spot near Jussieu Métro station in the 5th arrondissement, where he stood waiting for her, umbrella in one hand, a gym bag in the other. She looked at him completely puzzled, which was what he wanted, and he smiled and handed her the bag.

  “Here you go, evening clothes,” he said.

  “What, for dinner?”

  “Uh, no, not dinner.”

  She unzipped it and checked inside. Now she was really confused. “This is my gi.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He had made arrangements to have her white practice gi top and trousers and the black hakama she wore as a senior black belt in aikido flown by courier over from London.

  Now he casually turned and led her up a flight of stairs to a surprisingly airy studio. By day, the beautiful, polished hardwood floors and the mirrors on the wall were for dancing, but at night, mats were laid down, and the place became a dojo. He watched as she peered inside and saw about twenty students in the white gis of juniors, some in hakamas, already warming up and practicing. There was a short, spry, barrel-chested Japanese man in his seventies with silver hair, wearing a hakama, watching them all with his arms folded. He could have been a general surveying an army, but when he noticed Tim and Crystal at the door, his face became cheerful, almost elfin in its delight at finding them here.

  “Oh, my God, that’s Gozo Tanaka!” said Cryst
al. “That’s Gozo Tanaka.”

  “Uh, yes, I believe it is.”

  “He’s, like, a legend in aikido!” Crystal babbled on excitedly. “He’s tenth dan, studied with Shioda, opened the first Yoshinkan aikido school in Europe. He was there when the founder Morihei Ueshiba visited Hawaii, and—oh, my God, how did you manage this? Oh, no, he’s coming over here.”

  “A friend in the Quai d’Orsay owes me a favor, so I set this up,” explained Tim.

  Tanaka stood in front of them now, and Crystal bowed low, Japanese-style, saying, “Osu! Sensei Tanaka, it’s an honor to meet you.”

  “The honor is mine, Miss Anyanike.” Despite the years, Tanaka’s English had kept a heavy accent. “Your students are waiting.”

  “My students?” echoed Crystal. “I thought…”

  Tim smiled. “You’re going to teach them. You’re a fourth dan, right? Sensei Tanaka would like you to lead the class, and then he’ll give you an hour of private instruction.” He added mischievously, “I mean, if you have the time.”

  “Good!” boomed Tanaka, smiling brightly, and he began to walk back to the edge of the mats.

  Crystal was over the moon. “Yes! Yes, I have the time.” She turned to Tim. “This is amazing. This is one of the best gifts I ever… Why?”

  Tim shrugged, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “We’ve both been through a horrible ordeal, and… I thought of finding a special church for you, but that seemed too presumptuous. Have you seen Miller’s crazy ship model that he brought over? It gave me ideas. We all need a distraction. If you painted, I would have got you the best paints. If you played guitar, I would have found you a hot rock band to jam with. You do this, so… I made a couple of calls.”

  She beamed at him, took a step forward to reach out, then thought better of it. There was a pause of a second, and then she turned back to Tanaka across the dojo and called, “Sensei, do you have a spare training gi for our kohai here?”

  “Me? Whoa, wait! I don’t know this stuff, Crystal, this is your thing—”

  “You’re here. My class, my rules. C’mon, we’ll go get changed. Ten bets to one, you’ve never put on a keikogi before.”