The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “The fridge is cold,” Mary had announced once more in her sleepwalker’s drone.

  And Gordon Fraser had thought: Who are they kidding? Girl’s a train wreck. One second lucid, wanting to hit an art store for pastels or some shit, and the next rambling on about—

  “Mary, you want we should get some coffee or something?” he asked with genuine compassion. “I don’t know anything about India, sweetheart. I don’t know anything about Europe or elsewhere or olives, okay? And most fridges are supposed to be cold. I thought you wanted to get your art supplies? Look, why don’t we take a break and—”

  “September sixteenth, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t understand,” said Mary, suddenly more agitated.

  She pulled away from him, and for a moment, Fraser thought she might cause a scene. Fraser hated scenes. But the currents and eddies of unflappable New Yorkers swirled around them and then past, and there was not a single, second glance of regretful interest from the human pilot fish on the move.

  “Okay, there’s the store, let’s do it.”

  “September nineteenth, contact made,” said Mary, her eyes scanning the shelves full of black leather portfolios and taking none of it in. “He gets a print-out article by Vikram Raj Singh Chauhan, a copy of Gerald Kersh short stories. The book has been left in a puddle, and blackish-green mold grows and festers on pages eighty-six through hundred and twenty-five. The fridge can’t hold it safe. There is no caring because he’s not a reader, the other one’s the reader, and he wants to do, wants to act—”

  “Mary, we came here for your supplies.”

  “You don’t see, you can’t see,” said Mary Ash, her head shaking nervously with a Tourette shudder. Her fingers fidgeted with a button on her coat. “You want photographic precision, edges that are clear and defined. You do not know what you were—or what you were before that and before that and so on and so forth. Now imagine you remember.”

  “What I was?” demanded Fraser, and then thinking better of it, he asked, “Mary, who are you talking about?”

  “They kill because they need to die. They become desperate, mad—locked in lower forms of incarnation. Murder is the door out. I’m not strong enough yet, but I have to try.”

  “Okay, that’s it, I’m taking you home.”

  “Look there,” said Mary Ash quietly.

  Fraser couldn’t help but look.

  Slumped on the floor was a brunette girl of about twenty-five with high cheekbones, dressed in a heavy woolen sweater and jeans, looking past them. A fountain of arterial spray shot from her throat. Blood, so much blood, but what rocked Gordon Fraser even more was how the girl gazed at him with the expression of the nodding addict, with a faint smile of the anesthetized patient counting down from ten, as she said, “It won’t be like your dreams…”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” yelled Fraser, dropping to his knees, and then he shouted for the store clerk to call 911. He vaguely heard Mary Ash behind him announce quietly that the victim with her throat slashed was called Gudrun.

  “I should have been there to help her,” he heard Mary Ash say behind him as vivid liquid red poured through his fingers and down his wrist, over the sleeve of his jacket. “I could see it. In my head, I mean. Before I could… just make things that happened to me. But I’m getting stronger. That’s why I can make you see stuff now that happened to other people. This one was bad.”

  “Mary, help me!”

  “I can’t… Not for her. It’s already over, you see. I just wanted you to understand.”

  The guy behind the counter saw what he saw, and what was Mary babbling about? The store clerk recoiled two, three steps, and rushed back to the front counter in his scuffed Doc Martens to grab the phone and call for an ambulance.

  “There are others,” said Mary Ash. “I’m not really strong enough yet, but I have to try.”

  Gordon Fraser pleaded for the hemorrhaging victim to hold on, hold on, but the girl in his arms literally bled away. Fraser didn’t understand how and why her flesh became a pulpy, spongy and bloody mass in his trembling fingers like so many rotting peaches. He didn’t know anything about how this girl had once focused, willing herself to stand in clean woods and sunshine. Crunching leaves under boots and birds twittering.

  Then she was gone completely.

  And of course, Mary Ash was gone.

  Fraser groaned as his colleague in the New York office, Dorfman, came on the line of his cell phone. He knew he had to be honest. “She’s in the wind.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” barked Dorfman. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “I don’t know! One minute she’s looking at charcoal pencils, and the next I’m on my knees, trying to help this chick with her throat slashed, only she wasn’t…”

  “Wasn’t real?” ventured the condescending voice on his cell. “Damn it, Gordon, you read the brief.”

  Yes, he had read the brief, damn it, and he knew his practically spotless record couldn’t insulate him from the recriminations over this fuck-up. But it was one thing to read what the Ash girl could do, quite another to be mesmerized by the result.

  “Look, will you get Zabalotny and Ingram to swing by the parents’ place? Tell ’em—”

  “Fuck, Gordon! We’re not going to tell them anything. We’ll say we’re doing a follow-up on her mental state.”

  “Oh, God, oh, God,” muttered Fraser. He’d thought… He thought he could handle it. Handle her.

  “Get it together, man.”

  “The shit she comes out with. All she needs is a shopping cart and a filthy blanket. And what she can do…”

  He heard Dorfman sigh on the line. “Well, is there anything in what we said we can use? You know that Cale guy they hired is going to have both our asses. What did she say, Fraser? Come on!”

  “I don’t know!” answered Fraser, wanting to do anything but relive his failure. “Shit about India and Europe—no. She said ‘Not India’ and—”

  “What’s not India?”

  “She didn’t say, man. She said, ‘They’ll think it’s India because of him.’ Uhhhh, ‘somewhere closer in Europe, like her.’ Whatever that means. Started talking about olives off the trees. She kept saying the fridge is cold. What’s her deal with fridges?”

  “Fuck… Oh, Christ.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “She didn’t mean a fridge. She meant ‘The Fridge’—as in a nickname. The guys at the garage where Emmett Nickelbaum worked called him ‘The Fridge.’ She’s told people that Nickelbaum isn’t dead—he’ll be coming back for her.”

  Yes, it was definitely time to panic.

  Then something occurred to Gordon Fraser. Mary Ash had known this, but she had chosen to slip away from him anyway.

  “She doesn’t want to hide anymore,” Fraser said into his cell phone.

  Dorfman was skeptical. “How do you know that?”

  “I feel it’s true,” Fraser replied, knowing it was an anemic answer, that he had nothing to base that on. “She said there are others, and that she had to try. Dorfman.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something terrible is going to happen.”

  Sarcasm coming down the line: “You feel that, too?”

  “Yeah. Dorfman, when we find her—if we find her—I need to go on sick leave. You know something? Tell ’em I got to go on sick leave now. I’m coming in.”

  “Gord, there’s nothing wrong with you. You lost the girl, and the assignment went to shit, that’s all. You’ll be okay!”

  “No, I’m not, Dorfman. I’m really not.”

  Because he couldn’t stop thinking about what the girl had said. He didn’t fully understand how he was aware of what Mary Ash was about to do, but she had cursed him with the gift of being able to put it together in this moment.

  There was no way to follow the girl to prevent what was going to happen, and worse, far worse, was his growing conviction that it should happen, and that he had no right to even dare to interfere.

  The Italian g
irl, Maria Gigliotti, had spent four hours in excruciating terror in a closet, stripped nude and with her wrists and ankles bound with electrical tape. In the moments between the crushing tedium of the darkness alternating with blind fear over what would happen to her, she still couldn’t piece together what was her mistake. The great wall of an American with his veil of wiry chin stubble and his stolid dome with the bad comb-over had approached her with an open guidebook.

  She should have known better, because his nails were dirty and his clothes didn’t look very clean, but it had been eleven o’clock in the morning, and they got so many tourists in Brindisi. He had picked her up like used furniture, his huge mitt of a hand covering her mouth even before they got to the shadows in the narrow alley.

  She had cried so hard and for so long in the closet that her reddened eyes ached. The big man had gone away, and hours had passed. She had tried to hold out from natural instinct, making noise through the coarse rag stuffed in her mouth, but in the end she had been forced to urinate in the tiny, black space. It stank in here. It reeked of piss and sweat and fear.

  And then she was suddenly elsewhere. Still nude and bound, but it was as if a great hand had scooped her up in the night of the dank closet and opened its palm to reveal her new place. She was somewhere else… She didn’t know where, and at the moment it hardly mattered.

  But there was a girl here who sat on the gray broadloom carpet across from her and against a wall. She looked about her own age but made no effort to crawl over and help. To tear away the sticky electrician’s tape and free her or declare she would go and fetch the police. No, she just sat there with her elbows on her knees, two idle fingers playing with a split end of her brunette hair.

  Maria Gigliotti noticed there were two bloody stumps where the fingers should have been on her other hand.

  “I’ve been where you are,” said Mary Ash in her thin, ethereal voice. “You’re right, it’s about to get worse. I’ve been thinking lately… about evil. You know they say soldiers guard us while we sleep, and they have to kill indiscriminately to preserve democracy, liberty, whatever. Whole shebang, right?”

  Maria Gigliotti, eyes wide and struggling in her bonds on the carpet, could only Mmmmmm-mmmmrrrhhhmmm as she tried to wrench herself up to a sitting position. She couldn’t sit up and fell with a painful thump onto the ragged carpet.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” said Mary Ash. “I used to watch the news, but…” The corners of her mouth turned up in a shy smile. “But I don’t really need to watch the news anymore,” she added lightly. And she rocked with a singsong laugh at her own joke.

  Maria Gigliotti pleaded with her eyes. Please. Please, help me.

  “I think about little kids in war zones,” said Mary Ash in her dreamy, distracted way. “They get hurt or killed, and people just accept it. That’s war. Collateral damage. But I’m thinking, no, that’s wrong.”

  “Mmmm-mmrrrhhhmm.”

  “Why do collateral strangers have to die in a war but not when you fight, you know, something else? A single evil? You get what I mean, right? War’s a collective evil, but you can fight evil one on one.” In a whisper, she added, “We both know about the singular kind…”

  Maria Gigliotti watched as the stumps, the two bloody stumps, lifted and brushed through a strand of hair.

  “Oh, these. I know. I don’t draw anymore so I thought I’d go back to what he left me. What was I saying? Oh, yes… Little kids. Innocents. Evil. Like, nobody thinks about the scale. They’ll say it’s different, but it isn’t. I mean, it’s just the scale that’s different. It’s a scale of one.”

  Maria Gigliotti sobbed quietly, lying on her side.

  “My mom says they found splinters in me,” said Mary Ash.

  Maria Gigliotti kept begging with her eyes.

  “I have to send you back now,” the strange girl told her with what sounded like genuine regret. “I don’t want that for you, but this is a war. And you’re going to be my bomb.”

  The crying, terrified nude victim on the floor strained harder at her bonds, screaming now through the muffling rag that No, she couldn’t go back, please, please, please don’t send her back, don’t send her—

  But then it was done.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Crystal stayed one more night in the hospital and then was discharged. She put on a brave face over how close she had come to death, telling Miller and Tim back at the hotel, “I’m glad that bloody Russian’s dead! Doctors tell me I’m going to have a scar.”

  “I’m sure it’ll fade,” offered Miller, hovering like an anxious puppy.

  She stepped on her toes and gave him a peck on the forehead. “You’re a sweet little geek, Andrew. You really are.”

  Then she casually announced that she had to get some air and strolled out of the hotel lobby.

  Miller went upstairs, back to the decks of the Missouri. Tim retreated to his own room, checking emails and returning a couple of phone calls from the university back home. An hour passed. Then it was two hours. Then three…

  The three of them hardly ever passed much time without checking in with each other, and Miller called Tim to ask if he knew if Crystal was all right. Tim thought he should find out for himself. He had his own concerns. Their detective inspector was tough as nails, sure, but she could have been murdered by Zorich. True, the same could be said for him, but Zorich’s blade hadn’t sliced into his stomach.

  Paris in the late afternoon. Each cobblestone of the tourist areas was glazed with the ocher light of restaurants and shops. The traffic was picking up, and there was a cacophony of voices and marching feet outside the Métro stations. Tim sent a text message to Crystal, wondering where she was, and within minutes, she replied with a one-word text that surprised him: Beaubourg. She hadn’t written anything else. That could mean I’m fine, leave me alone, or it could mean she expected him to come around.

  When he arrived, he found her hanging out in the gently dipping courtyard in front of the Centre Pompidou, listening as a young black busker with dreadlocks played acoustic guitar, singing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The busker’s voice was gentle and clear, and Tim watched for a little while as Crystal smiled and sang along under her breath.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she echoed.

  “Something we missed here?”

  “No, no.” She sounded surprised by his question. “I came here for me. This place always felt special for me. I mean, before we ran into Zorich and Tvardovsky…You could see jugglers and musicians and street performers. It used to be magic here. I wanted to find that again.”

  He sat down beside her on the gently rising slope of the cobbles. The reggae ballad mixed with a bell from a passing cyclist, and a young girl ten feet away laughed as her boyfriend lifted her in a hug and swung her around. And it was all fine. It was special, just as Crystal wanted.

  Her fingers played with the gold crucifix dangling from her necklace. “You used to work in London, didn’t you? Do you know the Notre Dame de France church right off Leicester Square? I used to love popping in there. I mean, you know I’m not Catholic, but there are certain beautiful places… Doesn’t matter what you are.”

  He did know it. It was an unassuming little treasure of a church in a narrow street off the movie theaters, the Häagen-Dazs outlet and the rowdiness of the square. In one of its chapels were simple but stunningly beautiful modern murals by the French writer and poet Jean Cocteau. Those who didn’t know his work probably mistook them for Picassos, but they probably enjoyed them just the same. Tim had often felt the impulse to stroll in and refresh himself by gazing at those murals. They were so simple—like a child’s foolscap drawing—yet lovingly rendered and spiritually inspiring. It was nice to know that he and Crystal, unknown to each other back then, had shared a similar taste in one of London’s overlooked gems.

  They sat there for a long moment, and then she turned to him and asked, “What did you want to be when you grew up? When you were v
ery little—you know what I mean.”

  Tim laughed. “Got to think about that one. Huh, let’s see… An astronaut.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, why not? My dad was an engineer, and I suppose that influenced me. I liked space stuff, read books on Mars. But by junior high school, it was clear I was terrible at math and sciences.”

  “And a diplomat was born.”

  “I couldn’t get away from physics quick enough. What about you? Little Crystal with her hair in braids.”

  She smiled and watched the crowd in the square. “I wanted to be a teacher. My dreams seem so modest now, but that’s the way it was for us. My mum had a good job as a nurse, and that was all you could hope for sometimes where I came from—a good job. And when I got older, I thought it would be amazing to be a uni professor. Respect, tenure, working on ideas… Never even imagined being a copper.”

  “You can still be a professor, if you want to leave the force.”

  “Yeah.”

  The busker played on, and he noticed in the dim light that her eyes were wet.

  “Crystal…”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s stupid, really. I’ve had close shaves before—well, you know some of it. They fast-tracked me for a unit that faces some scary, dangerous people—terrorists, gangsters—and you don’t fight them alone, you have a team, you have resources, and… I don’t even know why it’s bugging me. Yes, I do. I do. It was just us, you and me, and Zorich wasn’t some stupid thug, he’s evil, he’s part of real evil. And he cut me…”

  “And you put him down.”

  “Barely,” she said, and her body suddenly shuddered. “Christ, Tim, why don’t you have someone better? Why don’t they have the good sense to throw someone bloody better at this?”

  “I don’t think there is anyone better.”

  “That’s sweet, and no offense, yeah? But you’re not qualified to know.”

  “I know a little something about evil, because I met it before,” he answered. “I know that I was a clumsy, terrified idiot that night, and you saved my ass. I know that I don’t want anyone better.”