The Acolyte (11 page)

The bell jangled as Garvey plowed through the door. The lone customer took one look at us and made a beeline for the exit.

Tibor Goldberg stood behind a glass-topped counter. Tall and handsome in a malnourished sort of way, wearing black except for the red ID band round his left arm.

“Here he is, sitting Shiva.” Garvey’s tone was more frightening for its mock-sunniness. “Busy collecting your pound of flesh, Goldberg?”

Golberg laughed nervously. “Aboveboard and lawfully, of course.”

Garvey tucked his chin and pooched his lips, nodding sarcastically. “An upstanding rat such as yourself, a guy who’d squeal out his own grandma for a few pieces of silver—why would we question your integrity in matters of commerce?”

“Officers, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Goldberg said. “You want some skinny? That can be arranged. No need to pump me like the town well.”

I insinuated myself between them, hoping to keep Garvey’s hands at arm’s length.

“See that payphone out there?” I said. “At eight forty-seven this morning someone placed a call from it. You need to tell us who.”

Goldberg looked confused. “Some guy?” he said hesitantly. “Some phone call?”

I stared him down. “I didn’t say some guy, did I? Said some
one
.”

Goldberg flushed. “I don’t know anything about any call about any crime.”

“Who said it was a crime-related call?”

“That’s right, Goldie,” said Garvey, flipping through a rack of LPs. “Could be the guy was phoning in his winning lottery numbers.”

“When’s the last time a Jew won the lottery? We can’t even buy a ticket. I keep my ear to the ground but my eyes down, you know? Now what I do know is, a family over on Zundel Avenue’s got a box full of menorahs—”

Garvey pulled an old record:
The Very Best of Christopher Cross
.

“Mind if I give ’er a listen?”

Garvey centred the LP on the turntable and dropped the needle. Some guy started to croon about sailing. Garvey snapped his fingers and bobbed his head to the beat . . .

. . . then, with one finger, he started to rotate the disc backward, tortuously slow.

Mmmwwuooubbrooouuueeeeegertuaahhuueeeedddaaaa . . .

“Ah, man,” Goldberg whined. “You’ll ruin the vinyl.”

“Hear that?” Garvey cocked an ear. “It’s saying . . .” His eyes went wide. “Deliver your soul to the dark lord Satan.”

Goldberg’s face fell. “Officer, now wait, there’s no way—”

Garvey rotated the disc faster.

Ggggooouuuwwweeeeiiiisllllooouuuugheepher . . .

“Now it’s saying . . .”—hissing this through clenched teeth—“heave your grandparents into the roiling lake of fire! You heard that, Murtag?”

“Sorry to say”—I bit my lip to deadpan the delivery—“but yes, I did.”

“Selling seditious materials, uh?” Garvey was fired up, his tongue coated in a yellow film of Hallelujah Energy Boost. “Corrupting youthful Followers with subliminal messages—is that your angle?”

Goldberg appealed to me. “Christopher Cross was a devout Baptist. His songs played on easy listening stations.”

I tut-tutted: “The devil assumes beguiling guises.”

Garvey snapped the record over his knee. Goldberg moaned. I rifled the stacks and picked
East of Midnight
by Gordon Lightfoot, and handed it to Garvey.

“That’s a first pressing LP in its original jacket,” Goldberg pleaded. “Mike Heffernan on keyboard, Sheree Jeacocke singing backup vocals, produced by the incomparable David Foster . . .”

“Relax.” Garvey switched gears, went fatherly. “That other album was an anomaly, right? Your entire shop can’t be packed with treasonous propaganda,
can
it?”

Garvey rotated the Lightfoot album slowly, tortuously against the grain.

Hhhuuoooooaaaarrrdddurtaaaassssstttrrreeeeoooiinnnwwwooowwow-woaaaaii . . .

“You picking up anything?”

I shook my head. Once I saw the relief wash over Goldberg’s face, I said, “Wait . . . wait, I hear it now. Coming in clear as a bell. It’s saying,
Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay
—”

Goldberg cradled his head in his hands.

“
Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, now dreidel I shall play
.”

Garvey busted
East of Midnight
into shards. Goldberg yelped.

“So help me, I’ll tear this den of sin apart!” Garvey shouted.

“I can ease him off,” I said. “Just tell me who you saw.”

“If I saw anyone I’d say so,” Goldberg grovelled.

Garvey seized a record at random and broke it. A valuable one, judging by Garvey’s anguished reaction.

“I don’t believe you,” I told him. “And until you make me believe, my partner’s gonna persist with this bull-in-a-china-shop routine.”

“Well, well, well,” said Garvey. “What do we have here?”

Now he was displaying the golden calf idol, which he’d discreetly tucked behind a stack of 45s.

“That’s not mine,” Goldberg said dejectedly.

“I found it in your shop,” Garvey went on, “and possession is nine-tenths of the law. Unless this is a tiny little milking cow. Is it a milking cow, Goldie?” Garvey turned the golden calf over, inspecting it. “Jeez, sorry, no teats. So we’ve got you on intent to distribute seditious materials and possession of a false idol. Enough to send you away for a long time.”

Goldberg rested his forehead on the countertop. “If I tell you, can you promise immunity?”

I said, “We’ll do our best.”

“I don’t mean immunity from you,” he said. “Immunity from
him
.”

“From who?” Garvey wanted to know. “You recognized this guy?”

Goldberg straightened up. “I never seen him before. Or ever want to again.”

Garvey looked very interested now. “
Speak
.”

“I was opening this morning, at a quarter to nine. This guy shoves past me—couldn’t do otherwise, seeing as he was wide as the sidewalk.”

I prompted him. “So?”

“So he goes to the callbox. This guy was so huge he couldn’t even wedge his shoulders inside. Then before he leaves he opens the callbox door and just stares at me. Marking me, it felt like.” Goldberg shivered. “He looked evil. The most vile evil I’d ever seen.”

I thought back to the trailer scene. Whoever had perpetrated that did indeed possess a core of perfect evil. “And then?”

“And then he’s gone. And now, a few hours later, you guys’re here.”

“You got a clean look at his face?” When Goldberg nodded, Garvey said, “Lock up. You got a date with our sketch artist.”

Human Remains

Garvey hightailed it to the stationhouse with Goldberg in the back seat. I led Goldberg down the hallway and through a set of frosted swinging doors, up a flight of stairs past the evidence lockup into an empty room housing a draftsman’s table. The artist wasn’t around so I shackled Goldberg to the radiator.

“Sit tight, Tibor. You’re a heathen in a police station; everyone’s armed and nobody will think twice.”

Goldberg tipped his chin at the portrait of The Prophet on the wall. “I am rendered paralyzed by his mesmerizing countenance,” he said sarcastically.

I left him and put the bird on my desk. It was chirping animatedly in its box. I dug a pack of sunflower seeds out of my desk drawer and dropped a few in for it. Then I took the elevator down to SB2: Sub Basement #2. A cramped corridor led to a pair of swinging galley doors:
PATH
written on the left hand door;
OLOGY
on the right.

I shouldered through into a large, antiseptically white room. Meat-locker cold: the chill amplified the intensity of the halogens popping and fritzing above. Storage vaults lined the walls. Red tags detailed their residents: H
. GOTCHALL, M, FOLLOWER / B. FALGUNI, F, HEATHEN.
The clatter of water pipes made it sound as if the cold corpses were knocking their metal cells in an effort to free themselves.

Newbarr entered, followed by Doe. My heart trip-hammered. I thought back to the last time we’d been alone together, her naked in the moonlight. . . .

“You’re both here,” said Newbarr. “Marvellous. Let’s get down to it, shall we?”

He led us to vaults tagged E
VE, F
and J
. S. KINCAID
,
M
. When he rolled out the slabs there wasn’t much to consider: a pair of four-gallon Tupperware containers filled with charred debris, plus a Ziploc bag holding a sizzled lump of fur with the words “Canis—Erasmus” written on the plastic in black Sharpie.

Newbarr acknowledged the slim pickings. “It’s basically guesswork. Bits of Kincaid could be mixed up with bits of Eve—even bits of the bomber.”

“How did you separate them out?” I said.

Newbarr gestured to Kincaid’s container, shrugged, said, “I put the most artistic looking pieces in there?”

Doe barked laughter.

Newbarr pried the plastic lids off. The expelled air smelled like rain-sodden cigarettes. He stirred through the meagre evidence with a speculum, turning over knobs of bone, melted dental bridgework, flame-scored costume jewellery. A diamond crucifix winked in one fire-blackened tooth.

He plucked a slim metal ring from the ash. “Surgical stomach band—one of them had gastric bypass surgery.”

I said, “Eve?”

Newbarr shrugged. “Judging by his press photos, Kincaid wasn’t carrying any extra weight.”

He rubbed his chin with the speculum. “I haven’t been acting coroner on many suicide bombings, but in those cases the bombs were homemade jobs, and badly botched: in the first case the bomb misfired and tore the bomber in half; in the second it exploded early, killing only the bomber’s accomplice. But this recent rash has been lethal: hundreds dead, hundreds more critically injured. There’s a chilling professionalism to it.”

He shut the vaults and opened one tagged J
OHN DOE, HEATHEN
. Two more containers: one of ashes, another of charred metal balls. Beside them were a pair of steel-toed boots—with a pair of burnt and blackened feet still inside them. Next to them lay a scooped metal plate pitted with tiny bowl-shaped dents.

Newbarr said, “The explosion was baffled by this.” He rapped the metal plate. “It ensured the bomber’s body and debris were blown forward, toward the crowd. Rebound effect. The blast was so fierce it snapped the ankle bones and tore the lower legs from the feet.”

He picked up a boot and displayed the wax-smooth tread. “Melted to the stage. I had to cut them off the boards with a knife.”

He rattled the container of balls. “Tungsten. The metal with the highest melting point. Iron or steel would’ve liquefied. The plate’s tungsten, too.”

Doe said, “Can you give us a reconstruction?”

Newbarr said: “Give me an intact corpse and I could examine the stomach contents, give an idea of that person’s heritage, make presumptions regarding their last seventy-two hours on this earth. Give me a crime scene with blood spatters, a murder weapon, tissue samples, footprints, fingerprints—Lord,
anything
. That’s the problem with bombings—the blast erases everything. No trace to work from. Back when we used forensic science, I could’ve scraped a shred of meat from the boots and gotten a DNA fingerprint. But never mind that. Here’s one thing that still confuses me.”

Newbarr pointed out a series of burnt discs climbing like ladder rungs up the tungsten plate. “The vertebrae of the bomber’s spinal column—they’re fused directly to the metal.”

I said, “What’s so odd about that?”

“If his chest was girded with explosives, it’s hard to see how it could occur. The combustion should’ve scoured every vestige of tissue and bone.”

Newbarr grabbed folders from a file cabinet. “I need your John Hancocks on these evidence reports. Eve’s remains need to be interred in a state burial, plus Kincaid’s manager has been hassling me.”

The doctor gave a disgusted snort. “Apparently he’s packaging the ashes in crucifix-shaped ampoules for fans to wear round their necks. A sick little piece of Kincaid-iana. He wants the remains pronto, before his client’s star goes on the wane.”

Before leaving, I handed Newbarr a packet of Hallelujah Energy Boost.

“No, thanks,” the coroner said. “I’ll stick to rotgut coffee.”

“Could you give me a breakdown of the ingredients?”

“Says here it’s packed with vitamin V,” he said, examining the ingredients archly. “What more proof do you need?”

“If you’d rather not . . .”

“I’ll see what I can do. No promises, son.”

Doe and I rode the elevator up together. It was the first time we’d been alone since the night I’d said in a roundabout but sincere way that I was in love with her.

She stood very still, watching the elevator buttons light up floor by floor. Shallow incisions radiated from her left eye; I could only speculate as to which of Hollis’s subtle tortures had inflicted those.

I said, “You were in Little Baghdad this morning?”

She nodded.

“Everything okay? I thought the residents might have been angry, on account of all the casualties. I . . . I was worried about you.”

She performed an ironic curtsy. “Don’t you go worrying your pretty head.”