The Broken Ones (10 page)

“You don’t listen to my wife,” said Paz Lovering, not looking up.

“She’s not a good liar,” said Oscar. “Migraine?”

“You’re my fucking headache,” Lovering said without malice. “Besides, who wants a wife who’s a good liar? Look where it got you.”

“Sabine never lied. She just didn’t answer the questions I never asked.”

Lovering grunted, and the soldering iron hissed as he cleaned it on a damp sponge. In different times, Paz Lovering would have been a fat man; instead, his flesh hung on his bones like forlorn sails. Paz had once been a producer on a string of current-affairs television shows including
ARClight
, a foreign-affairs program spanning hot spots from Port-au-Prince to Jerusalem. A few months before Gray Wednesday, Lovering had been caught up in a bribery scandal involving several media outlets, a former communications minister, and the police union. Oscar and Jon had been the investigating officers. The attorney general had wanted to burn away the whiff of corruption by making a loud, well-publicized case of it, and had sought to bring charges against all and sundry. Oscar knew Lovering’s involvement had been incidental, and managed to shield the producer from the fracas. As a result, Lovering felt forever indebted to him … and the man clearly hated being obligated. Lovering wiped his hands on his jeans and ran his hand through his thinning hair in frustration.

“It wouldn’t kill you to telephone, you know.”

“You don’t answer the phone,” Oscar said.

“Exactly.”

Lovering screwed a circuit board to the chassis of a DVD player. In the past three years, television had been reduced to the weather channel; a taxpayer-funded federal network that broadcast sessions of Parliament, national news, and cheaply made shows for children; a shaky commercial broadcaster rerunning ancient sitcoms; and three
channels of what amounted to soft porn. The industry had died, and Lovering kept his household afloat by repairing electrical equipment. Lovering had once revealed—after several Glenlivets—that his ghost was his grandmother, a stern, unsmiling creature whose appearance had not improved with death, and who was never more than a few steps away. She was one reason that he liked the long hours at his workbench, where he could keep his back to the horrid apparition. Oscar found his own eyes probing the shadows, but there was no sign of the dead boy. He kept his distance; Oscar knew he had that to be grateful for.

“Working on the Sabbath?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be at temple?”

“The temples are all closed,” Lovering replied. “And what does a bead-mumbler know about Shabbat?”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“Of course you are. You’re Italian.”

“I’m not Italian.”

“You were raised Italian.” Denna descended the stairs with a tray of soup, a plate of
flódni
, and a pot of coffee. “Don’t use those words, Pazel; you don’t know what a person believes these days.” She set the tray down and caught Oscar’s eye. “And you, don’t sound so ungrateful.”

Lovering eyed the sweet desserts. “Great. Now he’ll never want to go. We can’t keep him, he’s not neutered.” He squinted at Oscar. “Or are you?”

Oscar ignored him and thanked Denna; she waved away the gratitude and returned up the stairs. Oscar sipped the soup and realized that he was ravenous. Was it wrong to be hungry after finding a dead girl? He ate anyway, one-handed, and pulled his phone from his pocket, activating it with a musical tinkle.

“I don’t do cell phones,” said Lovering, stealing a glance at the device. “Okay, I do Siemens. And old Nokias. But only for cash.”

Oscar shook his head as he scrolled through the photographs. He handed Lovering the phone. On the LCD screen was a close-up of the symbol carved into the dead girl’s lower abdomen. A residual chill of when he first saw those tiny, careful cuts spidered up his back.

Now Lovering was staring at the picture. “For fuck’s sake,” he whispered. “Dead?”

Oscar nodded. “Found this morning.”

“So why are you showing me? You just want to ruin my appetite? The more for you?”

“I thought you might recognize it.”

“You and thinking never got along.”

“She was murdered, Paz.”

“By a Jew, you reckon?”

“A man has to start somewhere.”

“So why not with the Heebs? Hardly a fucking original idea.” Lovering zoomed in on the star carved into the dead girl’s flesh, then handed the phone back. “That’s not the Magen David. Seven points, not six. Can you count? Do they let anyone into that police force of yours?”

“Not the star, the writing.”

“I don’t read scalpel.”

“You read Hebrew.”

“I fake it. It keeps the peace.” Lovering poured coffee and prodded the circuit board. “You know, I need to get this finished for someone who is
paying
me to work.”

Oscar shrugged, chewing cake. “Hey, I thought the executive producer of
ARClight
knew stuff. My mistake.”

Lovering glared at him a long moment, then sighed and gestured for the phone. He twisted it with a careful finger, as if what was on the screen might be contagious. He adjusted his glasses, squinting. Even from a distance, Oscar could see the strange text, twisting like curls of poisonous smoke.

“I don’t think it’s Hebrew,” Lovering said. “It’s hard to read … but some of it is pictorial, like hieroglyphs. This—these wedgy symbols—looks like old cuneiform.” He looked up at Oscar. “I’m still in touch with some of my researchers. One, she’s good. She might agree to look into this.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“She doesn’t work for nothing,” Lovering warned, and connected the phone to an old Canon printer.

“I can pay,” Oscar said.

Lovering looked dubious.

Oscar’s watch alarm sounded; Lucas Purden would be rousing from his Fentanyl stupor soon. Lovering printed two copies of the symbol and handed one and the phone to Oscar.

“Thanks,” Oscar said. “Let me know.” He went to the stairs.

“Mariani?”

Oscar turned back. Lovering was staring at the photograph.

“Yes?”

Lovering regarded the picture a moment longer, then folded it sharply and shoved it into his pocket. “Go, get gone. Leave a man to make a buck.” He turned back to his workbench.

It took twenty minutes to reach Purden’s flophouse. Oscar parked in front and went inside. Again, the street had seen him coming: the squat was empty. So was the boy’s locker; its door hung open. The mattress was bare. Lucas Purden was gone.

Oscar slowed as he drove into the strange borderland between the deteriorating office buildings of downtown and the run-together alleys of Chinatown. The steady rain had driven the seediest elements from the streets. Oscar found the doorway he was looking for and parked. He knocked; no answer. In an adjoining doorway, a beggar opened one eye, appraised Oscar in a glance, then closed it again. Brave little breezes puffed snatches of mud salt from the river mangroves, piss from the gutters, and slaps of fish and cabbage from the alleys. A burned doll lay in the gutter. Oscar went back to his car to wait.

She arrived through the rain under an umbrella, an elegant, black-sailed caravel navigating polluted waters. Her name was Tanta, a name she’d chosen, Oscar was sure, because it allowed her to show her little pink tongue when introducing herself to new clients. She carried a small bag of groceries.

He stepped out of the car. “You look beautiful,” he said.

She took one look at Oscar’s outfit and tutted softly; her once famous tongue winked red between pearl-white teeth.

“What are we going to do with you?” she said.

“Hopeless case,” he agreed, and showed her a bottle of wine he’d scrounged. “Do you have a moment?”

“Pleasure before pleasure,” she replied.

Oscar followed her up stairs as narrow as a coffin to a tiny bedroom.
A double bed with black satin sheets took up so much of the floor that only one person could walk crabwise around it. Oscar guessed that people didn’t come up here to walk. Tanta had once worked from a penthouse apartment overlooking Southbank, until a client—a member of Parliament representing a dry and dusty western electorate—found the Lord a month or so before Gray Wednesday and decided to publicly confess his sins. Tanta, perhaps the most colorful of those misdeeds, was caught up in the orgiastic reportage. She soon found herself out of her penthouse and working from this tiny room; after Gray Wednesday, there was no going back uptown. She lit three candles.

“Bad luck, three to a match,” she said. “But bad’s the new good, right?”

He handed her a paper cup of wine. “Fentanyl,” he said.

“No one I know uses it. Who could afford it?” She looked at Oscar and smiled. “Who did afford it?”

He told her about the now vanished Lucas Purden.

“If he’s smart, he can hide anywhere.”

“He’s not smart.”

“He gave
you
the slip.” She sipped delicately. “How does a silly boy afford Fentanyl?”

“By doing something silly. Will you ask around?”

“May I ask what this is about?”

“Do you want to know?”

“Does it involve sweaty men who want their assholes fingered and cry after coming?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then, God, yes.”

Oscar showed Tanta the photograph Lovering had printed for him. Her full lips curled downward.

“Oh, my.”

“Heard of anything like this?” he asked. “Guys into knives, into the occult?”

“Everyone carries knives, Oscar.” She smiled a mild rebuke. “And everyone believes in ghosts. But I’ll ask.”

He reached into his wallet and pulled out his last twenty.

Tanta made a face, offended. “I think you need it more than I do.”

She stood, intending to tuck the photograph down her décolletage, then thought better of it and put it in her small clutch purse.

Oscar stood. “I have to run.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips because he knew she liked it. She closed her eyes, just a little, and leaned into him. He felt the bulge in her crotch against his leg. She looked down at it, then back up through heavy lashes.

“What can I say? You do things,” she admitted. Her smile became more humid. “You
could
do things. Rain makes for a quiet night.”

He smiled. “It’s always raining.”

“You’re a lovely disappointment,” she said, sighing.

“Years of practice.”

At the door, she called to him. “Hon? Don’t hold your breath. These days, secrets stay secret.”

The late-afternoon sky was so heavy with rain it drooped. Oscar parked under police headquarters and took the lift to the Industrial Relations floor. He wound his way between empty chairs and silent cubicles to his desk and sat. He soon printed the thirty or more pages required to report a death and request that the coroner approve an autopsy. Many of the blanks he filled with the same answer. Family advised of death? No. Formal identification? No. Has a criminal proceeding been commenced against any person in relation to this death? No. The one person who might have been of assistance—Lucas Purden, a boy with barely more intellect than an Irish setter—had deceived and eluded him.

He logged on to Prophet, the service’s intranet. Prophet had become so unstable that officers and staff called it Loss; anyone wanting to check files without the risk of having them disappear before their eyes went to the hard copies. But for once Prophet seemed to be cooperating, and Oscar accessed the Missing Persons database. He entered the parameters of what he knew about his Jane Doe: approximate age, approximate height, hair color. Without a face, the Jane Doe was a Caucasian adolescent with brown hair and brown eyes—a quarter of a million girls across the country would fit her description. The search returned 192 possible matches: a solid week’s work just to cross-reference them all. And those were just girls
reported
missing. With schools’ registers
in turmoil and child allowance payments terminated, there was neither stick nor carrot to entice loveless parents to register a runaway.