The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  ‘Excuse me,’ the woman said. ‘We look for Fordham Road. Shopping. Yes.’

  Fran detected that her accent was Russian. They’d moved into the outskirts of the neighbourhood in recent years.

  ‘It’s a long way away.’

  ‘So, we way off, eh?’ the Russian said.

  ‘Yeah, what I said.’

  She felt frightened now without knowing why. The thing about a tough neighbourhood was that locals were generally safe, and visitors generally weren’t. But somehow the roles had been reversed, even though the woman hadn’t threatened her in any way.

  ‘Can you show me, on map?’

  The Russian unfolded a map and half pushed it out of the window.

  ‘Sure,’ Fran said, although she wondered why a vehicle like that didn’t have sat nav.

  She moved forward, so that her swollen belly was almost touching the car’s shiny, metallic black paint. Two guys sprang out from the back doors, and she turned towards them.

  ‘What the hell?’

  Turning her head had exposed her fleshy neck. She felt a pinprick, but as she raised her hand instinctively, it was gripped hard by the Russian, and she gasped, her only response to the sudden, violent contact.

  Almost instantly, she felt queasy, her surroundings becoming vague and disjointed. It was as if she’d drunk too much red wine. She tried to scream, but no noise came out, as in a dream. Feeling faint, her eyes glazing over and watering, she saw the road undulate, like a film she’d seen of a suspension bridge as an earthquake struck. The ugly houses became fluid things and she realized she was falling.

  My baby, she thought. My precious baby.

  But she didn’t hit the pavement.

  In her mind now, she was suspended in the depths of a black ocean, her body enveloped by the muscly arms of an enormous octopus.

  42

  Fury saw a young man run out of a hardware shop, just as Fran was being bundled onto the back seat. He had floppy blond hair, like the photos she’d seen of Californian surfers, and wore a mustard-coloured apron.

  The few cars that had passed by had been placated by the bar of red and blue LED light, which flickered atop the SUV’s rear windscreen. The road didn’t lead to anywhere useful, save other houses. But Surfer was standing in the middle of it now. He started to wave his arms about, in a vain attempt to attract attention to what he’d seen happen, apparently.

  Now he lowered his hands. He stood still, staring.

  ‘He’s checking the number plate,’ Fury said in Russian to the driver.

  ‘We can change them,’ he said.

  She frowned. ‘Not quickly enough.’ She glanced around. The road was clear. ‘Take him out.’

  The Russian floored the accelerator and Surfer ran for the pavement up from the shop. Here, it abutted a twelve-feet high wire mesh fence, which sectioned off a derelict basketball pitch. The SUV mounted the kerb and Surfer started sprinting. He glimpsed over his shoulder every few seconds, a look of wild fear on his fresh face, as if he was a primitive seeing a motor vehicle for the first time.

  The SUV was so close to the fence that a flurry of sparks flew out, like ignited sparklers. The SUV’s alloy bumper bar hit him with a distinctive thud and he somersaulted over the windscreen, as stiff as a shop mannequin.

  ‘Stop,’ Fury said.

  The SUV skidded to a standstill, little puffs of dirt mingling with the faint blue rubber smoke.

  ‘Reverse.’

  Four seconds later the sensation reminded her of the time she’d run over a deer in the Black Forest. She’d thought then it would feel like going over a speed hump. It hadn’t.

  Just the same.

  She’d used a needle on the pregnant woman because she knew a Taser would have been an unacceptable risk. The woman might miscarry, or worse. The electronic current produced involuntary muscle spasms. Too dangerous. She wanted both the woman and the unborn child unharmed.

  The SUV sped away and she checked the rear-view mirror. Surfer’s body was mangled, a leg bent up to his ribcage, the back of his head resembling cat food. Blood was leaching from three of his limbs. He looked as if he’d just jumped off a ten-storey building.

  Her eyes slid to her own reflection. Her name was Anna Belova. She covered a burn mark that ran from her left temple to her jawline with expensive foundation cream. The worst of the ugliness had been removed by plastic surgery in Hong Kong. But still it left a reddish marble on her skin. She fingered it at night, after she’d removed her make-up.

  Her uncle had abused her from the age of eight. She’d decided to take her revenge on her sixteenth birthday, with a steam iron. He’d managed to yank it from her in the struggle and had slammed it back into her face. The searing heat had made had her faint. After she’d come to, she’d taken the iron from the kitchen worktop and had stabbed its metal point into the back of his skull as he’d been watching TV. They’d found him three days later. His erstwhile good looks had morphed horribly into something reminiscent of a cheese and tomato pizza. She’d reheated the iron and used it to hit him in the face more than thirty times, although she’d lost count after a dozen blows.

  A week after that she’d entered a squalid block of flats in Moscow and had started to hang out with skinheads, who treated her with respect. Some were followers of neopaganism and the white power groups. Others, members of the People’s National Party, which at the time was xenophobic and anti-Semitic, regarding Hitler as an idol. They’d spoken openly of extermination. Women had been welcomed into their ranks.

  She’d seen the packs of abandoned homeless children that lived underground like troglodytes. She’d given them a handful of roubles at first, but a skinhead had said she’d just be feeding their drug habits. She’d gotten part-time work at an extremist publisher and the skinheads had taught her to pump iron. She’d told herself that no man would touch her without her consent again.

  Now, her ideology was limited to Putinism — at least, its near lawless capitalist aspects — her work to instances of international criminality.

  Still looking in the rear-view mirror, she applied some more make-up.

  43

  Yale, the same day.

  Gabriel walked past the neoclassical Hewitt University quadrangle in the centre of the grounds, glancing at the World War One cenotaph in memory of the ‘Men of Yale’ situated in front of the stately colonnade. He looked down at the sunken courtyard garden of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and at the three minimalist sculptures by Isamu Noguchi of a pyramid, a globe and a cube, which were said to represent time, the sun, and chance. The heat hadn’t abated, and the only creatures moving at speed were small birds, hunting winged bugs.

  Gabriel had done as much research as he could in the short time that had elapsed since he’d watched the DVD, but still he didn’t know whether the Kalmyk religion could have anything to do with its hideous contents. He had to find out, and that was why he was on his way to see Professor Boris Iliev. That was why he knew he had to be frank with him, to an acceptable degree, at least. It would be a wasted exchange if he just skirted around the central issue.

  Gabriel knew his sister had been anxious to teach Sangmu about her cultural and religious roots, as much as was possible, and she’d taken advantage of events such as the New Jersey Folk Festival, which for one day in April 2011 had centred on the Kalmyk people. They’d started to migrate to the eastern state in the late 1950s, due to the sponsorship of Russian émigrés and the Tolstoy Foundation. His sister had been invited to Rashi Gempil-Ling, a Kalmyk Tibetan Buddhist temple just off Route 9. She’d told Gabriel that the smaller of its two buildings, which smelled of incense, had been empty save for an enormous prayer wheel, a lavishly decorated device that a Tibetan monk had said contained a million printed prayers wrapped around an engraved, brass core. A gift to the world.

  And who could blame them for coming? Kalmykia was one of Europe’s most deprived and under-developed regions. The Dalai Lama had sent a high lama to minister to
them, but Stalin’s agricultural policy, the disastrous irrigation projects, the relentless ploughing and grazing, including the introduction of robust sheep from the Caucasus mountains, all had reduced the dark soil of the once fertile steppe to a near desert. There was no industry, except for a trifling amount of food processing, fishing and wool washing, and the average wage was little more than fifty US dollars a month. Who could live on that?

  Elista had few shops, his sister said, and fewer restaurants. She’d been true to her word and had taken Sangmu back to Kalmykia every few years to visit what was left of her family. The capital, ramshackle as it was, compared favourably to the rest of Kalmykia, she’d said. But despite the hardships only a relative few had come to America. Now, Moscow didn’t bother them much in their restored autonomous republic. They had their own land, albeit in a poor state. Their language, abolished in 1924 by the Bolsheviks, was once more being taught in the few schools that existed. Traditional musical instruments were made from imported Mongolian timber and domestic animal skins. They were making the best of it. All this Gabriel knew, but it didn’t explain a thing.

  The library building was a six-storey, windowless, off-white oblong, the walls of which were made of translucent marble and appeared to glow orange in the half-light of dawn and dusk. It had closed for months of renovation works. Normally the interior was cavernous, with subdued lighting and the feel of an ultra-modern place of worship, the valuable books in tiers of glass cabinets, their antique pages illuminated by hundreds of jaundiced lightbulbs. Gabriel had always thought it looked like an outsized and extravagant beehive.

  Now it was all but empty, the cathedral of learning rendered prosaic by rusted and paint-stained scaffolding, by enormous dust sheets and hung polythene dividers.

  It was off-limits to the students who usually filled every available work surface, every recess. But Boris Iliev, a Bulgarian, had refused to work anywhere else and had been granted a concession. He’d published a dozen books on his specialty and was widely regarded as the leading expert in his field. He was in the religious studies department and specialized in Tibetan Buddhism, although he also had a penchant for Kalmyk history.

  If any man could make sense of it, it was Boris Iliev.

  44

  New York State, the same day.

  Johnny Hockey had entered a not guilty plea when the case was heard before a district judge at his arraignment, following the return of the grand jury indictment. The public defender had told him beforehand that it was normal to plead not guilty at this stage of the proceedings. It allowed sufficient time for the disclosure of detailed evidence to take place. Hockey had shrugged nonchalantly. He wasn’t going back to federal prison in any case. Word had gotten to him that today was ‘game day’.

  Federal prisoner transport was the responsibility of the US Marshals Service. The transport vehicle was a white van, reinforced with blast-proof doors, side impact bars, wire mesh and bulletproof windows. It was doing a steady thirty miles per hour as it carried Hockey and two prisoners from the federal courthouse back to the remote correctional facility. They were held in segregated compartments that were little more than claustrophobic cages, which smelled vaguely of bleach and beeswax. To mask the stink of previous passengers, Hockey knew.

  The sun was a peach-coloured glow atop a grassy hill, the country road a mere two-lane track without white markings. At a junction, a black station wagon approached from around the nearest bend. It skidded to a halt in front of the van. Simultaneously, two dark-green SUVs and a mail van, which had been travelling behind, boxed it in, like police cars corralling a drunk driver on a motorway. Two at the sides, preventing the van’s left-hand doors from opening, and one at the rear. Reversing wasn’t an option and the right-hand doors were all but jammed in by an overgrown bank. The vehicles had tinted windscreens and opaque windows — even the mail van.

  The driver was Carl Carpenter, thirty-two, a big-boned ex-Navy man, with a widow’s peak. He wore wraparound shades. He’d watched the vehicles on and off, a little warily, in the wing mirror for the past five minutes or so, but had put his fears of their significance down to an overactive imagination, a decision he now regretted. The air conditioning was on full blast and he reached over to the dial and turned it down, silencing the airflow.

  ‘Jesus,’ Kowalski said.

  He was a squat, middle-aged guy, with a foot fetish he couldn’t keep to himself, and a bad case of halitosis that made Carpenter wince. In truth, Carpenter didn’t know which disgusted him the most. They were both dressed in general issue black padded jackets, Kowalski with a baseball cap on his meaty head. Their holsters held Glock 22 .40 calibre pistols.

  ‘Stay calm,’ Carpenter said. ‘Call it in.’

  Kowalski picked up the VHF radio handset and reported what had happened. He said they had a potential life-threatening hijack situation, and added that he wasn’t sure exactly what was going down, but if they didn’t receive emergency backup soon, there could be fatalities.

  For a few seconds, it was as if they were merely waiting at a red light, except there was no passing traffic. Carpenter wondered if the roads had been blocked with fake maintenance works. Maybe there just wasn’t any traffic. It was isolated enough.

  He looked around him. He watched, almost casually in the circumstances, a buzzard struggling to hover above a swaying cornfield, buffeted by the high wind. But his thoughts were dark, and who knew what lurked in the blackness?

  Kowalski went for his Glock.

  ‘Wait, you wanna get killed for these?’ Carpenter said, referring to their human cargo. ‘Let’s just see how this pans out.’

  Carpenter wanted to live. He had to live. His wife, Fran, was eight months pregnant.

  His personal smartphone rang. He put his hand into his cargo pocket, pulled it out. The number was unknown. He took it anyway.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Just shut fuckup. Watch video on phone. If you love wife, watch.’

  It was a woman’s voice, a little staccato due to the shaky connection. An accent he wasn’t sure about due to the quality, but had sounded Eastern European.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he said.

  But he checked his mobile hurriedly. A video had been sent. He thumbed it open. He heard the screaming first. It was Fran. His eyes widened and sweat broke out on his forehead. His breath quickened, and he found himself clasping the smartphone so hard that a vein popped up on the back of his hand.

  Fran was on her back. It looked like a bedroom, but he’d nearly gone into shock. A man was standing over her, wearing blue denim overalls that looked strewn with paint and oil. His face was obscured by a white, full-face ski mask, making identification impossible. He held a knife with a long, serrated blade. Fran’s arms were over her head, her hands and forearms out of view. Her legs were splayed, as if she was going into labour. The bump of her stomach seemed to have increased in size, such that it dominated the small screen. She looked as vulnerable as a wing-damaged sparrow.

  ‘Open back door, Carpenter,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘I don’t tell you again.’

  Carpenter hit two buttons instantly. The back door unlocked. He was whimpering and shaking.

  The radio crackled. A voice said, ‘A state trooper is twenty seconds away. Don’t get out of the vehicle.’

  Carpenter fingered the silver Saint Christopher next to his pulsating throat, which he regarded more as an agnostic amulet than a symbol of faith. He didn’t hear a siren. He adjusted the wing mirror electronically. The road that rose to the hill behind him was empty. He started pleading to God with a new-found piety for his wife’s deliverance.

  45

  Yale, the same day.

  Professor Boris Iliev was in a poky basement office. He was a tall man, perhaps six three, with an elongated neck, pallid skin and wiry grey hair. A pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses were perched halfway down his hawkish nose. He wore a woollen, pale green blazer, with buttons that looked like hazelnuts. The tone of h
is voice was guttural, almost comically so, as if he spent his days trading in scrap iron rather than poring over ancient and sacred texts for a living.

  Sitting at a wooden desk, they exchanged pleasantries and Gabriel said that he had been shown a video of the horrific abuse and murder of a young Kalmyk woman in which the man wore a Tibetan demon mask and a Buddhist monk’s robe. He didn’t mention Sangmu, but he could see by the look on Iliev’s face that he had an inkling of what this was all about, given he’d met Sangmu on a few occasions, knew she was a Kalmyk and that she’d disappeared in Central Park eighteen months before. Thankfully, he was too much of a gentleman to enquire further.

  ‘I’d be grateful if this conversation was kept private,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Of course, Gabriel.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Iliev took off his glasses and began to stroke his left cheek with the tip of the left temple. ‘How can I help you?’

  Gabriel clasped his hands, forming a steeple above the desktop with his index fingers, which he pointed downwards. ‘I know the Kalmyk people are Tibetan Buddhists, but that’s just about all I know about their religion. Is there anything in their belief system that might allow what I just referred to?’

  Iliev raised an eyebrow, as if he found the question a little impudent.

  ‘I have to eliminate all possibilities,’ Gabriel said, truthfully.

  Iliev said that the Kalmyks followed the newest of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism known as Gelugpa, which some called the Yellow Hats. It had been founded over 700 years ago. The Gelugpa monks had allied themselves with the Mongols in 1577 and, over time, their spiritual practices had been adopted by those feared horsemen. In turn, that connection had propelled the school to pre-eminence in Tibet, which had been awash with warring Buddhist sects. Monks from the different factions had tortured and murdered one another.

  ‘This was not the Tibet portrayed by Western culture, but rather a land overseen by monks that repressed the local peasantry. There was a class of untouchables, called ragyaba. Whippings that often led to death. Capital punishment was rife, as were penal amputations.’