The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Franklin Babineaux, that skinny kid from New Orleans, he’s first into the room, and then me, and then Audrey. Yeah, she was still my partner, right. This was still six months or so before her accident. Anyway, so, by the time I make it through the door, Babineaux, he’s already gotten a big, juicy eyeful, and he’s just sorta standing off to the side, fucking dumbstruck, gawking. And there before us was the nightmare that Esmé Symes had neglected to elaborate on. My first thought—I shit you not—my very first thought was how it all had to be some sort of sick-ass practical joke. Something like that, your brain doesn’t want to admit you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing, and if you are seeing it, well, then it can’t possibly be what it looks like. Oh, you’ve seen the photos, I know, but the photos, let me assure you, they don’t convey one one-hundredth of the sheer surreal fucked-upness. The photos, they’re like a fading memory of the real thing, like, let’s say, a copy of a copy. For one, you look at them and you don’t get the smell. Like a fish market or a salt marsh at low tide, and just beneath the oily, fishy ocean smell there was the sharp metallic stink of all that blood. See, you take away the smell and you take away that punch to the gut. Thank sweet damn Jesus it was winter. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have been like walking into that shitstorm in July instead of January.

  But, like I said, first thing through my head was that someone had set it all up just to fuck with us. Because right there in front of me, hanging from the ceiling, was this goddamn fourteen-foot great white shark. The tip of its nose was just barely touching the concrete floor. I knew what kind of shark it was, because when I was a kid, my dad and me, we used to deep-sea fish down in Destin, and once one of his buddies landed a great white. Only, the one in the warehouse was bigger, a lot bigger. Probably, right then, it looked like just about the biggest goddamn fish ever was. Later, I heard it weighed in at something like fifteen hundred pounds. Anyway, the shark had been suspended from a hook, from a block and tackle rig that had been set into the ceiling of that place, a rope looped about the shark’s tail. Its jaws were bulging out of its mouth, just because of gravity, I guess, because of its own weight. There were rows and rows of glistening triangular teeth big as my damn thumb, serrated like a steak knife. And its eyes were bugging out, too, those horrible black fucking eyes. Even when a shark’s alive, its eyes look dead.

  Of course, you know that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. That fish was just the opening act, right?

  So, there we are, and the initial shock’s beginning to fade. Audrey, I remember she started in laughing. At the time, it pissed me off, but now I get it. I mean, it really is like the setup for a bad joke, right? Three cops walk into an empty warehouse in downtown Atlanta. There’s a fucking dead shark hanging from the ceiling. One cop says to the other cop, “Who brought the hush puppies?” and etcetera. Real funny. Anyway, I remember Babineaux looking over at me like, “Hey man, you know what this is, right? You’ve seen this shit before, right?” Me, I’m just trying to let it all sink in, okay. Because it’s not just the shark. There’s this enormous design drawn on the concrete floor, sorta painted on the floor in red sand. You know, like those Tibetan monks do. Later, one of the specialists that the department called in—an anthropologist from Georgia Tech—he said the design was a mandala, like in Hindu religion. To me, what it put me in mind of was a maze. And right at the center of all those parallel lines, all those circles inside circles, was the shark.

  “Call it in,” I say to Babineaux, and Audrey, she says to me, “What the fuck is he supposed to call it in as?”

  I was the one who found the body. But you know that, too. Those lines of sand on the floor, they were spaced just far enough apart from each other that you could get to the shark without stepping on them. Straight off, I felt this instinctual sorta revulsion at the thought of doing that, putting a foot down on one of those lines. Step on a crack, break your momma’s back, right? So, while Babineaux is making the call, I go and ignore that little nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me just to get the fuck out and let someone else deal with this crazy shit. Audrey, she tells me we should wait for the ME, and when she says that, I swear she sounds scared. And that also pisses me off. “Christ,” I tell her, “it’s just a goddamn fish. What the fuck.” All the same, crossing that space between the doorway and the shark—and it couldn’t have been more than ten feet—I am perfectly cognizant how I’m being so careful not to step on even one of those lines, acting like some superstitious seven-year-old, and, hey, that’s something else pissing me off. That’s the thing pissing me off the worst.

  I get up close and I see how the shark’s belly is split open, right down the middle. Well, not just its belly. The fish has been sliced open from the underside of its head most of the way back to the tail. And here and there, it’s been sewn shut again with nylon fishing line. We couldn’t see that when we first came in, because of the angle it was hanging at. Anyway, this doesn’t come as a surprise. No reason it should. You catch a fish, you gut it. And who the hell ever had gone to the trouble to drag a fifteen-foot great white shark up three flights of stairs, surely they’d have done themselves the favor of not hauling along the extra weight of its innards. That’s just plain common sense.

  “They’re on their way,” says Babineaux.

  I reach into a pocket and pull out a pair of latex gloves, and that’s when I see three fingers poking through between a gap in those nylon stitches. A thumb, an index finger, the middle fucking finger—a woman’s fingers with this deep red nail polish, some shade of red so dark it is almost black. And the fingers, they’re fucking moving, okay. I yell, “We need an ambulance, we need a fucking ambulance right fucking now,” or some shit like that, and I’m digging around in my coat, trying to find my pocket knife. Next thing I know, Audrey’s standing there beside me, and Jesus God, the look on her face. I could talk all day and I wouldn’t ever come up with words to convey that expression. She starts in tugging at the fishing line with her hands, but it’s slippery with blood and oil and shit, and the line’s like, you know, hundred-pound monofilament test. Finally, I get my knife out and start cutting, and—whenever I come to this part of the story, it’s always like, looking back, like right here a flashbulb goes off in my head or something. Suddenly, everything is so clear, so stark, more real than real—and I know that doesn’t make sense. I get that, see, but I don’t know what would. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, it’s kinda like that. That exact instant when two cars collide, a moment that seems so perfectly defined, but that also seems sorta smeared.

  Anyway . . .

  It doesn’t take me all that long to get the fish’s belly open again. I nick myself once or twice in the process, but I don’t even realize that until later, when the EMTs arrive. I have a scar on my left palm from that day. Souvenirs, right?

  Yeah, she was still alive, the woman they’d stitched up inside the dead fish. Only barely, but, well, you’ve read the files. You probably read the book that cocksucker from New York City wrote about the whole thing. So you know how it was. We’re standing there, and Audrey, she’s saying, “Oh God, oh dear God, oh God,” over and over, and back behind us, Babineaux is praying the fucking rosary or some other sorta Catholic mumbo jumbo. The woman in the shark, she’s completely naked and she looks maybe twenty-five, probably younger, but it’s hard to tell much because she’s covered head to toe in rotting shark. “We have to get her out of there,” says Audrey, and I’m holding the sides of the fish’s belly open, and Audrey, she’s leaning in and putting her arms around the woman. Thank fuck she wasn’t conscious. I think that’s the one small piece of mercy we got that day, that she wasn’t conscious. Audrey’s in up to her shoulders, and I’m starting to gag from the stink. I just know I have maybe ten seconds before I spew coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, and that’s when Audrey says, “Oh Jesus, Mike, they’ve been sewn together.”

  “What?” I ask. “What’s been sewn together?”

  “S
he’s sewn in here,” Audrey replies, “sewn to the fucking fish,” and there’s this terrible, brittle tone in her voice, like eggshells. I’m never gonna forget the way she sounded. And that’s when I see what the woman inside the shark is holding. The sons of bitches who’d done it to her, they arranged her hands—sewed them together, too—so that she’s cradling the thing in her palms. She seems to be holding it out to us, like an offering. Only, I know it isn’t three cops that offering is meant for. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking—hell, I’m not thinking. I’m running on shock and instinct, shit like that. I take it from her hands, that jade idol, what the fuck ever it is, and I just stand there, holding it, staring at it. You spend fifteen years on the force, and you think maybe you’ve seen evil, maybe you’ve stared it in the face enough times that you and evil are chummy old acquaintances. But I know right then how wrong I was to ever believe I’ve seen evil. That chunk of rock, not much bigger than a plum, it’s evil, true and absolute, indescribable, and I want to put it down. More than anything, I just want to set it down on the floor with the lines of red sand. But I can’t. Sounds hokey as hell, but it’s like that Nietzsche quote, the one about staring into the abyss and it staring back into you. I’m still standing there holding that thing when backup arrives. They have to pry it out of my hands.

  As for Esmé Symes, one week later she hangs herself with an extension cord. She was brought in twice for questioning, so I think she knew she was the closest thing we had to a suspect, that she was in the department’s sights. The DA’s screaming for blood. And her apartment, it’s fucking wallpapered with sketches of that goddamned jade atrocity, right? Dozens and dozens of sketches, from all different angles. But she doesn’t leave a note, not unless you’re gonna call all those drawings a suicide note. You ask me—and I know you didn’t—but you ask me whether she was involved or not, and all I got to say is Miss Esmé Symes got off easy. She got off scot-fucking-free.

  4.: Creature → Feature ← Comforts

  (Arbor Hill, Albany, New York, June 7, 2028)

  There’s a game that they play, Ellison Nicodemo and the psychiatrist. She tells him a lie, and he patiently makes like he doesn’t know that she’s lying, no matter how outrageously, how egregiously the lie contradicts some previous lie that she’s already passed off as the truth. They have arrived at the simple rules of the game by a silent, unspoken gentleman’s agreement. It’s true no one will ever win, at least not fair and square, but—she tells herself, whenever she feels up to pretending there’s a bright side—the most she’ll ever lose is one hour every two weeks, and, after all, she’s got time to burn. If time were money, Ellison Nicodemo would be Scrooge McDuck. She can afford the pantomime.

  Exempli gratia:

  It’s five past two on a Monday afternoon and Ellison sits on the wide, slightly threadbare corduroy sofa in the psychiatrist’s office, wishing, just like always, that she could get by without the charity of the agency’s stingy pension. If she could only manage that trick somehow, then she’d be free to tell the psychiatrist enough was enough and his services were no longer required, thank you very goddamn much. That he could take his kindly, knowing looks and patronizing nods and go fuck himself. Game, set, match. Checkmate. She could stand up and walk out the door for the last and final time and catch a bus back across town. She could score and fix and, as she nodded off in a velvety heroin fog, she could congratulate herself on finally finding the backbone to do what she should have done a long damn time ago. Of course, she knows she won’t. She was never a particularly brave woman, even at her best, and at forty-one Ellison knows that her best is far behind her. Her best is dead and buried. Still, there are days when the fantasy that she might is the only thing that gets her from one excruciating side of these sessions to the other.

  The clock ticks. Here we go again.

  “How are you doing today?”

  The psychiatrist stops staring at the screen of his pad and stares at Ellison instead. The man is at least old enough to be her father. He has great bushy eyebrows that remind her of Gandalf or Walt Whitman. She’s wondered if maybe he’s one of the shrinks who worked on MK-Ultra or the Stargate Project or some other long-ago covert psychofuck operation or if maybe he has no idea whatsoever who actually writes his checks. Maybe he’s exactly who the diplomas on the wall say he is and no more. Maybe he’s no one much at all. Possibly, he’s the single least interesting man Ellison Nicodemo has ever met and the most subversive thing the psychiatrist ever did was vote for Goldwater in 1972. But it’s got to be one or the other. Either he’s an agency man following a carefully prepared script, minding protocol to the letter, or he’s a patsy who really does believe she isn’t anything more exciting than a junkie and a profoundly delusional schizophrenic who only thinks she used to be some sort of top-secret occult assassin for a shadow government and he only plays the game because the checks don’t bounce.

  He can’t be both or anything in between. Albany has never been one for half measures. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Last time,” he says, “you told me that today maybe we could talk about Atlanta and the scars. Are you still up for that? I understand it’s a big step.”

  Ellison shuts her eyes a moment and tries to recall if she really did say that two weeks back or if he’s just banking on there being so little left of her short-term memory that she’s not in a position to argue the point.

  “Did I?” she asks, opening her eyes again. On the wall behind the psychiatrist there’s a cheaply framed print, a copy of an oil painting of a rocky seashore someplace like Rhode Island or Maine or Massachusetts. Or Wales, she thinks, and not for the first time. “Well, if I did—if I did tell you that—I shouldn’t have. If I did say that, I’ve changed my mind.”

  The psychiatrist frowns his consternation and rubs at his bushy white eyebrows. “Are you sure?” he asks her, and she tells him yeah, she’s sure. In fact, she’s very, very sure. “All right, then what would you prefer we talk about today?” he asks. “What about your sister? We never did quite finish with that, did we?”

  Ellison almost asks which story about her sister he means, which fabricated version of the truth is it that the psychiatrist would like her to continue with—and, by the way, for the record, she never actually had a sister (and the psychiatrist knows that), only an older brother whom she never even met because he died of a fever when he was just a baby. But she doesn’t ask. Asking would almost certainly violate the rules of the game, whatever those might be.

  “When I was a kid, I got a pet monster,” Ellison says, before she can think better of it, before it occurs to her this is the worst imaginable way of cheating, because, as it happens, she’s telling the truth.

  The psychiatrist stops rubbing his eyebrows and clears his throat.

  “A monster,” he says—not in a way that dares to sound as if he doubts what she’s told him, but only as if to suggest that maybe he wasn’t paying close attention or perhaps the noise of a delivery truck rattling past down on Livingston Avenue made it hard for him to hear what she said.

  “Yeah,” she says, astounded at her own audacity and wishing she had a cigarette, wishing the psychiatrist would let her smoke in his office. “Well, I didn’t really think of it as a monster, not when I was little.”

  The psychiatrist opens the bottle of water on his desk and takes a swallow. Then he clears his throat again. “You mean like an imaginary friend?” he asks her, and to Ellison it almost seems as if he’s asking hopefully.

  “No, I mean like a monster,” she says. “It wasn’t imaginary, and I never thought of it as especially friendly, either. Though, every now and then, it was sort of helpful.”

  “Sort of helpful,” says the psychiatrist, and then he taps at his pad before screwing the cap back on the water bottle and setting it aside. “Helpful how, exactly?”

  “Like, sometimes it would show up when I was in trouble.”

  “If it was helpful, why do you call it a monster?” the psychiat
rist wants to know.

  Ellison sits up a little straighter, and she glances at the window and the dingy beige drapes hiding the view of the world outside. Her mouth has gone a little cottony, and right now she wouldn’t mind if the psychiatrist deigned to offer her a sip of his water. She says, “It seems to me that the world is full of helpful monsters. I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between monstrosity and usefulness. Some of the most terrible things, the most hideous things, we let them into our lives—knowing full well that they’re monsters—because they’re helpful.” She expects the psychiatrist to ask her to pony up an example, but he doesn’t. If he had she might have said nuclear fission, or she might have said religion, or she might have said something else altogether. She might even have said psychiatry, only she isn’t so sure it’s of much use to anyone.

  “I see,” says the psychiatrist.

  “Do you?” Ellison asks, still watching the drapes. When she arrived for her appointment almost forty-five minutes ago (she’s usually early), the sky was hidden behind a blanket of blue-grey clouds, much as the drapes now hide her view of Arbor Hill. The air had smelled of ozone and the promise of rain. She’ll probably get soaked on the way home, bus or no bus.

  Now the psychiatrist is looking at the drapes, too, as if he’s afraid he’s missing something, as if there might be something here he ought to see, but doesn’t. He says, “What I mean is, I understand the point that you’re making, about the occasional usefulness of things most people would find monstrous.”

  “A lot of people wouldn’t understand,” she tells him, then looks away from the window, looking back at the psychiatrist and the framed seashore. “Or, I don’t know, maybe they would, if they ever had a reason to stop and think about it.”