The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  Gelareh produced the last sheet. This was covered with dozens of lines—some straight, some curled, some ending in flourishes, some terminating in tiny stars or blunt slashes.

  “These are undeniably words. But there is no single language. This one could be Bronze Age Hittite.” She peered at the photograph and shrugged. “Because the instrument used and the … medium were so unusual, it is tricky, as you say.”

  “I can show you the original.”

  She looked up at him and shook her head. “I moved to this country so I’d see fewer bodies. Thank you, but better photographs would do. If you want me to continue, that is. Of course, it will take some time.”

  Gelareh looked at the floor, and an awkward silence fell.

  “Oh, yes,” Oscar said. He reached into his bag and produced a sealed box of loose tea. “I don’t have cash. A bit embarrassing.”

  “No, no, this is wonderful.”

  “We used to have money for this—”

  “And I hate to ask. Only because, you know—”

  “Of course.”

  “—my time.”

  “Yes.”

  Another silence descended, and Oscar picked up the photograph.

  “What sort of a person would do this?” he asked.

  Gelareh didn’t speak at once. “A serious one,” she said.

  “A serious scholar? A serious nutter?”

  Again, she hesitated, weighing her words. “I don’t know. But there’s work in this. I think whoever did this believed in what they were doing.”

  “Which was what?”

  She tapped the edge of the photograph with the care someone might exercise touching a tarantula’s cage. “As I said, a lighthouse. They were trying to bring something in.”

  The air outside had become still but charged, waiting like an indrawn breath, latent with the promise of a storm.

  “So they’re crazy,” Oscar said.

  “Do you think so? Look around you. Somewhere there’s a dead person only you can see. Sitting there”—she smiled unhappily and pointed to an empty chair beneath a framed eighteenth-century pen-and-wash of a winged lion with a bearded man’s head—“is someone only I can see: a man my father killed more than fifty years ago.” Oscar felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “It’s already happened,” Gelareh continued. “Things have already come in.”

  Outside, a breeze tugged at Lovering’s gray hair, and the air began to grow cold. Somewhere an alarm clock sounded. Gelareh checked her watch.

  “Will you excuse me?” She smiled apologetically, went to her bedroom, and shut the door.

  Oscar looked at the traced pages. A lighthouse. A beacon.

  Nonsense.

  And yet in his mind flickered the memory of something falling from the building opposite Jon and Leonie’s apartment. Falling … then flying.

  He heard Lovering cough, and the teacup on his stomach rattled as he sat up. He rubbed at the stain on his shirt. The sky was now gray and dark.

  Gelareh returned, dressed in a cleaner’s uniform, pinning to her blouse a nametag branded with an inner-city hotel’s logo. She smiled at Oscar as she collated her papers.

  “If you can get me some clearer photographs, I’ll continue tomorrow.”

  Chapter 9

  In the foyer of the state mortuary, a family of a dozen Polynesians had gone to war. They took turns screaming at the sole reception clerk, demanding that he give them a body back. Two uniformed cops stood by the front door, impassively watching as if they’d seen it all a hundred times before. Oscar supposed they probably had.

  He stepped behind the islanders and held up his ID to the reception clerk. The clerk, a tall Nigerian, waved him forward. Oscar pressed the ID against the glass.

  “How come you talk to this moke but you won’ talk to us?” demanded a young Polynesian the size of a small tractor. Oscar showed a glimpse of his holster.

  “Manners?”

  The islander grinned at the gun. “Fucking pigs.” But he turned and ambled back to his kin, who began to tease him.

  The clerk thumbed in a code to the glass security door, and Oscar stepped quickly inside; on the other side of the glass, the Polynesians’ expletives and threats became the muted roar of distant surf.

  He followed the clerk, who walked unhurriedly along the corridors.

  Oscar looked around. Before Gray Wednesday, Forensic Services held an atmosphere of respectful quiet: morgue technicians wore paper slippers, voices were hushed, and the air had a scent of chemicalized lavender. Today, phones rang shrilly, people yelled, and the air was a languid stew of sweat and formaldehyde. Suddenly, the clerk stopped and lashed out at the empty air, making Oscar jolt.

  “Ban gane ba!” the clerk shouted at a blank wall, pointing angrily. “Na gaji!”

  Oscar took a careful half step back.

  The clerk sent a final, angry flick at nothing, then turned to Oscar. “Sorry,” he said, and gestured loosely toward a closed door up ahead, then returned the way he came.

  Oscar opened the door and went inside.

  The large examination room was the clouded gray of a dead tooth, and cold. An overhead gantry system for transporting bodies ran across the ceiling and through a twin set of plastic flap doors. One door was jammed open, and beyond Oscar could see barely controlled chaos in the adjoining storeroom. A technician was short-temperedly hunting through stainless-steel body drawers; each was built for single occupancy but held two or three white cadaver bags. Nearby, cool air spilled in a fog from an open cold-room door, and two more technicians in stained white coats were arguing about how to fit another body in. From somewhere came an AC/DC song, sounding thin and strangled. In the exam room proper were six stainless-steel necropsy tables, each with its own sink and U-shaped faucets. A body lay on every table, five in white plastic bags, the one on the farthest table exposed. This was a woman’s body; her face had been peeled down over her chin, and a small figure in a lab coat and plastic visor was running a dumbbell-shaped Stryker saw around the crown of the exposed skull. There was a clatter as the skullcap slipped from the pathologist’s gloved fingers onto the perforated tabletop.

  “Shit it.”

  The pathologist flicked off the saw and its nasal whine hazzed down to silence. She picked up the skullcap and dropped it into the stainless-steel bucket. Oscar remembered Dianne Hyde as a woman defined by her work: quiet, even-humored, and unrushed. So when she lifted her visor Oscar was shocked to see Hyde’s face taut with exhaustion.

  “Oscar Mariani,” she said, flicking off the Surgilux lamp. “I presume you’ve come to give me that bucatini recipe you’ve been promising?”

  He surprised her by pulling the handwritten recipe from his pocket. A small smile appeared on Hyde’s face—it looked bewildered and out of place.

  “And where am I supposed to get Pecorino cheese?”

  “You’re a resourceful woman.”

  “I’m an old woman.” She pocketed the recipe. “With a workload.”

  The cadaver she was working on was in her twenties. The dead woman’s legs were swollen and purple; her chest and breasts were ice-white. A rope bruise on her neck rose in an inverted V under her left ear. Her fingertips were chafed, and one nail had been torn off. The young woman had changed her mind after kicking away the chair, and had clawed at the fatal rope.

  “Suicide,” he said.

  “Suicide,” Hyde agreed, and nodded at the next two cadavers. “Suicide, suicide …” She gestured through the flap doors to the overfilled cold rooms, raised her hands, and then let them drop helplessly by her sides. Oscar felt his stomach grow cold. So many. Was life really that bad? But then he was lucky: his ghost mostly hid himself away. Oscar had heard numberless accounts of people whose dead wouldn’t leave their side. People would go to sleep at night with their dead grandfather or drowned school friend or cancered cousin an arm’s length away, staring down with those worming finger-hole eyes. Waking, the first thing they saw was a death mask looking back
. In every mirror, at every meal, every time they went to buy a paper or drink tea or make love to their partner, the staring dead would be there, a silent, corpselike chaperone. Could anyone blame those who couldn’t cope?

  “Do you have to autopsy them all?” Oscar asked.

  Hyde smiled humorlessly. “Legislation, from the good old days when we only had two dozen suicides a year. Until some bright spark in Parliament puts forward a change, we have to postmortem them all. I invite you to write to your local member. So, Detective, what can I do you for?”

  He handed her another slip of paper with a file number on it and produced his digital camera. This time he’d replaced the battery. “I need some better pics of a cadaver.”

  “Scenes of Crime?”

  “Didn’t get there.”

  Hyde rolled her eyes and gestured for Oscar to follow her to the computer at one side of the room.

  “How’s Sabine?” she asked as she typed in the details from his note.

  “Still divorced.”

  Hyde grimaced. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  “I do that. It’s more embarrassing when I do.”

  Hyde peered at the screen. “This cadaver’s Tetlow’s. Patrick Tetlow, he’s good. Gone home sick today, but … oh.”

  She stared at the screen.

  “Oh?” Oscar asked. “Oh, what?”

  Hyde frowned and checked the number against the slip of paper. The corners of her mouth turned downward.

  “That body’s been released,” she said.

  “Released?” Oscar leaned to look over her shoulder. “When?”

  “Today.”

  “Released to whom?”

  Hyde tapped the screen. “Released for destruction. It’s gone to the crematorium.”

  Oscar watched the speedometer’s needle climb. There was little traffic on the freeway heading south out of the city. It took him less than fifteen minutes to reach the crematorium.

  Business must be good. The gardens were tended, the columbaria clean, the Art Deco–style chapel locked but undamaged. The woman who met him at the front office rocked from hip to hip as she walked with arthritic slowness down plush maroon carpets past walls the color of buttermilk. She’d tried the intercom out to the cremator but got no response. “It’s hard for Richard to hear the intercom over the burner,” she explained. “He turned it on a few minutes ago. We only have the one body this morning.”

  Oscar mentally willed her to walk faster.

  “If they’ve made a mistake, we’re not responsible,” the woman warned. “We get a lot of work from the government because we follow the paperwork. We do all the morgues while they’re still waiting on parts for their N20; we do bodies from two hospitals. We even do the university’s biotrash. One time we even had to destroy a truck full of monkeys that had died of some disease. We all had to wear these suits—”

  “Can we hurry?” Oscar said.

  “All I’m saying is, we just follow the paperwork.”

  She hauled back on a swing door and allowed Oscar into a roofed alleyway between buildings. Carpet gave way to tiles, and the scent of roses to the pungent burn of bleach. She reached another pair of swing doors and pushed them open with a stiff arm. Warm air struck Oscar’s face.

  “Richaaaard?” the woman bellowed.

  Oscar broke into a jog. To his left was a series of stainless-steel rollers on tracks that led from an open pair of shuttered windows, inside which he could glimpse the chapel curtains. Ahead to his right was a tall stainless-steel box, eight feet high and thirteen long. The cremator’s internal roar sounded like a trapped bushfire. The woman behind Oscar called again, and from around the oven’s corner poked a balding head. The mortician’s glasses reflected the colored lights of glowing buttons, and his pale eyes bounced from the woman to Oscar. He gave a wave.

  He called, “Let me send this one in and I’ll be with you.”

  Suddenly, there was a loud solenoidal click, the pneumatic hiss of a door opening, and the surflike roar of flames grew louder.

  Oscar ran around to the front of the oven and was hit by a wave of intense heat punched out by pressurized, burning gas. Attached to the oven by two couplings below the door was a large, slab-sided gurney topped with rubberized steel rollers. On these rested a cardboard casket. The mortician’s finger moved to the green button that would launch the casket into the fierce orange glow.

  Oscar slammed one hand hard over the mortician’s and threw his other arm over the casket. “No!”

  The bald man looked down at Oscar over his glasses and pressed a red button. The hatch closed with a solid thunk, cutting off the intense heat.

  He gently unplucked himself from Oscar’s grip.

  “That,” the mortician said, “is very unsafe behavior.”

  Oscar concentrated on not letting the trolley get away from him. The wind had strengthened, threatening to yank his hat from his head. It hissed in the gum trees and blew a strange, mournful note between the low brick walls studded with brass plaques. His sedan sat in the wind like an old, whipped dog. In his pocket was the Form Six, signed by Dr. Patrick Tetlow, MBBS FRCPA. In the casket was the girl torn by the auger.

  The mortician plucked at Oscar’s sleeve. “You’re not licensed to carry human remains.”

  “If I catch myself, I can issue a fine.” Oscar popped his car trunk and folded down the backseat. “Give me a hand?”

  The mortician helped lift the casket into the car and cleared his throat. “Maybe I should phone the mortuary?”

  “You do that,” Oscar replied.

  “I don’t like you taking our paperwork,” the woman protested, hobbling to keep up. “We don’t get paid unless we present the Form Six.”

  Oscar closed the trunk lid, locking the murdered girl’s body into his car. “Why should you get paid,” he said. “You didn’t burn her.”

  He got behind the wheel.

  At Forensic Services, he searched two laboratories, the storeroom, the tearoom, and both toilets. He found Dianne Hyde pacing on the flat roof. The stiff wind carried the raw taint of smoke. Hyde let her lab coat flap about her like mad wings while she tried to light a cigarette with an uncooperative lighter. She seemed unsurprised to see Oscar.

  He found a match and cupped the flame around the tip of her cigarette. “Avoiding me?”

  She didn’t meet his eye. “Avoiding trouble. One gets to my age by drinking lots of water and avoiding trouble.” She coughed as she inhaled.

  “When did you start smoking?”

  “After I looked for your dead girl’s blood samples. Here we take three samples: one for testing, one for backup or further tests, and one gets locked in our evidence fridge for ten years.” She inhaled and coughed. “There are no samples. So I rang Tetlow’s house. Didn’t care if I woke him from his sickbed. His number has been disconnected. He lives three minutes that way, so I drove over. He’s gone.”

  Oscar felt something tighten inside him. “Gone?”

  “Gone. House empty. Gone.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another, watching Oscar. “Do you think he won the lottery?”

  Oscar shook his head. The remote chance that this was all just an administrative error had evaporated.

  “What’s going on, Oscar? Who is this girl? On second thought, don’t tell me. I’m a grandmother. I’m up here because I don’t want to know. I forgot you could be persistent when it took your fancy.”

  Oscar heard a growling croak behind him and turned. Two crows were perched on the building’s cold chimney crown. Their feathers were the blue-black of wet coal; their eyes were yellow and unblinking. One of them opened its wings and swooped to land on the graveled rooftop just three feet from Oscar and cawed hungrily. He took a swing at it with one shoe. The crow croaked unhappily and flew back up to its cousin. Thoughts collided in Oscar’s head like marbles. Someone had persuaded Tetlow, a good pathologist according to Hyde, to authorize an unknown cadaver’s destruction before an investigation had even begun, and
then pack himself up and disappear. And Oscar knew someone whose threats were an effective means of persuasion, because he followed through. But if it got out that Oscar had retrieved the cadaver, wouldn’t Haig offer those same threats to Dianne Hyde?

  “You saved the body?” Hyde asked. The white cigarette vibrated in her fingers.

  “It’s in my car.”

  “Lovely. Warming up nicely.”

  He squeezed Hyde’s arm, turned, and went to the stairwell doorway. “Just play dumb. If I see anyone downstairs, I’ll tell them I couldn’t find you.”

  At the door, he glanced back. Hyde was watching him.

  “Take it back, Oscar,” she called. “Take it back and burn it. There’s enough dying going on. One more doesn’t matter.”

  When he entered the stairwell and closed the door behind him, he heard the breathy rush of the crows taking wing above him. The sound sent an ice-bright shiver up his spine.

  Chapter 10

  The horse knew it was about to be killed. Its wide eyes showed whites, and its nostrils flared; its frantic whinnying hurt Oscar’s ears. Three men were trying to hold the beast secure—one held a rope around its snout, one a rope around its neck, and the third ran around with something in his hand. The horse—a strong brown mare—tried to rear so she could kick at the men, but her forelegs were hobbled, so she simply pushed up, jerking wildly; when she landed, her steel shoes sparked on the concrete. Oscar didn’t want to see this, but he needed to speak to the man beside him at a galvanized-steel rail overlooking what had once been a loading bay. This new killing room smelled of ammonia, horse sweat, and blood.

  “A racehorse that kept coming last.” Gregos Kannis grinned. “I bet it would run like blazes now.”

  “People buy horse meat?” Oscar asked.

  “People buy dog meat,” Kannis replied. “A smart man sells the horse as beef and the dog as lamb. But me, I’m not so smart.” The mare whinnied again and Kannis yelled to his men, “Get it down, for Christ’s fucking sake, I can’t hear a thing here!”