The Polka Dot Girl

by Darragh McManus

  The fact that a Greenhill had died in violent circumstances was taken by the more histrionic radio commentators as proof, if it were even needed, that Hera was a city in terminal moral decline. The lives of Madeleine, and people like her, were considered intrinsically more valuable than the life of Jane Q Dirtball, recently deceased dealer/assassin/loan-shark enforcer/ whatever. Which, you know, maybe they were. I don’t know, and in one sense I don’t care. Moral judgments aren’t my bailiwick. I investigate what happened, regardless of who it happened to, as fairly and dispassionately as I can manage.

  But shock-jocks and attention-seeking columnists aren’t bound by such tedious restraints, which is why I switched off the radio when the pitch passed beyond “melodramatic” and moved somewhere to the north of “collective hysteria”, pulled the car to a halt and trotted into Old Ma’s Noodle House. I wondered, as I was slurping down my warm, soupy sustenance, what Old Ma actually looked like. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her. Did she still run the place, or had she handed on the reins to Young Ma, her daughter? (The girl’s real name was Bao but everyone called her by the nickname. She took it in the spirit of affection with which it was said.) Or maybe there was an Even Older Ma, say a sister with whom she fell out 40 years ago, who had now returned to claim her rightful share of the family business. Such is how I amuse myself sometimes. I’m a fun girl to be around, aren’t I?

  I paid the waitress and stepped out into the warm night, darker along this street than the more salubrious parts of town. It was always darker in the Zig-Zag. I swear, sometimes I think the power company sends less juice through to the streetlights here, and there are less streetlights to begin with. The Zig-Zag is our dirty attic, our jumble-filled basement, that room filled with junk and crap and the dust of neglect that you seal off from visitors, locking the door and pretending it doesn’t exist. Anything can happen in the Zig-Zag because nobody who matters is watching. But someone was watching me as I began walking the three blocks to my parked car.

  I could lie and say my sixth sense told me something was off from the second I hit the cracked pavement, but like I say, that would be a lie. The Zig-Zag is a mess of colors and noise, a sensory riot, a fucked-up cacophonous kaleidoscope. You’d hardly notice an atom bomb going off down here until you swallowed the mushroom cloud. So I hadn’t a clue that the bulky woman in the knit-cap and bomber jacket was on my trail. I pieced it together retrospectively, but at the time she was just another dumb punk doing the Zig-Zag hustle. She wasn’t even that, she was nothing, she didn’t exist for me. I lit a Dark Nine and continued on my merry way, thinking about nothing really by this point, just dragging my tired ass home to a cool drink and a cozy bed. I’d made my way through only three members of my top ten list, and already I felt like I’d been questioning people about Madeleine for months. Tomorrow, as they say, was another day…more’s the pity, considering how laborious all of this was.

  I took a last hit from my cigarette and flicked it into a drain. I stopped and squinted up at a street-sign—was this where I’d parked, or was I the next block up? Turning to get my bearings, I saw Young Ma come running towards me, waving her arms like a maniac dashing through a swarm of wasps. Her mouth moved, soundlessly at this distance, and she held up something dark and cubic: my wallet. Silly girl, you left it behind you. I smiled at Young Ma and nodded my thanks. As I began walking back in her direction, she smiled too and gave a little bow, waiting for me in a weak pool of sodium-oxide light. And then her expression changed, lightning-fast, from courteous friendliness to agitation as she spotted something to my right, and then changed again, bang, to jumpy fear, and she looked back at me and pointed in that other direction, and by then I was close enough to hear her: “Lady, look out! She’s behind you, look out!”

  I spun around on my heels and was propelled backwards with tremendous force by a sort of “pointed” punch. It felt like the world’s smallest but most powerful fist had caught me just right on the breastbone. I flew off the pavement and crashed into a pile of refuse sacks and half-crushed cardboard boxes. Then I saw my assailant pounding towards me, powerful, muscular, built like the proverbial brick shithouse. She walked with an inelegant stomp and had a face like hard plastic. No emotions, no little tics, no sign that she was even breathing. This asshole was inhuman, robotic, pure menace in motion. I was breathing hard through the pain, each inhalation making me hurt, each exhalation making me hurt worse. She was holding something in her right hand and it flashed in the neon light of a nearby strip club: a thin baton of tempered steel, about an inch in diameter I guessed, with a sort of trigger at the base. The woman snapped the top 18 inches, an extendable section, back into the main tube with terri- fying strength and placed her thumb over the release button. She was coming for me now, coming for the kill.

  Then it hit me with all the force of that first blow: Jesus Christ. That’s the weapon which killed Madeleine. And this is the woman who murdered her.

  I think I would have died there and then, stupefied and in shock, if Young Ma hadn’t grabbed a pot of boiling water from a street-side food vendor and hurled it at my attacker, screaming, “Crazy bitch! You leave her alone!” The water splashed the woman’s thick-set legs—she looked like pain was nothing more than an abstract concept to her, but it distracted her long enough, it gave me life-saving time. I sprang to my feet as the killer took two large steps towards me and pressed the release button. A foot-and-a-half of hard steel lunged forward like a snake’s tongue but I was gone, diving to the side. The baton hit the wall and gouged out a chunk of plaster. I stumbled onto the road, cars swerving and honking at me, probably figuring me for a drunk. The killer turned to me, anger in her face now, and charged without warning. I pushed back my jacket and pulled my piece and got off one shot before that metal lance scored its second hit, though thankfully this time just a glancing strike against my left hip, whirling me off-balance and to the ground.

  My gun clattered away and I knew I was a goner for sure. I closed my eyes and could feel tears welling up in them, and then some kind of stubborn pride kicked in, a “screw you” to mortality, and more, a need to know who and why and what-the- fuck, and underneath all that, a renascent desire to go down fighting. I opened my eyes again and she was standing over me, snapping the weapon back to its “ready” position. I noticed that blood was gurgling out of a wound in her shoulder, though she didn’t seem to pay it too much mind. My aim had been true, but maybe not true enough to keep me alive. The light caught her face, or two-thirds of it, and I realized I knew her. This was the same woman who’d tried to run me down outside Odette’s house. Had I been the intended target all along, then? Something told me no, it wasn’t that straightforward.

  But who cared about any of that? I was about a fifth of a second away from meeting my maker. The crazy fucker looming over me smiled down and said, “Night-night, buttercup. Say hi to Madeleine for me, huh?”

  She poised with the baton, about to place it to my head, thumb at the release catch, and then I heard the sweetest thing in my entire life: sirens, coming closer, coming close, swinging through the night, sounding like angel-song. The woman cursed silently, shoved the baton into her jacket pocket, realized she was bleeding, put a hand to the wound and ran off, escaping into the frenzied jungle of the Zig-Zag. Just like that, and just like before, she was gone and I was still alive.

  Physically I figured I was okay, bruised and hurting but not seriously damaged. I didn’t have the stomach or patience to go through it with the patrol officers, to relive the thing in tiresome detail; tomorrow would be time enough for that. So I hot-footed it out of there after retrieving my gun and giving Young Ma a hug so strong I half-feared it might crush the two of us. And after all that, I forgot to take my wallet.

  I didn’t want to talk to my fellow cops, but I wanted to talk. Two blocks away, across the street from my car, I found a payphone and called Odette. The same soft tone, the same measured speech pattern…and the same answering machine message. “You’ve reac
hed the home of Odette Crawford. I can’t take your call…” Fuck it, I thought, and fuck you, Odette. Why aren’t you at home? Why aren’t you there when I need you? I know there are no obligations anymore, there is no “us” anymore, but goddamn it, I need someone right now.

  And now I was really pissed off, almost physically weighed down by stress, unrelieved adrenaline, and more than that, some indefinable ennui. Loneliness, I guess. I admitted it to myself: right at that moment, I was lonely. I wanted company. I wanted to touch someone, in some way beyond the banalities of profes- sional interaction or the maniacal extremities of lethal combat. I wanted fun, I wanted sex, I wanted conversation or a connection, and if I couldn’t get any of those, I wanted temporary oblivion.

  As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

  I hit for a bar nearby, a familiar old haunt with a familiar old tab, and was onto my sixth or seventh brandy, that floaty, slippery feeling of inebriation now soaking through my head, when someone came and stood next to me. I smelled her first: a distinctive perfume, something almost traditional about it but at the same time untried and newborn, for want of a better word. And more savory than sweet, if you follow me. Notes of orange blossom and oakwood, a hint of patchouli, and something else, something hiding in the background, reluctant to reveal itself… Her perfume made me think of joss sticks and Middle Eastern food, of a woman clad in black on a murderously hot day, kohl lining her amber eyes.

  Then I heard her, a gentle voice, precise, with a pleasingly sardonic undertone. She said, “Experience is wine and art the brandy we distil from it”, and it took me about two days to clock that she was speaking to me and not someone else.

  I turned to face her and what a face it was. I almost knocked over my drink. This girl was smokin’ hot. Beauty to launch a thousand ships of desire, a body built for both comfort and speed. She was in her early twenties, tall and voluptuous, with fiery red hair in soft waves, large green eyes, plump red lips, alabaster skin…and a figure to make a sculptor cry or lose their nerve or just give up on the whole damn thing. No, she was like a sculpture made flesh, the idealized rendition of the womanly form come to life. And she was talking to me.

  Naturally I responded with all the wit and charm of the average barfly: “Brandy is dandy but winer could be finer ”, laughing and lifting my glass in salute. “Though clearly it isn’t, or I wouldn’t be drinking this stuff.” I tipped a finger to the bartender: “Same again, please.” Then I turned to my Venus de Milo in her fitted suit, waist nipped in impossibly tightly by the belt, and said, “You want a drink?”

  She smiled warmly and slid onto the stool beside me, her skirt rising slowly along her perfectly turned thighs. I swallowed heavily and stared into my glass. She said to the girl behind the counter, “I’ll have what she’s having”, then to me, “Actually, what are you having? Just out of curiosity, you understand.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat. Pronounced dead on arrival at morgue. Police open full investigation. Curiosity called in for questioning but released due to lack of hard evidence. …Shut up, Genie. You’re not funny.” I lit a cigarette and offered her the pack. “Ragnaud-Sabourin. Never heard of it myself until a couple of days ago and never drank it until tonight, but fuck me if it doesn’t go down easy. Actually surprised a dump like this sells it. Classy goddamn stuff.”

  I laughed and the bartender frowned, then tried unsuccess- fully to hide the frown. I said, “Kidding, kidding. I love this place.”

  The red-haired beauty accepted a cigarette and said, “So where exactly does one find out about obscure brandies these days?”

  “Crazy old coots, mainly. You need a light?”

  “Please.”

  She plumped up her plump lips and placed the cigarette between them, looking at me expectantly. My eyes were wet and my mouth was as dry as sand. I flicked the lighter and she puffed a smoky cloud around her head. She looked like she’d just stepped out of an impossibly glamorous old black and white photograph.

  “And why is a young woman like you hanging around with crazy old coots?”

  I bowed ironically. “I thank you for the compliment, but I’m not so young. Not compared to you, at any rate.”

  “How old are you? If you don’t mind me asking.” She smiled, brilliant and overwhelming. “You can refuse to answer if you like.”

  Refuse you? Yeah, right. “I’m 31. Just gone. You?”

  She took a sip of her drink. “Oh…a little younger, but not too much. Mm. That is nice.”

  “These mad old broads know their brandy. What’s your name?”

  “You can call me…Cassandra.”

  I smiled to try and hide my disappointment. “Right. A pro. I should have known. A looker like you…”

  “A pro? You mean a prostitute?” Her laugh was like sparkling wine being poured down a tower of crystal glasses. “No. I’m not a pro.”

  “So what’s with the name thing?”

  “I’m not a prostitute, but I don’t necessarily always like to use my real name. Girls have secrets, don’t we?”

  I shrugged—sure, we have secrets. Whatever you say. Jesus, she was distractingly attractive. It was hard to just sit here and concentrate on having a simple conversation. Her beauty kept interrupting, getting in the way, distorting things, like it had its own gravity. I wanted her so badly I almost literally ached, and I was annoyed at myself for that. I felt uncontrolled, bereft of volition. I was naked, incapacitated by sex and sensuality, made stupid by it.

  “So what sorrows are you drowning tonight?” I asked, purely to distract my thoughts.

  “I sort of figured you weren’t having a party. Got a lot of sorrows to drown, honey?”

  “Ah…I don’t know. Yeah, I suppose so. Sorrows to drown, memories to kill—stuff to forget. Drink is a fine companion on your journey towards obliteration.”

  “That’s good. Who said that?”

  I squinted at her, mildly confused. “Actually, I think I did.” She smiled again and blew a smoke ring which sailed out before us, then paused before ascending, floating up towards the lights above the bar, glasses hanging from hooks, shimmer and reflections. It looked like a cheap version of paradise up there. Angel, devil, sin and desire, that heavenly body.

  I said, “So why do you call yourself Cassandra, Cassandra?” “I told you why.”

  “I mean, why that name? What, you foretell disaster and nobody will believe you? I know that feeling, kiddo.”

  “Actually, I’m more of an anti-Cassandra. I’ll tell you that something wonderful awaits in your future, but you still won’t believe me.”

  I turned to face her straight on. “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Like you and I will be in bed together by midnight and we won’t leave it until midday tomorrow.”

  Whoa. The world went tipsy on me then, or maybe I went tipsy on the world. The bar spun around my head and I thought, This is all going way too fast. These fantastical situations simply didn’t happen to me, to Genie, solid little Genie with her solid cropped hair and solid wardrobe, a regular kinda gal. I felt like I was being led, hand-held, into an entranced spiral, pitch-black, silent and velvet-lined, a vortex of mania and delight going down, down, down into the belly of the world…

  “Are you alright?”

  She touched me on the shoulder and I realized my head was on the counter. The bartender gave a concerned look; I snapped back to attention, affronted, and shouted, “I’m fine! Everything is fine. Two more here. You’ll have another, won’t you, Cassandra the anti-Cassandra?”

  She said, “Whatever the lady desires” and slugged back her brandy.

  The bartender hesitated, looking around for her supervisor. I raised my hands, composed a “serious” sort of face and said, “I’m fine. You know me, right? I’m often in here. You know me. I don’t cause trouble. So.” I clicked my fingers. “Two more of your finest Sabnaud-Blabourin. Pssschh! Did you hear what I just said? I fucked up the pronunciation.”

  Cassandra and me gigg
led together, conspiratorial and giddy. The bar girl slung out two brandies and we floored them, then two more, before moving onto shots of Jagermeister. Fiery, choking, almost medicinal. Bang, bang, bang, and another for good luck. No more conversation at this stage—she’d said what she wanted and we both knew exactly what I wanted and why talk when you can gaze in open-mouthed lust and admiration instead?

  I told the bartender to put it all on my tab and then we were stumbling out the door, sloppily throwing ourselves and each other into overcoats and hats, and then we were stumbling into a cab which had miraculously pulled up to the curb right where we needed it, and then Cassandra was kissing me in the back of the cab, the spicy after-smell of the shots on her breath, as the driver sighed in a bored kind of way and drove us to my apartment building, and then we were stumbling in my front door and tumbling to the floor together in a swirl of clothes and limbs and mussed hair and perfume clouds and her mouth on mine and my fingers entwined with hers and our bodies entwined and our selves entwined and then all was blackness and silence and rest.

  Chapter 10

  Anneka

  THE following morning, the whole case exploded.

  Cassandra the wonder woman hadn’t quite stayed until midday, but she hadn’t blown without saying goodbye, either. When I woke up I felt hungover but sort of ecstatic, too. I fell out of bed and reeled across the room in a pleasant state of mild post- coital delirium. I was still sore from the baton attack—a small, nasty-looking bruise was darkening on my chest—but I didn’t care about that, I didn’t care about anything. For the first time in a long while, I felt happiness: unadorned, empty-headed, bright- white happiness. I felt good about things.