Styx

by Bavo Dhooge

  “But what?”

  “Well, maybe Styx missed something.”

  “I don’t suppose taking another look could hurt,” said Ornelis.

  “I think we owe it to the chief inspector.”

  “Still no sign of him?”

  “Not a trace,” Delacroix lied.

  He’d taken a night to sleep on it—as John Crevits had directed—but hadn’t actually gotten a wink of sleep. He was too wound up to close his eyes, too eager to get a look at Tobias Ornelis. Delacroix wasn’t there because of anything Styx might have missed but because of something the zombie cop claimed to have seen: the Stuffer dressed in rain gear and a James Ensor mask.

  Ornelis was also obsessed with James Ensor and his masks. He had reproductions all over the place. But then again, this was Ostend, the birthplace of the master painter, so perhaps it wasn’t all that unusual for Ornelis to be a fan. Still, two things made the pathologist special. One, he apparently knew the last victim, had a secret crush on her, according to several people Delacroix had questioned. Even dead and lying in his morgue, she seemed to have an unnatural hold on him. Two, people were starting to gossip about Tobias Ornelis and his bizarre relationship with the dead girl.

  Ornelis led him into the morgue, its far wall lined with a bank of refrigerated lockers. He unlocked one of the compartments, slid out a long metal drawer, and unzipped the white plastic body bag that lay on it. Madeleine Bohy’s head and limbs were all there, not quite touching the torso but ranged around it in their proper positions. Delacroix stood there looking Death in the eye, and for the first time he had absolutely no doubt who it was he’d encountered the previous evening.

  Raphael Styx.

  He knew it the moment he saw the pigmentation of the dead woman’s skin, smelled the grave-reek that rose from her body, felt the changes that being in a room with her wrought in the very atmosphere. They were kinfolk, Bohy and Styx, two of a kind. With one difference: unlike the woman on the slab, Styx was still walking around.

  “Crevits gave you a copy of the autopsy report, I assume?”

  “Yes,” said Delacroix, staring at the severed head.

  “She was strangled, unlike the first two victims, both of whom were stabbed to death. Hey, can you tell me what we’re supposed to do with the sand? We’ve got it bagged in a storage closet, but it can’t sit there forever.”

  “Why not?” asked Delacroix. “It’s just sand.”

  “What are we supposed to do with it? Make sand castles?”

  “It’ll make its way back to the beach eventually,” said Delacroix.

  Ornelis cocked his head toward Martens or Maertens, who was waiting for them out in the corridor as instructed, on the other side of the viewing window. “How’s the new partner working out?”

  Delacroix shrugged. “I don’t really know him yet.”

  “He’s not as . . . colorful as you.”

  Delacroix understood that his approach to life must seem completely foreign to Ornelis, a man who spent eight hours a day puttering around among the dead.

  “You can zip her back up,” Delacroix said, after a perfunctory examination.

  “You sure?”

  The rookie nodded, and tried to act as if he’d found what he’d been looking for. As Ornelis carefully reclosed the body bag, the young cop wandered apparently aimlessly around the impersonal examination room.

  There was a battered metal desk in a corner of the room, and on it was an equally impersonal MacBook Pro. The lid was up, and a screen saver showed a colorful photo of the Ostend shrimpers’ annual parade: dozens of men in yellow oilskins and sou’westers on horseback, dragging enormous nets behind them along the beach.

  Delacroix had seen the picture on Ornelis’s desk a few times. He’d never paid any attention to it before—to each his own obsession—but it certainly caught his eye now. Only once had he noticed Ornelis at a crime scene—and then only from a distance.

  “The shrimpers’ parade,” he said casually. “When is that again?”

  He examined his memory more closely, zoomed in mentally on Ornelis’s figure in the distance—and, yes, there he stood, protected from the rain by his yellow oilskin jacket and hat. There’d been no reason to notice it at the time—yellow raingear was practically an Ostender’s uniform—but now he combined the memory of that crime scene with the more recent memory of Raphael Styx’s voice:

  I saw him, the Stuffer . . . a yellow oilskin slicker and a sou’wester hat . . . a James Ensor mask.

  Behind him, the pathologist said, “I’m not sure what the date is this year. Tell you the truth, I haven’t watched it in years.”

  “You still use that photo as your screen saver, though. When was it taken?”

  “Oh, Lord, I don’t remember. It’s not me, though.”

  Delacroix turned around. Ornelis had slid the drawer back into its refrigerated compartment and was tapping the lock code into the door.

  “The picture, I mean. I didn’t take it, and I’m not in it.”

  “I see,” said Delacroix. “Where’d you get it, then?”

  “Some website. Probably the city’s.”

  Delacroix turned back to the laptop, studying the yellow rain jackets like the little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft that had so affected Marcel Proust. The so-called Stendhal syndrome, the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty.

  Delacroix wondered if there was a version of the word for horror. Here in the morgue, he was prepared to believe there was.

  “When was the last time you took part in the parade?” he asked. Ornelis seemed not to hear him, and he began to repeat the question: “When was the last time you—?”

  “The last time I was in the parade?”

  So he had heard him. There was something weird about Ornelis, Delacroix thought. He’d heard enough gossip over the past year to know that he wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  “You haven’t met Dr. Death yet, eh, Delacroix?” one of his colleagues had joked, while a bunch of them were catching a beer after their shift, his second week in Ostend. “Never fear: you will. We all do. He’s a nutcase. But, I mean, what would it do to you, sitting there, day in, day out, nobody around but the dead? Who else has he got to talk to?”

  Delacroix thought he must have misunderstood. “You mean—?”

  “Oh, yes,” said another gleefully.

  “He talks to them?” He assumed the story was an exaggeration, some sort of hazing new members of the city’s police force were put through. But the whole group chimed in with its agreement.

  “I heard him myself,” a third man said. “I was about to open the door, and I heard him in there talking to someone. I figured he had somebody in there with him, but, when I went in, he was all alone.”

  “Creepy,” Delacroix had said.

  And then there was the aura the man gave off.

  Or, better, the lack of one.

  Like every pathologist, Tobias Ornelis was more or less required to wear a white lab coat during working hours, but he usually ignored that custom, roaming around in old jeans and a raggedy sweater. He wasn’t merely as somber as the Man with the Scythe. He had no personality at all—at least none he allowed anyone around him to see.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Delacroix, still focused on the laptop. Ornelis didn’t respond. Maybe he was only used to talking when no one else was around. No one alive, at any rate. “You still have your jacket and sou’wester?”

  “What?”

  “That fisherman’s gear.”

  “I’m not a fisherman.”

  “No, but you used to be in the parade.”

  Delacroix smiled affably, but the other man was carved out of ice, as cold and stiff as the corpses he worked with.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I don’t know. If I still do, I haven’t worn them in a while.”

  A silence fell upon them and lasted long enough to begin to become uncomfortable. Fin
ally, Ornelis added, “I don’t go out much.”

  “It’s been pretty busy around here lately, eh?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “But you have to go out sometimes? I mean, you don’t sleep here, do you? And there’s been so much rain lately. People tell me they’ve never seen anything like it. Supposed to be the worst spring since they started keeping records.” He let a moment go by, then continued: “You could use one of those yellow rain jackets. I hope you didn’t throw yours away.”

  They stood there eyeing each other. Tobias Ornelis, with his hands clasped behind his back, and Joachim Delacroix, placidly watching the doctor, a man who fit the description Styx had provided. Tall, thin, hollow eyes.

  “Anything else, Inspector?” Ornelis asked.

  “I don’t know,” Delacroix said. “I’m thinking.”

  “It’s just, I was about to take a break when you came in. I eat my breakfast late, and I like to keep to my schedule.”

  A slave to routine, Delacroix had heard it said. A strange, strange man. He lives alone, never married, never had a girlfriend or even been out on a date, far as we know. Had a crush on the last victim. Carries the smell of death around with him. No wonder he’s single. Can you imagine going out to dinner with the guy? How could you possibly eat?

  “I don’t want to keep you,” said Delacroix.

  But he couldn’t pull himself away. He’d seen Madeleine Bohy’s body, and he knew there were other bodies in the other sliding metal compartments. There were cabinets and drawers filled with scalpels, knives, and surgical saws. In the hands of a serial killer, these would be dangerous weapons. Here, though, they were simply tools of the pathologist’s trade.

  “I don’t like to leave strangers in here on their own,” said Ornelis.

  Apparently Delacroix counted as a stranger.

  “It’s all right, I’ll walk out with you.”

  “It’s just, people usually aren’t comfortable in here without me.”

  Delacroix let the statement hang in the air.

  “Why wouldn’t I be comfortable?”

  “Well, because they—because they’re all dead, obviously.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” said Delacroix. “I deal with death every day of the week.”

  “Then we’re two of a kind,” Ornelis said, smiling weakly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “We know the dead can’t hurt us. Most people are afraid of them, but we really ought to pity them. If you ask me, we need to do a better job of getting them ready for their journey. You take a living woman, for example. She spends an hour, maybe two, in front of her mirror in the morning, making herself up, smearing gel in her hair, covering up her wrinkles. Once she’s dead, though, that all comes to a stop. Except for me. I’m the one who takes over the job. It’s like maintaining an old car. It’ll never drive again, the motor’s shot, maybe even gone altogether like the heart out of a body, but I can still polish her chassis and keep her looking good.”

  “Although she’s dead,” said Delacroix.

  “At least she ends in beauty.”

  “I thought morticians were responsible for all that sort of thing.”

  “Perhaps. But I take my work more seriously than they do. Especially when I know the victim.”

  So at least some of the rumors were true, then.

  “I’ll admit,” said Delacroix, “when I go, I want to go in style.”

  “I can see that.”

  Delacroix could tell that it was time for him to leave. As he strode across the room he spotted a small table half-hidden behind a narrow door he’d barely noticed. On it was an array of what seemed to be medical specimens and personal effects.

  He swung open the door for a better overview of the table. There were a dozen airtight plastic Baggies, some containing bits of skin, tissue samples, strands of hair, nail clippings, while others held a lipstick, a compact, a ring of keys, and similar items.

  “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Evidence,” Ornelis responded brusquely. “From the decedent, Madeleine Bohy.”

  The sapeur delicately lifted one of the Baggies with his thumb and forefinger. It held a length of what looked like wire. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a thick plastic filament. “And this? The fishing line used to hold the body together, right?”

  “Yes, I took it all out. I I don’t think her family would want to see her buried like that.”

  Delacroix nodded. He laid the Baggie back in its place and asked, “Who says she’s going to be buried? Maybe they’ll have her cremated.”

  “What difference does it make? Either way, it’s better without the—”

  “Better?” Delacroix spat out the word. “A corpse is a corpse.”

  “Not to me.”

  “No, clearly not. I assume you had official permission to cut the line out of her? To make your . . . improvements?”

  “Improvements?”

  “You have a better word for it? You sewed her back together, I noticed, with surgical thread. That’s an improvement on the Stuffer’s work, isn’t it?”

  Delacroix’s imagination unspooled a film of Tobias Ornelis here in his workshop, leisurely restitching the sculpture he’d had to hurry through out on the beach. He could see the pathologist patiently sewing, talking pleasantly to the dead girl while he worked.

  “I don’t think I like your tone,” said Ornelis.

  “I don’t think I much like you,” said Delacroix.

  “As I said, Inspector, I spend most of my time with the dead. I’m not very good with the living. I apologize for my manners.”

  The doctor had clearly had enough of this particular representative of the living and wanted to be left alone so he could eat his late breakfast. Or early lunch. Delacroix was about to offer the pathologist his hand when he saw it.

  The scar. An ugly cut, perpendicular to the wrist on the side of the hand. Delacroix had known a young woman who’d succeeded in slitting her own wrists. In fact, it was because of her that he’d become a sapeur.

  His whole life, Delacroix had been a Sunday’s child, “bonny and blithe, and good and gay.” Everyone around him in Ostend assumed he’d grown up in Brazzaville and emigrated to Belgium as a young adult, and he thought that origin story added to his allure so he did nothing to disabuse them of the notion. But the truth was that he’d been born to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father, and had been raised in one of Brussels’ better neighborhoods. He’d coasted through middle school and high school, and was planning to study law and become an attorney.

  He was in his first year, wrestling with contracts and judicial remedies when his half-sister Celine, seven years his senior and a classic Jill of all trades, master of none, finally lucked into an internship in Prague. Though this was pre-Facebook, they’d stayed in close contact by e-mail and phone until the day her calls stopped coming.

  At first, he assumed Celine had fallen for some hulking Eastern European, but then he got a call from the host family that provided her with room and board. She’d been terribly homesick, they explained in English they barely spoke and he understood with only marginally less difficulty. Ultimately, the depression had driven her to slit her wrists in a public bathroom at school. No one found her until hours had passed and it was far too late to save her.

  Joachim thought the call had to be some kind of sick joke. But no one was laughing, and, when the confirmation came, he took a leave of absence from school and a train from Brussels to Frankfurt to Nuremberg to Prague to investigate the matter on his own.

  He questioned her friends, her colleagues, and her host family, determined to uncover whatever it was that had driven her to suicide. There had to have been more to it than loneliness. If that was all it was, then why hadn’t she simply gotten on a plane and returned home?

  He learned that Celine had steeped herself not only in the beauty of the Golden City but also in the darker side of its history, a history stained by occult practices and tragic melanc
holy. Had she gone mad? He didn’t know. He’d finally given up and returned to Brussels, unable to solve the mystery of her death.

  He knew from their father and their Congolese friends of the rise of La Sape back in Brazzaville, and to honor his sister’s memory he attended her funeral dressed for the first time as a sapeur. With his sister dead now, he wanted somehow to keep her spirit alive, so he dressed up every day, as if he dressed for two. It was months later that the host family in Prague came across a stack of letters she’d written but never sent on the top shelf of the closet in what had been her room. Several of the letters were addressed to him. They were heartbreaking cries for help, permeated with shame and grief and misery as she became convinced that a daughter of racially mixed parentage would always be an outcast.

  It was after reading those letters that Joachim Delacroix dropped out of law school and applied to the police academy.

  The scar on Tobias Ornelis’s wrist was a faint reminder of his lost half-sister Celine.

  They shook hands, and, before letting go, Delacroix turned the doctor’s arm a bit for a better look.

  “Occupational hazard,” Ornelis said, noticing Delacroix’s attention. “The problem’s not the knives and scalpels. It’s the thread.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought surgical thread was all that dangerous.”

  “It isn’t,” Ornelis laughed uneasily. “I meant the fishing line the victim was sewed up with. It’s all thread to me, but that stuff’s so stiff it flies all over the place when you try to stitch with it.”

  “You mean when you took it out of her?”

  “Right, of course.”

  “You said it flies around when you stitch with it.”

  “I mean it wasn’t the thread I used to sew her up the second time that cut me, but—”

  “The second time?” asked Delacroix.

  “Yes.”

  “You sewed her up twice?”

  “No, the killer sewed her the first time with the fishing line, and then I—”

  “So how did you cut yourself?”

  Ornelis held the door for him, but Delacroix wasn’t about to leave now.

  “On the—what difference does it make? I don’t really remember. Let’s just say it was the fishing line, and it happened when I was removing it from her body.”