The God Hunter

by Tim Lees

  “You have your meter.”

  Only some faint, conditioned fear of seeming rude made me reply. I tapped the pouch at my side.

  “Reader,” I said. “We call it a reader.”

  Outside, the streets of Budapest flicked by, the beautiful old buildings black with soot, just as I remembered them; dirt and grime, the dirt of history, but not a speck of litter on the streets. It was a city full of contradictions, that way. I could remember ­people waiting for the lights to change before they crossed the road. There were no cars in sight, but nobody would budge an inch until they got the go-­ahead. And there was porn at almost every newsstand, stuff on view you’d never get away with back in London. Yet I’d seen pretty girls in scanty summer clothes stroll down the street with not even a glance, much less the kind of lewd remarks they’d probably endure at home.

  A patrol car stood at the roadside. We pulled up behind. On the pavement, a large, fleshy man with a shaved head was quibbling with a lone cop set to guard the door. The cop looked bored. Ganz nodded to him, and he waved us through. We walked into the restaurant. The fact that we could do this, and the bald man couldn’t, seemed to throw him into further rage. He yelled and shook his fist and made noises I had seldom heard outside a zoo. The cop began to shout back. It had a kiddies’ playground air to it: “Oh yes you are!” “Oh no I’m not!”

  “He is restaurant owner,” explained Ganz, as we slipped between the tables. The shouting clipped abruptly as the door swung shut behind us.

  “Ah.” I followed her into the kitchen. “What’ll happen? Is he insured? Is there, you know, some sort of compensation . . . ?”

  “Oh, it will not take long. He will pay someone. Restaurant will open, ­people come in, eat. Is why we must hurry.”

  I didn’t take this in at first, it was said so casually.

  “Bribe,” she said, in explanation. “It is business, after all.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You do not approve? You tell me in UK that this is never done? In America? No?”

  “I’m just surprised you’re so—­up-­front about it, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps, if you were Hungarian, I would not be. But you should know the way things work, Mr. Copeland. After all, is what they say: we have best police money can buy. Is that not right?” She picked her way between gigantic steel tureens. “Do you know how much policeman earns, Mr. Copeland? His wage? ‘Cop on beat,’ perhaps? Man outside? Or me?”

  She didn’t wait for a reply. She shook her head. “No. No, you don’t.” Then, “This is it.”

  A ­couple of big metal cabinets had been shoved back to make room for all those underpaid police. Some utensils had been scattered on the tiled floor. There was nobody around, and thankfully the body had been moved. Some things I didn’t need to see. There was a blobby chalk outline, too vague and shapeless to be obvious as having marked a corpse.

  “I didn’t know you really did this. Police, I mean. The chalk, and that. Seen it on TV, but . . .”

  “We are Hungarians. You think we cannot draw chalk line?”

  I was ready with another apology when I realized she was smiling at me. So I smiled, too.

  She said, “Meter, please. Reader. Meter reader. This is what you came to do.”

  I unbuttoned the belt pouch, removed the little device, and set it down atop one of the metal counters. It was scarcely bigger than a phone. I checked it over, paused . . . And in doing so—­the moment’s quiet—­it felt like something suddenly went out of me, or out of the occasion. I looked at the bare, bleak walls, the dull gleam of the steel . . . There was a deadness to it. A kind of emptiness, like the air was too thin, or like I was the one dying here, me, and not the victim.

  “Yes?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m fine . . .”

  “No. I feel it, too. Worse last night. But yes, I feel it.”

  I held the reader. It’s a little box, a simple thing. When I didn’t get the reading I expected, I switched it off and tried again.

  “It’s a busy kitchen?” I said. “Normally?”

  “I think.”

  “Lots of coming and going? Hard work? Short tempers? All that kind of thing?”

  “Kitchen, yes.”

  “ ’Cause there’s almost nothing on the reader. This whole place, it’s like no one’s been here, not in years.”

  “This is common? Normal?”

  I shook my head. “There’s always something. Ambient. Something . . .”

  I looked around. But for the chalk mark on the floor, there was no sign anything had happened here. An ordinary place, quite unexceptional: too small, too cluttered—­like every other kitchen I had ever seen. But normal. Normal . . .

  That didn’t explain why I felt my guts sink just from looking at it.

  Or why the reader told me they were right to do so.

  I moved towards the door. Detective Ganz came with me.

  On the street, the quarrel was still going on. The bald man stamped his feet. He raised his face towards the sky, as if imploring some indifferent deity to look down on his efforts.

  He hadn’t yet reached for his wallet.

  He was waiting until Ganz cleared off, or else he’d have to pay them both. And her rank, I’d bet, would fetch a lot more than some beat cop’s.

  Maybe I’d ask Shailer what the going rate was.

  I climbed into the car. My chest felt like a piece of dead wood. She got the engine going. I said, “Fuck it. Can we just stop at a bar? Away from here, yeah? Drop me if you want. Or join me. Either way.”

  One look at her face, I knew which one she’d choose.

  Her skin had turned the color of her cigarette ash.

  As we moved off, I glanced back, saw the bald guy reach into his pocket.

  Business as usual.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE THIRD DETECTIVE

  It’s a good barman who brings your drinks and goes away. I never liked the kind who hovers, wants to be your pal, your confidant.

  Ganz ordered pálinka for us both. I swear to God you could have flown a jet on this stuff. It didn’t taste like booze so much as some ferocious super-­fuel, devised for engines no one had invented yet. Whatever that scene in the kitchen had drained out of us, the drink replaced it with a deep and purging warmth; false, maybe, but needed.

  She said, “Is my second time. Last night, I saw it, too. I hoped today it will be easier.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  She shook her head, lighting another cigarette. “A little, maybe. Never much.”

  “Were the others like that? The other deaths?”

  She didn’t answer. But presently, she raised her glass up to her lips, tipped back her head, and downed her drink in one.

  She smoked her cigarette.

  I thought it might be dangerous to smoke, with so much spirit around about. But she just called the barman, ordered more.

  “This is . . . fairly recent case for me, Mr. Copeland. Detectives previously assigned have not revealed their feelings. They give me nothing but reports.”

  “OK . . .”

  “No. Not OK. Very much not OK.”

  So I waited. A big truck passed by in the street outside, shaking the window glass.

  She said, “I am third detective assigned to this.”

  I didn’t get it. I muttered something about it obviously being a tough case.

  “Third. Nh?”

  “Um . . . third time lucky?”

  “Lucky. Again you tell me lucky.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am third assigned detective because there are no clues, no suspects, no witnesses, no near victims who escape. Because there are no leads. Because there are no fibers and no blood spots and no DNA. No money to
be made. No CCTV. No trace, no clue. Because it is fucking bastard impossible. So bad I must take help from Registry, and for a little while, I pretend to myself you will really give me help, and case will progress. That is how bad. No one will make career from this, so two detectives ask to be moved to better work. And case comes to me. Careers will die through this case, I believe. My career, I think.

  “I have trained in London and in New York and in Philadelphia. I know to swear in English, Mr. Copeland. Shit and fuck are words for this, I think. And ass-­wipe. This is fuck hell case, Mr. Copeland, I must tell you. If you know words more suitable, please say them now. I may have need of this vocabulary. Will you please?”

  CHAPTER 17

  DESERT SUN

  I lay in bed, remembering a soft, low desert skyline, the stars still visible against the first thin glow of dawn. Southeast by south of Marrakesh, an empty place which, for reasons no one seemed to know, had shown up on the readers and now, we hoped, was going to yield its bounty.

  So who had found it? Who’d come by, just happening to have a reader on his person, and gone, “Wow! Now look at this!”

  If the Registry had any kind of answer, they certainly weren’t telling us. And we didn’t ask. We drew the job, we went. That’s how it was.

  Our guides had camped a short way off, but they roused themselves at first light and rekindled the fire. Smoke rose like a rope trick in the still air. They boiled their kettles, made their tea, and watched us, keeping their distance.

  Our witnesses.

  The ground was flat, but littered with sharp stones, split by the desert’s heat and cold. We laced the cables in among them. Martin was in charge, Martin Klein. He lurched from junction to junction, stopping here and there to shift the wires, often only a few inches, one way or the other. He was very thorough on the job. Fairly hopeless off it, drunk or stoned most of the time—­the latter, given where we were. He’d opted for a dawn launch, saying the hour would be “auspicious.” It was also just about the only time that he could guarantee sobriety.

  But Martin was still good back then. He’d got the instinct for it. Not so much now, but then, if you were young, you watched him, trying to divine the secrets, picking up the tricks. You wondered if maybe there was something special in the way he loped about, or paused abruptly, staring at just one, single junction box for minutes on end . . . or whether he was simply waiting for a few unpickled brain cells to rouse up and kick into effect.

  But he had talent, and it seems that, while it’s not a necessary correlation, all too often talent in this job goes with some appalling, sometimes even fatal, flaw. Which makes me glad I’m only mediocre. A half-­good op, perhaps. But only half a fuckup, too.

  I doubt that Moira’d go along with that. The time I’m thinking of, I was still married to her. Well, in name, at least.

  This morning, though, we studied Martin out there on the desert floor. We were novices, apprentices; me and an Italian woman I’ve seen maybe twice, three times since then. Martin was precise about the cables. He wouldn’t talk to us, but he seemed to have the pattern all marked out inside his head; where others might get just an intuition of its shape, Martin had it clear and confident. A loop here and a twist there. Next a straight, a curve . . . He slouched along, then stopped, stock-­still, listening, perhaps to some faint movement in the air or some vibration in the ground.

  The sky grew lighter. The horizon was a sharp, dark edge. Soon, a lens of sunlight flared over the hills, though we still stood in darkness. The shadows pooled around us. We could hardly see our feet. Martin’s torch beam flickered to and fro across the dirt. He straightened briefly, looked up to the light, and then, as if dismissing it, bent back to his work.

  He worked alone. Our help would just be interference. We were there to carry gear and pack up for him afterwards, that was all.

  Martin nodded, then strolled over to us, a foul Moroccan cigarette between his lips. He wired the control box, muttered to himself—­a prayer, perhaps? A prayer to whom?—­and switched it on. The rising sun put him in silhouette. It occurred to me this dawn ritual, which all the time I had assumed was necessary, or at least beneficial, to the process was nothing more than showmanship. Martin was good, beyond a doubt. But sometimes good isn’t enough; you need ­people to notice you, to realize for themselves how good you are. And we’d a ­couple of high-­rankers with us on that trip. Just there for the ride, they said. Klein was smart enough to seize his chance; to know that being good wasn’t enough for his career. Being good was just the follow-­through. First, you needed to be seen.

  The sun swung up into the sky, as if at his command. The cables flared under the light, a silver cobweb spread across the desert floor.

  The air began to shiver. Dust rose, steeples of whirling sand that zigzagged back and forth, shuttling along the cables like toy trains on an intricate and tangled track. Whirlwinds in miniature.

  Martin, his back to us, kept a dramatic silence, checking meters, toggling switches; the apparatus was more complex back in those days, a stick shift to a modern automatic. The sun came up like floodlights, and he stood there, conductor of a symphony, his dark hair glittering with sand.

  I felt my own hair rise, the wind tugging my shirt.

  And then it stopped. The wind died. The full force of the morning sun shone on my face, like standing by a two-­bar heater.

  Everything was still. There had been, as we had thought, no manifestation, no attempted incarnation. But when we moved towards the flask we saw the ground was scattered with strange, dun-­colored lumps, almost like mushrooms. In the rising heat they soon began to deliquesce. Slow trails of vapor rose into the air, leaving a sweetish, not entirely pleasant, smell, like having an old alkie come and sit beside you on the bus. There was a whiff of it, then gone, vanished in the quickly heating desert air.

  We tried to take some samples, but the plastic bags we used weren’t airtight, and we brought nothing back.

  “It’s manna,” Martin Klein announced, matter-­of-­fact. “The stuff that fed the Israelites.”

  “Wrong desert,” I said. “You’d have to be a thousand miles east for that.”

  “Well.” He shrugged. “It gets around.”

  “So you eat it,” said somebody, and everybody laughed.

  The point being: while there are textbook operations that go swimmingly, they are rare, and even then, you still find things you don’t expect. It’s different every time.

  And that’s why it needs ­people, not machines. Because sometimes, it goes very badly wrong.

  You learn that soon after you start the job. The gossip, the tales. And then you look around at all the ­people who’ve been doing it for years and seem to have come through unscathed, and you think, well, OK, maybe that’s how I’ll be, too. And you think, you always think, when something does go wrong, maybe it’s someone’s fault. Maybe they deserved it, in a way: too careless, too distracted . . . whatever.

  Well, returning to the present, it seemed this was someone’s fault, as well. Not mine, perhaps, but that wasn’t important. I was carrying the can. And that was it.

  I shouldn’t have lied on that report. But it seemed easier. I don’t like workplace politics. I’m bad at it, and it gets in the way of what I’m good at.

  I always thought the bad thing, if it came, would happen on an op, not six years afterwards, trying to bail out some guy that I didn’t even like.

  So, who said that I had to? There’d be consequences, certainly. Maybe bad ones. But not so bad. I could drive a taxi, too. And chances were it wouldn’t come to that. No. Chances were . . .

  CHAPTER 18

  THE LEOPARD MAN

  I called Shailer probably a dozen times that night. Then in the morning, too. He wasn’t taking calls. Or, more specifically: he wasn’t taking mine.

  Supposing I’d had good news? Wouldn’t he want to hear?

&
nbsp; But it struck me he was not expecting good news. Far from it. And that was the whole point. He’d got me here, trying to resolve a mess that he’d made years ago, for which it looked like I’d most likely take the blame. What was he hoping? That I’d dig myself in deeper? Die in the attempt? Or, more likely, just keep the whole damn shitstorm well away from Adam Shailer?

  Once or twice I contemplated calling up Detective Ganz. Say hi, apologize for not being more help. Or, business-­like, request to view the files, recheck the evidence, pretend that there’d be something I could find, something I could see that no one else would spot . . . Or just come clean. Tell her what had happened, what I thought was happening now. Throw myself on her mercy, ask her for her help. Solve the case, stop the killings.

  Or ask her on a date . . .

  I thought about her more and more: her face, her voice, husky with cigarettes. And the fact that she, like me, had found herself stuck with a lousy job, shafted by colleagues higher up the ladder. That she needed comfort, reassurance, warmth. Everything, in fact, that I needed myself.

  I was projecting. I knew that. Once or twice I picked the phone up, started keying in her number, and then stopped myself. I was lonely here. Off-­balance. I might imagine us as kindred souls, but chances were she had a very different take on things; one far less flattering.

  So I went out for a walk instead.

  That’s what I do when I’ve got problems that I can’t resolve. I walk. Budapest is a good city for walking. Traffic’s not bad, though the smell of car exhaust hangs everywhere. The buildings, quiet remnants of an empire, stand splendid in neglect. Public monuments abound. In Varosliget Park I found a castle on an island, like something Ludwig of Bavaria might have built, a Strauss waltz ghosting on the breeze. And after that, quite unexpectedly, I found the zoo.