The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Crystal nodded in sympathy. “That’s true. It’s also true that sometimes intuition is all we have to go on. Fortunately, who she is—and was—still leaves fingerprints and can be caught on CCTV. The Paris police are cooperating. I had my department send them a special algorithm for facial recognition software—we usually reserve it for terrorism suspects. If she’s still here, we’ll likely get some hits after a few days. We’ll still be picking up breadcrumbs from where she was, but we may get lucky with a sighting in real time. This is what else we know…”

  She handed him the case file and a couple of newspaper feature bios as the waiter asked if they wanted coffee. Tim asked for the dessert menu and invited her to “go crazy” as he perused the faded, typed pages from almost a century ago.

  In the final year of her life, Emily Derosier was twenty-nine years old and at the height of her fame. Like certain celebrities today, she had become known more for simply “being” rather than for her accomplishments. Unlike today’s star crop, however, she could boast genuine talent (her paintings, with dream-like images, were reminiscent of Miro, only the iconography held Asian religious themes instead of Jewish). She was also known for a sometimes mischievous wit. When a notorious male prude complained about young women flashing their legs with the rising hemlines, she replied, “Keep complaining, and we’ll never flash you anything else.”

  She also had an impetuous, bold attitude over social wrongs. In 1926, a couple of tourists from the American South complained in a restaurant because famed black singer Josephine Baker sat at a nearby table. Emily got up and poured a silver bowl of Béarnaise sauce over the man’s head.

  As Tim read out this anecdote, Crystal declared, “Yeah, saw that. I like her already.”

  So did Tim. Even from the clippings and book photos, you could understand the woman’s allure. There was a luminescent quality to her oval face, framed by the flapper’s blunt cut. Only a couple of years later, she set a new fashion trend by getting her brown hair cut short. But Emily Derosier had staggered out of the Karma Booth nude, with tresses at shoulder length. Wherever she had been, time definitely passed in measurable increments there.

  In 1927, she had returned to Paris after a half-year trip to Sri Lanka, known back then as Ceylon. She had gushed in interviews that she felt “changed by the place” and that it had heavily influenced her work. A couple of her paintings were displayed ahead of a planned show at a gallery not far from the Jeu de Paume, but one week before the premiere she was murdered in her apartment in the 6th arrondissement. The newspapers made much of the fact that she was discovered in the nude, with multiple stab wounds to her chest and neck.

  The case file suggested she must have been sleeping, and as the door was forced open, she hadn’t bothered to reach for a robe but had stepped in surprise into her own sitting room—as if modesty wasn’t required. Or she simply didn’t care. Maybe there was a touch of fatalism in how she confronted her attacker, brazenly parading herself before the inevitable happened.

  The police took photos of her body, but neglected to take shots of the door, and the file included the pencil notation: “Front entrance smashed in; looks strongly like blood was up.” (Crystal rolled her eyes. “Forensics,” she muttered. “The early, early years.”) There had been a struggle. Emily Derosier’s fingers and palms showed several defensive wounds, and a wide puddle of blood had indicated exsanguination.

  Tim looked up from the file. “Well, you’re the detective. What do you think we should do?”

  “I need to check where her paintings are still being shown,” said Crystal. “Somebody must have done a coffee table book on her or something—maybe that will do.”

  “Why?”

  “Right,” said Crystal, tapping the file. “It says here that on the night of her murder, the canvases in her apartment were slashed and vandalized, and the gallery where her show was supposed to be held had a break-in. Her paintings were found in a pile and burned.”

  Tim nodded. “Okay. Which means what?”

  “It means they got it wrong ages ago, this wasn’t a crime of passion,” said Crystal. “An ex-lover destroying her work as an act of spite? Not buying it. The murderer—it couldn’t have been anyone else—didn’t want the world to see the new inspired visions of Emily Derosier. Her killer was afraid of something back then. What was it? What was she hoping to show the world? Maybe we can get a hint of it. The other question is what is Emily Derosier afraid of today? Why hide?”

  “You’re convinced she’s hiding.”

  Crystal leaned back and took a sip of her coffee. “Try this. Say you walk along an iced-over lake. It cracks, and you fall through a hole. You nearly drown, but the doctors get to you in time before you die of hypothermia. You lose time. You wake up, and any normal person would thank his rescuers and say, ‘Oh, my God, I nearly died, I have a new appreciation for life’ or some other rubbish. You would, wouldn’t you? But our lady of the lake doesn’t speak to a single soul in this new world and simply leaves. There are only two reasons you flee after you come back from the dead. One: you have something to hide, and two—”

  “Whoever tossed you in the water might still be around,” said Tim.

  “Exactly.”

  Tim folded his arms, impressed. For all the compliments he got from people over his alleged great insight, he always wished he had a more logical mind. He could see how Crystal Anyanike would complement his skill set. Still, he felt a peculiar urge to tease her, always a sign that he liked a person.

  “You’re not suggesting the killer is still a threat when he must be over a hundred years old?”

  “Very funny,” replied Crystal. “I’m pointing out this woman walked out of the Karma Booth the age she was murdered. Not older, not younger—as if her death fixed her in time. You can fear many things but high in the top ten is death or injury. Well, she’s defied both, hasn’t she? If she can walk back into our era, you’d think she has nothing to worry about from any human being here. Unless there’s someone else who doesn’t have to follow the rules…”

  “I’d like to know why she’s still Emily Derosier,” said Tim.

  “I don’t follow.”

  Tim explained to her about the three-year-old blond boy who was supposed to have returned as Daniel Chen. Crystal listened without interrupting, her mouth opening in wonder. He knew what he was telling her ran contrary to all her Christian beliefs, but she had dared to take on the assignment. Well, she was the one who claimed she could handle it.

  “This woman has been gone for close to a century,” explained Tim. “So why hasn’t she stepped through the Booth as someone else? Why not someone we know nothing about or have never heard of? Why not someone completely new?”

  Crystal reached for the folder with the breakdown of CCTV cameras in Paris. Answers would only come when they found the woman.

  The waiter stepped up with the exquisite piece of cheesecake she ordered. Crystal clapped her hands like a little girl. “This is Heaven. Chocolate…”

  Tim sat back and laughed. For a moment, the weight of Karma was briefly lifted.

  Dieter Wildman stepped out of his men’s health club onto Rue Saint-Denis in Montreal, mildly cursing the rain. He hadn’t brought an umbrella, and his hair was still wet from the pool. Well, he should be happy, he supposed, that he still did have hair at his age. Well into his eighties, he swam several laps at the club three days a week, and his doctor declared that he had the heart of a fifty-year-old. Not bad. Now, if he could only escape this demanding lecture circuit that was less work than his clinic but more of a pain in the ass. He scratched his salt and pepper beard and decided to walk.

  He never knew why he bothered to weigh his options. He always walked. Now and then, faces turned—brows crinkling, mouths open in recognition—but the curious on the street didn’t bother him most of the time and let him go on his way. He had made his home in Montreal partly because the attitudes here were more progressive and people supported his work. And there was the fact
that the beautiful architecture here, the circular da Vinci staircases and the old buildings, made him sometimes feel he was in a tiny corner of Europe preserved in Canada. It kept the ghosts nearby, all the haunting reminders in little, innocuous things—gray slabs of stone, the way the rain washed a pair of men’s boots, a menorah in a shop window. Keep the little things close, where they become familiar and mundane, and the ghosts lose their power.

  Tonight, in fact, he was not only giving a speech but dedicating a new exhibit for non-Jewish Holocaust victims: gypsies, Communists, homosexuals—all the forgotten ones. Wildman himself was Jewish, but his father was arrested and put in a camp primarily for his labor union activities. That was in 1937. Staring at barbed wire had bred in him the habit, the joy, of going for a stroll whenever he liked. But he didn’t buy into the myth of the “superior nobility of the oppressed.” He annoyed the B’nai B’rith when he spoke out about Israeli bombings in Gaza, and he had picketed the US consulate in the 1960s over the Vietnam War. Of course, neither of those activities were why he was famous in this country.

  He stopped into a drugstore to buy some mints and a newspaper, and when he jogged in a slow, easy gait across Saint-Denis, they were waiting for him.

  A man walking in front of him slowed down, his back to Wildman, and too late, he realized this stranger was nothing more than a distraction. He was there to block any curious eyes up the street. Behind him, an arm yanked him hard off the curb and a fist clubbed him on the nape of the neck. He staggered with the blow, and like any mugging target, he stammered surprise and went into denial. This can’t be happening. There was no reason for it.

  “Uhh! What…? What is this? What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” barked the voice of the man pushing him to an open car. He had an accent, but as Wildman struggled for his life, he didn’t recognize it. “We’re dragging your arse off the street.”

  “What—what do you want?”

  “What do we want? Me personally, I’d like ten minutes alone with you in a room to beat the shit out of you, you genocidal son of a bitch! But we need you alive!”

  They punched him in the nose and again in the temple, and as he lost consciousness, Dieter Wildman felt the fresh spit on his face and heard the words that explained the attack. Desmond Leary was still yelling at him, You fucking baby killer!”

  Tim’s computer woke him up. He had dozed off with a book folded open on his chest and the lamp on the night table still on. In times of stress, he liked to go back to the rationalists: the writers and thinkers whose prose was acerbic but logical, reasonable. He found them to be a comfort in an age when people’s ultimate defense was “I feel it’s true” rather than a thought-out argument. If a student in his lecture hall talked like that, Tim couldn’t help but pounce.

  When his notebook computer pinged, he lifted his head, and an old paperback copy of Gore Vidal’s Julian slid off his chest onto the floor with a pulpy thud. He had read it before, but had bought it out of a sentimental whim while on a date, strolling with a prospective girlfriend through New York’s cavernous Strand bookstore. He and the woman didn’t click. But he kept the book.

  He’d received another security-encoded email from Gary Weintraub, this one with an attached video file. The professor’s message started: “We’re told this was smuggled out of Tehran by a member of the Majlis.”

  Impressive, thought Tim. And dangerous. But if anyone could get valuable information out of Iran, it would be a member of the Majlis, which Tim remembered was the Islamic nation’s legislature.

  Iran’s Karma Booth, still a carefully guarded secret kept from the country’s population, was only to be activated by the will of the Special Clerical Court. The court had unique powers. It normally handled alleged crimes by clerics but could also hear cases involving ordinary Iranians. It couldn’t be overturned by any appeal and answered only to the Rahbar-e Enqelab, Iran’s Supreme Leader. The MPEG allegedly showed a use of the Booth last week.

  Tim detested the fanatical regime in Iran. It wasn’t because of the continued saber-rattling against the US. It was because he had several friends who were Persian expats, and they had told him horror stories of their lives back there. Tim scrolled down, preparing himself to be disgusted over the details of the background behind the execution. Iran’s warped version of justice was regularly featured on the websites of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. This isn’t going to be pretty, he thought.

  The man sentenced to step into the Karma Booth was a father pushed past his breaking point. His eleven-year-old daughter had been raped and choked, leaving her severely brain damaged. Her assailant was a sadistic university dropout who turned out to be the son of a powerful mullah. And the girl’s father had beaten him to death in a storm of rage and grief.

  Tim, disgusted, hissed aloud over the decision of the court. In their infinite wisdom, the clerics had decided—despite physical evidence gathered by police, as well as forensics that were on par with the standard in most countries in Europe—that the young man couldn’t have dragged the girl into the Tehran cul-de-sac where she was found later, glassy-eyed and barely breathing with her clothes torn. Two chums of the young man claimed he was with them. It didn’t matter that they had clearly lied and that both had been spotted in their classes. The mullah’s son was deemed innocent.

  So the girl’s father took his revenge. And now he had to be executed. Not by the usual method of the gallows at Tehran’s Evin Prison—no, the Karma Booth would be used. Intelligence operatives had learned the clerics preferred to call it “Divan-e Ahlee Keshvar.” The Chamber of Justice.

  Gary Weintraub ended the summary there. He made no comment on what was in the video footage except for the cryptic line: “This may give us another fixed rule for the Booth.” Then came his signoff. There was a quick postscript, informing Tim that the National Security Agency had provided translations of the voices on the footage. They ran at the bottom as subtitles, like in a foreign movie.

  “So let’s go to the video replay,” Tim whispered to himself, rubbing his eyes as he launched the clip.

  Orlando Braithewaite must have given every country the same “model” of Karma Booth. Tim recognized the twin chambers, and the angle of the camera on the tripod took in the hands of a technician running the control board. Tim ignored the backdrop—he suspected it was part of an infirmary wing just as American officials used a hospital ward for their Booth at Sullivan. It was quiet until a loud disturbance could be heard off camera, and then a portly man in a gray inmate uniform was dragged into frame by two guards. They must have informed him he was about to die.

  He kept shouting and fighting with every step. “No, tell me, just tell me! What would you do? If it was your child defiled like that? Your child, your blood!”

  The guard was telling him: “I don’t give a damn. And we don’t have time for this—”

  With all his dignity now stripped away, the man was still hoping to break through the guard’s indifference. “This is not justice! God will punish you for this! Don’t! Don’t—”

  “Are you a woman?” Barked the guard, telling him to shut up.

  He smashed the man across the cheek and jaw, his blow angry and wild. He used the back of his fist, and the condemned, middle-aged father staggered. It gave the guards the moment they needed to shove him into the chamber and lock the door. As the man recovered, he reached instinctively for a knob or a grip to slide a panel. There was none. Now he hammered on the tinted glass. Tim knew what would come next.

  But this was not why Gary Weintraub had sent him the footage. There were a couple of inaudible comments from the guards as the father disintegrated in the blazing white and swirling colors, and no translated subtitles were offered or needed. Then came the familiar secondary effect: more bright light and dazzling swirls. Someone unseen, perhaps another technician who had stood behind the camera all this time, picked the camera up off the tripod and held it, walking forward.

&nb
sp; Tim waited.

  There was a slight jerkiness to the hand-held shot of the camera as it approached the second chamber, and the belligerent guard who had struck the father looked into the lens, his lip curled in an expression of prison staff stoicism. It was clear they had expected their new arrival to be conscious, perhaps even alert.

  “Mahmoud Bahonar?” called the guard.

  Tim recalled that this was the name of the girl’s attacker, the mullah’s son who was traded back into existence for the life of the father. The guard opened the door to the chamber.

  “Mahmoud—”

  The camera angle jerked again, and then the technician found the zoom and moved in. But there was nobody in the Booth. Then the second guard let out a sharp cry and said, “Look, look!”

  He swore and gasped, stepping away. Tim could hear the voice of the camera operator demanding to know what he should be looking at. What is it? What?

  The first guard’s face was ashen. It sounded like the second guard was vomiting in a corner off camera. The lens finally tilted down as the technician understood. The focus blurred, and then the zoom—

  “White worm,” whispered the technician. For an instant, Tim was confused. Then the image sharpened, and he understood.

  It was a maggot. Crawling on the floor of the chamber.

  Emily Derosier spoke to Tim and Crystal the next day—through oils on canvas.

  At university, Tim had taken art appreciation courses, thinking they would be easy undergraduate electives, and for the most part they were—but he’d also been surprised to find he genuinely enjoyed them. The lectures on art had pushed him to mull over the canvases at the New York Met and not merely take them in like a fast-food consumer on a package tour.