The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Sri Lankan rupees. Crystal plucked a couple out of his hand and shrugged. “Pretty money. Emily Derosier had her big transcendental change while traveling in Sri Lanka. Maybe Lantern Jaw and Tvardovsky thought they could find her there.”

  “Maybe,” said Tim. “But these notes look fresh. They feel like ones you’d get at the foreign exchange booth. I don’t think she came from there, I think she expected to fly there soon.”

  Crystal nodded. “You’re right. Good catch. I’ll ask the Paris cops to check if her alias had any booked tickets to Colombo or—hang on. Why go to the trouble of changing your money if you think you’re going to catch up to Derosier in Paris? That’s pretty negative thinking.”

  “It’s a good question,” said Tim.

  The answer waited at the abandoned hiding spot of Lantern Jaw. It had taken the authorities longer to piece together his identity, and they had only got so far. The redhead’s partner had rented a squalid one-bedroom flat in the banlieue, or suburb, of Clichy-sous-Bois. Obviously, they hadn’t traveled together as a couple. In this neighborhood of mostly Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans, Lantern Jaw had tried to hide in plain sight as one of the poor whites, calling himself “Gogol.” Because of the 2005 riots, the building’s super had installed a hidden security camera in the parking lot, and the police had a clear shot of his face.

  “Gogol” was the name on his phony passport, but Crystal suggested they cross-match the man’s photo against known associates of Viktor Limonov. After two days, it worked. Lantern Jaw had been born in Minsk as Dmitry Zorich, one of Limonov’s merry band of psychopathic mercenaries working in Syria, Congo, Afghanistan and other war zones.

  “Polar opposites,” said Tim as he and Crystal rummaged through Zorich’s belongings. “She was practically a ghost at that timeshare. Few clothes, no keepsakes. If she hadn’t been killed, she would have left nothing behind for us. And this guy is—”

  “A slob,” Crystal put in.

  “Right.”

  Clothes were strewn over chairs, on the floor, in piles in the bedroom. While Ana Tvardovsky had settled for takeout, Dmitry Zorich liked to cook, and there were a couple of French cookbooks on his counter and elaborate spices bought in the neighborhood as well. Judging from the lingering odors, Tim suspected he wasn’t a half bad amateur chef. But Zorich didn’t like to clean up, and dishes encrusted with curry sauces and old food bits were stacked in the sink.

  When the French police had driven up to the banlieue block with sirens in full wail, Zorich had been forced to leave everything behind. The old luggage strip was still taped around the handle of his bag, which gave them the details of when he arrived and from where—a morning flight from Croatia three weeks before the showdown at the Beaubourg. As he and Crystal explored, Tim collected the moldy paperbacks that Zorich had been thumbing and marking with a yellow highlighter in virtually every corner of the apartment, all of them in either French or German translations.

  “According to MI6, this Zorich is what you Americans call a real piece of work,” said Crystal, nudging a stained sweater on the carpet with her shoe. “He would have been kicked out of the Russian army if the Cold War had lasted. Fits of manic paranoia and one diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Likes junk science, even flirted with joining a New Age cult. Then Limonov found him, and the briefing notes say Zorich became an almost fanatical devotee of his, always by his side. He would have been arrested in the same raid in Bangkok, but it looks like Tvardovsky warned him in time.”

  “He doesn’t fit any kind of profile I’ve heard about for these mercenary Blackwater types,” answered Tim, still checking the paperbacks. “These guys come out of war zones, and they know what they know. They’re practical types—adrenaline junkies. They like the concrete, the tangible. Look at this—”

  He held up the only book in English, Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. Tossing it aside, he recognized a French translation of The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley and allowed himself a sardonic smile. His late ex-girlfriend, Thérèse, had briefly been infatuated with Crowley’s mysticism through his books until Tim found her some other volumes—biographies that showed her how the author was a vicious racial bigot and misogynist. She didn’t speak to Tim for a week but eventually came around.

  “We’ve got a couple of books in French about parapsychology, a biography in German of Carl Jung, a French translation of The Holographic Universe… Something in German about dreams. And this one.”

  He showed her a French book on Wilhelm Reich. “You ever heard of this guy? Psychoanalyst who hung out with Freud. Believed there was a cosmic energy called ‘orgone.’ I had to learn about him for my psych minor in university.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Crystal. “He built these mad machines, didn’t he? He thought he could fiddle with his orgone particles to make it rain.”

  “Uh-huh. So I guess somebody else took psychology as a minor.”

  Crystal smiled. “Nope. Had a mate in uni who was really into Eighties retro and Kate Bush. She used to play ‘Cloudbusting’ practically every weekend. I thought she was pulling my leg until I checked it out—the song really is about the cloud machine.”

  Tim rolled his eyes and sifted the books.

  “What?” prompted Crystal. “You had the album on vinyl, did you?”

  “I’m not that much older than you, Inspector.”

  “Well, you have always seemed fairly spry to me,” she said, laughing mischievously.

  He smiled back, allowing her to score the point. They looked at each other a moment, Crystal still eyeing him warmly, and then she turned her interest back to the book in her hand.

  Tim decided he would take the paperbacks back to his hotel and go over the highlighted sections. Maybe they would give him a clue to what Dmitry Zorich was after.

  “Our Russian slob comes to Paris to kill,” he muttered, half to himself, “but he uses his spare time to soak up all this ‘beyond reality’ stuff. You’d think if he was trying to kill Emily Derosier, he’d already have his answers.”

  “The guy follows Limonov,” said Crystal, approaching the dirty kitchen and then thinking better of it. “And our war criminal is a master manipulator. It’s possible Limonov tapped into whatever insanity this fellow has and is using it. For Tvardovsky, he could have used something else, like plain greed.”

  “You and I both know what we saw that day,” Tim reminded her. “Emily Derosier got into everyone’s head, and I mean everyone’s head. I can believe Zorich is bonkers, sure, but Limonov must have fed him and the woman some answers to motivate them.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” she answered gently. “We’d be hell bent to get them off the streets even if we didn’t have this madness going on. Gives me the creeps that Limonov stepped out of a Booth!” She flipped open a fresh paperback. “Tim, look at this. Check this out.”

  He thought she had found a passage in the text, but no, what had captured her attention were notes scrawled in Russian on the inside title page of the book. Zorich had doodled tiny quick reference maps next to a paragraph of scrawl.

  “I can’t read Russian,” said Tim.

  “Neither can I, but look—this is our intersection here. And this is a sketch of where the Beaubourg is. He’s even put an ‘M’ for Rambuteau Métro station. Zorich’s a mercenary. He thinks in terms of figuring out terrain and geography. Force of habit.”

  “Is that so surprising when he comes to Paris to kill somebody?”

  “No, but look at this separate little map here,” answered Crystal, taking a pen out of her pocket and using it as a pointer. “This is odd. Whatever this place is, Zorich must not be familiar with it, so he’s copied a map out of a book for a visual aid—he’s even labeled a couple of streets in English because he can’t think of a phonetic version in Russian. But this… this can’t be Paris.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t,” said Tim.

  She looked at him, curious.

  Tim tapped the page. “He’s written ‘Chan
dni Chowk.’ That’s a big market in the old part of Delhi. I used to shop there for gifts for friends when I was stationed there. Wait a minute…”

  He began to search the other books. Crystal understood. Zorich might have drawn himself a map in the other titles. “Here, he’s done it again. The thing I don’t get is why doesn’t he simply buy the damn maps? They can’t be that expensive.”

  “But he needs to learn these places,” explained Crystal. “Terrorists rehearse their routes, Tim. They do recon on areas. Maybe he doesn’t have the luxury of time. You invest in a map when you need to stay a while. But it looks like Zorich and Tvardovsky have been globetrotting all over the place, stopping at a bunch of specific spots in a rush. He drew himself the map of the Beaubourg just so that he and Tvardovsky could hunt Derosier down. They were tracking her—and trying to box her in.”

  Tim nodded, impressed. “Well done, DI Anyanike.”

  “Thank you, sir. Now it’s your turn to be clever. If that was part of Delhi, what’s this a map of then?”

  Tim studied Zorich’s sketch. “If I’m right… Colombo in Sri Lanka.”

  “You’ve been there, too.”

  Tim shook his head. “Nope, wanted to—never got there. But I have read the list he’s scribbled next to his map. I’ve seen it before. These are all luxury property areas in and around the capital. Crystal, I don’t think our creepy couple was headed there for anything to do with Emily Derosier. This property list… Benson told me that CIA operatives and the NSA were checking these places to find out if Orlando Braithewaite lives in one of them. I think they’re trying to find Braithewaite for Viktor Limonov!”

  “What could Limonov possibly want with him?” asked Crystal. “He’s gone through the Karma Booth unharmed. He’s laughing at the world. The most he could want with our billionaire is to thank him.”

  Another good question, thought Tim.

  If Washington wanted to keep on pressuring him for answers then Tim was determined to push back over his multiple objectives. What progress had the NSA and CIA made, he demanded in a text back to Benson, on pinning down the whereabouts of Orlando Braithewaite? Any? Not so far, he was told.

  That evening, Tim strolled around Paris because it always helped him to think when he walked, but he found himself dwelling on the old personal ghosts that still lurked here. He must have come back to Paris more than a dozen times since his posting here early in his career, and while, of course, he had thought of Thérèse once or twice on those trips, the echoes of his cynical youth had collected to hiss and snarl at his conscience more than usual this time. He wanted to damn the Karma Booth for that, too.

  He had told himself later that he was intoxicated on the city more than he ever was on her. Thérèse had been fun but flighty, the girl who knew the best ancient elevators without security cams for risky sex, but who got herself into trouble with credit card debt, with the wrong friends holding drugs in a Belleville apartment, with being pegged as an accomplice to her shoplifting model friend.

  Tim broke it off after seven months. There was no way his rationalizing explanation sounded like anything else but betrayal. She was brilliant, he told her. She had so much potential. But he couldn’t afford to stick around and wait for her to get her act together. Didn’t he have a career? Didn’t he have a position that couldn’t afford any public embarrassment? Six months after he let her go, she went out on the date that had ended in her brutal attack.

  And wasn’t what had happened to her so similar to how Mary Ash had been savaged? He hadn’t wanted to think about it before. The Ash girl had not come back the same. Never mind what she could do; she was a haunted shell. And Thérèse, so doomed with her grandiose ambitions and erratic behavior—long before she was raped and beaten and infected—could never be called a survivor. The label implied ultimate triumph and acceptance over the worst, but the spiral for her had merely intensified.

  The Karma Booth wouldn’t have saved her because it insisted on death before it settled accounts. How could the Booth restore the wounded and broken like Thérèse? He recalled Mary Ash’s clinical recital of his opinions the first time he had stepped into her room: “You want punishment, but you also know terrible things change people forever. And you felt there was no pattern to life after Thérèse died in a car accident in Hamburg…”

  Life after life. This is the pattern the Karma Booth exposed and disrupted.

  So where did you go, babe? What life do you lead now, and are you even aware of what happened before? Are you here, he wondered, or are you somewhere in that strange place where Daniel Chen graduated to flavors of music in his throat?

  He strayed into the Latin Quarter, and as he made his way along Saint-Jacques, he found himself drifting by force of old habit into Rue de la Parcheminerie. He liked to go into the Abbey Bookshop, stuffed with more than 35,000 titles and where Leonard Cohen was usually groaning on the stereo, or he would take a few steps further to Exiles Bound, where he was on a first-name basis with the owner, Ron. Ron was a Brit and a retired Foreign Office secretary who treated his bookshop like a salon, happy to argue conspiracy theories, the virtues of socialism or the joys of Sufi poetry with any student from the nearby Sorbonne.

  But the lights were off as he approached the shop. Ron often kept the place open until one in the morning, but he was certainly entitled to a night off. Tim turned on his heel and swung back for an hour of browsing in Abbey Books, and he wouldn’t have thought twice about the gray sedan parked down the street except that he heard its engine starting up.

  There had been a gray sedan, too, on Rue Saint-Jacques.

  He didn’t like this. He didn’t think of himself as a paranoid, and it was entirely possible that the President had had a change of mind and sent along a couple of suits to keep a discreet eye on him. But unlike in the movies, they would have had to liaise with French authorities, and he couldn’t believe Benson or someone else wouldn’t drop him a line.

  Screw you, whoever you are, he thought. You want to follow me, let’s see you keep up.

  He still knew these streets pretty well. The obvious Métro station to hit was Cluny–La Sorbonne, but he doubled-back and walked briskly over to Rue Dante then onto Rue Domat. Any car tailing him had to circle around and would give the game away in the narrower avenues. Or they would have to guess where he was going and head east on Boulevard Saint-Germain. But he was already fishing out his Carte orange pass and heading down the steps of the Maubert–Mutualité station.

  He debated whether he should tell Crystal. But he wasn’t sure about the car; he had merely felt the déjà vu of its presence. If he was being followed, he knew he must make one hell of a disappointing surveillance target, that’s for sure. All he’d done tonight was eat out and wander around bookshops.

  What would Thérèse make of his quiet life these days as a consultant and professor? After all that she’d been through, she would have probably deemed it splendid. Good things had always been deemed “splendid” to her. Tim preferred to think of the pre-attack Thérèse, the young woman who would have turned up her nose at his drift towards middle age. Oh, yeah, how she would have chided him for that! He would give a lot right now to hear her teasing laughter.

  It occurred to him that the Karma Booth might soon invent a new kind of grief. Death was supposed to be irrevocable, but now there would be that peculiar ache of loss with the still living, always so tinged with its irrational resentment and contradictory bitterness. Right now he is getting on with a new form, you might be told by counsellors. She is growing up somewhere else with a different name. All the things unsaid, unresolved, undone. Tim stepped out of the Métro and his head was swimming with all the personalities of his life gone and perhaps renewed—parents, aunts and uncles, casual colleagues and beloved friends.

  If we leave this life, he thought, then what, if anything, do we keep? He didn’t know whether to mourn or celebrate. Because a door beyond the dazzling whorls and nebulae of the glass chamber had stayed stubbornly, frustra
tingly closed.

  Edward Brewah had a favorite spot in his home city, one that bordered the less affluent section of the West End but overlooked Freetown’s spectacular natural harbor. The harbor was one of the jewels of Sierra Leone. Here, watching the endless blue that stretched beyond Queen Elizabeth II Quay, the forty-seven-year-old former soldier could be by himself. He preferred to be alone more often these days, ever since his wife had left him two months ago, taking their small child with her.

  He shifted his weight as he sat on the artificial mountain of dirt left by the construction machines. Someone wanted to build something here, but there must have been bureaucratic delays or bribes not duly paid, because he had made his pilgrimage for weeks now and had never been disturbed. That was good.

  He could sit in peace and watch the ocean, and it could feed. Its belly was never full.

  His wife didn’t need to explain her decision when she left. Edward Brewah could see the dread in her eyes. It was always there, and one morning when he returned from the night shift, she had announced in nervous breaths, “I’m leaving… Edward.”

  She added his name with a peculiar note of formality, but then she had never truly believed this was her husband. He didn’t stop her from going. Somehow the impulse simply didn’t come; not when she picked up their little boy, and not when the gypsy taxi whisked mother and child in the direction of Lungi airport, where they would board a plane and go stay with his wife’s sister in a squalid town in Liberia.

  The gnawing. He never got used to the jaws and didn’t want to; the discomfort was just right and the pain had a twisted comfort of penance in the action. It would never get its fill. The back of his head felt wet. Of course.

  He had tried to adjust to life back home; he had, really. Ever since the shock and the nausea and looking up into the startled eyes of the white man with the spectacles and the melon-shaped head, the one they told him later was quite famous in America. He had never asked Edward his name, only questions and more questions about Where have you been? How do you feel? Where did you go? But you must remember something.