by Hopkin, Ben
“No, no. It’s okay,” Mala said, dabbing the corner of her eye with a napkin. “I think maybe Janey reminds me of Baasim, my brother. He was kind of an intense kid.” A grin broke out across the doctor’s lips, despite the obvious pain. “But with our parents, kind of hard not to be, you know?”
No, Trey didn’t know. His parents had spent his college fund when he was about ten. They thought a sequence of low-level construction jobs was probably in his future. He got a lot of “the point is that you tried” speeches around report-card time. Imagine their surprise when he made detective. Kind of one of the best things about being constantly underestimated. The look of sheer shock on people’s faces when you succeeded.
He nodded to the doctor, though. This wasn’t his story, it was Mala’s.
“I wish we’d been closer…” she said, looking out the window as rain splattered against the panes, creating a living, dripping piece of art. “But I was so much older and usually ended up babysitting him, so there were a lot of ‘you aren’t the boss of me’ kind of situations.”
“Was.” Mala was using the past tense about her brother. Never a good sign.
She shrugged as if she’d made some sort of internal decision to let Trey in on the source of the pain. “I went away to college, and you know how that goes. I didn’t really write or call or even show up to his twelfth-birthday party.”
Tears ran down her cheeks, but Trey didn’t interrupt her. He could feel when people needed to get stuff out. It was like a sixth sense. Maybe not as sexy as Darc’s image-based mathematics, but hey, it got the job done.
“I’m not even sure if I responded when my mom emailed that Baasim was going away to archeology camp. I was too busy taking twenty units in summer school to get my simultaneous degrees.”
Trey might not have been the best detective in the world, or even in the 50th percentile, but he could feel where this story was going. A young boy, off to camp. Tragedy in her voice.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Trey stated softly. It didn’t matter what she explained next—none of it could be her fault.
“No,” Mala said, “I couldn’t have stopped that counselor from doing what he did to Baasim…” She looked at him, taking a breath. “At least, I knew that after about five years of counseling.” Her gaze wandered back to the window again. “No, I blame myself for not being there for him afterward. Not protecting him from the system that should have been the ones protecting him in the first place.”
Mala rubbed her thumb against the palm of her other hand.
“You were just a kid yourself,” Trey comforted, although he knew from personal experience that knowledge didn’t always help.
“I mean, at first my parents did everything they could. Once they finally got out of him what had happened, they got him into therapy. They alerted the authorities…”
Trey waited as Mala’s tears fell from her cheeks onto the floor. Her lips scrunched up, then released, only to scrunch up again. Sometimes the pain needed a little prodding to come out.
“Then?”
“Ugh,” Mala sighed, using the back of her sleeve to wipe away the tears. “Some dick that called himself an expert in juvenile psychology convinced my parents that they shouldn’t press charges. That my brother should forgive his attacker and move past it.”
“But that wasn’t what Baasim wanted?”
Mala shook her head, tears streaming again. “But I agreed with my parents and the doctor. I. Me. I’m the one that talked Baasim into dropping the charges. I told him no good could come of the trial. The counselor had been fired. His wife was divorcing him. Why put our family through all of that”—Mala said with a hiccup, having to force the last words out—”when the prosecutors said the chances were slim a jury would convict.”
“Oh, Mala,” Trey said, reaching out and laying a hand on her arm. “How could you know better?”
Her head snapped around, her tone sharp. “Baasim killed himself the next night.”
Trey blew air out through his teeth but didn’t remove his hand.
“Sorry,” Mala apologized, her face softening again, the tears flowing.
“No worries,” Trey reassured her, squeezing her arm, though he could feel her pulling back into herself, putting up the walls, reconstructing the dam that held in all these feelings. She gently moved her arm out of reach.
“So,” she said, obviously trying to sound a bit more chipper, “that is why I let the patient decide when they are ready and for what. No one, I mean no one, knows better than the patient.”
Ah, now so much made sense. Back in the ICU room, he had seen the conflict in her face. As a matter of fact, Trey would have bet a month’s paycheck the doc would never have let Darc take Janey. But Mala in the end hadn’t let Darc take the little girl. She’d allowed Janey to go. There was a huge difference between those two.
“The patient knows best,” Mala stated with more certainty. “Janey wanted to go with you, so she went. I could probably get fired for that decision. But I’d make it again in a heartbeat.” Mala reached over and play-slapped Trey on the arm, startling him. “Just so you don’t think I can be bullied into doing something I don’t think is a good idea.”
Yeah, no. That was not something Trey would think about Mala. Ever.
* * *
Mala hugged herself. She’d been doing it a lot as they waited for Darc to rise from his trancelike state. She glanced at the clock. She blinked. She wiped her eyes, but the number did not change. It had been over seven hours since Darc had sat down next to Janey. You’d think in that time she would have settled. But after talking with Trey? She still felt unbalanced. It wasn’t like her to share like that. Just ask her fourteen therapists.
Yet Trey had gotten her to open up in, like, ten seconds. She looked at his sleeping form. He was on his fourth nap. Count them, four. Granted, she had taken two, but four did seem a bit excessive. But maybe that was what gave Trey his emotional resiliency. She knew detectives that cracked under half the pressure he was under. Yet to look at him, he seemed…happy. Not just content or compensating, but truly happy.
He’d grabbed one of the kid’s rag dolls and was now hugging it to his chest as he slept. Occasionally, or actually frequently, he would smile. Sometimes he’d even giggle. After everything he’d seen, he was giggling.
Mala nudged his bed. There were only so many times you could look through a chart by yourself. There were only so many times you could check in on your patient who was fast asleep in a comatose detective’s lap. Only so many times you could take a stroll around the ward or around the floor. Hell, Mala was pretty sure she’d explored the whole hospital at this point.
Perhaps she should take another nap, like Trey. Then her hand went to a kink in her neck from the last nap she’d taken. She really didn’t want to make it worse. So she gave Trey’s bed another nudge—you know, on accident.
He started awake and rubbed his eyes, giving her a bleary look. His normally messy hair was now sticking straight up.
“What’s up? Darc figure something out?”
“No. He hasn’t ‘figured something out.’ He hasn’t moved,” Mala stated, with perhaps a bit more bitterness than she had intended.
“Yeah. That’s Darc.” Trey craned his neck to give his partner a gander. “I’m telling you, he can go twenty-four hours without rest. Actually, he just had a full night’s sleep. He could go days.”
“This can’t be healthy for him.”
“Who said anything about healthy?” Mala opened her mouth, but Trey held up his hand to stop her. “I’m telling you. Go ahead and move him, take him home, put him to bed, but he is going to be doing exactly this.” He then nodded toward Janey. “And she is going to be doing exactly that.” He swept his arm around the room, indicating the gory symbols on the walls.
And then Darc croaked out a word.
“Need.”
Mala hopped from her chair as Trey knelt down next to Darc. “What? Buddy. What do you need?”
The tall detective swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He opened his mouth again. “Art dealer.”
Trey sat back on his haunches and ran his hand through his hair, spiking it even more.
“An art…? Sorry, dude, I…” He looked up at Mala, his face a question mark. “Wow. I did not see that…What kinda shape ‘spells out’ ‘art dealer’?”
“I don’t know,” Mala said, equally confused. “But—”
Darc spat out words, cutting her off. “Blake. Series. Inferno.”
Next to her, Trey took out a pad of paper and scribbled down words as fast as he could go. “Jehoshaphat. I wish he’d go slower!”
Mala put out a hand to shush him. She had a tiny inkling of what Trey’s partner might be talking about. Maybe.
“Are you talking about Dante’s works?” she asked.
But Darc shook his head, the sharp movement causing Janey to stir a bit in his lap. He let fall another word. “Aristotle.”
What? That didn’t make any sense at all. Mala looked at Trey. “I don’t understand.”
Trey leaned back and stood up in one smooth motion. “Get used to it, babe.”
But it appeared Darc wasn’t quite finished. He spoke once more.
“Christie’s.”
After releasing that one last word, his gaze sank inward once more. Darc was no longer really with them. Trey made a loud raspberry sound, then grimaced as Janey stirred. His next words seemed more directed at himself than at Mala.
“Great. Now we need another savant to figure out what he just said.”
Mala couldn’t help but agree.
* * *
Trey had looked up the only art dealer known to deal with prints of Dante’s work in less than an hour. Did anyone throw him a parade? Nope. King Darc had requested an art dealer, and so Trey delivered one. Unfortunately, she was about as friendly as a librarian when you had fourteen books overdue. The uniformed officers had deposited the mousy art dealer at Trey’s side all of thirty seconds ago, and already her voice was making the bones of his inner ear decalcify. Where was a roll of duct tape when you really needed it?
Ms. Steinway—she had insisted on the “Ms.”—clutched her portfolio even closer to her chest as she spoke, her tone like a cat scratching its claws across glass.
“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t come to my office.”
“You’ll figure it out when you see it,” Trey assured her.
The art dealer took one hand away from her precious portfolio to push her glasses back up on her nose. Her face was pinched enough that it looked like she had taken a big bite out of an unsweetened lime or something. When Trey had first seen her, he’d thought she was in her late fifties. Looking closer, he saw she was probably closer to her late thirties. The rest of the creases just looked like frown lines.
Her hair was pulled back in a bun, making the whole effect that much more severe. But here again was another indicator that she wasn’t nearly as old as she made herself look. Her hair was jet black. And she didn’t seem like the type to invest in a good colorist. Oh, and she smelled like old books. And dust.
“But even these lithographs of the original plates are worth—”
Trey cut her off. “Trust me. Theft is the least of your problems…” He paused as he pushed open the door to the peds ward. “Therapy bills, on the other hand…”
He watched Ms. Steinway for the expected reaction. He wasn’t disappointed. The woman whirled around, the portfolio held out like some kind of shield. Her mouth was wide open as she whipped her head from one set of drawings to the next.
“I don’t…I can’t…”
“Okay, okay. Don’t freak out,” Trey soothed. “Come on in and show us whatcha got.” Trey grabbed her by the arm of her pantsuit and halfway dragged her over to where Mala was waiting.
The dealer’s eyes darted from the walls to Darc and Janey, there on the floor inside the detective’s badge. Trey could only imagine what was going through her head. He had to give her props, though. After just another second or two of gawking, she straightened her jacket and pulled out several lithographs with shaky hands. She propped the first up on the easel.
“As instructed, I brought along reproductions of Blake’s commissioned works on the Inferno.”
The picture she placed in front of them depicted children with almost no expression on their faces huddled in a white space. The woman turned back from the print to eye both Trey and Mala.
“The first is limbo, where virtuous pagans and unbaptized children go.”
Peering more closely at the painting, it started to feel eerily familiar. Where had Trey seen this before? The art dealer lifted up another print, covering the first. Naked figures writhed in what looked like columns of wind, their faces eerie and corpselike. This one reminded Trey of something, too. It was starting to freak him out.
“The second is those that could not contain their lust, tormented by a permanent storm.”
A voice spoke at Trey’s elbow, making him almost jump out of his own skin.
“Look familiar?” Darc asked.
“Aaaah! Sonofa…I hate it when you do that. Oblivious to obnoxious in two seconds flat.” Trey did what he could to get his heart rate back down to normal operating levels. Mala stared at the painting, tilting her head at an angle as she viewed it.
“So, we are looking at Dante’s Divine Comedy?”
The art dealer reacted to that, her lips pressed into a thin line. “No, no, no. Not Dante. Whoever requested the Christie’s auction pieces knew their art history.”
Lady, you have no idea, Trey thought. Out loud he just said, “Yeah, he’s awesome that way.”
“You see,” Ms. Steinway continued, “Dante did nothing more that borrow—some might even say ‘stole’—from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.”
Darc spoke up again. Apparently, after his little “nap,” he was all chipper and raring to go.
“Dante’s third circle contains sinners tormented by black snow and hail slush.”
That got the art dealer all excited. She started pulling out more prints as she gushed.
“Yes, yes, yes.”
This wasn’t making a lick of sense. Okay, the first couple of paintings were pretty spot-on, which was why they must’ve looked so familiar. But this one didn’t compute. Trey raised his hand.
“Umm. That’s not what we found at the house.”
The art dealer scanned each of their faces, her standard puckered expression turning to one of confusion. It was clear she had no idea what they were talking about. “At the house? What…?”
Mala peered with such focus at the print that it looked as if she was trying to see through it. Her eyes reflected the vision of what they had found at Janey’s house.
“It was a blood- and vile-filled pool,” Mala remarked. “But isn’t that Dante’s fifth?”
Now Ms. Steinway was clearly back on familiar ground. She lifted a finger and pointed it for emphasis, looking more than a little like one of the nuns from Trey’s school.
“Yes. Dante’s…”
“But not Aristotle’s,” Darc finished for her. These two were turning into the dynamic duo of obscure art pieces. All they needed were matching tights.
The art dealer smiled, actually smiled, at Darc. The expression did a 180 to her appearance. She was still a little bookish, but she was almost…human.
“Exactly! While Dante plagiarized from the philosopher, he also took creative license and modified the order of the punishments to more suit his medieval audience.”
She pulled more prints out of her portfolio, plainly excited by the topic and the fact that she had a captive audience. And Trey definitely was feeling held captive. He was pretty sure that this much concentrated history and art couldn’t be good for him. In fact, he could already feel a headache coming. The dealer was almost cooing as she continued her lecture.
“Hence, Blake charged his patron, John Linnell, several hundred gold coins for Dante�
��s version, which he wasn’t able to finish before his death. But he painted another set before the other, what Blake considered to be the ‘true’ set of Aristotle’s original vision, for himself.”
She propped up another print on the easel. It was easily the sickest painting Trey had ever seen. There was a large pool filled with blood, floating limbs peeking up through the sludge. Faces pushed up from the surface, their expressions agonized. Trey looked over at the dealer.
“And you were worried about these walls?”
Just like that, the pinched face came back. Ms. Steinway lifted herself up to her full height, her spine stiffening. Her tone was ice cold. “This is art at its highest form.”
Just because it was high art didn’t mean it wasn’t totally gross. But hey, what did Trey know? He was just the guy who was experiencing what was in those pictures, up close and personal. The dealer started to put the paintings in order, starting with the one of limbo. Then the storm. Then the pool of blood. Trey finally felt like he was catching on.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me guess. The next one is people squished by rocks…?”
And, presto! There was the next print, just as if Trey had pulled it out of a hat.
The doctor piped up again, making a guess at what was coming up. “So, the next one should be the River Styx?”
“In Dante’s, yes…” Darc spoke over his shoulder while watching the easel without blinking.
Trey was tired of feeling left out. Did everyone else know what was going on?
“What?” he asked. “Did you guys take a class in this or something?”
Mala gave a quick nod, lifting a finger to cut him off. Great. Everyone else did know what was going on. Maybe Trey should’ve partied less while he was at Puget Sound.
But the art dealer was already on to the next print, pulling it out of her magical portfolio of grossness. “But in Aristotle’s…”
Trey had been wrong. The previous one was not the sickest painting he had ever seen. This one was. The sinners were being pelted with guts, which were raining down from above. The ground was littered with bits of flesh and smeared with streaks of blood. It was just nasty.