The Broken Ones (25 page)

Oscar looked up and realized that the Industrial Relations floor was silent—the printer had long finished its work. He stood, and then stopped suddenly. The dead boy was in the corner, standing beside the stationery cabinet. Oscar stared, unnerved. This was the first time the boy had shown himself in Oscar’s workplace. When the boy saw that Oscar was still watching, he nodded and raised a hand to his chest. Oscar looked away and hurried to the printer. He retrieved and signed
the Form Five and went to his in-tray to look for an envelope. In the tray he found a note from Foley: “A chick named T called. Said u’d know who. Call her. Foley. PS Get a fucking secretary. PPS Need 2 pick ur brains when u have time. PPPS How’s Neve?”

Oscar addressed the envelope to Moechtar, pigeonholed it, grabbed his hat and jacket and—staying well clear of the dead boy—went to the elevators.

While Tanta finished with a client, Oscar held off the chill by shuttling like a loom up and down the wet street. From the shadows, men and boys watched him pass, unsure what to make of him—too shabbily dressed to pickpocket, too sure-footed for a Delete addict. In confusion, they let him pass. From an alley came a mélange of smells: coal smoke, raw fish, an unusual tang of herbal incense. He paced.

Finally, Tanta’s door opened and a man shouldered past Oscar and up the street. Oscar climbed the narrow stairs. Tanta was behind a gauzy curtain, washing herself in a bowl from which rose fragrant steam. She was cranky.

“That friend of yours, Foley,” she said. “He’s a dirty motherfucker. Doesn’t know how to speak to a lady.”

“That’s true.”

“Does he have money?”

Oscar changed the subject. “Purden’s dead,” he said. “He’s been found. You can stop asking around.”

“I heard. The river.” He watched her silhouette as she toweled herself front and back. “This isn’t about Purden. It’s about your symbol.”

She emerged, tightening a silk gown about herself. She reached into a purse hardly larger than a wallet and produced a tiny notepad. She wrote an address. “Ask for Dalmar.”

Steel girders cantilevered into the night sky like the massive feelers of some alien craft. In the deep shadows under the stadium, dozens of dark figures shifted in the gloom—thieves, dealers, whores of all ages
and flavors. Nestled not far from a bus interchange and one entrance to the tunnel city of Hades, the stadium was a dangerous place to solicit: a thorny blueberry patch within a minefield.

Oscar scanned the murky walls of the coliseum, counting the gate numbers as he passed. He found the gate number that Tanta had written on her note. He stepped cautiously into soupy darkness.

He could just make out figures ahead—men or women, boys or girls, it was impossible to say. The air was thick with the tang of Delete smoke and the milky cloy of semen.

“Hi there,” said a voice. It sounded like a child’s.

“Dalmar,” he said.

The shapes moved. Oscar found his hand reaching inside his jacket. Then a stranger’s hand took his. He tried not to jump.

“I’m Dalmar.” A girl’s voice.

Her hand squeezed once, then opened on his palm like a tiny bowl. Understanding, Oscar reached into a pocket and pulled out the last twenty he’d been saving. It melted away faster than a snowflake.

“Oscar,” he said.

“The astronomer?”

Something clicked and rubbed. Oscar’s eyes were adjusting to the minelike gloom. The girl was small, and he could see her smiling up at him as she detached a prosthetic calf and scratched her stump.

“Astronomer?” Oscar said.

“A joke, hon.” The little prostitute strapped her leg back on. “You’re looking for the star, right?”

“Yes.”

She asked, “Do you have a car?”

The roads shone like black ribbon. As Oscar drove, Dalmar ate crackers from the car’s glove box, speaking around mouthfuls. She hadn’t always worked off the streets, she explained. But some guys like girls with quirks, so why not ride that wave? She had enjoyed long-term employ at a brothel in Spring Hill, a half mile out from the city. Not plush, but not bad—it had once been an art gallery. Dalmar had suffered a few knocks about the head as a child (hard to run away
with only one leg, ha-ha) and so had wondered if the whirring sound she heard while men grinded away on her front or back or face was real or just inside her skull. So one evening, on a break between clients, she decided to trace the whirring sound, and followed it, louder and louder, down the alley adjoining the former art gallery to a room.

“It was like being caught in a fucking karaoke film clip,” Dalmar explained. “All billowy curtains and shit,
whoosh-whoosh
. Pushed through. Smelled of incense and that mystic shit. There’s a card table with silky shit on top, a mirror made of some shiny metal shit, maybe brass, and then more of those fucking curtains. ‘Hello?’ I say, and the whirring stops. The curtain opens, and there’s this nice-looking bitch with her arms covered in—” She hunted for the word.

“Shit?” Oscar offered.

“Clay. Potter’s clay. And an oven.”

“A stove?”

“No, a clay oven.”

“A kiln.”

“Yeah. An oven for clay,” the girl said, as if he was a cretin, and pointed him down a side street. “She made little clay things: animals, moons, stars, shit. And she had a nice little kitchen, little bed, radio. Nice.”

The pottery-making fortune-teller’s name, the young prostitute explained, was Florica. No more a real name than Dalmar, ha-ha. Still, she offered to read Dalmar’s palm.

“ ‘You will meet a number of men,’ she says. ‘No fucking shit,’ I say.”

She and Florica became friends, of sorts, with Dalmar going behind the brothel to visit her on cigarette breaks. One night a few weeks ago, Dalmar visited Florica and found her agitated—“all nerves and shit”—and Dalmar followed her back through her curtains. “An’ I see all this mystical stuff pinned on the walls. Sketches of stars and crosses and weird writing like fucking Korean shit. All held up with thumbtacks.

“ ‘Whatcha working on?’ I ask her. ‘A sculpture,’ she says. ‘Like Michelangelo?’ I say. ‘Mike-a-who?’ she says, and then she says, ‘You better go; my client’s coming.’ I ask if he’s got money, and maybe he could come next door and ask for Dalmar, all the usual shit. But she’s shooin’ me out, and shuts the door behind me. She don’t let me in after that. Couple nights later, I get to work, and there’s no work.”

“No customers?”

“No
work
. The brothel, the old gallery, Florica’s place—all just a pile of ash.”

“When was this?”

Dalmar thought. “Four, five weeks ago. Turn here.”

Oscar steered the car down a back way as narrow as a canal. The lane was just wide enough for two cars to pass if their side mirrors kissed, and the choked baritone of his wounded exhaust rattled off the dumb faces of brick buildings. Clots of rubbish accreted against fences. His headlights reflected from tiny eyes that scurried away, taking long, pink-gray tails with them. A house with stairs disconnecting and yawning into darkness. A small tiled building, all arches and swoops of stained stucco with a refrigerator hanging out a second-floor window—thieves had found it too awkward to fit, and now its open door gaped over the rampant weeds below. A building with a cornerstone carved T
URIN
A
UCTIONS
. Beside it, a chain-link fence around a field of ash.

“Yuh-huh,” Dalmar said.

Oscar parked and they both got out. The air was cold, and his skin goosepimpled. He flicked on his flashlight and shined the beam through the temporary fence. Weeks of rain had pummeled the ash of the burned building into glossy mounds of black mud; sharp, charcoaled stubs of posts thrust up from them at odd angles, like witches’ teeth from diseased gums.

Dalmar sighed. “They say it was that fucking bitch’s clay oven.”

Oscar asked, “Did you see this client she spoke about?”

The girl shook her head. “I had to get back to work anyhows. Speaking of which”—she nudged her body against him, and the prosthesis groaned—“do you have any more money?”

“I don’t. Sorry.”

She nodded regretfully. “I’ll take your car, then.”

She swung a bottle into his head. It exploded on his skull and inside it like fireworks. Time and gravity slipped away from him and he realized that he was on the ground, with a hand rummaging through his pockets. He heard her say “Fuck!” and then a frantic, silvery jangle.

He forced himself to his knees, swaying.

In double vision, he saw that she was trying to unlock the door of the sedan, but the fickle lock had foiled her.

“Fuuuck!” she screamed again in frustration.

He pulled himself up using the fence wire and reached inside his jacket.

“Stop,” he managed to whisper.

“Fuck you!” the girl spat, and threw the keys at his face. He managed to jerk his head aside, but a jagged nickel edge caught his ear and the keys clattered onto the dirty footpath. The girl ran away down the street, her uneven footsteps echoing long after she was lost in shadow.

The world spun one last time as Oscar bent to pick up his keys. He straightened and felt his scalp. Wet, but only a little. He looked around, unsure if he was checking for witnesses or vultures. Neither appeared. He saw a red blink from the corner of his eye and turned. Whatever it was had gone; the windows of the street were dark and empty.

He found a loose section of wire and pulled the rusty links upward. He crawled under, careful not to catch his tender head. No light came from the sky; the lot was a crater held close in shadow. The air smelled burned and rancid. He played the flashlight beam over the dark, slick curves that looked like beached things harpooned with burned, rotting piers. He started out across the lot. Every step was unpleasant: damp ash and wet charcoal would crunch, then his foot would sink into the squelching slurry. Dalmar had said Florica’s rented space was behind the brothel. He slogged across. The black mud sucked at his shoes, and broken roof tiles clacked underfoot.

The burned and broken posts and debris tapered off. Oscar reached what he guessed had been the rear of the building and turned in a slow circle, running the light across the black, glossy ground. He picked up a length of steel pipe and began methodically jabbing it through the pitchy sediment. The pipe caught regularly on strands of electrical cable crusted with melted insulation, cold bricks, more pipe. Under a slight hillock, it caught the corner of something hard. He knelt and felt cold wetness seep through his trousers. He carefully balanced the flashlight on a blackened tile and forced his hands down into the muddy ash, tracing the object’s shape. He found another corner—it was metal, about the size of a domestic clothes dryer. The kiln.

Oscar straightened, and his damp arms grew instantly cold in the chill air. This was a thin lead: a fortune-teller who’d pinned stars to her walls. He shivered in the cold. “Go home,” he told himself. His flashlight had rolled a few feet away. He reached out for it, putting all his
weight on one arm. Suddenly, the ground beneath let out a wet, splintery crack and gave way, and his arm plunged into the ash to his shoulder; his chest and face connected with wet slurry, and a sharp corner of broken tile nipped at his cheek. His arm was underground and hanging in empty space. He must have pushed through a charcoaled table.