The Broken Ones (28 page)

“I’ll come in later,” he said.

“Oscar—”

He ended the call.

He leaned down to look in the car’s side mirror. A rivulet of blood crusted on his forehead, and a scratch across one cheek had freshly reopened and wept ruby pearls of blood. He walked painfully to the front of the car and knelt over the formless rumple of the garbage bag. He picked it up.

Shards of terra-cotta tinkled inside. Dream or no dream, the idol had been destroyed.

Gelareh Barirani squinted in the doorway. Her hair was an electric frizz, and a little spot of dried saliva rode the corner of her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Oscar said. He’d forgotten that she was a shift worker. “I’ll come back.”

“It’s okay,” she replied, pulling her hair back from her face. He watched her eyes rove over his cut and bruised face. He had washed and changed, but combing his blood-matted hair had hurt like hell, and he was sure the job looked less than half done.

“Rough night?”

“Interesting night,” he replied.

She stood aside and let him in. “Tea?”

His stomach was still a precarious tightrope, but he nodded. She went to the kitchen and put water on the gas flame.

“I got your better photos,” she said. “But I haven’t had much time to work on them.”

“I have something else, aside from those,” he said. “Quite a tricky thing.” He lifted the clanking plastic bag and pointed to her tabletop. “May I?”

She nodded.

Oscar set aside the candlesticks and placed the bag in the middle of the table. He folded it down, revealing the dozens of earthenware fragments.

Gelareh sauntered over. “This is not old pottery,” she said, inspecting the edges. “Contemporary. Brand-new, I think. Recently broken.”

“Yes,” Oscar agreed.

She looked at him archly.

“An accident,” he said, shivering at the memory of the leathery, sharp-clawed foot that had flung the bag with such purpose into the oilcans.

Gelareh began picking over the potsherds with careful fingers. “So, what was it?”

“I’m not sure. Some kind of idol. About yea high; this round. That’s a horn there. It has two horns.”

“A bull?” She began sliding pieces together.

“A demon, I think. An owl. Wings. But it’s a she.”

Gelareh’s eyebrows rose a little.

“Breasts?” she asked. “Sex organs?”

“Both. Quite exposed. And a seven-pointed star on her back.”

The corners of the researcher’s mouth turned down. And suddenly her fingers stopped moving. She leaned closer.

“This is writing.” Her fingers traced the patterns that Oscar had mistaken for feathers or scales. She looked up at Oscar. She was smiling. “I can read this,” she said.

“You can put it back together? Translate?”

“Transliterate,” she murmured, excited. “Again, it’s not just one language.” She leaned close. “Wait.”

“What is it?”

She headed over to the shelves at the side of the room.

“I found something like this on your photographs.” She returned with the blowups and tracings. “From the girl. I didn’t know if I was reading right, but now I think I am. So, here.”

On the paper were small traced ligatures that looked like arrowheads and staves. She pointed.

“This here, it looked to me very much like Akkadian cuneiform.”

“Arcadia?”

“Akkadia. The empire before Assyria and Babylonia. About 2400
BC
. Akkadian has a small alphabet—fourteen consonants, four vowel sounds.” She picked up a shard of pottery and her fingers traced over the wedge-shaped symbols.

“What does it say?”

“Door,”
she replied, delighted. “And that ties in with the vévés, don’t you think? And this, I’m almost sure it’s Assyrian cuneiform. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. It says,
Li-lit. Lilith
.”

“Lilith?”

“
Lilith
, the first wife of Adam. From the Babylonian Talmud. She bore him devils and spirits.”

The water bubbled on the stove. Gelareh handed Oscar the shard and went to carefully measure tea into a pot. He recognized the leaves he had given her.

“The Catholic Church removed references to Lilith when they decided the canon in the fourth century,” she continued. “
Lilitû
, in Akkadian, means ‘female spirit.’ A demon. It also means ‘black,’ or ‘night bird.’ Or ‘evil,’ depending on context. Some scholars interpret the
lilitû
to have come from the desert, like jinni, envious of human women, particularly women giving birth. They commanded disease and lions, fed on children, fucked men in their sleep.”

She handed Oscar a steaming cup of tea.

“What does that all have to do with this?” Oscar waved his fingers at the broken idol.

Gelareh shrugged. “At least one scholar believes Lilitû was a single entity, and she was the handmaiden of Inanna. You remember Inanna?”

Oscar nodded. “The queen of heaven.”

“Yes, and sister of Ereshkigal.” Gelareh sipped her tea, thinking. “So you could draw a connection—a loose one—between Ereshkigal and Lilith. Early depictions were certainly similar.”

They fell silent, drinking their tea. Oscar looked at the dozens of broken pieces of pottery, each marked with tiny symbols and arcane letters. And suddenly he knew where he had to go.

He stood. “Will you keep track of how long it takes you?”

She nodded, running a careful finger through the patterned potsherds, already lost in the mystery.

He hurried to his car.

The late-morning sky looked as fragile and colorless as a dusty lightbulb. Under its dull gray curve, the market tents were like a field of flowers—some fragrantly bright, others faded and drooping, some poisonous-looking. Vendors shouted, children laughed, charcoal fires sizzled, a stricken fiddle stitched the air with notes. Oscar dodged hawkers and the fingers of beggars, and wound his way to the row of tents where the fortune-tellers plied their trade.

Mother Mim had her back to the stall front and was humming an old Rolling Stones song while she made herself a cress sandwich on hard bread. Oscar approached quietly and looked over the items she had laid out on bright-colored cloth. Among the broken watches, the pencil stubs, the incomplete decks of playing cards and dusty Christmas baubles were some small terra-cotta figures, none larger than a sardine tin. Three represented signs of the zodiac—the maiden, the archer, the scorpion; each had been carefully inscribed with words and sigils. Oscar recognized Florica’s handiwork.

“The man in the hat,” Mim said, her back still to Oscar. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” he said, impressed.

She turned; again, she wore sunglasses. “You have a distinctive walk,” she said, chewing. “A bit slumpy. And you’re still wearing your hat,” she chided. “Are you looking up, like I told you to?”

Oscar’s mouth suddenly went dry as he remembered the rustle of feathers, the tick-tick of sharp claws, the smell of ancient rot. He changed the subject.

“Florica,” he said.

Mother Mim stopped chewing.

“These were hers,” he said, and rocked the fired-clay scorpion with his fingertip.

“I didn’t steal them,” she said.

“She had the stall next to yours.”

Mim fell quiet, as if trying to divine where this conversation was going. When she spoke again, her voice had a harder edge.

“You’re police,” she said.

“Yes.”

She was silent a long moment.

“Fine, that was her stall. Florica and I looked after each other’s things sometimes. When I had to duck off for a wee, et cetera and so on, she’d look after my gear. And I’d look after hers. And sometimes we’d sell each other’s stuff. But one day she left”—she took the figure from under Oscar’s finger—“and she never came back.”

“Did she ever meet someone here?”

“She met lots of someones here—this is a market.”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Oscar said. “Someone you’ve connected in your mind to her disappearance.”

Emotions played across the blind woman’s face, as tiny as pond skaters. Then she nodded. “There was a man here. The day before she never came back. An older man—I didn’t care for his voice. It was worn. Worn and tight.”

“How old?”

“I didn’t see,” Mim said tartly. “He was either sixty or more, or he’d done sixty years’ worth of nasty.”

“What did he talk with her about?”

“Chitchat about these figurines and how she made them.”

“And then?”

“Then she asked me to mind her shopfront, and they went into her tent to talk business. I didn’t hear, and when they came out and he was gone she went all mum and wouldn’t say anything. But she was excited. Money excited.”

“And?”

The blind woman shrugged. “And the next market day she didn’t come. Haven’t heard from her since.”

Oscar thought. An older man talking business. Was he the important client that the prostitute Dalmar had been shuffled out Florica’s door for—the man who’d commissioned the hideous idol now in pieces on Gelareh’s kitchen table? He was sure they were the same man, but his only eyewitness was a blind woman.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Mim asked.

“I think so. Is there anything about him you can tell me?”

Mim grinned. “Like the color of his eyes? Gold tooth and polka-dot pants?”

Oscar nodded. “Thanks.”

He turned away.

“He had a ponytail,” the woman said.

Oscar hesitated.

“I heard him,” she continued. “When he was first talking to Florrie. I heard his shirt wrinkle as his arms went up, and I heard the twing-twang of a rubber band.” She mimed pulling back her hair and stretching elastic on opening fingers. “Ponytail.”

“Thank you,” Oscar repeated.

“Nothing for nothing,” Mother Mim said loudly.

Oscar sighed and dug into his pocket. All he had was a gold two-dollar coin. He dropped it on the counter. Her speedy fingers plucked it up.

“For that you get info plus.”

“Plus what?”

“Plus more info.”

She reached into the fish tank full of skinks and plucked a little brown lizard from the branch in the tank.

“Touch it,” she commanded Oscar. “On the head.”

He could see the small lizard’s pulse throbbing in its neck. He touched its hard, cool skin.

Mim nodded and produced a brass tray and a small, very sharp knife. With practiced fingers she flipped the lizard onto its back and ran the knife from its throat to its anus, just deep enough to penetrate skin and muscle. Then she peeled the creature open and ran a careful finger over its still beating heart, across its tiny pink liver, and through its intestines. Oscar suddenly felt unwell. He saw the animal’s heart stop. The woman looked up.

“You’ll be dead soon,” she said softly.

He left.

Back at his car, he jiggled his keys in the door lock. He noticed that his fingers were trembling. When his phone rang, he dropped it. He picked it up, but didn’t recognize the number.

He answered, “Mariani.”

“Oscar Mariani?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Emergency Department at the Royal Hospital. Your father’s been brought in. It looks like he’s had a heart attack.”

Chapter
18