The Broken Ones (42 page)

He jolted awake, covered in cold sweat. In another room, his phone had beeped. He felt her eyes on him as he padded out of the room.

Crossing into the kitchen, he checked his watch. It was nearly three in the morning.

The message was from Gelareh. She had finished repairing the idol.

Chapter
30

S
he answered the door wearing a robe; her hair was wet.

“I didn’t expect you to come straight over,” Gelareh said.

“I was up,” he replied. “Sorry to intrude.”

“Not a problem.” She stood aside and let him in. “We can eat together.”

He closed the door behind him and wandered into the apartment. In the kitchen, soup simmered over a flame. Her cleaner’s uniform hung over the back of a chair.

“A minute?” she asked.

He nodded, and she went into her bedroom to dress.

On the table was a gas lantern, and a shape covered by a cloth. Oscar turned on the gas and lit the lamp’s mantle. When it was glowing white, he dropped the shielding glass and lifted the satin cloth off the form. He’d seen the idol whole only by flashlight while he was ankle-deep in ashy slop. Now it was rebuilt, and in the white glow of the gas lamp he could see it in awful detail. It was spiderwebbed with cracks, and some small missing fragments left dark triangular or rhomboid holes—but it was whole. It stood about two feet tall and was half that in diameter. Its legs were spread obscenely wide, exposing a gash two-thirds the width of its body and traveling a third of the way up its bloated abdomen. Its feet were avian, with horned plates and long talons. Its breasts were small, goatlike teats. Its mouth was an alien chasm: the upper and lower beaks divided horizontally so the orifice was opened like a quartered orange, exposing a split tongue that led to a flat disk of woven metal—a tiny grille separating the mouth from the belly space below. The demon thing’s eyes were wide-set and owl-like. Even though this was merely clay, the eyes conveyed unsettling intelligence and ruthless
hunger. From its head sprouted two horns, curled and mismatching. Its wings were more like a bat’s than a bird’s: like the rest of the idol, they were covered with markings that Oscar had first taken to represent feathers or scales but which he could now clearly see were the letters of a strange language. On the idol’s back was the seven-pointed star, and the fissured flaw where an air bubble in the clay had exploded during its firing.

Oscar was drawn back to the idol’s eyes and the mouth. Wide eyes, predator’s eyes, round and unblinking and as rapacious as its gawping mouth, split widely not once but twice, so eager to consume some kind of special flesh.

“She’s no oil painting, is she?”

Gelareh’s voice startled Oscar. She now wore tracksuit pants and a woolen cardigan, and was pulling her hair back into a band. He saw by the way she looked at the totem that she found it both intriguing and repulsive.

“And every time I see you, you look worse,” she added, taking in his fresh batch of wounds. “Next time I see you, you’ll be dead.”

He smiled, but felt an ominous chill. Mother Mim had said something all too similar. He nodded down at the idol. “How did you go?”

She crossed to the table. “It was interesting. Whoever made this had spent quite some time getting it right. The languages, I mean.”

“There’s more than one?”

“I can make out three. Soup?”

He realized he was hungry. “Please.”

“Sit,” she said. While she ladled, she continued: “The Aztec glyphs, like I said before, I really can’t help you with. But the rest, yes. Some are Akkadian, but just single terms. The majority of the writing is Sumerian. Some of the cuneiform were ruined by the flaw here”—she touched the ragged hole on the idol’s side—“and some when it was broken.”

She handed him the bowl of soup. It smelled delicious: spiced and hot. She returned the pot to the flame.

“And?” he said.

Gelareh sat beside him and opened a notebook. There were twenty pages filled with the wedgelike symbols scrawled into the pottery, accompanied by words in Hebrew and English. There were tables of letters and symbols, and dozens of instances where words had been
scratched through and new interpretations written above them. There were sketches of the idol from four angles, highlighting spots where key phrases of ancient text were written.

“Good Lord, you’ve been busy.”

“They cut some of my work shifts,” she explained. “And fortunately I’m fairly familiar with those two languages.” She unfolded a pair of reading glasses and looked at Oscar. “Yes?”

“Please,” he said.

She smiled. “That is, in fact, what it says here. And here, and here.” She touched the birdlike totem on its shoulders and on the top of its horned head. “ ‘Please.’ Messages of supplication. And here, there, and there it says, effectively, ‘We beg you’ or ‘We beseech you.’ But here, around the star, we see the main message.”

Oscar leaned forward. “And what is that?”

The room was still. The light in the lantern flickered and made the shadows on the idol’s gruesome, hungry face shift. It was as if the idol were listening.

Gelareh licked her lips, and read, “ ‘Queen, our Queen. You, behind the darkness. You, behind death. You, behind the curtain of bone.’ ”

Oscar felt the skin on his arms and neck prickle with goose bumps. His eyes were drawn to the wide, gluttonous mouth of the totem, its grossly spread legs, its unblinking stare.

“ ‘Accept this gift we bring with joy. Ereshkigal, Queen of Queens, the gate is open. Come as you will and grant us your favor.’ ”

She looked up at Oscar and raised her thin eyebrows.

“Eresh—?” he began.

“Ereshkigal.”

“You mentioned her last time. The sister.”

Gelareh nodded and left the room. Oscar looked out to the dark courtyard. The tiny bleed of light from the lantern made the wider darkness look enormous, holding infinite secrets. Gelareh returned with a heavy book entitled
Artworks of Mesopotamia
. She placed it on the table and flipped expertly through it.

“Here.” She turned the open book down so that Oscar could see the color plate. “This is what’s called the Burney Relief.”

When he saw the image, he felt his face suddenly tighten, as if someone had dashed ice water across it. The photograph was of a bas-relief carving. It depicted a naked woman. Her breasts were high,
and her hands were raised, each holding a ringlike amulet. Large, feathered wings descended from her shoulders, and her legs ended not in feet but in powerful three-toed talons. Her eyes held no orbs but were dark, hollow pits.

“We don’t know where she came from,” Gelareh said softly. “But she is, many believe, Ereshkigal.”

The winged woman seemed to float above two lions—not restful beasts but carnivores alert and watching, lean-flanked and hungry. Beside each big cat was an owl. They looked as large as the lions, with talons as long as the big cats’ claws; each feathered head was as broad as the winged woman’s hips. These monstrous owls were wide-eyed, staring obediently from the stone, as if waiting for their mistress’s command to fly or to hunt. Oscar remembered the childlike form falling from the apartment building opposite Jon and Leonie’s apartment, plunging earthward, but leaving no trace below. And the dog’s head, ripped from its body and crushed, as if in a vise, or by those long, powerful claws. And the talons that had tick-ticked on the garage concrete just inches from his face. It was no dream, he was sure now.

His mouth was as dry as sand.

“Owls,” he said.

Gelareh’s eyes were on the photograph of the relief. “Owls and lions.” She smiled. “But you see her wings? Her talons? She is closest to the owls. They’re her messengers, her ambassadors. Her soldiers.” Gelareh looked at Oscar. “Are you all right?”

“Thirsty,” Oscar whispered.

She went to the kitchen and he heard a glass filling. “She was painted red originally.” She handed him the water. “But she faded over time.”

“Red?”

“Red ocher.” Gelareh smiled grimly. “For blood.”

Oscar stared at Ereshkigal’s sculpted head. Rings of horns held her hair above a face that was serene, almost smiling, beauteous but for the almond-shaped black hollows she stared from.

“And what does she do?” Oscar asked.

Gelareh shrugged. “Whatever she pleases. She is the Queen of the Night. Goddess of the underworld.”

Three years ago, such things would have raised wry smiles. Today, there was no joking about death. The door to it had already been opened. The curtain of bone had been parted.

“And this”—he touched the idol, and the skin of his fingertips seemed to recoil—“is to please her?”

“To please her,” Gelareh said, staring at the idol she’d rebuilt. “To feed her. To summon her.”

The room fell silent again. Oscar watched Gelareh. She looked paler, as if she, too, felt the listening, waiting stillness.

“Masha’ Allah,”
she whispered, and went to the kitchen. She moved the soup saucepan and slipped a disk of woven metal over the flame. She reached into an earthenware pot and threw a handful of seeds onto the hot wire grill. He heard her say softly, “
Aspand bla band Barakati Shah Naqshband Jashmi
 …” Her whispered words were obscured by the popping of the heated seeds.

She returned, wiping her hands and smiling self-consciously.

“Aspand,” she explained. “Syrian rue. I know: I’m a superstitious fool. But this thing …” She shook her head at the reconstructed idol. “I haven’t enjoyed cohabiting with it.”

Oscar noted the similarity between the grill Gelareh had just thrown the rue seeds upon and the circular grillwork in the throat of the idol.

“Is that how she is summoned as well? Seeds on the hot grill?”

“You’re right, hot coals go in here.” She indicated the vaginal gape between the idol’s legs. “But this is an altar for holocaust. The offering goes, of course, into the mouth, where it burns away. I’m not sure what the offering would be. In traditional holocausts, a whole animal or person would be burned. The priests would check it, to make sure it was unblemished. If it had a coat, it would be flayed, and its blood sprinkled about the altar. But this is quite small. The mouth here is big enough to accept maybe a bird or a rodent or a handful of flesh.”

Oscar pictured the gash in Penny Roth’s abdomen, and Teddy Gillin pointing out the rude cuts where her ovaries had been excised. “A handful of flesh,” he repeated.

Gelareh nodded. “At least we can say this has never been used. This crack here ruined it. The dark queen has not been summoned.”

She smiled, but it was a forced expression. Oscar didn’t tell her about the ponytailed man who’d carried this idol’s wrapped twin from Florica’s.

They sat in silence for a long moment.

“Will you have more soup?” she asked, and they both smiled at how startling her sudden words were in the quiet.

“No,” he replied. “Thank you.”

She nodded, and went to the bedroom again. She returned with a cotton shopping bag and placed the idol in it.

“If you want to break it again,” she said softly, “be my guest.”

A bang startled them both. The French door to the courtyard swung loose on its hinge. Outside, the cold wind hissed in the climbing jasmine. The flames under Gelareh’s soup danced, and the aromas of herbs rode inside on the shifting air: basil, Jafari, star anise. Gelareh apologized and hurried to bolt the door shut.

“This weather,” she complained. “Everything has gone mad.”

Oscar let his nostrils drink in the last, delicate tendrils of fragrance. An idea jumped into his head.

“Do you have any cinnamon incense?”

Gelareh’s dark eyes fixed on him and narrowed. Without a word, she turned to the pantry and returned with a small earthenware jar that she placed in front of him. She opened it to reveal short, sticklike curls of brown bark.

“Just the bark,” she replied at last. “Some people burn it as incense.”

Oscar inhaled, and with the strong scent returned the memory of exactly where he’d smelled it last.

Chapter
31

T
he wind battered the motorcycle with invisible fists. Leaves and scraps of paper swirled through the white cone of the headlight. He could smell rain coming, and in the east, lightning flashed in the clouds over the ocean. He raced north, ignoring traffic signals and hunching his shoulders as he sped through intersections.

Oscar stopped the bike not far from where he’d parked to visit Tanta and stepped onto the footpath where he’d paced waiting for her to finish with a client. Music played somewhere, an angry and shrill tune. The wind preceding the storm flung past a mixture of scents that combined into an unpleasant greasy ensemble. From a doorway, two boys in rags watched him with the attention of hungry rats.

“Two bucks?” asked one.

Oscar showed his badge, and the boys retreated into shadow.

He went to the head of a narrow alleyway. It was here, two days ago, that he’d smelled fish and coal smoke and incense. Cinnamon incense. The buildings’ old downpipes whistled low and tunelessly. He stepped into the alley, and the wind diminished. It was dark, and he paused to let his eyes adjust. As he waited, his nostrils flared. He smelled spoiling potato, diesel oil, fish heads and, so faint that he wondered if he was imagining it, the earthy smell of burned cinnamon.

He took the Taurus from his pocket and walked carefully down the damp alley.

The walls were lined with old bins that leaked puddles of noisome liquids, and plastic milk crates and yawning old refrigerators that stank of piss. In shadows as thick as velvet, he heard tiny things scurry away. He inhaled. The herbal tang grew stronger.

He stopped and looked up.

A dozen feet overhead was a tiny window, hardly two handspans wide. Behind it, the orange light of a candle flame fluttered like a handkerchief in a breeze. Oscar didn’t dare turn on his flashlight, so he stepped toward the black wall beneath the window, one arm outstretched. His fingers touched cold brick, slick with mossy growths of who-knew-what. His fingers went left and right, feeling for an architrave. A wooden door. Its paint was peeling. He found the doorknob. Beneath it a keyhole.