Gelareh made mint tea and pulled out the photograph Paz had printed of the symbol on the Jane Doe’s belly, and a sheaf of greaseproof papers. On each sheet she had traced different elements of the sigil: on one, the star; on another, the patterned cross; on yet another, the texts with arabesque swirls, and the chopped and wedge-shaped symbols. While she poured the tea, Gelareh apologized for not having had more time to work on it.
“Your symbol is, I think, a concoction.” Her voice had a lovely curl that sounded like waves and stirred up tastes of spice. “Not from one country, not from one era.” She shuffled the papers. “Now, where to start?”
“Assume he knows nothing,” Lovering called from outside. “I find that is the least frustrating way.”
“Oh, yes, because you’re so smart, Paz Lovering,” she shouted back. “You who got lost in Ben Yehuda Street.”
“It was busy!” Lovering looked at Oscar for sympathy. “It was crazy with tourists. Baden-Powell would have gotten lost there.”
“Some Jew,” Gelareh tutted, and smoothed out the first sheet of onionskin paper. On it was traced the seven-pointed star. “Okay, the heptagram. Well, seven, as you know, is the number of perfection for some religions, including some divisions of Christianity and the Kabbalah. The star of seven points is also called the Faery Star, or Elven Star. Some pagans believe it shows the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, west—as well as above, below, and inside … within. Some Wiccans believe it helps open the way to the realm of Faerie. Alchemists from the sixteenth century used it as a symbol of power, to denote the seven planets then known in the solar system. Oh, and the seven-pointed star is also used five times on the Australian flag.” She looked at Oscar. “Patriots have been known to go too far.”
“That doesn’t really narrow down our list of suspects,” Oscar said. “Christians, Jews, pagans, alchemists, and radical patriots. I guess I can rule out alchemists.”
“I’m not finished. Older than all these was the star’s use in my stomping ground.” She smiled. “Mesopotamia. Five-, six-, and seven-pointed stars were all symbols associated with various gods and goddesses. They were appropriated and absorbed and amalgamated as years went by. The seven-pointed star”—she touched the tracing—“was associated with the goddesses Inanna and Ereshkigal.”
“And who were they?” Oscar asked.
“Sisters. The queen of heaven and the demon goddess of chaos.”
“Polar opposites.”
Gelareh shrugged noncommittally and flattened out the next tracing. The cross. On paper, it looked like an elaborate plus sign, its equal-length arms filigreed at the ends but appearing almost structural with a gridwork of crisscross patterns.
“I had to guess some of the lines,” Gelareh explained. “But this looks like a vévé. Or, really, a part of a vévé.”
“A what?”
“See?” Lovering called. “I told you.”
Gelareh ignored him. “Vévés are sigils used in vodou. You know what vodou is?”
“Voodoo? From Haiti,” Oscar replied. “Spirit worship. Possession.”
Gelareh wrinkled her nose. “Haitian vodou has strong roots in West
African vodun, you know? Yes, it is spirit worship, not unlike Native American and Celtic religions. The belief that spirits govern all aspects of earth and life. They live in stones, trees, animals, and they can be called upon to render assistance, to give comfort, confer favors—”
“To intervene,” Oscar said.
“Exactly. If they are called correctly and given appropriate offerings. The vévé—they are like doors, or keys, or … hmm.” She searched for the word. She looked outside to Lovering, but he was snoring lightly, the teacup on his belly. “The towers with the lights?”
“Lighthouses?” Oscar said.
She nodded. “Yes. Lighthouses to attract the Loa, the spirits. Like nasty moths.” She smiled, and the paper rustled dryly under her fingers. “This looks very much like a portion, the cross portion, of the vévé used to summon Baron Samedi.”
“Samedi?” Oscar asked. “French? Baron Saturday?”
“He is one of the major spirits. A Guédé, a guardian of the crossroads between the dead and the living. But, as I say, this is only a portion of the Baron’s vévé. Here.”
She had a reference book tabbed, and opened to a page that showed an almost childlike drawing that looked like a cross on an altar flanked by two coffins and embellished with asterisks.
Oscar frowned. “And the vodou priests and priestesses, they cut these into their flesh?”
“Oh, no. They draw them with powder, maybe flour, even gunpowder. Like the Navajo use pollen or cornmeal. But no incisions, no.”
This was raising more questions than answering them, Oscar thought. And they were only halfway through the sheets.
Gelareh flipped to the next tracing: crescents, stars, something that looked like a church spire, and other badly formed shapes that made no sense to Oscar.
“Pictograms,” Gelareh explained. “Very hard to read from the photograph.”
“It wasn’t the best quality.”
Gelareh said nothing. “Still. This glyph”—she turned the image upside down and Oscar could see that it looked like a heron or a crane—“looks very much like an Akh.”
“Egyptian?”
She nodded. “The symbol of the soul. A ghost.” She drew his eye
down to a curl of lines that came into unpleasant focus: a skull in profile. “And this looks a little like an Aztec image. I’m not so good with Aztec. But skulls and skeletons? Very popular in ancient Central America.”
Oscar remembered his and Sabine’s honeymoon—October in New England and November in San Francisco. The stores there were full of pumpkins and Halloween masks. Oscar and Sabine had gone down to Garfield Square to see the Day of the Dead festival—
Día de los Muertos
. So many skeletons. “For
La Calavera Catrina
,” explained a beautiful young woman whose face was painted as a white-and-black skull. “To remind us that even the rich die.”
Gelareh produced the last sheet. This was covered with dozens of lines—some straight, some curled, some ending in flourishes, some terminating in tiny stars or blunt slashes.
“These are undeniably words. But there is no single language. This one could be Bronze Age Hittite.” She peered at the photograph and shrugged. “Because the instrument used and the … medium were so unusual, it is tricky, as you say.”
“I can show you the original.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “I moved to this country so I’d see fewer bodies. Thank you, but better photographs would do. If you want me to continue, that is. Of course, it will take some time.”
Gelareh looked at the floor, and an awkward silence fell.
“Oh, yes,” Oscar said. He reached into his bag and produced a sealed box of loose tea. “I don’t have cash. A bit embarrassing.”
“No, no, this is wonderful.”
“We used to have money for this—”
“And I hate to ask. Only because, you know—”
“Of course.”
“—my time.”
“Yes.”
Another silence descended, and Oscar picked up the photograph.
“What sort of a person would do this?” he asked.
Gelareh didn’t speak at once. “A serious one,” she said.
“A serious scholar? A serious nutter?”
Again, she hesitated, weighing her words. “I don’t know. But there’s work in this. I think whoever did this believed in what they were doing.”
“Which was what?”
She tapped the edge of the photograph with the care someone might
exercise touching a tarantula’s cage. “As I said, a lighthouse. They were trying to bring something in.”
The air outside had become still but charged, waiting like an indrawn breath, latent with the promise of a storm.
“So they’re crazy,” Oscar said.
“Do you think so? Look around you. Somewhere there’s a dead person only you can see. Sitting there”—she smiled unhappily and pointed to an empty chair beneath a framed eighteenth-century pen-and-wash of a winged lion with a bearded man’s head—“is someone only I can see: a man my father killed more than fifty years ago.” Oscar felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “It’s already happened,” Gelareh continued. “Things have already come in.”
Outside, a breeze tugged at Lovering’s gray hair, and the air began to grow cold. Somewhere an alarm clock sounded. Gelareh checked her watch.
“Will you excuse me?” She smiled apologetically, went to her bedroom, and shut the door.
Oscar looked at the traced pages. A lighthouse. A beacon.
Nonsense.
And yet in his mind flickered the memory of something falling from the building opposite Jon and Leonie’s apartment. Falling … then flying.
He heard Lovering cough, and the teacup on his stomach rattled as he sat up. He rubbed at the stain on his shirt. The sky was now gray and dark.
Gelareh returned, dressed in a cleaner’s uniform, pinning to her blouse a nametag branded with an inner-city hotel’s logo. She smiled at Oscar as she collated her papers.
“If you can get me some clearer photographs, I’ll continue tomorrow.”
Chapter
9
I
n the foyer of the state mortuary, a family of a dozen Polynesians had gone to war. They took turns screaming at the sole reception clerk, demanding that he give them a body back. Two uniformed cops stood by the front door, impassively watching as if they’d seen it all a hundred times before. Oscar supposed they probably had.
He stepped behind the islanders and held up his ID to the reception clerk. The clerk, a tall Nigerian, waved him forward. Oscar pressed the ID against the glass.
“How come you talk to this moke but you won’ talk to us?” demanded a young Polynesian the size of a small tractor. Oscar showed a glimpse of his holster.
“Manners?”
The islander grinned at the gun. “Fucking pigs.” But he turned and ambled back to his kin, who began to tease him.
The clerk thumbed in a code to the glass security door, and Oscar stepped quickly inside; on the other side of the glass, the Polynesians’ expletives and threats became the muted roar of distant surf.
He followed the clerk, who walked unhurriedly along the corridors.
Oscar looked around. Before Gray Wednesday, Forensic Services held an atmosphere of respectful quiet: morgue technicians wore paper slippers, voices were hushed, and the air had a scent of chemicalized lavender. Today, phones rang shrilly, people yelled, and the air was a languid stew of sweat and formaldehyde. Suddenly, the clerk stopped and lashed out at the empty air, making Oscar jolt.
“Ban gane ba!”
the clerk shouted at a blank wall, pointing angrily.
“Na gaji!
”
Oscar took a careful half step back.
The clerk sent a final, angry flick at nothing, then turned to Oscar. “Sorry,” he said, and gestured loosely toward a closed door up ahead, then returned the way he came.
Oscar opened the door and went inside.
The large examination room was the clouded gray of a dead tooth, and cold. An overhead gantry system for transporting bodies ran across the ceiling and through a twin set of plastic flap doors. One door was jammed open, and beyond Oscar could see barely controlled chaos in the adjoining storeroom. A technician was short-temperedly hunting through stainless-steel body drawers; each was built for single occupancy but held two or three white cadaver bags. Nearby, cool air spilled in a fog from an open cold-room door, and two more technicians in stained white coats were arguing about how to fit another body in. From somewhere came an AC/DC song, sounding thin and strangled. In the exam room proper were six stainless-steel necropsy tables, each with its own sink and U-shaped faucets. A body lay on every table, five in white plastic bags, the one on the farthest table exposed. This was a woman’s body; her face had been peeled down over her chin, and a small figure in a lab coat and plastic visor was running a dumbbell-shaped Stryker saw around the crown of the exposed skull. There was a clatter as the skullcap slipped from the pathologist’s gloved fingers onto the perforated tabletop.
“Shit it.”
The pathologist flicked off the saw and its nasal whine hazzed down to silence. She picked up the skullcap and dropped it into the stainless-steel bucket. Oscar remembered Dianne Hyde as a woman defined by her work: quiet, even-humored, and unrushed. So when she lifted her visor Oscar was shocked to see Hyde’s face taut with exhaustion.
“Oscar Mariani,” she said, flicking off the Surgilux lamp. “I presume you’ve come to give me that bucatini recipe you’ve been promising?”
He surprised her by pulling the handwritten recipe from his pocket. A small smile appeared on Hyde’s face—it looked bewildered and out of place.
“And where am I supposed to get Pecorino cheese?”
“You’re a resourceful woman.”
“I’m an old woman.” She pocketed the recipe. “With a workload.”
The cadaver she was working on was in her twenties. The dead woman’s legs were swollen and purple; her chest and breasts were ice-white. A rope bruise on her neck rose in an inverted V under her left ear. Her fingertips were chafed, and one nail had been torn off. The young woman had changed her mind after kicking away the chair, and had clawed at the fatal rope.
“Suicide,” he said.
“Suicide,” Hyde agreed, and nodded at the next two cadavers. “Suicide, suicide …” She gestured through the flap doors to the overfilled cold rooms, raised her hands, and then let them drop helplessly by her sides. Oscar felt his stomach grow cold. So many. Was life really that bad? But then he was lucky: his ghost mostly hid himself away. Oscar had heard numberless accounts of people whose dead wouldn’t leave their side. People would go to sleep at night with their dead grandfather or drowned school friend or cancered cousin an arm’s length away, staring down with those worming finger-hole eyes. Waking, the first thing they saw was a death mask looking back. In every mirror, at every meal, every time they went to buy a paper or drink tea or make love to their partner, the staring dead would be there, a silent, corpselike chaperone. Could anyone blame those who couldn’t cope?
“Do you have to autopsy them all?” Oscar asked.