Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

Scalpel shrugged. He couldn’t help feeling sick. One of the coffins they had just pried open was that of a blonde-gray woman, fiftyish. The problem was, in the flashlight’s concentrated beam, the cadaver resembled his mother. Logically, he knew that this corpse was not her, for she was still kicking up her heels, so to speak, with her second hubby, in Come-by-Chance. But, emotionally stricken, he had to vomit.

Two false starts on, the boys found the gleaming mahogany, one-room place that was Diva Galatis’s last redoubt on the planet. When Bruno pried up the casket lid like an unholy deity reviving — but not repairing — the dead, a gasp seized in all three throats, mouths, and lungs: The girl was awesomely beautiful, and the magic of makeup and preservatives had merely enhanced her natural perfection. She seemed to have simply walked off the street, stepped into this miniature bed, and gone to sleep. Blissful. Her funeral dress was simple, a white silk sheath, with discreet pads cupping the perfectly circular, if yet immature breasts. Her gold flesh shone through the filmy white of her grave bridal dress. Diva’s hands were set to hold flowers at her chest, and the brown fingers flashed brilliant magenta nail polish. Her almond-shaped eyes were closed under dark-almond-colored lids, and the eyelashes were lustrously sable. Her slender legs tapered down to white schoolgirl socks and flat-soled black shoes. Death was an obvious crime in this case.

“Feast your eyes there, bud!” Pete croaked at Scalpel, whose porcine hands were now stroking, with the most delicate delicacy, the fine, though cool, cocoa-tinted skin of his beloved, his desire, his child-bride, only fifteen years his junior. No-nonsense Bruno, a man of practicality, tore free the satin lining the girl lay upon and, encasing her in this material, lifted her, with little strain, from the box, with Pete holding her legs straight, while Scalpel, disbelieving his joy, tore off his jacket and set it on the floor, as an act of homage for the gently descending corpse. Now, holding the flashlight, Scalpel watched as his two friends arranged the woman, still in a state of fine repose, upon the floor, using the coffin lining as a makeshift bridal suite sheet, while Scalpel’s jacket was bunched into a pillow.

Bruno and Pete pried at Diva’s legs, which parted stiffly, wafting the insidious smell of formaldehyde. The two men rolled up her dress, revealing a flawless anatomy, including a nicely wispy black brush of hair at her sex.

Excited, Pete snatched the flashlight and yelled at Scalpel, “DO it! DO it! We ain’t got forever!”

Scalpel felt queasy, but Diva looked delectable. His desire overthrew all scruples. Besides, with a big-hearted laugh, Bruno was tugging down Scalpel’s pants, and then encouraging him to kneel before the prone treat. Scalpel surged — he felt his blood and flesh surge — forward. Next, he realized Diva’s smooth, cool thighs against his hot, hairy ones. Now he felt for the sex of the dead girl, believing that she would be kindly tight, if dry, and exquisitely gripping.

Bruno hollered, “Get her wet, boy!”

At this moment, Scalpel withdrew while Pete anointed the cadaver’s unblemished sex with drippings from a flask. It gleamed; the whiskey glinted.

Ready, Scalpel thrust himself into the corpse; it shook and jiggled coldly upon the floor. But a pathetic delirium gave him pause: He understood that he was raping his beautiful neighbor, this luxurious pinnacle of womanhood, even as he adored the whiteness of his manhood as it drove into the inert brown once-woman, in a parody of copulation.

Pete reveled in this cocky farce, this murky but arousing debauch. The girl was sweetly akimbo, and utterly pretty, but Scalpel was jiggling and wriggling and snorting like a swinish monkey. No, Scalpel was like a busy eel, spasmodic, darting in and out of the unexpected luxury of the virgin spoil, until his nasty, brutal sallies should attain their vain objective. Suddenly he was groaning. Pete spat icily, “Don’t cuss the chill! Pal the gal, man, and laugh.” Pete stared, as if drooling at the seesawing transports of his buddy.

After five crazy minutes, a climax shook Scalpel and he fell away from the icy doll. He was satisfied, but sobbing, then vomiting under the empty ripped-up casket, still held up at chest level upon its trolley.

Pete growled, “Sloppy seconds for me!” After some perfunctory cleaning with tissue taken from the nearby washroom, he was also soon moaning, “Diva, Diva, Diva,” as he writhed and shivered. How memorably thrilling it was to have this highly polished cadaver, this ready-made, unblushing, yet virtuous excellence!

Looking, still weeping, at Pete’s infernal coupling with the dead girl, Scalpel knew it was not devotion, but desecration. Pete’s insistent, unstinting strokes, executed not an ordinary vulgarity, but a fantastically monstrous treason — like someone befouling the face of The Queen with a bodily emission. Scalpel regretted his own too-immediate yielding to Pete, for the dude was grinding into Diva as if she were a pencil sharpener. Scalpel sulked like an emperor forced to accept democracy. Okay, so none of us are Christ! Does that mean Pete has to play a cockroach? Scalpel imagined only one remedy for his escalating distaste for Pete’s violence: hatred for the man himself. Diva’s ravishing would have to prove costly. Scalpel could not let the snake dump his venom into the defenseless girl.

Immersed in Diva’s swank vise, Pete felt like an opulent Vandal sacking Rome. This defilement was delirious. He thought, I am dreaming. I am desiring. I am bad. He was a phallic angel — no, a reckless devil — now building up to an inevitable nicety. Athletic, untiring, he steadily pumped away at the cold woman’s core, that moist gleam in the cylindrical light showing up his dark driving. It was a signal plunder, though the victim was as sticky as mud. A billy goat stench, Pete’s, hovered over the scene.

Still shadowy, beyond the flashlight beam in Bruno’s hand, Scalpel stealthily retrieved the crowbar and struck wildly but heavily at Pete. The iron bar swung. One blow would pulverize Pete’s petal-soft skull.

Bruno saw a long, black object sweep down into the white flashlight illumination and sink, cracking, splashing, into the crown of Pete’s head. Bruno did not even have enough time to let the flashlight shake or flicker as some black liquid shot from Pete and dirtied his own face and clothes. Bruno felt rueful, but Scalpel had been ruthless.

In an instant, Pete went from fornication to celibacy. A sizzling convulsion. Black gore pissed up from the pointedly indented skull. Ominous. Here is real bullshit, some real horse manure , Bruno thought.

Bruno switched off the flashlight just in case Scalpel wanted to take a swipe at him with the bloody bat. He wasn’t sticking around. He dropped the light and hauled ass back to the basement stairwell.

Freaked out by the murder of his buddy, by another buddy, because both had copped with a corpse, and shaking anyway, Bruno lost his footing on the dark stairs. He pitched into the void and came up twisted, his neck broken.

Not the type to quail before a dog’s breakfast of a crime, Scalpel retrieved the flashlight, and, in the dimming beam, pulled Pete off their victim and pushed his pal’s body into the drying vomit under the dolly hoisting Diva’s gutted casket.

Now Scalpel held Diva’s head on his lap. The girl remained for him perfectly pure, despite her bloody, ruined dress and the outrages lately visited upon her otherwise preserved perfection. His pitiful tears rendered hers beautiful.

Little India

The door of the Taj opened and two men came in. They moved past Aziz and stood at the sweets counter in the back. The only other customer was some old guy waiting for a take-out order. He was sitting at a table near the door, watching Gerrard Street through the window. It was close to 6 o’clock and getting dark. The streetlamps had come on and cars flashed by hissing through the slush with their lights on.