Dana Stabenow - Powers of Detection

The next thing to turn up was a head. There was no doubt about who it belonged to. I couldn’t deny the possibilities any longer.

Right on cue, that evening, the call I was dreading came. I heard her voice on the end of the line, and my heart sank.

“I have some bad news,” I told her.

“Yes, what is it?” she said, her voice calm, her tone even.

“We think we’ve found your husband.”

“We? What is this ‘we,’ Jacques?”

I paused at that. “I use a couple of contacts, a couple of people who work for me, Madame Fouad. I can trust them.”

“All right. So tell me.”

“Well, we haven’t exactly found all of him.”

“I see. What have you found?”

“So far, only a foot and his head. I’m sorry, Madame Fouad.”

Her next statement blindsided me completely. I expected tears. I expected wailing. “Ah, very good, Jacques,” she said. “You have truly earned your fee.”

I held the phone away from my ear, staring at it in disbelief. Slowly, I brought it back to my ear.

“Madame Fouad?”

“Did you hear me, Jacques?”

“No, I’m sorry…”

“Make sure to keep the pieces you have safe. Continue searching. I have faith in you, Jacques. I will be in touch to arrange collection of what you have.”

The connection went dead, and I lowered the phone.

–

Over the next couple of weeks, the word went out, and one by one, pieces of the body turned up. A cowherd brought in one. A local farmer another. A tourist guide yet another. Every piece, wrapped in leaves, or newspapers, or blue plastic bags were all in the same perfect condition, as if they’d been severed mere minutes before. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t really want to. Ismail, his pockmarked superstitious face filled with knowing, seemed to accept it as if it was something that happened every day. Every couple of days, Madame Fouad called, monitoring the progress.

Of course we paid. We paid in bits and pieces for the bits and pieces, and the word spread. By the end, we had fourteen individual parts. We had the whole Ossie Fouad in pieces, all except for one. And maybe he didn’t need that piece anymore. After all, according to my research, he already had a son, a healthy young man called Horace, all set to take over the company when his own time came. I met him when he and his mother came to collect the pieces.

A good-looking young man, with his father’s skin, he leaned in close to me as he bundled the neatly wrapped pieces of his father’s corpse into the back of a truck.

“We cannot thank you enough, Mr. Jacques,” he said. “But I would keep out of sight for a while. Your fee should look after you. After my father’s resurrection, my uncle will not be pleased. He doesn’t take kindly to failure. I would give you this word of caution. My uncle Set does not forget and his reach is long. Watch for him in the darkness.”

Set? I had thought she’d said Seth.

I looked over at his mother, watching me with her dark, intelligent eyes, the barest smile upon her lips, and I felt a chill despite the evening’s heat.

I heard a few rumors later that the Fouads never did find that missing piece. I wonder from time to time how Ossie might feel about that. Ismail told me that she, Madame Fouad, had had a replacement fashioned from gold, right down the street from his little copper shop. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to take the trouble to find out.

All I knew was that somewhere inside Ra Industries, there was a man called Set Fouad, a man who didn’t forget easily. I wasn’t even sure if he was a man, but I knew I didn’t want to meet him anytime soon. For now, I was keeping my head down. Maybe I’d move. Maybe Alexandria. Maybe Athens. Somewhere like that. I needed to raise the cash first. If I never heard the name Ra Industries again, I’d be happy.

Do you know what a jackal sounds like in the fog of a Cairo dawn?

It was the first day of the Tattoo Fair, and the town square was bustling with vendors and performers from the nine provinces of Mnemosynea. Pthalean playwrights were rehearsing songs and skits with Pthersikorean dancers. From a dais two feet square a Kalliopean poet was declaiming in iambic pentameter what appeared to be an epic concerning the life of Okeon, the god of the sea, who had five wives, seventeen children, and a great deal of domestic discord that played out, as one might expect, on the hapless humankind living onshore. Next to the dais the poet’s clerk was doing a brisk trade in autographed scrolls.

A Palihymnean had a booth built of shelves of sheet music featuring every hymn written in praise of the gods from Atonis to Tseuz. Foreseers from Yranea set out star charts, some rolled, some mounted on poster board, next to wicker baskets full of fortunes tied with red satin ribbons, and shuffled their prefiguration cards in preparation for their first customers, girls looking for true love, farmers looking for rain, merchants looking for a reading on the futures of surcoats (long or short?) and breastplates (functional or ornamental?). As her mount picked his way through the debris field of wagons, tent poles, heaps of canvas and crates of goods, Sharryn pointed out one Pthalean stand-up comedian rehearsing an act that had a troupe of tragic actors holding their sides. “We should get tickets to that performance. Anybody who can make a Mnelpomenean laugh has to be funny.”

Crowfoot grunted and nudged her destrier through the crowd.

Sharryn looked at her with affectionate exasperation. “When last did you take the time to laugh that hard at something that silly?”

Crowfoot’s destrier whickered agreement, and the swordswoman cuffed her mane without force. “Less of that from you, Blanca.”

Blanca rolled an eye at Pedro, the sturdy brown pony bearing Sharryn, who tossed his head and snorted. “Even they agree with me,” Sharryn said. A bit grimly, she added, “And after Epaphus we could both use a little amusement.”

Crowfoot, ignoring the reference to the events in the provincial capital the day before, scanned the marketplace over the heads of the jostling, energetic crowd. “Where is this inn you keep on about? The road has left me dry as a bone.”

Sharryn brightened. “Makarios’s?” She craned her neck. “There, the red brick building on the corner.” She smacked her lips. “Wait till you taste Makarios’s lager. It truly is the stuff of the gods.”

“Careful, one of them will hear you.” Crow was only half-joking. She looked at Sharryn out of the corner of an eye. Her partner’s eager expression indicated that there was more of interest at the inn than mere beer.

They urged their mounts alewards. Weary of the road and their last Assideres, they were both mildly annoyed to find their way blocked by a small knot of shouting, gesticulating townspeople. The knot grew into a group, then into a crowd, with no way out or around save to walk their horses right over the top of it. That of course would be unacceptable behavior for two of His Most Serene Majesty’s chosen, so they didn’t, however greatly they were tempted.

“A full tankard of cold, crisp lager,” Sharryn said, staring sadly in the direction of the inn. “I can practically smell it from here.”

“Lead me to it,” Crowfoot muttered. “Goodman,” she said to one of the townsmen standing at the fringe of the crowd, and had to raise her voice and repeat herself to be heard over the uproar.

He spared her an impatient glance, then looked again, his eye caught by the crest on the breast of her tunic and by the hilt of the sword protruding from the sheath strapped to her back. What he had been about to say changed to a deferential, “Swordswoman,” accompanied by a bow of the head. He looked for and found Sharryn, almost hidden by the bulk of the destrier, took in the same crest on the same tunic and the staff in her hand, and said, bowing again, “Seer.”