John Abbott - Scimitar

Never in his life had Geoffrey Turner been inside a morgue. Even this early in the morning, there were people working in blood-stained smocks. Bloated bodies on stainless steel tables. Blood dripping into stainless steel basins. Everywhere Geoffrey looked, he saw the obscenely exposed insides of human beings. But the greatest obscenity was the stench. It was the stench of putrefaction, a sickly sweet odor that made him want to wash out his nostrils with salt water. The detective with him seemed not to mind any of it at all.

The detective’s name was Al Santorini.

He was not the same detective who’d called the Consulate on Monday to report the murder of a British subject. This one was a detective from Homicide. He explained that in this city, at this particular point in time, Thursday morning, the twenty-fifth day of June...

“It changes practically every day,” he said, “but this is what it happens to be at this particular point in time...”

— the precinct detective catching the original squeal, even if it was a murder, was usually the one who followed the investigation through to its conclusion.

“If there is a conclusion,” Santorini said. “Lots of them end up in the open file.”

But in this particular case, where the victim was someone believed to be a foreign national, and where now there seemed to be some question about whether the person really was British...

“It’s merely that we believe the passport is a forgery, you see,” Geoffrey said.

“Yeah, I understand that,” Santorini said.

He was somewhat taller and broader than Geoffrey, with a shock of very black hair hanging on his forehead, and dense black hair curling over the collar of his shirt. Forty-two, forty-three years old, Geoffrey guessed. A rough-hewn streetwise look about him. Brown eyes that matched the color of his sports jacket. Rumpled brown slacks and unpolished brown loafers. Smoking a cigarette, even though one of the doctors sawing open a skull looked up every now and then and frowned at him. Detective/First Grade Allan Santorini, Homicide Division.

“The point is, that’s why I took over the case,” he said. “Well, me and my partner. Jimmy Halloran, you ever hear of the Grey Ghost?”

“No,” Geoffrey said.

“He used to play ball for L.I.U.,” Santorini said. “He holds the record for most bases stolen in college baseball.”

“I’m not too familiar with the sport,” Geoffrey said.

“Yeah, well,” Santorini said drily. “Anyway, he’s famous. Used to be famous before he became a cop. The Department frowns on famous cops.”

“I would imagine,” Geoffrey said. He was thinking it was rather like the foreign service. They didn’t want anyone to shine. Brilliance was a definite handicap. “But you see,” he said, “the fact that she was carrying a forged British passport doesn’t necessarily mean she was British to begin with, don’t you see?”

“Oh, sure, but her landlady seems to think she was .”

“Well, how would she have known?”

“From the funny way she talked .”

“I see,” Geoffrey said, and cleared his throat.

“The landlady says she sounded English. Not British, she didn’t use the word British. She said English.”

“I see.”

“So that’s all we’re going on so far. So far, what we’re going on is an English lady with a phony British passport, or so you tell us, who gets shot four times and immediately cashes in. Also, we found two weapons in the apartment, a nine-millimeter Walther in the lady’s handbag, and a Browning automatic in the night table alongside her bed. So this doesn’t seem like your usual English lady taking a stroll in Piccadilly, does it?”

“ If she’s English at all,” Geoffrey said.

The smell in this place, and the fact that Santorini kept insisting the dead woman was English when for all anyone knew she could be Czech or Lithuanian or Mongolian for that matter, was beginning to irritate Geoffrey. He didn’t know why he was here in the first place. On the phone, Santorini had said something about positive identification, but how was he supposed to positively identify a woman he’d never seen in his life who, into the bargain, had been carrying a forged British passport? The doctor looked up from the open skull he was examining and again frowned at Santorini, who took a last puff of his cigarette and then ground it out in a small stainless steel cup that may have contained a pint of blood not half an hour ago.

“What I’d like you to do,” he said, “is take a look at the corpse.”

Oh, great, Geoffrey thought.

“You realize,” he said, “that I’ve never laid sight on this woman, don’t you? So my taking a look at her now, especially in her present unfortunate condition...”

“Yeah, her head all blown away,” Santorini said, and shook his own head sadly.

“Yes, exactly,” Geoffrey said, “could hardly serve any purpose, now could it?”

“Well, looking at her head wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Santorini said.

“You told me you wanted a positive identi...”

“No, what I told you was I thought what we found might help you guys get a positive ID.”

Geoffrey looked at him.

“So come take a look at her,” Santorini said, and walked over to where a man in a white uniform was sitting behind a desk reading a magazine. “We’re here for the Jane Doe,” Santorini said, and showed the man his shield. The man stood up without saying a word, leaned over the desk while he finished the paragraph he’d been reading, closed the magazine — which Geoffrey now saw was one of the American girlie books — and then walked to a stainless steel door set in a stainless steel frame. He opened the door. A chill rushed into the room.

It was not the chill of death — although at first Geoffrey thought it might be, given the circumstances — but was instead the chill of a refrigerated compartment. He followed the attendant and Santorini into a vast cool room, listened to them haggling over which unidentified female Santorini wanted to see — apparently there were three such stiffs, as the attendant called them, in residence at the moment — and was relieved, he guessed, when they finally settled on the woman who’d been brought in this past Monday.

The attendant opened a small door and rolled out a tray.

The woman on the tray was naked and blond.

Part of her face and most of her skull were entirely gone.

Geoffrey wanted to throw up.

“Take a look at the left tit,” Santorini said.

Geoffrey looked.

Tattooed just below the nipple was what appeared to be the silhouette of a sword:

A tiny green sword.

He was just coming out of the shower that Thursday morning when Elita noticed the tattoo.

At 6:25 last night they’d boarded the Lake Shore Limited in Chicago, and were already eating dinner when the train passed South Bend, Indiana. She drank a single scotch before dinner — no one asked her for identification — and two glasses of white wine during dinner, and then they went back to his bedroom again. And while the rest of Indiana, and then all of Michigan and Ohio, flashed by outside in the darkness of the night, she gave herself to him as she had the night before and the night before that, again and again and again, mindlessly and completely. By dawn, when the train entered New York State, she was utterly exhausted.

It was now a little past nine in the morning.

They planned to eat a late breakfast before the train pulled into the Albany-Rensselaer station. They were scheduled to arrive in Penn Station at twenty minutes to two that afternoon, and she was hoping he would take her to lunch in New York, although he’d made no mention of it thus far.