Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“Hurley,” Mallory said.

“Mrs. Hurley,” the black man said, “what’s your name?”

Sally didn’t answer. “Sally,” Mallory said, reading from his note pad.

“Thank you, Mallory,” the black man said with annoyance, “I know you know what her name is. I want to see if she knows what her name is.” The concierge was still whimpering at the sight of the body in the bed. “Mallory,” the black man said, “please take away our friend here and let me talk to Mrs. Hurley?” Mallory took the concierge out and closed the door, and now it was just the one man and the woman. Sally still hadn’t said anything and stared at her hands in her lap. “Hey,” the man said, snapping his fingers. Slowly she looked up at him. “Mrs. Hurley,” he said, “my name is Wade. I’m a policeman. I have to ask you some things and you’re going to have to try and tell me the answers to what I ask you.”

Sally looked around the room, at the walls and the bed.

“Can you tell me what happened here?” Wade said. She looked vacantly ahead of her and then at the dead man. “Can you tell me who he is?” Wade asked, and she looked at the bloody knife in the handkerchief on the table. “Is that yours?” She reached to touch it. “Just leave it, Mrs. Hurley. Sally. We’re going to have to check that out and if it’s not yours then you don’t want to touch—”

“It’s mine,” she said.

Wade gnawed on his cheek again. His brow furrowed and he looked around him to see that the door was closed. “Now you should be careful what you say,” he said to her in a low voice. “In this city you can be locked up for nothing other than the fact that someone in my position just doesn’t happen to like you, which I’ve done in the past but don’t want to do now.” Wade was trying to figure out if she was black. It was a tricky situation for him. It wasn’t beyond Mallory to be spying for either Wade’s superiors at headquarters or some low-level priest up at Church Central; everything was fucking intrigue in this city and here was Wade, a black man in a room with a very beautiful woman who might be black and might have just murdered a white man. So he couldn’t cut her much more slack than he’d be able to justify later on.

“It’s mine,” she repeated with determination. She was determined about it because it was the only thing she remembered now, or thought she remembered, though as the moments passed since she woke she became less and less certain. It seemed important to be able to lay claim to this singular memory. The legal ramifications of the knife’s being hers either hadn’t occurred to her or weren’t as important as the sanity of being able to remember this single thing.

“I’ve got to take you in then, Mrs. Hurley,” Wade said. He got up and went to the door of the hallway, where Mallory was waiting. “You make the call?” he said to Mallory.

“They’re coming in now,” Mallory said. He looked into the room at Sally and then at the bed. “Should we check out the body?”

“Let the coroner do it,” Wade answered, “that’s his job.” He nodded at Sally. “I’m taking her in. I want to hold off a little while before notifying the husband.” Sally turned slightly in her chair. Talking to Mallory, Wade lowered his voice. “You said there’s a child?”

“A daughter,” Mallory answered. Sally turned back in her chair. “This is the way I like these babies,” said Mallory, “open and shut.”

“That’s because you’ve got an open and shut brain,” said Wade. “When the others get here I want you to go over this place top to bottom. The whole hotel and the streets outside. Go around back and see if you can figure where that door used to go.”

“You’re going to have to take my altar shift this afternoon,” Mallory told him, with no small satisfaction.

“Shit,” Wade fumed. “Where?”

“Humiliation.”

Wade heard sirens outside from down the street and then the sound of them pulling in front of the hotel. Doors slammed. “That was actually damned punctual,” he said. Two other police came up the stairs and into the room. One looked at the body casually and the other, who was new on the detail, turned a little white. More cops were on the stairs and Mallory started giving directions. Another older cop came in and started on the body. “Either of you got a rosary?” Wade asked the first two cops who had just arrived. Rosary was the name they used for the irons and the new cop pulled some out. Wade nodded at Sally and the new cop clamped the rosary around Sally’s wrists. Sally looked at the chains on her hands as if she had known all along it would come to this. Wade took her down the stairs. The sound of the chains clanking between her arms and the way she looked at them as she got into the car released in Wade so deep a sense of betrayal he felt sick.

Headquarters was over on the other side of Sorrow, which was the next zone over from Ambivalence where the hotel was, so they had a good twenty-minute ride, maybe longer depending on the foot traffic. Wade took the long way to avoid the Market and part of Downtown. Sally sat next to him in the front seat. He told himself he put her in the front seat so he could question her, though he wound up not saying anything to her; then he told himself he didn’t say anything because the more he pressed her the less forthcoming she was going to be, and he knew he didn’t believe that either. He just wanted her in the seat next to him and now that he had her there he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her. She was so beautiful he just held his breath and felt mean about it.

When he placed her in the cell she gazed around her and then at Wade so mournfully that all he could do was hurry away.

Wade thought about the woman for the rest of the afternoon. The file on her was one of the thinnest he’d ever seen. Sally Hurley aka Hemings, twenty-five years old, married to Gann Hurley, twenty-seven, whose occupation was listed as “artist,” whatever the fuck that meant, with one child, two years old. Actual date of birth on Sally Hemings: blank. Place of birth: blank. Parents: blank. Race: blank. How did this ever get past Primacy? The husband’s listing as an artist and the Hurleys’ address on the edge of the outlaw Redemption zone were little red flags waving in Central’s face. Wade wished Sally could have told him more than she did and he wished she hadn’t told him the one thing she had, about the knife’s being hers, because if she hadn’t identified the knife and it somehow came back from the lab clean, there was always the chance she might have slipped through this somehow, though if Primacy wanted to burn her they didn’t need a reason anymore than he needed one to lock her up. He was still thinking about this when the alert siren went on across the city and he remembered he was supposed to take Mallory’s altar shift.

Wade went through the motions on the shift, his mind still on the Hemings woman. Randomly he narrowed his search choices to Circles Seventeen and Thirty, both on the far side of Humiliation. Seventeen was on the list of neighborhoods that hadn’t been hit in a while; Mallory had gone through Thirty only yesterday, which meant if Wade went back today he might catch someone off guard. Wade wasn’t up for catching anyone off guard, so he decided on Seventeen. Even under the perpetually dark sky the white of the circle shone blindingly in his eyes as he drove into the middle and parked in the shadow of the blue obelisk. As with all the residential circles of the city, nine individual units dotted the circumference of Seventeen and faced the obelisk at the center. The units were identical in size and all built of gray brick. The obelisks were so tall that from Downtown the suburban skyline of the city was a range of blue spires against the black clouds and the ash of the volcano to the east.