Face-Off. Chris Karsten
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adorned with tattoos of astronomical significance.
He needed those skins for the covers of ten volumes of his Cosmic Travels, and he already had two. But it was because of those first two reluctant donors that he was now a fugitive, because they had refused to cooperate and had forced him to harvest their skins against their will. He still needed eight more donors. He also needed another special woman to give him the greatest of gifts: a new face, his ultimate wish. For this face, as for the skins, he had strict requirements. The face had to be beautiful, the complexion flawless. Not just beautiful on the outside either: the donor had to be pure of body and soul. That was not negotiable; he would not accept the face of a slut. Since his childhood his mother had bombarded him with Bible verses that warned him against such women.
Ironically, while avoiding his hunters he had shared his hideaway with women who were guilty of Old Testament acts of iniquity: women who seduced men with embellishments to their bodies, and vulgar tattoos, and whose lapdogs and kitty cats wore coloured ribbons in their perfumed fur.
Oh, how he would have liked to have harvested a few of those pelts to hone his flaying technique: the skin of a Pekingese, a Toy Pom, a chihuahua, a dwarf poodle, even a shih-tzu, which would barely render an A5-sized pelt. He’d avoided skinning dogs, though, because he’d once had two pit bulls himself.
The cat was different, sitting in front of his door, mewing at night so he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he opened the door – to go and buy medicine, or a Paganini CD, or food – the cat had slipped in. Mitzi, the woman had called her. He knew the woman’s name too and had considered practising on Jewel, harvesting the Gothic cross at the nape of her neck and the snake on her thigh, the one that was visible under her short skirt when she walked along the passages, with her cries for Mitzi piercing his ears like needles.
He’d decided to practise on her cat.
* * *
After leaving the Sleep Inn, his final journey to freedom had taken a lifetime, or so it seemed. He’d considered all options carefully and decided to travel by train again. South African airports were too dangerous, despite the authorities’ ignorance of his alternative identity: Bartholomeu Lomas, citizen of Portugal. The problem wouldn’t necessarily occur on leaving the country, he’d thought, but on entering a new country.
The journey by train to Lusaka in Zambia was not without incident, but once there he had reserved a flight under the name of Lomas to Nairobi, Kenya, with a transit connection on a Czech Airlines CˇSA flight to Prague.
At Prague’s Ruzyneˇ airport he’d presented another passport, this one in the name of Dr August Lippens, citizen of Belgium: back in Bujumbura, his friend Jules Daagari’s fabricateur had modified the Lippens passport so that it displayed Abel’s own photograph, the way he looked now, the result of a botched “weekend facelift”.
He’d spent the day in Prague, visiting the fifteenth-century astronomical clock in the Old Town Square, located between Wenceslas Square and the Charles Bridge across the Vltava. He was interested in this astrolabe, which medieval astronomers had used to determine the position of the moon, the planets and even the stars. Of course, he knew that Ptolemy had used an astrolabe much earlier, for the astronomical observations recorded in his Tetrabiblos.
That night he’d caught the Copernicus night train to Amsterdam from the station near Wenceslas Square. During the fourteen-hour journey he’d rested. From an Internet café at the station in Amsterdam he’d sent an e-mail to his friend Ignaz Bouts, informing him of his arrival time in Bruges, his final destination.
The end of a long journey; the beginning of his new life.
6.
Three hours per day, that was the only private time Ella allowed herself. Well, not per day, strictly speaking, because it was almost dark by the time she went jogging at Alberts Farm, and it was still dark when she left in the mornings to go to the gym with her colleague, young Stallie. But it was the only time she could set aside for personal pleasure. And God knows there was little enough pleasure in her life, personal or otherwise.
Finished with the gym, she was always at the office by daybreak, or knocking on doors in search of witnesses and evidence in a murder investigation. At six in the evening she would drive home, put on her comfortable old Nike trainers, black spandex pants and a T-shirt. The sun had set by the time she was back, had taken a shower, had a bite to eat, pulled on her old jeans and driven off for her harp lessons with Suki Wolski three times per week. When there weren’t lessons, she practised in her living room on the second-hand lever harp Suki had lent her. From this old 36-string Troubadour she would progress to an orchestral pedal harp, Suki said. But she was to practise every evening, Suki had told her, no excuses. Like Harpo Marx, who even took his harp – albeit the smaller folk harp – to the toilet, where he played “I Got Rhythm” on the loo.
“Was Harpo constipated?” Ella had asked.
“Well,” Suki had said, “that’s why he was such a good harpist – he used every minute of his free time to practise. His music came from his heart and his soul, not from his fingers.”
“Just don’t expect me to play ‘Bolero’ on the toilet,” Ella had replied.
She’d positioned the borrowed Troubadour in front of the television in the sitting room; the bathroom was too poky anyway, laundry all over the place.
An hour for jogging, an hour at the gym, an hour for the harp – the sum total of her free time. And she’d just sat down behind the Troubadour, her hands on either side of the strings, little fingers held aloft, when her cellphone rang. Suki had said: “You might as well have your little fingers amputated. You don’t need them for the harp. If a little finger tries to find a string, it contorts the entire hand. Forget about your little fingers; keep them out of the way.”
Ella wanted to ignore the ringtone, R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”, but she’d already seen the caller ID.
“Evening, Colonel.”
You never ignored the boss; he got irritated if his call wasn’t answered by the second ring, day or night.
“What are you doing? Are you busy? If you’re free, phone Sgt. Mfundisi, Kensington uniform branch. Could be something, could be nothing, but phone him.”
“Kensington? That’s outside our jurisdiction, Colonel. Don’t they fall under East Rand Murder and Robbery?”
“It’s not a murder.” A short pause, just a second, then he said, his voice rasping: “Well, it’s not a person. Looks like a cat’s been slaughtered.”
“A cat?”
“In a hotel room.”
“What about the SPCA, Colonel? Aren’t cats their . . . jurisdiction?”
Was it a crime to slaughter a cat? If the cat had been abused, she supposed it was, but hardly a case for Murder and Robbery.
“There was a jam jar on the nightstand in a hotel room. Not filled with jam, but with formalin and a skin . . . hair removed and tanned. The forensic lab identified it and informed Sgt. Mfundisi late this afternoon that it belonged to Felis catus.”
“A skinned cat? So, has a crime been committed?”
“Sgt. Mfundisi says he’s a bit confused as to whether it’s a crime to skin a cat and tan its hide. The bathroom is still cordoned off, but the hotel owner is putting pressure on him. Says if no crime has been committed, he wants his room back; he’s losing money while the police are twiddling their thumbs.”
“But why didn’t the sergeant just report it to East Rand?”
The colonel ignored her question. “Sgt. Mfundisi says after he got the forensic results this afternoon, he sat down and gave the matter some thought. He then remembered a case