Chapter Two

Dave’s secretary, Maldiva, was a fashionable woman of fifty who looked forty. A true professional with almost thirty years of experience, she was the perfect office manager and kept track of the bills, the clients—of which there had never been an abundance—and subtly influenced the office atmosphere by maintaining a vase of flowers in every room.

The rooms were two.

The office was modest, capable of boasting, apart from the two rooms, only a bathroom and a smallish kitchen.

The bathroom was a disagreeable place with a hardened mop in a faded plastic bucket always lurking near the sink, and ancient documentation-filled dusty black nylon bags huddling in the corner of the unused shower stall.

The compact kitchen was adjacent to a small peeling terrace looking into the back street, but the glass terrace door was half-buried by more nylon bags, punctured in many parts by their cargo of timeworn magazines. The key to this door had lain unsought for well over a year.

The office was in an apartment building in the center and was hence a former apartment itself. Most of the neighbors were also small firms of various sorts, including even the local branch of a Belarusian tractor exporter. The people working there were mainly plump men with police mustaches and tracksuits. Dave exchanged nods with them during their fairly frequent corridor encounters.

The linoleum below his shoes was an icky green, slightly curled up at the corners of the rooms, and the two rustic landscape paintings on the walls of Maldiva’s room were only marginally better than the products of Hitler’s early artistic period.

“Hello, Mister Cohran.” The secretary smiled. She had a very wide mouth, her lips in the fashionable brown hue. The golden thin sticks hanging from her earlobes swayed and glittered as her head gently trembled in a habitual spasm of politeness.

Dave returned the nod with a smile, skillfully suppressing a shudder, which only made it to his left arm, and only for a second.

Just yesterday night he was reviewing the ‘MILF Sluts Galore’ portal, trying to find any hidden links to illegal vids, after being forwarded a report that unearthed a correlation between lust for older women and lust for little boys.

Maldiva’s far too successful attempts of keeping pace with contemporary, erotically tinged fashion, produced automatic recollections of other middle-aged mouths, smiling and gaping and sucking...

Dave briskly strode over the linoleum and into his room. He switched on his PC, and then returned to the secretary’s room, to the black plastic coffee table near her desk, to make himself a cup while the computer warmed up.

Lighthearted female voices sang melodically from the office radio. He listened for a few seconds, hearing the following:

“Face me, face me,

Ay-ay-ace me,

Darling, face,

I want you to face me,

Ace me, ace me,

Face me now.”

He glanced sideways at Maldiva, who caught his glance, and professionally smiled back at him with a half-mocking flutter of green eyelashes.

Malidva was sometimes coquettish in a girlish manner, but with a dash of irony added, as a sign of keeping up with the times.

After this short burst of amiable nonverbal communication, her gaze returned to the screen in front of her.

Dave thought about the song and about his secretary. Did she know the modern meaning of ‘face me’? Of someone ‘facing’ someone? If so, did she find it exciting, or repulsive, or just another handy piece of the puzzle of how to be in step with today’s world?

Come to think of that, did she fully realize the veiled meaning behind the brown lipstick, at least before it hit the mass-market fashion?

This was as big a mystery as her dominatrix boots and her huge and shapeless sagging leather handbag with the shiny decorative chains hanging from it.

Was she consciously attempting to recreate personae from the deepest desires of the twisted urban male or was this just fashion? Perhaps he, himself, was just getting worn down by the porn and seeing more than there really was to things?

The detective realized that the sound heralding his computer’s readiness for someone to unlock it had probably already been given, but masked by the pop music.

He walked into his room, shut the door, switched off the air conditioning, opened the window slightly, and sat down at his desk. The swivel chair accepted him with an accommodating creak and a soft hydraulic hiss.

Dave saw that his official inbox had three new letters. Two were tagged as reports.

The first report was of a woman found dead in her apartment. Her daughter had returned from school, only to find her mother naked, lying on her back on the bed, with her arms and legs tied to the bed posts. Apparent cause of death–feces in her mouth and nose.

Death by shit, Dave thought. He screwed up his mouth and forehead as the reaction hit him, and then looked at the additional info.

The victim was thirty-three years old, divorced, no known boyfriend or girlfriend. Apparently a case of a fetish game gone wrong. Unfortunately, she appeared to have been fed her own feces, with no non-family DNA found so far, and the speedy discovery of the unknown culprit seemed highly improbable.

Dave dwelled for a few more seconds on the information. This had obviously been a ‘swallow wallow,’ as the practice was called by aficionados, a consensual game gone terribly wrong. The passive player in the game, the ‘bottom pig’—the ‘swallow-wallower’ —would usually enter something like a trance, and begin gulping down the partner’s feces without chewing, in one continuous motion.

He had seen only two such episodes in amateur v-clips, for apparently the trance was difficult to achieve in front of a camera, and there was something fascinating in the glazed eyes of the ‘bottom’ fecalists. In this state, they could ingest more feces than they would normally be able to ingest ordinary food. So the blogosphere claimed anyway.

What a way to go.

What a bastard, or bitch, the partner had been, Dave thought as another wave of nauseous indignation hit him, first to not notice the woman’s death, and then the whole fleeing of the scene of accident thing, leaving the corpse for the daughter to find.

Dave closed the file, this was just general information to keep him updated, his services were obviously not required here.

He looked at the second report. This one was about a man of sixty-two, found in his hotel room, hanged in the closet, dressed in a Batman costume.

‘Coat hangers’ they’d been dubbed, these unfortunates who misjudged the ramifications of their happy hour. Moderately successful mature men and women most of them.

Talk about skeletons in the closet.

This one was a clear-cut case of accidental suicide through autoerotic asphyxiation. Nevertheless, since the deceased was a minor celebrity–the analyst of an online news show—the hotel staff was briefly questioned, to determine whether the man had any assistance in his self-directed games.

Unsurprisingly, everyone denied involvement.

Now was the time to look at the third letter. Upon clicking it open, Dave forgot about coat hangers and wallowers at once. It was a new assignment.

He read the letter, frowned, and read it again.

In the last one month, three people had reported break-ins, with some valuables missing from their homes, and their sex dolls destroyed. In all three cases, the cybernetic sex toys were smashed or dismembered.

Dave was given the case, since a consulting psychologist speculated there was a real chance that sooner or later the criminal could graduate from ‘murdering’ synthetic love slaves to the real murder of real people.

A possible latent serial killer.

Quite probably a stalker. Otherwise, how would he have known into which houses to break in?

Maybe a hacker, Dave mused, maybe he used digital stalking to find out where to break in. Dave always jumped to the conclusion that a perpetrator was a man and in nine out of ten cases, he was right.

Dave cranked his head left and right with some audible cracks and stretched his arms. He stood up and opened the window wider.

Outside, he saw people walking, cars moving, a stray dog darting furtively from car to trash bin, from cover to cover. He breathed in deeply and then closed the window and went out of his room.

“Maldiva,” he said as he put on his jacket. “I’m going to the precinct to talk to Mister Fortham. If anyone calls, I’ll be back in about two hours.”

“All right, Mister Cohran.” The brown lips stretched in a wide oily smile. The skin on her neck quivered slightly as she whirled back to her PC monitor with a show of youthful dynamism.

Pelicanic images popped unbidden into Dave’s mind again and he lunged for the door, stopped with a start, and returned to his room, to lock his computer. Then he really went out.

Written reports were all well and good, but it was always better to hear it personally from the person who forwarded the information. Besides, he liked to maintain personal contacts the old-fashioned way from time to time.

If you only communicate with someone electronically, sooner or later a certain disbelief sets in that you actually exist. Once that happens, people tend to forget to send you your wages, or your bonuses, or important updates—or cases.

Dave climbed into his car and switched on the player. An ambient version of Fool on the Hill, with plenty of synthesizers piled on top was the next song of the album.

A number of additional ‘ethnic’ instruments did not quite ruin it, but certainly did not improve on the melody.