Garvey nodded and stared into his desk. “Right,” he said. He glanced sideways and sighed as he watched Collins hulk back into his office.
“Detective?” said a voice.
He looked up. A scrawny boy in a white smock stood peeking into the Homicide office. “Yeah?” Garvey said.
“We’re about to begin,” said the boy.
“All right.”
Garvey stood and followed the boy across the rotunda and down the steps, then across the lower levels to the bleached tile stairs that wound down to where the dead slept and doctors did their best to make them speak.
The air grew cool down in the basement. The light was so lifeless here it was almost a different type of dark. Dusky jars of pink fluid lurked on shelves and blades winked from nearby rolling tables. The nauseating fragrance of formaldehyde and God knew what else floated in the room like a fog. And somewhere among it all was Gibson, overweight and darkly humorous, a cigarette dangling from his thick lips. No one had asked why he came seeking this job. It was the type of question you didn’t ask because you might get an answer.
“Heyo, Garv,” said Gibson. “Long time no see.”
“Not long enough.”
“You wound me, Garv,” he said. “You wound me. Who’s our lucky boy tonight?”
“No idea. That’s the problem.”
“I know. I was just making conversation.” He led Garvey to the little cabinets that hid the dead. Their shoes were loud on the tile floor, painfully so. The morgue was usually silent except for the hiss and chuckle of the pneumatic tubes in the walls as messages and packages shot in from somewhere out in the city. Other hospitals and labs, perhaps. Garvey had heard the contents were often gruesome. There was a story of a jar of fingers that had been misdirected up to Vice with the day’s mail, and Garvey wasn’t sure whether to believe it.
Gibson came to one cabinet door and offered Garvey a small jar of perfumed salve. “Here you go,” he said.
“I don’t need it.”
He chuckled. “You will.”
Garvey looked at it, then at the wall of small metal doors. “You got a ripe one?”
“Riper than a homegrown tomato,” Gibson said cheerfully.
“Then yeah. Yeah, I do.”
He laughed again and tossed it to him. “Smart boy.”
Garvey opened it and smeared a thumbful of the salve across his upper lip. Then he took a chair, put it next to the table, opened up the report, and began to write. Gibson and his attendant glanced at each other and Gibson smirked and shook his head. Then they opened the door, reached in, and pulled out the tray carrying the morning’s load.
His color and thickness had changed slightly, but that was all. His face had drained off some water and perhaps he had lost more of what little blood he had left. But overall it was the same. Garvey looked at his thin, intelligent face, his retreating hairline. Strong, worn hands, scarred lower arms. Genitals shrunken against the inside of his thigh. A man like any other, washed up on cement shores.
“Well,” Garvey said. “At least we know he wasn’t killed by denners.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Gibson.
“He’s still got a face, doesn’t he?”
Gibson chuckled and then began his inspection, chanting his litany of facts as he went along. Cause of death, estimation of age, summary description of wounds. The Latin terms for each body part formed some strange incantation in Garvey’s head. He and Gibson’s attendant wrote as fast as they could.
Garvey did this with nearly every homicide he caught. No other detective did, choosing instead to rely upon Gibson’s reports. Gibson was a fine doctor and did his job well, and Gibson knew that it wasn’t a sign of Garvey’s doubt that he was down here whenever he could be, watching their grim procedure. He knew it was something else.
Garvey did not know the word “vigil,” but he didn’t need to. This was a ritual for him, even though it had no name. It was a process of documentation, of marking the passage of the dead and the beginning of Garvey’s attempt to exact some sort of justice. And that was what their job was, at heart. They were men who noted deaths and attempted to change the world because of them. To put their killers to justice, perhaps, but what was that beyond a way of saying that this man mattered, that his life was important, and so his death should affect his killer’s life in turn?
And so he listened. And wrote.
He was considering the official phrasing of one of his sentences when he heard Gibson say, “Did you hear that, Detective?”
“Hear what?”
“Tattoo. On the inside of his bicep. It’s real faded. Hidden close to the armpit, probably so that you couldn’t see it.”
“What’s it of?” he asked, and stood.
“Looks like a bell and a hammer.”
“You mind?” Garvey asked, reaching for the corpse.
“I’m not married to him. Go on ahead.”
Garvey took the flesh of the man’s arm with his thumb and pushed it up. On the inside was a small black bell with a white hammer inside, acting as the clapper. It looked medieval. Some badge of brotherhood, almost.
“Ever seen it before?” asked Garvey.
“No,” said Gibson, frowning. “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“I haven’t. You?” Garvey asked the attendant.
The boy shook his head.
“Hm,” said Garvey. He looked at it a while, then picked up his file and sketched out the tattoo.
“Amateur stuff,” said Gibson. He flicked the dead man’s arm, the flesh as solid as rubber. “He didn’t know what he was doing at all. Probably just got some ink and a pin, maybe a razor, and went to it.”
“It’s the only identifying mark we have, though, right?”
“That’s true.”
Garvey sat back down, made sure to carefully notate the details of the tattoo, and then said, “Okay. Let’s continue on, then.”
CHAPTER SIX
Nights in Evesden were unlike nights anywhere else. As soon as the blue drained out of the sky all the cradle spotlights would come on at once across the city, shafts of hazy, dreamlike light stabbing up into the darkening atmosphere. They grew in clusters, positioned around each district’s cradle. If the angle was right one could look up and see a forest of soft white trunks swaying back and forth, moving so slowly and with borders so faint it was hard to tell if they were moving at all, unless they happened to fall across an airship, in which case a bright, burnished gold star would suddenly light up above. Newcomers found it hard to sleep in the more exposed neighborhoods, as they were unused to the tides of porcelain light that came washing across their walls or ceilings, but veteran Evesdeners hardly paid attention. They scarcely noticed the strange waltzes that moved back and forth across the city as overnight traffic poured in from the skies.
It was generally acknowledged that the farther you were from them the more spectacular the view was, and in that case Dockland, which would not tolerate a cradle or indeed any real sign of modern civilization, offered one of the best vistas possible, although probably one of the most dangerous ones as well. The entire neighborhood was almost a sea of gloom buried among mountains of sparkling light.
Deep in the twisting bowels of Dockland the city did not sleep. As the distant spotlights flickered on the markets stirred and came to life, gathering in dimly lit rooms and doorways and alley entrances. Smoke tumbled across the tent covers and turned the voices of the barkers and the tradesmen into coarse growls, barely human over the din and clatter of trade. Whores grouped in well-lit spots and flashed mangled grins at passersby. In other places men positioned themselves around the entryways of inconspicuous shops, signaling to one another and screening visitors for whatever business happened within.