Still shadowy, beyond the flashlight beam in Bruno’s hand, Scalpel stealthily retrieved the crowbar and struck wildly but heavily at Pete. The iron bar swung. One blow would pulverize Pete’s petal-soft skull.
Bruno saw a long, black object sweep down into the white flashlight illumination and sink, cracking, splashing, into the crown of Pete’s head. Bruno did not even have enough time to let the flashlight shake or flicker as some black liquid shot from Pete and dirtied his own face and clothes. Bruno felt rueful, but Scalpel had been ruthless.
In an instant, Pete went from fornication to celibacy. A sizzling convulsion. Black gore pissed up from the pointedly indented skull. Ominous. Here is real bullshit, some real horse manure, Bruno thought.
Bruno switched off the flashlight just in case Scalpel wanted to take a swipe at him with the bloody bat. He wasn’t sticking around. He dropped the light and hauled ass back to the basement stairwell.
Freaked out by the murder of his buddy, by another buddy, because both had copped with a corpse, and shaking anyway, Bruno lost his footing on the dark stairs. He pitched into the void and came up twisted, his neck broken.
Not the type to quail before a dog’s breakfast of a crime, Scalpel retrieved the flashlight, and, in the dimming beam, pulled Pete off their victim and pushed his pal’s body into the drying vomit under the dolly hoisting Diva’s gutted casket.
Now Scalpel held Diva’s head on his lap. The girl remained for him perfectly pure, despite her bloody, ruined dress and the outrages lately visited upon her otherwise preserved perfection. His pitiful tears rendered hers beautiful.
Filmsong
by Pasha Malla
Little India
The door of the Taj opened and two men came in. They moved past Aziz and stood at the sweets counter in the back. The only other customer was some old guy waiting for a take-out order. He was sitting at a table near the door, watching Gerrard Street through the window. It was close to 6 o’clock and getting dark. The streetlamps had come on and cars flashed by hissing through the slush with their lights on.
A young girl was working. Thursday nights were quiet. It was just her up front and her mum cooking in the back. She glided over and leaned her elbows on the counter.
“Ras malai,” said one of the men.
“With saffron,” said the other.
“We don’t do them with saffron,” said the girl. “Sorry.”
“What the hell, don’t do them with saffron,” said the first man. His voice was loud now. “First it’s minus bloody twenty-thirty degrees in your country. Benchod, you freeze your bloody nuts off! Now we ask ras malai with saffron, but you say no saffron.”
The girl whisked a stray bit of hair back from her forehead. “Yeah, no saffron. We’ve only got plain. You should try the gulab jamun. They’re good. Really fresh.”
The second man whispered something to the first man. Aziz scooped rogan josh into his mouth with his fingers, but didn’t take his eyes off the two men. They were dressed similarly: collared shirts — tucked into their jeans and unbuttoned to reveal great thrusts of chest hair — and leather jackets. The louder one had a mustache. The other didn’t. They both wore red threads tied around their wrists.
The second man, the clean-shaven, quiet one, said, “Gulab jamun, too sweet.”
“Try the jalebi,” said the girl.
The first one made a noise. “Benchod, even sweeter! You have ras malai, you add saffron, not too sweet. We want not too sweet.” He turned to Aziz. His eyes went from Aziz’s face to a poster above the table where Aziz was eating. On it was the actor Shahrukh Khan, mugging for the camera in sunglasses. “Is it right, Shahrukh?”
“Sorry?” said Aziz.
“Come on, Shahrukh.” He was getting into it now. “You want sweets, Shahrukh? You’re a film hero, which sweets will you order? You eat jalebi?”
Aziz looked at the girl on the other side of the counter. She looked back.
“Um,” said Aziz.
The two men advanced toward him. “What, Shahrukh?” said the one with the mustache. “Come on, yaar.”
The other one said something in what Aziz guessed was Marathi. Both men laughed. They were at his table now. The loud one poked his tin plate with a fingertip. “You eat meat, Shahrukh? You are Mussulman, just like the real Shahrukh?”
Aziz glanced down at his plate, at the half-eaten lamb. He looked up at the one man, then the other. They leaned toward him. There was beer on their breath. When the one with the mustache breathed his nose made a whistling noise.
Then a bell rang from the back. “Chicken tikka, naan, mattar paneer,” called the girl.
The old guy at the front of the restaurant got up. Aziz and the two men watched him move past their table and collect a paper bag from the girl. “Thanks,” he said.
The old guy left. Outside the snow was blowing in golden squalls in the light of the streetlamps. The two men turned back to Aziz. “Shahrukh,” said the loud, mustachioed one, “we are looking for a journalist. Do you know this journalist? His name is Meerza.”
“Shahrukhji,” said the other, “we work for a Mussulman. In Mumbai. We are not communalists. Our friends are Mussulman, Parsi, Hindu, Jain, Christian, whomever.”
The two men sat down across from Aziz. “I am Prem, this is Lal,” said the one with the mustache.
“Do you know this man, this Meerza?” asked Lal. He pulled out a photograph and slid it across the table. Aziz looked at the image. It was his neighbor, smiling before a typewriter. Aziz knew this man as Durani, the name written on his box in the building’s mailroom, and not Meerza. “We are journalists also,” said Lal. “We have come from India to meet this man.”
Aziz stared at the photograph. Once he had locked himself out and Durani had taken him into his own apartment until the superintendent arrived. The place had been empty except for a mattress on the floor and a few piles of books. While they were waiting Durani had prepared chai in the Kashmiri style, with almonds, cinnamon, and cardamom. Aziz had said nothing about this, nor had he mentioned the many books of Urdu poetry stacked around the room. The building, just west of Greenwood, was the sort of place where everyone had left a story behind somewhere else. The residents shared this, along with the understanding that no one needed to stir them up here.
In the photograph Durani looked different. There were no bags under his eyes. The skin on his face seemed less sallow. He appeared gregarious and happy, full of energy. His shirt was clean and freshly pressed. This was not how he looked now. But it was him.
“Do you know this Meerza?” asked Prem. He laid a clammy hand on Aziz’s arm. The knuckles bristled with hair. There was a time when Aziz would have taken that wrist between his fingers and snapped it like a twig. Instead, all he did now was resist the urge to yank his own arm away.
Aziz looked at the photograph again, then up at Prem. “No,” he said. “I don’t know anyone named Meerza.”
Prem and Lal sat there for a moment before Lal took back the photograph. “Okay.”
“What is playing at the cinema, Shahrukh?” said Prem, letting go of Aziz.
“At the Beach or at the Gerrard?”
“The one just there.” Prem motioned with his hand down the street. The gesture traced Aziz’s walk home, past the tikka houses and stores of religious paraphernalia, past the Ulster Arms with its coterie of drunks smoking in the parking lot, streetcars clattering by in both directions.
“The one that shows Hindi films,” said Lal.
“The Gerrard?” The cinema had reopened recently after years of dereliction. Durani worked there as an usher. Aziz often saw him leaving for work in the starchy uniform, bow tie and all. “I think that place is closed.”