LITMIR.BIZ

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branches, with cracks in the woven tree limbs above her. Glowing hot rocks were carried in on forked sticks and gently laid in a small depression in the earth floor. A man set up a worn concave stone full of water, and another man, with a broom tied of brush and leaves, sprinkled the water onto the hot stones. There was chanting; she stripped off her T-shirt and shorts and sat naked in the humid almost-dark, surrendering.

      She’d felt as if she were suffocating, the sweat rivers pouring individually from each scalp follicle and down her back. As she sweated something out of herself, she saw in the middle of her mind the sweat, black threads of thoughts and confusions, turn to silvery estuaries as her spirit cleansed itself, purified. It might have taken hours but she didn’t know, because she was stoned on herself and the smoke and the rhythmic murmurs of the three men in there with her. It was rancid with human seepage and the little tied bundles of tobacco and herbs smoking on the hot stones, and she seemed to not blink for five or ten minutes at a time, not until she remembered to. The lodge was very dark and close and she’d been told it was called the Mother’s Womb.

      One man had asked: “What are you, sister?”

      She said, for no discernable reason, “Raven,” the image, not the word, flying itself into what remained of her drained mind.

      “Go outside. Now.”

      One man held the thick blankets back from the doorway and she ducked out as naked as birth into the first cold day of creation, lit by a new light and populated with unheard sounds and unrecognizable colours and she heard every leaf rustle against itself, heard the individual microscopic boulders of sand shifting under a soft breeze. There in front of the low lodge was an inky raven perched on a mossy stone. It called to her and she laughed in return, a laugh her breath had never created before.

      She was thinking of that day, of imagining a raven and then finding one, as she pushed open the door to the detachment office and her corporal handed her the printout of an email. Before she took it she had a sudden unbidden image of Ray Tate’s face in her mind, and the email said the State Police were assisting the city during the epidemic. Manpower was requested.

      “Right,” the corporal said. “As if.”

      She said, “You’re Acting. You’re in charge until I get back.”

      He, who she’d overheard identifying her only by the monosyllabic name of a body part, smiled and said, “Yes, Sergeant Brown.”

      She saw his smile was genuine and appreciated that he was just a kid, an untested boy-cop who’d lose a lot if he ever had to cross the thickest of lines, inhaling his own gun smoke, watching someone die to death at his feet.

      She was packed and at the detachment office, and her lieutenant said there were lots of cars down in the city. “They don’t have a problem of vehicles, Sergeant, they’re parked all over the fucking town. What they have is have a problem of no one to drive them. Take the nine o’clock Amtrak.” He flipped her a State credit card and stared at her. “You sure you want to go? They got this plague going down there, I guess you heard? They’re quarantining people. They’re gonna have riots. That place is finished.”

      Her corporal silently drove her to the railway station. After she dragged her carryall from the back of the Expedition, she leaned in the window. “Look, you don’t have to be afraid, you know? Go out, talk to them. They’re just people, same as you and me. Ask them where the good fish are, where the good hunting is. Ask a question, even if you already know the answer. Give them that, at least.” She stared at him. She wasn’t sure she was getting through.

      He nodded and looked away through the windshield. She thought he was going to laugh: a midget black girl sergeant telling a buff farm boy how to bale hay. But when she spoke he had to at least listen: she’d killed a gunman in the line and it entitled her to a measure of respect. She got her stripes by smelling her own gun smoke, not down in the capitol with her legs open.

      She was fearful for the people up there, what might happen if she wasn’t around. This must be how Ray Tate feels about his kid cops. She started to try again, “Tom, listen to me just one listen, okay, you got a toolbox —” She gave it up and made a sad little smile. “Good luck, Tom.”

      He put the Expedition into gear.

      She stepped back, and when he drove away, she made a complex hand signal at his departing truck and went into the train station.

      Chapter 5

      In front of the old cut-stone courthouse on Soldiers’ Square, Ray Tate sat on his balled-up raid jacket and studied the bird droppings on the wide steps. His artist self and his detective self engaged one another: the splashes of the runny avian stuff had a natural textured aspect that appealed to his abstract painterly eye; the velocity, direction of spatter, and thickness spoke to his deductive talents as well as to his appreciation of crazy Jackson Pollock. One particularly wide glob, a little shiny and red and with no drag to any direction, told him the bird had recently perched on one of the eaves, held its ass over the edge, and bombed one straight down, perfectly vertical. Another sample had extreme fingering: the bird had been in flight north at a good speed. He deduced that the caked bird shit had been dropped at the end of the previous spring, when a lot of the birds headed north full of southern berries. Uncoagulated blood was thinner than bird shit but the principles were the same. On the walls of the academy training house, and at real crime stages afterwards, he could tell which way a knife had swung, what velocity a baseball bat had picked up in its travel. Spatter was the murderer’s brush stroke: it spoke to the miscreant’s enthusiasm and talent.

      The gunshot fella had been wrong. The sun had burned off the dawn into a sharp, still morning. The stars-and-bars hung from the flagpole, limp as a rag. In front of the courthouse, the morning parade of miscreants lounged in the sunlight on the steps, unintelligibly welcoming each other with yo-bloods and huhs and slapping boneless high-fives. They talked bail and jail with depressed, drooping lawyers in sagging suits and bad haircuts. Three members of the Flying Fukienese Dragons, in black sateen gang jackets with Mandarin collars, wore white surgical masks decorated with toothy shark’s mouths, lifting them only to take drags on cigarettes or to spit dangerously near passersby. A haunted bum clutched his chest and bent over, coughing sputum near the war memorial while four plainclothesmen backed away in a pack, looking back as though they wanted to kick his lungs out.

      Back in his uniformed days, Ray Tate had liked being in court. It was the culmination of his work. He was good on the stand. He gave good fuck, the prosecutors said. When a clerk offered him the bible and asked if he swore to tell the truth, Ray Tate held the book with reverence, crossed himself, said, “I do so swear,” and bit his knuckle. He stood erect in the box in his uniform, his hat on the ledge, hands clasped either front or back, but usually back because it gave a less defensive posture, and spoke exactly enough words to answer the question asked. Every second question, he’d answer directly to the judge or jury. Whenever he was asked about an action or statement of the accused, he’d glance over at the dock while answering, essaying that his answer applied to this specific accused and no other individual on earth. His entire posture said Nothing Personal; he seldom needed rehabilitation by the Prosecutor. The defence lawyers usually got him out of the box as quickly as possible.

      The fingerman from Homicide was late. Ray Tate used the time to wander his mind through Paris, where he’d never been. It would be like this, he thought: observing passersby, a glass of something cool and European as his elbow rested on a round metal table, a snobby waiter hovering in the background. A thick coil sketchpad would be awaiting inspiration. His fingernails would be caked with primary colours, his knuckles black with charcoal. Cobblestones would be an endless slick geometry, diminishing into the vanishing point of coffin-shaped rocks, defined and perfect and endless into infinity.

      Djuna Brown would’ve been in there too. He imagined swaggering narrow Frenchmen leering at her cocoa skin, at her spiked shiny hair poking from under a cocky beret. She’d wear a scarf looped at her long throat and would look as exotic as Paris itself.

      He didn’t make a picture of himself, but his garb wouldn’t be faux biker or the blue suit with chevrons on his arms, although he

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