Chapter I: Two Cities

First City: Manhattan

 

When Juan Serrano crosses the double-laned F. D. Roosevelt East River Drive with a few heavy steps of his worker’s boots, sunlight spears the moisture saturated air to lick over a dead body that is bobbing in the water. It’s the end of May, and any moment, the tangerine sun will break through the veil of fumes with a blast, lifting the cloak of haze and smog that shrouds the Five Boroughs. The corpse, stiff and contorted, swirls softly on the sheet of oily liquid, in no hurry to be discovered. There’s something profoundly peaceful in the air today, thinks Juan Serrano, who has lived half his life in and around New York,. By now he is forty-nine years old, and never experienced the city so tranquil as today. For once, the constant police and fire engine sirens are silent as the sun pushes through the last of shreds of dew and dust doming the skyline.

He listens to the soft splash of the river and hears the sea gulls calling out to each other across the expance of dark liquid. He takes a lungful of air, and fancies he smells the open salt of the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly a longing for the village he grew up in washes over him. Lately this happening more often to him. He’ll be hit by the memory of something from his hometown by a smell in the air. He scans the waves as he used to do as a teenager when he sailed along the coast of Columbia with the fishermen. That life had been dangerous, a constant fight against the elements. He sighs. The lullaby quality of the waves soothes him. All will be well. Yes. If he has faith than this country will be kind to him, he tells himself, and sends out a mental prayer to Baby Jesus. One day, he won’t need to live in constant fear of being deported back to the country he spend half his life trying to escape from. Morning mist swirls lazily over the basin where the Harlem and East River meet. The water’s surface reflects the salmon light peeking through the fringes of the clouds.

   Juan Serrano will be the first person to see the disembodied corpse, only barely discernible in the murky river. He’d set out before first light from the two-room apartment in Queens where he lives with his wife and three daughters to pay a visit to the car parking near Sutton Place, where he helps out, to ask demurely for his pay-check. Juan is one of Manhattan’s estimated 2.5 million illegal aliens, and he’s hoping to spend a few quiet days with his kids on the meadows of Central Park grilling pork sausages as it’s the weekend proceeding Memorial Day, one of the few chances he has to take time off. He has been looking forward to the holiday, but his boss isn’t in yet. And having time to spare, Juan becomes aware of the mega city as a part of the geography of the land and not as the man made hell he is acctually daily up against, living as he does at the bottom of the pecking order. There was hardly any traffic at this early hour, so he crosses the expressway and heads for the sooted fence to get as close to the water as possible and soak in the sence.

   When he first notices the bloated corpse bobbing between the choppy ripples, he thinks it’s a wooden log ploughing the river. Then his eagle eyes, accustomed to the endless horizons of wave heads of the his home country, recognizes the shape of a human backside in the river. The body is heading toward Gracie Mansion, where the Major of New York resides with his family. Juan Serrano turns back in alarm and, in that precise moment, Fate grabs him by the throat. A loaded lorry, roaring down the lane, knocks him over, bashing his leathery face into the mesh of the dirty metal fence. In the next instant, his body is thrust back onto the Driveway that hugs the shore of America’s richest island, and his skull is cracked open, killing him on the spot.

      From the upper floors of the skyscrapers, lining the elongated finger of land that constitutes Manhattan, one had the best view of the sun rise at this time of year. Standing in one of those luxus apartments one sees the water tanks of Roosevelt Island duck their heads into the warm breeze. But there are few people awake amongst the dwellers of those upper-class condos at this hour. Queensboro Bridge stands silhouetted like a sketteton against the rusty rose of dawn, watching over the naked corpse that drifts down-stream lying on its stomach. Water ripples scurry back and forth between Hallet’s Rock to the boulders of the Bronx like the shadows of migrating birds. America’s East Coast awakens with a start. Manhattan pounces to life. Sunlight races down the glass fronts of the Big Apple’s high rises, setting them aflame like gigantic candles of chrome, and the tall windows of the top storeys of an especially large duplex apartment mirror the scene especially well. To its feet, the bloated body spins against the back current, quietly disturbing the pattern of the other waves, unaware of the tusnami its discovery will unleash.

   Sergeant A. Hernandez will be the second person to see the body. The „A“ in the Sergeant’s name stands for Anthony, but everyody calls him Tony. He’ll be the one who will be officially known for having made the Memorial Day Discovery — that being the name under which events would soon be know as, nation wide as well as abroad. He is first police officer to get the call in that there had been a traffic accident on F.D. Roosevelt East River Drive. He had been on his usual control route along 1st Ave., past the UN building and back down 5th. Avenue when he was informed aboutthat somebody had been run over several times by vehicles unable to stop on short notice on their way into town. Well, thinks Sergeant Hernandez, thank God for Memorial Day coming up. On any other day, the city would already be brimming with vehicles and trunks and as chaotic as ever. Today it was different, for once in the year. The Sergeant swings into his car, preforms a clumsy a U-turn, and shoots down the forlorn streets of Mid Town.

   When he arrives, a flock of onlookers stands gathered around the threads of body tissue that were once Juan Serrano. In a bout of energy, he leaps from his patrol car and starts shouting. He’ll need to get the flow of traffic going again, have the site properly fenced off, follow routine police procedures. While Sergeant A. Hernandez scratches his head, he identifies two of the drivers involved in the accident. To judge by their guilty appearances one of them is a lorry driver with a sleep deprived face who shuffels the ground with his feet and the other an angry cabbie with a hoarse voice. Tony doubts that they will be proscecuted. In the middle of the road, the tarmac is splattered with a pool of dark blood and shreads of meaty fiber. The victim could have been young, or elderly; female or a male. There is no longer any way of telling.

   Then Tony sees something at the side of the road and walks over. It’s an arm, a lone arm, lying lost, its fingers curiously outstretched as if the man it had once belonged to had wanted to point out something. All other traces that this was once a human have been ground to brown mush. A murmur goes through the crowd, curious bystanders nudge each in the ribs, fighting for a better view of what the officer has found. In the distance, Sergeant Hernandez hears at least three fire engines nearing. It will not be such a tranquil Memorial Day weekend, after all he sighs.

It will be typically sunny, he thinks, grimy looking up. With one hand he takes out his note pad, ready to jolt down notes for his upcoming report. Ambulances sirens pierce the sigh of dawn, and the sun rises over the web of fumes. He looks up and lets his note book drop in the dirt with a start. He has seen the same distorted body floating on the dark waves that Juan Joaquin Serrano saw ten minutes earlier. „Mama mia.“ Automatically, the Sergeant grabs for his RT unit to contact HQs. His lips brush the coarse surface, so close he holds the radio set to his mouth, all the while scanning the river, as he shields his eyes against the bright light with his other hand. But what’s that? His jaw drops, his breathing quickens. Another body? It can’t be. All at once the orange haze shifts and half a dozen distorted bodies dot the river. Tony can’t believe it. In fascinating he watches as they fan out toward Downtown, polluting the waves, while the rising sun reflects off their naked limbs. It is the moment to whisk out his personal cellular and punch the repeat button he uses the most. This was big. As he blurts out his discovery a thrill shoots up his spine.

   Behind the floor-length windows of a certain luxurious duplex condo on 41st Street, the distorted claw of a hand clutches the curtains. The soft material frames the spectacular view of the sun rising behind iron wrought Queensboro Bridge, but the set of eyes the claw belongs to are eagerly following other events from behind the expensive, gold-threaded drapes. For a better view, a pair of binoculars is employed. For most of his almost eighty years the man with the claw-like hand has see the sun rise every morning, first from necessity then from choise.

   In the web of streets below the window, police cars, ambulances and unmarked police sedans are milling the vicinity of the claw’s building, obstructing the passage of traffic only further. The flow on the streets and on sidewalks swells up the sides of the buildings, till the gibberish of the people, speaking in a Babelonian mix of languages, billows into the air and the old man thinks he can feel their boom through the tall sheets of window glass. In the sky over Manhattan, a flock of helicopters encircles the fifty-fifthth story window and the claw’s brittle finger nails clutch the heavy curtains of the duplex, drawing them back into place, propelled by an echo of the survival instinct that has served him well all his life.

   Helicopters zoom in over the river to weave in between the high-rises, fighting to catch better shots of the dead bodies that are continuously surfacing out of the inky waves. Sometimes four/five come shooting up at once. Then another one swirls slowly into view only after half an hour. Over fifty-two have already been spotted. Ever so often, a new one pops up and then a deep roar goes through the mob of pedestrians, police and tourists flocking the intersections below the claw’s residence.

   During the next five hours, more and more dead bodies drift into sight amidst the State’s patrol boats that have fenced off the city’s waterways. Manhattan declares Alert Orange. The vans of the new’s networks have satellite discs attached to their roves. They’re mushrooming out of the ground, obstructing the criss-cross of roads all the way from the Embassy District, along the length of the entire Upper East Side, and far up into Harlem, even affecting the trafffic in Yonkers for the next few days. In the background, the claw has the TV running non-stop. On it, the news reporters from CNN and Fox, stationed on the streets of New York below, are buzzy interviewing different eye-witnesses, and they are taking up the owner of the claw’s whole acoustic attention with their excited jabbering.

   Manhattan is buzzing. The Big Apple is in a state of limbo, between panic, shock and sensational climax. The porcelain cup in the old man’s claw-like hand wobbles back and forth. He has been watching the news with special attention since the very start, soaking in every nuance of interpretation. Inbetween he has placed exactly twelve international long distance calls. The sun has long scince passed midday. The afternoon sun hits the man’s airy condo, casts a curry coloured glow on the walls. Hot Indian chai tea splashes onto the saucer.

   Tens of thousands of spectators throng the piers of the city, trying to catch first-hand glimpses. From his condo, the old man easily follows the movements of the blue uniforms of the police officers as they weave in and out of the spectators hoping to keep the unbearable tension building up under surveillance. He fancies he sees a pattern reminiscent of nano chips in a commputer simulation or the random hussel of a bazaar in his country of origin, guided by the invisible flow of different caste systems interacting in the same way as in the Big Apple.

On the flat-screen in the background, the old man watches how a fleet of twenty-five sleek, black rubber speed boats, steer in perfect V–Formation up the East River. Onboard the speedboats, one-hundred-and-thirty divers, in shiny black skin-suits, stand in determined postures, noses to the wind, ready to plunge under water to find out where the bodies are coming from. Midday has long since passed, the afternoon sun is throwing long streks of light over the high walls of the duplex, bathing everything with a sprinkle of curry. The wrinkled claw, clutches the cup, tightens its grip, and the dainty painted object from which he’s been drinking bursts apart between his emaciated finger tips.

   International news networks are broadcasting the discovery around the globe. All international news stations have their most prominant faces on the scene. Screens have been set up in the stores along the streets so that the people can follow the latesr events. But one man’s face keeps showing up in particular and filling out the TV screen on every channel: Sergeant Tony Hernandez. He is the cob who discovered the first mysterious corpse at the break of day, and he does not tire from describing how he perceived the moment.

   On the street, Tony Hernandez’s smile switches off the moment the camera pulls away. His gaze darts over to his identical twin, and his expression turns from friendly concern to open admiration. Even before phoning his chief, Tony had rung up his five minute older brother, Ernesto. The news had been just too good not to share with the person closest to him. More than one corpse in the river was already a decent story, and if somebody knew how to wrap up a story it was his twin brother.    

   Ernesto — or as all people apart from Tony call him — Ernie, is the more intelligent one of the two. He’s also inherited that uncanny sense for business of their late father’s, who came to the USA following the death of Spain’s fascist leader. Apart from family, most people couldn’t tell the two apart. But Ernesto was the one who’d studied journalism at NYU, travelled the five continents and worked with various net networks on a free-lance basis. Only once people knew this, they’d claim they saw the intellectual spark, so well did Ernesto know how to hide it.

   “Good one,” says Ernesto, slapping his younger brother on the back. „We’ve only been waiting for a story like this, bro.”

   The older one’s eyes are alight with a that glint that always meant that he was onto a new project, but that nobody apart from Tony knew how to read. “This is going to be our fifteen minutes of fame, Tony boy,” he said. “And guess what? I’m getting an exclusive. They’re paying me to do the whole coverage on this one.”

   Anthony whistles, grins back and high-fives his brother. “Good one, hermano mio”.

   They’re a dream team, the way brothers are meant to be. Tony would get one angle on the events — and he wouldn’t shy from peeking into the police files either — while his brother would weave story together, give it an edge that sold. In his mind Tony was already deciding which one of the suba-divers, who were descending to the debris-littered river bed of the East River, he’d contact later. Together with his twin, he’d solve the mystery burning on everybody’s lips: What the fuck was going on?

 

Second City: Mumbai

(Three Days Later)

 

From the airplane India looks to her like city on stilts made of concrete highways that bridged a river of cardboard shacks with tin rooves. The White Lady arrives in Mumbai. Faint smoke rises into the polluted morning air to greet her. India seems to be sinking, she thinks. Monica’s only recently been given the new code name White Lady, and not sure she likes it. It sounds pretentious, overbearing. The part she played in North Africa officially speaking never took place. Now it’s back to basics and, looking at the city formally known as Bomby, Monica feel the primeval strength of the Subtropical continent reach out to her.

   This is her second mission, and her new role came with the new name. For the last four hours, her fellow under-cover agent and she have been crossing the ink-blue Arabian Sea, speeding toward the rising sun with the moon on their trail. The moon is enormous, but it has not been the only thing kepting Monica awake since they boarded in Dubai. Her fellow under-cover agent, on the other hand, is fast asleep and has been snoring soundly ever since they boarded in the U.A.E. He makes her queasy. Normally she’s good at shaking off personal dislikes with a toss of her short mane. With Aziz it’s different. Too much has passed between them.

   But that is not the only reason she can’t relax. She’s studied the photos Mr. Schmitz, her boss at the intelligence agency they work for, gave her before take-off. The plane ride had been stifling; the photos in the folder shocking. Every time she’d tried to close her lids, disembodied corpses, ninety-five in total, had stared back at her with hollow eyes. The corpses had all been from the Indian Sub-continent, undernourished and fragile. The pictures showed piles of their wasted flesh and the husks of body parts, bloated by their contact with the brackish water of New York’s East River. The dead bodies the NYP had fished out, were grossly disfigured, and it was quickly determined that their organs having been extracted in a multitude of primitive but effective ways. The hideous details had been kept from the public, but that did not mean that the CIA and INTERPOL were not one the case. Better still, TROY I, (with a Roman 1) was in charge of background investigations. Many western governments employed the services of the company she worked for in highly explosive situations.

Below her, miles upon miles of illuminated highway stretched like the tentacles of an octopus till they dissolve in shadowy pouches of streaming curls and debris. She tears her eyes away from the traffic lights that vein the geography and flings Aziz, her co-worker, a look of disapproval. In sleep, he wears that self content smirk that always makes her want to choke him bare-handed.

   Their trail pointed indisputably toward Mumbai, India’s front door. Monica had only learnt about their new joint mission, labeled SIA — short for sensitive information acquisition — shortly before. On her first assignment on Djerba Aziz had played an ambiguous role. Now, he was her equal but the memory of his role during her last mission still hovers on her mind. In India, they will impersonate a team of human merchandisers. Would he be up to it?

   They closed over the shores of the Indian Ocean; Mumbai, the destination of their first joint job, lies below. The plane loops the yellowing moon, waiting for a chance to land on the humid runway of Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Before sunrise properly spreads its wings over Western India, the unequal pair of under-cover agents alight into the damp heat, and Monica’s thrill about being on the onset of a new enterprise is dabbed by the humidity that slaps her in the face the moment the automatic doors of the airport whiz to the side. She feels the sting of a mosquito bite prick her skin.

   She still thinks of the city as Bombay. Her knowledge is limited to what she’s picked up during Law School. But, whatever one calls it, it’s not only the biggest city of the Sub-Indian Continent it is also the most corrupt, maybe even in the whole of Asia. She’s only touched to the soil minutes before and she already felt that she’ll feel at home. After the many years she’s spent in North Africa, she easily makes the wild bustle, the hum of the air her own. A sharp smell rises from every corner of the airport.

   When the first Europeans came to these shores in 1858 they started filling up the rivers between the seven separate islands with soil and sand, to create what is now Mumbai. By the 1920’s the city’s were doors wide open to international trade. Today, the city housed over 20.5 million people from all over the world, offering every imaginable constellation of ethnical background and human ambition. Whatever one wanted; in Mumbai and in New York one found it...

Want to read more?

 

 This is only the beginning of chapter one of Masala Moon, Monica’s Assigment in India.

 

Tthat at least is the working title! I’mstill  in the process of charting out the different story threads. So far I’ve done some research into the history of India and particularily into the sale of sex slaves and the ancient local Hindu traditions conected with it. I’m excited to start writing now. There’ll be a lot of action and romance and a touch of magical surrealism, in the same way as it was in this book’s predecessor, ARAB NIGHTS, where Monica brushed shoulders with Islamic terrorism and chased the murderer of an English tourist girl.

So, in case, you have become intrigued by under-cover agent Monica and what role she previously played, read the background story! Arab Nights will tell you what Monica mastered to before her new adventure.

 

Check out Arab Nights here, on BookRix.com or elsewhere

Impressum

Texte: Svenja Bary
Bildmaterialien: Svenja Bary
Lektorat: Svenja Bary
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 15.11.2016

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