Girls of Yellow

  GIRLS OF YELLOW

  a novel by

  OREST STELMACH

  GIRLS OF YELLOW

  Copyright © 2018 by Orest Stelmach. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Orest Stelmach

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  ALSO BY OREST STELMACH

  The Boy from Reactor 4

  The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

  The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark

  The Altar Girl

  The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

  “Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if someone says anything back, that is an outrage.”

  Sir Winston Churchill

  Dhimmi – a person living in a region overrun by Muslim conquest who is accorded a protected status and allowed to retain his or her original faith.

  CHAPTER 1

  Major Sami Ali knew he’d been assigned the dhimmi’s murder because he was the worst detective on the Budapest police force. And he understood exactly what his boss expected him to do—use minimal departmental resources to conduct a basic investigation, find no evidence of religious cleansing, and bury the case.

  Ali knew such a weak effort rendered him a fraud and he didn’t care. Pride didn’t pay his daughter’s tuition. His job was to follow orders and provide for his family. Also, his father had made him take an oath as a child to hate Christians and Jews for the rest of his life. He didn’t give a damn about the dhimmis.

  The body had been found at the Matthias Catholic Church, one of only three remaining Christian churches in the section of the city known as Dhimmi Town. Gothic spires decorated with gargoyles towered above a diamond-patterned roof, green and brown ceramic tiles glittering in the sun. Ismael, the crime scene technician, was kneeling beside the corpse near the altar when Ali arrived inside. His friend reminded Ali of a mongoose—unassuming at first glance, but pity the snake who dared to test his mettle.

  “First comes Saturday,” Ismael said.

  “Then comes Sunday,” Ali said.

  The salutation had originated in the Middle East during the early twentieth century, long before the third world war, the collapse of governments and economies, and the migration of survivors toward people who shared the same faith.

  First we’ll take care of the Jews, who pray on Saturday, and then we’ll take care of the Christians, who pray on Sunday.

  The old prophecy had been fulfilled in Arabia. Then, after Muslims flooded Europe, Sharia law had been enacted throughout the continent. Only the dhimmis prevented the prophecy from being true in what was now known as Eurabia, too.

  And now there were one fewer dhimmis.

  Ali couldn’t see the corpse. Ismael was hovering over it, blocking his view.

  “What are we celebrating?” Ali said.

  “Death by strangulation,” Ismael said.

  “What? No machete?”

  “No blood. He strangled her with his hands.”

  “No blood. You’ve got to be kidding … Wait. Did you say her?”

  “Bruising on both sides of the neck but no actual prints. He must have worn gloves.”

  “Signs of struggle?” Ali said.

  “None that I can see.”

  Ismael stepped back to reveal a girl’s corpse, a lithe figure with hair the color of sun-drenched wheat. “Look, A. She can’t be more than fourteen or fifteen.”

  “Ish,” Ali said. The first syllable of his friend’s name was the only sound he could muster because the sight of the girl had taken him to the place he hoped to never revisit.

  “What a waste,” Ismael said.

  Ali’s childhood memories were secured in an impenetrable vault protected by imaginary barbed wire, steel walls, and padlocks. Whenever something or someone prodded the vault, its protective devices tightened. This time, however, its defenses disintegrated and the locks sprang open. Out streamed the vision he loathed so much it made him long for sudden death.

  It was all in the past, Ali tried to tell himself, but no one could detect a lie more easily than a cop, even a lousy one. A similar-looking girl was lying before him. And she, too, was dead.

  “The eyes,” Ismael said. He reached over and lifted the dead girl’s eyelids. “You see the eyes?”

  They looked like aquamarine jewels.

  Of course Ali had noticed the eyes, as surely as he’d noticed the girl’s oval face, alabaster skin, and golden locks. It wasn’t their beauty that shocked Ali and Ismael, but rather their presence in their sockets, because the typical religious cleansing involved their removal. Lower your head—submit to Islam—lest your eyes be snatched.

  Ismael nodded for Ali to come closer, then glanced in both directions to make sure the other two technicians taking pictures of the church interior couldn’t hear him.

  “She wasn’t killed here,” Ismael said. “She was brought here after the fact.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Ismail lowered his voice further. “Because there was a witness.”

  Ali lost his breath. “A witness?” There were never any witnesses in Dhimmi Town, at least none brave or stupid enough to come forward.

  “The caretaker who called it in. He was here when the killer brought in the body. Point of entry, front door. Point of exit, front door.”

  “He saw the killer?”

  “He was taken to headquarters to give his statement and for his own protection. But I don’t think it’s his protection your boss will be worried about. Especially not with the world leaders in town for that conference. Think about it. The heads of all four kingdoms—the Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and us—all in the same place. Can’t have religious cleansing when the religions are trying to find a way to get along, can you?”

  Ali heard the question and understood Ismael’s point. His boss wanted the case buried quickly. But that mattered less to Ali than Ismael’s previous implication, that the higher-ups would do everything necessary to make sure the witness was silenced. To Ali’s own amazement, something compelled him right there and then to do everything in his power to make sure the witness was heard.

  But was he too late?

  Ali told Ismael he’d be in touch and rushed out of the church. As he ran toward
his car, the call to prayer sounded. It was the second such call of the day which meant it was just past noon. The sound of the Muezzin’s mellifluous voice always slowed Ali’s pulse, drained him of angst and sorrow, and lifted his spirits. The thought of not stopping whatever he was doing to contemplate the substance of his Islamic beliefs five times a day was unthinkable.

  Yet that’s exactly what he considered doing the moment the initial call sounded. The image of the dead girl from his youth gripped him so tightly that he wanted—no, he needed —to begin a thorough investigation of this girl’s murder immediately. One death bore no relation to the other. More than twenty-five years had past since the first girl had died. The victims merely resembled each other.

  Ali realized this but it made no difference to him. To say that he’d failed the first girl was a gross understatement. He couldn’t contemplate repeating the mistake. Did he even have the skills to solve a murder? Ali wasn’t sure himself. The other cops called him the Dhimmi Lover precisely because he had no love for them. It was a joke well-known throughout the force. What would they say if the worst detective in Eurabia started acting like a real police? The Dhimmi Lover actually trying to solve the murder of a dhimmi? They’d all get a laugh out of that one.

  When the second call came for prayer to begin, Ali didn’t stop to face Mecca. Instead, he climbed in his car, hammered the gas pedal and raced toward the station. Never before had he thought of the streets of Dhimmi Town as his own. Who in his right mind would want them?

  But they were his, he realized, whether he liked them or not, just as surely as he was among the few Muslims not prostrating themselves before Allah in the capital city of the central region of the Eurabian Caliphate.

  Ali hoped like hell no one recognized him behind the wheel.

  CHAPTER 2

  When Elise De Jong arrived in Budapest a week ago, the call to prayer was a giant pain in the ass. The first call came before daybreak at five o’clock in the morning, right when she was trying to squeeze out her last hour of sleep before rising to get ready for work. Fat chance of that happening with a man whining in Arabic over a loudspeaker. But much to her shock, within a week she changed her mind. The man delivering the prayer was obviously a performer of the highest order, and what she initially considered to be whining became a hypnotic song that woke her up briefly and then lulled her into two more hours of delicious sleep.

  After maintaining pretenses and praying with the rest of the city after noon, Elise pedaled furiously to Ottoman Health Network’s offices. Women weren’t allowed to drive cars in Eurabia. Even worse, no woman under the age of forty-five was allowed to go anywhere without a male escort. Driving was considered an inducement to low morals, while appearing in public unescorted at a child-bearing age was considered to be a sexual provocation. The woman’s religion wasn’t relevant. Sharia—Islamic law that prescribed religious and civil duties and penalties for disobedience—applied equally to dhimmis and Muslims. Elise was ten years too young to be out alone, and with her unblemished skin she looked even younger. As a result, she wore a burqa, the most concealing of all the Islamic coverings for women that included a mesh screen over her eyes.

  Elise had done her research last night after work, when she’d tailed Dr. Rudolph Qattan to the Southern part of Pest, which was located east of the Danube. There she discovered a labyrinth of shops catering to those in need of things that were not supposed to be available in an Islamic state. Rubbish gathered at gutters as though neither state nor shopkeeper wanted to be accountable for them. The Saudis owned the stores, the Filipinos brewed the moonshine, the Pakistanis distributed the drugs, and Lebanese-Syrians trafficked in Far Eastern pornography called “Super Films.” Arabians loitered on the sidewalks, not a single European face among them. At least that’s what it seemed like on the outer rim of the maze of sin.

  In fact, the deeper one ventured into the labyrinth, the lighter the skin became. The Middle East had portrayed Western women as sexually obsessed deviants for centuries. The disinformation had worked. First-timers to the inner maze were shocked to learn that the women were in it for the cash, not the sex. Italian and Greek girls from Western Eurabia beckoned from green-lit doorways, and when the lights turned red, the Southern Pest’s most exotic sexual offerings revealed themselves—the Scandinavians. In fact, they were mostly Eastern European women masquerading as Scandinavians, but their clients either didn’t know or didn’t care. Many Muslim men paid a week’s wages to have sex with a Swedish woman—or a reasonable body double—preferably with a cross dangling from her neck. Wearing a cross in public was a crime punishable by death, thus the prostitute’s wearing it heightened the man’s sense of power and pleasure. An hour with a cross-wearing, Christian goddess was the most expensive offering on Southern Pest’s menu of forbidden indulgences, and lines stretched long for the best performers.

  Qattan didn’t lead her to the row of seamy doorways populated by the willing, white amazons of Western Eurabia. He led her beyond that place, where he engaged in an indulgence so immoral and forbidden that it would have taken a court less than sixty seconds to produce a guilty verdict. Elise photographed him going in and out of the unmarked door and later returned and interrogated the owner. One flash of her genuine-looking police credentials was all it took to win his complete cooperation. He told her everything she needed to know, escorted her into the back room, and let her take pictures of the goods in question. When the owner asked her what would happen to him and his business, Elise told him she would give him a pass for his cooperation with her investigation into the customer in question. He sobbed with gratitude.

  Elise entered Ottoman Health offices after arriving by bicycle and found the waiting area looking like a hospital emergency room. A seventeen-year-old had arrived with her face slashed from ear to mouth, her eye sockets bashed in, and a knife protruding from the right side of her chest. Doctors and office personnel were shouting instructions to each other and scrambling to administer first-aid while the girl lay on the floor in shock.

  It turned out she had escaped her attacker and run to her doctor’s office because he was the only man she trusted, and she feared her assailant would find and kill her if she went to the hospital. Her assailant was her fifteen year-old brother, who’d tried to murder her with his parents’ blessing to punish her for being raped a week earlier. The family had even planned a feast for this evening to celebrate its cleansing from the shame their daughter had brought upon them by being defiled against her will.

  Muslims, Elise thought. What a savage people.

  Qattan was a handsome man in his mid-forties with a square jaw and a neatly trimmed beard that matched his brown hair. He might have been the former lead singer of an Islamic boy band if such an enterprise hadn’t been punishable by death. He was one of the doctors who treated the girl. He didn’t throw her out of the building for breaking the law by showing up without a male escort, which she had done. He put her health first, and for this he earned Elise’s respect.

  Unfortunately for him, she was still going to ruin his life. She wished she could achieve her personal objective without making him suffer, but there was no other way. He was her last hope.

  “As-Salaam-Alikum,” Elise said, before sitting down in his office. The traditional greeting from one Muslim to another meant peace be unto you.

  “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,” Qattan said. And unto you peace. He flashed an uncertain smile. “It’s always a pleasure to meet a new patient. Who was it again that referred you to us?”

  “Fate.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a Hindu concept.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Last night. In the Southern Pest. We almost met in the store deepest in the maze. The one where weak men go to purchase the kind of depravity that brings eternal shame, that ruins them and their families.”

  “Who are you?”

  Elise opened a leather wallet that featured a badge on one side and an ID on the
other. The ID was embossed with the seal of the Eurabian Caliphate. Along with the badge, it identified Elise as Kawlah Ahmed, senior officer of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, also known as the morality police.

  The badge was real. The ID, with her picture laminated beside the seal, was a quality forgery.

  Elise snapped the wallet closed and slipped it back into her pocket.

  “Happy St. Valentine’s Day,” she said.

  Qattan’s lower lip began to tremble. “Oh, no.”

  “You bought thirty-six red roses, three teddy bears, and three heart-shaped boxes stuffed with chocolates made in the country formerly know as Belgium for your three wives. By doing so, you conspired with the shopkeeper to celebrate the life of a Christian saint and a holiday that encourages immoral relations between men and women.”

  “Oh, Allah.”

  “The punishment for promoting Christianity is death.” Elise remained silent for a moment to allow the gravity of his situation to set in. “Let this be a lesson to you in your final days as a physician. A man needs virtue when he wants it the least.”

  Qattan nodded.

  “However, in your case,” Elise said, “there may be a chance for redemption.”

  His eyes lit up. “Redemption?”

  “A concept that all the Abrahamic religions share. Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, well, we’ll see about that. I need your complete cooperation, Doctor, regarding a matter of great importance to the Caliphate.”

  “You have it.”

  “When was this office founded?”

  “It predates my arrival. Two of my senior partners opened it. It’s going on … twelve, thirteen … no. Fourteen years ago.”

  “That’s consistent with our records,” Elise said. “And as part of the services you offer to your most valued clients, you provide a full medical examination of any slaves acquired from conquered territories.”