Girls of Yellow Read online

  “Three months after Sharia law was enacted I formally bid Jesus and the Church of England a good day. And I must confess, praying five times a day has had a certain therapeutic benefit, though the Caliph wouldn’t be pleased if he knew the content of those prayers.”

  “Speaking of prayer,” Elise said. “I need assistance with a personal matter.”

  “The use of national resources for personal agenda is strictly forbidden. We could face trial and execution.” Darby cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Extraction.”

  “How many?”

  “One.”

  “Is the asset compliant?”

  “She will be,” Elise said.

  “You mean she isn’t yet?”

  “She will be.”

  “How old is the asset?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Darby pressed his lips together. Compassion flashed on his face. “And if she doesn’t become compliant?”

  “We extract anyways.”

  Darby thought about this for a moment before he spoke. “‘The infidels should not think they can get away from us. Prepare against them any arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them.’”

  “I need another favor. An imam by the name of Salim runs a slave training school in BP.”

  “That beast,” Darby said. “Even the Nazis and the Soviets believed in evolution as opposed to regression.”

  “I need access to one of the pupils. I presume the campus will have surveillance and security. But if they go off campus …”

  “I’ll see what I can learn. What number should I call?”

  Elise whispered her mobile number into his ear.

  “Do you need a prescription for the pain?”

  Elise looked at him philosophically. “Is there such a thing?”

  Darby considered her question. “Time machine?”

  “That would work, but I’d only go back fourteen years.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be leaving this place.”

  “It’s not where you are,” Elise said. “It’s who you’re with.”

  “Remember you said that the next time you hear the screams from Heroes Square.”

  Elise left the office.

  The notion of a time machine sent her tumbling into the past. A deafening silence echoed in her ears. It accompanied the horrifying visual of Valerie’s mother handing her baby to an Arabian nurse with total indifference to consummate the terms of her transaction. The terms consisted of trading a newborn child for money with which the mother could fuel her addictions.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ali fell asleep at the hookah bar. He returned home after five o’clock, took a shower, and drank some coffee that Sabida had prepared for him. When he saw her in the kitchen they ignored each other. She knew where he’d been. It was far from the first time. Such was their life. Tonight he would come home, they would pretend he’d never gone to the hookah bar, and they would resume raising their daughter as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  After breakfast, Ali went to the office early. The medical examiner’s report on the dead dhimmi girl was waiting for him. She had a name now. She’d been identified by her fingerprints, which were found in the dhimmi database. All dhimmis were fingerprinted when they formally refused to submit to Islam.

  Her name was Greta Gaspar.

  Ali called Ismael to discuss the medical examiner’s report. Ali knew he could depend on his friend’s expertise. Ismael was the Caliphate’s most respected crime scene investigator, who routinely traveled throughout Eurabia to conduct training seminars. Ali knew he also could depend on receiving a taste of Ismael’s warped sense of humor, whether he was in the mood for it or not.

  “Three guys walk into a bar,” Ismael said. “A Catholic priest, a child molester, and a rapist. And that was just the first guy.”

  Ali couldn’t even manage a chuckle. “I wonder what they say about us,” he said.

  “Who cares as long as they’re saying it to the rearview mirror?”

  “I’m looking at the autopsy report. Can’t say as I’ve ever really read one before. It’s like it’s written in another language. I don’t want to miss anything important, Ish, you know?”

  “Cause of death was manual strangulation,” Ismael said. “Just as I suspected. There was severe damage to the neck, throat and larynx. The toxicology report was clean.”

  “Other signs of trauma?”

  “None.”

  “She wasn’t assaulted in any other way?” Ali said.

  “If anything, it’s the contrary.”

  “What do you mean, the contrary?”

  “The killer … he cared about her,” Ismael said.

  “The hell you say.”

  “Her hair was washed, her nails cut, and her body was anointed with oil.”

  Ali pictured the killer rubbing oil on the corpse of the girl he’d just killed and wondered about his motive for doing so.

  “The oil is a surprise,” Ali said.

  “You think that’s a surprise? Are you lying down?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did she. Her hymen was still intact. And there were no traces of semen anywhere on her body.”

  The absence of rape significantly reduced the odds that Greta’s murder had been an act of religious cleansing. Theoretically, Zaman and the General should have been pleased about this development. The murder seemed to be the type of crime that could have occurred in any theocracy, or any society for that matter. But Ali had a feeling his bosses wouldn’t be pleased no matter what he discovered. For some reason, they just wanted the case buried.

  “You going to keep at it?” Ismael said.

  “Keep at what?”

  Ali recalled the last time he’d seen the girl who’d resembled Greta so many years ago, hanging from a drain pipe in the basement of her home.

  “The murder, A. Are you going to keep investigating this murder? Because maybe … maybe it would be best to let it go.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Ali said.

  “A cop in Eurabia’s got to know when to let it go.”

  “No one knows better when to let go than me. They don’t call me the Dhimmi Lover for nothing.”

  Ali hung up and looked up Greta’s parents in the dhimmi database. Then he drove to their barbershop in Dhimmi Town. It was located on the ground floor of a two-story brick building that looked like it had survived all three world wars. Eight battered and bruised barber chairs faced a mirrored wall. A teenager swept gray hair into a dustpan off a cracked tile floor while six mustachioed barbers tended to a bunch of old dhimmi customers. The display case at the front desk featured artisan chocolates and Hungarian shepherd axes, potassium iodide pills, and paperback copies of the Quran translated into Hungarian.

  The chocolate might provide a dhimmi with enough energy to sink the axe into a Muslim cop’s head, at least in his imagination, but the translation of the Quran was useless, Ali thought. Without the rhythm and rhyme of the original Arabic, without the passionate melody that accompanied the words, a person couldn’t comprehend their majesty. That was why most dhimmis—and even Muslims who weren’t fluent in Arabic—couldn’t truly understand the glory of Islam.

  A haggard woman in a gray pantsuit approached him at the front desk. Even though the years hadn’t been kind to her skin, Ali spied the resemblance to Greta Gaspar immediately. There was no mistaking the symmetry of the face, the spacing between the eyes, or the delicacy of the lips.

  “You want a shave?” Greta’s mother said, in broken Arabic.

  “I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Gaspar.”

  The woman’s expression softened. “Is this about Greta? You have news of her killer?”

  “No,” an unoccupied barber said, seething behind her. “I guarantee you he’s not here to tell us who killed our daughter. No one will ever tell us who killed our daughter.”

  Greta’s father looked rawboned and battle-t
ested, especially because he was missing his left ear. His gruff exterior combined with the gleaming scissors in his right hand gave Ali pause. He glanced at the stoic customers in their fifties and sixties seated in the barber chairs, crew cuts and heavily lined faces on all of them. If elements of the Hungarian resistance didn’t frequent this establishment, then the Caliph wasn’t an Arab.

  “Are you her parents?” Ali said, flashing his credentials.

  The couple didn’t speak, perhaps because they understood that Ali already knew the answer. The dhimmi database contained the picture of every Eurabian citizen who had refused to submit to Islam. The pictures were updated annually, and yet this couple looked like they’d aged six years in the last twelve months.

  “I’m the officer investigating her case,” Ali said.

  “Is that a joke?” the father said.

  “Heinrich,” the mother said.

  “What?” the father said. “The cops don’t give a damn about crime in Dhimmi Town. Why should we believe they care about our Greta?” He turned to Ali. “What’s this really about? What do you want?”

  “This is about Greta. And all I really want is to ask you some questions about her.”

  The mother lifted her eyebrows while the father fumed. That informed Ali who was more likely to be honest with a Muslim cop.

  The father took three steps to his barber’s chair and motioned for Ali to sit down.

  The other barbers continued tending to their customers as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

  “Is there some place more private?” Ali said.

  “No one is listening,” the father said. “They all have their own problems and they’ve heard enough lies from your kind.”

  “My kind?” Ali said. “What kind is that?”

  The mother slipped between them.

  “Have a seat officer,” she said, before glaring at her husband.

  “Major,” Ali said. “Major Ali.”

  The mother nodded. In fact, she did more than nod, she actually bowed her head a few inches. Ali appreciated her good manners, something that didn’t come easily to the dhimmis. But then again, if he were being systematically forced out his own country, he might not be the portrait of congeniality either.

  The father stepped aside and motioned to his chair again, this time waving with his scissors. “Have a seat, Major.”

  Ali eyed the scissors and chuckled. “I don’t think so.”

  “I said, have a seat Major. A customer comes by, sees a man who looks like a cop standing in my shop, maybe he decides he doesn’t need that haircut so badly after all. Maybe he finds another place where he can get one.”

  “The dhimmi tax, Major,” the mother said. “It’s killing us.”

  People who didn’t submit to Islam were forced to pay a dhimmi tax. The percentage tax escalated annually to encourage the dhimmi to submit or leave. Only a dhimmi with increasing cashflow could survive in Eurabia and those types of success stories were scarce.

  “You want to talk?” the father said. “I only talk to customers.”

  Ali considered the situation. “I’ll pay you for a haircut but I don’t want you to touch my hair. And I want you to put the scissors down and stand where I can see you.”

  The father shook his head. “We don’t take charity here. We work for our living. You pay? You get served. Pick a service.”

  “I didn’t realize there was a menu,” Ali said. “What are my choices?”

  Ali listened as the mother rattled off a variety of shaves, shampoos and haircuts. With each choice he feared he was going to have to drag these dhimmis to the station and convince the mother to cooperate apart from her husband. But then the mother concluded reciting the menu with a magical word.

  Massage.

  Ali sat down in the chair. The mother washed her hands. The father stood at an angle to the mirror, leaving enough room for Ali to see the mother work the knots out of his shoulders. The father continued to hold the scissors in his hand, but Ali decided not to make a big deal out of it. If he demanded the man drop his weapon, his request might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Better to retain his dignity, Ali thought, and take the risk the father charged him. Worst case, Ali guessed he could deflect an attempt to stab him in the heart. After all, Ali was trained in self-defense while the father was trained only to cut hair, wasn’t he?

  “Let me start by saying I’m sorry for your loss,” Ali said. “I have a daughter myself. She’s a few years younger than … She’s eleven. So while I can’t say I understand what you’re going through …”

  “No, you can’t,” the father said. “Get on with it, Major.”

  Ali glanced at the mirror and made eye contact with the mother. “When did you first notice that Greta was missing?” he said.

  “The day before … the day before …” The mother’s voice cracked, and she had to take a breath to compose herself.

  “Less than twenty-four hours before her body was found at the church,” the father said.

  “And where did you see her last?” Ali said.

  “At Central Market,” she said. “We went there to buy groceries. I gave her some money to buy a Balaton. She went off in the direction of the candy store and we never saw her again.”

  Balaton was a chocolate bar with wafers and cocoa cream.

  “Did you notify the police?” Ali said.

  “They told us we had to wait twenty-four hours before a report could be filed,” the father said.

  Ali questioned them about the trip to Central Market and whether they remembered anything suspicious, but their answers yielded nothing promising. Then he decided to switch topics.

  “Tell me a little about Greta,” he said. “What was she like? Was she serious or fun-loving?” Ali said.

  “All the children in dhimmi town are serious,” the father said. “Your kind give them no choice.”

  “That’s not true,” the mother said, “and you know it. That’s what made Greta special. She wasn’t serious. She loved to play. When she was little, she played spaceship with the other girls in the neighborhood. She made up names for everyone and pretended to be the captain of a ship taking them to faraway lands. She was so sweet. She saw the best in people, even when there was none to see.”

  “Meaning she was trusting,” Ali said.

  “No one in Dhimmi Town trusts your kind,” the father said. “Not even the children.”

  “But did Greta trust your kind?” Ali said.

  The father blinked hard three times. “Oh, I see where this is going. You’re trying to pin her murder on a dhimmi, aren’t you? What, some stranger came to town and seduced her —”

  “She wasn’t violated in any way,” Ali said.

  The mother stopped kneading his shoulders. She stared at his reflection in the mirror.

  Ali spoke softly and deliberately. “Greta’s virtue remained intact until the end. No one seduced her—not a dhimmi or an Arab—at least not for that purpose. No one touched her in that way. No one violated her. No one.”

  The mother’s eyes drew tears, while the father’s expression softened just enough to convey relief.

  “And if I were pinning Greta’s murder on a dhimmi or a Muslim or an alien from Jupiter,” Ali said, “I wouldn’t bother coming here to speak with you, would I? I’d just do what it is you think Eurabian cops do.”

  A moment of silence passed among the three of them. Then the father nodded to the mother, and she resumed her massage.

  “Greta was a sweet girl,” the father said, “but she wasn’t that smart.”

  “Heinrich,” the mother said.

  The father ignored her. “Street smart? Yes, always. She was our daughter, but not so much in school. Learning didn’t come easy for her.”

  “Which was another reason we worried so much about her future,” the mother said.

  “Another?” Ali said.

  The mother and father exchanged glances, and then the father stepped closer to Ali so that onl
y the three of them could hear his voice.

  Ali felt his muscles tense. He made sure the scissors remained within the confines of his peripheral vision.

  “We’re not going to survive here,” the father said. “The dhimmi tax sees to that. We have a year left. Two at most, and then we’ll have to pack up and move to Christendom.”

  “But life is very hard there,” the mother said. “We have family in the countries formerly known as Argentina and Chile. There are too many refugees. Jobs are scarce. We have a trade, yes, but who’ll be able to pay us? It’s a life of poverty for Christians.”

  “I know of what you speak,” Ali said. “All our kind know of what you speak. The Arab world knows the poverty that comes from being deemed a second-class citizen. What does this have to do with Greta?”

  The mother lowered her gaze to Ali’s trapezius and attacked the area between his shoulders with intensity. The initial pain of her assault gave way to release, and Ali could feel tension seeping from his body even as the father remained within striking distance.

  “We had to make some tough choices for her,” the father said. He sounded downbeat and embarrassed.

  “For her,” the mother said, “And for us. As parents, we had to put our daughter’s health and survival above all else.”

  “All else,” the father said. “No matter how painful it may have been from a … from a religious perspective.”

  “Ah,” Ali said, without thinking, as he realized what they were saying. They weren’t the first to have sacrificed their daughter’s Christianity to assure her a comfortable life, if not complete freedom. “You enrolled her in a slave training school.”

  The father hung his head but the mother continued working on Ali’s neck.

  “We did what was best for her,” the mother said, “as opposed to what was best for our pride and ego. Isn’t that right, Heinrich?”

  The father didn’t answer, but his pinched expression left no doubt that he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with that decision.

  “Which training school?” Ali said.

  “Imam Salim’s,” the mother said.