His cell phone vibrated. Willi was back.
'Sorry, I had to get a cigarette.'
'Take your time.'
'This is what happened. Zurin and the director had me cut the girl's lung again. By then the smell of ether had dissipated. They said if I couldn't replicate my findings, the autopsy report had to be revised.'
'Couldn't you detect it by other means?'
'Not after they're cremated.'
'Already?'
'It was the wish of the family.'
'Where's the dwarf?' Arkady asked.
'Here under a sheet. We're waiting for a table.'
'Has he been identified?'
'No. We know nothing about him.'
'Lift the sheet.'
'Oh. Okay,' said Willi. 'We know something now. He's blue with tattoos from head to toe. He's a con.'
Prison tattoos were done with a sharp hook and 'ink' made out of urine and soot. Once under the skin, the pigment was blue and slightly blurred, but behind bars, tattoos were more than art; they were autobiography. For anyone who could read the symbols, a tattooed man was an open book.
Arkady said, 'Tell me what you see.'
'All kinds. Madonna and Child, teardrops, cats, spiderweb, Iron Cross, bloody dagger, barbed wire. The works.'
'As soon as we hang up, I want you to take pictures of Dopey's tattoos with your cell phone and send them to me. I have an expert.'
20
Itsy's original family was an addicted mother and abusive father. Their house had been like a listing ship, filthy clothes and empty bottles rolled to one side, bills underfoot and electricity cut off half the time.
The old man raised guard dogs for security agencies. Alsatians. Rottweilers. Money in that, but it went down her father's throat. Any money that made it home was an oversight. He smelled like the dogs. Man's best friend. Loyal.
By the time Itsy was twelve, her older brothers had run off. Lost out on the family business, a thriving enterprise that would have gone to them if, God forbid, anything happened to their father. Good real estate too, if Moscow spread in his direction. So he informed anyone trapped between him and a wall.
Times Itsy missed school were when she had no shoes. It didn't bother her father or mother that she didn't know much more than the alphabet and numbers, and when the school sent people to check on her well-being, she hid rather than be seen in rags.
Her job from the age of six was to clean the pens and dog run. Her father fed them. His credo was that 'Him what feeds 'em is their muvver.' And then he would stagger out in a suit of plastic armor and train them to attack.
With no companions and little else to do, Itsy spent hours with the dogs, playing with them or simply lying with them in a heap. Each dog had his own personality. The dogs were supposed to be kept apart in their own pens, but Itsy let them mix. Their eyes followed everything she did.
One winter evening her father came home early, drunk and bruised, the sullen loser of a street fight, when he found the dogs milling freely around Itsy. The dogs read his mood and drew closer to her.
'Growl at me?' He pulled out his trouser belt and bawled, 'Out of the way!'
He might have cowed the pack and gained control if Itsy had not been present, if the first swing of the belt had not drawn a stripe of blood across her cheek.
One moment he was up and the next he was just a pair of legs kicking at the bottom of a frenzy that Itsy could not have stopped if she tried.
After, when the dogs tired of dragging her father's body back and forth, she put each in its pen, washed and dried the bloody money she found in her father's pocket and put on as many clothes as possible. He was too heavy to move, and the ground too hard to dig a grave, however shallow.
Her mother had slept through it all. Itsy would have left a note if she knew how to write. She would have written, 'Please Feed the Dogs.' Petra had stopped her cart at Aisle 3-Coffee amp; Tea, apparently undecided between bags of Sumatran or Colombian, whole bean or ground. She was nine years old and had the straight hair and broad face of a Romanian princess. She put the Colombian back on the shelf and picked up a French roast.
Strolling on Aisle 5 — Biscuits amp; Cookies, a cigarette cocked by his ear, Leo couldn't help but look like imminent trouble. He carried a 'maybe'; a 'maybe' was a mesh bag that everyone used to carry in case they saw anything for sale. Leo had long legs and loved to run. He was eleven.
Lisa was in Frozen Foods. She had bow lips, blue eyes, a halo of golden hair and a blank expression. Her best friend, Milka, was in Produce comparing cantaloupes, giving each the sniff test, the knock test, the squeeze. Milka was as plain as Lisa was beautiful, but she wore braces on her teeth, a sign of relative affluence. The girls were ten.
The supermarket was part of a French chain and there was a special emphasis on dishes with Gallic style like pate, cheeses and duck a l'orange ready for the microwave. Rabbits fluffy and skinned hung in a meat department designed to look like a true boucherie. A cafe served crapes and croque-monsieur.
Behind a one-way mirror over the lamb chops the floor manager flipped through a face book until he found a match with Lisa. Uniformed security guards were stationed at the entrance and emergency exits, wine department and caviar bar. When the chief counted four runaways, he went out on the floor. Although none of the kids had as yet done anything illegal, he wanted them to know he was keeping an eye on them, so he was looking the wrong way when the automatic door opened and a black Alsatian police dog on a loose leash bounded down Aisle 1- Breads amp; Baked Goods, followed by a girl.
The dog had a deep bark and the impact of a cannonball. In Produce he brushed a table and spilled lemons across the floor. Cans of stewed tomatoes rolled in his wake. A security man attempting to block Aisle 7-Pet Food grasped air as the dog leaped into the meat bin and came out with a filet mignon hanging from his jaws. Two guards who tried to corner the dog between Ice Cream and Frozen Foods were left in a tangle of overturned carts.
For the dog, it was a game. It crouched like a sprinter, barked and allowed the guards to get only so near before it made a feint in one direction and took off in another. When the floor manager approached with a can of pepper spray, the dog instantly retreated. Meanwhile regular customers abandoned their carts and made an exodus to the street. All the runaways vanished and, suddenly, so did the dog.
What confused the floor manager was that after a physical count and an inventory of receipts, nothing had been taken from the floor except the steak. It was hard to bring charges against a dog. A day later, however, the stockroom manager noticed what else was missing.
While his staff had watched the antics taking place on the other side of the one-way mirror, someone had walked in the backdoor of the stockroom and left with six cases of dry baby formula, four jumbo bags of disposable diapers and two cartons of premixed formula in bottles for babies on the move. Itsy said, 'She likes the bottle.'
'I'd rather breast-feed. Yum yum.'
'Shut up.'
'What a dirty mind.'
'Boys are disgusting.'
Leo said, 'That was so great when Tito smashed into the lemons.'
'Tito's a good dog.'
'Tito's the best.'
The dog raised his massive head at the sound of his name and cast a loving gaze toward Itsy.
