realized with a jolt that these were the dancers who gyrated in burkas during Karen’s performance.
“Is Olympia murdering Karen?” one of them asked.
“Or Karen killing Olympia?” Both laughed.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I’m a detective, and I’m investigating Nadia Guaman’s murder. What did you see the night that Nadia Guaman was killed?”
“Nothing,” the first one said. “Kevin and I were long gone.”
“We don’t do makeup for this gig. As soon as the Artist finishes, back we come, dump the rags, hit the road.”
“Did you leave through the back door here? Did you notice anyone in the alley?”
“We steer clear of the alley. Drunks, smokers, druggies, not our scene. Time to stretch, Lee.”
The two disappeared, shutting the door firmly in my face. I hate it when people do that. I made a ferocious face—that would teach them a lesson—and went onto the stage. The crowd noise dipped for a moment as people thought I might be the start of the act, but when they saw I was just inspecting the equipment the babble rose again.
I touched the mike and didn’t get electrocuted. I inspected the webcam and wasn’t sprayed with noxious gases when I pressed the ON button. I turned it off and moved to my position at the back of the room.
Petra zipped by with a trayful of drinks. She shot me an anxious look.
“I haven’t killed Olympia,” I assured her. “Yet.”
A moment later, Olympia herself appeared onstage carrying a tray of paint cans and brushes. The crowd noise grew more intense again. Catcalls began rising, demands for the Artist to get onstage at once.
The lights dimmed, went out for the usual thirty seconds. When they came back up, the Body Artist was on the stage. She was, as always, nude, but I joined in the gasps and applause from the audience at the artwork covering her. No wonder it had taken the unknown Rivka six hours to paint her. A lily stem grew from the Artist’s vulva, but instead of a flower it sprouted Nadia Guaman’s head, which covered Karen’s breasts. Karen’s left arm was painted black, the right arm white: colors of mourning in the West and the East. A cypress branch drooped along her white shoulder; on the black shoulder a field of poppies grew.
The Artist stood and turned around. An angel covered her back, its wings spread across her shoulder blades. Its head was bent in grief; in one hand it held a pomegranate, but the other carried a sword.
I looked at Rodney, who was scowling. He snapped his fingers in Olympia’s direction. She went to his table and bent so that the feathers at her cleavage brushed his ear—an erotic gesture that seemed wasted on both of them. He was angry; the club’s owner was trying to placate him.
On the stage, the Body Artist stood with her back to us, her head lowered. She must have had a mike in her upswept hair because her voice carried easily through the room.
“A beautiful, tormented spirit went home today. To Jesus, if you believe He’s the Resurrection and the Life. To the great goddess, if that’s how you think of life beyond these frail coverings of skin and bones. Nadia Guaman, who briefly honored my body with her art, was slaughtered last Friday night. Tonight, I offer up my body in tribute to her.”
The Artist held her arms wide. The angel’s wings lifted, their feathers flowing down her arms. The young men, now anonymous, feminine, in their burkas, each took one of her outstretched hands.
No one in the audience moved or spoke until Rodney pushed his way to the stage. He grabbed the paint cans and with large strokes began to put his usual work, letters and numbers, on Karen’s buttocks. His gestures were so aggressive that his painting looked like an assault.
“S-O,” he wrote. “1154967 !352990681 B-I 50133928! 405893021195.”
I copied the codes into my handheld, even though I didn’t expect to decipher them. As Rodney painted, Karen said, “In today’s news, the Taliban in Pakistan publicly flogged a seventeen-year-old girl. Her brother was among the floggers. She was accused of using her body as she chose, not as the men around her wished. In other news, two hundred twenty thousand girls under the age of eleven were raped in America last year. If Nadia is in heaven now, or someplace like it, we know she will intercede on behalf of all assault victims.”
The audience began to stir restively, and some people booed. It wasn’t clear