Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,4
turning off Oxford and away from the heavy traffic, which is giving me a headache, the kind that burrows in behind your temples like a brain termite, when my connection suddenly, horribly, goes slack.
Sloth squeaks in dismay and grips my arms so hard his long claws draw little beads of blood. "I know, buddy, I know," I say and start running. I clamp my fist around the cold circle of metal in my pocket as if I could jump-start the connection. There is the faintest of pulses, but the thread is unravelling.
We've never lost a thread. Even when a lost thing is out of reach forever, like when that wannabe-novelist guy's manuscript blew out across Emmarentia Dam, I could still feel the taut lines of connection between him and the disintegrating pages. This feels more like a dead umbilical cord withering away.
There's an ambulance and a police van outside Mrs Luditsky's block, strobing the dusty beige of the wall with flicks of red and blue. Sloth whimpers.
"It's okay," I say, out of breath, even though I'm pretty damn sure it's anything but, falling in alongside the small cluster of rubber-necking pedestrians. I guess I'm shaking, because someone takes my elbow.
"You okay, honey?"
I'm obviously not remotely okay, because somehow I missed these two in the crowd – a gangly angel with huge dark wings and a dapper man with a Maltese Poodle dyed a ludicrous orange to match the scarf at his neck. It's the man who has attached himself to me. He's wearing expensive-looking glasses and a suit as sharp as the razored edge of his chiskop quiff. The Dog gives me a dull look from the end of its leash and thumps its tail half-heartedly. Say what you like about Sloths, but at least I didn't end up with a motorised toilet-brush. Or a Vulture, judging by the hideous bald head that bobbles up and down behind the woman's shoulder, digging under its wing.
The woman falls into the vaguely ageless and androgynous category, somewhere between 32 and 58, with a chemotherapy haircut, wisps of dark hair clinging to her scalp, and thin overplucked eyebrows. Or maybe she just tries to make herself look ugly. She's wearing riding boots over slim grey pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It's accented by leather straps crossing over her chest from the harness that supports the weight of the hulking Bird on her back.
"You know what's going on?" I say to the Dog guy.
"There's been a mur-der," the man stage-whispers the word behind his hand. "Old lady on the second floor. Terrible business. Although I hear she's terribly well preserved."
"Have they said anything?"
"Not yet," the woman says, her voice, unexpectedly, the malted alto of jazz singers. Her accent is Eastern European, Russian maybe, or Serbian. At the sound of her voice, the Bird stops grooming and a long neck with a wattle like a deflated testicle twists over the woman's shoulder. It drapes its wrinkled head over her chest, the long, sharp spear of its beak angled down towards her hip. Not a Vulture then. She lays one hand tenderly on the Marabou Stork's mottled head, the way you might soothe a child or a lover.
"Then how do you know it's murder?"
The Maltese smirks. You know how most people's mashavi and their animals don't line up?" he says. "Well, in Amira's case, they do. She's attracted to carrion. Mainly murder scenes, although she does like a good traffic pile up. Isn't that right, sweetie?"
The Marabou smiles in acknowledgement, if you can call the faint twitch of her mouth a smile.
The paramedics emerge from the building with a stretcher carrying a sealed grey plastic body bag. They hoist it into the ambulance. "Excuse me," I say and push through the crowd. The paramedic shuts the double doors behind the stretcher, signalling the driver to kill the lights with a wave of his hand. The dead don't need to beat the traffic. But I have to ask anyway.
"That Mrs Luditsky in there?"
"You a relative?" The paramedic looks disgruntled. "'Cos unless you are, it's none of your business, zoo girl."
"I'm an employee."
"Tough breaks, then. You should probably stick around. The cops are gonna want to ask you some questions."
"Can you tell me what happened?"
"Let's just say she didn't pass in her sleep, sweetheart."
The ambulance gives one strangled whoop and pulls out onto the road, taking Mrs Luditsky with it. I grip the ring in my pocket, hard enough to embed the imprint