Welcome to the first episode of B-Ville, a mystery set in a slightly dystopian, post-plague France where a serial killer forces the flatfoot, Dik, to navigate between the power-sharing neo-Katar functionaries and far left Green Bloc.
Genre? Hardboiled, absurdist, dyke noir riddled with all my obsessions from religion and the flesh to censorship. And of course, Paris.
If you’re intrigued, please share.
B-Ville, Chapter 1
"You should've killed the bitch. Less paperwork. Kill the witness, the cops fill out a 497.B/X and case closed, the body disappears and the family gets a medal recognizing death in the service of the Good. Let ‘em live…” Léo pointed at the endless series of boxes on my screen.
I shook my head. He was right, but he shouldn't have said so. Not after what happened to Christine.
“You’re overdoing it, Kid. Want something?”
“That’s why I’m standing here.” He waved his phone and pinged me an address on rue Piat. “I told her you’d be there in twenty.”
I stared at him. The slicked back hair, pressed white shirt, grey trousers, little sneer which had replaced his ripped plaid leggings, blue hair, and piercings when he got his break one long year ago to work with the firm. Happy nineteenth b-day, chum.
“I thought you wanted to get out in the field. Test out your license.”
He scratched nervously at a pimple. “This one has your name on it.”
When I raised my eyebrows, his sneer looked more and more forced.
“I have some background checks to do. Remember?”
“Fine.”
“You said they couldn’t wait,” he argued.
“Okay.”
“It’s probably just hand-holding, anyway,” he added.
Then the young man stalked off to the tiny office in the back where Christine had installed a wall bed for him.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I’d asked. “He’s kind of a dick. And not the good kind—like us. Won’t this mess things up with his mom?”
“They’re fighting,” she’d shrugged. “Leave them together one will end up dead.” I loved her, so I shrugged and dropped it. Fucking Christine. Now Léo was there and she wasn’t.
I sighed and stood up. Anything was better than finishing that report explaining how Henriette Solars, 59, found herself in the trajectory of a bullet meant for me, lost half her face but kept her life. No doubt as I typed the cops had already glued her back together with some spare parts they kept for the Unfortunate Witness program. Her face would be almost the same, but not quite. It never was.
I stuffed my tablet in my daypack, and loaded my pockets with phone and fobs, my back-up gun, and took one last look around. There was an old-fashioned grey metal file cabinet in the corner where I kept the tissues and booze. On the wall to the left, a book shelf with rotting books I’d paid an arm and a leg for. There was a video screen, too. A framed poster of one of those old-timey movies where the femmes were always fatales, and the dicks who fell for them wore fedoras, got beaten-up, shot, but never seemed to die. It looked good behind me during video calls.
That was the Agency brand, gritty, genuine, authentic. The high tech side was there, but camouflaged. Not like one of those pristine, modern offices where jealousy and betrayal seemed passé and perhaps illegal, shamefully out of place.
I glanced out the window. It overlooked a grey, grimy street slick with October rain. Beyond it, if you bothered to lean out, was the dirty grey stone of the Palace Hotel where ultra-rich tourists stayed, thrilled to observe our revolutionary paradise, but only from the safe distance of a drafty room in the Louvre.
I put my rain slicker on over my jacket, picked up my bike helmet and battery, and locked the room.
In the outer office, the mysterious young Inés was at her desk huddled over the keyboard and glancing up now and then at the security cameras. She took out an earbud when she saw me.
“Going up to B-Ville,” I muttered.
She nodded politely. Her hair was cropped tight to her head. Her dark eyes glittering in a gaunt beige face. A black mask covered most of it. I’d never seen her mouth or even nose. Maybe she didn’t have one anymore. Not everyone did. Who could tell with the muffling mask?
“Léo tell you anything about that job?” I asked.
“No. There’s some chatter up there, though. Another dead body. No deets.” She had the liquid vowels of the tony suburbs. Forced herself to say, “chatter” and “deets.” Trying to fit in with the proles. “Then they went silent,” she said. “Again.”
“Suicide, probably.” The rumor was the city had lost a lot of people lately. What did a few more make?
When I didn’t add anything more, she popped her bud back in, then turned back to something on her screen. Strange person. I’d run her sheet once. There wasn’t much. In fact it looked like it had been scrubbed, though there was still a gap that hinted at trouble, no sign of what for. If it was someone else, I’d suspect crimes of the flesh. Which could mean almost anything since the Green Bloc government brought in the neo-Katars more than two decades ago. Had it really been that long? Twenty-five years. No. Longer. Thirty almost.
I stared at the door, suddenly queasy with memories. It was two years before the election. I was twelve. My mother had her feet propped up watching the news and shaking her head. There were planes dropping water on wildfires, men on the ground with sooty faces, pointing their tiny black hoses at enormous flames. On the coast, the ocean beat against crumbling shores, carrying away whole fishing villages, sneering at vacation homes. Inland, the raging sun burned wheat in the fields, reduced the soil to dust.
We lived in the outskirts of Cahors. I’d take my bike and ride into the fields. The broad leaves on the vines had withered, the few grapes that appeared became raisins overnight. I’d pick a few and chew them, sweet as caramels. All over the world, starving farmers packed their bags and moved en masse, from one town, one country to another. Somebody had to house them. Somebody had to feed them. And on TV, that somebody’s pinched face would fill the screen, furious. “We have our own problems. Why do they have to come here?”
Next there was a politician explaining in the perfectly structured sentences of Parisian schools just how much they were doing and why change had to be introduced incrementally, more glacially than the rapidly melting ice caps. Nobody believed them. Most nights we watched large unruly crowds in the streets of the capital goaded into action by people my mother once named demagogues, which she said could appear among people of all political leanings. They spoke the crowd’s most intimate thoughts, or seemed to. Maybe they created them.
Mostly my mom said nothing, like when an alliance of environmental parties unexpectedly captured the presidency and several seats in Congress. No, she just stared blankly, exhausted after another long day. Her dark hair pulled back with an elastic. Her black eyes half shut. Yes, I must have been twelve.
My mother had a little cold, blew her nose too hard, and so much blood gushed into the tissue she had to go to the Emergency. There was something going around. A few weeks later, the strange patch of skin she thought was just dried out from the summer sun or was it winter went all numb and then festered. The rough skin on her foot turned into an ulcer. Then healed. Not everyone was so lucky. Rumors were confirmed. It was a version of Hansen’s Disease they said. A mutation of leprosy that didn’t respond to the usual meds.
People panicked. Parents kept their kids home from school, neighbors quit speaking. Food was delivered. No one went to their offices. My mother kept me home, too, but couldn’t stay there herself. She was the concierge. She crept out early in the morning, swept and mopped when no one was around.
Soon my own nose bled. The tip of it came off in my hand. I was thirteen by then. We were still waiting on a vaccine, on treatment. A neighbor left a pamphlet on our door. She was a Katar. Called to say she would pray for us. The sect had re-emerged, become popular enough to run candidates in the next round of elections. That’s when the Greens invited them into the fold, gained a majority. Cynics said it was convenient to have political partners preaching that our bodies didn’t matter, only spirit.
I thought they owned the truth. Embraced them. Swallowed it all. Went further than they demanded. I began sleeping on the terracotta floor that my mother so carefully swept and mopped, shivering without a blanket until my mother threatened to punish me. I began to purge the house of what I called unnecessary things. My mother indulged me when she could. Felt guilty for my ravaged face, my damaged body. When she got sick she should have sent me away somewhere safe, she said. Now look at her baby girl, the misshapen nose. The limp. The mad glittering eyes demanding that unnecessary clothes—almost all of them— be given to the poor, refusing to eat. To be cuddled, touched. As if she herself were dirty.
I’d spoken to her recently.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“Fine. Absolutely.”
“Are you eating?”
“Whatever comes my way,” I laughed.
I looked back at Inés, and wondered again what she could be guilty of.
With her languid movements and dour clothes, she didn't seem energetic enough to do much, certainly never cast an eye towards the kids at the pediatrician’s on the first floor. Never looked at me either. Not the quizzical arch of my eyebrows, or my eyes themselves which were two dark pools. The state-of-the-art nose that you could barely tell was polymer.
I wondered if her mysterious crimes had been used against her, turned her into a rat, in fact was forced to spy on us for her Katar masters. It wasn’t that big a deal. I’d had to do it myself once. Maybe she even got paid. That didn’t bother me either. I only wondered who twisted Christine’s good arm to get her hired. We didn’t need anyone in the flesh, and it had taken Inés weeks to learn the spreadsheet program, a month to master the video reports, less from lack of ability than application. She came in late. Left early. Day-dreamed and skulked. She’d been showing more interest the last few weeks, maybe sensed I planned to fire her when her three-month contract was up, a week from now. We didn’t have room for her in the budget. I wished I could fire Léo, but Christine had left her shares in the firm to her pipsqueak nephew, and he was technically my partner now.
“See ya later, then.” I told her.
“Umm,” said Inés.
That’s it for this time. Stay tuned for more…
My usual newsletter will turn up on Monday or Tuesday.
Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo K