Naked Angels. Judi James

      What you saw when you booked her for a shoot was a tall, youngish woman – not ugly, not plain, but not quite beautiful either – in the throes of an intense, all-consuming relationship with a handful of strobe lights and a beaten-up Rolleiflex. What you got was an illicit love affair with light that made you feel like a snoop even to be watching.

      At thirty-five she had been at the top of her profession for several years, having hung there precariously owing to a mixture of driven ambition, technical perfection, and perpetual motion. Her name was legendary in the business and even photographers who trashed her work were in awe of her skill and her knowledge. She was not an instinctive worker – her pictures excited by their composition rather than their content.

      She would frown all the time when she worked; it was only when she was finished that she would flash the famous grin, but by then you were too emotionally and financially drained to catch it.

      The client that day was Japanese. He’d been warned about her working methods but his company was one of the largest in Japan and well up to the financial challenge. Besides, they wanted the best. The guy had foresight. He had a small roll-up bed with him, a portable TV for the Teletext and the number of an excellent local Japanese restaurant that delivered.

      An hour after he’d settled behind the set the news of Mik’s shooting had flashed onto CNN and less than an hour after that he was informed his own shoot was in the can. No take-away sushi and no flies on the Futon.

      His initial astonishment soon turned to anger, but when he went to speak to the photographer he found her staring into space and completely oblivious to anything around her. She looked so unwell he feared she might have had a stroke, but then the studio manager came to spirit him away and assure him that all was well and the job fairly completed. When he looked back the photographer still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was merely a display of the type of artistic behaviour the Americans were prone to. If the shots were no good he could always sue. But he still wasn’t sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a breakdown.

      He bid her farewell and good luck just in case, and was extraordinarily relieved when she finally looked up and smiled and politely wished him the same in almost perfect Japanese.

       1

       Budapest 1981

      The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.

      He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.

      The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.

      The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.

      The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.

      His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.

      There was a noise. There were other people in that long room. The boy fled to hide, scuttling across the floor like a rat.

      Joszef Molnar farted and Laszlo Kovacs giggled. It was the echo that made it so funny. Whistling was good for that, too. The corpse that lay between them on a trolley did nothing, of course. Not that you could always rely on a corpse to play dead. Sometimes they moved, sometimes they even sat up – it was something to do with the escaping gasses as they decomposed. Joszef and Laszlo had seen it all in their time.

      The corpse was covered in the regulation green rubber sheet but attached to the sheet were two pink balloons and a badly hand-written card that read: ‘Happy Birthday Lisa’.

      Lisa Janus was the local pathologist, a great heifer of a woman who was, nevertheless, the nearest thing to a sex object either man was ever likely to meet. They had been courting her half-heartedly for over a decade and the smell of Lysol was now like an aphrodisiac to them both.

      As they heard her galoshes squeaking down the dark labyrinth of outer corridors both men assumed appropriately sober expressions. The aprons they wore covered their police uniforms and that was a shame, but it was the rules. Molnar cleared his throat in readiness and Kovacs licked at his moustache to make it neat. Not that it needed further neatening; he’d spent fifteen minutes on it already that morning, trimming it into a straight line with his wife’s toenail clippers.

      Lisa Janus was not an ugly woman, although she could have been taken for one as her face puckered with annoyance at the sight of the two policemen. Every time those two brought a body in they behaved like fishermen displaying a catch. Then her eyes moved down to the rubber sheet and she noticed the pink balloons for the first time.

      ‘Is this supposed to be a joke, gentlemen?’

      A grin broke out on Inspector Kovacs’s face.

      ‘Ta-daa!’ He pulled the rubber sheet back with a flourish. The sudden movement caused the corpse’s head to roll to the side and he straightened it quickly.

      Lisa Janus let out a gasp and the two men smirked.

      ‘We thought you’d be impressed,’ Kovacs said. ‘The doctor was keen to get his hands on this one but we saved him for you.’

      The body was that of a young man, not more than twenty years old at the most. He was tall and slim but – most of all – he was extremely, outstandingly beautiful. His fair hair lay curled and plastered around his face. His skin had yellowed but it was a clear complexion, showing that he had, at least, eaten good food at some time in his upbringing.

      Looking at his slender corpse was like admiring one of the white marble statues in the National Museum. Earlier on, Kovacs had tied a red ribbon around the young man’s penis but then thought he might be taking the joke too far and removed it. Molnar had been disappointed at that – he had thought the red ribbon a hilarious touch.

      ‘Who is he?’ Janus asked. She was impressed. Her voice had shrunk to a whisper.

      Molnar shrugged. ‘Who knows? Lowlife. We found him collapsed in the street. No one has missed him – can you imagine that? What a loss to womankind, eh?’

      ‘Someone might miss him,’ Kovacs said. He twisted the corpse’s arm a little. ‘Look.’ The name Paulina was tattooed on the white forearm. ‘I should imagine this proves he had at least one girlfriend.’

      ‘It might be the name of his mother.’ Janus leant closer, fingering the tattoo gently.

      ‘Can