Masala Moon - Alexis Debary (ebook reader for surface pro .txt) 📗

First City: Manhattan

When Juan Serrano crosses the double-laned F. D. Roosevelt East River Drive with a few heavy steps of his worker’s boots, sunlight spears the moisture saturated air to lick over a dead body that is bobbing in the water. It’s the end of May, and any moment, the tangerine sun will break through the veil of fumes with a blast, lifting the cloak of haze and smog that shrouds the Five Boroughs. The corpse, stiff and contorted, swirls softly on the sheet of oily liquid, in no hurry to be discovered. There’s something profoundly peaceful in the air today, thinks Juan Serrano, who has lived half his life in and around New York,. By now he is forty-nine years old, and never experienced the city so tranquil as today. For once, the constant police and fire engine sirens are silent as the sun pushes through the last of shreds of dew and dust doming the skyline.

He listens to the soft splash of the river and hears the sea gulls calling out to each other across the expance of dark liquid. He takes a lungful of air, and fancies he smells the open salt of the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly a longing for the village he grew up in washes over him. Lately this happening more often to him. He’ll be hit by the memory of something from his hometown by a smell in the air. He scans the waves as he used to do as a teenager when he sailed along the coast of Columbia with the fishermen. That life had been dangerous, a constant fight against the elements. He sighs. The lullaby quality of the waves soothes him. All will be well. Yes. If he has faith than this country will be kind to him, he tells himself, and sends out a mental prayer to Baby Jesus. One day, he won’t need to live in constant fear of being deported back to the country he spend half his life trying to escape from. Morning mist swirls lazily over the basin where the Harlem and East River meet. The water’s surface reflects the salmon light peeking through the fringes of the clouds.

   Juan Serrano will be the first person to see the disembodied corpse, only barely discernible in the murky river. He’d set out before first light from the two-room apartment in Queens where he lives with his wife and three daughters to pay a visit to the car parking near Sutton Place, where he helps out, to ask demurely for his pay-check. Juan is one of Manhattan’s estimated 2.5 million illegal aliens, and he’s hoping to spend a few quiet days with his kids on the meadows of Central Park grilling pork sausages as it’s the weekend proceeding Memorial Day, one of the few chances he has to take time off. He has been looking forward to the holiday, but his boss isn’t in yet. And having time to spare, Juan becomes aware of the mega city as a part of the geography of the land and not as the man made hell he is acctually daily up against, living as he does at the bottom of the pecking order. There was hardly any traffic at this early hour, so he crosses the expressway and heads for the sooted fence to get as close to the water as possible and soak in the sence.

   When he first notices the bloated corpse bobbing between the choppy ripples, he thinks it’s a wooden log ploughing the river. Then his eagle eyes, accustomed to the endless horizons of wave heads of the his home country, recognizes the shape of a human backside in the river. The body is heading toward Gracie Mansion, where the Major of New York resides with his family. Juan Serrano turns back in alarm and, in that precise moment, Fate grabs him by the throat. A loaded lorry, roaring down the lane, knocks him over, bashing his leathery face into the mesh of the dirty metal fence. In the next instant, his body is thrust back onto the Driveway that hugs the shore of America’s richest island, and his skull is cracked open, killing him on the spot.

      From the upper floors of the skyscrapers, lining the elongated finger of land that constitutes Manhattan, one had the best view of the sun rise at this time of year. Standing in one of those luxus apartments one sees the water tanks of Roosevelt Island duck their heads into the warm breeze. But there are few people awake amongst the dwellers of those upper-class condos at this hour. Queensboro Bridge stands silhouetted like a sketteton against the rusty rose of dawn, watching over the naked corpse that drifts down-stream lying on its stomach. Water ripples scurry back and forth between Hallet’s Rock to the boulders of the Bronx like the shadows of migrating birds. America’s East Coast awakens with a start. Manhattan pounces to life. Sunlight races down the glass fronts of the Big Apple’s high rises, setting them aflame like gigantic candles of chrome, and the tall windows of the top storeys of an especially large duplex apartment mirror the scene especially well. To its feet, the bloated body spins against the back current, quietly disturbing the pattern of the other waves, unaware of the tusnami its discovery will unleash.

   Sergeant A. Hernandez will be the second person to see the body. The „A“ in the Sergeant’s name stands for Anthony, but everyody calls him Tony. He’ll be the one who will be officially known for having made the Memorial Day Discovery — that being the name under which events would soon be know as, nation wide as well as abroad. He is first police officer to get the call in that there had been a traffic accident on F.D. Roosevelt East River Drive. He had been on his usual control route along 1st Ave., past the UN building and back down 5th. Avenue when he was informed aboutthat somebody had been run over several times by vehicles unable to stop on short notice on their way into town. Well, thinks Sergeant Hernandez, thank God for Memorial Day coming up. On any other day, the city would already be brimming with vehicles and trunks and as chaotic as ever. Today it was different, for once in the year. The Sergeant swings into his car, preforms a clumsy a U-turn, and shoots down the forlorn streets of Mid Town.

   When he arrives, a flock of onlookers stands gathered around the threads of body tissue that were once Juan Serrano. In a bout of energy, he leaps from his patrol car and starts shouting. He’ll need to get the flow of traffic going again, have the site properly fenced off, follow routine police procedures. While Sergeant A. Hernandez scratches his head, he identifies two of the drivers involved in the accident. To judge by their guilty appearances one of them is a lorry driver with a sleep deprived face who shuffels the ground with his feet and the other an angry cabbie with a hoarse voice. Tony doubts that they will be proscecuted. In the middle of the road, the tarmac is splattered with a pool of dark blood and shreads of meaty fiber. The victim could have been young, or elderly; female or a male. There is no longer any way of telling.

   Then Tony sees something at the side of the road and walks over. It’s an arm, a lone arm, lying lost, its fingers curiously outstretched as if the man it had once belonged to had wanted to point out something. All other traces that this was once a human have been ground to brown mush. A murmur goes through the crowd, curious bystanders nudge each in the ribs, fighting for a better view of what the officer has found. In the distance, Sergeant Hernandez hears at least three fire engines nearing. It will not be such a tranquil Memorial Day weekend, after all he sighs.

It will be typically sunny, he thinks, grimy looking up. With one hand he takes out his note pad, ready to jolt down notes for his upcoming report. Ambulances sirens pierce the sigh of dawn, and the sun rises over the web of fumes. He looks up and lets his note book drop in the dirt with a start. He has seen the same distorted body floating on the dark waves that Juan Joaquin Serrano saw ten minutes earlier. „Mama mia.“ Automatically, the Sergeant grabs for his RT unit to contact HQs. His lips brush the coarse surface, so close he holds the radio set to his mouth, all the while scanning the river, as he shields his eyes against the bright light with his other hand. But what’s that? His jaw drops, his breathing quickens. Another body? It can’t be. All at once the orange haze shifts and half a dozen distorted bodies dot the river. Tony can’t believe it. In fascinating he watches as they fan out toward Downtown, polluting the waves, while the rising sun reflects off their naked limbs. It is the moment to whisk out his personal cellular and punch the repeat button he uses the most. This was big. As he blurts out his discovery a thrill shoots up his spine.

   Behind the floor-length windows of a certain luxurious duplex condo on 41st Street, the distorted claw of a hand clutches the curtains. The soft material frames the spectacular view of the sun rising behind iron wrought Queensboro Bridge, but the set of eyes the claw belongs to are eagerly following other events from behind the expensive, gold-threaded drapes. For a better view, a pair of binoculars is employed. For most of his almost eighty years the man with the claw-like hand has see the sun rise every morning, first from necessity then from choise.

   In the web of streets below the window, police cars, ambulances and unmarked police sedans are milling the vicinity of the claw’s building, obstructing the passage of traffic only further. The flow on the streets and on sidewalks swells up the sides of the buildings, till the gibberish of the people, speaking in a Babelonian mix of languages, billows into the air and the old man thinks he can feel their boom through the tall sheets of window glass. In the sky over Manhattan, a flock of helicopters encircles the fifty-fifthth story window and the claw’s brittle finger nails clutch the heavy curtains of the duplex, drawing them back into place, propelled by an echo of the survival instinct that has served him well all his life.

   Helicopters zoom in over the river to weave in between the high-rises, fighting to catch better shots of the dead bodies that are continuously surfacing out of the inky waves. Sometimes four/five come shooting up at once. Then another one swirls slowly into view only after half an hour. Over fifty-two have already been spotted. Ever so often, a new one pops up and then a deep roar goes through the mob of pedestrians, police and tourists flocking the intersections below the claw’s residence.

   During the next five hours, more and more dead bodies drift into sight amidst the State’s patrol boats that have fenced off the city’s waterways. Manhattan declares Alert Orange. The vans of the new’s networks have satellite discs attached to their roves. They’re mushrooming out of the ground, obstructing the criss-cross of roads all the way from the Embassy District, along the length of the entire Upper East Side, and far up into Harlem, even affecting the trafffic in Yonkers for the next few days. In the background, the claw has the TV running non-stop. On it, the news reporters from CNN and Fox,