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

stationed on the streets of New York below, are buzzy interviewing different eye-witnesses, and they are taking up the owner of the claw’s whole acoustic attention with their excited jabbering.

   Manhattan is buzzing. The Big Apple is in a state of limbo, between panic, shock and sensational climax. The porcelain cup in the old man’s claw-like hand wobbles back and forth. He has been watching the news with special attention since the very start, soaking in every nuance of interpretation. Inbetween he has placed exactly twelve international long distance calls. The sun has long scince passed midday. The afternoon sun hits the man’s airy condo, casts a curry coloured glow on the walls. Hot Indian chai tea splashes onto the saucer.

   Tens of thousands of spectators throng the piers of the city, trying to catch first-hand glimpses. From his condo, the old man easily follows the movements of the blue uniforms of the police officers as they weave in and out of the spectators hoping to keep the unbearable tension building up under surveillance. He fancies he sees a pattern reminiscent of nano chips in a commputer simulation or the random hussel of a bazaar in his country of origin, guided by the invisible flow of different caste systems interacting in the same way as in the Big Apple.

On the flat-screen in the background, the old man watches how a fleet of twenty-five sleek, black rubber speed boats, steer in perfect V–Formation up the East River. Onboard the speedboats, one-hundred-and-thirty divers, in shiny black skin-suits, stand in determined postures, noses to the wind, ready to plunge under water to find out where the bodies are coming from. Midday has long since passed, the afternoon sun is throwing long streks of light over the high walls of the duplex, bathing everything with a sprinkle of curry. The wrinkled claw, clutches the cup, tightens its grip, and the dainty painted object from which he’s been drinking bursts apart between his emaciated finger tips.

   International news networks are broadcasting the discovery around the globe. All international news stations have their most prominant faces on the scene. Screens have been set up in the stores along the streets so that the people can follow the latesr events. But one man’s face keeps showing up in particular and filling out the TV screen on every channel: Sergeant Tony Hernandez. He is the cob who discovered the first mysterious corpse at the break of day, and he does not tire from describing how he perceived the moment.

   On the street, Tony Hernandez’s smile switches off the moment the camera pulls away. His gaze darts over to his identical twin, and his expression turns from friendly concern to open admiration. Even before phoning his chief, Tony had rung up his five minute older brother, Ernesto. The news had been just too good not to share with the person closest to him. More than one corpse in the river was already a decent story, and if somebody knew how to wrap up a story it was his twin brother.    

   Ernesto — or as all people apart from Tony call him — Ernie, is the more intelligent one of the two. He’s also inherited that uncanny sense for business of their late father’s, who came to the USA following the death of Spain’s fascist leader. Apart from family, most people couldn’t tell the two apart. But Ernesto was the one who’d studied journalism at NYU, travelled the five continents and worked with various net networks on a free-lance basis. Only once people knew this, they’d claim they saw the intellectual spark, so well did Ernesto know how to hide it.

   “Good one,” says Ernesto, slapping his younger brother on the back. „We’ve only been waiting for a story like this, bro.”

   The older one’s eyes are alight with a that glint that always meant that he was onto a new project, but that nobody apart from Tony knew how to read. “This is going to be our fifteen minutes of fame, Tony boy,” he said. “And guess what? I’m getting an exclusive. They’re paying me to do the whole coverage on this one.”

   Anthony whistles, grins back and high-fives his brother. “Good one, hermano mio”.

   They’re a dream team, the way brothers are meant to be. Tony would get one angle on the events — and he wouldn’t shy from peeking into the police files either — while his brother would weave story together, give it an edge that sold. In his mind Tony was already deciding which one of the suba-divers, who were descending to the debris-littered river bed of the East River, he’d contact later. Together with his twin, he’d solve the mystery burning on everybody’s lips: What the fuck was going on?

 

Second City: Mumbai

(Three Days Later)

 

From the airplane India looks to her like city on stilts made of concrete highways that bridged a river of cardboard shacks with tin rooves. The White Lady arrives in Mumbai. Faint smoke rises into the polluted morning air to greet her. India seems to be sinking, she thinks. Monica’s only recently been given the new code name White Lady, and not sure she likes it. It sounds pretentious, overbearing. The part she played in North Africa officially speaking never took place. Now it’s back to basics and, looking at the city formally known as Bomby, Monica feel the primeval strength of the Subtropical continent reach out to her.

   This is her second mission, and her new role came with the new name. For the last four hours, her fellow under-cover agent and she have been crossing the ink-blue Arabian Sea, speeding toward the rising sun with the moon on their trail. The moon is enormous, but it has not been the only thing kepting Monica awake since they boarded in Dubai. Her fellow under-cover agent, on the other hand, is fast asleep and has been snoring soundly ever since they boarded in the U.A.E. He makes her queasy. Normally she’s good at shaking off personal dislikes with a toss of her short mane. With Aziz it’s different. Too much has passed between them.

   But that is not the only reason she can’t relax. She’s studied the photos Mr. Schmitz, her boss at the intelligence agency they work for, gave her before take-off. The plane ride had been stifling; the photos in the folder shocking. Every time she’d tried to close her lids, disembodied corpses, ninety-five in total, had stared back at her with hollow eyes. The corpses had all been from the Indian Sub-continent, undernourished and fragile. The pictures showed piles of their wasted flesh and the husks of body parts, bloated by their contact with the brackish water of New York’s East River. The dead bodies the NYP had fished out, were grossly disfigured, and it was quickly determined that their organs having been extracted in a multitude of primitive but effective ways. The hideous details had been kept from the public, but that did not mean that the CIA and INTERPOL were not one the case. Better still, TROY I, (with a Roman 1) was in charge of background investigations. Many western governments employed the services of the company she worked for in highly explosive situations.

Below her, miles upon miles of illuminated highway stretched like the tentacles of an octopus till they dissolve in shadowy pouches of streaming curls and debris. She tears her eyes away from the traffic lights that vein the geography and flings Aziz, her co-worker, a look of disapproval. In sleep, he wears that self content smirk that always makes her want to choke him bare-handed.

   Their trail pointed indisputably toward Mumbai, India’s front door. Monica had only learnt about their new joint mission, labeled SIA — short for sensitive information acquisition — shortly before. On her first assignment on Djerba Aziz had played an ambiguous role. Now, he was her equal but the memory of his role during her last mission still hovers on her mind. In India, they will impersonate a team of human merchandisers. Would he be up to it?

   They closed over the shores of the Indian Ocean; Mumbai, the destination of their first joint job, lies below. The plane loops the yellowing moon, waiting for a chance to land on the humid runway of Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Before sunrise properly spreads its wings over Western India, the unequal pair of under-cover agents alight into the damp heat, and Monica’s thrill about being on the onset of a new enterprise is dabbed by the humidity that slaps her in the face the moment the automatic doors of the airport whiz to the side. She feels the sting of a mosquito bite prick her skin.

   She still thinks of the city as Bombay. Her knowledge is limited to what she’s picked up during Law School. But, whatever one calls it, it’s not only the biggest city of the Sub-Indian Continent it is also the most corrupt, maybe even in the whole of Asia. She’s only touched to the soil minutes before and she already felt that she’ll feel at home. After the many years she’s spent in North Africa, she easily makes the wild bustle, the hum of the air her own. A sharp smell rises from every corner of the airport.

   When the first Europeans came to these shores in 1858 they started filling up the rivers between the seven separate islands with soil and sand, to create what is now Mumbai. By the 1920’s the city’s were doors wide open to international trade. Today, the city housed over 20.5 million people from all over the world, offering every imaginable constellation of ethnical background and human ambition. Whatever one wanted; in Mumbai and in New York one found it...

Want to read more?

 

 This is only the beginning of chapter one of Masala Moon, Monica’s Assigment in India.

 

Tthat at least is the working title! I’mstill  in the process of charting out the different story threads. So far I’ve done some research into the history of India and particularily into the sale of sex slaves and the ancient local Hindu traditions conected with it. I’m excited to start writing now. There’ll be a lot of action and romance and a touch of magical surrealism, in the same way as it was in this book’s predecessor, ARAB NIGHTS, where Monica brushed shoulders with Islamic terrorism and chased the murderer of an English tourist girl.

So, in case, you have become intrigued by under-cover agent Monica and what role she previously played, read the background story! Arab Nights will tell you what Monica mastered to before her new adventure.

 

Check out Arab Nights here, on BookRix.com or elsewhere