Osama by Tidhar Lavie

Author:Tidhar, Lavie [Tidhar, Lavie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PS Publishing Ltd
Published: 2011-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

the body in the library

——

He knocked hard on the door, but there was no reply, and he didn’t expect one. Passers-by stared at him. He stepped away from the door, glared at it, but it still wouldn’t open. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, which made him feel better, somehow. He glanced across the road at The Edwin Drood, thinking of a drink, but the dilapidated building glared back at him from its dark, stained windows, repelling the notion. Instead he walked down Little Newport, passing stalls selling incense, Buddha statues, posters of Sun Yat Sen, compasses, animal figures shaped in copper wire, cheap makeup, even cheaper perfume, past a door opening onto a stairwell where a hand-written sign said Miss Josette was available for French lessons upstairs, another for a Miss Bianca and Greek, past a dumpling restaurant, a stall where he could have had his name engraved on a grain of rice, and onto Charing Cross Road.

This time he turned right. As he passed the entrance to the underground, he avoided looking at it. He ran into the mass of people passing to and from Leicester Square, kept a hand on his pocket, waited patiently for the lights to change, crossed the road, passed Wyndham’s Theatre, passed Cecil Court with its row of rare book dealers, and went into the Charing Cross public lending library.

Joe had always liked libraries, though he could not remember having gone into one recently. There was something comforting about the intimate space, rows of books marking orderly borders, the only sound that of turning pages, whispered conversations and the dimmed noise of the traffic outside. He went to the reading corner and found the week’s newspapers draped neatly on wooden sticks, looking like an exhausted flock of albatrosses. He liberated a few and retreated to an empty desk by the wall.

Three days ago.

He found nothing on page one for any of the days.

Three days ago and it seemed like a lifetime.

Nothing on page two.

Somebody’s lifetime.

The late edition, three days ago. Page three. A Shoot-out in Soho.

He read through it. Unknown assailants fired shots outside the Red Lion pub in Soho earlier today, breaking glass and frightening customers. One woman was treated for minor cuts. There were no other casualties. ‘We are taking this very seriously,’ a spokesman for the police said, ‘and are following all available leads.’

No Mo. No mention of Joe lying there unconscious. Somehow, he hadn’t expected there to be.

Fuzzy Wuzzies, he thought. The word left a bad taste in his mouth. He thought – refugees. He wondered what leads the police had. Perhaps they were analysing samples of cigarette ash. He imagined them armed with round magnifying glasses, scattered around the city, backs hunched, searching for clues. He reached for his cigarettes, remembered you weren’t allowed to smoke in libraries. No clue for the police, then.

A different newspaper, this one a tabloid. The same story magnified, an opinion piece, an outraged tone, immigrants are to blame, government must increase control of remaining colonies, stronger powers of arrest demanded in the House of Commons.

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