The Vagrants

With a curse Kwen told Bashi to shut up. Bashi was shocked. He had thought that Kwen was fond of him; only an hour earlier Kwen had been the storyteller. Nini stared at them, and it hurt Bashi to see her unblinking eyes stay on his own face, hot and probably red as a beet now. “Fuck you,“ Bashi said to Kwen. “Fuck your sisters and your mother and your aunts and grandmas and all your dead female ancestors in their tombs.”

Before Bashi had time to react, Kwen held a long knife to his throat, the sharp blade pressed into his skin. In a cold voice Kwen told Bashi to get down on his knees.

For the next five minutes, Bashi did everything Kwen ordered him to do. He called himself all sorts of names, slapping his own face and begging for forgiveness. Kwen looked down at him with a smile. “You're a useless man, Bashi, do you know that?”

“Yes, of course,” Bashi said. It was then that Bashi noticed the suspicious stain on Kwen's crotch, near his fly, light gray on the dark corduroy overalls. Bashi moved closer, as if he wanted to let his head touch Kwen's feet, and stole another glance. Kwen could have given Bashi a thousand other explanations for the stain, but Bashi would never believe him.

It was dark when Bashi and Nini got back to town. She looked nervous, and did not reply when he suggested a meeting the next day. She was late, she said, and quickened her pace with a desperate effort; her parents might not be happy, he thought, but he decided not to ask her about the punishment she was to receive. He had enough to worry about, and would prefer not to take on her misery.

A block away, Bashi broke another bulb. He kicked the half bulb into the ditch. “You corpse rapist!” Heaven knows what else such a man could do, Bashi thought; the townspeople needed someone to watch out for them. He decided to go back and find out why Kwen had been so stubbornly guarding the body from them, but before that, he had to know Kwen's whereabouts. Think as a good detective, Bashi urged himself. He moved quietly toward Kwen's shack, and approached it facing the wind so the dog would not catch his scent. About sixty feet away, he hurled a rock in the direction of the shack. The black dog started to bark and jump at the invisible enemy. Bashi turned into a side alley quickly and heard Kwen shouting from inside the shack. After a few minutes, Kwen came out of the shack and headed to the electric plant for his night shift. All safe for him to explore, Bashi thought. Who would have imagined that he, Bashi, the man whom everybody called an idiot, would be the one to work for the town's safety on this dark night? He rubbed his ears roughly with his hands; he wished he had not forgotten to retrieve his hat from Nini.

Stumbling in the darkness, Bashi had a hard time finding the spot. He made a mental note to buy some appropriate tools the next day, a good knife, a long and slim flashlight that he had seen a safety guard carry, a compact notebook and a pen of matching color, a pair of gloves, a magnifying glass, and some other things he imagined a detective needed. It was too late to make the purchase now, but at least the moonlight on the snow and a few weak stars made the search less difficult. Bashi fumbled in his pocket and found half a matchbook. He lit a match to make sure he was in the right place, and then started to work in the near darkness. The boulders were heavy, and he had to take a break from time to time. At least he had to give that bastard Kwen credit for being a strong man despite his age.

Bashi cleaned off all the boulders and then tried to untie the strings holding the sacks, but his fingers, too tired, could not finish the task. He bent down and broke the strings between his teeth. When he peeled the burlap sack away, his hand touched something hard and cold, not the ripped prisoner's uniform he had seen earlier but the woman's frozen body. Bashi gave a little startled cry, and then laughed at himself. “You'd better get used to this from now on,” he said in a hushed voice to himself.

The body, entirely uncovered now, looked eerie in the dim light. Kwen's old towel was still around the woman's head, and Bashi thought he'd better leave it there. “Sorry, miss, I don't mean to disturb you twice,” he said. “I'm just doing my job. For your good too.”

He lit another match and bent down to check the body, and it took him a long moment to register what he saw. His hand shook hard and the match dropped onto the snow, hissing for a moment before going out. Bashi sat down and panted, his legs too weak to support the weight of his knowledge. After a while, he lit another match and checked again. He was not mistaken: The woman's breasts were cut off, and her upper body, with the initial wound from the transplant operation and the massive cuts Kwen had made, was a mess of exposed flesh, dark red and gray and white. The same mess extended down to between her legs.