The crime scrivener of Passion City

I twiddled my pen and looked at my notebook. A blank page looked back at me.

I looked out the window. It was raining. Insects, that seemed to spawn during the monsoon, invaded the room and flew sorties around the lone bulb that illuminated it. One winged arthropod flew straight towards my desk and landed on my notebook. "A perfect landing", he must have thought to himself before I squashed him with the palm of my hand. The insect's gender was of course indeterminable at that moment, but I would like to think that it was a male. Like all men of my faith, I too was taught that harming women, and consequently killing them, was wrong, very wrong. I imagine a person who might be observing my actions and thoughts now, amused at my guilt at killing an insect that could have been of the female gender. This person wouldn't be so amused though, if he lived in the city of my birth. The city of passion, or as we affectionately refer to it, Passion City.

The city earned its nickname; the real name being rather uninteresting to mention in this narrative; from a series of crimes of passion that took place among the aristocracy in the early years of this century. My counterparts who served in the Constabulary at that time went as far in their investigations to determine that one man was the reason, the cause, for the enraged, cuckolded husbands to butcher their adulterous wives to death. The identity of this man, this charmer, they were never able to determine. In the words of an investigator - who wished to remain anonymous, possibly to escape public wrath over the failure of the police investigation - "He showed these ladies the best time they've ever had in bed and then simply leapt out of the window when the husband burst into the bedroom, so to speak." Reports of a handsome, scantily clad man leaping out of windows and zooming away on his steed amused the populace, until the ensuing crimes of passion that followed it outraged them. The Satin Sheet Seducer, as he was called at that time, possibly because of his preference of aristocrat bedrooms and their female inhabitants, committed his crimes for over a decade and then faded out of the spotlight.

The brouhaha over the unsolved crimes of passion earned derisive laughter from the citizens of the neighbouring cities. "Aren't you man enough to satisfy your woman?", was a regular jibe that the male citizens had to hear when they visited the other cities. Eventually someone gave our city the nickname Passion City and it stuck. And now, almost half a century after the first recorded crime of passion, the name is still in use, even by our own people. People who seem to have forgotten the embarrassing origins of this name.

Passion City was now facing a string of sexually motivated crimes, but this time it was not crimes of passion. In the crimes of passion of the past, the perpetrator would be a charmer who wouldn't harm women but would cause harm to come upon them by the consequence of his actions. In the crimes that swept through our city now, the perpetrator forced himself upon women. A crime of the worst kind, committed by a man, or men, of the worst disposition.

And hence I found myself part of an investigative group investigating sexually motivated crimes, like my counterparts fifty years earlier. I looked at the innards of the insect spread over the blank page of my notebook. This was a male insect, I told myself again and tore the bloodied paper and threw it into the dustbin.

My job as a crime scrivener for the Constabulary wasn't a very glamourous one. I wasn't in the frontlines, investigating the scene of crimes. I was in the police station all day, writing down first hand reports of crime victims in a format that would be understood by the investigators. While listening to the victim narrate his tale of horror, I would get clues and note it down in my report, but the investigators mocked me for doing this. "Trying to be an investigator, are you?", they would jeer but I didn't let that stop me. I would become an investigator someday. I promised my mother that I would.

I looked at the blank page again. Today was slow, in police parlance. Crimes weren't being committed and investigators and crime scriveners alike slacked about. Some of us even went home, calling it a day. As I doodled on the blank page trying to kill time in the last hour of my shift, she entered the room.

It was part of my job as a crime scrivener to write down all the details, that I heard and observed, as clearly as I could, creating a vivid description of the crime to help the investigators in their investigation. At times I would have to write down descriptions of the victims who were speaking to me, observing their expressions, mannerisms and gestures to get an idea of who they were and what they had gone through. I began observing this lady who was now walking towards me as I just realised that except for a couple of low ranking constables who were leering at this lady, there was no one else around, making me the highest ranking policeman in the station. The rest of the crew might have gone home early to be with their wives this rainy night, I conjectured.

She was a tall woman. Taller than the average man and certainly much taller than the average woman, she might have stood out of a crowd wherever she travelled. I supposed that she might have been wearing high heeled footwear and I looked down and was surprised to find that her feet were bare. She wore a length of cloth draped diagonally across, in folds. That surprised me too. I hadn't seen such a costume before; I assumed that it was a costume since I've certainly never seen a regular dress of this style; but a look at her face made me question my assumption.

She was not a native of Passion City. Her face had oriental features. I looked closely and eliminated the ethnic possibilities. Her eyes weren't slanted too much. Not from the Koreas or China. Her almond shaped eyes were wide. Was she Japanese? No, the shape of her nose crossed out that possibility. She could be from Siam, but the racial similarities were slim. She seemed to share a lot of the facial features of the Mongoloids of the Indies, of whom I have only read about and seen pictures. Was she from the Indies? Was this, what she was wearing, the clothes of the women of the Indies?

She sat at my desk. I lifted my pen and looked at her, questioningly. I considered asking the constable to summon the translator from his house, assuming that this foreign lady would not speak in our tongue. I was wrong, however. She started speaking and spoke fluently in our tongue. That piqued my interest. If she knew how to speak in our tongue, then she might have been living here, for a while at least. But first, I had to listen to what she had to say. I opened my notebook and looked at the blank page. A page that was no longer blank as I began filling it with details of this strange woman and the recounting of her experience in the murky underworld of Passion City.