Book, Possessed

My partner Mickey and I were on our regular beat when we got called to a bakery around mid-morning. It was the one on 5^th with the croissants the size of your head. We arrived to find a book lying on the ground and a small crowd around it like it was a body.

“What happened, someone whack a paperback?” Mickey asked. Poor Mickey always wanted to be a poet.

“It moved,” a man said. He seemed the nervous type. I nudged the book with my toe. It moved.

“Imagine that,” I said.

“No, I swear it moved by itself,” the man said. “It seemed weird, so we called you.”

“Well, yeah, who else ya gonna call?” I said, sarcastically. Mickey shot me a look.

I sighed and took out my reading glasses. “Shoo,” I said to the onlookers. “Back to your pastries. Let the big boys work.” The crowd wandered away except the nervous man.

“Ken,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m the manager here.”

I let Mickey shake Ken’s hand while I squatted down next to the book and put on the reading glasses. These weren’t normal reading glasses. They let me see the words hiding in plain sight. Sure, it might seem obvious if you look at a cup of coffee and see the word COFFEE over it, but it’s sure a lot easier to identify a crime when you look at a body and see the word MURDER across it.

“Ha!” I said. “It’s an Arabic book.” The word lay spread out over the book like a plate of dropped spaghetti with meatballs dots around it.

“You know Arabic?” Mickey said.

“Yeah, it was my language elective at the academy,” I said. “It was either Brooklyn slang or Arabic and well, Brooklyn slang was at 8:00am.”

“So, you know the problem?” Nervous Ken asked, looking extra nervous.

“Yeah,” I said. “This book is possessed.”

“Possessed?” Mickey said. “How can you tell?”

“There are telltale signs,” I said. “You see this part—” I reached over and smacked his arm. “Put your reading glasses on.” Mickey thought the glasses made him look like a square. He took them out, grumbling.

“Now, this part here at end,” I continued when Mickey had his glasses on, “this means it’s possessed.”

“By what?” Nervous Ken asked, eavesdropping shamelessly.

“Not by what, by whom,” I said. “Her.”

“Who?” Eavesdropping Nervous Ken asked, looking around.

“How would I know? It just says her, as in her book.” Turning back to Mickey, I said, “It stands to reason that if this is an Arabic book, it probably belongs to an Arabic dame. Keep an eye out for this.” I drew a letter for him on napkin.

“Look for a surprised-looking Arabic dame?” asked Mickey, who was as bright as a 5-watt bulb most of the time.

“No! This is how you know something is female in Arabic,” I said. “It’s the sign of Ms. Buta. You see, if something’s female in Arabic, you add an ‘ah’ sound to the end. A cop is a guy but if it was a gal, you call her a coppa: an Arabic woman’s not a doctor, she’s a doctora. You see?”

“So you’re saying pasta is a female in the past,” Mickey said.

“Sure, Mickey.” If Mickey were an Arabic woman, he’d be a morona.

“Anyway,” I continued, “There was this one gal long ago, like I said, named Ms. Tamar Buta. She was mighty upset at having to talk more than guys just to say the same thing, so one night she went into the library and put a surprised face at the end of the all the female words to show how shocked she was at the injustice of it all. So now to find anything female, we just need to look for that. Easy peasy, pyramid of Gizee.” I wasn’t going to tell Mickey that I’d actually fallen asleep in Arabic class quite a bit. Still, I thought I’d gotten the gist of it pretty well.

I scanned the patrons in the bakery. This particular bakery served some of the best baklava in town so I could pick out a few women with Arabic names hovering over them.

“Hey, I got a better idea,” Mickey said. He took off the glasses and picked up the book.

“Anybody lose a book?” he shouted.

A woman hurried over. “Are you possessing this book?” Mickey asked.

“What do you mean?” the woman asked.

“Is it your book?”

“Yes, it’s my book.”

He handed it to her and nudged me. “It’s her book.”

“Yes, well done,” I said. I had to admit that maybe Mickey wasn’t such a morona after all.

Ken was looking relieved. “Well, I guess that solves it. Can I get you some baklava, on the house?”

Now that was more like it. “That sounds mighty fine, Ken,” I said. “And remember, if you have any problems in the future—anything at all—you call us.”

Notes, if you’re confused:

• in Arabic, possessive adjectives, like my, your, his, her, etc. are expressed through suffixes to a word, in this case book.
• the feminine marker (the surprised face letter) goes on the end of feminine nouns and is pronounced “ah”. It’s called a taa marbuta.

Thanks to my Arabic teacher, Carolyn Baugh, for inadvertently giving me the idea for this story.