Reed900 inspired Original
Volkov despised any additions to coffee and always proudly ordered his caffeine fix black. At first, when he noticed the creamy drink in Schmidt’s cup, he jumped at the opportunity to make fun of his partner, but with time came to terms with this sacrilege. He also insisted on only taking up standing tables at the eatery they frequented for lunch in fear of being seen as a couple on a date. Despite knowing virtually nothing about his partner’s personal life, he assumed that sharing a sitting-down table with a man would harm Schmidt’s dating prospects.
With time, though, it just became their thing: choosing a standing table or just taking up a bench outdoors if none were available. Mike didn’t question it, always happy to accommodate his partner in a small matter like this.
Today was no different. Schmidt had just brought their order when Volkov was checking his messages from the lab guys.
“The fingerprints match”, Jim said. “The note was definitely written with Marino’s finger.”
Schmidt hummed in acknowledgement, setting their little table as neatly as the cheap fast-food cardboard packaging would allow. Volkov lifted the plastic lid off one of the cups and TSKed when he saw creamed coffee as if it offended his very being. Picking up the other one, he theatrically grabbed his meat pie from the plate, ripping the greasy paper on purpose and ignored Schmidt’s accusing glance.
“The DNA test isn’t done yet, though,” he continued, taking a big bite.
Schmidt, relieved that Volkov would keep silent for a moment while he chewed, carefully unwrapped his own pie, taking time to enjoy the aroma first. After the morning visit to the butchery, he made sure to get the mushroom filling, and the unfamiliar scent filled him with almost childish giddiness. He knew being completely quiet made his partner’s incessantly working mind short-circuit and double down on the talking, though.
“I’m surprised you got your usual meat pie, to be honest,” he smiled, seeing Volkov’s angular jaws working on overdrive.
“Hummffghuermmgh, Shmiff,” came the answer, and the younger detective hid his smile behind a gulp from his own paper cup.
As he enjoyed his meal in relative peace, it wasn’t just Volkov’s mind and jaws that were working at their limit. Jim couldn’t tear his eyes off the taller man’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed his cream-tainted coffee. Distractingly, he scrubbed his own neck, which needed a shave and, if he was being honest, a good scrub with soap. It was unfair that Schmidt managed to look so put-together and do as good a job as himself while also being in such good shape! He wondered how this peacock had enough time in a day for the gym, the dressing up, cooking picturesque breakfasts AND writing his reports on time?
He gripped his untarnished coffee and as he forced a gulp down his throat, a runaway drop escaped the corner of his lips and ran down his t-shirt, ruining the white fabric. Well, it wasn’t as white as the day before yesterday when he picked it up from the washing, but at least he didn’t look like a slob wearing it. Until now.
What he didn’t notice was Schmidt’s keen eyes that followed that drop every millimeter of its way, committing the sight to memory for later.
“I’ve searched the Internet far and wide but I couldn’t make sense of it all. We need a textbook of Chinese”, Volkov said, rubbing his tired eyes after intensely staring at his screens for another couple hours.
“Or we could find a tutor who specialises in Chinese calligraphy”, offered Schmidt, finishing up his weekly report.
They of course went the Volkov route first.
The gruff detective looked out of place in the library. He thought they still looked stuffy and dusty, full of decrepit ladies who shushed you for so much as breathing. This one was different though: some kids were on their laptops, happily clicking away essays, one of the doors was invitingly left ajar to let in more people to a room with some lecture going on, and — aha! — there was even a coffee vending machine with snacks in the corner.
The front desk of the reading section had a woman in glasses, just as ageless at first glance as one could possibly imagine. She was occupied by scanning a pile of books and carefully putting them into columns according to some mysterious pattern. Her small hands with blunt nails worked quickly and carefully and as she lifted a pile of about ten books and took it away towards the shelves, Volkov noticed a tattoo on her forearm: an artsy ampersand with something written around it in a whimsical font.
“That’s dedication,” he thought.
Schmidt caught up after stalling for a minute next to the door to the lecture hall. He came up to the desk: it was his turn to do the asking this time.
“How can I help you, gentlemen?” the woman asked when she got back, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead from the effort. “Wait, don’t tell me: you are not here for reading recommendations.”
“We aren’t,” Schmidt admitted, flashing his ID. “We are from Bellenhaven police, want to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Michael Schmidt,” she read. “That’s a last name with a long history. Did you know it’s a German version of the English ‘Smith’?”
“I do, actually, and yes, I have German roots. Can I have your name, miss…?”
“Wilde. Juniper Wilde, but everyone calls me June,” she chirped.
“Wilde as in…” Schmidt started.
“What a coincidence,” the man laughed. “I guess you were born to do this job, weren’t you?”
He caught Volkov’s heavy stare in the corner of his vision. What exactly made his partner mad wasn’t clear but Schmidt knew he wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, building rapport with a possible lead was an important step in the detective handbook.
“I’m sure you’ve read all his books, Miss Wilde,” he went on.
Behind him, Volkov cleared his throat forcibly.
“... but what do you have on Asian languages? My partner and I are in the middle of a case and need some advice on Chinese handwriting.”
“There isn’t much but we do have a couple of tracing notebooks to practice the characters,” she quickly typed a request in the laptop.
“No, June, that’s not quite what we need,” Schmidt said and the librarian looked up with a bright smile women always had in stock for him.
Volkov was getting impatient.
“We actually have a piece of writing in what we think is Chinese and we couldn’t translate it. So we thought you might know how—”
It was the “might” that snapped Volkov’s patience. Huffing and puffing, he closed the distance with the desk in a couple of forceful steps and put his ID face down on the wooden surface.
“It will take all day, Mikey, let me do it,” he tossed, but before he had a chance to continue, June’s eyes rounded and she smiled even more.
“Wait, wait, wait,” — she flapped her palms in the air to stop him. “You have a very peculiar pronunciation, sir. Don’t tell me your name yet. Let me guess, your colleague here comes from Germany, but you… Eastern Europe?”
“What?” Volkov said, clearly disoriented with someone else asking him questions for a change.
Schmidt, knowing that June was close, still forced his face into a neutral expression. He didn’t want to spoil the experiment.
“Yes!” June went on. “It’s usually thought that native speakers of Polish, Slovak or Russian struggle with English ‘R’ sounds but in fact, your soft ‘L’ is usually the giveaway.”
Volkov resisted the urge to cover his mouth with his palm. The last time he felt like this was when his mother scolded him for lying as a teenager.
“You see, detectives, the English language only has the hard ‘L’ sound, softening it is a feature of some languages in that area, ” she beamed at Volkov like a kid. “You said ‘It will take all day, let me handle it’ which has a bunch of ‘L’ sounds. Most of them you pronounced correctly save for the one in ‘let’. It sounded very soft, which is not quite how a native speaker of English would say it.”
Schmidt had to admit he had noticed small idiosyncrasies in his partner’s speech but could never put his finger on it. He knew that Volkov grew up here after moving from his home country as a young child. He picked up the language very well. But apparently, not perfectly.
“I… uh,” — the older detective seemed a bit lost but quickly recovered. — “Nonsense, it’s just a slip.”
“Still,” June insisted. “Is your name Ivan by any chance?” — she glanced at the ID as if it was an early Christmas present.
“No, it’s James,” he said. “Anyway, we need to…”
Schmidt just couldn’t help himself, “James Volkov. He’s Russian.”
“Volkov, huh?” June looked ecstatic. “Comes from ‘wolf’. I was right!”
Volkov’s glare seared Schmidt’s face. Schmidt met his eyes with a calm look but inside, he rejoiced. Not often could one see someone play a symphony on his partner’s strings like that. Even if it was a lucky coincidence, he knew: this woman could be a valuable asset to their investigation. He could only hope her language prowess included Chinese.
While Volkov recovered, he took out the folded piece of paper with the scribbles of the “grain” character and carefully spread it on the desk. June’s eyes, instantly drawn to the ink, greedily scanned the paper.
“We need to know what this character might mean,” Schmidt said. “The online dictionaries and translators say it means ‘grain’ but it doesn’t make sense for our case. Can you tell us anything else about it?”
June spinned the paper upside-down, looked at its backside and brought it to her face so close that it looked like she was going to sniff the writing.
“It does look Chinese,” she confirmed. “But it’s useless, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, is that so?” Volkov perked up before Schmidt pinned him with a sharp sideways glance.
“Can I ask why?” he said calmly, turning back to June whose eyes jumped from one detective to the other now.
“Yeah,” she said, just a hint of a sly smile gracing her lips. “It wasn’t written by a native Chinese speaker so it’s likely just a bored doodle.”
“You see, detectives, when one learns to write Chinese characters, they quickly find out that there’s an order to the strokes. You must follow the order of each line for graceful and fluent writing. This ‘character’ you’re showing me is just someone trying to copy one. Or just coming up with a pretty symmetric design. It must be a coincidence that it looks like a character.”
She made a helpless gesture, and shrugged, showing that that was about it.
Schmidt’s “told you so” look wasn’t appreciated by Volkov in the slightest. In fact, the shorter detective went into the offensive and made another attempt, “Look again. It must mean something.”
June slid the paper back towards the guests.
“I can’t do more without knowing where it came from, I’m afraid. Every linguist depends on context more than anything. Is it a suspect’s handwriting sample? Then all I can say about them is that this isn’t a native Chinese speaker. Otherwise they would know the stroke order.”
“That’s true,” Schmidt smiled and thought he heard Volkov’s teeth grind. “Because I wrote this. But it’s a copy I made of a very important document. Can you please look again? It will help us immensely.”
“If you show me the document itself, I might help.”
“Out of the question,” Volkov cut in.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Schmidt said. “Excuse us, miss Wilde.”
They went outside to avoid disturbing the quiet of the library. Schmidt could tell his partner needed to calm down. It took a minute and a puff of cigarette smoke.
“Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not supposed to smoke near a library,” Volkov said.
“It’s not like I’m going to arrest you, you know,” the other smiled. He knew Volkov could be reasoned with. It just required some time and patience.
“We can’t show her the files, you know that.”
“If we appoint her a linguistic consultant with Captain, we can.”
“The paperwork will take weeks. All for her to say that it really means ‘grain’.”
“Jim, I feel some unreasonable resentment in you. Are you upset she noticed your accent?”
“No. Of course not, idiot. It’s just…”
“She’s just too…into this stuff. I’ve seen it before. This is a bad sign for an expert. Her enthusiasm can damage the investigation. She’s sitting in that room, with nothing to do for years, of course she wants something exciting to happen. No, Mike, she’s not a good lead.”
Volkov breathed in another lungful of smoke and held it in for several seconds, looking at the people passing by. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why exactly he needed to calm down, though. He just knew his explanation made him want to cover his mouth again.
Schmidt was silent. Then, he reached out and grabbed the cigarette from his partner’s fingers. Volkov’s heart skipped a beat at the skin contact and then another, when he saw Schmidt take a long drag before stubbing the butt into a trash bin.
“I still think she might be useful,” he heard Schmidt say before disappearing into the library again. “I’ll tell her to phone the precinct if she comes up with anything else.”
Volkov pinched the bridge of his nose and hoped it looked like a gesture of annoyance and not an attempt to hide the tremor in his hands.
June Wilde was making herself look busy when Schmidt came back inside. It didn’t take him long to realise she had been trying to spy on them out of the window. Exactly how much she had seen was hard to say because of the heavy shelves that lined the walls and cutting off direct access to the glass, though. She tried acting innocent, loading another pile of books into her hands and huffing with a fake effort.
“I couldn’t help noticing your tattoo, June,” Schmidt smiled. “An ampersand. You must really love languages.”
“Not just languages, linguistics mostly,” she beamed, dropping her act in an instant. “But forensic linguistics is a passion of mine. It’s so underappreciated!”
“Forensic linguistics? Is this what you did to my partner back there?”
“Sort of. But it can do so much more. Oh, detective Schmidt, please, let me help your investigation!”
He shook his head, “I really can’t show you the files, it would be a huge violation of the rules.”
She deflated like a balloon.
“However,” he went on, winking. “I can show you some of my own doodles. Let me know if they remind you of anything.”
He gave June a folded napkin from the cafe he and Volkov went to at lunch and she accepted it with both hands, like a treasure.
“I will, Detective! I’ll do my best!”
The “doodles” was his best rendition of the full note with his phone number on the other side. Schmidt knew Jim would lose his mind if he found out.
Volkov hadn’t given him a lift that evening, apparently still mad about the cigarette or his own accent slipping out.
It didn’t matter to Schmidt, who was used to his partner’s temper and switching gears at a snap. Volkov wasn’t fooling anyone acting all annoyed: the moment their fingers brushed, his pupils said everything Schmidt suspected long ago. This act of disrespect, both the snatch and the direct disagreement left Volkov breathless, wide-eyed and craving more.
But because his partner was a coward, it was too early to act on it. For now, he had…
The sheets were cool, feeling so nice under his freshly-showered skin, and Schmidt could surrender to the exhaustion of the busy day right there and then, but the slideshow of the pictures he had collected in his mind’s eye demanded immediate attention. He stretched on the bed, only covered by a damp towel around his hips, and let the fabric massage his back muscles. Just like enjoying a fresh pie started with the scent, taking time to enjoy himself wasn’t a straightforward business for Schmidt.
He savoured the image of the coffee drop he had committed to memory: the way it ran through Volkov’s stubble, pooled over his naked collarbone for a second and then disappeared into his t-shirt. He wondered what kind of noise his partner would make if it was his tongue that ran the same route. Would Volkov freeze, afraid to breathe and just let Schmidt take what he wanted? Or would he fight instead? “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Mike?” he’d say and throw a punch. Or perhaps, Volkov would melt right into his touch, submitting without a fight?
Schmidt turned on his stomach and rolled his hips into the mattress, testing the waters. It felt good, but could be better.
He imagined, instead of taking the cigarette from Volkov’s hand, grabbing his wrist with one hand and his stocky waist with the other and crushing their mouths together, licking the smoke and bewilderment off of his partner’s lips. Volkov would definitely start a fight then, because they were in public.
The idea of holding down Jim as he fought to free himself from the stronger man’s grip stirred Schmidt’s body further. “Don’t fight me, Jim, you know it’s in vain,” he’d say, pressing Volkov to the glass door of the library for everyone to see who he belongs to. “Or should I say ‘Ivan’?”
Schmidt imagined the look on Volkov’s face if he said that. His eyes wide, hazy, baffled, with a hint of pain at the bottom. He rolled his hips into the bed again and hardly held in a grunt, shutting his eyes in search of more, more, more of Volkov.
He imagined fighting his partner again, how they would roll around on the ground, their bodies pressing in the most inconvenient places. How he’d overpower Volkov and bite into his pulse just under his earlobe, hearing the man groan, trying to mask it as a cry of pain. But the hardness at Schmidt’s thigh would be proof that he wants it.
Schmidt’s phone dinged with a text notification. He debated leaving it unread but knew he couldn’t focus in case it was something important. With his right hand occupied, he fished it out of the sheets with the other.
It was Volkov. A voice recording.
“Fuck, Mike, my car won’t start. I’m gonna be late tomorrow, gotta get it fixed first thing in the morning. Just letting ya know.”
“ok” Schmidt texted back.
Still on his belly, he stuffed a pillow between his thighs, left thumb hovering over the “play” button.
