Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  “Hello, Odette,” she said. “You’re back early. Why are you wearing that insane hat?” Ernst looked up briefly from his papers and raised an eyebrow.

  “That hat is insane,” he agreed. The chapeau in question was made of an iridescent turquoise straw and had a dense black veil and a brim wide enough to shelter Odette and three other people from the burning rays of the sun (which was not shining that day).

  “The Checquy gave it to me,” said Odette. “They felt I needed a way to conceal my face from guests in the hotel.”

  “Well, that was very thoughtful of them,” said Ernst absently.

  “I get the sense that you’re not listening to me,” said Odette.

  “I’m listening to you, ’Dette,” said Marie. She awkwardly deposited her bottles on the table, sat down, lifted one to her lips, and began taking measured gulps, but some still spilled down her mouth onto her designer suit. After a few moments, she asked, “Why do they want you to conceal your face?”

  “Because I look like I got microwaved!” exclaimed Odette, pulling off the hat. She was well aware that her face would not have launched a thousand ships—unless they were trying to get away from the sight of her. The cream the Checquy had given her did a good deal to deaden the pain and keep things sterile, but it glistened on her burns and made them look even worse. The EA gave a little gasp, but Ernst and Marie seemed curiously unmoved. He continued his writing, and Marie continued to chug down water like a large man back from a run on a summer’s day. “I hope I don’t have to explain to you that this is not what I looked like when I left this morning.”

  “We were notified of what happened,” said Marie. “We were going to talk about it afterward. Has Marcel looked at you yet?”

  “No, he’s still at Apex House,” said Odette.

  “Well, you’re a doctor. Tell us, are you going to die?”

  “No,” said Odette sullenly. She could see where this was going.

  “Will you be crippled in some way?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to be permanently disfigured?”

  “No.”

  “Then stop complaining,” said Marie. “Yes, you look like something out of Italian cuisine, but you’ll get over it.”

  “I had a terrible experience!” said Odette petulantly. “I might have mental trauma.”

  “No such thing,” said Ernst dismissively without even looking up from his papers. “It’s just people being soft.”

  “Soft? Did you hear what happened to me?”

  “Yes,” said Marie. “You went prospecting in a whale or something, and it turned out not to be dead.”

  “It wasn’t a whale,” said Odette. “It was a creature unlike anything I’ve seen before. Huge.”

  “That sounds fascinating,” said Marie, taking a break from her swilling.

  “What was particularly interesting was the fact that in the middle of it was a space with a chair containing a dead naked person with protruding head nodules and pallid white skin.”

  At this revelation, Marie choked and spat a torrent of water across the table and onto Ernst.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” said Odette, “that reaction was incredibly satisfying.”

  “An . . . Antagonist?” Marie coughed.

  “Yes.”

  “Do the members of the Checquy understand the nature of their discovery?” asked Ernst intently.

  “No, they have no idea,” said Odette. “They were talking about mermen.”

  “Mermen?” repeated Ernst blankly. “Are there such things?”

  “No one knows,” said Odette. “But the possibility means they’ll be looking at this very closely. Grootvader, you have to tell them about the attacks.”

  “Out of the question,” said Ernst. He looked down at his papers and made an irritated sound. The deluge of water from Marie had smeared his notes. He began writing them out again.

  “The Antagonists are more powerful and have more resources than we realized,” said Odette. “That creature must be how they entered the country, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “We have,” said Ernst grimly.

  “You knew the Antagonists had something like this? Of course you did! You have to tell the Checquy!”

  “This problem will be solved shortly,” said Marie.

  “Are you sure?” asked Odette. “Because at the moment, things are set to become very bad very soon. And why are you drinking like you’re a fat person at a rave?”

  “I have to make a secure connection to the Chimerae in Wales,” said Marie before swigging down the last of the third bottle and reaching for the final one. “It’s massively dehydrating.”

  “I didn’t know you had communication implants,” said Odette, surprised. The Grafters could install devices that allowed the user to connect to the World Wide Web with his or her mind. Such devices tended to be limited to executive assistants, aides, and bodyguards because they took up so much space in people’s bodies. Older, more senior Grafters—those who were important enough to have executive assistants, aides, and bodyguards—were accustomed to conducting their long-distance conversations through the mouths of their entourages. The support staff channeled communications, acting as untraceable speakerphones. “With your combat abilities, how do you have room?”

  “Marcel installed them,” said Marie. “They’re not standard, and they’re not complete. This is why I have to drink my own body weight before I do this.”

  “What’s the phone number?” asked Odette curiously.

  “I’m not telling you that,” said Marie. “I don’t want you drunk-dialing my brain at four in the morning because you’ve lost your purse and need a ride home.”

  “I only did that once,” said Odette.

  “You were in Germany, I was in Belgium,” said Marie.

  “And I was very grateful. We all were.” She shut up then. It just happens, she thought. I forget for a moment about everything I’ve lost, everyone I’ve lost, and then a simple comment brings it all back.

  “I expect seeing that body in the whale was hard,” said Marie quietly. She put her hand on Odette’s shoulder. “It must have brought back some very painful memories.”

  “Just of the worst day of my life.” Odette shrugged. She sighed. “Anyway, I thought you should know about the creature and the . . . the Antagonist.”

  “Thank you,” said Marie. “We’ll talk about it later.” She chuckled. “Your bodyguard must have had a fit.”

  “She was not best pleased. And that reminds me,” said Odette. “I want a different bodyguard.”

  “Why?” asked Marie.

  “Because Felicity Clements is a bitch. She’s rude, she’s domineering, and I think she’s a psychopath. I don’t want to have to deal with her, and I don’t want her in my suite. If I must have a bodyguard, can you please ask the Checquy for a new one?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Ernst. “The Checquy could take it as an insult.”

  “Good!” shouted Odette. “She threatened to break my ankles!”

  “Oh, we’ve all wanted to break your ankles at some point or another,” said Marie dismissively. “Or at least your jaw.” Odette found herself making a peculiar gobbling sound of outrage.

  “If she actually does break your ankles, come back here and talk to me,” said Ernst, returning to his papers. He paused and thought for a moment. “Well, give me a call, anyway.”

  So your brain was inside a monster,” said Alessio in fascination.

  “My mind, not my brain,” said Felicity. “They didn’t saw open my skull or anything.”

  “And then the monster came alive.”

  “Yes. They moved my body while I was out,” said the Pawn. “Apparently, they were worried that the beast might crush the observation pavilion.”

  “And did it?” asked Alessio.

  “Oh, sure,” said Felicity. She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Twenty seconds after they got my body out of t
here, the whole structure was crushed like an egg. The attending doctor’s leg was broken. Then the troops sliced off the creature’s lower jaw with my mind in it. After the flesh died and I could get out, I tried to get back to my body, but all I could find were the shattered remnants of the pavilion.” Without opening her eyes, she took a sip of Talisker 12. “If I’d had access to my heart, I would have had a heart attack.”

  The memory of that frantic mental scrabbling through the hangar hung in her head: The fear that she would find her body crushed and ruined. The knowledge that if she had found her corpse, she would have slid back into it, willingly snuffing out her spirit rather than existing as a ghost. Is that something to be ashamed of?

  “Eventually I found myself, obviously, but it took a while. I opened my eyes to find my face completely shellacked with my own drool, and a huge hulking Irishman standing over me with a machete at my throat.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I broke his nose,” said Felicity tiredly.

  “Wow.”

  “Hmm. It’s not as great as it sounds. For one thing, he was the one who’d carried my body to safety, which makes me look pretty ungrateful. And for another, it made everyone think that I’d come back possessed by the vengeful spirit of a whale-monster. I had to talk very fast to persuade them otherwise.”

  “And now you have to write up a report for your superiors,” said Alessio.

  “Yup.”

  “So don’t you think you should stop drinking?”

  At this, Felicity opened her eyes. She had a wry, withering remark to make, but then the door slammed open. Leliefeld stalked in, clutching her huge hat. She didn’t look at Alessio or Felicity, just stomped across the suite to the bedroom. They heard two more doors slam, and then the distant sound of the bath running.

  “I think now is the perfect time to be drinking,” said Felicity.

  Odette put the toilet seat down and made a mental note to slap Alessio on the back of the head when next she got the chance. Then she put the lid down, sat, and listened to the roar of water pouring into the tub. The room filled with steam and the smell of jasmine. On the vanity was a photo of her and her friends, all dressed up to attend a wedding. She thought of that white corpse she’d seen in the belly of the beast. All of the memories that she spent every day deliberately not recalling came back to her. The horror, the loss. And then, very carefully, so as not to worsen her wounded skin, she put her face in her hands and began to weep.

  25

  When she awoke in the morning, Odette felt plain awful. She levered herself out of the tub, listlessly washed the slime off in the shower, and wandered out into the living room of the suite, only to find Clements engaged in some weaponized version of yoga on the carpet in front of the television. The Pawn looked up from under her own left armpit.

  “Oh, you’re up,” said Clements. Odette shrugged. With a grunt, the Pawn unbraided her left arm and right leg from each other and rolled up onto her feet. She peered at Odette. “You weren’t kidding about that stuff in your tub,” she said appreciatively. “You look like you fell asleep on the beach in Tahiti, but that’s it. I don’t suppose the two men who were in the beast with you can use it?”

  “You have to have had inoculations for two years and take supplements every day,” said Odette dully. “Otherwise, your skin comes off in big flakes.”

  “Figures,” said Clements.

  “Where’s Alessio?” The Pawn looked at her oddly. “What?”

  “He’s off with the school group,” said Clements. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

  “Oh,” said Odette. “What am I supposed to do today?”

  “Nothing.” Clements shrugged. “It’s Saturday, so there’re no meetings scheduled. You can just stay in.”

  “You don’t have anything to do?”

  “I’ve been having fun with room service,” said Clements. “I had a lunch composed entirely of parfaits.”

  “Well, I don’t want to stay in today,” said Odette.

  “All right,” said Clements, raising an eyebrow. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to do something touristy. From the moment I got off the plane, they’ve been warning us that we couldn’t go out. Well, I have a bodyguard, I should be safe, so I’m going out.”

  “You don’t have the best track record when it comes to ‘should be safe,’” pointed out Clements. “You managed to bring down spectral wrath upon yourself whilst sitting in a conference room. But fine, where do you want to go?”

  “What’s your favorite thing to do in London?” asked Odette.

  “It turns out that I really like watching repeats of forensic crime dramas and eating parfaits in a five-star hotel.”

  “Let’s go to St. Paul’s Cathedral,” said Odette. “Alessio’s school group got to go there, and I really want to see it.”

  “Sure,” said Clements. “I haven’t been there since primary school. It’s very cool. Any particular reason you want to go there?”

  “No,” lied Odette.

  St. Paul’s Cathedral stood before them, looking as if it did not quite belong in the world. It was as if it had been cut-and-pasted into the city just to make the surrounding buildings look tacky. Odette gazed up the steps, ignoring the lounging students, tracing the columns up to more columns, a gorgeously carved pediment, and then, soaring up into an unexpectedly blue sky, the dome.

  You were so right, Pim, thought Odette. It is glorious. She relaxed a little. All the things in my life are just temporary, she thought. This building will be standing long after me and all my ridiculous problems are gone. It was both a comforting thought and a sort of depressing one.

  Inside the cathedral, instead of the hushed sound of reverent visitors, the women heard an orchestra that was either tuning up or playing an extremely modern piece of music. A small notice board advised everyone that the Orchestra and Choir of Greater Juster Norton would be performing that evening and apologized for any disruption caused by the rehearsal. The two women walked down to the nave, beneath the gargantuan arches and the soaring ceilings.

  In the center, under the dome, the orchestra sat on a broad platform. The musicians were tootling their horns or frowning as they drew their bows across their strings, making all those little sounds that constitute foreplay in the orchestral world. Singers—Odette and Felicity presumed they were singers—were sitting about reading books or peering at their phones. None of them were staring open-mouthed at the magnificent spectacle above them, which struck Odette as astounding, since that was all she could do.

  The dome of the cathedral hung in the air, crowning at a height of sixty-five meters. A ring of windows beneath the dome filled the space with light, and its inner surface had been cunningly painted so that it seemed to be lined with gigantic sculptures.

  “Ooh,” she said, despite herself. She nudged Clements and pointed up to the balcony that ringed the base of the dome. “That’s the Whispering Gallery.”

  “What?” asked Clements over the sound of the orchestra.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  “That’s the Whispering Gallery,” Odette said, slightly more loudly. “If you go up there and whisper to the wall, the curve carries your voice around so that someone on the other side can hear you.”

  “I vaguely recall that.”

  “You see the top of the dome?”

  “Uh, yes,” said Clements. “It’s right above us.”

  “There’s a tiny little window cut there, and if you climb up, you can look down through it to the floor.”

  “Is it vomit-proof?” asked Clements. “Because I can imagine nothing that would be more likely to cause vertigo than doing what you just described, and if you throw up on someone from that height, your vomit would literally cut him in half.”

  “I—I don’t think that’s the case,” said Odette.

  “You want to climb it, don’t you?” asked Clements. Odette nodded. “Why?”

  “Because it’s there. And it’s c
ool.”

  “Well, you can’t.” Odette looked at her. “Not unless you tell me the truth about why you wanted to come here.” The Pawn did not give the impression of budging on this point.

  “Fine,” said Odette finally. “I like cathedrals. I used to go visit them with someone.”

  “Your boyfriend Pim,” said Clements. Odette stared at her in shock. “I read your file.”

  “Oh. It’s in my file?”

  “And Alessio talked.”

  “That little shit!” exclaimed Odette, then looked around guiltily. Even with the orchestra doing their thing, several cathedral-goers had heard her. She made an apologetic face.

  “Marcel too,” said Clements. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It sounded like an extremely rehearsed phrase, straight out of The Pawn’s Handbook for Normal Social Interactions.

  Odette resisted the obnoxious urge to say that it wasn’t Clements’s fault. “Thank you,” she said reluctantly. “Anyway, we did all the major cathedrals in Europe and always wanted to go to St. Paul’s together.” And instead I’m here with you. “Happy?”

  “Fine, we can go up,” said Clements. “But I’m not whispering any sweet nothings to you.”

  It was not as if they could have done any whispering to each other anyway. Once they had climbed the spiraling, far-too-broad-and-shallow stairs, they came to the balcony of the Whispering Gallery, where there were a number of visitors. Some were seated on the bench that circled the gallery, staring up at the dome. Some were standing at the iron balustrade (which seemed far too flimsy to Odette), looking down at the orchestra below. Others were walking around gingerly to the exit on the other side of the gallery. One or two could be seen whispering fruitlessly to the wall, their voices drowned out by the sound of the orchestra.

  There were also several children trotting fearlessly around, apparently unconcerned that the balustrade could snap away at any moment, allowing gravity to drag them over the edge and send them plummeting, screaming, into the orchestra far below.

  Remember, Odette told herself, you may be able to imagine the falls with exquisite, painful detail, but you can cope with heights. You climbed the outside of the Cologne Cathedral. Still, she took a seat on the bench, very close to the entrance. Clements walked along a little ways and then sat herself down. Odette leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.