by E. J. Swift
“I’ve set the window-walls to one-way,” called Adelaide. “So we can turn on the lights.”
“Great,” he mumbled. The we was anything but reassuring.
He expected to find more neurotic ordering in the next room, but instead walked into a scene resembling traders’ day at Market Circle. The room was crammed with cabinets. There were open shelf units, cabinets with glass doors, trunks with metal bolts, sets of drawers and a wardrobe with the doors thrown open. The wardrobe bulged with bolts of material, stacked in alternate reds and yellows. Adelaide was on her hands and knees, peering underneath it, her trousers stretched over the seat of her pants. Vikram allowed himself to enjoy the spectacle, and the silence, for a moment. He had no idea what she expected to find.
“What’s all the material for?” he asked.
“How should I know?”
“Well, what are we looking for? We haven’t got much time.”
“I told you. I don’t know yet.”
Vikram tried a few drawers. Their contents varied. One was entirely full of cans, the same fizzy Coralade, crushed to flat silver disks. Another contained thermometers. He found a third brimming with model horses; wooden, plastic, stone, even cardboard. He showed it to Adelaide. She picked up one of the horses and turned it over between gloved finger and thumb, frowning slightly. Then she put it back and shut the drawer. Vikram’s curiosity was piqued. He wanted to ask what was special about horses, but did not expect to be graced with an answer.
“When were you last here?” he said instead.
Adelaide prised open a drinks cabinet and cursed as a landslide of rubber bands poured out. Vikram went to help her pick them up. She didn’t thank him but after a minute she said, “It was a while ago.”
“So you won’t know if anything’s changed. Since Axel’s been gone, I mean.”
“I’m not assuming anything has.”
Vikram gathered up the last of the rubber bands. Between them they eased the cabinet shut.
“Then why are you here?” he asked.
“Because I can read what they can’t,” Adelaide said. She uncurled her hand. A miniature plastic horse was in her palm, legs gathered up as if it was galloping.
“Horses,” she said.
The penthouse was similarly structured to Adelaide’s apartment, with room collapsing into room like a pack of dominoes. Vikram walked into a room containing only a table, exactly centred. There was something about its solitary positioning that reminded him of the table he had seen in Adelaide’s dining room, beautifully laid but unused.
He didn’t switch on the light but went over to the window-wall, checking out the view. Despite the hour and the haziness, Osiris was a network of light on black. A shuttle streaked through its glowing shell, reminding him of the traces left by sparklers on midsummer night. The ocean was invisible and the city felt rootless. Vikram rapped the bufferglass with his knuckle, taking some comfort in its tensile strength.
He found the kitchen, and then the bathroom, which were both cleaner than everywhere else. The bathroom cupboard was full of medication. The bottles were organized in order of label colour. He took one out, tossed it in the air and caught it. The bottle rattled. It was unopened. So were the rest.
“Your brother had a lot of doctors,” he called to Adelaide, who was in the next room. She appeared sharply. She ran her index finger along the rows of prescriptions.
“Well, that has no effect… haven’t tried that. Interesting, nothing from Radir…”
Vikram had already learned that the best time to interrogate Adelaide was when she was distracted, and was therefore more likely to volunteer information. It meant pretending you weren’t really there, but since Adelaide was so self-obsessed this was remarkably easy.
“Who’s Radir?”
“His last shrink.”
“How many did he see?”
“Just about everyone in Osiris, I think… I never knew they gave him that… My father insisted.”
He didn’t push the issue any further. Whatever illness Axel had suffered from, two things seemed clear. The doctors did not agree on it, as none of the prescriptions matched, and nor did Axel, who had not been taking any of them. He left Adelaide peering at labels, mouthing their formulas to herself.
In the next room there was a broken clock on the wall. He stood looking at it, trying to decide why anyone would keep a broken clock. He checked his own watch. They still had over half an hour. If he listened, he could hear the watch ticking.
He found himself straining for noise. The twins’ reputation might have been wild, but the penthouse was not somewhere he could imagine holding a raucous party. It was easier to imagine his own friends here than it was Adelaide’s Haze. He wondered what Nils would say about it. Shake his head and laugh, Vikram decided, then remind Vikram that the penthouse’s owner was, after all, related to “that celebrity bitch.” Laughter was Nils’s reaction to most things: defusing agent and first line of defence. When Vikram finally told him about the deal he’d cut, Nils’s laugh was there. He’d had a warning, too. Watch out for her, he’d said. Don’t worry, Vikram had responded. I’ve not lost my head yet.
A laugh would sound strange in here.
The weirdness of being in a dead man’s home was steadily seeping into his consciousness. When people died, they were found and somebody mourned them and then their living space was recycled. What came with loss, unacknowledged and unspoken, but still there, was continuity. The penthouse held nothing of renewal, only endings. Death of the body. Worse than that, he thought. Death of the mind.
Adelaide strolled out of the bathroom with the sound of rushing water. She was doing up the buttons of her trousers.
“What?” she said. “I needed a piss.”
Vikram had a feeling the vulgarity was for his benefit.
Then she saw the clock. Her hands stilled at her waistband. He was going to ask its significance, but he saw her face, just for a second, succumb to something like fear.
She began her examination of the rest of the room. Her methods were erratic. She pressed her hands flat against the walls. She listened, with the shell of her ear close to the wallpaper, her face expectant. There was a white strip of skin between her glove and the sleeve of her shirt. She didn’t wear a watch. The foolishness of relying on one timepiece struck Vikram at the same time as he noticed how thin her wrists were.
When she twisted her head to look at him he thought of all the images in those paper magazines. A few strands of hair had escaped the confines of her hat and stuck to her face. He smiled to see the plastic sheaths over her feet, her long legs cut off so abruptly by the blue bags. Now he had to laugh.
“What’s funny?” demanded Adelaide.
He pointed. Adelaide frowned, then gave a reluctant smile. She raised her knee and extended her leg sideways in a slow motion kick. He imagined her muscles flexing beneath the loose black trousers.
“Sexy, aren’t they,” she said. She balanced for a moment, at once athletic and comic, before dropping her foot. For the first time he saw the charm of the girl. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
They came to the last room. The lock was broken, presumably the key was with Axel. Adelaide turned the handle and stopped. Vikram peered over her shoulder.
The room smelled, not damp exactly, but chill, like old ice. It had been papered. Every inch of wall, floor and ceiling was covered in hot air balloons. Even the window-wall had been claimed. Repeated over and over again was the upturned pear shape, the coloured segments of the balloon envelope. There were prints, photographs, technical drawings, mathematical formulas. Here and there were swatches of yellow and red material. They were glued, taped, nailed or tacked, but they fluttered from their moorings as if stirred by an invisible breath. Vikram looked at the ragged edges of the cuttings. Axel’s handiwork was evident in illegible scrawls. He imagined the frenzied tearing, the hammering in the night. He felt cold.
He tapped Adelaide’s shoulder. She jumped.
“Do you want to go in?”
She shook her head and motioned to the floor. A minefield of nails stuck out of the dust.
“Looks like your brother was planning to skip town.”
“What kind of person thinks about making a hot air balloon?”
Vikram did not reply at once. He was thinking of an old western story, a legend about a balloon.
“Maybe the sort of person who thinks there’s something worth finding,” he said slowly. They were speaking in whispers. Vikram forced himself to raise his voice.
“We should go,” he said. “The hour’s almost up.”
All the same they stayed. Vikram could not dispel a niggling sense of premonition. By stepping into this man’s apartment he had crossed another border with it, one of obligations and no returns. He glanced at Adelaide. There was no doubt about it this time, she looked scared. Her hand bumped against his. She did not immediately move her arm away.
Noise startled both of them. First an erratic, then a regular drumming. Adelaide’s head snapped up. Vikram turned silently. Then he realized it was just the rain, rain breaking on windows covered in paper trails.
He looked at his watch.
“Shit, we’ve got three minutes, come on!”
Adelaide didn’t move.
“Come on!” he repeated. He took her arm but she thrust him off. He ran back through the penthouse. He thought she was right behind him but when he turned she was dawdling, opening a drawer, a cupboard door. They had two and a half minutes.
“Adelaide! Get out!”
The porthole loomed once more. He saw the skadi banging on his door in the middle of the night.
“Adelaide!” he yelled.
Still she lingered. He saw her touch a broken rivet on the wall.
“Fuck!”
Tiny but ominous on her finger, Vikram saw a bead of blood. His eyes snapped to the broken glass, which now carried the indelible mark of Adelaide’s DNA.
“Wipe it off! Use your sleeve, clean it!”
She obeyed. He hauled her forcibly through the domino rooms of the penthouse, past the broken clock, the cabinets, past the plants and the stacks of shoeboxes, out the front door into the hall. Adelaide slammed the door shut. He checked his watch. Sixty seconds.
“Lock up!” hissed Adelaide. “You have to lock up. Otherwise they’ll know!”
A string of expletives exploded in Vikram’s throat. He ripped the picks from his back pocket and with fumbling fingers shoved the first into the lower lock. He couldn’t see it. He could only see the porthole. His hand shook. Adelaide ran. He heard her footsteps clatter down the first ten steps and knew she was safe. At that moment he hated her.
Forty seconds. The corridor was shrinking again. He closed his eyes and listened to the lock. Tiny movements. Forget the porthole. Forget Adelaide. Forget everything but the way the metal works.
Listen. Just listen.
The lock clicked. He whipped the swipe card through the yellow bar and threw himself into the stairwell. Out of camera range. Six seconds. He counted, slowly, as the slender hand completed its circuit. When it reached the twelve he looked up at the buried mole of the camera in the ceiling. A red light blinked, just once, as if the tiny machine was waking up.
Adelaide crouched further down the stairs, her face electric. Their eyes connected. The tension between them was like the trembling space between polar magnets.
She ran.
That’s right. Run. Because if I get my hands on you now The thought prompted his body to move. It was only in motion that he realized the full extent of his rage. He hurtled down the stairs, chasing after her. In their efforts to make no noise they moved in contortionist shapes, half flying, half falling. Above his own straining lungs he heard the intake of her breath, the faint squeak as she grabbed the banister rail and vaulted a corner. Her blue overshoes landed with a crackle of plastic.
Thirty-one floors down she skidded to a halt.
“I thought we weren’t going to make it,” she said. Her face was pink with exertion.
“We?” he repeated.
Adelaide was bent double, breathing dramatically. Her face stretched in a grin. It was a game for her, he thought. He kept a deliberate metre away, trying to slow his own breathing. Cross that border and he might not be able to stop his hands from fastening around her neck.
“You ran,” he said. “You fucking ran.” His throat ached with the effort of keeping his voice down. If anyone came out and questioned him, he had fake ID and no City pass. He had to get somewhere safe.
“Of course I ran,” said Adelaide. “I’m not going to get caught.”
“Except for your blood.” That shut her up, but only temporarily. He could see her mind working, figuring out how to turn the situation around. He didn’t give her the chance. “ We’d better get out of here.”
“There’s a storm started, genius. I can’t take the boat back to my scraper now.”
“Great. We’re stranded.”
His temples were splitting. Adelaide stretched up again, hands over her head, her spine arching.
“You might be,” she said. “I’m going to the tea parlour on floor sixteen.”
“Fine.” He didn’t care where they went as long as it was down, as far away from the penthouse as it was possible to go. “Then we’re taking the lift.”
“You can go home if you want,” said Adelaide.
Vikram jabbed the call button. Deep in the belly of the skyscraper, he heard a distant rumble as the lift started its journey.
“I’m not going anywhere until my side of the bargain’s settled,” he said. “I’ve risked enough for you today. How the hell do you think I can get over the border at four in the morning?”
Adelaide shrugged.
“The Undersea?”
“The Undersea doesn’t stop here. If you’d ever taken it you’d know that.”
“Why would I want to take the Undersea? Anyway, you can’t stay at my apartment.”
Vikram gave her an insincere smile. Clearly she hadn’t thought things through. The mechanics of it. What she was going to do with him in the lag time between her side of the bargain and his. For his part, he’d had no intention of spending any more time with her than necessary. But if he could bear it, an opportunity presented itself: to get even.
“Afraid I’m going to have to,” he said.
“Nobody stays at my apartment.”
“Then I’ll be the first. Don’t worry, I won’t rob you.”
There was a low ping and the lift doors slid open. Vikram stepped inside. Adelaide stayed still, her mouth set.
“You getting in or not?” he asked.
She got in. Once again they stood side by side, repeated in the mirrors. Their faces echoed the rigid stance of their bodies. He was a head taller than her. This small, biological victory gave him some satisfaction.
Perhaps noticing the same thing, Adelaide’s scowl deepened.
“Don’t think you’ve won,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think anything so childish,” he shot back.
Adelaide’s tea parlour had the dreamy, slow-motion atmosphere of a daylight facility still operating in the middle of the night. Purple lanterns hung in clusters, illuminating the low level tables, cushion seats, ink paintings on silk and the dividing mesh screens. Around a corner was an adolescent girl, folding paper napkins into a menagerie of birds. Adelaide gave the girl a wide berth. The old man near the entrance wore a full tuxedo, and glanced up nervously at every clink of a spoon. A woman in a large green hat, ostensibly reading a newspaper, would now and then recount some portion of it to the rest of the room. On the other side was a man with a cat on a lead. The cat had its own glass.
Vikram and Adelaide sat opposite one another in one section. Nobody seemed interested in them.
“The red coral tea, sir.”
The deferential did not go unnoticed. Vikram smiled his thanks. Ad
elaide fixed the proprietor with cold eyes. The proprietor, a tiny Asian woman with her hair in a chignon, ignored the look and placed a tray carefully on the table.
The teapot was flat and heavy with an s-shaped spout. It was accompanied by a small bowl of powdered ginger. Adelaide, very deliberately, took the pot and poured tea into one of two round-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pale amber. She blew ripples across the top of it before allowing a tentative few drops over the barrier of her lips.
Vikram poured and gingered his own tea. The scorching temperature did not affect him; hot beverages had kept him alive on many nights. Despite himself, his anger was fading under the dual influence of warmth and relief. They hadn’t been caught. The aroma of fresh tea, the soft drifts of rising steam and the intermittent sounds of human habitation relaxed him. He was safe. Even Adelaide’s pettiness with the tea seemed trifling. It was good tea too, the sort that would find its way onto the black market in the west.
“Me and Axel used to come here,” she said. “It was our local. Axel loves the Chinese because they keep their Mandarin, and he’s always been into Old World languages. Do people keep their languages in the west, Vikram?”
“Some do. But it makes it harder to get by.” And why make it harder than it already is, he thought.
“Axel used to speak bits of Mandarin with the servers and then we’d sit and make up stories about everyone else. You get some right crazies in here. You know, I can’t help wondering if he’s ever come back without me. Where would you hide, Vikram, if you wanted to escape?”
“Depends what you mean by escape.”
“Disappear, then.”
“When people go missing in the west they turn up dead or not at all, which generally means they’re being eaten by fish. I guess that’s one way to disappear.”
He spoke without thinking and expected an angry glower, but Adelaide was looking up at the misty windows. The rain still pounded on the exterior walls. Her cheeks were flushed.
“No, he’s alive.”
The question was too obvious not to be posed. Besides, Vikram was curious. He had made up his mind even before the break-in that Axel must be dead; seeing the penthouse had only confirmed his thoughts. One way or another, the boy had found his way to the sea.