Presently behind her hands a light began to shine. Startled, she lifted her wet face. The attic was radiant, and in the midst of the light her Fairy Godmother stood.
“Cinderella, child, why do you weep?”
It was the same question she had asked in the kitchen at home, long ago.
“Because they scold me,” sobbed the Princess. “Because I’m miserable! Oh, Godmother, Godmother, take me home!”
The Fairy smiled, and the radiance brightened until Cinderella’s eyes were blinded with light. She put up her hands to shut it out. There was a deep silence.
After a while, when the quiet had become unendurable, she uncovered her eyes. It was dark—warmly dark. She sat before the kitchen fire again, snug in the cinders.
“Why—why—” Cinderella dug her fists into her eyes, and then, somehow, was yawning, stretching like a kitten. No crown trembled precariously on her ruffled curls. She yawned again, luxuriantly, sniffing the boiling lentils that swung above the fire. She laughed a happy little gurgle deep in her throat, and settled down among the warm cinders.
Brad R. Torgersen was a Campbell, Nebula and Hugo nominee in 2012, has become a mainstay at Analog, and is currently putting the finishing touches on his first novel.
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THE FLAMINGO GIRL
by Brad R. Torgersen
Elvira was seven feet of naked avian loveliness. The tiny feathers sprouting from her skin formed a luxurious layer of bright-pink, velvet-soft plumage, and her unblinking eyes stared at the ceiling with an expression of surprise. The bed upon which her body lay was a confused mess of satin blankets and pillows, with not a hint of whom else might have been with her, or why that person had resorted to murder.
“Señor Soto,” said a voice behind me. I turned, and beheld another seven-foot beauty, this one parrot-green. Her wings flexed and ruffled with agitation, and her sapphire-blue eyebrows hunched over a fear-filled gaze. Looking up into her face—we unmodified humans are generally shorter than Specials—I asked her what I could do for her.
“The other women are very nervous, Señor,” she said. “They are wanting to know what has happened. Madam Arquette asked me to ask you what to tell them.”
“And you are?” I said.
“Josefina,” said the green bird-woman.
“You may tell them that Elvira is dead, and that housekeeping is free to enter and clean the Flamingo Suite as soon as the city’s public mortician has removed the body.”
“There isn’t going to be an investigation?”
“That’s for the police to decide. They’ll be here shortly. I imagine that they’ll want to question a few people, so make sure none of the customers leave before that happens.”
In truth, the cops wouldn’t give a damn about another dead Special. It was unlikely they’d interrogate anyone at all. The Aerie was a busy waypoint on Hollywood Boulevard, in a city that spared little budget for true law enforcement. I and three other guards were what laughably passed for security at the Aerie—our presence being a formality so that Madam Arquette could claim to be honoring her adult merchant commission with the Greater Los Angeles Commerce Bureau.
“The Madam will not be pleased,” said Josefina.
“Then perhaps the Madam should have listened to me when I warned her about cutting her private security expenses again. All the reputable adult businesses on the Boulevard hire triple our number.”
Josefina’s wings rustled violently.
“Look,” I said to her, “I’m sorry I can’t do more. I really am.”
I attempted to move past Josefina. She thrust out a wing that blocked my way.
“But you used to be a policeman,” she said with quivering indignation. “You were hired because of your experience. If you can’t help us now, what good are you?”
I stepped back, looked at the anger in her eyes, and felt the full weight of my fifty years settle on my shoulders. I had asked myself that same question ten times a day since coming to the Aerie. Once upon a time, I’d been an okay cop in the Long Beach supermetro. But when Carlita had left me, and taken the kids, and sold the house…whatever ties had been keeping me in Long Beach seemed to evaporate. I’d retired early, and immediately sought the job with the least amount of real responsibility I could find, as far away from Carlita as possible.
I just looked at Josefina, a sympathetic frown on my face. “The police will be here soon, and they will handle this. It’s out of my purview.”
Eventually her wing withdrew, and small tears began to stain the lime-colored down around Josefina’s eyes.
“Look,” I said, “if you really want to find out who did this, give the cops something to go on. I know the Madam has in-house rules about customer confidentiality, but this time I think there needs to be an exception. City corporate policy says they can’t make her release her records, and knowing the Madam, I doubt she’d sacrifice her reputation on the strip for a single dead girl—”
“I will get the police what they need,” Josefina said, suddenly standing stiff.
“Will the Madam know about it?” I asked.
“Would it bother you if she didn’t?”
No, I had to admit, it wouldn’t.
“You’re taking this kind of hard,” I said. “Was Elvira a friend?”
“No, Señor Soto. She was my younger sister.”
***
Twenty-four hours later I got a text from Josefina asking me to meet her in West Hollywood. No indication why, just that she needed me urgently. An address was attached. I checked in with the branch office of the security firm I worked for, and clocked out for an extended lunch break.
Josefina’s apartment block was in what the supermetro called the Special District. Most of the Specials in Greater Los Angeles tended to congregate there—where everyone could be uniformly bizarre together. The sidewalk out front was replete with walking and talking cats, dogs, birds, wolves, rabbits, and other Specials who had had their human DNA artificially adapted to take on various other species’ characteristics.
Entering the block I passed a man whose fur was striped like a skunk’s, though thankfully he didn’t smell like one. If he cared that a Normal—the Specials’ word for everyone else in the world—was going into his apartment complex, he didn’t show it.
I took the elevator up to the tenth floor and found the door with number 1036, tapped the little button in the middle of the door, and waited while the tiny camera inside the button surveyed me.
The door handle clicked, and I was beckoned into Josefina’s home, microscopic as it was. I’d seen student studios with more square footage. But it was clean, and smelled gently of ginger and orange peel.
“Señor,” she said respectfully. I took off my sun hat and nodded at her.
Josefina immediately pressed a thumb drive into my hand.
“It is all here,” she said quietly. I noticed that she had on a plain-patterned traditionally-cut dress, with holes in the back for her wings, and no shoes. Her ankles and feet were the same color as the rest of her. Bright green.
“What is this?” I said.
“I tried to give it to the police, but they didn’t want it. Nobody cares about Elvira.”
“I told you, I—”
“Por favor, Señor Soto,” Josefina said insistently. “There is no one else to do this. You must do it. Please! I don’t have much money, but I can pay you for your time. I can—”
I raised a hand and patted it down through the air, pleadingly.
“Just tell me what I’ll be looking at,” I said, “before you go giving me any money.”
“It’s Elvira’s schedule at the Aerie.”
“There are names? Everyone who ever used your sister?”
“Hired her,” Josefina corrected me. “Yes.”
“I’ll probably just need the names of the people she saw the night she died.”
“But she was off that night, and there is no record of anyone having rented the suite or hiring Elvira.”<
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“Then what was she doing there at all?”
“I do not know,” Josefina said, eyes on the floor. Her wings had begun to tremble.
I slipped the thumb drive into a pocket and took her right hand in both of mine—the sensation of the tiny feathers on my bare palms was like mink pelt, but softer.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, flashing back to an almost identical scene in my supermetro days, when I’d had to both question and console a stricken mother whose son had died in a gang turf tumble.
“Of course it is,” Josefina said. “It was my idea for her to come to the Aerie. I recommended her to the Madam. She was nervous about going Special, and I talked her into it. Mother and father never forgave me when I went Special, and they doubly hated it when Elvira came to work with me. I have no idea how much the whole family will hate me now.”
“So why did you wind up at the Aerie in the first place?”
“It was my best option.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Señor Soto, you’re not from East L.A.?”
“Not originally, no.”
“But you are Raza?”
“I grew up in the barrios of Oakland. Joined the Army at 17. When I got out of the Army, I moved south and went to the police academy.”
I remembered when I told my mother I’d joined supermetro’s PD. She’d cried. But then, she’d cried when I’d joined the military, and when my brothers ran away, too. At least with me she’d known where I was and what I was doing. But it had still upset her a great deal. Always terrified I was going to get myself hurt, whether it was overseas, or here in California working Vice, or second-level Theft stuff, or the small army that ran herd on gangs.
I mumbled something to that effect.
“My mother was almost proud of being poor,” Josefina said. “Our family had been in East L.A. for almost five generations, all in the same crappy little house. Elvira and me, we hated it. We wanted something better. But the schools in East L.A., what good are they? For you, the Army was your avenue out. For Elvira and I, just two poor sisters with homely faces and no education…”
I nodded my understanding—so far.
“Anyway, I got a cleaning job. They sent me all over. One day I got sent up to Madam Arquette’s house in Beverly Hills. I’d never worked for a Special before, much less someone that rich. She’s like a peacock, you know. Beautiful and grand and when I started asking questions, she told me how it works. If a girl will undergo Specialization and work in the Aerie, Madam will carry the cost. You pay it back over time, plus interest, and after that, you keep everything you earn, minus a house fee.”
“But if you wanted to go into business for yourself—” I started to say, but Josefina cut me off.
“Look at me, Señor,” Josefina stepped away a couple of paces and flared her wings wide, filling the tiny apartment, her hourglass silhouette accentuated through the thin fabric of the dress. “Men and women both will pay hundreds an hour to be with me. We have the richest clients in the entire city. People who want the Special experience. Crave it. A pro Normal girl in Long Beach, how much does she make, compared to that?”
Not much, I had to admit.
Josefina lowered and folded her wings.
“I didn’t want to be just any working girl,” she said. “I wanted to literally be a different person. Because someday, I want to have enough money of my own to leave Los Angeles on my own two feet, and not look back, and not need anyone else’s help, and not have to take this…this part of me with me when I leave.”
“Reversal of the Specialization is twice as expensive as the initial procedure,” I said.
“I don’t care. Once I’ve earned enough to pay the Madam off, I’ll keep working until I can pay for the reversal, and get myself out of here to boot. When Elvira came to visit me and I told her about my plan, she’d wanted to come with me, but it would have been too expensive for both of us, so I told her she had to find a way to help with costs.”
Josefina stopped, her face in her hands, wings gently shaking as she sobbed.
I felt my cheeks growing red.
“Look,” I said, “I meant it before: Madam Arquette can’t rely on just four men to keep her establishment free of trouble.”
“But you’re here, when you know you don’t have to be,” Josefina said, her nose sniffling.
“I didn’t know your sister,” I said, “But I don’t like the idea of anyone killing a young woman and getting away with it.”
She seemed to accept that explanation at face value, lame as it was.
“I can’t make any promises,” I said, reaching into my pocket and feeling the cool plastic of the thumb drive. “All I can tell you is that I’ll take a look.”
“Do what you can,” Josefina said abruptly. “It’s better than nothing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, sticking out my hand, which she shook. Then she leaned down quickly and pecked me on the cheek.
How long had it been since a woman—any woman, Special or Normal—had done that to me? I felt my face redden all over again, then muttered a goodbye and ducked back out into the hallway.
***
The thumb drive turned out to contain all of Elvira’s business calendar—every appointment going back to when she’d gotten out of the hospital, post-Specialization. The header on the calendar simply read FLAMINGO. Having met the Madam a few times I got the sense that she didn’t bring on anyone new unless it was done on the Madam’s terms, so Elvira was just filling the role assigned to her.
And while names were present, salient data beyond that was tough to come by. All financial transaction information had been stripped, as well as whether or not clients had been locals, celebrities, or even the rare tourist. If the schedule had ever contained details on what precisely Elvira had provided, in terms of customer care and needs—beyond what I already knew to be the case—that too was missing.
And Josefina had been right. Elvira was blacked out the day of her death. In fact, she was blacked out most of that week.
I mulled this over at my desk, back at the Aerie. If the Madam discovered I had this information—we guards were never ever allowed access to the scheduling software, for confidentiality purposes—it would cost me a lot more than my job. I quickly dumped the calendar to text, then erased the calendar, keeping only names and time blocks in ASCII format on the same thumb drive Josefina had given me. She was off for the rest of the week, a considerable concession from the Madam, given the circumstances, so I went about my usual work, only occasionally poking my head into the women’s private rooms to ask a discrete question or two.
So far as anyone knew, Elvira had had no quarrels with the other Specials. In fact, the lot of them seemed heartbroken over the girl’s death, and mournful in the extreme for her older sister. A community pot was being passed—I dropped in my share—and they were planning to have a silent moment in Elvira’s memory when Josefina came back to work. Otherwise, business at the Aerie continued as usual. Clients came and went, their communications hushed and monosyllabic at the palatial registration desk—often from behind hoods or sunglasses or anything else that might obscure their faces from prying eyes, the Special fetish still being a somewhat controversial fetish, even in a city which had long ago abandoned any pretense of sexual propriety.
As I watched the clientele come and go from behind my own set of sunglasses, I realized that I didn’t have much of a clue about what went on when the clients and the Specials met behind the closed doors of the suites. Oh, sure, I had plenty of educated assumptions. The Aerie had two-thirds female Specials and one-third male Specials, and if ever they “talked shop” it was done strictly between them, away from the ears of a Normal like me.
In many ways, I and the three other guards were like wallpaper or store window mannequins: unless our presence was called for—which was seldom—we kept our distance. The Specials did the same, and the clients ghosted to and fro with as low a profile as possible.
/>
I examined the names I’d gotten from Josefina. I didn’t know any of them, though I couldn’t be sure any of them were actual names either. Fake names were as likely as anything, which was probably why the cops hadn’t wanted the list in the first place. What good was a list of bogus identities?
Josefina came back to work. We never acknowledged that I’d been to her home.
I kept looking at the list of names throughout the next week, until I noticed one name that was down for numerous appointments in predictable succession, then abruptly stopped showing up.
I texted Josefina about this, and asked her if she knew the name. Or if Elvira had ever talked about this particular person. I got a text re-inviting me to Josefina’s apartment, this time in the dinner hour.
***
“What her real name is, I am not sure,” Josefina said. She’d offered me a plate of grilled beef with peppers and onions, which I ate thankfully, not having had food since sipping a cup of bitter coffee at mid-morning.
“Her?” I said, somewhat surprised.
“She was an Anglo Normal, mid-forties.”
“Did Elvira ever talk about this person?”
“Yes, because this woman never actually wanted sex.”
“Is that unusual?”
“It happens. Some clients come in simply for the vicarious thrill of being around a Special. We’re fascinating to them.”
“This anglo Normal, she was one of these?”
“Yes. She would request Elvira in two-hour blocks. She adored real flamingos, apparently. She and Elvira would sit together on the bed of the suite, and the Anglo…she would stroke Elvira’s body and wings affectionately, and just talk about her life. Her hectic middle-management work. Her grown sons. Her ex-husband, who apparently divorced her in disgust when he discovered she had a thing for Specials and had been surreptitiously using family funds to begin exploring the Special world on-line. That’s how she found out about the Aerie, apparently, and when Madam Arquette put up the listing for The Flamingo Suite, this woman was an instant customer.”
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2: May 2013 Page 5