by Steven Brust
“If I were sure that was true,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here.”
I sat down, Matt remained standing.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your next plan. Where you go from here.”
“Why? So you can stop it?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. “If I had a plan, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, dear Much the Miller’s Son. In fact, I’d make bloody damn sure neither of you interfered with it.”
“Not that easy,” I said.
“But it is,” she said, and about the time I realized she was holding a gun, it was already pointing at me; and about the time I realized it was pointing at me, it was flying through the air, and Irina was on her knees clutching her wrist, with Matt standing next to her.
I caught the gun, more by accident than design. A revolver, Smith and Wesson .38. A big gun for such a frail old lady.
“You broke my wrist,” she said.
“No,” said Matt. “I didn’t. It’s just bruised. Alternate cold and warm, half-hour inter—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
She rose shakily to her feet and glared at me, still holding her wrist, as if everything she’d done had been my decision.
“I have,” I said, “only one thing to threaten you with, Irina. You’re old; you’re going to need a new Second soon. And everyone will know about this. The harder you push, the more unpleasant we can make things. Want to sleep through the next hundred years? How about two hundred?”
“You Judas!”
“Shut up, Celeste. I’m talking to Irina. Help us out, Irina. Tell us what Celeste is planning.”
“I can’t.” It was Irina speaking now; I could tell from her inflection. She was pleading.
“You can. You’re strong. Fight her. Or you can take the consequences if you don’t.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” That was Celeste again, dammit.
There were so many answers to her question, I could have recited them for a day. I settled on, “You tried to kill Ren.”
“That was Irina,” she said. “But I had a backup for that. Besides, I’ve always hated the little cunt.”
One plus zero is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three …
“Celeste? I can’t remember. How much is five plus three?”
Before she could answer I shot her in the face.
THIRTEEN
Keep Walking
Ren
By the time Jorge and Liam were done eating, my planned rewrites and new photo shoot were irrelevant. Jorge would call tomorrow, I could see it, and in a brief but pivotal conference call, explain to me, and to my boss, that of the three ideals—high quality, quick delivery, and low cost—we mere mortals could expect only two. Quality, nay artistry, was nonnegotiable to RMMD, and because elderly patients can only wait so long, speed was literally vital as well. He would open the budget and let us tell him what we needed. I could almost hear the gears in him turning. But Jimmy caught me checking my phone for anything from Phil, and with a brief digression over half a glass of Tokay on the virtues of and history behind the hot water spa, Jimmy moved the call back a day. Jorge was going to take tomorrow off, and so should Liam and I.
I still hadn’t heard from Phil by the time we reeled out of Hugo’s. His phone went straight to voice mail when I called him. We ambled through the night oven and parried invitations from Liam and Jorge, arms slung around each other, to shows, or drinks, or the zip line overhead until Ramon managed to peel them away. He piled them into a cab with override instructions to the cabbie not to leave Liam and Jorge anywhere but their own hotel, no matter where they went between here and there.
Ramon gave the driver two hundred-dollar bills and his business card. “Call me tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll double this when I hear from my friends that they are awake and well. No penalty to you for hangover, but keep them from thieves, photographers and beautiful women.”
“What are you?” The cabbie chuckled. “Their goddamn fairy godmother?”
“Almost exactly that.” Ramon closed the cab door, and we waved good-bye.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Jimmy will reimburse me.”
“Then thanks to you both.”
Ramon silently inclined his head.
“What now?” Jimmy asked me.
“I’d like to find Phil.”
“He plays poker at The Palms,” Ramon said.
I shuddered. “Irina’s there.”
“It’s a big place,” Oskar told me. “And you’re not alone.”
“It still gives me the willies,” I said. “But let’s go.”
Jimmy pointed out that none of us should be driving, so we took a cab ourselves. For as late as it was, traffic was grindingly slow, and by the time we turned onto Flamingo, our cab wasn’t outpacing the drunks weaving the sidewalk, so we paid up and got out. From the walkway it was easy to see why the cars weren’t moving. A welter of ambulances, fire trucks and cop cars was balled in a clot ahead of us.
“I think they’re in front of The Palms,” Oskar said.
I shivered, looking at the impassive facade and the wheeling red-and-blue lights. “You know, when they’re hightailing it down the road, and need those people who are not in their mad dash to rescue someone or apprehend someone else to get the hell out of the way, I’m sure those lights are just right. But even the anemic fluorescent bulbs in coffee shop bathrooms are wired with sensors and switches to plunge their perhaps too-stationary occupants into darkness requiring the coffee-filled and jittery to pee in the dark, or pray that seated, their flailing arms reach high enough to count as present to the censorious sensor. If toilets can interpret sheer inactivity as a Darkness Now directive, could not the flashy chariots bearing our dear extinguishers of flame and catchers of criminals not be similarly equipped with light-stopping technology? Would it not be to their advantage, even, to cease calling such grotesque attention to themselves, advertising the life-and-death excitement of whatever incident has brought them screaming forth? Would it not perhaps afford the stricken and maimed they’ve flown to some pretense of privacy or at least peace in the disorienting post-life moments should our stalwart foes of Death and Chaos have come too late?”
It seemed we had stopped walking. Jimmy and Oskar were staring, and Ramon was shaking his head. I was holding a rose, though I didn’t know where it had come from. I smiled uncertainly, not quite remembering what I’d been yammering on about.
“Sorry,” I said. “I had quite a bit of Jimmy’s gorgeous wine. And fucking Phil has just fucking killed me.”
Jimmy staggered. Oskar caught his massive shoulders and steered him to a planter. Jimmy sat, not on the edge, but in the dirt.
“I’ll get us a suite and computers,” Ramon said. “We’ll need an ops center as close as we can manage.” He vanished.
Jimmy looked up at me. “Celeste,” he said. He dropped his head into his hands and started to sob.
I looked at Oskar, pale and motionless, and clearly en guard, and whispered, “Who’s Celeste?”
Phil
If you’re going to play the “Pick a moment, call it now” game, I suppose it would be when I settled down enough to realize what had just happened. I don’t mean shooting Irina-Celeste; that part was sculpted in marble and would no more fade than my first death, coughing blood and cursing God. I mean that I became aware that we were walking towards the west door, which led to the parking ramp. That took us past the poker room, and I realized someone had said hello as we walked by. Matt had said, “Keep walking.”
Matt had been taking care of things. He wiped the gun clean, he got us out of there, and he had been talking to me the whole time. And I’d responded.
“Almost out,” he said. “Now, again, what do you say if you’re arrested?”
“I need to speak to my attorney, and I do not consent to any search.”
“Good.”
“When
do we call the others?”
“As soon as we’re out the door.”
“The family on the elevator are witnesses. Are you going to meddle with them?”
“Of course. Me or someone.”
“Can you fix Mom while you’re at it?”
“I’ll try.”
No one stopped us from leaving. No one needed to; this was a casino. There were more slot machines than cameras, but only just barely. It was a question of when, not if.
Las Vegas’s heat hit me in the face. We walked out into the parking lot next to the ramp. We stopped right there, and Matt said, “Give me your phone.”
I did. “I can’t believe someone heard the shot,” I grumbled. “You’d think they’d have better soundproofing.”
He spoke on the phone and I walked away, because I didn’t want to hear one side of it. The conversation went on for a while. He came back still holding on to my phone, and said, “They’re getting things started.”
I nodded. “What’s my job?”
“Go home. Stay there until you’re either arrested, or we know you won’t be. If I put you in a cab, can I be sure you’ll go home and stay there?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you’ll have to take the long way around getting a cab. The cops—”
“I know, Phil,” he said patiently. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”
“Sorry. And thanks. For. You know.”
“You’re welcome. Ren will be joining you.”
I closed my eyes and nodded and almost cried.
“And Phil. Celeste is back sporadically. In Ren.”
“All right,” I said, meaning it wasn’t.
He used my phone again and arranged for us to be picked up at a convenience store on Decatur. It was a long, long walk on a hot night.
As we walked, Matt said, “If you do get arrested, what—”
“I need to speak to my attorney, I do not consent to any search.”
“Do you have an attorney?”
“I have the Garden, Matt. I suspect I can manage to find a fucking criminal defense lawyer. This isn’t my first rodeo either.”
“Can you afford one? How’s your sugar spoon been?”
“There are public defenders, if it comes to that.”
“We’ll ask Jimmy to—”
“No.”
He didn’t answer, which didn’t mean he accepted it. It’s not often someone in the Salt has money. It’s hard not to take advantage of it when it happens. Besides, I had money; it’s just that the money I had was my bankroll, and spending that meant being out of action, with no way to make more. Funny how it’s the bullshit that occupies your mind when you don’t feel like thinking about things that actually matter, such as—
“You know, Matt, I’d feel better about what happened if I weren’t so afraid I did just what Celeste wanted.”
“Me too,” he said.
The cab was there. Matt put me in and said, “Drink lots of water.”
“You too,” I told him, and gave the cabbie my address.
Ren
“What?” I said.
Jimmy was sitting in the potted tree, not even trying not to cry. Ramon was gone.
“What?” Oskar demanded, body curled around the phone he clutched to his ear. “Right. Got it.” His eyes scoured my face. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t move. And don’t try to comfort Jimmy.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But you can sit next to him.”
I perched on the edge of the cement planter and watched Oskar run. He was a large man and not at all averse to using his size to make a statement, but when he ran, it was pure efficiency—graceful, powerful and fast.
I sat next to Jimmy in the too-hot night and pondered what I had meant by saying Phil had killed me. It was a stupid expression, “He kills me,” right? And what had I been ranting about before that? And why had it upset Jimmy so? The wine and the heat made a sleepy combination, but a quick spike of adrenaline, remembering the last time I’d felt so unnaturally weary, popped me back awake.
I scooted fractionally closer to Jimmy, to touch my side to his shuddering one thinking about a night in Dublin when I was on exchange during college. A man, goaded by calls to “give us a song!” had stood up at his table and done just that. And another man at a table several over, who didn’t seem to know the singer, had put his head down on his table and wept. My boyfriend had leaned over to me and whispered, “In Texas, they’d get a beating for that.”
“For singing or crying?” I’d asked, and he’d just nodded. We watched another guy clap the crier on the shoulder and kiss the top of his head, as he passed.
“Him too,” my boyfriend noted.
Oskar pulled up beside us, driving a limousine. He slammed his door, flipped his middle finger at the honking car behind him, and stalked around to open the rear passenger door. He looked again at the driver now waiting quietly, seized Jimmy by the jacket lapels and heaved him to standing.
“Look at me,” he demanded in a gruff whisper.
Jimmy took a shuddering breath and met Oskar’s eyes.
“I can carry you or you can pull yourself together and walk with the dignity you deserve.” He let go of Jimmy’s jacket front slowly enough to verify the man would stay standing, but didn’t move from their navel-to-navel pose.
Jimmy took a brisk breath in through his nose and shook his head as though knocking water from his hair. He smoothed his shirt over his globe of body, stepped delicately around Oskar, and moved with studied precision toward the limo. Oskar touched my arm tactically, and we followed Jimmy, me into the back with him, Oskar to the driver’s seat, and pulled back into very well-behaved traffic.
“I’m taking you to Phil’s house,” Oskar said, maneuvering the obscene length of a car like a kayak.
“Okay,” I said, and tried not to smile. Jimmy and I were sitting side by side, our backs to Oskar, facing empty seats.
“I’m going to leave you there and come back here with Jimmy.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Phil call you? Is he okay?”
“No.”
“Oskar.” I was starting to get angry, but something in his profile stopped me, and we drove in silence until Jimmy’s phone rang.
Jimmy listened for a while and said only, “Okay.” Then he turned around to Oskar and said, “I must make a call.” He spoke in swift, clipped French, the rest of the drive.
Oskar beached the limo outside of Phil’s house.
“Should there be lights on?” I asked.
“He’s home.” Oskar turned in his seat to look at me. “Phil says you’re strong.” He didn’t sound like he believed it.
“And cute, too!” I said, trying for a smile that wasn’t ever going to come.
“Phil’s in trouble,” Oskar said. “Maybe police trouble, maybe not, but bigger trouble either way.”
“Oh, shit.” This was not the night I was hoping for.
“Phil’s life is in the balance, just as much as yours was the other night when Irina poisoned your tea. If this breaks him, he won’t come back out of stub. And we need him. We need Phil, not somebody else in his Primary, do you understand? Phil.”
“I understand.”
“So you better be as strong as he thinks you are.”
I returned Oskar’s steady glare. “I am.”
“Every time I’ve heard you let Celeste through it was because you were excited about something.”
“Celeste?” I said.
“When you talk, and it’s not you, when you hear yourself saying things. When you get carried away.”
“Okay.”
“You must not let that happen. Not tonight. Not ever again. But absolutely not tonight. It would kill him.”
“Okay,” I said again.
“So whatever it takes, you keep calm. Choose your words and make damn certain it’s you choosing them. Or stay silent.”
“I will.”
“We must go,” Jimmy said.
“Ye
ah,” Oskar said. “Yeah, I know.”
I said good-bye and walked up the drive to Phil’s door. It was open before I reached it. And I was in his arms.
Phil
After what seemed a long time but not long enough, she said, “We’re letting all the A/C out.”
I nodded and moved back so she could close the door, then held her again. Can I be trite? It was like she was my anchor on reality, like she was keeping me from flying away into IwishI and whydidn’tI. In two thousand years, you build up a lot of regrets. It doesn’t make the generation of a new one any easier, and when you’ve just done that, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing like the touch of someone to whom you matter more than whatever your latest fuckup was.
“What happened?” she said after a while.
I disengaged and went and sat on the couch, hoping she’d take it as an invitation. She did.
“I shot Irina,” I told her.
“Are you all right?” She took one of my hands in both of hers.
“If you mean physically, yes.”
She nodded. “Why?” There was no change in how tightly she held my hand.
“I was angry. Furious. There was a gun—Jesus. I’m a walking cliché. There was a gun in my hand and it went off. Christ.”
I had all of her focus, like she could keep me tethered to the ground with her eyes and her hands, and it almost seemed like she could.
She said, “I’ve never been, well, in whatever position you were in.”
“So angry you couldn’t count to eight? I don’t know, Ren. I’m afraid I did what she wanted, which is worse than what I did. I feel like, I don’t know, like I’ve ruined everything.”
“What do you need right now?”
“I need you doing just what you’re doing. Holding me, touching me, convincing me that—shit. I don’t know what you’re convincing me of, but it’s a good thing, and it’s working.”
“It’s not that hard,” she said, rubbing her forehead against mine, just a few inches from the Incrementalist Handshake.
“Celeste was never a good person,” I said. “You probably don’t remember her right now, but it doesn’t matter. She was never what I would call good. But the point is, it’s like, she didn’t have to be good for me to love her. She was just her. She got there, somehow, into me, and that was that.”