Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  I hoped.

  I looked at our objective, the two-story carriage house. Lights glowed dully through the mullioned windows of the kitchen and parlor. The building had been converted into what Bart would’ve called a “mother-in-law” cottage.

  We moved quickly now, double-timing across the backyard to the carriage house door. Maggie and Max took up positions on each corner, becoming part of the walls.

  I went up to the kitchen door and gently tried it. Unlocked.

  I stepped inside. The guard glanced up from his sandwich, mayo on his face.

  “Man,” I said. “Don’t you worry about cholesterol?”

  58

  CONCH BEAM

  ** WEBSQUIRT/LIVE FEED/INSERT PEBBLE/NOW FOR/ACCESS THANK/YOU **

  Perfect glowing female smarty face:

  >Kinner, have you noticed all the wasps?<

  Perfect rugged male smarty jaw line:

  >Yes, Mala! They’re Surazal’s newest security device, and boy, are they impressive! At six ounces apiece, and with a length of only an inch-and-a-half, you wouldn’t think they could do much, but they pack state of the art punch!<

  >Guess we don’t have to worry about terrorists today, do we, Kinner?<

  >No, Mala! With two hundred thousand of these babies patrolling our streets today, we’re totally SAFE!<

  59

  STRULDBRUG

  It was the hotel’s largest ballroom—fifty thousand square feet—and it was ready for a hell of a party. After the joining was complete, four thousand VIPS would swarm into this place and ooh and ah over the tens of millions of dollars that had been spent: the food, the booze, the body-painted aerialists moving in complex rhythms over their heads, the 1:50 scale replica of the Blister rendered in glow-ice, the serotonin gas wafting from the air system that produced a mild but clear-headed euphoria. It had been electronically swept and re-swept for all manner of nastiness. Up until a moment ago it had been under the capable watch of the President’s personal safety detail.

  Now, it was empty. Except for one man, sitting at the nearest table, fiddling with a Blister keychain party favor.

  His son, Adam.

  Struldbrug had to give him credit. Adam was able to suppress the shock of seeing him almost completely.

  “You would pick today,” Adam sighed.

  “Hello, Adam.”

  Adam dropped the keychain onto an ivory plate and the noise galloped across the room. “I suppose this is meant to be some kind of punishment.”

  “No.”

  “How the hell did you get into the city? Here, into this building?”

  Struldbrug shook his head and wondered why, in this day and age, people insisted on linking age with declining ability. “I got into the Holy of Holies during the siege of Jerusalem, remember? Got back out with a couple important items that couldn’t be allowed to fall into the hands of the Babylonians. This, in comparison, is child’s play.”

  Adam shook his head. Struldbrug knew that there was nothing more tedious to his son than being reminded of his father’s ancient exploits. It was kind of like some singer who’d had a hit song thirty years ago and was now playing the local state fair. “I don’t have much time, so get to it.”

  “You’re right,” his father said, pulling up a chair and sitting beside him. “You don’t.”

  He laid the player on the table and turned it on.

  60

  DONNER

  I found her in the parlor, sitting in a Queen Anne chair, sipping a cup of tea. She looked up and froze as solid as Lot’s wife.

  “Hey, baby,” I said.

  She seemed to realize her cup was fixed halfway between lap and mouth and put it carefully back in the saucer on the sideboard. To her credit, her hand shook only a little.

  “Paul,” she said.

  Nobody called me Paul. Nobody but her.

  I looked around. Pocket doors, the heavy kind that rolled on tracks into the walls, were closed at the left. Behind her was a fireplace with a floor-to-ceiling mantle, ornamented with beveled mirrors. Its ledge held wax flowers under glass domes. Fake life under glass. Appropriate.

  “You look great,” I said.

  “God, you’re so young,” she replied softly.

  “Guess we’re both full of surprises.”

  She straightened her back, clasping her hands in front of her. The lamp on the sideboard made her russet hair gleam. I knew exactly how it would feel.

  “Let’s go through it, shall we?” I said. “For the record?”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “Humor me.”

  She flicked a wrist toward the other chair, but I chose the American Empire sofa. It was comfortable as a pile of rocks. I laid the Beretta on the coffee table. Within reach of both of us.

  “My case is unusual,” I started. “Usually the memories don’t come back.”

  “When did you remember?”

  “It first started surfacing in fragments, blended into dreams and other memories. But, with a little prodding from someone, it came back clearly yesterday.”

  “You’re holding up pretty well, then. I doubt I’d have.”

  I canted my head noncommittally.

  “Where should I start?” she said with a tremor.

  The funny thing was, I really hated putting her through this. Wasn’t that funny?

  “The first time you met Nicole.”

  “Such a long time ago.”

  “Seems like yesterday.”

  She expelled a puff of air through her nose that I couldn’t interpret. That delicate nose. “Well, you’d just left my office after your visit with the roses.”

  “Yeah, you loved roses.”

  Her eyes flickered. “Actually,” she said, apologetic, “not really. But you took such pleasure from giving them to me…”

  “Huh,” I said, unable to summon more.

  “Anyway, that day, I was getting ready to read this Struldbrug woman the riot act. But before I could get a head of steam going, she told me something that took my breath away.”

  “About her and her father.”

  An impressed widening of the eyes. “Still a detective. Yeah. About their peculiar… gift.”

  “She came right out and told you?”

  “I had her ‘by the short hairs,’ as you used to be fond of saying.”

  She’d hated my gutter talk. Except in bed.

  “I thought she was crazy, of course. I was ready to call security, but she’d come with evidence. She kept laying it out: pictures, drawings, files, and then finally the research.”

  “That’s what swayed you? The science?”

  “It was my job to know fake science from real science,” she replied.

  “What was her pitch?”

  “It was simple. If I turned her in, the government would shut her down, confiscate her research, and pretty much do to their family what Hitler would’ve done—dissect them. There wasn’t a government on Earth that would act any differently.”

  “But she offered you an alternative.”

  “She said her team would crack her father’s secret in my lifetime. Of all the generations that had come and gone, I’d been born at precisely the right time to be the first to take advantage of their gift.”

  “And that gave you pause.”

  “It would give anyone pause, Paul.”

  “Eternal youth. And all you had to do was keep your mouth shut.”

  She looked at me evenly. “No. I never deluded myself about that. The price would be high. It would mean violating my oath to my country, betraying my coworkers, lying to my friends and family, and…”

  Her face wrestled with itself for a moment. The mask of composure reasserted itself.

  “Why’d she make the offer? It’d be safer to kill you.”

  “That’s what she said. Which gave me a whole different kind of pause. But she felt, with my background, I could be useful. If she could flip me to her side, with my knowledge and expertise, I could help her avoid any future
governmental entanglements. That was very valuable to her. So she offered me the carrot and the stick.”

  “Live forever or die right now,” I mused. “She gave me the same extreme choice.”

  She picked the cup up, took a sip, grimaced, and put it down again. “Tea. It’s the loveliest thing in the world,” she said softly. “Unless it’s gone cold. Then it’s the worst.” Kind of like you, Paul, her eyes said. “Her scientists answered my questions, showed me the data. I had three days to come to a decision.”

  “How’d she know you wouldn’t turn her in?”

  “I was under surveillance. She could have killed me any time, I suppose.” She shifted, re-crossed her legs. Every familiar movement was a spike through my chest. “I went home that night like I was drifting through a dream. I don’t even remember the train. I was beyond confused, beyond upset, beyond…” Anguish distorted her alabaster poise. “And then I found you passed out on the couch.”

  My vision went grainy.

  “It got very clear then. Despite the endless promises, you weren’t going to change. You were going to flush your potential down the toilet, along with mine.”

  I expected the taste of hot tears. The Workahol must have been keeping me numb.

  “I’d married a drunk, just like my mom. I just couldn’t bear repeating that future.” She tossed back her hair. Her lowermost locks sank into the darkness beyond the range of the candelabra. Her eyes flicked to the gun. “You’re giving them a lot of time, sitting here chatting.”

  “It’s alright. Keep going.”

  Her lips shrank into a perfect rose. “You believed in that ‘’til death do us part’ fiction. Your parents never split up. But I came from a different world, Paul. I had three stepfathers. It wasn’t a mortal sin to cut your losses.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “For you, leaving was the right choice.”

  That shocked her. For the first time she made real eye contact with me, searching. You haven’t actually changed, have you?

  “A divorce, at least, I could have lived through.”

  “Nicole was convinced you’d never accept it. You’d start digging and eventually find out about her. Nothing ever could stop you, once you’d made up your mind. You were like one of those left-behind dogs that find their owners three thousand miles away. There was no way around you.”

  “So you had me killed.”

  Her eyes widened. “God, no! How could you—?” She looked actually hurt. “Is that what you thought?”

  I rubbed my brow. “Then what was the plan?”

  “The only solution was for me to disappear. I had to die, but right in front of your eyes, so you’d believe it, accept it.”

  “A dangerous game.”

  “Yeah. With your training, your experience? It had to go perfectly. Which it didn’t.”

  I shook my head. “You were going to let me think you’d died. I was supposed to go through the rest of my life grieving for you—”

  “Nicole wanted to kill you, Paul! This was the only way I could save your life, understand?” She looked at the plaster decorations on the ceiling, working very hard not to meet my eyes. “If we had one of our famous fights, you’d offer to take me some place nice to make up, a show, a four-star restaurant. It was—what do you guys call it?—your modus operandi.”

  My throat tightened. “Yes.”

  “So we had a fight. Remember? A real doozy. And you came up with Don Giovanni, like clockwork. All I had to do was get you into that bodega. There’d be a stick-up gone bad. Wrong place at the wrong time. And you’d become a widower.”

  Regained memories…

  Lincoln Center. The spotlighted fountain shoots streams of water into the air—

  “I knew you’d want a smoke before you went in, to hold you through the performance. So I emptied your pack before we left.”

  Me: “Listen, if I’m going to sit through three hours of this Don Corleone thing—”

  “I steered you to the bodega.”

  Elise nods in the direction of Korean grocery across from the subway. “We’ll go to that one. It’s cheaper.”

  I’d been so easy to maneuver.

  Anger clouded her eyes. “Nicole spun this elaborate tale about how some ‘robber’ would run into the store and ‘shoot’ me right in front of you. They had me rigged up with blood squibs, just like the movies. Then Alvarez would shoot you with a stun gun or some tranquilizer or something. You’d wake up in the hospital a week later, a widower, your wife already buried.” She shook her head. “I was an idiot.”

  “It wasn’t exactly your area of expertise.”

  “Please,” she said, her voice hardening. “Don’t be nice.”

  “So how’d it really play out?”

  “Nicole never had any intention of letting you live. McDermott told Alvarez to kill you the moment we walked in.”

  More memories…

  —Alvarez behind the counter, looking startled when I walk in—

  —I see him recognize me—how can that be?—

  “But he froze. And that gave you all the time you needed.”

  —Alvarez tries to pull the piece from under the counter, but he’s too slow. I’ve seen the panic in his eyes, I know something’s wrong. My hand punches the gun away from him, and his eyes dart behind us—

  —Behind us?—

  “Nicole gave me a backup weapon, just in case. She said it was a tranq gun. If things went wrong, I was supposed to sedate you. So when you disarmed Alvarez, I… I…”

  —I turn, already too late, and see—

  —I see—

  Elise pointing the gun at me, face screwed tight like rose petals crushed by a boot heel.

  —Thundering I hear the words from my dream, those acid words—

  “How long,” she says in a shredded voice, “did you think I was going to wait for you to get your shit together?”

  And then the muzzle flash whites out my vision and the stink of cordite fills my nostrils—

  The broken mirror, its shards re-laid. But still broken.

  “When I saw the blood, I knew…”

  She sat there, crying softly, hands fluttering in her lap. “Oh my. I thought it’d be easier, after all this time.”

  “It never gets easier,” I offered. “It just goes to sleep for a while.”

  She sniffled. “From then on, I was her creature. I did Nicole’s bidding, helped keep the feds off her back. A second, empty grave was placed next to yours. And I grew old without you. I was seventy-five years old when they finally perfected the Retrozine. I’d given up hope they’d have the breakthrough in my lifetime. Talk about a bitter old woman. To my mind, I’d been the victim of the longest long con in history.”

  “But then Crandall actually had his breakthrough.”

  “Yeah. True to her word, Nicole made sure I was the first normal human to be youthed.”

  “Betting both teams, as usual. You’d be an ally for eternity if the drug worked. Or a tied-up loose end if it didn’t.”

  “But it did work.” She gestured to herself. “Courtesy, in part, of that horrible, horrible accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “The Shift, of course.”

  I stood. She tensed. All I did was go to her, sitting in the other chair. I took her hand, felt the delicate bones beneath the translucent skin. Her pulse thrummed, fast and faintly blue.

  “Elise. The Shift wasn’t an accident. Nicole did it on purpose.”

  She took her hand back. It was like an eclipse. “What are you talking about?”

  “How’s it coming, chief?” It was Max, in my VR. I tilted my head away, seeing him in my left contact lens.

  “Slower than expected,” I replied.

  “Pick up the pace,” Max said. “We’re running out of time.” He blinked away.

  Max was right. But convincing Elise was the cornerstone. I turned back to her. “We don’t have much time, sweetheart—”

  She winced. “Please don’t call me that.”<
br />
  Habits die harder than men.

  I laid the player on the coffee table and turned it on.

  ***

  She listened to the recording, like we had. Listened to Nicole’s voice, laying it out. Insanity made to sound reasonable.

  Elise shut the player off.

  The tall case clock thundered in the corner.

  After an eternity, she looked at me. “I’m the reason Struldbrug brought you back, aren’t I? For this very moment.”

  I nodded. “Nicole trusts you—a very rare thing. You’re the only one in her inner circle who can make this work. And he thought I was the only person who could convince you to do it.”

  It broke my heart, there was such sadness in her eyes. “God, Paul. There’s never been a moment, through this whole thing, when we haven’t been manipulated, has there?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We still can make this come out right.”

  She looked out the window. “What do you want me to do?”

  61

  BUNKER

  Nicole watched the President’s speech over the Times Square websquirt.

  “Look at that asshole,” she said. “Making a big show of being in Necropolis. He’s wearing a triple-redundant filter field to protect himself!”

  McDermott looked at his watch. “Sadly, that field will fail in about ten minutes.”

  There was a chime on the tech’s console. Elise was signaling from the carriage house.

  “Pull up the feed from the parlor,” she said.

  The tech, Marco, complied. Display Two resolved into a pale, red-headed beauty, standing in the middle of the empty room, looking up at the camera drone.

  “I’m busy,” snapped Nicole.

  Elise held up a cell phone. Marco smirked. What a Luddite. She was obviously the type that feared implants.

  “It’s Adam,” the woman said. “He’s suspicious.”

  Nicole’s whole manner slowed down, focused. She lifted her veil, securing it to her hat with a long and dangerous pin. “He’s on the phone now? He’s calling you from the Ceremony?”

  “I have him on hold,” Elise stammered. “He wants to know why we’re not there.”