‘Are they supposed to be doing the Steel Door gig, or is it samizdat?’
‘Dunno. I’ve lost track.’
Harry’s radical rockstars weren’t supposed to take gigs without his approval, but they did: which paniced the golden boy. Sage stared gloomily, Fiorinda chugged her frosty beer, and it was good.
‘Cheer up. It could be worse. We could really be trying to get into the movies, like the futile post-career rockstars that we are, and still fucking it up.’
‘Hahaha.’ He stopped glowering and grinned: a tingling warmth ran through her. What, is this life returning? ‘I love you, Fiorinda, because you are so wise.’
‘What happened at the party? Did something bad happen?’
‘Something and nothing. I had a couple of things I wanted to say to President Eiffrich.’
‘The cocaine?’
‘Yeah, and something else, something I thought of: which I didn’t get round to,’ He lifted his glass, and she saw that his left hand was bare, a pale band where the braided gold should be.
‘Sage, what happened to your ring?’
‘Oh, it’s okay, it’s in my pocket.’
Fiorinda trembled. ‘W-why did you take it off? Is it something to do with me?’
‘Hey, hey, stupid brat, come back. Look, here it is.’ Sage produced the ring, and put it on. ‘See. Ring is on finger… I took it off because,’ He twisted the braided gold, his beautiful mouth downturned, childishly wounded. ‘I was chatting with the President, an’ he told me his cameras had spotted me kissing the boss’s girl. He said could I for God’s sake be more discreet.’
‘But why did you take off your ring? Why didn’t you explain!’
‘Didn’t feel like it. If he’s the only person in California who hasn’t heard about the intriguing fucking ménage à trois by now—’
The waitress came over with refills. ‘I took it off because he’d accused me of cheating on Ax,’ said Sage, when she’d gone again. ‘An’ it’s true, I did.’
‘Yeah, so did I. I still think there was wrong on both sides, too. Get over it Sage. What do you want? A medal for being sorry that we screwed around?’
‘Vicious brat. You’re always so good to me when I’m in trouble.’
‘You’re not in trouble. Well, not with Ax… Only with a huge Hollywood money man, and oh, the leader of the free world, and the golden boy, and of course the monster that’s stalking Hollywood.’
He shook his head, sank half the refill, and signalled for another. ‘I can’t talk to him,’ he said miserably, twisting the ring, eyes down. ‘He…he doesn’t want me. He thinks I’m not human any more, that I’m not his big cat. I didn’t realise, I thought it was because we were both so screwed up, fucked over, destroyed, exhausted, but now I do… Shit, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. Forget it.’
‘Hohoho,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Aoxomoxoa, this uncertainty is so ridiculous, so unwarranted, I think you must be in love.’
Colour burned across his cheekbones, which looked enchanting. ‘Fuck off.’
Around the Steel Door there were street barricades, broken roadways and not much lighting apart from oil-drum fires. Nevertheless a crowd of swanky autos were being taken away by armed flunkies, and a crush of people in designer evening dress at the plate-metal doors. They handed over the Rat, joined the line, and all went well until they hit the door police.
‘Excuse me, mizz, would you mind telling me how old you are?’
‘I’m twenty three.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘What-?’
‘Do you have hard-copied photo ID?’
She did not. Photo-ID had not been required at Camp Bellevue. ‘Oh, come on. I do not look under eighteen! I wish I did.’
‘I’m sorry, mizz. No can do.’
‘I can’t believe this. I’m twenty three. Look, I have my driving, I mean, driver’s licence, with a photo, here on my phone, see?’
Sage stood back. He didn’t care if they got in or not, and he was very sure step aside little lady, I’ll handle this, would get him his head in his hands.
The door policeman grinned all over his fat face. ‘Sorry, lady. You have to be twenty-one to get in here, and if I question your age, you have the correct photo ID, hard copy, in your hand, or I can’t let you by. Sorry Fiorinda. Sorry big blond dude, we hate to spoil your evening. Please move to one side.’
Ah, fuck it. Leave gracefully. She was moving, as directed, when she realised what the bloke had said. ‘Wait a minute. You called me Fiorinda. You know who I am, and you’re carding me? How does that work?’
‘It works in America. Don’t matter who you are. No ID, no get in.’
She should have let it go, or at least said nothing out loud.
‘Okay, fine. I’m leaving, and I wish you all the harm that’s good for you, sunshine. And I hope it’s plenty.’
Fiorinda heard a sharp intake of breath, and knew she was busted, but Sage didn’t say a word. Not a word, until they’d recovered the Rat, tipped the car-minder flunky heavily (despite his bastard colleague), and let the Rugrat take them, quickest route, back to the freeways.
‘What a wanker.’
‘Mm.’
‘Why are people such jerks? We should have said we were with the band.’
Sage offered no comment.
‘You’d better stop.’
He pulled off onto the shoulder, luckily there wasn’t much traffic in his way. Fiorinda tumbled out, fell on her hands and knees, and threw up. Sage took a water bottle, got down and waited until she was finished.
He handed her the bottle. ‘How long have you been doing that?’
Fiorinda crawled away from her vomit, and huddled under an Adopt A Highway sign, in the scrub and rubbish at the foot of the steep verge. ‘Drinking too much? Quite a while, I’m afraid. Since I was about ten.’
‘Cursing people.’
‘I didn’t do him any harm!’
‘I know.’ He took out a pack of greymarket Maryjanes and lit one. ‘I heard the ingenious form of words. I asked you how long?’
‘I don’t know. A while. Since we came to Hollywood.’
‘Oh, Fiorinda—’
‘Please don’t oh Fiorinda me. Look, I’m not doing anything bad, or dangerous, give me credit. No changing the world, nothing happens that couldn’t happen, only tweaked a bit. It makes me feel better, I need this.’
‘Hm. You’ve discovered methadone.’ He sighed, and watched the Maryjane smoke rise. ‘Don’t bother, sweetheart. It just prolongs the agony.’
Fiorinda stared at him, in the cold, roadside light. ‘I am NOT addicted to magic, for God’s sake. I hate it. You always have to have been there, done that, don’t you? Why are you so fucking mean to me, whenever I’m in trouble?’
‘Hopefully, so you won’t have to visit the same abysmally stupid places I did. Did you curse the surveillance team?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, hanging her head.
‘I should have known. And whoever had set them up?’
‘I… I may have done.’ She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. ‘Oh, shit, okay, you’re right. I screwed up, I have to stop, I’ll try, I will try—’
‘C’me here.’
‘Smelling of sick?’
‘Tuh. You’ve seen me face down in it often enough.’
He hugged her close, and the warmth of her skinny, resistant, reckless little body flooded him with painful joy. He loved the grown up Fiorinda, protector of the poor (sometimes known as Ax’s Fiorinda), but this was his wild child, soul mate, that he’d never hoped to hold again. ‘Stupid brat,’ he whispered, rocking her, ‘stupid brat, it will be all right’. But oh fuck, oh fuck… Fiorinda tugged his dinner jacket around her shoulders, and burrowed against his side.
‘It’s my fault if the movie’s dead.’
‘Don’t see that. It was Ax an’ me insisted on pissing around. If we’d jammed the signal, the way you said, there’d have been no problem.’
‘Fiorinda, get a grip. We don’t want to be in a cartoon. Fuck the movie.’
‘Are you going to tell Ax? Let me have a hit of that.’
Sage tucked the Maryjane into her mouth, his heart leaping as her worried, guilty perfectly sane expression. Long ago, he had discovered that Fiorinda had unusual talents, and she’d forced him to keep her secret, even from Ax. Things happen as they must, but this had turned out very badly.
‘Not me. This time, princess, you are going to tell him.’
The warm transparent darkness smelt of petrol (gas) and dust; and fugitive desert scents, along with the taint of vomit. Cars like tanks, long shiny trucks thundered by, strange great lighted shapes of concrete and steel loomed around, but they were hidden, safe in the cavernous belly of this alien world.
‘You know, I’m sure there’s a touch of nicotine in these things.’
‘Shock, horror. Sage, I feel as if we’ve stowed away on a huge spaceship. It doesn’t care about us, we don’t know where it’s going, and we had to leave everything we possessed behind. But I don’t mind. It’s so incredible just to be alive and together, I could be happy anywhere.’
‘I get that too.’
‘If only magic (how I hate that word) didn’t exist. If we could bury the filthy stuff in an unmarked grave, the way we thought we had, after that night at Drumbeg. Things would still be falling apart, but they’d be falling apart in normal ways, and we could spend our lives helping Ax try to save the world, hopefully not by being the henchpersons of a benign dictator, some other way. But you’d have to be dead and I’d have to not exist, so I can’t make that world real, and trust me I have tried.’
Oh, shit—
‘Mm…’ He stayed calm. ‘There could be a reason, you know, why this world is the easiest to maintain, now you have the trick of it again.’
‘Of course,’ she said, sweetly. ‘Because this is the real world. Don’t be silly.’
Oh, my Fiorinda.
‘D’you remember a conversation we had, one night at El Pabellon?’
‘No?’
‘Well, never mind. It’s not really important.’
He had offered to help her reach a place where she could realise that so-called magic was a newly discovered, tech-mediated potential, always inherent in the nature of things: she had called his offer theraputic rape. She preferred her lonely battle, and the terrible thought came to him that she could never win. This was what life would be like: Fiorinda smiling, acting like herself, but robbed of the most vital of her senses. Secretly believing she was alone in hell, and refusing to let it get her down. But don’t think like that. She is better, and it’s a feedback loop. The more she acts like herself, the more those pathways will be strengthened, the paranoia will weaken—
‘Hey, shall we call him? It’s late. He must be finished with the president.’
‘You want me to tell him what I did now?’
‘Er… No, I just want to hear his voice.’
They called Ax. He wasn’t answering, and they found they couldn’t locate him. He wasn’t at Sunset Cape: he’d called to say he was on his way back, but had not turned up. Instant panic. Oh, shit. This is how it happened before.
Ax had expected a whispered summons from an aide. In fact, Fred Eiffrich came looking for him, as the party thinned out: consoling attention for the ex-dictator, who can’t come in by the front door. They went along to Fred’s private sanctum. There was a silver tray, bourbon, ice and glasses, on a sidetable by the fireplace.
‘Will you take a drink with me, Ax? This is great sippin’ whiskey.’
‘No thank you.’
The president poured himself a small drink, no ice.
‘I guess you got my letter.’
‘Yes, Mr Eiffrich.’ Ax gave nothing back to the warmth in the president’s manner. ‘Harry delivered your letter, and the rest of the pitch. We came to Hollywood, and were taken, by your Committee’s FBI contingent, to view a reasonably unpleasant murder scene. That was a little unexpected.’
‘I wish you’d call me Fred,’
The president sat down, indicating the other armchair. ‘I’m sorry. It seemed as if sending Harry to track you down on vacation was the only card I had left. I’m sorry about the murder scene, too, but on the whole I think Phil was in the right, it could have been a breakthrough. You would have known more… I would have told you more, if I’d been able. Your redoubtable Secretary of State—excuse me, is that her title?—Ms Marlowe, wouldn’t give me the time of day. I tried to reach you personally by digital means,’ Mr Eiffrich lifted his chin. ‘They say I’m a technophobe. Maybe I don’t understand my own email program, but I wrote you about a dozen times, last winter, and every one of them bounced.’
‘I was reading them,’ said Ax. ‘I’d resigned. If anything that looked like state business turned up in my personal email, I’d check the contents and either forward it to Westminster, or have Sage seal it up and return it failed delivery. My boyfriend’s part geek, you know. You didn’t say anything about blood sacrifices, or a Fat Boy, in those emails, Mr Eiffrich. You mildly raised your concerns about the whole concept of “fusion consciousness” research—’
‘How could I tell you,’ demanded the president, ‘until I knew we were in secure contact? Uh, did you say, boyfriend?’
‘Yeah?’ said Ax, raising an eyebrow. ‘Sage.’
He shouldn’t have confessed about reading the emails, that was a wrong step. He felt this interview was going to be full of them.
‘Sage Pender is your boyfriend?’ The president looked extremely taken aback. His ruddy complexion had darkened alarmingly. Oh please, thought Ax.
‘Yes, Mr Eiffrich. Sage is my boyfriend, Fiorinda is my girlfriend, they’re both my lovers. I didn’t mean to startle you, our relationship is public knowledge.’
‘No no. That’s okay. I just, er, I just hadn’t picked up on that.’
The president sipped his whiskey, and looked into the cold fireplace.
‘Well, now you know,’ he said, having recovered his poise. ‘Phil tells me you guys are being very helpful, but so far you can only confirm that we could be right in our dreadful suspicion. I’ve done a lot of reading about fusion consciousness, Ax. I considered it my business. I’ve talked to the guys who say that the Vireo project is impossible, I’ve talked to the other guys who are convinced it’s a righteous mission, and I guess I can follow the arguments, I have a postgrad in Chemistry, far back in the mists of time. But the occult tradition, Jeez, that’s a nightmare. Spirit journeys, Kabalistic rituals, voudun, psychic aura –is that aura, or aurae, in the plural? Clairvoyance, card tricks, blood and entrails.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘It’s a mess. Not just distasteful: a mess. No logic, no core, a tangle of mutually unintelligible competing structures. There’s no way to make head or tail of it. I badly need someone who comes from that culture, and has been involved in the…the business in Europe, who can tell me.’
Over my dead body is that someone going to be Fiorinda, thought Ax.
‘It’s aurae,’ he said. ‘But you hear both. Mr Eiffrich, I don’t think I understand the situation. If you have convincing reason to believe that your fusion scientists, financed by your Defense Department, are attempting to weaponise natural magic, surely that’s enough? Surely you don’t need to prove they’re complicit in a string of murders. You can shut them down on scientific grounds.’
‘It’s a delicate matter to investigate.’
‘If you know that the Vireo Lake neuronauts are being selected for psi talent, I’d say that would be a conclusive smoking gun.’
Mr Eiffrich looked at Ax severely, and did not answer this question. ‘I have one undisputed fact that I consider significant. Did you know, the guys at Vireo got hold of Rufus O’Niall’s head, from your Celtics?’
‘I knew it had gone missing,’ Ax shrugged. ‘It was to be expected.’
The president stared. ‘Expec
ted,’ he repeated. ‘That’s a turn of phrase. We can expect the heads of our enemies to become objects of exchange value?’
‘It’s not unreasonable that they’d want to look at Rufus O’Niall’s brain, you know. Did they find anything of interest?’
Mr Eiffrich shook his head. ‘Soup, or so I’m reliably informed. It was flash frozen, but they didn’t manage to defrost the soft tissue successfully.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Ax, you make my blood run cold. Okay, then, in that case, I have no evidence I can use of anything improper going on at the Vireo Lake labs, and if there’s another lab, so far I can’t find it.’ He paused, considering his words. ‘The situation, Ax, is that I have information, apart from those sacrifices, which strongly suggests that this is going on.’
‘Does a Fat Boy candidate feature in this information?’
‘At one time we had word of mouth testimony, from sources inside the Pentagon, to the effect there’s a Fat Boy in the making. We lost the witness, and all record of the statement. You’re going to ask me how, but I’m afraid the details are sensitive. Could they do what they want without courting that risk, Ax? I can’t tell what they mean when they say, this is not a genuine possibility.’
‘I wouldn’t lose sleep. Every big theory has its lunatic fringe.’
Mr Eiffrich sighed, and leant forward, elbows on his knees, nursing his glas. ‘Ah, well… If I started to tell you the rest of my current problems, we’d be here all night. Things fall apart, Ax.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Since I took office, I’ve been a thorn in the side of the people, and the vested interests, in this country who just will not read the writing on the wall, though it’s in letters a mile high. But what scares me is the social collapse. We didn’t reckon on that: now we see what happened in Europe, and we’re afraid it’s inevitable. It’s hellish. How can we use the tools of civilisation to repair the damage to our ecosystems, if civilised society itself is vanishing?’
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