Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  Ax and Sage returned to Sunset Cape the next day. Fiorinda had withdrawn a wad of cash out of their joint, Digital Artists credit account, and that was all they’d been able to find out. She’d gone, and she didn’t mean to be traced. On Thursday, when she started missing diary dates and still hadn’t contacted anyone, Allie told the studio, and Digital Artists went into gear. Her friends were soon apprised that there’d been no reported accidents involving a brown Toyota Rugrat. No one answering Fiorinda’s description had been admitted to a public hospital or private clinic in LA County; and there were no transactions on her DA credit cards. No young red-headed female dead bodies either. The studio’s view was that Fiorinda was adult, and had gone AWOL for her own reasons. Everyone should relax, and keep it quiet. They put out a release saying Ms Slater had been advised to rest, and was taking a break out of town.

  Her friends could not relax. They were murderously anxious, imagining Fiorinda with total amnesia, living on the streets; where she’d ended up once before in her life. Ditzy Julia said: she probably took failing the audition harder than we realised. Hey, maybe she’s gone to look up her father’s family in Chicago, have you thought of that? Unlikely. The orphanage where Rufus O’Niall had spent the first years of his life no longer existed, and all records of his natural parentage were gone. If O’Niall didn’t want something to exist, then it vanished…he had that power. Julia had no idea what abysses her kindly suggestion opened, what horrors she suggested.

  Kathryn Adams came to Sunset Cape, and wanted to talk to Ax and Sage about Fiorinda’s disappearence. They took her to Allie’s office.

  ‘She hasn’t disappeared,’ said Ax, firmly. ‘She’s taking a break.’

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ said Kathryn, intimidated by these two beautiful, powerful men and their hostility, but determined to speak. ‘That day, when she came into town to do the interview with me, that was Fiorinda’s idea.’

  Ax shook his head, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t get it.’

  ‘I mean she set it up. I was to tell anyone who asked, including you two, that we’d arranged it ages ago, but we hadn’t. I think she had another appointment. She didn’t want to tell you, so when you fixed up to go to Laz’s cabin, she had to have an excuse to come back to LA that day. Wherever she went it can’t have been far from Wilshire—’

  ‘Did she tell you she had another appointment?’ asked Sage, coldly.

  Kathryn’s whey face turned scarlet. ‘She didn’t tell me anything. I just knew, knew I was covering for her, so I didn’t ask. But that’s not it. I –I have to tell you this: she was frightened. She didn’t show it much, but I know her and I knew. Whatever she was going to do, when she left me, it frightened her. Listen, I know something about why you’re here, besides the movie.’

  They stared at her, stone faced.

  ‘She may have been following a lead?’

  ‘Whatever you noticed it can’t have been anything significant,’ said Ax, at last.

  ‘She was fine when we saw her at the cabin, a few hours later.’

  ‘But then she took off, you don’t know where and you don’t know why!’

  ‘No offence, but this is personal. It’s not really your business.’

  ‘Journalists,’ said Ax. ‘They have no idea. Fiorinda’s cut short a boring interview, on some flimsy excuse, before this.’

  Kathryn had gone. They were sitting at Allie’s desk. The litter of the life they’d tried to leave behind, document files, boxes of clippings, promotional freebies, a diary planner screen taped on the wall, shards of the dead Reich, lay like a mask over the character of the alien room they had looked into long ago, with Fiorinda beside them, auditioning beach houses.

  ‘We should talk to the Committee. I mean, to Roche. I won’t talk to Harry.’

  ‘About what? They know as much as we do.’

  ‘No they don’t, Sage. They don’t know that the woman who has disappeared was mentally unstable, or that she is…that she has has the qualities a rogue military project would look for, if they were trying to weaponise natural magic.’

  ‘She is not mentally unstable.’

  ‘Right. She has untreated schizophrenia, that’s different.’

  ‘It’s an altered state. It’s possible to live with the symptoms.’

  ‘As you would know, oh bodhisattva.’

  They weren’t sleeping. There was no question of sharing a bed: they could hardly bear to be in the same room. They hated each other.

  ‘As I would know, yes. Ax, try to follow this. I have blindsight. I went to somewhere outside time and causality, so to say I came back doesn’t cover it. I can tell you, non-consciously I can’t prove it, that she left us of her own free will and she has not gone over to the dark side. That’s not what’s happened.’

  ‘So where is she, and why did she go?’

  ‘Because you were smothering her.’

  They had taken a terrible risk, they had played and lost. Now everything they’d done since the A&R man turned up at El Pabellón seemed like criminal insanity. They tore at each other with words, almost past caring whether they kept the rending and tearing out of their friends’ sight.

  When Fiorinda had been missing for two weeks the English had a meeting, in Allie’s office, about the gig Harry had set up at the Hollywood Bowl. The discussion quickly degenerated into acrimony. The Few, unanimous, said they didn’t like the Hollywood Bowl thing. They felt they were being treated as cute curiosities, Brit nostalgia. They particularly hated the ‘hippie DJ’number. It had to go. They didn’t want a hired orchestra, they didn’t want to be in a variety show. The whole thing was beneath their dignity.

  This was news to Ax. The Crisis Management Gigs had never had any pretensions. The ‘masques’ at Reading had always been family entertainment.

  ‘We’re not in this to look cool. We never were. We do whatever’s necessary, to please the masses and keep them sweet—’

  ‘I hated that part,’ said Verlaine. ‘I’d rather swab pus.’

  ‘But why are we doing this gig at all?,’ demanded Felice. ‘We’ve promoted the movie. Why can’t we just get dipped in goo and move on?’

  ‘You told us to look out for ourselves, Ax,’ said Chip. ‘A Hollywood Bowl Extravaganza won’t sell any Adjuvant records. Our fans will desert us.’

  ‘I think we should wait for Fiorinda’s opinion,’ said Anne-Marie primly.

  Silence followed this, and seemed unbreakable.

  ‘Fiorinda wouldn’t have an opinion,’ snapped Sage, at last. ‘She wasn’t going to do the gig. She wasn’t going to do any more big stage gigs, ever.’

  ‘I think that’s for Fio to decide,’ Smelly forgot all respect. ‘Not you, Sage.’

  ‘This is senseless,’ said Ax, white-lipped, hating them with his eyes. ‘Allie, call Mr Lopez, tell him the Hollywood Bowl is off.’

  The meeting broke up. Later that day there was a call from the LAPD. The Rugrat had been found, undamaged, at a small resort called Carlsbad, about fifty miles south of LA. Sage and Ax went down there. They identified the car, and unlocked it. Fiorinda’s bags were inside, and her phone, and her yellow slingbacks. Nothing seemed to be missing. There were no signs of violence, there was no note. The car had been immobilised and its conceal feature had been switched on, but even an AI car has its limits and the conceal had failed, which was how the Rugrat had been discovered. The local police said it could well have been there for a fortnight. This was an unsurveilled area, extra parking for the beach, and had hardly been used this season. Forensics moved in. Before long, they were pretty sure no one had been in the car with her.

  Sage and Ax stayed in the little town. The studio booked them a hotel suite; it was better than going back to Sunset Cape. The evening after they’d identified the Rugrat (which remained in custody), the heatwave broke in a tremendous downpour. Ax sat in the hotel room window, watching the palm trees, stoically upright under the grey rain, that fell thick and steady over the Pacific.

>   ‘Prayer isn’t about belief,’ he said. ‘It isn’t about hope. It isn’t really about begging God for mercy. It’s something you build out of the void, a projection of the mind into an unreal orbit. It’s mathematical. Hey, Sage, tell me, how’s the Buddhalike calm?’

  He’d reached a dead level, where his pain and fear were so great they felt like nothing at all, and Sage was a buzzing fly, a presence he could not shake off; not a person, just a scab to be picked. Sage was sitting with his back against the wall, arms wrapped around his knees, like a gangling sick spider.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘She knew what kind of life lay ahead of her, the horror buried inside, never going to go away, buried in her like the dead man’s cock. If we’d been true lovers we wouldn’t have humoured her. We’d have talked to her straight. She was smiling when she left us because she was already in fugue. Hey, Sage, wake up. Tell me again, she’s in Canada, starting a new life.’

  ‘She’s not dead.’

  ‘She’s dead or worse. You’re the one who told me she’d been hexing people.’

  ‘Fiorinda told you, and she was not hexing people. You don’t understand.

  ‘Yeah, always the problem, I don’t understand. I thought you said you didn’t know what had happened, now you do. Could you explain? I’m confused.’

  ‘Emotional truth. It’s non-conscious, I can’t know it.’

  Ax curled his lip. ‘Nah… Sorry. I don’t get it, oh sainted one.’

  ‘Fuck you. I don’t know where she is, I know she went of her own free will and she’s not the Fat Boy. She simply walked out on us. She’d had enough.’

  He blinked away tears, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘You’re not making sense, Sage.’

  ‘We were suffocating her. You didn’t care, I knew it was wrong, I couldn’t stop myself. I never had a girlfriend except Mary. I didn’t know how to, how not to fuck up. I wanted to hold her, all the time, she was sick of it, so she ran away.’

  ‘You’re saying she hated us enough to vanish, leaving us helpless to deal with the Fat Boy menace, which she absolutely believed in?’

  ‘You think she hated us enough to kill herself?’

  ‘Maybe the Committee’s killed her,’ said Ax. ‘That would figure.’

  He got down from the window. Without a word, without any change in the bleak, savage misery in his face, he knelt and took the sick spider in his arms. Sage resisted, and then gave way like a falling wall.

  The rain continued. It washed the beaches and drowned the summer gardens of the little resort towns that stretch in an unbroken chain from LA to San Diego. It sluiced the debris of high tides out of the storm drains, it drenched the police as they searched, sad description, for the girl who was gone, gone. Fiorinda’s lovers waited through another day and another night. Early on the second morning they got the call. The body of a young woman in a yellow dress had been found, dredged up from a sport-fishing boat inlet, a couple of miles north of where the Rugrat had been parked. They had a car supplied by the studio: Sage drove. On highway 5 he stopped at a truck-stop cafeteria. Californian prosperity had skipped a beat here. Everything spoke of poverty; and of the military, because of the Pendleton base. A Mexican girl with gentle eyes served them two cups of hot water, a plate of flyblown donuts and a jar of Nescafé.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Sage, touching Ax’s hand. ‘Can you do this?’

  ‘I can do it.’

  Harry Lopez was waiting outside the single storey white building. It stood in a garden, a tall fence around it; flat gravestones in rows in the green lot outside. The tiger and the wolf entered, shoulder to shoulder, and were shown to a room that smelled of disinfectant, with a taint of marine decay. The body lay on a metal trolley. One hand, discoloured and abraded, had slipped from under the sheet. ‘Her face is not recognisable,’ said the medical examiner, gently. ‘The body’s in good shape but the water’s cold, and the way she was wedged there, I’d say she’s been in the water at least a week or more. You’re not being asked to make a formal identification at this time.’

  ‘Turn back the sheet.’

  The examiner hesitated. ‘The injuries are all post mortem.’

  There she lies, frail breast and slender throat rising from the neckline of the stained and battered yellow dress. No one spoke. Ax studied the mutilated face, the pallid and sodden flesh, stripped of skin except for one shard over the right cheek. Some impact that had torn a groove through the soft remains of the nose had also broken the upper teeth. The blueish lobe of one ear emerged from the seaweed masses of her hair, like a clinging globule of marine life. He could see an open slit, like a tiny keyhole. He looked up. He and Sage exchanged one glance.

  ‘I’ll take this,’ said Ax. He lifted the dead woman’s left hand and removed the braided ring. ‘We should go, now.’

  Harry found them sitting on a flight of shallow steps that led from a parking lot to the beach. The Zen Self champion had been crying. Mr Preston’s fine, Indio profile was impassive, dry-eyed.

  ‘I am so…so very sorry.’

  Sage nodded. Ax went on gazing at the sunlit ocean.

  Harry rubbed the back of his hand over his face, wiping a dew out of his felt tip moustache. ‘She was great. She was truly a great person. Why would she take off her shoes? Why did she leave them in the car?’

  ‘Fiorinda couldn’t do high heels,’ said Sage, absently. ‘Those shoes were just for dandy. Walking on the beach for the last time, she’d want to be barefoot.’

  ‘I feel so bad about this. She was talented and wise, and beautiful, and, and funny, and I suppose she’d just, just been through too much. I hope to God you don’t think it was failing the avatar test that finally—’

  ‘Go away, Harry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m being crass, you want to be alone. Uh, later.’

  Ax turned and looked after the A&R man, making sure he went back to his car and left the parking. ‘Can you believe that bloke?’

  ‘No.’

  They’d washed Fiorinda’s ring in the sea. They clasped hands over it. Ax reached for Sage and the big cat rocked him, hugging tight.

  ‘Sssh, ssh, baby, baby—’

  ‘The Fiorinda I knew didn’t have pierced ears.’

  ‘No piercings at all, she didn’t like the idea. Th-that was a fucking stupid oversight on someone’s part.’

  ‘She could have had it done after she left us, for some reason we can’t guess. Maybe we’re kidding ourselves. Maybe that was Fiorinda, and it’s better than some outcomes.’

  ‘It wasn’t her, Ax. We both knew it. Hang on to that.’

  The Committee’s position on the disappearence had been clear from the start. Fiorinda’s flipped. She’s wandered off, suffering from delayed post-traumatic stress, what a shame. Nothing to do with a horrific series of murders, or a doomsday, insane rogue Pentagon project. The Few had been railroaded into accepting this bizarre response at first, but they’d recovered their senses, if Ax and Sage had not. They believed in their rock and roll brat, hard as nails and totally courageous. Something had happened to Fiorinda, in the window between twelve thirty when she’d left Kathryn Adams, and six thirty, which was approximately when she’d talked to Ax and Sage at the cabin in the hills. Somewhere in those few hours they would find the key to her disappearence.

  Anne-Marie performed her own ritual magic—hampered by the fact that Fiorinda’s lovers refused to take part, and reviled her attempts. She didn’t like doing this without her mistress’s consent, but it was an emergency. (Dilip called Sage my lord sometimes, and got away with it. Ammy knew she better not call Fiorinda lady, or mistress, to her face. But she often did so in her mind). She asked the incense fire, in which one of Fiorinda’s yellow ribbons burned, to give her a word, a message; guidance. Where did Fiorinda go? Did she check into a hotel for an hour with a Latin lover? Did she sing for the lunchtime trade in a piano bar, in the hope of founding a new career? Did she meet one of their movie-
star acquaintances, and recognise the monster within? Or was there something else, a door that opened onto an abyss? Kathryn Adams says she was afraid.

  What’s Fiorinda afraid of?

  Doctors.

  This was the word that Ammy had been given.

  Draw a circle round the Bullocks Wilshire, make it half an hour’s LA driving in radius. Remember she had the Rugrat, ace negotiator of the freeway maze, remember she could equally have stuck to the surface streets, or reached her appointment on foot. They did not know what the word Doctors meant, but since it had been given to them they downloaded lists of medical practices, hospitals, clinics, medical suppliers, from the public net. Ammy cut up the lists, played with them, slept with them, and reduced the number.

  Now they worked with shoeleather and persistence, covering the territory in pairs. The women did the gynaecology, paediatricians, female cosmetic surgery. Chip and Ver tackled the suburbs with a hired car. Dilip and Rob were on general medicine. You locate one of the places Ammy rated as a possible: you send her a photo. It’s important, apparently that you be physically there. If she says yes, one partner stays outside. The other walks into reception, shows the picture, asks the question. See what happens.

  Ammy rarely said yes.

  The Rugrat had been found, with all Fiorinda’s possessions inside. Her lovers were at Carlsbad, waiting to view a corpse. Fiorinda’s friends doggedly pursued their mystery. Dilip and Rob, buddies because Anne-Marie had vetoed mixed couples, travelled by bus and taxi. They took the MTA into town, and continued where they’d left off the evening before. Even if she was dead, they still wanted to know. The rain had vanished, the sky was grey but the temperature was back in the mid thirties. They worked for a couple of hours, and stopped to eat corner-store sandwiches in a little park, with the inevitable palm trees; which no longer gave them that eye-kick that says you’re not in London anymore.