Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  I cannot give you the hope… The little halt in Fred Eifrrich’s warm, homely, patrician voice, country-bred aristocrat. When he had heard that, and known his babe was alive, but that there was no appeal—

  The body was still in limbo. The residual fingerprints were inadequate, a bureaucratic hitch over the DNA matching, a problem with the dental records sent over from London. Ax took faint comfort in the delay. It seemed as if somebody (maybe Fred himself?) was holding off from final committment until… Until what? Ax swallowed bile, and looked down at his clasped hands. His Triumvirate ring on the left; on the ring finger of his right hand the carnelian ring she’d given him long ago, the bevel inscribed in Arabic.

  This too will pass.

  He hadn’t finished his sentence, and they were all waiting.

  ‘I wish to God we’d never brought her here,’ said Sage.

  No one had tidied away Fiorinda’s stray belongings; Emilia’s cleaners weren’t allowed in the spa. A book of hers lay by the dry swimming pool, a silver scarf on the hooks by the defunct sauna. A pair of scuffed beach sandals, traps for her friends’ glances. Poor Fiorinda, she’s gone like into water, the surface closes over. You hear her step, you look around and no one’s there.

  Smelly Hugh said, ‘But you didn’t bring her, it was the lady brought you guys. Don’t beat yerselves up too badly mates, it was her gig. I remember that.’

  Sage smiled wanly. ‘Thanks, Hugh.’

  ‘What I think is, if it was Fio’s idea, it was probably, like, a good one.’

  Smelly sat back: proud of his contribution, not bothered that nobody responded. He was getting the hang of this round table palavar at long last. When to put your hand up, when to keep your head down.

  ‘We can ask questions,’ said Chez Dawkins. ‘Listen, how about this? We know she’s gone, but we need to hear all the details for ourselves, so we can mourn and move on. It works in the movies. I think of the studio. And phonecalls. If the police can ask the company for those records, why can’t we?’

  ‘I think of Silverlode,’ said Dora. ‘It’s the last place we know.’

  The Digital Artists troubleshooters had checked out the little town when Fiorinda first went missing. Discreet questioning had established that she, or someone very like her, had eaten an ice cream at the coffee shop, in the early evening of the fatal day, and gone on her way, alone and showing no signs of distress—the studio had taken this as proof that there was no need for alarm. Remarkably, despite the time lapse, the police had later been able to confirm this report from CCTV images. Apparently.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ax, (and wondered why the fuck they should take his orders). ‘All good, but not yet. Not before we’ve talked to Laz Catskill. We’re going to meet him up at the cabin.’

  Laz and Kaya had been out of town, they’d sent messages of shock and sympathy, naturally. They were back in LA now. The Few looked at each other: strange, uneasy glances. Laz Catskill fit the profile.

  ‘You’re going up there? Are you sure that’s wise?’ said Dilip, slowly, ‘You know, we thought Laz Catskill might be the candidate.’

  ‘I never thought that,’ said Sage, dismissive. ‘Okay, outside chance: but when we met, the message I got was that he had something he wanted to tell me. He invited us to that cabin, Fiorinda disappeared, and the more I think about it, the more I want to talk to him, tha’s all. Could be nothing in it.’

  They weren’t fooled. ‘Sage,’ asked Anne-Marie. ‘When you went to his house, did he give you anything, from his hands to yours?’

  ‘Nah. Fucking poor planning on my part. I could have screwed a private jet or so out of him, I didn’t think of asking. Why?’

  ‘Food or drink?’

  ‘Hm. A maid brought coffee. I poured my own.’

  ‘Did he touch you?’

  Aoxomoxoa and Laz might have hugged, or high-fived, in the past. They’d never been touchie-feelie, so maybe not. Nowadays it was A-list manners (daft, when there were so many more risky occasions) to avoid skin contact greetings.

  ‘No,’ said Sage. ‘Oh, wait, shit… He did touch me. He touched my ring.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You think Lazarus Catskill did a hex, on Sage?’ exclaimed Chip. ‘Whoa!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘I’m just thinking.’

  ‘What?’ Sage tried to sound casual, but he’d become very attentive.

  ‘I’m thinking that’s the way magic is. I couldn’t harm anyone, I haven’t the power, and I wouldn’t if I could. It’s wicked and it comes back on you. But that’s the sign of a hex. It’s not what people think, it’s really subtle. It twists the world, just slightly, so ruin falls on someone like horrible coincidences, evil bad luck. That’s what used to happen with people who crossed Rufus. Check it out.’

  ‘I don’t need to, Ammy, I know.’

  ‘Barely distinguishable from background noise,’ murmured Dilip, looking up at his ghost-ripples. ‘Invisible and odourless.’

  ‘But Fiorinda disappeared,’ protested Rob. ‘Nothing happened to Sage.’

  Sage gave him a look worthy of the living skull.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So we’re not to do a thing,’ said Dora. ‘But you guys are going to walk into the den of maybe the ultimate bad guy. Great.’

  ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t go,’ Anne-Marie’s kept her black Chinese eyes lowered, embarrassed at giving advice to the mighty. ‘Just be careful. I know what you are, Sage, but this is another kind of power and it could hurt you.’

  ‘Don’t worry Ammy,’ said Ax, ‘We’ll be careful.’

  ‘Ideally, ask him, direct, to take the hex off.’

  ‘I’ll try to find an opportunity,’ said Sage.

  Lazarus had agreed to the meeting at once, which was interesting. When they reached the guards knew them, administered the obligatory shake-down politely, and let the Rat pass without a search. They parked, alone in the tank-division parking, and, concealed by the Rat’s one-way coated windows, opened the shielded stash for illicit items that they’d failed to find in Mexico. They’d borrowed sidearms from Doug Hutton’s armoury.

  ‘Are we sure about the guns?’

  ‘I’m not sure about anything,’ said Sage. ‘Your decision, sah.’

  ‘Well, we don’t know what we’re walking into.’

  They knew the Rat was bugged, and they knew they’d better leave the wire alone, if they ever wanted to see her again. Listen all you like, you bastards: we’re rockstars, we have no private lives. If you don’t like what you hear, if you don’t like what we get up to, then do something.

  But that’ll mean admitting there’s something going on. Something you don’t like any more than we do… They took the guns, back of the waistband, under the jacket. Their right to carry concealed weapons was something to argue about should the occasion arise. When they looked back the AI car seemed to be watching them, alert and anxious on its Mars Buggy axles, pleading for them to listen to the story it could not tell.

  Laz hadn’t yet arrived, he was on his way: the guards had unlocked the cabin’s front door from the gate. They walked in and prowled: opening doors, peering into closets. A freezer room beside the kitchen stocked like the Overlook Hotel for the winter to end all winters. The racks on racks of shoes that Laz and Kaya kept in this second-best holiday home, the sedimentary deposits of perfect casuals in walk-in wardrobes. Nothing had changed.

  ‘All this could have been ours,’ said Ax. ‘Well, yours, Aoxomoxoa. You were on this golden road, do you realise? Before your career was rudely interupted.’

  ‘I prefer things the way they turned out.’

  Ax grinned. ‘Even with the Revolutionary Tribunal?’

  ‘We’re lucky we still have our heads, citizen-’

  ‘We lost her. They’d have been justified in any reprisals.’

  In the walls of photographs, Ax saw himself: someone who had never made it as far as those pictures, never more than a beggar at the shrine of corporate whore
dom. Sage opened Laz’s bathroom cabinet, recognised most of what was there by the long, complicated names; though the labels were different—and remembered the very bad years, his taste for domestic violence, the hateful underside of his fame and fortune. Heavy glow. Strange how some people can only get off on prescription drugs… They found nothing like an office. Nothing but the house computer in the kitchen, with which they were already familiar, and if it had hidden depths, they were very well hidden.

  They met on the open-plan redwood stairs.

  ‘What d’you think?’ said Sage.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘The oldest profession,’ said Sage. ‘Oh, I have been here.’

  They were very angry. This place was mocking them, telling them that yes, it had taken Fiorinda, and they would never find out how or why—

  Downstairs. In the room that faced the poolside on the long stroke of the L, the chill of the airconditioning fought with the blaze of the sun, which at this hour flooded the glass with a diffuse, fluorescent glare. The pool appeared and vanished, depending how you turned your head.

  ‘Just out of interest, if it turns out he is the candidate, do you have a plan?’

  ‘No,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t worry, planning not appropriate, it’ll be okay.’

  ‘Non-conscious,’ Ax recalled. ‘I am really getting to dislike that term.’

  A door opened and shut.

  They let Lazarus come to find them. He was looking good. He walked in, toned and graceful, smiling with unaffected feeling and natural awkwardness. Sage noticed that the star was not wearing make-up, unless you counted surgical enhancement. At his LA house he’d been burnished and glossed, sponged and lip-brushed: one of the things that had warned Sage that no matter what it looked like, they would never be off camera.

  ‘Hey. Hi Sage. You must be Mr Preston. Sorry we have to meet this way.’

  ‘It was good of you to let us come back.’ Ax sat in an armchair.

  ‘You might have thought it was a fuckin’ imposition,’ said Sage, likewise.

  ‘No problem,’ Laz sat and faced them, on the giant leather and hessian couch. ‘I’m glad I was able to make it. No words can express how sorry I am about the girlfriend. What is it I can do for you? I get that she was with you for the last time right here. If you want to be alone here a while, that’s cool, I can leave.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Sage, turning the ring on his left hand, his blue eyes wide and insolent. ‘Chicks, bitches. There’s always more. It’s you we’re interested in, Laz.’

  ‘We were wondering if we could negotiate you into joining our club.’

  ‘You seem to have the credentials. We just need to know a little more.’

  ‘About your resumé,’ added Sage. ‘With which chapters are you already affiliated? The initials will do: so long as we know who’s riding.’

  Ax was afraid they had fucked up. They had not attempted to script this encounter, the hostility had just broken free, irresistible. But fuck it, we are rockstars, our girlfriend died, who expects us to be polite?… At Sage’s last words, the megastar’s look of surprise collapsed into intense, angry shame.

  ‘No one rides me!’ he cried.

  ‘Oh really? We think otherwise.’

  Paydirt. Ax’s heart jumped as if it would burst out of his chest, he was swept by rage. When the callous lying breaks down, when the bastards let you glimpse the truth, that’s what betrays you. He could barely restrain himself from leaping across the room and throttling the shite—

  Who are you working for? What have you done with her?

  Sage gave him a glance, and Ax held it back. But pursue this!

  ‘Are we on camera now?’ asked Sage, cheerfully. ‘Nah, you don’t have to answer. I’ll take my chance if I’m being recorded for the fans, or for your keepers. You see, we need the details of how she died, so we can grieve and move on. We want to know who was riding you. Who told you to invite us up here, Laz? So they could take our girl, kill her and dump her—’

  ‘Okay, listen,’ said Lazarus, his hands on his thighs, his long fingers stretching and clenching. ‘Listen. We’re not on camera, we can talk, but it has to be short. I am… Lemme try an’ explain. Someone can be on a mission. I knew someone, a white boy, I didn’t care, someone I used to call Aoxomoxoa. We used to talk about things like where the world was at, and how someone ought to put a hand to the wheel an’ do something—among a whole lot other piss up the wall nonsense. But I don’t know him anymore, he’s a stranger to me. One of you is Ax Preston. I’m not sure I ever met the other guy before the other day. But I’ll talk. I came here to talk. A person like me can get involved in something. It might be big, and important, and necessary.’

  Ax and Sage glanced at each other, amazed.

  ‘It’s like a religion,’ said Lazarus urgently, as if he expected to be gagged at any moment, ‘but stronger than that. It’s love of my country, born in the USA. It also happens to be secret but you’re from Europe so you know what I’m saying, even tho’ Sage talked to me as if I was a moron when he came to my house.’

  ‘Did they tell you to touch me?’ demanded Sage.

  ‘They ask me to do things,’ Lazarus plucked at the sleeve of his shirt, a loose, white sleeve, in some glimmering modern textile that moved like fine cotton. ‘Mostly they want money, and I’m glad to provide, but sometimes they ask me to do things. Yeah, they asked me to invite you up here. Okay, yeah, they also asked me to touch the ring, or the world won’t continue turning right for me. I touched the ring. I had no reason to think any harm. I thought it was a ritual.’

  ‘Bullshit. You knew what you were fucking doing. How was I supposed to talk that day, Laz? Who the fuck was I talking to—?’

  ‘Hey,’ said Ax, ‘Let the man tell us.’

  Laz was still plucking at the white sleeve, ‘I’m here to explain, so you’ll know I did you no wrong. You may think I ran out, it wasn’t like that. I had to go, it was a working vacation. When I heard she was found dead, I knew I would tell you guys the truth, soon as I could. As much of the truth as I know. I have to get this off… I’m still on the mission, but nobody rides me. There’s gonna be a discussion. I didn’t know what was going to happen until it was happening, I swear to God, Sage, and even then I didn’t know what it meant—’

  His task was giving him strange difficulty, as if he were very smashed, or trying to do something in a dream. They watched, fascinated as he managed to fumble the fabric out of his way, revealing a bracelet of plaited cord, almost the same shade as his skin. ‘I need to get this off, first. Then I’ll tell you.’

  Sage said, in a changed tone, ‘Laz, I don’t think you should do that.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Lazarus gave the cord a sharp jerk and it parted. He looked up. His light-coloured eyes were shining, as if with tears. He gave them a wide, vivid smile, like someone who’s burned his boats: and then turned his head, listening.

  ‘Ah, shit. We are about to be interupted. Be cool, it won’t—’

  He listened again to the voice in his ear, and his expression shifted into deep disgust. They heard an approaching vehicle: it pulled up in the cabin parking. All three men listened, Lazarus angry, disgusted, but seeming neither afraid nor surprised.

  ‘Are you guys armed?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sage.

  ‘Huh. Thought you might be. Half-assed terrorists. Don’t show, even if you are provoked, or you’ll catch hell and me too. I can handle this. C’mon.’

  They left the chill room, with its paradoxical flood of baking light, and repaired to the cathedral-ceilinged entrance hall, where they met the guards, five of them. Their uniforms and peaked caps bore the Pixelity Studio logo, the little heap of rainbow-cubes. Apart from the officer’s pistol in a buttoned holster their weapons were non-lethal. The mood wasn’t hostile. The guards were black, naturally enough, like their nominal master. The officer was Asian.

  ‘Hey, you goons. The servants’ entrance is around the side.’

>   ‘I’m sorry for the intrusion, Mr Catskill.’

  ‘It’s Roy, isn’t it? What the fuck is it, Roy? What’s wrong with the phones? What dire emergency brings you in person to my withdrawing room door?’

  ‘No emergency, it’s kind of a mistake. We discovered these guys aren’t on the visitors’ list any more, access to Mr Catskill’s family denied. They’re coming up suspected capable of lethal violence, and we have to escort them from the estate. Mr Preston, Mr Pender, this is embarrassing but it can be okay. I personally know you’re not dangerous and what happened in England was not terrorism on your part. It’s the studio, I only work for them.’

  ‘They let you in when they’re not supposed to,’ translated Lazarus to Ax and Sage, shrugging, but extremely pissed off. ‘I get this all the time.’

  ‘We’ll leave,’ said Ax. ‘No problem. We’ll be in touch.’

  Lazarus looked from one to the other, with the warmth of someone who has just discovered a pair of soulmates. ‘Yeah. Soon, my brothers. An’ we’ll discuss that other thing. We’ll discuss it fully, I swear.’

  He turned, with a wry grimace, to retire from the hall. Two of the guards were in his way, having positioned themselves to make sure the unauthorised guests didn’t escape back to the inner rooms. They didn’t retreat quickly enough. Laz might have been jostled as he tried to pass: or maybe his annoyance at the situation just got the better of him. ‘Don’t touch me!’ he shouted, and lashed out.

  One of the guards went down, floored by an unrestrained, power-hammer swing. It couldn’t have been the first time. Laz Catskill was a family-values property now, and his violence didn’t get into the media, but he’d been as volatile as Aoxomoxoa in the old days. Most likely he hadn’t reformed. But this was that rare unlucky occasion. The men who’d stayed by the outer doors, confused by the presence of Mr Preston and Mr Pender, grabbed for their weapons. One fired a non-lethal stun gun, the other launched a projectile that burst into a wide sticky net of webbing. The rubber bullet hit Lazarus full in the chest at about five metres. He gasped and fell, but for a moment this was masked by confusion. The guard who’d been floored by Laz’s blow had staggered to his feet, his companion was struggling and panicing in the web, the others were rushing to their assistance—