by Lyndsay Faye
“That man can’t picture nothing saving as a conquest, him,” Moma scoffs. “What an ape. Me stronger than you, you serve me. Him stronger than me, I serve him. Caveman bullshit.”
“He’s unevolved,” Mam’zelle agrees.
“Robin wants a binding spell, I’ll give him one next time he wants to wipe his ass.”
Lia has never struggled so hard not to laugh, and it’s the least appropriate time and place possible.
“But I’m somehow important to the . . . grand scheme of things? I was never your pet charity project?”
“Mon Dieu, Lia, you are one of the most key players,” Mam’zelle gushes.
“What kinda time I got for a charity project?” Moma glares down her nose. “The idea. We watch you, we guard, we guide, and you don’t figure there’s something in it for us, too? What kinda magical negress home for the stupid you think you landed yourself in?”
“That would have been ridiculous, chouchou,” Mam’zelle agrees. “Winning your trust was a triumph. Robin said all those things because he’s hot under the collar.”
“Oh, we dilled his pickle all right.” Moma smirks. “He dangled this in front of our Lia, dangled that.”
“The main thing he dangled was who I am.” Lia pauses, then presses on. “He even implied it would take you thousands of years to tell me, seeing as I’m your magical indentured . . . thrall . . . thingy.”
Maw-maw tugs her shiny dress collar impatiently. “What is freely given must still be freely received.”
“I had a choice, working for you,” Lia translates.
“It woulda stopped the second you said no thank you,” Moma agrees.
“What am I then? A spirit? A ghost?”
“Our friend,” Mam’zelle chides gently.
“And a goddess,” Moma adds, shrugging.
“An excuse me?” Lia cries.
“You wanna go back to the Greeks, you’re Heimarmene.” Moma’s brow lifts, amused. “Doing that kinda root work at your age, strong as you are now, couldn’t be nobody else. The goddess of cause and effect. This action produces this result. A leads to B. Not a lotta forces in this existence more powerful than cause and effect and, well . . . that’s your jurisdiction right there.”
“Not individual lives, that would grow so tiring,” Mam’zelle coos. “More . . . how to say it?”
“Fate of the universe,” Maw-maw assists.
“Oh,” Lia says, dizzy. “OK. Well. Guess I better read the handbook soon, then.”
“There are my divine sisters!” Robin exclaims. “All looking ravishing, I might add. What’s a poor tailor to do?”
Moma mutters a suggestion that Lia doesn’t think anatomically possible.
The silver tray Robin carries is laden with five glinting champagne flutes. He raises his eyebrows when he sees Lia looking significantly more demonic than previously. But his cheer returns, and he tosses the empty tray over the ledge like a Frisbee.
“A toast!” Robin proposes. “To the circle of life. Long may it grind!”
“To the next beginning,” adds Mam’zelle.
“Unto death,” Moma continues.
“Into dust,” says Maw-maw.
Everyone stares at Lia.
“Mazel tov?” she hazards.
You fucking bitch, I’ll kill you! comes from the ballroom below them.
Over the course of the next minute or so, a series of events unfolds below them, the instigating factor being Jessica Anne Kowalski’s bouquet. While matters progress quickly, the climax of the scene features Horatio Patel holding one Jeremy Bradford, hedge fund manager, at bay with the point of a sword cane.
“Lord have mercy,” Robin comments during these proceedings, sipping his champagne. “What fools these mortals are.”
HORATIO
This sex is more than sex, under the will of the God of sex,
so I softly invoke transformation of your rueful image of haven
—those frozen rocks, that guilty lighthouse isolate from temptation—
—Gerrit Lansing, “A Poem of Love In Eleven Lines”
I don’t care!” Benjamin yells, waving his arms. “We needed a fundamental shift, Horatio, a quantum jump if you will, and here’s this nifty secret cheating bit that they didn’t want anybody to know. Hokey-dokey, what if everybody knew? This is a filthy long-term affair, now how are you guys gonna behave? They could never have anticipated Paul ordering those pictures taken, and definitely not his smearing them in my face for pure uncut spite right before I accidentally shot him dead.”
“It’s not, ah, the likeliest of scenarios.”
“Damn straight it’s not. Talk about a quantum jump, I just took their electron and kicked the shit out of it.”
“There’s a world of difference between the atomic electron transition and asking your mum if she’d care to shag a monkey’ ” Horatio groans from behind his fingers.
The part of him that can feel Benjamin’s anguish, as if jumper cables connected them, burns. The part repulsed by Claude and Trudy applauds. But every British instinct sparked while watching that spectacle made Horatio want to relocate to a moon, and preferably not Earth’s.
They sit—rather, Horatio leans while Benjamin paces—in a cul-de-sac bordered by an electrical room, a service elevator, and the unmarked staircase they used to flee. If the Danes wanted them, they’d be caught by now; a security camera stares down unblinking. And if Paul Brahms were alive, they’d have been whisked to the nearest cement-shoe-fitting salon. But neither scenario is occurring, so Benjamin schemes while Horatio rests against a stack of boxed tile cleaner.
“Fine, there are hardly ever monkeys mentioned in conjunction with the creation of a photon, what did you see?” Benjamin demands.
“Um. See?”
“See, while I was giving the most memorable eulogy known to civilization, what did you see? That’s the whole reason we put you so close to my mom and that broken breast pump Uncle Claude.”
“Right, I need one thing clear first. You surveyed this catastrophic situation in which multiple people are dead, you were nearly murdered, and you were disinherited before you burned those documents, and you thought, you know what this calls for? More chaos.”
“Exactly!” Benjamin snaps his fingers as if Horatio just did a cool trick, and Horatio might genuinely push him down the service elevator shaft. “Chaos theory.”
“Chaos theory?”
“The tiniest alteration in the initial conditions of a highly complex situation can produce a wildly different outcome. Your dad makes one joke his boss appreciates, he gets the better job posting, you marry a different person, and you die in a different freak traffic accident than if he never pulled that crack about bad golfers. This is a deterministically chaotic system, which means that even if we knew atom by atom what happened just before my dad died, it would be, like, beyond arduous to figure out where this is headed. But we don’t know what those initial conditions were, so I reset the clock. The initial conditions are now the present.”
Horatio attempts to think of a meditation prayer.
All that comes through is buggerfucking hell.
“By doing that slideshow, I intend to restart all my thought processes under the assumption this is the beginning. Horatio, what did you see?”
Horatio isn’t the shirking sort, so he says, “Whatever happened to your father, it wasn’t Claude.”
Benjamin worries at the cuff. “Good, now we’re getting somewhere, why do you say so?”
“Because he was narked off but mainly worried over Trudy. Not once did he look frightened. And even when the final slide showed up, he was shocked, granted, but not defensive. More protective.”
Horatio does not want to tell Benjamin what else he saw.
“OK, so my dad was wrong. That leaves accident, suicide, or someone else
was the killer. This is sooooo good, finally, this is progress.”
Horatio pictures Trudy Dane, Claude’s hand finding soothing places to alight. He’s never observed a woman less in need of being comforted. Trudy’s eyes were arctic blue, love and loathing congealing into a noxious expression. If she’d been born a few hundred years ago, Horatio thought, Trudy would have been a remorseless queen, and her subjects would have trembled and worshipped at her golden slippers. She would have made for a stirring biography.
But this was Benjamin’s mother. And when he’d shown the final slide, she’d flinched before baring her teeth like a predator.
“Horatio?”
“Present, yes.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
Benjamin’s entire body is a question—the half-frown, the madly tugged hair. Horatio holds both his hands out. The smaller man readily approaches, and with Horatio propped against boxes, for once they’re the same height.
“Hey,” Horatio begins.
Benjamin slides into his arms. “Hi. We’re investigating, don’t try to distract me. The tux is distracting enough.”
“I’m not, love.”
“That’s weird.”
“Oh, I didn’t even notice that I . . . My apolo—”
“Nope.” Benjamin smooths a palm over his hair and Horatio doesn’t need a skeletal system, this is fine. “Your inner monologue being . . . outer, it’s strange. Just because I couldn’t hear it before doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear it. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.” Horatio doesn’t need whatever throat impediment this is. “I was happy enough.”
“In fact, this doesn’t feel like happiness.”
“What does it feel like?”
A sad smile emerges. “What you said before.”
Love.
Do what you need to do before he renders you sodding incapable of human speech.
“Benjamin, about the investigating. Claude wasn’t overtly fussed when you showed the final slide.”
“You said so. And?”
“Trudy was.”
Horatio misses nothing of Benjamin’s full-body tremor. His friend closes his eyes. They’re glassy when they open and have been red at the edges for days now, painfully blue within.
“So, right. Right. Maybe Mom really was trying to off me. That’s disturbing.”
Horatio can’t imagine any possible response.
“I, we, I need to get back inside,” Benjamin stammers. “Where’s the bunch of dudes in black-tie security-detail uniform? I know they hired extra muscle for this so where are they, why aren’t they here, because they should be so what’s the holdup?”
Horatio gathers him closer. “We can just—”
“No, we’re going back in, and then. Then we can leave. But I need to gauge the aftermath.”
Horatio studies him, all the brackets around his eyes that weren’t there before Horatio left for London, the way the corner of his mouth tucks down miserably.
“Then let’s get it over with, shall we?”
“Let’s shall.”
They link fingers and return the way they came. The gala is a firestorm of gossip and speculation. There’s more programming to come—a medley from their current rock opera production of Paradise Lost, Ben thinks—but it hasn’t begun. It’s as if a lion-mauled Christian is still bleeding out, and the Romans are salivating for the next course.
They circle the room slowly, readying to leave it. But everyone is so preoccupied by exactly the same thing that a single dissimilarity stands out. Horatio finds himself tuning in to an unrelated conversation, out of context and none of his business. A thin, processed-looking young woman holds out a bouquet to the man before her. She’s so frightened her arms shake.
“Please just take it.” The young lady’s mouth wobbles. “It’s, it’s an apology bouquet.”
The man’s hands are wedged in his pockets. He is superficially good-looking, with a cleft chin, though his hazel eyes have the depth of a goblin shark’s. This chap would just drift toward his prey on a deep-sea current and then lazily snap teeth. He’s also three or four sheets to the wind.
He’s a discount Marlowe twin, and Horatio prickles with loathing.
“What is wrong with you, Jessica?” he demands. “Look, I said I was sorry about punching your date. You wanna get back together with me and you think a bouquet is gonna cut it?”
“No, I don’t want to get back together, I just, this is an apology.” Jessica takes a deep breath. “At least let me read you the card. ‘May you have all the happiness that you deserve.’ ”
Jeremy shakes his head. “This is the saddest shit. You’re bringing me flowers and wishing me happiness but you don’t want me back?”
“This is, uh, to smooth things over at work.”
“Pathetic. Things are totally smooth there, it’s outside of work you’re a total nightmare.”
Jessica starts to cry. Horatio’s aunt in Norwood had a terrier that sounded like that when it was hungry.
“We should—” Benjamin starts.
“Just a tick, love.” Horatio squeezes his hand and goes to Jessica. “Are you all right?”
Jessica thrusts the bouquet out with both hands. She shakes her head. The canine crying intensifies.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” Jeremy sneers.
Horatio doesn’t understand anything about this situation. Jessica is terrified of Jeremy; she’s handing him a unique, large, and frankly costly looking bouquet. People don’t behave so, and if Horatio is an expert at anything whatsoever, it’s how people behave. Jeremy snatches the bouquet out of her fingers, to her obvious relief.
“My name is Horatio,” he answers. To Jessica, “If you need anything, say the word.”
“Look man, she doesn’t need some Arab guy hitting on her.”
Jeremy puffs himself bigger. Or attempts to. Horatio fights the urge to wince in distaste. The incorrect racial slur he ignores, as he’s been doing periodically since he was a child.
“He’s not hitting on her, he’s with me.” Benjamin peers intently at the bouquet, as if trying to place it. “Dude, I dunno what your deal is, but it’s shadier than a back alley.”
“My deal? I’m a fucking Two Sigma hedge fund manager!”
“Oh my god, you say that as if you want people to hear you. Do you need us to stay with you, miss?”
Jessica shakes her head so hard that Horatio worries about whiplash. Benjamin slips his hand through Horatio’s arm, and they step away. Obviously too legless to recognize the Dane heir, Jeremy turns back to his ex and almost staggers at the change of direction alone.
“Something super weird is going on,” Benjamin decides.
“Agreed.” Horatio does a perimeter check, but the Danes are nowhere in sight. “I’ve no idea—”
Jeremy attempts to swell like some none-too-bright species of poultry. Horatio is about to bodily whisk Jessica away when a newcomer arrives. Her hair is Coke label red, she’s dipped from décolletage to ankle in silver sequins, and she’s several shades beyond angry.
“Jeremy!” she brays. He startles. “What the fuck is this?”
“Brittany, calm down, it’s nothing.”
“Hi, Jessica,” Brittany says coldly. “What, you’re back with this ugly bitch now? You got a nice romantic bouquet and everything? That’s sweet, Jeremy, that’s the sweetest thing I ever seen.”
“This isn’t what it looks like, calm down.”
Brittany swings ample hips at Jessica. “Did you just tell me to calm down, you cheating piece of shit? Jessica, did you give Jeremy these weird-ass flowers?”
“Uh,” Jessica sniffles.
“And he took them?”
“Yeah. But they’re not—”
“Have a nice life, then.” Brittany, with a convictio
n Horatio can only admire, turns on a gravity-defying platform heel and sashays toward the nearest champagne station.
“That’s not—no,” Jeremy snarls. “Brittany!”
“I should be going, too,” Jessica says in a tiny voice.
“Jessica, how exactly do you manage to ruin everything?”
“It, it was just meant, I have to—”
“You fucking bitch, I’ll kill you!”
Benjamin and Horatio are both in motion, but it’s too late. Horatio doesn’t know the number of drugs in Jeremy’s system, nor drinks. But he recognizes the nasty power play of an impotent man, and they’re both too late to prevent Jeremy from throwing his ex into the nearest floral display. The centerpiece shudders but is heavy enough to remain standing.
Jessica hits the ground, stunned. Horatio dives to her side while Benjamin, bless him on occasion for the fearless bastard he is, grips Jeremy by the tux lapels and shoves him several feet backward.
“Night watch! Palace guards? Sorry, security? Right now would be a good time!” Benjamin shouts.
Horatio helps Jessica to stand.
The patrons notice the show isn’t over yet and scuttle back for a better view.
Jeremy sizes up Benjamin and decides he likes his odds. A knife appears in his hand, the sort of concealed switchblade that idiots bring with them to drug deals—which likely happened a few hours back—and are easily overlooked when screening at large events.
“I’ll teach you to touch me, you little faggot,” he snaps.
Benjamin rolls his eyes.
Jeremy lurches forward, finding himself at the business end of Horatio’s sword cane.
Horatio cannot believe that any of this is happening.
“Yes, I do actually know how to use this,” Horatio warns him. “Oddly enough, I was ranked third in the Eton College Fencing Club my final year. Drop the knife if you please, mine is longer.”
“Holy unmarried teen mother of god, what are you doing?” Benjamin marvels.
“Not now, Benjamin.”
“I think I just came in my pants.”
“Security is en route and I’m holding an illicit sword, so if you don’t mind taking matters just the slightest bit seriously?”