The Crying Machine

by Greg Chivers

  I start making out that I’m good for the money, but when I get to the part about only ten K up front he looks like he’s sucking something sour. I stop talking and his expression softens.

  ‘Levi, it’s not for me. You’re a smart kid; I can see that. Leo would tell me to nod and smile and keep pumping you for info, but I respect you for coming here. I respect you for trying to make this work, but it’s no good. Walk away from this. Have you thought about Gaza?’

  We shake hands. As I head out the door, Uncle Leo gives me a mock salute with the stub of his cigar. All that respect stuff was bullshit. Shant figured out it’s a job they don’t want to steal, so he found a quick way to end the conversation. In a way it doesn’t matter. They’ll forget about the job they didn’t do, but they’ll remember we had this conversation. After this, Levi Peres can sit down and talk business with anyone in this city, which is great, but it doesn’t get me out of my hole with Safar. Only money’s going to do that, but I have a manpower problem, and not enough money to fix it.

  4.

  Clementine

  From a distance, the Mission is a white hole in the dark of the Old City. As Clementine gets near she can see the cracks the whitewash doesn’t cover. In the gothic-arched doorway the smell hits her: an intense urine tang. The deranged cluster in the shadows, dark piles of shambling rags drawn to this place of succour, but repelled by some ineffable magnetism from the door itself. A pair of yellow eyes, slitted like a cat’s, watches her pass from beneath a concealing hood, the expression impossible to read.

  Inside, the Mission is true to its name, an outpost for a dying Europe. The walls are the same whitewash as outside but cleaner, with fewer cracks. Six rows of dark wood benches line up either side of an aisle pointing arrow-straight to a low altar covered with white cloth. For the first time since she left France, homesickness touches Clementine. This room could be in Lyon or Grenoble, but for the faint mist of dust that hovers golden in the yellow light.

  A pale-skinned woman, the first she’s seen since she arrived, appears from a doorway in the wall behind the altar. She wears a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a cord. Her short, red hair is cut like a man’s in a style that would mark her as sexually deviant at home, but maybe the rules are different here. The shaven sides show her ears fully, but there is no glint of metal in either of them. For whatever reason, this woman does not embrace the technology the locals favour. She smiles in a manner that grants limited, conditional acceptance of Clementine’s right to be here and waits for her to speak.

  The silence is wrongfooting. The conversational gambits she’d been running through on her way here all seem too obviously false now. This woman’s stern simplicity demands repayment in the same currency. Clementine’s concocted stories of a struggle against oppression, of loss and abandonment, evaporate, replaced by a single statement. ‘I want to disappear.’

  The woman’s eyes wander over Clementine’s pale skin and inappropriate, form-fitting European clothes. There’s a glimmer of something that might be sympathy. ‘Are you ready to embrace our Saviour?’

  A simple, binary question, loaded with two millennia of history, packed with an infinity of agendas. Which one does this unremarkable woman serve? What will it demand? Choice is a luxury reserved for those already possessed of food and shelter. Clementine does not hesitate. ‘With all my heart.’

  The woman’s smile warms, but her eyes are still calculating. ‘I am Hilda. You can help in the kitchen for now. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in the hostel dormitory tonight. You’ll need to change out of those clothes. They’ll bring trouble we don’t need.’ She walks with slow, smooth steps, leading the way to a darkened glass door behind the altar. It opens to reveal a small vestry that looks as if it serves as a bedroom. Despite conspicuous cleanliness, it is a tableau of a life improvised. Piles of things, mostly books and papers, cover every available flat surface, including a narrow, hard-looking bed. Hilda reaches into one of the piles, pulls out a brown robe identical to her own, and passes it over. For a moment Clementine watches dumbly as the reality of what she’s doing settles on her. Holy orders. Will there be a vow? Some sort of ritual? Will they accept someone like her? All she has is this woman’s tacit acceptance. Instead of hopelessness, the thought inspires a wave of calm. This is all she has. Perhaps a freedom from choice is the gift of the Holy City.

  There is a pang of loss as she strips off her smart-fabric leggings and vest. Inappropriate they may be, but the temperature-sensitive weave and adjustable wicking properties made them valuable in any climate. The variable colour shift was a useless legacy of her old life – it wouldn’t hide her in the city. Clothes like this were hard to find, even in Europe, since the war on the Ural frontier had started up again. The gossamer network of goods between continents necessary for such sophisticated products had taken years to re-emerge after the first war, and now it was gone again.

  She hesitates, wary of nakedness in front of a stranger, until Hilda looks away. The world goes dark as the robe slides over Clementine’s head. It’s heavy, and the coarse fabric scratches her skin where it touches. Her head emerges to see Hilda smiling now, perhaps in amusement at the sight of the slight woman swaddled in fabric, perhaps at something else. The benign opacity of her expression is a mask that could hide anything, or anyone.

  The kitchen is spotless but tired. The stainless-steel surfaces are scored with the passage of a decade of cutlery. A small, dark woman stirs two big pots of something surprisingly appetizing. She doesn’t wear robes and she seems surprised to see Clementine, but silently accepts her presence, handing her an apron and a dented ladle. From the other side of a green plastic folding shutter comes the sound of moving bodies and murmuring, the stilted conversations of the hopeless, not listening to each other, hitting dead ends, repeating themselves.

  The cook leans across the counter and pulls at the centre of the shutter. It clacks noisily up into a hidden recess. The people on the other side are mostly men, already in a line. They know how this works. A few glance up, noticing the unexpected robed figure, but most are focused on the food. They shuffle past blindly as Clementine ladles bowls full of aromatic stew. There’s a faint waft of sumac and bursts of something else more exotic, a spice that leaves an almost uncomfortable heat on the tongue. Still, it’s good food. The homeless in Europe have been killing rats for more than a decade now. An unwanted memory sends a shudder through her: not just the homeless.

  The act of serving becomes automatic and she stops noticing the faces in front of her until one of them hisses thanks. She looks up to see the yellow eyes that watched her in the doorway. They see through the disguise of her robe. The features around them are hidden behind shadows and layers of ragged cloth, the blotched red wrist of the hand that takes the bowl seems almost to strobe out of existence in the flickering yellow ceiling light, but the scars of radiation sickness are unmistakeable.

  Clementine suppresses a start of surprise and resumes the mechanistic act of filling the bowls, looking around her to see if anyone else has noticed the stranger. The cook wrestles the dead weight of the second pot, oblivious. The homeless continue their dead-man shuffle.

  A few make attempts at conversation when she steps out from behind the counter to gather bowls and spoons, but they’re nonsensical, or perhaps in some dialect of the damned she doesn’t understand. She smiles dumbly; none of her language training prepared her for this. As she clears away, she looks in vain for the yellow-eyed stranger.

  The small, dark cook makes empty conversation as they share the duties of washing up and putting away. She answers Clementine’s questions about recipes and ingredients with gentle incredulity at her ignorance, unable to grasp the exoticism of her fare to someone who comes from a place where spices will not grow. The rest of her talk is platitudes and local gossip: political scandals, acts of outrage by a cult she calls ‘the Machine people’. The stories mean nothing to Clementine. There is no threat of meaningful dialogue. She has already
disappeared.

  She follows the cook’s directions to the dormitory. A windowless corridor floored with colourless, hard lino takes her there. The geography of this place is unsettling, hard to follow even for someone like her. It doesn’t correspond at all to the featureless white box visible from the outside. Walls have been knocked away into nearby buildings and tunnels dug between to link them. It is a warren of the faithful with many entrances. The exteriors are all facades. It makes her wonder who else is hiding here. Or is this just what pragmatism looks like in the ruins of the Holy City?

  The hostel dormitory is small and cramped compared to the cavernous dining hall. There are people already here, most dressed in the ragged uniform of the poor. Some chat with cautious familiarity. Hilda had explained the hostel’s twelve beds were allocated on the basis of a benignly rigged lottery. At 5 p.m. every day applicants were invited to draw straws for a place. Recent winners, and known substance abusers, chose from a lot that contained no long straws. Some perhaps suspected their fate was sealed, but it was fairer than chance. Clementine had bypassed the lottery entirely, for reasons as yet unclear.

  Fully half her roommates are women: the lottery’s work again. They look genderless in the garb of poverty and the skin of their faces and hands is hard from days spent outside in the streets. The eyes of the men follow her hungrily across the room to an empty bed in one corner. Their scrutiny is relentless, their thoughts obvious, but signs proclaiming the Mission’s code of conduct hang like silent sentinels on the walls. Nobody wants to find themselves losing the lottery.

  Nobody undresses. Instead, there are token gestures towards the rituals of preparing for bed: outermost garments are put to one side; one of the men prays in a style Clementine has never seen before, rocking backwards and forwards while murmuring atonally. Another uses a bowl of water to perform lengthy, ritualistic ablutions confined to the limited areas of flesh accessible without removing further layers. They all seem to move to some unspoken timetable. By the time the fluorescent strip light on the ceiling flickers out, they are already lying still.

  Clementine stares at the ceiling in the darkness. She can feel the eyes of the men and hear their thoughts. Still, this is the safest she’s been for months, since before leaving France. She thinks of the people she left behind. How many survived? Most would be dead, the bravest. If there were any survivors, they’d likely been sent to join the punishment battalions in the east. Not everybody got the chance to disappear. She was lucky, lying here in a hard bed amongst the hopeless. Still, sleep would not come.

  A rustle of cloth and a stifled gasp is the sound of a man masturbating in the dark. Clementine pushes her bedcovers aside and walks to the door, picking her way faultlessly through the pitch black, the path and distance memorized through instinct honed by months of training. In the corridor, she blinks three times rapidly and a film descends over her eyes. Monochrome outlines appear out of what was total blackness and she retraces her steps through the warren until she reaches the smoked glass of Hilda’s door and knocks.

  A light blossoms behind the glass and the older woman gestures her inside wordlessly. She doesn’t seem surprised. Even roused from sleep, she still wears the same gentle, slightly calculating expression. Clementine slips out of her robe and crawls into the recently vacated bed, still warm from Hilda’s body. The older woman smiles as she leans down to pull the blanket across to cover her nakedness. The light flicks off, the door clicks closed, and she is gone. Tears of relief and gratitude well in Clementine’s eyes. She has to blink three times before they can fall.

  5.

  Levi

  Yusuf is pretending to be busy when I get back, chin on his elbow, bodyweight pushing a dent into the clouded zinc of the bar while he listens to some no-hoper trying to sell knock-off shisha tobacco from India. If the guy bothered to look at Yusuf’s face he’d know he wasn’t making a sale, but he just keeps talking, stuck on a script that won’t work without a clean data feed he can’t get this deep in the Old City. Any other week, Yus wouldn’t be giving this schmuck the time of day, but he’s still smarting at getting cut out of the Silas deal. He makes out like it’s all a big fuck-up, but jealousy is what it is. This is the kind of petty shit he does as payback. The tobacco guy only lets up after Yusuf promises to try a sample batch, which is never going to happen. Through me he gets Zanzibar gold leaf at closer to wholesale than is decent or reasonable. That’s the other part of our agreement.

  The door curtain rattles behind the tobacco guy. Yusuf gives me a look while the rainbow beads swing and slow to a stop; then he moves to the door, fingers picking at the knot of his apron as he walks. Smoke swirls through the chink of light striping his face while he watches the guy disappear down the street. ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  He sits opposite, bulk filling half the table. The way he moves, quick, crisp, he’s excited about something. ‘So you’re still here. It can’t have gone that bad.’

  ‘Yeah, it went pretty good actually.’

  ‘You got yourself a cheap thief?’ There’s an edge in his voice, like I put a little dent in his excitement.

  ‘Not that good.’

  ‘Have you thought about …’

  ‘I am not going to Gaza! Will you shut up about Gaza?’

  ‘Ya rab, Levi! Forget about Gaza. Did you hear about your girlfriend?’

  ‘Again with this?’ It’s the girl. I should have known. His ability to drop things is zero.

  ‘Hear me out. A few people saw her come in here. You expect that. Well, it turns out she had a little trouble on her way over: a couple of boys from the Safar crew thought she looked like fun, followed her into the souk.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s too bad, but shit like that’s going to happen. What’s your point?’

  ‘It didn’t exactly turn out how they expected.’ He’s got his fists clenched, he’s so excited.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She ditched them.’ He watches my face, waiting for a reaction.

  ‘Ditched them? Ditched them like how? Like she ran away? I mean, good for her, but that doesn’t qualify her for shit, Yus.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what Omar told me. He was there; his stall’s right across the street. She turned into the alley opposite the arcade, you know the one with the carpets hanging out front, and the Safar boys followed her. Two minutes later, she comes out, heads straight in here like nothing happened, and get this – the boys don’t show their faces for ten minutes after that.’

  ‘So what? She beat them up?’

  ‘Come on, be serious! Omar’s friends with those guys – they talk to him, and they say she disappeared! They turn the corner, it’s a dead end, but there’s nobody there.’

  ‘You are full of it, my friend. Or they are. It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘So she’s perfect for you.’

  ‘Ha, ha, you kill me.’ A certain percentage of everything Yusuf says is bullshit. If it’s second-hand, like from his friend Omar, you can double that percentage, but, by the law of averages, every so often he comes up with something. Safar’s boys are just kids, but they’re a serious proposition on home turf. If she got away, she did something right. ‘OK, you made your point. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s interesting. If she disappeared, how would I even find her?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy. She followed your advice. Smart girl.’

  ‘My advice? I didn’t give any.’

  ‘Sure you did. One of the regulars saw her at the Mission. Looks like she’s working there now.’

  I look over my shoulder at where the three old guys are still taking turns sucking at the pipe. ‘One of them? I didn’t realize they ever moved.’

  ‘You’re a piece of work, you know that, Levi? Old Yash has been scoring his dinners at the Mission ever since his wife died.’

  ‘Hold on a minute. Are you telling me one of those guys at the pipe is a different person than was here when I left?’

  ‘And you’re supposed to be t
he sharp one. You think I only have three paying customers? How do you think my business works?’

  ‘I’m not an accountant.’

  ‘No, you leave the adding up to me.’ The dome of that big bald head glistens as he shakes it at me. ‘You got into this mess because you owe too much money to the wrong people, and now you’re at the wrong end of a bad deal. You’ve got to fix this.’

  ‘Look, OK, I get it. A strange woman came in; she was kinda hot, in a skinny European way, and you’re excited. I still don’t get why you think she’s a solution to my thief problem. You don’t know anything about her.’

  ‘I know she made the Safar boys look stupid, and she’s faster than Fat Saul.’

  ‘Evolution is faster than Fat Saul.’

  ‘Options, man. Options. All I’m saying is, you don’t have many of them.’ He’s got that big dopey grin on his face, and he’s nodding at me like he’s waiting for me to agree. It kills me when he’s right.

  ‘Look, it’s late, it’s been a messed up day, and I can’t even think right now. If it’ll make you happy, tomorrow I’ll go to the Mission, see if she’s there. If I find her, we can have a conversation. If I don’t … well, we’ll work something else out. Sound good?’

  ‘Hey, I’m just trying to help you here, but yeah, that makes sense.’ He sucks his teeth and grimaces, which tells me whatever comes next is going to be a pain in the ass. ‘Seeing as you’re going out, can you pick something up for me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m running a little low on whisky. You got some in last week, didn’t you?’

  ‘Can you get it yourself? It’s just in the stash: in the tunnels in the usual place.’

  His face breaks into a sheepish grin. It looks kind of ridiculous on a guy his size. ‘C’mon, man, you know I don’t like to go down there. Gethsemane always freaks me out. There are people buried in that place, like actual dead bodies.’