‘Would you emigrate to Samsara?’ Axl suddenly asked the Colonel, who went bug-eyed. A woman sat behind sniggered, but most of those around them looked away. Leaving Mexico was disloyal. Even prisoners should know that.
‘Clean air,’ said Axl lightly. ‘Better climate.’ He glanced slowly round the crowded chamber and stopped at the carved door he knew led through to the Cardinal’s study. ‘Better class of criminal...'
A captain of police standing by the wall stepped forward, noticed he was outranked by Colonel Emilio and stepped smartly back. But he didn’t lower his gaze and when he spoke it was direct to the Colonel’s prisoner.
‘Keep your mouth shut.’
‘Or what… ?’ Axl asked. ‘You’ll have me condemned to death?’ His laugh was abrupt, at odds with the polite irony in his voice. Enough at odds to make the fat woman beside them suddenly stand up and walk away.
* * * *
‘Axl O’Higgins Borja...'
The voice from the flat speaker set into the far wall was soft, almost reedy, with the faintest Fall’s Road accent. And of all the waiting petitioners, only Axl recognised it and he wasn’t even really petitioning. Unless he was meant to count asking for his life, which he didn’t. As far as Axl was concerned he was owed that, whether the Cardinal intended to pay up or not.
Heads were being raised around the waiting room, as every petitioner glanced frantically round to see who’d been called. Even the hot chocolate sellers who ambled with little silver trolleys from bench to crowded bench stopped their endless round of fleecing the bored, weary and upset.
Jaw clenched against his own embarrassment, the Colonel yanked Axl forward and began to push his way down an aisle, treading on the feet of those who didn’t move their boots fast enough. Axl tagged along behind him, staring back at anyone who looked at him. Raybans would have helped his defiance, but the only person allowed to wear shades when the Cardinal was around was the Cardinal himself, and his were tiny pebble glasses that only just kept the sunlight from his eyes.
‘Which one of you is Axl O’Higgins Borja?’ The major-domo’s smile was sympathetic, but he didn’t look at the prisoner.
Axl raised his chin. ‘That’s me.’
‘Okay. In you go…’
The Colonel stepped forward and the small man slid neatly in front of him, blocking the door. ‘Borja goes in,’ he said shortly.
‘But the man’s my prisoner ...'
Tiny slit pupils narrowed, memorising the Colonel’s face. ‘Whose prisoner?’ The small man had that low gravel growl so popular back when vampyres were in fashion. Only with him, you got the feeling it was for real.
‘I am to escort the prisoner,’ the Colonel said, sounding suddenly formal.
‘And you’ve done so,’ said a soft voice from behind the door. ‘Now go and buy some of that God-awful chocolate and wait, in case I need you further ...'
He wouldn’t, of course. He just wanted to make Colonel Emilio wait. The Cardinal didn’t like the Colonel, not least because he was Maximillia’s spy. Other politicians might try to keep spies out of their offices but not Cardinal Santo Ducque. He held his friends close and his enemies closer still, where he could keep a jaundiced eye on them.
Saluting smartly, the Colonel turned on his heel. There wasn’t space to sit so the cavalry officer pushed his way towards a huge window that overlooked lush terraces and the sea beyond.
‘Right,’ said the major domo to Axl, ‘in you go.’ He stepped back and as Axl slouched forward the small man gave an irritated hiss, pointedly straightening his own back and squaring his shoulders. Axl immediately followed suit and the major-domo gave a nod so slight Axl might have imagined it.
‘Mother of God. Stop sympathising with the fool,’ said the voice inside the door, ‘and send him in. I don’t have all day to waste.’
‘No, Your Excellency,’ said the major-domo. ‘Of course not.’
There was a sour joke that had done the rounds a few months back about the Cardinal.
The emperor, her uncle and the Cardinal land in the United States on their first visit. The first thing Max sees is a black goat. ‘Look,’ exclaims the emperor excitedly, ‘all the goats in America are black.’
‘No,’ responds her uncle cuttingly, ‘in the US some goats are black.’
The Cardinal sighs. ‘All we can truly say,’ he says firmly, ‘is that in the US there exists at least one field, containing at least one goat, at least one side of which is black. Now that’s solved, let’s eat it. . .’
What put that into Axl’s head he didn’t know. Simple fear, maybe. Or perhaps it was the handwritten list on the black glass desk in front of the Cardinal that the man was busy annotating with an old-fashioned pen. The kind that ran on ink. The list on the desk could be anything, Axl knew that. Imports and exports, revenues collected, coming engagements ... A note of those recently condemned to death.
The old man tugged once at his small pointed beard but said nothing, did nothing, merely kept amending the list in front of him. And then he started over again… Just when Axl was beginning to think the Cardinal really had forgotten he was there, the old man spoke without looking up, his voice dark as treacle.
‘I won’t even begin to ask where you’ve been.’
Since when? Not since the second series of WarChild got bounced off the networks after a three-year run through the jungles of South America. The Cardinal knew all about that. And not since Axl had ripped a suit, because that alone wasn’t enough to bounce him out of the Cardinal’s employ. Besides, that occasion had worked out well, for both of them.
The suit in question had been reaming out a twelve-year-old rene. A street kid so malnourished and stunted she could have been mistaken for her ten-year-old brother, if he hadn’t looked six. That mission was not ordered by anyone, not even televised. Axl did it on instinct, and no one would have paid him anyway. Hell, no one Would’ve even known the kid had been raped except for Axl stumbling drunk into an alley by accident and put a flechette through her attacker’s throat halfway through his attack.
It was Axl’s bad luck the alley had vidcams set up outside a warehouse door and that the cams were working. Good luck kicked in when the shooting made GoodGuysGoneBad with an approval rating of eighty-four percent. It saved his life.
‘Mulling over your sins,’ a voice asked dryly.
‘No.’ Axl shook his head, ‘thinking about that kid out at Xochimilco.’
‘You mean Sister Innocenta?’
Axl laughed. ‘Innocenta?’
‘You have a problem with that name?’ The voice was darkly amused, but there was steel behind it.
Axl shook his head. Anything the child wanted to call herself was all right with him.
‘It means innocent,’ said the Cardinal slowly, picking a pastelillo de Cabello de Angel off a Sevres plate and painstakingly eating away the sugared crust around its edge. He knew Axl knew that.
* * * *
‘Look at me,’ demanded the Cardinal and finally Axl stopped looking everywhere except at the man who held Axl’s life in his withered hands. As always, it was impossible to see the old man’s eyes behind those trademark lenses dark enough to be used to look at the sun. But dragging on his thin cigar, the Cardinal looked serene, unmoved.
Not furious but not friendly either, Axl decided.
‘Assassination is illegal under Mexican law, yes?
Axl nodded.
‘And when I reintroduced the death penalty, I made it clear that anyone who broke the law would suffer its full force, no exceptions?’
There was little Axl could do but nod. He could hardly claim to have missed the edict. ‘Assassination law targets zaibatsu killings,’ the upscale local newsfeeds had splashed. Further down the bit stream, the midmarkets had run endless variations on, ‘Is this the end to horror?’ And at the mouth of the stream where fact was whatever you claimed it was and information hit the open sewer that was Mexico’s unconscious, every title from the Enquirer upwards wen
t into a feeding frenzy at the though of the reintroduction of public executions. Tickets to the killings and half-price hotel vouchers was the least of the promotions.
But that was nothing to the bidding scrum. Before a LotusMorph of the Cardinal had even finished reading the original edict, those same networks had been on screen to the Cardinal trying to buy exclusive access, including full syndication rights.
‘No exceptions, remember?’ the Cardinal repeated and Axl nodded.
‘So why should I make one for you?’
That was the big question. ‘Because I saved your life… ?’ Axl suggested slowly.
‘And you’ve already had yours from me, twice over,’ said the Cardinal. Smoke curled up between his lips to meet dust-laden sunlight, its ectoplasmic edges thinning to fractal-fine invisibility.
‘I might save your life again.’
For a moment the elderly prelate looked almost interested and then he gave a twisted smile. ‘You’re not telling me you know of a plot?’ His tone was ironic, but beneath it the Cardinal sounded disappointed.
‘No,’ said Axl. ‘No plot.’
‘Would you tell me if there was? And could I blame you if you didn’t?’ There was gravel in the Cardinal’s whisper, put there by insomnia, thirty years of bad dreams and too many cigars, but there was something else as well. And if it had been anyone speaking but the Cardinal then Axl would have called it guilt.
This was the man who took him away from New York, fixed the audition for WarChild and paid to have Axl’s reflexes enhanced and his sight augmented. Was that what itched the old man’s conscience, or were they talking about the one thing they never talked about?
It seemed they were.
‘You’re not responsible for your birth.’
No. He wasn’t. No one was. But the Cardinal had been responsible for finding out about Axl’s mother. And having found out, he told a traumatised ten-year-old boy something he couldn’t bear to hear. Back then the Cardinal called it dealing with the truth…
Axl called it irresponsible.
Eyes hidden behind their own darkness examined Axl’s face, looking for something. Axl didn’t know if the Cardinal found it, but the old man took a deep hit on his thin cigar and suddenly pointed to the window and the azure sea beyond.
‘You think they catch anything?’
Fishing boats hung on the water above the reef, butterfly nets slung both sides of the prows of crude canoes, their mesh not yet touching the sea.
Axl shook his head.
‘Occasionally they get a bonefish or two over the reefs… Father Pedro,’ the Cardinal jerked his pointed chin towards a distant speck, ‘once caught a barracuda.’
‘What did you do?’ Axl asked.
‘With the fish? We fed it to Behemoth.’ The old man smiled at a large black cat lying curled up on the tiles in the sun, which opened one green eye at the mention of its name. Axl could have sworn the brute was grinning.
‘All right,’ said the Cardinal as he stubbed out his cigar and immediately picked up his hardly-eaten pastille ‘I’ll make you an offer. Give me one good reason why I should spare your life.’ It was obvious that the audience was nearly over.
‘I can’t,’ said Axl. ‘There isn’t one.’
And then he admitted the truth to himself. There never had been.
Chapter Eleven
Ghosts in the Beehive
There was a bare-arsed boy squatting by a puddle in the August sun. Tattered cotton T-shirt, no Levis or Nikes. No soundtrack in his head either, not yet. He had one small hand cupped to his mouth and was trying to drink black water that trickled away between shaking fingers. The puddle was shallow and its surface swirled with every hue in the rainbow, as beautiful as the wings of any butterfly. All the same, it tasted acrid and was half the size it had been the day before.
Memories weren’t something Axl went in for. He hadn’t had them removed, surgically or psychologically. And he didn’t buy time with some rem/Temp, the side effects were just too predictable. He handled time gone in the old-fashioned Freudian way; locked it away in the back of his head and told himself it was forgotten. So successful was he, that the memories shocked him with their newness, every single time they reappeared.
The stack system was at the back of the Port Authority Terminal. Older boys called it the hive. Rows and rows of tiny roomlets stacked on top of each other, each cell two foot high and six foot deep, all sealed at one end and open at the other. There were 120 cells in all, ten to each row and a spiral staircase that fed steel walkways on rows four and eight.
Hotter than hell that summer, more crowded too. Hot as a bathhouse said the older boys. Axl didn’t know what a bathhouse was but he didn’t tell them that.
Years back the hive had briefly been The Salariman Hotel thrown up by FujiSu, a Japanese metaNational on West 42nd for minor suits who’d suffered a hard evening’s team building at one of the karaoke dives on Times Square. But FujiSu had turned turtle long before Axl was born, leaving behind a supposedly-disposable locker hotel that had so far lasted as long as the oldest bum on Times Square could remember.
Axl lived in Row 4. Not his first choice because most mornings saw someone slumped drunk on the walkway and he had to move them to get out of his cell. Row 5 was a middle row and those were prized. Row 6 was also good but Axl wasn’t tall enough to reach the walkway overhead and swing himself up into a top row cell.
And by the time he did get big enough he was already living somewhere else…
The Cardinal’s shades rested neatly on the black glass desk. Golden pupils, as unblinking as any cat’s, stared into Axl’s eyes until it seemed to him that the burning gaze passed beyond now into the memories behind. He was…
. . . sitting in a cold café, watching his reflection in the window. Overhead was an unmoving wooden fan, resting askew on worn-out bearings. In summer the fan did nothing to cool the café, merely stirring up the hot air. At Christmas it was hung with fat strands of cheap electric tinsel, like now. The rest of the year it got forgotten and try as he might Axl couldn‘t even work out why he’d remembered the fan.
The boy sat at a plastic table opposite a tall man in dark glasses with a thin moustache and small pointed beard. Everyone in the café, including the owner and his brother, were carefully not looking at them.
Red smoke filled Axl’s mind as it rolled in from the edge of his vision, sharp flashes of memory flickering in front of his eyes as neurons charged and flared, billions of tiny electric connections made and broken in an instant. Snow. Cold. Despite the heat of the Caribbean coast, Axl shivered. Personality is a grid, whispered a voice in his head. Memories even less, just neural remembrance of the route most taken. Not even accurate, not even true…
The old Jewish tailor was nervous, thumbs twisting together as he watched the boy watching himself in the long glass. It wasn’t the black-suited youngster who worried him, it was the tall man in shades standing silently behind him, upper lip pulled back in an amused sneer. A black coat was wrapped tightly around the man, but not tightly enough to hide the crimson of robes beneath, anymore than his lip hid the tell-tale canines.
Cardinals didn’t usually visit tailors in New York’s lower Eastside. Actually, no one visited tailors anymore. A semiAI running coutureSoft could scan a body, cut cloth and stitch faster than any human. And that was only relevant to those not rich enough not to want their clothes grown to measure.
And even if Cardinals did visit, it wasn’t usually to buy silk suits for boys with slicked-back blond hair, violet eyes and cheekbones sharp enough to slice your heart in two…
Chapter Twelve
Wait No Longer
‘I have a job for you,’ said the Cardinal.
Axl blinked and caught his own shock before it had time to reach his face. What he couldn’t do was keep the hope out of his eyes.
The Cardinal gave a sad smile. ‘The sentence of death is postponed only. You understand me?
The man stood in front of
the Cardinal nodding slowly, waiting…
‘Succeed and we can talk again,’ said the old man ‘Fail me and you will be hunted down and executed. Do you also understand that?’
Yeah. He understood all right. He’d been here before, over twenty years previously. Same offer from the same man. He didn’t know if the Cardinal knew he was repeating himself. Somehow Axl suspected he did. Axl understood what the words meant too, just as he’d understood back then.
What sounded like a threat was actually a reprieve. Bizarrely enough, Axl wanted to cry.
The Cardinal smiled and shook his head. ‘You don’t change, do you?’
Axl knew it wasn’t a compliment.
* * * *
‘Mother of God.’ The Cardinal stubbed out his latest cigar and grabbed another, not waiting for the silver box to open itself. ‘I don’t know how she could do it to us ...' They were talking about Pope Joan, again. Outside the sun was setting over a silver sea and the small boats had set their tiny sails for the shore. From the other side of the study door came the shuffle of feet as ushers cleared the waiting room. Axl was hungry, thirsty and tired but at least he was still alive. And he could do with losing the weight anyway.
‘What’s so funny?’
How could he explain to the Cardinal? Instead of using words, Axl gestured at the smoke filled study, the black cat still snoozing on the tiles and himself now sitting in a huge green-leather armchair opposite the Cardinal’s black glass desk.
‘This,’ he said. And the old man nodded before getting back to briefing Axl.
‘We started last year with record profits. Now we’ve got a dead Pope, a black hole where the Vatican’s assets should be and WorldBank demanding to be allowed to crawl through our accounts like maggots on a corpse. And if that isn’t bad enough, we’ve got newsfeeds springing up every hour saying the bitch should be canonised immediately…’
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