by Gene Wolfe
When the wrapping was back in place, he went into the room next to Orchid’s cramped office. It was larger than he had expected, and its furnishings were by no means devoid of taste. After glancing at a shattered hand mirror and a blue dressing gown he picked up from the floor, he uncovered the dead woman’s face.
* * *
He found Blood in a private supper room with Musk and the burly man who had carried Orpine’s body, discussing the advisability of keeping the yellow house closed that night.
Uninvited, Silk pulled up a chair and sat down. “May I interrupt? I have a question and a suggestion. Neither one should take long.”
Musk gave him an icy stare.
Blood said, “They’d better not.”
“The question first. What’s become of Doctor Crane? He was out there with us a moment ago, but when I looked for him after you left I couldn’t find him.”
When Blood did not answer, the burly man said, “He’s checking out the girls so they don’t give anybody anything he hasn’t got already. You know what I mean, Patera?”
Silk nodded. “I do indeed. But where does he do it? Is there some sort of infirmary—”
“He goes to their rooms. They got to undress and wait in their rooms until he gets there. When he’s through with them, they can go out if they want to.”
“I see.” Silk stroked his cheek, his eyes thoughtful.
“If you’re looking for him, he’s probably upstairs. He always does the upstairs first.”
“Fine,” Blood said impatiently. “Crane’s gone back to work. Why shouldn’t he? You’d better do the same, Patera. I still want this place exorcised, and in fact it needs it now more than ever. Get busy.”
“I am about my work,” Silk told him. “This is it, you see, or at least it’s a part of it, and I believe that I can help you. You spoke of disposing of that poor girl’s—of Orpine’s—body. I suggest that we bury it.”
Blood shrugged. “I’ll see about doing something—she won’t be found, and she won’t be missed. Don’t worry about it.”
“I mean that we should inter it as other women’s bodies are interred,” Silk explained patiently. “There must be a memorial sacrifice for her at my manteion first, of course. Tomorrow’s Scylsday, and I can combine the memorial service with our weekly Scylsday sacrifice. We’ve a man in the neighborhood who has a decent wagon. We’ve used him before. If none of these women are willing to wash and dress their friend’s body, I can provide one who will take care of that as well.”
Grinning, Blood thumped Silk on the arm. “And if some shaggy hoppy sticks his nose in, why we didn’t do anything irregular. We had an augur and a funeral, and buried the poor girl in respectable fashion—he’s intruding on our grief. You’re a real help, Patera. When can you get your man here?”
“As soon as I return to my manteion, I suppose, which will be as soon as I’ve exorcised this house.”
Blood shook his head. “I want to get her out of here. What about that sibyl I talked to yesterday? Couldn’t she get him?”
Silk nodded.
“Good.” Blood turned to the handsome young man beside him. “Musk, go down to the manteion on Sun Street and ask for Maytera Marble—”
Silk interrupted. “She’ll probably be in the cenoby. The front door’s on Silver Street, or you could go through the garden and knock at the back.”
“And tell her there’s going to be a funeral tomorrow. Have her get this man with the wagon for you. What’s his name, Patera?”
“Loach.”
“Get Loach and his wagon, or if he’s not available, get somebody else. You don’t know what happened to Orpine. A doctor’s looked at her, and she’s dead, and Patera here is going to take care of the funeral for us, and that’s all you know. Get the woman, too. I don’t think any of these sluts could face up to it.”
“Moorgrass,” Silk put in.
“Get her. You and the woman ride in the wagon so you can show this cully Loach where it is. If the woman has to have anything to work with, see that she brings it with her. Now get going.”
Musk nodded and hurried away.
“Meantime you can get back to your exorcism, Patera. Have you started yet?”
“No. I’d hardly arrived when this happened, and I want to find out a great deal more about the manifestations they have experienced here.” Silk paused, stroking his cheek. “I said that I’d just arrived, and that is true; but I’ve had time enough to make one mistake already. I told Orchid that I didn’t care what the devils—or perhaps I should say the devil, because she spoke as though there were only one—had been up to. I said it because it was what they taught us to say in the schola, but I believe it may be an error in this case. I should speak with Orchid again.”
The burly man grunted. “I can tell you. Mostly it’s breakin’ mirrors.”
“Really?” Silk leaned forward. “I would never have guessed it. What else?”
“Rippin’ up the girls’ clothes.”
The burly man looked toward Blood, who said, “Sometimes they’re not as friendly as we’d like them to be to the bucks. The girls aren’t, I mean. A couple times one’s talked crazy, and naturally the buck didn’t like it. Maybe it was just nerves, but the girls got hurt.”
“And we don’t like that,” the burly man said. “I got both those culls pretty good, but it’s bad for business.”
“You have no idea what may be doing this?”
“Devils. That’s what everybody says.” The burly man looked toward Blood again. “Jefe?”
“Ask Orchid,” Blood told Silk. “She’ll know. I only know what she tells me, and if an exorcism makes everybody feel better…” He shrugged.
Silk rose. “I’ll speak to Orchid if I can. I realize she’s upset, but I may be able to console her. That, too, is a part of my work. Eventually, I’d like a talk with Chenille as well. That’s the tall woman with the fiery hair, isn’t it? Chenille?”
Blood nodded. “She’s probably gone by now, but she’ll be back around dinner. Orchid’s got a walk-up upstairs over the big room out front.”
* * *
Chenille opened the door to Orchid’s rooms and showed Silk in. Still wearing the pink peignoir, Orchid was sitting on a wide green-velvet couch in the big sellaria, her hard, heavy face as composed as it had been when they had talked in the cramped office downstairs.
Chenille waved toward a chair. “Have a seat, Patera.” She herself sat down next to Orchid and put her arm around her shoulders. “He says Blood sent him up to talk to us. I said all right, but he’ll probably come back later if you’d rather.”
“I’m fine,” Orchid told her.
Looking at her, Silk could believe it; Chenille herself seemed more in need of solace.
“What do you want, Patera?” Orchid’s voice was harsher than he remembered. “If you’re here to tell me how she’s gone to Mainframe and all that, save it till later. If you still want somebody to show you around my place, Chenille can do it.”
There was a glass on the wall to the left of the couch. Silk was watching it nervously, but no floating face had yet appeared. “I’d like to speak with you in private for a few minutes, that’s all.”
To Chenille he added, “I was going to say that it would give you a chance to get dressed—so many of you here are not—but I see that you’re dressed already.”
“Go out,” Orchid said. And then, “It was nice of you to worry about me, Chenille. I won’t forget this.”
The tall girl rose, smoothing her skirt. “I was going to look for a new gown, before this happened.”
“I have to speak to you, too,” Silk told her, “and this should only take a few minutes. You can wait for me, if you prefer. Otherwise, I would appreciate it very much if you came to my manteion this evening.”
“I’ll be in my room.”
Silk nodded. “That will be better. Please pardon me for not rising; I injured my ankle last night.” He watched Chenille as she went out, waiting until she ha
d closed the door behind her.
“Nice-looking, isn’t she?” Orchid said. “Only she’d bring in more if she wasn’t so tall. Maybe you like them that way. Or is it the hips?”
“What I like hardly matters.”
“Good hips, nice waist for a girl as big as she is, and the biggest boobs in the place. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
Silk shook his head. “I’m surprised you didn’t mention her kind disposition. There must be a great deal of good in her, or she wouldn’t have come here to comfort you.”
Orchid stood up. “You want a drink, Patera? I’ve got wine and whatnot in the cabinet here.”
“No, thank you.”
“I do.” Orchid opened the cabinet and filled a small goblet with straw-colored brandy.
“She seemed quite depressed,” Silk ventured. “She must have been a close friend of Orpine’s.”
“Chenille’s a real rust bucket, to hand you the lily, Patera, and they’re always pretty far down anytime they’re straight.”
Silk snapped his fingers. “I knew I’d heard that name before.”
Orchid resumed her seat, swirled her brandy, inhaled its aroma, and balanced the goblet precariously on the arm of the couch. “Somebody told you about her, huh?”
“A man I know happened to mention her, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.” He waved the question away. “Aren’t you going to drink that?” After he had spoken, he realized that Blood had asked the same question of him the previous night.
Orchid shook her head. “I don’t drink until the last buck’s gone. That’s my rule, and I’m going to stick to it, even today. I just want to know it’s there. Did you come here to talk about Chen, Patera?”
“No. Can we be overheard here? I ask for your sake, Orchid, not for my own.”
She shook her head again.
“I’ve heard that houses like this often have listening devices.”
“Not this one. And if it did, I wouldn’t have any in here.”
Silk indicated the glass. “The monitor doesn’t have to appear to overhear what is said in a room, or so one’s given me to understand. Does the monitor of that glass report to you alone?”
Orchid had the brandy goblet again, swirling the straw-colored fluid until it climbed the goblet to the rim. “That glass has never worked for as long as I’ve owned this house, Patera. I wish it did.”
“I see.” Silk limped across the room to the glass and clapped his hands loudly. The room’s lights brightened, but no monitor answered his summons. “We have a glass like this in Patera Pike’s bedroom—I mean in the room that he once occupied. I should try to sell it. I would think that even an inoperable glass must be worth something.”
“What is it you want with me, Patera?”
Silk returned to his chair. “What I really want is to find some more tactful way of saying this. I haven’t found it. Orpine was your daughter, wasn’t she?”
Orchid shook her head.
“Are you going to deny her even in death?”
He had not known what to expect: tears, or hysteria, or nothing—and had felt himself ready for them all. But now Orchid’s face appeared to be coming apart, to be losing all cohesion, as if her mouth and her bruised and swollen cheeks and her hard hazel eyes no longer obeyed a common will. He wanted her to hide that terrible face in her hands; she did not, and he turned his own away.
There was a window on the other side of the couch. He went to it, parted its heavy drapes, and threw it open. It overlooked Lamp Street, and though he would have called the day hot, the breeze that entered Orchid’s sellaria seemed cool and fresh.
“How did you know?” Orchid asked.
He limped back to his chair. “That’s what’s wrong with this place, not enough open windows. Or one thing, anyhow.” Wanting to blow his nose, he took out his handkerchief, saw Orpine’s blood on it just in time, and put it away hastily.
“How did you know, Patera?”
“Don’t any of the others know? Or at least guess?”
Orchid’s face was still out of control, afflicted with odd, almost spastic twitchings. “Some of them have probably thought about it. I don’t think she ever told anybody, and I didn’t treat her any better than the rest.” Orchid gulped air. “Worse, whenever there was any difference. I made her help me, and I was always yelling at her.”
“I’m not going to ask you how this happened; it’s none of my affair.”
“Thanks, Patera.” Orchid sounded as though she meant it. “Her father took her. I couldn’t have, not then. But he said—he said—”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Silk repeated.
She had not heard. “Then I found her on the street, you know? She was thirteen, only she said fifteen and I believed her. I didn’t know it was her.” Orchid laughed, and her laughter was worse than tears.
“There’s really no need for you to torment yourself like this.”
“I’m not. I’ve been wanting to tell somebody about it ever since Sphigx was a cub. You already know, so it can’t do any harm. Besides, she’s—she’s—”
“Gone,” Silk supplied.
Orchid shook her head. “Dead. The only one alive, and I’ll never have any more now. You know how places like this work, Patera?”
“No, and I suppose I should.”
“It’s pretty much like a boarding house. Some places, the girls are pretty much like in the Alambrera. They don’t hardly ever let them out, and they take all their money. I was in a place like that once for almost two years.”
“I’m glad that you escaped.”
Orchid shook her head again. “I didn’t. I got sick and they kicked me out—it was the best thing that ever happened to me. What I wanted to say, Patera, is I’m not like that here. My girls rent their rooms, and they can go anytime. About the only thing they can’t do is bring in a buck without his paying. Are you with me?”
“I’m not sure I am,” Silk admitted.
“Like if they meet him outside. If they bring him back here, he has to pay the house. So do those that come here looking. Tonight, we’ll have maybe fifty or a hundred come. They pay the house, and then we show them all the girls that aren’t busy, downstairs in the big room.”
“Suppose that I were to come,” Silk said slowly. “Not dressed as I am now, but in ordinary clothes. And I wanted a particular woman.”
“Chenille.”
Silk shook his head. “Another one.”
“How about Poppy? Little girl, pretty dark.”
“All right,” Silk said. “Suppose I wanted Poppy, but she didn’t want to take me to her room?”
“Then she wouldn’t have to,” Orchid said virtuously, “and you’d have to pick somebody else. Only if she did that very often, I’d kick her out.”
“I see.”
“Only she wouldn’t, Patera. Not to you. She’d jump at you. Any of these girls would.”
Orchid smiled, and Silk, confronted by the effect of her bruises, wanted to strike Blood. Hyacinth’s azoth was under his tunic—he thrust the thought away.
Orchid had seen and misinterpreted his expression; her smile vanished. “I didn’t get to finish telling you about Orpine, Patera. All right if I go on about her?”
Silk said, “Certainly, if you wish.”
“I found her on the street, like I told you. That’s something I do sometimes, go around looking for somebody if I’ve got an empty room. She said her name was Pine—you don’t hardly ever get a straight name out of them—and she was fifteen, and it never hit me. It just didn’t.”
“I understand,” Silk said.
“Somebody dusted her dial, you know what I mean? So I said, listen, lots of girls live with me, and nobody lays a finger on them. You come along, and we’ll give you a good hot meal, free, and you’ll see. So she said she didn’t have the rent money, like they always do, and I said I’d trust her for the first month. That’s what I always say.
“After she’d been here nearly a year, she ducked ou
t of the big room. I said what’s wrong, and she said her father had come in and he’d made her do certain things for him when she was little, and that was why she’d run out on him. You know what I mean, Patera?”
Silk nodded, his fists clenched.
“She told me his name, and I went out and looked at him again, and it was him. So then I knew who she was, and by and by I told her all about it.” Orchid smiled; it seemed strange to Silk that the identical word should indicate her earlier expression as well.
“I’m glad I did it now. Real glad. I told her not to expect any favors, and I didn’t give her any. Or at least, not very often. What I did, though—what I did—”
Silk waited patiently, his eyes averted.
“What I did was start having cake on the birthdays, so we could have it on hers. And I called her Orpine instead of Pine, and pretty soon everybody did.” Orchid daubed at her eyes with the hem of the pink peignoir. “All right, that’s it. Who told you?”
“Your faces, to begin with.”
Orchid nodded. “She was beautiful. Everybody said so.”
“Not when I saw her, because there was something in her face that didn’t belong there. Still it struck me that her face was a younger version of your own, although that could have been coincidence or my imagination. A moment later I heard her name—Orpine. It sounds a great deal like yours, and it seemed to me that it was such a name as a woman named Orchid might choose, especially if she had lost an earlier daughter. Did you? You don’t have to tell me about it.”
Orchid nodded.
“Because orpines, which only sound like orchids, have another name. Country people call them live-forevers; and when I thought of that other name, I said, more or less to myself, that she had not; and you agreed. Then when Blood suggested that she might have stolen the dagger that killed her, you burst into tears and I knew. But to tell you the truth, I was already nearly certain.”
Orchid nodded slowly. “Thanks, Patera. Is that all? I’d like to be alone for a little while.”