by M. Suddain
‘Tranquilax. Mostly.’
‘The rape drug?’
‘It has medical applications, too, Beast.’
‘Can I have some?’
‘No, Beast. Listen. I need you to do the deed. I need plausible deniability. Now, I’m going to the door to stand guard, because if she catches us she’ll destroy us.’
‘She’ll destroy us anyway. She never misses anything.’
‘She can’t hurt us if she’s asleep. Frankly, I think she’ll appreciate the rest. You know she only sleeps a bit at a time? Like a duck.’ I tapped the glass vial on the bar top.
‘Is that right? Well, I trust ducks about as much as I trust witches. No love in a duck’s eyes.’
I eased off my stool and strolled across the room to the big double doors and watched for movement through the frosted glass painted in gold letters: ‘LADIES’ CONVENIENCES’. When I saw a shadow wobbling insolently in the distance I pushed the heavy fire doors open. ‘Seventy-nine seconds. We were starting to worry!’ She made a noise like she was trying to eject a grape stem from her windpipe. I followed her back to our seats. Woodbine was gone. ‘Where’s my friend?’
‘Gone to the men’s conveniences, sir.’ Fuck. Stamper lifted Gladys’s drink from behind the bar and placed it on a napkin before her, beside the plate of biscuits which hummed with a wheat-golden light. ‘Enjoy, madam,’ he said. The drink glowed like a mythical chalice. Gladys looked calmly at it. Do people ever look more radiant than when you have, or are about to, betray them? I took a sip of my own drink, distracted myself with my reflection. Gladys and I now occupied, I realised, with a certain amount of horror, the exact same seats the couple had for that illicit photo all those years ago.
Stamper went back to brutalising a block of ice with a pick till it wept diamonds. The whole room was sparkling madly. I could not even look at Gladys, and this might well have been my unravelling. Here, after all, was a woman who had once deduced I was being blackmailed by the way I was tapping my thumb and index finger. The gods help, I often thought, the man whom Gladys marries. Any paramour. Any gentleman caller. There will not be a hiding place, not a secret indulgence or indiscretion he can ever hope to keep from this unholy mistress of secrets.
‘What?’
Mistress of Secrets wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking at her chalice, her gaze melting the microscopic shards. ‘Not a thing, dearest,’ I said, and I shook the ice in my drink. I knew the game was up. Gladys does not ask questions she does not know the answer to. Beast returned and heaved his bulk onto his stool, smiling, slumped around his drink, took a dainty sip without lifting it from the bar top. ‘What’s happening, little duck? You were gone a long time. Did you have a run-in with a dusky attendant? Did she spritz you good?’
‘John is up to something.’
‘Oh? Typical.’
Stamper approached and said, ‘Is everything to your satisfaction, madam?’ And then Gladys lifted her eyes to Stamper, looked past him into the mirror behind the bar, looked directly at me – into me – and I died a hundred times, in a hundred places. I was stabbed, drowned, burned, buried alive. I could feel those predatory eyes unfolding my brain, opening wads of meat and peering in. ‘You put something in my drink.’ She said it plainly. No accusatory tone. Just a very simple statement of fact. ‘You. Jonathan Salvador Tamberlain. Thirty-five. Of no fixed abode. Of no certain future. Have put something in my drink.’ There was no going back now. Shit was about to get real. And then unreal. In that order. I’d seen her do this to others. I turned slowly to face her, putting on the most patronising expression I could muster. ‘I can assure you, dearest heart, that nothing went into your drink except ice, and love. Right, Stamper?’ He nodded helpfully.
‘I will ask you one more time, Jonathan. Did you … or did you not … put something … in … my drink?’
It was a battle to the death. I towered over her. And yet it was me who felt tiny. I looked right into that terrible ocular abyss, said, ‘And I will tell you one last time, Gladys, that … I put nothing … in your drink.’ Which was the truth. At that point I was not entirely sure anything had gone into anyone’s drink.
‘Then you asked him to,’ she said.
‘Madam?’ said Stamper.
‘This man did not tamper with your drink. Did you tamper, Stamper?’
‘Sir?’
‘Stamper, please bring me your ice pick.’
‘Madam?’
‘Do it now, please, Stamper.’
‘Don’t give her that ice pick, Stamper.’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s him or you, Stamper?’
‘Madam?’
‘Oh, honey,’ Beast finally broke in, ‘for the love of all fuck, take my damned drink, I’ll drink yours. I don’t care if it’s poisoned. I’m too happy to care. Happy fucking birthday!’ He took her drink and drained it in one noisy gulp, then pushed his over, still on its pale green napkin, and he winced in genuine pain as he did. ‘Hotshot. Problem solved.’ Gladys was still staring at me. Hard. But something about Daniel Woodbine’s pitiful state, along with the fact that he was dosed up like a banker’s wife, disrupted her detection systems. She shrugged, turned back to her drink, said, ‘If you want me to sleep, old man, just tell me one of your travel anecdotes.’
Within fifteen minutes she was saying, ‘Need to slow down. Getting tight here. Fuck. Whassat?! … Just a shadow. Fuck!’
Once she dropped I had Woodbine carry her back to our rooms. Sleepy-child-style. She looked like a child. A deadly, deadly child.
‘How long will she be out for?’
‘Her size? On double dose? At least a couple of hours. She has filters in her blood, though, so we have to move.’
‘What have we done?’
‘What had to be done, Beast.’
He placed her reverently on the sofa. I went to her room to get her a blanket, not daring to look at any other object in there: the discarded clothes and underwear; the piles of musical cassettes; and Hunter.
Fucking Hunter.
I can still picture her snoring loudly on the sofa, Beast watching her dolefully. ‘You know it was her birthday today. She’s twenty-four.’
‘Really? She doesn’t act a day over fourteen. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t know. I guess she doesn’t celebrate birthdays either. I checked her donor card – for fun.’
‘She’s a donor?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Imagine having Gladys’s lungs. Or her heart.’
‘Yes, imagine hiring someone to protect you, then secretly poisoning them.’
Shut up, Hunter. He sat slumped in a green leather armchair. We’d found him hiding in her room. He had a serious puncture wound on the left side of his lower abdomen and could hardly lift his head. He wore a hotel bathrobe, and his face was still made up. She’d patched up his wounds as best she could. He’d die soon if he didn’t get proper medicine. Though not soon enough for me.
‘So tell me your great plan again. Poison the woman who was protecting you, the only person who had a hope of bringing this place down, so you can go upstairs to dinner? Is that it?’
‘Yes, that’s it. You nailed it.’
‘I feel bad that we’ve effectively stolen a birthday from her,’ said Beast. ‘She’ll wake up with a sore head and no recollection of having ticked a year off.’
‘She’ll wake up angry.’
‘She’ll wake up, Hunter, thanks to me. She’ll wake up tomorrow and she won’t be here and she’ll hate me. But she’ll be alive to hate me. The only reason any of you make it out of here will be because of me.’
‘The only reason your friends are here at all is because of you.’
Shut the fuck up, Hunter.
‘We wouldn’t be in this deep if she’d had her mind on the job. She’s paid to take care of me, not run off to rescue some painted piece of holiday fluff.’
‘You think she’s the one who rescued me?’
‘Should I not think that?
’
Hunter shrugged. Smiled.
‘It wasn’t G, Boss.’
‘It has to be G. Who else would do it?’
‘It was me. I did it. I arranged his rescue.’
Hunter shrugged again. Smiled again.
‘You arranged his rescue?’
Beast kept his eyes on Gladys. ‘Sure. G didn’t want to do it. Said it would just complicate things. But I’ve made contacts since we got here. There’s a clique. The Mountain Man Club. And another called BEAST. Born Exactly As the Stars inTended. Not a great backronym.’
‘Agreed. It’s fucking terrible.’
‘There’s the Gentle Giants. And Lady Remedy. They’re all just female staff members who want to fix me. Anyway. I asked some of the Mountain Men to stop Hunter getting killed and smuggle him here. I hid him in my closet. Then I got worried you’d smell him. So I asked G if he could hide in her room. She hardly uses it. She wasn’t happy about it, but she finally agreed.’
Hunter had lipstick on his teeth and a rose of blood on the bandage on his side from shrugging and smiling too much.
‘I see. Well, that is very interesting. And for your information I did smell him, Beast. I just assumed he’d imposed his secretions on Gladys. Instead I find you’ve secreted him in our suite.’
It was his turn to shrug. He still hadn’t looked at me. He didn’t seem at all ashamed.
‘I guess I just have that effect on people,’ Hunter said.
‘I’m sorry I deceived you, John. But I don’t feel bad about it. Feel bad about her, though. Gods. Look at her.’
I did. I looked right at her. I busted my record for looking at her. Five and a half seconds. She was splayed like the pavement corpse of a midnight jumper, mouth open, one hand hanging limp over the edge of the sofa, the knuckles of the other pressed against her cheek. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘if it’ll make you feel any better put these on her.’ I produced the party crown and blower I’d kept from my own birthday dinner. ‘When she wakes up she’ll at least think there was a party, and Hunter here can make up a colourful story about a grand celebration.’
He snorted, winced. ‘I’m not joining your gang of liars.’
‘Who said we’d let you join our gang? Find your own gang.’
Woodbine put the paper crown on her head with, it seemed to me, an excessive amount of false reverence. He pushed the blower between her lips and gently pushed her mouth closed with his knuckles. Now she looked like a fallen queen. With every exhalation the paper tube inflated and made mournful music. ‘Phlaaaaaaaaaaarp.’ ‘Phlaaaaaaaaaaarp.’ ‘Phlaaaaaaaaaaarp.’
I had my things packed up. I had gone to G’s case and removed her favourite auto-pistol, slipped it in my jacket pocket. I’d given it to her for our first insanniversary. Back then she hadn’t been able to afford devices of this quality. It had ‘With thanks – J’ engraved on the handle, worn faint from repeated use.
‘Beast, you know the score. When I head upstairs the doctor will think everything is progressing as planned. You have to get her to the life-pod. Just throw her over your shoulder and walk there as quick as you can.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll see you there, if I can. But if things get hot, or she starts to wake up, you have to promise me you’ll hit eject. You know she’ll try to come back for me. And when she does wake up you have to promise me you’ll tell her you saw me killed. And tell her … well, tell her to look after herself.’
Hunter laughed and almost coughed himself to death. ‘You’re like a character from a bad movie. Have you honestly deluded yourself enough to think you’re doing this for her? Do you seriously think you could poison this woman without her knowing? Did it occur to you that she might have let herself be poisoned on purpose? So she wouldn’t feel guilty about running off with me?’
I gave him my sincerest smile. ‘I suppose anything’s possible, Hunter. But after several hours of her exclusive and terrifying attentions, you’ll come to understand why the possibility doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
That truly shut him up. The expression on his face was almost worth the entire ordeal.
‘Going up, Mr T?’
‘Going up, Sam.’
‘Just you?’
‘Of course. My invitation says “no additionals”.’
He chuckled. ‘Have to admit, I’m enjoying watching you work.’
‘You too, Sam.’
‘What do you think Doctor Rubin’s going to do when he finds out you didn’t bring her?’
‘I’d hate to guess and be wrong.’
‘Heh. The man won’t be happy, let’s put it that way.’
‘I doubt he ever will be.’
Elevator 1 looked like a tiny hospital room. It had a steel gurney, which I supposed had been meant for G. There was a small heart crudely cut out of purple paper on it. We went up.
‘He’s insane, Sam.’
‘He’s just lonely. We do crazy things when we’re alone or in love. And when we’re both, all bets are off.’
All the way up.
Then in come lovely Nancy, the corn all for to lay,
She is my charming creature, I must begin to pray;
See how she gathers it, binds it, she folds it in her arms,
Then gives it to some waggoner to fill a farmer’s barns.
‘How long you think I’ve got before Rubin figures out something’s up?’
‘Oh, I’d say you have an hour or two. Maybe three. Except Diffy’ll probably have people waiting to take the gurney. Didn’t think of that, did you?’
‘I thought of it.’ When the doors opened I saw two hulking orderlies dressed in clean white coats, and I thought of the moustached nurses at St Direghul. The biggest one grinned at me. When he saw the empty gurney his grin vanished. ‘Where she is?’
‘She’s right here in my pocket.’ I pulled out the gun and shot him. The second turned to run; I shot him too.
Heard Sam chuckle. ‘Oh, this is quite a hand you’re playing.’
‘You wouldn’t tell on me, would you, Sam?’
‘Those boys are from Medical. Not my department. Head on with that boy there. I’ll be seeing you, J.T.’
‘Take care, Sam.’
Now Harvest’s done and ended, the corn secure from harm,
All for to go to market, boys, we must thresh in the barn;
Here’s a health to all you farmers, likewise to all you men,
I wish you health and happiness till Harvest com—
The closing elevator doors cut the tail off Sam’s song.
‘Hello, Tommy.’
‘Hello, sir.’
‘You’re not going to drug me again, are you?’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir. I’m on your side. We all are.’
‘Oh? Good.’
‘Now that the Great Whore is out of the way you can take your natural place. You can be our King.’
Had I made a terrible, terrible mistake? No. Onwards.
‘Let me ask you this, Tommy. Do I have any cliques which aren’t made up of horrible misogynists?’
‘I’m not familiar with that word, sir.’
‘Never mind.’
These halls are wider up here. Grander. Tommy left me in my grand new apartment. I went to the bar and poured myself a grand drink. I took two Exocet, washed them down. I thought about things. I tried to think of happy memories. I went back to the main room, sat down in a chair. I felt the Exocet come on quickly: a heavy, dreamy, honey sensation. Like taking a warm bath from the inside out.
I still had an hour to kill before dinner, so I sat down to finish these notes.
TRANSCRIPT 56QF – RYAN STEELE, AKA ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR HUNTER’.
VOICE1: This session begins, 18.19.01 Central Time. Microphones are hot. Mr Steele, thanks for joining us under difficult circumstances. We –
VOICE2: Madam, my client has already indicated that he would like to be referred to as Special Investigator Hunter. It was part of his agreemen
t to be non-obstructive.
VOICE1: That information wasn’t passed on to me, counsellor. Is this because of his medical cond—
VOICE2: No. It’s in the agreement with your agency, signed by my client. If you’ll just refer to section 94/F –
VOICE1: I don’t have that documentation with me. Is this a confidentiality issue, counsellor? Because the information from this session is classified Level –
VOICE2: This has nothing to do with confidentiality. As I have explained on a number of occasions, my client has spent several years preparing for a role in a cine-film called Empire Hotel, which begins shooting next year. He plays an undercover tax investigator who falls in love with the woman he’s following, who turns out to be a Water Bear.
VOICE1: You mean an actual …
VOICE2: No. No I don’t mean the species of animal, I mean the agency of clandestine assassins from T-anxia. Their romantic entanglement establishes the central conflict of the film. He employs the Fitzhelder Method.
VOICE1: The character?
VOICE2: … No. My client.
VOICE1: For choking?
VOICE2: You’re thinking of the Fitzmarker Manoeuvre. The Fitzhelder Method is an acting technique in which a performer immerses himself completely in a role. My client has been immersed in the role of Special Investigator Hunter for almost three years. He has added the name as a legally certified alias, which means he has the right to request to be addressed by it, even in these secret sessions.
VOICE1: You’re telling us he’s legally changed his name to Special Investigator Hunter?
VOICE2: I’m surprised you don’t know this, considering who you are.
VOICE1: We’re working through a mountain of information at the moment, very little of which makes sense.
VOICE2: Well, if it helps things at all I can tell you that Ryan Steele is a professional alias, too. His birth name is Mervin Symonds. He changed it when he became an actor.
VOICE1: That doesn’t really help at all. I know that with his medical condition your client has limited time to assist us. So in the interests of speeding things up, we’ll refer to him as requested. Special Investigator Hunter, thanks for agreeing to meet us under difficult circumstances.
HUNTER: Inaudible.