She had nothing to say to that, so she hung up.
“He really hurt me when he said that,” she said to Benedetta, and began to cry.
“You should leave that old fool,” Benedetta said, munching a fresh canapé. “You should come with me to Bologna. Come tonight. We’ll catch a train. It’s the finest city in Europe. There are colonnades and communards and blimps. You should see the arcades, they’re so beautiful. And we have wonderful plans in Bologna. Come with us to the Istituto di Estetica. You can watch us as we work.”
“Can I take photos of what you’re up to?”
“Well …”
“I take such bad photos,” she mourned. “Josef Novak doesn’t take bad photographs. Sometimes they’re wonderful. Sometimes they’re just odd, but he never takes a bad one. Never, he just doesn’t make mistakes. And me, I never take good ones. It’s not that I have bad technique. I can learn the technique, but I still don’t see.”
Benedetta sipped her tincture.
“There’s no one me inside to see with, Benedetta. I can be beautiful, because there is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion, and I am all a strangeness. But being beautiful doesn’t make me all right. I’m not at one with myself. I am in fragments, and I’m starting to think that I’ll always be in fragments. I’m a broken mirror inside, and so my work in artifice is always a blur. Art is long and life just isn’t short anymore.” Maya hid her face in her hands.
“You’re a good friend, Maya. I don’t have many true friends, but you’re a true friend of mine. The years don’t matter like you think they matter. They matter but they matter differently. Please don’t be so sad.” Benedetta began to search in her jacket pockets. “I brought you a gift from Bologna. To celebrate. Because we truly are sisters now.”
Maya looked up. “You did?”
Benedetta searched through her pockets. She pulled out a suckered barnacle.
Maya stared. “That really looks like something I ought not to be messing with.”
“Do you know what a cerebrospinal decantation is?”
“Unfortunately, yes, I do.”
“Let me give this to you, Maya. Let me put it on your head.”
“Benedetta, I really shouldn’t. You know I’m not young. This could really hurt me.”
“Of course it hurts. It took me a year to prepare this decantation. It hurt me every time. Whenever I felt a certain way—the way that was really me … I put this thing on my head. And it sucked me out, and it stored me. I thought I would use it sometime much later, to remember myself if I ever got lost somehow. But I want you to have it now. I want you to know who I am.”
Maya sighed. “Life is risk.” She took off her wig.
The barnacle went in through the back of her skull. It hurt quite a bit, and it was good that it hurt, because otherwise it would have come too easily. Perfusions oozed and she went very calm and supernaturally lucid.
She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a little bitterness for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.
She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the gray meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices.
When she came to, the barnacle was gone. She was flat on the floor, and Benedetta was gently wiping her face with a damp towel. “Can you speak?” Benedetta said.
She worked her jaws, forced her tongue to move. “Yes, I think so.”
“You know who you are?” Benedetta was anxious. “Tell me.”
“That was truly holy,” she said. “It’s sacred. You have to hide that in some sacred place. Never let anyone touch that, or defile that. It would be too awful, and too terrible, if that were ever touched.”
Benedetta embraced her. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how to do it. I know how it works. I even know how to give it to you. But I don’t know how to hide from what I am, and what I know.”
Three weeks passed. Spring had come and Praha was in bloom. She was still working with Novak, but it was not the same. He treated her like an assistant now, instead of a magical waif or a stranded elf. Milena could sense that there was trouble in the wind. Milena hated cops, but Milena was nevertheless making life hard, because Milena hated a disruption in the ancient Novak household even more than Milena hated cops.
Maya took a train to Milano and did a very boring shoot with some of Vietti’s very boring staffers. Because it was a working engagement, she saw almost nothing at all of Milano, and precious little of the Emporio Vietti. Vietti himself didn’t bother to show; the great man was off in Gstaad boiling his crabs.
The results of the shoot were perfect and glossy and awful, because it wasn’t Josef Novak. She learned quite a bit during the shoot, but mostly she hated it. Nevertheless, she thought it was a smart thing to do. People had been fussing entirely too much about the Novak photographs. They were all over the net and they were rather too beautiful and they were much, much too true. It seemed to her that people would be happier if she proved she could be boring. Just another silly model, on just another couture shoot. And besides, there was money in it.
She persuaded Benedetta to come to Milano to handle the money for her. Benedetta didn’t handle the funds herself, but she knew people, who knew people, who knew people who could handle money. Benedetta bought her a Milanese designer furoshiki, which was beautiful and useful, and a big Indonesian network server, which was useful and beautiful. Maya returned to Praha and the actress’s apartment, wearing the furoshiki and carrying the server in its shatterproof case.
The Indonesian server came with an elaborate set of installation procedures in sadly mangled English. Maya booted the server, failed, wiped it, rebooted it, failed again. So she fed the actress’s cats. Then she wiggled all the loose connections, booted the server, failed much worse than before, and had a frappé to calm down. She booted it again, achieved partial functionality, searched the processing crystal for internal conflicts, eliminated three little nasty ones. The system crashed. She ran a diagnostic test, cleaned out a set of wonky buffers, picked the main processor up and dropped it. After that, it seemed to work. She installed a network identity. Finally she plugged into the net.
The server rang immediately. It was a voice call from Therese.
“How did you know I was on-line?” Maya said.
“I have my ways,” said Therese. “Did they really throw you out of the Tête because you killed a cop’s dog?”
“Word gets around in a hurry, and no, I didn’t do that, I swear it was somebody else.”
“If word travels any slower than the speed of light now, it only means we’re not paying attention,” Therese said. “I was paying plenty of attention. Because I need a big favor from you.”
“Is it the favor, Therese?”
“It is the favor, Maya, if you are discreet.”
“Therese, I’m in so much trouble of my own now that I don’t think yours can possibly affect me. What is it that you need?”
“I need a very private room in Praha,” Therese said somberly. “It has to be a nice room with a very nice bed. Not a hotel, because they keep records. And I need a car. It doesn’t have to be a very nice car, but it has to be very private. Not a rented car, because they keep records. I need the room for one night and I need the car for two days. After that, I don’t need any questions, from anybody, ever.”
“No questions and no records. Right. When do you need these things?”
“Tuesday.”
“Let me call you back.”
The actress’s room was out of the question. Novak? She couldn’t. Paul? Maybe, but, well, certainly not. Klaus? Since she’d become a regular at the Tête, she’d come to realize that Klaus was a very interesting man. Klaus had many resources through every level of Praha society. Klaus was a
genuine doyen. Klaus was universally known and respected in Praha, and yet Klaus seemed to owe nothing to anyone; Klaus belonged to nobody at all. Klaus even liked her, but …
Emil. Perfect.
She did what she could for Therese. The arrangements required a serious investment of time, energy, and wiles, but they seemed to work well enough.
At two in the morning on Tuesday she got a priority call from Therese. “Are you awake?”
“I am now, darling.”
“Can you come and have a drink with me? I’m in the Café Chyba on the forty-seventh floor of this big rabbit nest you found for me.”
“Are you all right, Therese?”
“No, I’m not all right,” said Therese meekly, “and I need you to come and have a little drink with me.”
Maya dressed in a hurry and went to the café. It took her forty minutes. When she arrived at the Café Chyba she found it deserted. It was a perfectly clean and perfectly soulless little bar, entirely automated, just the sort of place where one would end up at three in the morning when one was having an emotional crisis in an eighty-story modern Czech high-rise. Emotional crises seemed to be pretty rare in the high-rise, to judge by the lack of customers. This high-rise was inhabited by Emil’s parents, who were, conveniently, in Finland for a month. In Suomen Tasavalta, rather.
Maya ordered a mineralka from a disgustingly cute little novelty robot. She sipped it and waited.
Therese appeared around half past three. She perched on the edge of a barstool and tried to smile. She had been weeping.
“Maya,” she said, and took her hand. “You’ve grown up so much.”
“This wig makes me look a lot more mature,” Maya lied cheerfully.
“You’re so chic! You’re so … Well, I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t, truly. Can I still trust you?”
“Why don’t you just tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, Therese. I’ll see if I can figure out the rest of that later.”
“He beat me.”
“He did? Let’s go and kill him.”
“He’s doing that already,” Therese said, and began to cry.
Therese’s boyfriend had never beaten her before, but since he was on the point of suicide, he seemed to feel a need to put a sharper point to their relationship. He’d whipped her on the back and bottom with a leather belt. Therese’s boyfriend was a Corsican gangster.
Therese’s boyfriend wasn’t a cute gangster. There was nothing cute about him. He was a career criminal, a consigliore in the Black Hand organization; protection racketeers, pimps, hardcase tincture people. Major-league money launderers. Influence peddlers. Bribers of judges, suborners of police. Murderers. Men who put people’s feet in buckets of cement. He was sixty years old and he called himself Bruno when he wasn’t calling himself something else.
“How’d you come to know this character?”
“How do you think? I run a gray-market shop in the rag trade. I got mixed up with the rackets. Mafiosi dress very flash, and sometimes they steal clothes and sell them. The rag trade is very old. You know? It’s very old and it has some strange things in its closets. I do little illegal things. Mafiosi do big illegal things. They counterfeit couture sometimes, they give people protection sometimes. It happens. It just happens.” Therese shrugged.
Maya drummed her fingers slowly on the top of the bar.
“He likes the apartment you found for us,” Therese offered. “It’s funny to steal a last night from bourgeois people.”
“I can’t believe this,” Maya said.
“Bruno’s a real man,” Therese said slowly. “I love real men. I like it when they can’t be polite about it. I like it when men really …” She thought about it. “When they really come unwound.”
“That’s not a healthy hobby, darling.”
“Life is a risk. I like it when they’re truly men. When nothing else matters to them but being a man. It’s exciting. It really feels like living. I didn’t think he’d beat me. But I was doing anything he wanted tonight. So he wanted to beat me. It’s his last night on earth. I shouldn’t have cried so much. I shouldn’t have called you. I’m being a big baby.”
“Therese, this is really sick.”
“No, it’s not,” Therese said, wounded. “It’s just old-fashioned.”
“How do you know he’s not going to murder you?”
“He’s a man of honor,” Therese said. “Anyway, I’m doing him a big favor tomorrow.”
Bruno was dying. Therese’s best guess was liver cancer. It was impossible to tell for certain, because Bruno hadn’t been near official diagnostic machinery in forty years. First his rap sheet had caught up with him, and denied him access to life-extension treatments. Then he’d begun to do a number of extremely interesting and highly illegal things to himself through the medical black market. The extra testicle, apparently, was just the least of it.
Bruno was determined to die outside the reach of the polity. Should the authorities happen to render his corpse in one of those necropolitan emulsifiers, then alarm bells would ring from Dublin to Vladivostok. The Black Hand had been founded on the ancient tradition of omertà, silence until death. Nowadays, silence after death was just as necessary.
The romance between Bruno and Therese had been very simple. He’d met her in Marseilles when she was twenty. Bruno was always beautifully dressed, reeking of mystery, and entirely menacing. For Therese this combination was catnip. Bruno liked her because she was young, and cute, and no trouble for him, and pretty much ready for anything, and grateful for favors. Sometimes he bought her nice presents: shoes, gowns, sexy underwear, little holidays on the Côte d’Azur. He gave her contact with a very, very vivid side of life.
Once she had gone into the rag trade, Bruno became even more useful. Sometimes she had trouble from buyers and suppliers. If he happened to feel like it, Bruno would show up from out of town and have a little word with the offending parties. This never failed to effect radical improvement.
Sometimes Bruno would slap her around a little. This was only to be expected from a man who was perfectly capable of putting her enemies into cement. Not that Bruno had actually murdered anyone for Therese. If he had, he wouldn’t have told her about it anyway. “It isn’t that he hits you,” Therese explained. “He hits you so you do what he wants. He’s the man, he’s the boss, he’s the top. Sometimes he makes you do what he wants. That’s what he is.”
“This is seriously bad,” Maya said.
Therese tossed her head irritably. “Did you think every criminal in Europe was like your loser boyfriend Jimmy the pickpocket? Bruno is a soldier! He’s a boss.”
“What happened to Jimmy?” Maya said. “I haven’t thought about him in such a long time.”
“Oh, they caught him,” Therese said. “Jimmy was always stupid. They arrested him. They did a laundry job on his head.”
“Oh, no,” Maya said. “Poor Ulrich. Did it change his behavior much?”
“Totally,” Therese said gloomily. “He used to steal purses from tourist women. Now he fills purses with useful goods and gives them to tourist women when they’re not looking.”
“Well, it’s a good sign that they let him keep his anarchist political convictions.”
“Oh, the polity, they fuss so much about behavior mod,” said Therese. “They catch some nasty creep like Jimmy who ought to be dropped off a bridge, and every civil libertarian in the world starts whining on the net. Really, bourgeois people have no sense at all.”
“So what’s the plan with Bruno?”
“We’re going to drive into the Black Forest tomorrow. He’s going to kill himself. I’m going to bury him in a secret place where no one will ever know. That’s our bargain. That’s our secret and private arrangement.”
“Young lady, you’re not supposed to bury any lovers until you are very, very old.”
“I’ve always been so precocious, it always gets me into trouble.” Therese sighed. “Will you come with me tomorrow? Please?”
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br /> “Look, you can’t ask that of me. If you think I can handle a sick and desperate man who’s bent on suicide, well—” She hesitated. “Well, actually, I’d probably be better at that than anyone else you know.”
“You’re so good to me, Maya. I knew you would help me. I knew somehow, the moment that I saw you, that you were someone very special.” Therese stood up. She was much happier now. “I have to go back and sleep with Bruno now. I promised I’d stay all night.”
“A promise is a promise, I guess.”
Therese looked around the deserted bar. “It’s late, it’s so strange and lonely here.… Do you want to come in and sleep with him with me?”
“I might not mind it all that much really,” Maya said, “but I hardly see how that’s going to help.”
She met Bruno for the first time at ten in the morning. She was astonished by Bruno’s uncanny resemblance to a twentieth-century matinee idol. The twentieth-century look mostly came from his bad health and the crudity of his makeup. Bruno had a broad wavy-haired rock-solid head with the greasy pores typical of heavy male steroid treatment. He wore a lacquered straw hat and a thin-lapelled dark suit and crisply creased tailored slacks and a shirt without a cellphone.
Bruno didn’t bluster or threaten. He swaggered a bit, but he lacked the smooth enormous muscle of people truly devoted to muscle. Bruno was terrifying because he truly looked willing and able to kill people, without hesitation and without regret afterward. Bruno looked truly feral. He looked old and beaten, too, like a very sick wolf. He looked as if he had chewed off his own leg and eaten it and enjoyed the flavor.
For a man driving to his own execution, Bruno was remarkably cheerful and philosophical. She’d never met anyone bent on death who seemed so truly pleased about the prospect. He kept making little wisecracks to Therese, in some criminal south-of-France argot that baffled Maya’s wig translator. Quite often he used obscenities. This was the sort of language no one used nowadays. Obscenity had simply gone out of use, vanished from human intercourse, gone like the common cold. But Bruno spoke obscenely and with relish. This verbal transgression would always upset Therese no end. She never failed to scold Bruno while showing unmistakable signs of arousal. It was like a table-tennis game between the two of them, and appeared to be their version of courting behavior.
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