"But guilty? Is that enough to make them guilty?"
The detective shrugged. "Complicit, then. It's only a way of putting it. Myself, I prefer the New Nuevo Tango. There's more heart."
She stared at him, got down off the stool, laughed in a nervous way which revealed the flecks of lipstick on her white teeth. He caught briefly the smell of her, strong, warm, a little unwashed, a little cheap; in some way reassuring.
"Goodbye," she said. "Maybe I'll see you again."
Aschemann watched her leave, then finished his drink and shadowed her unhurriedly into the warm air and black heart of the city. He could smell the guilt and excitement that came up out of the street gratings to meet her. He could smell her excitement at being alive there, in Saudade among the sights. Did she know he was behind her? He wasn't sure how she saw the world, but she hadn't forgotten him. He was certain of that, but he wasn't certain how dangerous she might be. He followed her to a coldwater walk-up behind the bottled-milk dairy at Tiger Shore, running up the last few metal risers of the outside staircase to catch her and lay his hand on her warm shoulder. His footsteps rang and scraped, she fumbled with the door. Dropped the key. Picked it up.
"Wait," he ordered. "Police. Don't go in without me."
She stared at him in despair; then over his shoulder, less as if there was someone there than at the city itself. "Please!" she said. "I don't know what I've done wrong."
"Neither do I."
Whatever happened next, he wanted to make sure he was there.
It was bare: grey board floor, bare bulb, a single bentwood chair. On the wall opposite the window, the shadow of the slatted blind fell across a poster with the logo SurfNoir. "Hey," she said. "I know: why don't you sit here-?" When she bent forward from the waist to undo his raincoat, the red dress presented her breasts to him in a flickering light. She knelt, and he could hear her breathing. It was placid, rather catarrhal. Later she lifted the hem of the dress and positioned herself astride him. So close, he saw that her gait, the shadows round her eyes, the foundation caked in the downy hairs by the corners of her mouth, had conspired beneath the Cafe Surf neon to make her seem older than she was. She whispered when he came, "There. There now." She had been a month in the same dress. She was a victim, but of what? He wasn't sure. He had no idea what she was. How had he smelled her excitement yet failed to smell his own? He felt weakened by it.
"Where do you sleep?" he said puzzledly. "There's no bed in here."
This idea let in a moment of confusion. It was very brief. But when he shook his head to clear it and turned to pay her, she was standing in the corner motionless with panic, facing the angle between the walls. She had learned enough to know what the city wanted but no more. New clothes were scattered across the floor, clean but disordered, as if she had tried to wear them but wasn't sure how. She had collected objects too, some coloured feathers on a stick, an unopened bottle of "Ninety Per Cent Neon." She started to fade as he watched, but he was out on the iron stairway long before the process was complete. He returned to the Long Bar, where he drank until he stopped shaking. Resting in the music and light he thought: does it matter who she was, when every night here the world is somehow touched? Guilt made him report to his assistant:
"I think I begin to see what's happening."
Two days later, hands in pockets at the end of an afternoon spent with his friend the bottle, Vic Serotonin lounged in the doorway of Liv Hula's bar watching the cats flow back into the event site. He had been waiting there five minutes and Straint was still thick with them.
"Pay that tab any time," Liv Hula reminded him from behind the zinc counter.
"Sure," Vic said.
He stood there a minute or two more without saying anything then turned up his collar and left.
Liv Hula rubbed at a stain on the counter. She threw the rag into the sink. "Always good to see you, Vic," she said quietly to herself. "Come again soon." She went upstairs and turned on Radio Retro, but they were just then announcing the evening's fights, and that only made her think of Joe Leone.
Outside it was Saudade.
At one end you got the tall black and gold business towers and tourist hotels, with the lights coming on in them in angular cyphers; at the other, the pastels of the Corniche dimming in a sunset of impure hot pinks and greens. Between them the sea; and the horizon somewhere past the tremendous roll of the surf, like a crease in a piece of paper the colour of doves. Onshore winds, persistent as a hand on your arm, came up the streets from the front, picking up in transit the rich smells of seafood and low-end mixed drinks. The hotels were emptying, the bars were filling up, surf noir basslines were bumping out of every open door.
Vic Serotonin passed all this, his shoulders in a permanent shrug.
Vic was puzzled. He had a leather-bound diary in one pocket and a Chambers gun in the other.
He walked down Straint to its intersection with the top end of Neutrino, where two rickshaw girls and their clients were already in a traffic altercation, then turned left on to Cahuenga which brought him eventually to Hot Walls. After that, he was five minutes finding the right door. It was one of those tall narrow town-houses, six floors split into apartments. Vic rang the bell. There was a long wait, during which he rang the bell a couple of times more. Then an uncertain voice said:
"Who's there?"
"Remember me?" Vic said. "You want to see me. You want me to help you."
"Come in, Mr Serotonin."
He ran up the stairs two at a time.
Her diary had unsettled Vic, but he was unable to stop reading it. "I fear the unknown," she had written, "but the fear of the known is so much worse."
There were pages of this kind of thing. You got a list of expenses-a rickshaw downtown, meals at upscale venues like Els and Encientum, underwear from Uoest, clever books from Parker amp; Bright. Then a description of the fights-naphtha flares casting a kind of anti-illumination over the arena, burnt cinnamon smells, the cultivars strutting about, all tusks and tattoos, their erect cocks the size of horses', the sudden flash of an eight-inch spur then something slick and ropey levered out and steaming in the shadows. "There's a moral dimension here no one seems aware of," was her conclusion about the fights. That was fine. It barely scratched the surface, but it was more than understandable. It was the travelogue you'd expect. But then she was off again:
"The known is slicked on to everything like a kind of grease. You would do anything to avoid the things you already know."
It made her hard to place. She seemed like someone who had spent time in Saudade; then like someone who hadn't. But if she belonged somewhere else, no clues were left where that might be. You got the impression of a woman who'd depended on privilege one planet past what she could handle, and who had inevitably become lost in space. Other than eat and shop and take rides around town, she stayed home and got tense. She loved her apartment, she said, but her relationship with the city was partial, unconstructive. Despite that, she didn't just catch a ship out of there, which is what any tourist would have done.
"Am I meant to live this way?" she asked herself. "Is it the same for all these other creatures? Is that how they see things here?" Speaking as one of those creatures, Vic would like to know too.
But answers weren't forthcoming, and the diary's language was empty because its true object-her own anxiety-would always remain both present and unstated: so that every observation suggested more than it could ever contain. As a result even the physical object sometimes seemed packed and decodable. Pressed to the nose, its pages gave out the scents of midtown: coffee, perfume, polished wood. Then, very faintly, human sex. Vic couldn't imagine that. The words rose from among these smells as if they were sensations too: "I dream entirely in tiny mad paintings. A man seems to be spewing up a snake. Someone else is helping him. The roof of their house is on fire. They recoil from one another yet seem entwined, bent in the shapes of a body language which no longer has any meaning.
"Is this what will happen to
me inside the site? Am I dreaming what it is like? I don't want to go in but I must." There being no attempt to explain this combination of need and paralysis, Vic was forced back repeatedly on to the entry which had first caught his eye. "Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before I was born?" Then, as if this weren't enough:
"The vast craneflies, libellulinae and locusts which somehow filled my life then were emblematic. They were alien species, icons of difference; as tentative and fearful as they were frightening. They were usually trying to speak, through the woman I knew as The Girl Beneath the Dragonfly. She was ^translating for them, caught up, electrified, pushed out of herself, taken over, by their need. She had no life of her own. She was a radio, a retro radio. She lay on the sodden black ash. She was myself. They stood over her, trembling. They were trying to explain through her how badly things had gone wrong. How they had been blown here by circumstances they could not control. How they didn't mean to be here. In a sense they were my parents, but they had never been meant to be here, in the world as we knew it then.
"Insect," she concluded, "is an anagram of incest."
Even for a childhood on another planet it seemed extreme.
At least he had learned her name, written repeatedly across the first two or three pages in a hand which, formless at first, soon became practised and fluent. It was Kielar. "Mrs Elizabeth Kielar," she had written again and again, like a girl trying out future identities from the safety of some expensive New Venusberg school. "Elizabeth Kielar. Mrs Kielar." Vic would never use it, but it was a name. She stood looking at him uncertainly from her doorway. The fur coat Irene had so admired was loosely slung over an oyster satin slip, which encouraged the hallway light to pool up blue shadows behind her thin collarbones.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I-"
"In the end," Vic said, "sorry's never enough."
He pushed past her and into the apartment. It was seven or eight rooms one after the other, the connecting doors open so you could see the length of it. A bank of identical windows ran all the way down on the left, lighting it like a single artfully divided space, a restaurant or a gallery. Vic could feel her standing behind him, pulling the coat closed across her breasts, watching him with that continuous bland puzzlement of hers. She smelled of Anai's Anai's, and also some expensive flowered soap.
"You knew that," he insisted, without looking back, "but until now you've never had to acknowledge it." He held up the diary. "Why give this to me?"
She shut the door quietly behind her.
"You're angry," she said. "I don't know why you're so angry."
"I can't work with uncertainties on this side."
"Would you like to have a drink?" This idea seemed to restore her. "I was asleep when you knocked," she said. "Please come in and have a drink."
"I want to know what you think I can give you," Vic said.
"It didn't work because you were so angry. I was more afraid of you than that place."
"Maybe that's how it seems to you now," Vic said.
In the end, though, what could he do but shrug? He followed her down the curious linear apartment, accepted a drink, sat at one end of a sofa with a green chenille cover thrown over it and watched while she arranged herself at the other, in the corner as far away from him as she could get. She drew up her knees. She allowed the fur coat to fall loosely around her, and watched Vic in return. Vic made a pantomime of placing her diary carefully on a small table, which was perhaps his way of saying that was over now, he'd just leave that alone. There was a single narrow glass vase on the same table. In the mornings the light would fall harshly across it, tangle the transparent shadow of the vase in the shadows of the window frame. "Is that the drink you like?" she asked him. "Is that the way you prefer it?"
After a moment he said:
"When you walked into Liv Hula's bar, I thought you were a tourist. That was a mistake. It put both of us in danger."
"Mr Serotonin, I-"
"Look at me," Vic urged. "Listen. I'm telling you this. In there, the most unreliable people are the ones looking for something. Their lives were too difficult to solve. Now they hope something good will happen to them, but they've been hoping for too long and that's what makes them dangerous. You never know what will happen to them in there. They thought they wanted to find something-it would have been easier to stay this side of things." It was his standard speech to women like that. He usually gave it in a corner of Liv Hula's bar, or a suite at one of the tourist hotels.
He swallowed his drink. He leaned forward.
"Do you understand?" he said.
She shivered and pulled the coat back round her suddenly. "You're angry because you're afraid of everything," she said.
Vic shrugged and smiled.
"It's good we can agree," he said politely.
At this, she pursed her lips and turned her head away from him so that the long tendons of her neck stood out. Vic could see the tension in them. Her skin was a little darker than he remembered. "This morning," she said quietly, "I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I'm waiting for something to happen, and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." She turned back to him suddenly and asked, "Have you ever lost your way?" Her eyes, a curious colour between green and brown, were so wide and direct he couldn't look into them for fear of disappointing her in some obscure fashion.
"Would I know?" he said.
"People lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again."
She got up from the sofa and stood in front of him smiling. "Come and look," she said. "Come over here with me and look out of the window." When he didn't respond, she walked over to stare out anyway. "I won't wait for you," she said. Then:
"Look!"
Outside it was Saudade, rooftops and streets stretching away in the soft rain and dark. Lines of lights. Cabs and pedestrians flickering under the neon, adstreams like migrations of pastel moths. Distant cries came up; laughter. Past all that, past the tourist port and the military pits, out at the limits of vision, you could see something-a whitish, roiling strip like surf, the boundary of the event site, a stationary vapour of uncertain physics. Beautiful but very strange. Above it, the Kefahuchi Tract had stretched itself across the yielding black sky like the generative principle of some old cosmology. Vic Serotonin stood next to Mrs Kielar. He frowned briefly as if he had seen something out there he wanted to be certain of. Finally, he looked down at her.
"It's quiet tonight," he said.
She smiled to herself. "Is it?" she said. "Why did you come here?"
"I don't know."
"Tell yourself that if you like. It won't help."
The fur coat had fallen open again. City light splashed behind the narrow collarbones, and where the edge of the satin slip lay across it, her skin was the colour of balsamic cream. An unexpected warmth came up from her. The moment he became aware of that, she knew. She gave a low laugh and moved a step or two away from him. "You never had to see me again. What do you care about some tourist? It wasn't the diary. It was me." By then Vic had her by the shoulders, which were small and rounded.
"What's this?" he said, "what's happening?" and began kissing her.
His mouth safely on hers, she backed towards the sofa and pulled him down. Vic worked the coat off and tugged the slip up round her waist, felt the heat of her on his face; caught broken glimpses, through his own excitement, of the light on her skin. She was one of those women who writhe and push a lot. Some internal struggle with themselves-as urgent as their own narrow bones, skin over muscle-causes them to sweat immediately they touch your clothes. Everything is in their way. You don't know if they want you or not, but something won't stop in them. She bit Vic's arm. One foot pushed and kicked impatiently at the coat as she placed herself, then she had him in her.
"Christ," Vic said.
"You like this," she said. "You like it." She made a small agitated noise, as if she liked it too. She smiled at the ceili
ng for a moment, then drew up her legs and began to say yes, in a determined yet meditative voice, in time to Vic's thrusts: "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes," until he came.
"How you wanted to do that!" she said.
Vic, as puzzled as he'd ever been in his life, tried to roll away from her and sit up. She only wrapped her legs round him and held him by the shoulders until he couldn't avoid her eyes.
"Will you take me into the site, Mr Serotonin?"
He stared at her, shook his head. Pulled himself away. "It's Vic," he said thickly-then, sitting on the edge of the sofa staring at the window and talking to himself as much as her, "I'm Vic." He felt used. He didn't know what he felt. He sat there for half an hour with his back to her in a defensive curve. Neither of them said anything, then he turned round and had her again. Facing away to present herself, she whispered, "You have no idea who you are."
When Vic woke it was still night, and he was alone.
He toured the long apartment looking for her. White wainscoting and layers of ethnic rugs gave way to shoulder-height marble tiling over large black and white linoleum squares; then green silk wallpaper and dark wooden floorboards worn unevenly but polished to a high shine. Objects were everywhere-feathers from a dead alien, musical instruments casting angular shadows, three sketches of someone else's ancestors in thin, black-japanned frames. Ceramics from some culture no one knew the name of, a thousand lights down the Beach, a million years down the drain. Everything changed, room to room, except the row of windows, and through these the city light fell cleanly, downshifting colours, accentuating the museum values of the space, emptying everything out. He felt glad of the slight chill on his skin. It reminded him he was alive.
"Mrs Kielar?" he called. There she was, crouched on a window seat naked, legs drawn up, twisted from the waist so she could look out. Her sharp, vulnerable elbows on the windowsill supported her upper body; her hands were clasped in front of her face. She rocked a little, to and fro. Vic touched her.
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