by Darren Shan
In all my visits I’d never used the stairs. There was no need, when the building was equipped with a fine array of efficient elevators. But I was feeling brisk after my exercise earlier in the day. The thought of jogging up fifteen flights appealed to me. It would waste some of the time and I could slip into a toilet up there and dab under my armpits to get rid of the sweat it would draw.
The staircase was dimly lit, the darkest place in the otherwise luminescent building. I didn’t encounter a soul until the eleventh floor. People simply didn’t use the stairs, even if they were only going up or down a flight. It wasn’t so much general laziness, more the decree of The Cardinal, which said that in his building, on his time, you better damn well get to where you were going in a hurry.
Somewhere around the seventh floor I began to think about the woman again. I slowed, narrowed my eyes, and got my best picture of her yet. I saw her in a variety of situations and poses, each segueing into another after a few seconds. She was in a kitchen, over a barbecue, serving a tennis ball, kissing me, lying by an open fire with a chessboard before her and no clothes on, driving a car, making love (I guessed to me), tossing a pancake, nervously twisting her wedding ring, watering flowers, laughing—laughing a lot of the time.
Whoever she was, real or a phantom of my imagination, she liked to laugh. A genuinely happy person, lines around her eyes and mouth from smiling so much. Every time her lips lifted, my chest constricted a notch, as if I was in love with her. I couldn’t understand it. Why should I feel so strongly about a dream woman?
I tried recalling past girlfriends. Maybe she was one of them, one I’d forgotten, or a conglomerate, my ideal woman pieced together from all of those I’d loved and left behind. I moved even more slowly, almost coming to a bemused stop.
I couldn’t remember them.
My girlfriends and previous lovers. I could recall many since coming to the city but before that, nada. I was drawing a blank again, the blank I’d been noticing more and more these last few months. There were gaps in my memory. I must have had girlfriends before I came to the city but I couldn’t remember any of them. Hell, it was hard enough for me to remember what my parents looked li—
With a sickening lurch I stopped short on the eleventh floor. I couldn’t remember! My mother, my father… Did I have brothers or sisters? I didn’t know! Everything was a blank. Every day, every face, everybody I may or may not have known before I stepped off the…
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a woman above me. I wouldn’t have bothered with her if she’d been moving normally, coming down loud and clear like a person with nothing to hide. But she was skulking, sneaking down the stairs. When she saw me, she stopped and tried to slip back into the shadows. Ironically, it was this attempt to conceal herself which alerted me to her presence.
She froze when I looked up. She was clad in black. As I stared, moving up a step for a better look, she resigned herself and came out of the shadows, affording me a proper look. She was tall, maybe my own height, long legs angling up to wide hips, narrowing to a trim waist, building up to what looked like a nice pair of breasts. She had a long face, not beautiful by any standards. Quite dark skin, though that might have been a trick of the dim light. A triangular chin, ears hidden by a long mane of black hair. I felt myself hardening as I looked her over and it took an effort to focus on the business at hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked sharply. She obviously wasn’t here on legitimate business. But how had she entered the building? I had thought Party Central was impenetrable. “Who are you?” I let my right hand travel to the small of my back, giving the impression—I hoped—that I was carrying a weapon. “What’s your name? Why are you—”
I stopped. She’d moved forward and was eyeing me intently, head bent to one side. Her face creased, as though she knew but couldn’t place me. Then, with a sexy grin that disarmed me completely, she brought her hands to her hips, undid her buttons and wriggled out of her trousers.
My hand fell away from my imaginary gun. She was wearing large, white panties. Nothing sexy about her choice of underwear but I didn’t have long to look at them, because seconds later they’d joined the trousers in a heap at her feet.
She moved down the stairs, her dark pubic hair the only thing my eyes could fix on. She probably had a knife but I didn’t care. I was like a man hypnotized.
She stopped four steps above me. “Hey,” she said softly. I tore my eyes away and looked up. She licked her lips and fell on me.
We went down instantly, kissing and tearing. My hands grabbed her breasts, then pushed down her body. She bit my neck hard. Found my zipper with her hands, ripped it open. Her fingers were cold as she pulled me toward her, urging me on (like I needed any urging!).
We rutted like cats. Rolled across the stairs to the wall, where we found our feet. I pushed her up against it, then she reversed our positions. Down again a few thrusts later. I’d never fucked so wildly. I freed one of her breasts and moaned as I sucked. I climaxed but kept pounding, still hard. She clutched me closer and bit my ear, muttering obscenities. Neither of us wanted to stop. Neither of us could. Until—
Suddenly I rolled off, breathing hard. I was dizzy and had to give my head time to clear. When I looked at her again she was sitting up, shaking her head, one hand on her knee, the other touching her groin softly. She grinned shakily, stood and pulled on her panties and trousers. Blew a kiss to me and left without a word.
I lay there like a fool and watched her go. She might have left a bomb in the building but that didn’t matter. I could no more have stopped her than I could have stepped off the roof of Party Central and flown.
After a while I rose in a daze and buttoned up. I checked my watch—I still had time. The romp had only lasted a few minutes. I hurried to a washroom and cleaned up. And then, red-faced and breathing raggedly, I went to see The Cardinal.
There were several people waiting outside his office. They were from every social stratum, dressed in suits, rags, even clerical garb. The receptionist waved me past the lot. They stared jealously as I walked by, eyes smoldering.
The Cardinal was playing with his puppets when I entered, squatting behind a small table. There was a white sheet of cloth stretched across the front, lit from behind by a bright bulb. The Cardinal had two stick puppets mounted on the ends of long rods, which he pressed against the sheet and jigged about, so from the front it looked as though they were freestanding shadows.
“Chinese,” he told me, not looking up. “Three hundred years old.” He swapped one of the figures—a man with a large hat—for a small dragon.
“Not the most sophisticated form of entertainment,” I said.
“Who needs sophistication when you have…” He pulled the models away and set them down, then crossed his arms and smiled. On the screen the shadows still danced, the dragon and a man with a spear, circling each other, lunging in fits and spurts. “…Magic,” he finished.
“How… ?”
He let me look behind the screen. There were no mechanical devices and no sign of the shadows on the back of the sheet. I leaned around and there they were on the front. I looked over my shoulder but couldn’t spot any cameras.
“Is it a screen?” I asked.
“Touch it,” he said.
It was just a simple cloth. Then, dimming slowly, the shadows vanished and all that remained was the glare of the light, which The Cardinal soon extinguished.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“Belief. Willpower. Using my mind.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“Are you hungry?” He brushed my question aside. “Thirsty?”
“I could do with a beer.”
He crossed to his desk, flicked a switch and told the secretary to bring some sandwiches, a beer and a mineral water. The sandwiches looked tasty so I had a couple. We sat munching and drinking, discussing the weather and football results, a couple of ordinary Joes.
“Just what the doctor o
rdered,” he said, finishing off the last of the bread. “I’ve been on the go since five this morning and forgot about eating. I do that a lot. My doctors are always criticizing me but where would we be if we lived life only for our doctors?”
“You work a long day,” I said, impressed. “You must be ready to wind down soon.”
“No, Mr. Raimi. Not for another thirty hours or so.” He wiped crumbs from his lips, licked his hand and burped. “I don’t sleep much. A couple of hours every other day. Sleep is a vastly abused talent. People sleep seven, eight, nine hours a night.” He shook his head morosely. “Dreaming their lives away. It’s fine for animals to sleep for hours on end—not humans. I think apes evolved when they stopped giving in to the powers of sleep. Where would the world be if people slept sixteen hours a day? Nothing would get done. Nobody would be awake long enough to invent anything. We’d still be swinging from the trees.”
He was serious, so I kept a straight face. But it was a struggle.
“We don’t need to sleep so much,” he continued. “We can push on when we force ourselves, and we should. Imagine an extra eight hours to play with every day, fifty or so a week, two and a half thousand a year. Then imagine everybody working that way. Multiply the hours by the talents of the workforce. Think how much more we could achieve. The key to success, Mr. Raimi, lies in the controlled manipulation of sleep.”
“Maybe we should ban it,” I quipped.
“No,” he said seriously. “Sleep’s necessary. There has to be a place for the mind to retreat to and refresh itself. But we only need small quantities. Anything more than three hours a night is gluttony. It weakens and undermines us. There should be health warnings fixed to every headboard, like on cigarette cartons.”
“That’s going a bit far,” I smiled.
“I’ve built an empire going too far,” he snapped.
There was no response to that, so I said nothing for a while. He let me consider his words and I got the feeling he wanted me to contradict him. If that wasn’t what he wanted I was in deep shit, because Ifelt compelled to argue.
“That line of reasoning falls down in certain cases,” I said tentatively.
“Name one.”
“Einstein. Greatest brain since who knows when. He slept a solid eight hours every night and swore blind by it.”
“Einstein was a wastrel,” The Cardinal said dismissively. “How much money did he make? How much power did he wield? What did he ever do in practical terms? Where was the profit?”
“They built the nuclear bomb based on his theories,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “ They. Men like me, Mr. Raimi. Men with power, aims and both feet planted on the ground. Einstein made nothing from the bomb. He even warned against the dangers of it. He could have designed the A-bomb, held the world to ransom and made a fortune. But he slept too much. If ever there was a man who needed an extra eight hours a day, it was Einstein. If he’d figured out a way to use his theory of relativity to control the stock market, that would have been clever!”
His mention of the stock market reminded me of something. “I was speaking to Y Tse Lapotaire a while back. He said I should ask about a deal you had going with shares and divination. He…”
The Cardinal’s darkening features silenced me. He raised a hand, the one with the crooked little finger, and pointed ominously. “Don’t ever mention that fucking name here again. I don’t acknowledge it. I knew a man named Inti Maimi once. As far as I’m concerned, he left my employ and is of no further relevance.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry!” he snapped. “Be silent!” The Cardinal moved to the window, face black, and brooded silently.
“Inti Maimi,” he sighed eventually. “A great man surrounds himself with greatness. I rule this city because I own its strongest men. Inti Maimi was the best. I had so many plans for him. I saw us ruling the world together, side by side. But he threw it away, wrecked my plans, set me back years. I’d planned to be out of here by now. I meant to exert the same control internationally that I do here, a king of countries, not just one lousy city.”
He shook his head sadly. The words would have been ridiculous coming from anyone else, but from him they were chillingly plausible. I caught my first glimpse of the empire The Cardinal hoped to build, a world of slaves under his control. He wasn’t going to bother with the master race. No, The Cardinal wanted it all for himself.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” I asked.
His jaw started to tic alarmingly and he clenched his fingers into fists. He was struggling to check his temper. That gladdened me immeasurably—The Cardinal usually didn’t bother holding back.
“Don’t test my patience any further,” he growled. “I told you not to mention his name. Let that be the end of it.”
“OK,” I said softly. “But what about the stock market and divination?”
He smiled and I knew I was safe. For a while. “Very well. I’ll let you in on my secret. But this is for your ears only. I’ve been king of the market for a decade and a half. There are men who’d pay any amount you asked for my secret, bankers who’d go down on their knees for it. Inti Maimi should not have shared such a gem so carelessly. I’ll have to take steps. I’d advise you not to get too close to that particular fallen angel in the near future. But now that the cat is out of the bag, why not reveal all? Wait here a few minutes. Finish your drink. I have a call to make.”
When he returned (more like a quarter of an hour later), he led the way out of the office, past his secretary and the waiting crowd, to the elevator shaft. He pressed a button and the doors slid open. “Six,” he growled at the shivering attendant, and we descended.
“Have you been to the Fridge yet?” he asked.
“No.”
“But you know about it?”
“Sure.” The Fridge was a huge, private morgue, owned and operated by The Cardinal. Many of his friends and foes had wound up there over the years, and according to the rumors thousands of bodies were stored there still, though nobody knew why.
“I’ve ordered takeout,” The Cardinal said with a wink.
Downstairs, after a short walk, we arrived at a large set of sliding doors. The Cardinal tapped a code into the console to one side. The doors opened and we entered a long room with simple benches set along opposite walls and what looked like an operating table in the middle of the floor. The Cardinal took a seat on one of the benches and told me to sit on the other.
For about half an hour we waited, hands on laps, The Cardinal humming tunelessly. Then the doors slid open again and three Troops entered, pushing a gurney with a bagged body on top. They transferred it to the table in the center of the room, then withdrew without a word.
The Cardinal rose and strolled toward the table, nodding for me to join him there. He unzipped the body bag and peeled it back to reveal the naked corpse of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Impossible to tell how long he’d been dead, since he’d been frozen like a turkey.
“Simon Spanton,” The Cardinal said. “A high-flying executive with a major software company until his sudden, unexpected demise. I suppose it was a stress-related heart attack or a drug overdose. Those are the killers of most execs who die young.”
The Cardinal slid open a drawer in the table which I hadn’t noticed. He produced a set of scalpels. From a hook on the side he fetched a saw and other heavier instruments to slice through the dead man’s breastbone and crank the two halves of his chest apart.
“I’d never have made a good forensic scientist,” he said as he set to work on the man’s pale blue flesh. “I enjoy myself too much. You have to be serious for this job. I’d have forever been playing around with guts and bones, making puppets or funny shapes out of them.”
I said nothing while he sawed, gritting my teeth against the crunching sounds. I kept waiting for him to ask me to give him a hand but he was having too much fun. He wanted to do it all by himself. For which small mercy I was grateful.
When he’d opened up the dead executive’s chest, The Cardinal set his tools aside and wiped his hands on his trousers. He hadn’t bothered with gloves and took no notice of the stains he’d left. His attention was focused on Simon Spanton’s guts.
“I was always interested in divination,” he said softly. “The ancients swore by it. They thought they could see the secrets of the universe in a person’s innards if they looked hard enough. They thought we were all connected on some level, that what was within mirrored what lay without.”
He glanced up at me. “I’m sure you recall what I said about connections when we first met. I think the ancients were right. If you know what to look for, everything is linked. It’s simply a matter of knowing how to connect these”—he grabbed the corpse’s guts, hauled them out of their stomach lining and dumped them unceremoniously on the floor—“with this.” He waved a hand at the walls, indicating the world in general.
The Cardinal knelt over the mound of guts and began poking through them, ripping them apart, studying the patterns they formed. I felt queasy but I bowed over him politely, as if he were a collector of bottle caps showing me his latest finds.
“I made a study of divination,” The Cardinal huffed as he worked, “but I wasn’t impressed. Most of those who’d dabbled were fools. They wanted to tie our innards to the elements, the spirits of the dead, wacky shit like that. I mean, who gives a flying fuck if you can tell what the weather’s going to be like tomorrow? Carry an umbrella and sunglasses at all times if you’re that worried—you’ll be covered for every emergency.”