ALAIN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card shed taken from Picards desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadnt been there for Alains call.
She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. "I had a talk about your employer today," she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. "Our academic was in from Nice. Hes baffled as to why Id choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but hes also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk."
Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames lick around the coals.
"He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it," Andrea continued, "and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth century, an American. Hes in the book as well, as a sort of proto-Virek I hadnt known that Tessier-Ashpool had started to disintegrate . . . She went back to the counter and un-wrapped six large tiger prawns.
"Theyre Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I think They own one of the big spas?"
"Freeside. Its been sold now, my professor tells me. It seems that one of old Ashpools daughters somehow managed to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became increasingly eccentric, and the clans interests went to hell. This over the past seven years."
"I dont see what it has to do with Virek," Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo.
"Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anachronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolution by watching them. Hes convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate."
"But what did he say about Virek?"
"That Vireks madness would take a different form."
"Madness?"
"Actually, he avoided calling it that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daughter totally bizarre. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of jump. Jump was his word."
"Evolutionary pressures?"
"Yes," Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. "He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind."
After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Vireks surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk through a city where things were simply themselves. In Vireks world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Vireks model of the Parque Guell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudis park, in an afternoon that never ended? Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation. She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.
The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.
Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, students and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she assumed, were part of Vireks machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Señor all his life.
"Whats wrong? You look as though youve just swallowed something." Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut.
"No," Marly said, and shivered, "But it occurs to me that I very nearly did . . ."
And walking home, in spite of Andreas conversation, her warmth, the shop windows had become boxes, each one, constructions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought. The books and furs and Italian cot-tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.
And waking, once again, face smudged into Andreas couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing. In a gray morning of Paris rain.
"No," she told Paco, "Ill go myself. I prefer it."
"That is a great deal of money." He looked down at the
Italian bag on the café table between them. "Its dangerous, you understand?"
"Theres no one to know Im carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didnt say Id go alone, only that I dont feel like company.
"Is something wrong?" The serious deep lines at the corners of his mouth "You are upset?"
"I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, Im sure you have the address."
"That is true," he said. "But for you to carry several million New Yen, alone, through Paris He shrugged.
"And if I were to lose it? Would Señor register the loss? Or would there be another bag, another four million?" She reached for the shoulder strap and stood.
"There would be another bag, certainly, although it requires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Señor would not register its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find."
"Nonetheless. I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me with my thoughts."
"Your intuition."
"Yes."
If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he had given her that morning would already be a focus of their attention, whether he were there or not.
She felt a new strength today She had stood up to Paco It had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art. She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger Too perfect.
She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator carried her down into the métro, pleased with the cut of her dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the black Porsche glasses shed bought that morning. Good lips, she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm.
Im in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New Yen, and he will give me something in return A name, or an address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to Virek.
* * *
The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern suburb, was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic rubber bag stuffed with Alains fortune. How queer to stroll through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm, on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with these bales of New Yen.
There was no answer when she buzzed the apartments numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had arrived, leaving you to wait there in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. "Alain?" Nothing.
She tried the door. It wasnt locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoons watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. "Cher Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly." As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse She found the flat little green tin flashlight shed carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit.
And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two levels below. She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for centuries: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a diabetic syringe . . . She held the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she clicked off her light.
"Damn you," she said. "O Jesus."
She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.
Rapping on the door again. It was pressboard, laminated with a ghastly imitation of rosewood, the lithographed grain just visible in the light from the long corridors single strip of biofluorescence. "Damn you Alain? Alan!" The myopic fisheye of the doors little spyglass, looking through her, blank and vacant. The corridor held a horrible smell, embalmed cooking odors trapped in synthetic carpeting.
Trying the door, knob turning, the cheap brass greasy and cold, and the bag of money suddenly heavy, the strap cutting into her shoulder. The door opening easily. A short stretch of orange carpet flecked with irregular rectangles of salmon-pink, decades of dirt ground into it in a clearly defined track by thousands of tenants and their visitors.
"Alain?" The smell of black French cigarettes, almost comforting. And finding him there in that same watery light, silver light, the other tower blocks featureless, beyond a rectangle of window, against pale rainy sky, where he lay curled like a child on the hideous orange carpet, his spine a question mark beneath the taut back of his bottle-green velour jacket, his left hand spread above his ear, white fingers, faintest bluish tint at the base of his nails.
Kneeling, she touched his neck. Knew. Beyond the window, all the rain sliding down, forever. Cradling his head, legs open, holding him, rocking, swaying, the dumb sad animal keening filling the bare rectangle of the room. And after a time, becoming aware of the sharp thing under her palm, the neat stainless end of a length of very fine, very rigid wire, that protruded from his ear and between the spread cool fingers.
Ugly, ugly, that was no way to die; it got her up, anger, her hands like claws To survey the silent room where he had died. There was no sense of him there, nothing, only his ragged attaché Opening that, she found two spiral notebooks, their pages new and clean, an unread but very fashionable novel, a box of wooden matches, and a half-empty blue packet of Gauloise. The leather-bound agenda from Browns was gone. She patted his jacket, slid fingers through his pockets, but it was gone.
No, she thought, you wouldnt have written it there, would you? But you could never remember a number or an address, could you? She looked around the room again, a weird calm overtaking her. You had to write things down, but you were secretive, and you didnt trust my little book from Browns, no; youd meet a girl in some cafe and write her number in a matchbook or on the back of some scrap, and forget it, so that I found it weeks later, straightening up your things.
She went into the tiny bedroom. There was a bright red folding chair and a slab of cheap yellow foam that served as a bed. The foam was marked with a brown butterfly of menstrual blood. She lifted it, but there was nothing there.
"Youd have been scared," she said, her voice shaking with a fury she didnt try to understand, her hands cold, colder than Alains, as she ran them down the red wallpaper, striped with gold, seeking some loose seam, a hiding place.
"You poor stupid shit. Poor stupid dead shit . . ."
Nothing. Back into the living room, and amazed, somehow, that he hadnt moved; expecting him to jump up, hello, waving a few centimeters of trick wire. She removed his shoes. They needed resoling, new heels. She looked inside, felt the lining. Nothing. "Dont do this to me "And back into the bedroom. The narrow closet. Brushing aside a clatter of cheap white plastic hangers, a limp shroud of drycleaners plastic. Dragging the stained bedslab over and standing on it, her heels sinking into the foam, to slide her hands the length of a pressboard shelf, and find, in the far corner, a hard little fold of paper, rectangular and blue. Opening it, noticing how the nails shed done so carefully were chipped, and finding the number hed written there in green feltpen. It was an empty Gauloise packet.
There was a knock at the door.
And then Pacos voice: "Marly? Hello? What has happened?"
She thrust the number into the waistband of her jeans and turned to meet his calm, serious eyes.
"Its Alain," she said, "hes dead."