Steven Keller hated all the bitches at Calex.
When not weathering their stupidity as marginally attractive cogs in Calex's corporate high-rise, he resented the living foldout girls flaunting it in the commercials for Calex Petroleum products that clogged up prime time television. He had pulled far too few consummated dates out of the female staff on the twenty-second floor to suit him; sometimes he went more than a week without getting laid, and that fouled his optimum performance work-wise. At home he was perpetually short on clean socks. Most of his dress shirts did too much duty, and had gained skid-tracks of grime on the inner collars.
This was not Steven Keller's idea of the joys of upwardly mobile middle management.
That fat old bastard Bigelow had elevatored down this afternoon just to ramrod him. Business as usual. The cost estimates that had sputtered from Steve's printer had displeased Bigelow. That was the word the old hardball had used—displeased. As though he was not one vice president among many, but a demigod, an Academy Award on the hoof, a fairytale king who demanded per diem groveling in exchange for meager boons.
Displeased. Steve had watched his manila folder slap the desktop and skid to a stop between his elbows. Before he could lift it or even react, Bigelow had wheeled his toad bulk a full one-eighty and repaired to his eyrie on the thirtieth floor. Steve's own office was illusory. A work area partitioned off from twenty others exactly like it by dividers covered in tasteful brown fabric. His MA in Business Administration hung on a wall that was not a wall, but a reminder that he was just one more rat dressed for success inside the Calex Skinner Box. Displeased meant his Thursday was history. The nine-to-five running lights on the twenty-second floor were dark now, and because of the change in illumination levels Steve could get a different perspective on his slanted reflection in the screen of his word processor. He laboriously reworked the quote sheets on his own time. He looked, he thought, ghostly and haggard. Used.
He punched a key and the revised lists rolled up. Bitches. Bastards. You could say those words on TV nowadays and nobody blinked. Their potency as invective had been bled away by time, and time scared the shit out of Steve. At thirty-five his time was running out. He had passed the point in his life where failure could be easily amortized.
He had spent his life living the introduction to his life. So far it had been all setup and no payoff. It had been a search that at times grew frantic; a dull joke with a foregone punchline. As he watched the printer razz and burp and spit up the new tabulated columnar lists—pleasing, now—he reviewed his existence as a similar readout. As an index of significant events it ran depressingly thin.
Apart from his degree there had been two wives, one at twenty-one and another at twenty-nine. Both were a matter of record now. To Nikki, Steve had suggested what was now called a summary dissolution; the cut-rate legal beavers at Jacoby & Meyers had split them for about two hundred bucks plus tax. With Margaret, the roles had been reversed. She never suggested anything. She simply sought out more sophisticated counsel, and did for Steve's assets what Bigelow's nightly shots of Kaopectate did for the old fart's Sisyphian regularity.
Calex recruitment had been the goal of his entire college career. The dream had been first class; the reality, a budget tour, via steerage.
The face on the screen did not yet require glasses. He supposed that was something. Apart from beaning the class bully with a softball during Phys Ed, at twelve, he could recall no other little victories. He would always remember the sound the ball had made when it bounced off the bigger kid's anthropoid skull—twock! Like a rolling pin breaking a thick candle in half. Steve Kelowicz, school shrimp, did not suspect the full savor of this victory until a week later. The lunchtime poundings ceased. The berserker had shifted his tyranny to less reactive targets. No vengeance ever came.
Steve's growth was undistinguished, and while his objectives matured, his satisfactions remained childish. He sought those things expected of his station—corporate achievement, the accumulation of possessions, the company of the correct women. As soon as it became legally feasible he Americanized the mistake that had been his last name. A Kelowicz might be a fruit vendor. Keller was a name that begged imprintation on a door panel of plastic veneer, assuredly a proper name for a Calex executive.
As the printer shut down he realized that Bigelow was just a grownup version of the school bully—older, shrewder, more scarred, warier, like a veteran tomcat. Bigelow the Big just might need an unanticipated line drive to depose him from his nest on the thirtieth floor. A home run. It was a miracle that Steve could not force, though he felt entitled to a coup that would end Bigelow's taunts about his being an aging college punk.
Bigelow was just another threat, plumper, more streetwise. But still a bastard, and beatable. Steve's image on the video screen did not supply a very convincing affirmative, but at least he felt a bit better.
And what of all the bitches?
Once in Bigelow's extra-wide chair, Steve could order around the entire executive steno pool, and take his pick. His prime advantage over most of the denizens of the thirtieth floor was that he was a decade younger (and, he hoped, infinitely more potent) than the bulk of the veepee staff. The hierarchy inside the corporate headquarters of Calex was supremely feudal and caste-conscious. The peons working on the floors below you were more than literally beneath you. Steve's best sexual conquests so far had been career secretaries entrenched on his own level, women like Rachel Downey, captainess of the copy room, whom he had "dated" twice. He had discovered the hard way that Rachel the Red dyed her hair. Since their tryst had fizzled, he was finding it difficult to get Xerox work sent back to him on time… so thanks to her, he was yet again in the frypan with Bigelow through calculated, long-distance sabotage.
He shut down his machines and piled his work into his briefcase, the leather job with the blunt corners. On his way to the elevators he reviewed his mental checklist of local watering holes for "suits" like himself and came up with a few why-nots. Century City, alive with night-light, blazed in through the windows of the twenty-second floor and tried to diminish him. Just as his finger touched the heat-sensitive button, he noticed the car was crawling downward on its own, and he counted along with the orange digits: 28, 27, 26 …
The brushed steel doors parted. Bigelow was not inside, lurking in ambush, as he had feared. The only passenger at this time of night was a woman.
He would remember her amber pendant until the moment of his death.
"You look like a man bearing a burden," she said, in the kind of throaty voice that might have conferred an amusing secret to a lover.
"Oh yeah," he said mechanically, stepping in. Then his eyes tarried.
She was barely inside of a clinging, silky-red dress featuring a pattern of black oval dots and scalloped, shortie sleeves. The front of the dress divided neatly over her breasts—not Body Shop silicone nightmares, but a warm swell that was the real, proportionate item.
Broad, shiny black belt—real leather—black hose, black heels, large clunky bracelet in enameled ebony, matching the pendulant onyx drop earrings. The face between those earrings was cheeky and feline, with elliptical sea-green eyes, a sharp, patrician nose, and neat small teeth. Her weight was on one leg, the other inclined to an unconscious model's pose.
Her hands held before her a large, flat-brimmed sunhat of woven black fibers and a petite clutch-brief of papers. Her hair was unbound, strong coffee black-brown, and lots of it. Her expression, which at first had been neutral, now seemed one of avid but cautious curiosity; she examined him with a quizzical, cocked-head attitude.
The doors guillotined shut behind Steve with slow, inexorable Nazi efficiency. Thunk.
"I'm working late again," he said with a shrug, and was suddenly astounded at the bilge his mouth was capable of spewing. He checked her out again, and regretted not spiffing up before quitting the twenty-second floor.
"I'm overtime on behalf of the great god Bigelow." Her pendant, a rough-cut chunk of translucent yellow stone, dallied on a foxtail chain of gold near the hollow of her throat.
The orange floor digits winked from twenty-two to twenty-one and Steve's gonads finally kicked into brain override. She spoke first, the mechanism said. You've got twenty floors to fast-talk this muffin into having a martini with you. Chat footholds were already abundant—Bigelow, Calex, their mutual late oil-burning—but he faltered in response, as though the sheer pheromone outflow from this woman was stupefying him. "Uh Bigelow?" Wake up, you moron! Nineteen lit up as one more floor of time ran out.
"Mm. You look like another of his bond-slaves." Her eyes appraised him. "Nice to find a kindred spirit."
"Well, you know, we ought to be thankful that he takes the burden of credit off our lowly shoulders."
Her melodic laugh was as pleasing as her voice. She asked him his position, and he told her; she fingered her pendant (it caught even the soft light in the elevator, like a diamond sucking up the colors of the spectrum) and asked point-blank why he did not have Bigelow's job. He said something off-handed and ironic in response, and instantly felt self-consciously glib. She saved him again by speaking before he had time to think his unthinking words into a real gaffe.
"You'd fit one of those thirtieth-floor suites just fine. And I'd much prefer working under someone from my own generation."
His brain was afloat with possibilities. "There aren't many clean ways to erase a vice president." At once he began to fear that this woman, who seemed all too eager to be picked up, might be some sort of planted Bigelow spy.
"Oh, I've got a way," she smiled. "What I've always needed is a man willing to do it."
By now, there was no man in recorded history more willing to do it than Steven Keller.
Not too much later, when they were sweating and short of breath, Vivia told him about the seed.
"I can't see it." He disentangled himself from her hair.
"Just shy of the center." She broke the chain from around her neck and handed him the pendant. "Look at it while I go thrash out the ultimate martini, hm?" With that, she was up and striding across his bedroom, hips switching liquidly. Naked she was smooth of flank, balletically graceful; Steve's notice did not turn to the pendant until she was out of sight.
When he held it to the candle flame a tiny silhouette appeared, a dark bead trapped fast in the honey-colored amber. It was boring.
Vivia placed the martini shaker, frosty with condensation, on the nightstand within easy reach. The vermouth had given the ice the barest kiss; the drink was cold, and as she had promised, flawless, as perfect as her body was sleek, as her eyes were hypnotic.
Now Steve's brain was really rocking and rolling, and an imp voice said Vivia, Vivia Keller, not too shabby… but before he could polish off his drink she was tugging him down, wrapping her thoroughbred legs around him, engulfing him in her cascade of hair. Sometime before dawn she touched the empty shaker, and asked if he wanted more.
Not knowing what she was talking about, Steve nodded.
It seemed poetic that the perfect martini yielded what could only be called the perfect hangover—murderous, battering, as perfect as bamboo shoots or electroshock. The blatting of Steve's alarm did not penetrate his cognizance until 8:45, and the first thing he heard on the clock-radio was an advertisement for a perfume called Objet D'Art. Which, he knew, was manufactured by Michelle Dante Cosmetics, which had been co-opted by Calex Corporation in 1976. It was as though Calex itself had come home to invade his bedroom and whack him on the head with the guilt stick.
The revised cost estimate sheets waited in his briefcase while he attempted to shower, dress and drive to work with only five minutes available for each task. He finger-combed his hair in the blurry reflection afforded by the elevator doors and straightened his tie by touch, praying that the shitty coffee on the twenty-second floor would at least deaden his breath to neutral. His eyes itched. In his haste he had climbed into his trousers without underwear, and now felt vulnerably askew below decks. The trip up seemed unjustly quick in comparison to the deliciously slow descent he'd taken in the same car a scant thirteen hours previously.
When the elevator disgorged him, he won few pitying looks. From the copy room, Rachel Downey saw him vanish into the brown-fabricked maze… and ignored him.
He found Bigelow seated on his desk, waiting. The bounceback of the ceiling fluorescents from the older man's harsh gold wire-rims gifted Steve with an instant migraine. No human pupils were to be seen behind those thick, black-hole lenses, merely multiple white rectangles of pain-giving light.
"It's nine fifteen and twenty seconds, Keller, did you know that? Your eyes are stubbornly red." Bigelow's voice was sepulchral and resonant, the bellows-basso of a vast, fat man.
Steve was weary beyond even snideness. "Yes sir. I've brought the revised estimates you asked for on the—"
Upon seeing the proffered sheaf of pages, Bigelow's expression rivalled that of a man whose pet cat has proudly sauntered through the kitchen door with half an eviscerated snake in its jaws. He dropped the sheets into Steve's own roundfile. They fluttered helplessly on the way down. "When you did not deliver these figures to my desk at nine o'clock this morning, I had young Cavanaugh revise them. Good morning, Keller." He slid off the desk, leaving a large buffed area, and trundled out without a backward glance.
Drained and hopeless, Steve just stood there. Cavanaugh did not drink. Cavanaugh was married. Cavanaugh had just neatly eroded another inch off Steve's toehold on the thirtieth floor. Should Bigelow die right this moment, he thought he might lock onto the vice presidency through simple corporate momentum… but not if Cavanaugh kept punching away, infiltrating his projects.
Vivia had been long gone by the time he opened his eyes, leaving neither last name nor current phone number. He stayed in a zombiatic funk through lunchtime, not eating, but his depression eased when he thought of accessing the Calex Building's personnel listings through one of the computer terminals on the twenty-second floor. With his eighth mug of silty company coffee in hand, he waded through the rollups searching for the first initial V.
Vinces and Valeries formed an entire platoon by themselves, with Victors, Vickies and Veras as the runners-up. Two Vondas, one Vianne, and no Vivia by the time he reached the last-name letter M.
God, what if her last name was Zamperini?
He'd risked all the computer time he dared, and decided to do M through Z on Monday, even though he'd hoped for a weekend tryst. As it turned out, Bigelow was not finished with him for this Friday, either.
No bulk blocked his doorway; this time Steve got his scorching over the phone: "It has just come to my attention, Keller, that you've been frittering valuable computer time in the pursuit of non-Calex—"
He squeezed his eyes shut as slivers of pain aligned themselves along his temples. Knowing full well that Rachel and some of the other bitches on the twenty-second floor were most likely eavesdropping, he held the receiver to his ear and went through the dance, not really giving a damn as Bigelow tiraded onward in his fat-cat drone, the sound of the axle of corporate doom pounding a few more dents into his sinecure at Calex. It had probably been a decade or more since the fat old bastard had last screwed his starched and reedy wife, and maybe sexual frustration was what gave Bigelow the stamina, at his age and with his rotten, cholesterol-gummed clock of a heart, to jump on Steve's head with both heels every time he made the slightest little …
Yes sir, he said robotically. No sir. Yes sir. And as with the best forms of torture, there at least came a hiatus.
The elevator doors slid back, revealing an empty car. Once again the twenty-second floor was mostly dark, and Steve stepped in, alone. Going down.
He felt like he was drowning.
"Your door was open."
His heart began to jitterbug with an accelerated thudding so sudden and intense he momentarily feared an internal fuckup. Vivia waited on his sofa, smothered inside of his brown plush bathrobe. The martini shaker waited on the glass-topped coffee table. It was very likely he had forgotten to lock his door while dashing out that morning; he locked it now, and as he did she stood up to greet him. The robe stayed on the couch.
Deep into the night, she mentioned the seed again, and Bigelow, and a solution to Steve's problem that sounded quite insane.
"It's simple, really, so it doesn't matter if what I say is crazy." She spoke past him, stroking his hair. "Just consider it a gesture. A contract, like marriage. If you'll do this tiny thing for me, I'm all yours. Desperate men have done crazier things for less return. You're shrewd, Steve—indulge me. I promise you it'll be worth it."
She demonstrated how. If he was not convinced, he was certainly intrigued.
Logy, he said, "So this is what you want me for," half-jokingly. Out of habit he'd been waiting for the catch to the whole deal; the condition she'd put to him that would render her down to the low rank of all the other Calex women he'd known, the words that would make her cease to be something special. Yes?
What came instead was a shiver of horror that he might never become more special than she deemed him at this moment, that he might never move up-market, as they said in jolly old Great B. That fancy triggered another, spurred by his notion that Vivia was of foreign origin, (thus her trace accent, thus her exotic manner)—not of Calex, not of LA., but somewhere else. Somewhere else was where he needed to go; did he dare risk losing her, after she'd explained her plan bluntly, just because that plan didn't conform to linear corporate logic? This is what you must do to have me, she had said. No tricks.
That was when he decided to do what she asked, and not fake it. This woman would know if her rules were fudged.
He rose to begin dressing. When she rose on one elbow in the bed to watch, and told him how she needed him, he nodded, his blood hot and racing. He left to perform his task, his gesture, before the sun could announce Saturday morning.
Bigelow lived in a fashionably appointed ranch house in Brentwood, on the far side of UCLA. The drive took time even though traffic was sparse—cabbies, police, battleship-sized garbage trucks, and the occasional renegade night person.
Breaking Vivia's amber had proven simple; he'd used a cocktail hammer, and the pendant scattered apart into crushed-ice chips of see-through gold. The seed was tiny, no larger than a watermelon pit, flat and glossy like a legless bug. It was in his pants pocket, inside a plastic box that had once held a mineral tie-tack.
Also in the pocket was his Swiss Army knife, and the full moon was reflected in the car's windshield—two more of Vivia's odd conditions fulfilled. It had to be done by the full moon, she'd said, so that they might both reap by the next full moon. Steve purposefully put her other instructions on hold while he drove; he wanted nothing to make him feel foolish enough to turn back. He thought of Vivia instead, of gaining her strange trust, of having her body for a long time. Longer than any of the bitches, since she could be many women for him—none of whom mucked about with excuses or mood-killing delays in the name of messy human givens like menstrual periods or birth control. She was admirably void of what to him was standard-issue female bellyaching. Instead she was very no-nonsense, a delicious riddle, perhaps beguiling. He judged her perfect for his needs, and wasted no time thinking of himself as selfish, or, as Rachel the Red had called him, a usurer. Rachel read too Goddamned many gothic romances.
Bigelow's home occupied the terminus of a paved and winding drive that isolated it from the main road. Steve caught a flicker of a low-wattage all-nighter bulb glowing in a front kitchen window as he cruised the area. He parked around a comer a block and a half away and began his stealthy approach, thankful that the drive was not graveled.
The fat old bastard had once made bragging mention of his bedroom's western exposure, and Steve soon located the window above a precisely clipped hedge of rosebushes.
"You mustn't dig a hole," she had insisted. "You must uproot a living plant, and place the seed in the hole that results from the death of that plant." Luckily for Vivia's instructions, the Bigelow grounds had abundant flora.
He threaded into the tangle of sharp leaves and spiked branches and hefted gently, fighting not to stir up a commotion. A thorn sank into the palm of his hand and he grimaced, but the pain made the contest with the bush personal. For making him bleed, it would die.
He thought of Neanderthal men ripping each other's entrails out, of grappling with Bigelow and wrapping his fingers around his fat, wheezy windpipe. The bush rattled a bit but was no match for him. When it came up, clods of deep-brown dirt hung from its freed roots.
There was no reaction or notice from within the house. Of course, if Bigelow suspected a prowler he would take no direct action—for that function there was a little steel sign at the head of the driveway. Every home in Brentwood had one, and Bigelow's read CONROY SECURITY SYSTEMS-ARMED RESPONSE. The threat implied by that little hexagonal sign compelled Steve to finish up quickly.
There was no need for the pocketknife, since his palm was already slathered with fresh blood. He dabbed the black seed; "consecrating it" was the term Vivia had used. Somewhere in the darkness right in front of him, beyond the window, the impotent Bigelow snored on, hoglike, lying in state next to his frigid cow of a wife. Maybe they lolled in separate beds, genuflecting to that grand old era of Beaver Cleaver, when sex equalled pornography, when nice girls didn't. Steve grinned. Then he groped his way back to the gout in the earth and tamped dirt over the seed with his fingers.
It was in. As Vivia had wanted.
He lugged the rousted bush out with him so that it might not be discovered and replanted by whatever minority Bigelow engaged to manicure his grounds. Walking heel-to-toe in burglar doubletime, palm stinging and wet, Steve felt absurdly victorious, as though he'd just bounced a homer off Bigelow's noggin instead of merely vandalizing a hedge. He had come through for Vivia, and thus gained a kind of control over her, too. In a single day he had galloped the gamut of rough emotions. By the time dawn began to tint the sky, he felt renewed—exhausted yet charged, back in the running, a success in the making, confirmed executive fodder. Definitely up-market.
He ditched the murdered rosebush in a supermarket trash dumpster on his way home.
According to the adage that defines sanity as the first twenty minutes following orgasm, what Casey (Steve's most recent non-Calex blonde) had told him not so long ago was sane, reasoned.
"I don't think you like women very much. Present company excluded, of course."
"Of course." He stroked her thigh, his lungs burning with immediate umbrage at her remark. Who in hell was this vacant twinkie to pass judgment? They had swapped climax for climax, shared a smoke, and now she was gearing up to pry into his psyche. It always began around the fourth fuck or so, these sloppy digressions into his private feelings. He'd given her a good technical orgasm and this was how she responded. They were past the stage where he could joke off such an accusation, as more tentatively acquainted people can. His fingers traced upward knowingly, commencing an automatic process guaranteed to shut her up.
Further, it was Casey's opinion that some woman had done vast damage to Steve in the past. That he had been avenging that hurt on every woman he'd touched since, trying to distill away the poison inside him. That things could change at last, now that she had arrived on the scene.
In that moment Steve's judgment on Casey banged down like a slamming cell door. Things did change, and quickly. He brought the prying bitch off hard, with some pain. While she was still moist he slammed into her as though driving nails. The next morning he subtracted her from his Rolodex, hoping she was sore for a long time.
That was lost in the past now.
Now, Steve lay next to Vivia, recalling Casey's words and wondering if they might have been true… and whether Vivia might not be the turnaround he didn't even know he had been seeking for most of his adult life.
The past four weeks had been a whirlwind of input for him. When not assimilating and processing the swelling workload dumping downward from Bigelow's office, he was wrapped up in Vivia, who had taken a fervently singleminded interest in his sexual well-being. Bigelow had called in sick in the middle of the first week, and Steve had marveled frankly and quietly. The fat old bastard finally lumbered into the office late on Thursday, and botched everything he touched. By Friday—exactly one week after Steve had been carpet-called for using the computer on the sly—Bigelow had mazed his way back to Steve's cubicle in person again… but this time, it had been to thank him.
Oh, how he had savored that moment!
"You've performed admirably, Keller," he'd croaked, red-faced and dappled with fever-sweat. "You've risen to the occasion and saved my callused old butt; I was beginning to think you didn't have that kind of dedication. I appreciate all your help, and the extra hours you've put in during this… uh, time." Steve had said yes sir at the appropriate lulls in the rally-round-the-company spiel, invoking his new prerogative as victor not to rub Bigelow's veiny nose in the events of the past. When the old man finished, he had shuffled out, slump-shouldered. He didn't make another appearance in the office until the following Wednesday.
That was when the thought of just what might be growing, unobtrusively, amid the rosebushes in Brentwood, began to gnaw at Steve.
"Why my blood, anyway?" he asked Vivia. "Why not his? I mean, he's the object—the victim, right?"
Whenever he brought up the subject of the seed, she seemed to answer by rote. "Whose blood is used for the consecration isn't important. It's who the plant grows nearest to. It leaches away the life essence, thrives on it. As it grows larger, it needs more. Those asleep near it are especially susceptible. It reaches maturity in one month, from one full moon to the next." She draped one of her fine white legs over his. "Then it dies."
"The blood is just to prime the pump? Get it started?"
"Mm." Her hands were upon him. Getting him started.
"Just what is it you've got against Bigelow? You know, I tried to find your company employee index number on the computer and came up with zilch." She had since given him a last name, but that had not dissipated the mystery.
"What is it you have against him?" she countered, with a trace of irritation. "And what does it matter? You're not the only person privileged to hate him for the things he's done!"
He thought she was sidestepping; then he caught on. Bigelow's blue-rinsed wife lent perspective to the supposition of a squirt of randiness somewhere in his boss's recent past. Promises, perhaps, traded for a bit of extra-marital hoop-de-doo with a Calex functionary who had just happened to be Vivia. Unfulfilled promises, naturally—the office rule was that verbal contracts weren't worth the paper they weren't written on. So Vivia had lain back and devised her retaliation. For Steve to bring this matter up in bed, he now saw, was deeply counterproductive.
She did not let him pursue it further, at any rate. "It'll be done soon now, darling, don't worry it." She poured them both another of her stinging-cold, perfect martinis. "And we'll both get what we want."
He was surely getting what he wanted. Vivia seemed satisfied, too. He had long since given her a door key; he usually found her awaiting his pleasure, and he liked that.
"Give me what I want," he said, and she rolled onto him. He thought he was happy.
During the final week, Bigelow did not appear in the Calex Building at all. The scuttlebutt was that he'd suffered a minor stroke.
"I took a stack of escalation briefs out to his house, y'know?" It was Cavanaugh, Steve's former competitor, spreading the news. "Steve, he looked like hell; I mean, pallid, trembling. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot, the works. I was afraid to breathe air in the same room with him, y'know? It's like he got the plague or something!"
Steve nodded, appearing interested. He was learning the executive trait of letting subordinates do most of the talking. With open hands of sympathy he said, "Well, in the old man's absence I'm stuck with twice the work, and it's time I got back into it."
Cavanaugh was dismissed. That was something else new, and Steve was getting better at it. It made him feel peachy.
While he had made no effort to see what had blossomed at Bigelow's, his desire to know had germinated and grown at a healthy pace. Vivia had said the plant would die with the coming of the next full moon, its task complete. It all sounded like a shovelful of occult hoodoo, as vague as a syndicated horoscope. A thriving plant shouldn't keel over due to a timetable, he thought, horticultural genius that he was. Since the technique appeared to be working and producing results, simple Calex procedure dictated no need to scrutinize the hows and whys. You didn't have to know how a television set worked to enjoy it; how Objet D'Art functioned, to appreciate its scent on women.
Time was running short. Time for Bigelow, time to see what had sprung from the black seed.
"You don't really need to see it," Vivia had agreed. "That would be… superficial."
Again he nodded. Her words were reassuring and correct. Once she drowsed off, he went out driving in the wee hours one more time.
He duplicated his original route and found the Brentwood streets unchanged. A blue-and-white Conroy security car hissed past in the opposite lane. That was the last Steve saw of the local minions of armed response.
Two curious sights awaited him at the bedroom window. The first was Bigelow, tossing about in his bed, sheets askew. He was in the grip of some nightmare, or spasm. His flesh shone greenly under a ghostly-soft nightlight, by which Steve saw the bedstand, littered with medications. The old man's movements were enfeebled and retarded by fitful sleep; the thrashing of a suffocating fish.
Then there was the plant. Against the all-weather white of the ranch house's siding, it was quite visible.
It was confused among the rosebush branches, and resembled a squat tangle of black snakes, diverging wildly as though the shoots wanted nothing to do with each other. Like the chitinous hardness of the seed, the branches were armored in a kind of exoskeleton of deep, lacquered black.
The small leaves that had sprouted at the ends of each branch were dead ebony, dull and waxy to the touch, with spade shapes and serrated edges, he leaned closer, to touch, and felt a papercut pain in the tip of his finger that caused him to jerk back his hand and bite his lip in the dark.
Kneeling, he undipped a penlight from his pocket, oblivious to the risk of being spotted, and saw that the skin of the plant was inlaid with downy white fibers, like extremely fine hair. They were patterned directionally, in the manner of scales on a viper; to stroke them one way would be to feel a humid softness, while the opposite direction would fill the finger with barbs like slivers of glass. Steve tried to tweezer the tiny quill out with his teeth.
The black plant exuded no odor whatsoever, he noticed. He found that to be the most unsettling aspect of all, since all plants smelled like something, from the whore's perfume of night-blooming jasmine to the clean-laundry scent of carnations. This had all the olfactory presence of a bowl of plastic grapes.
He heard a strangled cough through the window panes, and saw Bigelow stir weakly in his bed. The moon was ninety percent full. Tomorrow night it would be perfect.
Watching his superior whittled down in this way, Steve realized that now it wasn't necessary that the old man actually die. Ever since his conjecture about Bigelow's dalliance with Vivia, he'd begun to feel an inexplicable fraternal sympathy for the old goat. Would Steve care to come to such a finish, merely because he'd chased a bit of tail in his declining years? Vivia sure was enthusiastic enough about jumping his bones to get her revenge on Bigelow. And Steve's future with Calex seemed locked without the nastiness of a death to blot it… didn't it?
Was he starting to feel sorry for the fat old bastard?
Inside the house, Bigelow let out a congested moan, and the sound put ice into Steve's lungs.
Impulsively he gathered the black plant into two fists and hoisted it upward, hoping to tear loose the roots. The rosebushes rattled furiously, shifting about like pedestrians witnessing an ugly car crash, but the plant remained solidly anchored, unnaturally so. Yanking a mailbox out of a concrete sidewalk would have been easier. Steve's hand skinned upward along the glossy stalks and collected splinter quills all the way up. This time he did scream.
Bigelow stopped flailing. Now he was awake, and staring at the window.
Tears doubling his vision, blood dripping freely from his tightly clenched fists, Steve fled into the night.
Shortly after lunch on Friday, Cavanaugh wandered into Steve's office wearing a hangdog H.P. Lovecraft face, broadcasting woe. His eyebrows arched at the sight of Steve's bandaged hands, but the younger man was determined to maintain the proper, respectful air of gloom and tragedy.
"I got the phone call ten minutes ago," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know if you've heard. But, uh—"
"Bigelow?" Steve was mostly guessing.
Cavanaugh closed his eyes and nodded. "Sometime last night. His wife said he saw a prowler. He was reaching for the phone when his heart—"
"Stopped." Steve folded his hands on the desk. The old man had probably hit the deck like a sledgehammered steer.
Cavanaugh stood fast, fidgeting. "Um, Blakely will probably be asking you up to his office on Monday for a meeting… you know." Blakely was Bigelow's superior.
Heavy on the was, Steve thought as his line buzzed. He excused himself to speak with Blakely's busty girl Friday, who was calling from the thirtieth floor regarding the meeting that Cavanaugh had just mentioned. And, incidentally, was Mr. Keller possibly free for cocktails after work? Was today too soon? Her name was Connie, and of course he already had her extension. Polite laugh.
At the flick of the wrist, Cavanaugh faded into the background. That was the last Steve ever saw of him.
Waiting for him at home were Vivia, the martini shaker—perfect—and a toast to success.
It took both his hands to navigate the first glass to his mouth, since both were immobilized into semi-functional scoops by the bandages. The more he drank, the more efficient he became at zeroing in on his face, and to his chagrin the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol permitted some of the last night's bitterness to peek out, and beeline for Vivia.
"Here's to us, to us," he said mostly to his glass. He was on the sofa, and Vivia sat cross-legged, sunk into a leather recliner across from him. His shoes were cockeyed on the floor between them. "Methinks I've just hooked and crooked my merry way into a higher tax bracket, thank you very much to my… odd little concubine… and her odd little plant. Perhaps we should consider incorporating. Corporeally speaking, that is." His sightline flew to the bedroom door and back.
Vivia raised her glass to him. She was wearing an Oriental print thing far too skimpy and diaphanous to qualify as a robe.
"So now, as—ahem!—partners in non-crime," he said as she refilled their glasses, "you have to fill me in on the plant. Where the hell did you come across something like that? You don't buy that sort of thing down at the Vigoro plant shop. How come people aren't using them to… Christ, to bump off everybody?"
She finished off her drink before he was halfway through his, and stretched languorously, purring. "This tastes like pure nectar," she said.
"Stick to the subject, wench."
She cocked her head in the peculiar way he'd become so familiar with, and mulled her story over before saying, "I had the only seed." That was it.
He remembered the amber, and nodded. So far, so logical. "Where'd you get it?"
"I've had it quite a long time. Since birth, in fact." She ran her tongue around the rim of her glass, then recharged it by half from the shaker.
"An heirloom?"
"Mm."
She was preparing to lead him off to the sack again, and he fully intended to bed her, but not before he could hurdle her coy non-replies and clear his conscience. "Tell me what happened between you and Bigelow." Instinct had told him to shift gears, and he expected a harsh look.
"I've never really seen the man."
The office coffee was starting to have an unlovely reaction to the quickly gulped booze, and he burped quietly. "Wait a minute." He waved his free hand to make her go back and explain. The surrender-flag whiteness of the bandages hurt his eyes in the room's dim light. "You two had some kind of… assignation, or something. You wanted vengeance on him."
"Hm." The corners of her generous mouth twitched upward, then dropped back to neutral, as though she was still learning how to make a smile. "In point of fact, Steven, I never said I wanted vengeance on anything. Perhaps you thought it."
Now this definitely registered sourly. For a crazed, out-of-sync moment he thought she was going to add, no, I wanted vengeance on YOU! like some daffy twist in a 1940s murder mystery. But she just sat there, hugging her knees to her chin, distracting him with her body. Waiting.
"Oh, I get it—you just help a total stranger, out of the blue, to do in his boss, whom you've never met, with the last special black plant seed in the entire universe." The sarcasm was back in his tone.
"I was interested in you, Steven. No other."
"Why?" Urrrrp, again, stronger this time.
"Except for one thing you've been perfect for me. You were… what is the word? Fertile. You were ripe."
"Where'd I slip up?" Now his head was throbbing, and he feared he might have to interrupt his fact-finding sortie by sicking up on the shag carpeting.
She gave him her quizzical little shrug. "You were supposed to go uproot the plant tonight, you sneak. During the full moon. Not last night, though I don't suppose it'll matter." She rose; her legs flashed in and out of the wispy garment as she approached. "Let me give you a refill. This is a celebration, you know, and I'm ahead of you."
"Ugh, no—wait," he muttered, his brains sloshing around in his skull-pan like dirty dishwater. "No more for me." He put out one of his mitts to arrest the progress of the shaker toward the glass and blundered it out of Vivia's grasp. He was reminded of the time he had tried to keep a coffeeshop waitress from freshening up his cup by putting his hand over the cup to indicate no more… and gotten his fingers scalded.
The shaker bounced on the rug without breaking. Its lid rolled away and ice cubes tumbled out, clicking like rolling dice. Mingled with the ice were several limp, wet, dead-black leaves. Gin droplets glistened on them. They were spade-shaped, with serrated edges.
Steve gaped at them numbly. "Oh my God…" Poisoned! Unable to grab, he swung at Vivia, who easily danced out of range. He gasped, his voice dropping an octave into huskiness as he felt a shot of pain in his diaphragm. He understood that his body needed to vomit and expel the toxin.
But he wanted to get Vivia first.
He launched himself off the sofa and succeeded only in falling across the coffee table, cleaning it off and landing in a drunken sprawl on non-responsive mannequin limbs. The feeling in his fingers and toes was gone.
"Oh, Steven, not poison," he heard her say. "What a silly thing to think, darling. I wouldn't do that. I need you. Isn't that what you always wanted—a woman who truly needed you? I mean truly? Not in all the petty ways you so despise?"
His tongue went dead. His throat fought to contract and seal off his airway. If he could force himself to throw up, he might suffocate … or save his life. He was incapable of snaring Vivia now, but he sure as hell could use two fingers to chock down his tongue. He saw the expression on her face as he did it.
She watched intently, almost lovingly, with that unusual cocked-head attitude he remembered from their first meeting in the elevator. It reminded him of a cocker spaniel hearing a high-frequency whistle, or a hungry insect inspecting food with its antennae. It was an attitude characteristic of another species.
He heaved mightily. Nothing came up but bubbly saliva.
A tiny, hard object shot up from his gullet to click against the obverse of his front teeth. Its ejection eased his trachea open. While he spit and sucked wind, Vivia stepped eagerly forward with a cry of excitement identical to the sounds she had made in bed with him.
She picked up the wet black seed and held it between her thumb and forefinger. She tried to gain his attention while he retched. "This is the one I'll keep always, darling. You may not be aware, but amber takes ages to solidify properly."
He struggled to speak, to ask irrational questions, but could only continue what had begun. Another of the wicked little seeds chucked out with enough force to make a painful dent in the roof of his mouth. It bounced off his dry tongue and escaped. He did not feel it hit. It was chased by fifteen more… which were pushed forward and out by a torrent of several hundred.
The last thing Steve did was contract to a fetal ball, hugging his rippling stomach. His breath was totally dammed by the floodtide of beaded black shapes that had clogged up his system and now sought the quickest way out.
"I loved you, Steven, and needed you more than anyone ever has. How many people get that in their lifetimes?"
Then he could hear nothing beyond the rainstorm patter of the seeds, gushing forth by the thousands as his body caved in and evacuated everything, a full moon's worth. In the end, he was potent beyond his most grotesque sexual aspirations.
Vivia held the first seed of the harvest, and watched. The sight fulfilled her as a female.