Now this makeup-masked minx (I understand the creature’s performing face paint is from the Noh drama of Japan) and her familiar, the Siamese siren Hyacinth, have reappeared in Las Vegas on the grounds of the Cloaked Conjuror’s secret estate. I am convinced that the Synth is emerging from the darkness to do evil. What is the point of being a secret, sinister organization if you cannot creep out once in a while and cause chaos?
So let other gentlemen of the night cruise this Neon Nightmare hunting prey of the opposite gender. I am after loftier game in order to save my significant other. If I happen to run across the winsome Miss Hyacinth in less than her usual homicidal mood, I would not object to trying to establish some rapport in whatever way possible, all in the service of the greater good, of course.
Am I glad I ditched that wet blanket Miss Midnight Louise for this assignment!
She sniffs at my People’s Court appearance, but the fact is I came out of the humiliating episode that preceded our call for justice in very good shape. I had the latest in enlightened birth control methods forced upon me against my will.
Luckily, this gives me what James Bond would kill for, excuse the expression, a license to thrill. Like Mr. Bond’s trademark martinis, I was shaken but not stirred. Unlike Mr. Bond, I am shooting blanks.
Despite knowing this, Miss Louise has no tolerance whatsoever for unfixed females, and I am very sure that neither Shangri-La nor her nimble magician’s assistant, Miss Hyacinth, are in any way whatsoever “fixed.”
Chapter 18
… Play Mystery for Me
Matt took a last look at Ambrosia’s beaming face through the studio glass. On the big schoolhouse clock affixed to the wall the seconds were ticking toward zero hour: midnight. That’s when Mr. Midnight began answering call-in questions.
He had some of his own tonight.
Could he really be sitting here at the same table and microphone when only twenty-four hours earlier he’d been in a posh room at the Goliath entertaining the idea of los-ing his innocence with an intimidatingly gorgeous call girl who called herself Vassar?
Could Vassar really be sixteen hours dead?
A trick of reflection momentarily pasted Vassar’s haugh-tily beautiful white features over Ambrosia’s darkly stunning black ones.
He stared at both women, unwilling to give either of them up for dead.
But a radio show was just that: a show that must go on. And, if he had truly listened to his own advice all these months, he would believe that going on was the only reasonable response to loss.
The canned intro resonated in his headphones, introducing “Mr. Midnight,” who brought personal counseling and humane advice to “The Midnight Hour.”
Personally, he didn’t feel very human tonight. Or rather, all too human. Lord, I am not worthy.
“Mr. Midnight?” The voices were always hesitant at first. Calling in was not easy for most, despite the numbers who did it. For people who sought the long-distance anonymity of a phone-in radio program, speaking up at all was not easy.
He had to respect his callers, even if he had trouble respecting himself for conducting business as usual.
“I’m here,” he said, to encourage her to talk, to affirm something to himself.
“I am in such trouble,” the young voice went on. “I don’t know what to do.”
Matt recalled Vassar saying very similar words only twenty-four hours earlier, after they’d gotten past the roles of buyer and seller, predator and prey (which one being which depending how you looked at their unique situation), man and woman.
Matt suddenly knew what to do. “No trouble is so bad it can’t be helped by talking to someone else about it. What kind of bad is it?”
Very bad. She thought she was pregnant. She was in high school. Her boyfriend, forbidden of course, was older and wanted nothing to do with her or her condition. Her parents would never understand. She didn’t dare confide in a girlfriend; she didn’t have many … any … of those.
The classic story had also been classic in the New Testament. The church had resolved it with the concept of the Virgin Mary. Sadly, no other unwed mother since then had received a similar dispensation. In the Holy Land, they were still stoning them to death.
“Just once,” she was saying. “Honest. I never thought … just once.”
If there could be a virgin mother, could there be a sinless sinner? Not in any religion he knew. There could be an innocent sinner. That he had reason to believe.
He coached her into giving birth to some options: a drugstore pregnancy test. Buy it out of the neighborhood, off the Strip. If it came out positive, talk to a school counselor. Her writhing protest was clear even over the phone line. Planned Parenthood, he suggested in desperation, aware that were he still wearing a Roman collar, even figuratively, that would be anathema. But where does a girl desperately seeking impersonality go with this most personal of problems? To people she doesn’t know, since the ones she does have made clear through sixteen callous years that they don’t really care enough about her to inspire any kind of confidence at all. That was the real sin. It starts at home and spreads beyond to school and the larger society. Once the human hen yard decides that you are the chick to be picked out and pecked to death it only gets worse and your predictably nervous behavior only reinforces the bullying.
Matt recalled the awful incident Ambrosia had mentioned of the Pakistani teenager gang-raped by the village elders. If a pregnancy resulted, that fact would only further condemn her, even and especially in the eyes of her own family. She would be doubly dishonored. For this the God of Christians had made himself human and died by torture, to reflect and reject humans’ inhumanity to humans, and two thousand years later it still went on.
His caller was sounding a little more hopeful. Not a lot. A little. She had a plan, a mission. A test to buy. Information. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she’d go to Planned Parenthood.
Maybe, Matt thought, her self-destructive spiral could be halted by contraception. He had mixed feelings about that issue. He knew many “good” Catholic couples who had rationalized using it despite the church’s stand against it. Many others had tried natural family planning methodswith great or not-so-great success. Being orthodox in any religion was always a balancing act.
But given that this girl on the phone, this child, had been conditioned to not care much for herself, preventing her from having another person in her care until she had matured seemed a necessary stopgap.
“Thanks for listening to me, Mr. Midnight,” she was saying, gushing, high on the idea that she had places to go, things to do, that she wasn’t necessarily alone.
“A lot of people would listen to you, if you take a chance. But pick them carefully.”
“I know. Not everyone is mean, is what you’re saying, even if it seems that way. Chuck—” She hadn’t meant to mention his name, not ever and especially not on the radio.
Matt couldn’t help smiling at the notion of all the “Chucks” out there in the listening audience who were doing hasty examinations of conscience.
“I never thought I could get caught. I never thought, I guess. I need to figure out why I did that, and how not to get caught again, right?”
“You need to figure out who you are and what you want and need and care about.”
“Everybody says that: figure out who you are. They never say how.”
“Look at what makes you happy. Look at what makes you hurt. Think about your future, not just now. Think about what you owe to yourself, not anybody else.”