“Your enthusiasm,” the large woman warned the fat man.
“Anyway, he is bitter,” the fat man concluded with a nonchalant wave of his ringed hand.
“Do you know anything about Emanuel Goldsmith?”
“The poet,” the fat man said. “Colonel Sir’s wordmaker. Colonel Sir uses the poet. Tells him he loves him. Pfaah.” The fat man raised his big arms high, shook his jowls at the ceiling. “He said to me once, ‘I have a poet. I do not need history.’”
“Would he give shelter to this man, if he became a refugee?” Mary asked.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” the fat man said. “He plays the poet along like a fish. But maybe he believes what he says. If anything happens to the poet before he finishes his great work on Colonel Sir, Colonel Sir’s spirit vanishes like a snuffed candle. So maybe no, he cares little for the poet; maybe yes, he worries for his future in history.”
Mary frowned, puzzled. “There is no poem about Yardley,” she said to the fat man.
“Ah, but there will be. Colonel Sir hopes that there will be, so long as the poet is alive.”
“Would Yardley protect the poet even if he was ordered to return him to the United States?” Mary asked.
“Who will order Colonel Sir?” The fat man considered this for a time, chin in hand, rings knocking heavily against each other as he tapped his fingers on his cheek. “Oh my. Once, maybe, when there were commissions. But now there are no commissions. He might do some things, in honor of past friendships, but not that.”
“What did you do for Yardley?”
The fat man leaned forward as much as his girth would allow. “Why do you want to know?”
“Simple curiosity,” Mary said.
“I was a gobetween. I sold hellcrowns. Colonel Sir sent me around the world.”
Mary stared at him for a moment then looked down. “To Selectors?”
“Whoever would buy them,” the fat man said. “Selectors limit their activities to this country. So far. They were not a very big market. China, United Korea, Saudi Arabia. Others. But this is not what you’re interested in. Let’s talk about the poet.”
“I need to know a great many things,” Mary said.
“You are a public defender in Los Angeles. Why do you need to know about any of this? You are not federal.”
“I’d like to ask the questions,” Mary said. “Is Yardley sane?”
The fat man pouted dubiously and spoke to his colleague in Haitian Creole. “You are going to Hispaniola to see him therapied? Is that it?”
Mary shook her head.
“He was once the most sane man on Earth,” the fat man said. “Now he hunts us down, reviles us, calls us butchers. Once we were useful to him. He has thrown us aside and so we are here, sheltered like pigeons in a cote.” He shrugged magnanimously, enormous shoulders undulant. “Perhaps he is sane. He is not the same kind of sane he used to be.”
The large woman stood suddenly and faced Mary as if angry, expression stern. “You will leave now. If you make it so that these people are hurt, we will hurt you, and if we cannot get at you, we will hurt this man.” She pointed to Ernest, who grinned cheerily at the theater.
Mary’s face remained blank. “I’m not interested in you,” she said. “Not right now.”
“Leave now,” said the large woman.
The blue eyed longsuit showed them the door, escorted them to the cab and returned her phone and camera. The cab opaqued its windows and took them to another level, then stopped. They disembarked and found themselves still a kilometer up into the comb, in a largely empty undeveloped neighborhood, cavernous and windy. Finding a wallmap, they located the nearest shaft and walked toward it along inactive, unmoving slides. “You’re really going to hand over artwork?” she asked.
“You got it. That was my bargain.”
Riding a free comb express down, Ernest shook his head and ran his hand through his hair. “Most fun,” he said. “Anything useful?”
Mary grabbed him by the shoulders and stared him straight in the eye. They broke up in laughter together. “Jesus,” Ernest said. “They were something!”
“You have the strangest friends.”
“Friends of friends of friends,” Ernest said. “Somehow, they don’t strike me as your average therapied citizen. I don’t know any of them. How do they rate a spot in the comb? Such bad, such rad, no problem, so mad!” He leaned against the lift wall, still laughing. “Wouldn’t even spend us a cab back down. Did you get what you want, Mary dear, a night among the dregs of the ancien regime?”
“You think they’re dirty east too?”
“They have to be, no? Special privileges, horrible people…They don’t belong here. Even I say that, and I don’t love combs! Did you get what you were after?”
“Confirmation,” Mary said. “Goldsmith probably is in Hispaniola.” She activated her lapel phone, hoping the comb private transponders were not too crowded at this time of night with adolescent chatter. She left messages for R Ellenshaw and D Reeve. I’m going to Hispaniola. Please vet arrangements and tell me if permissions and federal assistance are clear.
She then took Ernest’s hand. “What are you doing tonight?”
He leaned forward on tiptoes and kissed her eyebrow and temple. “Making love to my comb sweet,” he said. She smiled and lifted his hand to kiss the nano-roughed fingers.
“You really must be more careful about your materials,” she warned, brushing the scars with her lips.
23
Ferocity. Richard did not take Nadine’s tears lightly. When she returned, he ignored her words and even her tears but they burned for this time he and his circumstances had made her sadly guilty and gave him a power he had not known until now.
They had made love the night before. Now this late evening, interrupted, the papers lying waiting and the words still within, he impatiently took her again, seeking a kind of release from both passions and finding only a nervous exhaustion.
“Please forgive me for leaving you earlier,” she said when the heat had passed and the clocks silently edged toward twenty three. “I was frightened. It isn’t your fault. It’s Goldsmith. He brings this on us all. Why don’t they find him and do things to him?”
Did she mean capture and therapy him or capture and torture him? Maybe they had. Maybe even now Goldsmith was in a clamp living in lucid dream a nightmare of emotional pain raised from the wells of his own past. Emotional pain and then physical. Only a few seconds or minutes or perhaps for him, considering the enormity of his crime, an hour just an hour for eight deaths. Richard did not know whether he wanted this to be true. Would he actually wish that on anyone, thereby approving of the Selectors and their imitators?
It was said therapy meant nothing to those who had been in the clamp. They underwent their own kind of therapy. It was said that recent technical elaborations allowed the Selectors to reach in and attract, draw out the very hidden personality that had actually done the foul deeds and that usually sat inactive uncaring while the poor conscious bastard suffered all the pain; thus the part of Goldsmith that had actually held the reins during the killing would suffer, not just the man presently riding the horse. And that part of Goldsmith the killer would not wish to live with this memory of pain and would purge himself, leaving the other free, with an hour’s null and terror and little more…