“This one,” I say. I’ve gone slightly out of breath and look to Massimo, whose thick features are flushed, whose suppressed grin begins to move my own.
In the end I listen to Eva Steiner nervously asking that what happened this afternoon, our agreement, the race and its outcome, be kept confidential. What she does on theTube as a passenger is a private matter, she says—this affair might be a disaster for her on the outside, it would be a humiliation.
She is relieved when I tell her I wasn’t thinking of filing any codex numbers to make official Collette’s transfer, manages a thin smile when she suggests that there are ways in which we might enjoy one another after all. “It is your recklessness,” she says. “I didn’t know. If I had, I wouldn’t have raced you. There are other games we might have played,” she goes on, her smile actually widening.
What a strange thing for her to say—to a pilot whose last eight years have depended on control in the face of default, on total attention to the operation of a flight to return a lame ship. She is a small and insecure woman, finally—at least that’s what shows in her when I tell her I don’t think she’d enjoy what I have in mind, and I laugh.
“Yet we might see one another again after all,” she says before she leaves. I send Collette over to the canopied trackside table where Massimo and I had lunch; la fortuna mei, Massimo keeps saying. He is going out in the Ferrari to better my lap time “as act of love,” he laughs. In which case, he says, still laughing, maybe it is he who should see Eva Steiner again.
“It is the magic of this place,” he tells me. “Everywhere else is like Rome now—so many people, barely the food, there is no joy in life. This place. Ah, if all the world could be so.”
An Italian steward is adjusting a sun screen as I sit across from Collette, cappuccino for her and pastries between us. She won’t look up, but I can see that her eyes have become wet, and the long, thin fingers of her right hand tremble as she takes her coffee.
“Well, you sure do look familiar,” I say. “But I’m not sure I know who you are. Max, is it’?”
She looks up, hurt, her breasts are heaving. “My name’s Collette,” she says. “Service codex 782, service codex.” She’s gorgeous, the bitch. Her face is flushed, her head is uncovered now and her hair blown back, her lips are shiny.
“Look here, Max,” I say, “tell me about SciCom retirement pay. Is it as good as they say it is?”
“My name is Collette,” she pleads, biting her lip. “My codex is a service codex, a service codex.”
I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal. I mean to make her smile, but her eyes close and her face pinches up and she begins to cry, tears slipping down her high, flushed cheeks, her breath coming in sobs, a napkin in front of her nose. For a minute it seems she wants to bury herself in its fabric. Her shoulders shake, her breath becomes a gasp, and she turns her face down toward her knee—too much for me to bear. I sigh, move my chair over next to hers, and put my hand on her shoulder, try to calm her down.
“I’d like to hear the story,” I say. “You can still talk to me.”
“Please don’t make me talk about that woman. Please don’t send me back to her.”
“I don’t see that anybody deserves her,” I say, half to myself. “I just thought we could talk about the time we spent together. I’d just like to know the truth, Collette.”
“Oh, Rawley, I have so much to say to you. I should never have lied to you in the first place. God, how stupid. And that woman, too, she’s part of it. Service Control transferred me to her for discipline. They knew we went off the grounds when we went hiking—they were watching us, Rawley, I didn’t know what to do.”
I lean back in the chair—well, I fall back, too, trying to comprehend. This is new—watching us; I think: That pavilion. A blue-white Formula E approaches through the near turn, the rising and falling whistle of its passing bringing a chill down my spine.
“I didn’t know if the man I saw was really you this morning,” she says. “It was like a dream. We had just been woken, and the drugs…” Collette drinks half her coffee at once, puts the cup down, and looks at me tearfully. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she says, her breasts heaving with a deep breath. “Oh, Rawley, you drove so well.”
There is such a look to her face that I can do nothing but lean closer and kiss her warm, damp lips—and so taste the salt of her tears. “Thanks,” I say. “Erica said you didn’t leave, they… took you away. Whichever, I felt pretty bad to find you gone.”
“Oh, this job,” she says, squeezing the napkin in her fist. “How I hate this job. That woman and her games—God, what a pain in the ass being a slave—every time something like this happens, I say to myself…”
I give Collette my napkin to wipe her face. Her lower lip is quivering as she tries to laugh at what she’s said; her makeup is smeared. I don’t quite know what to think. Everything’s become so complicated in the last two days, and Collette—well, what has she been through? What, exactly? I can’t take my eyes off her.
“I need to know how you’re involved with SciCom,” I say. “I need to know what they’re after.”
“I want to tell you, Rawley. I want to tell you everything. Can we talk here? God, how I wish I’d told you the truth. I lied to you and then… Do you know why I lied to you? I lied to protect this job, this lousy job, this ugly job. How stupid I am. You trusted me and I fell for you. I had already lied, and the things you told me about yourself that afternoon… meant you really trusted me. I felt so bad. But I didn’t tell them anything. I said we talked about sex, we spent the whole time talking about sex. God, it was awful.”
’Told whom?”
“I was straight with you until I was missing that night, believe me. I swear to you, Rawley. Do you remember? The third night, at the rest house? There was a signal from Service Control for me to remain, you left… and these two men came in an electric cart and took me across the meadow. They questioned me and questioned me and told me I had to report on you. They weren’t just interested in that, either. There was one with bushy hair and glasses, he’s as bad as Eva Steiner, he’s…”
“Taylor,” I say. “Taylor was at the biosphere reserve.”
“That’s right,” she says. “Taylor. And the other one’s name was Mancek. They had just come in, I think they had just found out where you were, because they wanted to know what we had been doing since Thursday. I don’t think they knew where you had gone from Guam.”
But they knew exactly where I was then, I think, yet didn’t approach me.
I stare at the track at the sound of Massimo’s passing, see the Ferrari as a red blur. What do they want? I told Collette about my hallucinations, my nightmares, that second afternoon. They are a personal key to something, I’m certain of that—the horror of the experience, I think, though that doesn’t seem right. Is that what they want? Do they want to destroy me with the horror of the blow? Is that what they did with Cooper, was that his psychotic episode? My visions aren’t horrible, only having them is…. It’s spooky, not right.
“And then after the fantasy co-op. It was about four a.m. I didn’t betray you, Rawley. I made up some stories, and that’s when they knew I was lying. I told them we never left the grounds on the day we had. They knew we had hiked off. They turned me over to Service Control. He told them to ‘see that I’m taken care of,’ that’s what Taylor said. The next thing I knew, there was Eva Steiner….”