“It’s not dangerous. It just likes to pretend it is.”
“If you say so.”
“Let’s find out where this performance is.”
The Masquerade is divided into three spaces: Heaven, upstairs, for the larger bands; Purgatory, a sort of coffee hangout for those who don’t get up until after dark; and Hell, down a series of ramps where the lighting gets gloomier and gloomier and music louder and more unsettling. As we headed down I could feel my face stretching into a smile and my stride loosening and lengthening. The sharp scents of dance sweat and tequila cut through the hip haze of handrolled cigarettes. Julia’s eyes glittered. I had to put my mouth to her ear and shout to be heard. “Want a drink?”
She nodded, pulled my head down to her level and touched her lips to my cheekbone just by my ear. “Beer and a tequila shot.”
“Aud!” A young, thin woman cut through the crowd. Metal gleamed from forehead, shoulder, nipples, even the webbing between thumb and fingers. Thin chain threaded from nose to ear to temple. “Aud, how are you doing! Helen with you?”
Julia stepped a fraction closer.
“No. Cutter, this is Julia. Julia, Cutter. An old friend.”
“Hey, Julia. Nice to see you around.” She reached a thin, strong hand to Julia’s face, touched the corner of her upper lip. “Little topaz would look good here. Very fierce. Aud likes fierce. Think about it. If you like the idea, Aud can give you my e-mail. Gotta go get ready. Aud—later, okay?”
Julia, finger on the place Cutter had touched, watched her slide back into the crowd. She turned to me. “‘Aud likes fierce’?”
“Let’s go get that drink.”
Even though Hell was full, there were not many people waiting at the bar. Julia ordered, and gave me a warning look when I made a move to pay. “You’ve known Cutter a long time.”
“Eight years.”
“Eight? She doesn’t look old enough.”
“She was fourteen, living on the street.”
“Was she…” She pointed to her temple and nose.
“Yes. When I first met her she had seven studs in each ear, one in her nose, a ring through her tongue. She’s got them everywhere now. And scars.”
“Is it the pain she likes?”
“I’ve never asked.”
“What about her family?”
“What about them?” They wouldn’t be bothering her, not anymore.
“It’s just…” She changed tack. “All that metal, it seems a bit excessive.”
“If wearing all the hardware stops her jamming herself with heroin and makes her feel good about who she is, then I’m all for it. She even makes a living at it. As you’ll see tonight. From what she said, it looks as though we’ll be getting a live demonstration of body mod after all.”
She sipped her beer and licked the foam off her lips. “Who is Helen?”
“Another friend.”
“Like Cutter?”
“There’s no one like Cutter. Helen is a professor in the Sociology Department at Georgia State. She and her husband would have been here but they had to go to St. Louis because her mother’s in hospital.”
“So I’m here with you instead.”
I tossed down my shot, turned back to the bar and said, “My turn to buy.”
After midnight and we were sitting with Dornan in the Borealis. A dozen or so other customers dotted the place. Dornan and I were drinking red wine, Julia had coffee.
“But what was interesting,” she was saying to Dornan, “was the Q&A they did afterwards, how seriously they took everything. They were talking about what gauge metal to put through the penis the same way student drivers ask what kind of gas to put in their car.”
Dornan blinked a little more rapidly. “Through the penis?”
“Through everything: penis, scrotum, nipples, labia, tongue, nose, eyebrows, navel, clitoris. It made me feel so…old. The only holes I have are the ones I was born with, and one in this ear, two in this.”
“That’s one more than I have,” I said.
“Well, you’ve both had me beat since birth,” Dornan said mournfully, and Julia laughed. I had not heard her laugh before. It was subtle and warm as swirled brandy.
“And then there was the cutting,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, have you, Aud? They had this stool, just an ordinary wooden stool on stage, and Cutter got this man to sit on it and strip to the waist. He only looked about twenty. She washed his pecs with surgical alcohol and picked up a scalpel. It was like watching someone cut into a radish to make those fancy patterns. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated. They looked like children playing with red paints. At least she wore gloves. And he smiled the whole time she was cutting this big spiral round his nipple, cutting through his lovely soft golden skin. Cutter said that skin like that is prized because you get a nice thick white raised scar. And then she taped gauze to his chest, he put his shirt back on and everyone just chatted normally. People do very strange things for kicks.” She stood up. “Excuse me a moment.”
She walked like a thoroughbred towards the bathroom. I turned back to the table to find Dornan smiling slightly. “Very nice, Torvingen.”
“It’s business.”
“You’ve never introduced me to one of your business acquaintances before.”
I shrugged. “Always a first time.” We sat in companionable silence until Julia came back.
“So,” Dornan said, looking from her to me, “you paid good money for the privilege of watching this primitive blood ritual?”
“Ah,” I said. “Cutter was just like the previews you get at the start of a video, an unexpected bonus. The main feature was truly strange.”
I told him about Diane Pescatore and her performance, about the banks of video screens showing tapes of various operations she had undergone to sharpen her cheekbones, clip out her floating ribs, remove her molars, shape her nose, fill out her lips, carve her belly and lengthen her legs. Throughout the tapes, she had chanted peculiar verse about the subjugation of women, their hopeless quest to look like the women of men’s dreams, to look like Barbie. “Yes, the doll,” I told a disbelieving Dornan. “She said, quite seriously, that she’s trying to find a surgeon who will try to narrow her shoulders and maybe even shave her pelvis down.”
“But what does she look like?”
“Crazy. As though the only thing holding her together is this fierce will to show people, to make them understand what it’s really like, in the face of the realization that her audiences only come to see her because they’re horrified by what she’s doing to herself. I think she knows she’s made a terrible, irreversible mistake but she can’t stop because if she did, she’d have to acknowledge the mistake and the fact that people really don’t care. They just think she’s a freak.”
“Do you?” Julia had her chin on her fist and was looking at me intently.
I shrugged. “Who am I to judge?”
She decided to dig in another direction. “So how long have you two known each other?”
“A long time.”
“You mean she hasn’t told you how we met?” Dornan shot me a sly smile. “It was a summer afternoon, at ten thousand feet. You see, it was in the nature of a bet I had with an old girlfriend…”
He loved to tell this story. I excused myself and headed for the bathroom. He was still telling it when I got back.
“…hurtling through the air and nothing was happening, nothing, and I thought, Mother of God, I’m going to die, and I was spinning around like a top, one minute seeing the ground rushing at me like a drunken rhinoceros, the next seeing the sky and all these tiny dots that were open chutes, and I was tugging on that bloody parachute cord and nothing was happening. And then I saw one of the dots…split, and this body came bulleting down at me. It was Aud. She’d cut her chute loose and was swooping down on me. She didn’t even know me!”
“I knew you were a fool who was panicking and had forgotten he had an emergency bac
kup chute.”
“I hadn’t forgotten, I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that, but I hadn’t forgotten: I’d never been told about it in the first place! So there I was, and she came bulleting at me, arms all folded in like a human cannonball, and smacked into me hard enough to take my breath away. And you should have seen her face! Lips skinned back and eyes like a demon. I swear she was laughing. She clamped her legs around me so hard she broke two of my ribs.”
“I fractured one, slightly.”
“It’s just that the doctor at the hospital didn’t look at the X rays properly. So, anyway, she had her thighs clamped around my chest like a vise but did she pull the cord straightaway? Oh, no. She had her mouth to my ear and was yelling, ‘Do you feel it? Feel it, feel it!’ and I thought I was going to die. But then she tugged on something and flump, we were floating. It seemed to last forever, but it was only about eight more seconds before we hit the ground, she’d cut it so close. And then we landed. She left me all tangled up like a kitten in a ball of wool and strode off to find the instructor, who was screaming at her for being a dangerous lunatic. She talked to him—”
“You were only half trained. He should never have let you up.”
“—but she never raised her voice, she rarely does, you know. And that’s when he made his big mistake. He smiled. She broke his jaw.”
Julia’s expression gave nothing away, but she did try to sip from her empty coffee cup. “And how long ago was this?”
I never got to answer that. The door banged open and in breezed a woman of around twenty-five with black hair, lips as red as her press-on nails, and an astonishingly pneumatic figure. Dornan jumped to his feet, and all the intelligence drained from his face to be replaced by an idiot grin. He held out his arms. “Tammy, darlin’!”
I sighed and stood up, too.
“Mmmn, Dornan, I’ve missed you. Mmmn.” Then she stepped back and smiled her heavy-lidded smile—“Aud, how nice to see you”—and raised her eyebrows at the table.
“Julia, this is Tamara Foster. Tammy, this is Julia Lyons-Bennet.”
Julia stood and they shook hands in that brittle Southern girl-girl squeeze of limp fingers; the one that says, When did they start letting people like you in? Dornan, of course, noticed none of this. His world was full of Tammy, his girl, his fiancée, the light of his life. “Sit, darlin’, sit. We were just swapping stories. Aud and Julia here have had an extraordinary evening. Jonie, Jonie!” he shouted at the barista. “We’ll have another carafe of this red, and bring four fresh glasses.”
“No, Dornan, not for me. I’m sure you and Tammy want some time on your own. Julia and I will be getting out of your way.”
Julia stood up. “I had a really good time, Dornan. Thank you. And it was lovely to meet you, Tammy.”
Dornan merely beamed.
In the car, Julia drove as though she had not been drinking at all. “You don’t like Tammy.”
“No.”
“Let me guess. She’s really a multiple murderer.”
“She’s a manipulative schemer who picks Dornan up and puts him down whenever she feels like it. She flies hither, thither, and yon doing what she calls business development for a local company and is only ever in town for four or five days at a time. Sometimes less. Dornan thinks they’ll get married one day.”
“She wears his ring.”
“It’s worth a lot of money, and that’s all that interests Ms. Tammy Foster. She’s one of those women with a body like a magnet who just keeps trolling until rich fools clang up against her sides. I’ve seen her around town with different men when she’d told Dornan she’s in Baltimore or Chicago. She’ll drop Dornan like a rock the moment she has a better catch.”
“You sound very certain.”
“She’s very good at what she does, but if you watch her long enough you’ll see that she can’t help positioning herself sexually for every man who walks through the door. It’s an instinct. She’s been trained since childhood by her rich daddy in Connecticut to believe that who she is or what she does doesn’t matter nearly as much as who she marries.”
“You sound almost sorry for her.”
“That doesn’t make me like her. And when she realized Dornan’s best friend didn’t like her, she tried to win me over by propositioning me.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes.” I would rather go to bed with a python.
“And you haven’t told him.”
“No.”
“Why haven’t you frightened her off? I imagine that would be easy enough for you.”
“She makes him happy, and it won’t be forever.”
“You do like to play god.” She sounded thoughtful more than judgmental.
We drove half a mile in silence. “Turn left on Leonardo. It’s a bit quicker.”
When we pulled up, she leaned across me to unlock my door. “Thank you. It was an interesting evening.”
“Interesting in the Chinese sense?”
“No. I mean it. Thank you.”
There was a slight pause. We both just sat there, facing the velvet dark beyond the windscreen, breathing the same air, then I was outside the car leaning in, nodding, saying good night, telling her I would call sometime very soon to give her an update on my investigations. After she drove off I stood outside for a long time, listening to the tree frogs.
five
It was one of those Atlanta mornings when you step outside and the heat and humidity seal around you like shrink-wrap. The air is as thick as potato soup and you have to breathe in sips. I drove to Buckhead with the windows closed and the air-conditioning on and even the Mozart seeped limp and dispirited from the speakers.
I picked Beatriz up at the Nikko. She had replaced her glasses with contact lenses, her hair was sleek and groomed, and the unhealthy puffiness of her face was gone, or at least masked by professionally applied makeup. She wore a beautifully cut business suit, designed to show off a surprisingly generous figure, and instead of a purse carried a large leather portfolio. The way she did not meet my eyes when I said good morning was just the same, though, as was the facial spasm that passed for a smile.
Traffic moved south on Piedmont in fits and starts. Drivers in some of the cars around me began picking up cellular phones and calling in to explain why they were going to be late. Horns blared. We crept forward. With the engine at idle speed, the air-conditioning lost some of its bite. The car began to warm up. Just ahead, flickering red and blue lights across two lanes funneled vehicles past a car with its roof ripped off and a white-sheeted figure on the melting asphalt. I knew how a haemoglobin-carrying red corpuscle must feel as it squeezes through the hardening arteries of a fifty-year-old executive running about the tennis court in one-hundred-degree weather trying to impress his secretary, knowing that at any moment everything could jam up and stop forever. But then I was past the accident and traffic sped up and we all survived to hurtle endlessly along our paths for another day.
The sweat beneath the gun harness could not evaporate. With its seven-round clip full, the Walther PPK weighed less than a pound and a half, but it felt like more, an unaccustomed and unbalancing weight. Guns can be a distraction, a dangerous focus of one’s authority, a crutch. Many come to depend upon them: take away the gun and you take away their identity. Once I saw a police officer deprived of his weapon stand uselessly, dazed and uncomprehending, when he could have been calling for backup, chasing the perpetrator or helping me staunch the blood pumping from his partner’s thigh.
I wear a gun when the occasion demands it. I was being paid well to ensure that during the next three days strange little Beatriz del Gato came to no harm. Philippe Cordova would expect me to wear a gun. I wore one.
As we neared the centre of town and Atlanta’s one-way system we travelled west for a while on Tenth. The sun poured into the car through the rear window, and in moments the interior was swollen and thick with heat. I glanced in the rearview mirror. Beatriz did not seem affected. South
again on Juniper, and into the cool shadow of the Peachtree Medical Building. The interior temperature dropped fifteen degrees. Beatriz stared out of the window and did not move a muscle the whole time.
I parked on Courtland and prepared for the long, long morning of appointments.
It was after she came out of the first office, face stiff, that I understood Beatriz del Gato was wasting her time. No one was going to employ an advertising executive who did not seem to understand the meaning of small talk and whose expression was as impervious as pottery glaze. She was utterly self-involved, did not acknowledge my presence at all but simply followed me doggedly through the hydrocarbon heat of downtown Atlanta to the sterile chill of another office tower for the second appointment. I waited in the reception area while she went off to some inner sanctum to show her wares. I tried to imagine her talking to one of these potential employers, and failed.
As the morning progressed, her expression began to change. She got paler, and there was a disturbingly gelid cast around her eyes and cheeks, as though the pottery glaze were on the verge of melting.
As we arrived at the offices of Perrin & Norrander, her fourth appointment, I found myself holding my breath, willing her to hang on. It was the usual Atlanta advertising agency: hand-knotted silk carpet, blond wood inlay (a competent assembly of ash and maple), men wearing Hugo Boss, women good jewellery, both with far too many clothes for this kind of weather; an ultimately self-defeating attempt to prove that advertising in the capital of the South was every bit as aggressive and cutting-edge as Madison Avenue. There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you’re important, you’re not.
The secretary was one of those sorority sisters from Ole Miss who didn’t believe in pronouncing l’s when they appeared in the middle of a word. She was on the phone. “Would you please ho’d one moment?” Efficient punch of button with terrifyingly red nail followed by professional smile at us. “How can I he’p you?”
The Blue Place Page 9
