The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  “1946,” said Ulrich. “Vandecker hits the joint. He’s killed two cops, which makes him pretty much this week’s big man on campus. People come to him for career advice—one of them a young punk named Stada. Stada comes up, trades secrets, and when he gets out he heads straight for Spiro Garments, where Alberto Spiro’s running a load of stolen cars through every week. He’s independent, needs muscle to keep the big boys off his tail—and muscle Stada has.”

  “Fast worker,” I commented.

  “The fastest. Except for . . . well.”

  And he gave me that smile again—a secret kept back for extra savouring. But I didn’t care enough to prompt him. And besides, if he liked it that much, he was sure to get there eventually.

  “In 1958, Spiro makes a will. An accident follows. Now Stada has the business, he’s built himself a little empire, which takes more muscle, not to mention more money. But when it comes to the crunch, he always finds just enough.”

  “Okay, let’s take a giant step here,” I interjected. “Vandecker told Stada where he hid the Auschweiss diamonds—somewhere in the foundations of St. Joseph’s is my guess. By getting control of Spiro Garments, Stada got the haul.”

  “Smart, Vosloo. So: Stada’s getting old now. He hires a young guy to do business for him. And when the kid gets restless—”

  “—he pulls exactly the same move on Stada that Stada did on Spiro.”

  Ulrich nodded. “But he can’t find Stada’s loot, see? And the cops catch up with him.”

  “Which is where Vandecker comes in again.”

  “Exactly,” Ulrich said. “The kid worms his way into Vandecker’s cell, and offers to spring them both—for half the haul. Vandecker takes him up on it. They hit Spiro’s, they find the diamonds, and Vandecker disappears, and the kid gets even better than Stada. But this year, Vandecker shows up again. Mistakenly fences a diamond to one of the kid’s employees. And the kid figures maybe Vandecker held out on him.” He paused for effect. “Maybe there were two hauls.”

  “Both hidden in Spiro Garments.”

  “Yep.”

  “Which I was contracted to burn—and where Vandecker would have to dig it up.”

  “Yep, again.”

  The bathroom was very small. It had no visible smoke detector. Only the window, flapping open. I felt the walls contract.

  “Ulrich,” I said softly. “Tell me this . . . kid’s . . . name.”

  “Charlie Myczyk.”

  Which is what I thought.

  “Excuse me a moment,” I said, remounting the toilet.

  I pushed out into the alley once more. Once past the ledge, rain fogged my goggles, rendering me almost blind, while my brain clicked a mile a minute, connecting the dots.

  Charlie shadowing Vandecker, taking the loot and killing the old man, leaving his body in the same secret hiding place where the diamonds were hidden for so long. Then me, all unaware, torching the place on contract, and getting the blame for the bones in the ashes.

  Very neat.

  I felt around the corner for Harry’s arm and shook him sharply.

  “Harry, wake up.”

  No response. I shook him again, and listened closer. Still nothing.

  Then I noticed the hilt of an icepick jutting from his neck.

  I wheeled back to the window, locking eyes with a couple of bouncers just walking in—bench-pressed, Armani-clad, their twin stares flat under bad New Wave haircuts. Ulrich stood safe behind. Revenge was not an option, so I cut my losses and ran for the fire escape.

  The sirens which had hovered shark-like in the distance ever since leaving the Nova Express suddenly intercepted me at the bottom. One squad car, one unmarked car, and something I hadn’t seen since the bad old days: A matte-black Impala with a doctor-soldier double-date behind the wheel.

  Military Intelligence.

  Ulrich’s Elvis-esque pompadour had already unravelled into a stew of greasy forelocks, obscuring his eyes as he climbed through the window. As the spooks got out of their cars he met them with a showman’s flourish.

  “The Flare, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all yours.”

  Two pairs of shaded eyes flicked over me, already simultaneously fitting me for cuffs and a hospital gown. I got it then—Charlie had believed my boasts after all. Not able to take out his own trash unaided, he had called in the big boys—my erstwhile, purely accidental, patrons. Now they would collect on the government’s investment. With interest.

  “Private Vosloo,” said the doctor. “I’ve read your file.”

  I’ll bet you have.

  “We’ll take it from here,” the soldier told Ulrich, and slapped a thick packet of bills into his hand. Ulrich just smiled past him, at me.

  “Drop me a line sometime when you know how the Spiro job comes out, huh, Maia?” he said affably.

  I ignored them all. The soldier asked me something as the cops frisked me, but his voice was static on an empty channel. I numbed my knees and fell unprotestingly backward into their waiting arms, allowing myself to be pushed inside the patrol car. By the time my mind began to work again I was already on my way to who knows where, hands limply cuffed in my lap. A grill separated me from the bulging nape of the driver’s neck. His partner gazed out the fogging window, lighting a cigarette. A curl of fragrant smoke grazed my eyes.

  Now.

  And I brought my right foot down against the floor of the car so hard the boot-heel shattered, igniting the flare concealed within it.

  The driver recoiled from the sudden rush of phosphorus-blue flames licking at his back, barely avoiding giving himself a concussion on the juncture of the roof. His partner dropped the cigarette into his lap. “Christ!” he exclaimed, scrabbling for it.

  With this distraction as cover, I ducked, took the end of the electric tape in my teeth—

  —and pulled, reopening the rip.

  The radio spat out, “Red one, red two: Where’s the fire?”

  An apt choice of words.

  Because I was starting to feel the rush, now. The glow—palm-centred, and spreading.

  Finally managing to bat the errant cancer-stick well away from his crotch, the partner turned to face me, gun up. I put my hand to the grill, just over its muzzle, and smiled. Handcuffs sliding down my gauntlets like sweaty mercury, already going liquid. Beside him, the driver, radio in hand: “Sir, yeah, I think we have a situation here—”

  Starting to go for the burn.

  The gun smoked and softened, and the cop shrieked, dropping it. The driver turned white. The radio kept right on chattering: “Disengage and pull over, repeat, pull over. Do nothing to perforate Vosloo’s protective shell. Patrolman. Patrolman. Red one. Red two, do you copy?”

  “Ever wonder what it would’ve been like to make a drop from the Enola Gay, right at the moment of impact?” I asked the guy on the right, conversationally.

  “I have kids,” he managed, holding tight to what was left of his fingers.

  “That’s nice. Boys or girls?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw the driver had finally got his gun free—so I punched right through the fiery hot spot in the grill, spraying his incredulous, half-turned face with glowing metal. The partner, making a remarkable mid-cringe recovery, lunged for the wheel, and I hit him across the face as I pulled my hand back through the grill. He fell sideways, gasping as his nose bled.

  The car lurched over some kind of curb, jouncing badly, skidding across a divider and up onto an exit ramp. I glanced back into the rear-view mirror, and saw the Impala swerve to follow. The radio had already cut off, abruptly, in mid-blare.

  That’s right. No more time for talking, not now.

  I sighed, letting my head loll back, right hand already at my throat, little finger snagged in the key of my zipper. With that flush boiling up through me like incipient fever, flesh hot as gangrene;
veins like wires, laid bare and sparkling.

  The Impala sped up, squad car jolting as they tried to run it off the road. Then metal screeched and dragged as the bumpers locked. We hurtled forward while the road curved out from under us, well away from the yawning chasm—

  Just me, or is it getting hot in here?

  The doctor leaned on the horn. The soldier unholstered his gun.

  And I . . .

  . . . let it rip.

  * * *

  I broke through the roof as it peeled away and hit the cliffside with far more force than I’d expected, missing a rock-borne head injury by a mere hair’s breadth. By the sound of that grinding snap my left arm made on impact, I assumed it was probably broken; I also seemed to have either developed a permanent stitch in my side, or cracked several of the same side’s ribs. The whole sole of my boot had ripped away, exposing scalded skin to the hissing rain: No tape, no coverage, about sixty seconds left until the next combustive blast. And . . . I had lost my goggles.

  I lay limp for a moment, letting the mud seep around me, and felt my bones slowly begin to defuse. Because it was so nice there beneath the overhang, down amongst the trees’ bare roots, where erosion had made everything soft and loose and cool and dark—soft enough to cradle, cool enough to soothe. Dark enough, almost, to actually put me out.

  But the lit seed in my stomach told me otherwise, every time I took another blood-laced swallow of rain.

  I pushed myself up by my good arm, stumbled, then stood—wavering a little—to watch the lovely orange storm below, Impala and squad car melting from the inside out, caught in the act like some pyrolangist’s ultimate wet-dream. A chance updraft hit me full in the face, gusting my eyes shut, and I revelled in its reviving heat: Sparks singing my clotted hair, soot blackening my face. And still I stood fast, quite transfixed, drinking in the wave in all its complex, terrible, all-consuming glory.

  But not afraid, no. Because, after all, the wave could never hurt me.

  I know it far too well—too intimately—for that.

  * * *

  So now, I wait. I know that Charlie assumes I died in the crash—a scenario which Battaglia, yapping at his heels as usual, was no doubt all too eager to suggest. The sun is up and it hurts my eyes, naked without the protection of my goggles—just a pair of dark glasses and a triple layer of fresh electrician’s tape, up here where I roost amongst the pigeons, above Charlie’s penthouse balcony.

  It took me an hour and a half to get back to Mr. Pang’s, and my supplies. An hour and a half of cold rain in my eyes, abraded skin on wet asphalt and sizzling sparks inside that wouldn’t ever quite go out, always poised and waiting for the rain to let up just a little, even while I wended my way through Chinatown.

  Soon enough, however, noon will come and Charlie will wake, pulling his incongruously gaudy velvet curtains aside to face the day. He’ll step out onto the balcony in that checkered bathrobe of his, yawning and stretching—maybe praying, even. Who knows.

  Which is when I’ll slip down on him, silent and swift: The wave made shaky, igneous flesh. Ground Zero crashing in at last, consuming him, as it must us all.

  And when only his bones are left, long after those bones are nothing but a fine, grey, rendered ash like that of a slow-burning cigarette, then I’ll go home. And go to sleep.

  Thinking: All in all, a good night’s work.

  Bottle of Smoke

  YOU ENTER YOUR AUNT MARIS’ garden through a hole in the wall, so draped as to be half-hidden by a fallow choke of dead trumpet vine. The grass is sere on the frozen ground, dry and uncut, still high enough to have to wade through. Your own breath, white and visible, blows back over your face like a veil in the wind, a gumbo of rotting herbs—coaxed forth from that half-moon-shaped flowerbed under the small back window—mingling with it. You smell basil, taste thyme. Dead marigolds. Desiccated rosemary. You smell and taste something that died here not too long ago, when the weather had already turned too cold to let it rot away quickly.

  Inside your jacket, your breasts press painfully against the ribbing of your T-shirt. Because your maternity bra was not among those few things you grabbed as you made your escape from the hospital earlier today, they ride unrestrained, full and leaking; you cup one cartoonishly, mittened hand and arm beneath them, propping them up protectively, and use your other to dig with, scrabbling at the rigid dirt. You start to kneel, but something seeps down one thigh, quick and hot—blood? Fluid? So you rise again, bend carefully over. Try to ignore it.

  Your stomach still bulges slightly—a pale swell, an empty gourd. If you only pressed hard enough, you think, you might be able to feel something rattling around inside it.

  Perfectly fit to leave, according to hospital staff—despite the strenuous objections of Diehl, your (hopefully) soon-to-be ex-husband. A clean bill of health; no complications. Hale and hearty.

  And hollow.

  Eventually, you find the key to the kitchen door buried under a broken stone cupid’s head rakishly set (ever so slightly askew) in a nodding circle of withered things that probably used to be pansies, right where your Aunt Maris’ unexpected last note said it would be. The lawyer who read you her will passed it on to you, discreetly sealed inside a rough-woven, off-white envelope with an unfamiliar watermark, the pulp of its paper thick with cotton fibres. The note itself written in strong black ink, bordered with a faint, printed pattern of Arabic writing—a poem maybe, or a curse, or an advertisement for some hotel, but completely indecipherable to you, no matter its actual content—framing Aunt Maris’ few choice words, a looping flow of script, as terse and stylish as herself:

  They gave you my name. I give you my house, and everything in it, with this sole proviso: Use it as you see fit, but tell no one of your intentions. If you need it, find it. And use it.

  And since you do, you have. And will.

  You breathe on the lock, scrub at it clumsily, showering the mat with frost. Faint icy flowers flourish at every corner of the door’s glass insert, a pale frenzy. At first, the key sticks; but as it turns at last, with a distressingly loud wrench, the first flurry of that snow they’ve all been telling you to expect—these three days running—finally blows over your shoulder, sending a few flakes up over the collar of your coat, across that feverish line of flesh which occasionally comes and goes between the otherwise impervious meeting of hat, sweater and bundled-up hair. They melt on contact, as though consumed by some inner infection.

  Your nipples hurt. The mess between your thighs is cooling now, insistent. You want bed, bath, music, sleep. Dreams, even—preferably borne on a tide of Drambuie fumes, rendering them incoherent and easy to forget.

  You step inside, into dusty silence, and let the blooming, colourless riot of the door’s glass forest swing shut behind you, ice marbled like veins over the trunks of numberless suggested trees—hidden eyes, gleaming here and there, amongst the frail and subtle leaves.

  * * *

  1949.North Africa. Somewhere outside of Ain Korfa.

  The woman’s name, Maris has been assured, is Sufiya. She makes bottles, Madame. Excuse me, Mademoiselle. The ceilings of her hut are too low for Maris to stand upright; she enters sideways, slipping on sand. Curtains are everywhere, veils fine as smoke. Outside, two musicians perform—some kind of flute and a small drum bound with hide on either end, and a girl dancing with a cane held between her hands. One thought you might take an interest, seeing as you collect them.

  So hot, and dry, and breathless, in the dimming light; everything turns flat and pulsing, as when you walk into a dark shop on a bright afternoon. The girl is reduced to a series of undulations, a bored mouth, the liquid sideways flash of an eye.

  Wouldn’t Maris rather stay outside, and ask her whether—for a modest fee (but then, all fees are modest, here)—she might be persuaded to do more than dance?

  But here is Sufiya now, between the curtain
s, barely visible against a bank of convex and reflected light, her collection—her wrapped limbs gilded by a warped, bluish halo of glass. Smoking. Watching. Combing the tobacco’s sweet exhalation back over her head in handfuls, like gaseous perfume. It lingers, heavy and enticing, more than possibly laced with something stronger.

  Ya Ummi, foreigner. One hears you seek me.

  There are faint blue tattoo marks between her brows, shards of mirror hanging from her long, dark hair, braided into it. More tattoos, stretched triangular by time and gravity, on her long, full, bare brown breasts. Maris feels a fresh clutch of interest, and lets the dancing girl slip away, forgotten. She takes her hat off, loosing her own pale braid like a sudden flood; Sufiya smiles at the sight, revealing flat, slightly discoloured teeth. Also bluish.

  Again, the barest suggestion of addiction; there is a definite nervous edge to her Oriental languor. The inside of her bottom lip is tattooed as well, rimmed in faded purple.

  Is her tongue? Will she show her?

  You have money, one doesn’t doubt, Sufiya says, putting her cigarette out in the sand at her feet. Foreign lady.

  Maris smiles herself. Much, she replies.

  Sufiya shrugs, fluid.

  Then you may ask . . . what you will.

  * * *

  Your Aunt Maris, on your mother’s side, for whom you were indeed named (much as your father might sometimes like to imply otherwise)—Aunt Maris, the family myth. Literally unmentionable. Few of her pictures survived the internal purge, but here is one: A snapshot, small and brown-tinted, taken in Tunis, the year that you were born. There, under the lone palm, one bright slice of darkness in a collective mass of shadow, straight-backed for her age, linen-suited. Her hair—pile on pile of it, gone quite colourless as bleached silk—is hidden, like yours, under her hat. But not against the weather.

  Her eyes are black stones under incongruous ink-black brows, crinkled at the edges, long washed clean of anything but curiosity.

  Your parents met and married late; both are old, comparatively speaking, and she was always older than either. A world traveller. Cosmopolitan. Serene and self-contained.