by Neil Clarke
“Go on,” she said.
My chest was tight. Nobody tried to stop me, so I went ahead and stuck my head into the lion’s mouth. Like that little girl at school, I’d always wanted to have a real job when I grew up. “You’ve got a leak, Father. Your problem isn’t devil super-science. It’s the good old-fashioned Judas kiss. Seeren has an inside source, a mole among your congregation. When it decided the time had come to meet with you, it wanted to be sure that none of you would suspect where its information was actually coming from. It decided that the way to give the mole cover was to hire some gullible PI to pretend to find stuff out. I may be a little slow and a lot greedy but I do have a few shreds of pride. I can’t let myself be played for an idiot.” I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, but maybe it was just my own blood pounding. “You see, Father, I don’t think that Seeren really trusts you. I sure didn’t hear you promise just now not to be making little boys. And yes, if they find out about the boy babies, the devils could just disappear them, but you and the Bride of God and all your batty friends would find ways to make that very public, very messy. I’m guessing that’s part of your plan, isn’t it? To remind us who the devils are, what they did? Maybe get people into the streets again. Since the devils still need to know what you’re up to, the mole had to be protected.”
Father Elaine flushed with anger. “Do you know who she is?”
“No,” I said. “But you could probably narrow it down to a very few. You said you married Rashmi and Kate, but that you never filed the documents. But you needed someone to witness the ceremony. Someone who was taking pix and would send one to Seeren . . .”
Actually, my timing was a little off. Gratiana launched herself at me just as big Alix hurtled through the doorway. I had the air taser out of the drawer, but my plan had been for the Christers to clean up their own mess. I came out of my chair and raised the taser but even fifty thousand volts wasn’t going to keep that snarling bitch off me.
I heard a huge wet pop, not so much an explosion as an implosion. There was a rush of air through the doorway but the room was preternaturally quiet, as if someone had just stopped screaming. We humans gaped at the void that had formerly been occupied by Gratiana. The familiar surroundings of my office seemed to warp and stretch to accommodate that vacancy. If she could vanish so completely, then maybe chairs could waltz on the ceiling and trashcans could sing Carmen. For the first time in my life I had a rough sense of what the grannies had felt when the devils disappeared their men. It would be one thing if Gratiana were merely dead, if there were blood and bone and flesh left behind. A body to be buried. But this was an offense against reality itself. It undermined our common belief that the world is indeed a fact, that we exist at all. I could understand how it could unhinge a billion minds. I was standing next to Father Elaine beside the open door to my office holding the taser and I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there.
Seeren hopped down off the bookcase as if nothing important had happened and wrapped its translucent wings around its body. The devil didn’t seem surprised at all that a woman had just disappeared. Maybe there was no surprising a devil.
And then it occurred to me that this probably wasn’t the first time since they had taken all the men that the devils had disappeared someone. Maybe they did it all the time. I thought of all the missing persons whom I had never found. I could see the files in Julie Epstein’s office bulging with unsolved cases. Had Seeren done this thing to teach us the fragility of being? Or had it just been a clumsy attempt to cover up its regrettable mistakes?
As the devil waddled toward the door, Alix made a move as if to block its exit. After what had just happened, I thought that was probably the most boneheaded, brave move I had ever seen.
“Let them go.” Father Elaine’s voice quavered. Her eyes were like wounds.
Alix stepped aside and the devil and the bot left us. We listened to the devil scrabble down the hall. I heard the elevator doors open and then close.
Then Father Elaine staggered and put a hand on my shoulder. She looked like a granny now.
“There are no boy babies,” she said. “Not yet. You have to believe me.”
“You know what?” I shook free of her. “I don’t care.” I wanted them gone. I wanted to sit alone at my desk and watch the room fill with night.
“You don’t understand.”
“And I don’t want to.” I had to set the taser on the desk or I might have used it on her.
“Kate Vermeil is pregnant with one of our babies,” said Father Elaine. “It’s a little girl, I swear it.”
“So you’ve made Seeren proud. What’s the problem?”
Alix spoke for the first time. “Gratiana was in charge of Kate.”
7.
The Poison Society was lit brightly enough to give a camel a headache. If you forgot your sunglasses, there was a rack of freebies at the door. Set into the walls were terrariums where diamondback rattlers coiled in the sand, black neck cobras dangled from dead branches and brown scorpions basked on ceramic rocks. The hemlock was in bloom; clusters of small, white flowers opened like umbrellas. Upright stems of monkshood were interplanted with death cap mushrooms in wine casks cut in half. Curare vines climbed the pergola over the alcohol bar.
I counted maybe fifty customers in the main room, which was probably a good crowd for a Wednesday night. I had no idea yet how many might be lurking in the specialty shops that opened off this space, where a nice girl might arrange for a guaranteed-safe session of sexual asphyxia either by hanging or drowning, or else get her cerebrum toasted by various brain lightning generators. I was hoping Kate was out in the open with the relatively sane folks. I didn’t really want to poke around in the shops, but I would if I had to. I thought I owed it to Rashmi Jones.
I strolled around, pretending to look at various animals and plants, carrying a tumbler filled with a little Johnnie Walker Black Label and a lot of water. I knew Kate would be disguised but if I could narrow the field of marks down to three or four, I might actually snoop her. Of course, she might be on the other side of town, but this was my only play. My guess was that she’d switch styles, so I wasn’t necessarily looking for a tommy. Her hair wouldn’t be brunette, and her skin would probably be darker, and contacts could give her cat’s eyes or zebra eyes or American flags, if she wanted. But even with padding and lifts she couldn’t change her body type enough to fool a good scan. And I had her data from the Christer medical files loaded into my sidekick.
Father Elaine had tried Kate’s call, but she wouldn’t pick up. That made perfect sense since just about anyone could put their hands on software that could replicate voices. There were bots that could sing enough like Velma Stone to fool her own mother. Kate and Gratiana would have agreed on a safe word. Our problem was that Gratiana had taken it with her to hell, or wherever the devil had consigned her.
The first mark my sidekick picked out was a redhead in silk pajamas and lime green bunny slippers. A scan matched her to Kate’s numbers to within 5 percent. I bumped into her just enough to plant the snoop, a sticky homing device the size of a baby tooth.
“’Scuse me, sorry.” I said. “S-so sorry.” I slopped some of my drink onto the floor.
She gave me a glare that would have withered a cactus and I noodled off. As soon as I was out of her sight, I hit the button on my sidekick to which I’d assigned Kate’s call. When Kate picked up, the snoop would know if the call had come from me and signal my sidekick that I had found her. The redhead wasn’t Kate. Neither was the bald jane in distressed leather.
The problem with trying to locate her this way was that if I kept calling her, she’d get suspicious and lose the sidekick.
I lingered by a pufferfish aquarium. Next to it was a safe, and in front of that a tootsie fiddled with the combination lock. I scanned her and got a match to within 2 percent. She was wearing a spangle wig and a stretch lace dress with a ruf
fle front. When she opened the door of the safe, I saw that it was made of clear luxar. She reached in, then slammed the door and trotted off as if she were late for the last train of the night.
I peeked through the door of the safe. Inside was a stack of squat blue inhalers like the one Rashmi had used to kill herself. On the wall above the safe, the management of The Poison Society had spray-painted a mock graffiti. 21L 4R 11L. There was no time to plant a snoop. I pressed the call button as I tailed her.
With a strangled cry, the tootsie yanked a sidekick from her clutch purse, dropped it to the floor, and stamped on it. She was wearing Donya Durand ice and taupe flat slingbacks.
As I moved toward her, Kate Vermeil saw me and ducked into one of the shops. She dodged past fifty-five-gallon drums of carbon tetrachloride and dimethyl sulfate and burst through the rear door of the shop into an alley. I saw her fumbling with the cap of the inhaler. I hurled myself at her and caught at her legs. Her right shoe came off in my hand, but I grabbed her left ankle and she went down. She still had the inhaler and was trying to bring it to her mouth. I leapt on top of her and wrenched it away.
“Do you really want to kill yourself?” I aimed the inhaler at her face and screamed at her. “Do you, Kate? Do you?” The air in the alley was thick with despair and I was choking on it. “Come on, Kate. Let’s do it!”
“No.” Her head thrashed back and forth. “No, please. Stop.”
Her terror fed mine. “Then what the hell are you doing with this thing?” I was shaking so badly that when I tried to pitch the inhaler into the dumpster, it hit the pavement only six feet away. I had come so close to screwing up. I climbed off her and rolled on my back and soaked myself in the night sky. When I screwed up, people died. “Cyanide is awful bad for the baby,” I said.
“How do you know about my baby?” Her face was rigid with fear. “Who are you?”
I could breathe again, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Fay Hardaway.” I gasped. “I’m a PI; I left you a message this morning. Najma Jones hired me to find her daughter.”
“Rashmi is dead.”
“I know,” I said. “So is Gratiana.” I sat up and looked at her. “Father Elaine will be glad to see you.”
Kate’s eyes were wide, but I don’t think she was seeing the alley. “Gratiana said the devils would come after me.” She was still seeing the business end of the inhaler. “She said that if I didn’t hear from her by tomorrow then we had lost everything and I should . . . do it. You know, to protect the church. And just now my sidekick picked up three times in ten minutes only there was nobody there and so I knew it was time.”
“That was me, Kate. Sorry.” I retrieved the Donya Durand slingback I’d stripped off her foot and gave it back to her. “Tell me where you got this?”
“It was Rashmi’s. We bought them together at Grayles. Actually I picked them out. That was before . . . I loved her, you know, but she was crazy. I can see that now, although it’s kind of too late. I mean, she was okay when she was taking her meds, but she would stop every so often. She called it taking a vacation from herself. Only it was no vacation for anyone else, especially not for me. She decided to go off on the day we got married and didn’t tell me and all of a sudden after the ceremony we got into this huge fight about the baby and who loved who more and she stared throwing things at me—these shoes—and then ran out of the church barefoot. I don’t think she ever really understood about . . . you know, what we were trying to do. I mean, I’ve talked to the Bride of God herself . . . but Rashmi.” Kate rubbed her eye and her hand came away wet.
I sat her up and put my arm around her. “That’s all right. Not really your fault. I think poor Rashmi must have been hanging by a thread. We all are. The whole human race, or what’s left of it.”
We sat there for a moment.
“I saw her mom this morning,” I said. “She said to tell you she was sorry.”
Kate sniffed. “Sorry? What for?”
I shrugged.
“I know she didn’t have much use for me,” said Kate. “At least that’s what Rashmi always said. But as far as I’m concerned the woman was a saint to put up with Rashmi and her mood swings and all the acting out: She was always there for her. And the thing is, Rashmi hated her for it.”
I got to my knees, then to my feet. I helped Kate up. The alley was dark, but that wasn’t really the problem. Even in the light of day, I hadn’t seen anything.
8.
I had no trouble finding space at the bike rack in front of Ronald Reagan Elementary. The building seemed to be drowsing in the heavy morning air, its brick wings enfolding the empty playground. A janitor bot was vacuuming the swimming pool, another was plucking spent blossoms from the clematis fence. The bots were headache yellow; the letters RRE in puffy orange slanted across their torsos. The gardening bot informed me that school wouldn’t start for an hour. That was fine with me. This was just a courtesy call, part of the total service commitment I made to all the clients whom I had failed. I asked if I could see Najma Jones and he said he doubted that any of the teachers were in quite this early but he walked me to the office. He paged her; I signed the visitors’ log. When her voice crackled over the intercom, I told the bot that I knew the way to her classroom.
I paused at the open door. Rashmi’s mom had her back to me. She was wearing a sleeveless navy dress with cream-colored dupatta scarf draped over her shoulders. She passed down a row of empty desks, perching origami animals at the center of each. There were three kinds of elephants, ducks and ducklings, a blue giraffe, a pink cat that might have been a lion.
“Please come in, Ms. Hardaway,” she said without turning around. She had teacher radar; she could see behind her back and around a corner.
“I stopped by your house.” I slouched into the room like a kid who had lost her civics homework. “I thought I might catch you before you left for school.” I leaned against a desk in the front row and picked up the purple crocodile on it. “You fold these yourself?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, “so finally I gave up and went for a walk. I ended up here. I like coming to school early, especially when no one else is around. There is so much time.” She had one origami swan left over that she set on her own desk. “Staying after is different. If you’re always the last one out at night, you’re admitting that you haven’t got anything to rush home to. It’s pathetic, actually.” She settled behind her desk and began opening windows on her desktop. “I’ve been teaching the girls to fold the ducks. They seem to like it. It’s a challenging grade, the fifth. They come to me as bright and happy children and I am supposed to teach them fractions and pack them off to middle school. I shudder to think what happens to them there.”
“How old are they?”
“Ten when they start. Most of them have turned eleven already. They graduate next week.” She peered at the files she had opened. “Some of them.”
“I take it on faith that I was eleven once,” I said, “but I just don’t remember.”
“Your generation grew up in unhappy times.” Her face glowed in the phosphors. “You haven’t had a daughter yet, have you, Ms. Hardaway?”
“No.”
We contemplated my childlessness for a moment.
“Did Rashmi like origami?” I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t want to listen to the silence anymore.
“Rashmi?” She frowned, as if her daughter were a not-very-interesting kid she had taught years ago. “No. Rashmi was a difficult child.”
“I found Kate Vermeil last night,” I said. “I told her what you said, that you were sorry. She wanted to know what for.”
“What for?”
“She said that Rashmi was crazy. And that she hated you for having her.”
“She never hated me,” said Najma quickly. “Yes, Rashmi was a sad girl. Anxious. What is this about, Ms. Hardaway?”
She stared at me for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You know, I actually wanted to have many children.” She got up from the desk, crossed the room and shut the door as if it were made of handblown glass. “When the seeding first began, I went down to City Hall and volunteered. That just wasn’t done. Most women were horrified to find themselves pregnant. I talked to a bot, who took my name and address and then told me to go home and wait. If I wanted more children after my first, I was certainly encouraged to make a request. It felt like I was joining one of those mail order music clubs.” She smiled and tugged at her dupatta. “But when Rashmi was born, everything changed. Sometimes she was such a needy baby, fussing to be picked up, but then she would lie in her crib for hours, listless and withdrawn. She started antidepressants when she was five and they helped. And the Department of Youth Services issued me a full-time bot helper when I started teaching. But Rashmi was always a handful. And since I was all by myself, I didn’t feel like I had enough to give to another child.”
“You never married?” I asked. “Found a partner?”
“Married who?” Her voice rose sharply. “Another woman?” Her cheeks colored. “No. I wasn’t interested in that.”
Najma returned to her desk but did not sit down. “The girls will be coming soon.” She leaned toward me, fists on the desktop. “What is it that you want to hear, Ms. Hardaway?”
“You found Rashmi before I did. How?”
“She called me. She said that she had had a fight with her girlfriend who was involved in some secret experiment that she couldn’t tell me about and they were splitting up and everything was shit, the world was shit. She was off her meds, crying, not making a whole lot of sense. But that was nothing new. She always called me when she broke up with someone. I’m her mother.”
