Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  If I wrote anything, would it be literature or pulp? Sometimes I think it wouldn’t matter - the cover art would define it more than what was written in it. Gun equals crime thriller. Fangs and cleavage equal vampire horror. Deserted alley or pathway at dusk equals mystery. Pastel colours and stylized fashion-plate graphics equal chick lit. Big author name equals celebrity writer. Big title, equals catchy blockbuster title. It’s a designer product, at the end of the day. As much a fashion accessory as a form of consumer entertainment. But, like me, people are visually stimulated – the same as my thoughts were regarding the interior of the police station when I arrived. Something has to be on the outside to give a taster or indication of what’s on the inside. Whether it’s uniform, style, hygiene, or method. When there’s no indication of contents or purpose, like the police station walls, it’s like Pandora’s Box. Down to basic curiosity, trust, and risk.

  People trust what’s sold to them. When it’s packaged in a specific style, they gravitate towards the most appealing idea of what’s entailed in the packaging, based on what is being suggested initially. Including the appearance of other people. Canem probably had some basic social fishing skills to work out what intrigued Alice, and reeled her in with enough of a story for her to fill in any blanks herself, with her own fundamental fantasies and beliefs about the world. Just like she’d unwittingly bought a book about the sex trade, based on a misleading cover claiming to be a supernatural spy detective novel. Guys can learn those pick-up skills in any NLP book or website, or read about how stories impress girls, and how to catch girls out by using their own prompts in conversation, usually punctuated by controlled methods of contact - such as assessing or admiring jewellery being an excuse to hold hands, or to stare intently at a cleavage. Unless you’re like Doorman Harry, and you just need to announce that you’re the man who thought up the QWERTY keyboard based on the order of the Hungarian International Standardised Alphabet, and that Mr. Gates had to pay you royalties when designating the Windows shortcut keys, and it’s free lap-dances all the way. He didn’t sound like that type, but Canem could potentially have fast-tracked Alice into his harem, by simply wearing dark glasses and saying something along the lines of, he was in charge of Area 51 security, during his alleged FBI service.

  I’m quite surprised Connor didn’t think of that one as a chat-up line. Was too busy shooting harmless goats out of a helicopter.

  For some reason, abstractly, I wonder whether any women are out there with the shiny patent stiletto on the other foot, mistakenly thinking they’re innocently saucy escorts, or call-girls, when actually they’re part of a pillow-talk spy ring. Well, if they’re blogging about it on the internet and giving head office all that interesting bedside reading, technically they all are. Wouldn’t be the first time a Cherzia posted her hit-man shag-buddy’s intentions on her Facebuddy account…

  Ash nudges me and points at the camera view. Alice is scratching her unseen fungal rash, self-censorship evaporated.

  “She’s at the limit of what she can factually speak of,” Ash reports. “All she’s got otherwise is Canem’s word for it. And she knows it, too.”

  “The scratching is her scraping the bottom of the barrel, then?” I ask. “Scratching for the answers?”

  “Clutching at straws, same kind of thing,” James agrees, sipping his tea cautiously, having let it stand a few minutes as warned.

  “Sounds like her social life, hoping to shag a Scarecrow,” I observe, in a very unladylike response. They look at me. “Trust me. I spoke to her in the toilets. I reckon she got close enough to get a bit of a rash, but nothing else. Women like her only obsess that much over guys they haven’t slept with yet.”

  “Yeah, the guy with the gunshot wound,” Ash muses. “He’s not asked for her, or even about her, since he’s been in hospital.”

  Which in fact makes it worse than I thought. Some part of me feels pity for all the self-deluding types. Talking a good love story to themselves, and anyone impressionable that they might encounter. But not in actual relation to the object of their affections. My phone vibrates in my pocket and I take it out to read the text, as it turns out, from Connor. Hey trouble. Stop thinking about me. Xx

  I wasn’t, but possibly was about to, by empathising with the girl in the interview room about doomed infatuations. It almost irks me that I don’t have enough proof that things aren’t predictably doomed with Connor. It makes life unpredictable, and I don’t identify with that. Strangely, I identify more with the girl being interviewed, than the owner of the body I’m standing up in at the moment, considering the last couple of weeks.

  I let out an involuntary heavy sigh, not sure whether to think of a reply or not, as I put my phone away. Ash reacts, kicking his wheeled chair away from me like something out of a cartoon.

  “Careful,” he says, scooting back to his original position, and straightening his hair with exaggerated gestures. “Nearly blew my quiff over.”

  I catch James’s eye, and am immediately reminded that I’m in a room with some practising body-language experts. But I’m used to being watched. They can draw their own conclusions, same as everyone else does. I realise I’ve just missed an opportunity to rant about Connor being arrogant and taking me for granted, sending me that text. But another part of me is saying, maybe I should take it as a compliment. Or maybe I just can’t think of a cocky enough answer.

  I’m in the middle of feeling as though I’m having a post-modern view of myself from the outside, in the interview room. There but for the grace of God go I, that kind of thing. Not in her circumstances, but in her psychological state. It’s weird that I’m not feeling my usual indignance towards Connor’s attitude. I’m too caught up in identifying with a much more recognisable version of myself. The delusional part. Obsessing about ways of fixing it, when up until recently, I felt that side of me was no longer an ongoing concern of mine.

  I’m finding that I kind of miss being deluded, instead of appreciating reality. Delusion has its own system of comforting storylines and logic. Reality has logic, but it’s fractal. Infinite outcomes branch out from infinite potential for occurrence. A story-based delusion is contained, limited to stereotype, plot and assumption, with limits, even when it masquerades as reality. He loves me, he loves me not. Delusion is the comfort blanket for those not currently caught in the grip of a secure and stable relationship. Without the fantasy that one might exist, or be just around the corner, what is there?

  I put myself in her shoes, psychologically speaking. Supposing I were in her place? Thinking my job was real, that my contacts were real, when I was basically part of some crime thriller fantasy escort service, expected to do the nasty like the other lady runners and their sperm-jacking habits. It would turn out to be a final fantasy euthanasia club. Going Out With A Bang, it should be called. Hookers for the terminally sentenced. Or maybe it would be Connor’s fantasy, which given that his life is all fantasy anyway, sounds even more believable. Two assassins partner up and inevitably the chemistry happens. The Bond Girl Fantasy Club. I’d be the only Bond Girl who never put out, in that case.

  It’s a Schrodinger’s Cat moment. Look at the outside of the box containing her reality, and at any one point, is Alice a call-girl, or a spy detective? Now she’s in the police interview room and they’re quizzing her for information, is she the true-to-life inside informant she always believed she was? Have her circumstances turned inside out, so that her espionage fantasy is now the reality on the outside, and her boastful pillow-talk-gathering games the guilty secret on the inside? How does she view herself now? What will her lifeline turn out to be - another job, another faked storyline to her life - another misjudged relationship?

  I know I’m personalising my analysis far too much, because my brain believes I’ve been there, in her position, in her psychological state. Not in her circumstances, so of course her brain has other factors and hormones acting on it than mine. But I know I’ve caught myself out in the grip of a fantasy needing valida
tion before, like she’s still holding Canem’s cheap Post Office print machine business card as if it’s The Holy Grail. Knowing also that what she’s most wishing for, is for the dead man himself to stroll in with a suit, a badge and dark glasses, proving his identity as bona fide FBI Detective. Or at least, her interpretation of the Hollywood version. If Wesley Snipes is the Hollywood hit-man, Danny Glover or Morgan Freeman would be Alice’s Hollywood FBI man.

  James is half watching her now, half watching me read myself into her.

  “What?” I say to him, less indignantly than curiously. I’m interested to hear his translation of the subtext of my response.

  “What would you say was the most useful thing for her to start believing in right now?” James asks me.

  “Useful for us, or for her?” I query.

  “Would be good if there was something to serve both.”

  I shake my head slowly.

  “You’re talking about something with universal meaning, to delineate a set of automatic trust principles between her and us. You won’t find it while she’s stuck at the Mad Hatter’s Conspiracy Theory Tea Party with our Officer Dibble,” I say. “She’s not going to find religion from where she’s sitting right now. In other cultures it might work. In ours we don’t have that sort of foundation stone laid for us when we’re born any more. It’s all Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, and similar hallucinations.”

  “Trust principles can be engineered,” says Ash. “Trust games, extreme team-building sports - like white-water rafting, abseiling, skydiving, and whatever puts your life in someone else’s hands. And, of course, the old neuro-linguistic programming charisma party tricks, for the indoor sofa-surfer types.”

  I find my focus of memory shifting away from Alice’s predicament and back to my own, trusting Connor. I know I shouldn’t forget that concept, about trust being engineered. That’s what team-building weekends are based on. Maybe I should be more aware of Connor trying to set me up in that sense - not less cautious.

  “Or, we just work out what her fairytale is that she tells herself still,” James remarks. “Out of curiosity, do you think it’s possible to trigger a psychotic episode in a clinical self-monitor?”

  I shrug and lean on the desk.

  “If you’re talking about loss of control, sounds like any psychopathic self-monitor’s idea of a dream holiday,” I remark. “Most of the fun I’ve had has been jumping up and down on the roofs of police vans in my pyjamas. A psychotic episode to me is just like a fat person’s Black Forest Gateaux binge. I know it’s a bad idea and potentially lethal, but I like to dream about it.”

  “So you do have a personality disorder, then?” he asks. “It’s not that you have issues with your functionality or reality. Your emotional responses are skewed in favour of an alternate reality.”

  “Inappropriate emotional response is about right,” I agree. “Why do you ask?”

  “If she self-monitors, or has been monitoring this fake reality she’s believed in for however long, how would you disintegrate it?”

  “I don’t think it ever fully disintegrates,” I say thoughtfully. “A psychotic state occurs when too much reinforcement, or emphasis, or coincidence occurs in a specific thread of the individual’s life story. Usually a thread of fantasy, like having a crush on a celebrity, or in a negative sense, that a partner is having an affair. A few coincidences might lead to the individual actively looking for further reinforcement. It can be only one thing, or a series of things they choose to emphasize, that make the fantasy thread their new full-blown reality. Do you know the Mandelbrot Set for fractals? They only have to go down a certain theoretical pathway from Reality to Fantasy, and if they see patterns they recognise as having previously reinforced their old reality, appearing again, reinforcing their fantasy, the repetition or echoes of the same pattern reinforce the belief that this is the new reality for them. And outlines what their expectations are for the outcome. It’s what marriage guidance counsellors deal with, when facing couples repeating past relationship patterns, due to assumed characteristics or behaviour of a partner. It’s quite literally pattern-matching. With her, I reckon you’d only need to get her in a bar with a guy acting shady and suspicious, and she’d be itching to get her hands on him. All over him like a rash. Again, quite literally. Telling herself a new twisted fairytale.”

  “So you’d have to work out what her pattern is and match it,” James remarks, while Ash shows me his search results for fractals on Boogle Images.

  “Can you identify the suspect?” he says jokingly.

  “When you think about chat-up lines and NLP, basically what men learn, is how to pattern match themselves to women in order to get some fundamental responses from them, but not necessarily learn anything about each other in a healthier fashion,” I say, pointing out the Mandelbrot Set for Ash. “Why, are you thinking of giving her a job?”

  “She might make a good informer if we approach her in the right way,” James admits. “Sleeping with subjects would be optional. She’d have to do her own seducing, though, if that was her method of choice - no pimp setting up blind dates for her. We’d want the information she came back with to be real, not made up as part of some sex fantasy.”

  “So if you recruit her as a super grass, what are her long-term promotion prospects?” I query, thinking about my earlier theories on Jay and Bob.

  “Don’t think we’d need to offer her any. Most likely she’d continue to write an enormous blog and then try to sell the movie rights to her life story. Either that, or she’d suddenly grow a moral backbone, quit blogging and end up as Special Obs. She won’t be the first sperm-jacker on their books,” Ash says, selecting a fractal image, and setting it as his on-screen wallpaper. “Probably we’ll call her back to do another statement. See if her story changes or if she sticks to it. Then work from there, depending on what that gives us. What’s the equation for this again?”

  I pick up a pen and write on the clipboard next to him. Zn+1= Zn2 + C.

  “How would you translate that into psychosocial manipulation like NLP?” he asks, still watching Alice on the screen.

  “Zn is the target’s existing perception of self, you equal C,” I tell him. “By adding yourself to her reality and successfully showing you reinforce and increase her ideal self-identity, you get a self-regenerating fractal reality - she fills in the blanks with her own pattern matching.”

  “Nice.” Ash doesn’t take his eyes off the screen, draining the last of his orange squash. “I like your metaphysical polymath skills.”

  “Warren said you’re an engineer,” James remarks. “Yuri reckons more of a physicist. Now you sound like a mathematician. What was your science major again?”

  “I didn’t finish,” I say, slightly wary, not knowing if head office kept track of my student alter ego while at University. It was an experiment in privacy, and a whole identity and self-contained world that had nothing to do with door work or the To Do List. “It was Electronics, actually. I never thought about it much though since. Can’t remember much either. Voltage, current, power, the basics. Not stuff I’ve been able to integrate in everyday life psychological theories. Except maybe in finances.”

  “Ah,” says James. “You’re a sparks. That explains everything.”

  “Explains what?”

  He grins at me.

  “You make all the right connections.”

  In the interview room, Officer Dibble seems to have a similar thought, along the line of making possible connections.

  “Did you ever have to meet female clients… sorry, suspects?” he asks. “Or just men?”

  “He said he would set me up with a woman who was really important, but he never got round to it,” says Alice. “There was one woman he mentioned a number of times as being his biggest case so far, and I’d have to train really hard to get the experience first, or she’d suss me out. The other girls and I would get drunk and practise, and he would watch, but he said we weren’t good enough yet.”
r />   “Who was this female target, did he give you a name?”

  “No. Just that she was top dog of some big French company that was recruiting all of its science and medical staff from African Universities, so she could pay them less than Western graduates. Also meaning that important skills were being lost by the smaller communities there, who would have benefited from their support and qualifications. That she was making some mockery of African tribal culture as well, but he wasn’t specific.”

  “Okay,” Dibble nods. “We’ll look into that. He’s bound to have - case files, I suppose you’d call it. If he’s a genuine agent, we’ll find the right people who can talk to us about it.”

  Chapter 30: Dressing To Kill

  My brain is aching slightly from discussion with James and Ash. James notices I didn’t get myself a drink, and offers me a can of ginger beer from his rucksack under the table. I sit down on the spare chair, while on the monitors in the interview room, Officer Dibble reads back Alice’s statement to her, and asks her to initial any changes or corrections.

  For some reason, something about Ash’s posture as he sits opposite me, attentively watching the screen and doodling his ideas on the clipboard next to him, reminds me of ‘Yakuza Man’ that I saw in Green’s Restaurant by the hotel spa. I have a pattern-matching moment of my own. Just a thought. Potentially a big one. But also potentially a psychosis. I decide to keep it to myself.

  I’m just wondering now if this was as much about getting an observation of me, as about the interviewee. Which in itself, is a self-centred psychotic ego-trip. Could be a very fine line between work and hallucination.

  My phone rings again, and I check Caller I.D. before answering to Connor.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You avoiding me already?” he teases.

  “No, I just couldn’t think of a smart enough reply to your text.”