redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  redRobe

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Ex-assassin Axl Borja has agreed to do one last hit - only he hasn't told his gun yet. Cardinal Santo Ducque faces political ruin if he can't regain the Vatican's missing billions. Mai's a Japanese kinderwhore held hostage on a space habitat. As they collide their actions could change the world.

  redRobe

  Jon Courtenay grimwood

  Prologue

  Tunic by Issuki Marino

  ‘That one,’ said Father Sylvester, pointing to a Japanese whore with tiny breasts and soft legs, her legs wrapped in crepe bandages so fine as to be almost transparent, ‘she’s perfect. . .’

  She was, too. Young enough to pass for his daughter if needs be, not so young that she’d cry at being forced to do things she didn’t want to do. Spit at him maybe from that down-turned bee sting of a mouth or lash out with black-lacquered nails, but not cry. This one was long since cried-out. That was, if the emptiness in her dark brown eyes was anything to go by.

  No expectations.

  Nothing left that resembled hope.

  Hollow.

  Father Sylvester realised that probably made them equal. The bearded, black-robed priest nodded at Madame Sotto who smiled as if she expected no less, and levered her vast bulk from an ornate and over-gilded chair. Fake Louis Napoleon from the look of it, and not a good fake either.

  At Madame Sotto’s shoulder stood a Megrib bodyguard dressed in a silver posing pouch, silver body paint and heavy brass bracelets. Behind her, red velvet rose to the ceiling, swathes of it covering all four walls. The whole brothel was one giant fire risk.

  ‘You told me you wanted young,’ Madame Sotto said with a short laugh, ‘maybe you should have mentioned you also wanted Chink.’ The fat woman made it sound like a joke but Father Sylvester knew it wasn’t. She was upset. He’d watched the edginess rise in her puffy face as he rejected one after another of her whores. Running first through the beautiful ones, then the sullen, sultry and obviously under-age. After that, she’d tried podgy and then out-and-out odalisque, just in case he was chubby-chasing, but he’d waved them all away until they got to this one.

  And now he was interested. Really interested.

  The girl was round hipped. Soft from lack of proper exercise. She wore a weird high-collared top of grey canvas that stretched like a restraint-jacket from under her chin down to her thighs. Her legs were bound from the ankle upwards with those crepe bandages and only her arms and feet were bare, each toenail decorated with a tiny henna spiral.

  Father Sylvester knew high fashion when he saw it. And though he couldn’t put a price on the clothes he recognised expensive.

  The Madame had been saving her. That was the reason he hadn’t been shown Mai before. This girl was earmarked for someone else but the priest didn’t waste his time wondering who. He wasn’t interested in anything except leaving with the girl in front of him-and soon.

  ‘Japanese,’ he told Madame Sotto, looking at the girl’s sullen mouth and heavy cheeks, so rouged they looked like she’d been slapped hard. ‘She’s Japanese, not Chinese.’

  ‘Nip, chink…’ Madame Sotto shrugged. She was going to say they all looked the same to her, but then she caught Father Sylvester’s eye and swallowed the words. There weren’t many Korean priests working for the Jesuits, but she was looking at one of them.

  Half Japanese, that’s what the girl was. Not full…Father Sylvester amended the words in his head, without bothering to tell Madame Sotto. Not that she’d have understood the difference anyway. A bit of Father Sylvester, the dark bit that always burnt at the back of his mind, wanted to tell the brothel keeper that, actually, when it came to Occidentals he couldn’t tell one raddled Madame from another either. But as a priest he didn’t allow himself the indulgence.

  ‘You…’ Father Sylvester jerked his chin rudely at the girl. ‘Strip.’

  He caught it then, inside her head, a faint flare of anger that never quite reached her face. The priest smiled and Mai’s eyes widened.

  She knew who he was then. Or at least what he was…

  Psi. Sucking her thoughts like a cerebral vanpyre. And she’d thought it was her body he’d wanted.

  ‘Strip,’ Madame Sotto ordered crossly and the girl did, blank-faced as she began to undo her canvas jacket, starting at the left hip, her childish fingers fumbling at tiny hooks. The huge swirl of dark hair wound up on her skull like a headdress shuddered as the girl lent forward to get a clearer view of what she was doing.

  Madame Sotto snapped something in Spanish and Mai stopped, fingers frozen over the hooks. Then she nodded and ran one finger quickly down the other side seam of her jacket, waiting impassively as the canvas parted neatly and the grey jacket slid to the marble floor.

  Smartcloth. Father Sylvester had read about it. Ate sweat, adjusted its TOG rating according to ambient temperature and kept itself dirt free. Also changed colour by adjusting its refractive index and provided invisible uplift to most of Hollywood, if the Enquirer was to be believed. And Father Sylvester made a warped point of believing the Enquirer.

  The girl was beautiful. In a sulking, pouting, ‘5 a.m. in the morning, what the fuck am I doing up being gawped at by a priest’ sort of way. A single band of crepe was wrapped once round her chest, not quite hiding cherry-blossom nipples, but what Father Sylvester really noticed were her eyes. They were dark with the knowledge that she’d never find her way out of life’s maze, not even if the rats helped her.

  ‘Enough,’ Father Sylvester held up his hand.

  ‘You don’t want her to remove the rest?’

  No. The priest shook his head. He’d seen enough. More than enough, more than he should. He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And he was very definitely doing the wrong thing.

  ‘How much?’

  Madame Sotto named a price that would have kept Father Sylvester’s old food kitchen in the Aleutian Islands going for a year. But he wasn’t in a barren archipelago off the coast of Russia or even at the Vatican, he was in Spain. In a ramshackle farmhouse set fifteen klicks outside Alicante. And there was a stretch UltraGlyde waiting outside the door, chattering to itself as it waited for the Jesuit to make his purchase.

  ‘That’s acceptable.’ The priest motioned to the girl to put on her clothes and waited while she struggled to push one arm into a tight sleeve and then zipped up the opposite seam with a quick run of her nail along the edge of the cloth.

  Did the garment do that for everyone, the priest wondered, or was it imprinted to Mai’s touch only? Either way, there was going to be time enough to find out.

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ the Madame said firmly.

  Father Sylvester nodded, his face impassive. Without hesitation he reached into his soutane and pulled out a Moroccan leather wallet, its corners edged with brass. The card he selected at random was stolen, they all were. So was the Honda outside. But they were as nothing compared to the dead Pope’s soul hidden in his pocket.

  Sliding the gold HKS across the top of the marble table, Father Sylvester made sure his fingers never quite touched those of the Madame.

  He should have asked about infections, about retro Virus and malaria and all the other diseases whores in Spain were prone to. Not that any of it would have changed his mind. This was the one he wanted, no matter how bad her blood count. Taking his gold card back from the Madame he pushed it deep into a pocket.

  All that stood between him and success was a door and a short walk to his car.

  ‘This time tomorrow,’ he said, most of his attention now on the Japanese girl. ‘Go on,’ he told her, stepping back to let Mai enter a small courtyard flanked by Moorish ajimez, double arches cut from local red marble.

  Later in the day the heat would be blistering. B
ut right now it was still cool, in that Mediterranean way that everyone knew signified the sun would eventually be hot enough to melt blacktop.

  Father Sylvester sighed.

  Behind him a thin mist clung to the grey slopes of the Sierra, those final foothills of the Baetic Cordillera that had once plunged into the Mediterranean at Cape La Nao to reappear miles later as the island of Ibiza. Now, of course, the cities of Alicante and Valencia were landlocked, the new coastline a product of General Que’s decision to lower the Mediterranean.

  Between the brothel and the sierra were huertas, heavily-irrigated orange groves thriving in the alluvial soil of the Levant littoral. But it was the bare mountain beyond that which people really noticed, the puig, its hard-edged grey slope rising sharp as pain. Not high but jagged like broken teeth and fringed around the bottom with a white-walled hill village that clung tight to its base.

  Father Sylvester didn’t even turn to look at it. Priest and girl, they walked down the grey stone steps together towards the waiting Honda, the girl picking her way carefully across damp gravel, bare feet moving over sharp stones as if undertaking complicated ballet steps, to a score that only she could hear.

  ‘Ready to move, Monsignor?’

  The man nodded, remembered his car wasn’t running on visual and brusquely told the Honda to unlock its door. The Honda did, both front doors opening in a gentle hiss of well-damped hydraulics.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ the priest told the car, daring it to disagree. And then he had the hover up on its skirt and spinning in a neat circle before the semiAI even had time to remind him about his seat belt.

  ‘The girl too,’ said the Honda, and Father Sylvester nodded to Mai to strap herself in, which she did in bland silence.

  Experienced in the ways of the world though he was, Father Sylvester didn’t realise the girl was thinking precisely nothing. That Mai’s head was empty of thought, fear or hope. She had long since discarded all three, learning first to retreat into a corner of her mind and then-later-once she’d reached twelve and the lessons got harder, to leave her body altogether. To hover at the edge of existence, in the far corner of every room while clients beat or abused her empty body.

  There was a clinical name for disengagement, for the fracture of psyche from pain, but the girl didn’t know that. She thought she’d invented the technique: that it was hers alone. A way to keep sane while other children retreated into suicide or the fixed brightness of crystalMeth.

  ‘Ready?’ Father Sylvester asked, half thinking about his wallet and already regretting its loss. Fat with its stolen credit cards and bank bonds, he’d left the thing on top of Madame Sotto’s marble table, just inside the viewing room.

  How long before the Madame noticed? How long before she picked it up and opened it, not to take anything of course, but just to take a look at the possessions of a priest who’d woken her up at 2 a.m. on a Friday demanding to be shown all her girls? Three minutes, maybe four... If he’d been a betting man that’s what Father Sylvester would have gambled on. But she didn’t even wait until his car was out of the drive.

  The ball of fire expanded outwards from white through gold to red, flames licking up for the briefest second before black smoke followed them skywards and the twisted olive trees around the edge of the brothel began to catch, leaves shrivelling like singed paper.

  But it wasn’t the explosion that broke the habits of Mai’s short lifetime and shocked the girl into screaming ... It was the aftershock that hurled down the red-earth path behind the car and caught the Honda, twisting it sideways towards a rock-strewn bank.

  She needn’t have bothered. Without hesitation, the semiAI overrode manual and slid the silver Honda up the steep bank and down the other side into a field of orange trees. The brothel was a mess of flames behind them. Its grey stucco walls already flaking with heat, red roof tiles falling into the inferno below through gaping holes in the broken rafters. Whole olive trees were aflame, smoke spiralling up like a plume of black feathers into the early morning sky. Father Sylvester had been right, Madame Sotto’s brothel was a giant fire risk.

  So simple and so Efféctive. All it took to prime the trigger was to remove a credit card from the wallet. Opening the wallet again ignited the core and after that everything was a mathematical certainty.

  If he hadn’t been dying, Father Sylvester would have been proud of himself. As it was, he didn’t have the time or energy left for pride, foolish or otherwise. On a plane to Mexico was where he was meant to be. Not killing brothel keepers, buying children or stealing souls.

  He turned to the girl and gripped her podgy face in one hand, looking deep into her eyes while the Honda steered itself between rows of orange trees and back onto a narrow road.

  ‘Your name…’ he began but got no further before Mai interrupted, trying to tell him who she was.

  ‘No,’ said Father Sylvester, holding her face a little harder between his hands, his eyes never leaving hers. ‘Your name is Joan, do you understand me?’

  Mai looked uncertain, unhappy. They were sliding down a slip road now towards a battered, cracked four-lane blacktop and behind them, what she had loosely called home for the last five years was burning up in flames.

  ‘You have a new name,’ the priest told her fiercely, ‘a new life. Now tell me, who are you?’

  ‘Joan…’ The girl stumbled over the unfamiliar name.

  Father Sylvester let go of the girl’s face and collapsed back into the black ultrasuede of his ergonomically-perfect driver’s seat. He was shaking. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your name is Joan. You’re the new Pope.’

  Chapter One

  Sounds/Silence

  Axl could hear, that wasn’t his problem. Axl’s problem was his life lacked a coherent sound track, at least it did these days. When doors shut they just slammed, with no kick-back loop of drums. Cars collided on the freeway and no hi-haus/low-fi chords crashed. Not like back when…

  He was blind to the music.

  Axl still had a Korg sound system installed in his head, at least he figured he did, just not connected. After fifteen years Axl still couldn’t get used to it.

  He had the negative algorhythm blues. He had…

  Shit, Axl knew exactly what he had, a sucking black hole where the music used to loop and feed inside his head, sound-tracking everything.

  ‘You look like death ...”

  The mirror wanted to say like shit, but it was too mealy-mouthed.

  ‘Yeah.’ Axl pushed one thin arm through the sleeve of an old biker’s jacket. He had a job to do and he was in a hurry. Plus, there was something he was meant to remember and crystalMeth from the night before was making him forget.

  The jacket was PaulSmith with silver ceramic elbowpads, relined years back in spider’s silk and Axl liked it. The mirror didn’t…

  Wedged into the mirror’s frame was Axl’s driving licence which showed a round-faced, vaguely European male with spiky, peroxide-blond hair. Years of not sleeping had left him with the dissolute look of a drunken Welsh poet, which was odd because his mother was originally Irish Catholic. Axl had no idea who his father was, the police never caught the man.

  Age 29, height 6’ 1”, weight 152 lb, name Axl Borja, status human. It lied about everything except his height, and that was only true if Axl wore Cuban heels. There was other shit crypted onto it, like a DNA profile and medical record but that was also fake.

  Besides he was using another name these days too. Which one didn’t matter. He changed them as regularly as swopped his dead-end jobs flipping hamburgers.

  Axl shrugged, checked his looks in the glass and then took another glance at his eyes. Nineteen years back they’d been advertised as ‘clear and sparkling, like early daybreak peeping through a clear night sky.’ And at $4500 a pop on the open market that’s what they should have stayed. Right around now they looked more like the sodium headlights of a dumptruck refracted through smog. And he could have moved house using the bags under them, if only he could raise en
ough credit to relocate…

  Walking across the kitchen of the flat he semi/sort-of squatted, Axl realised he was stark bollock naked except for the jacket and remembered seconds later that it didn’t matter a fuck, he lived alone.

  His choice. At least that was what he always told himself.

  Machines he could handle, even if they did answer back. Human beings couldn’t be returned. Hell, most didn’t even come with a guarantee.

  ‘Hey fuck-wit ...’

  ‘Coffee,’ Axl demanded and wrapped his fingers round the cable attaching the Zanussi BreakfastBar to the wall. For once the Zanussi didn’t argue. Above the BreakfastBar what looked like a tastefully-framed Fox Studios poster flicked over on cue to a rolling newsfeed, leading in on the major headlines.

  ‘Samsara takes another 50,000 refugees from Europe.’

  Crashing chord from the screen. Shot of thin Catalan woman breastfeeding toddler.

  ‘Cartel Pharmaceuticals sue IMF for collapse of Colombian economy. . .’

  Another chord, less emphatic. A pan back from bombed office block to burned-out district of Bogota.

  ‘Vatican refuses to release figures for auditing. WorldBank denies Pope Joan might rise from the dead ...’

  Minor chord for what would be a major miracle. And an archive shot of the Pope staring at a hovering camera.

  No news in other words.

  Axl pulled the tab on a Lucky Strike and drew smoke deep into his lungs. If there was anything the Zanussi hated worse than Axl washing breakfast down with coffee it was him smoking and eating at the same time.

  The front door said goodbye, even though it knew Axl hadn’t paid rent on the sublet in months. The lift was scrupulously polite on the way down. One of the Armani-suited porters even smiled wryly as he let Axl out through a service entrance, something that was strictly forbidden.

  But Axl was still scowling as he walked out of the Metropole and into a Mexican morning so hot it felt like someone had just kicked down Hell’s front door. Dead fireworks from last night’s fiesta littered the open-air car park at the back of the building. Dead fireworks, a sleeping drunk and three blank-faced local kids flopped out on a discarded nylon settee.