Hunters & Collectors

by M. Suddain

  … Finding a hotel this famous should be easy, but there are challenges. Firstly, the establishment worked diligently to keep their location secret from hacks and fanatics. Secondly, their guests signed non-disclosure agreements with crushing forfeiture clauses. So getting anyone to talk about it will be difficult. Thirdly, they have always had a strict policy of not accommodating journalists or critics. Lebaubátain dined in their famous restaurant, the Undersea, but he never wrote a word about it. Finally, and most critically, this establishment was, by all accounts, blown up by the Great Butcher’s Republican forces during the People’s Revolution.

  So it will be a demanding case. A case, admittedly, I was never intentionally hired for. And for a hypothetical client I’ve never actually met, whose name I don’t even know. And based upon evidence – one photo – supplied by a firm working for another client, now dead – possibly murdered. And with the goal of discovering a hotel which, by all accounts, was also destroyed in an explosion. Never mind. I’ll dabble. I’ll see where the trail leads.

  … But look at me going on when you have far bigger challenges. You’ll be taking over Pop’s cafe, I assume? Let me know what I can do to help. I’ve had a ton of people ask me about Monsterat’s. FSoLF want me to write it up for my ten-year anniversary piece. I probably won’t. But if I do it’ll be glowing, of course.

  My new agent, Daniel, thinks I should cut ties with Samson. (Have I even told you about Daniel? He’s young, and into men, but I still think you’d like him. I’ll bring him down to Monsterat’s when we aren’t so busy.)

  Anyway, for gods’ sakes write me back and I promise I’ll stop going on about this fucking hotel.

  I miss you more than ever, friend.

  … and then the Windbreaker, Skylights Lodge, the Gothic Castle …

  … Beast. What are these? These aren’t Watermargins™. Call me urgently. And go through your network. Dig out anything you can on the Empyrean. Some people call it Station One. And cancel all my other private jobs, I want to focus all my attention on this.

  … then the Autumn Kitchen, Black Spider, Gacy’s …

  … I’m not accusing you of intentionally trying to deceive me, Sieven. But the old Watermargin™ F was unmistakable. The tip of my pen would seem to dip into the paper like it was covered with a millimetre of cream. Writing on that paper gave me the sensation of walking shoeless across a boundless field of soft white moss. This stock feels like doing the same across an ice rink. My pen seems to slip and slide off the paper. Look. See? See? You had a winning formula. Do you not know perfection when you have it?

  … then the Empress, the Peninsula, Hotel Cerebellus …

  … And don’t get me started on the binding. It’s weak. The pages fall out. Will historians have to fish fragments of my story from sewers?

  … Calm, wind, feed this to your hungry child.

  Calm, wind, feed this to your hungry child.

  Hopeless.

  … and Beltway Grill, Placebo, Manhunt, the Baron’s Munch-house …

  … then a second train to a dive bar to get a fake booking reservation from an anonymous source. Had to shake one tail by stepping off a carriage as the doors were closing. No tail on the way back. The papers seem in order.

  Colette. Where to begin. I’m flattered you’d work so hard to discover my true identity, and that you’d go to so much trouble to dig up these things from my past. But I have no interest in letting you travel with me on a tour. For a start, I’m not entirely confident you’d survive the trip. I fear enough for the lives of the young sex professionals who sometimes accompany me as decoys, and although an investigative journalist still sits a few notches below their profession on the scale of respectability, your death would still trouble my soul.

  Regarding these rumours you’ve supposedly uncovered about my past – corruption, substance abuse, family violence – incest, even – I think they all sound fantastic. I’d love to have lived such an interesting life. So I sign off on all of them. You may write about them with my blessing. You say you’re exploring ‘a number of intriguing avenues’? The avenues you choose to wander are your own business. I have wandered many avenues in my life, and it’s astonishing the surprises which lie in wait there.

  I have never heard of Hotel Grand Skies: the Empyrean, and so could not possibly be investigating its existence.

  Please direct all future whims to my agent, Daniel Woodbine (aka Beast). This is as polite as he or I’ll ever be.

  … then the Red Lodge, the Thunder Cat, Big Heart Rooms, a mediocre meal at Moondance Diner …

  … then a night at One East Plaza: the Sapphire …

  … Please instruct this Colette woman not to contact me any more. And please re-exhaust your network for any word about this hotel. It makes no sense that no one would know anything. And, Beast, I need you to purchase any of the old-style Watermargin™ notebooks you can get your hands on. Ask the collectors. I don’t care about the cost. Do the same for NMX-4S pens, JetSet Atlantic 9 Compact type-ribbons, and 12M Equator bond paper. And bring a bottle of Barleycorn when you come up. They only have Palace Gin here.

  … Also, that girl Gladys, the one you introduced me to at the Locus party last month, we like her. She’s young and sullen enough to pass for my teenaged child, I think. I think we should hire her for the Spice Markets jaunt. Does she charge by the hour, or can we negotiate a weekend rate?

  … then the Great Bear, the Golden Tulip, Hotel Trans-Europa …

  … And no, Sieven, I’m not ‘on board’ with turning your product into a verb. I will not be saying, ‘I’ve just Watermargined a few thoughts on One East Plaza.’

  … No mention of the Empyrean in the IHoA database. Not a single line anywhere in the press about it reopening. No one who could afford the price of admission will admit they’ve been. They all say the place was blown up. But some do it with a wink. There’s a certain winkiness as they say, ‘Oh, that place was blown up in the Revolutionary War.’ Well then why say it with a certain winkiness? They’re torturing me with something that doesn’t exist, and they know it, or which does, but I can’t have. Either way it’s torture. I’ve been finding myself drawn deeper and deeper into this without ever actually seeming to break the surface. I’d pay the one million international francs for the rest of the dossier, but I don’t have that kind of money since we cancelled all my other private jobs. Whose idea was that? And anyway, I haven’t spoken to Gloria since I stole her photo fourteen months ago.

  I need you to go through your network one more time. And ask Gladys, too. She seems to know people. And while you’re talking, see if you can find out what her favourite handgun is.

  … I’ve only found one person who’ll admit to staying at Hotel Grand Skies. Her name is Diana, she’s an actor, and like most she’s out of her fucking tree.

  … ‘Oh, it’s a paradise, Jonathan. A ghost from the Olde Worlde. You must go. Leave now!’

  ‘Uh-huh, I am trying.’ But she has my arm, this actor who is possibly also a lunatic. She hisses: ‘You must! But you won’t find it. They’ll deny it exists. They use computing machines to plot their journey now so they can’t be tracked. There’s no passenger service. We get sent out there by post.’

  ‘Sent to a computerised hotel by post, sure. Listen, Diana, I have to –’

  ‘You must go, Jonathan. You must. You must.’ She grabs both my shoulders, digs her painted talons in deep, like a demented owl; her mouth is a cruelly twisted inflammation of lipstick and spittle. ‘But you’ll be haunted by it, Jonathan. Haunted.’ Dousing me in painted mucoid droplets with each explodent. ‘Once a day I find myself calling the front desk to ask about some possession I pretend I might have left, just to hear the sound of the clerk’s voice, or to pick up the tap of footsteps across the marble floor, or the sound of a clerk’s bell. I’ve learned to tell which desk the clerk is standing at by the way his voice echoes. They’ve blocked my calls. I still ring through just to hear the recorded voice. I am haunted, Jonathan.
I sometimes think I want to kill myself.’ Then she throws back her head and laughs loudly, her pearls tinkling against the edge of the liquor bottle she’s stolen.

  ‘Gods, woman, why don’t you just go back?’

  ‘They won’t have me back. Redmond and I spent our children’s inheritance on one night there.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘We did. Every bit. And we haven’t told them. And when we do, they’ll literally murder us. And it was all fucking worth it!’ She takes another hit from her half-empty bottle. ‘What a tragedy if you died without seeing it. You of all people. I know who you are. I know your secret. I knew your mother. Oh. Oh, oh, oh. But I just remembered. They don’t take critics at this establishment. So sad. You’d die if you went there, Jonathan. Such a happy death. You have a gun?’

  Actors. They’re mad. The world is mad.

  … Diana says the Great Butcher was in love with the place, so she never destroyed it like she did all the other palaces and treasures of the old Eastern families. There’s a rumour it’s now hidden out in deep space, beyond the edge of the Cloud; that the whole establishment is a front for a charismatic cult; that you can only be admitted if you submit to a series of dark rituals; that the rites involve the murder of a child. I can’t say I’d go that far for a meal in the Undersea. It would depend on the child.

  There aren’t many solid clues, aside from that photo from the Mirror Lounge, and all the clues I have lead back to Zoraster. Which makes no sense.

  … Then to Misty’s Spice Boutique for food so bland and inambitious I doubt it’ll ever aspire to become shit. It’ll probably just sit in my colon yawning.

  … I’ll tell you this story – for free – Sanjaya, since I’m still in hospital on Zoraster, and you seem to have a profoundly misguided sense of goodwill towards the world.

  I was taking the TOMAHAWK from Zoraster One to Oijini. (TOMAHAWK is the high-speed train which crosses the Zoraster Seas through a specially designed glass tunnel. We aren’t related. This TOMAHAWK uses a powerful magnetic levitation drive to move the cars at speeds above supersonic. I prefer to amble.) I was sharing a cabin with a majestically pregnant woman with darkly golden hair and glowing skin. I was distracted by the fact that this woman was maybe the most radiant, most fertile creature I’ve ever seen. Her voice had that richness that comes with late-stage engorgement. She had a fruity, animalic odour: like a patch of new hay recently vacated by a farm girl who’d lain there while she ate her way through a basket of overripe peaches. I was actually enjoying being trapped with her in this small opera box as it shot across the waters of Zoraster at almost one thousand miles per hour. She happened to be reading a battered copy of Hunters & Collectors – by me, have you read it? It’s very good – but she put it aside to engage me when I sat down opposite. For once I didn’t even mind the chatter. She was excited about being a new mother, and her husband is a successful photographer, and she’s probably going to be a full-time mother, even though it means abandoning her career in antiques, and have I been to the Mall of the World, and doesn’t this thing move fast? I was nodding and looking at her. Uh-huh, yes, can I bottle you for a gloomy day? Can I squirt a little of you behind my ears before a long trip?

  ‘Ronaldo and I were joking, what if he came while I was on the train? I can’t have a baby at sea. He’d be a devil-baby!’

  Uh-huh, spawn of the devil. Amazing. Will you turn your head a little more towards the light? That’s it. Exactly like that. ‘Sorry, I missed that.’

  ‘I said, have you read it?’ She tapped the book on the seat beside her.

  ‘No. I hear it’s good … Is it? Good?’

  She was staring hard at me. ‘Is it good?’

  ‘I hear it is.’

  ‘The man is a poet.’ She stared through my eyes to a point about a foot behind my skull. So I pressed on. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘Oh, Ronaldo wants to photograph some sponge divers. You?’

  ‘I’m following a lead on a missing hotel.’

  ‘You’ve lost a hotel?’

  ‘Someone else has lost it.’

  ‘How do you lose a hotel?’

  ‘The same way you lose anything, I suppose. You love it too much, or not enough.’

  And as islands flickered at the windows and vanished, I told her everything about the Grand Skies Case – the rumours: that the place had not been blown up in the war at all …

  … that the establishment generates its flight path for each voyage randomly by computer algorithm.

  … that the establishment only hosts ten thousand famous guests.

  … that the establishment houses more priceless art and treasures than the MOWC.

  … that its restaurant, the Undersea, is the finest anywhere.

  … that my hero, forensic gastronomer and nine times international blind-tasting champion Eliö Lebaubátain, once dined there, before the Velvet Curtain went up, and told the chef that it was worth losing his legs for.

  … that he was only allowed to dine there after agreeing that he would never write a word about his meal.

  … that their location in the lawless waters of the Near East means they don’t have to adhere to pesky Western conventions like supplying a passenger manifest, or declaring their revenues to the tax office …

  … that they use postal-service vessels to smuggle their wealthy and famous guests through the Curtain and back …

  … that they’re about to expand their register by one thousand guests.

  … that some powerful people are already going to extraordinary lengths to eliminate potential rivals for this List of One Thousand.

  … that the explosion was no accident.

  … that since I’d started investigating the hotel I’d been getting strange notes from multiple sources warning me to drop it, or pay the price.

  … that I have in my possession what is most likely the only known photo from the inside of the hotel. ‘Wait, you said you were in antiques?’

  ‘Pre-modern.’ I found the photo in my valise, hidden between the pages of a book on ancient sacrificial cults of the Near East. I took it carefully from its clear plastic envelope. She received the photo, held it close enough to her face that its surface image was reflected in her wide wet eyes. ‘That lamp on the bar is a replica.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Or it should be in a vault. It’s at least two thousand years old.’

  ‘That’s the consensus.’

  ‘Consensus?’

  ‘You’re the ninth expert I’ve spoken to about it. But from what I’ve heard, the Empyrean is as secure as any vault.’ I reached out for the photo with scissored middle and index fingers, but she continued being lost in it. ‘So eerie how that bartender is looking straight into the camera lens,’ she said. ‘I can almost make out the name on his badge.’

  ‘It’s Stamper. I had it analysed.’ I had spent thousands of francs having the photo examined in every way possible. I had it swept for DNA. I had it fingerprinted. I still had my own fingers extended towards the photo, but she flipped it over to peer at the writing on the other side.

  ‘Grand Skies. I’ve heard of it. Ronaldo shot a woman who claimed to have stayed there only last year. An actor. Works at the Court.’

  ‘Is her name Diana?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘We’ve met. You say your husband shot her?’

  ‘He’s a photographer. I mentioned it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Diana tried to rape him. I do mean literally.’

  ‘It happens. I think this is a lost cause anyway. I’ve been on the case for almost two years and I can’t find anything substantial. I might never get on the List.’

  ‘Why would you get on the List?’

  ‘Hmmmm?’

  She held my photo in her lap so that the two anonymous drinkers peeked out from between her fingers. ‘Aren’t you working for a client? Wouldn’t it be them who gets a place on the List?’

  A fair poi
nt. Except, as I explained to her, there was no client, and I wasn’t even the person the initial party had meant to pass this photo to, and I hadn’t heard from them since that first meeting, and when I called the number on the woman’s card, if only to see if she wanted to have a drink, it rang through to a Kaukassian barbecue restaurant. Now the pregnant woman was looking at me like I was asking to borrow money. So I excused myself to go to the dining car.

  … They still do things the old way on this high-tech train. Sittings in the dining car are assigned by cards distributed to passengers an hour before service. I reserved for two, then went back to my cabin all ready to say, ‘I’ve been so rude; you must dine with me,’ but instead found a large man I didn’t recognise in my seat, and another even larger man next to him, and my tiny antiques expert stoically appraising them. The smaller of the two men stood and said, ‘Ah, finally he re-enters us.’ The larger of the two grinned as he stood, crossed his hands in front of his waist. He had an orange tan which made his teeth glow like radioactive material. I saw he had strangely tiny and immaculately manicured nails. Smaller said, ‘Come in here. What cause to run, or shout for marshals?’