The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  She leaned in and kissed him.

  Her mouth was soft, her tongue exploring his with an eager grace, and he felt her fingertips on the back of his neck. As she broke from him, he felt suspended in a powerful moment of intimacy playing over and over, the busker music now somehow faraway, and yet he was still in the present, watching her lean away and smile.

  It was a brief smile, one to cover her nervousness as she asked, “I bet you were a shit boyfriend when you were younger, weren’t you?”

  “I was,” he laughed. “Ambitious workaholic. I took her for granted. Her—them, all of my lovers.”

  “I was rubbish at relationships, too,” she said, and he felt her warm, soft hand still on his neck. He loved the touch of her fingertips on his skin. “And now?”

  “Now I like to think I’ve found a balance. At least I hope so.”

  “So do I,” said Crystal.

  Without a word, they rose, both knowing they were headed back to their hotel.

  They went to his room, and before he could say anything as they stepped inside, she was in his arms, kissing him passionately and coaxing him towards the bedroom. Their mouths hardly parted as he wrestled free of his jacket, and she kicked off her shoes. She tugged and worked his buttons, opening his shirt and then taking his hands to put them on her breasts. He felt his legs collapse under him as she sat down on the edge of his mattress, and on his knees in an almost worshipping posture, he sucked a nipple into his mouth.

  Her breasts were exquisite, and her waist was a perfect hourglass beneath her clothes, her brown tummy flat and perfect. Tim’s index finger idly traced a line along the black stitches. You won’t scar, he assured her. You’ll heal. She smiled at him but said nothing. From her face, he could tell she wasn’t really that vain, worrying about a seam of old injury along her belly. Hungrily, he tugged on her unzipped skirt, taking her panties with it. She was wet to the touch, shuddering with the pleasure of his fingers exploring her core. Then he climbed on top of her, already hard.

  “Wait a minute,” he said huskily, knowing any self-control was fading away.

  “Oh, no, please,” she said, not wanting the moment to break. “Tim…”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “The world is going to hell,” she answered, her soft hands slipping up the small of his back to feel his shoulder blades. “And I want… comfort. Tenderness. Warmth. I know you’re a good man. And I like you. What more do you need?”

  She kissed him again, their mouths opening for each other with a more languid energy. When her head fell back against the pillow again, she said, “I haven’t seen good in a long time, Tim, and you’ve been acting decent and keeping your head while all this chaos is going on around us. I don’t know what to believe anymore, so I want a break. I want time to stop for a little bit.”

  “Okay.”

  Au Dauphin often got the word “unassuming” attached to it in reviews, but it was a likeable bistro in Paris facing the Place André Malraux and the Palais Royal. The chefs were from Biarritz, and the dishes were French and Basque. Enough tourists came in that Tim and Emily Derosier could talk and be ignored—that is, if she showed up.

  He had learned enough about her by now to order a Cabernet, what he suspected was her favorite sort of wine. This is beyond surreal, he thought. You’re about to meet a woman from the flapper era in twenty-first-century Paris. Surreal, but not impossible, because he had stood facing Emily Derosier once before as she sifted through research online at the Centre Pompidou. He half expected her to plunk down in the seat across from him wearing a large sunhat and a movie-star smile, as if her cryptic gift of the painting had been an overture to a romantic chase, and he had now somehow proven himself.

  Thanks to the ever-cooperative MI6, Crystal had set him up with spy gear in the form of a pinhole camera in his lapel pin and a carefully hidden mike in his tie. Since Derosier had seen her before, she would monitor the conversation from a surveillance van a block up from the restaurant. As well, a couple of French plain-clothes detectives fluent in English sat at a table only four feet away.

  He should have watched for his approaching guest or anything out of the ordinary, but he found his concentration wandering. From his research, he had discovered that Emily Derosier had frequented an Italian bar around here, now long since gone. The story went that she “shared” a handsome young pâtissier with Cole Porter in a rear booth. Another story went that the American writer and arts patron Max Eastman, while on a visit over to Paris, had talked the innocent young socialite out of wasting her time with a Communist organization by telling her horror stories about Stalinist Russia. Then there was the time she was supposed to act in a silent movie written by Jean Cocteau, one promising a more frank and provocative depiction of sexuality than Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy. But two weeks before shooting was to commence, she had been murdered.

  She intrigued him, this flapper whose story was cut short before it became legend. While stationed in Paris, Tim hadn’t given in to the romanticism that was a packaged product for tourists here, but he was still amused by the idea that, once upon a time, you could rub shoulders with so many future bohemian giants, seeing them as ordinary human beings before they were trapped in sepia photographs like moths in amber.

  “Ditzy,” said a voice in front of him.

  He snapped to attention.

  Emily Derosier. Seated. Relaxed. Here, without him seeing her walk up.

  Wearing a simple cream blouse and beige skirt as if she had come in for lunch from an insurance office up the street. The French detectives seemed to take no notice of her, and Tim realized they had been foolishly naïve in planning surveillance. What she had done back in the courtyard in front of the Centre Pompidou…

  “Ditzy?” he echoed.

  “You were curious what my friend Josephine Baker was like,” she answered coolly. “She was feather-brained, but she had a sweet soul. She enjoyed life—food, sex, animals, travel, men. And women. When you grow up as poor as she did, wearing the same dress and going barefoot every day, I suppose it gives you appetites for more than just luxury. She was the most vivacious woman I ever knew.”

  Tim paused, thinking he had to tread carefully. “You miss her.”

  “That’s not nearly as subtle as I expected, Mr. Cale. You were doing so well. You have genuine interest in what my life was like, my time, and that made you so much more interesting than others. I would expect them to pester me with the usual.”

  “Where you went and what happened to you after you died,” said Tim, nodding. “But those are reasonable questions.”

  “But not your first questions, which is why I wasn’t expecting you to be a bore.”

  She flashed a winning smile at a waiter and picked up the wine menu. “The Cabernet was a good choice, it was very thoughtful of you,” she said to Tim. “Let me return the compliment by getting us a Merlot I think you’ll like.”

  The waiter nodded and went away.

  “I think you would have liked the age I lived in very much,” she said, resting her chin on her laced fingers. “You’re right—there was far more sex going on than historians believe. Far more open-mindedness and of course, far more silliness when it came to politics. More literacy and more wit, but I’m trying to be fair. I can’t say I like all the people running around now with their tiny earplugs, recreating privacy and sense stimulation because they lack the time and the room for recreational pursuits. Josephine, Cole, Max—we lived in the moment. We never had to learn about Zen for that.”

  Tim watched the waiter fetch a new bottle from the wine rack and said, “They don’t see you. I mean those I came with. The same tricks you pulled outside the Beaubourg you’re using to disguise your presence here now, aren’t you? The akinetopsia, the mind reading—”

  “You over-estimate what the resurrected victims can do.”

  “You’re not a resurrected victim.”

  She looked at him sternly. “I am, Mr. Cale, in my own way. I’m merely one who
’s come back after a significant delay. As for ‘tricks’: what’s being done is the planting of a suggestion. The detectives, the others—they’re under the impression that Miss Anyanike has stepped in to talk to you. Even she thinks she’s making casual chit-chat with you at this table right now and will go back soon to her seat in that vehicle. It’s not that they can’t or don’t see me, it’s that this temporary idea is overriding their senses.”

  Tim studied the plain-clothes detectives for a moment. Amazing. They remained perfectly oblivious. He wanted to call out to them, but her eyes asked him silently to give up on the idea. He could tell that she would interpret this as some sort of mild betrayal.

  “It’s not such a clever trick. Did you know that two percent of the population has what’s called prosopagnosia?”

  “I have no idea what that is, but you’re starting to sound like Miller.”

  “Face blindness. These poor people… They literally can’t recognize others.”

  “But that’s not what you’re doing here,” said Tim. “You’ve substituted Crystal for you in their minds.”

  “Yes. I just find the other condition interesting as a point of trivia. It’s interesting how we see people. Your friend, Dr. Miller, will tell you that when you first spot a friend in the crowd on the street, you may not really see him either. Your mind has to play catch-up and match the physical description in front of you with your image of the person from memory. I suppose it gets more technical than that, but you get the gist. I can’t maintain it for long.”

  “Good to know.”

  “It’s not a slip of the tongue in admitting weakness, Mr. Cale. I’m not your enemy.”

  She reached across to rest her hand on his. Tim felt the softness, the quiet charge of sensual electricity as he’d feel with any attractive woman, and though he didn’t move his hand, he knew he showed surprise.

  “Yes, Tim. I’m real.”

  The waiter brought back the new bottle, placing it next to the Cabernet. Out of pure habit, Tim waited for the man to go, though he wondered if the waiter saw Emily Derosier or the illusion of Crystal Anyanike. He poured glasses of Merlot for both of them. She was right. It was a nice wine, and seeing his reaction, she crinkled her nose at him, biting her bottom lip. This was the mischievous British expat that had once weaved her spell only a couple of streets away.

  Don’t get seduced, he told himself.

  “What do you want?”

  “Ah. Not ‘Why are you here?’ You’d rather be impertinent.”

  “Fine,” he shot back. “If you like, we can start with ‘Why me?’ The only reason for you to make contact is because you must have information related to the Karma Booth. That’s an assumption, but I think it’s a reasonable one. The resurrected victims—sorry, other resurrected victims—have no memories of what happened to them between their deaths and their returns. You didn’t come out of that Booth scared and confused by the future. You hid, and then you sought me out. Maybe you are Emily Derosier, but you’re also something more, and you have an agenda. So why not seek out Weintraub? He’s the physics genius who understands the Booth. For that matter, why not go to Orlando Braithewaite? He gave us these damn things, from what I understand.”

  She paused, seeming to choose her words carefully. “Orlando Braithewaite is not your immediate problem.”

  “And you’re here to help.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So I ask again: Why come to me?”

  “Do you know why you were given this job?” she asked back. “You think it’s because you’re one of the few they could trust who has seen the impossible. But what the officials trusted—what is serving you best now—is that more elusive quality of insight you’re famous for.”

  He didn’t want to be distracted by flattery and pressed again: “You said there was an immediate problem. What is it?”

  “You were correct about the pattern of the resurrection victims, Tim. Heightened empathy connects us all.” And as he stared at her, she added, “No, I couldn’t observe the moment you said this to Weintraub and Miller, but the conversation is still in your memory, and you’ve been puzzling over what that connection of empathy means ever since you suggested it to them. You have insight. There is no insight without empathy. Where do you think such a gift comes from?”

  “If you’re about to tell me it’s a gift from Heaven—”

  “I don’t know anything about Heaven.”

  “Crystal will be disappointed.”

  Emily Derosier sat back and smiled, almost as if she had expected this reaction from him all along, as if she had hoped for it and was proud he had come through a modest test. “You’re not surprised by my answer. Because you don’t believe. Again, this is the kind of unordinary thinking that made you the right person to come to. I must say you’re showing remarkable restraint in not asking where I arrived from.”

  “You told me if I asked, I’d be a bore like others,” he reminded her.

  “So you would. But that’s not the reason, is it? It’s because you don’t think I’ll be truthful with you.”

  He ignored this, sitting forward and trying to be casual as he took another sip of the Merlot. “You still haven’t told me what the immediate problem is.”

  “Viktor Limonov.”

  “Limonov… What do you know of him?”

  “Things that you need to know.”

  “He’s a war criminal and a sociopath,” snapped Tim. “And he’s so far demonstrated he’s still a regular human. Or are you going to tell me that going through the Booth gave him abilities like the resurrected victims?”

  “No,” she said tensely, all playfulness from her voice gone. “No, he’s the same man—for the moment, as far as I know. But he doesn’t want to stay that way. He actually wants to leave this earth.”

  “If he wants to shuffle off his mortal coil, they gave him a chance in Amsterdam.”

  She shook her head. “You’re missing it. You’re missing the point completely. You’re assuming Limonov came out of the Booth in Delhi by choice.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tim felt his heart quicken. He looked to the two French detectives, needing someone else to share in his disbelief. What? Limonov came back because he couldn’t be executed in the Karma Booth?

  “Damn it, enough games! That couple hunting you at the Beaubourg—Ana Tvardovsky and Dmitry Zorich. They’re tied in with Limonov—”

  “Yes. Very good.”

  “They were trying to find you for Limonov. What the hell is this about? If you really want to help us, then help us! I watched Zorich die. Crystal shot him. And the bastard grinned at me like it was a joke! What makes Limonov different from him? From any other murderer? And just what are you? Why did you come back and where are you from? What does a psychopathic war criminal want with you? What is that thing you sent me in the picture frame? Miller says it’s alive—”

  “It’s not,” she broke in. “And it is.”

  “The truth!”

  “India but not India,” she said quickly, making him stop and calm down immediately.

  He waited for her to go on.

  “You were there, Tim, near the border. And the monks demonstrated to you a horrifying punishment for evil acts committed. You’ve tried to reconcile that power with what appeared to you to be a lack of compassion, a summary judgment. But you didn’t give in to a reflexive impulse of believing in myths. Where others see a divine hand, you felt a vague presence of… colonialism.”

  “What are you telling me?” he whispered.

  “Once upon a time, Viktor Limonov was one of those monks, interfering from another tier of existence,” she said, keeping her voice low and confessional.

  “From where you came from?”

  “I didn’t come from the same place as Viktor Limonov,” she replied with a note of disgust. “I was born in Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey, and I lived and died at twenty-nine years old in Paris, France. Viktor Limonov is far older than me—far older tha
n you can imagine. All I can make you understand for now is that there are multiple planes, tiers, levels—whatever you wish to call them. Think of it as…”

  She paused for an instant and then, inspired, said, “Think of it in terms of evolution if you like. Limonov was one of those monks, Tim, but as much as he’s been a monster here on earth, he excelled in cruelty in that form. There was a war, a horrible war that consumed two whole realms of existence near the one where I… where many human beings go. When it was over, they exiled him. They dumped Limonov on the bottom rung of corporeal existence here on earth. No matter where he is, no matter what he is, his consciousness has never forgotten what he was, and he has never forgiven his exile. He’s slithered and crawled and scuttled and galloped and run his way back up to humanity, and from humanity to a position of influence and corruption. He can’t be allowed to cross over.”

  “Cross over into what?”

  “Those other realms of existence.”

  “But the Booth…”

  “He can’t find his way back through the Booth. He’ll seek other means.”

  “If you know all this, if you’ve been sent back by someone,” asked Tim impatiently, “why can’t you stop him yourself?”

  “I told you. You over-estimate what the resurrection victims can do. They’re still quite human, I assure you, despite having abilities that allow some of them to fight back. So am I right now, in fragile ways you would scarcely believe.”

  Tim studied her beautiful face, her eyes so tender in their sincerity. “He murdered you. Didn’t he?”

  “No. By then Limonov had been exiled to this plane of existence, trying to climb back up. I was murdered by one of the monks, actually by one of those you met in India.” Before he could interject, she added quickly, “It doesn’t matter which one, really. And I’ve stopped caring. But yes, I remember the stranger in my apartment. I can remember how he spouted self-righteous platitudes after he stabbed me the first time. The first of many. It hurt so much. My killer said that I had gained an understanding of things human beings weren’t meant to know in their lifetimes. So he would ‘help’ me progress. I did.”