by Tad Williams
Devil-devil, the minister's wife had said. Devil-devil man.
The absurdly melodramatic thought nevertheless sent a chill through her, and for a moment she could almost believe she was not the only person in the tiny apartment. She barked an order at me system to close the blinds, cross with herself for doing so but suddenly wanting to be a little more private.
Calliope went back to the juvenile picture again, to the boy with a face like a shuttered house. Little Johnny. Johnny Dark.
It was obvious once you saw it, but she would have trouble explaining where the idea came from, or—more importantly—what she thought this intuition proved even if it were true. John Wulgaru's mother claimed he had been fathered by what the juvenile justice report called "a Filipino boatworker with a criminal history"—which meant a pirate, Calliope knew damn well, one of those human predators who waylaid boats and small ships on the Coral Sea, pilfered the cargo, even took the hijacked craft itself if it was worth the risk of a black market sale in Cairns, then machine-gunned the sailors and passengers to make sure there were no witnesses. Calliope had been a police officer in this part of the world long enough to know what a "boatworker with a criminal history" was, and she had also seen eyes shaped like little Johnny's many times: it wasn't just a rumor that the boy had an Asian father.
So little Johnny's Aboriginal last name didn't come from Daddy's side. His mother Emmy's real last name, the few remaining social worker reports agreed, was Minyiburu, although she was better known by various Anglo-sounding aliases, the most frequent being "Emmy Wordsworth." So where did "Wulgaru" come from? It might have been from one of the men who serially shared her life, an attempt to legitimize her boy through a stepfather's name, but from what the report had to say about her short-lived, violent liaisons—none mentioned as being with Aboriginal men of any sort, anyway—Calliope had a strong hunch that the name had come from somewhere else.
So where would that be? Why would his Aboriginal mother give her boy the name of a monster from her people's folklore?
Calliope was considering this, and feeling a vague certainty beginning to form that even the most scornful could have labeled intuition and she would not have been able to argue, when the other nagging concern, the one about the death notice, suddenly came clear to her and blew the question of Johnny's name out of her mind like a strong, cold wind.
She was so full of what she had just discovered that when the call was picked up on the other end she was only mildly bemused by the fact that her partner appeared to have been processed through some kind of reverse-time machine that had taken twenty years off his age. It wasn't until she noticed the acne that her scattered thoughts rearranged themselves into some kind of sense. She struggled to remember Stan's older nephew's name, but it came at last.
"Hi, Kendrick. Is your uncle there?"
"Oh, yeah, Ms. Skouros." He seemed to be watching something above her, and did not look away even when he shouted, "Uncle Stan!" It took Calliope a moment to realize she must be in a window at a corner of the wallscreen.
"So how are things with you?" she asked the boy. "School going well?"
He made a face and shrugged, not willing to take his eyes completely off whatever was banging and screaming on the other part of the screen. That was pretty much it for conversation, but he was a polite young man and did not simply ignore her: they both sat waiting patiently until Stan Chan arrived, at which point Kendrick evaporated from her view, moving to get a better angle on the wallscreen.
"What's up, Skouros?" Stan was wearing one of his horrible weekend shirts, but Calliope bravely resisted the urge to comment.
"Working. And you're babysitting. For a Friday night, this pretty much locks, Stan. At least one of us should definitely be having a date."
"I did have a date."
She raised an eyebrow. "You're home early, then." Stan refused to be drawn into further discussion on the subject, so she said, "It doesn't matter anyway. I found something. I was ready to give up and go out, go drinking or something, but I made myself work a little longer—you might try that sometime, Stan—and I think I hit paydirt."
Now it was Stan's eyebrow that tilted up. "Paydirt? Is that from a flick or something?"
"Shut up. I think I've had a big breakthrough. Shit—now I am talking like a flick. Here, I want to show you something. I'm putting it on your screen."
His eyes flicked up as his nephew's had done, examining the document; he had his little I'm-not-impressed quirk to his mouth, but he was reading carefully. "So?" he said when he had finished. "It's a report by some guy named Buncie to his parole officer that he met our Johnny on the streets of Kogarah. It's years old, Skouros—what's the point?"
"Damn, Stan, I wish you would read the files. Didn't you check out the notice of death?"
For a moment she saw a flash of defensiveness. "We only got them this afternoon, Skouros, after I was officially clocked out. Do I have to apologize for not being on the job twenty-four hours of every day?"
"I'm sorry." Behind him on the couch, she could see his younger nephew wrestling with Kendrick over something or other, could hear their breathy laughter. There were better things than work to do on a Friday night. "You're right, Stan. Sorry. Do you want me to save this until Monday?"
He laughed. "After calling me up in the middle of 'Romeo Blood: DEATH PACT SEVEN—The Return of Scourge' and making me miss the arch-villain's careful explanation of all the things he's going to do to destroy the world, so now I'm going to have to have it repeated to me by these two couch monkeys? Chance not, Skouros. You better have come up with something worthwhile, that's all I got to say."
"Okay, Right. Well, this guy Buncie told his parole officer. . . ."
"Why do we have that anyway?"
"Turned up in the cross-check. If someone was editing out Johnny Wulgaru stuff, they missed it. Anyway, Buncie claims he had a conversation with Johnny on September 26th, about nothing much—Buncie said our boy 'much sliced him,' didn't give him a lot of respect. The kind of thing that sticks in a street beast's mind."
"So? Or have I said that before?"
"You have, Stan. Come on, take your eyes off Romeo Blood for a second. That's two whole weeks after the date of death on the death notice!"
Stan shrugged. "I saw that. But Buncie-boy has probably got charge damage like crazy, and the statement was made a year after the fact. I think it's more likely he got his dates wrong."
"I thought so, too, Stanley." She couldn't resist a small note of triumph. "But I checked, just to make sure . . . and you know what? Buncie might have a skull so pounded by bad gear he wouldn't know when he last saw his own mother, but he was in prison until three days after the date when Johnny Wulgaru is supposed to have died. So either he made the whole thing up for no conceivable reason, he was talking to a ghost, or somebody falsified a death notice. Me, I don't think little Johnny Dread died before Polly Merapanui. I think he killed her, and you know what else I think? I think the bastard's still alive."
Stan was silent for a long moment. His younger nephew asked him something Calliope couldn't quite hear, but Stan ignored him.
"Know something?" he said at last. "You should swear off going out for good, Skouros. You do your best work when you're home feeling sorry for yourself and spilling ice cream on your sweater." As she looked down to see the glob of white she had completely missed slowly oozing its way into the fibers, Stan continued. "You are one smart person, partner, and that is the truth. Now I'm going to watch the end of the Romeo Blood program, 'cause I think any moment now they're going to start blowing up all kinds of stuff."
"Is that all?"
"Well, even though I love you, I'm still not going to work through another weekend. But on Monday I think we start to hunt Johnny Dark for real. Okay?"
She smiled. It felt good. "Okay."
It was only after she broke the connection that she remembered she had forgotten to tell Stan her idea about the name.
On a sunny day like today, w
ith the shop banners moving in the breeze along Spring Street, the windows full of artsy animated displays and the sidewalks a continual parade of interesting-looking people, Dulcie Anwin remembered again what it had felt like when she first moved to New York.
Her mother, who had no idea that her daughter had already lost her criminal virginity while still a student hacker at Stevens Institute (a swift slide from stealing tests to a credit card scam that kept her in the kind of clothes her roommates couldn't afford), could never understand why her daughter would leave the relative safety of Edison, New Jersey, for a dangerous, dirty place like Manhattan. Ruby Anwin had carefully constructed what she thought of as an exciting life for herself in the suburbs—friends who were musicians and artists and philosophy professors, lovers who became husbands, or some who simply stayed lovers, including one or two women just pour épater le bourgeois—and couldn't understand why her only child would want something more. The idea that a permissive upbringing could lead to rebellion had occurred to Ruby, of course, and she had feared raising a daughter who might become a religious zealot or a slot-eyed Republican, concerned only with material goods. In fact, since all she knew of her daughter's current profession was that she worked with information technology and traveled a lot, she was quietly convinced that Dulcie had veered toward the latter. What had never occurred to her was that a child raised in a household in which her own high school teachers were doing drugs in the downstairs bathroom during her mom's parties might need to go even farther afield to find her individuation.
Born into an earlier generation, Dulcie might have become a political extremist, a bomb builder, someone willing to sacrifice her own life—and those of occasional bystanders—in an assault against the System. But when Dulcie had begun to discover who the secret masters of the world truly were, instead of rebelling against them, she had gone to work for them.
So when her mother said with the aggressive cheerfulness that was her hallmark, "Dulcie, honey, I know you're busy, but why don't you come visit for a week anyway? You can do your work here. I have a system, you know—I don't live in the Stone Age," Dulcie couldn't tell her the truth. She tried instead to explain it away in terms of bandwidth, and business calls coming in at weird hours from other parts of the world, and all her reference material being at home, and even in terms of needing proper security: her own system was almost alive, teeming with evolving antivirals, tiny A-Life gear that adapted and learned and changed. But the truth was that if she wanted to, she could get a fast enough link from her mother's house to work off her own system from there. The reason she didn't go home for more than a few hours at a stretch, even after eight years of living only a short drive away, was that she didn't want to. Her mother made her feel like a little girl, and Dulcie had spent far too much time building credibility with international criminals to like that feeling very much.
The piece in the gallery window had caught her eye, and she was standing in a ray of sunshine, squinting against the glare and wondering whether she shouldn't be wearing sunblock, when her pad beeped.
The artist had taken a group of little builder toys—the kind you could buy in any souvenir store or on most street comers—and put them into an intricate grid made of glass pipes. But what gave the piece its jolt was that he had supplied them with building materials too large to be manipulated within the narrow confines, thus frustrating the monomaniacal automata completely.
Is that supposed to be some comment on modern life? she wondered. The pad beeped again, this time with a second tone—a priority signal. She felt her heart speed a little. She felt pretty certain she knew who it was.
He was not transmitting visuals, but his voice, even with slight distortion, was unmistakable. "I have to talk to you."
She stilled the hammer of pulse as best she could. Why did he have this effect on her? It was like something at the pheromone level, if pheromones could travel over satlinks from Colombia to New York, something subliminal that made her feel she was being stalked by an interested male despite the lack of any outward signs. Whatever the cause, it was something she could not understand and did not entirely like.
"I'm outside at the moment." She couldn't assume he was getting visuals on his end. "I've got you on my pad."
"I know. Go home. I need to talk to you now."
The voice was flat, and Dulcie bristled at the tone of command—one of her early stepfathers had tried the Dad Voice on her, as she thought of it, and had received permanent contempt as his reward. But she had another response as well, a more placatory urge. He was her employer, after all. He was a man used to dealing with men—stupid men, or at least men who needed to be ordered around, from what she'd seen. And was that an undertone of real need in his words, something he did not want to let her see? Was that why he had blanked the picture?
"Well, you've probably saved me spending a lot of money," she said, keeping her tone light. The little builders in the gallery window were trying to get a stainless steel pin around an S-bend in their pipette, something that wasn't physically possible for them, but they weren't giving up; she had a feeling if she came back the next day they'd still be shoving the same pin at the same bend, still without result. "I was about to indulge in some serious shopping. . . ."
"I'll call you in thirty minutes," he said, and was gone.
The palm-reader at the main street entrance was even slower than the one on her own door. The thing was ridiculously old, and miserable in chilly weather when you had to take off your glove to operate it.
As she wrestled her bags through the door, someone called a greeting to her. She looked up to see the guy with the artistic haircut who lived a few doors down from Charlie, waving as the elevator door hissed closed.
The bastard. Did he ever think I might want to use it, too?
Every time she wondered about the life she had chosen for herself—hurrying home on a Friday evening, not to get dressed to go out somewhere, but to take a call from an international terrorist—she thought of how pleased her mother would have been to see her hooked up instead with somebody like Mister Elevator Wave, and it all fell back into perspective. She knew that type only too well. He would be big on personal freedom when it came to things like getting his own way—oh, the Bohemian clichés that would be flung around then!—but it would be quite a different story if someone was having a loud party upstairs when he wanted to work, or if she wanted to go somewhere he didn't.
Dulcie waited for the elevator, hating a man with whom she had never spoken.
But the thing was, she thought as she got out on her own floor, what other kind of man was she going to meet? She worked too hard, even when she was on the road, and when she came back to New York she barely ever had the energy to go out. Was that her range of options—criminals and neighbors?
Even someone like Dread, someone who was at least interesting—how could you have a relationship with someone like that? It was stupid. Even if there had been a spark of some kind, even if her own strange feelings were in any way reciprocated, what future could there be?
Still, even a fling had its attractions.
She stood waiting for her own door to recognize her, wondering if she'd gone too far now ever to turn back, to be a normal person. Was it just the adrenaline? Surely she could get that somewhere else—skydiving, jaywalking on freeways, something. The whole thing had seemed so exciting when she had first started, but that's what people always thought before everything went bad. Dulcie wasn't stupid: she knew that. Was it all worth it?
It was the dreams that were unsettling her, she told herself as the door grudgingly decided to let her in. The bad dreams. There was nothing very mysterious about them. Her little cocker spaniel, Nijinsky—her mother's choice of name; Dulcie had called him "Jinkie"—the one who had been hit by a car when she was ten, was suffering. She didn't know how or why exactly (in the dream there was no car, no blood on the little dog's muzzle as there had been in real life) but she knew she had to put Jinkie out of his misery. "End his
suffering," as her mother had said. But in the dreams there was no veterinarian's office either, no smell of alcohol and pet hair. In her dreams she had a gun, and as she touched the barrel to the little dog's head, he rolled his eyes toward her without seeing, responding only to the feeling of the metal bumping against his skull.
It didn't take a Park Avenue specialist to tell Dulcie what the dream was about, that it was not Jinkie she was dreaming about, but a Colombian gear monkey named Celestino. She had been pleased with herself for how easily she had done the deed—a neat, quick performance, like swatting a spider with a rolled-up newspaper—and she had been proud of how little it had affected her. But night after night she saw Jinkie's small body trembling with fear as she approached. Night after night she woke up sweating, calling for the lights in a shaky voice.
It happens, Anwin, she told herself. So you thought you'd get off lightly—you didn't. But the world is full of innocent little children getting killed every day, starved, raped, beaten to death, and you're not losing sleep over them. Why worry about a lowlife like Celestino? He was putting every other person in that operation at risk. You were a soldier, and he was a risk to everyone. You did your job.
Which might be true—she wasn't quite sure anymore—but there were moments, especially at two in the morning, when the idea of working for a normal company and being married to a man whose idea of wild behavior was making love on the living room couch instead of in the bedroom seemed to have its charms.
