redRobe

Chapter Ten Waiting For Darkness

The sun overhead on the Cancun coast was blistering but it was the wet-sponge humidity that really got to Colonel Emilio. That and the 1500-klick journey from Day Effé, through Veracruz, Campeche and Valladolid to Cancun.

‘You know the real problem with Mexico?’ Axl said loudly as he looked round at the uniforms filling the long corridor of the Villa Carlotta with a clash of primary colours and handfuls of gold braid.

The walls of the corridor were salmon pink, the floor white marble and all the windows were trompe l’oeil… Florid Rousseausque gardens painted directly onto cracking plaster. Axl had worked McDonald's kitchens that were less humid and he wasn’t even dressed in a green cavalry tunic buttoned to the neck.

‘Well, do you?’ he asked the sweating Colonel.

Colonel Emilio didn’t know and—what’s more—he didn’t want to know either; but that wasn’t going to stop Axl Borja telling him.

‘Most of the fuck-wits in this government can’t tell the difference between history and nostalgia.’ Which was probably true.

Unfortunately it was also slander against the state, a fact obvious to all those stood around them. So it was a relief to the Colonel when he finally reached the huge double doors that led into the Cardinal’s anteroom.

‘Colonel Emilio to see His Excellency,’ announced the Colonel. It had taken three hours to navigate the corridor. And all that time he’d been unable to sit down or relieve himself for fear of losing his place in the vast and restless queue.

He didn’t bother to give the waiting usher the name of his prisoner. The red cuffs that bound Axl’s hands made clear his position in the equation, and if the cuffs didn’t, the blackened eye and cut lip certainly did.

The usher consulted a list and nodded, running one finger over Colonel Emilio’s name so that it changed from blue to red on his pad. There had been no need for the Colonel to announce himself, just as there had been no real need for the man stood at the door to check his list. FaceSoft would already have pulled up names plus a bullet-point list of their careers to date.

In fact, neither would have got that far if the Villa’s AI hadn’t already authorised their presence. Cameras were everywhere in the corridor, tiny pin-lenses wired into a spider’s web of optic that ran behind the priceless 19th-century frescoes.

‘If you would wait in here…’ The usher nodded to the door which creaked open, struggling under its weight.

They found themselves in a pre-anteroom. Ornate, gilded, impossibly baroque but a holding pen all the same. Axl looked approvingly at the tall window that made up one side of the tiny room.

A real window this time, glazed with crystal polymer. Running through each huge pane, invisible to the naked eye, was spider’s web woven into a mesh that was tougher than military-grade steel and more forgiving than thermal polymer.

And if that wasn’t enough, the window had semiAI fast-action shutters, lead-lined against radiation, while the heavy brocade curtains were woven from charcoal-bearing silk to protect against biologicals. The window couldn’t fight back but as passive defence systems went this one defined ‘top of the range’.

Mind you, it should have done… Axl had served under the woman who drew up the original specification and he was willing to bet Colonel Emilio didn’t know that either.

‘Come on man, move,’ the Colonel hissed and Axl gave a twisted smile.

‘LockMart-designed doors,’ Axl announced, tapping what looked like wood, ‘alternate layers of titanium alloy and blast-proof ceramic micromesh, sourced in Paris from the Imperial Armouries. The windows were grown in Prague around spider’s web woven in Beijing. I‘d tell you where the curtains came from, but His Excellency doesn’t want anyone to know…’

Colonel Emilio looked at the usher, who very carefully didn’t return his gaze. If there was going to be trouble, the flunky didn’t want any part of it.

‘Through there,’ he told the Colonel politely, nodding his head towards the next door and went back to examining his list. It ran for screen after screen, but anyone seeing the queue built up in the corridor behind would have known that.

Axl stepped through the door ahead of the Colonel and, following after, the Colonel found himself facing not the Cardinal as he’d expected but a grand room, lined down the sides and in the middle with wooden benches, all occupied. Towering brick-red walls were hung with gold-framed mirrors and antique portraits. The mirrors were neo Venetian and the vast pictures showed Hispanic men in armour with beards and jutting chins or woman with jutting breasts and dishevelled hair. The only black figures in the paintings were kneeling or stood discreetly in the background.

Not one of the paintings was religious. The first time Axl had stayed at Villa Carlotta, back when he was a boy he’d decided the Cardinal didn’t want to get religion and politics mixed. Now he knew you could no more separate religion from politics in Mexico than you could separate a person from their past.

‘My,’ said Axl lightly, nodding towards the benches, ‘isn’t His Excellency popular?’

Hundreds of faces had turned to watch them come in.

‘Still, that’s the nice thing about Mexico. Even the meanest peon can request an audience with the Cardinal. Of course...' Axl shrugged, ‘whether they get to see him is another matter.’

Colonel Emilio nervously adjusted his empty sword belt. He was wearing full dress, like every other officer in the room. But minus his sabre. Weapons were not to be carried in the presence of the Cardinal, not even ceremonial ones. Those petitioners without uniform wore long dark soutanes or simple cassocks, belted at the waist with the colour of their order. And those without church dress wore dark suits, with white shirts or blouses.

Only Axl was dressed in basic peon uniform of black chinos and white T-shirt, and he was so obviously a prisoner that no one expected anything better.

‘Stand over there,’ ordered a fat usher, his expression so bored it had to have been surgically enhanced. Colonel Emilio was about to protest but never got the chance. ‘Over there,’ repeated the usher and was gone. Waddling past a crowded bench, the man managed to ignore every upturned and enquiring face, disappearing through a small wooden door which banged shut behind him.

Five, maybe six, hundred people waited in that room, with maybe twice as many in the queue outside. Almost all were men, with only a handful of women to leaven the mix. That was how Mexican politics still worked; to the despair of Mexico’s northern neighbour and the Emperor herself.

And how many waiting in that sweltering crowd would the Cardinal actually see in one day? Ten, fifteen… ? Axl didn’t know, but he wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if the Cardinal was somewhere else altogether, like Paris or Rome.

Or in the capital having a discreet meeting with the new emperor. And if not then maybe in New York talking to the UN about the ‘fugee lifts to Samsara. Rumour in the barrio said the Cardinal was irritated by the number of Mexicans approaching the Red Cross to claim ‘fugee status. And if the word had met the street, then it was pounding the beat because the Cardinal wanted it there. That was how Declan Begley worked.

‘Would you emigrate to Samsara?’ Axl suddenly asked the Colonel, who went bug-eyed. A woman sat behind sniggered, but most of those around them looked away. Leaving Mexico was disloyal. Even prisoners should know that.

‘Clean air,’ said Axl lightly. ‘Better climate.’ He glanced slowly round the crowded chamber and stopped at the carved door he knew led through to the Cardinal’s study. ‘Better class of criminal...'

A captain of police standing by the wall stepped forward, noticed he was outranked by Colonel Emilio and stepped smartly back. But he didn’t lower his gaze and when he spoke it was direct to the Colonel’s prisoner.

‘Keep your mouth shut.’

‘Or what… ?’ Axl asked. ‘You’ll have me condemned to death?’ His laugh was abrupt, at odds with the polite irony in his voice. Enough at odds to make the fat woman beside them suddenly stand up and walk away.

‘Axl O’Higgins Borja...'

The voice from the flat speaker set into the far wall was soft, almost reedy, with the faintest Fall’s Road accent. And of all the waiting petitioners, only Axl recognised it and he wasn’t even really petitioning. Unless he was meant to count asking for his life, which he didn’t. As far as Axl was concerned he was owed that, whether the Cardinal intended to pay up or not.

Heads were being raised around the waiting room, as every petitioner glanced frantically round to see who’d been called. Even the hot chocolate sellers who ambled with little silver trolleys from bench to crowded bench stopped their endless round of fleecing the bored, weary and upset.

Jaw clenched against his own embarrassment, the Colonel yanked Axl forward and began to push his way down an aisle, treading on the feet of those who didn’t move their boots fast enough. Axl tagged along behind him, staring back at anyone who looked at him. Raybans would have helped his defiance, but the only person allowed to wear shades when the Cardinal was around was the Cardinal himself, and his were tiny pebble glasses that only just kept the sunlight from his eyes.

‘Which one of you is Axl O’Higgins Borja?’ The major-domo’s smile was sympathetic, but he didn’t look at the prisoner.

Axl raised his chin. ‘That’s me.’

‘Okay. In you go…’

The Colonel stepped forward and the small man slid neatly in front of him, blocking the door. ‘Borja goes in,’ he said shortly.

‘But the man’s my prisoner ...'

Tiny slit pupils narrowed, memorising the Colonel’s face. ‘Whose prisoner?’ The small man had that low gravel growl so popular back when vampyres were in fashion. Only with him, you got the feeling it was for real.

‘I am to escort the prisoner,’ the Colonel said, sounding suddenly formal.

‘And you’ve done so,’ said a soft voice from behind the door. ‘Now go and buy some of that God-awful chocolate and wait, in case I need you further ...'

He wouldn’t, of course. He just wanted to make Colonel Emilio wait. The Cardinal didn’t like the Colonel, not least because he was Maximillia’s spy. Other politicians might try to keep spies out of their offices but not Cardinal Santo Ducque. He held his friends close and his enemies closer still, where he could keep a jaundiced eye on them.

Saluting smartly, the Colonel turned on his heel. There wasn’t space to sit so the cavalry officer pushed his way towards a huge window that overlooked lush terraces and the sea beyond.

‘Right,’ said the major domo to Axl, ‘in you go.’ He stepped back and as Axl slouched forward the small man gave an irritated hiss, pointedly straightening his own back and squaring his shoulders. Axl immediately followed suit and the major-domo gave a nod so slight Axl might have imagined it.

‘Mother of God. Stop sympathising with the fool,’ said the voice inside the door, ‘and send him in. I don’t have all day to waste.’

‘No, Your Excellency,’ said the major-domo. ‘Of course not.’

There was a sour joke that had done the rounds a few months back about the Cardinal.

The emperor, her uncle and the Cardinal land in the United States on their first visit. The first thing Max sees is a black goat. ‘Look,’ exclaims the emperor excitedly, ‘all the goats in America are black.’

‘No,’ responds her uncle cuttingly, ‘in the US some goats are black.’

The Cardinal sighs. ‘All we can truly say,’ he says firmly, ‘is that in the US there exists at least one field, containing at least one goat, at least one side of which is black. Now that’s solved, let’s eat it. . .’

What put that into Axl’s head he didn’t know. Simple fear, maybe. Or perhaps it was the handwritten list on the black glass desk in front of the Cardinal that the man was busy annotating with an old-fashioned pen. The kind that ran on ink. The list on the desk could be anything, Axl knew that. Imports and exports, revenues collected, coming engagements ... A note of those recently condemned to death.

The old man tugged once at his small pointed beard but said nothing, did nothing, merely kept amending the list in front of him. And then he started over again… Just when Axl was beginning to think the Cardinal really had forgotten he was there, the old man spoke without looking up, his voice dark as treacle.

‘I won’t even begin to ask where you’ve been.’

Since when? Not since the second series of WarChild got bounced off the networks after a three-year run through the jungles of South America. The Cardinal knew all about that. And not since Axl had ripped a suit, because that alone wasn’t enough to bounce him out of the Cardinal’s employ. Besides, that occasion had worked out well, for both of them.

The suit in question had been reaming out a twelve-year-old rene. A street kid so malnourished and stunted she could have been mistaken for her ten-year-old brother, if he hadn’t looked six. That mission was not ordered by anyone, not even televised. Axl did it on instinct, and no one would have paid him anyway. Hell, no one Would’ve even known the kid had been raped except for Axl stumbling drunk into an alley by accident and put a flechette through her attacker’s throat halfway through his attack.

It was Axl’s bad luck the alley had vidcams set up outside a warehouse door and that the cams were working. Good luck kicked in when the shooting made GoodGuysGoneBad with an approval rating of eighty-four percent. It saved his life.

‘Mulling over your sins,’ a voice asked dryly.

‘No.’ Axl shook his head, ‘thinking about that kid out at Xochimilco.’

‘You mean Sister Innocenta?’

Axl laughed. ‘Innocenta?’

‘You have a problem with that name?’ The voice was darkly amused, but there was steel behind it.

Axl shook his head. Anything the child wanted to call herself was all right with him.

‘It means innocent,’ said the Cardinal slowly, picking a pastelillo de Cabello de Angel off a Sevres plate and painstakingly eating away the sugared crust around its edge. He knew Axl knew that.

‘Look at me,’ demanded the Cardinal and finally Axl stopped looking everywhere except at the man who held Axl’s life in his withered hands. As always, it was impossible to see the old man’s eyes behind those trademark lenses dark enough to be used to look at the sun. But dragging on his thin cigar, the Cardinal looked serene, unmoved.

Not furious but not friendly either, Axl decided.

‘Assassination is illegal under Mexican law, yes?

Axl nodded.

‘And when I reintroduced the death penalty, I made it clear that anyone who broke the law would suffer its full force, no exceptions?’

There was little Axl could do but nod. He could hardly claim to have missed the edict. ‘Assassination law targets zaibatsu killings,’ the upscale local newsfeeds had splashed. Further down the bit stream, the midmarkets had run endless variations on, ‘Is this the end to horror?’ And at the mouth of the stream where fact was whatever you claimed it was and information hit the open sewer that was Mexico’s unconscious, every title from the Enquirer upwards went into a feeding frenzy at the though of the reintroduction of public executions. Tickets to the killings and half-price hotel vouchers was the least of the promotions.

But that was nothing to the bidding scrum. Before a LotusMorph of the Cardinal had even finished reading the original edict, those same networks had been on screen to the Cardinal trying to buy exclusive access, including full syndication rights.

‘No exceptions, remember?’ the Cardinal repeated and Axl nodded.

‘So why should I make one for you?’

That was the big question. ‘Because I saved your life… ?’ Axl suggested slowly.

‘And you’ve already had yours from me, twice over,’ said the Cardinal. Smoke curled up between his lips to meet dust-laden sunlight, its ectoplasmic edges thinning to fractal-fine invisibility.

‘I might save your life again.’

For a moment the elderly prelate looked almost interested and then he gave a twisted smile. ‘You’re not telling me you know of a plot?’ His tone was ironic, but beneath it the Cardinal sounded disappointed.

‘No,’ said Axl. ‘No plot.’

‘Would you tell me if there was? And could I blame you if you didn’t?’ There was gravel in the Cardinal’s whisper, put there by insomnia, thirty years of bad dreams and too many cigars, but there was something else as well. And if it had been anyone speaking but the Cardinal then Axl would have called it guilt.

This was the man who took him away from New York, fixed the audition for WarChild and paid to have Axl’s reflexes enhanced and his sight augmented. Was that what itched the old man’s conscience, or were they talking about the one thing they never talked about?

It seemed they were.

‘You’re not responsible for your birth.’

No. He wasn’t. No one was. But the Cardinal had been responsible for finding out about Axl’s mother. And having found out, he told a traumatised ten-year-old boy something he couldn’t bear to hear. Back then the Cardinal called it dealing with the truth…

Axl called it irresponsible.

Eyes hidden behind their own darkness examined Axl’s face, looking for something. Axl didn’t know if the Cardinal found it, but the old man took a deep hit on his thin cigar and suddenly pointed to the window and the azure sea beyond.

‘You think they catch anything?’

Fishing boats hung on the water above the reef, butterfly nets slung both sides of the prows of crude canoes, their mesh not yet touching the sea.

Axl shook his head.

‘Occasionally they get a bonefish or two over the reefs… Father Pedro,’ the Cardinal jerked his pointed chin towards a distant speck, ‘once caught a barracuda.’

‘What did you do?’ Axl asked.

‘With the fish? We fed it to Behemoth.’ The old man smiled at a large black cat lying curled up on the tiles in the sun, which opened one green eye at the mention of its name. Axl could have sworn the brute was grinning.

‘All right,’ said the Cardinal as he stubbed out his cigar and immediately picked up his hardly-eaten pastille ‘I’ll make you an offer. Give me one good reason why I should spare your life.’ It was obvious that the audience was nearly over.

‘I can’t,’ said Axl. ‘There isn’t one.’

And then he admitted the truth to himself. There never had been.