The Blue Place

four

I wore a light linen suit. It was going to be a hot one today: only ten-thirty and already in the high eighties. I opened all the Saab’s doors and windows and waited while the oven heat gushed out. A small redheaded woodpecker, a male with black body and white stripe across its back and wings, was thwacking its beak industriously against the siding under the eaves. No doubt the resonant drumming would sound impressive to the brown females in the area and they could take turns feeding him when he was too addled to catch beetles.

I left the air-conditioning off, the windows down, and enjoyed the fat heat that snaked through the car as I drove.

What kind of car did Michael Honeycutt, banker, drive? What did he look like, how did he sound? I wanted to see him, to weigh the fabric of his suit, smell his cologne, judge his haircut, watch his body language, listen to the way he shaped his vowels.

One of the first times I had been called on the carpet as a police officer had been back when Denneny was still a lieutenant, back in the days when he could still tremble with fury, or laughter, or worry for one of his people. I couldn’t even remember the details of the incident; all I remember was him pacing up and down his office, shouting at me: “You can’t just break in and start banging heads, Torvingen! Knowing isn’t good enough. You need proof, because our justice is legal justice, not street justice.” So I would need to assemble my proof, I would need to bide my time. Besides, while personal indicators would tell me things that no dossier could, they would also give me nothing like the whole story.

People are twisty animals. I have met unpleasant men and women whom I do not like because I suspect they are at heart cruel, or take absolutely no joy from life, or believe some sections of society are little better than vermin and should be exposed at birth; but I have trusted some of these same women and men with my life because they have learnt to bind their natural inclinations with cages of rules and ethical behaviour that I know will hold and guide them under almost any circumstance. Equally, I have met people whom I have liked instinctively, on sight, but would not trust because they have never been tested, not even by themselves, and have never had to formulate rules to get by. Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first?

So although there were certain things I could only learn about Michael Honeycutt by meeting him face-to-face, there was a great deal I could find out by looking at his track record, his habits, and his job.

At the Ponce de Leon branch of the Fulton County Library I parked carefully under the pathetic sapling in the middle of the lot. Better than nothing. There was a minivan four spaces down. The sliding door was open. A man was lying back in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, keys dangling from the steering column. Probably waiting for his wife. It would be so easy to slip into the passenger seat, break his neck with one twist, bundle him into the back and drive away. Less than forty seconds. No witnesses. People are so stupid.

“Anthony,” I said to the plump, balding man blinking in the sunshine leaking through the enormous skylight over the reference desk, “I need some information on Massut Vere, investment bankers.”

He sighed—he always sighed and acted like a fifty-year-old who had been forced to get out of his cosy fireside armchair and shuffle off in his slippers on some unpleasant errand, even though I doubted he was a day over thirty—and repeated, “Massut Vere.”

“Corporate structure, personnel, specialist interest, political flavour, anything that would give me a feeling for what kind of institution they are. Pay particular attention to any mention of a man called Michael Honeycutt.”

“When do you need it by? Yesterday, I suppose.”

I didn’t smile; Anthony thought smiles frivolous and out of place in a library. “I’ll be here for forty minutes or so.” He would have a first cut for me in less than half an hour. The more he looked forward to a task, the more he grumbled.

At the New Fiction section I skimmed the rows of E. Annie Proulx, Anne Rice and Robert James Waller and moved on in disgust to Non-Fiction. There was a new biography of Albert Murray that looked interesting. Farther down was something called Gender Critique in Body Modification. Helen had said something about that performance artist being into “gendered body art,” so I picked it up. I took those and a text on cults to a carrel and started flipping through. An index can tell you a book’s parameters. Everything I looked up in the Murray was there: Romare Beardon, Malcolm X, Count Basie, Ralph Ellison, The Omni-Americans, Wynton Marsalis, geopolitics. The cult book, on the other hand, was less promising: Cohesiveness, Conditioning, Controlled Drinking, Conformity…. The body modification volume had something it called a hyperindex, no doubt put together by someone who thought they were designing a web page. I flipped through charmingly obtuse text and stomach-churning graphics.

After half an hour I took the Murray and bod-mod books to the reference desk. Anthony was presiding over a pile of books, catalogues and printouts looking sour: his version of smug complacency. “These you can check out”—he pointed to the books—“these you can keep”—a handful of still-warm photocopies—“and this is a list of files, some of them more general than I would like, that I’ve pulled from a quick electronic search. Just two references to Honeycutt.”

I didn’t thank him—he would start to stutter—but I would as usual send a cheque for the library’s Children’s Books fund that was Anthony’s particular passion. Maybe I’d put that one on expenses.

I stared past my monitor and into the back garden. A chipmunk picked up an old, old pecan, threw it down in disgust. Two cardinals trilled liquidly at each other, bright red against the emerald green. One of the neighbour’s cats slunk belly down through the grass towards them. Snakes in fur coats, Dorothy Parker had called cats. Sometimes I could see why.

Anthony’s references had not been much help. I had tedious details about Massut Vere, who, despite the unlikely name, were one of the oldest and richest merchant bankers in the South, with interests in everything from tobacco, cotton and railroads to bioengineering, cable television and pizzas. Michael Honeycutt had been with them for just under two years, coming to the company from a bank in California. There was a small black and white photograph that could have been anybody.

The cat stopped, twitched its hindquarters to and fro, and pounced; not at the birds, but something hidden in the grass. Probably a shrew. The garden teemed with them. They dug burrows all over the lawn and if you crouched motionless on the grass, sooner or later you would hear them rooting about under what was left of last year’s leaves. They were always there, even in the rain. Shrews can’t store or metabolize fat. If humans ate proportionally as much as a shrew, we would have to consume the equivalent of two pigs, thirty chickens, two hundred pears, three pineapples, and twenty bars of chocolate every day. Busy life.

I turned off the computer. Time to go to the second leg of my plan.

I called Eddie, the special assistant and researcher to Elaine Merx, a popular columnist at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

“Hello, Eddie.”

“Aud. Good to hear from you. And how are you?”

“Good.”

“Let me guess, you want some help on something.”

“Of course.”

“There’s a new restaurant I’ve discovered. The Horseradish Grill….”

“Anytime after next week.” It would be expensive—it was always expensive when he picked—but the food would be wonderful, the service even better, and we would both enjoy ourselves immensely. I have known Eddie for a long time. “I want to know everything about two different people. Charlie Sweeting, who lives—”

“In his seventies? Lives off Ponce? I know Charming Charlie. And the other one?”

“A banker with Massut Vere, Michael Honeycutt.”

“Hmmn.” A long drawn-out contemplation as he tick-ticked at his keyboard. “Ah. Hmmn. There’s a fair amount here. And some of the information on Charming Charlie isn’t in the electronic archive, so perhaps you should come down and take a look. I’ll be here until seven tonight.”

“I’d like to come now if it’s convenient.”

“Of course.”

I found my way around the big AJC building on Marietta Street and to Eddie’s cubbyhole with the ease of long practice.

“Aud, lovely to see you!” There was no way to describe Eddie’s voice except to call it lugubrious. He was almost six feet tall, built like a dancer, with tight nappy hair and mournful brown eyes that could light up with bright, clean joy at the slightest provocation. We hugged. “You look…” he tilted his head to one side, “engaged.”

I lifted my eyebrows.

“As in engaged with life, rather than engaged to be married.”

“I’m trying to find out who burned someone to a crisp in Inman Park last week.”

“A crusader at last.”

“At last?”

“Don’t tell me it’s for the money, or for the thrills and spills that you’re taking on a drug case.”

“It’s not a drug case.”

“The police found cocaine.”

“Yes.”

“But it was a white boy art historian who died and not some crack dealer.”

“Eddie…”

“Sorry. It’s a habit I get into around here, pointing out the obvious. So, you think Charming Charlie, and Honeycutt, patron of all the most boring Big Culture groups in the city and darling of the downtown gallery owners, are involved in this nondrug drug murder?”

“Darling of downtown galleries?”

“Oh, indubitably. Take a seat.” Click. “Top bidder for this jade piece in November.” Click. “Purchaser for an undisclosed price of not one but two Fabergé eggs.” Click. “This rather indifferent sculpture by a local artist.” Click. “Owner of these recently discovered Roman coins. Hmmn.”

“What?”

“Remarkably catholic, don’t you think?”

“Explain.”

“Most collectors have a specialty, a burning passion: silver snuffboxes of the seventeenth century, British Commonwealth stamps pre-World War II, that kind of thing. These items don’t seem to have anything in common.”

“Are there more?”

“Many.” He clicked through the rest: a ten-inch jewel-encrusted icon; a rare stamp; a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (“There are at least six pairs of those floating around that I know of,” Eddie said); a messy explosion of an oil painting by someone I’d never heard of…. “He has bought these over a period of just two years.”

“How much has he spent?”

“Some of the prices were not officially disclosed, but at a conservative guess I’d say somewhere between twelve and fifteen million. That’s all of them. You want to see them again?”

I nodded. Fifteen million. Fifteen million on such a wild collection that was part odd, like the painting and sculpture, but mostly precious. “What else?”

“He goes to dozens of fund-raising balls, dinners and speeches. He is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and two or three other professional organizations. Gives parties. He’s not married but often photographed in the presence of beautiful young women from Atlanta and from out of town.”

“Gay?”

“Don’t think so. There was a rumour last year that some old girlfriend was threatening to sue him for battery and emotional abuse but that the case was settled before it got to court. He’s forty-two—”

His photographs showed a lean, tanned, smiling man with short dark hair and wire-framed glasses. “Older than he looks.”

“Indeed. Previously employed by California Mutual Holdings and, before that, Bay Banking. No arrests here or in California. Not even a parking ticket. House in Marietta, one on Lake Lanier.”

“Tell me about his job.”

“Vice president, but I don’t know what of. Several articles mention meetings with foreign business managers, and I think he was involved in helping North Carolina get that BMW plant. Travels to various offshore tax havens such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, and—three times last year—the Seychelles. Also flies to Mexico and Los Angeles fairly regularly.”

“Give me the names of the galleries he patronizes most.”

“Easy. Cess Silverman at Hye Galleries.”

I frowned. Cess Silverman. “Isn’t she one of Georgia’s Democratic Party movers and shakers?”

“The same.”

I thought for a while but could not make any of it hang together. “How about Sweeting?”

“Ah,” he said with approval, “at least he knows how to collect.” He handed me a one-page printout.

“This is his obituary.”

“Yes. As a précis of his life so far, it’s hard to beat. We have them on file for all prominent Georgia citizens, updated every four months.” I wondered if they had one on me.

I ran through it quickly. S. Charles Sweeting III. Born in Covington, Georgia, in 1922. Son of congressional representative S. Charles Sweeting, Jr. Purple Heart in World War II. Married Jonetta Marie Sturton in 1947. Three children…. Worked in radio. Inherited. Bought radio station. Bought second. Bought TV station. Divorced. Remarried. Patron of High Museum of Art, Atlanta Ballet, the zoo…“It all looks very straightforward. What’s not on here that I should know about?”

“He’s said to have been a real son-of-a-bitch to his first wife. None of his children can bear to live in the same state as him. The closest is in Virginia, I think. He’s on the board of the TV station still, but can’t influence programming.”

“Reputation?”

“Straight shooter: worked hard for what he’s got, doesn’t take shit from anybody, gets what he wants when he wants it, no matter who he has to run down. And he’s run down quite a few. Earns a lot, gives a lot. What’s not on there are contributions, the very hefty contributions I’m pretty sure he makes anonymously to the Atlanta Society for the Deaf.”

“If they’re anonymous, what makes you think he gives?”

“One of his mistresses gave birth to a son after she caught measles while pregnant. The son was deaf; retarded, too, as I recall. I talked to one of the ASD’s finance assistants last year—you remember that piece the paper did on Southern noblesse oblige?—and he told me that every July for the last seventeen years they get a cheque for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They’ve come to rely on that money, but because they don’t know who gives it, they worry about the golden goose just…flying away one day. So they did some research on past beneficiaries of their services, looking for rich relatives, and my friend discovered that Sweeting’s son was born in July seventeen years ago. A big coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

I nodded. “You said he was a real collector?”

“He buys publicly and in a big way, always makes sure everyone knows what he paid. Representational art: landscapes and portraits. Nothing more modern than the 1920s. He displays the art on his own walls—no bank vaults for Charlie Sweeting. He takes the same kind of pride in owning beautiful things as being a man of his word.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once. Briefly.”

“Would you trust him?”

He thought about that. “Sixty years ago he and his buddies would probably have spent their summers setting their hunting dogs on folks like me, but, yes, I’d trust him to do what he said he would do. Or to not do what he said he would not. His honour is who he is.”

I sat on the deck sipping a Corona, watching the last bloody footprint of the sun fading from the sky, listening to the tree frogs and crickets, thinking idly that I really should cut some flower borders at the back one of these days.

A murder, some cocaine, a fake painting. Sweeting and Honeycutt.

Sweeting was ruthless, no doubt about it, but I agreed with Eddie: faking a painting did not fit his profile, nor did an anonymous murder. Which left Michael Honeycutt, as I’d known it would.

Roman coins. Unmarried. Jade carvings. No parking tickets. Fabergé eggs. The Seychelles. Democratic Party. Cocaine. I could not see a connection.

A huge barred owl ghosted silently across the garden to land in the pecan tree overlooking the deck. It turned its head this way and that, intent. Somewhere on the lawn a shrew crept through the grass in a desperate search for juicy insects to stoke its ever-needy metabolism. The owl focused for an instant, dropped into a shallow glide. It dipped once and I heard the tiniest squeak, then the soft wingspan and full talons were lifting over the hedge, blending with the darkness to the east.

That night I dreamt of a man in a bathtub. He looked dead but he wasn’t, he kept sitting up. Every time he sat up, I hit him: palm strike to the nose, thud and splinter of bone slamming into his already dead brain; knife hand to the larynx, crushing it like cardboard; double fist to the temple, fingers sinking in to the second knuckle. But he kept sitting up. And then he smiled and opened his mouth, and out flew an owl, clutching a small jade statue in its taloned fist.

I woke at six with my muscles pulled tight as guy ropes and my mind flapping like a split sail in a high wind. My hands kept flexing of their own accord, remembering hitting his face. I pulled on shorts, boots and muscle-tee, took a bottle of water from the fridge, and went out into the back. The air was still and quiet, heavy with morning damp and the scent of jasmine. The shed I had built under the deck was dark. The spade hung from the opposite wall. I took it down and unwrapped it. It took a while to locate the tarpaulins.

Cutting flower borders through healthy sod is hard work but my body needed to sweat for a while, and I have never understood the wasteful American pastime of running. Why not direct your muscles towards something useful? After I had laid out four overlapping tarps, I set the gleaming edge of the spade against the damp turf, put my boot on the rim and pumped, taking great satisfaction from the slide and grit of steel through dirt. I turned the sod onto the tarp. Set and pumped and turned, set and pumped and turned. After half an hour, I switched feet.

An hour later the muscles of thigh, calf and lower back were warm and supple and the tarps full. I switched to the fork, bending my knees, letting my triceps and shoulders power the tines through the topsoil. Birds were singing now, and in the distance I heard the chunk of a car door and an engine turning over. At some point the background had filled with the hum of traffic streaming down McLendon three blocks away. I worked on.

By the time I had all the borders cut and the dirt turned, had cleaned and oiled the garden tools and put everything away, it was nine-thirty, and though my skin was slick with sweat and muscles burning, I felt calm and refreshed. I had a leisurely shower, an enjoyable breakfast of cold rice and smoked fish with hot, fragrant tea, then called my banker.

“Laurence, it’s Aud Torvingen. Very well, thank you. And you? Catherine and the children? Good. Laurence, I wonder if I might impose upon your goodwill for a few minutes this afternoon. I find myself floundering for information on a subject far outside my area of expertise. I hoped I could persuade you to share some of your experience on these matters.”

It was a very small branch, and my deposits were substantial. He said yes, of course, and how did one o’clock suit?

From the Spanish consulate downtown, the drive to my Decatur bank along Piedmont and then North Avenue is about twenty minutes if you ignore the speed limit. I whipped along, letting the slipstream take care of the pollen on the Saab’s paintwork, enjoying the power under my hands, the smooth glide of the stick as I shifted into fourth. Traffic was surprisingly light and I cut through it like an otter knifing playfully through the water. I opened the windows. Nina Simone sang “Feeling Good” in her chocolate and cream voice. A wonderful morning to be alive.

I had Beatriz del Gato’s proposed itinerary weighted open on the seat next to me. She wanted to visit a Spanish-speaking school in Duluth then go on to a community centre in Buford. Just as Philippe said: boring. Other places on her list—apart from the half dozen ad agencies downtown—included Underground Atlanta and a Catholic church. She was twenty-three, reasonably good looking if the photo was anything to go by, well educated, and all she wanted to do in the historic South was visit a mediocre mall, go to Mass, and try to get a job.

I made it to the bank in fifteen minutes.

Laurence is about fifty, one of those African-Americans from the North who heard that Atlanta, the City Too Busy to Hate, was a paradise of opportunity. He applied for a corporate transfer and moved his whole family, hoping for big things. He had been here nine years now, long enough to realize that the good old boy network was even stronger here than in Pittsburgh. He had managed this bank for all of those nine years. He no longer expected to be promoted out of there. Once a year I met his wife and children at the stiff Christmas function the bank held for its more important customers. We treated each other with unfailing politeness.

Today he looked a little more formal than usual as he ushered me into his office. We sat in two comfortable easy chairs near the silk rubber plant whose leaves shivered in the hissing air-conditioning. “Perhaps you would like to tell us how we can help you.”

He almost always said we. I don’t think I had ever heard him say anything personal, ever use I. “The matter I wish to discuss is rather confidential.” He simply nodded. “I need to know what kind of responsibilities and authority would be expected of and given to a particular banking position. The position I am talking about is as a vice president with a very well established investment bank in this city.”

“Do you have any additional information? It could…” He pushed his glasses up. “Well, it’s a little like you being asked by someone: What does a police lieutenant do?”

“I take your point.” A lieutenant could be on a SWAT team, could be a PR person, in Internal Affairs, homicide…. “The banker in question may or may not have been involved in the effort to persuade a foreign automaker to build a plant in North Carolina; he flies to the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Seychelles. I could tell you what sort of authority and accountability a lieutenant in the APD would have, but I have no idea about bank VPs.”

“Given that he is a vice president, he is to some extent legally responsible for the affairs of that company and can be held liable. To the same extent, he—depending on the decision-making policy of the company—would be able to commit the company to a certain amount on his own recognizance.”

He wasn’t giving me anything I didn’t already know. I wondered what he would do if I leaned forward and said: Larry, I don’t belong here, either. It’s a beautiful day outside. Let’s go get a six-pack and watch the ducks on the pond. It would never happen. He had so many defenses because he needed them. No doubt he saw armour glinting around me that I was not even aware of. He probably hated being called Larry. “So he wouldn’t necessarily be checked up on a great deal?”

“It would depend on the size of the bank. If he’s a VP of a large national organization, then it’s probable he would have considerable personal authority. The fact that he travels frequently to the Bahamas and Bermuda is interesting.” He paused. “That he travels to the Seychelles even more so.”

“How so?”

“The Bahamas and Bermuda are tax havens, as you probably know.”

“Aren’t the Seychelles?”

“Oh, yes. But they’re also eight thousand miles away. He wasn’t just taking a vacation?”

“Not three times in one year.”

Again, he paused, and I knew that he wanted something from me, a sign, an indication that if he offered me something he wouldn’t be rebuffed for stepping beyond the bounds of manager and client.

“It might help if I told you something of the context for all this. You know I am no longer with the Atlanta Police Department, of course, but I have just undertaken to investigate a murder on a private basis for a third party because the police think it’s a drug case, and the third party and I don’t. It…I saw the victim’s house burn, Laurence, I felt the heat on my face, and whoever did it is going to get away with it unless I can find him. I don’t even know if this banker has anything to do with it, but he might, and I have to run every possibility, no matter how wild, to ground. So if you have any ideas, please help me.”

“What’s the bank we’re talking about?”

“Massut Vere.”

He took his glasses off, leaned back in his chair, polished them awhile. There was the faint shininess of burn scar tissue at his right temple that I’d never noticed before. He stared into the middle distance. “Apart from the fact that the Seychelles are eight thousand miles away, they aren’t generally used as a haven by what I’d call respectable banks.”…what I’d call respectable banks…

“Why’s that?” I asked obligingly.

He put his glasses back on and this time when he looked at me I think he really saw me. “What do you know about international banking?”

“Probably about as much as you do about tactical hostage rescue.”

“It’s amazing what you can learn from watching TV.” A joke. Well, well. “It used to be that the Swiss were the people who took money, no questions asked, and held it against all comers. Then they changed their laws so that the money of any depositor who was proved to have earned it illegally was liable to be returned. A lot of unsavoury characters switched to money laundering and the tax havens off the East Coast. Then three years ago the Seychelles declared that anyone who wanted to deposit ten million dollars or more with them would be entitled to protection from extradition and from seizure of assets, as well as…Hold on.” He jumped up, looking ten years younger than when he had ushered me into his office, and pulled open a file drawer. He rifled quickly through a buff folder. “Here we are. Apart from the extradition and seizure protections, big depositors would also be entitled to ‘concessions and incentives commensurate with the investment.’” He shut the folder, put it away, slammed the drawer shut and dropped back into his chair. There was something familiar about the way he moved. “In other words, they held up a great big sign saying, ‘Welcome All Criminals.’”

The implications were staggering, especially the extraordinary entitlements. The Seychelles government had written a law that made it possible to issue diplomatic passports to terrorists, the mob, drug traffickers….

“You’ve just made my life a lot more complicated,” I said.

“You’re welcome.” And he smiled. The scar tissue by his eye crinkled.

“Laurence…” When an imago first pushes free of the binding chrysalis and unfolds its still-damp wings, anything, even something as ephemeral as breath, can deform the final, glorious insect. A crass question now could crush this fragile new understanding. I asked anyway. “Where did you serve?”

He touched his face and sighed. “Two tours in Vietnam. The Rangers.”

We sat silently, contemplating the ghosts we had created between us, and the difference between our world and that of most people.

Beatriz del Gato arrived on the four forty-five flight from Madrid. I met her in the international arrivals terminal at Hartsfield Airport. Either the photograph in her dossier was a very expensive special effects shot or it had been a truly terrible flight. Beatriz del Gato was a small, ferociously plain woman. Her features were symmetrical enough, in proportion and in roughly the right places, but she seemed weighed down, pulled out of shape by a relentless dullness. Brown hair was tugged back gracelessly from a face that looked white and puffy next to the glowing tans of other passengers. Her hands hung at her sides as though she did not know where they came from or what to do with them now they were here. Her brown eyes looked very small behind thick glasses.

“Ms. del Gato?”

“Yes?” The way she lifted her head and looked at me sideways reminded me of an adolescent, not a woman of twenty-three.

“Philippe Cordova asked me to drive you to your hotel this evening and get you settled in. My name is Aud Torvingen and I’ll be escorting you during your stay in Atlanta.”

“Thank you.” So low I could hardly hear.

I got her and her luggage—surprisingly little—to the Saab, held open the rear door for her, then got behind the wheel. As she was finding the seat belt I slid the Walther PPK from the underarm spider harness to a lap holster that I clipped to my belt, handy in case I should need it while driving. When we were both strapped in I pulled out smoothly into the streaming traffic.

I glanced in the mirror. She had slumped like a bundle of abandoned knitting. “How was your flight?”

“Quite pleasant, thank you.” Four whole words. Perhaps a tightly modulated contralto, it was hard to tell. Soft, gliding Castillian accent.

“Traffic will be bad at this time of day but I hope to have you at the Hotel Nikko in forty or fifty minutes.” She nodded without looking at me. “Philippe gave me your itinerary, of course, but I’d like to go over it with you to make sure there are no errors or misunderstandings.”

“Certainly.”

“And I would like to know how inconspicuous you want to be.”

A pause. “Perhaps you could explain.”

“Philippe tells me you are interviewing at the ad agencies we’ll be visiting tomorrow. If I am obvious as a bodyguard, it might be a little off-putting for your potential employers.”

“Yes. I see.” The knitting was straightening, just a little. “What would you suggest?”

“That you call me Aud and I call you Beatriz, and we take the parts of strangers put in touch by a mutual acquaintance while you are visiting a foreign city.”

“Very well. Aud.” Her trace of accent made my name longer and softer.

“It would mean I don’t hold doors open for you or carry your things.”

“By all means.” She seemed to be sagging and fading again. Probably exhaustion. I concentrated on driving.

The first thing I did when I got home was take off the gun and stretch. The next four days were going to be very, very long.

There were two messages on the machine. The first was Charlie Sweeting sounding conspiratorial.

“Miss Torvingen? Aud. I haven’t forgotten your request. I think I might have something for you in a day or two.”

Beep.

“Hey, Aud, it’s Mick. Are you there? Oh. Well, listen, we got a call an hour ago from Helen’s father. Her mother’s in the hospital. I don’t know if it’s serious or not. Well, it’s got to be fairly serious or she wouldn’t be in the hospital so suddenly.” Get to the point, Mick. “Anyway, we’ll be flying to St. Louis first thing tomorrow, so we won’t make the performance tonight. Sorry about that. I think it’ll be wild. Tell you what, let’s go out for a beer when we get back and you can tell us all about it. We’ll call you. Bye. Oh, forgot. The thing tonight? It’s been moved from King Plow to the Masquerade. Same time. Bye.”

Helen’s mother had been ill for a while. At least she had Mick with her.

The last time I’d seen my mother had been the three days I had spent in London on my way to Kirov. We had both been busy—she with embassy functions, me trying to get in touch with the guide who was supposed to be travelling with me to the steppes—too busy to spend much time together. Story of our lives. Not always unintentional. She’s never really forgiven me for choosing to live in my father’s country. “You’ve no one there, Aud. No family. No job. Nothing to keep you.”

On impulse, I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?” Clear and sharp, so unlike Beatriz del Gato.

“Julia? It’s Aud.”

“Have you found out something?”

“Yes and no. That is, nothing spectacular, and that’s not why I was calling. How broad is your definition of art?”

“Why do I get the feeling I shouldn’t answer that one?”

“There’s a performance tonight that you might find interesting.”

“What kind of performance?”

“You’ve got me there. She’s a performance artist into body modification. That’s all I know.”

“Okay…. Hello? Aud, are you still there?”

“Yes, yes. I was just trying to remember what time it starts,” I lied. “How about if I pick you up around nine-thirty?”

“Why don’t I pick you up? After all, I know where you live.”

“Fine. And don’t dress up. It’s at the Masquerade.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. Wear something casual. And if the CD player in your car has one of those removable face plates, remove it.”

She must have got the message. She arrived at nine-thirty wearing just the right clothes: wide-legged jeans with a big belt, tight low-cut button tee that exposed her flat, tanned belly, and big boots. She’d even done something with her hair, wearing it casually upswept with thick wings hanging at each side so that it didn’t look quite so sleek and moneyed. Two silver studs gleamed from her left ear and her fingernails were painted a red so dark it was almost black. The effect was to make her seem both younger and more worldly. I slung my leather jacket in the back and got in the passenger seat. It had been a long time since I had been driven anywhere; door locks and seat belts all seemed the wrong way around.

“North Avenue,” I said, and after a while I began to relax. The hands on the wheel were competent.

We drove in silence. The only things we knew about each other revolved around the death of a man who had been her friend and I didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t want to think about murder and men with money.

“So. What am I letting myself in for tonight?” Orange streetlight glided across her right cheek and disappeared through the back window.

“Diane Pescatore has spent the last eleven years of her life surgically and cosmetically altering herself to look like a Barbie doll.”

“Barbie? Those shoulders and hips and legs aren’t physically possible!”

“I believe that’s the point. According to a book I got from the library this week, Pescatore is one of several well-known artists and/or body sculptors who try to draw attention to the way women’s bodies have been objectified by the patriarchy et cetera, et cetera.”

“You mean she actually does this stuff on stage?”

“Please watch the road. No. At least I hope not. I think she’s put together some kind of multimedia…thing.”

“Thing?” She sounded amused.

“Performance, then.”

The car passed under a railway bridge and slowed down by a garishly lit, dilapidated warehouse. “Is this it?” She swung into the lot, parked automatically under a light. It was strange, being with a woman who thought about these things, who remembered to take corners wide, even when she was running.

The Masquerade is an odd venue in the middle of an industrial wasteland. It looks a bit like a cross between a castle and a wooden fort from the Old West, with huge, chained freight doors on the third story and a massive iron-bound front entrance. We showed ID, paid, and walked into the gloom. Julia had her hands out of her pockets and all senses on red alert.

“It’s not dangerous. It just likes to pretend it is.”

“If you say so.”

“Let’s find out where this performance is.”

The Masquerade is divided into three spaces: Heaven, upstairs, for the larger bands; Purgatory, a sort of coffee hangout for those who don’t get up until after dark; and Hell, down a series of ramps where the lighting gets gloomier and gloomier and music louder and more unsettling. As we headed down I could feel my face stretching into a smile and my stride loosening and lengthening. The sharp scents of dance sweat and tequila cut through the hip haze of handrolled cigarettes. Julia’s eyes glittered. I had to put my mouth to her ear and shout to be heard. “Want a drink?”

She nodded, pulled my head down to her level and touched her lips to my cheekbone just by my ear. “Beer and a tequila shot.”

“Aud!” A young, thin woman cut through the crowd. Metal gleamed from forehead, shoulder, nipples, even the webbing between thumb and fingers. Thin chain threaded from nose to ear to temple. “Aud, how are you doing! Helen with you?”

Julia stepped a fraction closer.

“No. Cutter, this is Julia. Julia, Cutter. An old friend.”

“Hey, Julia. Nice to see you around.” She reached a thin, strong hand to Julia’s face, touched the corner of her upper lip. “Little topaz would look good here. Very fierce. Aud likes fierce. Think about it. If you like the idea, Aud can give you my e-mail. Gotta go get ready. Aud—later, okay?”

Julia, finger on the place Cutter had touched, watched her slide back into the crowd. She turned to me. “‘Aud likes fierce’?”

“Let’s go get that drink.”

Even though Hell was full, there were not many people waiting at the bar. Julia ordered, and gave me a warning look when I made a move to pay. “You’ve known Cutter a long time.”

“Eight years.”

“Eight? She doesn’t look old enough.”

“She was fourteen, living on the street.”

“Was she…” She pointed to her temple and nose.

“Yes. When I first met her she had seven studs in each ear, one in her nose, a ring through her tongue. She’s got them everywhere now. And scars.”

“Is it the pain she likes?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“What about her family?”

“What about them?” They wouldn’t be bothering her, not anymore.

“It’s just…” She changed tack. “All that metal, it seems a bit excessive.”

“If wearing all the hardware stops her jamming herself with heroin and makes her feel good about who she is, then I’m all for it. She even makes a living at it. As you’ll see tonight. From what she said, it looks as though we’ll be getting a live demonstration of body mod after all.”

She sipped her beer and licked the foam off her lips. “Who is Helen?”

“Another friend.”

“Like Cutter?”

“There’s no one like Cutter. Helen is a professor in the Sociology Department at Georgia State. She and her husband would have been here but they had to go to St. Louis because her mother’s in hospital.”

“So I’m here with you instead.”

I tossed down my shot, turned back to the bar and said, “My turn to buy.”

After midnight and we were sitting with Dornan in the Borealis. A dozen or so other customers dotted the place. Dornan and I were drinking red wine, Julia had coffee.

“But what was interesting,” she was saying to Dornan, “was the Q&A they did afterwards, how seriously they took everything. They were talking about what gauge metal to put through the penis the same way student drivers ask what kind of gas to put in their car.”

Dornan blinked a little more rapidly. “Through the penis?”

“Through everything: penis, scrotum, nipples, labia, tongue, nose, eyebrows, navel, clitoris. It made me feel so…old. The only holes I have are the ones I was born with, and one in this ear, two in this.”

“That’s one more than I have,” I said.

“Well, you’ve both had me beat since birth,” Dornan said mournfully, and Julia laughed. I had not heard her laugh before. It was subtle and warm as swirled brandy.

“And then there was the cutting,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, have you, Aud? They had this stool, just an ordinary wooden stool on stage, and Cutter got this man to sit on it and strip to the waist. He only looked about twenty. She washed his pecs with surgical alcohol and picked up a scalpel. It was like watching someone cut into a radish to make those fancy patterns. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated. They looked like children playing with red paints. At least she wore gloves. And he smiled the whole time she was cutting this big spiral round his nipple, cutting through his lovely soft golden skin. Cutter said that skin like that is prized because you get a nice thick white raised scar. And then she taped gauze to his chest, he put his shirt back on and everyone just chatted normally. People do very strange things for kicks.” She stood up. “Excuse me a moment.”

She walked like a thoroughbred towards the bathroom. I turned back to the table to find Dornan smiling slightly. “Very nice, Torvingen.”

“It’s business.”

“You’ve never introduced me to one of your business acquaintances before.”

I shrugged. “Always a first time.” We sat in companionable silence until Julia came back.

“So,” Dornan said, looking from her to me, “you paid good money for the privilege of watching this primitive blood ritual?”

“Ah,” I said. “Cutter was just like the previews you get at the start of a video, an unexpected bonus. The main feature was truly strange.”

I told him about Diane Pescatore and her performance, about the banks of video screens showing tapes of various operations she had undergone to sharpen her cheekbones, clip out her floating ribs, remove her molars, shape her nose, fill out her lips, carve her belly and lengthen her legs. Throughout the tapes, she had chanted peculiar verse about the subjugation of women, their hopeless quest to look like the women of men’s dreams, to look like Barbie. “Yes, the doll,” I told a disbelieving Dornan. “She said, quite seriously, that she’s trying to find a surgeon who will try to narrow her shoulders and maybe even shave her pelvis down.”

“But what does she look like?”

“Crazy. As though the only thing holding her together is this fierce will to show people, to make them understand what it’s really like, in the face of the realization that her audiences only come to see her because they’re horrified by what she’s doing to herself. I think she knows she’s made a terrible, irreversible mistake but she can’t stop because if she did, she’d have to acknowledge the mistake and the fact that people really don’t care. They just think she’s a freak.”

“Do you?” Julia had her chin on her fist and was looking at me intently.

I shrugged. “Who am I to judge?”

She decided to dig in another direction. “So how long have you two known each other?”

“A long time.”

“You mean she hasn’t told you how we met?” Dornan shot me a sly smile. “It was a summer afternoon, at ten thousand feet. You see, it was in the nature of a bet I had with an old girlfriend…”

He loved to tell this story. I excused myself and headed for the bathroom. He was still telling it when I got back.

“…hurtling through the air and nothing was happening, nothing, and I thought, Mother of God, I’m going to die, and I was spinning around like a top, one minute seeing the ground rushing at me like a drunken rhinoceros, the next seeing the sky and all these tiny dots that were open chutes, and I was tugging on that bloody parachute cord and nothing was happening. And then I saw one of the dots…split, and this body came bulleting down at me. It was Aud. She’d cut her chute loose and was swooping down on me. She didn’t even know me!”

“I knew you were a fool who was panicking and had forgotten he had an emergency backup chute.”

“I hadn’t forgotten, I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that, but I hadn’t forgotten: I’d never been told about it in the first place! So there I was, and she came bulleting at me, arms all folded in like a human cannonball, and smacked into me hard enough to take my breath away. And you should have seen her face! Lips skinned back and eyes like a demon. I swear she was laughing. She clamped her legs around me so hard she broke two of my ribs.”

“I fractured one, slightly.”

“It’s just that the doctor at the hospital didn’t look at the X rays properly. So, anyway, she had her thighs clamped around my chest like a vise but did she pull the cord straightaway? Oh, no. She had her mouth to my ear and was yelling, ‘Do you feel it? Feel it, feel it!’ and I thought I was going to die. But then she tugged on something and flump, we were floating. It seemed to last forever, but it was only about eight more seconds before we hit the ground, she’d cut it so close. And then we landed. She left me all tangled up like a kitten in a ball of wool and strode off to find the instructor, who was screaming at her for being a dangerous lunatic. She talked to him—”

“You were only half trained. He should never have let you up.”

“—but she never raised her voice, she rarely does, you know. And that’s when he made his big mistake. He smiled. She broke his jaw.”

Julia’s expression gave nothing away, but she did try to sip from her empty coffee cup. “And how long ago was this?”

I never got to answer that. The door banged open and in breezed a woman of around twenty-five with black hair, lips as red as her press-on nails, and an astonishingly pneumatic figure. Dornan jumped to his feet, and all the intelligence drained from his face to be replaced by an idiot grin. He held out his arms. “Tammy, darlin’!”

I sighed and stood up, too.

“Mmmn, Dornan, I’ve missed you. Mmmn.” Then she stepped back and smiled her heavy-lidded smile—“Aud, how nice to see you”—and raised her eyebrows at the table.

“Julia, this is Tamara Foster. Tammy, this is Julia Lyons-Bennet.”

Julia stood and they shook hands in that brittle Southern girl-girl squeeze of limp fingers; the one that says, When did they start letting people like you in? Dornan, of course, noticed none of this. His world was full of Tammy, his girl, his fiancée, the light of his life. “Sit, darlin’, sit. We were just swapping stories. Aud and Julia here have had an extraordinary evening. Jonie, Jonie!” he shouted at the barista. “We’ll have another carafe of this red, and bring four fresh glasses.”

“No, Dornan, not for me. I’m sure you and Tammy want some time on your own. Julia and I will be getting out of your way.”

Julia stood up. “I had a really good time, Dornan. Thank you. And it was lovely to meet you, Tammy.”

Dornan merely beamed.

In the car, Julia drove as though she had not been drinking at all. “You don’t like Tammy.”

“No.”

“Let me guess. She’s really a multiple murderer.”

“She’s a manipulative schemer who picks Dornan up and puts him down whenever she feels like it. She flies hither, thither, and yon doing what she calls business development for a local company and is only ever in town for four or five days at a time. Sometimes less. Dornan thinks they’ll get married one day.”

“She wears his ring.”

“It’s worth a lot of money, and that’s all that interests Ms. Tammy Foster. She’s one of those women with a body like a magnet who just keeps trolling until rich fools clang up against her sides. I’ve seen her around town with different men when she’d told Dornan she’s in Baltimore or Chicago. She’ll drop Dornan like a rock the moment she has a better catch.”

“You sound very certain.”

“She’s very good at what she does, but if you watch her long enough you’ll see that she can’t help positioning herself sexually for every man who walks through the door. It’s an instinct. She’s been trained since childhood by her rich daddy in Connecticut to believe that who she is or what she does doesn’t matter nearly as much as who she marries.”

“You sound almost sorry for her.”

“That doesn’t make me like her. And when she realized Dornan’s best friend didn’t like her, she tried to win me over by propositioning me.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes.” I would rather go to bed with a python.

“And you haven’t told him.”

“No.”

“Why haven’t you frightened her off? I imagine that would be easy enough for you.”

“She makes him happy, and it won’t be forever.”

“You do like to play god.” She sounded thoughtful more than judgmental.

We drove half a mile in silence. “Turn left on Leonardo. It’s a bit quicker.”

When we pulled up, she leaned across me to unlock my door. “Thank you. It was an interesting evening.”

“Interesting in the Chinese sense?”

“No. I mean it. Thank you.”

There was a slight pause. We both just sat there, facing the velvet dark beyond the windscreen, breathing the same air, then I was outside the car leaning in, nodding, saying good night, telling her I would call sometime very soon to give her an update on my investigations. After she drove off I stood outside for a long time, listening to the tree frogs.