“Kowalski,” Randy said calmly. “Told me to get up close and personal with somebody here. I picked Russ.”
Russ looked at her in shock.
“Sorry,” she said to him, “but you’re the cute one. And I knew about your Amnesty work. I figured hey, why not. And you run.”
“And you figured this was okay—exactly how?” said the grey man.
“He wasn’t passing on orders from you?”
“You know bloody well he wasn’t. Don’t you?”
“Had an idea. But I’m just a flunky.”
“No, you’re a minion. Flunkies have more brains. Get the hell out of here before I bust your ass down to bedrock and put you back on booze patrol. And when you tell Kowalski about this, tell him I want him in my office at ten tomorrow morning.”
She looked shamefaced. Morgan was catching up.
“You mean, this is a cop?”
Mr. Grey looked at Morgan. “In the broadest possible interpretation of the term, I suppose you could say yes.” Randy went into the hall, came back with her coat and shoulder bag.
“Working for Blue Suit?” Morgan persisted.
“Excuse me,” the grey man said, and turned to the Boy Wonder. “The reason Ko’s appointment is at ten is to give me time to deal with
you,”
he snarled. Without turning around, he said, “and don’t bother creeping out of the room, Aziz, if that’s what your name really is.”
Aziz froze halfway through the archway to the living room, reconsidered his silent slinking away, and stepped back to Jakob’s side. Morgan looked from Mr. Grey to Aziz. “You know him? I mean, you know him
too?”
“I met him in the Atrium, some time ago,” said the grey man. “I assume that you”—to the Boy Wonder—“were gambling I wouldn’t remember.”
Jakob grabbed Aziz by the arm. “You’re a fucking
cop?”
“Well, no,” said the Boy Wonder. “He’s a fucking dancer faggot, but he’s my cousin. I needed to have a little more control of the situation, and Aziz owed me a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” Delany asked.
“The kind where if I don’t do it, he tells my grandmother and my father that I’m queer,” said Aziz to Jakob, “and they send me ‘back home’ to get deprogrammed.” He took Jakob’s wrist. “I told him how much I watched your dance. Right away he was on to me. I didn’t tell him anything important. But I had to …”
Morgan was feeling a bit like quicktime goop herself, the tool of last resort to patch up interfaces. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s eat. You guys want to stay for casserole and salad? We can work it out over dinner. And kids?”
They all looked at her.
“‘Keep your forks. There’s pie.’” Jakob knew the reference, and snorted. The others sat down rather meekly, all things considered. “Randy” hesitated.
The grey man shook his head. “Take your coat off, May. You can’t be in any
more
trouble. You may as well eat. You too, Aziz.”
Rahim was edging toward the door. He gestured out the window to the surveillance center. “I’ll just …”
“As for you, Wonderboy, don’t piss me off any further. Call in some backup for the booth. You’re suspended until further notice. Siddown. Have a nice dinner.”
“Two in one blow,” said Morgan. “Nice work. Blue cheese or vinaigrette?”
“Don’t be cute,” the grey man said. “Oh, I suppose you can’t help it. Vinaigrette. Please.”
It was possible, thought Morgan, that he even had a good time at dinner. With the exception of Morgan, who at least found it fascinating, if not pleasant, no-one else did.
Hardball
Morgan drifted through the night on this dream, watching herself without question through Russ’s eyes. Morgan and Russ walked in the back lane, the artificial moonlight harsh on their faces. Morgan, hands in her pockets, looked down at her feet, kicking the gravel as she walked. With peculiar double vision, she saw herself, as Russ, looking at her, saw the blue light turn her face to a pallor like Blue’s. Under this light, the alien’s color wouldn’t change. Russ thought,
they are two peas in a pod.
He thought,
this woman frightens me. She is so tight. If the lid ever blew, what would happen to all of us?
He thought,
I want her.
Surprised, he stopped walking. She turned to him, looked at him with the look that meant: I am thinking. It meant: I think; I am. He was a tree trying to move through soil. He shook his head.
“What?” she said. He could only shake his head again. She smiled. “Say it.”
She took a step toward him, warmth in her belly and some kind of energy transfusing her extremities. He thought irrelevantly of the training he had received decades ago in his first job as an orderly. If a patient became violent or threatening, move toward them, not away. But she was the threatening one. He took a step, almost a lunge, reached for her, pulled her against him. He felt her chuckle as he kissed her. Her mouth opening to him. Her arms around him. He was shaking, and her hands found the center of that, in his lower back, and she pulled her head back and smiled again.
“What’s this? Am I so scary?”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t belong here, and I don’t know where you are, and I find myself wanting you and not wanting to want you. I don’t like angst, Morgan. You people in this house are taking my life apart.”
She studied him for a moment, listening to the layers. “No. You are taking your own life apart. You feel trapped if we say we love you, but you don’t leave, and the door is open. You are so hungry that you don’t know what it feels like to be satisfied. You have just made me into an image of something you want. Not a person to make love with. You want someone to take you apart, like you say. I won’t. Even if I had that power, how dare you expect me to use it just so you won’t have to have anything to do with the result?”
“Of course you have the power. Don’t you know how we all see you? The cards keep coming up in the Tarot, the Chariot, the High Priestess. Who do you think makes us do what we do?”
“You like to believe you take no action, don’t you? You like to believe the images you have of people. You want to see me as some kind of cosmic arbiter twiddling with your fate. What will you say when my clothes are off, when you see Morgan, the person, not the Tarot card image? Will I seem unworthy then, when you see that I am real, that I hurt, that I bleed once a month just like a human woman? I am bleeding now, you know. Would you like to have some, on your hand, to prove I am alive?”
She pulled away from him and walked on. He fell into step, a fast angry step. All this time her voice had been soft, but now she had given up kicking pebbles. She pulled the gate open with a jerk, looked back at him then went in. He caught the gate on the backswing and closed it carefully.
She was already at the veranda door, waiting for him, looking back, her face half in shadow and half in the streetlight. As he came up the path she said, “Well, come on, then.” Did he really want this whirlwind? He thought, yes.
She strode through the dark kitchen, her scarf flying behind her, up the back stairs and down the strip of hall carpet to her room.
He thought,
this escalator is taking me somewhere very scary. This isn’t men’s sportswear.
She opened her door. The light was on in her room, and it shone out in a fan into the hall, so again her face was half bright, half dark with one eye still shadowed. Or, she thought, his face, brightening in the overflow of gold.
“You are the first man for a long time to get invited in,” she said, and grinned. He walked through the door.
“Into your room?”
“No,” and she laughed shortly.
“What about that Sal character?” he said.
“He wasn’t anywhere near me,” she said. “I told all of you that. What about Miranda-turned-Maybelle?”
“I never got that far with her. Maybe if I hadn’t found out for a couple more days, I would have been seriously bent out of shape, but it just seems stupid to me. I feel a little stupid, I mean.”
“We could all wear that label, by now. Never mind.”
She was not joyous, he could see, but she was not angry any more either. She began to take her clothes off, methodically, hanging them up on the back of the desk chair.
“Come on,” she said again, “I want this, and so do you, you know. It’ll be fine.” Then: “If I take my sponge out, there will be blood all over. Don’t use your mouth, it’s not safe.”
She came over to him, naked, and smiled. “You’ll have to take me as I am, you know. I’m no sister of mercy. Life’s not a game. I only live here.”
“That will do,” he said, put his hands on her face, bent his head, kissed her.
Sometime during the lovemaking, he looked up at her. She was looking again with that look that said
I am thinking at you,
and her face was as remote as the moon.
He knew he would never reach her, but he began to see that it was his own fault if he didn’t get what he needed for the night. He reached up to her and pulled her down to kiss. He felt for a moment like he was holding that wraith, but she became solid in a second, pulled his head up to meet her, and her mouth came down hard on his, reaching into him, as she reached into him, with mouth and hand and body, bringing him through orgasm to comfort, until his face was softened and he lay back with a quiet smile.
“There,” she said, her face open as his. “You should let yourself out more often. You look good.”
He sat leaning up against the wall, his warm back against the cool plaster, cradling her against him. She was silent, looking out at infinity. He watched the crescent of her face that he could see, mysterious, warm. After a while it occurred to him that she was asleep, so he moved a pillow to his side, gently laid her down on it. Her breathing didn’t change. He kissed her shoulder, covered her as well as he could without disturbing her, then slowly, carefully got up, picked up his clothes, went to the door. As he was opening it silently, he looked back. She had not moved, and her deep slow breathing rhythm had not altered, but her eyes were open, she was looking at him with a half-smile and half-lidded gaze. He stood in stasis for a moment, watching her watching him; then her eyes closed slowly and opened again, like a cat, like a dismissal. He went out, closed the door quietly. She turned over onto her back, one hand against her lower belly, groped with her other hand for the quilt. She slept.
“So what
was that?”
Morgan demanded of Blue. “I spent two hours listening to Russ
thinking
about me, while we made love. I saw the whole thing from his point of view, even more than my own. And
you
heard it too.
What did you do?”
They were walking in the ravine, and for good measure Morgan had rigged them each with a portable tape player, which she had turned to max volume with the headphones hanging around their necks so that the music made a tinny tiny blare right beside their mouths.
“I dreamed Russ’s thoughts. You were there, so I gave them to you.”
“Maybe I didn’t want them!”
“I didn’t see you complaining at the time,” said Blue, using the phrase with which Aziz had won Jakob’s forgiveness at that awful involuntary dinner party, and which had become a household joke.
She shook her head, annoyed. “Until I saw the condom wrapper in the wastebasket, I thought it was a dream.”
“It was,” said Blue smugly.
“It was not a fucking dream. It happened, and I rode Russ like a loa in some American novel about voodoun. And you rode me.”
“I didn’t … do anything you didn’t want.”
“You moved my perceptions around. That’s invasive.”
“But you liked it,” said Blue.
“Yes, but that doesn’t make you any less presumptuous for doing it without my permission.”
“If I had asked, you wouldn’t have let me.”
“Yes, you’re absolutely right. And yes, okay, it was amazing, but I didn’t choose it, and I don’t like being messed with. Can you do this trick with everyone?”
“No; well, sort of. It’s not a trick. It’s just there. I can sort of hear Delany when she’s really sleeping. I can hear Jakob sometimes. Sleeping and dancing, but sort of like there’s a short circuit. I can’t hear John or Mr. Chief Inspector McKenzie Grey or Staff Sergeant Kowalski. There’s one police officer on surveillance that I can hear for a few seconds every now and again, like shortwave radio very far away. I can’t hear Aziz but sometimes I get a sort of whisper from Rahim, very far away and grouchy. I can hear cats a lot. And Russ when he is having sex, just. And you.”
Chilled by the cool catalogue, Morgan said, “Well, don’t eavesdrop on anyone. At all. Unless they let you. And besides, what if they find out you can do this sort of thing? They’ll think that you might just as well be the one who killed Sal.”
“If I can do ‘this sort of thing’, why would I beat him like that? It’s inefficient. And killing is foolish anyway. If I had heard anyone, I would have gone for help.”
“Well, I know that, and you know that, but would they believe us?”
“Mr. Grey believes us.”
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’?”
“Yes, of course I have.”
“It’s a rhetorical question.”
Blue knew what those were for. “Oh.”
“Let’s put it this way,” said the grey man. “For a start, you’re fired.”
“Fired?” said the Boy Wonder. “You can’t do that! Regulations—”
“—aren’t too kind to police officers who blackmail civilians into espionage tasks in high-security locations. Fired is just step one.”
“High security? A fucking joke. Listen, the U.S. has their alien sewed up so tight people can’t even
find
it. China won’t admit they have one. India has it in an underground bunker. You have ours out in the community in the most unsafe house in the city.
And
ours is probably doing murder. Somebody had to do something.”
“So you appointed yourself.”
“Yes. And I’m not alone. I have support from higher up …”
“So you say. So have I. Step two will test whether your friends or my friends win. You’re under arrest.”
“What exactly are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t plan to bury Blue underground, but I don’t much care about you. Do you have a pet?”
“What? A what?”
“A pet. Something that will starve to death when you don’t come home. Never mind, we’ll be going through your place with a lice comb anyway. We can feed the cat. See it gets a nice home. We’ll take care of the plants, too.”
“I don’t have a goddamn cat. You can’t arrest me!”
“I just did. Put your badge and gun on the desk, just like in the movies.”
Rahim took out his ID wallet, threw it on the desk. “My lawyer won’t like—” The grey man had him up against the door, his bunched-up collar bending his earlobes upward, before Rahim could finish the sentence.
“Federal employees of our particular agency,” the grey man said, jaw set, “don’t have recourse to lawyers. I’m invoking the New Official Secrets Act. You’ll be lucky ever to see the light of day again, let alone a lawyer.”
“Mac, what the—”
“I don’t like you—” each new phrase punctuated by banging Rahim’s shoulders back against the door “—I don’t like your mefirst politics, I don’t like watching you claw your way up the ladder, and I don’t like your notion that you can sink your poisonous little claws into me. I especially don’t like someone under my command breaking the law for his own career advancement. Smacks of corruption in the police service, and I’m a little
old-fashioned
about that. As you so often have told me. So, you go down. Welcome to hardball policing. Something, as I recall, that you have always advocated for others.” He let go with a shove, and Rahim staggered upright and shook the expensive suit back into place.
“Come in here,” said the grey man, only slightly louder than before, and the door opened to the escort squad: two line officers and Flora, looking angry and ruffled. “He still has his gun,” he said to Flora. “Strip-search him first. Scan for chips. Dig them out if you have to. Then take him downstairs. Find out where he got the money to buy these suits. Find out why he can afford to drive a Hurricane. Find out who else besides Aziz he’s running, and where, and why. Find out what outside interests he works for.”
“I don’t—” Rahim protested.
“I don’t want to see his face again until you have the answers,” said Mr. Grey. “Don’t kill him, but I don’t care whether or not he stays pretty.”