Chocolate Chocolate Moons (26 page)

“Sit here,” 509 says.

“No, there,” 507 says.

“Here.”

“There.”

“Here.”

“There.”

“Stop arguing with me,” 509 says. “You people from Minsk always like to argue.” His face contorts into a twisted leer.

“Pinsk. I’m from Pinsk, Pluto.”

“Minsk on Mercury, Pinsk on Pluto. Same thing. Whatever.”

“But there’s only one stool,” Drew says.

“Shut up, wise guy! You can stand.” 509 yanks the stool away and points to Roger. “And you can sit on the floor.”

After a while, Drew walks to the wall to his left. It is lined with portraits. “It’s the Thieves family,” he says, counting. “Yup, there are forty, all right.” He turns to the opposite wall and sees a framed award. He reads: “To Scheherazade, the Seven Deadly Sins award: gluttony, anger, pride, greed, lust, envy, and sloth for all your help founding a charter school for scoundrels.” Drew says, “Boy, those Thieves really know how to raise funds.”

509 approaches and escorts them into Scheherazade’s office. Drew recalls the time Rocket brought Scheherazade to the Gramercy Gardens and he and Scheherazade sat at the same table. He wonders if she will remember.

They enter a dark room with three low-hanging lights over Scheherazade’s desk. Her red dress clings to her body like wet dry cleaning. Her long black hair, smooth as seal’s pelt, falls down her back. Every finger has a ring. Drew thinks: brass knuckles.

Scheherazade stands behind an elaborately carved ivory-colored desk talking on her palm. There is a Giacometti identical to Drew’s on her desk. She motions to a green leather sofa against the opposite wall.

“Be with you in a moment,” she growls, obviously annoyed with the person on the other end. She turns her back to Roger and Drew, who hears, “No,
off with your head
is not a figure of speech! When was it ever a figure of speech?” She clicks off and says, “Idiot!”

She motions for Drew and Roger to come closer. “You guys looking for a job? I’m looking to hire another knight, because now I have a thousand, and I need one more as a tiebreaker when their union votes.” She sits down at her desk, pushes her hair behind her ears, and leans forward on her elbows, revealing a deep cleavage.

Roger and Drew try not to look at her cleavage. Drew notices she wears a blue-ice sapphire necklace identical to the one he bought for Kandy.

“What a beautiful necklace,” Drew says.

She fingers the necklace and gives it a long, sensuous touch. “Got it on the home shopping channel. So you guys want jobs?”

“We’re not looking for a job,” Roger stammers. “A friend of ours has died and he has storage here. I brought his will and a key to his vault.” He takes off his backpack, unzips it, and fumbles for the key.

“And who might that be?” Scheherazade says, drumming her nails on her desk.

“Rocket Packarod.”

“Rocket Packarod!” Scheherazade throws her head back and laughs. “Neither of you look like a friend of Rocket’s. I’m gonna miss those free supplements and drugs.”

She points to the Giacometti on her desk. “I got that from Rocket. Told me it was real but I haven’t checked. Could be a first edition from my art factory. Even I can’t tell if it’s mine or a real one unless I put it through elaborate tests.” She turns to a silver screen on her desk and touches several points with a long red fingernail. “Ah, Rocket’s storage is in an area called the Waldorf Asteroid, section five, cave four. Let me stamp your hands.” She takes out her stamp and inks it up, grabs Drew’s hand, and pushes the stamp into the back of it. “This is good for a one-day pass. No exchanges. No refunds. Just hold it under the little light at the door and my knights will let you in.”

“Ouch,” Drew says, rubbing his hand. “That hurt. Did you have to be so rough?”

“That’s nothing compared to what you’ll feel if you don’t give Ali Baba Caves a token of appreciation when you’ve finished going through Rocket’s vault.”

Drew works up his courage and says, “I wonder if you remember me? We met at Gramercy Gardens. You came with Rocket. I was on the other side of the table with Kandy.”

Scheherazade’s lip curls but she says nothing.

507 and 509 stand in front of the Waldorf Asteroid section, each holding back a growling pit bull ready to pounce.

“Down, Rimsky,” 507 says. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a piece of raw tofu in the shape of a man’s hand. He throws it to Rimsky, who retreats.

“Down, Korsakov,” 509 says, throwing him a piece of raw tofu in the shape of a man’s foot. Korsakov retreats.

507 scans their hands and gives each a shove toward a long, dark, misty hallway.

“I can hardly see,” Drew says with grim apprehension. “Does it have to be so misty?”

“We just got the mist machine. No one was afraid without mist.”

Drew and Roger walk through the haze in silence until 507 finally shouts, “Stop here!”

Roger inserts the key into a rusty door and turns the lock. A bolt slides.

Drew hands 507 twenty-five starbucks. When he makes menacing sounds and his face remains twisted in a bad way, Drew hands him a hundred. 507 walks away mumbling to himself.

The storage cave glows with amber darkness. One bulb hangs on a thin twisted wire. Drew pushes through cobwebs and sneezes. “Why am I not surprised it looks like this?”

They start at the front and pick through Rocket’s things. There are ten pairs of eyes signed Picasso, six sets of dentures signed Matisse, twenty individual ears signed Van Gough, a photograph of Jeff Koons shooting a loon on a moon, eight identical Giacomettis, three Venuses from Willendorff’s cafeteria, a box containing cash and a portrait of Kermit the Frog with Miss Piggy, which Roger identifies because he says he saw a copy on a wall in a mart.

On a dark shelf in the back is a scrapbook with pictures of a young Rocket and a woman holding a baby. “I’ll take this with me,” Roger says.

Drew and Roger lock the storage cave and make arrangements for its contents to be shipped to Far Horizons with the exception of the cash, which they take with them.

“A token of our appreciation,” Drew says handing Scheherazade thirty thousand starbucks.

“And a portrait of Miss Piggy and Kermit,” Roger adds.

“Wasn’t she the first female president of the United States?” Scheherazade asks.

“I’m not sure,” says Drew. “But Kermit was definitely a prime minister.”

“Thanks for letting us stop by,” Roger says backing toward the door.

Scheherazade waves her hand. “You can go.”

Drew starts to retreat. She points to him. “You stay.”

Sid calls Lamont. “You shouldn’t have sent me. I told you I couldn’t get in. I told you I would fail their test.”

“What was the question?” Lamont asks.

“To be or not to be?”

“What did you check?”

“I checked ‘not to be.’”

“You never check
that.
Everyone knows that.”

Sid groans.

“What’s the matter now? Where are you?”

“Two guys with rubber whips and bushy eyebrows just put me on a tram back to New Chicago with a tattoo on my butt that says ‘Rejected: Return to Sender.’”

35

C
ORTLAND LANDS A
spot on
Katie Racket Interviews
to promote the Lunar Tunes and Molawn, his music agency. The twins and I watch and cheer from home. Katie Racket tells Cortland how lucky the twins are to have him as a father and after the show gives him her private number, in case, over a bottle of wine, he wants to show her how one becomes a father.

He gets so much publicity from being on her show that he decides the best way for the twins to get more exposure and find more talent is to go on tour. Billings begs him not to leave, because he’s feeling a pinch from his competition, the Original Ray’s Red Planet Pizza. So before he leaves, Cortland blitzes the media with ads that say eating a Green Men pizza helps the greening of Mars. Ecology buffs rejoice. Sales soar. Billings is happy, but Cortland’s pizza days are over.

Lamont calls. “Molly, how would you like an all-expenses-paid vacation to Rose’s Heaven?”

“Rose’s Heaven! When I went to Ruby’s Spa, someone told me that it was the spa in space for the plus-size.”

“That’s right. Decibel Point is there. I hope you don’t take offense, but you are the only one I know who would fit right in with their clientele. Would you go and find him and keep him busy until we arrive?”

This is a no-brainer. Ever since I learned about Rose’s Heaven and its never-ending buffet, I’ve been dying to go. “The Culinary owes me time off because I put in extra hours when Gramercy Gardens opened. When do I leave?”

I arrive at Rose’s docking station. It’s been a long while since I floated in space. Ah, the bearable lightness of being. Lovely music plays. An announcer says it is the “Moonlight Sonata.”

“Which moon do you think the composer had in mind?” asks a woman dredging the last drops of her first piña colada.

“Probably all of them,” I say.

A sign says, “Welcome to Rose’s, where no one asks how much you lost but asks how much you’ve gained.” Three attendants greet me. One wears a smock that says “Rose’s Angels Regular” and another wears a smock that says “Rose’s Angels Deluxe.” The third woman wears a smock that says “Rose’s Angels Rehabilitation.”

“What’s the difference?” I ask.

“Rose’s Angels Regular is for people who weigh less than five hundred Earth pounds. Rose’s Angels Deluxe is for those over five hundred Earth pounds. And Rose’s Angels Rehabilitation is for anyone who wants to reverse the genetics that took away their sense of taste.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Only a few know about it, but it’s our fastest growing area. Most of the people who come here haven’t tasted anything fully since infancy, when taste suppressants were put into their food. We have to wean them off very slowly or they’ll go into shock.

“We wake up their taste buds by having them eat small portions of something strong—things like hot Mexican chili peppers and fiery Madres curries. When they can taste that we move on to something milder. In the end they can taste egg whites. While they are here we also make it impossible for them to turn off the cooking channel. Tell me now; will you be signing up for Rose’s Regular or Rose’s Deluxe?”

I give a cold, blank stare. How could anyone think I weigh more than five hundred Earth pounds? Are the twins right? Do I look that bad? For the first time in my life, I am seriously upset about my weight. “Rose’s Regular,” I mumble.

I am shown to my room by a bouncy round woman. “You can adjust the gravity from Earth level to weightless by pushing a button next to the bed. Some people like to try it out while they are lying down. Earth’s gravity gets people depressed. Almost everyone who comes here has forgotten how heavy it made them feel, except of course for those just released from Jupiter’s penal colony.” She peers at me closely. “You’re not coming from there, are you?”

She opens a closet door. A mirror on the back looks like it came from a fun house. “You can also adjust this to show how you look now or how you’d look if you gained or lost weight. Lots of people keep it on the lowest, which is the skinniest setting, because they have a good idea what more weight would look like but have no idea about less.”

“I know how they feel,” I say.

“There are several restaurants,” she continues. “The heart of the spa is the never-ending buffet. Some guests spend all their time at the buffet, except to bathe, sleep and change their clothes.”

“Are there any exercise classes?”

“Of course. We have classes that teach how to get two hot dogs on one roll, eat the crumbs off a crumb cake so it doesn’t show, pick the chocolate chips out of cookies without breaking them and triple the food on your plate at a salad bar. If you need anything, just call. My name is Jumbo.”

She pushes a button and chocolate melts over the door lock and seals it. “When you want to get back in, just crack it open. You can eat the lock.” Watch me. She taps the lock with the key that she hands me and chocolate pieces fall into her hand.

Wow!
I think, What a place. No wonder it’s in space.