Cronix (18 page)

“I don’t like this,” said Lola. “I don’t like this one little bit. I’ve heard about these places. Not good.” She stopped to address Swaincroft. “And you aren’t even chipped, baby. I’m telling you, if anything goes wrong, you stay behind me. I’ll take care of it. I’m not letting anything happen to you.”

Swaincroft gave an embarrassed cough, and muttered something Oriente didn't catch.

The mournful lilt of an accordion drifted from the bar, a singer sounding lost and lyrical. The spell was broken by Lola stamping through the long grass, swearing like a trooper.

“We shoulda brought a gun,” she said. “These places are full of bad asses. I heard they even let in scolds to drink. That’s really stupid man. Those creatures, they get a drink in them, and they’re full-on psycho. Not that that they’re not dangerous already, sober. But people get hurt in places like this. Seriously. And we're here because some
bug
told you to come here? I mean, really?”

“Hey,” Oriente whispered. “We’ll be okay. Believe me.” She looked at him, a mix of anger and consternation on her face.

“And you be careful in there, too” she said, squeezing his arm. “Both of you, get behind me if any shit goes down.”

The bar was a wooden shack mounted on a raft that creaked at its moorings. In the bright moonlight, the river bled mercury into the night. A shaky gangway hovered over the water: clearly the proprietor had no interest in whether his clients took a dive after imbibing. The planks pitched and sagged and Oriente's shoes were soaked by the time he reached the deck.

“Motherfucker,” Lola swore as she caught up, feet squelching. Swaincroft, giggling slightly from nerves and the drinks they'd had before setting out, joined her a minute later.

“Hey, let’s hit this joint,” he said with a boyish grin. Lola scowled and the three of the stepped into the smoky bar.

The joint was half-lit by hurricane lamps swinging from low beams. Peering into the murk, Oriente saw the singer, a young local woman whose arms and almost bare torso were heavily tattooed with cave paintings of horses and bison. She was singing the blues in a husky voice, pulling on a cigarette between verses. A few punters sat at the tables, glassy eyed and oblivious.

Oriente ordered three beers from the enormously fat bar tender, who told him the beer was off and they only had pine liquor. Oriente asked where the toilets were, excused himself and stepped into a fetid little bathroom.

He didn’t need to pee, but, following the precise instructions of by his nocturnal visitor, he unbuttoned himself and stood as close as he dared to the ammonia-reeking urinal that hung, half-unplumbed, from a damp wall. A minute passed: a fly buzzed around his head, then settled on the wall in front of him. Oriente wondered what he should do if another customer came in. The fly crawled to a spot just above the pissoir. As Oriente stood at the urinal, he saw a gecko emerge from a crack behind the hand basin. It darted at the fly: a pink tongue lashed out and the insect was gone.

Oriente stared at the impromptu nature documentary until the gecko peered at him and spoke. “Okay, pal” it said. “Safe to go now. Their bug’s gone. Remember, ask for Wexler.”

Suddenly self-conscious, Oriente buttoned himself up again. Without a word to the lizard, he returned to the bar and took a sip of his pine liquor, wincing at the bouquet of turpentine.

“I'm looking for Wexler,” he told the barman.

“Wexler? See that funny looking little runt sitting over in the far corner, looks like an ape?” The barman nodded at a man sipping from a tumbler of clear liquor. “That's Wexler. Dunno know what your business is with him, mister, but watch yourself. He’s a crazy little fuck. He was on Flight 904, you know.”

Oriente stared at him for a moment, then walked over to the strikingly short and wiry man. His face with cavernous, dark eyes perched over cheekbones that seemed to have been eroded into his skull like limestone bluffs. His face was deeply lined and gave the impression of geological age rather than human lifespan. Wexler nodded in greeting, then poured an extra glass of from his carafe.

“Oriente? Sit down, I was expecting you,” Wexler said. “Who the hell are they?”

Oriente turned to make the introductions as Lola seated herself across the table from the wizened homunculus, Swaincroft at her side. They sat in silence, keeping a wary eye on Oriente and Wexler.

“Just some friends,” Oriente said. “This is Lola, who works at the clinic I’m staying at. And this is Quin. He’s an historian.”

“Historian, huh? I could you some stories, kid. Good to have friends, Mr Oriente,” said Wexler, with a downturned grin that revealed large, mineral teeth. “You must have some serious ones. I suddenly found a lot of money in my account recently, and instructions to meet you.”

Oriente leaned forwards, his hands folded on the table. He had no idea what this man, this leathery knot of sinew and bone, was talking about.

“How much did they pay you?”



Wexler sucked from his glass. ”Enough that I’m here. They must be real good friends.”

Oriente shook his head. He had no idea who these 'friends' might be, but he wasn't sure it was a good idea to let this dangerous-looking creature know. “We'll see,” he said. “What else did they tell you?”

“That you might be looking for a way out of London. Discreet, like.”

Oriente nodded, concealing his confusion. “Why you?”

Wexler smirked, spread his hands. “Because I don’t exist. Like you. Just a wisp of river fog, a deleted statistic in a book no one reads.” For the first time, the little man looked him straight in the eyes, eyes like dark fungal growth wrapped in an autumn leaf.

“Hey,” he said. “Like the face? It’s an advertisement for my trade. Alfons Wexler, finest carpet beater in the Old World. At your service.” He gave a tiny mock bow.

Oriente hesitated. Wexler was perhaps the runty-est looking person he’d ever laid eyes on. “Aren’t you supposed to find rare and exotic genes for rich airsiders? No offense, but it doesn’t seem like great advertising to me.”

Wexler laughed. “None taken. But you’re right, rare and exotic is the name of the game. And while our friend Miss Lola here has obviously paid through her beautiful, regal nose for some of the finest genetics in history, I am displaying the raw material of my trade. This, my friends…” and he swept his hand over his gaunt face and sinewy neck… “is the original genepool of Abraham, father of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Procured by great effort and zealous endeavor from the Tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron, deep in the radiation zone. Very popular with some of my more religious-minded clients.”

“Looks like you dug up his pet chimp by mistake to me,” said Lola.

Wexler refused to look annoyed. “First of all, my dear, there ain’t no chimps in the Holy Land, and secondly, people were much smaller in those days.” His cocky grin abruptly returned. “You hungry? They have good bush meat here. Venison. Possum. Bunny on the spit.” He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “They even have Cronix. Roasted a la pekinese. Very good. Crispy skin.”

Oriente grimaced at the thought of a cannibal menu. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Fair enough. Pretty tasty though, especially if you’ve never tried the other white meat before.” He cackled, reached inside his mouth to tug at some scrap caught between his teeth. He had clearly dined already. Oriente tried not to notice. Lola looked about ready to gag.

“I hear you were on Flight 904,” Oriente said.

Wexler removed his hand from his mouth, scowled at the barman, then nodded. “Now that’s going back a ways,” he said, examining a slither of food on his index finger, before flicking it away. Lola flinched, as though it might land on her. “But yes, you heard right. I was on the 904. Crashed smack dab into the heart of Mecca. That was quite a ride, I can tell you.”

He eyed Oriente, clearly suspicious, but also drawn by the temptation to tell his story. Swaincroft, ever the historian, could contain himself no longer. “You were on 904? My god. That’s incredible. Were you on the Dubai Death Star too?”

Wexler nodded, frowning.

“How long were you there for?” said Swaincroft, who had already pulled a crisp white business card from his pocket and was proffering it across the booze-sticky table.

“Too long,” said Wexler. He looked at Oriente. “Where d’you hear all this from anyways? Gypsy Joe there tell you?” He looked around at the barman, who was smearing glasses with a dirty cloth, then at Swaincroft, clearly pleased at his reaction.

“You were really on Flight 904?”

“Like I said, I was one of the 220,” said Wexler. Lola looked confused. “What was flight 904? What are you guys talking about?”

Before Wexler could begin, Swaincroft was already babbling. “Flight 904 was a passenger jet liner out of Cairo that was hijacked by a group of Christian…” he'd been about to say ‘fanatics,’ but quickly revised his choice of words “… zealots who believed a final showdown between Islam and Christianity was in the offing…”

“Christian zealots, my ass,” growled Wexler. “We were patriots, finally paying them bastards back for what they done to New York.”

“Well, you also managed to trigger a devastating war across the Middle East,” Swaincroft said. “Millions of people died.”

“Only them that were dumb enough not to get the old third eye,” smiled Wexler, tapping the center of his forehead, where his chip was located. “Even back then, no one had to die. And besides, there was more than one of us on that plane that wished we had died. A few of the smarter ones – the real
zealots
– refused to be chipped before they boarded. Thought they’d rather go to an imaginary heaven than risk a real hell.”

“Why? What happened to you?” asked Lola, innocent of pretty much any event that may have taken place since she absented herself from the machinations of human history.

“Well, you see, we took over the plane, thirty minutes out of Cairo airport,” said Wexler, rubbing his glass between his leathery palms. “We set up our own soul pole in the cockpit, a kind of endure-anything black box version, so that when the crash happened, we would wake up safe and sound in the Orbiter, with a bunch of nice shiny Americans and cute European girls. We even had some Saudi engineers set up repeaters on the QT near the shrine, just to make sure.” He shrugged. “But Saudi workmanship was always slipshod at best. They were lazy, spoiled bastards glutted on their oil wealth. The repeaters never kicked in.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lola. She saw Swaincroft was bursting to answer, like the class swot trying to impress a favorite teacher. But he was too intrigued by meeting a survivor of the historic flight to actually interrupt again. Wexler leant in and took a sip of his drink.

“Long story short, my dear, we never made it to the safety of the Orbiter. Those of us that woke up, woke up in the Death Star.”

“The Dubai Death Star,” chipped in Swaincroft for the benefit of his lover, “was the Muslim world’s answer to the Orbiter. It was financed by the Gulf oil sheikhs. They realized there could be no fighting such technology, so they built their own version, complete with a Koranically correct paradise: rose gardens, rivers of crystal clear waters and wine flowing through it. There were plenty of imams who rejected it as a heresy, but most of the elite secretly subscribed. It was only the poor saps who believed what they heard in the Wahhabi pulpits who didn’t get chipped. The sort that Mr Wexler here crashed an Airbus 480 into, during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.”

“Well, I’m sure a Darwinist like yourself would probably call that natural selection.” Wexler gave him a toothy leer. “And besides, we paid our dues in the Death Star. Like you said, they had a version of heaven inspired by their holy book up there. They also had quite a nice little mock-up of hell that would suit any creed or disposition. That's where they put us. Woke up every day in pitch blackness, and every day, they’d find some new horror to unleash upon us. Sometimes they let us believe we were home already, rescued by some kind of prisoner-swap deal. That just made it harder when we were catapulted straight back into their torture mazes, their simulations of schizophrenia. We were like insects being ripped apart by some psycho-kid, day in, day out. Many of our boys went clear crazy. Went on for years, and every day felt like eternity. Even after we got out, some of our boys refused to believe it and went insane, waiting to wake up again in hell every day.”

Lola snorted. “Sounds to me like you were pretty crazy already, killing all those innocent people.” Her huge black eyes were narrow and her nostrils flared, and Oriente wondered what the hell young Swaincroft was waiting for.

“It was war, lady,” said Wexler, refusing to get riled. “They killed a bunch of our people, we had to pay them back in kind.”

“War?” said Lola. “Sounds like murder to me. How many thousands of people did you kill, for nothing? You know what I think? I think you got just what you deserved.”

Wexler said nothing, staring at the Rorschach swirls of alcohol evaporating on the table. Oriente agreed with Lola, but remembered the barman’s warning about this man. He was glad Wexler kept his cool. “Well, I just pray that none of you ever has to know the likes of what we went through,” he said.

The barman lumbered up with another bottle. Oriente poured shots for each of them, raised his to Wexler.

“Amen to that,” he said, diplomatically. “So how did you get out?”