The Decoy (25 page)

'What do they say?'

'That it makes you horny,' she whispers. She giggles. 'Nature's way of making sure we keep the species going. Whenever we see a corpse, we want to get laid.' She reaches for his hand. 'Dad's at a funeral.'

'I know.'

Her fingers run down his hand, stroking his fingers, brushing the front of his pants. What she finds there makes her grin even wider. 'Can we go to your place?'

Glenn's mind is racing. 'OK,' he says, 'I'd like that very much.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Alicia looks at the photographs on Glenn's wall and says, 'Wow.'

There are six prints, each blown up to two foot by three. They show the red snapper Glenn bought from the supermarket. He took one photograph each day for a week, capturing the colour changes as the scales turned first violet, then black. By the end the fish had been little more than bones in a pile of mouldy, iridescent jelly.

'They're beautiful,' she says. 'Weird, but beautiful.'

Coming to stand behind her, he nods. 'Rembrandt used to say that the best fruit for a still life is fruit that's about to rot.'

'Like, it's decaying, but you stop the decay with your photographs. That's neat.'

'Yes,' he says, surprised that she has understood his art so quickly. Just for a moment he wonders if it might be possible for this girl and him… but no, there is too much behind him, too many ghosts, for that. 'It's part of a… project,' he adds.

For a moment they stand there, each thinking their own thoughts. 'Where's the bedroom?' she says at last. 'Is it this way?'

'Uh-huh.' He follows her, as he knows she intends.

'Oh, that's neat, too,' she says. She's looking at the Insect-O-Cutor on the wall above the bed, a glowing neon circle mounted directly above the pillow. The blinds are drawn and the room is filled with pale-blue light from the tube. 'Like, found art, right?'

'Right,' he says. She bounces onto the bed and turns to look up at him. He can see by her eyes that she's excited. She reaches for the clasp of his belt.

He stands there and watches her, as if through a movie camera. She is freeing his penis, making the noises they make in movies, holding it in her fist as if she's holding a knife to stab herself with. She is wetting the head with saliva, running it around her lips like a tube of lipsalve. She's lapping at the tip, licking it long and slow, taking her eyes off it occasionally to look up at his. She is pushing her fingers underneath his sac, palming his balls, rolling them in her fingers, not realizing that they are bombs which, when they go off, will destroy her and the world with her. She is wrapping her lips around the head of his cock, pouting at him, not understanding that she is wrapping her lips around the barrel of a gun. He feels her trying to suck the power from him, suck the bullets out of the gun and the explosive from the bombs, and for a moment he wilts in her, but only until he puts his hands around her neck. She looks a little doubtful, but she doesn't stop. He presses his thumbs against the front of her throat, feeling for the delicate cartilages of the larynx, the springy thyroid and the harder knob of the cricoid underneath. He squeezes, and she tries to pull away, but standing above her like this he is the one with the power. For a moment she tries to make a sound, but the pressure on her windpipe is too great. He reaches down with his free hand to the bed, to the belt she pulled from his trousers just a few minutes before. Looping it around her neck, he puts the buckle underneath her ear and tightens it, pulling upwards with all his strength. She starts to rise with it, but he pushes her down with his other hand on her shoulders. Her tongue, protruding from her mouth with the pressure on her larynx, pushes his penis out of her mouth. He barely notices. He hadn't wanted to come yet, anyway. Not just yet.

'OK,' Rob Fleming says. 'I might have something for you here, Frank.'

Durban nods.

The computer crimes technician indicates the screen in front of them. 'As you know, the lawyers haven't had much success with getting pictureman.com pulled.'

'Tell me about it,' Frank growls. 'How many hits has it taken so far?'

Fleming checks something on the computer screen. 'Over half a million. Anyway, I asked myself, what other ways are there of getting a website off the air? And then I thought, what about hacking it?'

Positano, watching from the side of the room, stirs uneasily. 'Hacking it?'

'Sure. Only last week some college kids got onto the Pentagon site and deliberately crashed it. And that's the Pentagon; they've got a full-time team working on counter-hacking measures. Pictureman.com's just a souped-up homepage.'

'Is hacking legal?' Positano asks.

'It's a grey area, just like sticking up a site like this in the first place.'

'And?' Durban says. 'Can you do it?'

'Bear with me. First, I opened an account with the server myself, to see what sort of site-builder software it provides. As I thought, it allows the designer of the site access privileges, in case he wants to update the site, change the typeface or whatever. After that, it was just a matter of getting hold of the relevant codes. I didn't even have to go to the software manufacturers; all the information was out there on a hacker's bulletin board. See?' He types something on his keyboard, and the web-page on the screen is filled with his gibberish. He clicks with his mouse and it disappears again.

'Great,' says Durban. 'What are you waiting for? It's a no-brainer, Rob. Get this guy off the air.'

'Well,' Rob says, 'that's what I was going to do. But then I had this other idea.'

Durban looks at him. 'What's on your mind?'

'You ever heard of mirror sites, Frank?'

Durban shrugs. 'Can't say I have.'

'They're websites that look identical to another website and even appear to have the same address; they're just being run by a different server. People set them up when their existing site gets clogged with traffic.'

'Go on,' Durban says.

'Well, it's just that, if I were to set up a mirror site to this one and hide the real one, we could rig it so that, when the killer comes along to update his site, look at the number of rubberneckers he's been hit by, whatever, we'll know about it.'

'Jesus,' Durban says. 'You mean, just by watching, you could tell when the killer's online? And maybe trace the phone connection?'

'Screw watching,' Fleming says. 'We could get the website to send us an e-mail.' He laughs. 'They call it the worldwide web, don't they? We're gonna be the spider in that web.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

For a week Christian nurses her, despite her protestations. He brings her delicacies from the Italian store across the street, runs baths filled with sweet-smelling Parisian oils for her, and swaddles her afterwards in vast soft towels. He has a gym room, and she starts to exercise in it, slowly losing the weight she gained in the hospital, toning her body while he watches in the double wall of mirrors that reflect a thousand Claires, a thousand Christian Voglers. He trims her hair while it's still wet from the shower, brings her clothes he's picked out for her in Barneys and Donna Karan, cooks her meals of fresh produce from the Union Square Farmer's Market and Dean & DeLuca.

Twice a day, Dr Felix visits. He tells them she's making an excellent recovery.

On the seventh night after her return from Greenridge, Christian takes her to Liberty Island on the ferry. They stand like tourists beneath the hollow lady, watching the lights of Manhattan dancing on the silver-black water.

'Claire,' he says, 'there's something I need to know.'

She waits.

'How much of it was acting?' he says softly. 'All of it? Some of it?'

She stares across the water. 'Connie was very clever,' she says at last. 'There was just enough of my real self in the cover story to make all those crazy things she made us do seem plausible. Even when I was certain you hadn't done it, I didn't want it to end.'

'Me neither.'

'What about your wife?'

'Stella was the reason I agreed to help them, initially. She wasn't the reason I agreed to go on. I thought if I walked out I'd lose you altogether.'

'I understand,' she murmurs.

'Do you think… could we ever start this again, from the beginning? Or has there been too much water under the bridge?'

She gazes across at the elegant tracery of Brooklyn Bridge. 'Some bridges can span an awful lot of water.'

'I love you, Claire. I want to be with you.'

'And me with you.'

'Whatever happens,' he says, 'I've given you my heart. Will you accept my hand as well?'

'Christian. My God… are you saying what I think you're saying?'

'Marry me,' he says simply, and after the briefest of pauses she answers, 'Of course.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

He spends the whole night, almost, inside her. At times they barely move, rocking together, murmuring. Eventually he falls asleep, still inside her, without coming, and she understands that it is this, and not the physical climax, that he really craves: to be whole again, to complete the circle; to be joined to her by his penis, as a baby is joined to its mother by the cord.

'Harold, I am so sorry,' Dan Etheridge says awkwardly. 'Please accept my condolences. And Martha sends hers too.'

Harold nods bleakly. All those years of uttering condolences himself, the grave formula of sympathy and regret. Now he understands how empty, how meaningless they are.

'We've had the report back from the autopsy,' Dan says slowly. 'Just so's you know, it was pretty much what we expected. When folks hang themselves, there's a distinctive mark underneath the ear, and in this case the buckle…' His voice tails off. 'It happens, sometimes, with kids. Kind of like a craze. One of them will do it, and then another will copy her, and before you know where you are there's a whole epidemic going on.'

'Yes,' Harold says. He looks out of the window, towards the woods where his daughter's body was found, hanging from a tree, after a week-long search.

'I don't know whether you'll want to handle the … arrangements yourself,' Dan says. 'Harold, I think I should warn you. Her body — out in the woods like that — some animals must have got to her while she was hanging there. It might be best to ask another firm to take care of her.'

The young assistant, Glenn, who has been standing quietly behind his employer, speaks for the first time. 'Harold?' he says gently. 'Harold, I'd be honoured to see what I can do for her. I would very much like to do my best for Alicia.'

Harold feels he has lost the power to make any decisions at all. 'If you think you can do it,' he says.

Dan Etheridge lets his gaze travel down the soberly attired young man. For the first time he notices that Glenn Furnish's trousers have no belt.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Furnish hums tunelessly as he hooks the aspirator pump up to Alicia's body. One tube in, another tube out, as if the aspirator were some mechanical steel heart, an alternative circulation that, once connected, will make the dead girl sit up and walk again.

Glenn smiles at the memory of those days, the days they spent together. Him and Alicia. A tranquil time. His smile broadens. For the piece he intends to call
Tranquillity
he had arranged the girl in front of a television screen on which a porno tape was showing an orgy scene.

Now, while the vile multitude strip bare

and squeal as Pleasure's whips strike home,

numbing their feelings of sorrow or despair,

come, take my hand: let us stand back and watch.

He had experimented with various objects inserted into her vagina. Finally, in a reference to her insight into his work, he had decided on a rotten fish. 'Death, triumphant, sweeps in from the sea.' His patrons, he knew, would appreciate the irony of that.

Glenn intends to price
Tranquillity
at $10,000.

While the aspirator pump shakes and gargles, and Glenn gets on with repairing the damage done by scavengers, he starts to turn over in his mind the possibilities of another idea.

After all, he has the bodies of two young women here. An opportunity like that only happens rarely.

Soon, Glenn knows, it's going to be time for him to move on. He has time for just one more piece before he has to go.

He read somewhere that Michelangelo had said the statue was already captive in the marble; the artist's job was merely to release it. Intrigued, Glenn looked up the series of sculptures known as the
Captives
and studied them for hours, entranced by the grimaces on the faces of the artist's subjects as they struggled to free themselves from their cauls of stone. He knew the power Michelangelo must have felt, the godlike power, as he stood over his creations and knew that he, and he alone, had the power to release them.

When Glenn was in Italy he made a special pilgrimage to see them, queuing outside the Accadèmia with all the other American tourists at opening time. The others, of course, had been after a glimpse of the sculptor's graceful, serene
David,
not the stunted, writhing effigies of the
Captives.
Cameras raised, they had advanced down the long colonnade of statuary, clicking away at the
David,
strategically placed at the end of the gallery. Glenn had been amazed. How could anyone simply walk past the
Captives,
ignoring those stark, tortured forms?

One day Glenn will do something as great as the
Captives.
Not in marble, of course, but in his own medium, the medium of the age in which he lives: flesh. His artworks preserved as bytes, electronic slices of information flowing from computer to computer through the infosphere.

Not yet, though. Not yet. For the moment, Glenn needs his patrons' money, just as Michelangelo needed the Medicis' gold. Just one more piece here, and then it's on to the city and his next commission.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Dan Etheridge methodically goes through the sheaf of faxes that have come in from the FBI, Interpol, the NYPD and other police departments. In the usual course of things, Dan doesn't exactly ignore these notices — nothing is ever thrown away, and each fax is added carefully to the stack behind the spare printer cartridges — but neither does he actually pay them much mind. Out here, law enforcement is usually more a matter of keeping drunk drivers off the roads than keeping a lookout for criminals on the most-wanted list.