Death & the City Book Two (22 page)

Now my internal scanners are suddenly picking up cues incrementally. He sounds a bit less cheery than the other day. Looks as though he's pulled a late night shift, straight through into an early morning one. His tie is loose, top button undone, and his sparse fair hair is dishevelled, and in need of a shower. His shirt collar seems to be sporting a coffee stain. Idly, I imagine his wife locking him out last night, and the possibility that he came straight back to work rather than sleep in his car.

Now, if my senses had previously been distracted by some busy design features on my route through the building so far, or by passing more than just Drury on my way here, I'd probably have noticed none of this. But I store the assessment of Flynn up in my head anyway. Always useful to notice the cracks if they appear, as Warren said.

"How are you getting on with Connor?" he asks, and it sounds dry, as if he'd prefer it was negative, and a bit dark, as if he's suspicious of the personal angle things have taken. But I choose to interpret it as a work query.

"Working fine so far," I reply. "It's good to have back-up, should I need it."

"Yeah. He seems quite happy with you, anyway," Flynn agrees distantly, complying with the boundaries of impersonal information I've set. "Right. Let's take a look at what Miss Dorothy of Kansas is up to."

Two other officers are in the room, and nod as we join them at the CCTV monitors. They're like the anti-Jay and anti-Bob. Both are Oriental in descent, and have probably been looking at video images in darkened rooms since they could sit up in their cots unaided. One has a Navy SEALS jar-head flat-top haircut, while the other is wearing glasses and has more of a Yakuza Elvis-impersonator quiff and sideburns. They mutter to one another derisively over the desk, trading mild insults, and speculations about the Marmite percentage of Flynn's shirt, in Mandarin and Japanese respectively. I try interjecting
'Fucking grow up'
in Vietnamese, and they both grin at me, while Flynn makes a great show of yawning and coughing up phlegm, to drown out the noise of the other three of us reaching a level of mutual understanding.

"You have to pardon the boss,"
Navy SEALS tells me in Mandarin, his eyes focused on the screen.
"His wife is playing away."

"When did he find out?"
I ask, sticking with Vietnamese, knowing that both can understand me.

"Just after midnight last night,"
Yakuza Elvis replies, staying in Japanese, in turn.
"She sent him a text meant for someone else."

"San ba,"
I remark. It's a Chinese insult, but the first that came to mind. I'm guessing head office probably picked up on it, but I'll have to watch my step around Flynn if he can't shower or change a shirt due to stress. If he was like me, I'd expect pyjamas, dressing gown and a sledgehammer, but he's listed as sane. I switch to English to prevent his growing suspicion of more than just greetings being exchanged. "How long has she been in interview?"

"Just preliminaries, confirming name and address, yada yada yada. Some joking about the cameras and being on
Big Brother
, saying she's always wanted to be a TV star." Navy SEALS speaks English with a south London accent similar to Connor's. I wonder if they took the same voice coaching, erasing their territorial accents. "She's under observation while waiting for a cup of tea. Has had her phone out texting Canem."

"She's got her phone on her still?" I ask.

"Yeah, well we've got his," Yakuza Elvis shrugs, and throws a phone over the desk to me. I catch it and open the SMS files. "And we've told her she's in police protection, not under arrest. So we can see who she tries to get hold of."

I skim through texts to Canem from 'Gingham Girl' as she's named in his Contacts list.
Where R U?
being the most common message in the last few days, to which someone here has obviously sent bogus replies, keeping the pimp's spirit alive.
Trying to get in confidenz wiv the fuzz 4 U xxx
one day ago sounds like an empty promise, until just now when she's texted
OMG inside City Central after fight in Moon will call bk asap & Report!!! Xxx.
She seems to have taken her espionage role seriously. Even though for clients, it was all just role-play, that she was merely the gullible victim of. Sounds like the plot of a porno
/spoof Film Noir
. Except in the Hollywood spoof, the gullible victim is the ultimate victor. In this reality, I have no idea where Dorothy is heading. In her own mind, she's probably light-years ahead of the game anyway. Asking someone with a personality disorder to get some perspective, is merely asking them to identify with a different God. Or martyr, depending on the polarization of their distorted self-esteem. The proportionality to any reality according to the rest of the world has very little to do with it.

"If she rings we're just letting it go to voicemail," says Flynn, joining in at last, when I'm guessing he'd rather be somewhere else. "She's not said anything yet, other than she'll call with any updates, and to call her back with any new assignments. It seems she mostly took calls from repeat clients herself, who then paid into Canem's account, and she was paid a wage based on invoices. So fishing for new introductions from him to increase her assignments was in competition with other girls, and led to a lot of flirting with the boss, so to speak."

Sounds like the bar staff, I muse. Even though he's as gay as Brighton seafront, Crypto's Mgr Lenny still gets covered in barmaids regularly, all hoping to get promoted to V.I.P. hostess. Charmaine went through a phase of bringing him cupcakes, and then profiteroles, and then cream meringues, until Sadie upstaged her with a crackle toffee cheesecake she had got one of her housemates to make and passed off as her own, although her Twaddle updates gave the game away. Elaine decided she'd had enough, and made him Mississippi Chocolate Fudge Brownie Pie, which was so strong his taste buds didn't work again for a week afterwards. And then only responded to chocolate cooking essence straight from the bottle, at a concentration my brother Luke reckons you could stop time with; and Absinthe, which is what fuels the
TARDIS
. Elaine knows things about baking that Martha knows about Black magic. It's not just innocent cookies on Valentine's Day.

Flynn doesn't seem to find introspective silences comforting, particularly considering his last remarks. He grunts and rubs his eyes.

"I'm getting a coffee," he mutters. "Make sure you keep recording."

"Yes, Dad," Navy SEALS teases, and the security door slams. He grins at me. "I'm Zheng, by the way. James, in English."

"I'm classified," I greet him honestly, shaking hands. "Lara, in English."

"Yeah, we know you as Lara." Yakuza Elvis leans over the desk to shake hands also. "Sometimes as
Chun Li
too. I'm Akira. Here they know me as Ashley."

"I've been wondering when that
Chun Li
thing will go away," I say wryly. "Obviously going blonde, and quitting the pigtails hasn't done it."

"You'd have to also quit jumping out from behind dustbins and kicking people's heads in," says Ash.

"Yeah, I think that's more or less what it's about," James smiles. "Oh, look, she's filing her nails. It's like a celebrity caught on webcam, with no celebrity."

"She's allowed a nail-file in there as well?" I remark, before remembering I've still got Connor's gun strapped under my t-shirt. I'm not just a pot calling the kettle black. I'm the whole kitchenware department.

"I think the idea is, if she's going to turn either destructive or self-destructive, we kind of want to see how it pans out," says James. "Treat her as if she's not under suspicion, and see if she drags the suspicion out of herself in the desire for attention. Sticks it under our noses for us, so to speak."

"What, like Baron Munchausen?" I ask. "Attention-seeking to the point of drawing attention to herself, even if it's detrimental?"

"Cry for drama, more than a cry-for-help type, we were thinking," Ash puts in. "A gnawing need to be the centre of attention at any cost."

"Yeah, well - something tells me, it's not just to fulfil a personal demon eating away at her," I suggest. "If she's going to do anything dramatic, it looks like she wants to be seen doing it with a perfect manicure."

"She knows there's a camera in the room," James shrugs. "Maybe she wants to be seen DOING a perfect manicure."

We all watch, as she holds up a hand daintily for inspection, with slightly more exaggeration and flourish than required for purely personal use.

"Wow," I agree.

"Yeah," James nods.

"That's some inner demon," Ash concurs.

These two sound like they share a book club or reading group with Connor. But I decide to skirt around drawing the kind of conclusions that are usually followed by enforced medication, and being detained at the Health Service's convenience.

"You two spend a lot of time watching women on camera?" I ask instead, hoping to expand new information instead of revolve inescapably around the gravity of the old, like an obsessive gyroscope.

"Uh-huh," they respond, in unison.

"What does that tell you about women, out of interest?" I want to know.

"You can tell the difference between a woman acting, and a woman just being herself," James tells me. "Like how she's putting on a show of the nail filing, but can you see her knees fidgeting against one another, how she's sitting? She's trying to hide the fact she's got an itch she wants to scratch instead. Half of her body is acting, while the other half is being suppressed. Like girls who cross their legs and swing their feet trying to hold in a fart, or to hide the fact they want to pee."

"She might have ringworm," I point out. "Her drinking buddy was covered in it."

"And yet she isn't sitting awkwardly, not like she wants to be anywhere else," says Ash. "Not like a normal person with an itch. Most would just scratch. She's got some whole other performance going on to detract from it."

"I thought that was just women in general who do that," I grin. "A guy would sit there and scratch. Unless he was guilty of something. But women do perform extravagant camouflage, contrived by their insecurities. Particularly if it's about romantic failure. Like those female writers and academics who become career feminists, to hide the fact they didn't pull the guys they lusted after at University."

"You mean a masquerade demon," James agrees, thoughtfully. "Even when the demon becomes so complex and necessary that it becomes the driving force, even though it takes over the person's entire life, in effect it's still only a cloak over the original soul, being acted out to hide an original vulnerability. It's not that hard to observe. The real character of a person tends to be more fearful, more furtive. Moves in less broad gestures compared to the more flamboyant demon, except in cases of the very brave."

"You ever see
Presbyterians
taped live in Las Vegas?" Ash asks. "Like that. Even the smiles and the winks at the audience. All demon. Like she'd managed to leave her real self in the hotel room altogether and slept right through it, while her body was possessed and performing under obligation to her recording contract. It was like watching a Replicant from
Bladerunner
on stage."

If I was Miss Presbyterians, I'd think being compared to a Replicant was quite cool. I know a lot of doormen who like to think of themselves as mean machines in the workplace. Being called a machine is a compliment, like Nicole 'Dominica' Ladd - the original topless tabloid Laddette - showing she's not just a brand name, doing various TV celebrity torture trials for comic charity funds, and going back for more every year. Although being referred to as acting like a machine in the bedroom, in terms of just going through the motions rather than as a 'sex machine' is probably less complimentary. So probably you wouldn't want to be compared to a robot in your job if you were a prostitute, like Miss Dorothy. Although she didn't know she was a hooker, and probably would still take it as a distorted compliment in her Universe.

"Is that why they call it meltdown, when the artificially-created machine fails?" I muse. "Leaving behind a considerably less than super-human operator?"

"Yeah, that works in my reality," Ash nods. "You'll have to come up with a suitable demon-related analogy for Zheng."

James grins again, still watching the screen.

"Know much about demons?" he asks me.

"Only that they live on top of some mountain in Java," I shrug, pulling up another wheeled office chair to sit down, and replacing Canem's phone on the desk. "According to the history of Java, anyway. According to the internet, they live underneath Sunnydale, California. The Hellmouth."

"I told you she was
Buffy
," Ash puts in, wagging a finger at James. "It's no coincidence she picked a job where she gets to wear black."