Bombshell (26 page)

“Operational hygiene? What the hell would you know about ‘operational hygiene,' Jones? Was it not you who left his credit card in the bar in Miami when we took Al-Zahrani? You thought I didn't know? Jesus . . . ”

Static and silence now separated them. Dresner knew that it would have to be he who spoke next.

“Listen, I'm as torn up about Spicer as the rest of you.” Unconsciously, he glanced at Royce, finding him glaring back. He was possessed of the same
stricken look Dresner had witnessed when he emerged from Varyushka Cash's cabin bearing the plastic grocery bag of Spicer's remains. He was shaking. “He put his trust in me,” Dresner explained.

Still trembling, Royce sipped at his drink before speaking. His eyes glossed with sorrow. Feeling his words gathering, the rest of the group all lowered their faces slightly toward their glasses or blank spaces on the table.

“Anthony Spicer was my
lover
, Robert, you son of a bitch.”

The surf music clanged overhead, a bright blue wave suspended, vast and coiled yet never breaking, like an old Japanese painting.

“I'm sorry.” Dresner's head fell involuntarily toward the sticky table. He began to speak, barely audibly. “Please, there is something else . . . ” He needed to get out what The Voice had told him after the assassination of Evelyn and Frederick Winters in the wreckage of his engagement to Janelle Gresham, who was to have been his salvation. Royce sniffed mucous, still lost inside the tremors and ripples of his grief. As Dresner raised his face, he saw that he had the attention of Green, Jones, and Gordon, if only for a moment, if only because he himself appeared so pathetic and desperate. “There has been an
incident
at Indian Point, a nuclear reactor plant only forty miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River.” If his voice did not strengthen, it was at least swollen with his hatred of Varyushka Cash and her detonations within him. “Indian Point is a Winters Corporation plant, so this may not be over. I can't tell you, the agency could not tell me, whether the incident is serious in any way. With the Winters Corporation in mourning and chaos, The Voice informed me that the risk of this incident had not been determined. We cannot be certain, yet, that she is responsible, but I believe that she is still in the city. This is not her date. So we need to go in and get her, even as, hypothetically, there might be a minor risk of this
undetermined incident at Indian Point revealing itself to be significant, and with that, bringing a significant risk of the contamination of Manhattan.”

Slowly, the men rose from their seats. Royce was the first. Dresner wanted to call out
Wait! We're not finished!
But he could neither speak nor prevent images of Royce and Spicer exploding like queer strobe lights across his consciousness: Spicer's cock dripping with lubricant as he banged Royce in a Miami bathroom stall; Spicer turning to ash, disintegrating as though blown by a nuclear wind as they kissed, Royce's tongue coiling around the bleached jawbone, the only remnant of the fire. He was disgusted. How could he lose them to this? How had he not seen the conspiracies of internal loyalties gathering beneath him? The others had all known about Spicer and Royce, he realized. His own victimization was overwhelming. Now he found himself abandoned, washed up on the gaudy atoll of his career. Across that dead beach, he perceived in the warping distance the figure of Varyushka Cash. She had come to destroy him. If Cross Spikes tried to return to him now, it would be too late. Self-piteous, he resigned himself to their protest. He took the dregs of each of their cocktails, alternately finishing them and pouring them into his own glass, until it ran over with the luminous blue of the undead. Pussies. Stray corpses.

Seeing him alone, Declan Collins approached the table. “Your fellas there don't like zombies, then?” He indicated the direction of the door, inclining his head. “I'll get you another of your own, my friend.”

He considered running into the street after them. Even if he had not told them of the potential for a nuclear incident, he recognized that, shaken by Spicer's murder and immolation, they would not have followed him into the risk of radiation sickness. He would finish the rendition of Varyushka Cash alone. He would shame them with his loyalty, his talent, his vengeance, his atonement, even if it was fuelled by desperation, despair, and the futility of any other future.

APRIL 18, 2011. THE QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS WITH A LOBOTOMY
haircut, Cash thought, of the framed poster of Bettie Page in her leopard-skin bikini on the wall of the Domino bar, and of herself, resting against the counter, nursing a vodka gimlet, staring at her skinhead cut in the mirrored glass over the bartender's shoulder. She rubbed the dark fuzz on her scalp with her palm. It felt good, clean, and pure. It was almost the time for which she had been anticipating her entire life. With the Winters men saturated in their own blood, she would move against Indian Point, and she, Varyushka Cash, looked like a warrior. Finally, she would be able to stare down the trail of corpses and ghosts behind her, far back along to the fireball of her birth. It would be over soon.

In the distance, in the salted ossuary of her memory, Cash stood at the edge of the Black Sea, hundreds of years ago, recollections of the Eurasian steppes giving way to the freezing monochrome water; twelve centuries past, twenty-five centuries past. I am Hippolyta, bound by the flow
of pores, fingernails, menstrual fluids, hair follicles, indelible teeth, lips in scream and orgasm, running in the plain grass into the horizon of wormwood trees, sometimes lacerated by exfoliants of frost and blown ice on the wind, sometimes standing like a denuded X in the rays of dawn. Centuries ago, we stood at the shore of the sea, immaculately self-possessed, realized, individuated, female, Amazons. Ukraine, the old lands belonged to us, and our ink-embroidered skin. Our citadel was in constant motion. Our city was our body, arteries, cardinal points, lymph nodes, heartbeats, and nerve terminals. Cash receded from yellow taxicabs to golden chariots, and she was the monarch at the head of an army of women, at the end of a civilization . . . Angular pectoral muscles daubed with paint during the radiant blood of evening. The women wore conical leather caps and woolen breeches. Their weapons were short bows, javelins, and swords. The cavalry archers had flat chests and their bows were composites of supple wood and animal horn. Riding without reins, their torsos twisted and contorted; they learned spine bends, allowing firing angles only known to the female. The javelin throwers had powerful shoulders and long muscles through their arms. They wore bands of cloth strapping across their breasts, like some of the archers and the sword girls, narrowing the target silhouette, focusing the flesh in a vortex of lethal power, and in this manner captured male breastplate armor was appropriated as the bodies fell. The Amazons did not mutilate their own flesh, removing their right breast or beating their figures flat with hot irons or wooden tools. These mutilations were part of the processes of male fantasy, and anathema to the Amazons, just as they did not circumcise, they did not hack away and diminish themselves. Because the body was a city besieged, they brought their weapons to bear on he who would garrison them, invading them with laws. The Amazons would move to gain control of the future city of Pripyat, dismantling the state apparatus. During the final night assault, the males lose control of their nuclear reactor and the future city is contaminated with radiation, inky oriental clouds of rose, blood, milk, and gold, like the infernos of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Certain male captives were
removed to the sperm banks, as was the annual custom of the Amazons. The males were shackled and attached to genital pumps and rubber hoses before television screens of pornographic movies on a cyclical program. The males, shivering in the smudged gore of battle, were ingratiating and grateful, at first. Slowly, the jars filled with ejaculate and the prisoners began to complain. They began to understand that they would never be released from the breeding cycle until they could produce no more. Their flesh became gray and emaciated. Testosterone injections caused their hair to fall out. They ate only meals of protein powder and zinc lozenges. Finally, they expired in white powder. In the seasons that followed, the women suffered miscarriages, breast cancers, thyroid cancers, uterine cancers; the sperm bank was contaminated from the meltdown of the males' source of power. The Zone of the Amazons was a cobwebbed womb . . .

“You dig Bettie Page?” The bartender who suddenly addressed her wore a black and red bowling alley shirt and ancient Lee 101s, a fifties-styled young man with pomaded black hair, a tattoo of tumbling dice on his left forearm, and a viper on the right. “I saw you looking at the picture, up there.”

“She is, uh, ubiquitous.” Cash smiled, touching her buzzed hair again.

“Huh? You got me there. What does ‘ubiquitous' mean?” He struggled over repeating the new word to her.

“It means she's hot,” Cash said.

“Yeah, cool.” He wiped the counter with a canary yellow cloth. “You can tell the girls that get her, even if they don't have the bangs, right?” The bartender eyed Cash's skinhead cut. “She was pretty edgy too,” he explained.

“Well, she was pretty naked. Can I get another drink, please?”

“Sure, another gimlet?” He reached for her empty glass.

“Can you make me a Manhattan, please?”

“Definitely. When in Rome . . . ”

A police officer came in from the light rain that was falling outside and the cold wind from the northeast. He hesitated, looking back over his shoulder, questioning the weather as though it were pursuing him. He sat down on the stool beside her at the bar. What would Valerie do? Before she could organize her thoughts, the greaser brought her the Manhattan and greeted the policeman.

“Yo, Schmalix! How's it hanging? You look depressed. Not retiring yet?”

“No, kid, not yet. I'm not as old as I look, you know? But I'm supposed to have a real boner because a pair of rich guys got shot in their office yesterday, and it's overtime for the moneyed stiffs. I don't care if they were rich. I scrape up poor people every day and look here,
no boner!
Do I look excited, I ask you?” Water dripped from the soft spikes of the cop's cap and ran from his slouching shoulders.

“Not really. Who exactly got killed?”

“I can't tell you that, Johnny, come on.”

Johnny appeared crestfallen.

“Ah, you'll probably see it all on the TV news anyway, so screw it, I'll tell you: It was the father and eldest son from a company called the Winters Corporation. Energy tycoons.”

“Never heard of them.”

“No, of course we haven't, they're too big.”

“You're here for your daily Guinness, Officer Schmalix?”

“It won't affect my arousal. Pour it, friend.”

Schmalix removed his soaking dark blue cap and laid it on the bar counter and waited for his drink. He looked to be about fifty years old. He and Cash were the only customers drinking up at the bar. Others haunted the red padded booths, or shrugged disconsolately in front of the pinball machine. Schmalix eyed Cash as his drink arrived.

“It's okay, I'm not on duty anymore. Cheers!” The cop raised his dark glass toward her Manhattan, and Cash held her glass towards his.

“
Budmo
!” she said. “That's Ukrainian.”

“Oh, how about that? You're on holiday, a tourist?” The cop was warming up, relieved to be off duty.

“Uh-uh.” Cash shook her head as her lips met her cocktail glass.

Schmalix swiveled on his barstool to better talk to her. “My family, the dead part, was from Europe, kind of eastern-central. I don't know. I've never been there. There might be another Schmalix or two at the big synagogue, but I never go.” He sipped his Guinness. “People assume that all old cops are Irish, anyway. It's vague, lost.” He spoke without sentiment, waving his hand in a sweeping gesture at the word “lost.”

“Here's to forgetting where we come from,” Cash offered.

“
Budmo!
” Schmalix tilted his glass and smiled. “I like you, kid. You're all right.” He looked up at the old television suspended by chains at one end of the bar, where a baseball game was in silent progress.

Her tears began, almost imperceptibly, minute bulbs of glass against a white field, dark lashes swelling and drinking like desperate tendrils in a tragic arbor. Cash stared at the pocked planes of Schmalix's face, the moisture in the goat curls of gray hair about his weathered ears. There is a moment, she told herself, in any series of dramatic acts when one can simply decline, walk away, or surrender. There is a flickering moment when it is still possible to avoid the shattering, the exposure, and the violence that one has planned for so long. She saw Valerie Solanas in her mind, inside the Factory elevator, watching the floor buttons illuminate as she rose toward the fourth floor and her assassination attempt on Warhol, electricity shaking her flesh, a storm of desire and profound anxiety, a struggle that continued even as the bullets flew across the office. In the bar, beneath the defused sexuality of Bettie Page and in the comfortable presence of the police officer, Cash understood that she might be experiencing one last opportunity to quit. There was something nostalgic about this moment of crisis; it seemed to take place in the past, and all she had to do was hold out her guilty hands, surrendering between atomic age sex and the law. No. That was bad faith. There remained distance to traverse. She was still to wreak havoc at Indian Point, the lone skinhead girl in Jane Fonda drag shooting up the gangways. She had to prove their vulnerability. She knew that she could not turn herself in, as Valerie had done, because unlike Valerie, the white-hot spotlight of her life had not yet found her. Schmalix gestured toward the television, lowering his glass from his lips.