Holy Fire (32 page)

Maya blinked. “I thought you said you hadn’t brought proper equipment.”

“I said I hadn’t brought equipment to the
show,
” Novak said. “Anyway, this gear is nothing much. Since I was forced to come here, I thought I might shoot—I don’t know—a few of those lovely Roman manhole covers.… But a couture shoot! Oh, what a challenge.”

“Won’t Vietti help us? He’s got a million flunkies on staff, he ought to give us anything we want.”

“Darling, Giancarlo and I are professionals. The game between the two of us has rules. When I win, I give Giancarlo exactly what I want to give Giancarlo. He shuts up and pays me. When I lose, Giancarlo offers me the full and terrible burden of his tactful advice and help.”

“Oh.”

Novak examined his bedspread arsenal of digital photon-benders and tugged thoughtfully at the bulbous end of his large, aged, cartilaginous male nose. “A couture session is no mere still life, it truly needs a team. You don’t take couture shots, you
make
them. The stylist for the clothing, the set dresser … a decent studio service is invaluable for props. A location scout … Hair designer, cosmetician very certainly …”

“How do we get all these people?”

“We hire them. After that, we bill Giancarlo for their services. That’s the good part. The bad part is I have no decent contacts in Roma. And, of course, since I am devastated by business failure, I have no capital.”

She gazed at him thoughtfully. She knew with deep
cellular certainty that Novak had plenty of money, but extracting it from him would be like drawing ten liters of blood. “I think I have a little money,” she said tentatively.

“You do? That’s exciting news, my dear.”

“I have a contact in Bologna who might help us. She has a lot of friends in virtuality and artifice.”

“Young people? Amateurs.”

“Yes, Josef, young people. You know what that means, don’t you? It means they’ll work for us for nothing, and then we can bill for whatever we like.”

“Well,” Novak allowed thoughtfully, “they’re still amateurs, but it never hurts to ask.”

“I can ask. I’m pretty sure I can ask. Before I can ask, though, I’m going to need some equipment for asking. Do you happen to know a nice discreet netsite in Roma that runs defunct protocols?”

That question was no challenge for Josef Novak. “The Villa Curonia,” Novak said at once. “Of course, the old and wicked Villa Curonia. What a lovely atmosphere for a location shoot.”

T
he Villa Curonia was a former private residence in Roma’s Monteverde Nuovo. The shaggy green heads of indiscreet palm trees loomed behind its glass-topped brick walls. A certain eccentricity in the facade suggested that its builder had been some opium-smoking D’Annunzio aesthete with aristo relations in the highest and creepiest circles of the early twentieth-century Curia.

Inside, the villa had an arch-heavy interior courtyard with a dry fountain and pedestaled statue of Hermes, perfect for the midnight meetings of bagmen. The three-story east wing was riddled like cheesecloth with power leads and fiber optics, all scuffed parquet flooring and silent ivory corridors and monster antique virch-sets squatting like toads behind the locked doors of servants’ cubbyholes. Two comically sinister brothers named Khornak were
running the place, for heaven only knew what sub-rosa cabal of backers, and under their aegis the ancient building had achieved the silk-padded atmosphere of a digital bordello. A Roman house of assignation for man-machine liaisons.

Novak was busy and methodical, Maya busy and nearly manic. Benedetta proved very helpful. Benedetta was tireless once she perceived a link to her own ambitions.

Brett arrived on a rented bicycle around three in the afternoon. Maya ushered her past the sidewalk guard post and the glowering Khornak brothers.

“This place is so amazing, it’s so refined,” Brett marveled. “It was so nice of you to ask me here.”

“You can stop gushing at me just any time now, Brett. Tell me something—tell me how you got to Roma.”

“You really want to know? Well, my first stop in Europe was Stuttgart, but the rents are so high there and the people are so snobby and full of themselves, so I just started doing a kind of wanderjahr, and, well, all roads lead to Roma, don’t they? And nobody was interested in what I could do with clothes, so I kept asking around and I got this kind of piecework spex job with this tabloid net, and I hang around on the shows and cafés and sometimes I get lucky and spot somebody who ranks.”

“That’s about what I imagined. You must know a lot of secondhand shops around here, right?”

“You mean clothing stores? Sure. This is Roma, there’s zillions. The Via del Corso, the Via Condotti, you can get all kinds of stuff for cash in Trastevere.… ”

“Josef is upstairs, running through his files in Praha. He’s going to instantiate me some clothes from his files, some clothes from the twenties. That’s the theme of the shoot. You know the style of that period?”

“Well, sure I do, sort of. In the twenties they were real big on, like, camisades and aubades with lastex and tulle and lots of optical fringe ribbon.”

Maya paused. The camisades sounded plausible, but she
couldn’t recall having ever worn so much as a centimeter of optical fringe ribbon. “Brett, we’re going to need some props for the session. Something to inspire Josef. He hasn’t worked this way in a long time, so we need something very atmospheric, something very … well, very
Glass Labyrinth
, very early-Novak. Josef Novak was always very big on the inherent poetry in things … on that very strange intense poetic thingness that certain, uhm, things possess.… You have any real idea what I’m talking about here?”

“I guess so.”

Maya handed her a fat cashcard. Brett checked the register band and her eyes widened.

“Old playing cards,” Maya told her. “Crescent moons. Ladies’ gloves. Colored yarn. Netting. Weird twentieth-century scientific instruments. Obsolete prosthetics. Driftwood. Prisms. Compasses. Brass-tipped walking sticks. Some ratty stuffed animals with scary glass eyes, like minks or weasels or, you know, ermines. Broken windup toys. Do you know what a phonograph was? Well, never mind the phonographs, then. Do you get my general Novak-ish drift here?”

Brett nodded uncertainly.

“Okay, then take that money I just gave you, scout out some junk shops, tell them you’re my stylist. You’re working on my photo shoot for Giancarlo Vietti. Try to borrow whatever you can, rent what you can’t borrow, and don’t buy anything unless you’re willing to keep it yourself. We’re in a big hurry here, so round up any vivid friends that can help you. Bring it all back here to the villa. Travel quick. Forget the bike, use taxis. If you get in trouble, call me. Time is of the essence, and money is basically no object. Understand all that? Okay, get going.”

Brett stood blinking.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so exciting. I’m just so glad to be really doing this.”

“Well, do it quick.”

Brett scampered off. Josef’s first instantiations arrived by courier. They were costumery. They weren’t about comfort or wearability. They were camera props, they were about photons.

Back in the twenties, they had still been very big on natural fibers, but there was no fabric in these costumes. They were all microscopic shirrings and shrinkings and tiny little squirms of extruded plastic. The costumes didn’t breathe well and they rustled loudly when they moved, but they looked angelic. When you pinched or tucked them into place they stayed that way and laughed mockingly at gravity.

“Looks like you got us our money’s worth.”

“The Khornak brothers are robbing us,” groaned Novak. “Sixteen percent transaction fees! Can you believe that?”

Maya peeled a tangerine cape-dress from the top of the heap and held it to herself. “That won’t be a problem as long as they’re discreet.”

“Maya, before we begin this, give me an answer. Why is this being financed through the defunct production company of a dead Hollywood film director?”

“Is it?” Maya said, examining the printed sleeves. “It was supposed to be financed through the student activities budget of a Bolognese technical college.”

“That childish dodge might fool a very impatient tax accountant. It won’t fool me, or these miserable little fences either.”

Maya sighed. “Josef, I happen to have a little grown-up money. A certain grown-up gave it to me, and he really shouldn’t have done that. That money is no good for me, and I have to get rid of it. This villa is a very good place to do that. Isn’t it? This is a black-market underwire netsite. This is Roma, a very old and very wicked town. And this is the fashion industry, where people always spend absurd
amounts of money for really silly reasons. If I can’t launder hot money under these circumstances, I’ll never be able to do it.”

“It’s risky.”

“My life is risk. Never mind the stupid money. Show me what beauty is.”

Novak sighed. “This isn’t going to be beauty, darling. I’m very sorry, but it will only be chic.”

“All right, then maybe I’ll settle for glamour. I’m a woman in a hurry. I want it so much, Josef. I just have to have it now.”

Slowly Novak nodded. “Yes. I can see that quality about you. That’s just where your allure lies, darling … that’s it, that’s you, and that is this moment, exactly.”

Philippe arrived at half past three to do her face. Philippe brought along a gift: a couture wig from the Emporio Vietti. This new wig boasted a built-in translation unit doing forty-seven major global languages through a translucent cord that snaked to the wearer’s right ear. It was, said Novak, “very Vietti” to pointedly ignore their purloining of the other wig and then double the ante by sending along a much nicer one.

The wig came preprogrammed with a set of three twenties hairstyles, Vietti’s tactful method of elbowing his way into the shot. It would have been crass to turn down such a handsome gift, and one that she needed so much. But Novak was angered by this little jab from his old patron. The irritation sent Novak into a frenzy of spontaneous invention.

“This I want from you, darling,” Novak muttered. “Let me tell you what is happening tonight. The thrill of the uncanny lies in the piquancy of oxymoron. You remember what life was like in the twenties? Well, of course you don’t. You can’t, but you must pretend that you do, just for me.… When Giancarlo and I were young in the twenties, anything seemed possible. Now it’s
the nineties, and anything truly
is
possible—but if you’re young, you’re not allowed to do anything about those possibilities. You understand me?”

She nodded, stone-faced, careful not to damage her cosmetics. “Yes, Josef, I do understand. I understand perfectly.”

“The uncanny is beauty
macchiato
, darling, beauty just a little spotted—with the guilty, with the monstrous. That’s what Vietti really saw in you, when he said that he saw something cute. You see, my darling, in order to make this world very safe for the very old, we have changed life for the young in ways that are truly evil.”

“Is that really fair, Josef? You’re being very harsh.”

“Don’t interrupt me. Vietti cannot recognize that truth without recognizing his own complicity. That was why he was intrigued.” Novak waved his single arm. “Tonight, you become the long-dead youth of the gerontocracy, in a dangerous liaison with the crushed youth of modernity. An impossible conspiracy, a dreamlike violation. Something that plays at sentiment and nostalgia, but conceals a core that is a little dangerous, a little perverse. I’m going to push that old man’s face into it. He won’t see all of it, because he can’t allow himself to see the full truth; but what he can see of it, he will be forced to love.”

They set to work. Maya lurking in svelte black by a half-dead antique virtuality engine. Maya passing a stuffed weasel and a stuffed envelope to a sullen half-naked errand boy (played by one of Brett’s Roman acquaintances). Maya in a set of virching goggles like a domino mask, letting her signet ring be kissed by the Khornaks’ burly security guard. (The glamour-struck guard was especially good in his role.) Maya spurning a packet of dope stickers and pretending to smoke a cigarette. A pensive Maya in candlelight, crouching in her high heels over a little playing-card castle of Roman bus tickets.

Ten, then a dozen, then a score of kids showed up at the villa netsite, in their street couture. Novak fed them
into the shot. Faceless and crawling at her feet, their cheap and vivid gear gone half-grotesque in shadows.

When Maya saw the raw shots on Novak’s notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novak’s fantasy was so revelatory. He’d made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novak’s glamour was a lie that told the truth.

Novak took a cab back to the hotel at half past one in the morning. The old man had not given so much of himself in a long time. He was palsied with an exhaustion that only a man in his one hundred twenties could manifest.

With Novak’s departure, the Khornak brothers, who had been growing very nervous about the vivid kids, threw everyone out in a scattered welter of props and equipment.

The kids drifted off with cheery good-byes, rattling off on bicycles, or cramming half a dozen into a cab. When Brett and Maya inventoried the borrowed props they discovered that the extras had magpied off with a dozen or so small but valuable articles. Brett was reduced to tears by this discovery. “That’s so typical,” she said. “Really, you give people a chance, a real chance for once, and what do they do with it. They just slap you in the face.”

“They wanted souvenirs, Brett. They gave us their time and we didn’t pay them a thing, so I don’t mind. Really, a stuffed weasel can’t be worth all that much.”

“But I promised the store people I’d take good care of everything. And I let the kids in on something really special, and they robbed me.” Brett shook her head and sniffled. “They just don’t get it here, Maya. These Roman kids, they’re not like us. It’s like all the life has been squeezed out of them. They don’t do anything, they don’t even try, they just hang out on the Spanish Steps and drink frappés and
read
. Good heavens, these Roman kids read.
You just give them some fat paper book and they’ll sit there and nod out for hours and hours.”