Holy Fire (37 page)

“You’re very sweet to say that.”

“I heal from that black eye your little friend Klaudia gave me, so I decide, I like you anyway.”

“That’s very good of you, Niko, dear. Considering.”

“It’s so cold,” complained Bouboule, hugging her arms. “It’s so stupid that the Widow can drive us to this. For two marks I’d run down there and slap her face.”

“Why do they call her the Widow?” Maya said. The four of them were now squatting like four vivid magpies on the peak of the roof. The question seemed ideal for the circumstances.

“Well,” said Bouboule, “most women get over sex in later life. But not the Widow. She keeps marrying.”

“She always marries men of a certain type,” said Benedetta. “Artists. Very self-destructive artists.”

“She marries the dead-at-forty,” said Niko. “Every time.”

“She tries to save the poor gifted boys from themselves,” said Benedetta.

“Had any luck?” Maya asked.

“So far, six dead ones,” Bouboule said.

“That’s got to hurt,” Maya said.

“I grant her this much,” said Benedetta. “She never marries them until they are really far gone. And I think she does keep them alive and working a little extra while.”

“Any boy in her bed is too afraid to die,” Niko said sweetly.

Bouboule nodded. “When she sells their work later, she always holds out for top mark! She makes their reputation in the art world! Such a lovely trick! Don’t you know.”

“I see,” said Maya. “It’s a coup de grâce, then. It’s a charity.”

Benedetta sneezed, then waved her hand. “You must be wondering why I called you here tonight.”

“Do tell us,” urged Maya, cupping her chin.

“Darling, we want to make you one of us tonight.”

“Really?”

“But we have a little test for you first.”

“A little test. But of course.”

Benedetta pointed down the length of the roof. The roofline stretched for the length of the bar. At the roof’s far edge rose the broad metal post of a shallow celestial bowl. Klaus’s satellite antenna. Maybe twenty meters away.

“Yes?” Maya said.

Benedetta plucked the stylus from her hair. She adjusted a tiny knob, then bent over carefully and touched the stylus to a ceramic tile. Sparks flew. Blackness etched its way into the tile.

“Sign our membership list,” Benedetta said. She handed Maya the stylus.

“Wonderful. Good idea. Where do I sign?”

“You sign on that post.” Benedetta pointed at the satellite dish.

“You walk,” Niko said.

“You mean I walk from here to there, along the peak of this roof.”

“She’s so clever,” said Bouboule to Niko. Niko nodded smugly.

“So I just walk twenty meters in the dark along the peak of a slippery tile roof with a four-story drop on both sides,” Maya said. “That’s what you want from me. Right?”

“Do you remember,” said Benedetta, quietly, “that vivid friend of yours in Roma? Little Natalie?”

“Natalie. Sure. What about her?”

“You asked me to look after your friend Natalie a little.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I did that for you,” Benedetta said. “Now I know your Natalie. She could never pass this test. You know why? Because she’ll stop in the middle, and she’ll know that she can’t win. Then the fear will kill her. The blackness and the badness will take her by her little beating heart, and she’ll slip. Down she goes. Off the edge, darling. Bang, bang, bang, down the tiles. And then hard
onto the cold old streets of Praha. If she’s lucky, she’ll land on her head.”

“But since you are one of us,” Bouboule said, “it’s not risky.”

“It only
looks
risky,” offered Niko brightly.

“If these tiles were on the ground in the old town square, any fool could walk them,” said Benedetta. “No one would ever slip or fall. The tiles are not dangerous. The danger is inside you. In your head, in your heart. It’s your self that is the danger. If you can possess your self, then you go sign your name on the post and you walk back to us. It is safe as a pillow, safe as a bed; no, darling, it’s safer than that, because there are men in the world. But to walk beneath the stars—well, it’s in you, or it isn’t in you.”

“Go sign your name for us, darling,” said Bouboule.

“Then come back to us and be our sister,” said Niko.

Maya looked at them. They were perfectly serious. They meant it. This was how they lived.

“Well, I’m not gonna do it in heels,” she said. She pulled off her shoes and stood up. It was good that Novak had taught her to walk a little. She fixed her eyes on the distant glow of the dish and she walked the spine of the roof. Nothing could stop her. She was perfectly happy and confident. Then she wrote:

In a blast of sparks. It looked very nice there on the post with all the other names. So she did a little drawing, too.

The way back was harder because her bare feet were so cold. The tiles hurt her, and she picked her way more slowly, and this gave her more time to think. She would not fall, but it occurred to her in a cold black flash that she might deliberately throw herself from the roof. There was bittersweet appeal in the idea. If she was Mia Ziemann, as
she had just proclaimed herself to be, then there was part of Mia Ziemann she had not yet made her peace with. This was the large and deeply human part of Mia Ziemann that was truly tired of life and genuinely anxious to be dead.

But she was so much stronger than that now.

“We hoped you would blow us a kiss,” Benedetta said, scooting over to make room.

“I save that for gerontocrats,” Maya said. She gave Benedetta the stylus.

The trapdoor opened a bit. One of Helene’s dogs squirmed out. A little white dog had no business on a steep tile roof, but the dog walked like no dog had any business walking. It crept like a gecko, like a salamander. It saw them and it skidded a bit on the tile in surprise and it whimpered.

“
Voici un raton!
” Bouboule shouted. “Patapouff,
de-fends-moi!
”

A screech, a catapulting flash of golden fur. Primates were smarter than canines. Primates could climb like anything. The dog yelped in terror and tumbled from the edge of the roof with a howl of despair.

“Oh, poor baby,” said Bouboule, hugging her shivering marmoset, “you have lost your fine chapeau.”

“No, I see it,” said Niko. “It’s in the gutter.” She scrambled down and fetched the tiny hat and brought it back.

They were silent for a moment, weighing the consequences.

“We’d better not go back down. You know another way out?” Maya said to Benedetta.

“I specialize in other ways out,” said Benedetta.

T
he four of them caught the tube and split up. It seemed wisest. Maya took Benedetta home with her. She and
Benedetta had a lot to discuss. Two in the morning found them nibbling canapés in the actress’s white furry apartment. Then Novak called her on the actress’s netlink. The screen was blank, a voice call. Novak hated synchronous video.

“You don’t meet in the Tête again,” he told her somberly.

“No?”

“She wept for her little dog. Klaus won’t have that. It was cruel and stupid.”

“I’m sorry for the accident, Josef. It was very sudden.”

“You’re a bad and destructive girl.”

“I don’t mean to be. Truly.”

“Helene understands you far, far better than you will ever understand Helene. She means so well and has no malice, but how she suffers! She won’t allow herself any luck.” Novak sighed. “Helene was rude to me tonight. Can you believe that, girl? It’s a tragedy to see a grande dame being crass. And in public! It means she is afraid, you see.”

“I’m sorry that she was rude.”

“If you could have known her, Maya, when she was young. A great patroness of the arts. A woman of taste and discernment. She asked for nothing but to help us. But the parasites crowded around her, taking advantage of her. Feeding on her, for decades. Never forgiving her anything. They have embittered her. She’s defending you, you should know that. She defends you from far worse things than Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. She guards the young people in artifice. Helene still believes.”

“Josef,” she said, “are you calling me from your house?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think this line might be tapped?”

“Helene has that capacity,” Novak said, his voice tightening. “That doesn’t mean that she will bother to listen.”

“I’m sorry I made this night such a debacle. Do you hate me now, Josef? Please don’t hate me. Because I’m afraid that worse is coming.”

“Darling, I don’t hate you. I’m sorry that I must tell you this, but there’s nothing you can do to make me hate you. I am a very old man. There’s nothing left of me but irony and pride, and a little muddy benevolence. I’m afraid perhaps you are becoming evil. But I can’t find it in myself to hate that, or to hate you. You will always be my favorite little monster.”

She had nothing to say to that, so she hung up.

“He really hurt me when he said that,” she said to Benedetta, and began to cry.

“You should leave that old fool,” Benedetta said, munching a fresh canapé. “You should come with me to Bologna. Come tonight. We’ll catch a train. It’s the finest city in Europe. There are colonnades and communards and blimps. You should see the arcades, they’re so beautiful. And we have wonderful plans in Bologna. Come with us to the Istituto di Estetica. You can watch us as we work.”

“Can I take photos of what you’re up to?”

“Well …”

“I take such bad photos,” she mourned. “Josef Novak doesn’t take bad photographs. Sometimes they’re wonderful. Sometimes they’re just odd, but he never takes a bad one. Never, he just doesn’t make mistakes. And me, I never take good ones. It’s not that I have bad technique. I can learn the technique, but I still don’t see.”

Benedetta sipped her tincture.

“There’s no one me inside to see with, Benedetta. I can be beautiful, because there is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion, and I am all a strangeness. But being beautiful doesn’t make me all right. I’m not at one with myself. I am in fragments, and I’m starting to think that I’ll always be in fragments. I’m a broken mirror inside, and so my work in artifice is always a blur.
Art is long and life just isn’t short anymore.” Maya hid her face in her hands.

“You’re a good friend, Maya. I don’t have many true friends, but you’re a true friend of mine. The years don’t matter like you think they matter. They matter but they matter differently. Please don’t be so sad.” Benedetta began to search in her jacket pockets. “I brought you a gift from Bologna. To celebrate. Because we truly are sisters now.”

Maya looked up. “You did?”

Benedetta searched through her pockets. She pulled out a suckered barnacle.

Maya stared. “That really looks like something I ought not to be messing with.”

“Do you know what a cerebrospinal decantation is?”

“Unfortunately, yes, I do.”

“Let me give this to you, Maya. Let me put it on your head.”

“Benedetta, I really shouldn’t. You know I’m not young. This could really hurt me.”

“Of course it hurts. It took me a year to prepare this decantation. It hurt me every time. Whenever I felt a certain way—the way that was really me … I put this thing on my head. And it sucked me out, and it stored me. I thought I would use it sometime much later, to remember myself if I ever got lost somehow. But I want you to have it now. I want you to know who I am.”

Maya sighed. “Life is risk.” She took off her wig.

The barnacle went in through the back of her skull. It hurt quite a bit, and it was good that it hurt, because otherwise it would have come too easily. Perfusions oozed and she went very calm and supernaturally lucid.

She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a little bitterness for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.

She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the gray meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices.

When she came to, the barnacle was gone. She was flat on the floor, and Benedetta was gently wiping her face with a damp towel. “Can you speak?” Benedetta said.

She worked her jaws, forced her tongue to move. “Yes, I think so.”

“You know who you are?” Benedetta was anxious. “Tell me.”

“That was truly holy,” she said. “It’s sacred. You have to hide that in some sacred place. Never let anyone touch that, or defile that. It would be too awful, and too terrible, if that were ever touched.”

Benedetta embraced her. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how to do it. I know how it works. I even know how to give it to you. But I don’t know how to hide from what I am, and what I know.”

T
hree weeks passed. Spring had come and Praha was in bloom. She was still working with Novak, but it was not the same. He treated her like an assistant now, instead of a magical waif or a stranded elf. Milena could sense that there was trouble in the wind. Milena hated cops, but Milena was nevertheless making life hard, because Milena hated a disruption in the ancient Novak household even more than Milena hated cops.

Maya took a train to Milano and did a very boring shoot with some of Vietti’s very boring staffers. Because it was a working engagement, she saw almost nothing at all of Milano, and precious little of the Emporio Vietti. Vietti himself didn’t bother to show; the great man was off in Gstaad boiling his crabs.

The results of the shoot were perfect and glossy and
awful, because it wasn’t Josef Novak. She learned quite a bit during the shoot, but mostly she hated it. Nevertheless, she thought it was a smart thing to do. People had been fussing entirely too much about the Novak photographs. They were all over the net and they were rather too beautiful and they were much, much too true. It seemed to her that people would be happier if she proved she could be boring. Just another silly model, on just another couture shoot. And besides, there was money in it.