The City Under the Skin (5 page)

Zak remained in the doorway, poised among various kinds of uncertainty and inertia. The incident had been so brief, so self-contained. What had he actually seen? Was that really a map on the woman's back? Had she really been showing it to him? And if so, why? The mental image was already fading, and he felt that was probably no bad thing. And who was the guy in the car? The woman's keeper? Boyfriend? Kidnapper? He looked in the direction the car had gone, curious and intrigued, but equally aware that there was nothing more to see, no conclusion to be drawn. It was a little while before he realized there was somebody standing beside him.

It was a woman about his own age, maybe a little younger. She was tall, a little gawky, fit-looking, with something steely yet quizzical in her face. She was wearing thrift store clothes, a man's jacket that was too big for her, baggy pants, combat boots, and her big dark eyes looked out through ornate tortoiseshell glasses. Something about the image didn't quite suit her, as if she was trying to appear more bookish and hipsterish than she really was. She straddled a bike that was either an old wreck or something very cool and retro—Zak couldn't tell which—and there was a serious-looking camera slung over her shoulder.

“Did you just see what I just saw?” she said to Zak.

“I'm not sure what I saw,” Zak said, honestly enough.

“Sure. But the woman and the stuff on her back. You saw that, right?”

“Yes,” said Zak: how could he not have seen it?

The woman looked at the window of the store with detached curiosity.

“How long has this place been here?” she asked.

“Quite a while,” he said.

“Strange, I never noticed it before.”

He didn't think that it was all that strange. If you weren't interested in antique cartography you'd have no reason to be aware of Utopiates' existence.

“Come in if you like,” he said. “Take a look around.”

He wasn't exactly sure why he said that. She certainly didn't look like a potential customer, a fact that was confirmed when she took half a step toward the front door, hesitated, peered into the interior of the store, then gave a mild but distinct shudder.

“No, I don't think so,” she said. “The place kind of gives me the creeps.”

As he watched her get on her bike and pedal away, he couldn't understand quite why he found her remark so hurtful.

*   *   *

At last Zak closed up the store and went for a walk around the neighborhood. He did a lot of that. The city was a big mess these days: in the process of being simultaneously built and unbuilt, reshaped and made formless. Well, perhaps all cities are like that, but here special conditions applied: big changes were being made in the name of regeneration and renewal, a civic master plan, public and private initiatives, a cultural and commercial renaissance. Yeah right. At the same time, nothing ever quite got finished. Projects were constantly stalling, running out of money or coming up against planning “snags.” Buildings sat half-built, while others sat half-demolished; the whole city seemed to be suffering from completion anxiety.

And so wherever Zak walked he encountered detours, blocked sidewalks, metal plates covering the street, giant trucks making impossible turns. Roads were closed or made one-way. The fabric of the city was being torn wide open, both above- and belowground. One of the more glittering prestige projects involved extending the subway system, creating the new Platinum Line to connect downtown with the slums on the northern edge of the city, a connection that not everybody thought was such a great idea. Work on the subway created occasional deep, subterranean rumblings as new tunnels were blasted through some particularly unyielding section of the earth below—a trembling, an unsettling that Zak sometimes chose to see as symbolic.

As he drifted, he kept trying to make sense of what he'd just seen, unsure whether there was any “sense” to be made. It was puzzling, but hardly one of the world's great mysteries. Strange women got into strange cars with strange men at any time of the day or night, every day, every night. People had all kinds of weird stuff tattooed on their backs. People lived incomprehensible and desperate lives. It probably meant nothing: things only meant what you decided they meant. He would probably forget all about it in a day or two. But he kept thinking about the woman in the tortoiseshell glasses; he knew he wouldn't forget about her quite that soon.

 

6. BILLY MOORE'S FIRST JOB

The first one was easy, so easy that Billy Moore couldn't understand why Wrobleski even needed him. Any idiot could have done it. But maybe that was to be expected. It was a chance for him to prove he was not less than an idiot. He knew that the real tests, the real complications, would come later.

There had been a phone call, and a thick, deep, somehow affected voice that he didn't recognize said, “I'm calling on behalf of Mr. Wrobleski. He'd like to offer you that job.”

And as predicted Billy Moore didn't say, “Tell Mr. Wrobleski I've found alternative employment.” Instead, he said, “Can't Wrobleski make his own phone calls?”

And the voice said, “He can, but he doesn't need to.”

“So who am I talking to now?” said Billy.

“The name's Akim.”

“Right. Are you the one who washes cars?”

“That's one of my more minor responsibilities.”

Billy Moore reckoned there was no point telling him he'd done a lousy job on the Cadillac: he must know that already.

“And you have others?”

“Clearly. Which is why I'm calling you. This is to tell you the time and the place where you will locate a certain woman and bring her to Mr. Wrobleski.”

“Okay,” said Billy. “Then I guess that's what I'll do.”

Beforehand he wondered if he'd have any trouble recognizing the woman, but that proved to be the least of his concerns. He'd been told she was living rough, and that she had a tattoo similar to the one he'd seen on Laurel, but he never thought that finding her would be so simple. He certainly didn't imagine she'd be naked in the street. And once he saw the state of her, he wasn't so happy about having her in his car. The Cadillac may have been beat up on the outside, but the interior was his territory. Those rags of hers were filthy and they'd surely stink. She looked as though she might throw up or bleed or piss on his leather upholstery. He also wondered how eager she'd be to get in the car, whether he'd have to drag her in kicking and screaming, whether he'd have to slap her. But again, it wasn't a problem. He just maneuvered her toward the car and in she got. Yeah, it was all far too easy.

Once inside, she slumped in the passenger seat, maybe exhausted, maybe a bit mad, and she closed her eyes and seemed quite content, maybe relieved to be anywhere other than the street. She looked as if she was falling asleep, which was fine by Billy. They drove in silence, but he knew it wouldn't last. Before long the woman opened her eyes, stirred herself, and if she didn't exactly seem alert, at least she took an interest in her surroundings. She looked around the inside of the car and approved of what she saw.

“Elegant,” she said; then, “Where are we going?”

Nobody had told Billy what he was and wasn't allowed to say, but his inclination was to be cryptic. “A friend's place,” he said.

“A friend of yours or a friend of mine?” the woman asked.

“Both, I expect.”

That satisfied her for the moment. She peered out through the side window of the car, her eyes drooping, sliding in and out of focus. Then a new thought occurred to her.

“How am I going to get back?”

Billy didn't know the answer to that, so he said, “On the bus.”

“I go out in a Cadillac; I come back on the bus.”

“That's about the size of it.”

“Okay.”

She seemed to find that a perfectly reasonable state of affairs, and then another thought arrived.

“And what's going to happen to me when I get to your friend's place?”

Billy had even less idea of the answer to that.

“That'll be a surprise,” he said.

She let that one float away.

“My name's Genevieve,” the woman said.

“You don't look like a Genevieve,” said Billy.

“I used to.”

“Maybe you will again.”

“You think?”

They approached Wrobleski's compound, and Charlie, the efficient old gatekeeper, opened up the gate as the Cadillac arrived. Wrobleski and Akim were waiting in the courtyard, standing by the SUV, which seemed not to have moved since Billy's last visit. He stopped his car, left the engine running, then got out and went around to the passenger side to let the woman out. He knew he was behaving like a chauffeur, yet it seemed the decent thing to do, to show the woman some respect. Genevieve got out, hugged the velvet rags to her, and stood swaying gently, moving to some distant music only she could hear.

“Nobody saw you, right?” Wrobleski said to Billy.

It was the kind of question that allowed only one answer.

“Nobody saw me,” Billy lied.

“If somebody sees you, then you'll have to do something about that.”

“Understood,” said Billy.

Akim took charge of the woman. He put an arm around her shoulders, seeming rather happier doing that than washing cars. He gave her something to drink, and he had something in his hand that looked like a syringe. Billy didn't ask what was going to happen to her. It wasn't his business, and he already knew you didn't ask Wrobleski questions like that.

*   *   *

As Billy Moore drove away from Wrobleski's compound, it started to rain: big thick globs of water stippling the Cadillac's windshield. He waited as long as he could before turning on the wipers and watched the world become marbled. He drove with the window half-open so he could feel the spray on the side of his face, and at last he snapped the wipers into life, blurring, smoothing, eventually clearing his field of vision.

Beside him on the passenger seat was an envelope of money Wrobleski had given him for his work. He decided it was time to open it. He pulled over, stopped the car in front of a shuttered halal supermarket, and unsealed the envelope. There was too much money inside. Billy could find a good use for all the cash that came his way—there was some upgrading to be done on the parking lot, and Carla was always begging for a new cell phone—but this was far more than you'd expect to be paid just for acting as driver to some homeless woman. Wrobleski was being generous, and that was flattering and worrying in equal proportions. Billy tried not to think about what was happening to Genevieve inside Wrobleski's compound, but he couldn't quite manage that.

*   *   *

Carla was awake and waiting for him when he got back. She was in her trailer, at her desk, an image of a lion on the screen of her laptop.

“Have a good night out?” she asked.

“I was working,” said Billy.

“This parking business takes up a lot of time, doesn't it?”

“It sure does. What have
you
been doing?”

Carla said, “I've been thinking about lions.”

Billy looked at the screen and said, “So I see.”

“Yeah,” said Carla. “And about
The Wizard of Oz
. They talk about the Cowardly Lion like that's something out of the ordinary, but it's not, is it? All lions are cowardly. I mean, when they attack a herd of antelope, they always pick off the stragglers, the weak ones at the back, don't they? It's not like they go and fight the biggest, toughest antelope they can find, just to show how brave they are.”

“Are there any big, tough antelopes?” said Billy.

“Some of them have got to be bigger and tougher than others.”

“I suppose so. Is that all you've been doing? Thinking about lions?”

“Sure.”

“How's your skin?”

“The same.”

“Let's have a look.”

“No.”

“Come on, roll your sleeve up.”

“I don't want to.”

“What are you trying to hide?”

She wouldn't admit that she was trying to hide anything, so she pushed up her sleeve to reveal her right arm. At first all Billy could see was a red, inflamed rash.

“You've been playing with it.”

“It helps pass the time.”

“You weren't happy with the skull and crossbones?”

She shrugged. “Change is good,” she said.

When Billy looked more closely, he saw there was a pattern in among the disorder. By constantly pressing and drawing on her skin she'd made a word appear, a livid, blotched, temporary tattoo that read
DAD.

“That's a very weird thing to do,” Billy Moore said. “Kind of sweet and touching, but also very weird.”

Without being asked, Carla pushed up the other sleeve and revealed on her left arm the word
MOM.

“Even more touching,” he said, though he was touched in a very different way by this.

“Don't worry,” Carla said. “They'll fade eventually.”

 

7. NIGHT UNDER GLASS

Rain stippled the roof of Wrobleski's domed conservatory, and inside it, a few scattered candles burned among the cacti, their flames reflected in the glass between the spines and paddles, reinforcing the wet darkness beyond. Shadows flicked over the relief map of Iwo Jima. Laurel was there, lolling, angled across the sofa, awake but drunk or stoned or exhausted, her head just a few inches away from the blue-black point of an agave leaf, her attention a million miles away. Wrobleski and the improbably named Genevieve sat in rattan chairs facing each other. He had poured two glasses of wine, and Genevieve was holding hers tightly in both hands, as if it might fly away.

“How are you?” Wrobleski asked, sounding, or at least trying to sound, concerned.

Genevieve blinked a couple of times, looked not quite at him, and said, unconvincingly, “I'm good.”