Dark Rivers of the Heart (39 page)

“You have that? Why didn’t you use it?”

“You were already unconscious.”

He closed his eyes, walked through a black-and-white place made of bones, under an arch of skulls, and then opened his eyes again and said, “Well, I’m not now.”

“You’re not what?”

“Unconscious,” he said.

“You just were again. A few minutes passed between our last exchange and this one. And while you were out that time, I almost finished. Another stitch and I’m through.”

“Why’d we stop?”

“You weren’t traveling well.”

“Sure, I was.”

“You needed some treatment. Now you need rest. Besides, the cloud cover is breaking up fast.”

“Got to go. Early bird gets the tomato.”

“Tomato? That’s interesting.”

He frowned. “I say tomato? Why’re you trying to confuse me?”

“Because it’s so easy. There—the last suture.”

Spencer closed his grainy eyes. In the somber black-and-white world, jackals with human faces were prowling the vine-tangled rubble of a once-great cathedral. He could hear children crying in rooms hidden beneath the ruins.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he was lying flat. His head was now elevated only a couple of inches on the pillow.

Valerie was sitting on the ground beside him, watching over him. Her dark hair fell softly along one side of her face, and she was pretty in the lamplight.

“You’re pretty in the lamplight,” he said.

“Next you’ll be asking if I’m an Aquarius or a Capricorn.”

“Nah, I don’t give a shit.”

She laughed.

“I like your laugh,” he said.

She smiled, turned her head, and ruminated on the dark desert.

He said, “What do you like about me?”

“I like your dog.”

“He’s a great dog. What else?”

Looking at him again, she said, “You’ve got nice eyes.”

“I do?”

“Honest eyes.”

“Are they? Used to have nice hair, too. All shaved off now. I was butchered.”

“Barbered. Just one small spot.”

“Barbered and then butchered. What are you doing out here in the desert?”

She stared at him awhile, then looked away without answering.

He wouldn’t let her off that easily. “What are you doing out here? I’ll just keep asking until the repetition drives you insane. What are you doing out here?”

“Saving your ass.”

“Tricky. I mean, what were you doing here in the first place?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why?” he wondered.

“Because you’ve been looking for me.”

“But how’d you find me, for God’s sake?”

“Ouija board.”

“I don’t think I can believe anything you say.”

“You’re right. It was Tarot cards.”

“Who’re we running from?”

She shrugged. The desert engaged her attention again. At last she said, “History, I guess.”

“There you go, trying to confuse me again.”

“Specifically, the cockroach.”

“We’re running from a cockroach?”

“That’s what I call him, ’cause it infuriates him.”

His gaze rolled from Valerie to the tarp that hung ten feet above them. “Why the roof?”

“Blends with the terrain. It’s a heat-dispersing fabric too, so we won’t show up strong on any infrared look-down.”

“Look-down?”

“Eyes in the sky.”

“God?”

“No, the cockroach.”

“The cockroach has eyes in the sky?”

“He and his people, yeah.”

Spencer thought about that. Finally he said, “I’m not sure if I’m awake or dreaming.”

“Some days,” she said, “neither am I.”

In the black-and-white world, the sky seethed with eyes, and a great white owl flew overhead, casting a moonshadow in the shape of an angel.

Eve’s desire was insatiable, and her energy was inexhaustible, as though each protracted bout of ecstasy electrified rather than enervated her. At the end of an hour, she seemed more vital than ever, more beautiful, aglow.

Before Roy’s adoring eyes, her incredible body seemed to be sculpted and pumped up by her ceaseless rhythmic flexing-contracting-flexing, by her writhing-thrashing-thrusting, just as a long session of lifting weights pumped up a bodybuilder. After years of exploring all the ways she could satisfy herself, she enjoyed a flexibility that Roy judged to be somewhere between that of a gold-medal Olympic gymnast and a carnival contortionist, combined with the endurance of an Alaskan dogsled team. There was no doubt whatsoever that a session in bed with herself provided a thorough workout for every muscle from her radiant head to her cute toes.

Regardless of the astounding knots into which she tied herself, regardless of the bizarre intimacies she took with herself, she never looked at all grotesque or absurd, but unfailingly beautiful, from any angle, in even the most unlikely acts. She was always milk and honey on that black rubber, peaches and cream, flowing and smooth, the most desirable creature ever to grace the earth.

Halfway through the second hour, Roy was convinced that sixty percent of this angel’s features—body and face overall—were perfect by even the most stringent standards. Another thirty-five percent of her was not perfect but so
close
to perfect as to break his heart, and only five percent was plain.

Nothing about her—no slightest line or concavity or convexity—was ugly.

Roy was certain that Eve must soon stop pleasuring herself or otherwise collapse unconscious. But by the end of the second hour, she seemed to have more appetite and capacity than when she’d begun. The power of her sensuality was so great that every piece of music was changed by her horizontal dance, until it seemed that all of it, even the Bach, had been expressly composed as the score for a pornographic movie. From time to time she called out the number of a new lighting arrangement, said “up” or “down” to the rheostat, and her selection was always the most flattering for the next position into which she folded herself.

She was thrilled by watching herself in the mirrors. And by watching herself watch herself. And by watching herself as she watched herself watching herself. The infinity of images bounced back and forth between the mirrors on opposite walls, until she could believe that she had filled the universe with replications of herself. The mirrors seemed magical, transmitting all the energy of each reflection back into her own dynamic flesh, overloading her with power, until she was a runaway blond engine of eroticism.

Sometime during the third hour, batteries gave out in a few of her favorite toys, gears froze in others, and she surrendered herself once more to the expertise of her own bare hands. For a while, in fact, her hands seemed to be separate entities from her, each alive in its own right. They were in such a frenzy of lust that they couldn’t occupy themselves with just one of her many treasures for any length of time; they kept sliding over her ample curves, up-around-down her oiled skin, massaging and tweaking and caressing and stroking one delight after another. They were like a pair of starving diners at a fabulous smorgasbord that had been prepared to celebrate the imminence of Armageddon, allowed only precious seconds to gorge themselves before all was obliterated by a sun gone nova.

But the sun did not go nova, of course, and eventually—if gradually—those matchless hands slowed, slowed, finally stopped, and were sated. As was their mistress.

For a while, after it was over, Roy couldn’t get up from his chair. He couldn’t even slump back from the edge of it. He was numb, paralyzed, tingling strangely in every extremity.

In time, Eve rose from the bed and stepped into the adjoining bathroom. When she returned, carrying two plush towels—one damp, one dry—she was no longer gleaming with oil. With the damp cloth, she removed the glistening residue from the rubber mattress cover, then carefully wiped it down with the dry towel. She replaced the bottom sheet that she had earlier cast off.

Roy joined her on the bed. Eve lay on her back, her head on a pillow. He stretched out beside her, on his back, his head on another pillow. She was still gloriously nude, and he remained fully clothed—though at some point during the night, he had loosened his necktie by an inch.

Neither of them made the mistake of trying to comment upon what had transpired. Mere words could not have done the experience justice and might have made a nearly religious odyssey seem somehow tawdry. Anyway, Roy already knew that it had been good for Eve; and as for himself, well, he had seen more physical human perfection in those few hours—and in
action
—than in his entire life theretofore.

After a while, gazing at his darling’s reflection on the ceiling as she stared at his, Roy began to talk, and the night entered a new phase of communion that was nearly as intimate, intense, and life-changing as the more physical phase that had preceded it. He spoke further about the power of compassion, refining the concept for her. He told her that humankind always hungered for perfection. People would endure unendurable pain, accept awful deprivation, countenance savage brutalities, live in constant and abject terror—if only they were convinced that their sufferings were the tolls that must be paid on the highway to Utopia, to Heaven on earth. A person motivated by compassion—yet who was also aware of the masses’ willingness to suffer—could change the world. Although he, Roy Miro of the merry blue eyes and Santa Claus smile, did not believe that he possessed the charisma to be that leader of leaders who would launch the next crusade for perfection, he hoped to be one who served that special person and served him well.

“I light my little candles,” he said. “One at a time.”

For hours Roy talked while Eve interjected numerous questions and perceptive comments. He was excited to see how she thrilled to his ideas almost as she had thrilled to her battery-powered toys and to her own practiced hands.

She was especially moved when he explained how an enlightened society ought to expand on the work of Dr. Kevorkian, compassionately assisting in the self-destruction not solely of suicidal people but also of those poor souls who were deeply depressed, offering easy exits not only to the terminally ill but to the chronically ill, the disabled, the maimed, the psychologically impaired.

And when Roy talked about his concept for a suicide-assistance program for infants, to bring a compassionate solution to the problem of babies born with even the slightest defects that might affect their lives, Eve made a few breathless sounds similar to those that had escaped her in the throes of passion. She pressed her hands to her breasts once more, though this time only in an attempt to quiet the fierce pounding of her heart.

As Eve filled her hands with her bosoms, Roy could not take his eyes off the reflection of her that hovered above him. For a moment he thought that he might weep at the sight of her sixty-percent-perfect face and form.

Sometime before dawn, intellectual orgasms sent them spiraling into sleep, as physical orgasms had not the power to do. Roy was so fulfilled that he didn’t even dream.

Hours later, Eve woke him. She had already showered and dressed for the day.

“You’ve never been more radiant,” he told her.

“You’ve changed my life,” she said.

“And you mine.”

Although she was late for work in her concrete bunker, she drove him to the Strip hotel at which Prock, his taciturn driver from the previous night, had left his luggage. It was Saturday, but Eve worked seven days a week. Roy admired her commitment.

The desert morning was bright. The sky was a cool, serene blue.

At the hotel, under the entrance portico, before Roy got out of the car, he and Eve made plans to see each other soon, to experience again the pleasures of the night just past.

He stood by the front entrance to watch her drive away. When she was gone, he went inside. He passed the front desk, crossed the raucous casino, and took an elevator to the thirty-sixth and highest floor in the main tower.

He didn’t recall putting one foot in front of the other since getting out of her car. As far as he knew, he had floated into the elevator.

He had never imagined that his pursuit of the fugitive bitch and the scarred man would lead him to the most perfect woman in existence. Destiny was a funny thing.

When the doors opened at the thirty-sixth floor, Roy stepped into a long corridor with custom-sculpted, tone-on-tone, wall-to-wall Edward Fields carpet. Wide enough to be considered a gallery rather than a hallway, the space was furnished with early-nineteenth-century French antiques and paintings of some quality from the same period.

This was one of three floors originally designed to offer huge luxury suites, free of charge, to high rollers who were willing to wager fortunes at the games downstairs. The thirty-fifth and thirty-fourth floors still served that function. However, since the agency had purchased the resort for its moneymaking and money-laundering potential, the suites on the top floor had been set aside for the convenience of out-of-town operatives of a certain executive level.

The thirty-sixth floor was served by its own concierge, who was established in a cozy office across from the elevator. Roy picked up the key to his suite from the man on duty, Henri, who didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow over the rumpled condition of his guest’s suit.