Holy Fire (13 page)

“I know you need it,” Ulrich said in English.

“Great.” She began carefully polishing the camera with a paper tissue.

“[I happened to look inside your bag,]” Ulrich confided, “[while you were staring up at the steeple at those
crazy Catholics. I saw that there was nothing much in your bag except a half-eaten welfare pretzel and some panties spotted with rat dung. This made me very curious.]” Ulrich leaned closer. “[I declined to appropriate your useless purse. I thought it much better that I offer you my protection. I don’t know who you are, little Californian. But you are very unworldly. You won’t last long in Munchen without a friend.]”

She smiled at him sunnily. Perfectly happy and confident. “So you’re my new friend?”

“[Certainly. I’m just the kind of bad company you need.]”

“You’re very generous. With other people’s property.”

“[I’d be generous with my own property if I were allowed to have any.]” He took her hand and squeezed it, very gently. “[Don’t you trust me? You might as well trust me. We’ll have much more fun that way.]” He lifted her fingers, and lightly touched them to his lips.

She pulled her hand free, clapped her palm against the back of his neck, and leaned into him. Their faces collided. Their lips met.

Kissing him was absolute rapture. Heat rose from his sleek young neck inside the woolly collar. The smell of male human flesh in close proximity hit a core of memory within her that lit her up all over. She could feel her whole personality pucker and collapse as if her bare brain had bitten into a lemon. She began to kiss the stuffing out of him.

“[Be careful, little mouse,]” Ulrich said, tearing free with a happy gasp. “[People are watching.]”

“Can’t I kiss a guy on a subway?” she said, wiping her mouth on her coatsleeve. “What’s the harm?”

“[Not much for us,]” he agreed. “[But it might make these people remember us. That’s not smart.]”

She looked up the length of the railway car. A dozen Muncheners were staring at them. Caught out, the Deutschlanders continued to stare, with deep and solemn
interest and without one shred of inhibition. Maya frowned, and raised her camera to her face in self-defense. The Deutschlanders merely smiled and waved at her, clowning for the lens. Reluctantly, she put the camera back into her purse. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“[Where do you want to go?]”

“Where can we go lie down?”

Ulrich laughed delightedly. “[It’s just as I thought. You’re a madwoman.]”

She poked his ribs. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like that, you big faker.”

“[Of course I liked it. You’re the exact sort of madwoman I’ve been looking for all my life. You’re very pretty, you know. It’s very true. You should let your hair grow out.]”

“I’ll get a wig.”

“[I’ll get you seven wigs,]” Ulrich promised. He’d gone all heavy lidded. “[One for every day of the week. And clothes. You like nice clothes, don’t you? I can tell from that jacket that you’re a girl who likes nice clothes.]”

“I like vivid clothes.”

“[You ran away from home to be vivid, little mouse? Vivid people have a lot of fun.]” She’d taken his breath away for a moment, but all the kissing was having a delayed effect on Ulrich. He’d gotten his initiative back and he was having a hard time controlling his hands.

“[Necking always makes me stupid,]” Ulrich announced, meditatively massaging her left thigh. “[I should take you to a cheap hotel, but I’m going to take you to my favorite criminal den.]”

“A criminal den? How lovely. What more could I need?”

“[Better shoes,]” he told her, very seriously. “[Contact lenses. Cashcards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.]”

They left the train in Schwabing. Ulrich took her to a squat. It was a four-story twentieth-century apartment
house, in cheap and hideous yellow brick. Someone had methodically ripped all the electrical wiring out of the building, reducing it to unrentable junk. Ulrich picked up a wire-handled oil lamp from the stoop by the front door.

“[You can’t keep the health inspectors out of a squat,]” Ulrich warned her. They ignored the shattered elevator and headed up the first of several flights of darkened, reeking stairs. “[Civil-support people are stubborn pests, they are very brave. But Munchen police are very efficient and therefore lazy. They want machines to do their work, and it’s hard to bug or tap a squat when it has no electricity.]”

“How many people live in this dump?”

“[They come and they go. About fifty people. We are anarchists.]”

“All young people?”

“The dead-at-forty,” Ulrich said in English, and smiled. “[They call us young.… Old people don’t like squats. They don’t want freedom or privacy. They want their archives, cleaning machines, reclining chairs, real money, monitors and alarms everywhere, all the comforts. Truly old people never squat. They don’t feel the need.]” Ulrich leered halfheartedly. “[One of many such needs that old people no longer feel.… ]”

“Do you have parents, Ulrich?”

“[Everyone has parents. Sometimes we misplace them.]” They reached the landing on the third floor, and he lifted the hissing lamp to study her face. He looked very solemn. “[Don’t ask about my parents, and I won’t ask about yours.]”

“Mine are dead.”

“[How lovely for you,]” Ulrich said, patiently climbing stairs. “[I’d be sorry for you, if I believed that.]”

They reached a top flight, puffing for breath. They walked down a chilly hall with bare, graffiti-tagged walls. The graffiti was very subversive, neatly stenciled, highly politicized. Much of it was in English. TO BUY A NEW
CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE, insinuated one graffito. CONSUME MORE RESOURCES TO GRATIFY SHORT-TERM DESIRES, another suggested darkly.

Ulrich opened an ancient padlock with a metal key. The door shuddered open with a scream of hinges. The room within was dark and icy, and it stank. The interior walls had mostly been kicked out and replaced with blankets on ropes. The place smelled of slow decay and wild mice.

Ulrich slammed the door and shot a bolt. “[Isn’t this luxurious?]” he said, voice echoing in the fetid gloom. “[It’s real privacy! I don’t mean legal privacy, either. I mean that this area is physically inaccessible to surveillance.]”

“No wonder it smells like this, then.”

“[I can repair the smell.]” Ulrich methodically lit half a dozen scented candles. The room began to fill with the piercing waxy reek of tropical fruits: pineapple, mango. She doubted that Ulrich had ever tasted a pineapple or mango. Presumably that lack of direct experience made the scents more appealingly exotic.

Maya examined the stinking dive in the romantic glow of the candlelight. “You sure have a lot of electronic gizmos in here, considering that you got no electricity.”

“[Appropriated materials.]” Ulrich nodded. “[As it happens, I share this area with three other gentlemen with similar interests. We’ve found that pooling resources is a necessity for our life outside the law.]”

He hooked the lantern on a rope that dangled from the ceiling, and set it swaying gently. Shadows swam the walls. “[We don’t live here. Under no circumstances would one keep appropriated materials in one’s regular domicile. Any serious commercial fencing operation is also quite difficult, thanks to time-based currencies, the informant network, panoptic tracing measures, and other means of
gérontocratie oppression. So my comrades and I use this area as our joint storeroom, and occasionally we sleep with women in it.]”

“It’s a real mess. Fantastic. Can I take a picture of it?”

“No.”

She gazed in wonder at the ugly clutter: bags, shoes, sporting goods, recorders, dismembered laptops, heaps of tourist clothes from raided luggage. “This place is a real archive. You got any touchscreens in here that can recognize a gestural passtouch and get me into a memory palace set up back in the sixties?”

“[I’m sorry, darling,]” said Ulrich, “[but I have no idea what you’re talking about.]” He advanced on her, arms spread.

They began kissing feverishly. The room began warming up nicely, but not so warm as to make it fun to step out of your clothes. “Where can we do it?”

“[There’s a sleeping bag over there. I stole it from a skier and it’s very warm. Big enough for two.]”

“Okay,” she said, pulling free from his insistent grip, “I want to do it, and you know that I want to do it. Right? But I know that you want to do it, worse than I want to do it. So that means I get to make the rules. Okay?”

Ulrich raised his sloping brows. “ ‘Rules?’ ”

“That’s right, Ulrich, rules. Rule number one, you don’t know who I am, or where I came from. And you don’t ever try to find out.”

“Oh, I like your idea of rules, treasure. This could be fun.”

“Rule two, you don’t brag about me to any of your ratty friends. You don’t ever say anything about me to anybody.”

“That’s very good, I am certainly no informer. That’s two rules, but …” Ulrich paused. “[You are rapidly expanding the conceptual territory.]”

“Rule three, I get to stay in this squat until you get tired of me, and you have to make sure I don’t freeze to
death, and you have to watch me and make sure that I eat.”

“[We’d better work on all those proposals later,]” Ulrich said. “[They sound ambitious. Anyway, I’ve never been able to obey more than two rules at a time even under the best of circumstances.]”

That seemed sensible, given the situation. She climbed into the sleeping bag with him. They shed their clothing and embraced. There was sweet delightful groping and stroking and some vigorous heaving. It seemed to take the usual nice long time, but in reality it took about eight minutes. Which was just as well.

When he was done, she sat up in the bag. The skier’s stolen bag was lined with woven foil and by now it felt like a kitchen toaster. “That was lovely. I feel very happy now.”

“[I’m also delighted,]” Ulrich declared gallantly. He was postcoitally morose, and visibly trying to assemble a state of consciousness that was not hormonally driven. It had been a long time since she had seen this happen to a man in her company, but in its own way it was a touchingly familiar sight. She’d come to terms with the realities of male physiology a very long time ago. It would have been lovely to kiss him some more, but if he ran true to form, he would want to either eat a sandwich or go right to sleep.

“I should get us some nice food to eat,” Ulrich offered, with machinelike behavioral accuracy. “What do you like?”

“Oh, something colloidal. Something very cross-linked and tryptophan-ish.”

“[I’m sorry, what?]”

“Anything but vegetables or dead animals.”

“Okay.” Ulrich climbed methodically into his clothing. He managed a cheery wink. “[I love it when a girl wears nothing but a translation earpiece. A sight like that makes life seem so full of promise.]” He left. She heard
him padlocking the door shut behind him, heard his footsteps down the hall.

The thought of being locked within the criminal den did not disturb her in the least. She got up immediately and began compulsively to clean the room. The state of disorder had been driving her crazy.

She stopped her cleaning frenzy when she discovered a little stolen laptop television. Genuine televisions, with their broadcast datastream, lack of keyboards, and miserably unilateral interface, were real oddities. She’d spent years collecting kitschy oddities from the enormous freakish garbage heaps of twentieth-century television culture, before she’d discovered the even odder CD-ROM and software media niches.

She tried turning the television on. There was no battery inside it. She began searching, and quickly discovered that all the electronic devices in the room had been deprived of their batteries. Except, of course, for the newly stolen devices that were still in her bag. She eviscerated the netlink and transplanted its battery into the laptop television. She turned the television on.

A Deutschlander talk show appeared onscreen. The host was a St. Bernard dog. He had an actress with him. Maya methodically cleaned the room as she watched the show and listened through one ear.

“[My problem is with reading,]” the dog confessed in fluent Deutsch. The dog had shaggy St. Bernard genetics, but he was very well dressed. “[Mastering speech is one matter. Any dog can do that, with the proper wiring. But reading is an entirely different level of semantic cognition. The sponsors have done their best for me—you know that as well as I do, Nadja. But I have to admit it, right here, publicly—reading is a very serious challenge for any postcanine].”

“[Poor baby,]” the actress said with genuine sympathy. “[Why fight it? They say it’s a postliterate epoch anyway.]”

“[Anyone who could say that is deeply out of touch,]” the dog said gravely and with dignity. “[Goethe. Rilke. Günter Grass. Heinrich Böll. That says it all.]”

Maya was fascinated by the actress’s clothing. The actress was wearing diaphanous military gear, greenish see-through combat pajamas, and a paratrooper’s sweater in satin. Her face was like something chiseled in cameo, and her hair was truly awe-inspiring. Her hair deserved a doctorate in fiber engineering.

“[We’re all on our own in this epoch,]” the actress mourned. “[When you think what they can do to us on set nowadays—the weird mental spaces they’re willing to put people into, in pursuit of a decent performance … And then there are the gutter net-freaks, those stinking paparazzi … But you know, Aquinas, and I mean this: You’re a dog. I know you’re a dog. It’s not any secret. But truly—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I feel happier on your show than I would on anyone else’s.]”

The audience applauded politely.

“[That’s very sweet of you,]” the dog said, wagging his tail. “[I appreciate that more than I can say. Nadja, tell us a little about this business on-set with Christian Mancuso. What was that all about?]”

“[Well, Aquinas, just for you,]” the actress said. “[It’s certainly not something I would tell to just anyone.… But it happened like this. Christian and I are both in our sixties, we’re not young people. Of course. We’d been working together on this project for the company, Hermes Kino. We’d been within the set together for six weeks. We got along wonderfully—I was used to his company, you know, we’d emerge from the set, decompress, have dinner together, talk about the script.… Then one night, Christian took me in his arms and kissed me! I suppose we were both rather surprised by that. It seemed very sweet, though.]”