Holy Fire (16 page)

“I answer to that name sometimes,” Ulrich said in English.

Therese laughed. She spoke to Maya in English. “You poor little sausage! You love your new boyfriend? He’s a real wonder-boy, your Jimmy. He’s all heart.”

Ulrich frowned. “She made a little mistake, that’s all.”

“I don’t love him,” Maya said loudly. She took off her sunglasses. “I just need some things.”

“What?”

“Contact lenses. Silver money. Wigs. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed. And I want to learn some Deutsch so I can stop being such an idiot.”

“She’s an illegal,” Ulrich said, hand closing on Maya’s upper arm. “The poor little thing is hot.”

Therese looked at the pair of them. “What are you trying to sell?”

Ulrich hesitated. “Give her the list,” he said at last.

Therese looked it over. “I can move this stuff. If it’s in good condition. Where is it?”

“In the boot of my car.”

She looked surprised. “[Jimmy, you’ve got a car?]”

“[It’s on loan from Herr Shrottplatz.]”

“[You sure can pick nice friends.]”

Ulrich turned to Maya and smiled sourly. “[I forgot to mention junkies in my former list of interest groups opposed to the current order.]”

“[Twenty big dimes,]” Therese told him, bored.

“[Thirty dimes.]”

“[Twenty-five.]”

“[Twenty-seven.]

“[Go and fetch it, then. Let’s see the goods.]”

“Come on,” Ulrich said, tugging at Maya’s arm.

Therese spoke up. “Leave the Yankee for a minute. I want to practice my English.”

Ulrich thought it over. “Don’t do something stupid,” he said to Maya, and left.

Therese looked her over, judgmental and cool. “You like nice boys?”

“They have their uses, I guess.”

“Well, that one’s not a nice boy.”

Maya smiled. “Well, I know that.”

“When did you get into München? When did he pick you up?”

“Three days ago.”

“What, three days and you’re already here in a camp and dealing? You must really like clothes,” Therese said. “What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

“What are you in München for? Who’s after you? Cops?”

“Maybe.” She hesitated, then took the risk. “I think mostly it’s medical people.”

“
Medical
people? What about your parents?”

“No, not my parents, that’s for sure.”

“Well, then,” said Therese, with an air of cosmopolitan assurance, “you can forget about the medical people. The medical people never do a thing to investigate, because they know that in the long run you’ll have to come to them. And the cops—well, the cops in Munchen never do much about runaways unless they’ve got the parents behind them, pushing.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“Sleep under bridges. Eat pretzels. You’ll get along. And you should dump the boyfriend there. That kid is ugly. One of these days, the bulls will break his head open and stir his brains like porridge. And I’m not going to shed one tear, either.”

“He’s been telling me about European radical politics.”

“Munchen isn’t a good town for that topic, darling,” said Therese, wryly. “What’s your hair look like when you’re not wearing that wig?”

Maya pulled off her scarf and wig. After a moment, she dropped them on the table.

“Take off the jacket and turn around for me,” Therese said.

Maya peeled off her jacket and turned slowly in place.

“You have truly interesting bone structure. You swim a lot?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Maya said, “I did a lot of swimming just lately.”

“I think I could use a girl like you. I’m not so bad. You can ask around town about me, anyone will tell you that Therese is okay.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“You could call it a job,” Therese said. “It’s couture, it’s apparel, it’s the rag trade. You know the rag trade, don’t you? It means you can have some rags and maybe a place to sleep.”

“I really need a job,” Maya said. Quite suddenly, she began to cry. “Never mind me crying,” she said, wiping her cheeks, “it’s so funny, it comes so easily lately. But please let me have the job, I just need a place where I can be okay for a while and try to be more like myself.”

Therese was touched. “Come over here around the table and sit down.”

Maya walked around the table and sat obediently in Therese’s folding fabric chair. “I’ll be okay soon, really, I’m not as silly as this usually, I’ll work really hard, truly.”

“Calm down, girl, stop babbling. Tell me something. How old are you?”

“I think I’m about two weeks old.”

Therese sighed. “When was the last time you ate a decent meal?”

“I don’t remember.”

Therese stooped and dug around under the table. She came up with a bag of government granola and a mineral water. “Here. Eat this. Drink that. And remember, you steal one pin from me and I kick you into the street.” She looked downhill. “Joy of joys. Here comes your boyfriend.”

Maya tasted the granola. The granola was fabulous. She jammed an entire handful into her mouth and munched like a hamster.

Ulrich, red-faced and puffing, dropped the duffel bag onto the tabletop. “Let’s talk business.”

“Prima,” Therese said. “[By the way, I just hired your girlfriend for my shop.]”

“[What?]” Ulrich laughed. “[You’re kidding, right? She can’t even speak to the customers.]”

“[I don’t need another salesgirl, I need a mannequin.]”

“[Therese, this is really shortsighted and counterproductive
of you. I have to say I’m disappointed. You’re doing this just to spite me,]” Ulrich said. “[I thought you’d gotten over that little contretemps we had before.]”

“[Me? Spiteful? Never! This girl is pretty, she can’t talk much, and she’s got a real bird in her head. She’s a perfect mannequin.]”

“You shouldn’t trust this woman,” Ulrich told Maya in English. “She says you’re crazy.”

“So did you,” Maya said, munching. She glugged some mineral water. “It’s a job and I’m an illegal. It’s a really good break for me. Of course I’m gonna take it. What did you expect?”

Ulrich flushed, slowly. “I did everything you asked from me. I never broke even one of your rules. You’re not being very grateful.”

Maya shrugged. “Jimmy, there’s a million girls in the Marienplatz. Go pick up some other girl. I’ll be fine now.”

Ulrich yanked the bag from the table and slung it over his shoulder. “[If you think you’re moving up in society by going to work in this cow’s stupid little shop, you’ll soon learn differently. If you want to go, go! But don’t think you can come crawling back to the life of freedom!]”

“Her shop’s got heating,” Maya pointed out.

Ulrich turned in fury and lurched away.

There was a long silence. “Girl, you are really cold,” Therese said at last. Half-admiring.

M
aya went to work for Therese in her shop in the Viktualienmarkt. The shop was glass-fronted brick, untidily crammed with clothes and shoes, with a tiny office in the back where Therese scraped out a narrow financial niche. Therese dealt mostly in cash, often in barter, sometimes in precious metals. Maya lived in the shop, wore her pick of the merchandise, and slept under Therese’s desk. Therese slept in her parents’ high-rise with a variety of scruffy, dangerous-looking, semiarticulate boyfriends.

It was a great comfort to be compelled to work and not have to spend so much time being perfectly free and happy and confident. All that freedom and happiness and confidence was terribly wearing.

One night at the shop in late February, Maya awoke to find herself sleepwalking, yet still compulsively putting the stock in order. That was Mia’s doing. Mia was all right now.
Mia liked this situation. Mia felt very safe and at ease now that she had duties.

Maya worked quite hard and without complaint and without much in the way of reward, and Therese appreciated this. Like most young people who had created careers for themselves in the contemporary economy, Therese was a great connoisseur of the gratuitous gesture. Still, Maya was dissatisfied. She couldn’t read the tags in the clothing, and she couldn’t discuss things properly with the customers. This would not do.

Maya begged some cash off Therese, went to a cut-rate language school in the Schwabing section of Munchen, and bought 500 cc’s of education tinctures. These particular philters were said to convey a new plasticity for language, “giving the adult brain the eager syntactical receptiveness of a child of three.” All the smart drugs in the world couldn’t make the Deutsch language a cheap or easy accomplishment—but the “child of three” part certainly met its billing. The neural dope found her inbuilt mastery of English and put its pharmaceutical foot right through it, like a boot through a stained-glass window.

“You’d better ease off that cheap dope and try learning Deutsch the old-fashioned way,” Therese said.

“
Ist mein Deutsch so schlecht, Fräulein Obermufti?
”

Therese sighed. “Maya, you try too hard. People enjoy having foreign girls in a couture shop. It’s cute to be a young foreign girl. At least you can make correct change with silver money, and that’s more than Klaudia has ever managed.”

“
Ich verstehe nur Wurstsalat. Am Montag muss ich wieder malochen.
”

“Would you
stop that
? It’s eerie.”

“I really need to do this so that, uhm,
können Sie mir das Dingsda da im Schaufenster zeigen
?”

“Listen, darling, you can’t give anyone fashion advice. You don’t have any proper sense of chic. You dress just like a little California magpie.” Therese stood
up. “I never dreamed you’d treat the shop like an adult’s job. You need to relax. You’re an illegal, remember? If you start fussing about making money, some cop is going to notice you.”

Maya frowned. “ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’ ”

Therese thought this over. The tone and the sentiment didn’t agree with her at all. “That’s like something my grandmother would say. I think I know some people who can help you, darling. Let’s stop this nonsense, it’s a slow day anyway.”

Therese made some net calls, and then shut up shop. They took the tube into Landsbergerstrasse and crossed the Hacker-Brucke. Maya saw the distant towers of the cathedral rising behind the train station. The ancient permanence of Munchen—combined with the seductive possibility of instant escape. The contrast gave her a deep moment of intense inexpressible pleasure.

All the young people in Munchen seemed to know Therese. Therese had a thousand vivid friends. Therese even personally knew some old people, and it was touching to see that they treated her almost as an equal. It often seemed that Therese’s little clothing store scarcely existed as a shop per se. The shop was just the physical instantiation of her vast and tenuous gray-market web of tips, barters, bribes, pawns, trade-offs, swaps, hand-me-downs, subtle obligations, and frank kickbacks.

Today’s particular friends of Therese had a production studio in the basement of a low-rise in Neuhausen. There were strict laws in central München about obscuring the skyline with high-rises, so the local real-estate entrepreneurs had tried burrowing into the earth. The faddish subterranean buildings had a big overhead from ventilation and heat pollution, and they’d gone broke so repeatedly that they were forced to rent out to kids.

Therese’s friends were sculptors. Their studio was down in the bowels of the place, oddly shaped and full of
coughing lunglike racket from the ventilator next door. “Ciao Franz.”

“Ciao Therese.” Franz was a stout Deutschlander with a brown beard and a rumpled lab coat. He wore spex on a neck chain. “[So this is the new mannequin?]”

“
Ja.
”

Franz fiddled with his spex, scanning Maya as she strolled into the studio. He smiled. “[Interesting bone structure.]”

“[What do you think?]” Therese said. “[Can you cast her for me? Maybe a nice porous plastic?]” They started bargaining, in a vivid Deutsch so thick with argot that Maya’s translator choked.

Another guy showed up from the back of the lab. “Hey, hello, beautiful.”

“
Ich heisse Maya
. And yes, I speak English.” She shook the new guy’s plastic-gloved hand.

“Ciao Maya. I’m Eugene.” Eugene removed his spex, let them dangle on the neck chain, and looked her up and down bare eyed. “I like your color sense. You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

“Are you American?”

“Toronto.” Eugene looked pretty good without his spex on. A bit gawky and hawk faced, but with a lot of energy. Eugene hadn’t bathed in a long time, but he was giving off an intriguing scent, like warm bananas. “You’ve never been in our studio before, right? Let me give you the tour of the works.”

Eugene showed her a camera-crowded scanning pit and a pair of big, translucent assembler tanks. “We map out our various models here,” said Eugene, “and this is how we do physical instantiation. This old classic,” he patted the transparent wall of the tank, “is a laser-cured thermoplastic instantiator. Modern industrial standards passed her by some time ago. But we’re not industrial people here in the lab. We do artifice. Franz has worked some intriguing culturotechnical variations.”

“Really?
Wunderbar.
”

“You know how thermocuring works?”

“
Nein.
”

Eugene was very patient. He was obviously taken with her. “You fill this tank with a special liquid plastic. Then you fire lasers through the plastic, and the lasers cause the liquid plastic to cure into a durable solid object. The object’s proportions are defined by the movements of the beam—sculpted from liquid into solid, at the focus of coherent light. Naturally the beam is an output from our design virtuality—so we can design physical objects from scratch inside a computational space. Or else we can photocopy Three-D actualities. Like, for instance, your body. Which is what we’ll be doing today.”

The technical English verbiage seemed to be driving the language tincture out of her head. “I think I understand. What you do is like photography.”

“Right! Very much like photography!
Solid
photography. The plastic’s expensive, but we can carbonate it. We can get cheap Three-D foam objects that are mostly gas. The real fun is in whipping it all the way up to aerogel. That way, we can make a structure the size of an elephant that weighs about three kilos.”