Jezebel's Ladder (7 page)

As Jez reached out to touch him,
the man vanished. She staggered into the wall and propped herself against it
for a long while. Implications swirled in her mind like sheets of newspaper
inside a tornado.

Jezebel staggered up to Benny’s office in a daze. The
secretary tried to stop her, but Benny intervened, “It’s okay. Come in here and
sit on the couch. You shouldn’t be running around like this after a theta
shock.”

“Shock effects last about half the
duration with each successive page,” she mumbled, borrowing his brain power for
the regression analysis. She hadn’t mastered the page and wouldn’t for months,
but she was definitely infected. Perceptions were already shifting.

He carried her over to the plush
sofa. Benny smelled great, better than the donuts had. Other appetites stirred.
Jez shook her head. “Why are there boxes on your desk?”

“When Dirt Bag ordered me to zap
you with the blank page, that was the last straw. I quit on principle. I was
just cleaning my things out of the office.”

“Where did he put the blank page?”
she demanded.

The star pointed to a wall safe
that had an alphanumeric key pad. “In there with the rest. I can’t get in any
more. Dirt Bag changed the combination. All I know, from hearing the beeps, is
that it has nine characters.”

When she tried to stand and toppled
again, he said, “You need water, electrolytes, and food. I’ll be right back.”

Benny ran to the break room.

With him gone, she took out her
origami butterfly and concentrated. There were a dozen actives in the
conference room directly beneath her feet. She borrowed brain power from them
and smiled when the answer came to her. She activated the alphanumeric touch
screen and typed in the name CLAUDETTE. The safe opened.

On top was the page they had used
against her. Just as she suspected, the sheet wasn’t blank after all. Dirt Bag
just couldn’t see it. The page represented a code of ethics. He had none. She
laughed out loud like a crazy person. As she changed the password to the safe,
Benny’s ex-secretary came in. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

Giggling, she said, “I’m going to
find that nice man and let him buy me lunch. When we get back, I’ll agree to
talk terms with Mr. Fortune.”

“Ma’am?”

Jez leaned over Benny’s computer,
and typed a one word e-mail to Elias Fortune. “Checkmate.”

“He’ll understand. There are going
to be some changes around here soon.”

****

Jez ate with Benny in a booth at
Spago. Photographers and fans stared at Jez because of her dowdy clothes. Who
was she and why was Mr. Hollis dating her? Was it for his charity?

Benny made pleasant conversation,
but he was depressed. When the waiter left, he admitted, “I want a drink.”

She grabbed his left hand. “You’re
free of a major asshole. This is the best thing that ever happened to you,
besides having lunch with me dressed like a bag lady.”

He played with the stir stick in
his iced tea. “Jez, Fortune is going to come after me. There are some things
about me you don’t know. They’re going to come out in the press, and it’s going
to be ugly.”

“You worry too much. By dinner
time, I think Fortune is going to be begging us to come back, but if it bothers
you so much, tell me.”

Benny stopped stirring. “I can’t.”

Jez coaxed. “I’m from a trailer
park, and Oobie found me in a dumpster. I’m very hard to shock. How bad could
it be compared to Wannamaker?”

Despite himself, Benny laughed. “Not
in public—come to my place after lunch and we’ll see.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she
stayed silent. Her role at lunch was to get him to talk, to feel comfortable
again. When his phone rang during the entrée, she snatched it out of his hand.
She spotted the New York area code and powered the device off. “It’s Dirt Bag;
he needs to suffer a little before we let him grovel.”

Benny just shook his head. “I
should’ve had you for an agent.”

“You’ve got me curious. After
lunch, you’re driving me to your place before you chicken out.” Then, they
passed the rest of the meal talking about everything but work. When the dessert
cart came, Jez passed, eager to hear the secret. Benny, who had enjoyed their
time so much he’d forgotten about the blackmail, left reluctantly to get his
Mercedes.

While Benny waited for the valet, a
woman in a tennis outfit leaned close to Jez. “How did you land him?”

Jez smiled, “I got him fired from
his job, and he had to let me take him out to apologize.”

“Risky,” the impeccably manicured
bystander said. “But with a lot of potential.”

Jez shrugged. “I’ll get him rehired
by dinner, but I wanted him all to myself for a few hours for curiosity’s sake.”
She knew this was none of the woman’s business but couldn’t stop herself. It
was probably the after-effects of the ethics page.

The woman handed her a card. “Have
dinner with us at the club this weekend and tell us all about it.”

After driving to a residential
area, Benny began, “You know I’m an alcoholic. Hollywood enables that
lifestyle, encourages it. I’ve done some things that can never be forgiven. At
first, I thought people covered for me because of my gift. Eventually, I figured
out all it takes is money. People’s lives are just grease for the machine.”

Jez nodded. “You’ve stood as the
Project’s only conscience for years. I refuse to believe accusations against
you without hearing your side.”

Benny pulled up to a gated driveway,
and pushed the remote to open it. “I’ll do one better. One of my victims will
tell you.”

After they parked in the garage and
entered through the side door, Jez was overwhelmed by the huge, white kitchen. “Wow,
this place is bigger than my last three apartments put together.”

A young, Asian man in an Oriental
housecoat approached and bowed.

Jez bowed back and said to Benny, “You
have a houseboy?”

“Tan is a good friend who stays
with me. He owes me nothing. He fixes tea because he drinks it as well and gets
up before I do.”

Jez kept a neutral expression and
said, “Any friend of Mr. Hollis is a friend of mine.”

“I had the same reaction to this
kitchen as you,” Tan confided. “It is like a palace here. Even after so many
years, this city is so strange. You actually seem normal.”

 “If you only knew,” Jez laughed.

Benny pulled him aside and
whispered. “Actually, I would call her exceptional. Tell her everything about
that night.”

Tan seemed uncomfortable. “Mister
Ben, you do enough. You should not worry. It is past.”

“Tell her. I can’t,” Benny said,
emphasizing each word.

Tan led her into a sitting area and
offered tea. “Please, do not share what I say with anyone else. People in this
town cannot be trusted. Mister Ben brought me here from Thailand. I had no family. He opened his home to me. I have a job at his hospital charity.”

“Nothing negative there,” Jez said.

Tan paused. “Mister Ben was filming
a movie in my country. It was monsoon season, so filming was delayed. Most of
the crew went on elephant tours or to the brothels in the city. Mister Ben got
drunk with local farmers, rice wine. He is very friendly to everyone. He boasts
of being able to make best Western omelet ever, but we have no cheese. Mister
Ben sets off in his car in the heavy rain to get cheese for his new friends.”

The story was difficult for even
Tan to tell, so Jez put down her cup and listened intently. “We lived ten miles
from the nearest town. No one in our village even owned a car or a phone. There
are no street lights. My sister, Mali, forgot to close up before the storm and
left the chickens to go free in the street. When she heard the car, she ran out
to grab the birds, to save them.”

Jez read volumes into the silence. “He
ran into your sister.”

“He swerved to avoid, but the graze
was enough to cause internal bleeding,” Tan said. “The car continued sliding
until it destroyed our small house. I was inside, watching through the window.
I escaped with only two broken arms.”

Jez grimaced at the image.

“Mister Ben’s phone would not work
in the monsoon with the antenna broken. The fancy car would not start because
of a safety feature that disconnects the battery after accident. This is to
save lives. Mister Ben put my sister in our wheelbarrow and started walking to
the nearest clinic. The wheelbarrow broke after three hours. I was unable to
help because of my arms. He had to carry Mali himself for the last hour. He
fell several times in the mud.”

Tan folded his arms tightly against
his chest as he relived his old injuries. “When we finally arrived, the clinic
is closed. Been closed all day. Police very busy. Mister Ben would not give up.
He convinced police to give us ride to the city. Offer to let them lock him up.
I sing to Mali the whole drive our mother’s favorite song.”

Tan wept openly.

Jez stepped in. “It was too late
for her. Somebody contacted the movie company and money made everything go
away.”

Tan nodded. “But not Mister Ben. He
stayed for six months, raising enough donations to keep the clinic open always.
He started a new charity and collected enough to give each village a phone. Even
this was not enough. When his visa expired, he came back here to get bigger
donations, to make real change. Mister Ben offered me his home because he destroyed
mine. I tell him…I told him that I only stay here as his friend.”

Placing her hand on his shoulder,
Jez said, “Friends like you are hard to find, Tan. Thank you, for forgiving him
and for sharing your pain with me.”

When Jezebel found Benny, he was on
his computer in the study, drafting his resignation letter from the hospital
charity he had helped to found. When he noticed her arrival, he said with mild
surprise, “You’re still here.”

She placed herself between him and
the screen. “You’re not going to need that letter.”

Benny said, “Fortune has the tox
results from the hospital. I demanded they do a blood test on me. The results
didn’t come back till after all charges were dropped, but the doctor still
saved them. I was over the legal blood-alcohol limit.”

Jez nodded, “
Mea maxima culpa
.
Those prisons aren’t very friendly. And Tan seems to think you’re doing a lot
more good out here.”

When he started to object, she
placed a finger on his lips. “You’ve risked yourself for me twice now. I’m
standing by you this time, and you’re not going to stop me.”

Reaching under her shirt, she said,
“I’m going to share something with you this afternoon I’ve only showed to one
other man.” When his eyes got big, she hastily amended, “Relax, this isn’t a
pass. When I make a pass, you’ll know.”

Jez pulled out her golden butterfly
and held the back side up in front of his face. “Take a quick look, but don’t
touch.”

Math symbols danced across the
surface. He covered his eyes, “Holy Mother, you’ve had a page the whole time?”

“I covered the front in eight
dollars worth of gold leaf, but left the back bare to give me direct skin
contact. Nobody searched me on intake. The nurses removed it before you met me.
Direct contact with this page is why I can see Daniel. I think you’d call it
Quantum Computing. Chance and I used it to design some cutting-edge illusions.
Nobody could figure them out. As long as no one else was looking, he could even
do tricks like making all the traffic lights green. I never got that good, but
in combination with group think, I was able to guess Fortune’s password and
change it.”

“That means you have three pages!” His
face lit up.

She shook her head. “Today I made
four. That makes me Queen of the Hill. I’m willing to keep that a secret if
Fortune meets our demands. Though you’re going to have to handle negotiations
because I don’t think I can lie anymore, not even a shade.”

Benny raised an eyebrow.

She sighed. “The ‘blank’ page is
Ethical Geometry. Once it starts reformatting your brain, you can’t violate the
rules.”

Benny laughed so hard that Tan came
in. Seeing the two standing so close, he pulled the door shut on his way out.

She continued. “I still want to
acquire the envoy, but I’ll do the sales pitch myself. I want him to work on a
moral code for the whole project, everyone with pages, really.”

“You continually amaze me, but as
long as you get results, Fortune won’t care.”

She stepped away and held up a
hand. “I don’t know that I can keep this level up for long. I might be able to
swing one per month, some of them just paragraphs.”

He was still smiling. “All good.”

Jez sighed. “Not fast enough.
Here’s the last thing, the part you’re not going to like.” After Benny sat back
down to brace himself, she continued, “Once a person gets enough pages, the
document speaks to them like some kind of artificial intelligence. I think it’s
sort of like holographic storage when you assemble enough pieces.” She
described Sensei to him.

“What’s so bad about that?”

Jez snorted. “Other than them
throwing me in with the Zombie Master because of my hallucinations? The Fossils
have enough pages to do this already. What if one of them tries what I did?
They might use it get to the top of the Ladder first. You really don’t want
Wannamaker to get that particular set of master keys.”

“So now there’s a fuse?” he said.

Jez nodded.

 “We can make that work for us.
I’ll take care of Dirt Bag,” Benny said. “Thank you, for everything.” After a
beat, he asked, “Why didn’t you show me earlier?”

Jez smiled. “I had to trust you
with my life first. Besides, it’s the only part of Chance I still have. I
didn’t want to lose that, too.”

He hugged her close for several
minutes. When the phone rang, it jolted him out of his reverie. He said, “Fortune,
right on cue.”

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to
borrow your shower,” Jez said.

Benny said, “Fine. Sorry I don’t
have any women’s clothes for you to change into.”