Vineland (17 page)

Each girl had a number pinned to her outfit. When it was called, she had to step into a spotlight and do a basic tits-and-ass or beauty-pageant turn. The girl just before DL came from a high valley in northern Thailand, bartered as part of a heroin deal, dolled up tonight in black chiffon and mink eyelashes, about to enter a world where she would never again meet anyone who had ever heard of the place she'd been born in and taken from. She was sold for a million yen and slipped from kinder theatrical lighting down into the dark to join her new owner, feeling something warm but unyielding, like padded steel, slide around her neck, around one wrist . . . no one spoke to her. No one would, for days.

DL, remembering beauty-contest interviews back on the childhood Tube, thought
Just relax and have fun
, picked up the beat, and stepped out into the warm fall of light to let everybody have a look. The minute she appeared she could hear altered breathing and interjections in a number of tongues, but was oddly aware herself only of one electrician, poised silent near a small fill light . . . just out of her field of vision, his smoky and blurred presence more real to her than any bidder in the room, any future master. . . . How could that be?
Relax, have fun.
She smiled even with her eyes, Lobelia's eyes, alert now at nipples and clitoris, the price being bid upward deliriously. Suddenly she heard a new voice. Others may have recognized it too. There were no more bids. The hammer fell, she left the light, blind for an instant, adrift on treacherous runway in high heels, but then feeling the hand take her arm firmly as shackles and steer her instead off into the wings. . . .

When she could see, moving quickly into the chill of outdoors, into an alley where a long American automobile waited, she turned to have a look at her purchaser. Shades, black and white outfit, inches shorter but—she already knew by touch—faster and better. “Relax, lady,” he warbled pleasantly. “I'm only the agent here.” He opened a rear door. In a slither of tulle, she ducked and curled, alone, into the back seat. The man disappeared up front, doors latched solidly, and off she was driven into neon confusion. Waiting for her on the seat were fresh flowers—orchids. She lifted her chin. As a girl she had missed every single dance, including school proms, and this happened in fact to be her very first orchid corsage in her life.

Tonight's blind date turned out to be none other than Ralph Wayvone, who had a suite at the Imperial. They eyed each other across a spacious sitting room. She'd slid off her shoes first thing and now flexed her toes in the deep carpet. “You're pissed off, huh,” she ventured.

Ralph was pouring champagne. He turned, holding the two glasses, and DL noticed changes in his packaging. His suit fit like Cary Grant's, he appeared to have shaved sometime in the last hour, and he was wearing a pink tropical blossom in his lapel. He still smelled, however, like the far end of a men's toiletries section in a drugstore, and his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking.

A lightning storm had appeared far out at sea and now, behind them out the window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along the horizon. Somewhere in here a stereo began to play a stack of albums from the fifties, all in that sweet intense mainstream wherein the tenor drowns of love, or, as it is known elsewhere, male adolescence.

“Couldint believe it was you,” handing her the fluteful of champagne, beaded in the humid night, his voice slow, almost dazed. She twirled for him, as she had just before he'd bought her, and drank champagne.

“You sure paid a lot.”

“Annual event, goes in a pension fund.”

“Oh—you only pretended to buy me.”

“Not exactly. Let's say you're here till you can get away again.”

“You still want Brock Vond.”

“Now more than ever.” He had his lower lip out, trying to look sinned against.

“Please—I just needed a vacation from my life. You never heard of that?”

“Should I be reprimanding my intelligence people? Are they giving me faulty data on you? It don't sound to me like you're really all that hungry to get this little fuck. Like you've—” she was expecting “lost your nerve,” but he thoughtfully went for “changed your attitude,” instead.

She met his look. “Long as you're here in town, why not talk to some talent scouts, I'm not the only one knows 'is particular Oriental trick, you know.”

“But you are the one who can execute.” Tony Bennett had been singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Ralph touched her bare arm lightly. “Darryl Louise, think of who you are—mentioned in
Black Belt
before you were ten, the
Soldier of Fortune
interview, that centerfold in
Aggro World
, almost made runner-up in the Dangerous Teen Miss pageant in '63. . . .”

“Best I could do was Miss Animosity, why are you bringing up my rap sheet here?”

“All that great gift—you wanted to just escape it? Spend the rest of your life typin' up invoices and dodging the customer-service reps? I could cry.”

“Could you. And would I have to deal with that?”

“Ahh, you cold cookie. . . . I can take ya, but I'll never break ya.” He put down his glass, held his arms open. “Come on, Black Belt. Dance with an old gentleman.”

Ralph had shifted—she could feel it—into a fifties time warp, and DL, once in his arms, found, surprised, that she could now think about her situation clearly for the first time since the Pizza Hut. Even putting champagne and orchids aside, here was the first human in her lifetime of running away who'd ever taken the trouble to come after her, not to mention publicly buy her, however much in play, for the sticker price of a Lamborghini plus options. How could a girl not be impressed? And as lagniappe she'd get the chance to ice detestable Brock Vond once and for all.

They drifted across the neutral carpeting, crooners crooned, and the storm came sweeping on. He was careful, mouth close to her ear, to speak only during instrumental breaks. “You might even get to like working for us. Our benefits package is the best in the field. You get to veto any assignment, we don't ask for weekly quotas, but we do run a cash-flow assessment on each of you quarterly. . . .”

“What's this, then, your leisure outfit, where's 'em gold chains, 'at endangered-species hat?”

“
Ufa, mi tratt' a pesci in faccia
—my dear Miss Chastain, who'd ever try to run a lady such as you, with your independent ideas plus all those lethal talents, do I look that stupid?”

Well, the problem of course was that he didn't look quite stupid enough. Had a certain luminous shade of skin not balanced out the wrong-length sideburns, the tightly rationed smile not likewise made up for the no-eye-contact eyes, why she'd most likely've passed on the venture and had to arrive at other, less hopeful arrangements. But it came about, after a night and a day of jackhammer sex, amphetamines, champagne, and Chaliapin Steaks ordered up from Les Saisons, that she was sped by Lincoln limo, semen drying on her stockings and one earring lost forever, through rainglare and wet streets to the notorious Haru no Depaato, or Department Store of Spring, installed in a room of her own, and handed a large clutch purse stuffed full of yen, for transitional expenses till she went officially on the payroll.

“Your other clients,” Ralph trying to be helpful, “they'll just be there for your cover, right?”

“Ralph, wow, I—I feel better already.” In fact, she did, not because of the clients, who were no worse than expected, but because she was finally back getting some dojo time in, stretching, striking, working out with 'chuks and eagle catchers, meditating, finding inside herself the way back to shelter she'd wondered more than once if she'd lost for good. Outside the establishment, in the street, to keep herself in the mood, she paid special attention to car collisions, ambulances in a hurry, even bowls of severed shrimp heads in the noodle shops, as she and Ralph Wayvone went nailing down the scenario for Brock's assassination.

“He'll be flying in for a two-week international prosecutors' symposium, staying at the Hilton. We have a schedule of his free time, unless he's also one of those mischievous lads who like to play hooky. You'll wait, you'll live by his schedule—sooner or later he'll show up, he's a regular here whenever he's passing through.”

“But he'll ID me, he'll remember.”

“Not the way you'll be.”

Uh-huh, the way she'd be . . . of all the jacking around she was getting, that makeover would prove to be the real shocker. Soon as the Depaato beautician staff got to work, the minute they brought out the wig she was to wear, dyed and styled precisely, she knew. And when she saw it on, a shivering crept all over her skin, as she looked at her own face on Frenesi's head. “Mr. Brock Vond,” the girls assured her, “likes American girl, looking just this way, always the same,” the little sixties outfits, the lurid makeup of the time. . . . But I'll have to wear shades, she thought, he'll see my own pale eyes and it won't work, surely he'll want hers, those fluorescent blue eyes of Frenesi's. . . . And so he would, but that was all taken care of too—when the time came, DL would be wearing tinted contact lenses.

“I knew it!” Prairie exploded. “My mother and this creep, and you better tell me how serious, DL—”

“Serious.”

“So my dad and my grandma've been lyin' to me all the time? They told me she was on the side of the people—how could she've ever gone near somebody like this Brock guy?”

“I never could figure it either, kid. He was everything we were supposed to be against.” But the shock had been different for DL—it was in finding out that he loved Frenesi but did not possess her, and was driven to fetishism in faraway countries as his only outlet, helpless to change—obsessed, though it gagged her to admit it, as DL. And Ralph, the fucker, must have known the whole story all along. Was he getting off on this? What kind of a sense of humor was that, anyway? Sometimes, waiting in her room, she'd wonder if this was all supposed to be some penance, to sit, caught inside the image of one she'd loved, been betrayed by, just sit. . . . Was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth, or was she finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion, having only read about Frenesi Gates once in some dentist's waiting room or standing in line at the checkout, whereupon something had just snapped and she'd gone on to make up the whole thing? And was now not in any Japanese whorehouse waiting to kill Brock Vond at all, but safely within a mental institution Stateside, humored, kindly allowed to dress up as the figure of her unhappy fantasies? For company while she waited she left the Tube on with the sound off. Images went rolling in and out of the frame as she sat, quiescent, sometimes teasing herself with these what-is-reality exercises, but keeping always balanced, right on that line, attentively breathing herself through the turn of the hours, the rise and fall of the five elements and the body organs governed, the combinations, the dance of husband-wife and mother-son laws. Today, of course, you can pick up a dedicated hand-held Ninja Death Touch calculator in any drugstore, which will track, compute, and project for you quick as a wink, but back then DL had only her memory to rely on and what she'd learned from Inoshiro Sensei, obliged early, she and her brain, to enter a system of eternal repayment humming along with or without her existence. Sensei called it “the art of the dark meridians,” warning her repeatedly about the timing. “Perfect blow to the correct alarm point, but at the wrong time—might as well stay home—watch a Run Run Shaw movie!” She asked if she could visit him. They said no.

Meanwhile, Takeshi Fumimota was in and out of Tokyo for reasons of business connected with the mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging to the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco. About a week after Brock Vond's arrival, Takeshi was standing at the edge of a gigantic animal footprint which only the day before had been a laboratory. From an insurance point of view, the place was totaled, though free of fatalities, the event having occurred precisely during an evacuation drill. Strange!

Looking through the dark morning drizzle, Takeshi couldn't even see over to the other side of the foot-shaped crater. From up here on the rim, about all he could make out were the yellow headlamps of the tech squads moving far below, taking samples of everything, every last splinter, for testing. Here and there edges of the footprint had begun to slide in.

As Takeshi made his way cautiously down, he found a network of plastic duckboards and temporary traffic lights already in place. Traffic was heavy. He paused at a turnout, poured himself another cup from his coffee thermos, and took another amphetamine capsule. “It's going to take a while,” he chuckled aloud, drawing a stare or two, “to get to the bottom of this!” Another strange element, as his former mentor Professor Wawazume, eccentric CEO of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, had reminded him over the phone last night, was that recently Chipco had wanted a floater written in on an inland marine policy, against “damage from any and all forms of animal life.” The demolished complex was located on a lightly traveled piece of coastline, and Chipco could certainly argue that something had come up out of the surf, put one foot in the sand for leverage, and stomped on the lab with the other. Since it had happened at low tide, any second print on the beach would have got washed away when the tide came back in. “Clearly reptilian,” the Professor had summed up, “or possibly the work of a—disgruntled environmentalist!” Takeshi, by the time he got to see it from the air, didn't want to rule out another secular possibility—a professional job. There were some fancy blasters around, studio special-effects people, Yank veterans of Vietnam, few yakuza maybe—Takeshi knew most of the boys and girls, though it wasn't always easy to keep track, and the work could get pretty sophisticated. Size 20,000 here could be an artifact from heel to claw-tip.