Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Wade chose three units in Seventeen as randomly as he’d chosen the circle itself. It wasn’t possible for anyone ever to be certain their unit would be inspected during an altar-room search; sometimes, if the cop was surreptitious enough, it wasn’t possible to be sure even after the search was over. He found nothing to confiscate in the first; in the second he took a small wooden carving of a woman’s head. There wasn’t anything particularly subversive about the woman’s head, but something faintly enigmatic about the woman’s expression made him decide he better bring it in, since there was no telling these days what Primacy considered subversive and what it didn’t.

In the third unit he was dissatisfied with the sealing on the altar-room door. He inspected it for a few minutes to see that there wasn’t some kind of peephole through which those in the small room on the other side of the door could look out. That was a heavy-duty felony and it would be pretty damned stupid of whoever lived here, but some people were just pretty damned stupid. He clicked on the intercom next to the door. “This sealing’s a violation of city ordinance,” he said to those inside the room. “Get it taken care of by tomorrow morning’s alert.” He made a note of the unit. He kept looking at the carving of the woman’s head from the second apartment, thinking maybe it was harmless enough and he’d put it back. But it was the only artifact he’d confiscated and he ought to have something to show for the search; the matter was decided when the siren came on announcing the shift was over. He put the carving in his coat pocket. Sitting in his car in the shadow of the blue obelisk he could see families emerging from the altar rooms of their units, peering out the windows. As he started the car and slowly drove out of the blinding white circle, the crash of the ocean against the city’s cliffs in the distance reminded him of something, but it wasn’t until he felt the nausea that he realized it sounded like the irons around Sally’s hands as she’d gotten in his car at the hotel.

Crossing Humiliation back toward Sorrow, Wade filed a report over the car radio about the faulty altar-room-door sealing in Circle Seventeen’s third unit. To his surprise a response came back from Mallory, who was already finished with the business at the hotel and back at headquarters. “Shit,” Wade said, “you could have done your own damned altar search.” Mallory laughed with dull malice. Wade thought Mallory was going to tell him something about Mrs. Hurley or the hotel but instead Mallory was calling back about a disturbance “over in Desire,” he said, and then abruptly stopped, and now it was Wade’s turn to laugh because he knew Mallory had just fucked up. Redemption was Primacy’s name for that zone but, because it was an outlaw zone, everyone called it Desire; Church Central’s jurisdiction over it was shadowy at best. It wasn’t a good idea, however, to call it Desire over the police radio because some ass-licking priest up at Central was probably monitoring it and now Mallory had fucked up and this made Wade happy. “Say,” Wade answered back, “where did you say that was again, Mallory?” and he emphasized Mallory’s name just so the ass-licking priest would be sure to catch it.

As twilight fell Wade headed toward Desire and the scene of the disturbance, a twenty-four-hour strip joint called Fleurs d’X.

SOMETIMES EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT the same time, Wade told himself later looking back on this particular day. As he finished the altar shift and was heading back to headquarters, he’d already thought about swinging by to check out the day’s graffiti. But if by any chance he’d forgotten about the graffiti, what he saw at the Fleurs d’X would have reminded him.

Wade knew he was going to have to take a better look at the day’s second dead body than he had the first. For the cops to get called in about a “disturbance” in Desire, it had to be pretty disturbing; what probably happened this time was that someone panicked before cooler heads could prevail. Desire got away with more than the usual shit because it operated out at the edge of the lava fields just barely within — or without — Primacy’s threshold of righteous indignation; the zone’s anarchy particularly manifested itself in a huge neighborhood called the Arboretum, a single unit of chambers, lofts, urban caves and underground grottoes linked by hundreds of corridors and passages that shot off in every direction. The Arboretum’s nefarious activities included a theater, TV arcade, book outlets and, Wade had heard, a floating emporium of forbidden artifacts, most of which had been seized by police during altar-search shifts before making their way back onto the black market. You needed either a map or a very weird brain to find your way through the Arboretum, and since no map existed because no one person knew everything that was in it, that narrowed the neighborhood’s demographics to the very weird. Sailors docked up the coast and drove down across the tip of the lava fields in old bombed-out buses in the dead of night, just to get lost in the Arboretum for weeks.

Wade spent an hour bullying his way through the labyrinth to the Fleurs d’X, where twelve stages and a bar operated twenty-four hours a night, since daylight never invaded the Arboretum. Between the lights and liquor and women the club usually got pretty steamy and crazy, but now it was empty. Bodies on the decidedly rigorous side of mortis probably didn’t do much for business. No suspects were waiting in bed with the dead man this time, just the faces of the girls watching from behind the curtains as Wade walked into the club’s dressing room. The dead man slouched on the bench was more a kid, really — about twenty, Wade supposed — good-looking and muscular, bare-chested and his head completely shaven. Covering his chest was the tattoo of a voluptuously naked woman with the head of a bird, standing in a sea of fire. Something dripped from the birdwoman’s mouth, and behind her was a strange insignia of crossed blue lightning bolts; on the back of the boy’s shoulders were tattooed red wings. His eyes stared openly before him, their terror frozen and eternal; his chest was ripped and his fingernails bloody with his own flesh, as though he had attacked his own body. From the look on his face Wade figured heart failure as the cause of death, but that was another thing for the coroner to work out. As with the body in the hotel bed earlier this morning, Wade had never seen this guy before. The nice thing about a bald kid with wings tattooed on his back was that if you’d ever seen him before, you sort of remembered later.

Behind the bar a tall darkhaired woman named Dee, whom Wade had known as a stripper herself in younger days, poured him a drink. He waved it away. “Somebody panicked,” he said, “that’s how I figure it.”

“You going to get it out of here?” said Dee.

“How long’s he been dead?”

“All night.”

“Outside in the real world,” Wade explained, “the night’s just starting. In this place ‘all night’ means anything.”

“I would have dumped him myself except I heard someone called the cops,” Dee said with some disgust. “I decided it would be better if there was a body when you got here rather than me trying to convince you there wasn’t.”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“The girls?”

“Nobody knows him at all. Things broke up fast when it went down. Jenny, one of the dancers, became hysterical. It made for a shitty evening.”

“So who called it in?”

“You’re the cop, you tell me. Could have been anybody.”

“Your girl?”

Dee shook her head.

“So exactly what happened?”

“You’re the cop, you tell—”