Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“You’re running out of ideas, my man,” Wade muttered out loud. In his dismay he forgot about the burning match, crying out when it reached his fingertips and flicking it in the air where it fell like a dead firefly.

THOSE WHO BUILT Church Central on the huge rock that overlooked the sea to the west and the city to the east never imagined any other structure would challenge its predominance on the landscape. Their contempt for God was large enough that they presumed not only to speak for him but to approximate his stature; a few may have convinced themselves that it was God who gave them the rock for the purpose of building the church in the first place.

In the meantime the Arboretum to the northeast grew higher. Those living in the Arboretum didn’t give much thought to the Church at all; their descent into the Arboretum’s passages was the lateral motion of their mirth at God and Primacy. The Church insisted on jurisdiction over the zone that it called Redemption but everyone else called Desire and continually drew up plans to tear down the Arboretum board by board. That the priests shrank from this finally had less to do with bureaucracy than dread of what might come shrieking out of the Arboretum once its walls had been pulled away. Even heaven, one priest conjectured, needed a hell where the things heaven could not know or touch might be contained.

If Church Central was anxious about the disorder of human desire that lurked in the Arboretum, it genuinely feared the only thing on the landscape that dwarfed both, and that of course was the volcano. The volcano towered high enough in the east that the sun didn’t rise above it until a couple of hours before noon; and from the rooftop of Church Central a day never passed that the priests didn’t contemplate the curl of smoke that rose from the volcano’s flat peak. A day never passed that somewhere in the city a priest didn’t fall to his knees and press the palms of his hands flat to the ground, not to prostrate himself before God and beg for mercy but to assess the seismic whispers of the coming infernal scream.

Mostly Church Central feared the volcano because it represented the most alarming of possibilities: that there was indeed a God, who manifested himself daily in the mix of volcano smoke and ocean fog that the residents called the Vog. What’s more, God’s molten wrath might be reserved not for the hedonists of the Arboretum but the priests’ cynical impertinence, though this consideration demanded a moral imagination no one in Primacy possessed enough to fully formulate or understand. But the possibility nibbled beneath the floorboards of their consciences. It was heard at night as the devouring of an approaching infestation. And if moral imagination would not acknowledge let alone speak to the prospect of God’s living in the crater of the volcano, it certainly wouldn’t account for the fact that if one were to stand on the volcano’s peak and look midpoint between Church Central and the Arboretum in the distance, if one were to stand in the highest tower of the Arboretum and look midpoint between Church Central and the volcano, if one were to stand with the priests on the rooftop of Church Central and look midpoint between the volcano and the Arboretum, the crosshairs of these vantage points would have fallen on the small alley off the corner of Desolate and Unrequited where Wade read the daily graffiti like changing tea leaves. But Wade didn’t know this either, and the man who would later chart such coordinates only stared at their undistinguished meeting point and concluded it meant nothing at all.

On his way into headquarters the next morning, Wade encountered the rookie who had provided the rosary for Sally Hemings the previous afternoon. That was when Wade heard about the satellite dish the police had found at the hotel. If there was a dish, Wade thought, then there must have been a monitor, but Mallory hadn’t mentioned either. “Mallory said not to tell anybody,” the rookie added, affecting his most guileless expression but not quite able to conceal the connivance in his eyes. Shit, Wade said to himself, another weasel. Mallory tells the kid not to tell anyone and the kid runs straight to me; the entire force is made up of one ambitious backstabbing motherfucker after another, and that now includes guys who haven’t been around for more than a week. “I was trying to get the concierge to cough up the TV when Mallory came along and said forget it, he’d take care of it. He didn’t want to book the concierge, either.” The rookie said, “I thought monitors and dishes were felonies. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

It was stupid of Mallory, really. Every time Wade thought maybe he shouldn’t underestimate him, Mallory did something silly. “You’ve done fine,” Wade said to the rookie.

“You won’t tell Mallory that I—” the rookie started, but Wade was already walking away through headquarters, narrowly missing its low ceilings and brass pipes that coiled from the walls. If Mallory worked fast enough, he could have sold the TV on the black market last night at the Arboretum, assuming he was there to check out the Fleurs d’X business and there weren’t a lot of other cops around. For a few minutes Wade was feeling pleased that he had something on Mallory, to balance out whatever Mallory had on him, but the maze of paranoia through which his mind wandered led to another possibility, that Central let Mallory work his black-market scam as a reward for being an informant. Of course, if Mallory was caught red-handed, Central would deny any knowledge of it and Mallory would be on his own. When Mallory walked by his desk Wade, studying the file on the hotel murder, said casually, “Heard you found a dish,” to which someone with a little imagination or humor might have answered something cute along the lines of, You mean the little dark one with the huge tits or the blonde with the long legs and funny accent? Instead Mallory sputtered just long enough for Wade to change the subject and wave the file at him. “So what do you have?”

“Have?” Mallory said, flummoxed.

Wade leaned back in his chair. “From the hotel yesterday,” he said. “What did you think I meant?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“We didn’t find anything.”

“What did the concierge say?”

“About what?” Mallory nearly shouted.

“The murder, Mallory,” Wade answered slowly, “there was a body, remember? Blood everywhere?”

Mallory read from a note pad he took from his pocket. He was rattled, the way Wade had brought up the TV and then dropped it. “Concierge says Mrs. Hurley checked into the hotel two nights before.”

“Under what name?”

“Sally Hemings.”

“What was she doing checking into a hotel in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t say it was the middle of the night.”

“All right. What was she doing checking into—”

“Domestic dispute. Told her husband she was leaving. Or, actually, the husband says she just left.”

“What’s the husband do?”

“He’s an actor in the Arboretum.”

“Did he say what the argument was about?”

“No.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Sure I asked him,” Mallory answered.

“She was upset enough to check into a hotel for two days.”

Mallory said, as though it explained something, “They’re broke.”

“They’re not living off anything he’s doing in the Arboretum, that’s for sure.”

“She makes jewelry and sells it. Necklaces and earrings and shit.”

Wade looked at the file. “She ever clear this jewelry with Central?”

“I doubt it.”

“You search their place?

“I thought we were investigating a murder.”

“They live off the sale of this jewelry?”