Max Collins - Before the Dawn

She had selected, from the various pictures of Sterling with pretty young women (and there had been dozens over the last year or so), a petite brunette, who bore a faint resemblance to Max.

“I’ve been here before,” she said. “A few months ago? Marisa Barton.”

A tiny smile played at the corner of the security man’s mouth. “Ms. Barton is already inside.”

Max’s smile curdled. “Look... I’ll be straight with you. I’m a journalist, and this is my big chance.” She withdrew a precious twenty-dollar bill from her purse.

But the guard, not at all mean, almost amused, just shook his head.

Max said, with a frozen smile, “You’re not going to let me in, are you?”

“Worse luck for you, ‘Ms. Barton’ — I’m gay. You don’t even have that going for you... Tell your driver to turn it around, and we don’t have to take this another step... You wouldn’t like that step, anyway.”

“Bet not.” She’d already put her twenty bucks away.

Max told the driver to turn the hack around, but before the cabbie could shift gears, the guard leaned down, like an adult talking to a child, and said, “By the way, just so you know next time — Ms. Barton’s a blonde, now... For a journalist, you’re not so hot on details.”

She smirked. “I’m savin’ up for a research assistant.”

The driver turned around and drove back toward the ferry. When they were out of sight of the gate, Max told him to stop and, after waiting till no cars were coming in either direction, climbed out of the cab. The street was dark and Sterling’s mansion was two blocks back.

“If you’re plannin’ to go over the fence in that dress,” the skinny cabbie said, when she came to his rolled-down window to pay him, “I wouldn’t mind hangin’ around to watch.”

She got the twenty back out. “Here.”

“Hey! Thanks, sweetie... that’s generous.”

“No — it’s payment for you getting amnesia. You alert that guardhouse about me, I’ll want my Andy Jackson back.”

“Sure...” He took the bill from her, and she clamped onto his stick of a wrist. Hard.

She looked at him hard, too, and his eyes were wide and amazed and somewhat frightened.

“If you’re thinking of playing both ends against the middle,” she said, “you might be surprised what a girl in a dress like this can do.”

He nodded, said no problem, no sweat, and pulled away.

On her walk back, Max avoided the road to the front of the castle, and the other cars she knew would be using it. She passed the place where she’d docked the boat the other night, and kept moving. Even in the short dress, the wall wasn’t any more of an obstacle than it had been the first time, though that cabbie would have received quite an eyeful.

She glided around the house to the front, staying in the shadows, waiting until a larger group of six or seven people poured out of a stretch limo — their slightly drunken laughter like off-key wind chimes in the night — and breezed up the wide stairs toward the massive green dollar-bill door. As they moved up past the lions, Max just blended in with the crowd and, for the second time, entered the Sterling mansion.

A string quartet sat to one side of the foyer, their soft melodies providing unobtrusive musical wallpaper for the many conversations going on. Thanks to Moody, Max recognized the piece as Bach, though the name eluded her — it wasn’t something you could steal, after all.

The last time Max had stood in this foyer, she’d broken and entered — and had felt much more at ease than in the midst of this crowd of tony people... chatting in little groups, sipping flutes of champagne, nibbling at canapés, courtesy of silver-tray-bearing waiters in tuxedo pants and white shirts with black bow ties, winding through the throng like moonlighting Chippendale’s dancers. The male guests tended to be in their late thirties to midforties, wearing tailored suits and an air of success. The female guests often were ten years younger than their dates, and wore clingy cocktail dresses, and airs of excess.

Max fought a spike of panic — she had rarely felt more out of place in her young life, perhaps not since those early months after the Manticore escape.

Some rich people had not weathered the Pulse at all well, even spiraling into failure and poverty. For those born to wealth — or those capitalists (like, say, Jared Sterling) who saw in disaster potential for their own prosperity — it was as if there had been no Pulse. To such people, affluence was as natural as breathing; and those who’d been born to it, should they lose their fortunes, would wither and die.

This way of life was completely foreign to Max, who’d scratched for every cent she’d ever earned... or anyway, stolen. Oh, she’d seen her share of fancy parties and posh events in Los Angeles, of course; but she’d always been on the outside looking in, hoping to snag a bauble or snatch a purse when the wealthy left whatever function she and the other members of the Chinese Clan were staking out.

Despite the care Kendra and Original Cindy had taken to help her blend in here, that was impossible for Max; in a way, her home girls had done too good a job on her. Her dark exotic beauty, so fetchingly displayed in the low-cut frock, had attracted male eyes from the moment she walked in. The women took only a few seconds longer to catch onto her unique presence... and suddenly it seemed that Max wasn’t the only female with cat genes in the room: the debutante girlfriends and trophy wives threw her looks of undisguised contempt.

A waiter paused for Max to select a champagne flute from his tray, and she exchanged smiles with him — two human beings trapped here in the Decadence Museum. Then he was gone, and she sipped, hoping the bubbly would relax her, but instructing herself to hold it to one glass: she was, after all, working...

As she eased off toward the gallery, Max nodded at several of the appreciatively gazing men, thinking, Even if I were still in heat, you toms wouldn’t stand a chance ...

The vast room where, not so long ago, she and a security guard had interacted now held fifty-some people, mostly milling about enjoying the artwork, murmuring appreciatively at Sterling’s collection, about every third one trying to impress with his or her knowledge. Music from the foyer filtered in, but muffled, as if this were Muzak piped in.

Glancing around the room, Max saw that Sterling’s people had cleaned up the mess after her visit, neatly, efficiently. The holes from the security leader’s pistol shots had been patched; the Jackson Pollock ruined by Maurer’s MP7A had been taken down (and replaced by a different Pollock painting!); and — much to Max’s surprise — she caught glimpses of a new Plexiglas display case in the corner, where she’d found the Heart of the Ocean. But she would have to get closer, to see what new object had been put on display in the necklace’s place...

Not wanting to arouse suspicion — and now starting to look for Sterling in earnest — Max went down the left side of the room (the side opposite the display case), gliding behind guests lined up staring at paintings. A stunning blonde in blue velvet who must have been straight out of art school was explaining a Georgia O’Keeffe flower to her much older male companion, specifically the “powerful symbol of life and female becoming.”

As Max slipped by the couple, she noticed the blonde’s hand was brushing the thigh of her date, who was about as weathered as one of O’Keeffe’s cow skulls. He was studying her, not the painting — though Max had a hunch the guy understood the blossom symbolism just fine.

Shaking her head a little, Max spotted, on the far wall, one of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga pictures, which she wished she’d grabbed on her first visit. She smiled privately, moving on even as she considered the possibility of a third visit to the mansion, some night soon...