Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘I won’t even begin to ask where you’ve been.’

Since when? Not since the second series of WarChild got bounced off the networks after a three-year run through the jungles of South America. The Cardinal knew all about that. And not since Axl had ripped a suit, because that alone wasn’t enough to bounce him out of the Cardinal’s employ. Besides, that occasion had worked out well, for both of them.

The suit in question had been reaming out a twelve-year-old rene. A street kid so malnourished and stunted she could have been mistaken for her ten-year-old brother, if he hadn’t looked six. That mission was not ordered by anyone, not even televised. Axl did it on instinct, and no one would have paid him anyway. Hell, no one Would’ve even known the kid had been raped except for Axl stumbling drunk into an alley by accident and put a flechette through her attacker’s throat halfway through his attack.

It was Axl’s bad luck the alley had vidcams set up outside a warehouse door and that the cams were working. Good luck kicked in when the shooting made GoodGuysGoneBad with an approval rating of eighty-four percent. It saved his life.

‘Mulling over your sins,’ a voice asked dryly.

‘No.’ Axl shook his head, ‘thinking about that kid out at Xochimilco.’

‘You mean Sister Innocenta?’

Axl laughed. ‘Innocenta?’

‘You have a problem with that name?’ The voice was darkly amused, but there was steel behind it.

Axl shook his head. Anything the child wanted to call herself was all right with him.

‘It means innocent,’ said the Cardinal slowly, picking a pastelillo de Cabello de Angel off a Sevres plate and painstakingly eating away the sugared crust around its edge. He knew Axl knew that.

‘Look at me,’ demanded the Cardinal and finally Axl stopped looking everywhere except at the man who held Axl’s life in his withered hands. As always, it was impossible to see the old man’s eyes behind those trademark lenses dark enough to be used to look at the sun. But dragging on his thin cigar, the Cardinal looked serene, unmoved.

Not furious but not friendly either, Axl decided.

‘Assassination is illegal under Mexican law, yes?

Axl nodded.

‘And when I reintroduced the death penalty, I made it clear that anyone who broke the law would suffer its full force, no exceptions?’

There was little Axl could do but nod. He could hardly claim to have missed the edict. ‘Assassination law targets zaibatsu killings,’ the upscale local newsfeeds had splashed. Further down the bit stream, the midmarkets had run endless variations on, ‘Is this the end to horror?’ And at the mouth of the stream where fact was whatever you claimed it was and information hit the open sewer that was Mexico’s unconscious, every title from the Enquirer upwards went into a feeding frenzy at the though of the reintroduction of public executions. Tickets to the killings and half-price hotel vouchers was the least of the promotions.

But that was nothing to the bidding scrum. Before a LotusMorph of the Cardinal had even finished reading the original edict, those same networks had been on screen to the Cardinal trying to buy exclusive access, including full syndication rights.

‘No exceptions, remember?’ the Cardinal repeated and Axl nodded.

‘So why should I make one for you?’

That was the big question. ‘Because I saved your life… ?’ Axl suggested slowly.

‘And you’ve already had yours from me, twice over,’ said the Cardinal. Smoke curled up between his lips to meet dust-laden sunlight, its ectoplasmic edges thinning to fractal-fine invisibility.

‘I might save your life again.’

For a moment the elderly prelate looked almost interested and then he gave a twisted smile. ‘You’re not telling me you know of a plot?’ His tone was ironic, but beneath it the Cardinal sounded disappointed.

‘No,’ said Axl. ‘No plot.’

‘Would you tell me if there was? And could I blame you if you didn’t?’ There was gravel in the Cardinal’s whisper, put there by insomnia, thirty years of bad dreams and too many cigars, but there was something else as well. And if it had been anyone speaking but the Cardinal then Axl would have called it guilt.

This was the man who took him away from New York, fixed the audition for WarChild and paid to have Axl’s reflexes enhanced and his sight augmented. Was that what itched the old man’s conscience, or were they talking about the one thing they never talked about?

It seemed they were.

‘You’re not responsible for your birth.’

No. He wasn’t. No one was. But the Cardinal had been responsible for finding out about Axl’s mother. And having found out, he told a traumatised ten-year-old boy something he couldn’t bear to hear. Back then the Cardinal called it dealing with the truth…

Axl called it irresponsible.

Eyes hidden behind their own darkness examined Axl’s face, looking for something. Axl didn’t know if the Cardinal found it, but the old man took a deep hit on his thin cigar and suddenly pointed to the window and the azure sea beyond.

‘You think they catch anything?’

Fishing boats hung on the water above the reef, butterfly nets slung both sides of the prows of crude canoes, their mesh not yet touching the sea.

Axl shook his head.

‘Occasionally they get a bonefish or two over the reefs… Father Pedro,’ the Cardinal jerked his pointed chin towards a distant speck, ‘once caught a barracuda.’

‘What did you do?’ Axl asked.

‘With the fish? We fed it to Behemoth.’ The old man smiled at a large black cat lying curled up on the tiles in the sun, which opened one green eye at the mention of its name. Axl could have sworn the brute was grinning.

‘All right,’ said the Cardinal as he stubbed out his cigar and immediately picked up his hardly-eaten pastille ‘I’ll make you an offer. Give me one good reason why I should spare your life.’ It was obvious that the audience was nearly over.

‘I can’t,’ said Axl. ‘There isn’t one.’

And then he admitted the truth to himself. There never had been.

There was a bare-arsed boy squatting by a puddle in the August sun. Tattered cotton T-shirt, no Levis or Nikes. No soundtrack in his head either, not yet. He had one small hand cupped to his mouth and was trying to drink black water that trickled away between shaking fingers. The puddle was shallow and its surface swirled with every hue in the rainbow, as beautiful as the wings of any butterfly. All the same, it tasted acrid and was half the size it had been the day before.

Memories weren’t something Axl went in for. He hadn’t had them removed, surgically or psychologically. And he didn’t buy time with some rem/Temp, the side effects were just too predictable. He handled time gone in the old-fashioned Freudian way; locked it away in the back of his head and told himself it was forgotten. So successful was he, that the memories shocked him with their newness, every single time they reappeared.

The stack system was at the back of the Port Authority Terminal. Older boys called it the hive. Rows and rows of tiny roomlets stacked on top of each other, each cell two foot high and six foot deep, all sealed at one end and open at the other. There were 120 cells in all, ten to each row and a spiral staircase that fed steel walkways on rows four and eight.

Hotter than hell that summer, more crowded too. Hot as a bathhouse said the older boys. Axl didn’t know what a bathhouse was but he didn’t tell them that.

Years back the hive had briefly been The Salariman Hotel thrown up by FujiSu, a Japanese metaNational on West 42nd for minor suits who’d suffered a hard evening’s team building at one of the karaoke dives on Times Square. But FujiSu had turned turtle long before Axl was born, leaving behind a supposedly-disposable locker hotel that had so far lasted as long as the oldest bum on Times Square could remember.