Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Axl lived in Row 4. Not his first choice because most mornings saw someone slumped drunk on the walkway and he had to move them to get out of his cell. Row 5 was a middle row and those were prized. Row 6 was also good but Axl wasn’t tall enough to reach the walkway overhead and swing himself up into a top row cell.

And by the time he did get big enough he was already living somewhere else…

The Cardinal’s shades rested neatly on the black glass desk. Golden pupils, as unblinking as any cat’s, stared into Axl’s eyes until it seemed to him that the burning gaze passed beyond now into the memories behind. He was…

. . . sitting in a cold café, watching his reflection in the window. Overhead was an unmoving wooden fan, resting askew on worn-out bearings. In summer the fan did nothing to cool the café, merely stirring up the hot air. At Christmas it was hung with fat strands of cheap electric tinsel, like now. The rest of the year it got forgotten and try as he might Axl couldn‘t even work out why he’d remembered the fan.

The boy sat at a plastic table opposite a tall man in dark glasses with a thin moustache and small pointed beard. Everyone in the café, including the owner and his brother, were carefully not looking at them.

Red smoke filled Axl’s mind as it rolled in from the edge of his vision, sharp flashes of memory flickering in front of his eyes as neurons charged and flared, billions of tiny electric connections made and broken in an instant. Snow. Cold. Despite the heat of the Caribbean coast, Axl shivered. Personality is a grid, whispered a voice in his head. Memories even less, just neural remembrance of the route most taken. Not even accurate, not even true…

The old Jewish tailor was nervous, thumbs twisting together as he watched the boy watching himself in the long glass. It wasn’t the black-suited youngster who worried him, it was the tall man in shades standing silently behind him, upper lip pulled back in an amused sneer. A black coat was wrapped tightly around the man, but not tightly enough to hide the crimson of robes beneath, anymore than his lip hid the tell-tale canines.

Cardinals didn’t usually visit tailors in New York’s lower Eastside. Actually, no one visited tailors anymore. A semiAI running coutureSoft could scan a body, cut cloth and stitch faster than any human. And that was only relevant to those not rich enough not to want their clothes grown to measure.

And even if Cardinals did visit, it wasn’t usually to buy silk suits for boys with slicked-back blond hair, violet eyes and cheekbones sharp enough to slice your heart in two…

‘I have a job for you,’ said the Cardinal.

Axl blinked and caught his own shock before it had time to reach his face. What he couldn’t do was keep the hope out of his eyes.

The Cardinal gave a sad smile. ‘The sentence of death is postponed only. You understand me?

The man stood in front of the Cardinal nodding slowly, waiting…

‘Succeed and we can talk again,’ said the old man ‘Fail me and you will be hunted down and executed. Do you also understand that?’

Yeah. He understood all right. He’d been here before, over twenty years previously. Same offer from the same man. He didn’t know if the Cardinal knew he was repeating himself. Somehow Axl suspected he did. Axl understood what the words meant too, just as he’d understood back then.

What sounded like a threat was actually a reprieve. Bizarrely enough, Axl wanted to cry.

The Cardinal smiled and shook his head. ‘You don’t change, do you?’

Axl knew it wasn’t a compliment.

‘Mother of God.’ The Cardinal stubbed out his latest cigar and grabbed another, not waiting for the silver box to open itself. ‘I don’t know how she could do it to us ...' They were talking about Pope Joan, again. Outside the sun was setting over a silver sea and the small boats had set their tiny sails for the shore. From the other side of the study door came the shuffle of feet as ushers cleared the waiting room. Axl was hungry, thirsty and tired but at least he was still alive. And he could do with losing the weight anyway.

‘What’s so funny?’

How could he explain to the Cardinal? Instead of using words, Axl gestured at the smoke filled study, the black cat still snoozing on the tiles and himself now sitting in a huge green-leather armchair opposite the Cardinal’s black glass desk.

‘This,’ he said. And the old man nodded before getting back to briefing Axl.

‘We started last year with record profits. Now we’ve got a dead Pope, a black hole where the Vatican’s assets should be and WorldBank demanding to be allowed to crawl through our accounts like maggots on a corpse. And if that isn’t bad enough, we’ve got newsfeeds springing up every hour saying the bitch should be canonised immediately…’

The old man barked with laughter but there was no amusement in it at all. ‘So you know the options. Accept your death sentence, which strikes me as the least intelligent choice. Or go to some hovel called Cocheforet and track down Father Sylvester and Kate Mercarderes. Then all you have to do is bring one of them back, so we can find out what the fuck the sainted Joan did with our money.’

It was a stupid question but Axl asked it anyway, ‘Why me?’

‘Because you’re available, you’ve got the combat skills and you’ll fit right in on Samsara. Just another traumatised ‘fugee, tortured and blinded in Joan’s service…’

Axl looked at the Cardinal. ‘But I’m not. . .’ And then as the guards came in, he stopped talking.

‘Fresh, delicious, wholesome…’

A taco cart stood in the middle of the Plaza de Armas, chained to black wrought-iron railings that fenced off the entrance to the metro. The cart’s aluminium sides were scuffed to a matt finish that looked like a bad acid etch but was just dust, grease and age, and its voice was tiny and uninviting, coming from a single speaker.

But its owner didn’t need the cart to tell tourists he was there, the stink of frying onions did that for him as the late-morning wind wafted odour molecules northwards towards a line of Honda setting them down directly outside the Sagarario. The cruisers would have put the tourists down outside the Catedral Metropolitana next door, but parking was forbidden there.

Almost all the tourists pulled a face when they caught the smell of burritos but a few always headed towards the cart, hands dipping into slack pockets to look for credit chips or loose change.

Next to the small cart, stood its owner shovelling fried mince mixed with chocolate into a tortilla roll, using his filthy fingers when he thought the Americans weren’t watching. The meat looked obscene and smelt of gristle and fat, and yet even that was better than the over-sweet smell of the onions that went on next. Sloppy tomatillo finished it off, hiding the sludge grey of the onions. Refritos were extra.

Sábado grinned, showing yellow teeth. He wouldn’t have eaten one even if he could. And besides the Voudun priest didn’t eat animal, not even those that hadn’t really been alive in the first place.

Sure, he killed occasionally to make offering. But nothing bigger than a chicken and even then he didn’t take off the bird’s head with his teeth like the ignorant said. And he never ate their flesh. He left flesh eating to the Christians.

‘Will you take a fucking look at that. . . !’

Sábado shushed the gun he carried wrapped in a brown paper bag like some dustout trying to hide his kit, but he did what the gun said all the same. The American girl at the taco cart had breasts like small melons and buttocks like colliding twin moons, all covered with some orange lycra-derivative that stretched in all the wrong places.