Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

“Come on, cher,” I said. “You going to be just fine. Y’all can be a significant asset for Billy, and that works to your advantage.”

She leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee; the touch surprised me. “Mister Lamb,” she said, and I said, without intending to, “Jack. You can call me Jack.”

“I want to be able to count on you, Jack. Can I count on you?”

“I told you I don’t have any control over the situation.”

“But can you be a friend? That’s all I’m asking. Can we count on you to be a friend?”

Those big brown eyes were doing a job on me, but I resisted them. “I haven’t ever been much good as a friend. It’s a character flaw, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t believe that.” She sat back, adjusting her T-shirt so it fit more snugly. “You can call me Jo.”

I contacted Billy Pitch, though not during prime time, fearing I might interrupt The Surreal Life or Wife Swap , and I told him what I had learned, omitting any mention of the “remarkable powers” that might soon be Pellerin’s, stressing instead his developing visual capacity. I wasn’t sure why I did this—perhaps because I thought that Billy, already powerful, needed no further inducement to use his strength intemperately. He professed amazement at what I had to say, then slipped into business mode.

“I got an idea, but it needs to simmer, so I’m going to stash you away for a while,” he said. “Get everybody ready to travel tonight.”

“By ‘everybody,’” I said, “you don’t mean me, right? I got deals cooking. I have to…”

“I’ll handle them for you.”

“Billy, some of what I got going requires the personal touch.”

“Are you suggesting I can’t handle whatever piddly business it is you got?”

“No, that’s not it. But there’s…”

“You’re not going to thwart me in this, are you, Jack?”

“No,” I said helplessly.

“Good! Call my secretary and tell her what needs doing. I’ll see it gets done.”

That night we were flown by private jet to an airstrip in South Florida, and then transported by cigarette boat to Billy’s estate in the Keys. Absent from our party was Dr. Crain. I never got to know the man. Each time I walked him to the john or gave him food, he railed at me, saying that I didn’t know who I was dealing with, I didn’t understand what was involved, causing such a ruckus that I found it easier to keep him bound and gagged in a separate room. I warned him that he was doing himself no good acting this way, yet all he did was tell me again I didn’t know who I was dealing with and threaten me with corporate reprisals. When it was time to leave, I started to untie him, but Huey dropped a hand onto my shoulder and said, “Billy say to let him be.”

“He’s a doctor,” I said. “He’s the only one knows what’s going on. What if Pellerin gets sick or something?”

“Billy say let him be.”

I tried to call Billy, but was met with a series of rebuffs from men as constricted by the literal limits of their orders as Huey. Their basic message was, “Billy can’t be disturbed.” Crain’s eyes were wide, fixed on me; his nostrils flared above the gag when he tried to speak. I made to remove it, but Huey once again stayed my hand.

“Let him talk,” I said. “He might…”

“What he going to say, Jack?” Huey’s glum, wicked face gazed down at me. “You know there ain’t nothing to say?”

He steered me into the corridor, closed the door behind us and leaned against it. “Get a move on,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do, so you might as well not think about it.”

Yet I did think about it as I descended the stair and walked along the corridor and out into the drizzly New Orleans night. I thought about Crain waiting in that stuffy little room, about whether or not he knew what was coming, and I thought that if I didn’t change the way things were headed, I might soon be enduring a similar wait myself.

Some weeks later, I watched a videotape that captured Jo’s interaction with one of the shortlived zombies whose passage from death to life and back again she had overseen at Tulane. By then, I had become thoroughly acquainted with Pellerin and the zombie on the tape didn’t interest me nearly as much as Jo’s performance. She tempted and teased his story out of him with the gestures and movements of a sexier-than-average ballerina, exaggerated so as to make an impression on the man’s dim vision, and I came to realize that all of her movements possessed an element of this same controlled grace. Whether she was doing this by design, I had no clue; by that time I had tumbled to the fact that she was a woman who hid much from herself, and I doubted that she would be able to shed light on the matter.

Over the space of a month, Pellerin grew from a man whom I had mistaken for dead money into a formidable presence. He was stronger, more vital in every way, and he began to generate what I can only describe as a certain magnetism—I felt the back of my neck prickle whenever he came near, though the effect diminished over the days and weeks that followed. And then there were his eyes. On the same day I interrogated Jo, I was escorting him to the john when he said, “Hey, check this out, Small Time!” He snatched off his sunglasses and brought his eyes close to mine. I was about to make a sarcastic remark, when I noticed a green flickering in his irises.

“What the fuck!” I said.

Pellerin grinned. “Looks like a little ol’ storm back in there, doesn’t it?”

I asked him what it was and he told me the flickers, etched in an electric green, signaled the bacteria impinging on the optic nerve.

“They’re bioluminescent,” he said. “Weird, huh? Jocundra says it’s going to get worse before it gets better. People are going to think I’m the goddamn Green Lantern.”

Though he had changed considerably since that day, his attitudes toward almost everyone around him remained consistently negative—he was blunt, condescending, an arrogant smartass. Yet toward Jo, his basic stance did change. He grew less submissive and often would challenge her authority. She adapted by becoming more compliant, but I could see that she wasn’t happy, that his contentiousness was getting to her. She still was able to control him by means of subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation, but how long that control would last was a matter for conjecture.

The island where we were kept was Billy’s private preserve. It was shaped roughly like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions from the west end. Billy’s compound took up most of the available space. Within a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings (including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled haute mafia . The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware, German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a single block of marble, and mounted on the wall facing it, a section of a Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the sensibility of a magpie had looted the world’s museums in order to furnish the place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste. Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy’s house, he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.