George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

I found Reinhardt in his own upstairs suite, in the same shape. The nameless old Arab had been murdered on the lawn in back of the house, as he worked among the lovely flowers he nurtured in defiance of nature and climate. All had been killed quickly, then dismembered. Khan had crept from one victim to the next, killing fast and quiet. He moved more silently than a ghost. Before I went back into the house, I chipped in a few daddies that suppressed fear, pain, anger, hunger, and thirst; the German daddy was already in place, but it looked as if it wouldn’t be very useful this afternoon.

I headed toward Seipolt’s office. I intended to go back in there and search through the desk. Before I got to the room, though, someone called out to me. “ Lutz ?”

I turned to look. It was the blonde with the legs.

“ Lutz ?” she asked. “ Bist du noch bereit ?”

“ Ich heisse Marîd Audran , Fraulein . Wissen Sie wo Lutz ist ?” At that point my brain swallowed the German add-on whole; it wasn’t as if I could just translate the German into Arabic, but as if I was speaking a language I’d known since early childhood.

“Isn’t he down here?” she asked.

“No, and I can’t find Reinhardt either.”

“They must have gone into the city. They were saying something about that over lunch.”

“I’ll bet they’ve gone to my hotel. We had a dinner engagement, and I understood that I was to meet him here, I hired a car all the way out here. What a damn stupid thing. I guess I’ll just give the hotel a ring and leave a message for Lutz, and then call another taxi. Would you like to come along?”

She bit her thumbnail. “I don’t know if I should,” she said.

“Have you seen the city yet?”

She frowned. “I haven’t seen anything but this house since I’ve been here,” she said grumpily.

I nodded. “That’s how he is, he drives himself too hard. He always says he’ll take it easy and enjoy himself, but he works himself and he works everybody around him. I don’t want to say anything against him — after all, he’s one of my oldest business associates and dearest friends — but I think it’s bad for him to keep going the way he does. Am I right?”

“That’s just what I tell him,” she said.

“Then why don’t we go back to the hotel? Maybe once we’re there together, the four of us, we’ll get him to relax a little tonight. Dinner and a show, as my guests. I insist.”

She smiled. “Just let me—”

“We must hurry,” I said. “If we don’t get back quickly, Lutz will turn around and come back here. He’s an impatient man. Then I’ll have to make still another trip out here. It’s an awful ride you know. Come along, we don’t have any time to spare.”

“But if we’re going out to dinner—”

I should have guessed. “I think that dress suits you perfectly, my dear; but if you prefer, why, I beg that you allow me to accommodate you with another outfit of your choice, and whatever accessories you feel are necessary. Lutz has given me many gifts over the years. It would give me great pleasure to acknowledge his generosity in this small way. We can go shopping before dinner. I know several very exclusive English, French, and Italian shops. I’m sure you’d enjoy that. Indeed, you might choose your garments for the evening while Lutz and I take care of our little business. It will all work out beautifully.”

I had her by the arm and out the front door. We were walking up the gravel drive to Bill’s taxi. I opened one of the car’s rear doors and helped her in, then I walked around the back of the cab and got in the other side. “Bill,” I said in Arabic, “back to the city. The Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio.”

Bill looked at me sourly. “Marcus Aurelius is dead, too, you know,” he said as he started up the taxi. I got a frosty feeling wondering what he meant by “too.”

I turned to the beautiful woman beside me. “Pay no attention to the driver,” I said in German. “Like all Americans, he is mad. It is the will of Allah.”

“You didn’t phone the hotel,” she said, giving me a sweet smile. She liked the idea of a new suit of clothes and jewelry just because we were going to dinner. I was just a crazy Arab with too much money. She liked crazy Arabs, I just knew it.

“No, I didn’t. I’ll have to call as soon as we get there.”

She wrinkled up her nose in. thought. “But if we’re there—”

“You don’t understand,” I told her. “For the common run of guests, the desk clerk is capable of handling matters like this. But when the guests are, shall we say, special — like Herr Seipolt or myself — then one must speak directly with the manager.”

Her eyes got bigger. “Oh,” she said.

I looked back at the freshly watered garden that Seipolt’s money had imposed on the very edge of the creeping dunes. In a couple of weeks, that place would look as dry and dead as the middle of the Empty Quarter. I turned to my companion and smiled easily. We chatted all the way back to the city.

At the hotel, I left the blonde in a comfortable chair in the lobby. Her name was Trudi. Trudi Nothing, she told me blithely, just Trudi. She was a close personal friend of Lutz Seipolt. She’d been at his house for more than a week. They’d been introduced by a mutual friend. Uh huh. That Trudi, she was just the nicest, most outgoing girl — and Seipolt, you couldn’t ask for a sweeter man, down under all that murder and intrigue he wore just to fool people.

I went to make my phone call, but it wasn’t to anyone in the hotel that I needed to talk — it was Okking. He told me to babysit Trudi until he could get his fat ass moving. I popped out the daddies I was wearing, then put back the German-language one; I wouldn’t be able to say a word to Trudi without it. That’s when I learned Vital Important Fact #154 about the special add-ons Papa had given me:

You Pay For Everything In This World.

See, I knew that. I learned it many years ago at my mama’s knee. It’s just that it’s something you keep forgetting and have to relearn every once in a while. Don’t Nobody Get Nothing For Free.

All the time I’d been out at Seipolt’s, the daddies were holding my hormones in check. When I went back into the house to search Seipolt’s desk, I would have been helpless with nausea, knowing that the hacked-up bodies hadn’t been dead very long, knowing that bastard Khan might still be around the place somewhere. When Trudi called out “Lutz?” I would have split my skin jumping in twenty directions at once.

When I popped the daddies out, I found out that I hadn’t avoided those terrible feelings, I’d only postponed them. Suddenly my brain and my nerves were tied in an agonizing jumble, like a tangled ball of yarn. I couldn’t untwist the separate emotional currents: there was wide-eyed, gasping horror, stifled by the daddies for a few hours; there was sudden fury directed at Khan, for the satanic method he had chosen to remain unknown, and for making me witness the results of his heinous acts; there was physical pain and utter weariness, as the fatigue poisons in my muscles rendered me almost helpless (the daddy had told my brain and the meat part of me to ignore injury and fatigue, and I was suffering from both now); I realized that f was awfully thirsty and I was getting pretty damn hungry; and my bladder, which the daddies had ordered not to communicate with any other part of my body, was near bursting. ACTH was pouring into my bloodstream, making me even more upset. Epinephrine pumped out of my adrenals, making my heart beat faster still, getting me ready for fight or flight; it made no difference that the threat was long gone. I was getting the entire reaction I would normally have experienced over a period of three or four hours, condensed into a solid, crippling blow of emotion and deprivation.