Steven Brust - Agyar

After a while, I picked one out and got acquainted with her for a few minutes. Her name was Rosalie, and she can’t have been more than eighteen. She had fair hair, a fair complexion, and was the least bit plump. She was heavily roughed to cover over some minor acne that I think would have made her face more interesting if she’d let it show.

I escorted her home, then returned home myself, cold and not entirely satisfied, but feeling better for having been out, at least. Jim is nowhere in sight, presumably he’s wandering around the house, which he does fairly often; it goes with the job, I guess. It’s getting late and I’m tired. I’ll see Jill tomorrow.

A slight thaw, not uncommon in late December, I’m told, had melted some of the snow from the boulevards and lawns, but it was freezing again as I reached the big white house with the blue lights in the attic. I politely knocked at the door, and, after a minute or so, Jill opened it. Her face went through a quick flurry of contending emotions when she saw me, ending with a small smile. “Hello, Jack,” she said.

I walked in past her and threw my coat onto a chair. Susan wasn’t in. “Hello yourself. What’s this I hear about you seeing Young Don?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Is it true?”

She frowned. “Jack,” she said, “it isn’t like we have a relationship.”

That stopped me cold. “We haven’t?”

“No.” She started to pick up strength. “I like you, but that-”

“It seems I’ve spent an evening in your bed.”

She pressed her lips together and tossed her head back. “So?”

“Isn’t that a relationship?”

“You mean, sleeping with someone once or twice means you’re having a relationship with them?”

I tried to make sense of that. I said, “What do you mean by ‘relationship’?”

“I mean, you know, when you’re seeing someone regularly, and the two of you always do things together, and-”

“Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t understand. No, as you define it, I don’t think we’re having a relationship.”

“Well then?”

“But I forbid you to see Don again.”

You’d think I’d just announced that I intended to burn down her house. Her mouth fell open and she stared at me, then she said “What?” in a voice that sounded like highland pipes.

I repeated myself.

She said, “Who do you think you are-”

“You will do what you’re told,” I said.

“I will not-”

“Let’s talk about it upstairs.”

If anything, that made it worse. “If you think I’m going upstairs with you-”

I shrugged. “Right here will be fine, but won’t you be embarrassed if your roommate comes in?”

“If you think I’m going to-”

I laughed, and took her in my arms. She tried to fight her way out, with profound lack of effect. She stopped fighting and said, “Jack, Jack, please stop. This isn’t-”

“Keep still,” I said, and threw her onto the couch, and myself onto her. She gasped as the air was driven from her lungs. By the time she could speak again she had nothing to say.

Sometime later I looked at her face, tear-streaked and pale. She reached up to caress me clumsily then let her hand fall back down to her side. “Jack?” she said in a whisper.

“Hmmm?”

“I don’t-I don’t think I can make it up the stairs.”

“What’s wrong with sleeping on the couch?”

“Please, Jack. I don’t want Susan to see me this way.”

“You should have thought of that when I first suggested we go upstairs.”

She tried to sob but seemed not to have the strength. “Please, Jack.”

I sighed. “Very well.” I picked her up, carried her upstairs, and put her to bed.

I’ve had to get up and walk around a little. I’ve spent some time wandering and seeing what’s here. As I was pacing through the house I met Jim in the parlor, his usual haunt, so to speak.

“You’ve been type-typing away, haven’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“May I read it?”

“No. Wait, yes. Go ahead. Only don’t talk to me about it.”

(He’s going to be reading this. Will knowing that I have a reader change what I write? I hope not. If I think it does, I’ll ask Jim not to read it any more. Hi, Jim, how’s the ghost business?)

“I won’t,” he said. (You said? How can anyone write for an audience? To Hell with it.)

So he went up and read it, and after about an hour came back down. He said, “I don’t understand what this Laura Kellem is waiting for. If she’s going to stick it to you, why doesn’t she just do it?”

I had to think, because I hadn’t wondered about it one way or the other. I finally said, “I should imagine that she has quite a bit to work out.”

“You said something like that before, but what do you mean?”

“Implicating someone for a murder he didn’t commit isn’t easy, modern forensics being what it is. If the authorities should discover my name, and succeed in tracing my movements, they might learn that I hadn’t arrived in this part of the country until after the crimes had been committed.”

He frowned his particular frown, squinching his face as if to touch his eyebrows to his upper lip. “But that means she has to kill you.”

“Well, yes, but that isn’t difficult, for her. The hard part is bringing in the authorities at just the right time so they think they have their man, and then what they end up with is a body shot full of holes, or burned enough to be unrecognizable. Things don’t look good for your abode, Jim.”

“So she’s out there setting it up right now?”

“Probably.”

He frowned very hard, the same frown, as if he were trying to think and it was an effort. In fact, thinking comes pretty naturally to Jim. At last he said, “It seems like something that tricky, you could screw up for her pretty easy.”

“In one sense, yes. There are many ways to disrupt it, the simplest being to leave.”

“But then-”

“But I can’t. She is who she is, and I am who I am, and orders are orders.”

He squinted at me. “You don’t need to provide examples of the law of identity. I don’t understand why you can’t-”

“Because I can’t. Drop it.”

“All right, but couldn’t a friend of yours do it?”

“What friend?”

“Well, this Jill person you’ve been seeing?”

“That’d be no different than me doing it.”

“What about if I were to do something?”

“Like what? What can you do? Shit, Jim, you can’t even pick up a piece of paper.”

He winced at the obscenity and said, “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

“So, what, you’re just going to wait for the ax?”

Once more I had to stop and consider the question. I said, “I’m being very careful where I put my feet.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean that I have to watch where I go, where I’m seen in public, and who I’m seen with. If I were, for example, to kill someone, I’d better make sure there’s no one who can trace me to the killing. That kind of thing; trying not to make the job easier for her.”

He shook his head. “Can you talk to her about it? She must have cared for you once.”

“Cared for me?” I said. “Cared for me?”

“Well, from what you said-”

“You just don’t get it, do you? She doesn’t care for people the way you mean it. She-”

“Hasn’t she ever?”

I started to say “No, she never has,” but then I remembered that incident in London. This was before we left for the Continent, so everything was still young and fresh, and I was delighting in my life with her. On that occasion, I went to a cabaret hoping to meet her, and I saw her there, in one of the dark corners, talking earnestly to a young man. I was about to leave, but she caught my eye, and came over to me. We chatted about inconsequential things for a while, then I turned to go. She asked why I was leaving, and I said I thought she was busy. She said she was never too busy for me, and we left together. I never spoke about it, and I didn’t even think about it much, but I’ve never been able to make sense of it, unless, for a while, she really did care about me. I don’t know.