Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

“No, I don’t think so. The way I see it, nobody who’s really capable of delivering an armed response is going to put up a sign saying ARMED RESPONSE, are they?”

Marilyn could see no point in debating the many illogicalities of that premise.

“Maybe they’ll just throw you in a cellar and have rats do terrible things to you for a few months,” she said.

“And maybe they won’t. Do you want to know what’s going on in there or don’t you?”

“I do,” said Marilyn. “You know I do.”

Zak emptied his pockets, handed Marilyn his wallet and keys, everything that would identify him if he got caught. He clambered out of the car and trotted briskly away in the direction of the compound, into the darkness, until Marilyn could no longer see him. She sat in the car, waiting, wishing that she smoked. Meanwhile, with a litheness Marilyn would scarcely have believed even if she’d been able to see it, Zak began to scale the nearest outer wall, like a surprisingly elegant spider monkey.

Zak ascended, negotiating a series of thin ledges and windows, a couple of loose drainpipes. He took it all in his stride, climbing skillfully, gracefully, without hesitation. He rather wished Marilyn could see him. At the top of the wall he paused just long enough to scan for cameras, motion sensors, trip wires, mantraps, and especially dogs, but there were none as far as he could tell. He hoisted himself over the parapet onto the building’s flat roof.

He found himself close to the glass-walled living quarters, empty but brightly lit, and he glanced inside at the natty furnishings and some strange and interesting framed maps. Another man might have found this more surprising than Zak did: if you like maps, it doesn’t surprise you that other people like them too. In any case, he didn’t linger. He crossed a stretch of the roof, his thin-soled sneakers silent on the concrete, and he looked down into the courtyard below, where the Cadillac and a black, steroidal SUV were parked.

There were lights on in some of the lower windows surrounding the courtyard, and a couple of guys in overalls stood around down there, but they didn’t look even remotely alert. Zak made a dash across a farther section of roof, to a cluster of vents and air-conditioning units that provided a decent hiding place, not far from the domed conservatory. That was apparently where the action was. Through the glass he could see people, movement, sharp, shadowy candlelight.

He moved closer, close enough to see while still remaining unseen, an outsider looking in: a role that suited him extremely well. He could see this wasn’t a typical conservatory: not many plants, some kind of model of an island at the center. Under the glass, two men and four women were acting out an unfathomable dumb show. The first man was Billy Moore; the other was a solid, gray-haired man, a dense center of dangerous authority whose face Zak couldn’t see. The two men were fully clothed, suited, and they sat edgily on rattan chairs; the four women stood in a line and were completely naked.

To Zak they looked like contestants in a sad nudist beauty pageant, lined up for display and inspection. But even the most modest beauty contest demands some smiling and preening, a show of confidence and self-presentation, and there was precious little of that here. One of them he recognized as the homeless woman Billy Moore had scooped up at Utopiates. Nothing so very terrible seemed to have happened to her: in some ways she looked better, or anyway cleaner, now than she had then. Another, he was pretty sure, was the stripper who’d just been brought there from the club; the other two were unknowns, a young, tough-looking little number and a fleshy woman with lots of dark hair.

Zak shuddered, only partly from the cold. A sharp-edged wind flapped in from across the city. He hunkered down, tried to make himself smaller. He watched the gray-haired man rise from his chair, and now Zak got a look at his face. It was not exactly familiar, but he definitely knew who it was. He’d just been talking about him with Ray McKinley.

This was Wrobleski, Mr. Wrobleski, a good customer of Utopiates, though he wasn’t someone who spent much time browsing the stock inside the store. On those few occasions when he’d been in, it was to buy directly from Ray McKinley, and he’d treated Zak like a serf. Meanwhile, Ray usually behaved as though he and Wrobleski were blood brothers, though that in itself didn’t mean a whole lot: Ray treated a lot of people that way when there was something in it for him. The fact that he’d said he wasn’t “very happy” with Wrobleski now seemed deeply, though incomprehensibly, significant.

Inside the conservatory the four women moved together, though still not with any coordination or poise. This time Zak had the impression of a very amateur chorus line in its early days of rehearsal. They revolved through 180 degrees so that they now had their backs to the two men and to him.

Zak sensed he was on the verge of something, as if some of the dots could be joined up, could be made to reveal a grand design. He felt both excited and disablingly anxious. This was what he’d come to see, but now a part of him wished he didn’t have to look at it. He saw that each woman’s back was marked with a bad, ugly, tattooed map. They were not identical to one another by any means, but you’d certainly assume they were all done by the same lousy tattooist: the clumsy lines and forms had a consistency about them. And it occurred to Zak that the tattooist wasn’t simply inept but rather that he’d scrawled all over these women’s backs as a deliberate act of desecration. The lower the tattoos came on the body, the more ugly and confusing they got, until they dissolved into a collection of abstract lines and patterns, circles, arches, spirals. And while the maps on the women’s backs all looked different, below the waist they all seemed very much the same, including the presence of a compass rose, at the base of each woman’s spine, just above the cleft of the ass, right on the coccyx.

Zak watched as Wrobleski stood up, took a few steps forward, and reached out to touch the women. His hands trembled just a little, both eager and faltering. With infinite gentleness his fingers made contact with the back of the woman from the strip club, began to trace the shapes of the tattoo, the rough gouges and grids that bore no relation to the shape of the flesh beneath. The woman whipped around, straightened her neck, and unleashed a gout of saliva that hit Wrobleski sloppily on the side of his broad, flat face.

Wrobleski steadied himself, raised his hand as though to slap the woman, but something stopped him, maybe something that Billy Moore said, or maybe some deep, personal uncertainty. He lowered his hand, and the woman turned her back on him, resuming her position in the line.

Zak moved forward, pressing right up to the wall of the conservatory. The light wasn’t good, there were reflections and streaks on the glass, and his view was obstructed by a large golden barrel cactus, but the map-obsessive in him wanted to know more. He tried to get a better look at the tattoos. Those markings begged for interpretation. Zak was well aware, professionally aware, that all maps demand a degree of decoding, and these maps could surely make sense only to a strictly limited number of people. He clearly wasn’t one of them.

He watched in taut anticipation, fascinated yet dreading what might come next, how this ritual would play out, but suddenly Wrobleski had had enough. He stepped back from the line of women. He stood very solemnly, held his chin up, and stretched his arms straight out to his sides at shoulder height. It would have been an ambiguous gesture at the best of times, a sign of affection, as if he were trying to embrace and enfold the women, an attempt to grow wings, an indication that he was ready for his crucifixion.