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  Father Sylvester sighed.

  Kate had been grateful when he asked permission to retire to his room. Her anger at his treatment of the Japanese girl palpable in the abruptness of her nod.

  Dying wasn’t as easy as Father Sylvester had imagined, but then it had begun earlier and lasted longer than he had made allowance for. And now his patience, like his faith, was exhausted. It was time to close the book. For the recording angel to weigh up his life and make judgement.

  Father Sylvester carefully took off his trousers and folded them, leaving them on top of a rock that was slick with white spray from the high foss. He didn’t believe in waste. That was one of the reasons he’d kept himself alive so long. His shirt came off next and Father Sylvester folded that neatly too. He was tempted to leave his Calvins on but he’d come naked into the world and bloody-mindedness said that was the way he should go out.

  Drowning had been his first idea. A pocket full of stones and a slow walk into the freezing pool at the foot of the waterfall, the cold binding tight his chest before his lungs had even filled with water. But Father Sylvester’s greatest fear wasn’t death, it was changing his mind. The idea that the stones might not be heavy enough or survival an instinct too strong filled him with doubt. And he despised doubt, not as an intellectual position, that he accepted entirely, but as a weakener of action.

  It would have to be by the blade.

  Father Sylvester climbed out of his Calvins and stood naked in the darkness. His body was old, not bloated or fat but weak with old injuries only half repaired and swollen around the upper gut where an ulcer ate at his stomach lining. He wouldn’t miss that. Actually, the priest’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile, there wasn’t much he would miss.

  Unfolding his trousers to get the blade, Father Sylvester refolded them quickly and stepped away from his pile of clothing. He’d prevaricated enough. What he needed now was a stone as ballast to keep him from slipping or floating as he walked out into the water. Finding one the correct size was difficult but he managed it, holding the glass blade in his right hand and the stone in his left.

  The meltwater numbed his ankles as Effectively as a baseball bat and Father Sylvester winced as he knelt and the water reached his genitals, which constricted like three snails with the contact. But he kept on shuffling his way further into the pool, feeling for the rocky bottom as the water closed ever higher round him until only his shoulders were above the darkened surface.

  Now came the real test.

  The stone went between his knees where he knelt. He’d been planning to hold it in one hand while using his other to drive the blade. But his hands were weak these days and besides his fingers shook so much he was afraid that if he dropped the blade it would be gone forever. So between his knees was where the rock had to go.

  Taking the razor-edged glass blade in his right hand, Father Sylvester closed left hand over right and without pausing, rammed the knife point hard into his abdomen, low down on his left hand side. Muscle tore but the water was so cold and his body so numb that Father Sylvester felt almost nothing. But then he expected that, he’d been stabbed in the gut before.

  Now came the hard bit. Clenching his teeth, Father Sylvester gripped the blade’s handle and yanked viciously, pain exploding as he cut open his own stomach wall in one sickening pull of the knife. Guts bulged through the sudden slit in his abdominal lining to reveal a tangled sausage-like mess within. And cold water rushed into his body as if someone had just packed his insides in ice.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Father Sylvester cut harder, slicing more muscle and gut and watched in shock as lengths of his ileum and jejunum tumbled out through the rapidly gaping slit and slowly sank, spilling their ruptured contents like floating fish shit where they’d been hacked open by the knife.

  Grabbing at his own small intestines, the man severed a slimy white handful and reached inside himself to pull out another length, sawing at the muscle until that too came away in his hands. And then he pushed his fingers back inside his body for more.

  He was undoubtedly insane and undoubtedly dying, but that didn’t make killing himself hurt any the less. In the end it was slitting his wrists that finished Father Sylvester. But he didn’t remember doing it, though he felt the blood sluggishly leave his veins. All he remembered, and the only thought he took with him to the edge of death, was that his stomach was frozen.

  * * * *

  ‘Your name is Joan. You are my sister.’

  Mai looked doubtfully at the woman sat on a wooden chair beside her big cast-iron bath. She wanted to say No, I’m Mai. To insist that she’d never been anyone other than Mai, that she’d never had a sister, or mother or father come to that, not that she could remember. But the woman was being kind to her. Very kind. Which wasn’t something Mai knew how to deal with.

  Not that she trusted the woman or anything. She didn’t. It was just that Mai was being buried under an accumulation of small kindnesses. And besides she was warm for the first time in days and her face had stopped hurting.

  Powder had been brushed on her lips to take away the swelling, unseen assemblers unweaving insoluble fibrin threads as scabs dissolved, her wrists had been dressed and antiseptic skin sprayed onto the raw flesh of her thighs, analgesic deadening the rawness as proteins knitted together a new dermal layer. The woman had made Mai cover her sex while she sprayed on the new skin, and even with the edge of a sheet covering Mai’s groin Kate had been jumpy, almost irritable.

  The crossness hadn’t lasted though. After the painkillers and skin came something Louis called thukpa, food, hot noodle soup that Kate spooned into Mai’s mouth herself. It was salt and sweet, not a taste the girl recognised, but she finished the bowl anyway. And would have had more if only Kate had let her.

  After that, Mai was taken through to a bathroom on the ground floor next to the vast kitchens. So hot water could be carried through, Mai supposed, and she was almost right. Hot water came gurgling down a sluice from the kitchen and kept splashing into the bath until it was almost full.

  The feather thing that weird priest made her wear round her neck rested on a chair by itself, well away from the water, but Mai’s jacket was gone: removed as soon as she took it off, along with the crepe bandages, and carried out of the room at arm’s-length by Kate who returned seconds later with a small pile of folded clothes.

  ‘Nightdresses,’ Kate said. ‘We’ll find one that fits.’

  The girl sat up to look, soap bubbles sliding in a sloppy avalanche from her shoulders and tiny breasts.

  ‘Do you want to get out?’ Kate asked, her face suddenly stiff.

  ‘No,’ Mai shook her head.

  ‘Then get back under the water,’ said Kate, ‘it’s better for you.’

  Mai shrugged and sank back in her bath, burying herself beneath the scented bubbles. She’d tried silence and sulking, but neither made a difference. The strange woman still just sat there, occasionally smiling at Mai but mostly looking worried when she didn’t know the girl was watching her.

  ‘My name is Katherine Mercarderes,’ the woman said finally. There was the briefest hesitation, as if she expected Mai to say something and when the moment passed she smiled sadly, ‘but you can call me Kate. You’ve always called me Kate…’

  Always? Mai shrugged and sank even lower, until slowly cooling water rose to her chin and only her face showed above the surface. She liked the bath, with its four cast-iron legs and she liked the big room. Though the house seemed more like a derelict palace than the empty monastery Kate said it was. Plaster peeled from the dusty pink walls and the ceiling overhead seemed to be held up by narrow wooden beams, at least they looked like real wood from where she lay.

  She liked the house too. There were no swathes of watered silk to line the walls, no naked marble nymphs, no heavy chandeliers or gold leaf highlights to the ornate ceiling rose, because there was no ceiling rose, no architectural decoration at all. The walls just ended at the top and then the ceiling began… An
d best of all, at least for Mai, there were no huge mirrors to reflect her back at herself. Mai liked the house, liked it a lot.

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘We all live here… Joan.’

  Kate said the name like she was tasting it. And from the expression on the woman’s face, she found the taste strange.

  ‘Joan is your sister?’ That was what the woman had said, wasn’t it?

  ‘Sweet, lovely, innocent, stupid Joan.’

  The tall woman was crying, Mai realised. Not loudly but softly, almost as if she hadn’t quite realised it herself.

  ‘Hey, you okay?’

  ‘Of course I’m…’ Kate stopped and bent to pick a white towel from the grey slate floor and when she straightened up again her face was calm.

  ‘It’s time to get out.’ Kate held up the towel and blushed as Mai scrambled up to stand there, suds sliding down her soft stomach and legs. Then Kate suddenly stepped forward to wrap the Japanese girl in the towel, steadying Mai as she stepped out of her bath onto the tiles.

  ‘Time you slept.’ Strong arms, surprisingly strong arms, gripped Mai in a quick hug and then Kate was fussing with the clothes she’d carried in earlier, holding up simple cotton nightdresses one after the other, eyeing them for size.

  ‘This one, I think.’ She held it out, stopped and laughed when she saw the naked girl wasn’t yet dry. A laugh was so brief it sounded like a sob. ‘Joan never could dry herself properly either.’ Kate took the towel and tossed it over Mai’s head, rubbing hard to dry the girl’s hair before patting dry her shoulders and back.

  ‘The rest you can do yourself,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute to show you your room.’

  Mai watched her go, wondering. About Kate and about the others. But mostly about sticking around for a day or two. She’d liked the way the hot bath water flowed over her body like waves. She’d never had a bath before, only used a sonic cubicle or rubbed on skin crawlers to get rid of sweat and dead skin. The bath was nice and so far the woman was nice, in a fussy sort of way. Even the huge house wasn’t bad, though it had almost no furniture and was so dirty it looked like only animals had lived in it for years.

  All the same, nice bath and house or not, Mai knew she couldn’t stay there long term. They were all too freaky. Besides when was she ever going to get a better opportunity to set up on her own?

  Commission, food and bed space at Madame Sotto’s had taken ninety-five percent of her earnings and now that Madame Sotto was burnt toast, Mai planned to do without an agent. And there was bound to be room for a hard-working ex-kinderwhore, in wherever the hell it was she was…

  Chapter Ten

  Waiting For Darkness

  The sun overhead on the Cancun coast was blistering but it was the wet-sponge humidity that really got to Colonel Emilio. That and the 1500-klick journey from Day Effé, through Veracruz, Campeche and Valladolid to Cancun.

  ‘You know the real problem with Mexico?’ Axl said loudly as he looked round at the uniforms filling the long corridor of the Villa Carlotta with a clash of primary colours and handfuls of gold braid.

  The walls of the corridor were salmon pink, the floor white marble and all the windows were trompe l’oeil… Florid Rousseausque gardens painted directly onto cracking plaster. Axl had worked McDonald's kitchens that were less humid and he wasn’t even dressed in a green cavalry tunic buttoned to the neck.

  ‘Well, do you?’ he asked the sweating Colonel.

  Colonel Emilio didn’t know and—what’s more—he didn’t want to know either; but that wasn’t going to stop Axl Borja telling him.

  ‘Most of the fuck-wits in this government can’t tell the difference between history and nostalgia.’ Which was probably true.

  Unfortunately it was also slander against the state, a fact obvious to all those stood around them. So it was a relief to the Colonel when he finally reached the huge double doors that led into the Cardinal’s anteroom.

  ‘Colonel Emilio to see His Excellency,’ announced the Colonel. It had taken three hours to navigate the corridor. And all that time he’d been unable to sit down or relieve himself for fear of losing his place in the vast and restless queue.

  He didn’t bother to give the waiting usher the name of his prisoner. The red cuffs that bound Axl’s hands made clear his position in the equation, and if the cuffs didn’t, the blackened eye and cut lip certainly did.

  The usher consulted a list and nodded, running one finger over Colonel Emilio’s name so that it changed from blue to red on his pad. There had been no need for the Colonel to announce himself, just as there had been no real need for the man stood at the door to check his list. FaceSoft would already have pulled up names plus a bullet-point list of their careers to date.

  In fact, neither would have got that far if the Villa’s AI hadn’t already authorised their presence. Cameras were everywhere in the corridor, tiny pin-lenses wired into a spider’s web of optic that ran behind the priceless 19th-century frescoes.

  ‘If you would wait in here…’ The usher nodded to the door which creaked open, struggling under its weight.

  They found themselves in a pre-anteroom. Ornate, gilded, impossibly baroque but a holding pen all the same. Axl looked approvingly at the tall window that made up one side of the tiny room.

  A real window this time, glazed with crystal polymer. Running through each huge pane, invisible to the naked eye, was spider’s web woven into a mesh that was tougher than military-grade steel and more forgiving than thermal polymer.

  And if that wasn’t enough, the window had semiAI fast-action shutters, lead-lined against radiation, while the heavy brocade curtains were woven from charcoal-bearing silk to protect against biologicals. The window couldn’t fight back but as passive defence systems went this one defined ‘top of the range’.

  Mind you, it should have done… Axl had served under the woman who drew up the original specification and he was willing to bet Colonel Emilio didn’t know that either.

  ‘Come on man, move,’ the Colonel hissed and Axl gave a twisted smile.

  ‘LockMart-designed doors,’ Axl announced, tapping what looked like wood, ‘alternate layers of titanium alloy and blast-proof ceramic micromesh, sourced in Paris from the Imperial Armouries. The windows were grown in Prague around spider’s web woven in Beijing. I‘d tell you where the curtains came from, but His Excellency doesn’t want anyone to know…’

  Colonel Emilio looked at the usher, who very carefully didn’t return his gaze. If there was going to be trouble, the flunky didn’t want any part of it.

  ‘Through there,’ he told the Colonel politely, nodding his head towards the next door and went back to examining his list. It ran for screen after screen, but anyone seeing the queue built up in the corridor behind would have known that.

  Axl stepped through the door ahead of the Colonel and, following after, the Colonel found himself facing not the Cardinal as he’d expected but a grand room, lined down the sides and in the middle with wooden benches, all occupied. Towering brick-red walls were hung with gold-framed mirrors and antique portraits. The mirrors were neo Venetian and the vast pictures showed Hispanic men in armour with beards and jutting chins or woman with jutting breasts and dishevelled hair. The only black figures in the paintings were kneeling or stood discreetly in the background.

  Not one of the paintings was religious. The first time Axl had stayed at Villa Carlotta, back when he was a boy he’d decided the Cardinal didn’t want to get religion and politics mixed. Now he knew you could no more separate religion from politics in Mexico than you could separate a person from their past.

  ‘My,’ said Axl lightly, nodding towards the benches, ‘isn’t His Excellency popular?’

  Hundreds of faces had turned to watch them come in.

  ‘Still, that’s the nice thing about Mexico. Even the meanest peon can request an audience with the Cardinal. Of course...' Axl shrugged, ‘whether they get to see him is another matter.’

  Colonel Emi
lio nervously adjusted his empty sword belt. He was wearing full dress, like every other officer in the room. But minus his sabre. Weapons were not to be carried in the presence of the Cardinal, not even ceremonial ones. Those petitioners without uniform wore long dark soutanes or simple cassocks, belted at the waist with the colour of their order. And those without church dress wore dark suits, with white shirts or blouses.

  Only Axl was dressed in basic peon uniform of black chinos and white T-shirt, and he was so obviously a prisoner that no one expected anything better.

  ‘Stand over there,’ ordered a fat usher, his expression so bored it had to have been surgically enhanced. Colonel Emilio was about to protest but never got the chance. ‘Over there,’ repeated the usher and was gone. Waddling past a crowded bench, the man managed to ignore every upturned and enquiring face, disappearing through a small wooden door which banged shut behind him.

  Five, maybe six, hundred people waited in that room, with maybe twice as many in the queue outside. Almost all were men, with only a handful of women to leaven the mix. That was how Mexican politics still worked; to the despair of Mexico’s northern neighbour and the Emperor herself.

  And how many waiting in that sweltering crowd would the Cardinal actually see in one day? Ten, fifteen… ? Axl didn’t know, but he wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if the Cardinal was somewhere else altogether, like Paris or Rome.

  Or in the capital having a discreet meeting with the new emperor. And if not then maybe in New York talking to the UN about the ‘fugee lifts to Samsara. Rumour in the barrio said the Cardinal was irritated by the number of Mexicans approaching the Red Cross to claim ‘fugee status. And if the word had met the street, then it was pounding the beat because the Cardinal wanted it there. That was how Declan Begley worked.