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  ‘We use chimpanzees,’ she told him, steering into the drive of the private cybics park. The complex was entirely hers; Daddy’s coming-of-age present. She called it her playpen. Hyper-bourgeois understatement; typically Italian. She drove slowly, letting him gauge the size of the place, its opulence. ‘We work with sense-feed, rather than environments. VR’s banal.’

  She was not beautiful. He stole glances at her while she drove. Quite stocky, breasts too large, a downy lip. No feature could be said to mar, but as a whole she seemed too matronly for him. Why then the charge, the quickening warmth whenever their eyes met? Plain fear, perhaps; or recognition. He saw that she, like him, was never one to stop.

  She said, ‘Chimps are fun to be.’ He saw them now, racing in packs across the grounds, climbing the statuary that guarded formal graveled courts, spruce-hedged nooks, dead fountains. They waved at the car, chrome skull-caps glinting bluish in noon light, their eyes insectile, red-pink facets gleaming dimly under sutured lids. ‘We’ve tried bug-eyeing men, too. But they went mad.’

  A ruse, to scare him? He thought not.

  ‘What was your aim?’ he asked.

  ‘The eyes we build are sensitive to quanta. We had one volunteer could navigate a maze using his body-heat as radar.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Gloucestered himself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oedipussed, or what you will.’

  ‘Blinded himself?’

  ‘A billion ecus’ techniq skewered. Daddy had him shot.’

  Ajay stared at her.

  She stared back. ‘It was a kindness.’

  They came in sight of the main building. A mansion, half-derelict. The sort of dereliction, though, you pay designers for. Buried in the east wing’s rubble like it fell from out the sky – hurled there by Moonwolf perhaps – a Fuller dome squatted, lustreless and sinister, the New’s obscene intrusion.

  They turned aside and pulled up by the other, intact, wing. No staff in penguin suits came out to greet them: Ajay – whose first contact with Europe had been his grandfather’s old Merchant Ivory discs – felt sheepish disappointment.

  Inside, the mansion had been butchered, half its interiors torn out and new floors scaffolded in place: steel grids and stairwells, concrete slabs and fibreboard partitions.

  Halls like bomb sites, muralled here and there in dud Rothko, were carpeted in rugs threadbare as they were priceless, and all around stood antique Chinese cabinets, their surfaces a mass of tasteless fabergé. The smaller rooms were full of antique chrome, cod-Brutalist furniture in leatherette and textured rubber. Early holographic art crowded the walls: everywhere he looked, acid-pink fractals tore at his eyes.

  He saw no one, but animals spied on them at every corner, their stares a-brim with more than animal intelligence. Monkeys – some insect-eyed, some not – and dogs, and even a hawk, blinking at him from the top of an undressed concrete stair. Surveillance with a baroque streak.

  She showed him to his room. A silk-sheeted futon lay across a slatted hardwood base. The wallpaper was silk. A blue silk kimono hung from the door. She showed him the bathroom, assiduous as any hotel maid, and reached over his shoulder to show him how to work the true-way mirror, pinning him for a second against the edge of the vanity unit.

  His penis engorged, schoolboy-fast.

  She affected not to notice, and moved away.

  Alone, he explored the room. It would be wired, of course. He snapped open his suitcase, checked the integrity of the box that held his ‘home-made’ logic bomb. He stroked it gingerly. It thrilled beneath his fingers.

  Suckers scrabbled at the glassy lining, hungry for his heat.

  He knew now who Haag’s target was: the daughter, not the father. It was Lucia who was arming Milan’s Massive, lacing it with techniq coined from vintage Moonwolf logic ’ware.

  Lucia knew all about New York, Paris, Pnom Penh, now Delhi. She hankered for Milan to join the Massive club: out-do Rome first and then the world, a sort of virtual Hannibal, herself its confidante.

  ‘With your help, sweet,’ she sighed to him, in the deep darkness of her bed. The next morning, as a sign of her good faith, she bought his sister a new cunt.

  Now it was his turn.

  About a month later, she pointed out a woman in her father’s entourage and said, ‘She’s Haag.’

  Ajay was not surprised. It was not uncommon for two agents to be assigned to the same hit. Drawing up a plan did not take him long. Haag had trained him well.

  Lucia found out the aide’s address and gave it to Ajay. He entered the condominium and, as luck would have it, bumped into her on the landing outside her apartment. They exchanged passwords.

  The woman smiled cautiously. Already she was suspicious: why the contact? Ajay wasted no time in breaking her neck.

  He left the condominium unchallenged and walked to the northern end of the Via Berlusconi. There he found the café Lucia had told him of and took a seat on the terrace. While he waited for Lucia to pick him up, he drank German-style coffee and tried to keep his hands from shaking.

  Down the road he heard a police siren.

  Above him, from an open window, came sounds from the kitchen . . . an involved complaint about meat, a baby crying, easy listening on the radio. He kept telling himself he was free. He told himself he was blooded now, part of the League and out from under the cryptic sway of Haag’s Massives for ever. The siren dopplered and span. The police car was jammed in behind an empty Coke truck. The music stopped and someone on the radio said something about Cecére. It was very confused. Another newscaster came on, calmer, and said the presidential candidate was dead.

  Dead?

  He couldn’t work it out.

  What should he do? Dead. It made no sense. The Coke truck pulled up onto the pavement and the police car revved past.

  Dead.

  Why? By whose hand? Had Haag sent a third assassin? Or was this some corporate coup, some double-play of Lucia’s, with Haag as the cover, himself as the dupe?

  He thought, Maybe I’ll ring Lucia. Maybe I’ll ask her what I was for. What it was I helped happen, and how. But then it occurred to him, why should she tell him any more than Haag ever had? After all, he was only a gun. Guns are not supposed to ask questions.

  A great sadness washed over him.

  Blue light from the police car eddied across the surface of his coffee. Revolted, he put the cup down.

  Brakes squealed. A carabiniero rolled out of the back of the car into the gutter, fire-arm upraised. Ajay blinked. The laser mounted in his spectacles burned the policeman’s retinas. He waited, palms pressed to the table where they could be seen.

  The carabinieri had no idea what was happening. The driver got out. Ajay blinded him, too. The two men remaining hesitated a moment, figuring it out. They climbed out bearing rifles. They pointed them at him, looking at him through their sights. His laser bounced harmlessly off the silvered lenses.

  They screamed something at him. Their words were so panicked, he had no idea what they were saying. The driver, blinded and howling, stumbled through their line of fire. They shouted at him to get down.

  Ajay upset the table and rolled it to the door of the café, cowering behind the makeshift shield. He leapt inside the café and hit out indiscriminately with the laser, putting dazzled diners between him and the police. A gun went off. People fell to the floor, scrambling for shelter. He walked into the kitchen.

  There were enough people here to shield him, if he caused enough commotion. The sort of commotion a gun wouldn’t cover. The baby was quiet now, nursed by a girl who couldn’t have been much over fifteen. He took the baby off her, waited a beat, and lobbed it into the air.

  A wail went up from many throats and hands reached past Ajay to catch the infant. A man ran at him with a cleaver. Ajay disarmed and gutted him, crossed to the back door. It was open. He stepped outside.

  Over the screams came the swoop of sirens. Back-up units. He looked back inside the kitc
hen. Everyone was screaming, running about, blocking the door. The carabinieri were there. They saw him. He blinded them and walked away.

  He felt too heavy to run.

  Failure bound and stiffened him.

  His gamble had failed. Not content with Haag’s offers, he’d risked all on a power play, but he was only a pawn in this game, a gun that others fired. The money for Shama’s last great operation had eluded him, and now, a marked man, traitor to Haag’s cause, such riches would forever elude him.

  He looked at his hands.

  They were shaking again.

  The years pressed down on him, slowing him up. Weary, guilt-burdened, labouring years in Trinidad and Cuba and India, all trashed in an hour by a shallow woman’s ambition and his own twisted, ill-understood desire for her.

  ‘Shama,’ he whispered, ‘Shama,’ thinking not of the sister he had but of the one he’d been building and had now lost forever.

  Hands. Tongue. Cunt. All that effort to replace mere meat. The replacements he’d so far bought were nothing without their keystone, and that was now forever beyond his grasp.

  At the last hurdle, he had fallen. Without Lucia’s resources – the unimaginable wealth he had glimpsed and lost – a brand-new personality was out of the question.

  Shama would have to make do with the old one.

  Rosa woke to the touch of snakes. She lay back at first, relaxed, knees bent, to let them play. Their touch was familiar. They began tickling her. She flexed away. They resisted and tugged her back towards them. Still sleepy, she allowed them their fun.

  Their caresses grew insistent. Dimly aware that something was wrong, she thought back to other mornings. Once so gentle, recently the snakes had grown boisterous. Remembering this, she put her knees together.

  They yanked them apart. Insistent and unkind, they began to rape her.

  The longer ones wound themselves around her legs, eased her thighs apart. The smaller ones trapped her feet and pinned them to the wall. She leant forward, screaming, and tried to free herself. Snakes grabbed at her hands. Hot, dry scales chafed at her wrists, tightening . . .

  She yanked herself free. The biggest snake nosed at her crotch, butting her perineum. Fear-triggered, her bladder emptied. The snake roiled around in the flow. It purred.

  She reached up to the side of the bed and pulled. The snakes pinning her feet squealed. They were anchored to the wall. Were she to wrench them from it, they would die. She pulled harder.

  Harder.

  Nothing gave.

  The cutting cloth lay draped over her chair. She let go the bed with one hand, reached out for it. Sensing their chance, the snakes pulled her roughly up to their slit mouths, their long black tongues. They slobbered at her sex.

  She swung up, punched them hard, too fast for them to grab her flailing fists. They rose up, hissing.

  She pushed off against the wall, reached out and caught the cloth between two fingers. She snapped it off the chair onto the floor.

  The snakes took hold again. They turned her onto her front and bruised her arse.

  She snatched at the cloth, missed, grabbed again. In her hand at last, the cloth recognised her. It grew stiff.

  With guttural cries, she forced herself up on her knees. The snakes gurgled and writhed, savouring the scent of her fear. The first snake struck. Rosa howled, arched and struck back, cleaving the snake in two. The snakes were blind, but they could smell; the scent of blood excited them. Thinking they’d breached her, they stretched and weaved, their black tongues writhing like anemones.

  She chopped them all, willy-nilly, and when she was done – the bed blood-soaked, the snakes, once friends, now so much writhing meat – she trimmed the stumps back to the wall where they were anchored. The stubs wept. Streams of lymph ran down the wall and set like glue before they reached the bed.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘it’s over!’ She stared at the wreckage she had made of her night-time companions. Bitter tears burst out. ‘You spoiled everything!’ she wailed, remembering their former tenderness. Their hugs and squeezes when she needed comfort. The tickle of their tongues when she desired play.

  ‘How could you,’ she whispered, appalled.

  The largest snake let out an obscene fart, shuddered and lay still.

  Rosa, trembled, picked at her skin as at a threadbare blanket.

  After an age the crawling sensation went away. She took a shower. She tended herself. They had bruised but failed to breach her. If only memories sloughed off as easily as blood! Half an hour passed. She climbed out of the shower, wet, fragrant.

  On the table before her the toys stirred, uneasy. Wendy. Fountain-Mouth. Potted Eye. Unlike her snakes they had the gift of sight. Her slaughter of the snakes had frightened them. She crossed the room, and smiled to reassure them. Her snakes, her one-time friends . . .

  Her smile crumpled. Her legs trembled. She slumped to the floor. A death-smell filled the room. She began to cry again, more gently, more from sadness than from rage. Her chastity near-lost – she shuddered, wiped her eyes, but the tears kept coming. They fountained from some deep-rooted place. The core of her innocence had burst.

  ‘It’s not true!’ So she bullied herself: ‘I am intact!’ But it seemed unnatural, somehow, to have survived the snakes’ assault unharmed. No longer innocent in mind, the innocence of her body seemed parodic. An affront. She shuddered, said ‘I must not hate myself,’ aloud, so she could hear it. From the back of the table, Wendy, her doll, clapped her approval. Swallowing her tears, Rosa stood up, took Wendy by her outstretched arms and held her tight against her trembling chest. ‘My bestest friend!’ she exclaimed, tearfully, to the oldest of her toys. ‘Dearest and best!’ The doll slid fretfully about in her arms. She laid it on the table and pulled up its dress. There were rashes on its backside. ‘Poor dearest,’ Rosa crooned. ‘I’ve been neglectful.’ Carefully, she sat the doll back on the table, slumped at a different angle. Once the doll had walked about. Now it was old and broken. It was prone to bedsores. Only its arms worked.

  Rosa took up her trophy belt – a copper wire strung with conquered prey – and pulled it tight about her waist. She looked about for the cutting cloth and found it on the floor by the bed. Blood-soaked, limp: she took it up between two fingers, trying not to look at it. It hardened in her hand. She carried it to the table and held it over her Fountain-Mouth. Mother had fashioned it from a human throat. A limpet-like foot anchored it to the bottom of a water bowl. Where it emerged from the water it bloomed, like a lotus, into a pair of roseate lips, puckered in a perfect bow.

  The bloom engorged. The lips moued. Water squirted up between them, arced and fell, spattering the table. Once, the water had dropped neatly back into the bowl. But years ago, Rosa had sliced the lips to make the water pink; and though the skin had healed, some resonance of nerve was lost. Rosa held the cloth over the jet. When it was clean she laid it on the table to soften, then took it up and looped it round her belt, quickly, before it stiffened once again.

  Time for a mouse hunt.

  She’d little heart for it. But she knew that she’d best follow her routine. When all else failed, it was routine defined her. Without it, she feared she might lose her self. She suppressed a shiver and left the room.

  Corridors spread before her door, dividing and redividing like the branches of a lung, encrusted with cold, heavy ornamentation. Stairways too immense. Sculptured portals. Panelling. Stucco. Mouldings. Marble. Deep armchairs, stairs, steps, one after another. Ranks of doors gave onto colonnades and windowless galleries. Transverse corridors led to deserted salons. Spaces replicated themselves endlessly in black mirrors, cut-glass mirrors, and glass partitions. Images spiraled, innumerable, infinite, in empty glasses, chandeliers, paintings, framed prints, glass doors, pearls. An elaborate cornice hung over Rosa’s door, with branches and garlands like dead leaves: foliage from a stone garden. Silent. Carpets so heavy, so thick, footsteps never carried.

  Appalled, dizzy, Rosa knew that she kne
w nothing: not why she was here, nor where ‘here’ was. The rape had shaken her out of herself. Everything seemed new and heavy and terrible. ‘Mother,’ she sighed, ‘please help me now. Tell me who I am!’ Tearful, she pressed her hands against the richly panelled walls of the corridor. Solitude crushed her.

  She was, she reminded herself, not altogether alone. Bare comfort. Ma birthed her sisters from time to time. But all but one of these had been short-lived, monstrous things. And even the short-lived sisters were barred to her since Elle – the one who lived as Rosa did, and shared their corridors – had taken charge of Mother’s slabs. As for Elle, she excelled Rosa in everything. Mother’s favourite, rarely seen, Elle could not be called truly her ‘friend’.

  Rosa brushed away a tear.

  Not one real friend.

  No, not one.

  Ever.

  Except – she squeezed her eyes tight shut against the thought – except the snakes.

  When Rosa thought of her mother, she thought of a crab. A hermit crab, making her home in a shell that lesser creatures have built then discarded. This place – this maze of rooms and corridors – was such a shell. It too had once housed lesser beings. Their leavings lay scattered all about: icons, effigies, unmade pallets, part-eaten meals, creased laundry, stains, leavings, dust. Particles of skin. Small creatures had built these doors and corridors, service ducts and cables, making a home for themselves and then – for some forgotten reason – they’d disappeared, abandoning their shell. One day, a long time later, Mother – like a hermit crab – had picked it for her home, making of this maze of steel no mere hovel, but a body. Its conduits were her veins, its reservoirs her glands, its rooms her many wombs, its airlocks and its docking towers her mouths. And its cameras had a use: a clumsy substrate for her mind.