Heiresses of Russ 2013 Read online

  And I nodded, kept my face straight, my eyes right on hers.

  Depose was a power—when the militia at Liberty Land needed something done in the city she was the one they hired. Somewhere down the line she’d want me working for her but I didn’t want to get close and didn’t want to have to find out what was inside her brain.

  2.

  In October the sun starts going down fast. We bought food and water at the Red Crescent kitchen before we headed back to our place, made a tight group with the boys on the outside and Dare and me and the gold in the center.

  I told Dare what Depose told me and she said, “If that’s Mai Kin, she tried to make herself look like you. Why did that happen?”

  I shook my head because I didn’t know. “If what Depose told me means anything there’ll be money.”

  Dare said. “I don’t want that bull to think she owns us.”

  Old people who remember twenty-five years back talk about how hot it is now but winter when it comes still kills if you can’t stay warm. “We both felt cold a couple of nights ago,” I said. “It’s still okay in the days but that’s what’s coming. Things are jumpy lately and we may need lots of gold to survive.”

  Dare listened and said, “Okay, you’re right,” and I reached up and kissed her. Dumb girls have boyfriends smart girls have other girls. And smart girls and gay boys are natural allies.

  The street we were walking on had a lot of burned houses and an old railroad overhead that had mostly fallen down. Eighth Avenue when we crossed it had people. An open market about ten blocks uptown was breaking up; people loaded carts and trucks. Downtown, a U.N. Peacekeepers armored car was crossing the avenue.

  On the next block a bicycle boy whizzed past turned a hundred feet away and looked us over. Another bike boy was on the other side of the busted street, then a third and a fourth. All of them thin with faces like the vultures you see sometimes near the river. They knew us and that we were coming back with gold, they called us faggots and dykes.

  But the Peacekeepers shoot people like them if they see they have guns and we’d handled these guys before. Our boys had their knives out, Dare had her hand on the jump pistol under her caftan, Not and Hassid yelled that the bike boys would starve soon. We never stopped moving and they kept circling but never closed.

  Then because it felt like the right time, I looked one in the face and caught sight of us in his eyes, caught the way he saw us: we were gold, we were sex. Then he knew something was inside him and freaked, almost fell off his bike before he and the rest of them faded away.

  My mother knew some stuff. When there were still parties, when there was the thought of getting close to the ones running things and running with them, my mother was on the job. But wherever I got this skill I didn’t get it from her.

  I never met my father but she told me he was someone who traveled in important circles. He must have been some kind of prospect because I think the reason she had me was to try and make him marry her.

  People my mother’s age were big on names. When there’s no money people do things like that. Dare’s mother named her only daughter Virginia Dare after the first European baby born in the U.S.A.. The Virginia part got discarded since anything you hear about Washington and Virginia sounds worse than here.

  But she kept the Dare. It’s an old word meaning tough which is what she is: tough and beautiful. “Real!” she said and I looked where she was looking. We were almost at our place. But on the next corner a building had fallen down last winter and blocked most of the street and on the wreckage were Regalia and her crew.

  Regalia was a six-foot-tall queen with paint on her face and an ax in her hand. A couple of years ago she had this giant boy Call who followed her like a stray dog and her crew was it.

  But Call was dead white and got too much sun which did him in. They say his face is partly gone and he’s a skeleton. I haven’t heard he’s dead but I haven’t seen him either.

  In the last few weeks the city seemed to go desperate. For the second time in two blocks a gang wanted to take us off for a few gold coins. Again Dare took the lead and we came on like they weren’t even there. Her blade was in her right hand and her left was under her robe. Two steps more and she’d have drawn the jump gun and put a slug in Regalia’s stomach. I was reaching for Regalia’s brain.

  It would have been better if things had played out and we’d gone in and snuffed Regalia right then. Instead a truck with guys standing on the back and packing rifles came out of the twilight.

  Regalia’s people saw this and a couple started to back away. Then out of the cab jumped this bear-looking mean and huge in that light. One of Regalia’s crew yelled and started to run, another followed him and Regalia went back howling at all of them.

  Dare turned to face the bear but I already knew what this was about. Caravaggio always had chimeras around him. The bear pulled himself up and said, “I am Ursus. I have a message for Real.” The voice was mostly human and hoarse and old. When I nodded he said, “Caravaggio wishes that you come with us.”

  Dare didn’t take her eyes off the bear and the guards on the back of the truck. “It’s okay,” I said, “This is what Depose talked about.”

  Dare said, “I need to come with you.”

  “I’d like that too. But we need you to guard the money. To make sure our place is defended. To come get me if something goes wrong.” I reached inside and showed her what we’d do together when I came back.

  Finally she nodded and I climbed into the truck and headed downtown to Studio Caravaggio. I know about the studio and about him.

  That name is some artist hero in the past. Lots of old people took big artist names. We still got Mozart in the streets playing the same tune every day on a busted clarinet.

  The quarter moon was up so there was some light, people slipping through the shadows where there were buildings standing. We passed a convoy of cars full of tourists and guards. The driver moved the truck around the holes and piles of rubbish in the street. He slowed when a religious crowd from the projects carrying torches and saints’ pictures and chanting crossed town on Fourteenth.

  I saw Caravaggio when I was small and he drove by in a big car, had a grey beard and hair and dark eyes that stared out like a hunter’s and someone told me he was looking for kids and if he liked you and brought you home you never worked or went hungry. Someone else said he took your soul first.

  Years after that, they had this film festival and he showed a movie against the wall of a building at night. It was pieces of old past century movies with people crashing cars and blowing up buildings, making jokes as they broke glass, gunned down people and wrecked New York and dozens of other places just for their own amusement.

  All the kids watching it screamed and threw things at the stupid grinning twelve foot tall guys and women, the destroyers who used up our city and our world. Caravaggio was there nodding approval at our anger.

  3.

  Studio Caravaggio is downtown on some blocks of old buildings still in good shape with generators and lights. Neighborhood guards with rifles stood on roofs and watched us come down the street. Their guns meant the Peacekeepers respected them like they did Depose.

  Ursus went to a big metal gate, reached through that to a brass knocker on an iron door. He slammed the knocker a few times and a spy slot opened. “I brought the Reality Girl.”

  The spy slot closed, the iron door opened, dim light spilled out and a feathered chimera in slippers appeared, unlocked the metal gate and stood aside. We entered this huge space like a warehouse with old, historic furniture, gold Chinese screens, long tables covered with lenses and tools. One wall was painted to look like a faraway city with tall buildings.

  The chimera took me past rooms with lights from screens where people watched and worked. Others were dark with humans and chimeras lying on mattresses. Some watched us pass. At a work table a fox, a cat and a lizard chimera showed some human kids how to polish models of the old empire building and the stat
ue of the lady that was in the harbor and stuff.

  Those get sold to tourists and the metal they’re made of is supposed to be from the original buildings and statues. And I guessed this studio was where they got made.

  A guy was cleaning the floors and I smelled food cooking. From right then I wanted some of this for me and Dare and our crew.

  From somewhere deep in Studio Caravaggio a voice, hoarse and kind of shaky said, “Visitors from the Orient encounter visitors from the future and fight it out in the ruins of New York while the natives dive for tourist gold is what it’s about. Where did I get the story? My dear sir it’s my life. I look out my window and it’s what I see.”

  Ursus turned a corner and down a short hall bright light shone out a doorway. The bear stopped at the door and we both looked at Caravaggio.

  Before when I saw him, he was old but strong and dangerous and needing to be respected.

  Now he was in a white robe with stains on the front, holding a long glass of wine in a shaky hand. His face was thin and he slumped in a big, soft chair with a fan playing on him. What I thought was a boy in silk shorts held a bowl of something and a spoon like he’d been feeding him.

  Caravaggio’s eyes moved, focused on me and he said into a tiny disc in his open hand, “That’s the scenario, Assad. As always I’m interested in financial backing. My health? I’m not going to die before I complete this, I promise you. But now I’ve got to talk to someone.”

  When the boy put down the bowl and took a plug-in from behind Caravaggio’s ear, I saw he was maybe pushing thirty and I recognized him as Tagalong, who was on the street with a gang when I was small. He nodded to me.

  “I’ve brought Reality Girl,” said the chimera.

  “Depose says you wanted to see me,” I said.

  Caravaggio said nothing, just stared at me through eyes that looked like he was crying but his face didn’t move. Tagalong tried to feed him from the bowl. Caravaggio brushed it away. He drained the glass, picked up a bottle with both hands and drank out of it. Wine dribbled out the side of his mouth.

  “My scouts talked about you,” he said.

  “You want to use my boys diving for the tourists?”

  “The boys sure, but mostly it’s you I’m interested in.” He moved his hand over a glass surface then pointed at something behind me, wanting me to turn and look. I wasn’t doing that, but I stepped back, kept him and Tagalong in my sight. Tagalong shook his head like he couldn’t believe me.

  What I saw was a flat screen. It took a second to know I was watching myself. First I was on the riverfront that summer with Dare and the boys. Then Dare and I walked through the early morning streets before the sun got bad and we kissed. Next we were at the U.N. clinic in Times Square getting ointments and medicine.

  Don’t get scared, get mad was Dare’s motto and mine. “You and your freaks followed me!”

  “If we meant you harm we could have done it many times,” Caravaggio said. “I’ve been thinking of you, imagining you in a film. The tourists you saw today were impressed by these pictures and were impressed by you.” Mai Kin’s face popped up on the screen. “At my suggestion Mai Kin has been redone in your image.” Seeing her again, she didn’t look that much like me.

  Next I saw myself in the evening walking all alone down an empty Fifth Avenue. This was fake; none of us ever went anywhere alone. Caravaggio talked on the soundtrack.

  “Once this was the most famous city in the most powerful nation in the world,” he said. “Then the bombs fell, the earth quaked, the waters rose, the government collapsed. Around the world cities and nations fell but none fell further. Mighty Gotham is a ruin at a crossroads with local warlords like Liberty Land and the Northeast Command fighting for possession.”

  He touched the surface again and I disappeared. Color and faces exploded on the screen. A girl in leather smashed mirrors in some huge bathroom. Maybe it was a party, maybe it was a riot, but the camera spun around in an enormous space. A mob dressed better than anyone in the city is now poured fuel on chairs and set them on fire, smashed glass doors, shot out the lights high overhead.

  “A fiesta of destruction made a ruin of Madison Square Garden,” Caravaggio told me, “Caught for my first full length film. But places remain on this planet where people are still rich and bored. The films I’ve made have kept the eyes of that world on us and that’s what I’m still doing.”

  The city opened before me. Buildings were down but ones I’d never seen before stood. The streets were full of people. Cars went by; I saw a bus! It was New York after the bombs but before the quakes. A girl in a silk dress walked arm in arm with a chimera gorilla.

  “What did you bring me here for?” I asked.

  “I want you in a film. I’ll use you as Mai Kin’s body double. She’s more a prop than an actor. You’ll stand in for her in certain scenes. But it will be more than that. They think to use me to film the New York sequences for an episode of that idiotic series.

  “But I’m going to use them to tell the story of kids on the waterline. I want you and your crew. Anything can be faked but what’s true will always stand revealed.”

  “I want a hundred gold pieces a day,” I said because that’s as much money as I’ve ever seen at once and because gold is the only thing everyone trusts. “I want the first day’s pay up front,” I said because that’s what I know about doing business.

  “I created the legend of Jackie the angel of divers.” he said like he hadn’t heard me. “Now I want to give the tourists a taste of the desperation of diver kids’ lives.”

  I said, “What about the money.”

  “Once I dreamed of showing Jackie returning to the city like an avenging angel come to save the place,” he said, “My new vision of the city will be you and your friends.” Again his hand moved over a glass surface in front of him.

  A boy in long hair and shorts stood on a pier in the full light of day. Big crowds of people watched as a coin was flung and the boy leaped, seemed to flicker like silver light in the gold sun. He skimmed over the water and caught the coin in his hand. It looked fake.

  What got to me was how the riverfront wasn’t all smashed up. The water was lower than the walks. New Jersey was wrecked but not totally. Boats sailed and people didn’t look scared. I remembered some of that from when I was real little and got angry it was gone.

  I wanted to see more but the screen went blank. I got careless and reached for Caravaggio wanting to see what he remembered. I touched his brain and saw a jumble of faces, heard a tourist talking about a hundred million yen deal, tasted the wine he had just drunk, caught the smell of Silken Night, a perfume he remembered.

  Caravaggio looked startled and confused. He tried to stand and knocked over the wine bottle. Tag caught it, stared at me wide eyed like he had a hint of what just happened.

  It was stupid to give myself away. But I just shrugged. Then I remembered what we’d been talking about before Caravaggio started showing me pictures.

  “A hundred gold pieces, right now,” I said. “And I’m not going in the water.” I didn’t say that even if I got as dumb as a boy, I couldn’t swim.

  “We’ll talk about that,” he said. “Fifty. Any more will get you and your friends killed.” He was suspicious, maybe frightened after what he felt me do.

  We settled on seventy-five and he said shooting began in a few days. Tag counted the coins out for me in a little room near the front door of the Studio. He whispered, “I followed you around and took those shots of you and your crew. I got him interested.” He looked at me curious and scared like he guessed my secret. I nodded and said nothing but now I knew Depose had nothing to do with my getting hired.

  In that huge front room, an owl showed humans how to make posters of Jackie look old and how to tell tourists they had found them in old trunks. I knew that even the ones who said there had really been a Jackie Boy said Caravaggio kept him chained like a dog and only let him out to make movies until he escaped.

  The
bear and the truck waited for me outside. As we drove away I looked back: the lights, the guards, the street with people standing outside their buildings talking, little kids playing after dark, was magic and I wanted all of it.

  Riding home I was cold and the only light ahead of us was the glow from the Tourist Zone way uptown, I thought about the city Caravaggio showed me and remembered how my Mom died when the superflu was killing everyone. The U.N. medics couldn’t stop it. Some of them died. They told me I must have good genes and wanted to know who my father was but I couldn’t help them.

  It was then that I met Dare. Her mother was dead too so we had that in common and she was tough, took me under her wing, protected me until I got able to take care of myself. She had done gold diving but gave it up when she saw what happened to older kids. Together we worked out the deal with the boys.

  The truck stopped in Madison Square which is semi-wrecked buildings around a park that’s a jungle nobody wants to go near. We have a lair in the cellar of a building that still stands on the west side of the Square and has water and we’ve got the entrances booby trapped.

  Lott, who’s too sick to dive, guards the place night and day. We brought in Rock as his replacement. Ursus made the truck wait while I rattled the gates and said the password and Lott let me in before they drove away.

  The Indians at the clinic say Lott’s got a few things wrong but it’s lung cancer that’s going to kill him. Dare thinks it’s because we got him too late and if we’d been looking out for him sooner he’d be okay.

  The boys were behind the curtains at the back of our place laughing about the way we’d stood down the bike boys and Regalia. I could hear Lott’s heavy breathing.

  Dare said, “I don’t much trust this deal you have.” I didn’t either but it was the best deal we’d ever had. I wanted to show her the Studio but when I tried what I found in her was fear that she was going to lose me.

  So instead I told her about Caravaggio and Tagalong and the studio, made it funny and had her laughing.