Ghosts of Punktown (7 page)

     When she’d first viewed the statue, Cynth had thought the arms and head had broken off and been reattached, because of the gaps that separated these pieces from the rest of the white stone body. But then she had learned that these were more like the jointed appendages of a mannequin, and the figure had been hollowed inside, the cavity filled with clockwork internal organs.

     Colores had said he might need to ask Cynth questions about the item, but he seemed well enough informed already, as he explained, “There’d be two of these framing the temple door, and they’d be aligned to face the sunrise. Their arms would be lowered by night –” the figure’s smooth arms hung at its sides now “– but they were timed to lift above their heads with the rising of the sun.” He demonstrated with his own arms. “And they’d turn their heads gradually over the course of the day to follow the sun as it arced across the sky. Their eyelids would even open at dawn, revealing beautifully painted glass eyes. Just remarkable, isn’t it? Some of these statues are still going through their motions, four or five hundred years after they were created, but obviously this one isn’t. Do you know if the gears are inoperative, or is it just that no one has set the mechanism? It has to be reset about every four days.”

     “I’m told it’s rusted and seized up inside.”

     “A pity. But that can be cleaned up and repaired. Otherwise, she looks to be in incredible condition! It’s not easy to find one of them intact. As you can see, our lovely lady here is fully disrobed and anatomically correct. This offended followers of the more prevalent Choom religions, who persecuted Raloom’s followers – they hated Lupool more than they hated Raloom himself. So they went around razing the temples and smashing most of these columns. Some were hidden away, thank Raloom.” He grinned at his joke.

     Cynth knew enough about the Raloom faith to know it had become obsolete, all but extinguished, and that Raloom himself was always portrayed simply as a head and shoulders, these busts often rendered in metal and sometimes so large they served as temples themselves. Cynth found it telling, and typical, that the male deity should be portrayed as a head, focusing on his mental attributes, while his wife should be celebrated for her sensuality.

     “What I’ve been wanting to do at the Hill Way Galleries,” Colores told her, “is frame the entrance to the antiquities hall with the facade of a temple to Lupool, sort of like a dolmen with the two sides upheld by these caryatids. We already have one of these on display individually, and I’ve acquired the lintel for the top, but I’ve been looking for a matching figure. And to get both of them into a state where they can raise and lower their arms, turn their heads and open their eyes according to the time of day –” he clapped his hands together “– sublime!”

     “That would be impressive,” Cynth conceded.

     “Better than having the figure hidden away in some private collector’s home, huh? Used as a coat rack or something?” He chuckled. “The public should be able to appreciate this lady.”

     “Well, I wish you the best at the auction, then.” Cynth’s wrist comp beeped. “Sorry, I should take this.”

     “By all means.”

     She drifted away to leave Chard Colores admiring the seductive nude figure, leaned against the sill of a large window and raised her arm with dread. To her relief, it was not Simon, but a consignor she had been working with. She accepted the call and his face appeared on the device’s tiny screen. As she conversed with the client, however, she found her eyes lifting to the window, drawn to the scene beyond.

     It had been twenty years, yes, but it still surprised her that Tower 1 of the complex formerly known as the Triplex should have gone from its original brass color to a uniform shade of pale green verdigris. The building that contained Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, formerly called Tower 3, had been kept in a much better state, shone as brightly as when it had faced her own building in her childhood – but then, the property had been sold off and divided over a decade ago. While Tower 3 had been converted into business offices, Tower 1 had remained an apartment building, though its clientele was apparently no longer as upscale as when Cynth had lived there. Sitting at her desk, gazing outside idly, Cynth often took note of the people who came and went through the building’s front doors. Their shabby coats, their furtive or dispirited movements, the sometimes misshapen forms inside the shabby coats that hinted at mutation. The battered vehicles in the lot, making it look more like a junkyard than the shiny showroom it had resembled in her day. Amazingly, there were even parasitic vines growing upon the face of the building that caught the most sun, so thickly that they obscured some of the windows, though these hardy city weeds had turned brown and brittle over the winter, like veins drained of their blood.

     Cynth had had no prior experience with auction houses while living in Miniosis, city of unfaithful fiancés. She supposed she had pursued this job as much out of a sense of nostalgia as anything else. At least, knowing that Jango was situated in the Triplex had cemented her interest when she’d learned about the job.

     She’d even briefly, wildly considered backing out of her condo and taking an apartment in Tower 1 instead, until she’d come to her first interview at Jango and seen the condition her former home was in.

     She concluded her business on the wrist comp, and then with Colores. He let her go ahead of him as they slipped between two of the displays, placing one hand on the small of her back while making an ushering gesture with the other. There was a crash behind them at that moment, and both spun to look, startled.

     Cynth hadn’t taken much notice of the robot before; there was a small fleet of them, of various types, that saw to the building’s upkeep. This was one of several Jango used to move the consignments from storage to the exhibition room, to the auction room and eventually out of the building when it was time for the winning bidders to gather their prizes. The robot had bumped the base of a pedestal, causing the Kalian lamp to fall and shatter. The gelatin had broken into quivering chunks, out of which the fetus’s limbs reached. It looked like a miscarriage lying there, or perhaps an unexpected birth.

     Cynth switched her gaze to the robot, which had already begun gathering up the broken shards of glass in delicate brass claws. Its box-like body was scuffed and dinged, but she didn’t know whether it might actually be two decades old.

     “Hey,” she called to it.

     The sweeping arms paused for one or two moments, as if the machine had become befuddled, and then slowly resumed their work.

*     *     *

     “Excuse me – do you work here?”

     Cynth turned from watching the snow fall outside the exhibition room’s largest window. “Yes?” She was a little unsettled, not having heard the man approach, but then she was distracted from having found a new message on one of her work computer’s virtual screens. It had read, in large letters:
“You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”

     The man was a Choom, youngish, and because Cynth had lived all her life in Punktown, and a minority of Chooms had even attended her private schools, she was able to consider him attractive. His face had strong cheekbones and a broad jaw to accommodate the rows of molars hidden behind his ear-to-ear mouth, his eyes gray and his hair cut short and spiky as most Choom males wore it. He looked disheveled in his snow-dampened raincoat over a comforta
ble-looking old sweater over a T-shirt. He clutched the latest glossy Jango catalog. “My name is Mendeni. I’m a professor of anthropology at Paxton University. I had some questions about item number twenty-eight?”

     “Ah,” Cynth said. “Our statue of Lupool.” She stepped closer to the man, who stood several paces from the stone automaton, which still slumbered though it was well past noon. Maybe the snow had lulled her? “A very popular item, I guess.”

     The Choom looked wary. “How so?”

     “There was a curator from the Hill Way Galleries in to see it yesterday, though it’s actually not very professional of me to talk about that.”

     Mendeni looked warier, or more nervous, by the moment. “No, please, please tell me – it was Richard Colores, wasn’t it? I was going to ask you about that.”

     “Yes. Mr. Colores was here, and expressed a great deal of interest in item twenty-eight.”

     “Damn him,” Mendeni hissed, flicking his hot gaze toward the caryatid as if Colores might have vandalized it somehow. “I was hoping his budget would be exhausted. Well, maybe it is...maybe he’s hoping to get it for a song. But then he’d know better, wouldn’t he? He knows her value.”

     “He did mention what a rare and important piece it is.”

     Mendeni turned to her again. “Can you tell me what the reserve price is?” This was a consignment’s minimum selling price, agreed upon with the consignor, the so-called “floor price” below which no bid would be accepted.

     “I’m sorry, but I can’t; the reserve price is a confidential matter between Jango and the seller. And I can’t reveal the seller to you, either, as he wishes to remain anonymous.”

     “You don’t have to,” Mendeni said. “He’s a Kalian businessman named Darik Stuul, who found himself in a lot of hot water with the controversy over Alvine Products and the crazy cult that was behind it, him being one of the owners and the cultists. He wants off Oasis and he’s had to sell off his very impressive collection.”

     “How do you know all that?”

     “I have some connections. I know about Richard Colores, too. He was appointed as Hill Way’s curator of antiquities recently, though he’s been with them for over ten years, and he wants to shake things up to put the spotlight on himself.”

     “He seemed to me to have an enthusiasm for your people’s history, and a desire to restore the facade of a temple for his museum.”

     “Restore?” Mendeni practically screeched. “He’s raped major archeological sites and broken up valuable collections to assemble displays like what he has in mind! He’d chop the head off Michelangelo’s David and put it on a rotating pole outside the museum’s front door if he thought that would increase ticket sales! I’m the one who wants to reconstruct a temple devoted to Lupool – in its entirety, and on its original site! Colores knows this all too well. If he had a true love of history he’d be supporting our project, but instead he’s been discrediting us to whoever will listen.”

     “It could just be that you actually want the same thing, to restore a valuable piece of history, but there’s only so much material to go around. Isn’t it just possible you resent his efforts because he’s not a native to your world?” Cynth regretted this speculation the moment it was uttered. Very unprofessional of her. But then, she excused herself as still being disturbed by Simon’s latest message.

     Mendeni drew in a long breath. “Did you ever see Hill Way’s art exhibit called ‘Through the Eyes of Raloom’? A lot of contemporary artists were invited to paint very iconoclastic, one might say very blasphemous images of Raloom. It was a nice bit of controversy that sold a good number of tickets. Well, Colores was the chief organizer of that exhibition. He has no love of history, Choom or otherwise, only of creating his own grand history.” In an increasingly shaky voice, Mendeni went on, “My paternal grandfather belonged to the Raloom faith; it was a tradition carried down for generations in our family, and it ended with him. If he had ever gone into that ‘Through the Eyes of Raloom’ exhibition...”

     “Look,” Cynth said in a soothing tone, “on the day of the auction, you’ll have your chance to bid on this statue, and it may well end up in your hands.”

     “Our budget doesn’t compare to Hill Way’s.”

     “You said yourself, their budget might not permit it at this point.”

     “Even if it didn’t,” Mendeni sulked, “some other rich monster like Darik Stuul will snatch her up.”

     Maybe it was the guilt, but Cynth actually felt herself sympathizing with the man. His emotion was real, and barely in check. “I was just on my way to lunch, Mr. Mendeni. Would you like to accompany me? While we eat I can register you for a bidder’s paddle, if you haven’t done so on the net already.” She tapped her wrist comp to show him how this could be accomplished.

     Mendeni’s wide mouth spread a little wider in an apologetic smile. “Look, I’m sorry I’m so excitable.”

     “We’ll call it passionate.”

     “I didn’t get your name, I’m afraid.”

     She told him, and he shook her hand. “Nice to know you, Cynthia.”

     She was about to ask him to call her Cynth instead, when something occurred to her. Cynthia, Simon had called her in today’s message.

    
“You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”

     But Simon only ever called her Synthia.

*     *     *

     Walking from Tower 3's parking lot to the building’s front entrance the next morning, Cynth again noted the verdigris tint of Tower 1, that made it look covered in lichen. Like the building that housed Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, Tower 2 retained its polished brass exterior, only somewhat tarnished by the years. She stopped for a few moments to look between Towers 1 and 3, and recalled again the night the emergency vehicles had descended on the building she now worked in. She turned her face up toward the rows of windows in the building she had once lived in, at this angle black and staring down at her like myriad empty skull sockets. She felt the impulse to cut across the triangular park between the three buildings and enter Tower 3's front lobby, where she had often sat to read magazines...

     The beeping of her wrist comp jostled her out of her reverie, and she lifted her arm to study it. The call was from her supervisor, Mr. Rosetta.

     He was the first to inform her that item twenty-eight had been stolen from the exhibition room.

*     *     *

     There were two of those security guards now, identical in their rubbery black attire and surly scowls, plus city law enforcers in uniform and street clothes. Cynth hung back a bit until Mr. Rosetta was free for her to approach him.

     “Nothing else was taken,” he told her.

     “Thank Raloom,” Cynth said, more to herself. “There was no guard on duty at the time?”

     “Only during the hours the room is open to the public, between ten and five. After that, it’s locked.”

     “What about cameras?”

     “They were down! We don’t have anything after five-thirty.”

     “Oh my. So someone disabled them?”

     “So it would seem, but they appear to be operating correctly again now.”

     Cynth excused herself at the earliest opportunity and hurried to her office, where she went into her files for the personal contact numbers for Mendeni and Chard Colores. As she waited for Mendeni to answer, her eyes lifted to the blank white panels of the ceiling, identical to those that covered the ceiling in the expanded exhibition area. She wondered if the brass insect arms she remembered, folded into their grooves in every ceiling of the three buildings of the Triplex, had been removed or simply covered over under new dropped ceilings. She was certain that those nimble limbs were not administering to the needs of the low income families, mutants and junkies who appeared to be the inhabitants of Tower 3 now.

     At last, Mendeni materialized on one of her floating screens. “Cynthia, hello! I was meaning to call you today and tell you how much I enjoyed our lunch yesterday. Any chance –”

     Cynth cut him off. “The statue of Lupool was stolen last night, Mendeni.”

     “What?” he screeched. “Stolen by who?”

     “You tell me.”

     “What do you mean, you tell me? Are you accusing me of this?”

     “Sorry; I only meant, your guess is as good as mine.”

     “Is that what you meant? And so that’s why you called me?”

     “I thought you’d be interested to know.”

     “I’m sure Richard Colores would be interested to know, too – have you called him? Or is it only me you think is a criminal?”

     “I am not calling you a criminal, and yes, I was going to call Colores next. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention to the forcers or even my boss about you two coming to view the piece, and how intensely you both want it.”

     “So what if I want it intensely? That doesn’t make me so lacking in intelligence or sanity to do something like this!”

    
But you are lacking in cash,
Cynth thought. “Well, whoever did this would be as intensely interested in the piece as you two are. Look, calm down, I just wanted you to know. Maybe you’ll hear of something, someone else who might have wanted the statue enough to do this. In the meantime, like I say, I need to tell Colores, too.”

     “Yeah, you do that,” Mendeni said, apparently as shaken by Cynth’s not-so-subtle accusations as he was by news of the theft itself. “Keep me informed.” Then he signed off.

     Colores, when she called him next, was clearly stunned but maintained his composure. If he was aware of Cynth’s suspicions, he didn’t mention it or appear defensive or resentful. “This is terrible, just terrible – and so perplexing! Why only that item? I wonder if it could be a Raloom cult; there are still a few of them here and there on Oasis, you know. But I also know of a young man named Mendeni, at P.U., who very much wants that figure, too. And I happen to know his family were Raloom worshipers going way back. You might want to –”

     “I know Mr. Mendeni,” Cynth broke in.

     “Ahh. Well, if you know him, then I need say no more. But I hope you mentioned him to the authorities, so they might talk to him.”

     Cynth didn’t say whether she had or hadn’t. All she would say was, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Please do the same, Mr. Colores.”

     “Yes, yes,” he said, so preoccupied with worry now that he forgot to remind her to call him Chard.

*     *     *

     Cynth wouldn’t have answered the call from Simon were it not for what he said. He seemed shocked to see her face come on his own screen. “What are you saying, Simon?”

     “Well, so it speaks at last.”

     “I asked you what you’re saying.”

     “And I ask you, what was the idea of having me come to Punktown? You can’t really be living in that dump. I should have known from the outside before I even went in, which was stupid of me – I could have been mugged or killed. But maybe that was your intention, huh?”

     “Will you please tell me what the hell you’re going on about, Simon?”

     “About the text message you sent me, damn it! Asking me to bring your stuff to your new apartment.” He gave the address. He even gave the apartment number: 933.

     “Oh my God,” Cynth said under her breath. She fumbled with her thoughts. “You didn’t go in? Inside 933?”

     “I rode up the elevator, looked into the hallway, and turned right around again. That is, I tried to ride back down, but the elevator wouldn’t even work again. It almost caught my arm in the doors! It was a joke, you sending me there, wasn’t it? A cruel joke?”

     “It was a prank, sort of, but not by me.”

     “Who, then? Do you have a new boyfriend? Someone trying to do me harm?”

     “Someone who thinks they’re looking out for me,” she muttered. “Are you still in Punktown now?”

     “Yes!”

     “Don’t go back to that apartment again. You’re right – it isn’t safe there.”

*     *     *

     Riding down in one of Tower 3's elevators, Cynth thought back now over things she had only half noticed since beginning work for Jango. The odd gurgling of what she figured was a water pipe behind one wall of her office. The way the office was hot as a sauna one day, icy cold the next. She had even complained of this, and maintenance people had looked into the problem; it hadn’t recurred so she’d assumed it had been resolved.

     The elevator took her down past the second floor, where the two home invaders had broken in all those years before. It didn’t stop there, but continued on toward the lobby. After speaking with Simon, though, Cynth had this fear that when she arrived, the doors wouldn’t open, that the elevator would keep her as a prisoner inside.

     It didn’t, however, and she left Tower 3 to cut across the triangular park, along a path through the snow that one of the service robots had plowed.

     Walking toward Tower 1, which loomed over her as if it might topple, cold in its giant’s shadow, Cynth remembered the last day her family had been inside the structure, inside apartment 933, before they’d left for Miniosis. Alone in her room, emptied of all her belongings except for the bed she had outgrown, ten-year-old Cynth had spoken softly to the air, as if partaking in a séance. “Good
-bye, Mr. Moon.” She had been brave, had held back her tears. Barely. “I’ll miss you.”

     For the first time ever, Mr. Moon did not reply to her. At the time, she hadn’t been sure if –  because they were leaving – the computer mind felt it was no longer imperative for it to attend to its former masters. Or was it, instead, that Mr. Moon was at a loss for words?

     She entered the spacious lobby of Tower 1 and found it not much warmer inside than it was outside. The carpet was worn, tracked with mud. The interior metal of the walls and ceiling were not the green verdigris of the exterior, but were still tarnished almost black. A man lay mumbling to himself in uneasy sleep on one sofa, and on the other side of a low table strewn with old newspapers and ragged magazines, an elderly Choom woman slouched deeply in a once plush but now fungus-like chair. She and the sleeping man had gray hair and skin that looked leeched of color, or even life force. Glancing at the woman again, Cynth couldn’t tell if she were not so much elderly as very unwell, but the gray woman’s eyes followed Cynth with a bright curiosity as she made her way across the lobby to the elevator. Cynth had called for the lift, and it was taking an extra long time to arrive, when a voice rasped behind her, “Don’t you go down to the basement, now.”

     Cynth turned to see the faded, wrinkled woman smiling a huge Choom grin over the back of her chair, like the disembodied head of a mummified Cheshire cat. “Excuse me? What’s wrong with the basement?”