Holy Fire (28 page)

“Yes, of course I found the pornography. But I left this call button for you”—Benedetta gestured at the chalkboard—“because we have a little problem now. A little problem in the palazzo.”

“We do, do we?”

“Something is loose in here. Something alive.”

“Something you
let
loose, or something you
found
loose?”

“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know,” Benedetta said. “I tried to find out, but I can’t. Neither can anyone else.”

“I see. How many ‘anyone elses’ have you let through here, exactly?”

“Maya, this old palazzo is very big. Wonderfully big. There’s a lot of space. No one was using it, and it’s wonderful that there are no network cops here. Please don’t be jealous. Believe me, you never would have noticed us. If not for this little trouble.”

“This isn’t good news.”

“But there is very good news. There’s money inside this place. Did you know that? Real money! Old people’s certified money!”

“How nice. Did you and the gang leave any money for me?”

“Listen, I so much want to talk to you,” said Benedetta. “About everything. But this truly is not a good time. I’m playing cards with my father right now. I don’t like to do this kind of talk from my father’s house. Can you come to Bologna and see me? I have a lot I can offer to you. I want to be your friend.”

“Maybe I can come. Exactly how much money did
you find? Do I have enough to pay off these Swiss shareware pests for this diamond necklace you gave me?”

“Don’t worry about the necklace,” Benedetta said. “The Ohrschmuck company went broke. They asked too much, so no one ever paid them. Just give the necklace to some other woman. She can use it free for a month before it starts to complain in the ear.”

“You’re such a treasure, darling.”

“Let me call you later, Maya. I’ve been bad, I admit it. I will do for you so much better if you only give me a chance! Just for one thing, I can give you much better online presence—do you know that you look like a big ugly blue block to me? Where are you now?”

“I’m nowhere that you need to know about. Leave me a message with Paul.”

Benedetta’s virtual mouth stretched in surprise. “You didn’t tell Paul about your palace, I hope.”

“Why shouldn’t I tell Paul?”

“Darling, Paul is only a theorist. But I am an activist.”

“Maybe I’m a theorist, too.”

“I don’t think that you are,” Benedetta said. “I don’t think that at all. Am I wrong?”

Maya considered this. “All right, if we can’t tell Paul, then leave a message for me at the Tête. I go there almost every day. I’m on pretty good terms with Klaus.”

“All right. At the Tête. That’s a good idea. Klaus is a good man, he is so discreet. Now I truly must go.” Benedetta morphed. The chair recovered and lay sideways on the floor.

Maya tried to set the toppled chair upright. Her gloved hands plunged through it repeatedly, with the deep ontological uselessness of dysfunctional software. She struggled with the chair for quite some time, her back bent, wrestling air at various experimental angles.

She then became aware of another presence in the virtual room. She gazed about herself cautiously, not moving.
The virtual presence oozed through the wall, moved through her presence like a crawling wind, exited through the far wall. A fractured glaze creeping through the fabric of computation.

Maya yanked her head from the spex and earphones. She stripped the gloves away from her swollen fingertips. She shut the machine down. Then she examined the sweat-smeared gear, regretting the vilely incriminating cloud of human DNA she had just deposited on Czech police equipment. She scrubbed at the spex a bit with her sleeve, just as if that token gesture would help anything. DNA was microscopic. Evidence was everywhere. Evidence was totipresent, the truth seething below awareness, just like germs.

But crime could not become a crime unless somebody, somehow, cared enough to notice.

She decided not to steal the handy touchscreen.

S
he was tired now, so she got onto a train and slept for two hours as it ran back and forth below the city. Then she walked into a netsite at the Malostranska tubestation and asked the net to find her Josef Novak. The net offered his address in a split second. Maya took the tube back to Karlovo Namesti and walked, footsore and limping, to Josef Novak’s home. The place did not look promising. She examined her civil-support map, cross-checked it twice, and then pushed on the doorbell. No response. She pushed harder and the defunct doorbell cracked inside its plastic case.

She pounded on the iron-bound wooden door with the side of her fist. There were muffled noises from the interior, but nobody bothered to answer. She banged again, harder.

An elderly Czech woman opened the door, which was
secured on a short brass chain. She wore a head-scarf and spex. “[What do you want?]”

“I want Josef Novak. I need to speak to him.”

“[I don’t speak English. Josef isn’t taking any visitors. Especially not tourists. Go away.]” The door slammed shut.

Maya went out and had some chutovky with a side of knedliky. These little setbacks were very useful. If she remembered to eat every time she was locked out, shut out, or thrown out, it would keep her fit and healthy. After a final carton of tasty government-issue blancmange she returned to Novak’s place and knocked again.

The same woman answered, this time in a thick winter night-robe. “[You again! The girl who smells like Stuttgart. Don’t bother us, it’s very rude and it’s useless!]” Slam.

Another good reminder. Maya walked down the block and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil wasn’t there. Emil’s absence might have been worrisome, but she deduced from the state of his kitchen that he’d had to leave the place to eat. She scrubbed and mopped for a long time, and inoculated the studio with certain handy packets she’d acquired in Stuttgart. The studio began to reek of fresh bananas. This solid victory over the unseen world of the microbial gave Maya a great sense of accomplishment. She walked back to Novak’s in the cold and darkness, and knocked again.

A bent white-haired man opened the door. He had a black jacket with one sleeve. The old man had only one arm. “[What do you want?]”

“Do you speak English, Mr. Novak?”

“If I must.”

“I’m your new pupil. My name is Maya.”

“I don’t take pupils,” Novak said politely, “and I’m leaving for Roma tomorrow.”

“Then I’m also leaving for Roma tomorrow.”

Novak stared at her through the wedge of light in his chained door.

“
Glass Labyrinth,
” Maya said. “
The Sculpture Gardens. The Water Anima. Vanished Statues.
”

Novak sighed. “Those titles sound so very bad in English.… Well, I suppose you had better come in.”

The walls on the ground floor of Novak’s home were a wooden honeycomb: a phantasmagoria of hexagonal storage racks. Jointed wooden puppets. Glassware. Etching tools. Feathers. Wicker. Postage stamps. Stone eggs. Children’s marbles. Fountain pens and paper clips. Eyeglasses. Relief masks. Compasses and hourglasses. Medals. Belt buckles. Pennywhistles and windup toys. Some of the cubbyholes were stuffed to bursting. Others spare, a very few entirely empty. Like a wooden hive infested by some sentient race of time-traveling bees.

There were study tables, but no place to sit. The bare floor was waxed and glossy.

A sleepy female voice called down from the stairs. “[What is it?]”

“[A guest has come,]” Novak said. He reached into his baggy trouser pocket and pulled out an enameled lighter. “[Is it that stupid American girl with short hair?]”

“[Exactly, the very same.]” Novak thumb-clicked a muddy flame and methodically lit a candelabrum. Six candle flames waxed. The overhead lights blinked out. The room was immersed in deep yellow. “[Darling, send down a beanbag, won’t you?]”

“[It’s late. Tell her to go away.]”

“[She’s very pretty,]” said Novak. “[There are sometimes uses for someone very pretty.]”

There was silence. Then a pair of black beanbags came slithering down the candlelit stairs like a pair of undulant blood puddings.

Novak sat in his bag and gestured one-armed at Maya. His right arm was gone at the shoulder. He seemed very
much at ease with his loss, as if a single arm were perfectly adequate and other people were merely being excessive.

Maya heaved her backpack onto the wooden floor. She sat in her beanbag. “I want to learn photography.”

“Photography.” Novak nodded. “It’s wonderful! So very real, so much like life. If you are a Cyclops. Nailed in one spot. For one five-thousandth of a second.”

“I know you can teach me.”

“I have taught photography,” Novak admitted like a man under torture. “I have taught human beings to see like a camera. What a fine accomplishment! Look at this poor little house of mine. I’ve been a photographer for ninety years, ninety! What do we have for all that hard work, the old woman and I? Nothing. All the terrible market crashes! Devaluations! Confiscatory taxes! Abolitions and eliminations! Political troubles. Plagues! Bank crashes! Nothing solid, nothing that lasts.”

Novak glared at her with resigned suspicion, gone all peasant shrewdness suddenly, protuberant ears, bristling eyebrows, a swollen old-man’s nose like a potato. “We have no property, we have no assets. We are very old people, but we have nothing for you, girl. You should go, and save everyone trouble.”

“But you’re famous.”

“I outlived my fame, I am forgotten. I only go on because I cannot help myself.”

Maya gazed around the sitting room. A unique melange of eclectic clutter and utter cleanliness. A thousand little objects on the razor’s edge of art and junk. A library of gimmickry rocket-blasted from the grip of time. Yet there was not a speck of dust in the place. Those who worship the Muses end up running a museum.

The burning candles gnawed their white cores of string inside their waxy sheaths. The white-haired Novak seemed perfectly at ease with an extended silence.

Maya pointed to the top of the honeycomb of wooden
shelving. “That crystal vase,” she said, “that decanter up there.”

“Old Bohemian glass,” said Novak.

“It’s very beautiful.”

Novak whistled softly. A trapdoor opened in the wall beside the kitchen and a human arm flopped out.

The arm landed on the wooden floor with a meaty slap of five outstretched fingers. Its naked shoulder had a feathery clump like the curled marine feet of a barnacle.

The arm flexed and leapt, flexed and leapt, pogoing deftly across the gleaming candlelit floorboards. It twisted and ducked, and then tunneled with unearthly speed into a scarcely visible slit in the empty shoulder of Novak’s jacket.

Novak squinted, winced a bit, then lifted his artificial hand and flexed it gently.

He then shifted casually onto his left elbow in the beanbag and reached far across the room. The right arm stretched out, its hairless skin gone all bubbled and granular, his forearm shrinking to the width of bird bone. His distant hand grasped the decanter. He fetched it back, his arm reassuming normal size with a quiet internal rasp, like ashes crunching underfoot.

He gave Maya the decanter. She studied it in the candlelight.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I lived inside it for a little while. It was a universe.”

Novak shrugged. With his new arm and shoulder attached, he shrugged in remarkable fashion. “Poets have said the same for a single grain of sand.”

She looked up. “This glass is made of sand, isn’t it? A camera’s lens is made from sand. A data bit is like a single grain of sand.”

Slowly, Novak smiled. “There’s good news,” he said. “I like you.”

“It’s such a wonder to hold the glass labyrinth,” she said, turning the decanter in her hands. “It seemed so
much more real when it was virtual.” She gave it back to him.

Novak examined his decanter idly, stroking it with the left hand, the right one like a glove-shaped set of rubber forceps. “Well, it’s very old. A little shape from culture’s attic. Oh attic shape!” He began to recite aloud, in Czestina. “ ‘[Designed with marble men and marble women, and forest branches, and weeds crushed by the feet. You silent formation. You twist our minds as if you were eternity. You poem of ice! When old age kills this generation, you will remain in the thick of other people’s troubles. A friend to humanity. You say to us, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” We know nothing else and we need to know no more.]’ ”

“Was that poetry?”

“An old English poem.”

“Why not recite the poem in English, then?”

“There is no poetry left in English. When they stretched that language to cover the whole earth, all the poetry fell out of it.”

Maya thought this over. It sounded very plausible, and seemed to explain a lot. “Does the poem still sound all right in Czestina, though?”

“Czestina is an obsolescent platform,” Novak said. He stood up, stretched his arm like plasticine, and put his decanter in place.

“When do we leave for Roma?” Maya said.

“In the morning. Early.”

“May I sit here and wait for you, then?”

“If you promise to blow out the candles,” Novak said. And he trudged upstairs. After ten minutes his arm hopped down and deftly put itself away.

T
hey left for Roma in the morning. Mrs. Novakova had packed her husband an enormous shoulder-slung case. Novak didn’t bother to take his prosthetic arm.

Maya shouldered her backpack. Bravely she offered to carry Novak’s case. Novak handed it over at once. It weighed half a ton. Novak collected himself with a sigh of discontent, opened his front door with deep reluctance, and took three short steps across the ancient sidewalk into a very new and very polished limousine.

Maya put the case and her backpack in the trunk and climbed into the limo, which departed with silent efficiency. “Why won’t your wife come with us to Roma?”

“Oh, these business events, they are tiresomeness itself, they are completely obligatory. They bore her.”

“How long have you and Milena been married?”

“Since 1994,” Novak grunted. “A marriage in name only now. We live like brother and sister.” He stroked his chin. “No, that doesn’t put it correctly. We’re past any burden of gender. We live like commensal animals.”