Holy Fire (31 page)

Their clothes were decorative and columnar and slender hipped and without much in the way of bustline. To see these clothes was to realize just how garments could be beautiful, impressive, even feminine, while being almost entirely free of sexual allure. The clothes were splendidly cut and defined. Rather ecclesiastical, rather bankerly, rather like the court dress of high-powered palace eunuchs from the Manchu Forbidden City. Some of the clothes showed skin, but it was the kind of skin a woman might reveal as she conquered the English Channel.

The clothes were very rich in feathering. Not frail or showy feathers, but feathers in gleaming businesslike array, feathers in swathes like chain mail. Giancarlo had been very reliant on feathers this spring season. It was mostly the detail work with feathers that had sent these garments soaring into the unearthly realm of luxe.

“[It’s not just the risk reduction,]” said the nearest model, in Italiano. “[You get a six-point-five percent rate of return.]”

“[I’m not sure the time is right for medical mutual funds,]” said a second model. “[Besides, I’m Catholic.]”

“[No one says you have to take a treatment on the banned list, you just invest in them,]” said the first model patiently. She was deeply, spiritually, untouchably beautiful;
she looked like a bit player in Botticelli’s
Primavera
. “[Talk to any Vatican banker sometime, darling. They’re very simpatico and very up to speed about this.]”

The second model looked at Maya in surprise, and then at her wristwatch. “[When do you go on?]”

Maya touched her necklace and her ear. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italiano.”

“Your diamonds are so true to the past life, I love the diamonds,” said the second model in halting but sympathetic English. “The hair, though—not so very good. That’s very smart hair, that’s not twenties hair.”

“You’re very sexy,” the first model told her politely. “
Molte grazie
” Maya said tentatively. “There should be more couture for sexy women now, such a pity sexy women don’t have proper money,” the first model said. “When I was young and sexy they paid me so much money. It’s so hard for young girls now, it’s so hard to sell sexy. Really, it’s not fair one bit, not at all.”

The show was warming up outside; she could hear periodic bursts of applause. They brought her Vietti’s gown, still warm from the instantiator. This gown fit at least as well as the cheaper version Novak had given her, but Vietti’s stylists did not consider this a proper fit at all. Maya found herself naked and shivering beneath the impassive eyes and knowing hands of two men and three women. They slashed quickly at the gown with razorlike ceramic scissors and painted her goose-bumped flesh with quick-setting adhesive. In a fury of efficiency they squeezed and waxed her into the gown, then jammed her feet into pumps two sizes too small. Then, out the door in a bustle of anxious minders. Philippe hurried alongside her, retouching her face as she waited to take her cue.

When her cue came she left the curtain and walked as she had been taught. The catwalk’s floods were as bright as double-ranked full moons and the audience beyond their arc was a gleaming mass of spex, nocturnal eyes in a gilded swamp. They were playing a twenties pop song, a
theme she actually recognized, a song she’d once thought was slick. Now the ancient pop song sounded lost and primitive, almost feral. Theme music for the triumphal march of the living fossils.

They’d dressed her as a glamorous young woman from the 2020s. A joke, a little shattering blast at the conceptual framework. Because, in stark actuality, she’d been a young woman during the 2020s. She had never been glamorous then, not a bit like this, not even for a moment, because she had been far too busy and far too careful. And now through some astounding fluke of chic she had avenged herself. The joy of it was both nostalgic and immediate, melding in her head in a fabulous jouissance.

White laserflashes puffed from cameras in the audience, growing into a crescendo as she walked. She felt so radiant. She was stunning people. She was whirling past their machine-shrouded eyes like nostalgic vertigo. She was the cynosure, the belle, the vamp, the femme fatale. Lost love beyond mortal attainment, dressed to kill, dressed to bury, dressed to rise again and walk among mortals. She had crushed them with stolen charisma. They had dressed a risen ghost in a Milanese couture gown and let her trample time underfoot. She was making them love her.

She took the little pirouette at the end of the walkway, kicked back a bit with a crack of heels, sneered at them happily. She was so high above them and so wrapped in lunar brightness, and they were such low fetid dark creatures that not a one of them could ever touch her. The walk was taking forever. She had forgotten how to breathe. The sense of constriction made her frantic with excitement. A white crane leapt onto the catwalk, immediately recognized that it had done something rash, and hopped off into the crowd with a jostle of pipestem legs and a snowy flap of wings. She hesitated just before the curtain, then whirled and blew the crowd a kiss. They responded with a cataclysm of photographic flash shots.

Behind the curtain she found herself tingling,
trembling. She found a stool in a corner and sat and fought for proper breath. The crowd was still applauding. Then the music changed and another model slid past her like an angel on casters.

Novak found her. He was laughing.

“What a brave girl. You don’t give two pins, do you?”

“Was I all right?”

“Better than that! You looked so very pleased and wicked, like a little spoilt child. It was so pretty of you, so apropos.”

“Will Giancarlo be happy with me?”

“I have no idea. He probably thinks you’re a terrible brat to ham it up that way. But don’t worry, it made the night for the rest of us.” Novak chuckled. She hadn’t seen Novak truly pleased before; he was like a man who’d just pulled off a trick billiard shot with a rubber cue. “Giancarlo will come around, once he hears them talk about you. Giancarlo’s very clever in that way. He never judges anything until he sees what it’s done to his public.”

Maya tumbled hard from her crest of elation. The real world felt so deflated suddenly. Quotidian, wearied, flat. “I did the best that I could.”

“Of course you did, of course you did,” he soothed. “You mustn’t cry, darling, it’s all right now. It was very nice for us, it was different. They hire the pros to walk properly for them, and you were very sincere, they can’t buy that.” Novak took her elbow and led her backstage to a watercooler.

He deftly filled a cup with pristine distillate and gave it to her, one-handed. “It’s so remarkable,” he mused. “You can’t show a garment to advantage, of course, because you’re only a little beginner. But you truly have that look! Seeing you there, it was like archival video. Some Yankee girl from the twenties, in her too-tight shoes, so touchingly proud of her wonderful gown. What déjà vu, what
mono no aw arel
. It was uncanny.”

Maya wiped at her tears, and tried to smile. “Oh, I’m
so bad, I’ve ruined that wonderful job Philippe did on my eyes.”

“No, no, don’t fret now.” Novak stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Maya, we’re going to do a proper photo shoot. You and I. We can bring your Philippe in on the job, we can bill for him. When you are working on assignment for Giancarlo, it’s very nice to have some good expensive people you can bill for.… ”

“I should go thank Giancarlo. Shouldn’t I? He really did me a huge favor, letting me go on. I mean, compared to all these professionals … And they were so kind to me, they weren’t jealous at all.”

“They are veterans. You’re far too young to make them jealous. You can thank your friend Giancarlo on the net. It’s better for us to leave now.” Novak smiled. “You’ve beaten them, darling, you beat them like sick old dogs. We’ll go now. It’s always best to leave them wanting more.”

“Well, I’ll get dressed, then.”

“Wear that gown. You can keep it. They had to hurry, so they had to ruin it.”

“Well, I’d better return this incredible wig at least.”

“Take the wig with us, we’ll hold the wig. Just to make sure they call.”

She managed to get rid of the pinching shoes. When she emerged from the dressing room she found Novak clawing one-handed at the air in the corridor, as if fighting off a phantom horde of gnats. He hadn’t gone mad, he was only using the menus on his spex. He was calling them a taxi.

Novak led her deftly past half a dozen random well-wishers backstage. The professionals all seemed quite pleased and amused with her, in their rigid and terrifying fashion. They escaped the amphitheater by a stage exit. It was cold outside, cold enough to frost the breath. The sweat leapt off her bare neck and shoulders into the Roman night. She shivered violently.

When they rounded the corner of the Kio, the paparazzi spotted them. A dozen of them dashed up, yelling at her in Italiano. They were the youngest of the paparazzi, which accounted for the fact that they were willing to dash. Some of them held up ragged halos of fiber-optic flash wire, drowning the damp pavement in sudden gouts of light. Maya smiled at them, flattered. When they saw this response they yelled more loudly and with greater enthusiasm.

“Does anyone here speak English?” Maya said.

The paparazzi, circling them and staring through their gleaming lenses, held a quick shouted consultation. A young woman hurriedly shoved her way through from the back. “I do, I speak English! Will you really talk to us?”

“Sure.”

“Great! We all want to know how you pulled that off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, how did you get your big break?” said the girl, hastily plucking the translation cuff from her ear. She was American. “Did you do it yourself?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, so you owe it to your escort here? Does he sponsor you? What’s your relationship with this guy exactly? And what’s your name, and who is he, anyway?”

“I’m Maya and this is Mr. Josef Novak. There’s certainly nothing illicit about our relationship.”

Novak laughed. “Don’t tell them that! I’m deeply touched to be a source of scandal.”

“How do you know Giancarlo Vietti? How old are you? Where are you from?”

“Don’t tell them anything,” Novak advised, “let the poor creatures feed on mystery.”

“Don’t be that way,” begged the young paparazza. She forced a business card on Maya. The flimsy card showed nothing but a name and a net-address. “Can I interview you later, Signorina Maya? Where are you from?”

“Where are
you
from?” Maya said.

“California.”

“What city?”

“The Bay.”

Maya stared at her. “Wait a minute! I can’t believe this! I
know
you! You’re Brett!”

Brett laughed. “Sorry, that’s not my name.”

“But it is! Your name is Brett and you had a boyfriend named Griff and I bought one of your jackets once.”

“Well, my name’s not Brett, and if anybody had one of my jackets it sure wouldn’t be a runway model for Giancarlo Vietti.”

“You
are
Brett, you had a rattlesnake! What on earth are you doing here in Roma, Brett? And what have you done to your hair?”

“Look, my name’s Natalie, okay? And what does it look like I’m doing here? I’m hanging around on a cold pavement outside a couture show trying to pick up scraps, that’s what.” Brett pulled off her spex and stared at Maya in pained surprise. “How come you know so much about me? Do I really know you? How? Why?”

“But it’s me, Brett! It’s me, Maya,” Maya said, and she shuddered from head to foot. A finger’s width of glue popped loose on her back. She was freezing. And she suddenly felt very bad. Nauseated, dizzy.

“You don’t know me,” Brett insisted. “I never saw you before in my life! What’s going on in there? Why are you trying to fool me?”

“The cab’s here,” Novak said.

“Don’t go now!” Brett grabbed her arm. “D’you know there’s a million girls who’d
kill
to do what you just did? How’d you do that? What do I have to do, to get that lucky? Tell me!”

“Don’t touch her!” Novak barked. Brett jumped back as if shot.

“If you knew what it was like in there,” Novak told her, “you’d go home tomorrow! Go lie on the beach, be
a young woman, live, breathe! There’s nothing for you there. They made sure of that long before you were born.”

“I feel so bad, Josef,” Maya wailed.

“Get in the taxi.” Novak shoveled her inside. The doors shut. Brett stood stunned on the pavement, then jumped out and hammered at the window, shouting silently. The taxi pulled away.

N
ext morning she found she’d gotten write-ups on the net. There were white tuberoses from Vietti and eight calls from industry journalists. One of the journalists had called from the hotel lobby. He was camping out there.

They had breakfast smuggled into Novak’s room. “You’re not at the point where you can talk to real journalists,” Novak told her. “Journalists are the class enemies of celebrity models. They become hormonally excited when they discover any fact that will cause you deep personal pain.”

“I’m not a celebrity model.” She certainly didn’t feel the part. She’d had to shred the couture gown. It had required cleansing cream, a long-handled loofah, and half an hour to scrub the glue from her skin. She hadn’t dared to sleep in the intelligent wig, and in the morning she discovered it limp and dead. She couldn’t even manage to boot its software.

“That’s true enough, but a pile of sand is not yet Bohemian crystal, my dear.”

“I want to be a photographer, not a model.”

“Don’t be hasty. You should learn how to work to the camera before you torment other people with a lens. A few location shots will teach you proper sympathy for all your future victims.” Novak patted his grizzled lips with a napkin, stood, and began emptying his travel case on the bed.

The false bottom of his case held two deep layers of
gray equipment foam. Four sets of highly specialized spex. Lenses in 35 mm, 105, 200, 250. Two ductile fisheyes and a photogrammeter. A tripod. Filters. Two camera bodies. Sync cording. Ten meters of tunable laser fiber-optic lighting cord. Gaffer tape. A fat graphics notebook with a high-powered touch-up wand and backup storage. Multi-head photofloods, roll-up reflector cards, filter frames, adapter rings, matte foil, a pocket superconductor.