In World City (14 page)

How they met – again.

Dion found himself with twelve under-tens. They were not his company men or even kids' stuff workers. They were far too young. But somehow he had allowed them under his protection: they were brothers of his company men, or they wanted to become company men, or he had simply found them one day. They were a messed-up crowd, abused, dysfunctional, prey to rages that went way beyond anything the situation warranted. But none had been so messed up that they hadn't been able to break away one day and survive long enough to find their way to Dion. And none had been so damaged they couldn't dream of becoming company men. Still, Dion wanted to do something with them right now, knock them into some kind of group that could be effective in the work he was running. He told himself he was getting them ready for business, but Leo would have said he was being soft and Leo would have been right. Dion needed to find something for them to do, some economic role so his company men could see some justification for them being around.

Nial, the eldest at just over nine years, found the advertisement while gazing into an information-centre screen, coasting through the personal columns in one of the more dangerous areas of bulletin board: ‘Needed, healthy children under ten years of age to act as volunteers for medical research. Full ethical approval obtained. Good rates of reimbursement.' A site address was given. Nial said to Dion, “It'll be pornography or worse. But you could check if it's straight. You know, be our safety man, negotiate pay.”

Dion contacted the site address. The message he left said where and when, and what identifier the contact should wear. Two days later he was seated in the lobby of the World City hotel he had specified, waiting for the hour he had specified. The hour came and with it a young man wearing the specified flower in his buttonhole. The young man looked uncomfortable and remained looking that way when he saw Dion recognise him. Dion motioned him to be seated. The young man asked, “Are you from out of the Waste?”

Dion nodded.

“All I know about any of this is that my principal wants to meet with you there, not here.”

“Why not here?” Dion asked, savouring the anonymity of the place.

“Someone might recognise her.”

Dion considered the young man. No point in asking him questions. He wondered where in the Waste would be the best place to meet someone who might be recognised in World City. He smiled to himself and described a damp cubicle at the top of a stained, concrete apartment block. There was an old Asian lady who would show his guest up. Dion had not been there in ten years, but he still kept an option on the space. His parting words to the uncomfortable young man were, “She'll need to ask for Dion's Place.”

*

Miranda Whitlam was accompanied into the Waste by one driver who doubled as a bodyguard. She tried to dress down for the occasion but wealth radiated from her like an aura. Most of the people she passed assumed she was criminal, which, in truth, she was.

The old Asian lady twittered suspiciously at the sight of her but was happy enough to take her money, in exchange for showing her up to ‘Dion's Place' and for having the driver-bodyguard sit with her in silence, drinking coffee, watching her cook.

Once up in the cubicle, Miranda sat cross-legged on the filthy floor. Some kind of creature had been living there in Dion's absence – probably rat. She waited, deliberately relaxing herself, emptying her mind, working on not being aware of the dirty, ammoniac air she was breathing. Thus Dion, who, out of age-long habit, moved in complete silence, came upon her when her eyes were closed and her face was in an expression of complete repose. He recognised her instantly and stood dead still, taking in this new world he had just stepped into.

Some of it was still familiar: the concrete-bound space beneath the roof where he had survived his first years in the Waste; the single bulkhead light with its surface-cabling pinned to the wall and its ceramic switch that you turned rather than pressed; runnels of dried leakage from the roof; paper and cloth strewn across the floor; traces of rat shit; and, surprisingly, still taped at three corners, a travel poster of a jungle-clad tropical island.

But then, in one corner, facing outwards, her face sidelit by the unsoftened glare of the bulkhead light, Miranda Whitlam. The shock of seeing her there almost made Dion cry out loud. For a moment, he thought he saw a shadow pass across the littered floor and, as when he first saw her so many years before, he found himself questioning whether this was a substantial person he was looking at.

This time it was less easy to decide. Her figure seemed to have separated from the surroundings, cocooned in its own luminosity, and there was no inner whisper from his grandmother to tell him she was too sensibly dressed to be a vision. Her dark, chestnut hair was more luxuriant now, tumbling in waves over her shoulders rather than being cropped for the tropical heat. The skin was still snow-smooth but, in the unforgiving light, unreally so. Her clothes were loose, casual, black. She remained Buddha-still, eyes closed. Dion watched until she opened them and looked up at him.

*

Miranda Whitlam saw a stranger, tall, somewhat over six feet, in a stained cape that reached from around his neck almost to the floor. A hat with a broad, floppy brim fell across his forehead. In the space between cape and hat, the skin showed jet black, the eyes liquid dark. The face: South Indian, North African, Nilotic? She couldn't place it. This troubled Miranda. She liked to be able to place things. It also troubled her that she couldn't place the type of person this was. She had expected something ugly; something like the kind of low life she assumed haunted these marginal worlds. She had resigned herself to having some pusher try and sell her a handful of strung-out kids who only wanted the money to sustain whatever habit they'd got themselves into – in which case she would have had to refuse. She needed children with some basic hope of healthy survival. But this, she had already accepted, would be difficult. What she wanted to do to these children was not acceptable in the world she came from, the world in which ethics committees and informed consent ruled everything she might try. True, she had approval for her control group, but, unknown to them, she also needed an experimental group.

But this man, surveying her carefully, was not self-evidently degenerate; criminal possibly, but not obviously mired by the dissolution the types she had expected thrived on. He was probably all the worse for that, she concluded, and rose to her feet. She said, “Hi,” and Dion heard the forced brightness and saw the complete lack of recognition.

He felt a kind of cruel humour rising. When they had last met, he had known things she hadn't and he had wasted that knowledge on her. Now he was older and much more experienced. He would waste nothing. This time round, he told himself, he would make sure he had secured her attention before investing any feeling in her.

“Who's that man down there?” he asked, nodding back towards the stairwell. He could recognise a servant well enough when he saw one and knew something of how servants worked but he wanted to challenge her with a question. Dion guessed the man drinking coffee with the Asian lady down the stairs was employed as a driver, but he would be thinking of himself as a bodyguard. Dion was slightly sorry it wasn't the man who had called him a filthy little nigger all those years before, but he decided to assume the one below was in direct line of descent.

“That's my driver. You didn't think I would come here alone?”

Dion heard the stirrings of contempt in her voice. He looked hard at the coat she was wearing, his gaze resting just under her left armpit. Of course she hadn't come alone and she hadn't come vulnerable. He let his gaze hang until he was sure she had noticed then eased his own left arm out as if he was feeling some slight discomfort there himself. The driver-bodyguard issue he would deal with later, when he had a better sense of how far he could push her.

“So, what are these medical experiments you want to do?”

“The details are necessarily secret. The experiment requires no more than a single injection. After that I take blood samples once a month.”

She said nothing further, making it clear she expected Dion to make the next move. Dion let an ironic smile show. This was just toe-in-the-water stuff.

“You have to take samples – once a month,” Dion mused out loud. “You have to take samples? – Just you? No nurse or technician, nothing like that?”

“There'll be only me.”

She looked uncomfortable. Of course she looked uncomfortable. Her discomfort – and the fact she was doing this alone – made a lot of things clear, like how much she wanted to do this, and how much against the rules it was.

“How much are you prepared to pay for each kid?”

“How much do you want?”

“No,” Dion whipped back, “This isn't drugs or sex. This isn't shit with a market price. This is kids under my protection. I need to know how much this means to you.”

“And I need to know whether I've any chance of success.”

They stared at each other, Miranda forcing herself to meet his gaze, fearing he might see how desperately uneasy she was. By the minute, this tall, dark man was getting less and less like any of the stereotypes she had imagined. What had he meant by, ‘kids under my protection'? He seemed so dangerously serious. He was still looking at her. She said, “What are they bringing you in right now?”

Dion named five times the figure they would be getting if they were working the kids' stuff, and well into it.

“How many do you have under ten?”

“Twelve.”

“What are they like? Are they addicted to anything? I need them in good health.”

Dion regarded her speculatively. She had got practical fast. That much was promising. “They're in good enough health. They might take something sometimes but no one's hooked.”

“Okay, if it works out, I'll pay twice what each one's making you now,” looking at him like she knew the price was high but this was a game she would play generously.

“I was thinking more like four times as much,” Dion said, holding in his mind all this must mean to her.

“Okay, make it three. You started high. But it'll need to work out.”

“So what do you need for it to work out?”

“I need that you guarantee they turn up once a month fit and healthy.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you want, as long as it's away from anywhere I might be recognised. Why not here?”

Had she stopped to think, Miranda would have recognised this filthy concrete cubicle was the last place in the world she would have wished to return to. But so desperate was she to complete the deal she had simply grasped for what was most ready to hand.

Dion allowed himself a wry chuckle. Why not here? Why not, indeed. Dion's Place.

“Is there a problem with that?” Miranda asked quickly.

“It's a long way from World City,” Dion covered.

“World City,” Miranda repeated levelly – a phrase she had heard used by clever people in the media to identify their supposed empire. It sounded eerily powerful, though, coming from this unfathomable black man who lived a life immeasurably far from any media reach or interest. “I told you, I might be recognised in World City. Anyway, what's the problem?”

“It's okay. There's no problem. No problem at all.”

“I'd need it cleaned up, of course.”

Dion found himself lightening. This Miranda was talking to him like he was someone who mattered, someone who could actually grant her wishes.

“Okay, I can organise that,” he said easily. “I need money up front for the decoration though. The kids you can pay for according to who shows up on the first day. They'll all show up, but you can see that happen before you spend any more.”

He was pleased to see her look surprised. She'd been expecting to risk losing money on this. He gave her a fair estimate for how much he would need to get the room in order. She reached inside her coat and counted out from a wad of notes, handing him over a rounded-up sum. Dion nodded his acknowledgement.

“So, what do I tell them?” he asked, as he took the cash. “Okay, you said it was a secret. But your advert said you had ethical approval for this. You didn't say the details were necessarily secret to the people who gave you that.”

“Of course I haven't got ethical approval for what I want to do here,” Miranda snapped. The tension was getting to her, not least the tension that came from it all seeming to go so smoothly. She still hadn't detected anything contemptible about this man, unless it was his sarcasm over her bulletin-board notice – and the high price he'd opened with. “Listen,” she added less sharply, “I've got a group of children that I want to compare yours with and I've got ethical approval for studying them, but I'm not injecting the group I've ethical approval for with anything.”

“So, what do I tell my kids?”

“Tell them I've tested what I want to inject them with on animals – rats and monkeys mainly – and they've been fine. There's a remote chance of an immune reaction developing, but it's unlikely and it's even more unlikely it'll be serious. There's a theoretical chance of cancer, but that's so remote as to be near enough impossible and anyway, if such a thing did happen I'd pick it up so early from the monthly testing there would be no question of it not being successfully treated. As far as that goes, your kids would probably have a better chance of staying healthy than anyone outside of the experiment.”

“What are you going to inject them with?”

“It's a mixture of proteins and nucleic acids – ordinary biological molecules – nothing toxic.”

Proteins and nucleic acids, Dion thought. The words meant a little to him from school lessons way back. He would remember the words and maybe find out a bit more about what they might really mean.