Strange Trades Read online

  When he finished, the applause was real and tremendous.

  Above the clapping, from the table nearest me, I heard a bitter voice say, “The bloody little kaffir sings like a black crow.” A sharp bark of laughter answered.

  I looked to see who had spoken and shattered the magic.

  Seated together were Koos van Staaden, his daughter, Christina, and Henrik Blauvelt.

  Van Staaden and his daughter were refugees, having fled South Africa—or rather, to use its official name, Azania—six years ago when that aching, tortured country finally erupted. Van Staaden had been Administrator of the Transvaal at the time. During his tenure, he had apparently accumulated quite a fortune, most of which he had managed to transfer abroad prior to the revolution. He and Christina, I knew, had caught one of the last flights out of Jo’burg. Maria, his wife, had been at their country home that week. No doubt her scattered bones were bleached the color of my suit by now.

  Spiteful gossip maintained that on the walls of van Staaden’s house hung relics of his homeland, among which was a sjambok, its business end tipped with flakes of brown. I couldn’t quite credit even van Staaden with such an offense.

  Blauvelt, a burly fellow countryman, had been an expatriate in England when the government fell. Nowadays, he acted as Christina’s companion.

  Like so many wealthy dissolutes without goals, they had ended up in the Hesperides.

  I watched van Staaden warily as the patter of applause faded. If he continued to voice his drunken racial slurs, I’d have to sic Deatherage’s man on him. I had plenty of HUB patrons richer than he whom I had no wish to offend.

  As it was, his daughter intervened.

  “Quiet, Father,” she said firmly. “I think he sings very well.”

  Her grip on his arm seemed to drain all belligerence from him. Across his riven face, his love for his daughter warred with his hate. Finally, he raised his glass to his lips and drank deeply, a tired and defeated old relic.

  I studied the strange tableau they presented. Van Staaden was a cranelike figure with a stubble of white hair and a sharp nose. Blauvelt was a beefy man in his thirties, with a dandy’s mannerisms ill-suited to his heavy body. Christina—well, Christina, I thought then, no more fitted in visually with those two than a nun in a rogue’s gallery, or Circe amid her swine.

  She was a willowy, small-breasted woman with hair the color and fineness of platinum threads, styled in bangs across her brow and feathered down the back of her long neck. Her nose was tiny, her lips always hidden by jet lip-gloss. Tonight, she wore lilac pants and top, with white sandals. Like half the women in the club, she had a small lifegem affixed at the base of her throat, which fluxed in time with her pulse.

  The whole potentially ugly scene was over in seconds, much shorter than I have taken to describe it. Charlie had vanished from the stage, and the club buzzed anew with meaningless talk.

  Ten minutes later, I felt a gentle tug at my elbow as I mingled.

  I turned to face Christina van Staaden.

  “I know you overheard my father’s tactless comment, Mr. Holloway,” she said. “I’d like to apologize for him. You will make the proper allowances for his situation, I hope.”

  I nodded without expressing my real opinion. It was something I had grown quite good at.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “It’s all forgotten, then. By the way, I really do feel that Kid Charlemagne is a most exciting performer. I wasn’t just sticking up for him out of sympathy. In fact, I was wondering if I could possibly meet him.”

  She paused for a moment. Then, as if it possessed the utmost importance, she said, “I understand he’s from Mexico.”

  Again, I nodded without comment, neither confirming nor denying. I was trapped in her eyes.

  Once a friend brought me a piece of olivine from Hawaii. Formed in a volcano’s heart, the gem was like translucent jade, hard and impenetrable, with fascinating depths.

  Christina’s eyes were two shards of olivine.

  I thought about her request. I neither liked nor disliked the woman at this point. Yet I felt indebted to her for defusing her father. And of course, she could always approach Charlie on her own if I didn’t introduce her.

  But why try to dissect my motives at this late date?

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go now.”

  Backstage, I knocked on the door to Charlie’s small dressing room. There was no answer, so we went in.

  We found Charlie reading. He pored intently over a paperback I had given him. It was the ’95 edition of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands, with the Ralph Steadman cover.

  “Charlie,” I said. He looked up.

  Sky met sea.

  Something snapped closed in the air between them.

  “Christina van Staaden,” I said.

  But neither heard me.

  The next morning, I sat at a table in the empty room still pulsing with the ghosts of last night’s events, figuring accounts. A shadow fell across the screen of the submicro.

  Across from me stood Leon Deatherage, head of Hesperides security, having arrived in his usual silence.

  I filed my useless reckoning of gains and losses and flicked the machine off. “Sit down, Leon, and save your energy for evildoers.”

  Deatherage lifted a heavy transparent chair off the table with one hand and deftly set it upright. He dropped down into it with a grace that surprised me in such a big man. From his pocket he took a pack of Camel vegerettes. He lit one, puffed briefly, and made a face.

  “Five goddamn years, and I still can’t stand these. My only consolation is that I helped to nail the bastards.”

  Before becoming head of the islands’ security, Deatherage had worked for the L.A. police force. He had been part of the team responsible for capturing the domestic eco-terrorists who had released the tailored tobacco mosaic virus that had ended all cultivation of that crop. The Sierra Club never recovered from the revelation that the conspirators had solicited and received funding from them.

  “What can I do for you, Leon?” I asked. “Do you need a drink this early in the morning? I won’t tell anyone.” I pushed back from the table, as if to rise.

  Deatherage made a magician’s move, and suddenly in the palm of his hand lay a small empty white plastic shell the size of a quarter. It was color-coded like an antique transistor with three dots of red.

  My stomach churned. I wanted to puke my breakfast. Somehow I kept it down.

  My face must have blanched. Deatherage smiled. Suddenly, I regretted taunting him.

  “Recognize it, do you, Holloway? I thought it might touch a chord in your past. Do you want to name it, or shall I?”

  I wet my lips. Merely to summon up the name took an immense act of will.

  “Estheticine,” I said.

  “Exactly. In a nice convenient dermal patch. Would you like to guess where I found it?”

  I said nothing.

  “On the beach, with the used condoms and the empty bottles, during my morning jog.”

  I swallowed gratefully. For an instant, I had been sure he was going to claim it had come from the club.

  “I’m clean,” I said.

  Deatherage looked at me solemnly. “I know that. Do you think I’d come to you if I thought you were the user? I know what you went through to kick the stuff. I want your help. I’ve just been on the phone to friends on the mainland. They say that, due to a series of busts, sources for E have dried up. It’s almost impossible to score now. Whoever’s using this might get your name somehow and come to you. At which point, you come to me, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Very good.” Deatherage rose as if to leave, then sat again, seeming to remember something. I knew it to be a charade. The man forgot nothing.

  “By the way. This singer of yours. Is he a Mex?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “A lot of this stuff comes through Mexico. It could be that he’s our connection.”

  “He’s a citizen,” I said. “You can
check his card. And he told me he’s a HUB.” I don’t know why I lied, except that Deatherage had upset me so much.

  “Hip Urban Black, huh? Well, well see.” Deatherage stood without pretense now. “Remember what I said, Holloway.” He left.

  A lot of unpleasant memories swarmed in to fill his seat.

  Once the world had seemed bright and beautiful. That was when I was young, and my lover was alive.

  His name—we won’t get into his name. What essentials do names capture? He was a charming young mestizo boy of no fixed abode or occupation, whom I had met on a business trip to Guatemala, just before the war. (Once I had another job, another life, when I lived much as everyone else.)

  Picturing his face now, for the first time in years, I realized how much Charlie resembled him.

  I managed to get the boy a visa after I returned stateside, although even then, in the days before mandatory citizen IDs, the authorities were tightening up on immigration of the unskilled. I had to grease many bureaucratic palms.

  I thought I was doing him an immense favor, lifting him up out of his poverty and squalor. I little knew then that I was arranging his death.

  Life in the First World did not agree with him. Everything was too confusing; there were too many choices, too many options. He got into a fast crowd, took risks, became promiscuous—picked up AIDS.

  He died six months before they announced the drug that cured me of the infection he had passed on to me.

  Infection of the body, but not the heart.

  When his death came, the world grew pale and dingy, an echoing stage filled with mocking mannequins and hollow props.

  When I found estheticine, a new kind of beauty returned to fill the void. Unnaturally sharp, crystalline, infinitely seductive and ultimately unsatisfying, promising eventual meaning beyond words that never materialized.

  But once estheticine left me—I truly feel that the drug spurned me, as if I were not good enough for it, rather than I the drug—how did the world look?

  Curiously two-dimensional. A black-and-white place, leached of all emotional resonance.

  Something of an improvement, I suppose, over the pain of stage two.

  Thanks to estheticine.

  Uglybuster, E, lotos, beardsley—call it what you will, it remained the quintessential drug of the late, late twentieth century.

  In a world of ever-increasing ugliness, who did not occasionally wish that everything might appear beautiful?

  At the beginning of the decade, experiments on the perception of beauty came to a head. (The publicity images persist: the wired people at the ballet, the museum, the edge of the Grand Canyon, their responses being plumbed and recorded.) Exact ratios and mixes of neurotransmitters were fingered as the agents; sites of stimulation in the brain were charted. Synthesis succeeded. The result: estheticine.

  To be used only judiciously, of course. Let the connoisseur brighten Beethoven, magnify Mozart, uncage Cage.

  Most definitely not recommended as a crutch.

  How surprised the experts were when the public began to swallow it like candy, and the GNP dropped by three percent in six months. How quick the authorities were to outlaw it. How fast the underground sales sprang up.

  And now it had reached me here, on my dead-end island in the sun.

  Two concerns filled all my free time during the weeks following the meeting between Charlie and Christina.

  Who was using estheticine on the island?

  What was going on between my young singer and the woman with the semiprecious eyes?

  I made no headway on the former. Deatherage did not approach me again, and try as I might, I could detect no users among my clientele—least of all Charlie, who I knew needed the drug no more than a fish needed a substitute for the clean sea in which it daily swam.

  As for my impractical lie about Charlie’s origins, Deatherage never called me on it, perhaps believing my former addict’s brain was turning to mush.

  I made more progress on the latter topic. In a sense, learning what they did together was easy. In another way, baffling.

  Everyone in the Hesperides—except the reclusive and rum-sodden Koos van Staaden— knew the two were lovers. That much of their relationship was evident in their every gesture.

  The two of them were together continuously, except when Charlie was performing.

  Wearing hemosponge units, they dove in the azure waters surrounding the Hesperides. Once they even swam out and down to the UCLA research station bedded on the ocean floor. I remember how tired Charlie was at that night’s performance. The muscles in his lean flat legs twitched as he sat astride his stool, and he had to cancel his last set of the evening.

  They rode motor scooters (no cars were allowed on the islands) all over the hilly interior and along the cliff paths. One morning, as I stood on the veranda watching the crowds of gawking daytrippers (the feverish pleasures indulged in by the rich in plain view on the beach never failed to shock them), I saw two small figures atop Sheepshead Bluff. I recognized the colored smudges intuitively for Charlie and Christina. Sunlight glinted off the chrome of their bikes and caused my eyes to tear. For a moment, I had the frightening delusion that they were about to jump, fulfilling some incomprehensible lovers’ suicide pact.

  Water-skiing and hang-gliding, swimming and racing hydroplanes, the two enjoyed all the Hesperides had to offer. It seemed an idyll of young love, an eternal summer of instant fulfillment.

  That much, as I’ve said, was easy to discern.

  The baffling part was understanding how two such disparate personalities meshed. What had really prompted Christina to ask for that introduction? I couldn’t reconcile infatuation with a certain flintiness I sensed in her soul.

  I felt I had to know more about her. I decided Blauvelt was the one to pump.

  Around noon one day, I managed to catch the man as he idled past the club. At my insistence, he came inside for a drink. He favored the awful peach liqueur I so disliked to stock.

  We sat at the same table where Deatherage and I had had our disturbing talk. I naturally compared the two men. Although of a size with the security chief, Blauvelt was somehow spongy, an amorphous thing masquerading as a man. In his sweaty tennis clothes, he looked like a wax dummy left too long in the sun. I knew I would have no trouble getting information from him.

  “Henrik,” I said, “I need your help.” He looked flattered. “You understand that I have an enormous investment tied up in that singer of mine. He’s good for business, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  I was sure the mercenary angle would appeal to Blauvelt. His cynical smile confirmed it.

  “So,” I continued, “I need to know all about Christina, and her relationship with him. After all, we wouldn’t want her father causing trouble, would we? How is it, by the way, that he’s not aware of what’s going on?”

  Blauvelt sipped his syrupy drink. “Old Koos—he thinks I’m still chaperoning his daughter. He talks to no one—thinks all you Americans are rooineks, anyway. And I’m not about to tell him his girl’s seeing Charlemagne. Not as long as Christina keeps the money flowing my way.”

  “Is Christina the type to form a romantic attachment so quickly?”

  Blauvelt scowled, as if I had hit upon some sore spot. “Not in my book. There was never anything between us. Christina’s been a different person since the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “Back in the Transvaal. One night on the road between Jo’burg and Pretoria, she drove right into a stupid kaffir and his cows crossing the highway. Her Mercedes flipped three times. Stupid wog was killed outright, of course. Christina sustained a lot of brain damage. Ever notice her hair?”

  “Thin and white, I believe.”

  “Grew back that way after they shaved her head for the operation. Used to be black as night before. Just like her mother’s. Those bangs of hers—they hide the scar on her forehead. Notice how she always wears a cap when she swims. She’s very self-consci
ous about it.”

  “She seems quite normal now. How did they repair her injuries?”

  Blauvelt waved his hand negligently, as if to dismiss as unimportant all things he could not understand. “Tissue transplant of some sort. Newest thing, it was. God, we had some smart bloody people before the bad times. But even they couldn’t stop the Black bastards, could they? Even A-bombing Capetown didn’t slow them down.”

  He drained his drink and got to his feet. I considered Christina’s fleshed-in past.

  “Do you think it’s love, then?” I asked.

  Blauvelt shrugged. “Love for herself, yes. For that little songbird—hardly.” Then he left.

  Alone, I tapped into the medical databases, curious as to how Christina’s apparently massive wounds had been healed.

  Embryonic brain tissue had proven to be the only matter that could be planted to adapt and grow in the adult brain, repairing and substituting for lost sections. No in vitro process had yet been perfected to serve as an ethical source of the tissue, and so the procedure was not advocated in the West.

  In old South Africa, they had had embryos to spare—”donated” by pregnant slum-dwellers in Soweto and elsewhere.

  The clinics where such operations had been performed were the first places to be torched in the war. Then they were dismantled brick by charred brick.

  The first time Charlie and Christina disappeared, it was for only three days, and I wasn’t too concerned. I, who never left the confines of La Pomme, knew best of anyone how close and stultifying the Hesperides could become. I assumed that they felt at last the need to explore their feelings for each other in a different setting. That could have been Charlie’s motives for the unscheduled trip, at least. What alien urges swayed Christina, I could not say.