Solitaire, page 23
She didn't know, and there was no one to help her. She had no people anymore. The three sisters—maybe they were called Ko and VC and NNA—had eaten that little boat,
The Jackal, and now it was struggling in the belly of the sea. All this work, making the apartment as nice as she could, being brave about the shopping and the neighborhood, the hope of a fingerhold at Solitaire—all this, and she was still simply trying not to drown.
And there was the matter of Crichton, her suspicions and her brilliant eyes that saw too clearly. What could Crichton want with Jackal tomorrow that could be anything but trouble? Maybe her patience had run out and she would pull the plug on Jackal, hand her over to the brain-strippers. Or maybe she wouldn't: so what? If not tomorrow, then someday.
Jackal hugged herself, made herself into a tight ball. So here it was: she was doomed. The only choice she had was how she went under and who she took with her. Well, not Snow. Never Snow. So now I have to do something about this, she thought, with a sudden deep sense of bitter anger. Why do I always have to do something?
Because you do, she told herself. Well, she would do it. Then maybe she could stop being so torn and twisted. Then maybe she could get some fucking sleep.
It took hours to write the pages and pages of e-mail, the whole story of VC, the frightening solitude and the madness and the eventual joy; the current danger and the thin strands of hope still left to her; and her resolution to go it alone. When she was done, she made a cup of tea and cried while she read it through. It was a beautiful letter. It explained everything. It would bring Snow right inside Jackal's head.
Then she deleted it all and sent the necessary message, a ten-second burst of words whose only possible result was distance. She used a transient account that she canceled as soon as she was reasonably sure the message would not bounce for any reason. Then she sat in the growing dark. She was hollow: waves pounded her and filled her full of echoes that sounded sometimes like
Snow and sometimes like don't leave me, don't leave me. But it was done. After a while, she put on her coat and went to Solitaire.
Snow,
I wanted you to hear from me that I am out of prison instead of finding out some other way.
We can't be together anymore. We can't be in touch. You won't hear from me again.
Good-bye.
Jackal
15
THE BAR HELD A BUSY CROWD, LOTS OF MOTION AND rising voices, laughter full of alcohol or some other high. She put her meld on her left cheekbone where it would make a white shock against her skin and the unrelieved black she wore, long-sleeved tunic and trousers and boots; and she used it and the force of her yawning emptiness to carve a path to the bar.
She didn't return Scully's hello, only said, “Can you give me six pints on a tray?”
“Did you bring a friend?” he asked, almost hopefully. She remembered his remark about solos and their friends; maybe she would ask him about it one day, if she ever cared.
“I have some thinking to do.”
“Ah,” Scully said, “the kind of thinking that makes a person want to drink a hundred and twenty ounces of beer in one evening.”
“That's the kind.”
“It's your liver.” But he said it with the particular stamp that she was coming to recognize as his impersonal kindness, comforting because it required no response. And he gave her a dish of olives as well.
She found a table on the outer ring of the room and set her back to the wall. Solitaire staged itself around her. She put the beer away slowly and methodically, and thought about the strange skewed dynamics of anonymous grief in a room full of strangers, people who would notice but not share. Witnesses. She stripped the olive flesh from the pits with her teeth and made sure to suck all the pulp and oil before she dropped them back into the dish. She drank her beer and imagined a huge bowl full of beads that had been dipped in various paints and tossed in together; a giant hand shook the bowl and the beads mixed, bounced against each other, leaving a dent or a streak of color behind. Soon all the beads would be little lumpy rainbows, shaped by each other but still discrete. Millions of them, each one alone in a universe of beads.
She imagined the giant hand reaching into the bowl to pluck out the Jackal bead and put it in a box of its own where it could roll unimpeded, no more friction, no more pain.
She drank. When Scully came by to bus the tables, she told him solemnly, “I know what Solitaire is. It's a special little box for broken beads.”
“Are you okay?”
She thought about it, shook her head.
“Time to go home, maybe.”
“Not done thinking.”
He didn't answer, just hefted the tub over to the next line of tables; a few minutes later he set a mug of strong milky coffee on the table and went away before it occurred to her that she should thank him. The coffee wouldn't make her any less drunk or angry, but it was meant to be comforting and she was touched. She didn't drink it, though. It didn't really go with the beer. She closed her eyes and let the noise of Solitaire spin around her, a tidal pool of words and glassware and background music, voices breaking against her like waves on a reef.
She opened her eyes to find a young man standing a careful distance away.
“Excuse me,” he stuttered. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask,” she said deliberately.
“Are you Ren Segura?”
She put both hands on the table, her heart pumping faster; she wasn't ready for this, not tonight. She thought of the kill lists and the breathless accounts she'd seen on the web sites; and then she saw herself as he must see her, the solo meld defiant against her skin. She wore the badge; she looked at the web sites every night for her name. She had already consented.
“Jackal,” she said.
“Um, sorry?”
“I'm Jackal Segura.”
His eyes opened wide and his mouth jerked in excitement. “Ayo! It is so crisp to meet you! You've been number one on the spotter's list since Mario saw Jeanne Gordineau at HeadSpace last week!”
She had no idea what to say to that, so she picked up the last olive. He seemed to take it as a routine dismissal.
“Well, um, thanks. Um, if you need anything, I'm Razorboy, I do stuff for Scully sometimes.” He managed a certain dignity with the introduction, which he promptly spoiled by adding, “Wait until I tell Cy and Drake about this!” before he faded off toward the back of the room.
The buzz started to spread no more than two minutes later. Grateful for the distraction, she put her training to work charting its course through Solitaire, the one-to-one progress of the news of her identity, followed by a slow I'm-not-looking scan of her sector of the room and the equally slow think-I'll-just-wander-over-to-the-bar stroll that inevitably offered the chance for at least one guess what I know! exchange with someone along the way. She pretended not to notice the curious eyes, or the breathless way the crowd shifted to let her up the line when she decided to go get some more olives, but she did make sure to stand up straight and look as scary-but-not-too as she could manage.
“Welcome to the party,” Scully said. “Razorboy is absolutely delighted with himself. And business will pick up even more the next few days, thanks very much.”
“How thrilling to be useful,” she said. Then she smiled briefly to show him that she wasn't trying to be rude.
He studied her more closely. “How about something else to eat? Grilled cheese sandwich?”
“…sure. Okay.”
He built a fat sandwich with orange and yellow cheeses and thick brown bread, and set it to sizzle on the grill, slathered with butter. Jackal stared around the room, and the art wall caught her gaze. She hadn't looked at it closely since the first day and the aftershock, but now she was curious and the sandwich would take five minutes; so she left the olives on her table and, beer in hand, wandered toward the back of the room. People got out of her way a shade more quickly than on previous nights.
Standing close to the panels made her head feel like it was trying to expand, and she didn't think that was just the beer. The images were brutal and direct, but not simple: they spoke to her of the lonely journey that a person's soul could make when it was faced, unprepared, with itself. There was a new picture that she liked, a forearm and hand reaching out of a hole, caught in a moment that might have been the beginning of a grip or the end of a letting go; it was left to the watcher to decide whether the person inside would pull themselves up or not.
But as nice as that one was, she returned again and again to the panel that was the basis for the solo meld. Whatever else it was, this was a face that shouted, “Here is what VC is like.”
“What do you think?”
A woman stood to her right, so close that her shoulder nearly touched Jackal's arm; the woman from her first day, who tonight had approached so silently that Jackal hadn't sensed her. Jackal managed not to spill her beer.
“Well…at first all I saw was pain…” She hunted for the right words. “But now I think there's more to it. This one could be a face with no more humanity in it. Or it could be a face that has had so much experience, so much contradiction, that it's the complete face. Like it's saying that we can be nothing or all things. And the common thread is anger and endurance: this has both, whether you see it as an empty face or a full one.”
The other woman tilted her chin up, as if considering. Tonight she wore the same fisherman's trousers with a long black priestcollar jacket over a white ribbed T-shirt, a combination that gave her a compelling air of being both brutal and severe. “
Muy bien,” she said finally, with a trace of Euro accent. “That is a graceful thing to say to an artist.”
“You did this?”
The woman shrugged, but in a way that told Jackal it was hardly a casual subject.
“It's very powerful. It makes me feel lonely and strong.”
The woman smiled a strange smile. “A poet,” she said. She turned to face Jackal. As with the last time Jackal had seen her, terrorizing a tourist, the woman's meld was on her right cheekbone, a mirror of the one on Jackal's left. She saw the other woman register the similarity and be flattered. Good; the imitation certainly was a tribute to her style, and this was not a person Jackal wanted to offend. There was no wine bottle tonight, but she remembered the practiced grip she'd seen. And from her time on solo web sites, she had a name to put to this face like a hungry cheetah's under the straight black hair.
“You are Segura,” the woman went on, managing to convey simultaneously
Here's some news for you and Why was this not brought to my attention before?
Jackal nodded, a formal up-down of her head.
“Estar Borja,” the woman said, and even though Jackal had known it was coming, she couldn't help the thrill she felt. It was different when the legend named itself.
“Everyone knows the Lady Butcher,” she answered, sounding like nothing so much as a goggly-eyed fan watcher: she could have kicked herself. The other woman's eyes narrowed: Borja was deciding whether she had been insulted or not.
Jackal said quickly, “I'm sorry, I meant no disrespect. You're such a good artist, I should be talking about that instead of…well, anyway, this is really powerful, like I said. It's beautiful, it's really really beautiful,” she added, surprised at her own intensity. She waved her glass at the wall, and then, finally at a loss, raised it in a toast and drank down half the remaining beer in one gulp.
The muscles around Borja's eyes relaxed. “There's no harm in being known for many achievements,” she said. “You may appreciate me with a drink.”
And it was that easy. They went back to the counter, where two stool-sitters melted away under Borja's stare. Scully gave Jackal her sandwich and Borja a glass of rioja. “Why don't you give me a glass too, and leave the bottle,” Jackal said; Scully's face set into an expression that Jackal couldn't quite fathom, as if he were trying to decide whether to smile or shriek. “Relax, my friend,” Borja said lazily, “I will drink wine with this ferocious child and then she will walk me home safely.” That didn't seem to reassure Scully, but he left them alone with only one last hard look at Jackal.
“What was that all about?” Jackal said.
“He worries too much,” Borja replied unconcernedly, and began to talk of the panels on the wall. Her hands were small and strong, with slender square-tipped fingers that sketched rapid, expressive pictures as she spoke. Jackal found herself telling Estar of her own clumsy attempts at painting and the sadness she had felt when it was clear she had no talent. “This was about ten years ago,” she said, and then fumbled, recovered, “No, of course I mean about four years ago…well, you know what I mean—”
Estar nodded, and Jackal went on, rolling the wine around in her glass, “It was more than just no talent. It was anti-talent. The more I practiced, the worse I got. It was so frustrating to have a picture in my mind and only be able to create something stupid and completely joyless. And to know that the vision would always be a prisoner in my head, there was no way to get it out into the world. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes, of course. Visions want to be real. There is the vision and then there is the act of birthing it.” She touched her meld absently. “We are here because we realized our visions too well.”
Jackal blinked and decided to let that one pass; instead she drank the lees of her wine. It seemed that Estar was finished too: “Walk me home,” she told Jackal, and slid off the stool without waiting for an answer. Jackal followed more slowly, and when a movement caught her eye she turned to see Razorboy slide Estar's dirty wineglass into the pocket of his voluminous madras jacket. He reached for Jackal's: “Don't even think about it,” she said, pitched just loud enough. He jerked his fingers back and blinked at her like a startled owl. Scully plucked the glass off the bar on his way by without missing a beat, then paused long enough to say, “Take her straight home. It's just down the block on the right, the one with the big iron gate.”
Borja was waiting at the door. Jackal waved to Scully and headed out.
They walked in silence to Estar's gate. As usual, Jackal could hear muffled music inside the building. She opened her mouth to say good night, but Estar spoke first. “Come to dinner tomorrow.”
“I'd like that.” She tried to dredge up some pre-VC manners. “What would you like me to bring?”
“Ah,” Estar said, widening her eyes dramatically, “something delicious.” She grinned. “Seven,” she said, and then the gate was closed and Jackal was left on the doorstep grinning in her own turn. Then she remembered, and she almost rattled the gate and shouted, “If I don't show up it's because they're scooping out my brains downtown.” But she didn't. Instead she walked home full of grilled cheese and the beginnings of a classic hangover.
Before she reached the corner of Perdue, a voice said, “
Hola, neighbor!” Out of the darkness came the knife-wielding young woman she'd met on the street the day she moved her belongings into Shangri-La. There were others with her, but they lagged at the edge of the shadows rather than circling Jackal in the way she would have found immediately threatening.
“Buenas noches a ustedes,” she said politely.
The girl lifted a finger at Jackal's cheek. “You are Jackal Segura.”
“That's right.” She braced herself; she didn't really expect trouble now—it would have come already—but she couldn't help remembering Gordineau's morbid predictions.
“Chacal.
Es un nombre bueno.” There were soft noises of agreement from the dark around her.
“And may I know your name?”
“You may know me as Jane,” she said graciously. “Good night, Chacal.”
“Good night, Jane.” But they were already gone.
She felt calmer now, heavy with alcohol but also ready to face whatever was next; the curiosity at Solitaire, Crichton's intimidating behavior. Oh, and all the different versions of ‘not in a million years’ from prospective employers: she hoped they would be polite, but most executives didn't have compassionate confrontation skills. And she would hope for a lovely dinner with Estar Borja.
She was distantly amused, back at her apartment, to find that Razorboy's web site was already updated with the news—
Segura spotted!—including, to fully round out her day, one good digital photo of Estar Borja in mid-gesture, hand blocking Jackal's face, and a second fuzzy one of Jackal with her nose in a glass and five more piled up around her. Still, she could expect to be recognized from now on. It was about time.
She touched the meld on her cheek lightly, and left it on when she went to bed.
