I wandered through Berlin's darkest alleys for hours before emerging onto a long narrow street lined with bars and restaurants. I felt young and wild, a homeless wanderer, ravenous for new experiences. I pressed my nose to the plate glass window of a Turkish snack bar and stared wonderingly at a young couple laughing and joking with the waiter as they waited for their kebabs. Saliva dribbled down my unshaven chin. For the first time in a month, I realized how hungry I was. Anastasia seemed to live on an orange or a plum or a bunch of grapes. Once when we were returning particularly late from a nightclub, she suddenly braked to a screeching halt in the middle of the Kurfurstendamm during the morning rush hour and haggled over the price of a kilo of tangerines with a street vendor, oblivious to the irate honking of horns, and I cowered in my seat and put on an anxious smile when I saw a helmeted policeman ride up on a motorcycle and stride menacingly towards the Ferrari, but the policeman only saluted respectfully when he recognized Anastasia, and when he gestured imploringly at the traffic jam that had grown to incredible proportions behind us, Anastasia merely nodded testily, finished bargaining at her leisure, and peeled and ate her tangerine as she drove with one hand at high speed back to her apartment where she smeared the tangerines all over my body and licked off the viscous juices...
But man cannot live on fruit alone and so I spent the rest of the night walking down the street, stopping at each restaurant for a snack before proceeding to the next bar for a beer. At eleven in the morning, I was drowsily sipping Irish coffee in the Cafe Odeon, a soothing stack of newspapers before me, catching up on the world news of the last month, when a familiar voice caught my ear. I looked over at the next table and saw Immanuel. His hair was sticking up wildly and his bony shoulders were hunched up under a purple dressing gown tied loosely at the waist over a grey undershirt exposing his thin freckled chest. Pale blue hospital pajamas with numbers stencilled on the side were tucked into suede leprechaun boots. I had trouble believing my bleary eyes, but there he was, mad as ever, gesturing away maniacally at his handsome companion. "Man! What are you doing here?" I exclaimed in delighted recognition.
Immanuel stopped in mid-harangue and looked over. "Oh, hallo!" he said without surprise, raising a hand in benediction. "This is a world-famous cafe. Everyone meets here eventually. I was just telling Benito that if we stuck around long enough we might enter a time warp and meet Einstein or Hitler."
"Hi!" Benito said warmly. I remembered sitting in a cafe in Prague with Man and Benito. It seemed like a very long time ago. Benito's dress sense had improved: he had relinquished the Kalifornia liberal look in favor of a more conventional Euro-fag style that suited him far better. The ripped jeans patched with red plaid had been replaced by sharply creased olive drab trousers. A double-breasted blue blazer ostentatiously accentuated his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and its brass buttons had been polished to a blinding glare. All he lacked was a yellow silk cravat to wrap loosely around his tanned brown throat.
"What are you two doing in Berlin?" I asked, joining them.
"Buying big books," Immanuel said. "The bigger the better."
"For the Department of Culture library," Benito added. "I'm also working at the University of Truth and Justice now. I'm the new coordinator of the department of Culture."
"How are things at the university?" I asked nostalgically.
"Lots of peace and love since you left," Immanuel assured me.
"And since Marya Madlenova arrived," Benito added with enthusiasm. "She's a babe. Red hot!"
"Is that any way to talk about the greatest philologist of our time?" Immanuel chided, cuffing Benito on his handsome head. "Madlenova is beyond words."
I wished that I could meet this paragon of intellect and wickedness. So many attractive women in the world and so little time. Still, life is long and relationships are short: perhaps, one day I would encounter the mythical Madlenova. "I wish I were back there," I sighed.
"It's the happiest environment I have ever known," Immanuel declared. "It's driving me up the wall."
"Everyone still taking vitamins?" I inquired cautiously.
"More than ever," Benito answered enthusiastically. His brown eyes sparkled. "They're amazing, aren't they? We've been told that they will be in the drinking water soon. No more pills. So much more convenient that way."
"Who is in charge of vitamin distribution now?"
"Why, I am," Benito replied proudly, puffing out his pectorals. "I get a shipment from England every Monday and I put them out at the bars and at the reception desk. Hey, by the way, remember that cute chick at reception, Annichka? Boy, she really misses you. She's always talking about how you promised her drugs."
"Uh, right," I mumbled, embarrassed. I had been in Berlin for weeks now, taking exotic drugs every night and I hadn't given even a passing thought to pretty little Annichka. "Benito, who sends you the shipment of vitamins from England?"
Benito looked confused. "Someone at the X-O-X Foundation. Why?"
"Just curious," I replied evasively. "How's Otto Hell?"
"Seems all right," Immanuel answered. "We play chess and drink wine when he's around. H's away a lot, giving lectures at some conference or the other."
"Everyone at the department seems to be away a lot," Benito said, frowning. He obviously took his job very seriously. "They give lectures everywhere. Except to our own students."
"Well, that's what low-lifes like me are for," Immanuel responded consolingly. "The big names fly around the world and the small fry do the work. That's normal."
"Nothing you do is normal, Manny," Benito replied spiritedly. "Fyodor's been telling me about your lectures."
"I don't give lectures," Immanuel said with some pride. "I deliver sermons."
"About ethical obligation when facing up to apocalypse?" I asked.
"What else?" Immanuel grinned. "I rant. I rave. I think of it as performance art. Post-television evangelism. Like this." He pulled out a small plastic bag from his pocket and hurled it onto the table. "Speed! Coffee is not fast enough! We must accelerate!" he declaimed theatrically. His hair stood up on end and his eyes rolled alarmingly in his head. "There is not enough time if we are to save the world!"
"I thought you had given up on saving the world. Isn't it all over?"
"It is all over. But it is our ethical obligation to pretend! This is my new philosophical method. I adapted it from method acting. I call it ontological mimesis."
"What's that in plain English?" Benito inquired admiringly.
"Learning from the chameleons. Reptiles are good at adapting to their environment. They know how to survive in the wilderness. You're from LA. You should understand. Oh, speaking of Kalifornia..." Immanuel turned to me. "You got a parcel and Annichka didn't know what to do with it so I told her to give it to me. I knew I'd run into you somewhere." He dug around in his stained canvas knapsack. "Here it is."
I recognized my friend Sleaze's neat handwriting on the small parcel. The package contained a little cardboard box and a note. I opened the box. Carefully nestled in a bedding of cottonwool, sparkling like sapphires, lay a handful of iridescent blue pills. I sighed. Did I really need yet more drugs? But then I thought of Anastasia. She could use a new thrill. Besides some savage scratches, brutal bites, and other vicious wounds, I had received only excitement and exhilaration from being with her, not to mention the hundreds of marks which I had wildly squandered that night on Turkish kebabs and Irish coffee. Anastasia had been good to me, and I had to give the devil her due. Luke's note was cryptic: `Where did you get the pill you sent me? The thought police are about to raid my lab. I am on the move. Leave a message with Barbie. I will call you back.' I set a match to the paper and watched it turn into the twisted wings of a monstrous moth. I thoughtfully pounded it into a tidy pile of grey ashes and went in search of a phone.
Using the global calling card my mother had once given me in desperation, I called Barbie in Kalifornia only to got her answering machine. Amidst a disconcerting melange of sounds, the thunder of rolling surf, new age music, little bells tinkling, I managed to make out Barbie's sweet voice. "Barbara Ann is at the beach," she sang out cheerfully, "but she's not out of reach. Leave a number after the tone, and then wait anxiously by your phone." I assured Barbie of my enduring love and left the number of the Cafe Odeon. Then I bribed a waitress with enormous red arms to make sure that no one used the phone until I got my call. My mother was undergoing a heart operation, I told the matronly waitress, and I was waiting desperately for news of her condition. Tears dripped down the waitress's plump motherly cheeks and, as she furtively accepted the hundred mark bill I slipped into her huge hand, the last of the money I had stolen from Anastasia, she assured me that anyone who wanted to use the phone would have to reckon with her. A few minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman staggered past, staunching the blood flowing profusely down his bewildered face. The waitress followed him, clutching a rolling pin. She smiled at me and pointed towards the phone.
"Hi. Are you on a safe line?" Luke's voice was calm and precise as ever.
"This is a cafe. Why the secrecy?"
"I have to be careful. Every phone call is monitored in this fascist state. Where did you get that pill?"
"Somebody gave it to me in Prague. They told me it was a vitamin. What's the matter? Is it lethal?"
Luke laughed curtly. "Not exactly. I designed it."
"What?" I asked incredulously. I had a sudden sensation that the whole world was shrinking very rapidly all around me but that I remained exactly the same size. I had known this claustrophobia before but I still didn't like it.
"Look, I'll spare you the chemical details but there is an incredible isomorphism between part of the molecular structure of the pill you sent me and a new drug I designed about a year ago. The similarity cannot be a coincidence. Nobody else in the world is pursuing the specific line of psychochemical research which led me to develop this particular drug."
"What does it do?" I asked nervously.
"That's the thing. The drug I designed has certain essential similarities to the vitamin you sent me." Luke hesitated. "But the pill you took is different. For one thing, it's an extremely dilute compound of the drug I designed and some inert substance. But more importantly, the drug has been altered. Half of the drug has been twisted in some way. There's a very complicated asymmetry involved... I can't say what effects these alterations may produce."
"What was the drug you designed?"
"About a year ago a private foundation approached me..."
"What was the name of the foundation?" I interrupted.
"The X-O-X Foundation." Luke said. "Why?"
"Never mind. I'll tell you later. Go on."
"Anyway, this foundation asked me to design a drug for them. They knew exactly what effects they wanted. Superficially, a state of euphoria and self-confidence. That's easy enough to produce. A million drugs can do that by stimulating the brain's production of endorphins, you know, the things that make you feel good. But these people wanted more. They wanted a drug which would make people feel good about being good. A drug which would set up an enduring association between moral behavior and physical pleasure."
"And that's what I was on?"
"Only partly. I told you, there are crucial differences in the drug I developed and the one you took. What worries me is who made the alterations."
"What do you mean?"
"None of the leading pyschopharmacologists who work in established pharmaceutical companies would touch a project like this and if they did I would have read about it in the professional literature. And I can count the really good underground drug designers on the fingers of one hand. There's me," Luke said without false modesty. "Hans van der Annersvoort in Amsterdam. Slawek Nawrocki in Cracow. Toshiki Kanemaru in Osaka. And Nina Hamidi in Berlin. I've been in touch with all of them. Kanemaru and I don't get along personally but he wouldn't lie to me about something like this. Great artists don't paint over each other's canvases. They all swear that they haven't touched the drug I developed. So who is it?"
"Isn't there some way you can find out from the X-O-X Foundation?"
"They paid me two million dollars for designing this drug and told me that they would get back in touch with me about another project. I could try to reach Miss Setton and ask her..."
"Miss What?"
"The woman from the X-O-X foundation. What's the matter?"
"Sleaze. What was her first name? Do you remember what she looked like?"
"Her first name was Lucy," Luke replied obligingly. "I don't know what she looked like. We negotiated by e-mail."
I was in shock. "I don't think you can reach her now, Luke. She's been dead for a month."
"Impossible," Luke responded crisply. "I got a message from her just a week ago asking me the number of my Swiss bank account."
"Did she tell you how this foundation had heard about you?"
"I assumed that someone in the field would have told them about me. Maybe one of my professors at Berkeley. Maybe they just looked at the underground electronic bulletin boards. Getting in touch with me by e-mail is easy enough. The police state hasn't managed to totally infiltrate the computer networks yet. It's the phone surveillance I'm worried about..."
"Okay. Two more questions and I'll let you go," I promised. "What did you do with the two million dollars? And what are the pills you sent me?"
"It takes a lot of money to stay on the run," Luke said. "And I've been trying to bribe the Peruvian police into letting Jesus escape..."
"The Peruvian police?"
"Yeah. Didn't you know?" Luke sounded surprised. "You really are out of touch! The Peruvian police caught Jesus two weeks ago along with most of the other Enlightenment leadership. Jesus is in jail in Lima right now. They want to crucify him as an example."
"Is Jesus that important?"
"Well, he has been the Enlightenment's main spokesman for a few years ago. Since their founder was arrested and executed."
"Hell." I was horrified by the image of my old schoolfriend, Jesus Guevara, dangling limply from some rude scaffold in the Andes. I remembered his disgust with the endemic corruption and cruelty of the ruling regime in his country. I had dimly been aware over the years of Jesus's growing involvement in radical politics, but I had never realized how prominent he was in the shadowy revolutionary movement called the Enlightenment.
"Life is hell and then you die, as we used to say in prep school. Maybe I can get Jesus off the cross. It's all about bribing the right people. As for the pills I sent you, try them and tell me what you think. The drug I was designing for the X-O-X foundation put me onto a very promising new line of research. Bye for now."
I hung up the phone and looked blankly into the round face of the motherly waitress. "Well, how is she?" the waitress inquired anxiously. "Your mother."
"They operated for six hours," I said, putting my hand on the wall for support. I really did feel weak. "They replaced her left ventricle and right auricle with plastic valves. They vacuumed out fat from the major arteries and veins which were all blocked." The waitress gasped and put her hands to her mouth. I shook my head in despair. "It is touch and go. She may live. She may die. But she will never again eat strudel." I brushed a tear from my eye. "No more Kaffee und Kuchen for the rest of her life. It is terrible, is it not?" The plump waitress nodded earnestly, her eyes bulging out of her head at the prospect of a lifetime of such deprivation. I smiled wanly at her. "Thank you for your help."
I joined Immanuel and Benito. As usual, they were arguing about the prospects for the survival of life on earth. "Don't give me this crap about sustainable development," Man screamed. "It doesn't matter whether a billion Chinese peasants should be allowed to buy refrigerators or not."
"But a billion more refrigerators would completely wipe out the ozone layer," Benito demurred earnestly. "And then they'll want other large consumer appliances..."
"So what?" Man laughed harshly. "Let them lounge around guzzling six packs of chilled beer while they watch soap operas on huge television sets. Let them pop cheese popcorn in their microwaves. Let them drive large inefficient automobiles with tailfins. Let them eat steak!"
"But the electricity..." Benito spluttered. "The car emissions... The methane farted by the cows..."
Immanuel thumped the table vehemently. "It doesn't matter. There just aren't enough resources to sustain the good life for everyone on this planet. Let the poor fuckers in the Third World at least dream of the consumer lifestyle while they starve and suffocate to death. It's irrelevant. Human beings have already finished off any future for themselves. And for most other species on this planet. Can't you get it through your thick skull? Apocalypse happened yesterday."
"But that's so hopeless." Benito's voice broke in a dying fall. Under his thick eyelashes, his olive eyes seemed full of tears. I felt a sudden surge of affection for him and for all the other billions of pleasant, amiable, and beautiful young animals like him out there.
"The only hope for life is that a solitary breed of cockroach in some landfill somewhere is hardy enough to survive," Immanuel said. "Although it's misleading to give examples. We don't know what will come after us. All we can hope is that something survives. As Nietzsche says..." He dug around in his tattered backpack and then looked up. "I didn't bring it with me. I'll show you when we get back to Prague."
"When are you going back?" I asked enviously.
"Tomorrow afternoon," Benito answered. "Nero says we have to return right away."
"Who's Nero?"
"Nero Insanetti. Your replacement," Man answered. "Hell's assistant. He's... strange."
"I like Nero," Benito said. "He's a wop too. We guineas gotta stick together!" He threw back his head and laughed uproariously. "He wasn't always this crazy."
"You're right," Immanuel agreed. "He was actually quite pleasant when he first arrived from Budapest."
"Dealing with the bureaucrats at the Amerikan Embassy was Nero's undoing," Benito said mournfully. "Now, every time he hears an Amerikan accent, he locks himself into his office, whimpering. He only talks to me because I'm so proud of my Italian roots."
"What did the Amerikan Embassy do to him?" I asked, baffled.
"They sent the body over in a meat truck. It was personally addressed to Nero. The problem was that they had forgotten to take all these other hunks of meat out of the truck and he had to figure out which carcass was hers. It was horrible. He'll feel better once he disposes of the body. Next week, I hope. He's taken to carrying a gun around with him lately and I don't like it. I keep trying to give him vitamins but he just refuses to take them."
"We're all just hunks of meat," Immanuel interpolated irrelevantly. "Waiting for the inevitable maggots."
"Now the body is hanging around in the deep freeze of the University kitchen."
"You mean Lucy's body is still at the University of Truth and Justice?" I asked, stunned.
"Lucy?" Benito looked confused. "Oh, yeah, that's what she claimed her name was. It turned out that her real name was Charlotte Stant. Interpol identified her last week. She was a backpacker, just a nice Amerikan college girl doing Europe on her summer holiday..." Benito shook his handsome head sorrowfully. "Then she disappeared suddenly. The friend with whom she was travelling was worried but then she just assumed that Charlotte must have hooked up with someone else."
"Do they know where Charlotte was from?"
"Yeah. Nero's sending the body to Salt Lake City. No wonder she lost her mind. She was a Mormon, can you imagine?"
I thought sadly about a pair of wide azure eyes, of an angel with an ash-blonde halo. "Yes," I replied heavily. "I knew her well."
But I had to wonder: had I in fact known Lucy at all? From the day when she picked me up at Prague airport until the night of her mysterious murder, in all the days in which we worked together and all the nights in which she had snuggled up to me, what strange spirit had lain lurking behind those wide azure eyes? Why should a nice young Amerikan college girl named Charlotte Stant have disappeared in the middle of her summer vacation, adopted the name `Lucy Setton' and come to work for the University of Truth and Justice? And how was it possible that someone named Lucy Setton should have been in touch with my friend Luke Leazy on behalf of the X-O-X Foundation both before and after Charlotte Stant's death? After my argument with Anastasia about the possibility of spirits hopping from one body to another, I had the uneasy feeling that Benito might be wrong: Charlotte Stant had not lost her mind at all. Rather, she had lost her body. I realized that I would have to ask Anastasia about all this. I shivered.
Immanuel looked at me sympathetically. "You look beat," he said. "What are you doing tonight?"
"I have to talk to a witch about body-snatching." I yawned. "Nothing special. Why?"
"We're going to a concert. Want to come?"
"Who's playing?"
"Old Nick and the Fallen Angels. I saw them in Boston a few years ago." Man sighed heavily. "It was during the Gulf War and my girlfriend had just been arrested for necrophilia. She worked as a night guard at a morgue and she couldn't resist screwing the stiffs..."
"Where are they playing?"
"At Holle. Know where that is?"
I winced at the memory of what Nasty had done to the two young boys we had met there one night. "Yeah. I know where that is. I'll be in disguise."
I overcame my fears and went back to Anastasia's apartment. She was not there. I lay down and tried to sleep for a while but my head was as much a mess as the apartment. In an effort to bring some order to the jumble of confused and incoherent thoughts whirling around in my brain, I set about cleaning up the indescribable clutter in the apartment. I washed out coffee cups, dusted shelves, vacuumed the floors, arranged magazines neatly on coffee tables, and even washed and ironed Anastasia's clothes. After a while, the dust in my tired brain settled and only one nagging thought remained. Who the devil was Lucy Setton? I sighed and closed my eyes tight. It was none of my business whether there was life after death: I would find out soon enough. The living have drugs to take and rock concerts to attend: let the dead bury the dead.
But man cannot live on fruit alone and so I spent the rest of the night walking down the street, stopping at each restaurant for a snack before proceeding to the next bar for a beer. At eleven in the morning, I was drowsily sipping Irish coffee in the Cafe Odeon, a soothing stack of newspapers before me, catching up on the world news of the last month, when a familiar voice caught my ear. I looked over at the next table and saw Immanuel. His hair was sticking up wildly and his bony shoulders were hunched up under a purple dressing gown tied loosely at the waist over a grey undershirt exposing his thin freckled chest. Pale blue hospital pajamas with numbers stencilled on the side were tucked into suede leprechaun boots. I had trouble believing my bleary eyes, but there he was, mad as ever, gesturing away maniacally at his handsome companion. "Man! What are you doing here?" I exclaimed in delighted recognition.
Immanuel stopped in mid-harangue and looked over. "Oh, hallo!" he said without surprise, raising a hand in benediction. "This is a world-famous cafe. Everyone meets here eventually. I was just telling Benito that if we stuck around long enough we might enter a time warp and meet Einstein or Hitler."
"Hi!" Benito said warmly. I remembered sitting in a cafe in Prague with Man and Benito. It seemed like a very long time ago. Benito's dress sense had improved: he had relinquished the Kalifornia liberal look in favor of a more conventional Euro-fag style that suited him far better. The ripped jeans patched with red plaid had been replaced by sharply creased olive drab trousers. A double-breasted blue blazer ostentatiously accentuated his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and its brass buttons had been polished to a blinding glare. All he lacked was a yellow silk cravat to wrap loosely around his tanned brown throat.
"What are you two doing in Berlin?" I asked, joining them.
"Buying big books," Immanuel said. "The bigger the better."
"For the Department of Culture library," Benito added. "I'm also working at the University of Truth and Justice now. I'm the new coordinator of the department of Culture."
"How are things at the university?" I asked nostalgically.
"Lots of peace and love since you left," Immanuel assured me.
"And since Marya Madlenova arrived," Benito added with enthusiasm. "She's a babe. Red hot!"
"Is that any way to talk about the greatest philologist of our time?" Immanuel chided, cuffing Benito on his handsome head. "Madlenova is beyond words."
I wished that I could meet this paragon of intellect and wickedness. So many attractive women in the world and so little time. Still, life is long and relationships are short: perhaps, one day I would encounter the mythical Madlenova. "I wish I were back there," I sighed.
"It's the happiest environment I have ever known," Immanuel declared. "It's driving me up the wall."
"Everyone still taking vitamins?" I inquired cautiously.
"More than ever," Benito answered enthusiastically. His brown eyes sparkled. "They're amazing, aren't they? We've been told that they will be in the drinking water soon. No more pills. So much more convenient that way."
"Who is in charge of vitamin distribution now?"
"Why, I am," Benito replied proudly, puffing out his pectorals. "I get a shipment from England every Monday and I put them out at the bars and at the reception desk. Hey, by the way, remember that cute chick at reception, Annichka? Boy, she really misses you. She's always talking about how you promised her drugs."
"Uh, right," I mumbled, embarrassed. I had been in Berlin for weeks now, taking exotic drugs every night and I hadn't given even a passing thought to pretty little Annichka. "Benito, who sends you the shipment of vitamins from England?"
Benito looked confused. "Someone at the X-O-X Foundation. Why?"
"Just curious," I replied evasively. "How's Otto Hell?"
"Seems all right," Immanuel answered. "We play chess and drink wine when he's around. H's away a lot, giving lectures at some conference or the other."
"Everyone at the department seems to be away a lot," Benito said, frowning. He obviously took his job very seriously. "They give lectures everywhere. Except to our own students."
"Well, that's what low-lifes like me are for," Immanuel responded consolingly. "The big names fly around the world and the small fry do the work. That's normal."
"Nothing you do is normal, Manny," Benito replied spiritedly. "Fyodor's been telling me about your lectures."
"I don't give lectures," Immanuel said with some pride. "I deliver sermons."
"About ethical obligation when facing up to apocalypse?" I asked.
"What else?" Immanuel grinned. "I rant. I rave. I think of it as performance art. Post-television evangelism. Like this." He pulled out a small plastic bag from his pocket and hurled it onto the table. "Speed! Coffee is not fast enough! We must accelerate!" he declaimed theatrically. His hair stood up on end and his eyes rolled alarmingly in his head. "There is not enough time if we are to save the world!"
"I thought you had given up on saving the world. Isn't it all over?"
"It is all over. But it is our ethical obligation to pretend! This is my new philosophical method. I adapted it from method acting. I call it ontological mimesis."
"What's that in plain English?" Benito inquired admiringly.
"Learning from the chameleons. Reptiles are good at adapting to their environment. They know how to survive in the wilderness. You're from LA. You should understand. Oh, speaking of Kalifornia..." Immanuel turned to me. "You got a parcel and Annichka didn't know what to do with it so I told her to give it to me. I knew I'd run into you somewhere." He dug around in his stained canvas knapsack. "Here it is."
I recognized my friend Sleaze's neat handwriting on the small parcel. The package contained a little cardboard box and a note. I opened the box. Carefully nestled in a bedding of cottonwool, sparkling like sapphires, lay a handful of iridescent blue pills. I sighed. Did I really need yet more drugs? But then I thought of Anastasia. She could use a new thrill. Besides some savage scratches, brutal bites, and other vicious wounds, I had received only excitement and exhilaration from being with her, not to mention the hundreds of marks which I had wildly squandered that night on Turkish kebabs and Irish coffee. Anastasia had been good to me, and I had to give the devil her due. Luke's note was cryptic: `Where did you get the pill you sent me? The thought police are about to raid my lab. I am on the move. Leave a message with Barbie. I will call you back.' I set a match to the paper and watched it turn into the twisted wings of a monstrous moth. I thoughtfully pounded it into a tidy pile of grey ashes and went in search of a phone.
Using the global calling card my mother had once given me in desperation, I called Barbie in Kalifornia only to got her answering machine. Amidst a disconcerting melange of sounds, the thunder of rolling surf, new age music, little bells tinkling, I managed to make out Barbie's sweet voice. "Barbara Ann is at the beach," she sang out cheerfully, "but she's not out of reach. Leave a number after the tone, and then wait anxiously by your phone." I assured Barbie of my enduring love and left the number of the Cafe Odeon. Then I bribed a waitress with enormous red arms to make sure that no one used the phone until I got my call. My mother was undergoing a heart operation, I told the matronly waitress, and I was waiting desperately for news of her condition. Tears dripped down the waitress's plump motherly cheeks and, as she furtively accepted the hundred mark bill I slipped into her huge hand, the last of the money I had stolen from Anastasia, she assured me that anyone who wanted to use the phone would have to reckon with her. A few minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman staggered past, staunching the blood flowing profusely down his bewildered face. The waitress followed him, clutching a rolling pin. She smiled at me and pointed towards the phone.
"Hi. Are you on a safe line?" Luke's voice was calm and precise as ever.
"This is a cafe. Why the secrecy?"
"I have to be careful. Every phone call is monitored in this fascist state. Where did you get that pill?"
"Somebody gave it to me in Prague. They told me it was a vitamin. What's the matter? Is it lethal?"
Luke laughed curtly. "Not exactly. I designed it."
"What?" I asked incredulously. I had a sudden sensation that the whole world was shrinking very rapidly all around me but that I remained exactly the same size. I had known this claustrophobia before but I still didn't like it.
"Look, I'll spare you the chemical details but there is an incredible isomorphism between part of the molecular structure of the pill you sent me and a new drug I designed about a year ago. The similarity cannot be a coincidence. Nobody else in the world is pursuing the specific line of psychochemical research which led me to develop this particular drug."
"What does it do?" I asked nervously.
"That's the thing. The drug I designed has certain essential similarities to the vitamin you sent me." Luke hesitated. "But the pill you took is different. For one thing, it's an extremely dilute compound of the drug I designed and some inert substance. But more importantly, the drug has been altered. Half of the drug has been twisted in some way. There's a very complicated asymmetry involved... I can't say what effects these alterations may produce."
"What was the drug you designed?"
"About a year ago a private foundation approached me..."
"What was the name of the foundation?" I interrupted.
"The X-O-X Foundation." Luke said. "Why?"
"Never mind. I'll tell you later. Go on."
"Anyway, this foundation asked me to design a drug for them. They knew exactly what effects they wanted. Superficially, a state of euphoria and self-confidence. That's easy enough to produce. A million drugs can do that by stimulating the brain's production of endorphins, you know, the things that make you feel good. But these people wanted more. They wanted a drug which would make people feel good about being good. A drug which would set up an enduring association between moral behavior and physical pleasure."
"And that's what I was on?"
"Only partly. I told you, there are crucial differences in the drug I developed and the one you took. What worries me is who made the alterations."
"What do you mean?"
"None of the leading pyschopharmacologists who work in established pharmaceutical companies would touch a project like this and if they did I would have read about it in the professional literature. And I can count the really good underground drug designers on the fingers of one hand. There's me," Luke said without false modesty. "Hans van der Annersvoort in Amsterdam. Slawek Nawrocki in Cracow. Toshiki Kanemaru in Osaka. And Nina Hamidi in Berlin. I've been in touch with all of them. Kanemaru and I don't get along personally but he wouldn't lie to me about something like this. Great artists don't paint over each other's canvases. They all swear that they haven't touched the drug I developed. So who is it?"
"Isn't there some way you can find out from the X-O-X Foundation?"
"They paid me two million dollars for designing this drug and told me that they would get back in touch with me about another project. I could try to reach Miss Setton and ask her..."
"Miss What?"
"The woman from the X-O-X foundation. What's the matter?"
"Sleaze. What was her first name? Do you remember what she looked like?"
"Her first name was Lucy," Luke replied obligingly. "I don't know what she looked like. We negotiated by e-mail."
I was in shock. "I don't think you can reach her now, Luke. She's been dead for a month."
"Impossible," Luke responded crisply. "I got a message from her just a week ago asking me the number of my Swiss bank account."
"Did she tell you how this foundation had heard about you?"
"I assumed that someone in the field would have told them about me. Maybe one of my professors at Berkeley. Maybe they just looked at the underground electronic bulletin boards. Getting in touch with me by e-mail is easy enough. The police state hasn't managed to totally infiltrate the computer networks yet. It's the phone surveillance I'm worried about..."
"Okay. Two more questions and I'll let you go," I promised. "What did you do with the two million dollars? And what are the pills you sent me?"
"It takes a lot of money to stay on the run," Luke said. "And I've been trying to bribe the Peruvian police into letting Jesus escape..."
"The Peruvian police?"
"Yeah. Didn't you know?" Luke sounded surprised. "You really are out of touch! The Peruvian police caught Jesus two weeks ago along with most of the other Enlightenment leadership. Jesus is in jail in Lima right now. They want to crucify him as an example."
"Is Jesus that important?"
"Well, he has been the Enlightenment's main spokesman for a few years ago. Since their founder was arrested and executed."
"Hell." I was horrified by the image of my old schoolfriend, Jesus Guevara, dangling limply from some rude scaffold in the Andes. I remembered his disgust with the endemic corruption and cruelty of the ruling regime in his country. I had dimly been aware over the years of Jesus's growing involvement in radical politics, but I had never realized how prominent he was in the shadowy revolutionary movement called the Enlightenment.
"Life is hell and then you die, as we used to say in prep school. Maybe I can get Jesus off the cross. It's all about bribing the right people. As for the pills I sent you, try them and tell me what you think. The drug I was designing for the X-O-X foundation put me onto a very promising new line of research. Bye for now."
I hung up the phone and looked blankly into the round face of the motherly waitress. "Well, how is she?" the waitress inquired anxiously. "Your mother."
"They operated for six hours," I said, putting my hand on the wall for support. I really did feel weak. "They replaced her left ventricle and right auricle with plastic valves. They vacuumed out fat from the major arteries and veins which were all blocked." The waitress gasped and put her hands to her mouth. I shook my head in despair. "It is touch and go. She may live. She may die. But she will never again eat strudel." I brushed a tear from my eye. "No more Kaffee und Kuchen for the rest of her life. It is terrible, is it not?" The plump waitress nodded earnestly, her eyes bulging out of her head at the prospect of a lifetime of such deprivation. I smiled wanly at her. "Thank you for your help."
I joined Immanuel and Benito. As usual, they were arguing about the prospects for the survival of life on earth. "Don't give me this crap about sustainable development," Man screamed. "It doesn't matter whether a billion Chinese peasants should be allowed to buy refrigerators or not."
"But a billion more refrigerators would completely wipe out the ozone layer," Benito demurred earnestly. "And then they'll want other large consumer appliances..."
"So what?" Man laughed harshly. "Let them lounge around guzzling six packs of chilled beer while they watch soap operas on huge television sets. Let them pop cheese popcorn in their microwaves. Let them drive large inefficient automobiles with tailfins. Let them eat steak!"
"But the electricity..." Benito spluttered. "The car emissions... The methane farted by the cows..."
Immanuel thumped the table vehemently. "It doesn't matter. There just aren't enough resources to sustain the good life for everyone on this planet. Let the poor fuckers in the Third World at least dream of the consumer lifestyle while they starve and suffocate to death. It's irrelevant. Human beings have already finished off any future for themselves. And for most other species on this planet. Can't you get it through your thick skull? Apocalypse happened yesterday."
"But that's so hopeless." Benito's voice broke in a dying fall. Under his thick eyelashes, his olive eyes seemed full of tears. I felt a sudden surge of affection for him and for all the other billions of pleasant, amiable, and beautiful young animals like him out there.
"The only hope for life is that a solitary breed of cockroach in some landfill somewhere is hardy enough to survive," Immanuel said. "Although it's misleading to give examples. We don't know what will come after us. All we can hope is that something survives. As Nietzsche says..." He dug around in his tattered backpack and then looked up. "I didn't bring it with me. I'll show you when we get back to Prague."
"When are you going back?" I asked enviously.
"Tomorrow afternoon," Benito answered. "Nero says we have to return right away."
"Who's Nero?"
"Nero Insanetti. Your replacement," Man answered. "Hell's assistant. He's... strange."
"I like Nero," Benito said. "He's a wop too. We guineas gotta stick together!" He threw back his head and laughed uproariously. "He wasn't always this crazy."
"You're right," Immanuel agreed. "He was actually quite pleasant when he first arrived from Budapest."
"Dealing with the bureaucrats at the Amerikan Embassy was Nero's undoing," Benito said mournfully. "Now, every time he hears an Amerikan accent, he locks himself into his office, whimpering. He only talks to me because I'm so proud of my Italian roots."
"What did the Amerikan Embassy do to him?" I asked, baffled.
"They sent the body over in a meat truck. It was personally addressed to Nero. The problem was that they had forgotten to take all these other hunks of meat out of the truck and he had to figure out which carcass was hers. It was horrible. He'll feel better once he disposes of the body. Next week, I hope. He's taken to carrying a gun around with him lately and I don't like it. I keep trying to give him vitamins but he just refuses to take them."
"We're all just hunks of meat," Immanuel interpolated irrelevantly. "Waiting for the inevitable maggots."
"Now the body is hanging around in the deep freeze of the University kitchen."
"You mean Lucy's body is still at the University of Truth and Justice?" I asked, stunned.
"Lucy?" Benito looked confused. "Oh, yeah, that's what she claimed her name was. It turned out that her real name was Charlotte Stant. Interpol identified her last week. She was a backpacker, just a nice Amerikan college girl doing Europe on her summer holiday..." Benito shook his handsome head sorrowfully. "Then she disappeared suddenly. The friend with whom she was travelling was worried but then she just assumed that Charlotte must have hooked up with someone else."
"Do they know where Charlotte was from?"
"Yeah. Nero's sending the body to Salt Lake City. No wonder she lost her mind. She was a Mormon, can you imagine?"
I thought sadly about a pair of wide azure eyes, of an angel with an ash-blonde halo. "Yes," I replied heavily. "I knew her well."
But I had to wonder: had I in fact known Lucy at all? From the day when she picked me up at Prague airport until the night of her mysterious murder, in all the days in which we worked together and all the nights in which she had snuggled up to me, what strange spirit had lain lurking behind those wide azure eyes? Why should a nice young Amerikan college girl named Charlotte Stant have disappeared in the middle of her summer vacation, adopted the name `Lucy Setton' and come to work for the University of Truth and Justice? And how was it possible that someone named Lucy Setton should have been in touch with my friend Luke Leazy on behalf of the X-O-X Foundation both before and after Charlotte Stant's death? After my argument with Anastasia about the possibility of spirits hopping from one body to another, I had the uneasy feeling that Benito might be wrong: Charlotte Stant had not lost her mind at all. Rather, she had lost her body. I realized that I would have to ask Anastasia about all this. I shivered.
Immanuel looked at me sympathetically. "You look beat," he said. "What are you doing tonight?"
"I have to talk to a witch about body-snatching." I yawned. "Nothing special. Why?"
"We're going to a concert. Want to come?"
"Who's playing?"
"Old Nick and the Fallen Angels. I saw them in Boston a few years ago." Man sighed heavily. "It was during the Gulf War and my girlfriend had just been arrested for necrophilia. She worked as a night guard at a morgue and she couldn't resist screwing the stiffs..."
"Where are they playing?"
"At Holle. Know where that is?"
I winced at the memory of what Nasty had done to the two young boys we had met there one night. "Yeah. I know where that is. I'll be in disguise."
I overcame my fears and went back to Anastasia's apartment. She was not there. I lay down and tried to sleep for a while but my head was as much a mess as the apartment. In an effort to bring some order to the jumble of confused and incoherent thoughts whirling around in my brain, I set about cleaning up the indescribable clutter in the apartment. I washed out coffee cups, dusted shelves, vacuumed the floors, arranged magazines neatly on coffee tables, and even washed and ironed Anastasia's clothes. After a while, the dust in my tired brain settled and only one nagging thought remained. Who the devil was Lucy Setton? I sighed and closed my eyes tight. It was none of my business whether there was life after death: I would find out soon enough. The living have drugs to take and rock concerts to attend: let the dead bury the dead.
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