The Perdition Score. Richard Kadrey

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СКАЧАТЬ but I just wanted to say it.”

      “Thanks. You know if I find out someone’s hurt you, I’m going to eat their fucking heart, right?”

      “I know.”

      “I know you know, but I just wanted to say it.”

      “Thanks. Can I ask you one more favor?”

      “What?”

      “Can you turn that goddamn surf record over and play the other side. You’ve played this one about fifty times.”

      “This is my homework. Alessa is going to teach me surf guitar.”

      “I bet there are songs on the other side you can learn.”

      “Your wish is my command,” she says, and pads out of the bedroom to the stereo.

      When she’s gone, I take a long, deep breath. This thing we have. I don’t want to fuck it up. I don’t want to lie anymore and I don’t want a dog. I just want Candy or Chihiro or whoever she has to be next to stay alive. We’re in this together and I’ll kick the ass of anyone who gets in the way. Even if it’s me.

      “Did I tell you an angel gave me a birthday present tonight?”

      She comes back into the room and flops onto the bed.

      “No. Tell me every little thing about it.”

      So I do. And we’re okay.

      For a while.

      CANDY IS GONE when I wake up in the morning. There’s a note on the kitchen counter when I go in to make coffee.

       Jamming with Alessa at her rehearsal space after work.

       Home late. Be naked.

      There are some hearts and she’s taped a press-on tattoo of a sleeping cat at the bottom of the note. I lick a spot on my forearm and press down on the tattoo. A minute later I pull it off. No cat. Just a few frayed lines scattered across my scars. Once again, my stupid body rejects the simplest amusements. So, I make coffee. That’s one bit of pleasure that still works.

      I don’t bother going downstairs and bothering Kasabian. He’s even drearier than me in the morning. Before he gets up and turns on the news or does something else to annoy me, I turn on the rest of a movie I started with Candy the other night: Amer. It’s a deconstruction of Italian giallo flicks. The directors tear it down to its essential elements—beats, images, violence, colors, sexual tension—but they do it almost wordlessly, like a silent movie. Just the thing for that time of day when words are still hard to come by.

      I sip coffee and smoke, letting the movie run through to its end and one last little shock, then pick up my phone and thumb in Vidocq’s number. He picks up after a few rings.

      “James, how nice to hear from you at this early hour. Is everything all right?” His voice is deep, the accent relentlessly French.

      “Nothing’s wrong. Sometimes I’m actually up during daylight hours. I just thought if you were going to be around, I’d swing by and show you something that fell into my lap from Heaven.”

      “Really? You must come immediately. Do not stop for coffee. I’ve made some better than your vile swill.”

      He says it all like the friendliest headwaiter in L.A. See, I always notice the accent because it’s such an accomplishment. Eugène Vidocq has lived in the U.S. for around a hundred and fifty years. Any normal person would lose an accent after all that time. But Vidocq holds on to his like some grandma with the family photos. Nothing in the album means anything to anyone except her, which makes her hang on all the harder.

      “I need to get dressed. I’ll be over in half an hour.”

      “I doubt that on a weekend,” he says. “Let us say an hour.”

      “Don’t rub it in.”

      I used to walk across town through a shadow and come out by Vidocq’s front door in ten seconds. It feels like something that happened in another lifetime, but it’s really been less than three months.

      I plow through the Hollywood traffic south and get to Vidocq’s place in just under an hour. L.A. people are obsessed with addresses, distance, and times between places. I used to worry about the first two, but now I’m just like every other asshole in this town. A clock watcher, knowing the hour I wasted getting here I’ll never see again. Everyone in L.A. is like this. It’s one of the town’s big secrets. Want to know why people drink and smoke so much weed? They want to wipe out the time slipping away from them. Want to know why people do coke and get on the pipe? They’re trying to outrun the clock. Like Superman at the end of the movie where he flies around the world fast enough to roll back time. That’s all anyone in L.A. wants. To get back the time they lost just fucking being in L.A. I can’t outrun time. I don’t even know if angels or Mr. Muninn can. Gods and regular schmucks, we’re all stuck on the same linear run from here to the end of time. Just some of us get to run a little longer. Like Vidocq. He’s immortal. He doesn’t worry about being stuck in traffic. He could spend a month waiting for a cab and not blink. Me, I have to wait eleven seconds at the bodega to buy coffee and I’m contemplating a murder/suicide pact with everyone in the store.

      I take the old industrial elevator up to Vidocq’s floor in his building and knock on the door. He meets me at the door in a robe and slippers, holding a plate of crisp bacon slices. Vidocq has salt-and-pepper hair and a short trimmed beard. I put on actual people clothes and he’s just rolled out of the sack.

      “I see why you wanted me to come to you.”

      He looks down at himself for a moment.

      “I couldn’t bear to dress myself this morning. Do you ever feel that way? One more morning, brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes. It can drive you mad. When I was alone, I went years without cutting my hair or beard. I looked like the Abdominal, Aminal … What do you call him?”

      “The Abominable Snowman.”

      “Yes. Him.”

      “‘Yeti’ is an easier word.”

      “Yes, but I prefer the other. It gives him a sinister dignity whereas Yeti makes him sound like just another animal.”

      “He probably is just another animal. He’s got to know by now we’re looking for him. Three hot meals and a fresh pile of hay every day has got to beat running away and throwing your shit at hikers.”

      “I suppose it comes down to who’s looking for you. Will the hunters study and appreciate you or do they simply want to dissect you? Likely a smart beast, he will be suspicious of us,” Vidocq says.

      “Hey, don’t knock it. That’s how I feel every day.”

      “As do I.”

      “Then give me some coffee and let’s drink to that.”

      He hands me a cup full of the black stuff. I hold it up and say, “To freaks everywhere.”

      Vidocq СКАЧАТЬ