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Hoping I didn't already post this back in November. I checked my archives and I don't think I did, but there might be a few paragraphs overlap here and there.
LaBrea had changed from her costume into sweatpants and a faded black T-shirt with the phrase "She Who Must Be Obeyed."
"Rider Haggard joke?" inquired the Caryatid. LaBrea raised an eyebrow. Amanda gestured towards the description on the shirt:
"Ayesha? Thousand-year old-"African" goddess?" She made little quote marks with her fingers and blushed, feeling she'd derailed the conversation, perhaps irretrievably. LaBrea threw her head back unexpectedly and laughed at the ceiling. "No, but I like that. They just sent it to me years ago when I made a donation to public television. As I was saying, the dual identity is a fast ticket to burnout, love. I say if you have to have more than one persona, have enough you can keep one in reserve for your days off." Amanda thought of the Safe House and her weekends with Victor, but LaBrea continued: "Some of us, y'know, time-share a persona."
"Isn't that more trouble than it's worth?" argued Wendy.
"Well, it's easier than trying to keep your R&R identity ticking over between locations. See," she turned back to Amanda, "A bunch of us will set up an imaginary company with an imaginary employee called, say, 'Linda Expense-Account," who's in sales, always out on the road, and a heavy drinker. Do you see where this is going?"
"You put your drink money into Linda's account, then take turns going to bars as Linda whenever she's in your town?" guessed Amanda.
"Almost. We go as Linda when she's in the next place over from ours, " said LaBrea, "and we have pick a town to be Linda and stick with it, so a bartender doesn't recognize the name but not the face. We stay in hotels as Linda, shop as Linda, party as Linda, and if anyone ever looks at her receipts, she's a total wastrel and party girl, but that's less suspicious than someone who only pops into existence on the same few days that you or I are off-duty."
*****
Papa Fred's was a bar of the kind that has white Christmas lights strung from the ceiling all year round, framed reprints of vintage ads, and posters indicating that "Wednesday Night Is Karaoke Night." Such bars invariably also have television screens along every possible sight line, and Amanda found herself distracted by brightly-lit narratives, no matter which way she turned her head. She tried looking fixedly into her cosmopolitan.
[conversation]
Startled, Amanda raised her eyes to look at Wendy and saw, on the screen behind her colleague's shoulder, a reporter with a microphone standing in front of the lab she had passed the night before on the gallery block. Curious, and not one to believe in coincidence, she watched the screen, wishing she could hear what the reporter was saying: the bar's speakers were tuned to a soft-rock satellite radio station, and the reporter's lips moved to lyrics about highways and cars and young love. They continued as the picture changed to the image of a familiar bottle of conditioner. The evidence in the Flexikeratin case must be in that building, Amanda, thought, with the feeling she was fitting two sections of a jigsaw puzzle together. Carefully, she set down her drink:
"I just remembered a call I have to make ."
****
"Look, Amanda, I love you but we agreed not to interfere in each other's business and stealing art, whether you like it or not, is my business.This is my chance to work with one of the legends---"
"Maisie and Drew have already fled town, you don't need to keep helping - art?"
"Maisie and Drew? What's this got --"
"You were going to steal Imogen's show? She's put everything she has into it."
"I- I -- Stop. What have your cousins got to do with the gold shoe show?"
"Nothing, and it's The Twelve Dancing Princesses, not 'the gold shoe show.' God, Victor, I never really believed you were bad until just now."
"Yes. Put that on hold for a minute. What did you think I was doing that had to do with your cousins?"
"Flexikeratin's in trouble for flammable products. The lab just on the other side of the gallery is full of the stuff being held as evidence. I thought that's what you were planning to break into - to steal it or set it on fire or something."
"Oh, damn."
"Is that all you've got to say for yourself?"
"No, that's a small part of what I've got to say to El Hazard. OK, I'll admit I was feeling bad about this gig, and for a while I was afraid I had a conscience. But it was my gut warning me El Hazard was planning a double cross. Thank you." Abruptly he kissed her, then ducked under her arm before she could grab him and leapt, awkwardly, onto an bit of empty air that was suddenly un-empty of motorcycle. With a roar and another shout of thanks, he was round the corner and heading, no doubt, to the lab to confront El Hazard.
Don't mention it, thought Amanda, and, Oh no you don't. Not without me. Pausing to get her bearings, she chose an alley that she hoped was a shortcut through the block to where Victor was headed.
Victor, was, at that moment, too angry for subtlety, and there was no one in evidence at the lockup anyway. The Fexikeratin case was evidently not considered a major security issue by the Gradient police, and they'd trusted in a simple padlock. It was simple for Victor to open.
Once inside he regained a bit of his usual caution. Inscrutable though El Hazard's motives were, Victor believed him a clever man, and believed El Hazard held him in the same esteem. Whatever the older villain's plan was, it was lucrative or nefarious enough not to trust a colleague with the knowledge of it, and he would surely have an emergency plan in place in case said colleague found out.
It looked as though El Hazard was not concerning himself with subtlety either. He'd broken into a room and was dumping the bottles of Flexikeratin into a net bag, looking for all the world like a bargain-hunter at a clearance sale. Victor considered how to take him - he carried a taser for such occasions, but it would not be wise to run an electrical current through a man noted for carrying quantities of flammable materials on his person as though they were bubble gum (his 'bubble gum plastique' caper had flattened six blocks of downtown Sapphire in 1989). Mano a mano? El Hazard had a good thirty-five pounds on Victor, but the younger man had the advantage of surprise.
At almost any other time, Victor might have considered the situation a second longer. He might have come up with a better idea. On this particular occasion, he was upset at having been made a fool of, upset at from his argument with Amanda, upset at having had to admit to himself that he loved her, and that he might just have a moral sense - or at any rate enough of an aesthetic one to feel guilty about destroying a work of art.
Thus it was that the Obscurant attempted a flying tackle on his erstwhile boss; and five minutes later was tossed into a broom closet down the hall. Being unimportant, the closet did not have a padlock on the door, but as his senses stopped whirling about him, Victor heard the sound of a bolt sliding shut with a heavy thunk. As he clambered to his feet, groping the wall, a voice hissed:
"Since you do not know the switch is on the outside, I take it you are my fellow-prisoner?" In answer, Victor took the little concealed flashlight from his shirt and lit it, then caught his breath. The LED cast an eerie blue light on any person, and the woman looking up at him was already eerier than most, with her
decidedly old and human eyes in a heavy-browed, heavy-cheekboned simian face. Grey fur, neatly brushed, grew all the way down into the collar of her coat, and, he supposed, all over her, for the hand she extended ironically towards him was furred too. Victor was less easily startled than most, but this had caught him off guard. The old lady, (for such she was, undoubtably) smiled at his discomfiture. She had human teeth.
"Young man." Her accent was French. A connection fired in Victor's mind - the phrase El Hazard had muttered, not lozenge --
"La Singe, I presume?" He realized he was bowing to her as he took her furred hand. La Singe's eyes crinkled up as him: "Who else? Though in my younger days, I could also claim the title 'Venus in Furs.' But who are you?"
"The Obscurant. Supervillain." She smiled again.
"Myself, I am superheroine." A pause. "You seem at odds with your colleague?"
"I admire him, but he and I have different aims at the moment." La Singe's eyes grew serious.
"I had him on his heels until he netted me -- I was pondering escape when you were tossed in. I cannot allow him, or you, to go through with his intent."
"I've no liking for this particular plan of his, given that he didn't tell me about it, " Victor urged. "Hiding things is my specialty. If we can get out of here I should be able to sow some confusion around El Hazard."
"The door is strong," said La Singe, "But it is still just a regular door. The hinges are unprotected."
"You tried to melt them?"
"I tried to take the pins out. I'd almost freed one." Victor checked the hinges. The were old, but not thickly painted over. A good tap from the bottom up would likely be enough to dislodge them.
"El Hazard took my tool-belt," he said. "What were you using as a hammer?" La Singe removed one of her shoes and showed him the indentation in the stacked heel.
"I think I can go one better," said Victor. He tapped his steel-toed boot gently against the concrete wall, before he knelt down and began undoing his laces.
El Hazard was already out of the building by the time they found the tunnel entrance behind a cupboard. Victor crouched in the small doorway listening to the blackness beyond. A hunch was slowly occurring to him, when La Singe gave an unearthly screech behind him, as the Caryatid hove into view around a corner and immediately staggered as the little old woman leapt at her head.
"No, stop!" Victor tried to pry the small grey whirlwind off his girlfriend: "Stop! The Caryatid's on our side. Well, your side." To Amanda he said: "El Hazard's gone back into his tunnel, unless you saw him outside. Look, I'm mad enough at him that I'll help you now. We'll stop him taking Inanna's sculpture."
"Imogen's sculpture; and decide I'll when this is over if I still want to talk to you."
"That's fair. Caryatid, meet La Singe. La Singe, Caryatid." They entered the tunnel (La Singe throwing glances at them both); or as it turned out, tunnels.
"I've got a compass," said the Caryatid. "I expect you've got a GPS."
"Better." Victor took out his handheld and opened a map on the tiny screen. After checking it, he shrunk it to conserve screen space for the next window he opened - the camera he had hidden in the basement of Everett Emin Books.
****
"I think I prefer art made from junk," said Victor slowly, "then if it's only the art that makes it valuable, no one would have any reason to take it apart. And I like transformations."
"Shoes are the most - human of garments. These - what would it be like to wear a pair? The sound! Forgive me, " she smiled wistfully, "I am sentimental about shoes. When I was small, my parents...kept me hidden. I was only allowed to wear carpet slippers so no one would hear my footsteps and become curious." She must have read his expression, for she added, gently, "They were not as cruel as I make them sound. Only frightened of what people would do to me. My brother, Leon - for my thirteenth birthday, bought me a pair of black patent-leather pumps out of his pocket money, and smuggled them to me. They were shoddily made and too big, so I wore them with two pairs of stockings, that way, too, I couldn't see my fur. I had pretty nice-shaped legs, and when I walked around in my shoes, on the thickest carpet in my room, I would look down at myself and pretend I was a normal girl."
Dropping her coat, La Singe began moving fast, terrifyingly fast for her age, which was – how old, exactly? In the back of Victor’s head was a chilly memory of stories he’d heard, that La Singe had fought Nazis back in the day, strangling guards with her monkey’s paws.
LaBrea had changed from her costume into sweatpants and a faded black T-shirt with the phrase "She Who Must Be Obeyed."
"Rider Haggard joke?" inquired the Caryatid. LaBrea raised an eyebrow. Amanda gestured towards the description on the shirt:
"Ayesha? Thousand-year old-"African" goddess?" She made little quote marks with her fingers and blushed, feeling she'd derailed the conversation, perhaps irretrievably. LaBrea threw her head back unexpectedly and laughed at the ceiling. "No, but I like that. They just sent it to me years ago when I made a donation to public television. As I was saying, the dual identity is a fast ticket to burnout, love. I say if you have to have more than one persona, have enough you can keep one in reserve for your days off." Amanda thought of the Safe House and her weekends with Victor, but LaBrea continued: "Some of us, y'know, time-share a persona."
"Isn't that more trouble than it's worth?" argued Wendy.
"Well, it's easier than trying to keep your R&R identity ticking over between locations. See," she turned back to Amanda, "A bunch of us will set up an imaginary company with an imaginary employee called, say, 'Linda Expense-Account," who's in sales, always out on the road, and a heavy drinker. Do you see where this is going?"
"You put your drink money into Linda's account, then take turns going to bars as Linda whenever she's in your town?" guessed Amanda.
"Almost. We go as Linda when she's in the next place over from ours, " said LaBrea, "and we have pick a town to be Linda and stick with it, so a bartender doesn't recognize the name but not the face. We stay in hotels as Linda, shop as Linda, party as Linda, and if anyone ever looks at her receipts, she's a total wastrel and party girl, but that's less suspicious than someone who only pops into existence on the same few days that you or I are off-duty."
*****
Papa Fred's was a bar of the kind that has white Christmas lights strung from the ceiling all year round, framed reprints of vintage ads, and posters indicating that "Wednesday Night Is Karaoke Night." Such bars invariably also have television screens along every possible sight line, and Amanda found herself distracted by brightly-lit narratives, no matter which way she turned her head. She tried looking fixedly into her cosmopolitan.
[conversation]
Startled, Amanda raised her eyes to look at Wendy and saw, on the screen behind her colleague's shoulder, a reporter with a microphone standing in front of the lab she had passed the night before on the gallery block. Curious, and not one to believe in coincidence, she watched the screen, wishing she could hear what the reporter was saying: the bar's speakers were tuned to a soft-rock satellite radio station, and the reporter's lips moved to lyrics about highways and cars and young love. They continued as the picture changed to the image of a familiar bottle of conditioner. The evidence in the Flexikeratin case must be in that building, Amanda, thought, with the feeling she was fitting two sections of a jigsaw puzzle together. Carefully, she set down her drink:
"I just remembered a call I have to make ."
****
"Look, Amanda, I love you but we agreed not to interfere in each other's business and stealing art, whether you like it or not, is my business.This is my chance to work with one of the legends---"
"Maisie and Drew have already fled town, you don't need to keep helping - art?"
"Maisie and Drew? What's this got --"
"You were going to steal Imogen's show? She's put everything she has into it."
"I- I -- Stop. What have your cousins got to do with the gold shoe show?"
"Nothing, and it's The Twelve Dancing Princesses, not 'the gold shoe show.' God, Victor, I never really believed you were bad until just now."
"Yes. Put that on hold for a minute. What did you think I was doing that had to do with your cousins?"
"Flexikeratin's in trouble for flammable products. The lab just on the other side of the gallery is full of the stuff being held as evidence. I thought that's what you were planning to break into - to steal it or set it on fire or something."
"Oh, damn."
"Is that all you've got to say for yourself?"
"No, that's a small part of what I've got to say to El Hazard. OK, I'll admit I was feeling bad about this gig, and for a while I was afraid I had a conscience. But it was my gut warning me El Hazard was planning a double cross. Thank you." Abruptly he kissed her, then ducked under her arm before she could grab him and leapt, awkwardly, onto an bit of empty air that was suddenly un-empty of motorcycle. With a roar and another shout of thanks, he was round the corner and heading, no doubt, to the lab to confront El Hazard.
Don't mention it, thought Amanda, and, Oh no you don't. Not without me. Pausing to get her bearings, she chose an alley that she hoped was a shortcut through the block to where Victor was headed.
Victor, was, at that moment, too angry for subtlety, and there was no one in evidence at the lockup anyway. The Fexikeratin case was evidently not considered a major security issue by the Gradient police, and they'd trusted in a simple padlock. It was simple for Victor to open.
Once inside he regained a bit of his usual caution. Inscrutable though El Hazard's motives were, Victor believed him a clever man, and believed El Hazard held him in the same esteem. Whatever the older villain's plan was, it was lucrative or nefarious enough not to trust a colleague with the knowledge of it, and he would surely have an emergency plan in place in case said colleague found out.
It looked as though El Hazard was not concerning himself with subtlety either. He'd broken into a room and was dumping the bottles of Flexikeratin into a net bag, looking for all the world like a bargain-hunter at a clearance sale. Victor considered how to take him - he carried a taser for such occasions, but it would not be wise to run an electrical current through a man noted for carrying quantities of flammable materials on his person as though they were bubble gum (his 'bubble gum plastique' caper had flattened six blocks of downtown Sapphire in 1989). Mano a mano? El Hazard had a good thirty-five pounds on Victor, but the younger man had the advantage of surprise.
At almost any other time, Victor might have considered the situation a second longer. He might have come up with a better idea. On this particular occasion, he was upset at having been made a fool of, upset at from his argument with Amanda, upset at having had to admit to himself that he loved her, and that he might just have a moral sense - or at any rate enough of an aesthetic one to feel guilty about destroying a work of art.
Thus it was that the Obscurant attempted a flying tackle on his erstwhile boss; and five minutes later was tossed into a broom closet down the hall. Being unimportant, the closet did not have a padlock on the door, but as his senses stopped whirling about him, Victor heard the sound of a bolt sliding shut with a heavy thunk. As he clambered to his feet, groping the wall, a voice hissed:
"Since you do not know the switch is on the outside, I take it you are my fellow-prisoner?" In answer, Victor took the little concealed flashlight from his shirt and lit it, then caught his breath. The LED cast an eerie blue light on any person, and the woman looking up at him was already eerier than most, with her
decidedly old and human eyes in a heavy-browed, heavy-cheekboned simian face. Grey fur, neatly brushed, grew all the way down into the collar of her coat, and, he supposed, all over her, for the hand she extended ironically towards him was furred too. Victor was less easily startled than most, but this had caught him off guard. The old lady, (for such she was, undoubtably) smiled at his discomfiture. She had human teeth.
"Young man." Her accent was French. A connection fired in Victor's mind - the phrase El Hazard had muttered, not lozenge --
"La Singe, I presume?" He realized he was bowing to her as he took her furred hand. La Singe's eyes crinkled up as him: "Who else? Though in my younger days, I could also claim the title 'Venus in Furs.' But who are you?"
"The Obscurant. Supervillain." She smiled again.
"Myself, I am superheroine." A pause. "You seem at odds with your colleague?"
"I admire him, but he and I have different aims at the moment." La Singe's eyes grew serious.
"I had him on his heels until he netted me -- I was pondering escape when you were tossed in. I cannot allow him, or you, to go through with his intent."
"I've no liking for this particular plan of his, given that he didn't tell me about it, " Victor urged. "Hiding things is my specialty. If we can get out of here I should be able to sow some confusion around El Hazard."
"The door is strong," said La Singe, "But it is still just a regular door. The hinges are unprotected."
"You tried to melt them?"
"I tried to take the pins out. I'd almost freed one." Victor checked the hinges. The were old, but not thickly painted over. A good tap from the bottom up would likely be enough to dislodge them.
"El Hazard took my tool-belt," he said. "What were you using as a hammer?" La Singe removed one of her shoes and showed him the indentation in the stacked heel.
"I think I can go one better," said Victor. He tapped his steel-toed boot gently against the concrete wall, before he knelt down and began undoing his laces.
El Hazard was already out of the building by the time they found the tunnel entrance behind a cupboard. Victor crouched in the small doorway listening to the blackness beyond. A hunch was slowly occurring to him, when La Singe gave an unearthly screech behind him, as the Caryatid hove into view around a corner and immediately staggered as the little old woman leapt at her head.
"No, stop!" Victor tried to pry the small grey whirlwind off his girlfriend: "Stop! The Caryatid's on our side. Well, your side." To Amanda he said: "El Hazard's gone back into his tunnel, unless you saw him outside. Look, I'm mad enough at him that I'll help you now. We'll stop him taking Inanna's sculpture."
"Imogen's sculpture; and decide I'll when this is over if I still want to talk to you."
"That's fair. Caryatid, meet La Singe. La Singe, Caryatid." They entered the tunnel (La Singe throwing glances at them both); or as it turned out, tunnels.
"I've got a compass," said the Caryatid. "I expect you've got a GPS."
"Better." Victor took out his handheld and opened a map on the tiny screen. After checking it, he shrunk it to conserve screen space for the next window he opened - the camera he had hidden in the basement of Everett Emin Books.
****
"I think I prefer art made from junk," said Victor slowly, "then if it's only the art that makes it valuable, no one would have any reason to take it apart. And I like transformations."
"Shoes are the most - human of garments. These - what would it be like to wear a pair? The sound! Forgive me, " she smiled wistfully, "I am sentimental about shoes. When I was small, my parents...kept me hidden. I was only allowed to wear carpet slippers so no one would hear my footsteps and become curious." She must have read his expression, for she added, gently, "They were not as cruel as I make them sound. Only frightened of what people would do to me. My brother, Leon - for my thirteenth birthday, bought me a pair of black patent-leather pumps out of his pocket money, and smuggled them to me. They were shoddily made and too big, so I wore them with two pairs of stockings, that way, too, I couldn't see my fur. I had pretty nice-shaped legs, and when I walked around in my shoes, on the thickest carpet in my room, I would look down at myself and pretend I was a normal girl."
Dropping her coat, La Singe began moving fast, terrifyingly fast for her age, which was – how old, exactly? In the back of Victor’s head was a chilly memory of stories he’d heard, that La Singe had fought Nazis back in the day, strangling guards with her monkey’s paws.
