Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

A buzzer belched it open. They passed into a nondescript hall. A nose-tickling odor of oranges grew stronger but vanished as Temple was led through another door into a cubicle. The process reminded her of nothing so much as getting a mammogram, except for the male escort. And in fact she’d had her first one recently at the University Medical Center just two blocks away. Turn thirty and all sorts of strange and serious things come at you face first.

There had been a full-length curtain on that cubicle door. Here, they faced a shorter curtain on the opposite wall. Temple was reminded of a motel window with the drapes drawn.

“You know what to expect?” Alch asked, a hand on the drapery pulls.

“She’ll look like she’s ‘sleeping.’ ”

“No, young lady. I well know the temptation to get smart in the face of something unpleasant. She will look like she’s dead. You need to compare the pallor and stillness you see here with the healthy and mobile face you saw a few days ago. There will be changes but not significant ones.”

Temple swallowed, remembering that Matt had performed this very unpleasant service for his dead stepfather. How domestically bizarre and living-roomish it was to open the chintzy, short drapes just to see a draped gurney with only a dead head revealed.

How weird to see a person lying down never to get up again. How bizarre to imagine that graveyard-pale, makeup-masked Shangri-La persona as still as death.

“They washed off the makeup, of course,” Alch added.

Who was “they”? Temple wondered, bracing herself. Barefaced. Temple recalled the taut, angry, raw features she’d glimpsed on the exhibition floor when she was too surprised to realize that it was Shangri-La until the woman had moved on.

“How tall was she?” Temple asked.

A rustle as Alch consulted his lined notebook. “Five four.”

Temple nodded. Her impression exactly and height was always a prime issue with a shorty like herself. She knew where the top of her head hit on Max, for example, in heels and out of them, and now, on Matt. What a fickle girl! She deserved this moment of penance and repentance, only she didn’t believe in all that breast-beating stuff. Did she?

You don’t gaze on a dead person everyday. In funeral parlors they’re tarted up for the afterlife. Here, it was the naked and the dead and no escaping that reality in the comforting rituals of church and state and custom.

“Ready?” Alch didn’t sound ready himself.

Temple nodded.

The curtains hissed open on their rods like hula-dancing snakes. The sheet was so white it made the body’s skin tone look dingy, like yellow-gray laundry. In a way, Temple felt she was viewing a gray-and-white movie still. She saw mostly profile, but there was no denying the small, stubby nose, the large flat cheekbones, the jet black eyes. Nothing could return the taut muscular facial animation that had made all these features bold and vibrant and rather scary.

“That’s her.”

“Sure?” Alch’s forehead had creased like a raised miniblind, all furrows. Must be from working for Molina.

Temple nodded. “The animation’s gone, of course, but the features were quite striking. Unforgettable. And, we were a similar height, I saw them close-up. Do you have any idea yet who she really was?”

“We know exactly who she was.” Alch came to stand beside her. “Fingerprints. Ran them internationally.”

“Internationally?”

He shrugged. “Her Asian origin, the fact that the exhibition has a Russian connection. You never know what will turn up.”

“And?” A minuscule part of Temple’s reptile brain, the sheer primitive instinct part, still wasn’t sure this wasn’t Kitty the Cutter with plastic surgery and a spirit-gum extreme makeover.

“This little lady was on an international wanted list.”

Kitty? My God. Maybe she’d had plastic surgery years ago when she was on the run from both Interpol and the IRA, like Max. He’d just popped in some green contact lenses and disappeared into a bold performing persona. Maybe Kitty had remade her face and created a veiled persona. But wait! Matt was the only one to see her face-to-face as Kathleen O’Connor, and she’d been a black Irish beauty then. How could she—?

Alch was watching her wheels turn way too carefully.

“What could a young Asian woman do to be wanted internationally?” Temple asked.

“She defected fifteen years ago from a mainland Chinese company of acrobats touring in Spain. Was never seen since. Until now. Name of Hai Ling.”

Temple would have gasped but she held her breath instead. That would explain Shangri-La’s on- and off-stage makeup disguise. She was a political defector using her acrobatic prowess in a new career, magician.

That would not explain why this wanted woman who apparently had no love for Temple, sight unseen, had shown Temple her true face on the floor of the exhibition hall only two days before her death.

Who, What, Why?

Okay.

The Synth was big, bad, and in this caper up to its vanishing cream in perfidy.