The Maggot People (8 page)

He looked up. “I got your details from Günter. He's a four-footed guy from Rome. Excommunicated.”

She looked frightened and dropped her voice. “Oh, come on! I don't know you, I don't know him. Just because I live above a restaurant people think they can hit on me.”

“I only want to come inside for a few minutes. If I'd come to arrest you I would have brought a friend.” He opened his jacket to indicate he was not wearing a holster.

Her shades glittered down at him for a full minute. He waited for her decision. A police siren edged closer. Stepping into the recessed doorway, he pressed himself against the wall. The door buzzed and he quickly pushed it open and moved into the cool gloom, standing there waiting for his imaginary pulse to slow down.

The door squeezed itself shut behind him and he walked up the single flight.

Janine was waiting for him in the doorway, then, without a word, showed him into an apartment almost entirely devoid of furniture. She was clearly a big believer in blowup cushions and paper lanterns. The only thing of substance in there was a leather briefcase, large and fat and black. Everything else was inflatable.

He stepped into the living room, steeped in the sort of silence that follows a hastily evacuated party. Palls of smoke rose erectly from cigarettes left in scattered ashtrays, and six blue Siamese kittens sitting in line fixed him with their blue eyes until one of them made a rash attack on a cushion, which deflated with a hissing sound.

Janine turned to Michael. “This won't take a minute.” Then, calling out towards the back of the adjoining room: “Take him!” Two men charged out, sending the kittens scurrying in all directions. One of them pinned him down, the other used a pair of box-cutters to slice into his stomach. Michael kept his mouth shut, fearing that they might shoot him if he resisted. Peering down, what he saw would have made him retch if he had guts to retch with. His abdomen was open like a bowl of fruit: white warm maggots were squirming, wild to get out of the light.

Janine breathed out. “He's maggot. Close him up.”

They folded the skin back and it quickly sealed itself. Janine gave them a nod and they withdrew without a word into the back room. Once they were out of sight there were two metallic clicks—not of guns, but beer cans.

Janine sat down with a sharp squeak on one of her cushions. “Okay, so you're maggot. Doesn't mean very much, I have to say. Anyone could be maggot.”

She took off her sunglasses and with a fluid movement removed what proved to be a wig. Beneath, she was clean-shaven with pale eyes like jeans washed too many times. “Sit down.” She nodded at a plastic cube and he eased himself into it. “So why are you here? I can't possibly trust you. You could be anyone…”

“I'm not. I was locked up in the hospital but I got out. I did what Ariel said. She got me out. That's all. She didn't believe it either at first. We drove towards Chamonix to see Purissima, but Ariel died.” His voice grew tremulous. “I think her poison got to her. She picked a very hard one for herself.”

“No one picks their poison,” said Janine. “The poison picks you and then we blame it on the maggot. The waste remains and kills you in the end.” She stared bleakly at him. “I knew Ariel. I didn't know she'd crossed over, though. And of course Günter with his dirty ass. He used to be a monk, except he was always causing a stink. In the end he pissed off a few bigwigs. They decided to have some fun with him, so they had his brain transplanted into a maggot-dog.”

Michael shrugged. “Okay, that explains it.”

“And you?”

“I told you. I came here to find you. I wouldn't mind a drink if you've got one.”

“I think we'll go out and have one. I'd rather not be a sitting duck in this apartment.” She stood up and went to a plastic bag, from which she dug out another wig for him and a change of shirt and trousers. “Put these on.”

While he was kitting himself out, she took a syringe and injected herself. Twenty minutes later they were sitting on the wall of the promenade staring out over the darkening sea whilst smoking cigarettes and swigging from a bottle of red wine. He watched her profile for a little longer than he had to. She didn't turn her head, just sat quietly and consented to being scrutinized.

“Those guys in your apartment? Are they working for you?”

She swung round and said, with ferocity, “Are you interrogating me?” There was a lull, just long enough for Janine to glance up and down the promenade and then discreetly inject herself again before refocusing on Michael, with a raised eyebrow.

“In case you think I'm a drug addict, I should make it clear I'm not. And I'm not into sex either.”

“No drugs and no love. What do you live for, then?”

She looked straight at him for the first time. “I live for
nothing,”
she said. “And it works just fine for me.”

“In the long run we're all dead. Who said that?”

“Fuck Keynes and whatever he said. Fuck Hitler, fuck Mussolini in his pressed uniforms, fuck Stalin and his vodka and moustache, fuck the paranoid Zionists and their hatred for the Arab, fuck fucking Milton Friedman, fuck postmodernism, fuck the Nobel Prize. Fuck Mahatma Gandhi and fuck the Chinese, fucking yellow-bellied
naifs
with their love of dollars, fuck the bandana warmongers with their AK-47s, fuck Tony Blair and his entourage of middle-class masturbators, fuck Sarkozy and his tight-assed out-of-tune wife…” She stopped. “I'm a student, that's what people don't get about me. And a sister.”

“A sister?”

“Of God, my friend. Of God. Ever heard of Mary Magdalene?” Janine cut herself short and smiled at him. “What's
your
poison?” she asked. “You seem to think it's alcohol, but that's too brutal for you, Michael. I have a feeling your poison is religion.”

“I'm not religious.”

“Doesn't matter. I'd put money on it. That's your poison.”

“You've had too much heroin.”

“Probably.” She looked at him, weighing it all up, then took the plunge. “Ever been to Sardinia, brother?”

“Now you're asking me questions.”

“You want to come?”

“What for?”

“I know some nice people in Marseilles; they cut me open with a razor blade, put about five kilos of heroin inside me. They pay well. And they give you false papers.” She stared hard at him, as if to impress on him the importance of such things.

“Did you know, Michael, there are hundreds of people in France like you and me?”

“I didn't.”

“Our life expectancy is around two years. Most go to the doctor and get killed off. The rest try to stick it out, spread the seed around, pander to the little black-heads… then they die anyway. A very small elite end up doing what I do.”

He noticed her use of the word “elite”—there was an element of pride in it, and self-inflation.

“What
do
you do?”

“You're very lucky, I think I'm going to show you. Because of Ariel and Günter.”

That night they slept like brother and sister in her bed, in her blowup room—their dawdling hosts pacified by their high intake of heroin. In the morning they shared a cup of tea and a banana, then sat quietly thinking for a few moments, smoking a pack of cigarettes between them.

Midmorning a man in a dirty tracksuit came to photograph Michael. He announced he'd be back later with a passport.

They spent the rest of the morning shooting up.

At midday the new passport arrived by motorcycle courier. Janine slit Michael's belly open. The courier, a hollow-chested asthmatic with a smoldering joint in his mouth, did not recoil at the sight of the churning sea of maggots. He placed a heavy-duty foil bag on top of the seething mass and unceremoniously slapped the skin back in place. Within minutes, Michael was sealed up again with no scars and no lumps. Just a perfectly flat stomach.

They got on a train to Marseilles, then took a cab to the towering ferry in the harbor. Michael stood with Janine on deck, watching the tiered city basking in the late evening glow. Everything seemed perfect and dead as the great humming ship slipped its moorings and glided out.

16
.

Janine had booked a super-luxury cabin with a bedroom and separate sitting room. Ensconced in a comfortable if slightly plasticized sofa, they had a fine view of the sea through a big, salt-stained window.

To ease their passage, they had bought two bottles of Black Label, two of Courvoisier, two hundred cigarettes each, and more bananas. (Maggots have a liking for bananas—they're basic starch.)

After a calm night, the ship docked sedately the following morning, and they wasted no time in hiring a car and driving into Cagliari, where they made their delivery and walked away with more cash than Michael had ever seen. Apparently cash would no longer be of primary importance to him. It was nothing but printed paper to be stuffed into his wallet and carelessly flung about when he needed something.

Janine seemed in excellent spirits as they emerged from the slightly down-at-heel apartment block (having just transferred their contraband into the grasping hands of a small-time villain).

“Come on, mister,” she purred at Michael. “I've already saved your life and made you a pile of money; now I'm also going to make you immortal. Which means a short trip to St. Helena to meet the Mama.”

“The Mama? Who the hell is that?”

“Oh, just the greatest stoner this planet has ever known. Once you're with her you'll never have to ask yourself again who you are or what your life's about. She'll tell you.”

“I should probably think about it,” he said, remembering Günter's words about never trusting anyone.

“
The man who thinks, deceives his own desires
. Mama told me that.”

Janine drove inland from the rocky coast by Olbia, skirting inactive volcanoes, threading through hilltop villages. They saw a great number of ruined stone towers, and Michael reflected that there must have been a great civilization here once, though its people had failed, somehow, for they were all dead.

Slowly the landscape flattened out as they reached the western shore not far from Oristano. Towards midday they arrived at a covered black gate, with surveillance cameras on both sides peering down at them.

They sat waiting until the gates swung open.

Three or four hundred meters down a winding drive there was a slight incline towards an expansive terra-cotta roof partially hidden behind juniper trees. On the other side, the sea's horizon lay stretched like a massive, slightly curved rim. The courtyard was neatly swept but the banks on either side of the drive were overgrown with knotty, climbing geraniums that were more like small trees.

The door opened ahead of them, revealing a statuesque black maid in a pinafore dress—an emanation of the old Dixie South, practically singing a cotton-picking song as she stepped aside and let them through: “Just in time. She's getting impatient.”

Janine lengthened her strides. “And what's happening?”

“Not much. Elvira brought some fresh people up, she found them in Olbia; they're all hopelessly in love already. Engorged. They don't know what's going on, but they're up for an orgy.” The maid turned round and gave Michael a pointed look. “Don't mind my getup,” she said. “It's Mama's idea of fun. She likes to put people down.”

As they followed the maid's hips down a long, padded corridor, Michael poked Janine in the side. “What is this place?”

“A convent.”

“It doesn't seem like a convent to me.”

“That's the thing…” she said, with a wink.

They walked into a circular room with a bamboo-covered ceiling. At the center of it, encircled by a large group of white-robed chanting followers, sat a woman, a hawk-nosed late-fifties apparition, thin as a wishbone with hair so tightly pinned back that it looked more like a swimming cap. Her protruding eyes revolved back into place in her skull as soon as she grew aware of them, and seemed to linger on him especially. Michael had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being summarized or reduced in some way, and when she spoke he was slightly nauseated by the fastidiousness of her presence:

“Ah good. Janine. I was waiting for you. I don't like to wait.”

“I'm so sorry, Mama,” said Janine with exaggerated politeness and flopped down on a cushion, motioning for Michael to do the same. “I found this stray in Marseilles, hounded by the police. We weren't followed.”

Mama seemed to find this amusing. “Really, Janine. Someone is always following us, don't you know?”

“Well, yes, if you put it like that, Mama,” said Janine, clearing her throat. “We delivered two kilos to a Russian client in Cagliari.” She got out her bundles of money neatly held together by rubber bands and passed them across to Mama. Michael did the same. Mama casually weighed the dough in her hands, then threw it in a bag and called for the pinafore-wearing maid, who came across the cushions in her high heels and took it away.

When it seemed they could no longer bear the silence, Mama opened her mouth wide and began to chant once again in a plaintive voice:

The congregation joined in:

Once the ceremony was over, the cant and ritual was immediately discarded. Mama Maggot stood up and clapped her hands. “We break for tea!” she announced.

Twenty or thirty individuals—all waiting for this signal—bounced to their feet and hurried off like pupils released by the bell, flinging their white robes untidily into a small anteroom. Michael and Janine followed suit.