housekeeper. She put a hand consolingly on the woman’s shoulder.
“But humility and shame,” Christine continued, “can grow into pity, whether he wants you to feel pity or not. Pity to compassion. Compassion to regret. And so much else. You will be able to feel more than we feel, Mrs. Helios. You will learn to hope.”
A heaviness came into Erika’s heart, an oppressive weight, but she could not yet grasp its nature.
“Being able to hope — that will be terrible for you, Mrs. Helios, because your destiny is fundamentally the same as ours. You have no free will. Your hope will never be realized.”
“But William… How does this explain William?”
“Time, Mrs. Helios. Time, time, tick, tock, tick, tock. These disease-resistant, amazing bodies we possess — how long have we been told they will last?”
“Perhaps a thousand years,” Erika said, for that was the figure in the self-awareness package of her downloaded education.
Christine shook her head. “Hopelessness can be endured… but not for a thousand years. For William, for Margaret-twenty years. And then they experienced an… interruption of function.”
The housekeeper’s hard shoulder had not softened under her mistress’s touch. Erika withdrew her hand.
“But when you have the capacity for hope, Mrs. Helios, yet know beyond all doubt that it will never be fulfilled, I don’t think you can make even twenty years. I don’t think you can make five.”
Erika swept the kitchen with her gaze. She looked at the soapy water in the sink. At the dishes in the drying rack. At Christine’s hands. At last, she met Christine’s eyes again.
She said, “I’m so sorry for you.”
“I know,” Christine said. “But I feel nothing whatsoever for you, Mrs. Helios. And neither will any of the others. Which means you are… uniquely alone.”
Chapter 22
The Other Ella, a restaurant and bar in the neighborhood known as Faubourg Marigny, an area now as funky and soulful as the French Quarter had once been, was owned and operated by a woman named Ella Fitzgerald. She was not the famous singer. She was a former hooker and madam who had wisely saved and invested the wages of the flesh.
As Aubrey Picou had instructed, Carson and Michael asked the bartender to see Godot.
An elderly woman put down the beer she was nursing, swiveled on her barstool, and took their picture with her cell phone.
Annoyed, Carson said, “Hey, Granny, I’m not a tourist site.”
“Screw you,” the woman said. “If I knew for sure a tour carriage was nearby, I’d run you into the street and shove your head up a mule’s ass.”
“You want to see Godot,” the bartender explained, “you go through Francine here.”
“You mean less to me,” the old woman assured Carson, “than the dinner I vomited up last night.”
As she transmitted the picture to someone, Francine grinned at Michael. She had borrowed her teeth from the Swamp Thing.
“Carson, remember when you looked in the mirror this morning and didn’t like what you saw?”
She said, “Suddenly I feel pretty.”
“All my life,” Francine told Carson, “I’ve known perky-tit types like you, and not one of you bitches ever had a brain bigger than a chickpea.”
“Well, there you’re woefully wrong,” Michael told her. “On a bet, my friend had an MRI scan of her brain, and it’s as big as a walnut.”
Francine gave him another broken yellow smile. “You’re a real cutie. I could just eat you up.”
“I’m flattered,” he said.
“Remember what happened to her dinner last night,” Carson reminded him.
Francine put down her cell phone. From the bar, she picked up a BlackBerry, on which she was receiving a text message, evidently in response to the photo.
Michael said, “You’re a total telecom babe, Francine, fully swimming in the info stream.”
“You’ve got a nice tight butt,” Francine said. She put down the BlackBerry, swiveled off her stool, and said, “Come with me, cutie. You too, bitch.”
Michael followed the old woman, glanced back at Carson, and said, “Come on, bitch, this’ll be fun.”
Chapter 23
To assist with the tracking and the eventual efficient execution of Detectives O’Connor and Maddison, one of Victor’s people — Dooley Snopes — had fixed a magnetic-hold transponder to the engine block of their department sedan, tapping the battery cable for power, while the car was parked in front of O’Connor’s house, and while she had slept unaware through the summer morning.
Dooley had not been programmed as an assassin, though he wished that he had been. Instead, he was basically a sneak with a lot of technical knowledge.
Cindi Lovewell drove past Dooley, who was sitting in his parked PT Cruiser in Faubourg Marigny. The Lovewells had been issued an SUV — a Mercury Mountaineer with darkly tinted side and rear windows — which facilitated the discreet transport of dead bodies.
Cindi liked the vehicle not only because it had a lot of power and handled well but also because it had plenty of room for the children she yearned to produce.
When they had to drive to Crosswoods Waste Management north of Lake Pontchartrain with a couple of corpses, how much nicer the trip would be if it were a
In the front passenger’s seat, studying the red dot that blinked near the center of the street map on the screen of their satellite-navigation system, Benny said, “The cops should be parked about”—he surveyed the curbed vehicles past which they drifted, and glanced at the screen—“right
Cindi rolled slowly past an unmarked sedan, cheap iron that had seen a lot of use. Victor’s people were always better equipped than the so-called authorities.
She parked at a red curb near the end of the block. Benny’s driver’s license was in the name of Dr. Benjamin Lovewell, and the Mountaineer had MD plates. From the console box, he took a card that read PHYSICIAN ON CALL, and hung it from the rearview mirror.
Tailing a target, professional killers need to be able to park as conveniently as possible. And when police see a speeding vehicle with MD plates, they often assume that the driver is rushing to a hospital.
Victor disliked his funds being spent on parking tickets and traffic fines.
By the time they walked past the sedan to the PT Cruiser, Dooley had gotten out of his car to meet them. If he’d been a dog, he would have been a whippet: lean, long-legged, with a pointy face.
“They went into The Other Ella,” Dooley said, pointing to a restaurant across the street. “Not even five minutes ago. Did you kill anybody yet today?”
“Not yet,” Benny said.
“Did you kill anybody yesterday?”
“Three days ago,” Cindi said.
“How many?”
“Three,” Benny said. “Their replicants were ready.”
Dooley’s eyes were dark with envy. “I wish I could kill some of them. I’d like to kill all of them.”
“It’s not your job,” Benny said.
“Yet,” Cindi said, meaning that the day would come when the New Race would have achieved sufficient numbers to bring their war into the open, whereupon the greatest slaughter in human history would mark the swift
