Mardock Scramble

bringing his hand to twelve.

Then he drew a 9. He had reached his total of twenty-one. Shell had won.

02

–Never doubt. It’s the road to ruin.

Shell looked up at Balot, confused.

–The recipient of love shouldn’t have any doubts. No need to trouble yourself with questions.

Behind Shell, John chuckled to himself.

Shell collected the golden chip with hands that couldn’t quite stop quavering, then took in the cards for the discard pile.

Shell understood all too well what had just happened. The way the cards had been dealt was ace, king, 4, jack, 7, 9.

In other words, before his switch the cards had been arranged king, ace, 4, jack, 7, 9.

Had Shell not made his move, Balot would have had blackjack, and not just any old blackjack. The ace and jack of spades: a payout of 11 to 1. Her million-dollar stake at that level of payout would have been an atomic bomb, blowing the casino to pieces.

Then it hit Shell; he had worked it all out. Where exactly Balot had inserted the red marker: right below the ace that had just been dealt. She had known exactly how and where he was going to cut and based her own play around that.

Shell was completely under her thumb. She’d even planned exactly how he was going to win, forcing his hand, quite literally. He felt a deep malaise welling up inside himself. He was on the verge of screaming as his pride and confidence were ripped to shreds.

John, on the other hand, was delighted to see the golden chip return to its box, welcoming it home like it had been his own kidnapped daughter released from incarceration. Hardly surprising, considering the chip represented his own dirty money.

It wasn’t even so much the money itself that was at stake for John and Shell but the very fact of its existence. If, as a result of the transfer of large amounts of cash—a large payout, for example—they came under scrutiny from the authorities and their money-laundering scheme was discovered, it would be far more than the actual cash that John and Shell both stood to lose.

Balot’s aim now was to find the right timing to lay down the final three golden chips.

She threw around more of the ten-thousand-dollar chips for the next few rounds, waiting for her next chance. Then, just as she was getting ready to place the next million-dollar chip, an old memory came to mind.

Something she had once seen on television. Aborigines—native peoples under the protection of the Commonwealth. A funeral, a wake, but a festive occasion. The aborigines had great respect for Mother Nature and celebrated a person’s return to her bosom via the ceremonial slaughtering of a cow.

The reason she’d ended up watching such a program was simple: she had misheard the announcer and thought it was going to be a program about abortion.

Abortion, abortionist, abortive—Balot was only half paying attention to the television when she thought she heard something along those lines. She was surprised, therefore, to find out that the program was about a completely different topic.

She kept on watching, though, if for no other purpose than to try and dispel the images that her mind had conjured up. That was how she’d learned about aborigines. Where was she when she saw that program? Yes, that was it—the place she’d been at before her last brothel—the Date Club, in the waiting room.

There were a number of girls working there. The clients would phone in, having seen the details on a flyer or poster, and the man in the office—reception, really—would then send out the girl that most closely matched the client’s request. In between assignments the girls waited around in interminable stretches of tense boredom. The girls would do what they could to alleviate this with magazines, television, books, or by attending to their manicures. It helped blot out other, more unpleasant, thoughts.

Occasionally, though, these other thoughts would still seep through. Much in the same way that Balot ended up watching the program on aborigines—to try and take her mind off a more unpleasant thought.

The aborigines in the program didn’t just revere death—they also feared it. The reporter explained that this was all tied to their deep respect for the jungle. Balot understood immediately. She could relate to the animals being offered up to nature—she knew what it meant to be a sacrificial lamb. And she knew that this was a scene that played out everywhere.

It the city, people feared one another. Society was divided into those with power and those without, and if it was social interaction that helped to dissolve that fear of each other, it was also social interaction that served up scapegoats—sacrificial victims, a necessary and inevitable function to keep society running. Balot was always hearing such stories from her customers and the other girls.

Stories of sadistic men who could only get their kicks by torturing people, or religious nutjobs who had to follow a precise set of bizarre rules in the correct sequence in order to get off, or men who selected the right girls —or boys—to fulfill their fantasies to the letter, choosing their costumes and the scenery, ordering them around like a theater director would his actors. These men may not have physically been taking machetes to the throats of their livestock, but they were doing the equivalent to the hearts and minds of thirteen-year-old girls.

The Date Club that Balot worked at was one of the better brothels—one of the safer ones, anyway. The club paid taxes, or at least the man at reception said it did. We’re virtually a public service.

In other words, they’d covered their backs against charges of violating the protection of minors law.

Those places that operated under the radar, avoiding such “unnecessary expenses” as taxes—it stood to reason that these were the most dangerous of all.

The pimps weren’t always strangers, either. One of the girls, before she worked at the Date Club, used to be pimped out by her father on a regular basis. She’d already been with nearly a hundred johns by the time she was sixteen—most of her “clients” being his friends, drinking buddies, or customers at the watering holes her father frequented. Then one day her father found himself in deep trouble with one of her clients and mysteriously disappeared from the world. The girl carried on living, surviving, through the profession that her father had taught her so well. As if that was her way of showing her filial love and devotion.

At the club the girls swapped gruesome stories of how girls who plied their wares from street corners had a tendency to meet a bad end. One girl recounted to Balot a particular tale as if she were talking about a horror novel. How one of her friends ended up wasting away in the hospital, her bones shattered, her body jelly. Girls beaten to death by their violent men had looked a prettier sight.

Apparently the dead girl used to refer to herself occasionally as a bomb. A ticking time bomb. Her friend only understood why when she saw the diagnostic charts at the hospital. The dying girl had AIDS and had been slowly dying from it for many years, working the streets all the while. Then the dying girl told her how she had ended up infected with such a disease. She had been raped one day on her way home from school.

Since then she had lived only for her work. For revenge. On her deathbed, she dreamed of all the bombs that she had spread, hoping they would explode in a fiery blast inside the men to whom she had successfully passed on her disease.

Then there were the girls who worked in groups to ensnare the big earners.

Not just ensnare, either—often their behavior would descend into blackmail, forcing their marks into handing over increasing amounts of money under the threat of public disclosure. The gangs often ended up getting sucked into larger criminal organizations—some girls went voluntarily, others in order to protect themselves from the backlash from the disgruntled blackmailee. The girl who told Balot this story was one of the former group, having joined a large criminal gang by choice, but she had run away shortly after realizing that she had made a mistake. Men do understand on some level that women feel pain too, she said, but what they don’t realize is that the pain we feel has just as much impact on us as it does on them. Pain couldn’t fight gravity and always flowed downhill toward lower ground, finding the path of least resistance. However bad life at the Date Club was, it wasn’t as painful as the alternative.

Well, at least nothing like that ever happens here. This was the platitude so often