Shuttered Sky

of a civilian barricade: chairs, tables—anything that could be piled upon, had been wedged into the blockade, and smaller household objects became the mortar in the gaps. Through the barricade, Martin caught the blue flickering of an arc welder.

“What’s going on here?”

“Urban renewal,” the cabby told him.

They pulled over near a clean black and white sign that said “Par­don our dust during beautification.”

“This is as far as I go,” Cabby said. “They don’t let taxis into the Miasma. Nowadays it’s what you might call a ‘gated community.’ '

Martin turned to look out the back window, where several blocks away he could still see the crumbling streets. “I thought we just passed through the Miasma.”

“Naah,” the cabby said. “That was the shit around the pearl.”

“I thought you said it was a horrible place.”

“That was then,” explained the cabby. “This is now. The Miasma cleaned up real good . . . if you call that clean.”

Martin almost asked how such a thing could happen to such a localized area in such a short period of time . . . but he answered his own question. “Tory Smythe . . .” he mumbled under his breath, but this cabby missed nothing, and threw him a knowing grin.

“She used to live here. That’s the rumor, anyway. Kind of makes you wonder.”

Martin opened the door, but didn’t pull out his wallet. “You’ll wait for me,” Martin instructed. “I won’t be long—keep the meter running.”

The cabby threw him a disgusted look. “Yeah, yeah.” He threw the cab into park. “Why did I know you were going to say that.” He rolled down his window and lit a cigarette.

As Martin approached the gap in the barricade, a guard with a clipboard came out to greet him, Cuban-dark and as clean-cut as Ward Cleaver.

“I need your name and destination,” the guard said.

“Marcus D’Angelo,” said Martin, giving his alias of the day. “I’m going to 414 Las Estacas, apartment 3- C.”

The guard glanced up at him at the mention of the address, then back down to his clipboard and curtly said “I’m sorry—you’re not on my guest list.”

Martin tipped the clipboard so he could see it, and quickly found his name. There were only a handful of names on the list—and no way the guard could have missed it.

“Funny, I could see it just fine with one eye.”

“You have business with Sharon Smythe?”

“My business is no business of yours.”

The guard stared at him, mad-dogging him a moment more, then backed down. “Two blocks down, then make a left. If she’s not home, you might try the church across the street.” The guard’s eyes turned to Martin’s suit coat. He picked a shred of lint from Martin’s jacket, rolled it into a ball in his fingers, then glanced down at Martin’s rum­pled slacks. “We have a dress code here,” he said. “Maybe next time you’ll remember to get those pressed.” Then he stepped aside.

Martin crossed between the banks of the barricade, to find that the Miasma had been transmuted into an inner-city Mayberry.

Just inside the barricade, a welder worked to erect a wrought iron fence that would soon take the place of the barricade. Painters coated the gate with primer.

The buildings were of the same construction as those beyond the barricade, but here, the brick had been sandblasted clean. The hydrants were painted a cheery orange, and there was not as much as a single candy wrapper in the gutter. A man in front of an appliance store swept dust from the sidewalk. An elderly couple holding hands strolled lei­surely down the street and teens hanging out on a street corner greeted the couple with a smile, tipping their caps like boy scouts. A block down, children played in a park that had probably been a syringe-mined vacant lot before Tory’s cleansing presence had mutated every­thing caught within her sphere of influence. In a sense, a bomb had been dropped on the Miasma; a cleansing salvo that had sanitized the streets, the hearts and the souls of those who lived here.

As Martin crossed another spotless intersection, he could see, on either side about a half mile away, other barricades keeping out the rest of the impure world. This place was an oasis in the midst of squalor. An abnormal, unnatural place. It reminded Martin why he was there, and what he had to do.

People nodded him a polite greeting as he passed, but their stares lingered on his bandaged eye a moment too long, and he could read an aftertaste of suspicion. They made it very clear that he was an out­sider, unclean in some fundamental way. It wasn’t just his eye, or his rumpled clothes, he realized—it was the fact that he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t possess their peculiar brand of purity. He was half tempted to go take a piss in some corner, just out of spite—but he didn’t need to draw further attention to himself. Not now, when he was so close.

No one answered at Sharon Smythe’s apartment, and so, following the guard’s advice, he crossed the street to a church, climbing a set of wide stone steps, and entering through a partially open door.

It was a high-ceilinged cathedral. Stained glass pictorials of the life of Christ painted the sanctuary in a colorful mosaic of light, slowly fading as the sun slipped off the horizon.

A man near the entrance was on hands and knees with a scrub brush and bucket, polishing the tile floor in little circles.

“Shoes off!” he demanded as Martin stepped in. “Shoes off!” It took a moment for Martin to realize from the man’s vestments that he was the priest. Martin removed his shoes and left them in a rear pew, then strode slowly down the center aisle.

There was only one congregant in the empty church—a blonde woman of forty, hair beginning to grey at the temples. She sat in the second pew from the front, as if being in the front pew would put her too deep under God’s scrutiny.

“Ms. Smythe?”

The woman didn’t look up. She stayed in her kneeling position, finishing whatever prayer she silently recited. Martin had little patience for it. “I don’t mean to disturb you . . . ' he said, loudly enough to make it clear that he did mean to disturb her.

Finally she looked up at him. If she was put off by his bandaged eye, she didn’t show it. “I suppose you’re Mr. D’Angelo.”

Far in the back, the priest grumbled upon finding his shoes in the rear pew, and took them to the entrance mat.

“Don’t mind Father Martinez,” said Sharon Smythe. “He doesn’t have much to do these days. Oh, for a while the place was packed with repentant souls and daily sermons. Now nobody comes to con­fession anymore. I imagine they’ve all convinced themselves they’re free of sin.”

Martin didn’t care to make small talk, or linger longer than he had to within this sterile field.

“Perhaps we should go back to your apartment, Ms. Smythe—so we can make the exchange.”

She looked at the object bulging in his leather carrying case.

“Are you certain that those are my daughter’s ashes?”

“Absolutely.”

She eyed the carrying case a moment more, then she reached be­neath her pew. “I have it right here.” From beneath the pew, she pulled out a box, and from inside the box she pulled out an urn. It was a white ceramic vessel, much more appealing than the one Martin had brought.

“Her life was riddled with bad luck,” Sharon Smythe said. “I sup­pose it shouldn’t surprise me that it wouldn’t end with her death.”

Martin opened his carrying case, and removed his urn, making a point to handle it with more care than he really had. “It was a horrible time. So many had died when the dam burst.”

“I suppose your business was good.”

“We earn our money relieving people’s misery, not creating it.” He held the brass urn out to her, but she didn’t take it.

“I should be heartened to find a funeral home so honest it corrects errors that no one would know about. You didn’t have to tell me I had the wrong ashes—I would never have known.”