All the way from the airport, Wanda Ases wondered what he could have meant: The gaunt structure of a man with empty eyes suddenly veering into her path, falling as though drunk against her shoulder, knocking her backwards, grunting uncomprehendingly; and then, darting feverish lips into her ear and hissing—Everything that’s done is done for you! And then disappearing into the crowd like smoke. What could any of it have meant?
Wanda had given up thinking about what it all meant a long, long time ago. She had learned that the safest thing to do was just to worry whose number was on the plastic card in her purse and would there be a clean bar where she could drink and not be bothered.
She knew she wouldn’t have to spend much time in Buena Salida; just a fortnight or so, and probably the worst thing that could happen to her was boredom. Well, that was fine. What she needed most was time to think.
She used to feel like she’d be a kid forever, but lately she couldn’t even remember a time when she didn’t feel old as the hills. And everything had been just peachy in the Benelux until some breathtaking agent from Seven International had swept through the office and pinned dumb old Lippincott to the wall.
The paperwork took eighteen months to process, but in the end, two thirds of the company had changed hands and she’d been delivered with an ultimatum: Take a V.P. and go with the package, or stay behind and die a slow corporate death.
She took the promotion, of course; whatever her weaknesses, idiocy was not one of them. But then to find out the new regime based itself out of the sweat gland of South America was about all that she could take.
The local office only made matters worse when they sent Iulio Vraqez in a limousine to pick her up. In Rotterdam she’d seen a Bentley/Foucault, and in Luxembourg, she’d even been promised a ride in one. In a world where most people were content to putter back and forth in plasticized tin-cans, motor-cars like the Bentley/Foucault had become the dream-machines of all serious materialists, but the B/F 6000 they sent around with Vraqez at the wheel seemed like an old nightmare abscessed by a bottle of bad Cabernet.
Someone had painted the hand-built DeMiola fuselage a livid pink enamel. The paisley convertible top sported a gold-braid fringe and the engine, simply running at idle, sounded like a calliope. The whole coach vibrated like some tragic streetscene.
She felt like a child lost at the circus, climbing into that car. It popped and snorted wickedly. The only other people she’d seen wore only body paint and feathers. The entire population of Buena Salida had got caught up in some garish festival associated with the imminent nuptial condition of two native gods. The bright colors and unctuousness of the atmosphere made her dizzy.
She leaned out the window as though to cough and her eyes caught a fragment of something incredibly familiar out of the chaos: The way that earlobe tucked itself in—
An acute pang of regret shot through her and, for a moment she actually cried. Then realization struck, replacing terror for pain. And there she was in the back seat of a machine that shrieked like bleeding Hell, with a driver who was himself nearly naked and painted as a snake; who kept leering at her in the rearview.
Wanda Ases shuddered to find herself in a strange and volatile land where far too few people knew a meaning for the word happiness that didn’t contain, in its definition, the word covet. And now; somewhere, somehow, Brian S’pense was here too. And Wanda Ases knew that wherever was S’pense, there too, disaster had to follow.
Main image courtesy Wikimedia Commons: “Magie du Carnaval – Rio de Janeiro” by Frenchyfoot.
