Enamorata – Part 1

I’m not entirely sure how ‘erotica’ this story is going to be – it’s sort of a writing experiment for me. It’s also – those of you who are sci-fi fans might recognize – something of an homage to certain sci-fi writers. Here’s part 1 – I hope you enjoy it.

Behind the glittering towers of Bukit Bintang in Kuala Lumpur lay the leafy stillness of the old corporate compound. Its streets were lined with ancient mango trees planted when people still believed ghosts lived in their branches. Now it was an executive wonderland where sleek, black hydrocels glided along viscous avenues of night, matt-eyed and stealthy, like restless sharks.

I’d never been to Carradine house, but I’d heard about it. The Enamorate residencia was a massive twenty-room British colonial villa set deep off the street beyond a maze of sacred figs. As I drove up to the portico, their piano-wire filaments undulated on a humid breeze that stank of the kind of wealth normal people didn’t have the capacity to imagine. As a client, it would have cost me a decade’s salary just to get my foot in the door. Even if I’d had that kind of money, I wouldn’t have frequented the place; those sorts of arcane recreational pastimes gave me the creeps. But then isn’t that what everyone says about luxuries that they’ll never be able to afford?

The woman who met me at the door was expecting me, but she didn’t make eye contact. She took my ident card, touched it to the security broach on her lapel and, after it chimed discretely, motioned me to follow her up a wide, mahogany staircase. The place wasn’t what you’d expect: no glitter, no glam, no thumping music – none of the cliché trappings of over-the-top hedonism. In fact the softly lit corridor was deserted and silent as the grave.

She opened the double doors to a suite done in warm rose, lit as if by magic from hidden places, but there was nothing magic about the body soaking dark red arterial blood into the peach carpet. I didn’t bother checking for a pulse; no one loses that much and lives. The reek of jasmine and copper combined into the sort of scent memory you fight hard to forget. It lodged in the back of my throat and made me want to clear it.

“This is Michael Bettencourt,” said the woman redundantly, as if making a formal introduction. The man who’d bled out on the floor didn’t need one. He was Second Principal for one of the largest gigacorps on earth and, years ago, I’d indirectly worked for him.

Nor was there any mystery as to cause of death. An expensive black ceramic blade was sticking out of his throat, as if who ever killed him had grown bored of trying to hack him to pieces and left the tool embedded there in frustration. Lots and lots of stab wounds: his killer had either been very, very angry or certainly wanted it to look that way.

“Why haven’t you called the Sekuritas?” I asked.

“No police. The instructions from the client’s headquarters were very specific. I was to call you. Only you. They said you’d take care of everything.”

I looked away from the corpse to stare at her, but she still wouldn’t meet my eyes. I snapped on my comm and waited through the grey hiss of satellite transfer to link me through to Shanghai. It took almost ten minutes to get through to anyone with enough clearance to talk. Finally the head of security for BettCorp, Vasily Leong, came on.

“What the hell is going on, Vasily? Why am I standing here looking at your dead employer?”

“Just make sure the remains are on a flight to Shanghai tonight, and find the bitch.”

“Do I need to remind you that I don’t work for you anymore? I’m my own boss now and that’s the way I like it. Besides, this isn’t China, Vas. The Malays are sensitive about jurisdiction. They take their process very seriously when it comes to assassination.

The voice on comms was curt: “We’ve apprised them of our position on this matter and negotiated some solutions. They’ve agreed to stand down and let us take care of it.”

God, I hated that pseudo-official bullshit. Why couldn’t he just say he paid a big fucking bribe? “Well, where the fuck is your security team? There’s no one here. No one.”

“That was the deal. We settled on a corporate neutral. I chose you, Martinez.”

I began calculating all the permutations of how an exception like this one might have gone down. It was possible – anything was possible with enough cash – but there must have been huge favours called in places high enough to give me a nosebleed. Paranoia hit me like a high-speed maglev. Ever since I’d gone independent I worried something like this might drop in my lap.

“I’ll require an indemnity number to accept this. I’m not going to play rent-a-sacrificial-goat for Bettcorp’s extracurricular mishaps. Are we clear, Leong?”

I didn’t have to hit vid to catch the sneer; it came through just fine on audio. “Check your inbox, Mr. Martinez. I think you’ll find we’ve covered your ass and your expenses quite generously. Robert Bettencourt wants his brother’s remains in Shanghai by 9 AM and the enamorata in our custody by the day after tomorrow. No red tape. No bullshit. No delays.”

I wrestled my palmtop from my pocket and checked. There it was: a B-level transnational indemnity number: hold-safe from legal prosecution in almost every territory on the planet. Hell, with a TIN like that I could have probably committed genocide and gotten away with it. It took the tacit agreement of the 10 prime gigacorps to legitimately produce that kind of TIN. That only made the eels in my lower gut coil tighter. This wasn’t business as usual. It had gone down fiber-optic fast.

“I don’t poke my nose in these kind of messes anymore, and you know it. I’m nothing but a intercorp mediator now. I just break up the occasional internecine bar-brawl. Get someone else.”

There was a long pause, I could hear the creepy whistling sound that Leong made when he breathed through his nose. “Did you bother checking the fee, Martinez?”

Even as he said it, my gaze trailed down the palmtop screen at the rest of the missive he’d sent me. The figure nestled at the bottom of the email made my teeth itch, the kind of money that gives you a skull-rush. It was ‘pack up, move to somewhere with a beach and never work again in your life’ money.

“Shit,” I muttered.

There was a nasty chuckle on the line. “Do I take it that you’ll accept our terms?”

What I was looking at represented the end of all my worldly worries. It would retire me forever, pay for my daughter’s degree and still leave me bills enough to light cigars with. The whole thing reeked like rotting squid, but every one has their price. The figure glowing on the screen was more, by many orders of magnitude, than I’d I had printed on my tag.

“Whoever did this, I’m not taking them out, understood? I don’t do wet work.”

“Just get her to us. That’s all, Martinez. The rest is our problem.” Then the line went dead.

Closing my eyes, I took a big breath and regretted it immediately. The smell of blood was almost overwhelming and beneath it lay the banal reality that Bettencourt had lost control of his bowels before dying.

I commed Lim, my assistant, and heard his sleepy voice as he picked up. “Jeeze, Samuel. It’s almost one o’clock in the morning,” he whined. “What’s up?”

“I need you to come to Carradine House in the old corporate compound. Know where it is?”

“Um… sort of. Sure. I guess.”

“Bring the SUV, a biohazard kit and a body bag. There’s a corpse that needs to be at the airport in two hours and a BettCorp jet waiting on the tarmac at KLIA.”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” Lim barked. “A body? Since when did we become undertakers, boss?” But he was up and moving, rustling into his clothes as he spoke.

“Since now. Just get here quick.”

As I clicked off my comm, I turned towards the susurration of low voices. A huddle of men and women of varying ages and in varying states of undress had gathered just beyond the threshold of the open double doors, but they way they behaved reminded me of a group of small furry animals. They were whispering to each other and patting and cuddling each other, their wide eyes fixed on carpet at the body behind me. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen from a group of adults.

“So, I don’t suppose any of you know who did this?”

There was more whispering and more patting and a lot of nodding of heads but, like the woman who had shown me up, none of them met my eyes. They kept them pinned firmly to the carpet, like guilt-ridden children.

“Would anyone like to tell me?” I prompted. My tone turned unintentionally patronizing. What was wrong with these people?

Before any of them had a chance to answer, a tall, very thin middle-aged woman with deep taupe skin and short, stylishly cut grey hair pushed through the group and held out her hand.

“I’m Sanita. Would you like to have a talk in my office?”

Her eyes were a darker shade than her hair but the same metallic grey – stunning in someone of such a dark complexion – and they held my gaze steadily. My immediate reaction was: finally, an adult! I took her hand and shook it. “Samuel Martinez. Sure, I’d like that, but can we make sure this room is secured first?”

“Certainly.” Then she addressed the woman who had met me at the front door. “Alice, will you lock up the room, please, and see that the others all get back to theirs?”

Out in the corridor I hesitated, watching Alice as she pulled the doors closed and locked it them with a key. She handed it off to Sanita, who held it out for me. I took it and pocketed it.

“Shall we?” She turned, leading the way back down the corridor towards the stairs.

I followed, but not without a backwards glance at the fluffy bunny people shepherding each other in the opposite direction. It added to my queasiness. It was like watching heavily drugged lunatics in an asylum.

The office was on the ground floor. Cool and the kind of sedate that costs a fortune to achieve. Not that I knew much about interior decor, but it oozed wealth. Sanita motioned me to a dark red leather armchair and took a seat opposite in its twin.

“Annelise,” she said, simply.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s no mystery about who killed Michael Bettencourt. It was Annelise. He was her client.”

“And where’s Annelise now?”

Sanita tilted her head and shrugged. “Not here, I’m afraid. We’ve looked all over the house and the grounds. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I have no idea.”

I chewed on this for a moment. “No one seems very surprised or upset about this. Does it happen often?”

Her head changed its angle and burdened me with a bland smile. “It’s rare for it to go this far but, no, I’m not surprised. And, no, I’m not upset.”

“You don’t value your clients, Ms…?.”

“Sanita. Just Sanita.” Another cold smile. “BettCorp aren’t our only clients.”

“I guess not, but doesn’t a fatality under your roof concern you? I’m sure your other corporate clients won’t be so ambivalent about it.”

She gave a little laugh. “You don’t know much about the Enamorate, do you, Mr. Martinez?”

“They’re like those old fashioned geisha houses in Kyoto, aren’t they? Kind of retro style nookie?” I was talking out my ass but I didn’t want to use the word prostitute – it was so arcane.

“No, I see you don’t.”

“So why don’t you explain it to me?”

The smile she gave me then was genuine. “Certainly,” she said and, leaving her seat, walked over to a sideboard where thick cut crystal decanters glinted gold shards in the subdued light. “Drink?”

“No. Thanks.”

She poured herself something. The ice chimed expensively as she dropped cubes into her glass. “I’m going to have to give you something of a history lesson, then. Do you mind?”

I shook my head. “Elucidate me.”

Sanita retook her seat and crossed one slim ankle over the other. “In the year 2036, the world suffered the first wave of the Borna virus, the one that jumped from animals to humans.”

“That much of history I know.”

“It was mostly asymptomatic. At worst people suffered from a mild case of flu, but it left us with the inability to fall in love.”

“We also stopped blowing each other up for no reason and beating the shit out of our spouses.”

Sanita shrugged again. “True. All true. Most of the world recognized it as a positive change in mankind. That’s why it was decided there was no point in trying to formulate a vaccine to eradicate it. Not that it would have done any good – a vaccine wasn’t a practical reality. Of course, it didn’t curtail all our nasty emotional habits, but it did mean the end of what was once called romantic love.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Well, there were people – rare people – about 0.025 percent of the population who were affected differently. Not an actual immunity, per se, but the disease affected them in an opposite fashion. They aren’t just capable of falling in love. They become enamored of almost anyone, quickly, deeply.”

“I read that a lot of them went crazy, offed themselves. World without love and all that crap.”

“The variation of symptoms comes from a double recessive gene. That’s what the Enamorate are. Some people call them throwbacks; most psychotheorists consider them highly unstable. But for anything rare there’s a market, Mr. Martinez.”

“A market for nutjobs?”

“No. A market for love.”

I laughed. “I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t got the faintest clue what that even means. But as I understand it, it takes two to be in love. Isn’t that what those old fashioned songs say?”

“The songs are wrong. Enamorates fall in love with their clients almost immediately. And if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to have someone care for you on that level, there’s almost no way to explain it. But take my word for it, it’s an huge rush.”

“Like a drug?”

Sanita considered. “Not really. Slower than that. But it’s enormously gratifying to the ego. And…” she hesitated again. “It’s thrilling – like playing with fire. Far, far more dangerous than drugs.”

This wasn’t making a lot of sense to me. “I’ve met some Manufactureds. Is it like that?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. Manufactureds are a ghost of love, a theatrical pretence. They come out with pat phrases and terms of endearment by rote. They have implants to dilate their pupils at the right moment, but it’s all surface stuff. If you stood a Manufactured and an Enamorate side by side, you’d never mistake one for the other.”

It was my turn to shrug. The Manufactureds I’d run across disgusted me. They reminded me of bad soap operas, toothpaste commercials and confused transvestites out of drag. There was a kind of cult about them and most of them fucked transactionally – but who didn’t when it really came down to it? No one would have called them dangerous.

“So, the rush is in the sex? With the Enamorates?”

Sanita shifted in her seat and took a long swallow from her drink. “Well, it often starts that way. But no, that’s only a small part of the attraction.” She gazed at the ceiling. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to get close to someone who would die for you?”

It was important to get a sense of what was going on here so I pondered her question carefully. “I really can’t say I have.”

“Think about it for a moment.”

I did. It only made the eels in my gut squeeze tighter. The idea was kind of repulsive, but I could sort of see the attraction.

“Okay,” I said finally. “But that isn’t what happened here. The opposite, in fact.”

“Indeed. Love sometimes has a violent side. When it has, it’s usually self-destructive, but not always.”

“So why would anyone sane take the risk? Why would a Second Principle like Michael Bettencourt, who spends a fortune every year in personal protection, willingly engage in such a volatile situation?”

Yet another smile. A smug one. Had I ever considered liking a woman like Sanita, that smile killed it for me. She was as ruthless and avaricious as anyone I’d ever worked for. “People like Bettencourt get off on risk. They’ve experienced almost every kind of stimulus in the world. They’re jaded and bored and looking for extremes. This… this is it.”

I finally got it. I got it so hard it made my gums ache. “So Bettencourt’s murder isn’t going to hurt your business at all, is it?”

“Not in the least. In fact…”

“…You aren’t going to have enough Enamorates to go around…”

She nodded and pulled herself out of the chair. The leather creaked as she did.

“Where’s Annelise, Sanita?”

“No idea.”

“And you wouldn’t tell me if you knew.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

She held out her hand: a snotty way of telling me my time was up. I got to my feet, but I ignored her hand.

My comms ticked. Lim was there with the body bag.

“It’s in the eyes? That’s where it starts, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“Always in the eyes, Mr. Martinez. Always the eyes.”


Comments

19 responses to “Enamorata – Part 1”

  1. Well one thing’s sure – it’s gonna be a very interesting journey to take with you as you develop this promising story.

    All love!

  2. Nicely done, RG. “Susurration of low voices”..”The ice chimed expensively”..the dialog is pitch-perfect in a sort of Gibson/Chandler way…I’m hooked…keep writing, I look forward to more. This has tantalizing possibilities.

  3. City Different Avatar
    City Different

    Fantastic start, Rgrl! Beautiful writing, solid style, loaded with nice touches. I like the Philip Marlowe of the Future feel. And the premise, that letting someone fall in love with you is risky edge-play, is full of possibilities–and just right for you and your craft.

  4. An excellent start to a new world, RG. I’m a total sucker for next-century dystopias, but this has extra hooks, not the least of which is the sense of anticipation of discovery (or unraveling), both sensual and psychological, that comes with may of your stories.

  5. Absolutely thrilled, considering I’d just stepped off a plane the other day that came via KL. Although I’m guilty of not having reading the original, BR is one of my favourite films. (Reminds me of it, but I apologise if I’m wrong.) Can’t wait for the next installment.

    1. No need to apologize. It’s definitely paying serious homage to Dick and Gibson. I just hope something original comes through.

  6. Man, this is awesome! Classic noir meets science fiction. I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to the last little while. Knocked my socks off!

  7. RG,

    It left me yearning for more…

    Thank you.

  8. I honestly whined when I got to the end of this. I really, really want to know what happens next! Can’t wait for the next part, RG.

  9. RG, this is stunning, sci-fi and erotica, wonderful mixture.
    It’s beautifully polished, looking forward to the next episode. ๐Ÿ˜€

  10. This desert was really yummy and I can’t wait for more. I see Film Noir I see the bright and sterile future a graphic novel in less than a page.

  11. Sargaroth Avatar
    Sargaroth

    Beautiful, hanging on the RSS for more!

    /S

    1. Won’t happen till Monday. I’m marking ๐Ÿ˜€

  12. I really liked this: it’s original, clever and intriguing. Mainly, it leaves one wanting more! Roll on part 2. ๐Ÿ™‚

  13. Very nice. You got me hooked — looking forward to the next installment.

  14. Jerry Kircus Avatar
    Jerry Kircus

    What a great way to analyze the difference between lust and love. Great framework and I wait for you to fill in the blanks.

  15. I want more. Great premise thus far.

  16. Absinthene Avatar
    Absinthene

    Love that it is set in KL, my hometown. Can’t wait to read the next piece in the series…

  17. I wasn’t able to read this when you first wrote it – I can’t multitask very well, and I certainly can’t catch the tone of your writing when I’m doing something else! So I left it and read both parts together.

    Love it, by the way. ๐Ÿ™‚

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