Enamorata – Part 2

If you’d like to start at the beginning of this story, it’s here: Enamorata – Part 1

Forty-eight hours isn’t a lot of time. And even with a judicious dose of Nozee to postpone sleep, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to track down Annelise. Women are always harder to find than men. My wife always used to say it was because they don’t have the same itching need to break cover and do something heroic. Women can out-wait you, biding their time buried in the writhing shantytown masses for years.

But I knew from my experience in the House of the Enamorates that a woman like Annelise would probably not go unnoticed. If she were anything like the other inhabitants of that strange place, she’d stick out a mile. On the other hand, the picture Sanita had ported over to my palm top was disconcerting.

Annelise Tanasal was – there was no other way to put it – plain. You could see her mixed Dutch-Chinese-Indonesian heritage in the colouring and the shape of her face. Long, very straight dark hair and almond shaped eyes definitely tagged her as part Asian, but her eyes were an uncomfortable olive colour and she had a saddle of freckles over her cheeks and nose that spoiled her complexion. She had a pleasant smile, but her slightly crooked teeth marred it. I gauged her to be close to 40, although her file said younger. Maybe she just had unfortunate genes. It was only a head and shoulders shot, but I guessed her to be a little on the rolly-polly side. With all the predictive software and genetic correction available, I was surprised her parents had left her that way, or that the house of the Enamorates hadn’t paid for some cosmetic readjustment.

After I helped Lim bag up the body, I ran into Sanita at the front door and asked her about it.

“She’s not exactly what I expected,” I said, holding up my palmtop screen.

Sanita raised her eyebrows. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know… If I was going to pony up the kind of money you people charge, I guess I’d expect something a little more…”

“Perfect?” There was a sneer in her words. “Physically attractive?”

“Yeah.”

She exhaled in that way that let me know she thought I was a moron. “That’s not what we sell here, Mr. Martinez. Our clients have all the physical perfection that money can buy at their fingertips. And it doesn’t take a lot of money to get it. They want what’s rare. Enamoratas are rare, physically and emotionally. We strongly discourage them from changing themselves in any way.”

This bitch wasn’t going to give me any help at all. That much was clear. I was already mentally checking off my contacts in the skin business and wondering where the hell to begin my search.

“Well,” I said, staring at the face on the screen, “I wouldn’t fuck her.”

“Mr. Martinez,” Sanita said, with an ice-cold smile, “you’re a man with a very limited imagination.”

I shrugged. She was right enough – I didn’t get any of it. For me, women either got in your face or they didn’t. They were either easy to get along with or they weren’t. They’d either purchased the sort of tits that gave you a hard on or they hadn’t. Ultimately, I figured most men just settled for what was comfortable and worked for them, and that most women did the same. There was no point in pairing up with anyone unless it was financially advantageous to both parties. And truth be told, I hadn’t had much of an urge to spend a lot of time with anyone since my wife died. She’d been smart, sexy and possessed of a wicked sense of irony. In the heady and hectic days when I had worked for BettCorp, I could always rely on her to make good decisions when I was too busy to make them myself. I missed her.

That didn’t mean I’d been celibate. I had my favorite hook-up joints and every so often I’d pop a few stimulants and go down there looking for a little flesh trouble. Of course, you can’t expect the pick of the crop once you’re over 40 and self-employed. I guess I could have made an effort and bought some juvination treatment myself, but I was lazy about it.

Attraction-wise, I’ve always gone for small, willowy and blonde. Luckily it was a popular look, so it was never too hard to find someone who rang my bell. There was a ravenous little Icelandic number who sometimes turned up at the Belleview lounge. Katja was sylph-like and sleek. She had this trick of wrapping her long, almost silver hair around my cock when she stroked me, so her grip would feel slippery and dry at the same time. I’ve always been a sucker for that sort of goodwill gesture.

Then there was Miyomi. She was Jap by birth, but had blonded her genes. I liked the combo of all that flowing golden hair and heavily epicanthic folds on her eyes. She was all about keeping up with the Joneses and had had something done to her cunt that made it feel like it was sucking you off as you fucked her. But she had this irritating squeak when she got close to coming that always made me think I was boning a rubber duck. It was distracting.

Well, you can’t have everything.

After Lim headed off to the airport, I sat a while in my hydrocel with the windows rolled down and let night breeze keep me awake while the Nozees kicked in. I stared at the pic a little longer and then jacked my palmtop into the vehicle screen and did a little digging.

Enamorates services were purchased by private auction, but there were always gossipy society feeds that covered that sort of thing in vague detail. Michael Bettencourt’s transaction had made some waves, but it had been almost a year earlier. He’d purchased her for a year? That was a bit of a surprise and I tried to get my head around what it must have cost to do it. I had assumed that you hired one of these people on a temporary basis. But if he’d been seeing her for a year, I could see how things might have gotten a little complicated.

My muscles began to ping as the sythnenalin hit my bloodstream and my stomach was grumbling. I headed down to Chinatown and found a seat at the 100 Lucky Coins all night noodle and dumpling joint. Lee, the owner, slid a steaming bowl of mee in front of me and looked over my shoulder at the photograph on my palmtop.

“Your sister?”

“Nah.”

“Hmm. Too bad.”

“Enamorata. I’m looking for her.”

“You’ve come up in the world!’

“No. It’s a job. She iced a guy and did a runner.”

Lee shook his head gravely. “Those people are crazy.”

“Where do crazy people go?” I asked, more a joke than a question.

But Lee pondered the question anyway. “Malacca?’

“Why Malacca?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But if I were crazy and needed to hide, I’d go to Malacca. They run that freetrain down there for the tourists. It’s always crowded. Everyone is crazy in Malacca.”

I considered for a moment. I’d been thinking of heading out to the suburban slums and asking a few of the people I knew who dealt with immigrant labour. They processed the Burmese and Nepalese who paid for papers and a better life in KL and Singapore. But Lee was right. I was still thinking of this woman as skin trade and that was the wrong way to see it.