Please, Mr. Cohen!” the woman wailed. “I wasn’t holding out on the tips! The other girls all keep the same amount!”
“The constables Hector and Cavendish caught these three for me, Martin,” Cohen said, taking a cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his smoking jacket. He tapped a button on the case so that a cigarette popped out of a little hole; he lipped it up to the lighter, puffed, and blew smoke in Blinken’s face.
“Cavendish!” Blinken snarled. “That crook! Supposed to be the law! You bought him off!”
“And isn’t that always the case with the best policemen?” Cohen said, putting the cigarette case away. “That Sullivan is such a square. Won’t take a bribe. But Cavendish likes my little gifts … doesn’t he, Blinken?”
“That’s not my goddamn name!” the older man shouted. His remaining eye blinked furiously as he struggled with the tight leather restraints around his wrists and ankles. He went angrily on, “You know damn well who I am! I worked for you a good six years, Cohen! I did a hell of a job in that crappy little casino of yours!”
“Oh, but you were skimming the winnings, old Blinken,” Cohen said, his voice oily. He toyed with the cigarette lighter.
“Ask anybody in Fort Frolic; I was completely on the level!” Blinken snarled. “I was totally—”
He interrupted himself with a long, pealing scream as Sander Cohen put his cigarette out in Blinken’s remaining eye.
Cohen made a face at the man’s shrieking—and then came that sucking sound, the thump, the sparkling, and Cohen had vanished.
… Only to reappear close beside “Nod.” Cohen reached out and stroked the young man’s blond hair. “The problem is an artistic one, a compositional question,” Cohen said, raising his voice to be heard over Blinken’s cries. “Shut that one up for now, will you?”
“Sure.” Martin was glad to do it. Blinken’s screams were distracting him from the movie. He strode over to him, took him by the throat—but instead of squeezing, something else came from his fingers. Not quite intentionally.
Ice. It spread out from his fingers onto the man’s neck, his head, and clickingly up over his chin. It covered his face like a helmet. In another second it had coated his shoulders, his torso—the man was caught in a carapace of ice.
“Stop!” Cohen barked.
Martin stepped back, unsure as to what had happened at first—then realized that he’d used the plasmid. The power of the specialized ADAM he’d been given had sent a current of entropy from his fingers, slowing molecules, drawing water vapor from the air—coating Blinken in ice.
“If I hadn’t stopped you,” Cohen said, playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off, “you’d have frozen him right through in another second. This way he’s in a pretty cocoon of ice, for now…”
It was true. Blinken was wriggling in the sarcophagus of ice. A little melted water, mixed with bloody foam, slipped about his face, his cries were muffled; one wild eye was bleeding, the other rolling under its blackened, swollen lid …
Martin marveled that he felt so little, that he was so distanced from what was happening this close in front of him. But the rolling hotness, the transporting sweetness of the plasmid high was still upon him, dominating him, and nothing else was truly real.
“Please, Mister, don’t do that!” the woman shrieked. “No no noooo!”
Martin turned to see Cohen flicking the lighter under her ragged clothing, her hair. Setting “Winken” on fire.
“We’re almost ready, Martin!” Cohen crowed as she writhed, shrieking in a growing plume of flame. “You must capture her in ice when she’s in just the right posture for the composition! We’re making a glorious tableau, a lovely triptych of tragedy: the human condition! I shall entitle it, Three Souls Revealed! If only Steinman could see this glorious transfiguration!”
Martin could barely hear him over the woman’s shrieking. Most of her hair was gone now …
What was this movie he was in again? What was the title? Martin couldn’t remember …
“There!” Cohen shouted, leaping with excitement. “As she arches her back and howls and spreads her fingers! Now! Freeze her! Just point at her and freeze her right there!”
Martin stretched out his arm and willed the plasmid to emanate from his fingers—he felt the chill of it passing out of him, saw ice crystals shimmering in the air in front of his hand. Suddenly, the fire around the dying woman was snuffed out.
She was instantly frozen solid, her eyeless sockets—the flame had melted her eyes—filling with pockets of crushed ice. Her mouth agape around a chunk of ice, her singed-away hair replaced by icicles …
Martin felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He was starting to see that this was real. These people were real …
Cohen vanished, teleporting—then reappearing near Blinken. Who was just starting to crack out of his ice cocoon.
“As soon as he breaks out, when he opens his mouth to shout at us—freeze him!” Cohen ordered. “Freeze him solid!”
At least that would end the man’s terror, Martin thought. The thought making him feel sick in itself. This is real …
He emanated the entropic power of Winter Blast—and the plasmid quickly froze the man through and through. And Martin shuddered, as if he was frozen himself.
“Ha haaaaa!” Cohen cackled just before he vanished—reappearing close to the groaning young man hanging slack in his bonds. “Only one panel of the triptych remains! Come, come and play with Nod, Martin!”
Martin found he was drawn to Nod, that his hands went easily to him. He was a very pretty young man, after all. Cohen took out an elegant little straight razor …
Medical Pavilion, Aesthetic Ideals Surgery
1956
J. S. Steinman was bemused and distracted. Admiring the eyeless, limp face he had so deftly removed from the woman’s skull, holding it up to the sea light from the windows so that he could see the deep blue of the North Atlantic through her empty eye sockets, Steinman thought: Aphrodite, your light is entering my eyes …
And then the visitor buzzer razzed intrusively at him.
“Damn them, why won’t they leave genius to be genius!” Steinman muttered, hanging the detached face—complete with her nose and eyebrows—over the lamp beside the operating table. The electric yellow lamplight came prettily through the sockets, but the blood emitted an awful stench in contact with the hot lamp.
The buzzer buzzed again.
“Wait here, my dear,” he sighed to the faceless woman lying on the operating table. Of course, speaking to her was pure whimsy: she couldn’t hear him. She was dead. She’d been a rogue splicer he had bought from a constable, who’d shot her in the head when she’d tried to decapitate someone with a fish knife. The bullet had left her alive—anyway, she’d lived until a few minutes ago—but paralyzed. So Steinman hadn’t needed anesthetic or restraints to keep her quiet during the carving …
He left the operating theater, climbed the stairs, and went through the operating suite’s door, locking it behind him. Absently toying with a scalpel, he crossed the small lobby and opened the outer door.
Steinman realized he should have cleaned up a bit before answering the door. Frank Fontaine and his bodyguards were standing outside the Medical Pavilion, staring aghast at his blood-splattered surgical coat and the bloody scalpel in his hand. The booster plasmid he’d been using was starting to make him a bit abrupt, careless perhaps. He had gone three nights without sleep.
“We didn’t realize you were, um, busy, doctor,” Fontaine said, rolling his eyes at his bodyguards: a thuggish sort in a tatty suit and a grubby long-haired man who looked like a dirty Jesus.
Steinman shrugged. “Just some anatomical investigation. Work on cadavers. A trifle messy. Do you wish to schedule some—”
“What I wish to do,” Fontaine interrupted sharply, “is to come in and talk in private.”
Steinman gestured with the scalpel—his movement was preternaturally brisk so that the scalpel made a whipping sound as it cut the air. The bodyguards reached for their guns.
“Take it easy,” Fontaine told them, raising a calming hand. “Wait out here.”
He stepped into Steinman’s lobby, and closed the door behind him. But Steinman noticed that Fontaine had his left hand inside the flap of his coat. “No need to be reaching for that gun,” Steinman sniffed. “I’m not some … lunatic. You just caught me at a bad time.”
“Then maybe you could put away the scalpel?”
“Hm? Oh yes.” He stuck it in his jacket pocket so it stuck up like a comb. “What can I do for you?”
Fontaine ran a hand over his bald head. “I am going to need some work done. Some on me, and some on … there’s a guy who works for me. Kind of looks like me. I want you to make him look a lot like me.”
“Mmm, probably,” Steinman said, cleaning blood from under his fingernails. “I should have to see him to be sure. But you have a distinct face, and that helps. That chin. Yes. If you want, I might be able to do a face transplant! Yours on his, his on yours! Has never been successfully done, but I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“Yeah well—not a chance. No, just … a little painless surgery so I look … different. And so he looks like I do now. And I want nobody to know about it but you and me … And I mean nobody. Not Ryan’s people, not Lamb’s people, not even my people.”
“Lamb?”
“You haven’t heard? She’s got some kind of uprising cooking in Persephone. I don’t trust her—don’t want her knowing any of my business.”
“Mum’s the word!”
“So you can make me look different—in pretty short order? Painless? And not a freak like some you’ve been turning out. A good face. A face people’d trust…”
“Should be possible,” Steinman allowed. “It’ll cost you. I’ll need a free supply of plasmids and plenty of cash.”
“You’ll get it—but the plasmids come after the operations. I don’t want you crackin’ up all rogue when you’re working on me. You already look like you could use some sleep…”
Steinman waved airily. “I work long hours perfecting both my skills and my art.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll get you a nice deposit so you’re ready to do this at a moment’s notice. It will be soon … Remember—not a word to anyone. Not even to Cohen—he’s too close to Ryan…”
“Oh, I see. Fear not. I would not have mentioned it anyway. I am ever discreet. It’s part of my professional code.”
“Better be. Or you’ll find yourself going headfirst out an air lock without a diving suit.”
Now there was the real Frank Fontaine, Steinman thought. That icy voice, the even colder eyes. His true colors.
Steinman winked conspiratorially. Fontaine just looked back at him—then went out the door.
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