Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [131]
Getting through security had been easy; there’d been an anxious few moments while I wondered whether my picture might have been circulated around the security staff, but no one gave me a second glance. I was accompanying someone who had a bona fide invitation, as his guest, and I was also dead so I was unlikely to be a threat to anybody. Golson was still rather unhappy about the turn of events, but I’d reassured him that far from damaging his reputation, it would probably double his chance of scoring at the reception after the service. He seemed fairly cheered by this until he figured out what I meant.
I didn’t see anyone in the crowd who looked like trouble for me, nor did I expect to. I’d made Vinaldi promise to keep his head down until the afternoon. Maxen wouldn’t be showing himself before the service proper, where he was apparently slated to deliver a eulogy to the dead girl; and Yhandim and his colleagues were far too ragged-looking to be allowed near center stage of such an event. I had little doubt they were lurking somewhere on the sidelines, but so long as I stayed in the crowd I wasn’t too worried about them. Yet.
After half an hour I noticed something going on at the far edge of the group, and saw that Yolande Maxen was leading the woman whose image I’d seen talking on Golson’s invitation. This was Forma Richardson, I gathered, mother of the deceased, and she was being given a tour of the guests. I lit a cigarette, to the general irritation of everyone around me, and watched as the small entourage made its way through the crowd. Golson had disappeared by then, presumably working the room.
Something about Yolande Maxen’s face struck me as off; instead of the triumph I would have expected, or the public display of sympathy, her features seemed dead and hollow. Mrs. Richardson, for her part, seemed completely unaware of the identities of many of the people around her. Grief, possibly, or maybe the Maxens had primarily invited people they wanted to cow, rather than anyone who had any genuine relation to the dead Louella Richardson. When I saw one middle-aged couple turn away in distaste after shaking Forma’s limp hand, obviously trying not to let her misery intrude on the exciting time they were having, I looked away and gazed up at the ceiling instead.
Directly above me was a representation of some biblical event or other. It meant nothing to me, nor probably to anyone else in the room. It was yesterday’s box score. We used to have religion but now we had code, both signifiers of events that happen in worlds which are just out of sight. We used to believe in an invisible God: Now we put our faith in streams of electrons fizzing through spaces too small to see. Once again our understanding is handed over to the unperceivable, as if there is some fundamental need in humanity which requires the inexplicable to be at the heart of our lives, which requires that our destiny be shaped by intangible forces. Maybe we need places with no paths to them.
God, code, our own minds. Maybe we just never read the manuals properly.
As I stared up at the ceiling it shaded away, and instead I saw a series of images that came unbidden into my head. Henna’s face, and Angela’s; and then Shelley Latoya. Shelley took the longest to fade, a memory of the way her eyes had slipped across to me when I’d given her a