The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [129]
“Listen,” Dellaqua says. “If you get the opportunity—” He stops, looks her up and down critically, his eyes lingering on her breasts for a moment, then goes on: “Remember, you’re um . . . a bigger girl than she is. If you can grab her real tight and hold her by that far wall over there between the bed and the dresser, our men will have the door down and the fires snuffed and you girls safely out of there in ten seconds. Can you do that?”
She nods, and Dellaqua spends a minute locating his suit jacket, a double-breasted number, surprisingly crisp, which he buttons in a mirror by the door, squaring his shoulders and running a practiced hand over his pompadour.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Couch gives her the thumbs-up, and Dellaqua walks her down the stairs and across the street. To either side of the barricades camera bulbs flash and people shout things to her, but she can’t pick the words out of the overall noise. And even the noise she hears only distantly, as though through a thick sheet of glass. She is exhausted, in shock, barely even conscious, in that state just before sleep when dreamthought begins taking hold. She can barely feel her legs; rather, it seems to her as though she were being slowly trundled along past the eyes of consumers on some giant conveyor-belt product display. She floats past the group of street punks, who watch her with silent expectation. She watches them back, and with a surge of drowsy pleasure and pride, she decides she likes their look: it’s striking, challenging, and in its crude, savage way, even beautiful. From behind the safety of her sunglasses she goes on to examine the rest of the crowd, and she’s amazed to see how colorful they are, all of them, so harmonious and yet so variegated—all in winter coats, but each coat unique in hue and cut and fabric; all wearing bright, curious hopeful expressions, but displaying such a kaleidoscopic variety of hopefulness: hope of getting a final glimpse of the glamorous Ivy Van Urden in her window, hope that Ursula will talk her to safety, hope that they themselves may be called to acts of heroism, hope for a big, bright explosion, hope of scavenging money from the wreckage. Witnessing this dizzyingly, almost gruesomely gorgeous collage of hopefulness, Ursula for a moment can’t help admiring her little sister for putting this whole spectacle together, and moreover can’t entirely bring herself to hate Chas for it, either—Chas, who, even if he wasn’t directly involved, must have at least known about the bombs, must have known when he signed those papers that soon there would be no room full of money, no company for her and Couch to cheat him out of, no Ivy to watch putting herself together on calm, sunny mornings. She remembers what he said that day in his office about letting people destroy themselves if they want to. It’s a terrible notion, perverted by an individualism gone disastrously awry. But it’s not devoid of love. A wayward, twisted kind of love. For a wayward, twisted kind of world.
Dellaqua escorts her past the police guard at the entrance to Ivy’s building, then leads her up the stairs. Just outside the open front door stand four men in freshly pressed black fatigues, helmets, and tactical