Virtual Virgin

Chapter Five

RIC LOOKED SIXTY stories down to admire the fountains of cavorting flames that enveloped the Inferno Hotel’s towering exterior night and day.

They flaunted every color of a high-Fahrenheit rainbow, azure to orange, gold and red blending with the blue into teal and bright absinthe green.

On the top floor the flame tips formed a dancing set of spearpoints outside the glass walls, but the penthouse temperature was as cool as its ice-white albino master, the Vegas mogul that Delilah called Snow.

Ric tried to see through the fire-shrouded stories but failed to glimpse the Las Vegas Strip. Only the crowding new towers under construction were visible at this level. These were brown-gray skeletons of concrete and iron, ugly and crude at this stage. They reminded him of the architectural equivalent of giant zombies gnawed down to their bare bones.

He felt a shiver despite the exterior flames and forced away a sudden eerie stab of foreboding. He had safe passage here now, despite being one of the few people in Vegas, besides Delilah, who dared to argue, hard, with Christophe. He wasn’t going to stop now.

“I don’t like the first part of your proposal,” he told the long, pale figure lounging in an ivory leather conversation pit built into a ghost-pale plush carpet. “I do agree the Metropolis robot is ‘extremely valuable,’ but she’s not a ‘commodity’ to me. She’s a responsibility. I called her off the silver screen into being. I won’t let her become a fancy new CinSim in your hotel’s extensive collection of hapless celebrity zombies. I’m not even sure she is one.”

“‘Commodity’ was a poor choice of words with you,” Christophe admitted, his lanky frame stirring. “You’re a man of admirable if tiresome responsibility. Unfortunately, post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas is not much populated by individuals with scruples. Do you realize how much concentrated silver nitrate was on those film frames showing a solid metal robot? The mother lode. You must suspect that silver-power wielders are a new force on the paranormal scene. Hell, you’re sleeping with one.”

“Outta my private life. And I know where that silver familiar Delilah’s locked into came from, Christophe.” Ric eyed the mogul–rock star’s long, almost luminous white hair.

Christophe shrugged. “Powers can rub off like fleas in a place teeming with them as much as Vegas is nowadays.”

“You sent Delilah a lock of your damn hair like some lovesick Cavalier poet.”

“She wasn’t your girl then. And I didn’t know the ‘damn hair’ had a life of its own that would transfer to her. More likely her own latent powers animated it.” Christophe’s body shifted again.

Was he uneasy? Lying? Or telling an inconvenient truth? Ric didn’t know how to read it, but he sensed the Inferno kingpin was hiding a deeply personal reaction.

“Delilah has a wild talent,” Christophe said. “Better watch out. You’ve caught her silver powers, so your dead-dowsing abilities might rub off on her some night, Montoya. Imagine Delilah free, willing and able to raise her favorite vintage film idols. Errol Flynn, say.”

Now that Ric recognized as a guy-to-guy taunt designed to distract him. From what?

“Anyway, back to our real silver girl,” Christophe said. “Every power in town will be after . . . her, as you call the robot. And, you forget, I now own the film you filched her from and every frame in it.”

“It wasn’t deliberate, my raising her.”

“Exactly, not deliberate. Not planned, just like the case of the silver familiar. We’re both victims of undiagnosed powers.” Christophe’s smile was mocking. “Yet this unexpected new angle to your post–Millennium Revelation talent did put you a step beyond your usual bounds of dowsing for the in-ground dead. That was a focused but useful talent when you worked in law enforcement. You realize what you’ve just done to raise the so-called Silver Zombie from a movie screen? That makes you an ‘invaluable commodity’ in post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.”

“I can live with it.”

The albino’s perpetual inky-black sunglasses lifted to reflect the flames outside, not the sophisticated surroundings. “So you think,” he said idly.

Ric sensed Christophe was taking his comment in a way he hadn’t intended. That made him glad he hadn’t bothered to correct one misconception. Ric had been born into a family of poor rural Mexican water-dowsers, a boy only able to raise dead things, long before the Millennium Revelation had brought supernaturals out into the open and had exposed weird abilities in ordinary people.

“Sit.” Christophe’s guitar-riffing right hand gestured to a spot three feet away on the sprawling couch. On top of having untold money, influence, and probably unknown powers, he was a freaking rock star.

“Sit down, Montoya. Relax. You’re among friends. Who gave you shelter and protection after the Karnak vamps tried to eat you for brunch?”

Ric sat. “I didn’t ask for sanctuary here, with you, Christophe.”

“Call me Snow. Someone had to provide you with secure R and R time, so the Inferno Hotel stepped up. Now you’ve probably brought a demon drug lord down on us all. Why didn’t you kill your old tormentor when you had the chance in Wichita? You deserved to take your revenge on El Demonio and law enforcement would have loved you for it.”

“As you say, not long ago I was law enforcement. We’d want the bastard alive and in custody so we could break his organization.”

“You might have the power to do that solo now. Something enabled you to raise a CinSim directly without going through the Immortality Mob. That’s another ugly coalition that’ll be wanting you dead or on its payroll.”

“Is that why you’re making an offer you think I can’t refuse? That I live at your hotel from now on? To give you leverage with all these bad guys supposedly wanting my hide?”

Christophe kept silent, sipping from the martini glass set on a built-in Lalique glass table, savoring the drink Delilah had created to annoy him, an Albino Vampire. Christophe violently denied he was any such thing, but the jury that could rule on that issue hadn’t even been picked yet.

Ric could see why the man infuriated Delilah. He was unflappable.

“It’s the ideal solution to my prize CinSim’s security and your own safety,” he was saying. “It is an offer you can’t afford to refuse.”

As Christophe’s head had lifted to speak, Ric spotted a bruise as dark as cherry amber underneath the pink-ruby-studded black leather collar he wore onstage, and now, apparently, off.

Pink albino eyes were ultrasensitive to light. That would explain the constant sunglasses and symbolic hot-pink jewels. It didn’t explain why a flagrantly sexy rock star wanted to conceal a passion bruise . . . or a bite?

Ric didn’t want to speculate about Christophe’s sexuality any more than he needed to know what brand of supernatural he was. Sorcerer, it looked like, but looks were especially deceiving in a Vegas teeming with paranormal creatures and effects. The nickname “Snow” came from his onstage identity as Cocaine, the lead singer of the Seven Deadly Sins band. His stage persona reeked of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

Ric bet Delilah would have a fit to know he was seriously powwowing with the guy instead of just watching a movie, but Ric had learned long ago as a small boy in Mexico that sometimes you have to deal directly with the Devil.

“Moving in here would be . . . awkward . . . Snow.” Ric sipped his own cocktail.

The pale lips smiled at this first step toward possible concession.

“I’ll give you a whole floor,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, now attired instead of bared for the stage. “A private elevator for Miss Street to come and go discreetly on her errands of surveillance and . . . other matters.”

“I like my house.”

“A suburban ranch-style equipped with a smart-ass computer? It has a certain earthy charm, like you, maybe. But it’s not secure enough now, Montoya. You were in the FBI. You know that.”

“Perhaps not safe enough for . . . her.”

Christophe leaned forward, his long white hair brushing the lapels of his silk designer blazer. White, of course. The nickname literally suited him. “You can’t keep the most valuable CinSim in the world at home in a closet, like a vacuum cleaner.”

Ric sipped the Bloody Mary he’d accepted, silent and forcing the other man to speak.

“I’m building a new Metropolis for it . . . her,” the mogul went on. “A modern Tower of Babel for the first silver-screen robot. Once it’s done, I’ll have the best normal and paranormal security in Vegas or the world for it. Her. But you still won’t be free to return to your modest, middle-class house and play bait for whomever you like.”

“Why don’t we ask her?” Ric said.

“Really? That would be like boosting C-3PO from the Star Wars film strip and taking his scripted words for . . . well, scripture. That golden futuristic robot is her cinematic descendant.”

“I can see that without being a damn movie buff. Where is she?”

“In the home theater, of course.”

Ric stood, waiting to be shown.

He wasn’t surprised to be led through a pair of double doors, but the semicircular 3-D surround screen that confronted them could match any installed at major national monuments. A curved single row of six lavish reclining theater seats seemed lost in the massive carpeted space.

“Lonely at the top, huh, Christophe?” Ric commented.

Then the lights came up and he saw her again. At one end seat, the Silver Zombie stood like an unused usher.

His . . . protégé? Creature? What was it . . . she, really? His responsibility, certainly.

“We need a name for her.” Ric spoke softly, as if she might hear.

“Don’t ask me. I was content with It.”

“Delilah is right. You are a heartless bastard.”

“The last individual I heard of who was hankering after a heart was a Tin Woodman not unlike my mute guest there.”

The robot was evidently voice-activated, though, because the motionless metal figure had turned to home in on Ric. She moved stiffly at first.

Ric remembered Delilah saying that the actress had to wear the clumsy plastic-wood suit of silver-bronze painted “armor” to play the robot version of her character, even when it scraped her skin and a double could have taken her place. Poor . . . what was her name? Ric wondered.

“Brigitte,” Snow mused as if answering a spoken query. “Sexy name. Pretty little Brigitte Helm. The actress was only nineteen. Just eight years later she was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein. Fitting, that was, since that 1935 American film drew on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its invention of a mad scientist and ‘machinery’ of bubbling vials and neon. A vial shaped like a giant martini glass formed the centerpiece of the laboratory set. I imagine Delilah really enjoyed that part.”

So, Ric wondered, the Silver Zombie cocktail Delilah had concocted in Wichita was an idea whose time had finally come?

“I don’t know all these movie references,” Ric said aloud, “but I know how to put two and two together. You’re beginning to sound like Delilah, a film history buff.”

“Always was, a bit, but no. Now I’m most interested in the film’s futuristic cityscape, the gliding biplanes and bullet trains shooting along on tracks up among the skyscrapers with the Tower of Babel squatting like a gigantic horned god over the slick modern towers Las Vegas hotels have become famous for. I’ve been aching to pattern an addition to the Inferno on this film for . . . a very long time. You really must see Metropolis. Study it. Another reason you should move in here.”

“To see a movie? I don’t think so.”

Ric glanced at the gleaming metal figure beside him, standing as still as a life-size female Oscar award. Her metal carapace was anatomically correct on superheroine terms. She was a powerful female figure, far curvier than a Victoria’s Secret model in a Wonderbra but not at all caress-able.

“You’ll probably use her as the centerpiece of a recreated mad scientist’s resurrection laboratory,” Ric said. “What a waste.”

“She’s not the most scintillating conversationalist,” Christophe said with a smile, “but she was in a silent movie.”

“She spoke in your Emerald City Hotel penthouse in Wichita,” Ric reminded him.

The mogul’s pale white eyebrows lifted over the rims of his aviator sunglasses. They both knew what she’d said; apparently Ric’s reference had recalled that word to her as well.

Perfectly oval blank silver eyes seemed to bore deep into Ric’s.

“Master,” she said.

Again.

That one word gave him the creeps and drove Delilah crazy.

Christophe just smiled.

“Isn’t that . . . useful? She’s transferred her allegiance from the film’s evil genius who created her, Rotwang, to the do-gooder who re-created her in physical form in our own time. You, Montoya. At least you have a better-sounding surname. And, who knows? That one little word from her cold metal lips to your ears may save all our necks in the coming second Vegas apocalypse.”

“A ROBOT CINSIM,” Ric mused after they’d left the creature dormant again in the empty theater.

He’d returned to his seat, feeling as zombielike as . . . Brigitte . . . had acted.

“As you’ll soon see in the movie,” Christophe said, lounging in his white leather conversation pit again, “the robot was able to assume human likeness. I suspect the version you called off the screen is more of a cyborg, half machine, half human. You had to raise the dead body of the actress inside to draw the exterior likeness into being. Brigitte Helm died in 1996.”

“That recently?” Ric asked, trying to imagine a wizened, bent shell of a woman imprisoned in that eternally erect and superheroine-curvaceous body. If it didn’t mimic hard shiny metal, Ric would call it lush.

“Life expectancies have been climbing in recent decades,” Christophe noted, “especially now that vampires have joined the human race . . . or at least live side by side with humans.”

“Like you?”

“I’ll deny that false charge until the day I die.”

Christophe’s smiles, Ric observed, always seemed eerie because you could never see the expression of his eyes. The idea of Delilah accepting a kiss from those colorless lips, so like a corpse’s, and doing it on his behalf, made his skin crawl.

Some women might find that Ice King image hot, and obviously did by the legions, but not Delilah. She’d worked to free Christophe’s Brimstone Kiss–addicted groupies from their obsession. Odd what women would fall for, as odd as the absurd idea of him falling for the Silver Zombie. Time to get back on topic . . . squeezing Snow for information.

“Isn’t a cyborg a blend of human and machine,” Ric asked, “more than the mechanized body parts doctors can install now? That’s in steampunk films. Isn’t true cybernetics blending the brain and the circulatory system with machines?”

“The head and the heart. Quite a theme in Metropolis, as you’ll see.”

“I don’t need to view the film to know that the robot exterior is just an especially elaborate costume, and that the actress who wore it was an independent being.”

“But it was shaped from her body cast.”

“Still a shell. She has to be the sum of her parts, a CinSim raised inside one of her costumes for the movie, like a deep-sea diver brought to the surface.”

“Interesting point. Perhaps you should try to call the character of Maria in her human form off the screen.”

“No.” Ric stood and backed away from the lounging figure before he knew his impulses had willed him to move. “I’m not going to be responsible for multiple incarnations of that poor actress.”

“If not you, perhaps someone far worse than you.”

“You? I suppose now that you own the film you could order any image on it revived as a CinSim. Why would you even need me?”

“I want this incarnation.”

“Why did El Demonio Torbellino say there was a demon inside her that only he knew how to raise, Christophe?”

“Perhaps because it’s true? For God’s sake, toss out your anti-unhuman prejudices and call me Snow. Even Delilah does, and she hates my lily-white guts.”

“Why?”

“I’m sure she can enumerate my sins better than I can or want to. Ask her. Unlike Brigitte, she talks, fluently and frequently.”

Ric was done discussing his girlfriend with Christophe. “Why would the Metropolis robot be so powerful to a demon drug lord? Wasn’t the robot destroyed in the film, burned at the stake?”

“By then the character was both monster and martyr. The monster part was wrapped around the heroic Maria in that robot’s pseudo-metal skin. Perhaps your role is to draw out benign parts of her being: the role of Maria, the idealistic enslaved workers’ advocate, or Brigitte, the nubile young film star. You seem to have a gift for bringing out unsuspected depths in naive young women.”

Ric paused with the rim of the tall Bloody Mary glass at his lips. “You just want to use me and the Silver Zombie against your Vegas Strip rivals and Torbellino . . . and the Immortality Mob, I’m thinking.”

“Of course. But they’ll all want to enslave you for even more distasteful ends. Your life is in grave danger if you don’t gain the protection of a major force in Vegas.”

“My life has been in danger since I was four years old. No risk, no gain,” Ric said.

He drained the Bloody Mary before setting it down on a table.

“Your commercial instincts are second to none,” he told Christophe, “but there may be more seriously heavy players at work in Vegas than even you suspect.”

Christophe stood too. He was taller than Ric, but not by much. Ric suspected some lost Cuban blood in the water-dowsing peasant Montoyas.

The rock-star mogul’s eyes, and therefore expression, remained concealed by dark glasses, but a hand went to his throat as if touching a talisman. The neck collar’s vibrant pink rubies? Were they more than gemstones, as the vivid bruise might be something more?

Ric knew his hint had shaken the usually controlled stage performer. He also figured the babe who’d given ‘Snow’ that royal purple hickey must have been showgirl-tall, or wearing spike heels. An ex-FBI guy observes the little things.

“I’ll think about your offer,” he told Christophe.

“What does that mean?”

“What I said.”