Verismo Bliss - Chapter 1

Verismo Bliss

1

The Angel was cut up worse than Christ on the cross.
Harry Reed looked down from the rain splashed window of his office; watching the heavy drops as they fell and exploded upon the street, upon the chalk outline of an Angel with no wings. The police had gently lifted the body of the Angel, leaving her blood and the chalk behind, to be washed by London’s summer rain. It was a slow, gentle act, performed by men in dark blue uniforms; hands gloved, faces masked, as though death could be caught. Harry still recognised her, even in bloody death. Harry knew most people in Covent Garden: it wasn’t a place tourists came to anymore.
Harry had seen her around the Garden, pushing whatever treats were popular that month into mouths and veins. He didn’t know her name, but he knew she was an Islington Angel because he’d seen the angel wings tattooed on her right forearm. There was another girl being dragged away by uniforms and Harry guessed, by her skinhead, that she was a member of the Chaos Crux. It didn’t take a detective to figure that the blood she was covered in wasn’t her own. The Crux didn’t normally operate north of the Thames, but were clearly looking to expand. Most drugs weren’t illegal now, but it was illegal to sell them unlicensed and turf wars over them, or rather the money they earned, still happened.
Police, victims and perpetrators were not an unusual site in Covent Garden but the dead flesh of the Angel and her blood still sticky warm made Harry remember the warm body he had just been inside and his pleasant mood was smothered like Big Ben engulfed by a dark cloud.
Harry had never had long periods of sexual activity, not even when he was married, in fact less when he was married, but more than he should have away from the marital bed. During the Sexual Involution it hadn’t mattered - nobody was fucking around then – but now the world was in the grip of the Second Sexual Revolution and anybody who wasn’t joining in stood out like a sore thumb. Or maybe a limp penis, Harry thought. Harry could remember every name and every face that had ever let him enjoy their flesh. He had never come to terms with how easy it was to fall into bed with someone now; he had an antiquated belief that you had to make some sort of effort, not just compare medical records. But that wasn’t the only reason and Harry knew it. Still, it did mean that encounters like that afternoon’s were more pleasurable in his memory.
He’d seen her at the British Museum. It was the perfect space to spend a lazy afternoon where there was no work. And free – another bonus when there was no work. Besides, in that tropical like summer with its monsoon like rains, the museum was a cool resort. She was gazing down into a sarcophagus at a mummified corpse, which must have been seething with hollow dust jealousy looking up at that face so full of beauty and life. She was in her early twenties, about 5’5” with dyed blonde hair and hazel eyes, with a nose that some would have wanted reduced by surgery but Harry liked just fine, and lips that looked as though they sucked strawberry milk shake through a straw all day. She was in her early twenties. She wore tight black jeans and a low cut black top that was trying its damnedest to hold in the best cleavage Harry had seen in some time. And the thing was that Harry knew how her body felt. Her name was Laura and he had helped her out of a jam a couple of years back. When she had taken him to her bed he worried that she was only doing it to return the favour, but she told him she liked older men. Harry doubted that even if she had said she was only doing it to be nice that he would have refused.
He followed her through Egypt and downstairs to the Living and Dying Room, grateful that she didn’t turn around and see his eyes were fixed on her legs and buttocks. But she paused only briefly at exhibits, not giving him enough time to try and catch her eye. She walked into the Great Court and, if he’d believed in a heaven, this is how he would have imagined it: bright, white, huge and populated by beautiful women. The sun was a burning sparkle of lights through the glass dome. For a moment he was so blinded that he almost lost her, but there she was – leaving the museum.
He followed her onto the streets of Bloomsbury that were still grey damp with an overnight downpour, even though the day was sweat hot. She walked up Great Russell Street and then turned into Bloomsbury Square where people sat reading papers and eating lunches beneath the cool of the trees. Then she turned into Sicilian Avenue with its Italianate colonnades and shops spilling out onto the pedestrian way. There was a heavy smell of gardenias. The girl paused outside a café and then turned, ‘Harry, fancy a coffee?’ Her smile could have powered a rocket to Mars.
Harry grinned back. ‘Laura. I really must be losing my touch; how long have you known I was following you?’
‘Oh, since Egypt.’ She reached forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m not a case am I?’
‘Nope, you’re pleasure not business. It’s good to see you and, yes, a coffee would be great.’
She had a latte and he a double Americano. They sat inside in the relative coolness of the café.
‘You often follow people in the Museum?’
‘Just women. But don’t worry, my shrink says I’m harmless, a passive-passive.’
‘How have you been? And how is the detective business? I presume you’re still in it?’
‘I’m too old to change professions now. Besides I enjoy it, though most of my cases aren’t as attractive as yours.’
She smiled and looked down at her coffee. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still working in that dive?’
‘It’s cheap rent. You’re too young to remember but Covent Garden used to be a very desirable location.’
‘Everything changes.’
‘But everything stays the same.’
‘You ever get re-married, Harry?’
‘Nah, what about you?’
‘My partner asks me about once a week but who wants to be married in these times?’
Harry smiled, a little sadly. Who indeed would want to settle for just one partner when the world was fucking like cloistered monks let loose in a brothel?
‘I hated it when you used to do that,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Get that faraway sad look in your eyes. It really pissed me off when I saw it after we had sex.’
‘Sorry,’ he smiled lamely, ‘it wasn’t personal.’
‘Glad to hear it ‘cos I loved every minute of it. Harry! Are you blushing?’
‘It’s a generation thing. Nobody under 30 blushes anymore.’
‘It’s cute,’ she said, laughing. ‘Hey,’ she suddenly said, reaching out and gripping his arm, ‘if you promise not to get that faraway look in your eyes again we could have some fun.’
Harry felt a tightening in his throat. Laura spilled her handbag on to the table and poked through the detritus. He saw the ubiquitous Zehigh packet amongst the compact and lipsticks. ‘Here we go,’ she declared, holding up a small pill the colour of sand.
‘What is it?’
‘Harry, you a detective and you don’t know your drugs. It’s Bliss.’
Harry had heard of Bliss but he couldn’t recall when or in what context.
‘You not heard of it? Believe me if it’s as good as I’m told you’ll hear about it soon enough. Think of it as Viagra for women. Anyway, my friend Judy gave me this, said it’s amazing and I really wanna try it out. Now, I know you were clean a few years ago but we really oughta check each other out.’
As an answer, Harry passed her his ID card. Laura rummaged through the mess of her handbag again and pulled out a blue Swordfish reader, one of the early models. She slid his card into the slot and stared at the screen. ‘Shit.’ She pulled out the card and shoved it back in. ‘Bollocks.’ She shook the machine violently. ‘Fuck.’
‘I like your use of swear words. Those early Swordfish designs were always a bit dodgy.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Harry was pleased. It wasn’t that he had any dodgy sexual diseases he wanted to keep from her, it was just that he hated that look in their eyes when they saw that red F flash up. They looked at him as if he was some sort of freak. Shit, he was just 1 in a 100 (that’s what the last WHO report said anyway), not that much of a goddamned freak.
Laura dragged ringed fingers through her hair and looked around the café as though searching for an alternative. ‘OK, bollocks to it. I can trust you, but you better go and get some condoms. You’re old enough to remember how to use one.’
‘Ouch, below the belt,’ he said, smiling.
‘That’s exactly where I’m aiming to be soon.’

Harry sat in his office on the first floor of a cramped building, squashed between other cramped buildings, on Mercer Street, one of the dials of the Seven Dials. He gazed out the window at a Covent Garden early evening; the street was busy (if busy was the right word for people who didn’t strictly work) with hawkers, grifters, tramps, self sellers and the drugged, bugged and drunk. Ten years ago it would have been full of tourists and the grotesquely trendy. It was hot but the sky was turning a purple-black colour like a nasty bruise. It was gonna piss it down again soon enough.
From the sweat shop below he could hear the odd sing-song voices of the Ukrainian workers, which just sounded Russian to him, and always made him think of vodka. There must have been twenty of the poor bastards in the room beneath his office, all making designer label goods.
He could still smell the girl and feel the soft firmness of her body. He tried to remember the first time he had bought condoms, but couldn’t. No doubt as some embarrassed teenager, more in hope of using them than the reality. Of course, since strictly speaking only 1 in a 100 men needed condoms now, the manufacturers had closed a couple of factories, but recently there had been an upsurge in STDs (though not, thankfully AIDS; for some reason whatever it was that was making men infertile, also made them immune to the anti-immune disease) presumably because only that mythical 1 in a 100 needed condoms, and because ID readers were never 100% reliable. Besides, anybody with £50 could get their ID cards manipulated to say whatever they wanted, including a clean bill of sexual health. Harry had considered getting his red F removed, but in the end couldn’t be bothered.
The sex had been good. Shit, had been brilliant. And it had been a while since he’d had casual sex; something that the experts considered good for the physical and mental health of the self. But there was always that melancholy which crept over him after sex, like he had eaten a great dinner, but been denied dessert.
Whatever that Bliss stuff was that Laura had dropped had turned her into a insatiable animal. Harry had never heard anybody scream with pleasure so much, not outside of porno anyway. Afterwards she had actually held on to him for about fifteen minutes, her body still shaking with after shocks. He felt that women got the better deal with sex – all men did was try to hold back, putting off that moment of orgasm that gave them the little death, whereas women could abandon themselves to the pleasure – and now Bliss was going to put an even bigger gulf in the pleasure divide. He remembered what she’d said, as he watched her dressing.
“Shit, Judy wasn’t lying when she said this stuff was good. Fuck it, hope it doesn’t have any side-effects. Why do all the good drugs have things that fuck you up? Other than Zehigh, of course. Where would we be without Zehigh? Still, now I’ve got Bliss. Jesus, it’s never felt that intense before. You should feel flattered – I’ll always remember my first time with Bliss.”
Yeah, Harry thought, but will you remember Harry Reed?
Heavy drops of rain began to batter against the grimy window and somebody knocked on the door.