“We push the Big Red Button,” Tullio announced to Irma.
“Oh, Tullio, we said we never would do that! What a mess!”
“This is an emergency. We must push the Big Red Button. We owe it to him. It’s our duty to push the button.”
“But the whole world will find out everything! All his enemies! And his friends are even worse!”
A voice came from under the bed. “Please don’t push any button.”
Tullio bent and gazed under the bedframe. “So, now you understand Italian, miss?”
“A little.” Monica stuck her tousled head from under the rumpled satin bed-coverlet. Her frightened face was streaked with tears.
“What did you do to our Chief?”
“Nothing! Well, just normal stuff. He was having a pretty good time of it, for such an old guy. So, I kind of turned it up, and I got busy. Next thing I knew, he was all limp!”
“Men,” Irma sympathized.
“Can I have some clothes?” said Monica. “If you push that button, cops will show up for sure. I don’t want to be in a station-house naked.”
Irma hastened to a nearby wardrobe. “Inside, you girls do as you please, but no girl leaves my Shadow House naked!”
Tullio rubbed his chin. “So, you’ve been to the station-house before, Monica?”
“The oldest profession is a hard life.” Monica crept out from under the Chief’s huge bed, and slipped into the yellow satin house robe that Irma offered. She belted it firmly. “I can’t believe I walked right in here in my second-best bikini. I just knew something bad would happen in this weird house.”
Tullio recited: “Shadow House is the state-of-the-art in confidential living and reputation management.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve done guys in worse dives,” Monica agreed, “but a million bomb-shelters couldn’t hush up that guy’s reputation. Every working-girl knows about him. He’s been buying our services for eighty years.”
Stabbed by this remark, Tullio gazed on the stricken Chief.
The old man’s body was breathing, and its heart was beating, because the Swiss had done much expensive work on the Chief’s lungs and heart. But Tullio knew, with a henchman’s instinctive certainty, that the Chief was, more or less, dead. The old rascal had simply blown his old brains out in a final erotic gallop. It was a massive, awful, fatal scandal. A tragedy.
When Tullio looked up, the two women were gone. Outside the catastrophic bedroom, Monica was wiping her tear-smudged mascara and confessing her all to Irma.
“So, I guess,” Monica said, “maybe, I kinda showed up at the end of his chain here. But for a little Miami girl, like me, to join such a great European tradition—well, it seemed like such an honor!”
Tullio and Irma exchanged glances. “I wish more of these girls had such a positive attitude,” said Irma.
Monica, sensing them weakening, looked eager. “Just let me take a hot shower. Okay? If I’m clean, no cop can prove anything! We played cards, that’s all. He told me bed-time stories.”
“Is there a money trail?” said Irma, who had worked in taxes.
“Oh, no, never! Cash for sex is so old-fashioned.” Monica absently picked up the yammering tom-cat by the scruff of the neck. She gathered the beast in her sleek arms and massaged him. The surprised cat accepted this treatment, and even seemed grateful.
“See, I have a personal relationship with a big German arms firm,” Monica explained, as the cat purred like a small engine. “My sugar-daddy is a big defense corporation. It’s an Artificial Intelligence, because it tracks me. It knows all my personal habits, and it takes real good care of me… So, sometimes I do a favor—I mean, just a small personal favor for my big AI boyfriend, the big corporation. Then the stockholders’ return on investment feels much better.”
Baffled by this English-language business jargon, Tullio scratched his head.
Monica lifted her chin. “That’s how the vice racket beats a transparent surveillance society. Spies are the world’s second oldest profession. Us working girls are still the first.”
“We must take a chance,” Tullio decided. “You, girl, quick, get clean. Irma, help her. Leave Shadow House, and forget you ever saw us.”
“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you! I’ll be grateful the rest of my life, if I live to be a hundred and fifty!” cried Monica. She tossed the purring tomcat to the floor.
Irma hustled her away. The Shadow House had decontamination showers. Its sewers had membraneous firewalls. The cover-up had a good chance to work. The house had been built for just such reasons.
Tullio removed the tell-tale bedsheets. He did what he could to put the comatose Chief into better order. Tullio had put the Chief to bed, dead drunk, on more than one occasion. This experience was like those comic old times, except not funny, because the Chief was not drunk: just dead.
The lights of Shadow House were strobing. An intruder had arrived.
The hermit priest had rolled to the House perimeter within his smart mobile wheelchair. Father Simeon was a particularly old man—even older than the Chief. Father Simeon was the Chief’s long-time spiritual guide and personal confessor.
“Did you push that Big Red Button?” said the super-centenarian cleric.
“No, Monsignor!”
“Good. I have arrived now, have I not? Where is my poor boy? Take me to him.”
“The Chief is sick, Monsignor.” Tullio suddenly burst into tears. “He had a fit. He collapsed, he’s not conscious. What can we do?”
“The status of death is not a matter for a layman to decide,” said the priest.
The Shadow House did not allow the cleric’s wheelchair to enter its premises. The Vatican wheelchair was a rolling mass of embedded electronics. The Shadow House rejected this Catholic computational platform as if it were a car-bomb.
Father Simeon—once a prominent Vatican figure—had retired to the island to end his days in a hermetic solitude. Paradoxically, his pursuit of holy seclusion made Father Simeon colossally popular. Since he didn’t want to meet or talk to anybody, the whole world adored him. Archbishops and cardinals constantly pestered the hermit for counsel, and his wizened face featured on countless tourist coffee cups.
“I must rise and walk,” said Father Simeon. “The soul of a sufferer needs me. Give me your arm, my son!”
Tullio placed his arm around the aged theologian, who clutched a heavy Bible and a precious vial of holy oil. Under his long, black, scarlet-buttoned cassock, the ancient hermit was a living skeleton. His bony legs rattled as his sandaled, blue-veined feet grazed the floor.
Tullio tripped over the house cat as they entered the Chief’s bedroom. They reeled together and almost fell headlong onto the stricken Chief, but the devoted priest gave no thought to his own safety. Father Simeon checked the Chief’s eyelids with his thumbs, then muttered a Latin prayer.
“I’m so glad for your help, Father,” said Tullio. “How did you know that we needed you here?”
The old man shot him a dark look from under his spiky gray brows. “My son,” he said, lifting his hand, “do you imagine that your mere technology—all these filters and window shades—can blind the divine awareness of the Living God? The Lord knows every sparrow that falls! God knows every hair of every human head! The good God has no need for any corporate AI’s or cheap Singularities!”
Tullio considered this. “Well, can I do anything to help? Shall I call a doctor?”
“What use are the doctors now, after their wretched excesses? Pray for him!” said the priest. “His body persists while his soul is in Limbo. The Church rules supreme in bio-ethics. We will defend our faithful from these secular intrusions. If this had happened to him in Switzerland, they would have plugged him into the wall like a cash-machine!”