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He holds up a potion from behind the bar.
I look at Vidocq.
“One of yours?”
“You’re not the only one who barters for drinks,” he says.
“Rumor has it you’re doing some freelance work for the Vigil these days too. How does it feel to be back?”
Vidocq shakes his head. Regards his drink.
“Strange. As strange as I bet it is for you.”
“I’m still not sure it’s the right thing to be doing, but if I wasn’t working for them I don’t know if I’d be doing anything at all.”
“Confusion. Strange alliances. God’s new deluge. These are the things the world has been reduced to. Apocalypse. Le merdier. So let’s drink to the void.”
Brigitte sighs and picks up her wine.
“You boys are too grim for me. I’m going to find more congenial company.”
I say, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a drag.”
“You’re never a drag, Jimmy, but I see a studio friend I met when I first came here. A girl must maintain her connections, mustn’t she? Maybe I can be in the last movie before the world ends.”
“Now who’s the drag?”
She shrugs extravagantly.
“Knock ’em dead,” I tell her.
I turn back to the bar and pick up my drink. I haven’t had a cigarette in hours. My lungs are aching for abuse.
“Tell me the truth. Are we good enough for this? Look at us. What a bunch of fuckups.”
“What choice do we have?” says Vidocq. “Who else will do this if not us?”
“The government.”
“Save us from our saviors.”
I sip my Aqua Regia and Carlos moves off to serve other customers.
“I don’t trust the Vigil much more than the Angra. What’s more important to them, saving the world or controlling whatever’s left when this is over?”
Vidocq looks at his hands. Flexes his fingers. He looks good for two hundred. Not more than his forties.
“I was twenty-five when I faced my first apocalypse. When the bloated corpse of the eighteenth century rolled into its grave, making way for the wonders of the nineteenth. You should have seen Paris. Half the city praying, flagellating, and prostrating themselves before Notre-Dame and images of the Madonna. The other half whoring and drunk while fireworks burned brighter than all of Heaven.”
“I wonder which group you were with?”
“The Madonna and I had parted ways many years before that, I’m afraid.”
I look around the room and spot Brigitte sitting at a table with a group of network executives decked out in designer faux-military gear and safari vests like they’re running off to a Brentwood Red Dawn key party. But like a few million others, they’re just headed out of town with the family jewels sewn into the lining of their bulletproof trench coats. Brigitte laughs as the gray-haired alpha wolf exec lays some of his survival gear on the table. Lengths of paracord. Sapper gloves. A multicaliber pistol. Condoms in Bubble Wrap. A multitool with more moving parts than a Stealth bomber. Watching her smile, I wonder if Brigitte is pulling out of her depression or if she’s just an actress playing at being all right.
“There were suicides and riots. Fury and ecstatic joy, and all for the same reason. The world would end or be transformed, and unlike now, in this age of science and desperate rationality, there was nothing we could do about it. So each of us did what made sense. Drink. Pray. Stay with loved ones or sail off to the ends of the earth.”
