LITMIR.BIZ

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masculine about him that just watching him climb the stairs and saunter into my flat made my wire-tight shoulders unfurl. Okay, fine. I’d given in to Chicago’s uniquely primal summer heat. I was here. He was here. My libido was definitely here.

      Though Bogie wore a trench coat, he wasn’t sweating. I was. He shrugged out of the coat and tossed it onto my couch, then poured himself a glass of Vivante. Bourbon. You never had to ask with a man like Bogie. He took a long sip, then looked at me long and hard. His upper lip twitched once—one of his rare signs of emotion.

      “You look tired, Angel.”

      I nodded. “More than you could ever know.” Between Drummond and Detective Marco, I felt as if the whole world was against me. I needed someone who would accept me as I was, ask no questions and leave no doubts that I was a woman. Lucky for me, that someone was standing in arm’s reach.

      When Bogie put down his glass on the serving bar and came my way, hands tucked into his suit pocket, my skin tingled all over. He kissed me lightly. I smelled tobacco on his breath, and it was so real I melted in his arms.

      “Make love to me, Bogie.”

      “Is that an order?”

      I nodded. He took me to my bedroom and undressed me. His jaded eyes lit with hunger.

      “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

      And I knew from experience he would do much more than that.

      The next morning I arose, as usual, to the soft sound of Mike’s Chinese gong and the smell of incense. Both were di rigeur for his meditations. Sound and scent floated up from the garden through the open French windows in my bedroom. I flopped my arm across my double bed, not expecting to find Bogie there. And I didn’t.

      I’d only contracted with AutoMates to have Humphrey Bogart until 3:00 a.m. With his internal clock fully engaged, quite literally, Bogie always rose promptly, no matter how deliciously exhausting our lovemaking was. He’d light a cigarette, which AutoMates were permitted to do. After all, tar and nicotine can’t hurt a robot. Granted, second-hand smoke was still a problem, but the stinking rich AutoMates corporation lobbyists had convinced Congress that a few smoking movie star robots couldn’t produce all that much smoke.

      After lighting up, Bogie would dress in darkness, his rugged features illuminated only by the red glow of his cigarette, and depart.

      His zombielike obedience to time always reminded me a little of those blond people in The Time Machine who went off in a trance whenever the Morlocks called. The 1960s movie, starring Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, was a classic. It was in color, but I still liked it.

      The fact that Bogie had been programmed to send me to the moon diminished the afterglow, but not by much. With a compubot produced by AutoMates, the premiere manufacturer, satisfaction was always guaranteed. And I was lucky enough to get exclusive dibs on the star attraction of Rick’s Café Americain, the reality bar down the street.

      Yet I’ll admit the physical satisfaction did little to relieve my loneliness. That’s why I always sent Bogie home before morning. The emptiness of our so-called relationship always glared in early daylight. The problem was I just wasn’t sure if I could handle a real man again. I wasn’t exactly lucky in love. While on the outside I looked fearless, my heart was about as tough as a bowl of cherry Jell-O.

      I made coffee, and when I had a steaming cup in hand, I went into the garden, thinking my martial arts trainer would give me a break from training today. Mike’s savage attack cry promptly disabused me of the notion.

      “Haieeeeyaaaa!” he screamed.

      My every muscle tensed. I knew what was coming next. Nevertheless, as the stimulant-dependant occidental that I was, I managed to take a slurp of my treasured caffeine before going into defense mode. Not only because my sluggish brain desperately needed it, but because it made Mike mad.

      As a former Buddhist monk, he’d prefer I ate no meat, drank no caffeine, engaged in no sex and slept on a straw mat. He wanted me to live like a…well, a monk. It was my lifelong determination to prove to him that I could be every bit the fighter he was even while maintaining my status on the top of the carnivorous, lecherous and indulgent food chain.

      I saw a tornado of sienna-colored robes rounding a bank of blooming pink azaleas.

      “Aaiiiyeeee!” he cried again, every tendon straining as he squatted and assumed a pose of steel.

      “Oh, hell.” He was opening with the iron buffalo ploughs the field. That classic Shaolin kung fu move was enough to make me want to dig a foxhole. I took one last slurp of coffee and tossed my mug into the grass. “Hey, Mike, can we talk about this?”

      His typically enigmatic Oriental expression, boyish for his thirty years of age, was distorted into a mask of savagery. Boy, he wasn’t kidding around. My dalliances with Bogie always pissed him off. Mike believed compubots could suck the chi out of you for days. He was trying to teach me a lesson. But while I was sporting the just-laid look, I had more energy than he suspected. The question was, what move?

      I cleared all thoughts as Mike had taught me, making way for instinct. He blazed toward me—jumping, squatting, rolling on the ground and flailing. But just before he downed me with a blue dragon tail-wag move, I leaped and grabbed the twisted tree branch that was shading a bed of hostas and pulled myself up with catlike grace. Squatting barefoot on the branch, and wearing nothing more than a tank top and boy-short briefs, I pounced down on him—now the tiger—and flattened him.

      “Ha!” I cried out when he sank back in defeat. I stood on my adrenaline-pumped legs. “I told you never to do that before I’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”

      He sat up, not the least the worse for wear, and smoothed a hand over his shaved head. “I make sure you are awake.”

      “Well, it worked. But I lost a perfectly good cup of coffee. And I’m going to have more,” I said emphatically as I combed through my sprigs of platinum hair and headed back to the kitchen.

      “Wait, Baker.”

      His somber request stopped me cold. It was more his tone than the words that worried me. He always called me Baker. Ever since I’d rescued him from a prison camp in Joliet, Illinois, he’d called me by my last name, thinking it was my first. The Chinese put their last names first. His was Pu Yun. Yun would be his first name, except he’d taken a classic American nickname.

      “What is it, Mike? Can’t it wait for another cup of java?”

      His long pause worried me. But finally he nodded. Reluctantly.

      With a steaming cup of joe, I joined him in his shed at the end of the long, fenced-in garden. I always called it a shed, but it was much more than that. Mike lived in a cozy twenty-by-fifteen-foot renovated coach house. With a bare wooden floor, it was insulated but not well heated, so we had put in a potbellied stove.

      In accordance with the principles of feng shui, a water pond coated with green lilies and stocked with white and red carp sat serenely outside his door. Inside, colorful painted images of a dragon, a red bird and a tortoise adorned differing walls.

      I glanced around and noticed the place was unusually cluttered—Taoist amulets and talismans scrawled on red and yellow strips of paper were pinned here and there, his bag of I Ching tablets lay in the corner, incense burned before a small statue of the Buddha, and he’d been working at his suitcase-size desk on a purple astrology chart. Fact was, Mike was superstitious, as were most Chinese who’d grown up in the old country.

      “I have very bad luck,” he’d said when I first brought him here five years ago. His wrists had been scarred from being chained after numerous attempts to escape from the work camp. He was skinny and looked like a concentration camp victim. “My father…his grave is in a bad place near Shanghai. Pointing east. We are all cursed, my family, because of this.”

      Not if you’re one of the elite Shaolin monks, I’d thought at the time, which he was. The monks and their kung fu style of martial arts

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