The trick with psychopharmacological travel is knowing your body's tolerances to the drugs: too little and it's just another long, strange trip; too much and your own psychoses eat your brain, leaving you a drooling idiot. It's just the right touch that separates the visionaries from the addicts. That's what it says on my business card: "Harry Potemkin, just the right touch."
"That's funny," she said, resting a burnished nail on my business card.
"Potemkin, like the facades of false buildings, and yet you insist that you've got what it takes."
"Names are albatrosses," I said, keeping my fingers still. I wanted to peel back her coat and find out if she was neatly packaged on the inside as her arranged features and gold hair suggested.
She laughed. "I happen to like my name." I waited. She didn't supply it.
"Okay," I said, leaning forward, moving my hands from my stomach to the clean blotter on the desk. "What are you looking for?"
"I've got a problem. It's my twin sister."
I raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong with her?"
She produced a small leather case from the right-hand pocket of her coat, a slim, brown rectangle that, for another type of woman, would have been a cigarette case. She opened it with a practiced one-handed motion and, from a small stack of credit cards, coffee stand punch-cards and ID, drew off a small picture and offered it to me.
It was water-stained on one edge, the photo paper curling from age and the ancient lick of moisture. It wasn't perfectly rectangular, suggesting someone other than a machine had cut this picture down from a larger portrait. The picture was of two baby girls, both with happy smiles on their faces. "Nice looking kids," I said. "You the one on the left?" A carefully arranged blanket obscured the strand of flesh and sinew connecting them at the waist.
She favored me with an older version of that smile, stained with something that might have been sorrow or defeat. "Yes. Good guess."
I shrugged. Fifty-fifty shot. Easy odds. No one got hurt and, by being correct, I got points for being charming. That always helped later when we got right down to what I was going to be asked to do.
"This picture is the only physical record of my sister's existence," she said. "My father insists that I was an only child. The hospital we — I — was born at was torn down a decade ago to make room for a highway on-ramp and the records are scattered — " She shrugged. "They're gone. It doesn't really matter where. None of my extended family seem to remember a second child and, by the time I entered school, I was the only one."
"Mother?" I asked.
"Complications with the delivery," she said. "I never had a chance to meet her."
"I'm sorry," I said and meant it. I put the picture down on the blotter, arranged its edge with today's square on the calendar. "This picture is genuine? Not some photographic trickery or computer editing?"
"It was taken thirty years ago," she said. "That sort of optical obfuscation was hideously expensive back then and it wasn't the sort of thing..." Her voice trailed off. I rested the point of my index finger on the picture, touching the tiny feet of the girl on the left — the younger version of the one sitting on the other side of my desk. "Yeah," I said, "one doesn't normally fake pictures of conjoined twins just for a lark."
She nodded. "They've done a good job with the cosmetic surgery." She put her hand against her left hip. "You can barely tell. I only know when it gets cold."
"And the records are all gone?"
"Yes, and no one wants to talk about the separation. No one wants to tell me what happened. If she lived or not."
"Do you think she's still alive?"
She shook her head. "Not physically."
"Ah," I said, understanding why she can come to see me. "That's a good trick."
"She's haunting me, Mr. Potemkin," my new client said. "I want you to stop her."