Virtual Virgin Page 0,14

Ric. She moved stiffly at first.

Ric remembered Delilah saying that the actress had to wear the clumsy plastic-wood suit of silver-bronze painted “armor” to play the robot version of her character, even when it scraped her skin and a double could have taken her place. Poor . . . what was her name? Ric wondered.

“Brigitte,” Snow mused as if answering a spoken query. “Sexy name. Pretty little Brigitte Helm. The actress was only nineteen. Just eight years later she was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein. Fitting, that was, since that 1935 American film drew on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its invention of a mad scientist and ‘machinery’ of bubbling vials and neon. A vial shaped like a giant martini glass formed the centerpiece of the laboratory set. I imagine Delilah really enjoyed that part.”

So, Ric wondered, the Silver Zombie cocktail Delilah had concocted in Wichita was an idea whose time had finally come?

“I don’t know all these movie references,” Ric said aloud, “but I know how to put two and two together. You’re beginning to sound like Delilah, a film history buff.”

“Always was, a bit, but no. Now I’m most interested in the film’s futuristic cityscape, the gliding biplanes and bullet trains shooting along on tracks up among the skyscrapers with the Tower of Babel squatting like a gigantic horned god over the slick modern towers Las Vegas hotels have become famous for. I’ve been aching to pattern an addition to the Inferno on this film for . . . a very long time. You really must see Metropolis. Study it. Another reason you should move in here.”

“To see a movie? I don’t think so.”

Ric glanced at the gleaming metal figure beside him, standing as still as a life-size female Oscar award. Her metal carapace was anatomically correct on superheroine terms. She was a powerful female figure, far curvier than a Victoria’s Secret model in a Wonderbra but not at all caress-able.

“You’ll probably use her as the centerpiece of a recreated mad scientist’s resurrection laboratory,” Ric said. “What a waste.”

“She’s not the most scintillating conversationalist,” Christophe said with a smile, “but she was in a silent movie.”

“She spoke in your Emerald City Hotel penthouse in Wichita,” Ric reminded him.

The mogul’s pale white eyebrows lifted over the rims of his aviator sunglasses. They both knew what she’d said; apparently Ric’s reference had recalled that word to her as well.

Perfectly oval blank silver eyes seemed to bore deep into Ric’s.

“Master,” she said.

Again.

That one word gave him the creeps and drove Delilah crazy.

Christophe just smiled.

“Isn’t that . . . useful? She’s transferred her allegiance from the film’s evil genius who created her, Rotwang, to the do-gooder who re-created her in physical form in our own time. You, Montoya. At least you have a better-sounding surname. And, who knows? That one little word from her cold metal lips to your ears may save all our necks in the coming second Vegas apocalypse.”

“A ROBOT CINSIM,” Ric mused after they’d left the creature dormant again in the empty theater.

He’d returned to his seat, feeling as zombielike as . . . Brigitte . . . had acted.

“As you’ll soon see in the movie,” Christophe said, lounging in his white leather conversation pit again, “the robot was able to assume human likeness. I suspect the version you called off the screen is more of a cyborg, half machine, half human. You had to raise the dead body of the actress inside to draw the exterior likeness into being. Brigitte Helm died in 1996.”

“That recently?” Ric asked, trying to imagine a wizened, bent shell of a woman imprisoned in that eternally erect and superheroine-curvaceous body. If it didn’t mimic hard shiny metal, Ric would call it lush.

“Life expectancies have been climbing in recent decades,” Christophe noted, “especially now that vampires have joined the human race . . . or at least live side by side with humans.”

“Like you?”

“I’ll deny that false charge until the day I die.”

Christophe’s smiles, Ric observed, always seemed eerie because you could never see the expression of his eyes. The idea of Delilah accepting a kiss from those colorless lips, so like a corpse’s, and doing it on his behalf, made his skin crawl.

Some women might find that Ice King image hot, and obviously did by the legions, but not Delilah. She’d worked to free Christophe’s Brimstone Kiss–addicted groupies from their obsession. Odd what women would fall for, as odd as the absurd idea of him falling for the Silver Zombie.