“You could always refuse to answer.”
“Ahh. An escape clause. I like that. All right.”
“I was curious. What happened between you and the Aerialist?”
PA frowned, although perhaps she was merely focusing on Maria Calas’s version of ‘Un bel dì, vedremo’ that played, sight-unseen, around the large space. “Am I that easy to read?”
“The comic there’s probably easier.”
“I doubt it.” She flipped through the pages. “This is written in the original Japanese.”
“Ah. Magical superhero girls’ stuff.”
“No, no — desperate love. Candy Candy, by Kyoko Mizuki and Yumiko Igarashi. Famous in Japan and Europe in the 1970s. Didn’t really hit it off in the U.S. or Australia.”
The woman reclosed the manga and sighed.
“The Japanese call these slice-of-life stories. Unrequited affection, lost first love, heart-rending triangles, and tragic sacrifices aplenty.”
PA rubbed her eyes. She looked abruptly a decade older.
“Unrequited affection,” she repeated, to no one in particular. Jack suspected she’d forgotten all about him. “That’s pretty much what I felt for the Aerialist.”
What was it Gypsie-Ann had said about women as well as men falling head over heels for the Cape? “You were in love with her.”
“Mmm.” She shrugged. “Kind of. Silly, I know. I could kick myself for being so stupid. She was never going to be interested in me. But you never met her, SC. The Aerialist was warm, funny, vibrant. Beautiful, too, a redhead with a fiery temper and a passion for life and living that knocked you out. This place has been a vacuum ever since she — well. You know.”
“Since she died.”
“Yeah. Brutal, but that. She could hold a pencil, too.”
“Huh?”
“The kid could draw — whipped up this one of me in about two minutes.”
PA went to the back of her book and extracted a piece of pad paper, which she then lobbed. It spiralled across the smooth surface of the floor to Jack’s feet.
“Nice shot,” he said as he picked it up and studied the lead-work. Torn out of some ring-pad, the page had creases and a coffee-cup stain. “I see she liked to exaggerate.”
“I think she preferred to capture the spirit,” PA mused. “Definitely, that’s how I see myself.”
“What, twelve years old and anatomically over-the-top?”
“The kid nailed the shōjo manga influence.”
“I guess.”
Jack wandered around beside the walls of the hangar, taking in the contours of the GWH’s white dirigible, the OS-2 Magnetic Rose, that was parked there. He wondered if the Rose would be flown again — it’d ended up an unspoken shrine to a man none of the Equalizers actually liked.
“You mentioned unrequited affection,” he mused.
“Mm-hmm. I believe we also mentioned cheese.”
“You said something else a few days ago, just after we met, about the Aerialist having had a fling with Sir Omphalos.”
PA slowly sat up, wrapping herself in her arms.
“I was angry. The rumour was common knowledge among us Capes, and I began to wonder if this might’ve had some truth. They were…close. She never told me what their relationship entailed, and I guess she had no reason to — it wasn’t my business. But everyone in the Equalizers talked about it.”
“Any proof?”
“No, nothing to frame up and stick on the wall. Why all this interest?”
“I’m curious. How did you feel about the possibility they were together?” Jack stopped walking and looked directly at her. “About the Big O and the Aerialist having it off, I mean.”
“I told you before — it made me angry.”
“I didn’t believe you.”
“What makes you so intuitive?”
“Am I wrong?”
“No.” The woman paid a surprising amount of attention to straighten the bows on her short skirt. “You’re right. Honestly? It made me sad.”
“Jealous too?”
“Maybe.” PA now chewed the corner of her mouth and stared back his way. “Are you implying something?”
“Well, it’s a good reason to have bumped off the happy couple.”
“Don’t kid around — I thought we suspected Gypsie-Ann Stellar or Milkcrate Man.”
“You suspected them.”
“So, what, you’re now a budding detective in your free time?”
“Hardly. I want to be able to trust you.”
“You don’t?”
“Help me do so.”
“How? Trust isn’t a magic trick I can conjure out of thin air.” PA swept up her manga and slid out of the tome another sheet of paper, this one far better quality stuff, an ink drawing on Magnani stock. “This is her when she was Bullet Gal,” she said, handing it over.