Derek Dean, thought Nick. The guy’s name was Derek Dean. Shit, I wonder if my passport’s still good. I’ll need it if I go up to Boulder to reinterview him.
Sirens were wailing down Wazee Street now and the rush of people leaving the party became an undignified scramble.
There’s the ex-Israeli poet, Danny Oz, heading for a car with Delroy Nigger Brown. What on earth were those two doing together that night?
Remembering that Delroy was the major street vendor for drugs in this LoDo area, Nick figured that might answer his question. Patrol cars were arriving from opposite directions now and Nick recognized the white-blob faces of several patrolmen whose semi-intelligible reports were the first to be read in the giant pile that would become the K. Nakamura Murder Book. Nick had seen almost everything he’d wanted to see, but he kept the glasses on as the first ambulance arrived and EMTs boiled out of it in a totally unnecessary rush.
“Do I get my gun back?” asked Nick as he kept watching.
“Ah, so sorry,” said Sato. “The weapon you brought to the flashback cave is no longer available. But you have several at your shopping mall home, I trust.”
“What about the cash I had at Mickey’s?”
“So sorry,” repeated Sato. “The money there was left with the proprietor to cover any damages or medical bills for his bouncer.”
“Did you at least keep the flashback vials I bought?” asked Nick, feeling his anger beginning to burn again. If Sato did his Mr. Moto routine with that So sorry one more time, Nick thought he might go for the man’s throat.
“No,” said Sato. “The illegal drugs were also left behind.”
“Well, I’m going to need some of those illegal drugs if I’m going to do the research for the interviews I wanted to do later today,” snapped Nick.
“Whom do you think you will interview today, Bottom-san?”
“Oz, the writer, for sure,” said Nick. “But I want to prepare for the Boulder fruit fly, Derek Dean, and drop in to see my old friend Delroy at Coors Field. That’s three hours there, plus another two or three hours to flash on the reports themselves…”
“Four thirty-minute vials will be made available to you today,” said Sato. “And, of course, this complete video and digital reconstruction is being downloaded to your phone site as we speak.”
Swallowing his anger, Nick was reaching up to pluck off the glasses when he froze in place.
“Stop the recording!” he shouted. “Back it up… no, forward a little… back again… there! Stop!”
Sato put his glasses back on. “What is it, Bottom-san?”
Another patrol car had arrived as well as the unmarked GoMo Volta carrying the two plainclothes detectives on duty that night—Kendle and Sturgis. Cars that had been parked along the curb were driving up on the broad sidewalk to get past the growing cluster of emergency vehicles before they were hemmed in for good. Some people were just running away down the sidewalks to escape before the interviewing and ID’ing of witnesses began.
But Nick was looking at none of this.
Nick’s attention was focused on a small white twin-blob of a forehead and forearm appearing over the top of a parked car half a block to the east.
The lower part of this person’s face was hidden by the forearm and car roof, the person’s hair hidden by darkness, the rest of the form simply not visible.
Dara, thought Nick and felt literally dizzy for a second.
What the hell was his wife doing there that night? This wasn’t possible.
“Sato… forward a bit. Freeze. A little more now. Freeze again. Back…”
“Do you see someone, Bottom-san?”
Nick Bottom thought of his master’s degree work and heard some long-forgotten professor’s voice explaining that five million years and more of evolution had honed a Homo sapiens ability to distinguish a human face, however camouflaged or disguised, from its surroundings. The greatest enemy of man had always been man, said the professor, and the human mind was able to see another human face in even the most visually cluttered and ill-lit surroundings with more accuracy than one would think possible. The first thing a human infant can make out is his mother’s face—more specifically, his mother’s eyes and smile.
Nick saw no eyes or smile on this distant shape, only the white blur of a forehead, the white oblong of a forearm coming out of a dark coat to rest on the roof of a car, but he was certain it was his wife.
Dara?
Nausea and confusion rose in him. His first impulse was to rush Sato, take the big man down through the sheer kinetic energy of his assault, get his pistol, and hold the muzzle against the security chief’s head until he admitted what he’d done here and told Nick why.
Why would they fake this fuzzy image of Dara and insert it in the video?
To get Nick sucked into the investigation. To get him personally involved. To set him up somehow?
“Run it forward again… please,” said Nick.
The forehead bobbed down and out of sight. Was there a second person in the shadows with Dara or just refugees from the party moving past her in a hurry? The dark forms moved out of sight east along the sidewalk. Nick wasn’t even able to make out the form of a woman. His headache had returned and now joined with the sense of vertigo from the glasses to increase his nausea. Could he enhance that first frozen image? Probably, but the recording already looked to be at the end of its pixel-enhancement range for such a distant, dark shot. He could try with these glasses and phone interfaced with his own 3D-high-def displays at home.
He tugged off the glasses and slid them in his pocket. “Nothing. I thought I saw someone… but it wasn’t anyone. I’m tired. I need some rest and to get into the flashback of the interviews and documents.”
“You can take the Honda electric back to your lodging,” said Sato as he led the way out of the library to the foyer.
“So you can show off again by swooping away in your damned Sasayaki-tonbo?”
Sato shook his massive head. “I was thinking of calling for a taxi.”
“I don’t want your goddamned Honda electric, Hideki-san.”
“Mr. Nakamura thought it might be more reliable than your current vehicle for your…”
“I said I didn’t want your fucking Honda!” shouted Nick. His head was pounding with pain and the shouting made it worse. “Give me a ride home if you want, but I’ll use my own car.”
“As you wish,” said Sato and waved Nick ahead of him through the door. The two men clattered down the wide stairway. Sato got them through the lower door and they crossed the cold, empty living area without speaking.
Outside, Sato handed the physical key for the outside door to one of the two Japanese men waiting. It was still raining.
Before getting into the passenger side of the Honda, Nick looked east down the street as if Dara might still be standing there.
What are you bastards up to? he wondered as he felt the car bob to Sato’s weight. Nick ran both palms across the roof of the car and rubbed the cold water into his face before sliding into the passenger seat. Every part of Nick that could hurt did hurt, including his heart.
Neither man spoke during the fifteen-minute ride to Cherry Creek.
As Nick was getting out of the car at the shopping mall condos, Sato said softly, “Bottom-san, please to understand, if you call me ‘motherfucker’ again, I shall be forced to kill you.”
3.01
Los Angeles: Sunday, Sept. 12—Friday, Sept. 17
SUNDAY
PROFESSOR EMERITUS George Leonard Fox sat in his tiny, cluttered, closet-sized excuse for an office, writing diary entries into a leather-bound blank book he’d owned for decades but had never written in until now.
How strange it was to be writing in longhand again! It reminded Leonard of the year he’d spent working on his dissertation—Negative Capability in the Minor Poetry of John Keats—with him scribbling madly on yellow legal pads into the wee hours of the morning and then waking to the sound of Sonja typi
ng up his pages for review. Leonard tried to remember the approximate year… 1981. Reagan was the new president and he and Sonja and all the other graduate students and faculty were making fun of the man. Leonard had been twenty-three and Sonja nine years older and already, since he’d just begun a serious affair with a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Cheryl, destined to become Leonard’s ex-first wife. Or perhaps, he thought, that should be “first ex-wife.”
At any rate, the divorce he’d asked for had come through four months after his dissertation was successfully defended and his first PhD obtained. Sonja had resented that typing under false pretenses, as she put it. But somehow she’d forgiven him and the two had remained friends until her death in 1997.
Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox couldn’t say the same about his other three wives. They were all still alive (although he’d recently heard that Nubia was all but lost to Alzheimer’s), but none of them had forgiven him for the marriages or his hypothetical offenses. Wait… perhaps Nubia had if she no longer even remembered who he was. Leonard stopped writing in his diary and imagined, with some irony, hunting her up at whatever overcrowded government repository for dementia victims she was stored in and reintroducing himself.
He shook his head. Sometimes he wondered if he was showing early signs of Alzheimer’s himself. (Although, he realized, at age seventy-four, the signs wouldn’t be all that early, would they?)
Val hadn’t come home the previous night. The boy had finally shown up as Leonard was finishing a late breakfast. His only response to his grandfather’s “Good morning” had been an irritated grunt. Then Val had gone straight to bed and slept most of the Sunday away.
Whatever was going on in the sixteen-year-old’s life, Leonard knew, was not going to be shared with his grandfather or any other adult. Leonard hated that aspect of his grandson’s personality. The sulky, pouty, rebellious, noncommunicative teenager pose was such a terribly tiresome cliché. If Leonard hadn’t seen the other side of the personality of his daughter’s only child—Val’s sensitivity (which he worked so hard to hide from his peers), his addiction to reading, his reluctance (at least as a younger child) to hurt other people—the aging ex-professor would have been sorely tempted to wash his hands of the boy and send him home, somehow, to his father.
Val’s father. Several times in recent weeks, Leonard had come close to phoning Nick Bottom. But each time he’d held off. The first reason for doing so was the simple fact of nonlocal calls having become so difficult and expensive again, after decades of cheap instant contact with anyone anywhere. Leonard remembered from his childhood when one of his parents would say to the other, “It’s a long-distance call,” as if that involved paying for a call to the moon.
The other reasons for Leonard’s hesitation were less obvious and petty: the fact that Nick Bottom had shown less and less interest in his son over the past five years; and finally the fact that Bottom was almost certainly still a serious flashback addict which, to Leonard, meant the person met the clinical description of malignant narcissist.
But still, he wrote in his diary, as the storm clouds continued to build over the Los Angeles basin, Leonard knew that he would have to do something.
He paused and flexed his aching right hand. Writing by hand, he realized now, aggravated his arthritis more than typing on a virtual keyboard. But speaking of clichés! “Storm clouds building”! Sonja would have chastised him in her strongest Swedish for that one.
But with heavier clouds of smoke filling parts of the sky over Los Angeles every day—first in the reconquista neighborhoods to the east and southeast, then in the Asian sections farther south and west and around UCLA, yesterday in the rich people’s walled and gated and patrolled enclaves to the west and up in the hills toward Mulholland Drive—it certainly looked as if storm clouds were building and growing darker by the day.
Leonard resumed his diary entry. He’d decided to visit Emilio at the address the older man had given him—no phone or e-mail number, just the address—before the next weekend if Val’s aberrant behavior continued and if the growing sense of imminent Armageddon in the city persisted. As risky and expensive as buying passenger fare into one of the truck convoys to Denver might seem, it was beginning to feel like a more prudent course than remaining in Los Angeles.
MONDAY
Leonard started the day with simple relief that Val went off to school. Later, Leonard phoned the district’s autocheck line and confirmed that his grandson was actually there.
He’d tried to talk to Val over the boy’s rushed breakfast—chugging a bottle of UltraCoke and grabbing a food bar—and Val’s only response had been “If you’re so worried about where I spend my time, you should have done a kid-finder implant on me.”
If Val had been his own son, Leonard would have. But he’d come to him from Denver when Val was almost eleven years old—and in shock and mourning after the sudden death of his mother and the new addiction of his father—and it seemed too late to Leonard to take the boy to the LAPD for a tracker implant.
Leonard spent too much of Monday trying to run various errands, including stocking up on nonperishable food they could take with them if they did indeed decide to make a run for it the following weekend. As he rode his bicycle around his neighborhood and Chinatown, he was struck again by how impossible it was to get much done—or at least done efficiently—in this brave new world he lived in.
Flashback, he thought, was the greatest culprit. Leonard foolishly went to his bank, a real bank, to attempt a non-ATM transaction, and of course there were no human tellers available. One of his bank’s main TV advertising points was that there would always be a minimum of two human tellers on duty during the bank’s four half-days when they were open to the public, but Mondays—one of those half-days—was endemic with flashback absenteeism. Leonard knew he should have known better than to try to bank with a person on a Monday.
The supermarket was also a trial. It took Leonard almost fifteen minutes in line to get into the store through the various CMRI portals, sniffer credit checks, and DNA-recognition booths. Once inside, the only nonshoppers in sight were the beetle-armored security people with their ebony helmets, reflective visors, and clunky automatic weapons. Leonard had seen enough versions of this future in the movies so popular during his middle-aged years that he should have been used to it before it actually arrived, but now, even after almost two decades of growing security presence, it still bothered him.
The absence of clerks meant that when Leonard noticed that the fresh produce section was filled with rotting vegetables due to brownouts and negligence, his only option was to phone an automated national number. Somewhere in that echoing, horribly lighted building poxed with black security camera bubbles, he suspected, was a human, living, breathing store manager. But that manager certainly wanted nothing to do with his patrons. And Leonard seriously doubted if the Los Angeles chain was still owned by anyone named Ralph.
He had to bike many blocks out of his way coming home from his day’s errands because of the constant chirping of his phone’s terrorist-incident alarms. Tibetan suicide bombers had detonated themselves in Chinatown; Aryan Brotherhood California separatists were engaging in a shootout with LAPD and Homeland Security tactical units near Echo Park.
Val did not come home that night until almost 3 a.m.
TUESDAY
Leonard spent much of his day sitting in his study and sorting listlessly through the untidy stacks and piles of printouts of the various drafts of his huge failed and abandoned novel. Occasionally he would jot a note in his diary, usually questioning how a professor emeritus of English literature and classics could write so badly.
His goal, as he’d told Emilio and only a few others, had been to tell the story of the first third of this new century. But he realized, as he read pages and chapters of his abandoned work at random, all he’d done in his many drafts was to show his own ignorance. His characters were invariably victims of the social forces that had changed America an
d the world so much in the last twenty-five years, and their actions—such as they were (most of the drafts was just talk)—showed their own lack of understanding of those forces and their own impotence in the face of such change. In other words, his characters’ perceptions were as dulled and buffered by the illusions and comforts of forty years of campus life as Professor George Leonard Fox’s had been.
Leonard dropped pages as he read and had to smile. As he’d told Emilio, he’d attempted the ultimate authorial God-view of Leo Tolstoy and failed. In the end, he would have been happy to have achieved the minor godview of… say… Herman Wouk.
Leonard had read Wouk’s two magnum opuses, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, in the 1970s and had, along with all the other students and faculty he knew, dismissed them completely as middlebrow historical romances. Clumsy attempts to tell the story of the lead-up to World War II and the Holocaust, and the events themselves, in two huge volumes following scattered members of an American naval family—including the son’s Jewish wife, Natalie, who was shipped to Auschwitz with her Jewish intellectual uncle and her small child. “Wouk chewed more than he bit off,” he’d said wittily—not citing the real source—in an undergraduate course at Yale where the books had come up in some tangential discussion.
But Leonard now realized that Wouk—largely forgotten a third of the way through this following century—had known things about the world. The popular novels were rich with carefully observed detail, whether that applied to the clumsy machinery of a 1940s-era submarine or the more efficient bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust. And Wouk wrote his forgotten masterpieces as if the salvation of his soul depended upon telling the tale of the Holocaust.
All Leonard’s various drafts of a novel had done was record his passive characters’ confusion—so perfectly matching his own—at why the world was changing for the worse around them.