Virtual Light

  Then he got out, walked over to the ATM, and started feeding it cards. She sat there, watching it emerge from its armor, the way they do, shy and cautious, its cameras coming out, too, to monitor the transaction. He stood there, drumming his fingers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but he wasn’t making any noise. She looked down at the case and the phone and wondered why she didn’t just jump out and run, like he said.

  Finally he came back, thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it down in his front jeans pocket, and got in. He sailed the first of his cards out the open window at the ATM, which was pulling back into its shell like a crab. ‘Don’t know how they cancelled that one so quick, after you put that thing through Freddie’s laptop.’ Flicked another. Then the last one. They lay in front of the ATM as its lexan shield came trundling down, their little holograms winking up in the machine’s halogen floods.

  ‘Somebody’ll get those,’ she said.

  ‘Hope so,’ he said, ‘hope they get ’em and go to Mars.’ Then he did something in reverse with all four wheels and the Ford sort of jumped up and backward, into the street, some other car swerving past them all brakes and horn and the driver’s mouth a black O, and the part of her that was still a messenger sort of liked it. All the times they’d cut her off. ‘Shit,’ he said, jamming the gear-thing around until he got what he needed and they took off.

  The handcuff was rubbing on the rash where the red worm had been. ‘You a cop?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Security? Like from the hotel?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what are you?’

  Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like he was thinking about it. ‘Up shit creek. Without a paddle.’

  26 Colored people

  The first thing Rydell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley off Haight Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man lay on his stomach, on the board, and propelled himself along with a curious hitching motion that reminded Rydell of the limbs of a gigged frog. He had his right arm and his left leg, which at least allowed for some kind of symmetry, but there was no foot on the leg. His face, as if by some weird osmosis, was the color of dirty concrete, and Rydell couldn’t have said what race he was. His hair, if he had any, was covered by a black knit cap, and the rest of him was sheathed in a black, one-piece garment apparently stitched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked up, as he hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm, headed for the mouth of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he said: ‘You wanna talk to me? You wanna talk to me, you better shut your fuckin’ mouth…’

  Rydell stood there, Samsonite dangling, and watched him go.

  Then something rattled beside him. The hardware on Chevette Washington’s leather jacket. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘don’t wanna hang around back in here.’

  ‘You see that?’ Rydell asked, gesturing with his suitcase.

  ‘You hang around back in here, you’ll see worse than that,’ she said.

  Rydell looked back at the Patriot. He’d locked it and left the key under the driver’s seat, because he hadn’t wanted to make it look too easy, but he’d forgotten about that back window. He’d never been in the position before of actively wanting a car to be stolen.

  ‘You sure somebody’ll take that?’ he asked her.

  ‘We don’t get out of here, they’ll take us with it.’ She started walking. Rydell followed. There was stuff painted on the brick walls as high as anyone could reach, but it didn’t look like any language he’d ever seen, except maybe the way they wrote cuss-words in a printed cartoon.

  They’d just rounded the corner, onto the sidewalk, when Rydell heard the Patriot’s engine start to rev. It gave him goosebumps, like something in a ghost story, because there hadn’t been anybody back in there at all, and now he couldn’t see the skateboard man anywhere.

  ‘Look at the ground,’ Chevette Washington said. ‘Don’t look up when they go by or they’ll kill us…’

  Rydell concentrated on the toes of his black SWATs. ‘You hang out with car-thieves much?’

  ‘Just walk. Don’t talk. Don’t look.’

  He heard the Patriot wheel out of the alley and draw up beside them, pacing them. His toes were making little squelching noises, each time he took a step, and what if the last thing you knew before you died was just some pathetic discomfort like that, like your shoes were soaked and your socks were wet, and you weren’t ever going to get to change them?

  Rydell heard the Patriot take off, the driver fighting the unfamiliar American shift-pattern. He started to look up.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Those friends of yours or what?’

  ‘Alley pirates, Lowell calls ’em.’

  ‘Who’s Lowell?’

  ‘You saw him in Dissidents.’

  ‘That bar?’

  ‘Not a bar. A chill.’

  ‘Serves alcohol,’ Rydell said.

  ‘A chill. Where you hang.’

  ‘ “You” who? This Lowell, he hang there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘No,’ she said, angry.

  ‘He your friend, Lowell? Your boyfriend?’

  ‘You said you weren’t a cop. You talk like one.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘You can ask ’em.’

  ‘He’s just somebody I used to know,’ she said.

  ‘Fine.’

  She looked at the Samsonite. ‘You got a gun or something, in there?’

  ‘Dry socks. Underwear.’

  She looked up at him. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Don’t have to,’ he said. ‘We just walking, or you maybe know somewhere to go? Like off this street?’

  ‘We want to look at some flash,’ she said to the fat man. He had a couple of things through each nipple, looked like Yale locks. Kind of pulled him down, there, and Rydell just couldn’t look at them. Had on some kind of baggy white pants with the crotch down about where the knees should’ve been, and this little blue velvet vest all embroidered with gold. He was big and soft and fat and covered with tattoos.

  Rydell’s uncle, the one who’d gone to Africa with the army and hadn’t come back, had had a couple of tattoos. The best one went right across his back, this big swirly dragon with horns and sort of a goofy grin. He’d gotten that one in Korea, eight colors and it had all been done by a computer. He’d told Rydell how the computer had mapped his back and showed him exactly what it was going to look like when it was done. Then he had to lie down on this table while this robot put the tattoo on. Rydell had imagined a robot kind of like a vacuum-cleaner, but with twisty chrome arms had needles on the end. But his uncle said it was more like being fed through a dot-matrix printer, and he’d had to go back eight times, one time for each color. It was a great dragon, though, and lots brighter than the tattoos on his uncle’s arms, which were American eagles and a Harley trademark. When his uncle worked out in the backyard with Rydell’s set of Sears weights, Rydell would watch the dragon ripple.

  This fat bald guy with the weights through his nipples had tattoos everywhere except his hands and his head. Looked like he was wearing a suit of them. They were all different, no American eagles or Harley trademarks either, and they sort of ran together. They made Rydell feel kind of dizzy, so he looked up at the walls, which were covered with more tattoos, like samples for you to pick from.

  ‘You’ve been here before,’ the man said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Chevette Washington said, ‘with Lowell. You remember Lowell?’

  The fat man shrugged.

  ‘My friend and I,’ she said, ‘we wanna pick something out…’

  ‘I haven’t seen your friend before,’ the fat man said, perfectly nice about it but Rydell could hear the question in his voice. He was looking at Rydell’s suitcase.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘He knows Lowell. He’s a ’Land boy, too.’

  ‘You bridge people,’ the fat man sai
d, like he liked bridge people. ‘That storm was just terrible, wasn’t it? I hope it didn’t do you people too much damage… We had a client last month brought in a wide-angle Cibachrome he wanted done as a back-piece. Your whole suspension span and everything on it. Beautiful shot but he wanted it inked just that size, and he just wasn’t broad enough…’ He looked up at Rydell. ‘Would’ve fit, on your friend here…’

  ‘Couldn’t he get it?’ she asked, and Rydell caught that instinct to keep people talking, keep them involved.

  ‘We’re a full-service shop here at Colored People,’ the fat man said. ‘Lloyd put it on a graphics engine, rotated it thirty degrees, heightened the perspective, and it’s gorgeous… Now, were you interested in seeing some flash for yourself, or for your big friend here?’

  ‘Uh, actually,’ Chevette said, ‘we’re looking for something for both of us. Like, uh, matching, you know?’

  The fat man smiled. ‘That’s romantic…’

  Rydell looked at her.

  ‘Just come this way.’ The fat man sort of jingled when he walked, and it made Rydell wince. ‘May I bring you some complimentary tea?’

  ‘Coffee?’ Rydell asked hopefully.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the fat man said, ‘but Butch left at twelve and I don’t know how to operate the machine. But I can bring you some nice tea.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Chevette said, urging Rydell along with little elbow-jabs, ‘tea.’

  The fat man took them down a hallway and into a little room with a couple of wallscreens and a leather sofa. ‘I’ll just get your tea,’ he said, and shuffled out, jingling.

  ‘Why’d you say that, about matching tattoos?’ Rydell was looking around the room. Clean. Blank walls. Soft light but no shadows.

  ‘Because he’ll leave us alone while we’re trying to pick one, and ’cause it’ll take us so long to make up our minds.’

  Rydell put his Samsonite down and sat on the couch. ‘So we can stay here?’

  ‘Yeah, as long as we keep calling up flash.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  She picked up a little remote and turned one of the wallscreens on. Started blipping through menus. Hi-rez close-ups of tattooed skin. The fat man came back with a couple of big rough mugs of steaming tea on a little tray. ‘Yours is green,’ he said to Chevette Washington, ‘and yours is Mormon,’ he said to Rydell, ‘because you did ask for coffee…’

  ‘Um, thanks,’ Rydell said, taking the mug he was offered.

  ‘Now you two take plenty of time,’ the fat man said, ‘and you want anything, just call.’ He went out, tray tucked under his arm, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Mormon?’ Rydell sniffed at the tea. It didn’t smell much of anything.

  ‘Aren’t supposed to drink coffee. That kind of tea’s got ephedrine in it.’

  ‘Got drugs in it?’

  ‘It’s made from a plant with something that’ll keep you awake. Like coffee.’

  Rydell decided it was too hot to drink now anyway. Put it down on the floor beside the couch. The girl on the wallscreen had a dragon sort of like his uncle’s, but on her left hip. Little tiny silver ring through the top edge of her belly button. Chevette Washington flipped it to a big sweaty biker-arm with President Millbank’s face looking out from it in shades of gray.

  Rydell struggled out of his damp jacket, noticing the ripped shoulder, the cheap white stuffing popping out. He dropped it behind the couch. ‘You got any tattoos?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘So how come you know about this?’

  ‘Lowell,’ she said, flipping through half a dozen more images, ‘he’s got a Giger.’

  ‘ “Gigger”?’ Rydell opened his Samsonite, got out a pair of socks, and started unlacing his SWAT shoes.

  ‘This painter. Like nineteenth-century or something. Real classical. Bio-mech. Lowell’s got this Giger back-piece done off a painting called “N.Y.C. XXIV.” ’ She said it x, x, i, v. ‘It’s like this city. Shaded black-work. But he wants sleeves to go with it, so we’d come in here to look for more Gigers to match it.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ Rydell said, ‘you’re making my neck hurt.’ She was pacing back and forth in front of the screens. He took his wet socks off, put them in the Container City bag, and put the dry ones on. Thought about leaving his shoes off for a while, but what if he had to leave in a hurry? He put them back on. He was lacing them up when she sat down beside him.

  She unzipped her jacket and shrugged it off, the loose Beretta cuff rattling. The sleeves of her plain black t-shirt had been scissored off and her upper arms were smooth and pale. She reached over the end of the couch and put the jacket down, sort of propped against the wall, the leather stiff enough that it just stayed there, its arms slumped down, like it was asleep. Like Rydell wished he could be. Now she had the remote in her hand.

  ‘Hey,’ Rydell said, ‘that guy in the raincoat back there, the one shot—’ He was about to say the big longhair on the bicycle, but she grabbed his wrist, the handcuff rattling.

  ‘Sammy. He shot Sammy, up at Skinner’s. He… He was after the glasses, and Sammy had them, and—’

  ‘Wait. Wait a sec. The glasses. Everybody wants the glasses. That guy wants ’em, Warbaby wants ’em…’

  ‘Who’s Warbaby?’

  ‘The big black man shot the back window out of his car I was stealing. That Warbaby.’

  ‘You think I know what they are?’

  ‘You don’t know why people are after them?’

  She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had just told you it was a good day to spend all your money on one particular kind of lottery ticket.

  ‘Let’s start over,’ Rydell suggested. ‘You tell me where you got the glasses.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  He thought about it. ‘Because you’d be dead by now if I hadn’t done the kind of dirt-stupid shit I just did, back there.’

  She thought about that. ‘Okay,’ she said.

  *

  Maybe there really was something in the fat man’s Mormon tea, or maybe Rydell had just crossed over into that point of tiredness where it all flipped around for a while and you started to feel like you were more awake, some ways, than you usually ever were. But he wound up sipping that tea and listening to her, and when she’d get too deep into her story to remember to keep flipping the tattoo-pictures on the wallscreen, he’d do it for her.

  When you worked it around to sequential order, she was this girl from Oregon, didn’t have any family, who’d come down here and moved out on that bridge with this old man, crazy by the sound of it, had a bad hip and needed somebody around to help him. Then she’d gotten her a job riding a bicycle around San Francisco, delivering messages. Rydell knew about messengers from his foot-patrol period in downtown Knoxville, because you had to keep ticketing them for riding on the sidewalk, traffic violation, and they’d give you a hard time about it. But they made pretty good money if they worked at it. This Sammy she’d said was shot, murdered, he was another messenger, a black guy who’d gotten her on at Allied, where she worked.

  And her story of how she’d taken the glasses out of the guy’s pocket at this big drunk party she’d wandered into up in the Morrisey, that made as much sense to him as anything. And it wasn’t the kind of story people made up. Not like the glasses crawled into her hand or anything, she just flat-out stole them, impulse, just because the guy was in her face and obnoxious. Nuisance crime, except they’d turned out to be valuable.

  But from her description he knew her asshole up in the Morrisey had been the same one got himself the Cuban necktie, your German-born Costa Rican citizen who maybe wasn’t either, star of that X-rated fax of Warbaby’s and the one Svobodov and Orlovsky had been investigating. If they had been.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, in the middle of something she was trying to tell him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Keep talking…’

  The Russians were bent, and he knew that. They were Homicide,
they were bent, and he’d bet dollars to donuts they weren’t even investigating the case. They could talk Warbaby’s way onto the crime-scene, tap their department’s computer, but the rest of it had just been window-dressing, for him, for Rydell, the hired help. And what was that that Freddie had said, about DatAmerica and IntenSecure being basically your same company?

  But Chevette Washington was on a roll of her own now, like sometimes when people get started talking they just let it all hang out, and she was saying how Lowell, who was the one with the hair and not the skinhead, and who actually had, sort of, been her boyfriend for a while, was a guy who could (you know?) get things done with computers, if you had the money, and that sort of scared her because he was always talking about the cops and how he didn’t have to worry about them.

  Rydell nodded, automatically flipping through a couple more pictures of tattoos—lady there with these pink carnations sort of followed her bikini-line—but really he was listening to something going around in his own head. Like Hernandez was IntenSecure, the Morrisey was IntenSecure, Warbaby was IntenSecure, Freddie said DatAmerica and IntenSecure were like the same thing—

  ‘—Desire…’

  Rydell blinked. Skinny guy there with J. D. Shapely all mournful on his chest. But you’d be mournful, too, you had chest hair growing out your eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘Republic. Republic of Desire.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Why Lowell says the cops won’t ever bother him, but I told him he was full of shit.’

  ‘Hackers,’ Rydell said.

  ‘You haven’t heard a word I said.’

  ‘No,’ Rydell said, ‘no, that’s not true. Desire. Republic of. Run that one by again, okay?’

  She took the remote, blipped through a shaven head with a sun at the very top, planets orbiting down to the top of the ears, a hand with a screaming mouth on the palm, feet covered with blue-green creature-scales. ‘I said,’ she said, ‘Lowell bullshits about that, how he’s connected up with this Republic of Desire, how they can do anything they feel like with computers, so anybody messes with him is gonna get it.’