“Okay,” Chevette said.
“So when you need the stuff to do new things, or to do old things better, do you write new stuff, from the ground up, or do you patch the old stuff?”
“Patch the old?”
“You got it. Overlay new routines. As the machines got faster, it didn't matter if a routine went through three hundred steps when it could actually be done in three steps. It all happens in a fraction of a second anyway, so who cares?”
“Okay,” Chevette said, “so who does care?”
“Smart cookies,” he said and scratched his soul patch with the tip of the driver. “Because they understand that all that really happens, these days, is that ancient software is continually encrusted with overlays, to the point where it's literally impossible for any one programmer to fully understand how any given solution is arrived at.”
“I still don't see why this stuff would be any help.”
“Well, actually,” he said, “you're right.” He winked at her. “You got it, girl. But the fact remains that there are some very smart people who like to have this stuff around, maybe just to remind themselves where it all comes from and how, really, all any of us do, these days, is just fixes. Nothing new under the sun, you know?”
“Thanks for the screwdriver,” Chevette said. “I gotta go see a little black boy now.”
“Really? What about?”
“A van,” Chevette said.
“Girl,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “you deep.”
27. BED-AND-BREAKFAST
RYDELL sees it's dark, down here on the lower level, the narrow thoroughfare crowded and busy, greenish light of scavenged fluorescents seen through swooping bundles of that transparent plumbing, pushcarts rattling past to take up the day's positions. He took a flight of clanging steel stairs, up through a hole cut unevenly in the roadbed above, to the upper level.
Where more light fell, diffused through plastic, shadowed by the jackstraw country suspended above, shacks that were no more than boxes, catwalks in between, sails of wet laundry that had gone back up with the dying of the earlier wind.
Young girl, brown eyes big as the eyes in those old Japanese animations, handing out slips of yellow paper, “BED & BREAKFAST.” He studied the map on the back.
He started walking, bag over his shoulder and the GlobEx box under his arm, and in fifteen minutes he'd come upon something announced in pink neon as the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl. He knew the name from the back of the yellow flyer, where the map gave it as a landmark to find the bed-and-breakfast.
Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a place with steamed-up windows, prices painted in what looked like nail polish on a sheet of cardboard.
He'd only ever been out here once before, and that had been at night in the rain. Seeing it this way, it reminded him of some gated attraction, Nissan County or Skywalker Park, and he wondered how you could have a place like this and not have security or even a basic police presence.
He remembered how Chevette had told him that the bridge people and the police had an understanding: the bridge people stayed on the bridge, mostly, and the police stayed off it, mostly.
He spotted a sheaf of the yellow flyers, thumbtacked to a plywood door, in a wall set back a few feet from the front of Ghetto Chef. It wasn't locked, and opened on a sort of hallway, narrow, walled with taut white plastic stapled over a framework of lumber. Somebody had drawn murals on either wall, it looked like, with a heavy black industrial marker, but the walls were too close together to see what the overall design was about. Stars, fish, circles with Xs through them… He had to hold his bag behind him and the GlobEx box in front, to go down the hallway, and when he got to the end he turned a corner and found himself in somebody's windowless kitchen, very small.
The walls, each covered in a different pattern of striped wallpaper, seemed to vibrate. Woman there, stirring something on a little propane cooker. Not that old, but her hair was gray and parted in the middle. Same big eyes as the girl, but hers were gray.
“Bed-and-breakfast?” he asked her.
“Got a reservation?” She wore a man's tweed sports coat, sleeves worn through at the elbows, over a denim jean jacket and a collarless flannel baseball shirt. No makeup. Looked windburned. Big hawk nose.
“I need a reservation?”
“We book through an agency in the city,” the woman said, taking the wooden spoon out of whatever was coming to boil there.
“I got this from a girl,” Rydell said, showing her the flyer he still held, clutched against his bag.
“You mean she's actually handing them out?”
“Handed me this one,” he said.
“You have money?”
“A credit chip,” Rydell said.
“Any contagious diseases?”
“No.”
“Are you a drug abuser?”
“No,” Rydell said.
“A drug dealer?”
“No.”
“Smoke anything? Cigarettes, a pipe?”
“No.”
“Are you a violent person?”
Rydell hesitated. “No.”
“More to the point, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”
“No,” Rydell said, “I haven't.”
“That's good,” she said, turning down the propane ring. “That's one thing I can't tolerate. Raised by 'em.”
“Well,” Rydell said, “do I need a reservation to stay here or not?” He was looking around the kitchen, wondering where “here” might be; it was about seven feet on a side, and the doorway he stood in was the only apparent entrance. The wallpaper, which had buckled slightly from cooking steam, made the space look like an amateur stage set or something they'd build for children in a makeshift day care.
“No,” she said, “you don't. You've got a handbill.”
“You have space?”
“Of course.” She took the pot off the cooker, placed it on a round metal tray on the small, white-painted table, and covered it with a clean-looking dish towel. “Go back out the way you came. Go on. I'll follow you.”
He did as she said and waited in the open door for her to catch up with him. He saw that the Ghetto Chef line had gotten longer, if anything.
“No,” she said, behind him, “up here.” He turned and saw her hauling on a length of orange nylon rope, which brought down a counterweighted aluminum ladder. “Go on up,” she said. “I'll send your bags.”
Rydell put down his duffel and the GlobEx box and stepped up onto the ladder.
“Go on,” she said.
Rydell climbed the ladder to discover an incredibly tiny space he was clearly expected to sleep in. His first thought was that someone had decided to build one of those Japanese coffin hotels out of offcuts from all the cheapest stuff at a discount building supply. The walls were some kind of light-colored wood-look sheathing that imitated bad imitations of some other product that had probably imitated some now-forgotten original. The tiny square of floor nearest him, the only part that wasn't taken up by wall-to-wall bed, was carpeted with some kind of ultra-low-pile utility stuff in a weird pale green with orange highlights. There was daylight coming in from the far end, by what he supposed was the head of the bed, but he'd have had to kneel down to make out how that was possible.
“Do you want to take it?” the woman called up.
“Sure do,” Rydell said.
“Then pull up your bags.”
He looked over and saw her loading his duffel and the GlobEx box into a rusty wire hamper she'd hung on the ladder.
“Breakfast at nine, sharp,” she said, without looking up, and then she was gone.
Rydell hauled the ladder, with his luggage, up on its orange rope. When he got his stuff out, the ladder stayed up, held by its hidden counterweight.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into his bedroom, over the foam slab made up with one of those micro-furry foam-core blankets, to where some sort of multi-paned, semi-hemispherical plastic bubble, proba
bly part of an airplane, had been epoxied into the outer wall. It was thick with salt, outside, looked like; a crust of dried spray. It let light in, but just a featureless gray brightness. It looked as though you slept with your head right up in there. Okay by him. It smelled funny but not bad. He should've asked her what she charged, but he could do that later.
He sat down on the foot of the bed and took off his shoes. There were holes in the toes of both his black socks. Have to buy more.
He pulled the glasses out of his jacket, put them on, and speed-dialed Laney. He listened to a phone ringing somewhere in Tokyo and imagined the room it was ringing in, some expensive hotel, or maybe it was ringing on a desk the size of Tong's, but real. Laney answered, nine rings in.
“Bad Sector,” Laney said.
“What?”
“The cable. They have it.”
“What cable?”
“The one you need for the projector.”
Rydell was looking at the GlobEx box. “What projector?”
“The one you picked up from GlobEx today.”
“Wait a minute,” Rydell said, “how do you know about that?”
There was a pause. “It's what I do, Rydell.”
“Listen,” Rydell said, “there was trouble, a fight. Not me, another guy, but I was there, involved. They'll check the GlobEx security recordings and they'll know I signed for you, and they'll have footage of me.”
“They don't,” Laney said.
“Of course they do,” protested Rydell, “I was there.”
“No,” Laney said, “they've got footage of me.”
“What are you talking about, Laney?”
“The infinite plasticity of the digital.”
“But I signed for it. My name, not yours.”
“On a screen, right?”
“Oh.” Rydell thought about it. “Who can get into GlobEx and alter that stuff?”
“Not me,” said Laney. “But I can see it's been altered.”
“So who did it?”
“That's academic at this point.”
“What's that mean?” Rydell asked.
“It means don't ask. Where are you?”
“In a bed-and-breakfast on the bridge. Your cough sounds better.”
“This blue stuff,” Laney said. Rydell had no idea what he meant. “Where's the projector?”
“Like a thermos? Right here.”
“Don't take it with you. Find a shop there called Bad Sector and tell them you need the cable.”
“What kind of cable?”
“They'll be expecting you,” Laney said and hung up.
Rydell sat there on the end of the bed, with the sunglasses on, thoroughly pissed off at Laney. Felt like bagging the whole deal. Get a job back at that parking garage. Sit around and watch nature in downtown Detroit.
Then his work ethic caught up with him. He took off the glasses, put them in his jacket, and started putting his shoes back on.
28. FOLSOM STREET
FOOT of Folsom in the rain, all these soot-streaked RVs, spavined campers, gut-sprung vehicles of any description, provided that description included old; things that ran, if they ran at all, on gasoline.
“Look at that,” Tessa said, as she edged the van past an old Hummer, ex-military, every square inch covered with epoxied micro-junk, a million tiny fragments of the manufactured world glittering in Tessa's headlights and the rain.
“Think there's a spot there,” Chevette said, peering through the bad wiper wash. Tessa's van had Malibu-style wiper blades; old and hadn't been wet for quite a while. They'd had to creep this last block along the Embarcadero, when the rain had really started.
It was drumming steadily on the van's flat steel roof now, but Chevette's sense of San Francisco weather told her it wouldn't last all that long.
The black kid with the dreads had earned his fifty. They'd found him crouching there like a gargoyle on the curb, his face somehow already as old as it would ever need to be, smoking Russian cigarettes from a red-and-white pack he kept tucked into the rolled-up sleeve of an old army shirt, three sizes too big. The van still had its wheels on and the tires were intact.
“What do you think he meant,” Tessa said, maneuvering between a moss-stained school bus of truly ancient vintage and a delaminating catamaran up on a trailer whose tires had almost entirely rotted away, “when he said somebody was looking for you?”
“I don't know,” Chevette said. She'd asked him who, but he'd just shrugged and walked off. This after determinedly trying to hustle Tessa for God's Little Toy. “Maybe if you'd given him the camera platform, he'd've told me.”
“No fear,” Tessa said, killing the engine. “That's half my share of the Malibu house.”
Chevette saw that there were lights on in the tiny cabin of the catboat, through little slit-like windows, and somebody moving in there. She started cranking down the window beside her, but it stuck after two turns, so she opened the door instead.
“That's Buddy's space there,” said a girl, straightening up from the catamaran's hatch, her voice raised above the rain, hoarse and a little frightened. She hunched there, under some old poncho or piece of tarp, and Chevette couldn't make out her face.
“S'cuse us,” Chevette said, “but we need to stop for the night, or anyway till this rain lets up.”
“Buddy parks there.”
“Do you know when he'll be back?”
“Why?”
“We'll be out of here dawn tomorrow,” Chevette said. “We're just two women. You okay with that?”
The girl raised the tarp a fraction, and Chevette caught a glimpse of her eyes. “Just two of you?”
“Let us stay,” Chevette said, “then you won't have to worry who else might come along.”
“Well,” the girl said. And was gone, ducking back down. Chevette heard the hatch dragged shut.
“Bugger leaks,” Tessa said, examining the roof of the van with a small black flashlight.
“I don't think it'll keep up long,” Chevette said.
“But we can park here?”
“Unless Buddy comes back,” Chevette said.
Tessa turned the light back into the rear of the van. Where rain was already pooling.
“I'll get the foam and the bags up here,” Chevette said. “Keep 'em dry till later, anyway.”
She climbed back between the seats.
29. VICIOUS CYCLE
RYDELL found a map of the bridge in his sunglasses, a shopping and restaurant guide for tourists. It was in Portuguese, but you could toggle to an English version.
It took him a while; a wrong move on the rocker-pad and he'd wind up back in those Metro Rio maps, but finally he'd managed to pull it up. Not a GPS map, just drawings of both levels, set side by side, and he had no way of knowing how up-to-date it was.
His bed-and-breakfast wasn't on it, but Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl was (three and a half stars) and Bad Sector was too.
The lozenge that popped up when he clicked on Bad Sector described it as a source for “retro hard and soft, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century bent.” He wasn't sure about that last part, but he could at least see where the place was: lower level, not far from that bar he'd gone in with Creedmore and the guitar player.
There was a cabinet to put stuff in, behind the triple-faux paneling, so he did: his duffel and the GlobEx box with the thermos thing. He put the switchblade, after some thought, under the foam slab. He considered tossing it into the bay, but he wasn't sure exactly where you could find a clear shot to do that out here. He didn't want to carry it, and any-way he could always toss it later.
It was raining when he came out beside Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, and he'd seen it rain on the bridge before, when he'd first been here. What happened was that rain fell on the weird jumble of shanty boxes people had built up there and shortly came sluicing down through all of that in big random gouts, like someone was emptying bathtubs. There was no real drainage here, things having been built in the most random way possible, so t
hat the upper level, while sheltered, was no way dry.
This seemed to have thinned the line for the Ghetto Chef, so that he briefly considered eating, but then he thought of how Laney had him on retainer and wanted him to get right over to this Bad Sector and get that cable. So instead he headed down to the lower level.
The rain had concentrated the action down here, because it was relatively dry. It felt like easing your way through a very long, very homemade rush-hour subway car, except over half the other people were doing that too, in either direction, and the others were standing still, blocking the way and trying hard to sell you things. Rydell eased his wallet out of his right rear pocket and into his right front.
Crowds made Rydell nervous. Well, not crowds so much as crowding. Too close, people up against you. (Someone brushed his back pocket, feeling for the wallet that wasn't there.) Someone shoving those long skinny Mexican fried-dough things at him, repeating a price in Spanish. He felt his shoulders start to bunch.
The smell down here was starting to get to him: sweat and perfume, wet clothing, fried food. He wished he was back in Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, finding out what those three and a half stars were for.
He couldn't take much more of this, he decided, and looked over the heads of the crowd for another stairway to the upper level. He'd rather get soaked.
But suddenly it opened out into a wider section, the crowd eddying away to either side, where there were food stalls, cafés, and stores, and there was Bad Sector, right there, done up in what looked to him like old-fashioned aluminum furnace paint.
He tried to shrug the crowd-induced knots out of his shoulders. He was sweating; his heart was pounding. He made himself take a few deep breaths to calm down. Whatever it was he was supposed to be doing here, for Laney, he wanted to do it right. Get all jangled, this way, you never knew what could happen. Calm down. Nobody was losing it here.
He lost it almost immediately.
There was a very large Chinese kid behind the counter, shaved almost bald, with one of those little lip beards that always got on Rydell's nerves. Very large kid, with that weirdly smooth-looking mass that indicated a lot of muscle supporting the weight. Hawaiian shirt with big mauvy-pink orchids on it. Antique gold-framed Ray-Ban aviators and a shit-eating grin. Really it was that grin that did it.