“I need a cable,” Rydell said, and his voice sounded breathless, and somehow it was not liking to hear himself sound that way that took him the rest of the way over.
“I know what you need,” the kid said, making sure Rydell heard the boredom in his voice.
“Then you know what kind of cable I need, right?” Rydell was closer to the counter now. Ragged old posters tacked up behind it, for things with names like Heavy Gear II and T'ai Fu.
“You need two.” The grin was gone now, kid trying his best to look hard. “One's power: jack to any DC source or wall juice with the inbuilt transformer. Think you can manage that?”
“Maybe,” Rydell said, getting right up against the front of the counter and bracing his feet, “but tell me about this other one. Like it cables what to what exactly?”
“I'm not paid to tell you that, am I?”
There was a skinny black tool lying on the counter. Some kind of specialist driver. “No,” Rydell said, picking up the driver and examining its tip, “but you're going to.” He grabbed the kid's left ear with his other hand, pinched off an inch of the driver's shaft between thumb and forefinger, and inserted that into the kid's right nostril. It was easy hanging on to the ear, because the kid had some kind of fat plastic spike through it.
“Uh,” the kid said.
“You got a sinus problem?”
“No.”
“You could have.” He let go of the ear. The kid stood very still. “You aren't going to move, are you?”
“No…”
Rydell removed the Ray-Bans, tossing them over his right shoulder. “I'm getting sick of people grinning at me because they know shit I don't. Understand?”
“Okay.”
“‘Okay' what?”
“Just… okay?”
“Okay is: where are the cables?”
“Under the counter.”
“Okay is: where did they come from?”
“Power's standard but lab grade: transformer, current-scrubber. The other, I can't tell you—”
Rydell moved the tool a fraction of an inch, and the kid's eyes widened. “Not okay,” Rydell said.
“I don't know! Know we had to have it assembled to spec, in Fresno. I just work here. Nobody tells me who pays for what.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “If they did, somebody like you'd come in and make me tell, right?”
“Yeah,” Rydell said, “and that means people are liable to come in and torture your ass into telling them things you don't even know…”
“Look in my shirt pocket,” the kid said carefully. “There's an address. Get on there, talk to whoever, maybe they'll tell you.”
Rydell gently patted the front of the pocket, making sure there wouldn't be any used needles or other surprises. The massive pad of muscle behind the pocket gave him pause. He slid two fingers in and came up with a slip of cardboard torn from something larger. Rydell saw the address of a website. “The cable people?”
“Don't know. But I don't know why else I'd be supposed to give it to you.
“And that's all you know?”
“Yes.”
“Don't move,” said Rydell. He removed the tool from the kid's nostril. “Cables under the counter?”
“Yes.”
“I don't think I want you to reach under there.”
“Wait,” said the kid, raising his hands. “I gotta tell you: there's a ‘bot under there. It's got your cables. It just wants to give 'em to you, but I didn't want you to get the wrong idea.”
“A 'bot?”
“It's okay!”
Rydell watched as a small, highly polished steel claw appeared, looking a lot like a pair of articulated sugar tongs his mother had owned. It grasped the edge of the counter. Then the thing chinned itself, one-handed, and Rydell saw the head. It got a leg up and mounted the counter, pulling a couple of heat-sealed plastic envelopes behind it. Its head was disproportionately small, with a sort of wing-like projection or antenna sticking up on one side. It was in that traditional Japanese style, the one that looked as though a skinny little shiny robot was dressed in oversized white armor, its forearms and ankles wider than its upper arms and thighs. It carried the transparent envelopes, each one containing a carefully wound cable, across the counter, put them down, and backed up. Rydell picked them up, shoved them into the pocket of his khakis, and did a pretty good imitation of the robot, backing up.
As the kid's Ray-Bans came into his peripheral vision, he saw that they hadn't broken.
When he was in the doorway, he tossed the black driver to the kid, who missed catching it. It hit the Heavy Gear II poster and dropped out of sight behind the counter.
RYDELL found a laundromat-café combination, called Vicious Cycle, that had one hotdesk at the back, behind a black plastic curtain. The curtain suggested to him that people used this to access porn sites, but why you'd want to do that in a laundromat was beyond him.
He was glad of the curtain anyway, because he hated the idea of people watching him talk to people who weren't there, so he generally avoided accessing websites in public places. He didn't know why using the phone, audio, wasn't embarrassing that way. It just wasn't. When you were using the phone you didn't actually look like you were talking to people who weren't there, even though you were. You were talking to the phone. Although, now that he thought about it, using the phone in the earpiece of the Brazilian glasses would look that way too.
So he pulled the curtain shut and stood there in the background rumble of the dryers, a sound he'd always found sort of comforting. The glasses were already cabled to the hotdesk. He put them on and worked the rocker-pad, inputting the address.
There was a brief and probably entirely symbolic passage through some kind of neon rain, heavy on the pinks and greens, and then he was there.
Looking into that same empty space that he'd glimpsed in Tong's corridor: some kind of dust-blown, sepulchral courtyard, lit from above by a weird, attenuated light.
This time though, he could look up. He did. He seemed to be standing on the floor of a vast empty air shaft that rose up, canyon-like, between walls of peculiarly textured darkness.
High above, a skylight he guessed to be the size of a large swimming pool passed grimy sunlight through decades of soot and what he took, at this distance, to be drifts of something more solid. Black iron mullions divided long rectangles, some of them holed, as by gunfire, through what he guessed was archaic wire-cored safety glass.
When he lowered his head, they were there, the two of them, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before.
One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era, his lips pursed primly. He wore glasses with heavy, rectangular frames of black plastic and a snap-brim hat of a kind that Rydell knew only from old films. The hat was positioned dead level on his head, perhaps an inch above the black frames. His legs were crossed, and Rydell saw that he wore black wingtip oxfords. His hands were folded in his lap.
The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper's victim, in the instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, never quite attaining a steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind. Rydell thought of black-and-white footage, ground zero, slo-mo atomic hurricane.
“Mr. Rydell,” said the one with the hat, “thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This,” and he gestured with a pale, papery-looking hand, which immediately returned to his lap, “is the Rooster.”
The one called the Rooster didn't move at all when it spoke, but the open mouth flickered in and out of focus. Its voice was either the sound-collage from Tong's or another like it. “Listen to me, Rydell. You a
re now responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?”
“I don't know who you are,” Rydell said. “I'm not telling you anything.”
Neither responded, and then Klaus coughed dryly. “The only proper answer. You would be wise to maintain that position. Indeed, you have no idea who we are, and if we were to reappear to you at some later time, you would have no way of knowing that we were, in fact, us.”
“Then why should I listen to you?”
“In your situation,” said the Rooster, and its voice, just then, seemed composed primarily of the sound of breaking glass, modulated into the semblance of human speech, “you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you.”
“But whether or not you choose to believe what you are told is another matter,” said Klaus, fussily adjusting his shirt cuffs and refolding his hands.
“You're hackers,” Rydell said.
“Actually,” said Klaus, “we might better be described as envoys. We represent,” he paused, “another country.”
“Though not, of course,” said the perpetually disintegrating Rooster, “in any obsolete sense of the merely geopolitical—”
“‘Hacker,’” interrupted Klaus, “has certain criminal connotations—”
“Which we do not accept,” the Rooster cut in, “having long since established an autonomous reality in which—”
“Quiet,” said Klaus, and Rydell had no doubt where the greater authority lay. “Mr. Rydell, your employer, Mr. Laney, has become, for want of a better term, an ally of ours. He has brought a certain situation to our attention, and it is clearly to our advantage to come to his aid.”
“What situation is that?”
“That is difficult to explain,” Klaus said. He cleared his throat. “If indeed possible. Mr. Laney is possessed of a most peculiar talent, one which he has very satisfactorily demonstrated to us. We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City will be at your disposal in the coming crisis.”
“What city,” Rydell asked, “what crisis?”
“The nodal point,” the Rooster said, its voice like the trickle of water far down in some unseen cistern.
“Mr. Rydell,” said Klaus, “you must keep the projector with you at all times. We advise you to use it at the earliest opportunity. Familiarize yourself with her.”
“With who?”
“We are concerned,” Klaus went on, “that Mr. Laney, for reasons of health, will be unable to continue. We number among us some who are possessed of his talent, but none to such an extraordinary extent. Should Laney be lost to us, Mr. Rydell, we fear that little can be done.”
“Jesus,” said Rydell, “you think I know what you're talking about?”
“I'm not being deliberately gnomic, Mr. Rydell, I assure you. There is no time for explanations now, and for some things, it seems, there may actually be no explanations. Simply remember what we have told you, and that we are here for you, at this address. And now you must return, immediately, to wherever you have left the projector.”
And they were gone, and the black courtyard with them, compacted into a sphere of pink and green fractal neon that left residuals on Rydell's retinas, as it shrank and vanished in the dark behind the Brazilian sunglasses.
30. ANOTHER ONE
FONTAINE had spent most of the late afternoon on the phone, trying to lay Clarisse's creepy Japanese baby dolls off on a decreasingly likely list of specialist dealers.
He knew it wasn't the thing to do, in terms of realizing optimum cash, but dolls weren't one of his areas of expertise; besides, they gave him the horrors, these Another One replicas.
Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature's way of telling you you had too much money to begin with. But there was always a chance he'd find one who knew somebody, one specific buyer, to go to. That was what Fontaine had been hoping for when he'd started dialing.
But now it was eight calls later, and he was reduced to talking to this Elliot, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, who he knew had once been put under electronic house arrest for something involving counterfeit Barbies. That was a federal rap, and Fontaine ordinarily avoided people like that, but Elliot did seem to have a line on a buyer. Although he was, as you'd naturally expect, cagey about it.
“Condition,” Elliot said. “The three salient points here are condition, condition, and condition.”
“Elliot, they look great to me.”
“‘Great' is not on the NAADC grading scale, Fontaine.”
Fontaine wasn't sure, but he thought that might be the National Association of Animatronic Doll Collectors. “Elliot, you know I don't know how to rate condition on these things. They've got all their fingers and toes, right? I mean, the fucking things look alive, okay?”
Fontaine heard Elliot sigh. He'd never met the man. “My client,” said Elliot, speaking slowly, for stress, “is a condition queen. He wants them minty. He wants them mintier than minty. He wants them mint in box. He wants them new old stock.”
“Hey, look,” Fontaine said, remembering what Clarisse had said, “you don't get these things unused, right? The grandparents bought them as, like, surrogate offspring, right? They were big-ticket items. They got used.”
“Not always,” said Elliot. “The most desirable pieces, and my client owns several, are replicas ordered just prior to the unexpected death of the grandchild.”
Fontaine took the phone from his ear, looking at it as though it were something dirty. “Fucking hell,” Fontaine said, under his breath.
“What's that?” Elliot asked. “What?”
“Sorry, Elliot,” Fontaine said, putting the phone back to his ear, “gotta take one on the other line. I'll get back to you.” Fontaine broke the connection.
He was perched on a tall stool behind the counter. He leaned sideways to look at the Another One dolls in their bag. They looked horrible. They were horrible. Elliot was horrible. Clarisse was horrible too, but now Fontaine lapsed into a brief but intensely erotic fantasy involving none other, with whom he had not been conjugal in some while. That this fantasy literally involved Clarisse exclusively, he took to be significant. That it produced an actual erectile response, he took to be even more significant. He sighed. Adjusted his trousers.
Life, he reflected, was rough as a cob.
Through the sound of rain sluicing down around his shop (he'd rigged gutters) he could hear a faint but rapid clicking from the back room and noted its peculiar regularity. Each one of those clicks, he knew, represented another watch. He'd shown the boy how to call up auctions on the notebook, not Christie's or Antiquorum, but the living messy scrum of the net auctions. He'd shown him how to bookmark too, because he thought that picking what he liked might be fun.
Fontaine sighed again, this time because he had no idea what he would do about the boy. Having taken him in because he'd wanted a closer look at—well, had wanted, did want—the Jaeger-LeCoultre military, Fontaine would have found it impossible to explain to anyone why he had subsequently fed him, gotten him showered, bought him fresh clothes, and shown him how to use the eyephones. Actually he couldn't explain it to himself. He was not inclined to charity, he didn't think, but sometimes he found himself moving as if to right a particular wrong in the world. And this never made sense to Fontaine, really, because what he made right, he made right only for a little while, and nothing ever really changed.
This boy now, he very likely had some sort of brain damage, and most likely congenital, but Fontaine believed that trouble had no first cause. There was sheer bad luck, he knew that, but often as not he'd seen how cruelty or neglect or hard-luck genetics came twining up through the generations like a vine.
Now he dug down deep, into the pocket of his tweed slacks, where he was keeping the Jaeger-LeCoultre. By itself, of course, so that nothing else would scratch it. He pulled it out now
and considered it, but the tenor of his thoughts prevented the momentary distraction, the small pleasure, he'd hoped to take from it.
But how on earth, he wondered, had the boy gotten hold of something like this, such an elegant piece of serious collector's ordnance?
And the workmanship of the strap worried him. He'd never seen anything quite like it, for all that it was very simple. An artisan had sat down with the watch, whose lugs were closed not by spring bars but permanently soldered rods of stainless steel, integral parts of the case, and cut and glued and hand stitched however many pieces of black calf leather. He examined the inside of the strap, but there was nothing, no trademark or signature. “If you could talk,” Fontaine said, looking at the watch.
And what would it tell him? he wondered. The story of how the boy had gotten it might turn out to be not the most unlikely adventure it had had. Briefly he imagined it on some officer's wrist out in the Burmese night, a star shell bursting above a jungle hillside, monkeys screaming…
Did they have monkeys in Burma? He did know the British had fought there when this had been issued.
He looked down through the scratched, greenish glass that topped the counter. Watches there, each face to him a tiny and contained poem, a pocket museum, subject over time to laws of entropy and of chance. These tiny mechanisms, their jeweled hearts beating. Wearing down, he knew, through the friction of metal on metal. He sold nothing unserviced, everything cleaned and lubricated. He took fresh stock to a sullen but highly skilled Pole in Oakland to be cleaned, oiled, and timed. And he did this, he knew, not to provide a better, more reliable product, but to ensure that each one might better survive in an essentially hostile universe. It would've been difficult to admit this to anyone, but it was true and he knew it.
He put the Jaeger-LeCoultre back in his pocket and slid from the stool. Stood staring blankly into a glass-fronted cabinet, the shelf at eye level displaying military Dinky Toys and a Randall Model 15 “Airman,” a stocky-looking combat knife with a saw-toothed spine and black Micarta grips. The Dinky Toys had been played with; dull gray base metal showed through chipped green paint. The Randall was mint, unused, unsharpened, its stainless steel blade exactly as it left the grinding belt. Fontaine wondered how many such had in fact never been used. Totemic objects, they lost considerable resale value if sharpened, and it was his impression that they circulated almost as a species of ritual currency, quite exclusively masculine. He had two currently in stock, the other a hiltless little leaf-point dirk said to have been designed for the US Secret Service. Best dated by the name of the maker on their saddle-sewn sheaths, he estimated them both to be about thirty years old. Such things were devoid of much poetry for Fontaine, although he understood the market and how to value a piece. They spoke to him mainly, as did the window of any army surplus store, of male fear and powerlessness. He turned away now, seeing the dying eyes of a man he'd shot in Cleveland, possibly in the year one of those knives had been made.