He locked the door, put the CLOSED sign up, and went into the back room where he found the boy still seated, cross-legged, as he'd left him, his face hidden by the massive old eyephones cabled to the open notebook in his lap.
“Hey,” Fontaine said. “How's fishin’? You been finding anything you think we should bid on?”
The boy continued to monotonously click a single key on the notebook, the eyephones bobbing slightly in time.
“Hey,” Fontaine said. “You gonna get netburn.”
He squatted beside the boy, wincing at the pain it brought to his knees. He rapped once on the gray cowl of the eyephones, then gently removed them. The boy's eyes blinked furiously, swimming in the vanished light of the miniature video screens. His hand clicked the notebook a few times, then stopped.
“Let's see what you found,” Fontaine said, taking the notebook from him. He absently touched a few keys, curious to see what the boy might have bookmarked.
He was expecting auction pages, each one with a scan and description of a given watch on offer, but what he found instead were numbered lists of articles that came up in an archaic font meant to recall typewriters.
He studied one list, then another. He felt something like cold air across the back of his neck and thought for a second that the front door was open, but then he remembered locking it.
“Shit,” Fontaine said, pulling up more of these lists. “Shit, how'd you get this?”
These were bank records, confidential tallies of the contents of safety deposit boxes in banks of the brick-and-mortar sort, all apparently in midwestern states. And each list he saw contained at least one watch, very likely part of someone's estate, and very likely forgotten.
A Rolex Explorer in Kansas City. Some sort of gold Patek in a small town in Kansas.
He looked from the screen to the boy, aware of being privy to something profoundly anomalous.
“How'd you get into these files?” he asked. “This stuff is private. Should be impossible. Is impossible. How'd you do it?”
And only that absence behind the brown eyes, staring back at him, either infinitely deep or of no depth at all, he couldn't tell.
31. VIEW FROM A HELLWARD STANCHION
HE dreams a vast elevator, descending, its floor like the ballroom of some ancient liner. Its sides are open, in part, and he finds her there at the rail, beside an ornate cast-iron stanchion worked in cherubs and bunches of grapes, their outlines softened beneath innumerable coats of a black enamel glossy as wet ink.
Beyond the black stanchion and the aching geometry of her profile, a darkened world spreads to every horizon, island continents blacker than the seas in which they swim, the lights of great yet nameless cities reduced to firefly glimmers at this height, this distance.
The elevator, this ballroom, this waltzing host unseen now but sensed as background, as necessary gestalt, descends it seems down all his days, in some coded iteration of the history that brings him to this night.
If it is night.
The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt.
The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates out-come; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
And now she turns to him, and she is in that instant all she ever was to him, and something more, for he is aware in that same instant that this is a dream, this mighty cage, descending, and she is lost, as ever, and now he opens his eyes to the gray and perfectly neutral ceiling of the bedroom on Russian Hill.
He lies dead straight, atop the blanket of gray lambs wool made up in military fashion, in his gray flannel shirt with its platinum links, his black trousers, his black wool socks. His hands are folded on his chest like the hands of a medieval effigy, a knight atop his own sarcophagus, and the telephone is ringing.
He touches one of the platinum cuff links, to answer.
“It isn't too late, I hope,” says the voice.
“For what?” he asks, unmoving.
“I needed to talk.”
“Do you?”
“More so, lately.”
“And why is that?”
“The time draws near.”
“The time?” And he sees again the view from the huge cage, descending.
“Can't you feel it? You with your right place at the right time. You with your letting things unfold. Can't you feel it?”
“I do not deal in outcomes.”
“But you do,” the voice says. “You've dealt a few for me, after all. You become an outcome.”
“No,” the man says, “I simply discover that place where I am supposed to be.”
“You make it sound so simple. I wish that it were that simple for me.
“It could be,” the man says, “but you are addicted to complexity.”
“More literally than you know,” says the voice, and the man imagines the few square inches of satellite circuitry through which it comes to him. That tiniest and mostly costly of principalities. “It's all about complexity now.”
“It is about your will in the world,” the man says and raises his arms, cupping the back of his head in his hands.
There follows a silence.
“There was a time,” the voice says at last, “when I believed that you were playing a game with me. That all of that was something you made up for me. To annoy me. Or amuse me. To hold my interest. To ensure my patronage.”
“I have never been in need of your patronage,” the man says mildly.
“No, I suppose not,” the voice continues. “There will always be those who need certain others not to be, and will pay to make it so. But it's true: I took you to be another mercenary, one with an expressed philosophy perhaps, but I took that philosophy to be nothing more than a way you had discovered of making yourself interesting, of setting yourself apart from the pack.”
“Where I am,” the man says to the gray neutral ceiling, “there is no pack.”
“Oh, there's a pack all right. Bright young things guaranteeing executive outcomes. Brochures. They have brochures. And lines to read between. What were you doing when I called?”
“Dreaming,” the man says.
“I wouldn't have imagined, somehow, that you dream. Was it a good dream?”
The man considers the perfect blankness of the gray ceiling. Remembered geometry of facial bone threatens to form there. He closes his eyes. “I was dreaming of hell,” he says.
“How was it?”
“An elevator, descending.”
“Christ,” says the voice, “this poetry is unlike you.” Another silence follows.
The man sits up. Feels the smooth, dark polished wood, cool through his black socks. He begins to perform a series of very specific excercises that involve a minimum of visible movement. There is stiffness in his shoulders. At some distance he hears a car go past, tires on wet pavement.
“I'm not very far from you at the moment,” the man says, breaking the silence. “I'm in San Francisco.”
Now it is the man's turn for silence. He continues his exercises, remembering the Cuban beach, decades ago, on which he was first taught this sequence and its variations. His teacher that day the master of a school of Argentine knife-fighting most authoritatively declared nonexistent by responsible scholars of the martial arts.
“How long has it been,” the voice asks, “since we've spoken, face-to-face?”
“Some years,” says the man.
“I think I need to see you now. Something extraordinary is on the verge of happening.”
“Really,” says the man, and no one sees his brief and wolfish smile, “are you about to become contented?”
A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature cityscape in geosynchronous orbit. “Not that extraordinary, no. But some very basic state is on the brink of change, and
we are near its locus.”
“We? We have no current involvement.”
“Physically. Geographically. It's happening here.”
The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise, remembering flies on the instructor's face during that initial demonstration.
“Why did you go to the bridge last night?”
“I needed to think,” the man says and stands.
“Nothing drew you there?”
Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost in Market Street. The smell of cigarettes in her hair. Her winter lips chill against his, opening into warmth. “Nothing,” he says, hands closing on nothing.
“It's time for us to meet,” the voice says.
Hands opening. Releasing nothing.
32. LOWER COMPANIONS
THE back of the van collected a quarter-inch of water before the rain quit. “Cardboard,” Chevette told Tessa.
“Cardboard?”
“We'll find some, dry. Boxes. Open 'em out, put down a couple of layers. Be dry enough.”
Tessa clicked her flashlight on and had another look. “We're going to sleep in that puddle?”
“It's interstitial,” Chevette told her.
Tessa turned the light off, swung around. “Look,” she said, pointing with the flashlight, “at least it isn't pissing down now. Let's go back to the bridge. Find a pub, something to eat, we'll worry about this later.”
Chevette said that would be fine, just as long as Tessa didn't bring God's Little Toy, or in any other way record the rest of the evening, and Tessa agreed to that.
They left the van parked there, and walked back along the Embarcadero, past razor wire and barricades that sealed (ineffectually, Chevette knew) the ruined piers. There were dealers in the shadows there, and before they'd gotten to the bridge they were offered speed, plug, weed, opium, and dancer. Chevette explained that these dealers weren't sufficiently competitive to take and hold positions farther along, nearer the bridge. Those were the coveted spots, and the dealers along the Embarcadero were either moving toward or away from that particular arena.
“How do they compete?” Tessa asked. “Do they fight?”
“No,” said Chevette, “it's the market, right? The ones with good shit, good prices, and they turn up, well, the users want to see them. Somebody came with bad shit, bad prices, the users drive 'em off. But you can see them change, when you live here; see 'em every day, most of that stuff, if they're using themselves, it'll take 'em down. Wind up back down here, then you just don't see 'em.”
“They don't sell on the bridge?”
“Well,” Chevette said, “yeah, they do, but not so much. And when they do, they're quieter about it. You don't get offered on the bridge, so much, not if they don't know you.”
“So how is it like that?” Tessa asked. “How do people know not to? Where does the rule come from?”
Chevette thought about it. “It isn't a rule,” she said. “It's just you aren't supposed to do it.” Then she laughed. “I don't know: it's just like that. Like there aren't too many fights, but the ones there are tend to be serious, and people get hurt.”
“How many people actually live out here?” Tessa asked as they walked up the ramp from Bryant.
“I don't know,” Chevette said. “Not sure anyone does. Used to be, everyone who did anything here, who had a business going, they lived here. ‘Cause you have to. Have to be in possession. No rent or anything. Now, though, you get businesses that are run like businesses, you know? That Bad Sector we were in. Somebody owns all that stock, they built that storefront, and I bet they pay that sumo boy to sleep in the back, hold it down for them.”
“But you didn't work here, when you lived here?”
“Nah,” Chevette said, “I was messin’, soon as I could. Got myself a bike and I was all over town.”
They made their way into the lower level, past boxes of fish on ice, until they came to a place Chevette remembered on the south side. It had food sometimes, sometimes music, and it had no name.
“They do good hot wings in here,” Chevette said. “You like hot wings?”
“I'll let you know after I've had a beer.” Tessa was looking around at the place, like she was trying to decide how interstitial it was.
It turned out they had an Australian beer Tessa really liked, called a Redback, came in a brown bottle with a red spider on it, and Tessa explained that these spiders were the Australian equivalent of a black widow, maybe worse. It was a good beer though, Chevette had to agree, and after they'd both had one, and ordered another, Tessa ordered a cheeseburger, and Chevette ordered a plate of hot wings and a side of fries.
This place really smelled like a bar: stale beer, smoke, fry grease, sweat. She remembered the first bars she'd ever gone into, places along rural highways back up in Oregon, and they'd smelled like this. The bars Carson had taken her to in LA hadn't smelled like anything much. Like aromatherapy candles, sort of.
There was a stage down at one end, just a low black platform raised about a foot above the floor, and there were musicians there, setting up, plugging things in. There was some kind of keyboard, drums, a mike stand. Chevette had never been that much into music, not any particular kind, although in her messenger days she'd gotten to like dancing in clubs, in San Francisco. Carson, though, he'd been very particular about what music he liked, and had tried to teach Chevette to appreciate it like he did, but she just hadn't gotten with it at all. He was into this twentieth-century stuff, a lot of it French, particularly this Serge Something, really creepy-ass, sounded like the guy was being slowly jerked off while he sang, but like it really wasn't even doing that much for him. She'd bought this new Chrome Koran, “My War Is My War,” sort of out of self-defense, but she hadn't even liked it that much herself, and the one time she'd put it on, when Carson was there, he'd looked at her like she'd shit on his broadloom or something.
These guys, now, setting up on the little stage, they weren't bridge people, but she knew that there were musicians, some of them famous, who'd come out and record on the bridge just so they could say they had.
There was a big man up there, with a white, stubbly face and a sort of mashed-up cowboy hat on the back of his head. He was fiddling with an unplugged guitar and listening to a smaller man in jeans, wearing a belt buckle like an engraved silver dinner platter.
“Hey,” Chevette said, indicating the bottle-blonde man with the belt buckle, “this girl gets molested in the dark, tells 'em it was a mesh-back did it. ‘Well,’ they say, ‘how you know it was, if it was dark?’ ‘Cause he had a tiny little dick and a great big belt buckle!’”
“What's a meshback?” Tessa tilted back the last of her beer.
“Redneck, Skinner called 'em,” Chevette said. “It's from those nylon baseball caps they used to wear, got black nylon mesh on the back, for ventilation? My mother used to call those ‘gimme' hats…”
“Why?” Tessa asked her.
“‘Gimme one them hats.’ Give 'em away free with advertising on them.”
“Country music, that sort of thing?”
“Well, more like Dukes of Nuke ‘Em and stuff. I don't think that's country music.”
“It's the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat,” Tessa said, “barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America. Or that's what they'd say on Real One. But we have that joke about the big buckles in Australia, except it's about pilots and wristwatches.”
Chevette thought the man with the belt buckle was staring back at her, so she looked in the other direction, at the crowd around the pool table, and here there actually were a couple of the meshbacked hats, so she pointed these out to Tessa by way of illustration.
“Excuse me, ladies,” someone said, a woman, and Chevette turned to face directly into the line of fire of some very serious bosom, laced up into a shiny black top. Huge cloud of blowsy blonde hair a la Ashleigh Modine Carter, who Chevette thought of as a singer meshbacks would listen to, if they listened to women, which she wasn't certain they
did. The woman put two freshly opened Redbacks down on their table. “With Mr. Creedmore's compliments,” she said, beaming at them.
“Mr. Creedmore?” Tessa asked.
“Buell Creedmore, honey,” the woman said. “That's him over there getting ready to do the sound check with the legendary Randy Shoats.”
“Is he a musician?”
“He's a singer, honey,” the woman said and seemed to look more closely at Tessa. “You A&R?”
“No,” Chevette said.
“Damn,” the woman said, and Chevette thought for a second she might take the beers back. “I thought you might be from an alternative label.”
“Alternative to what?” Tessa asked.
The woman brightened. “Buell's singing, honey. It isn't like what you probably think of as country. Well, actually, it's a ‘roots' thing. Buell wants to take it back, back there past Waylon and Willie, to some kinda dark ‘primal kinda heartland.’ Kinda. Thing.” The woman beamed, eyes slightly unfocused. Chevette got the feeling that all of that had been memorized, and maybe not too well, but that it was her job to get it out.