Fontaine, seated on his high stool, behind the counter, sipping gingerly at his hot miso, wonders what exactly he would see, were he to follow the boy's course today via the notebook's recall function. That business with the lockboxes, and Martial getting all worked up. Where else might the boy have been? But nowhere really dangerous, Fontaine decides, if he's only chasing watches. But how was it he did that, got those lockbox lists? Fontaine puts the miso down and fishes the Jaeger-LeCoultre from his pocket. He reads the ordnance marks on its back:
G6B/346
RAAF
172/53
The 6B denoting a particular grade of movement, degree of accuracy, he knows, though the 346 is a mystery. The broad arrow, central, the Queen's mark, her property. 53 the year of issue, but 172? Could the boy somehow pry knowledge from these numbers, if the question could be put to him? Somewhere out there, Fontaine knows, every lastbit of information makes its way into the stream. He puts the watch down on his Rolex pad and takes up the salty miso again. Looking down through the scratch-frosted glass countertop, he notices a recent purchase, not yet examined. A Helbros from the 1940s, styled after military watches but not an “issue” watch. Something he bought from a scavenger, down from the Oakland hills. He reaches into the counter and brings it out, a shabby thing after the G6B.
Its bezel is badly dinged, probably too badly to benefit from buffing, and the luminous on the dull black dial has gone a shade of silvery ash. He takes his loupe from his other pocket and screws it into his eye, turning the Helbros under his ten-power Cyclops gaze. The caseback has been removed, screwed back in, but left untightened. He turns it out with his fingers, to check inside for minute graven records of its repair history.
He squints through the loupe: the last repair date etched into the inside back is August 1945.
He turns it over again and studies it. The crystal is synthetic, some sort of plastic, definitely vintage and very probably original. Because, he sees, holding it at just this certain angle to the light, radiation from the original radium numerals has darkened the crystal focally, each number having in effect radiographed itself in the accidental plate of the crystal.
And somehow this, combined with the hidden date, gives Fontaine a shiver, so that he puts the caseback back into place, replaces the Helbros in the counter, checks the locks on the door, finishes his miso, and starts to ready himself for bed.
The boy, on his back, is no longer snoring, and that is a good thing.
When Fontaine lies down on his own narrow bunk, to sleep, the Smith & Wesson Kit Gun, as it is every night, is at the ready.
50. “MORE TROUBLE”
RYDELL'S father, dying of cancer, had told Rydell a story. He claimed to have gotten it from a book of famous last words, or if not famous then at least memorable.
This man was being executed in England, back in the old days, when execution was made as deliberately hard a thing as possible, and after being burned with hot irons, broken on the wheel, and various other horrific punishments, the man was shown the block, the headsman's ax. And having been closed-mouthed and stolid throughout his various tortures, he had looked at the ax and the block and the burly headsman and made no reply at all.
But then another torturer arrived, carrying an assortment of terrible-looking tools, and the man was informed that he was to be disemboweled prior to his beheading.
The man sighed. “More trouble,” he said.
“IF they want me,” Rydell said, wincing along beside the man with the tanto in his coat, “why don't they just grab me?”
“Because you are with me.”
“Why don't they just shoot you?”
“Because we have, these men and I, the same employer. In a sense.”
“He wouldn't let them shoot you?”
“That would depend,” the man said.
Rydell could see that they were coming up on the nameless bar where he'd heard Buell Creedmore sing that old song. There was noise there: loud music, laughter, a crowd around the door, drinking beer and openly smoking cigarettes.
His side hurt with each step he took, and he thought of Rei Toei perched on his pillow, glowing. What, he wondered, did the projector slung over his shoulder mean to her? Was it her only means of manifesting here, of interacting with people? Did being a hologram feel like anything? (He doubted it.) Or did the programs that generated her somehow provide some greater illusion of being there? But if you weren't real in the first place, what did you have to compare not being there to?
But what really bothered him, now, was that Laney, and Klaus and the Rooster too, had thought that the projector was important, really important, and now here he went, Rydell, limping willingly along beside this killer, this man who evidently worked for whoever it was was after Rydell's ass, and probably after the projector as well, and he was just going along with it. Sheep to the slaughter.
“I want to go in here a minute,” Rydell said.
“Why?”
“See a friend,” Rydell said.
“Is this a bid for escape?”
“I don't want to go with you.”
The man regarded him from behind the thin crystal rounds of his glasses. “You are complicating things,” he said.
“So kill me,” Rydell said, gritting his teeth as he slung his weight around and staggered past the smokers by the door, into the warm loud beer smell and crowd energy.
Creedmore was onstage with Randy Shoats and a bass player with sideburns, and whatever they were playing reached its natural conclusion at just that point, Creedmore jumping into the air as he let out a final whoop and the music crashed down around him, the crowd roaring and stomping and clapping. Rydell had seen Creedmore's eyes flash flat and bright as a doll's in the stage light. “Hey, Buell!” Rydell shouted. “Creedmore!” He shouldered someone out of his way and kept going. He was a few feet from the stage now. “Buell!” It was just a little thing, the stage, maybe a foot high, and the crowd wasn't that thick.
Creedmore saw him. He stepped down from the stage. The singer's pearl-button cowboy shirt was open to the waist, his hollow white chest gleaming with sweat. Someone handed him a towel and he wiped his face with it, grinning, showing long yellow teeth and no gum. “Rydell,” he said. “Son of a bitch. Where you been?”
“Looking for you, Buell.”
The man with the knife put his hand on Rydell's shoulder. “This is unwise,” he said.
“Hey, Buell,” Rydell said, “get me a beer, okay?”
“You see me, Rydell? I was fuckin' Jesus' son, man. Fuckin' Hank Williams, motherfucker.” Creedmore beamed, yet Rydell saw the thing that was waiting there to toggle into rage. Someone handed Creedmore two tall cans, already opened. He passed one to Rydell. Creedmore splashed cold malt liquor down his chest, rubbed himself with it. “Damn, I'm good.”
“We can be too easily contained here,” the man said.
Leggo my buddy there,” said Creedmore, noticing the man for the first time. “Faggot,” he added, as if further taking in the man's appearance and seeming to have difficulty placing it in any more convenient category of abuse.
“Buell,” Rydell said, reaching up and grabbing the man's wrist, “want you to meet a friend of mine.”
“Looks like some faggot oughta be kilt with a shovel,” Creedmore observed, slit-eyed and furious now, the toggle having been thrown.
“Let go of my shoulder,” Rydell said to the man, quietly. “It doesn't look good.”
The man let go of Rydell's shoulder.
“Sorry,” Rydell said, “but I'm staying here with Buell and a hundred or so of his close personal friends.” He looked at the can in his hand. Something called King Cobra. He took a sip. “You want to go, go. Otherwise, just kill me.”
“Goddamn you, Creedmore,” Randy Shoats said, stepping heavily down from the stage, “you fucking drug addict. You're drunk. Drunk and ripped to the tits on dancer.”
Creedmore goggled up at the big guitar player, his eyes all pupil. “Jesus, Rand
y,” he began, “you know I just needed to get a little loose—”
“Loose? Loose? Jesus. You forgot the words to ‘Drop That Jerk and Come with Me’! How fucked do you have to be to do that? Fuckin' audience knew the words, man; they were singing along with you. Trying to, anyway.” Shoats rammed his callused thumb into Creedmore's chest for emphasis. “I told you I don't work with diz-monkeys. You're toast, understand? Outta here. History.”
Creedmore seemed to reach far down into the depths of his being, as if to summon some new degree of honesty, in order to face this moment of crisis. He seemed to find it. Drew himself more upright. “Fuck you,” he said. “Motherfucker,” he added, as Shoats, disgusted, turned and walked away.
“Buell,” Rydell said, “they got a table or something reserved for you here? Someplace I could sit down?”
“Maryalice,” Creedmore said, thoughts elsewhere, waving in the general direction of the back of the bar. He set off, apparently after Shoats.
Rydell ignored the man with the tanto and headed for the back of the bar, where he found Maryalice seated alone at a table. There was a hand-lettered sign, on brown corrugated cardboard, done in different colored felt pens, that said ***BUELL CREEDMORE*** & HIS LOWER COMPANIONS, each of the Os done in red as a little happy face. The table was solid, side to side, with empties, and Maryalice looked like somebody had just whacked her in the head with something that didn't leave a mark. “You A&R?” she asked Rydell, as if startled from a dream.
“I'm Berry Rydell,” he said, pulling out a chair and unslinging the bag with the projector. “Met earlier. You're Maryalice.”
“Yes,” she smiled, as if pleased with the convenience of being so reminded, “I am. Wasn't Buell wonderful?”
Rydell sat, trying to find a way to manage it that kept the rib from killing him. “They got an outlet around here, Maryalice?” He was opening the duffel, pushing it down around the sides of the projector, pulling out the power cable.
“You're A&R,” Maryalice said, delighted, seeing the projector, “I knew you were. Which label?”
“Plug this in there, please?” Rydell pointed to an outlet just beside her, on the scabrous wall, and passed her the plug end of the cable. She held it close to her face, blinked at it, looked around, saw the socket. Plugged it in. Turned back to Rydell, as if puzzled by what she'd just done.
The man with the tanto brought over a chair, placed it at the table, and took a seat opposite Maryalice. He did it, somehow, in a way that occuppied as little of anyone else's consciousness as possible. “Now you,” Maryalice said to him, with a quick glance down to check the state of her bodice, “you are pretty clearly a label head, am I correct?”
“Lapel?”
“I knew you were,” Maryalice said.
Rydell heard the projector humming.
And then Rei Toei was there, standing beside their table, and Rydell knew that once again he'd seen her naked for a second, glowing, white, but now she wore an outfit identical, it seemed, to Maryalice's. “Hello, Berry Rydell,” she said, then looked down and tightened the strings at the top of the black thing she wore.
“Hey,” Rydell said.
“Well, suck me raw with a breast pump,” Maryalice said, voice soft with amazement, as she stared at Rei Toei. “I swear to God I didn't see you standing there…”
The man with the tanto was looking at Rei Toei too, the light of her projection reflected in the round lenses.
“We are in a nightclub, Berry Rydell?”
“A bar,” Rydell said.
“Rez liked bars,” she said, looking around at the crowd. “I have the impression that people in bars, though they seem to be talking to one another, are actually talking to themselves. Is this because higher brain function has been suppressed for recreational purposes?”
“I just love your top,” Maryalice said.
“I am Rei Toei.”
“Maryalice,” Maryalice said, extending her hand. The idoru did likewise, her hand passing through Maryalice's.
Maryalice shivered. “Had about enough, this evening,” she said, as if to herself.
“I am Rei Toei.” To the man with the tanto.
“Good evening.”
“I know your name,” she gently said to the man. “I know a great deal about you. You are a fascinating person.”
He looked at her, expression unchanged. “Thank you,” he said. “Mr. Rydell, is it your intention to remain here, with your friends?”
“Time being,” Rydell said. “I have to phone somebody.”
“As you will,” the man said. He turned to survey the entrance, and just then the scarf came strolling in and saw them all, immediately.
More trouble, thought Rydell.
51. THE REASON OF LIFE
LANEY'S two favorite Tokyo bars, during the happier phase of his employment at Paragon-Asia Dataflow, had been Trouble Peach, a quiet sit-and-drink place near Shimo-kitazawa Station, and The Reason of Life, an art bar in the basement of an office building in Aoyama. The Reason of Life was an art bar, in Laney's estimation, by virtue of being decorated with huge black-and-white prints of young women photographing their own crotches with old-fashioned reflex cameras. These were such modest pictures that it took you, initially, a while to figure out what they were doing. Standing, mostly, in crowded streetscapes, with the camera on the pavement, between their feet, smiling into the photographer's lens and thumbing a manual release. They wore sweaters and plaid skirts, usually, and smiled out at you with a particularly innocent eagerness. Nobody had ever explained to Laney what this was all supposed to be about, and it wouldn't have occurred to him to ask, but he knew art when he saw it, and he was seeing it again now, courtesy of the Rooster, who somehow knew Laney liked the place in Aoyama and had decided to reproduce it, off the cuff, here in the Walled City.
In any case, Laney prefers it to the barbershop made of misaligned graphics tiles. You can just look at these girls, in cool monochrome renditions of wool and flesh and other textures of cities, and he finds that restful. It was strange though, to sit in a bar when you didn't have a body present.
“They're coy about it,” the Rooster is saying, of Libia and Paco and how it may be that they've succeeded in hacking Cody Harwood's most intensely private means of communication. “They may have physically introduced an agent into Harwood Levine's communications satellite. Something small. Very small. But how could they have controlled it? And how long would it have taken, undetected, to effect a physical alteration in the hardware up there?”
“I'm sure they found a more elegant solution,” Klaus says, “but the bottom line is that I don't care. Access is access. The means to access are academic. We've hacked Harwood's hotline. His red telephone.”
“And you have a tendency to pat yourselves on the back,” Laney says. “We know that Harwood's had 5-SB, but we don't know why, or what he's doing with nodal apprehension. You seem to be convinced it's something to do with Lucky Dragon and this half-baked Nanofax launch.”
“Aren't you?” asks Klaus. “Nanofax units are going into every Lucky Dragon in the world. Right now. Literally. Most of them are fully installed, ready to go operational.”
“With the faxing of the first Taiwanese teddy bear from Des Moines to Seattle? What's he hope to gain?” Laney concentrates on his favorite girl, imagining her thumb on the plunger of a hypodermic-style manual release.
“Think network,” the Rooster puts in. “Function, even ostensible function, is not the way to look at this. All function, in these terms, is ostensible. Temporary. What he wants is a network in place. Then he can figure out what to do with it.”
“But why does he need to have something to do with it in the first place?” Laney demands.
“Because he's between a rock and a hard place,” responds Klaus. “He's the richest man in the world, possibly, and he's ahead of the curve. He's an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it
?”
“No,” Laney says.
“We think he's like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He's trying to hack reality, but he's going strictly big casino, and he'll take the rest of the species with him, however and whatever.”
“You have to admire that, don't you?” says the Rooster, out of the depths of his silent faux-Bacon scream.
Laney isn't sure that you do.
He wonders if the Rooster's reiteration of The Reason of Life incorporates the tiny, six-seater bar downstairs, the darker one where you can sit beneath very large prints of the pictures the girls themselves were taking: huge abstract triangles of luminous gelatin-printed white panty.
“Can you get me that kind of look-in on Harwood's stuff anytime?”
“Until he notices you, we can.”
52. MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK
CHEVETTE had had a boyfriend named Lowell, when she'd first lived on the bridge, who did dancer.
Lowell had had a friend called Codes, called that because he tumbled the codes on hot phones and notebooks, and this Saint Vitus reminded her of Codes. Codes hadn't liked her either.
Chevette hated dancer. She hated being around people when they were on it, because it made them selfish, too pleased with themselves, and nervous; suspicious, too prone to make things up in their heads, imagining everyone out to get them, everyone lying, everyone talking behind their back. And she particularly hated watching anyone actually do the stuff, rub it into their gums the way they did, all horrible, because it was just so gross. Made their lips numb, at first, so they'd drool a little, and how they always thought that was funny. But what she hated about it most was that she'd ever done it herself, and that, even though she had all these reasons to hate it, she still found herself, watching Saint Vitus vigorously massaging a good solid hit into his gums, feeling the urge to ask him for some.
She guessed that was what they meant by it being addictive. That she'd gotten just that little edge of it off the country singer sticking his tongue in her mouth (and if that was the only way to get it, she thought, she'd pass) and now the actual molecules of diz were twanging at receptor sites in her brain, saying gimme, gimme. And she'd never even been properly strung out on the stuff, not how they meant it when they said that on the street.