4. Career opportunities

   Rydell’s roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.
   Monday morning, when Rydell told him he’d quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.
   “You got an okay build, basically” Kevin said, looking at Rydell’s bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks he’d worn when he’d gone to see Hernandez. He’d borrowed them from Kevin. He’d just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. “You could work out a little more regularly. And maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.”
   “Kevin, I don’t know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay.” It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.
   “Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give ’em an experience, too” Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. “Then you sell them a new outfit.”
   “But I don’t have a tan.”
   Kevin was the approximate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell’s aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.
   “Well” Kevin admitted, “you would need a tan.”
   Rydell knew that Kevin didn’t wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didn’t actually seem to do that much for him.
   What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room’s one closet. Rydell, who currently didn’t have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasn’t a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Glo, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he’d gone to the farmers market.
   He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasn’t any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell’s side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, Disneyland, and Skywalker Park. There were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).
   Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first month’s pay from IntenSecure. He’d bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the platform a twenty, then he’d let you get on the train with the rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydebl of a bodybag.
   Lately, waiting to take the cast off, he’d spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when they’d privatized it.
   “You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?”
   Rydell shook his head.
   “This one’s on me” Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasn’t anything like Karen’s slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. “Put it on. I’ll dial for you.”
   “Well” Rydell said, “this is nice, Kevin, but you don’t have to go to all this trouble.”
   Kevin touched the bone in his nose. “Well, there’s the rent.”
   There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.
   “Now” Sonya said, just as perky as could be, “we’re showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program—”
   “Academy” Rydell corrected. “Police.”
   “Yes, Berry, but we’re showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension.” Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didn’t eat. She had wonderful tits, though; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if he’d been a talented cartoonist.
   “Well” Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, “I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.”
   Sonya nodded brightly. “I see, Berry.” Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look like to an employment agency’s computer system? Not like much, he decided.
   “Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporation’s residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.”
   Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably they’d had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. “Yep” he agreed.
   “And you’ve resigned your position with IntenSecure.”
   “Guess so.”
   Sonya beamed at Rydell as though he’d just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. “Well, Berry” she said, “let me put my thinking cap on for just a second!” She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.
   Jesus, Rydebl thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevin’s helmet didn’t have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agency’s logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look like the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.
   Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. “You’re from the South” she said.
   “Uh-huh.”
   “Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.”
   Fawk—? “Huh?”
   “Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.”
   Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week’s People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.
   “Something for you, Berry?” Kevin looked hopeful.
   “Maybe” Rydell said. “This place in Sherman Oaks. I’ll call ’em up, check it out.”
   Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. “I can give you a lift” he said.
   There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.
   Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and he’d walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.
   Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must’ve driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn’t be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You’d pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.
   Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.
   There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, but they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn’t sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.
   “Got an appointment with Justine Cooper” he said, taking his sunglasses off.
   “With a client” the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should’ve been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.
   “I’ll wait” Rydell said.
   The farmer didn’t answer. State law said he couldn’t have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.
   Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon—at least that had some kind of spin on it.
   He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn’t good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn’t read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.
   “Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?” Justine Cooper’s jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn’t have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn’t sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.
   Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover’s defenses.
   “Sure.”
   “You’re from Knoxville?” He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.
   “That’s right.”
   “You don’t have much of an accent.”
   “Well, I wish everybody felt that way.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.
   “Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?”
   Shit, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. “My father was, I guess. My mother’s people are from up around Bristol, mostly.”
   Justine Cooper’s dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.
   “Ms. Cooper?”
   She gave a violent start, as though he’d goosed her.
   “Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?” Pointing at them.
   “Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.”
   Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. “Looks like hair” he said.
   “It is” she said. “What else would it be?”
   “Human hair?”
   “Of course.”
   “You mean like dead people’s hair?” He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was lusterless and no particular color.
   “Mr. Rydell, I’m afraid that I may have wasted your time.” She moved tentatively in his direction. “When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South…”
   “How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?”
   “What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.”
   Damn. That talking head in the agency display had been playing this shit back word for word.
   “I don’t suppose you’ve read Faulkner?” She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.
   There it was again. “Nope.”
   “No, I didn’t think so. I’m hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.”
   Rydell blinked.
   “But you don’t convey that to me. I’m sorry.” It looked like the invisible cobweb had come hack.
   Rydell looked at the rentacop, but he didn’t seem to be listening to any of this. Hell, he seemed to he asleep.
   “Lady” Rydell said carefully, “I think you’re crazier than a sack full of assholes.”
   Her eyebrows shot up. “There” she said.
   “There what?”
   “Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.”
   Rydell had to think about that. He found himself looking at the jockey-boy bed. “Don’t you ever get any black people in here, complaining about stuff like this?”
   “On the contrary” she said, a new edge in her tone, “we do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.”
   Now he’d have to walk to whatever the nearest station was, take the subway home, and tell Kevin Tarkovsky he hadn’t been Southern enough.
   The rentacop was letting him out.
   “Where exactly you from, Ms. Cooper?” he asked her.
   “New Hampshire” she said.
   He was on the sidewalk, the door closing behind him.
   “Fucking Yankees” he said to the Porsche roadster. It was what his father would have said, but he had a hard time now connecting it to anything.
   One of those big articulated German cargo-rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried chicken.
   The courier’s dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run, mountains the color of concrete. They are burying the orphans on a hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue. Clouds in the sky. The priest’s tall hat. They do not see the first shell coming in from the concrete mountains. It punches a hole in everything: the hillside, the sky, a blue coffin, the woman’s face.
   A sound too vast to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they hear, arriving only now, the distant festive pop-popping of the mortars, tidy little clouds of smoke rising on the gray mountainside.
   He comes upright, alone in the wide bed, trying to scream, and the words are in a language he no longer allows himself to speak.
   His head throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless carafe on the nightstand. The room sways, blurs, comes back into focus. He forces himself from the bed, pads naked to the tall, old-fashioned windows. Fumbles the heavy drapes aside. San Francisco. Dawn like tarnished silver. It is Tuesday. Not Mexico.
   In the white bathroom, wincing in the sudden light, scrubbing cold water into his numb face. The dream recedes, but leaves a residue. He shivers, cold tile unpleasant beneath his bare feet. The whores at the party. This Harwood. Decadent. The courier disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into contact with real wealth, genuine power. He meets people of substance. Harwood is wealth without substance. He puts out the bathroom light and gingerly returns to his bed, favoring the ache in his head.

5. Hay problemas

   With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he begins to sort through the previous evening. There are gaps. Overindulgence. He disapproves of overindulgence. Harwood’s party. The voice on the phone, instructing him to attend. He’d already had several drinks. He sees a young girl’s face. Anger, contempt. Her short dark hair twisted up in spikes.
   His eyes feel as if they are too large for their sockets. When he rubs them, bright sick flashes of light surround him. The cold weight of the water moves in his stomach.
   He remembers sitting at the broad mahogany desk, drinking. Before the call, before the party. He remembers the two cases open, in front of him, identical. He keeps her in one. The other is for that with which he has been entrusted. Expensive, but then he has no doubt that the information it contains is very valuable. He folds the thing’s graphite earpieces and snaps the case shut. Then he touches the case that holds all her mystery, the white house on the hillside, the release she offers. He puts the cases in the pockets of his jacket– But now he tenses, beneath the duvet, his stomach twisted with a surge of anxiety.
   He wore the jacket to that party, much of which he cannot remember.
   Ignoring the pounding of his head, he claws his way out of the bed and finds the jacket crumpled on the floor beside a chair.
   His heart is pounding.
   Here. That which he must deliver. Zipped into the inner pocket. But the outer pockets are empty.
   She is gone. he roots through his other clothing. On his hands and knees, a pulsing agony behind his eyes, he peers under the chair. Gone.
   But she, at least, can be replaced, he reminds himself, still on his knees, the jacket in his hands. He will find a dealer in that sort of software. Recently, he now admits, he had started to suspect that she was losing resolution.
   Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip the inner pocket, drawing out the case that contains his charge, their property, that which must be delivered. He opens it.
   The scuffed black plastic frames, the label on the cassette worn and unreadable, the yellowed translucence of the audio-beads.
   He hears a thin high sound emerge from the back of his throat. Very much as he must have done, years ago, when the first shell arrived.
   Careful to correctly calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki paid the fare and struggled out of the cab’s spavined rear seat. The driver, who knew that all Japanese were wealthy, sullenly counted the torn, filthy bills, then tossed the three five-dollar coins into a cracked Nissan County thermos-mug taped to the faded dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not wealthy, shouldered his bag, turned, and walked toward the bridge. As ever, it stirred his heart to see it there, morning light aslant through all the intricacy of its secondary construction.
   The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.
   Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy.

6. The bridge

   He’d first seen it by night, three weeks before. He’d stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and vegetables, their goods spread out on blankets. He’d stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of scavenged neon. Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into the neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain.
   In all the world, surely, there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.
   He entered it now, Tuesday morning, amid a now-familiar stir—the carts of ice and fish, the clatter of a machine that made tortillas—and found his way to a coffee shop whose interior had the texture of an ancient ferry, dark dented varnish over plain heavy wood, as if someone had sawn it, entire, from some tired public vessel. Which was entirely possible, he thought, seating himself at the long counter; toward Oakland, past the haunted island, the wingless carcass of a 747 housed the kitchens of nine Thai restaurants.
   The young woman behind the counter wore tattooed bracelets in the form of stylized indigo lizards. He asked for coffee. It arrived in thick heavy porcelain. No two cups here were alike. He took his notebook from his bag, flicked it on, and jotted down a brief description of the cup, of the minute pattern of cracks in its glazed surface, like a white tile mosaic in miniature. Sipping his coffee, he scrolled back to the previous day’s notes. The man Skinner’s mind was remarkably like the bridge. Things had accumulated there, around some armature of original purpose, until a point of crisis had been attained and a new program had emerged. But what was that program?
   He had asked Skinner to explain the mode of accretion resulting in the current state of the secondary structure. What were the motivations of a given builder, an individual builder? His notebook had recorded the man’s rambling, oblique response, transcribing and translating it.
   There was this man, fishing. Snagged his tackle. Hauled up a bicycle. All covered in barnacles. Everybody laughed. Took that bike and he built a place to eat. Clam broth, cold cooked mussels, Mexican beer. Hung that bike over the counter. Just three stools in there and he slung his box out about eight feet, used Super Glue and shackles. Covered the walls inside with postcards. Like shingles. Nights, he’d curl up behind the counter. Just gone, one morning. Broken shackle, some splinters still stuck to the wall of a barber shop. You could look down, see the water between your toes. See, he slung it out too far.
   Yamazaki watched steam rise from his coffee, imagining a bicycle covered in barnacles, itself a Thomasson of considerable potency. Skinner had seemed curious about the term, and the notebook had recorded Yamazaki’s attempt to explain its origin and the meaning of its current usage.
   Thomasson was an American baseball player, very handsome, very powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1981, for a large sum of money. Then it was discovered that he could not hit the ball. The writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated his name to describe certain useless and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape. But the term has subsequently taken on other shades of meaning. If you wish, I can access and translate today’s definitions in our Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern Terms.
   But Skinner—gray, unshaven, the whites of his blue eyes yellowed, blotched with broken veins, had merely shrugged. Three of the residents who had previously agreed to be interviewed had cited Skinner as an original, one of the first on the bridge. The location of his room indicated a certain status as well, though Yamazaki wondered how many would have welcomed a chance to build atop one of the cable towers. Before the electric lift had been installed, the climb would have been daunting for anyone. Today, with his bad hip, the old man was in effect an invalid, relying on his neighbors and the girl. They brought him food, water, kept his chemical toilet in operation. The girl, Yamazaki assumed, received shelter in return, though the relationship struck him as deeper somehow, more complex.
   But if Skinner was difficult to read because of age, personality, or both, the girl who shared his room was opaque in that ordinary, sullen way Yamazaki associated with young Americans. Though perhaps that was only because he, Yamazaki, was a stranger, Japanese, and one who asked too many questions.
   He looked down the counter, taking in the early-morning profiles of the other customers. Americans. The fact that he was actually here, drinking coffee beside these people, still struck a chord of wonder. How extraordinary. He wrote in his notebook, the pen ticking against the screen.
   The apartment is in a tall Victorian house, built of wood and very elaborately painted, in a district where the names of streets honor nineteenth-century American politicians: Clay, Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This morning, Tuesday, leaving the apartment, I noticed, on the side of the topmost newel, indications of a vanished hinge. I suspect that this must once have supported an infant-gate. Going along Scott in search of a cab, I came upon a sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features of the martyr Shapely, the AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very melancholy.
   “They shouldn’t oughta said that. About Godzilla, I mean.”
   Yamazaki found himself blinking up at the earnest face of the girl behind the counter.
   “I’m sorry?”
   “They shouldn’t oughta said that. About Godzilla. They shouldn’t oughta laughed. We had our earthquakes here, you didn’t laugh at us.”

7. See you do okay

   Hernandez followed Rydell into the kitchen of the house in Mar Vista. He wore a sleeveless powder-blue jumpsuit and a pair of those creepy German shower-sandals, the kind with about a thousand little nubs to massage the soles of your feet. Rydell had never seen him out of uniform before and it was kind of a shock. He had these big old tattoos on his upper arms; roman numerals; gang stuff. His feet were brown and compact and sort of bearlike.
   It was Tuesday morning. There was nobody else in the house. Kevin was at Just Blow Me, and the others were out doing whatever it was they did. Monica might’ve been in her place in the garage, but you never saw too much of her anyway.
   Rydell got his bag of cornflakes out of the cupboard and carefully unrolled it. About enough for a bowl. He opened the fridge and took out a plastic, snap-top, liter container with a strip of masking-tape across the side. He’d written MILK EXPERIMENT on the masking-tape with a heavy marker.
   “What’s that?” Hernandez asked.
   “Milk.”
   “Why’s it say ‘experiment’?”
   “So nobody’ll drink it. I figured it out in the dorm at the Academy.” He dumped the cornflakes in a bowl, covered them with milk, found a spoon, and carried his breakfast to the kitchen table. The table had a trick leg, so you had to eat without putting your elbows down.
   “How’s the arm?”
   “Fine.” Rydell forgot about not putting his elbow down. Milk and cornflakes slopped across the scarred white plastic of the tabletop.
   “Here.” Hernandez went to the counter and tore off a fat wad of beige paper towels.
   “Those are whatsisname’s” Rydell said, “and he seriously doesn’t like us to use them.”
   “Towel experiment” Hernandez said, tossing Rydell the wad.
   Rydell blotted up the milk and most of the flakes. He couldn’t imagine what Hernandez was doing here, but then he’d never have imagined that Hernandez drove a white Daihatsu Sneaker with an animated hologram of a waterfall on the hood.
   “That’s a nice car out there” Rydell said, nodding in the direction of the carport and spooning cornflakes into his mouth.
   “My daughter. Rosa’s car. Been in the shop, man.”
   Rydell chewed, swallowed. “Brakes or something?”
   “The fucking waterfall. Supposed to be these little animals, they come out of the bushes and sort of look at it, the waterfall, you know?” Hernandez leaned back against the counter, flexing his toes into the nubby sandals. “Some kind of, like, Costa Rican animals, you know? Ecology theme. She’s real green. Made us take out what was left of the lawn, put in all these ground-cover things look like gray spiders. But the shop can’t get those fucking animals to show, man. We got a warranty and everything, but it’s, you know, been a pain in the ass.” He shook his head.
   Rydell finished his cornflakes.
   “You ever been to Costa Rica, Rydell?”
   “No.”
   “It’s fucking beautiful, man. Like Switzerland.”
   “Never been there.”
   “No, I mean what they do with data. Like the Swiss, what they did with money.”
   “You mean the kvens?”
   “You got it. Those people smart. No army, navy, air force, just neutral. And they take care of everybody’s data.”
   “Regardless whatit is.”
   “Hey, fucking ‘A.’ Smart people. And spend that money on ecology, man.”
   Rydell carried the bowl, the spoon, the damp wad of towels, to the sink. He rinsed the bowl and spoon, wiped them with the towels, then stuck the towels as far down as possible behind the rest of the garbage in the bag under the sink. Straightening up, he looked at Hernandez. “Something I can do for you, super?”
   “Other way around.” Hernandez smiled. Somehow it wasn’t reassuring. “I been thinking about you. Your situation. Not good. Not good, man. You never get to be a cop now. Now you resign, I can’t even hire you back on IntenSecure to work gated residential. Maybe you get on with a regular square-badge outfit, sit it that little pillbox in a liquor store. You wanna do that?”
   “No.”
   “That’s good, ’cause you get your ass killed, doing that. Somebody come in there, take your little pillbox out, man.”
   “Right now I’m looking at something in retail sales.”
   “No shit? Sales? What you sell?”
   “Bedsteads made out of cast-iron jockey-boys. These pictures made out of hundred-year-old human hair.”
   Hernandez narrowed his eyes and shoved off the counter, headed for the bung room. Rydell thought he might be leaving, but he was only starting to pace. Rydell had seen him do this a couple of times in his office at IntenSecure. Now he turned, just as he was about to enter the living room, and paced back to Rydell.
   “You got this bad-assed attitude sometimes, man, I dunno. You oughta stop and think maybe I’m trying to help you a little, right?” Back toward the living room again.
   “Just tell me what you want, okay?”
   Hernandez stopped, turned, sighed. “Never been up to NoCal, right? San Francisco? Anybody know you up there?”
   “No.”
   “IntenSecure’s licensed in NoCal, too, right? Different state, different laws, whole different attitude, they might as well be a different fucking country, but we’ve got our shit up there. More office buildings, lot of hotels. Gated residential’s not so big up there, not ’til you get out to the edge-cities. Concord, Hacienda Business Center, like that. We got a good piece of that, too.”
   “But it’s the same company. They won’t hire me here, they won’t hire me there.”
   “Fucking ‘A.’ Nobody talking about hiring you. What this is, there’s maybe something there for you with a guy. Works freelance. Company has certain kinds of problems, sometime they bring in somebody. But the guy, he’s not IntenSecure. Freelance. Office up there, they got that kind of situation now.”
   “Wait a second. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about freelance armed-response?”
   “Guy’s a skip-tracer. You know what that is?”
   “Finds people when they try to get out from under debt, blow off the rent, like that?”
   “Or take off with your kid in a custody case, whatever. But, you know, those kinds of skips, they can mostly be handled through the net, these days. Just keep plugging their stats into DatAmerica, eventually you gonna find ’em. Or even” he shrugged, “you can go to the cops.”
   “So what a skip-tracer mostly does—” Rydell suggested, remembering one particular episode of Cops in Trouble he’d seen with his father.
   “Is keep you from having to go to the cops.”
   “Or to a licensed private detective agency.”
   “You got it.” Hernandez was watching him.
   Rydell walked past him, into the living room, hearing the German shower-sandals come squishing after him across the kitchen’s dull tile floor. Someone had been smoking tobacco in there the night before. He could smell it. It was in violation of the lease. The landlord would give them hell about it. The landlord was a Serb immigrant who drove a fifteen-year-old BMW, wore these weird furry Tyrolean hats, and insisted on being called Wally. Because Wally knew that Rydell worked for IntenSecure, he’d wanted to show him the flashlight he kept clipped under the dash in his BMW. It was about a foot long and had a button that triggered a big shot of capsicum gas. He’d asked Rydell if Rydell thought it was ‘enough.’
   Rydell had lied. Had told him that people who did, for instance, a whole lot of dancer, they actually liked a blast or two of good capsicum. Like it cleared their sinuses. Got their juices flowing. They got off on it.
   Now Rydell looked down and saw for the first time that the living room carpet in the house in Mar Vista was exactly the same stuff he’d crawled across in Turvey’s girlfriend’s apartment in Knoxville. Maybe a little cleaner, but the same stuff. He’d never noticed that before.
   “Listen, Rydell, you don’t want to take this, fine. My day off, I drive over here, you appreciate that? You get tweaked by some hackers, you fall for it, you push the response too hard, I can understand. But it happened, man, it’s on your file, and this is the best I can do. But listen up. You do right by the company, maybe that gets back to Singapore.”
   “Hernandez…”
   “My day off…”
   “Man, I don’t know anything about finding people—”
   “You can drive. All they want. Just drive. You drive the tracer, see? He’s got his leg hassled, he can’t drive. And this is, like, delicate, this thing. Requires some smarts. I told them I thought you could do it, man. I did that. I told them.”
   Monica’s copy of People was on the couch, open to a story about Gudrun Weaver, this actress in her forties who’d just found the Lord, courtesy of the Reverend Wayne Fallon, in time to get her picture in People. There was a full-page picture of her on a couch in her living room, gazing raptly at a bank of monitors, each one showing the same old movie.
   Rydell saw himself on the futon from Futon Mouth, staring up at those big stick-on flowers and bumper-stickers. “Is it legal?”
   Hernandez slapped his powder-blue thigh. It sounded like a pistol shot. “Legal? We are talking IntenSecure Corporation here. We are talking major shit. I am trying to help you, man. You think I would ask you to do something fucking illegal?”
   “But what’s the deal, Hernandez? I just go up there and drive?”
   “Fucking ‘A’! Drive! Mr. Warbaby say drive, you drive.”
   “Who?”
   “Warbaby. This Lucius Warbaby.”
   Rydell picked up Monica’s copy of People and found a picture of Gudrun Weaver and the Reverend Wayne Fallon. Gudrun Weaver looked like an actress in her forties. Fallon looked like a possum with hair-implants and a ten-thousand-dollar tuxedo.
   “This Warbaby, Berry, he’s right on top of this shit. He’s a fucking star, man. Otherwise why they hire him? You do this, you learn shit. You still young, man. You can learn shit.”
   Rydell tossed the People back onto the couch. “Who they trying to find?”
   “Hotel theft. Somebody took something. We got the security there. Singapore, man, they’re in some kind of serious twist about it. All I know.”
   Rydell stood in the warm shade of the carport, gazing down into the shimmering depths of the animated waterfall on the hood of Hernandez’s daughter’s Sneaker, mist rising through green boughs of rain forest. He’d once seen a Harley done up so that everything that wasn’t triple-chromed was crawling, fast forward, with life-sized bugs. Scorpions, centipedes, you name it.
   “See” Hernandez said, “see there, where it blurs? That’s supposed to be some kind of fucking sloth, man. Some lemur, you know? Factory warranty.”
   “When do they want me to go?”
   “I give you this number.” Hernandez handed Rydell a torn scrap of yellow paper. “Call them.”
   “Thanks.”
   “Hey” Hernandez said, “I like to see you do okay. I do. I like that.” He touched the Sneaker’s hood. “Look at this shit. Factory fucking warranty.”
   Chevette dreamed she was riding Folsom, a stiff sidewind threatening to push her into oncoming. Took a left on Sixth, caught that wind at her back, ran a red at Howard and Mission, a stale green at Market, bopped the brakes and bunnied both sets of tracks.
   Coming down in a hard lean, she headed up Nob on Taylor.
   “Make it this time” she said.
   Legs pumping, the wind a strong hand in the small of her back, sky clear and beckoning at the top of the hill, she thumbed her chain up onto some huge-ass custom ring, too big for her derailleur, too big to fit any frame at all, and felt the shining teeth catch, her hammering slowing to a steady spin—but then she was losing it.
   She stood up and started pounding, screaming, lactic acid slamming through her veins. She was at the crest, lifting off– Colored light slanted into Skinner’s room through the tinted pie-wedge panes of the round window. Tuesday morning.
   Two of the smaller sections of glass had fallen out; the gaps were stuffed with pieces of rag, throwing shadows on the tattered yellow wall of National Geographics. Skinner was sitting up in bed, wearing an old plaid shirt, blankets and sleeping-bag pulled high up his chest. His bed was an eightpanel oak door up on four rusty Volkswagen hubs, with a slab of foam on top of that. Chevette slept on the floor, on a narrower piece of foam she rolled up every morning and stuck behind a long wooden crate full of greasy hand tools. The smell of tool grease worked its way into her sleep, sometimes, but she didn’t mind it.

8. Morning after

   She snaked her arm out into the November chill and snagged a sweater off the seat of a paint-caked wooden stool. She pulled the sweater into her bag and twisted into it, tugging it down over her knees. It hung to her knees when she stood up, the neckband so stretched that she had to keep pushing it back up on her shoulder. Skinner didn’t say anything; he hardly ever did, first thing.
   She rubbed her eyes, went to the ladder bolted to the wall and climbed the five rungs, undoing the catch on the roof-hatch without bothering to look at it. She came up here most mornings now, started her day with the water and then the city. Unless it was raining, or too foggy, and then it was her turn to pump the ancient Coleman, its red-painted tank like a toy submarine. Skinner did that, on good days, but he stayed in bed a lot when it rained. Said it got to his hip.
   She climbed out of the square hole and sat on its edge, dangling her bare legs down into the room. Sun struggling to burn off the silvery gray. On hot days it heated the tar on the roof’s flat rectangle and you could smell it.
   Skinner had showed her pictures of the La Brea pits in National Geographic, big sad animals going down forever, down in L.A. a long time ago. That was what tar was, asphalt, not just something they made in a factory somewhere. He liked to know where things came from.
   His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street. That was in London. Skinner liked maps. Some of the National Geographics had maps folded into them, and all the countries were big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn’t been nearly as many of them. There’d been countries big as anything: Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of little ones where those had been. Skinner said America had gone that route without admitting it. Even California had all been one big state, once.
   Skinner’s roof was eighteen feet by twelve. Somehow it looked smaller than the room below, even though the walls of the room were packed solid with Skinner’s stuff. Nothing on the roof but a rusty metal wagon, a kid’s toy, with a couple of rolls of faded tarpaper stacked in it.
   She looked past three cable-towers to Treasure Island. Smoke rose, there, from a fire on the shore, where the low cantilever, cottoned down in fog, shot off to Oakland. There was a dome-thing, up on the farthest suspension tower, honeycombed into sections like new copper, but Skinner said it was just Mylar, stretched over two-by-twos. They had an plink in that, something that talked to satellites. She thought she’d go and see it one day.
   A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.
   The city looked the same as ever, the hills like sleeping animals behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought to be able to see that hotel.
   The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.
   She couldn’t believe she’d done that, been that stupid. The case she’d pulled out of that dickhead’s pocket was hanging up in Skinner’s jacket, on the iron hook shaped like an elephant’s head. Nothing in it but a pair of sunglasses, expensive-looking but so dark she hadn’t even been able to see through them last night. The security grunts in the lobby had scanned her badges when she’d gone in; as far as they knew, she’d never come back down. Their computer would’ve started looking for her, eventually. If they queried Allied, she’d say she forgot, blew the checkout off, took the service elevator down after she’d pulled her tag at 808. No way had she been at any party, and who’d seen her there anyway? The asshole. And maybe he’d figure she’d done him for his glasses. Maybe he’d felt it. Mayhe he’d remember, when he sobered up.
   Skinner yelled there was coffee, but they were out of eggs.
   Chevette shoved off the edge of the hole, swung down and in, catching the top rung.
   “Want any, you’re gonna get ’em” Skinner said, looking up from the Coleman.
   “Save me coffee.” She pulled on a pair of black cotton leggings and got into her trainers without bothering to lace them. She opened the hatch in the floor and climbed through, still worrying about the asshole, his glasses, her job. Down ten steel rungs off the side of an old crane. The cherry-picker basket waiting where she’d left it when she’d gotten back. Her bike cabled to an upright with a couple of Radio Shack screamers for good measure. She climbed into the waist-high yellow plastic basket and hit the switch.
   The motor whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom let her down the slope. Skinner called the cherry-picker his funicular. He hadn’t built it, though; a black guy named Fontaine had built it for him, when Skinner had started to have trouble with the climb. Fontaine lived on the Oakland end, with a couple of women and a lot of children. He took care of a lot of the bridge’s electrical stuff. He’d show up once in a while in a long tweed overcoat, a toolbag in each hand, and he’d grease the thing and check it. And Chevette had a number to call him at if it ever broke down completely, but that hadn’t happened yet.
   It shook when it hit the bottom. She climbed out onto the wooden walkway and went along the wall of taut milky plastic, halogen-shadows of plants behind it and the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down the stairs to the noise and morning hustle of the bridge. Nigel coming toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a delivery.
   “Vette” with his big goofy grin. He called her that.
   “Seen the egg lady?”
   “City side” he said, meaning S.F. always, Oakland being always only ‘Land. “Good one, huh?” with a gesture of builder’s pride for his cart. Chevette saw the hraised aluminum frame, the Taiwanese hubs and rims beefed up with fat new spokes. Nigel did work for some of the other riders at Allied, ones who still rode metal. He hadn’t liked it when Chevette had gone for a paper frame. Now she bent to run her thumb along a specially smooth braise. “Good one” she agreed.
   “That Jap shit delaminate on you yet?”
   “No way.”
   “’S gonna. Bunny down too hard, it’s glass.”
   “Come see you when it does.”
   Nigel shook his hair at her. The faded wooden fishing-plug that hung from his left ear rattled and spun. “Too late then.” He shoved his cart toward Oakland.
   Chevette found the egg lady and bought three, twisted up that way in two big dry blades of grass. Magic. You hated to take it apart, it was so perfect, and you could never get it back together or figure out how she did it. The egg lady took the five-piece and dropped it into the little bag around her scrawny lizard neck. She had no teeth at all, her face a nest of wrinkles that centered into that wet slit of a mouth.
   Skinner was sitting at the table when she got back. More like a shelf than a table. He was drinking coffee out of a dented steel thermos-mug. If you just came in and saw him like that, it didn’t strike you right away how old he was; just big, his hands, shoulders, all his bones, big. Gray hair slicked back from his forehead’s lifetime collection of scars, little dents, a couple of black dots like tattoos, where some kind of grit had gotten into a cut.
   She undid the eggs, the egg lady’s magic, and put them in a plastic bowl. Skinner heaved himself up from his creaking chair, wincing as he took the weight with his hip. She handed him the bowl and he swung over to the Coleman. The way he scrambled eggs, he didn’t use any butter, just a little water. Said he’d learned it from a cook on a ship. It made good eggs but the pan was hard to clean, and that was Chevette’s job. While he broke the eggs, she went to the jacket off its hook, and took that case out.
   You couldn’t tell what it was made of, and that meant expensive. Something dark gray, like the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell of one of those eggs, but you could probably drive a truck over it. Like her bike. She’d figured out how you opened it the night before; finger here, thumb there, it opened. No catch or anything, no spring. No trademark, either; no patent numbers. Inside was like black suede, but it gave like foam under your finger.
   Those glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in the poster stuck to Skinner’s wall, black and white. Skinner said the way to put a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the glue. Kind that came in a can. Nothing much came in cans, anymore, but Chevette knew what he meant, and the weird big-faced guy with the black glasses was laminated solid to the white-painted ply of Skinner’s wall.
   She pulled them from the black suede, the stuff springing instantly back to a smooth flat surface.
   They bothered her. Not just that she’d stolen them, but they weighed too much. Way too heavy for what they were, even with the big earpieces. The frames looked as though they’d been carved from slabs of graphite. Maybe they had, she thought; there was graphite around the paper cores in her bike’s frame, and it was Asahi Engineering.
   Rattle of the spatula as Skinner swirled the eggs. She put them on. Black. Solid black.
   “Katharine Hepburn” Skinner said.
   She pulled them off. “Huh?”
   “Big glasses like that.”
   She picked up the lighter he kept beside the Coleman, clicked it, held the flame behind one lens. Nothing.
   “What’re they for, welding?” He put her share of the eggs in an aluminum mess-tray stamped 1951. Set it down beside a fork and her mug of black coffee.
   She put the glasses on the table. “Can’t see through ’em. Just black.” She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, picking up the fork. She ate her eggs. Skinner sat, eating his, looking at her. “Soviet” he said, after a swallow from his thermos-mug.
   “Huh?”
   “How they made sunglasses in the ol’ Soviet. Had two factories for sunglasses, one of ’em always made ’em like that. Kept right on puttin’ ’em out in the stores, nobody’d buy ’em, buy the ones from the other factory. How the place packed it in.”
   “The factory made the black glasses?”
   “Soviet Union.”
   “They stupid, or what?”
   “Not that simple… Where’d you get ’em?”
   She looked at her coffee. “Found ’em.” She picked it up and drank.
   “You working, today?” He pulled himself up, stuffed the front of his shirt down into his jeans, the rusted buckle on his old leather belt held with twisted paper clips.
   “Noon to five.” She picked up the glasses, turning them. They weighed too much for how big they were.
   “Gotta get somebody up here, check the fuel cell…”
   “Fontaine?”
   He didn’t answer. She bedded the glasses in black suede, closed the case, got up, took the dishes to the wash-basin. Looked back at the case on the table.
   She’d better toss them, she thought.
   Rydell took a CalAir tilt-rotor out of Burbank into Tuesday’s early evening. The guy in San Francisco had paid for it from the other end; said call him Freddie. No seatback fun on CalAir, and the passengers definitely down-scale. Babies crying. Had a window seat. Down there the spread of lights through the faint glaze of some previous passenger’s hair-oil: the Valley. Turquoise voids of a few surviving pools, lit subsurface. A dull ache in his arm.
   He closed his eyes. Saw his father at the kitchen sink of his mobile home in Florida, washing out a glass. At that precise moment the death no doubt already growing in him, established fact, some line crossed. Talking about his brother, Rydell’s uncle, three years younger and five years dead, who’d once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps on the bubblepack envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-52, and WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS.
   “Is that the Coast Highway, do you think?”
   Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him to peer through the film of hair-oil. Like Mrs. Armbruster in fifth grade; older than his father would be now.
   “I don’t know” Rydell said. “Might be. All just looks like streets to me. I mean” he added, “I’m not from here.”
   She smiled at him, settling back into the grip of the narrow seat. Completely like Mrs. Armbruster. Same weird combination of tweed, oxford-cloth, Santa Fe blanket coat. These old ladies with their bouncy thick-soled shoes.

9. When diplomacy fails

   None of us are.” Reaching out to pat his khaki knee. “Not these days.” Kevin had said it was okay to keep the pants.
   “Uh-huh” Rydell said, his hand feeling desperately for the recliner button, the little dimpled steel circle waiting to tilt him back into the semblance of sleep. He closed his eyes.
   “I’m on my way to San Francisco to assist in my late husband’s transfer to a smaller cryogenic unit” she said. “One that offers individual storage modules. The trade magazines call them ‘boutique operations,’ grotesque as that may seem.”
   Rydell found the button and discovered that CalAir’s seats allowed a maximum recline of ten centimeters.
   “He’s been in cryo, oh, nine years now, but I’ve never liked to think of his brain tumbling around in there like that. Wrapped in foil. Don’t they always make you think of baked potatoes?”
   Rydell’s eyes opened. He tried to think of something to say.
   “Or like tennis shoes in a dryer” she said. “I know they’re frozen solid, but there’s nothing about it that seems like any kind of rest, is there?”
   Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front of him. A plastic blank. Gray. Not even a phone.
   “These smaller places can’t promise anything new in the way of an eventual awakening, of course. But it seems to me that there’s an added degree of dignity. I think of it as dignity, in any case.”
   Rydell glanced sideways. Found his gaze caught in hers: hazel eyes, mazed there in the finest web of wrinkles.
   “And I certainly won’t be there if he’s ever thawed, or, well, whatever they might eventually intend to do with them. I don’t believe in it. We argued about it constantly. I thought of all those billions dead, the annual toll in all the poor places. ‘David,’ I said, ‘how can you contemplate this when the bulk of humanity lives without air-conditioning?’”
   Rydell opened his mouth. Closed it.
   “Myself, I’m a card-carrying member of Cease Upon the Midnight.”
   Rydell wasn’t sure what ‘card-carrying’ meant, but Cease Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia, and illegal in Tennessee. Though they did it there anyway, and someone on the force had told him that they left milk and cookies out for the ambulance crews. Did it eight or nine at a time, mostly. CUTM. ‘Cut ’em,’ the paramedics called it. Offed themselves with cocktails of legally prescribed drugs. No muss, no fuss. Tidiest suicides around.
   “Excuse me, ma’am” Rydell said, “but I’ve got to try to catch a little sleep here.”
   “You go right ahead, young man. You do look rather tired.”
   Rydell closed his eyes, put his head back, and stayed that way until he felt the rotors tilting over into descent-mode.
   “Tommy Lee Jones” the black man said. His hair was shaped like an upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it. Sort of like a Shriner’s fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall and his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide. The shirt was lemon-yellow and printed with life-size handguns, in full color, all different kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy blue shorts that came to way below his knees, Raiders socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the size of five-dollar coins.
   “You got the wrong guy” Rydell said.
   “No, man, you look like him.”
   “Like who?”
   “Tommy Lee Jones.”
   “Who?”
   “Was an actor, man.” For a second Rydell thought this guy had to be with Reverend Fallon. Even had those shades, like Sublett’s contacts. “You Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth.”
   “You Freddie?” Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C… The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell’s class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those? Maybe Sublett had a great big one. But when they’d run the program on Rydell in the Academy, he’d come up a dead ringer for Howie Clacton, the Atlanta pitcher; he’d didn’t remember any Tommy Lee Jones. But then he hadn’t thought he looked all that much like Howie Clacton, either.
   This Freddie extended a very soft hand and Rydell shook it. “You got luggage?” Freddie asked.
   “Just this.” Hefting his Samsonite.
   “That’s Mr. Warbaby right over there” Freddie said, nodding in the direction of an exit-gate, where a uniformed chilanga was checking people’s seat-stubs before letting them out. Another black man loomed behind her, huge, broad as this Freddie, looking twice his height.
   “Big guy.”
   “Uh-huh” Freddie said, “and best we not keep him waiting. Leg’s hurting him today and he just insisted on walking in here from the lot to meet you.”
   Rydell took the man in as he approached the gate, handing his stub to the guard. He was enormous, over six feet, but the thing that struck Rydell most was a stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face. It was a look he’d seen on the face of a black minister his father had taken to watching, toward the end there. You looked at that minister’s face and you felt like he’d seen every sad-ass thing there was, so maybe you could even believe what he was saying. Or anyway Rydell’s father had, maybe, at least a little bit.
   “Lucius Warbaby” taking the biggest hands Rydell had ever seen from the deep pockets of a long olive overcoat stitched from diamond-quilted silk, his voice pitched so far into the bass that it suggested subsonics. Rydell looked at the proffered hand and saw he wore one of those old-fashioned gold knuckle-duster rings, WARBABY across it in diamond-chip sans-serif capitals.
   Rydell shook it, fingers curled over diamond and bullion. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Warbaby.”
   Warbaby wore a black Stetson set dead level on his head, the brim turned up all the way around, and glasses with heavy black frames. Clear lenses, windowpane plain. The eyes behind those lenses were Chinese or something; catlike, slanted, a weird goldy brown. He was leaning on one of those adjustable canes you get at the hospital. There was a carbon brace clamped around his left leg, big midnight-blue nylon cushions padding it. Skinny black jeans, brand new and never washed, were tucked into spit-shined Texas dogger boots in three shades of black.
   “Juanito says you’re a decent driver” Warbaby said, as though it was about the saddest thing he’d ever heard. Rydell hadn’t ever heard anybody call Hernandez that. “Says you don’t know the area up here…”
   “That’s right.”
   “Up-side of that” Warbaby said, “is nobody here knows you. Carry the man’s bag, Freddie.”
   Freddie took Rydell’s soft-side with obvious reluctance, as though it wasn’t something he’d ordinarily care to be seen with.
   The hand with the knuckle-duster came down on Rydell’s shoulder. Like the ring weighed twenty pounds. “Juanito tell you anything with regard to what we’re doing up here?”
   “Said a hotel theft. Said IntenSecure was bringing you in on a kind of contract basis—”
   “Theft, yes.” Warbaby looked like he had the moral gravity of the universe pressing down on him and was determined to bear the brunt. “Something missing. And all more complicated, now.”
   “How’s that?”
   Warbaby sighed. “Man who’s missing it, he’s dead now.”
   Something else in those eyes. “Dead hozi’?” Rydell asked, as the weight at last was taken from his shoulder.
   “Homicide” Warbaby said, low and doleful but very clear.
   “You’re wondering about my name” Warbaby said from the backseat of his black Ford Patriot.
   “I’m wondering where to put the key, Mr. Warbaby” Rydell said, behind the wheel, surveying the option-laden dash. American cars were the only cars in the world that still bothered to physically display the instrumentation. Maybe that was why there weren’t very many of them. Like those Harleys with chain-drives.
   “My grandmother” Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China, “was Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit boy. Army man. Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didn’t stick around. My daddy, his son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.”
   “Uh-huh” Rydell said, starting the big Ford and checking out the transmission. Saigon was where rich people went on vacation.
   Four-wheel drive. Ceramic armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers you’d need a serious gun to puncture. There was a cardboard air-freshener, shaped like a pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-vent.
   “Now the Lucius part, well, I couldn’t tell you.”
   “Mr. Warbaby” Rydell said, looking back over his shoulder, “where you want me to drive YOU to?”
   A modem-bleep from the dash.
   Freddie, in the plush bucket beside Rydell, whistled. “Motherfuck” he said, “that’s nasty.”
   Rydell swung back to watch as the fax emerged: a fat man, naked on sheets solid with blood. Pools of it, where the brilliance of the photographer’s strobes lay frozen like faint mirages of the sun.
   “What’s that under his chin?” Rydell asked.
   “Cuban necktie” Freddie said.
   “No, man” Rydell’s voice up an octave, “what is that?”
   “Man’s tongue” Freddie said, tearing the image from the slit and passing it back to Warbaby.
   Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.
   “These people” Warbaby said. “Terrible.”
   Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Skinner shave. Skinner sat on the edge of his bed, scraping his face pink with a disposable razor, rinsing the blade in a dented aluminum basin that he cradled between his thighs.
   “The razor is old” Yamazaki said. “You do not throw it away?”
   Skinner looked at him, over the plastic razor. “Thing is, Scooter, they just don’t get any duller, after a while.” He lathered and shaved his upper lip, then paused. Yamazaki had been ‘Kawasaki’ for the first several visits. Now he was ‘Scooter.“ The pale old eyes regarded him neutrally, hooded under reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinner’s inward laughter.
   “I make you laugh?”
   “Not today” Skinner said, dropping the razor into the basin of water, suds and gray whiskers recoiling in a display of surface tension. “Not like the other day, watching you chase those turds around.”
   Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinner’s ‘neighborhood.’ Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as he’d tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next. The hoses swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner had explained, a mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that carried it into the municipal system.

10. The modern dance

   He’d made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridge’s program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinner’s story of the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key to the bridge’s existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his physical survey of secondary construction in order to spend as much time as possible in the old man’s company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he would send the day’s accumulation of material to Osaka University’s Department of Sociology.
   Today, climbing to the lift that would carry him to Skinner’s room, he had met the girl on her way to work, descending, her shoulder through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.
   Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
   He found her attractive, Skinner’s girl, in an odd, foreign way, with her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark hair.
   “Dreamin’, Scooter?” Skinner set the basin aside, his hands trembling slightly, and settled his shoulders against musty-looking pillows. The white-painted plywood wall creaked faintly.
   “No, Skinner-san. But you promised you would tell me about the first night, when you decided to take the bridge…” His tone was mild, his words deliberately chosen to irritate, to spur his subject to speech. He activated the notebook’s recording function.
   “We didn’t decide anything. I told you that…”
   “But somehow it happened.”
   “Shit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.”
   “But you have said that the people were ‘ready.’ ”
   “But not for anything. That’s what you can’t seem to get, can you? Like the bridge was here, but I’m not saying it was waiting. See the difference?”
   “I think—”
   “You think shit.” The notebook sometimes had trouble with Skinner’s idioms. In addition, he tended to slur. An expert system in Osaka had suggested he might have sustained a degree of neural damage, perhaps as the result of using street drugs, or of one or more minor strokes. But Yamazaki believed Skinner had simply been too long in proximity to whatever strange attractor had permitted the bridge to become what it had become. “Nobody” Skinner said, speaking slowly and deliberately at first, as if for emphasis, “was using this bridge for anything. After the Little Grande came through, understand?”
   Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Skinner’s translated speech scroll down the notebook.
   “Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tunnel on Treasure caved in. Always been unstable there… First they were gonna rebuild, they said, bottom up, but they flat-out didn’t have the money. So they put chain link, razor-wire, concrete up at both ends. Then the Germans came in, maybe two years later, sold ’em on nanomech, how to build the new tunnel. Be cheap, carry cars and a mag-lev. And nobody believed how fast they could do it, once they got it legislated past the Greens. Sure, those Green biotech lobbies, they made ’em actually grow the sections out in Nevada. Like pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled ’em out here under bulk-lifters and sank ’em in the Bay. Hooked ’em up. Little tiny machines crawling around in there, hard as diamonds; tied it all together tight, and bam, there’s your tunnel. Bridge just sat there.”
   Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to lose the thread, as he so often had before—often, Yamazaki suspected, deliberately.
   “This one woman, she kept saying plant the whole thing with ivy, Virginia creeper… Somebody else, they said tear it down before another quake did it for ’em. But there it was. In the cities, lot of people, no place to go. Cardboard towns in the park, if you were lucky, and they’d brought those drip-pipes down from Portland, put ’em around the buildings. Leaks enough water on the ground, you don’t want to lay there. That’s a mean town, Portland. Invented that there…” He coughed. “But that one night, people just came. All kinds of stories, after, how it happened. Pissing down rain, too. No body’s idea of riot weather.”
   Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.
   “Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we just started running. Cops falling back, and what were they protecting, anyway? Mainly the crowd—orders they had, keep people from getting together in the street. They had their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us. Just made it easier. I had this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that ’link, it was maybe fifteen feet tall. Just kicked my toes in there and started climbing. Climb a fence like that easy, boots got a point. Up, man, I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of razor at the top, but people behind me were pushing up anything; hunks of two-by-four, coats, sleeping-bags. To lay across the wire. And I felt like… weightless…”
   Yamazaki felt that he was somehow close, very close, to the heart of the thing.
   “I jumped. Don’t know who jumped first, but I just jumped. Out. Hit pavement. People yelling. They’d crashed the barriers on the Oakland side, by then. Those were lower. We could see their lights as they ran out on the cantilever. The police ’copters and these red highway flares some of the people had. They ran toward Treasure. Nobody out there since the Navy people left… We ran too. Met up somewhere in the middle and this cheer went up…” Skinner’s eyes were unfocused, distant. “After that, they were singing, hymns and shit. Just milling around, singing. Crazy. Me and some others, we were stoked. And we could see the cops, too, coming from both ends. Fuck that.”
   Yamazaki swallowed. “And then?”
   “We started climbing. The towers. Rungs they welded on those suckers, see, so painters could get up there. We were climbing. Television had their own ’copters out by then, Scooter. We were making it to world news and we didn’t know it. Guess you don’t. Wouldn’t’ve give a shit anyway. Just climbing. But that was going out live. Was gonna make it hard for the cops, later. And, man, people were falling off. The man in front of me had black tape wrapped ’round his shoes, kept the soles on. Tape all wet, coming loose, his feet kept slipping. Right in front of my face. His foot kept coming back off the rung and I’d get his heel in my eye, I didn’t watch it. Near to the top and both of ’em come off at once.” Skinner fell silent, as if listening to some distant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.
   “How you learn to climb, up here” Skinner said, “the first thing is, you don’t look down. Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the bridge all the time. This guy, he didn’t know that. And those shoes of his. He just went off, backward. Never made a sound. Sort of… graceful.”
   Yamazaki shivered.
   “But I kept climbing. Rain had quit, light was coming. Stayed.”
   “How did you feel?” Yamazaki asked. Skinner blinked. “Feel?”
   “What did you do then?”
   “I saw the city.”
   Yamazaki rode Skinner’s lift down to where stairs began, its yellow upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant. All around him, now, the rattle of an evening’s commerce, and from a darkened doorway came the slap of cards, a woman’s laughter, voices raised in Spanish. Sunset pink as wine, through sheets of plastic that snapped like sails in a breeze scented with frying foods, woodsmoke, a sweet oily drift of cannabis. Boys in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were painted pebbles.
   Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand on a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too iow for the foreign, wishful ear.
   We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.
   Modernity was ending.
   Here, on the bridge, it long since had.
   He would walk toward Oakland now, feeling for the new thing’s strange heart.

11. Pulling tags

   Tuesday, she just wasn’t on. Couldn’t proj. No focus. Bunny Malatesta, the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her ear.
   “Chev, don’t take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or something?”
   “Fuck off, Bunny.”
   “Hey, I just mean you’re not your usual ball of fire today. All I mean.”
   “Gimme a tag.”
   “655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.”
   Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag and back down. The day gone gray after morning’s promise.
   “456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.”
   Pausing, her hand in the bike’s recognition-loop. “How come?”
   “Says messengers carvin’ graffiti in the passenger elevators. Go freight or they’ll toss you, be denied access, at which point Allied terminates your employment.”
   She remembered seeing Ringer’s emblem carved into the inspection plate in one of 456’s passenger elevators. Fucking Ringer. He’d defaced more elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it with.
   456 sent her to EC with a carton wider than she was supposed to accept, but that was what racks and bungles were for, and why give the cage-drivers the trade? Bunny buzzed her on her way out and gave her to Beale, the cafeteria on the second floor. She guessed that would be a woman’s purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she was right. Brown, sort of lizardskin, with a couple of green sprouts stuck in the corners of the bag. Women left their purses, remembered, called up, got the manager to send for a messenger. Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of the others would open them up, go through the contents, find drugs sometimes. She wouldn’t do that. She thought about the sunglasses.
   She couldn’t get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes you’d get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.
   She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner checked to see everything was there.
   “Restaurant’s supposed to take it to the cops” Chevette said. “We don’t like to be responsible.” Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.
   “298 Alabama” Bunny said, as if offering her some pearl of great price. “Tone those thighs…”
   Bust her ass out there to get there, then she’d pick up and do it. But she couldn’t get on top of it, today.
   The asshole’s sunglasses…
   “For tactical reasons” the blonde said, “we do not currently advocate the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.”
   Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, day’s last tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bunny’s pit wore something black and stretchy pulled over her face, three triangular holes cut in it. Blue letters at the bottom of the screen read FIONA X-SPOKESPERSON– SOUTH ISLAND LIBERATION FRONT.
   The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned running-shoes, and stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward memories of some unheated day-care basement in Oregon, winter’s colorless light slanting in through high dim windows. But now the street door banged open behind her, a pair of muddy size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin DuPree, his cheeks speckled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt, stood grinning at her, hugely.
   “Happy about something, Sammy Sal?”
   Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sal’s bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasn’t too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately.
   “Fact is” Sammy Sal said, smearing dirt from his cheek with the back of one long hand, “I’ve decided to kill Ringer. And the truth, y’know, it makes you free…”
   “Ho” Chevette said, “you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.”
   “I did, dear, do that thing. All the way up, in a dirty freight elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?”
   “Cause Ringer’s ’graved his tag in their brass, Sal, and their rosewood, too?”
   “Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.” Sammy Sal undid the blue and white bandanna around his neck and wiped his face with it. “Therefore, his ass dies screaming.”
   “and must begin, now, to systematically sabotage the workplace” Fiona X said, “or be branded an enemy of the human race.”
   The door to the dispatch-pit, so thickly stapled with scheds, sub-charts, tattered Muni regs, and faxed complaints that Chevette had no idea what the surface underneath might look like, popped open. Bunny extruded his scarred and unevenly shaven head, turtle-like, blinking in the light of the corridor, and glanced up automatically, his gaze attracted by the tone of Fiona X’s sound-bite. His expression blanked at the sight of her mask, the mental channel-zap executed in less time than it had taken him to look her way. “You” he said, eyes back on Chevette, “Chevy. In here.”
   “Wait for me, Sammy Sal” she said.
   Bunny Malatesta had been a San Francisco bike messenger for thirty years. Would be still, if his knees and back hadn’t given out on him. He was simultaneously the best and the worst thing about messing for Allied. The best because he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes, better than anything a computer could generate. He knew every building, every door, what the security was like. He had the mess game down, Bunny did, and, better still, he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing. He was a legend himself, Bunny, having Krypto’d the windshields of some seven police cars in the course of his riding career, a record that still stood. But he was the worst for those same reasons and more, because there wasn’t any bulishitting him at all. Any other dispatcher, you could cut yourself a little extra slack. But not Bunny. He just knew.
   Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel armchair with Bunny’s pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.
   Bunny rubbed his lower back with the heels of his hands. “Disk’s killing me” he said, not particularly to Chevette.
   “Oughta let Sammy Sal crack it for you” she suggested. “He’s real good.”
   “It’s cracked already, sweetheart. What’s wrong with it in the first place. Now tell me what were you doin’ over the Morrisey last night. And it better be good.”
   “Pulling a tag” Chevette said, going on automatic, the way she had to if she were going to lie and get away with it. She’d been halfway expecting something like this, but not so soon.
   She watched as Bunny took the goggles off, disconnected them, and put them on top of one of the monitors. “So how come you never checked back out? They call us on it, say you went in to make a delivery, they scanned your badges, you never come back out. Look, I tell ’em, I know she’s not there now, guys, ’cause I got her out Alabama Street on a call, okay?” He was watchiag her.
   “Hey, Bunny” Chevette said, “it was my last tag, my ride was down in the basement, I saw a freight el on its way down, jumped in. I know I’m supposed to clock out at security, but I thought they’d have somebody on the parking exit, you know? I get up the ramp and there’s nobody, a car’s going out, so I deak under the barrier and I’m in the street. I shoulda gone back around and done the lobby thing?”
   “You know it. It’s regs.”
   “It was late, you know?”
   Bunny sat down, wincing, in the chair with the Sacro-saver. He cupped each knee in a big-knuckled hand and stared at her. Very un-Bunny. Like something was really bothering him. Not just security grunts pissing because a mess blew the check-out off. “How late?”
   “Huh?”
   “They wanna know when you left.”
   “Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there’s a rat-maze.”
   “You went in 6:32:18” he said. “They got that when they scanned you. The tag, this lawyer, they talked to him, so they know you delivered.” He still had that look.
   “Bunny, what’s the deal? Tell ’em I screwed up, is all.”
   “You didn’t go anywhere else? In the hotel?”
   “Uh-uh” she said, and felt this funny ripple move through her, like she’d crossed some line and couldn’t go back. “I gave the guy his package, Bunny.”
   “I don’t think they’re worrying about the guy’s package” Bunny said.
   “So?”
   “Lookit, Chev” he said, “security guy calls, that’s one thing. Sorry, boss, won’t let it happen again. But this was somebody up in the company, IntenSecure it’s called, and he called up Wilson direct.” Allied’s owner. “So I gotta make nice with Wilson and Mr. Security, I gotta have Grasso cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up…”
   “Bunny” she said, “I’m sorry.”
   “Hey. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but there’s some big shit rentacop sitting behind a desk and he’s putting fucking Wilson through about what precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind of employee are you exactly, how long you mess for Allied, any criminal record, any drug use, where you live.”
   Chevette saw the asshole’s black glasses, right where she’d left them. In their case, behind Skinner’s Geographics. She tried to lift them out of there with mind-power. Right up to the tar-smelling roof and off the edge. Put those bastards in the Bay like she should’ve done this morning. But no, they were there.
   “That ain’t normal” Bunny said. “Know what I mean?”
   “You tell ’em where I live, Bunny?”
   “Out on the bridge” he said, then cracked her a little sliver of grin. “Not like you got much of an address, is it?” Now he spun himself around in the chair and began to shut the monitors down.
   “Bunny” she said, “what’ll they do now?”
   “Come and find you.” His back to her. “Here. ”Cause they won’t know where else to go. You didn’t do anything, did you, Chevy?“ The back of his skull showing gray stubble.
   Automatic. “No. No… Thanks, Bunny.”
   He grunted in reply, neutral, ending it, and Chevette was back in the corridor, her heart pounding under Skinner’s jacket. Up the stairs, out the door, plotting the quickest way home, running red lights in her head, gotta get rid of the glasses, gotta– Sammy Sal had Ringer braced up against a blue recyc bin.
   Worry was starting to penetrate Ringer’s rudimentary view of things. “Didn’t do nuthin to you, man.”
   “Been carvin’ your name in elevators again, Ringer.”
   “But I din’t do nuthin to you!”
   “Cause and effect, mofo. We know it’s a tough concept for you, but try: you do shit, other shit follows. You go scratching your tag in the clients’ fancy elevators, we hassle you, man.” Sammy Sal spread the long brown fingers of his left hand across Ringer’s beat-to-shit helmet, palming it like a basketball, and twisted, lifting, the helmet’s strap digging into Ringer’s chin. “Din’t do nuthin!” Ringer gurgled.
   Chevette ducked past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath the mural portrait of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr’s eye with a condomful of powder blue paint, blue running all down his hallowed cheek.
   “Hey” Sammy Sal said, “come here and help me torment this shit-heel.”
   She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop and tried to pull her handlebars out of the rack’s tangle of molybdenum steel, graphite, and aramid overwrap. The other bikes’ alarms all went off at once, a frantic chorus of ear-splitting bleats, basso digital sirennioans, and OUC extended high-volume burst of snake-hiss Spanish profanity, cunningly mixed with yelps of animal torment. She swung her bike around, got her toe in the clip, and kicked for the street, almost going over as she mounted. She saw Sammy Sal, out the corner of her eye, drop Ringer.
   She saw Sammy Sal straddle his own bike, a pink and black-fleck fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.
   Sammy Sal was coming after her. She’d never wanted company less.
   She took off.
   Proj. Just proj.
   Like her morning dream, but scarier.

12. Eye movement

   Rydell looked at these two San Francisco cops, Svobodov and Orlovsky, and decided that working for Warbaby had a chance of being interesting. These guys were the real, the super-heavy thing. Homicide was colossus, any department anywhere.
   And here he’d been in Northern California all of forty-eight minutes and he was sitting at a counter drinking coffee with Homicide. Except they were drinking tea. Hot tea. In glasses. Heavy on the sugar. Rydell was at the far end, on the other side of Freddie, who was drinking milk. Then Warbaby, with his hat still on, then Svobodov, then Orlovsky.
   Svobodov was nearly as tall as Warbaby, but it all seemed to be sinew and big knobs of bone. He had long, pale hair, combed straight back from his rocky forehead, eyebrows to match, and skin that was tight and shiny, like he’d stood too long in front of a fire. Orlovsky was thin and dark, with a widow’s peak, lots of hair on the backs of his fingers, and those glasses that looked like they’d been sawn in half.
   They both had that eye thing, the one that pinned you and held you and sank right in, heavy and inert as lead.
   Rydell had had a course in that at the Police Academy, but it hadn’t really taken. It was called Eye Movement Desensitization & Response, and was taught by this retired forensic psychologist named Bagley, from Duke University. Bagley’s lectures tended to wander off into stories about serial killers he’d processed at Duke, auto-erotic strangulation fatalities, stuff like that. It sure passed the time between High Profile Felony Stops and Firearms Training System Scenarios. But Rydell was usually kind of rattled after Felony Stops, because the instructors kept asking him to take the part of the felon. And he couldn’t figure out why. So he’d have trouble concentrating, in Eye Movement. And if he did manage to pick up anything useful from Bagley, a session of FATSS would usually make him forget it. FATSS was like doing Dream Walls, but with guns, real ones.
   When FATSS tallied up your score, it would drag you right down the entrance wounds, your own or the other guy’s, and make the call on whether the loser had bled to death or copped to hydrostatic shock. There were people who went into full-blown post-traumatic heeb-jeebs after a couple of sessions on FATSS, but Rydell always came out of it with this shit-eating grin. It wasn’t that he was violent, or didn’t mind the sight of blood; it was just that it was such a rush. And it wasn’t real. So he never had learned to throw that official hoodoo on people with his eyes. But this Lt. Svobodov, he had the talent beaucoup, and his partner, Lt. Orlovsky, had his own version going, nearly as effective and he did it over the sawn-off tops of those glasses. Guy looked sort of like a werewolf anyway, which helped.
   Rydell continued to check out the San Francisco Homicide look. Which seemed to be old tan raincoats over black flak vests over white shirts and ties. The shirts were button-down oxfords and the ties were the stripey kind, like you were supposed to belong to a club or something. Cuffs on their trousers and great big pebble-grain wingtips with cleated Vibram soles. About the only people who wore shirts and ties and shoes like that were immigrants, people who wanted it as American as it got. But layering it up with a bullet-proof and a worn-out London Fog, he figured that was some kind of statement. The streamlined plastic butt of an N & K didn’t exactly hurt, either, and Rydell could see one peeking out of Svobodov’s open flak vest. Couldn’t remember the model number, but it looked like the one with the magazine down the top of the barrel. Shot that caseless ammo looked like wax crayons, plastic propellant molded around alloy flechettes like big nails.
   “If we knew what you already know, Warbaby, maybe that makes everything more simple.” Svobodov looked around the little diner, took a pack of Marlboros out of his raincoat.
   “Illegal in this state, buddy” the waitress said, pleased at any opportunity to threaten somebody with the law. She had that big kind of hair. This was one of those places you ate at if you worked graveyard at some truly shit-ass industrial job. If your luck held, Rydell figured, you’d get this particular waitress into the bargain.
   Svobodov fixed her with a couple of thousand negative volts of Cop Eye, tugged a black plastic badge-holder out of his flak vest, flipped it open in her direction, and let it fall back on its nylon thong, against his chest. Rydell noticed the click when it hit; some kind of back-up armor under the white shirt.
   “Those two Mormon boys from Highway Patrol come in here, you show that to them” she said.
   Svobodov put the cigarette between his lips.
   Warbaby’s fist came up, clutching a lump of gold the size of a hand grenade.
   He lit the Russian’s cigarette with it.
   “Why you have this, Warbaby?” Svobodov said, eyeing the lighter. “You smoking something?”
   “Anything but those Chinese Marlboros, Arkady.” Mournful as ever. “They’re fulla fiberglass.”
   “American brand” Svobodov insisted, “licensed by maker.”
   “Hasn’t been a legal cigarette manufactured in this country in six years” Warbaby said, sounding as sad about that as anything else.
   “Marl-bor-ro” Svobodov said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and pointing to the lettering in front of the filter. “When we were kids, Warbaby, Marlboro, she was money.”
   “Arkady” Warbaby said, as though with enormous patience, “when we were kids, man, money was money.”
   Orlovsky laughed. Svobodov shrugged. “What you know, Warbaby?” Svobodov said, back to business.
   “Mr. Blix has been found dead, at the Morrisey. Murdered.”
   “Pro job” Orlovsky said, making it one word, projob. “They want we assume some bullshit ethnic angle, see?”
   Svobodov squinted at Warbaby. “We don’t know that” he said.
   “The tongue” Orlovsky said, determined. “That’s color. To throw us off. They think we think Latin Kings.”
   Svobodov sucked on his cigarette, blew smoke in the general direction of the waitress. “What you know, Warbaby?”
   “Hans Rutger Blix, forty-three, naturalized Costa Rican.” Warbaby might have been making the opening remarks at a funeral.
   “My hairy ass” Svobodov said, around the Marlboro.
   “Warbaby” Orlovsky said, “we know you were working on this before this asshole got his throat cut.”
   “Asshole” Warbaby said, like maybe the dead guy had been a close personal friend, a lodge-brother or something. “Man’s dead, is all. That make him an asshole?”
   Svobodov sat there, puffing on his Marlboro. Stubbed it out on the plate in front of him, beside his untouched tuna melt. “Asshole. Believe it.”
   Warbaby sighed. “Man had a jacket, Arkady?”
   “You want his jacket” Svobodov said, “you tell us what you were supposed to be doing for him. We know he talked to you.”
   “We never spoke.”
   “Okay” Svobodov said. “IntenSecure he talked to. You freelance.”
   “Strictly” Warbaby said.
   “Why did he talk to IntenSecure?”
   “Man lost something.”
   “What?”
   “Something of a personal nature.”
   Svobodov sighed. “Lucius. Please.”
   “A pair of sunglasses.”
   Svobodov and Orlovsky looked at each other, then back to Warbaby. “IntenSecure brings in Lucius Warbaby because this guy loses his sunglasses?”
   “Maybe they were expensive” Freddie offered, softly. He was studying his reflection in the mirror behind the counter.
   Orlovsky put his hairy fingers together and cracked his knuckles.
   “He thought he might have lost them at a party” Warbaby offered, “someone might even have taken them.”
   “What party?” Svobodov shifted on his stool and Rydell heard the hidden armor creak.
   “Party at the Morrisey.”
   “Whose party?” Orlovsky, over those glasses.
   “Mr. Cody Harwood’s party” Warbaby said.
   “Harwood” Svobodov said, “Harwood…”
   “Name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bell?” Freddie said, to no one in particular.
   Svobodov grunted. “Money.”
   “None of it in Marlboros, either” Warbaby said. “Mr. Blix went down to Mr. Harwood’s party, had a few drinks—”
   “Had a BA level like they won’t need to embalm” Orlovsky said.
   “Had a few drinks. Had this property in the pocket of his jacket. Next morning, it was gone. Called security at the Morrisey. They called IntenSecure. IntenSecure called me…”
   “His phone is gone” Svobodov said. “They took it. Nothing to tie him to anyone. No agenda, notebook, nothing.”
   “Pro job” Orlovsky intoned.
   “The glasses” Svobodov said. “What kind of glasses?”
   “Sunglasses” Freddie said.
   “We found these.” Svobodov took something from the side pocket of his London Fog. A Ziploc evidence bag. He held it up. Rydell saw shards of black plastic. “Cheap VR. Ground into the carpet.”
   “Do you know what he ran on them?” Warbaby asked.
   Now it was Orlovsky’s turn for show-and-tell. He produced a second evidence bag, this one from inside his black vest. “Looked for software, couldn’t find it. Then we x-ray him. Somebody shoved this down his throat.” A black rectangle. The stick-on label worn and stained. “But before they cut him.”
   “What is it?” Warbaby asked.
   “McDonna” Svobodov said.
   “Huh?” Freddie was leaning across Warbaby to peer at the thing. “Mc-what?”
   “Fuck chip.” It sounded to Rydell like fock cheap, but then he got it. “McDonna.”
   “Wonder if they read it all the way down?” Freddie said, from the rear of the Patriot. He had his feet up on the back of the front passenger seat and the little red lights around the edges of his sneakers were spelling out the lyrics to some song.
   “Read what?” Rydell was watching Warbaby and the Russians, who were standing beside one of the least subtle unmarked cars Rydell had ever seen: a primer-gray whale with a cage of graphite expansion-grating protecting the headlights and radiator. Fine rain was beading up on the Patriot’s windshield.
   “That porn they found down the guy’s esophagus.” If Warbaby always sounded sad, Freddie always sounded relaxed. But Warbaby sounded like he really was sad, and Freddie’s kind of relaxed sounded like he was just the opposite.
   “Lotta code in a program like that. Hide all sorta goodies in the wallpaper, y’know? Running fractal to get the skin texture, say, you could mix in a lot of text…”
   “You into computer stuff, Freddie?”
   “I’m Mr. Warbaby’s technical consultant.”
   “What do you think they’re talking about?”
   Freddie reached up and touched one of his sneakers. The red words vanished. “They’re having the real conversation now.”
   “What’s that?”
   “The deal conversation. We want what they got on Blix, the dead guy.”
   “Yeah? So what we got?”
   “We?” Freddie whistled. “You just drivin’.” He pulled his feet back and sat up. “But it ain’t exactly classified: IntenSecure and DatAmerica more or less the same thing.”
   “No shit.” Svobodov seemed to be doing most of the talking. “What’s that mean?”
   “Means we tight with a bigger data-base than the police. Next time ol’ Rubadub needs him a look-see, he’ll be glad he did us a favor. But tonight, man, tonight it just burrs his Russian ass.”
   Rydell remembered the time he’d gone over to ‘Big George’ Kechakmadze’s house for a barbecue and the man had tried to sign him up for the National Rifle Association. “You get a lot of Russians on the force, up here?”
   “Up here? All over.”
   “Kinda funny how many of those guys go into police work.”
   “Think about it, man. Had ’em a whole police state, over there. Maybe they just got a feel for it.”
   Svobodov and Orlovsky climbed into the gray whale. Warbaby walked to the Patriot, using his alloy cane. The police car rose up about six inches on hydraulics and began to moan and shiver, rain dancing on its long hood as Orlovsky revved the engine.
   “Jesus” Rydell said, “they don’t care who sees ’em comin’, do they?”
   “They want you see ’em coming” Freddie said, obscurely, as Warbaby opened the right rear passenger door and began the process of edging his stiff-legged bulk into the back seat.
   “Take off” Warbaby said, slamming the door. “Protocol. We leave first.”
   “Not that way” Freddie said. “That’ll get us Candlestick Park. That way.”
   “Yes” said Warbaby, “we have business downtown.” Sad about it.
   Downtown San Francisco was really something. With everything hemmed in by hills, built up and down other hills, it gave Rydell a sense of, well, he wasn’t sure. Being somewhere. Somewhere in particular. Not that he was sure he liked being there. Maybe it just felt so much the opposite of L.A. and that feeling like you were cut loose in a grid of light that just spilled out to the edge of everything. Up here he felt like he’d come in from somewhere, these old buildings all around and close together, nothing more modern than that one big spikey one with the truss-thing on it (and he knew that one was old, too). Cold damp air, steam billowing from grates in the pavement. People on the streets, too, and not just the usual kind; people with jobs and clothes. Kind of like Knoxville, he tried to tell himself, but it wouldn’t stick. Another strange place.
   “No, man, a left, a left” Freddie thumping on the back of his seat. And another city-grid to learn. He checked the cursor on the Patriot’s dash-map, looking for a left that would get them to this hotel, the Morrisey.
   “Don’t bang on Mr. Rydell’s seat” Warbaby said, a sixfoot scroll of fax bunched in his hands, “he’s driving.” It had come in on their way here. Rydell figured it was the jacket on Blix, the guy who’d gotten his throat cut.
   “Fassbinder” Freddie said. “You ever hear of this Rainer Fassbinder?”
   “I’m not in a joking mood, Freddie” Warbaby said. “No joke. I ran Separated at Birth on this Blix, man, scanned this stiff-shot the Russian sent you before? Says he looks like Rainer Fassbinder. And that’s when he’s dead, with his throat cut. This Fassbinder, he musta been pretty rough-looking, huh?”
   Warbaby sighed. “Freddie…”
   “Well, German, anyway. Clicked with the nationality—”
   “Mr. Blix was not German, Freddie. Says here Mr. Blix wasn’t even Mr. Blix. Now let me read. Rydell needs quiet, in order to adjust to driving in the city.”
   Freddie grunted, then Rydell heard his fingers clicking over the little computer he carried everywhere.
   Rydell took the left he thought he was looking for. Combat zone. Ruins. Fires in steel cans. Hunched dark figures, faces vampire white.
   “Don’t brake” Warbaby said. “Or accelerate.”
   Something came spinning, end over end, out of the crow-shouldered coven, splat against the windshield; clung, then fell away, leaving a smudge of filthy yellow. Hadn’t it been gray and bloody, like a loop of intestine?
   Red at the intersection.
   “Run the light” Warbaby instructed. Rydell did, amid horns of protest. The yellow stuff still there.
   “Pull over. No. Right up on the sidewalk. Yes.” The Patriot’s Goodyear Streetsweepers bouncing up and over the jagged curb. “In the glove compartment.”
   A light came on as Rydell opened it. Windex, a roll of gray paper towels, and a box of throwaway surgical gloves.
   “Go on” Warbaby said. “Nobody bother us.”
   Rydell pulled a glove on, took the Windex and the towels, got out. “Don’t get any on you” he said, thinking of Sublett. He gave the yellow smear a good shot of Windex, wadded tip three of the towels in his gloved hand, wiped until the glass was clean. He skinned the glove down around the wet wad, the way they’d shown him in the Academy, but then he didn’t know what to do with it.
   “Just toss it” Warbaby said from inside. Rydell did. Then he walked back from the car, five paces, and threw up. Wiped his mouth with a clean towel. He got back in, shut the door, locked it, put the Windex and the towels in the glove compartment.
   “You gonna gargle with that, Rydell?”
   “Shut up, Freddie” Warbaby said. The Patriot’s suspension creaked as Warbaby leaned forward. “Leavings from a slaughterhouse, most likely.” he said. “But it’s good you know to take precautions.” He settled back. “Had us a group here once called Sword of the Pig. You ever hear of that?”
   “No” Rydell said, “I never did.”
   “They’d steal fire-extinguishers out of buildings. Re-charge them with blood. Blood from a slaughterhouse. But they let it out, you understand, that this blood, well, it was human. Then they’d go after the Jesus people, when they marched, with those same extinguishers.”
   “Jesus” Rydell said.
   “Exactly” Warbaby said.
   “You see that door, there?” Freddie said.
   “What door?” The lobby of the Morrisey made Rydell want to whisper, like being in church or a funeral home. The carpet was so soft, it made him want to lie down and go to sleep.
   “That black one” Freddie said.
   Rydell saw a black-lacquered rectangle, perfectly plain, not even a knob. Now that he thought about it, it didn’t match anything else in sight. The rest of the place was polished wood, frosted bronze, panels of carved glass. If Freddie hadn’t told him it was a door, exactly, he would have taken it for art or something, some kind of painting. “Yeah? What about it?”
   “That’s a restaurant” Freddie said, “and it’s so expensive, you can’t even go in there.”
   “Well” Rydell said, “there’s lots of those.”
   “No, man” Freddie insisted, “I mean even if you were rich, had money out your ass, you could not go in there. Like it’s private. Japanese thing.”
   They were standing around by the security desk while Warbaby talked to somebody on a house phone. The three guys on duty at the desk wore IntenSecure uniforms, but really fancy ones, with bronze logo-buttons on their peaked caps.
   Rydell had parked the Patriot in an underground garage, floors down in the roots of the place. He hadn’t seen anything like that before: teams of people in chef’s whites putting together a hundred plates of some skinny kind of salad, little Sanyo vacuum-cleaners bleeping along in pastel herds, all this back-stage stuff you’d never guess was there if you were just standing here in the lobby.
   The Executive Suites, where he’d stayed in Knoxville with Karen Mendelsohn, had had these Korean robot bugs that cleaned up when you weren’t looking. They’d even had a special one that ate dust off the wallscreen, but Karen hadn’t been impressed. It just meant they couldn’t afford people, she said.
   Rydell watched as Warbaby turned, handing the phone to one of the guys in the peaked caps. Warbaby gestured for Freddie and Rydell. Leaned on his cane as they walked toward him.
   “They’ll take us up now” he said. The cap Warbaby had handed the phone to came out from behind the counter. He saw Rydell was wearing an IntenSecure shirt with the patches ripped off, but he didn’t say anything. Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy some clothes, and where he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie’s shirt, thinking Freddie probably wasn’t the guy to ask.
   “This way, sir” the cap said to Warbaby. Freddie and Rydell followed Warbaby across the lobby. Rydell saw how he jabbed his cane, hard, into the carpeting, the brace on his leg ticking like a slow clock.
   Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyperevolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.
   And she was starting to get that now, in spite of everything; if she just let go, quit thinking, let her mind sink down into the machinery of bone and gear-ring and carbon-wound Japanese paper…
   But Sammy Sal swerved in beside her, bass pumping from his bike’s bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bunny the curb to keep from going over on a BART grate. Her tires left black streaks as the particle-brakes caught, Sammy Sal braking in tandem, his Fluoro-Rimz strobing, fading.
   “Something eating you, little honey?” His hand on her arm, rough and angry. “Like maybe some wonder product makes you smarter, faster? Huh?”

13. Tweaking

   Let me go.”
   “No way. I got you this job. You’re gonna blow it, I’m gonna know why.” He slammed his other palm on the black foam around his bars, killing the music.
   “Please, Sammy, I gotta get up to Skinner’s—”
   He let go of her arm. “Why?”
   She started to cough, caught it, took three deep breaths. “You ever steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean, when you were working?”
   Sammy Sal looked at her. “No” he said, finally, “but I been known to fuck the clients.”
   Chevette shivered. “Not me.”
   “No” Sammy Sal said, “but you don’t pull tags all the places I do. ’Sides, you a girl.”
   “But I stole something last night. From this guy’s pocket, up at this party at the Hotel Morrisey.”
   Sammy Sal licked his lips. “How come you had your hand in his pocket? He somebody you know?”
   “He was some asshole” Chevette said.
   “Oh. Him. Think I met him.”
   “Gave me a hard time. It was sticking out of his pocket.” “You sure it was his pocket this hard time sticking out of?” “Sammy Sal” she said, “this is serious. I’m scared shitless.” He was looking at her, close.
   “That it? You scared? Stole some shit, you scared?”
   “Bunny says some security guys called up Allied, even called up Wilson and everything. Looking for me.”
   “Shit” Sammy Sal said, still studying her, “I thought you high, on dancer. Thought Bunny found out. Come after you, gonna chew your little bitch ear off. You just scared?”
   She looked at him. “That’s right.”
   “Well” he said, digging his fingers into the black foam, “what you scared of?”
   “Scared they’ll come up to Skinner’s and find ’em.”
   “Find what?”
   “These glasses.”
   “Spy, baby? Shot? Looking, like Alice ‘n’ all?” He drummed his fingers on the black foam.
   “These black glasses. Like sunglasses, but you can’t see through ’em.”
   Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one side. “What’s that mean?”
   “They’re just black.”
   “Sunglasses?”
   “Yeah. But just black.”
   “Huh” he said, “you had been fucking the clients, but only just the cute ones, like me, you’d know what those are. Tell you don’t have that many upscale boyfriends, pardon me. You date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you’d know what those are.” His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip.tab at the neck of Skinner’s jacket. “Those VL glasses. Virtual light.”
   She’d heard of it, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “They expensive, Sammy Sal?”
   “Shit, yes. ’Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he’d bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put ’em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there’s this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that…”
   “But they’re solid black.”
   “Not if you turn ’em on, they aren’t. Turn ’em on, they don’t even look like sunglasses. Just make you look, I dunno, serious.” He grinned at her. “You look too damn’ serious anyway. That your problem.”
   She shivered. “Come back up to Skinner’s with me, Sammy. Okay?”
   “I don’t like heights, much” he said. “That little box blow right off the top of that bridge, one night.”
   “Please, Sammy? This thing’s got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you, but I stop and I start thinking about it, I’m scared I’m gonna freeze up. What’ll I do? Maybe I get there and it’s the cops? What’ll Skinner say, the cops come up there? Maybe I go in to work tomorrow and Bunny cans me. What’ll I do?”
   Sammy Sal gave her the look he’d given her the night she’d asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white teeth. “Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.”
   He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.