Count Zero (14 page)

Rudy sighed. “Jesus . . . Well, bring her in . . .”

Rudy’s years in the house had stripped it of most of the things that Turner might have remembered, and something in
him was obscurely grateful for that. He watched the blonde crack eggs into a steel bowl, dark yellow free-range yolks; Rudy kept his own chickens. “I’m Sally,” she said, whisking the eggs around with a fork.

“Turner.”

“That’s all he ever calls you either,” she said. “He never has talked about you much.”

“We haven’t kept all that much in touch. Maybe I should go up now and help him.”

“You sit. Your little girl’s okay with Rudy. He’s got a good touch.”

“Even when he’s pissed?”

“Half pissed. Well, he’s not going to operate, just derm her and tape that ankle.” She crushed dry tortilla chips into a black pan, over sizzling butter, and poured the eggs on top. “What happened to your eyes, Turner? You and her . . .” She stirred the mixture with the chrome spatula, slopping in salsa from a plastic tub.

“G-force. Had to take off quick.”

“That how she hurt her ankle?”

“Maybe. Don’t know.”

“People after you now? After her?” Busy taking plates from the cabinet above the sink, the cheap brown laminate of the cabinet doors triggering a sudden rush of nostalgia in Turner, seeing her tanned wrists as his mother’s. . . .

“Probably,” he said. “I don’t know what’s involved, not yet.”

“Eat some of this.” Transferring the mixture to a white plate, rummaging for a fork. “Rudy’s scared of the kind of people you might get after you.”

Taking the plate, the fork. Steam rising from the eggs. “So am I.”

“Got some clothes,” Sally said, over the sound of the shower, “friend of Rudy’s left ’em here, ought to fit you . . .” The shower was gravity-operated, rainwater from a roof tank, a fat white filtration unit strapped into the pipe above the spray head. Turner stuck his head out between cloudy sheets of plastic and blinked at her. “Thanks.”

“Girl’s unconscious,” she said. “Rudy thinks it’s shock, exhaustion. He says her crits are high, so he might as well run his scan now.” She left the room then, taking Turner’s fatigues and Oakey’s shirt with her.

“What is she?” Rudy extending a crumpled scroll of silvery printout.

“I don’t know how to read that,” Turner said, looking around the white room, looking for Angie. “Where is she?”

“Sleeping. Sally’s watching her.” Rudy turned and walked back, the length of the room, and Turner remembered it had been the living room once. Rudy began to shut his consoles down, the tiny pilot lights blinking out one by one. “I don’t know, man. I just don’t know. What is it, some kind of cancer?”

Turner followed him down the room, past a worktable where a micromanipulator waited beneath its dustcover. Past the dusty rectangular eyes of a bank of aged monitors, one of them with a shattered screen.

“It’s all through her head,” Rudy said. “Like long chains of it. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, ever. Nothing.”

“How much do you know about biochips, Rudy?”

Rudy grunted. He seemed very sober now, but tense, agitated. He kept running his hands back through his hair. “That’s what I thought. It’s some kind of . . . Not an implant. Graft.”

“What’s it for?”

“For? Christ. Who the fuck knows? Who did it to her? Somebody you work for?”

“Her father, I think.”

“Jesus.” Rudy wiped his hand across his mouth. “It shadows like tumor, on the scans, but her crits are high enough, normal. What’s she like, ordinarily?”

“Don’t know. A kid.” He shrugged.

“Fucking hell,” Rudy said. “I’m amazed she can walk.” He opened a little lab freezer and came up with a frosted bottle of Moskovskaya. “Want it out of the bottle?” he asked.

“Maybe later.”

Rudy sighed, looked at the bottle, then returned it to the fridge. “So what do you want? Anything as weird as what’s in that little girl’s head, somebody’s going to be after it soon. If they aren’t already.”

“They are,” Turner said. “I don’t know if they know she’s here.”

“Yet.” Rudy wiped his palms on his grubby white shorts. “But they probably will, right?”

Turner nodded.

“Where you going to go, then?”

“The Sprawl.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got money there. I’ve got credit lines in four different names, no way to link ’em back to me. Because I’ve got a lot of other connections I may be able to use. And because it’s always cover, the Sprawl. So damned much
of
it, you know?”

“Okay,” Rudy said. “When?”

“You that worried about it, you want us right out?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. It’s all pretty interesting, what’s in your girl friend’s head. I’ve got a friend in Atlanta could rent me a function analyzer, brain map, one to one; put that on her, I might start to figure out what that thing is . . . Might be worth something.”

“Sure. If you knew where to sell it.”

“Aren’t you curious? I mean, what the hell
is
she? You pull her out of some military lab?” Rudy opened the white freezer door again, took out the bottle of vodka, opened it, and took a swallow.

Turner took the bottle and tilted it, letting the icy fluid splash against his teeth. He swallowed, shuddered. “It’s corporate. Big. I was supposed to get her father out, but he sent her instead. Then somebody took the whole site out, looked like a baby nuke. We just made it. This far.” He handed Rudy the bottle. “Stay straight for me, Rudy. You get scared, you drink too much.”

Rudy was staring at him, ignoring the bottle. “Arizona,” he said. “It was on the news. Mexico’s still kicking about it. But it wasn’t a nuke. They’ve had crews out there, all over it. No nuke.”

“What was it?”

“They think it was a railgun. They think somebody put up a hypervelocity gun in a cargo blimp and blew hell out of some derelict mall out there in the boonies. They know there was a blimp near there, and so far nobody’s found it. You can rig a railgun to blow itself to plasma when it discharges. The projectile could have been damn near anything, at those velocities. About a hundred and fifty kilos of ice would do the trick.” He took the bottle, capped it, and put it down on
the counter beside him. “All that land around there, it belongs to Maas, Maas Biolabs, doesn’t it? They’ve been on the news, Maas. Cooperating fully with various authorities. You bet. So that tells us where you got your little honey from, I guess.”

“Sure. But it doesn’t tell me who used the railgun. Or why.”

Rudy shrugged.

“You better come see this,” Sally said from the door.

Much later, Turner sat with Sally on the front porch. The girl had lapsed, finally, into something Rudy’s EEG called sleep. Rudy was back in one of his workshops, probably with his bottle of vodka. There were fireflies around the honeysuckle vines beside the chainlink gate. Turner found that if he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch swing, he could almost see an apple tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire. There were fireflies then as well, and Rudy’s heels thumping a bare hard skid of earth as he pumped himself out on the swing’s arc, legs kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the stars. . . .

“Tongues,” Sally said, Rudy’s woman, from the creaking rattan chair, her cigarette a red eye in the dark. “Talking in the tongues.”

“What’s that?”

“What your kid was doing, upstairs. You know any French?”

“No, not much. Not without a lexicon.”

“Some of it sounded French to me.” The red amber was a short slash for an instant, when she tapped ash. “When I was little, my old man took me one time to this stadium, and I saw the testifying and the speaking in tongues. It scared me. I think it scared me more, today, when she started.”

“Rudy taped the end of it, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. You know, Rudy hasn’t been doing too good. That’s mainly why I moved back in here. I told him I wasn’t staying unless he straightened himself out, but then it got real bad, so about two weeks ago I moved back in. I was about ready to go when you showed up.” The coal of the cigarette arced out over the railing and fell on the gravel that covered the yard.

“Drinking?”

“That and the stuff he cooks for himself in the lab. You know, that man knows a little bit of damn near everything. He’s still got a lot of friends, around the county; I’ve heard ’em tell stories about when you and him were kids, before you left.”

“He should have left, too,” he said.

“He hates the city,” she said. “Says it all comes in on line anyway, so why do you need to go there?”

“I went because there was nothing happening here. Rudy could always find something to do. Still can, by the look of it.”

“You should’ve stayed in touch. He wanted you here when your mother was dying.”

“I was in Berlin. Couldn’t leave what I was doing.”

“I guess not. I wasn’t here then either. I came later. That was a good summer. Rudy just pulled me out of this sleaze-ass club in Memphis; came in there with a bunch of country boys one night, and next day I was back here, didn’t really know why. Except he was nice to me, those days, and funny, and he gave my head a chance to slow down. He taught me to cook.” She laughed. “I liked that, except I was scared of those Goddamn chickens out back.” She stood up then and stretched, the old chair creaking, and he was aware of the length of her tanned legs, the smell and summer heat of her, close to his face.

She put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were level with the band of brown belly where her shorts rode low, her navel a soft shadow, and remembering Allison in the white hollow room, he wanted to press his face there, taste it all . . . He thought she swayed slightly, but he wasn’t sure.

“Turner,” she said, “sometimes bein’ here with him, it’s like bein’ here alone . . .”

So he stood, rattle of the old swing chain where the eyebolts were screwed deep in the tongue and groove of the porch roof, bolts his father might have turned forty years before, and kissed her mouth as it opened, cut loose in time by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of memory, so that it seemed to him, as he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life weren’t beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he’d
known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchell’s daughter.

“Hey,” she whispered, working her mouth free, “you come upstairs now.”

A
LAIN PHONED AT FIVE
and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card she’d taken from Picard’s desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadn’t been there for Alain’s call.

She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. “I had a talk about your employer today,” she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. “Our academic was in from Nice. He’s baffled as to why I’d choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but he’s also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk.”

Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames lick around the coals.

“He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it,” Andrea continued, “and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth century, an American. He’s in the book as well, as a sort of proto-Virek. I hadn’t known that Tessier-Ashpool had started to disintegrate . . .” She went back to the counter and unwrapped six large tiger prawns.

“They’re Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I think. They own one of the big spas?”

“Freeside. It’s been sold now, my professor tells me. It seems that one of old Ashpool’s daughters somehow managed to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became increasingly eccentric, and the clan’s interests went to hell. This over the past seven years.”

“I don’t see what it has to do with Virek,” Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo.

“Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anachronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolution by watching them. He’s convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate . . .”

“But what did he say about Virek?”

“That Virek’s madness would take a different form.”

“Madness?”

“Actually, he avoided calling it that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daughter totally bizarre. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of ‘jump.’ ‘Jump’ was his word.”

“Evolutionary pressures?”

“Yes,” Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. “He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.”

After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Virek’s surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk through a city where things were simply themselves. In Virek’s world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Virek’s model of the Parque Güell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudí’s park, in an afternoon that never ended?
Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation.
She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.

The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that
any
environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once
said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.

Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new
Elle.
Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, students and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she assumed, were part of Virek’s machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Señor all his life. . . .

“What’s wrong? You look as though you’ve just swallowed something.” Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut.

“No,” Marly said, and shivered, “But it occurs to me that I very nearly did . . .”

And walking home, in spite of Andrea’s conversation, her warmth, the shopwindows had become boxes, each one, constructions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought, the books and furs and Italian cottons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.

And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing, in a gray morning of Paris rain.

“No,” she told Paco, “I’ll go myself. I prefer it.”

“That is a great deal of money.” He looked down at the Italian bag on the café table between them. “It’s dangerous, you understand?”

“There’s no one to know I’m carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn’t say I’d go alone, only that I don’t feel like company.”

“Is something wrong?” The serious deep lines at the corners of his mouth. “You are upset?”

“I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, I’m sure you have the address.”

“That is true,” he said. “But for you to carry several million New Yen, alone, through Paris . . .” He shrugged.

“And if I were to lose it? Would Señor register the loss?
Or would there be another bag, another four million?” She reached for the shoulder strap and stood.

“There would be another bag, certainly, although it requires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Señor would not ‘register’ its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the
pointless
loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find.”

“Nonetheless, I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me with my thoughts.”

“Your intuition.”

“Yes.”

If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he had given her that morning would already be a focus of their attention, whether he were there or not.

She felt a new strength today. She had stood up to Paco. It had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art. She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger. Too perfect. She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator carried her down into the
métro,
pleased with the cut of her dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the black Porsche glasses she’d bought that morning. Good lips, she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm.

I’m in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New Yen, and he will give me something in return. A name, or an address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to Virek.

The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern suburb, was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic rubber bag stuffed with Alain’s fortune. How queer to stroll through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm, on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with these bales of New Yen.

There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment’s numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had arrived, leaving you to wait there in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. “Alain?” Nothing.

She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoon’s watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. “
Cher
Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly.” As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse. She found the flat little green tin flashlight she’d carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit . . .

And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two levels below. She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for
centuries: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a diabetic syringe . . . She held the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she clicked off her light.

“Damn you,” she said. “O Jesus.”

She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.

Rapping on the door again. It was pressboard, laminated with a ghastly imitation of rosewood, the lithographed grain just visible in the light from the long corridor’s single strip of biofluorescence. “Damn you. Alain? Alain!” The myopic fisheye of the door’s little spyglass looking through her, blank and vacant. The corridor held a horrible smell, embalmed cooking odors trapped in synthetic carpeting.

Trying the door, knob turning, the cheap brass greasy and cold, and the bag of money suddenly heavy, the strap cutting into her shoulder. The door opening easily. A short stretch of orange carpet flecked with irregular rectangles of salmon-pink, decades of dirt ground into it in a clearly defined track by thousands of tenants and their visitors . . .

“Alain?” The smell of black French cigarettes, almost comforting . . .

And finding him there in that same watery light, silver light, the other tower blocks featureless, beyond a rectangle of window, against pale rainy sky, where he lay curled like a child on the hideous orange carpet, his spine a question mark beneath the taut back of his bottle-green velour jacket, his left hand spread above his ear, white fingers, faintest bluish tint at the base of his nails.

Kneeling, she touched his neck. Knew. Beyond the window, all the rain sliding down, forever. Cradling his head, legs open, holding him, rocking, swaying, the dumb sad animal keening filling the bare rectangle of the room. . . . And after a time, becoming aware of the sharp thing under her palm, the neat stainless end of a length of very fine, very rigid wire, that protruded from his ear and between the spread cool fingers.

Ugly, ugly, that was no way to die; it got her up, anger,
her hands like claws. To survey the silent room where he had died. There was no sense of him there, nothing, only his ragged attaché. Opening that, she found two spiral notebooks, their pages new and clean, an unread but very fashionable novel, a box of wooden matches, and a half-empty blue packet of Gauloise. The leather-bound agenda from Browns was gone. She patted his jacket, slid fingers through his pockets, but it was gone.