Idoru (30 page)

“We've got the van,” the other man said.

The big man with the missing ear stepped up really close to the man in the white tuxedo, glared at him, and took the other man's jacket. “Okay, Rozzer,” he said, turning to Rez. “You know the drill this one. Old hat. Same as leaving that house in St. Kilda with the bastard Melbourne tabs outside, right?” He draped the jacket over Rez's head and shoulders, slapped him encouragingly on the upper arm. He walked over to the pink strips and drew one aside, looking out. “Fucking
hell
,” he said. “Right then, all of you. It's move fast, stay together, Rez in the center, and into the van. On my count of three.”

43. Toecutter's Breakfast

“You aren't eating,” Blackwell said, after he'd cleared his second plate of links and eggs. He'd appropriated this dining room on one of the Elf Hat's executive floors, and insisted Laney join him. The view was similar to the one from Laney's room, six floors below, and sunlight was glinting from the distant parapets of the new buildings.

“Who put out the word that Rez was dead, Blackwell? The idoru?”

“Her? Why d'you think she would?” He was using the edge of a triangle of toast to squeegee his plate.

“I don't know,” Laney said, “but she seems to like to do things. And they aren't necessarily that easy to understand.”

“It wasn't her,” Blackwell said. “We're checking it out. Looks as though some fan of his in Mexico went berserk; used some fairly drastic sort of 'ware-weapon on the Tokyo club's central site. Took that over from a converted corporate website in the States and issued the bulletin. Called on every fan local to Tokyo to get up immediately and go to that love hotel.” He popped the toast into his mouth, swallowed, and wiped his lips with a thick white napkin.

“But Rez was
there
,” Laney said.

Blackwell shrugged. “We're looking into it. We have more than enough on our hands, now. Have to dissociate Lo/Rez from this death hoax, reassure his audience. Legal's flying in from London and New York for talks with Starkov and his people. Her people too,” he added. “Going to be busy.”

“Who were those kids?” Laney asked. “The little redhead and the Japanese hippie?”

“Rez says they're okay. Have 'em here in the hotel. Arleigh's sorting it out.”

“Where's the nanotech unit?”

“You didn't say that,” Blackwell said. “Now don't say it again. The official truth of the night's events is currently being formulated, and that will never be a part of it. Am I understood?”

Laney nodded. He looked out at the new buildings again. Either the angle of light had changed or that parapet had shifted slightly. He looked at Blackwell. “Is it my imagination, or has your attitude on all this undergone some kind of change? I thought you were adamantly opposed to Rez and the idoru getting together.”

Blackwell sighed. “I was. But it's starting to look like something of a done deal now, isn't it? De facto relationship, really. I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but I'd hoped that he might eventually wind up with a bit of the ordinary. Someone to polish his gun, pick up his socks, have a baby or two. But it isn't going to happen, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“In which case,” Blackwell said, “I have two options. Either I leave the silly bastard to his own resources, or I stay and I do my job and try to adjust to whatever it is this is going to become. And at the end of the bloody day, Laney, regardless, I have to remember where I'd be if he hadn't come behind the walls at Pentridge to give that solo concert. Aren't you going to eat that?” Looking at the scrambled eggs going cold on Laney's plate.

“My job's done,” Laney said. “It didn't work out the way you wanted it to, but I did it. Agreed?”

“No question.”

“Then I'd better go. Get me paid off, I'm out of here today.”

Blackwell looked at him with new interest. “That fast, eh? What's your hurry? Don't find us agreeable?”

“No,” Laney said. “It's just that that way's better all 'round.”

“Not what Yama's saying. Rez either. Not to mention her otherness, who no doubt will voice an opinion in that regard. I'd say you were set to become the court prognosticator, Laney. Unless, of course, that whole business with the Kombinat turns out to be absolute bollocks, and it's discovered that you simply make that nodal nonsense up—which I for one would actually find quite amusing. But no, your services are very much desired now, you might even say required, and none of us would currently be happy to see you go.”

“I have to,” Laney said. “I'm being blackmailed.”

This brought Blackwell's lids to half-mast. He leaned slightly forward. The pink worm of scar tissue squirmed in his eyebrow. “Are you?” he said softly, as though Laney had just ventured to confess some unusual sexual complication. “And may I ask who by?”

“Slitscan. Kathy Torrance. It's sort of personal, for her.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me all about it. Do.”

And Laney did, including the 5-SB trials and their record for eventually turning the participants into homicidal stalkers of celebrities. “I didn't want to bring that up, before,” Laney said, “because I was afraid you might think I was at risk. That I might go that way.”

“Not that I haven't had experience with the type,” Blackwell said. “We have a young man in Tokyo right now who is the author of all of the songs Lo and Rez have ever written, not to mention Blue Ahmed's complete output for Chrome Koran. And he's an explosives expert. Watch him closely. But we have that capacity,
you
see. So the safest place for you, Laney, in the event you go werewolf on us, would be right
here
, at the watchful heart of our security apparatus.”

Laney thought about it. It almost made sense. “But you won't want me around if Slitscan runs that footage. I won't want
myself
around. I don't have any family, nobody else for it to damage, but I'm still going to have to live with it.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“I'll go somewhere where people don't watch that shit.”

“Well,” said Blackwell, “when you find that fair land, I will go there with you myself. We'll live on fruit and nuts, commune with all that's left of bloody nature. But ‘til then, Laney, I'm going to have a conversation with your Kathy Torrance. I will explain certain things to her. Nothing complicated. Simple,
simple
protocols of cause and effect. And she will
never
allow Slitscan to run that footage of your doppelgänger.”

“Blackwell,” Laney said, “she
dislikes
me, she has her motive for revenge, but she wants, she
needs
, to destroy Rez. She's a very powerful woman in a very powerful, fully global organization. Some simple threat of
violence
on your part isn't going to stop her. It'll only up the ante; she'll go to
her
security people—”

“No,” said Blackwell, “she won't, because that would be a violation of the very
personal
terms I will have established in our conversation. That's the key word here, Laney, ‘personal.’ ‘Up close, and.’ We will not meet, we will not carve out this deep and meaningful and bloody unforgettable episode of mutual face-time as representatives of our respective faceless corporations. Not at all. It's one-on-one time for your Kathy and I, and it may well prove to be as intimate, and I may hope enlightening, as any she ever had. Because I will bring a new certainty into her life, and we
all
need certainties. They help build character. And I will leave your Kathy with the deepest possible conviction that if she crosses me, she
will
die—but only after she's been made to desire that, absolutely.” And Blackwell's smile, then, giving Laney the full benefit of his dental prosthesis, was hideous. “Now how was it exactly you were supposed to contact her, to give her your decision?”

Laney found his wallet, produced the blank card with the pencilled number. Blackwell took it. “Ta.” He stood up. “Shame to waste a good breakfast that way. Ring the hotel doctor from your room and get yourself sorted. Sleep. I'll deal with this.” He tucked the card into the breast pocket of his aluminum jacket.

And as Blackwell left the room, Laney noticed, centered on the bodyguard's squeegeed plate and standing upright on its broad flat head, a one-and-a-half-inch galvanized roofing-nail.

Laney's ribs, an ugly patchwork of yellow, black, and blue, were sprayed with various cool liquids and tightly bound with micropore. He took the hypnotic the doctor had offered, showered at great length, climbed into bed, and was suggesting the light turn itself off when a fax was delivered.

It was addressed to
C. LANEY, GUEST:

DAY MANAGER GAVE ME MY WALKING PAPERS. “FRATERNIZING.” ANYWAY, I'M SECURITY HERE AT THE LUCKY DRAGON, MIDNITE ON, YOU CAN GET ME FAX, E-MAIL, PHONE'S BIZ ONLY BUT THE PEOPLE ARE OKAY. HOPE YOU'RE OKAY. FEEL RESPONSIBLE. HOPE YOU'RE ENJOYING JAPAN, WHATEVER. RYDELL

“Good night,” Laney said, putting the fax on the bedside module, and fell instantly and very deeply asleep.

And stayed that way until Arleigh phoned from the lobby to suggest a drink. Nine in the evening, by the blue clock in the corner of the module-screen. Laney put on freshly ironed underwear and his other blue Malaysian button-down. He discovered that White Leather Tuxedo had sprung a few seams in his only jacket, but then the boss Russian, Starkov, hadn't let the man come with them in the van, so Laney figured they were even.

Crossing the lobby, he encountered a frantic-looking Rice Daniels, so tense that he'd reverted to the black head-clamp of his Out of Control days. “Laney! Jesus! Have
you
seen Kathy?”

“No. I've been asleep.”

Daniels did a strange little jig of anxiety, rising on the toes of his brown calfskin loafers. “Look, this is
too
fucking weird, but I
swear
— I think she's been
abducted
.”

“Have you called the police?”

“We did, we did, but it's all fucking
Martian
, all these forms they tick through on their notebooks, and what
blood type
was she…. You don't
know
what blood type she is, do you, Laney?”

“Thin,” Laney said. “Sort of straw-colored.”

But Daniels didn't seem to hear. He seized Laney's shoulder and showed him teeth, a rictus intended somehow to indicate friendship. “I have real respect for you, man. How you don't have any issues.”

Laney saw Arleigh wave to him from the entrance to the lounge. She was wearing something short and black.

“You take care, Rice.” Shaking the man's cold hand. “She'll turn up. I'm sure of it.”

And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw that she was smiling back.

44. La Purissima

Chia was on the bed, watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was like a drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had watched, after her father had left.

But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been Mitsuko, only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were spinning huge wooden tops at a long table. They could really spin them, too; keep them up forever. It was a contest. The console could translate, but it was even more relaxing not to know what they were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the close-ups of the tops spinning.

She'd used the translation to check out the NHK coverage of the death hoax on the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.

She'd seen a very satisfyingly pudgy Hiromi Ogama denying she knew who had nuked her chapter's site and then issued the call to mourning from its ruins. It had not been a member of the club, Hiromi had stressed, either locally or internationally. Chia knew Hiromi was lying, because it had to have been Zona, but the Lo/Rez people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told Chia the whole thing had been launched out of a disused website that belonged to an aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant that Zona had blown her country, because now she wouldn't be able to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to be, Chia hadn't told her anything about Zona.)

And she'd seen the helicopter shots of the vigil, and of the baffled tactical squads facing an estimated twenty-five hundred teary-eyed girls. The injury count was low, everything fairly minor except for one girl who'd slid down a freeway embankment and broken both her ankles. The real problem had been getting everyone out of there, because a lot of them had arrived five or six to a cab, and had no way of getting home. Some had taken the family car and then abandoned it in their hurry to reach the vigil, and that had created another kind of mess. There had been a few dozen arrests, mostly for trespassing.

And she'd seen the message Rez had recorded, assuring people he was alive and well, and regretting the whole thing, which of course he'd had nothing to do with. He wasn't wearing the monocle-rig, for this, but he had on the same black suit and t-shirt. He looked thinner, though; someone had tweaked it. He'd played it light, at first, grinning, saying he'd never been to the Hotel Di and in fact had never visited a love hotel, but now maybe he should. Then he'd turned serious and said how sorry he was that people had been inconvenienced and even hurt by someone's irresponsible prank. And he'd capped it, smiling, by saying that the whole thing had been quite uniquely moving for him, because how often do you get to watch your own funeral?