Mona Lisa Overdrive (6 page)

“Or you me, honey. Maybe I’m one of those bad people your daddy’s worried about.”

Kumiko considered this. “Are you?”

“No. And if you’re Swain’s spy, he’s gotten a lot more baroque recently. If you’re
your old man’s spy, maybe I don’t need Tick. But if the Yakuza’s running this, what’s
the point of using Roger for a blind?”

“I am no spy.”

“Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in
the fire.”

“But why involve me?”

“You’re already involved. You’re here. You scared?”

“No,” Kumiko said, and fell silent, wondering why this should be true.

Late that afternoon, alone in the mirrored garret, Kumiko sat on the edge of the huge
bed and peeled off her wet boots. She took the Maas-Neotek unit from her purse.

“What are they?” she asked the ghost, who perched on the parapet of the black marble
tub.

“Your pub friends?”

“Yes.”

“Criminals. I’d advise you to associate with a better class, myself. The woman’s foreign.
North American. The
man’s a Londoner. East End. He’s a data thief, evidently. I can’t access police records,
except with regard to crimes of historical interest.”

“I don’t know what to do.…”

“Turn the unit over.”

“What?”

“On the back. You’ll see a sort of half-moon groove there. Put your thumbnail in and
twist.…”

A tiny hatch opened. Microswitches.

“Reset the A/B throw to B. Use something-narrow, pointed, but not a biro.”

“A what?”

“A pen. Ink and dust. Gum up the works. A toothpick’s ideal. That’ll set it for voice-activated
recording.”

“And then?”

“Hide it downstairs. We’ll play it back tomorrow.…”

Slick spent the night on a piece of gnawed gray foam under a workbench on Factory’s
ground floor, wrapped in a noisy sheet of bubble packing that stank of free monomers.
He dreamed about Kid Afrika, about the Kid’s car, and in his dreams the two blurred
together and Kid’s teeth were little chrome skulls.

He woke to a stiff wind spitting the winter’s first snow through Factory’s empty windows.

He lay there and thought about the problem of the Judge’s buzzsaw, how the wrist tended
to cripple up whenever he went to slash through something heavier than a sheet of
chipboard. His original plan for the hand had called for articulated fingers, each
one tipped with a miniature electric chainsaw, but the concept had lost favor for
a number of reasons. Electricity, somehow, just wasn’t satisfying; it wasn’t
physical
enough. Air was the way to go, big tanks of compressed air, or internal combustion
if you could find the parts. And you could find the parts to almost anything, on Dog
Solitude, if you dug long enough; failing that, there were half-a-dozen towns
in rustbelt Jersey with acres of dead machines to pick over.

He crawled out from under the bench, trailing the transparent blanket of miniature
plastic pillows like a cape. He thought about the man on the stretcher, up in his
room, and about Cherry, who’d slept in his bed. No stiff neck for her. He stretched
and winced.

Gentry was due back. He’d have to explain it to Gentry, who didn’t like having people
around at all.

Little Bird had made coffee in the room that served as Factory’s kitchen. The floor
was made of curling plastic tiles and there were dull steel sinks along one wall.
The windows were covered with translucent tarps that sucked in and out with the wind
and admitted a milky glow that made the room seem even colder than it was.

“How we doing for water?” Slick asked as he entered the room. One of Little Bird’s
jobs was checking the tanks on the roof every morning, fishing out windblown leaves
or the odd dead crow. Then he’d check the seals on the filters, maybe let ten fresh
gallons in if it looked like they were running low. It took the better part of a day
for ten gallons to filter down through the system to the collection tank. The fact
that Little Bird dutifully took care of this was the main reason Gentry would tolerate
him, but the boy’s shyness probably helped as well. Little Bird managed to be pretty
well invisible, as far as Gentry was concerned.

“Got lots,” Little Bird said.

“Is there any way to take a shower?” Cherry asked, from her seat on an old plastic
crate. She had shadows under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept, but she’d covered the
sore with makeup.

“No,” Slick said, “there isn’t, not this time of year.”

“I didn’t think so,” Cherry said glumly, hunched in her collection of leather jackets.

Slick helped himself to the last of the coffee and stood in front of her while he
drank it.

“You gotta problem?” she asked.

“Yeah. You and the guy upstairs. How come you’re down here? You off duty or something?”

She produced a black beeper from the pocket of her outermost jacket. “Any change,
this’ll go off.”

“Sleep okay?”

“Sure. Well enough.”

“I didn’t. How long you work for Kid Afrika, Cherry?”

“ ’Bout a week.”

“You really a med-tech?”

She shrugged inside her jackets. “Close enough to take care of the Count.”

“The Count?”

“Count, yeah. Kid called him that, once.”

Little Bird shivered. He hadn’t gotten to work with his styling tools yet, so his
hair stuck out in all directions. “What if,” Little Bird ventured, “he’s a vampire?”

Cherry stared at him. “You kidding?”

Eyes wide, Little Bird solemnly shook his head.

Cherry looked at Slick. “Your friend playing with a full deck?”

“No vampires,” Slick said to Little Bird, “that’s not a real thing, understand? That’s
just in stims. Guy’s no vampire, okay?”

Little Bird nodded slowly, looking not at all reassured, while the wind popped the
plastic taut against the milky light.

He tried to get a morning’s work in on the Judge, but Little Bird had vanished again
and the image of the figure on the stretcher kept getting in the way. It was too cold;
he’d have to run a line down from Gentry’s territory at the top of Factory, get some
space heaters. But that meant haggling with Gentry over the current. The juice was
Gentry’s because Gentry knew how to fiddle it out of the Fission Authority.

It was heading into Slick’s third winter in Factory, but Gentry had been there four
years when Slick found the place. When they’d gotten Gentry’s loft together, Slick
had inherited the room where he’d put Cherry and the man she said Kid Afrika called
the Count. Gentry took the position that Factory was his, that he’d been there first,
got the power in so the Authority didn’t know. But Slick did a lot of things around
Factory that Gentry wouldn’t have wanted to do himself, like making sure there was
food, and if something major broke down, if the wiring shorted or the water filter
packed it in, it was Slick who had the tools and did the fixing.

Gentry didn’t like people. He spent days on end with his decks and FX-organs and holo
projectors and came out only when he got hungry. Slick didn’t understand what it was
that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the narrowness of his obsession.
Nothing got to Gentry. Kid Afrika couldn’t have gotten to Gentry, because Gentry wouldn’t
have gone over to Atlantic City and gotten into deep shit and Kid Afrika’s debt.

He went into his room without knocking and Cherry was washing the guy’s chest with
a sponge, wearing white throwaway gloves. She’d carried the butane stove up from the
room where they did the cooking and heated water in a steel mixing bowl.

He made himself look at the pinched face, the slack lips parted just enough to reveal
yellow smoker’s teeth. It was a street face, a crowd face, face you’d see in any bar.

She looked up at Slick.

He sat on the edge of the bed, where she’d unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it
out flat like a blanket, with the torn end tucked in under the foam.

“We gotta talk, Cherry. Figure this, you know?”

She squeezed the sponge out over the bowl.

“How’d you get mixed up with Kid Afrika?”

She put the sponge in a Ziploc and put that away in the black nylon bag from the Kid’s
hover. As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and she didn’t seem to
have to think about what she was doing. “You know a place called Moby Jane’s?”

“No.”

“Roadhouse, off the interstate. So I had this friend was manager there, doing it for
about a month when I move in with him. Moby Jane, she’s just huge; she just sits out
back the club in a float tank with this freebase IV drip in her arm and it’s
totally
disgusting. So like I said, I move in there with my friend Spencer, he’s the new
manager, because I had this trouble over my ticket in Cleveland and I couldn’t work
right then.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The
usual
kind, okay? You wanna hear this or not? So Spencer’s let me in on the owner’s horrible
condition, right? So the last thing I want anybody to know is that I’m a med-tech,
otherwise they’ll have me out there changing filters on her tank and pumping freebase
into two hundred kilos of hallucinating psychotic. So they put me waiting tables,
slinging beer. It’s okay. Get some good music in there. Kind of a rough place but
it’s okay because people know I’m with Spencer. ’Cept I wake up one day and Spencer’s
gone. Then it comes out he’s gone with a bunch of their money.” She was drying the
sleeper’s chest as she spoke, using a thick wad of white absorbent fiber. “So they
knock me around a little.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “But then they tell
me what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna cuff my hands behind my back and put me in
the tank with Moby Jane and turn her drip up real high and tell her my boyfriend ripped
her off.…” She tossed the damp wad into the bowl. “So they locked me up in this closet
to let me think about it before they did it. When the door opens, though, it’s Kid
Afrika. I never saw him before. ‘Miss Chesterfield,’ he said, ‘I have reason to
believe you were until recently a certified medical technician.”

“So he made you an offer.”

“Offer, my ass. He just checked my papers and took me straight on out of there. Not
a soul around, either, and it was Saturday afternoon. Took me out in the parking lot,
there’s this hover sittin’ in the lot, skulls on the front, two big black guys waiting
for us, and any way away from that float tank, that’s just fine by me.”

“Had our friend in the back?”

“No.” Peeling off the gloves. “Had me drive him back to Cleveland, to this burb. Big
old houses but the lawns all long and scraggy. Went to one with a lot of security,
guess it was his. This one,” and she tucked the blue sleeping bag up around the man’s
chin, “he was in a bedroom. I had to start right in. Kid told me he’d pay me good.”

“And you knew he’d bring you out here, to the Solitude?”

“No. Don’t think he did, either. Something happened. He came in next day and said
we were leaving. I think something scared him. That’s when he called him that, the
Count, ’Cause he was angry and I think maybe scared. ‘The Count and his fucking LF,’
he said.”

“His what?”

“ ‘LF.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“I think this,” she said, pointing up at the featureless gray package mounted above
the man’s head.

She imagined Swift waiting for her on the deck, wearing the tweeds he favored in an
L.A. winter, the vest and jacket mismatched, herringbone and houndstooth, but everything
woven from the same wool, and that, probably, from the same sheep on the same hillside,
the whole look orchestrated in London, by committee, in a room above a Floral Street
shop he’d never seen. They did striped shirts for him, brought the cotton from Charvet
in Paris; they made his ties, had the silk woven in Osaka, the Sense/Net logo embroidered
tight and small. And still, somehow, he looked as though his mother had dressed him.

The deck was empty. The Dornier hovered, then darted away to its nest. Mamman Brigitte’s
presence still clung to her.

She went into the white kitchen and scrubbed drying blood from her face and hands.
When she stepped into the living room, she felt as though she were seeing it for the
first time. The bleached floor, the gilt frames and cut-velvet upholstery of the Louis
XVI chairs, the Cubist backdrop of a Valmier. Like Hilton’s wardrobe, she thought,
contrived by talented strangers. Her boots tracked damp sand across the pale floor
as she went to the stairwell.

Kelly Hickman, her wardrobe man, had been to the house while she’d been in the clinic;
he’d arranged her working luggage in the master bedroom. Nine Hermès rifle cases,
plain and rectangular, like coffins of burnished saddle hide. Her clothes were never
folded; they lay each garment flat, between sheets of silk tissue.

She stood in the doorway, staring at the empty bed, the nine leather coffins.

She went into the bathroom, glass block and white mosaic tile, locking the door behind
her. She opened one cabinet, then another, ignoring neat rows of unopened toiletries,
patent medicines, cosmetics. She found the charger in the third cabinet, beside a
bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the gray plastic, the Japanese logo,
afraid to touch it. The charger looked new, unused. She was almost certain that she
hadn’t bought it, hadn’t left it here. She took the drug from her jacket pocket and
examined it, turning it over and over, watching the measured doses of violet dust
tumble in their sealed compartments.

She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above
it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode
when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing
it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface
glittering with minute beads of DMSO—

She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the
bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly dry. Perfectly. Her
hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had
to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the
seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the
two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel,
then forced
herself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.