The City Under the Skin (7 page)

Zak was a little surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth, though not nearly as surprised as Billy Moore. They both knew it was absolutely the wrong thing to say.

“Are you telling me to fuck off?” Billy said.

“Only metaphorically,” Zak replied, and then he wished he hadn't said that either.

Billy Moore positioned himself between Zak and the front door of Utopiates. There'd be no chance for Zak to escape in that direction, and there was nothing to be gained by running into the back room: Billy had already established that was a dead end. Lacking other options, Zak squared himself up. He'd been in very few fights in his life and, given the choice, would never have been in any whatsoever. Still, he wasn't going to beg or plead; and he was certainly going to do his best to fight back.

He didn't get the chance. Billy Moore zipped up his leather jacket, a sign that he meant business. He took half a step forward and landed a precise, effortless punch in the core of Zak's body, as though his navel were a bull's eye. So, not the face after all, Zak thought, but that was no consolation. He was amazed by the pain, as though a battering ram had penetrated his body. Fighting back suddenly didn't seem to be a possibility. His legs lost their stability. The air was too thin, his lungs too feeble. He started to fall and another blow hammered him in the eye before he'd hit the floor.

Once there, Zak clutched himself and again tried to breathe, but he seemed to have lost the knack. Billy Moore stood over him, nicely positioned to give him a good kicking, a process he began by slamming his foot into Zak's left kidney. Zak squirmed, his arms and legs twitched, motor coordination was a thing of the past.

Another kick landed. From what had been said, Zak didn't believe this man had actually come to kill him, but he suspected that guys like this often made mistakes; they got carried away, enjoyed their work a little too much. Then, dimly, from very far away, Zak heard the front door open and close. Somebody had come into the store, and then a woman's voice that sounded only vaguely familiar was issuing commands—“Stop that. Stop that right now. Leave him alone. Stop kicking him”—and to Zak's great surprise he was no longer being kicked.

The female voice persisted. Zak recognized it now as belonging to the woman with the tortoiseshell glasses. She was angry and outraged, or was at least pretending to be. Either way it was impressive. From his quasi-fetal position, Zak couldn't tell exactly what was going on above him, but he sensed that his assailant was moving away.

“Get out of here. Go on,” the woman shouted. “And shame on you.”

Billy Moore was calm, and he didn't seem remotely ashamed. He straightened himself, ran a hand through his hair, though, in fact, his assault on Zak had left him entirely unruffled. It seemed he was about to leave the store, just as he had been told to do, but the woman wasn't finished with him yet.

“And that poor creature from the other night,” she demanded, “the one you put in your car, where is she now? What have you done with her?”

Zak was certain these questions would not be answered, and that even asking them was a very high-risk activity.

“It's none of your business, is it,” said Billy Moore, flatly.

She marched up to him. She was carrying a backpack and she swung it in a wide, shallow, urgent arc, slamming it into the side of Billy Moore's head. He flinched, surprised but certainly not hurt: not even conspicuously angry. He looked at her sadly.

“You know,” he said, “there are some guys who pride themselves on never hitting a woman. I'm not one of them.”

He delivered a single punch, not nearly as hard as either of the ones he'd landed on Zak—something more delicate, something for the ladies, but not a bitch slap either, more of a jab, a straight shot with a closed fist that landed neatly on the woman's left eye. Her head snapped back, her spectacles went flying, and she went down too, ending up on the floor, not far away from Zak. Billy Moore showed just a modicum of concern as he watched her fall, but once he was satisfied that she hadn't cracked her skull open, that she was down but not completely out, he was content to unzip his jacket and leave. He'd driven away before either of his victims was able even to contemplate getting up from the floor.

 

10. DEVIATION

“Why did you come back?” Zak asked when he could finally breathe and speak. “I thought the place gave you the creeps.”

“It did. It does. And I don't know why, and that kind of intrigues me in itself.”

They had, in due course, managed to raise themselves from the floor, inspected their own and each other's injuries. Both had facial bruises that would soon flower into black eyes. They had even managed to introduce themselves: “I'm Zak Webster”; “I'm Marilyn Driscoll.”

“You said you didn't know what you saw the other night.”

“I still don't,” said Zak.

“I can help with that.” She took a scuffed, bestickered laptop out of her backpack. “I took some pictures. They're not great, but they're a start.”

Zak was inclined to ask, “The start of what?” but he held his tongue. He also wondered why she'd been taking pictures. Was she a tourist? A street photographer? A student of urban renewal? He didn't ask any of that either. Recent events suggested he might be much better off not knowing what he'd seen, but it was already too late for that.

Marilyn Driscoll brought the laptop to life, and there on-screen appeared thumbnails of the pictures she'd taken on what Zak was increasingly, and ever less ironically, coming to think of as “that fateful night.” She clicked through a handful of quickly taken, not especially clear images. In one of them Zak could see himself standing in the doorway of Utopiates, looking awkward and profoundly unphotogenic. He didn't like seeing pictures of himself at the best of times. They moved on to another image, one that showed the battered Cadillac: that wasn't exactly fascinating either.

Then Marilyn brought up an image of the driver and zoomed in on his face. That was more revealing in a way. You could probably have identified the guy from it, though Zak could have identified him perfectly well without a photograph. In any case, there was nothing very special about him. To Zak he looked like just another bruiser, a petty crook, not a rarity in this city or any other.

Marilyn opened up the next picture, the one that seemed by far the most important, showing the pale, tattooed skin of the naked woman's back. The photograph had been taken from an oblique angle, so that the camera's automatic focus had struggled to find a center, and the framing was haphazard, but at least Zak could see that his impression had been right: it really was a map.

“Pretty crude,” said Marilyn Driscoll.

“The photographs?” said Zak.

“I meant the tattoos. Which is to say, a very crude map.”

“Yes,” Zak agreed, “although in general, the cruder the map, the clearer the mapmaker's intentions.”

He hoped that didn't sound too pretentious. It was true, as far as it went, but he was aware that he was saying it with more gravitas than it merited. He was playing the scholar, trying to impress this woman, attempting to do an impersonation of a shrewd, wise man.

“I can enhance it a little,” Marilyn said.

She played with the image of the woman's back, sharpened it, adjusted the brightness and contrast, the shadow and highlight function, until it became a little clearer, though scarcely less enigmatic. Zak could now see, at the center of the woman's back, running shakily down either side of her spine, two long, rough tattooed lines. One of them, in red, looked somewhat like the representation of a road. The other, a black line with cross-hatching, could have been a railroad track. Two other, more or less parallel, blue lines snaking lazily, horizontally across the woman's shoulder blades might possibly have been the banks of a river or canal. Elsewhere on the exposed flesh were scattered squares and rectangles that you might interpret as buildings, though you could just as easily have interpreted them as something else. Dotted and zigzag lines might have signified routes or directions, but then again they might not.

“So what are we looking at here exactly?” Marilyn asked. “You think it's a real map?”

“All maps are real,” said Zak, hoping that he wasn't pushing his luck too far.

“But where's it a map of?” said Marilyn. “Is it an actual place or an imaginary one? Can we use it to get somewhere? Is it maybe just decorative? Maybe it doesn't have any use at all.”

“Every map has its use,” said Zak. “The problem may be working out what that use is. And it may be even harder to work out who's the intended user.”

Marilyn Driscoll nodded thoughtfully. She seemed to be impressed: he liked that.

“And what's that thing there?” asked Marilyn.

She pointed at a small round tattoo located right on the flesh of the woman's coccyx. The image was especially unclear in that area, but Zak knew well enough what it was.

“That's a compass rose,” he said. “The kind of thing you'd see in the corner of a map or chart, showing cardinal directions—north, south, east, west—sometimes the intermediate ones too. Must hurt like hell to have it tattooed there.”

“You think?” said Marilyn.

“They're called roses because some of them are very ornate. The first one was drawn by a sixteenth-century Portuguese cartographer named Pedro Reinel. And originally they were called wind roses because early mapmakers made no distinction between a direction and a wind that came from that direction.”

“You're good,” Marilyn said.

“Are you glad you came back?”

“Glad might be overstating it,” she said, delicately touching her eye where Billy Moore had punched her.

“And of course,” said Zak, “as far as that goes, the early roses made no distinction between magnetic north and true north. That's called deviation. I could go on.”

“I imagine you could.”

It might have been a putdown, but he didn't think it was. She seemed happy enough to hear him spout his cartographic expertise. She looked at him approvingly, but then with some concern.

“We're both going to have black eyes,” she said. “People will think we've been boxing each other.”

“Well, they'll think you won. Mine's going to look worse than yours.”

“Maybe we need to get a bag of ice.”

“Funny thing,” said Zak. “Where they have ice they often have alcohol.”

“Don't tell me you know some sleazy watering hole where cartographers go to lick their wounds?”

“I don't actually hang out with cartographers,” Zak confessed. “But I do know a sleazy watering hole where I go to lick
my
wounds.”

“Good enough,” said Marilyn.

 

11. PLASMA

Wrobleski didn't like having to sit in one place in order to be informed, entertained, or sedated: he found the passivity excruciating. That's why he'd bought the biggest TV he could find—panoramic, high-def, as large as his own bed, all the bells and whistles and klaxons—and wall-mounted—once they'd reinforced the wall of his living room. When there was something he really needed to see, he could watch it while still pacing around the room.

The screen currently showed two women and a man sitting uncomfortably in gawkily stylish, primary-colored chairs. Behind them an electronic backdrop showed ever-changing “then and now” images of the city. One woman was the interviewer, young, eagerly serious, but unthreatening, unlikely to give the other two a hard time. The other woman was familiar to Wrobleski, and to everybody else in this city. It was the mayor, Margaret “Meg” Gunderson, a big, severe-looking woman, a bruiser with a background in the transport unions, worn only somewhat smooth by her years in city politics. She'd been pushed through media boot camp, taught when and how to smile, to speak slowly and display a certain quirky charm, but she still looked like someone you wouldn't want to tangle with in a street fight.

The man, if you wanted Wrobleski's opinion, was a ludicrous, pretentious clown, albeit one for whom Meg Gunderson apparently had some use at that moment. The interviewer introduced the clown as Marco Brandt, a member of the mayor's select committee on inner-city regeneration, and described him as a “futurologist with a special interest in speculative urbanism,” but Wrobleski had stopped listening before she'd gotten around to explaining what the fuck that meant.

Brandt's exoticism was conspicuous but oddly nonspecific. His voice, when he acknowledged the introduction, seemed to be conducting its own world tour of accents. He was an older man trying to look young. The clothes were all black but featured asymmetrical angles and various fabrics that showed different degrees of luster: velvet, brocade, leather insets. His white hair was spiked and upright, and he wore spectacles that looked like ornate miniature scaffoldings on a long, thin face that would otherwise have appeared bland.

The three TV heads were talking about the future of the city. Mayor Gunderson was giving it her all, being as genial as she could manage, but also comprehensible, talking about the need for the city to get off its butt and press on with new developments. And she had a pet project. The old Telstar Hotel, which all on-screen agreed was a great example of sixties architecture—though Wrobleski had only ever thought of it as that closed-down dump that used to have a revolving restaurant—was now about to be included on the National Register of Historic Architecture. Gunderson had worked hard for this, become personally identified with the campaign that put the Telstar at the heart of the next phase of renewal. She said she cared deeply, was passionate about the plans. She said she was prepared to put her reputation on the line here. For all that Wrobleski despised and distrusted politicians, he was almost inclined to believe her.