Wetware (17 page)

“Can you arrange it?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. He nodded. “They will take my word for it.”

She nodded.

“Good,” said Jack.

“Tell me,” said Kay. “Who comes to the competition?”

“Important people,” said Stone.

“What kind of important people,” said Jack.

“Oh, senators, congressmen,” said Stone.

“They’re just politicians,” said Jack. He shrugged.

“Well, the chairman of the banking board comes too. I think he is one of the few of them who understands music.”

“That’s Wendell Blaine, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, yes,” said Stone. “He is on the committee for the audition.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

They walked a little farther.

“Does he ever come backstage, after a performance?” she said.

“Who? Blaine? Wild horses couldn’t keep him away,” said Stone. “He has been very helpful in the past. He has opened doors. He is an important man, and don’t you forget it.”

“We’ve got good memories,” said Jack.

CHAPTER 5

April 5, 2029

JACKSON’S NAME was in the telephone directory, and when Briggs looked it up, he saw that Jackson lived in the older part of town. All of the back streets there were named for trees, Apple, Oak, Birch, Pine, Spruce, Elm, Pear, Orange, Lemon, Ash. Some of them were short alleys, culs-de-sacs in which brownstones still stood, three and maybe four stories, with steps that went up the front. Briggs supposed that there were small gardens in the back. People who lived here kept gardens for flowers and vegetables, and one of the ways to get a tomato, a real one, was to come here in September. Eating one with vinegar, oil, and a little salt and pepper was like being in another age. Jackson had a green thumb, and he had brought Briggs a tomato from time to time.

Jackson’s name was missing from the list of tenants next to the buzzers by the outside door, but there was only one name gone, so Briggs knew which apartment must have been his. Even from downstairs Briggs could hear the sound: the Mungo Men were already at work.

He leaned against the wall downstairs, hearing the sound. Briggs supposed that Jackson hadn’t known where Kay and Jack had gone; maybe he had just helped them get away and that was all he knew. Briggs tapped his head against the wall. Then he turned and started climbing, taking the steps one at a time.

The door of the apartment hung by the top hinge. The bottom one had been torn from the frame. The lock had been smashed. The Mungo Men communicated by grunts of disbelief that anyone could care about something as worthless as the object one of them had just found, or they used another sound, a guttural exclamation of curiosity or the interrogatory.
Augh. Unh?
Briggs pushed the door open.

Three of them were at work. Their clothes were mismatched, worn, picked up here and there in the apartments they ransacked. One of them had a scarf around his head and wore a coat made from fur that looked as though it came from an animal that had been killed for a bounty. The place had the smell of the cheap beer and brandy they drank.

One of the men went through the sofa with a knife, his stabbing a slow yet oddly insane motion, like a lunatic who was taking his time in killing someone. The stuffing of the cushions was on the floor. Briggs realized that the way in which the room was being attacked wasn’t as chaotic as it seemed; if you watched for a moment, you saw that they had divided the room into one-foot cubes, and that they were going to look through each one, completely, even if some object happened to be in it.

An older man, whose beard was a mixture of gray and black, was smashing things in Jackson’s bathroom. He stopped when he discovered Jackson’s dentures, which had been sitting in a glass on a shelf next to the medicine cabinet. The man made a grunt of excitement
(Unh)
and picked them up and put them into his toothless mouth. He grinned at himself in the mirror, the teeth too large for him but probably workable, and when he turned to look at Briggs, his expression was something like Jackson’s. Briggs looked at the smile and thought,
Jackson didn’t even
have time to get his teeth.

The apartment was only one room, a studio, and in it were a bed, a sofa, a desk, a table, and a chair, which had been moved to the center. The place was distinguished, even in its dismantling, by a paucity of emotional life. A lamp with a bent shade suggested how a drunken woman would wear a hat.

The Mungo Man came out of the bathroom, still satisfied with the teeth. He opened and closed his mouth, like a man who has peanut butter stuck on his palate, and as he stood there, his jaw working like a fish, he found a Hawaiian shirt. He stripped off his coat and put the thing on. Then he turned to Jackson’s desk, where he opened a drawer and found some letters that Jackson had saved. The Mungo Man went through them, scanning them, looking for numbers of accounts, details that could be turned into cash, and, finding none, moved on to the next item.

Briggs reached into the mess on the floor. It looked as if everything in the apartment had been suspended in the air, in free fall, and that it had suddenly stopped and everything had collected on the floor.

“We were here first,” said the Mungo Man with the teeth. “So don’t get cute.”

“I don’t want anything,” said Briggs.

“Bullshit,” said the Mungo Man. “Everybody wants something.”

“Well, maybe,” said Briggs.

“So, what is it?” said the Mungo Man.

“I don’t know,” said Briggs. “I just thought I’d look around. Maybe I’d see something.”

It was like talking to someone on an exercise machine: the man didn’t break stride. He opened the next drawer and used the edge of his hand to sweep the things in it from side to side. Photos, a birth certificate, a high school diploma, a book of pornographic pictures, which the Mungo Man looked at once and then dropped, and said, “Sex. Every one of these jackasses is into it. They like this or that. I could make a list.” He opened the next drawer, pulled it out, and turned it over, the things in it instantly changing from possessions to junk by the time they had hit the floor. The Mungo Man spread these items out. One good look was enough. No booze, no money, nothing to wear, no drugs. Fuck.

One of the Mungo Men had finished with the furniture and turned to a print on the wall. He broke the frame into small sections and looked at each one. They went about their work, grunting now and then, rodentlike, repetitive, their mouths opening and closing with the effort, with anticipation that seemed endless, no matter how disappointed.

They finished and turned to the pile of things they had made in the middle of the room to divide up: one took something and someone else grabbed it, and then the one who had grabbed something first kicked another object at the man who had objected, like kicking a dog to an alligator. One man got a half-empty bottle of brandy, a shirt, a couple of pairs of cotton underwear. Another man got the chair, a blanket, and what looked like some new razor blades. The last man got the teeth and some sheets. He looked quite happy. They kicked through the junk one last time, making sure they had missed nothing before giving Briggs a look of weary hostility. There really hadn’t been much here. The furniture, aside from the chair, had been too heavy to carry, given what it was worth. The credit cards were worthless. What they really wanted was a chance to hit someone’s apartment before word was on the street. Maybe even with a woman still there.

They left. Briggs sat down on the broken sofa. Sunlight slanted into the room. Somehow the disorder of the place was more upsetting than any abstract idea about Jackson. Here, at least, one could feel the certainty of life coming to an end. Briggs wished he had taken on one of the Mungo Men and had . . . had what? It was like saying you wanted to take hold of fate so as to stop it from being ugly. Then he felt his eyes filling for the briefest instant, just a little moisture, the arrival of it coming as a warning. He swallowed and stopped it, but didn’t feel any better.

He didn’t go. He was still sitting there when the Mungo Man with Jackson’s teeth came back, kicking through the things on the floor.

“So?” said the Mungo Man.

“I thought maybe he had stolen stuff from work,” said Briggs.

“What the fuck,” said the Mungo Man. His eyes darted back to Briggs, though, suspicious, furious, penetrating. What was it Briggs wanted? Had to be something.

“There’s nothing here,” said the Mungo Man. “Nothing but shit. Look.”

He kicked the trash.

“I’m telling you,” he said. “That’s it.”

The man stepped a little closer, bringing with him the ammonia smell of piss.

“I was here earlier,” said the Mungo Man. “Before the crew. Where did you say you worked?”

“Galapagos,” said Briggs.

“Oh, yeah,” said the Mungo Man. “They’ve got that turtle up there above the door. I’ve seen it. And they’ve got a picture of it on some blue cases, don’t they? Got diskettes in them, don’t they?”

The man took his hand out of his pocket, bringing out a blue handkerchief, with which he blew his nose. He did so while keeping his eyes on Briggs, although the man gave his nose a terrific side-to-side twist. Then he looked into the middle of his handkerchief before making a ball of it and stuffing it into the recesses of the coat.

The Mungo Man turned and abruptly moved away from the wall. After a couple of steps, though, he said over his shoulder, “So, are you coming or not?”

“Have you got the case?” said Briggs. “Did you find something earlier?”

“A blue case. Had a turtle on it,” said the Mungo Man. “Do you think he was stealing stuff? Heh?”

“I don’t know,” said Briggs.

In the street, the Mungo Man’s limp was more pronounced, and his gait gave Briggs the sensation of being on a platform of a merry-go-round and having a horse go up and down next to him. Their progress was steady and pretty fast, too, although Briggs had the feeling not so much of advancing horizontally as of descending. The sidewalk was cracked, with grass pushing up through it, and they went by two-story buildings that had obviously been put up in commercial haste which segued into an almost immediate decay. The fronts of many of them were covered with posters, which had been painted over with the graffito, “Whatcha got goin’?”

Needles and drug paraphernalia made the insidious glitter on the sidewalk, as though on this spot dreams had been so utterly consumed as to leave nothing more than this bright grit. The front of one building was like a warehouse, and on it were signs for ragpickers and junkmen, for product “liquidators,” and many of the names were written in Asian scripts he couldn’t read.

“Where are we going?” said Briggs.

“Down to the dump.”

The Mungo Man proceeded with that up-and-down gait. He put his hand into his pocket and brought out a sheet of newspaper in which he had wrapped a piece of smoked fish and a crust of bread. He took a bite, still going up and down, his jaw working in time to his walking, and when there was just a piece of skin with a shine on it, he held it out to Briggs.

“Here,” he said. “Eat.”

“That’s all right,” said Briggs.

“Are you too good to eat with me?” said the Mungo Man. “Ah, I could see it right off.”

Briggs reached over and picked up the skin. He put it in his mouth.

“I just don’t want anyone getting snotty with me,” said the Mungo Man. The Mungo Man rolled up the piece of brown paper and put it back into his pocket, like someone folding up a pocketknife.

Briggs looked into the distance, where the buildings became increasingly shoddy until it was hard to tell where the buildings ended and the junk began. The backside of the city, beyond the commercial part of it, was a moraine of shacks, a detritus of the most desperate souls who lived at the boundary of the dump. It was an open pit.

The surface was uneven, like waves, and each one seemed to be covered with a flotsam of only partially recognizable bits, shiny metal that could be part of a machine or just some packaging, a clutter of paper, old checks, more wrappers, something that could have been shattered glass, the edges of it giving off a spectral light. All of it stretched away to the horizon, shiny here and there in the way that only something worthless can be shiny, which is to say filled with false promise that had so correctly come to nothing. Overall, it gave the impression of a green-brown sea, sparkling here and there in the pale sunlight, uneasy, with some bad weather working in the distance.

They turned in at the gate. Briggs and the Mungo Man walked over the surface, which had been pushed around and compacted by a huge bulldozer. Every now and then they came across a canister of something that had broken and was oozing. Many broken lightbulbs. Shiny wrappers for toner. Briggs heard a dog’s two-tone woofing.

A hut stood at the side of the parking lot for the heavy equipment, the walls of the structure made from aluminum torn from truck trailers, the sections of it covered over with foil that looked as though it had been obtained from a space suit. A little smoke came from the roof, out of a heating duct that had been made into a stovepipe. The barking got louder.

“In here,” said the Mungo Man.

The dog was a brown animal, with a red tongue and the thick fur of something that had been manufactured rather than born. It had eyes like marbles and its movements were smooth, although repetitive. Briggs glanced at it once and then sat down at the side of the place, on a bench made from a plank and two engine blocks. He could still taste the fish.

A man was playing with the dog, cuffing the side of its face, on its jowls, knocking it one way and then the other. The dog jumped up, wagged its tail, and came in for more. The man cuffed it again, knocking it over. The dog jumped up and did it again. The man cuffed it. The two of them went about this like creatures at work, as though they were digging post holes. Briggs put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. What he heard was the watery, saliva-muffled slap of the man’s hand as it hit the dog, but after a minute or two the barking and the slapping stopped.

“Hey, what’s happened to your mutt?” said the Mungo Man. “Hey, Frank, I’m talking to you.”

The dog had rolled over on its side and now lay still. Frank pushed its rank fur with his toe.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was all right.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t hit it that way,” said the Mungo Man.

“He likes it,” said Frank. “He always came back for more.”

“Well,” said the Mungo Man. “The mutt doesn’t look too good.”

Frank stood there, looking down.

“I used to like to play with ’im,” said Frank.

“You aren’t going to start bawling, are you?” said the Mungo Man.

“He was a good dog,” said Frank.

“Ah, Jesus,” said the Mungo Man.

Frank sat down and put his head in his hands. He was whimpering now.

“Ah, Jesus. Stop it. You make me sick,” said the Mungo Man.

Frank sobbed harder.

“We used to sit here and have a game,” he said. “His fur was a little rough. But that was the only thing wrong with him.”

Briggs got up and looked at the dog. He turned it over and looked at the seam, which was a rough one, ridged, red. He wondered how anyone could do work like that. He guessed it was being done in Taiwan, or maybe Siberia. He had his tools in his pocket, and he took them out now and opened the seam. Frank stopped crying. The Mungo Man watched too. Briggs reached in and found the works, which sat in a bath of slime, a variety of impact-absorbing compound that looked like jelled mineral oil.