Mona Lisa Overdrive (20 page)

“Ghosts,” Sally said, rounding a corner, Kumiko close at her side. The streets had
grown progressively more empty, these past several blocks, the buildings darker and
more decrepit.

“Pardon me?”

“Lotta ghosts here for me, or anyway there should be.”

“You know this place?”

“Sure. Looks all the same, but different, you know?”

“No …”

“Someday you will. We find who I’m looking for, you just do your good-girl routine.
Speak if you’re spoken to, otherwise don’t.”

“Who are we looking for?”

“The man. What’s left of him, anyway …”

Half a block on, the grim street empty—Kumiko had never seen an
empty
street before, aside from Swain’s crescent shrouded in midnight snow—Sally came to
a halt beside an ancient and utterly unpromising storefront, its twin display windows
silvered with a rich inner coating of dust. Peering in, Kumiko made out the glass-tube
letters of an unlit neon sign: METRO, then a longer word. The door between the windows
had been reinforced with a sheet of corrugated steel; rusting eyebolts protruded at
intervals, strung with slack lengths of galvanized razor wire.

Now Sally faced that door, squared her shoulders, and executed a fluid series of small,
quick gestures.

Kumiko stared as the sequence was repeated. “Sally—”

“Jive,” Sally cut her off. “I told you to shut up, okay?”

“Yeah?” The voice, barely more than a whisper, seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

“I told you already,” Sally said.

“I don’t jive.”

“I wanna talk to him,” she said, her voice hard and careful.

“He’s dead.”

“I know that.”

A silence followed, and Kumiko heard a sound that might have been the wind, a cold,
grit-laden wind scouring the curve of the geodesics far above them.

“He’s not here,” the voice said, and seemed to recede. “Round the corner, half a block,
left into the alley.”

Kumiko would remember the alley always: dark brick slick with damp, hooded ventilators
trailing black streamers of congealed dust, a yellow bulb in a cage of corroded alloy,
the low growth of empty bottles that sprouted at the base of either wall, the man-sized
nests of crumpled fax and white foam packing segments, and the sound of Sally’s bootheels.

Past the bulb’s dim glow was darkness, though a reflected gleam on wet brick showed
a final wall, cul-de-sac, and Kumiko hesitated, frightened by a sudden stir of echo,
a scurrying, the steady dripping of water.…

Sally raised her hand. A tight beam of very bright light framed a sharp circle of
paint-scrawled brick, then smoothly descended.

Descended until it found the thing at the base of the wall, dull metal, an upright
rounded fixture that Kumiko mistook for another ventilator. Near its base were the
stubs of white candles, a flat plastic flask filled with a clear liquid, an assortment
of cigarette packets, a scattering of loose cigarettes, and an elaborate, multiarmed
figure drawn in what appeared to be white powdered chalk.

Sally stepped forward, the beam held steady, and Kumiko saw that the armored thing
was bolted into the brickwork with massive rivets. “Finn?”

A rapid flicker of pink light from a horizontal slot.

“Hey, Finn, man …” An uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice …

“Moll.” A grating quality, as if through a broken
speaker. “What’s with the flash? You still got amps in? Gettin’ old, you can’t see
in the dark so good?”

“For my friend.”

Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash
in noon sunlight, and Kumiko’s face was washed with a stutter of light.

“Yeah,” grated the voice, “so who’s she?”

“Yanaka’s daughter.”

“No shit.”

Sally lowered the light; it fell on the candles, the flask, the damp gray cigarettes,
the white symbol with its feathery arms.

“Help yourself to the offerings,” said the voice. “That’s half a liter of Moskovskaya
there. The hoodoo mark’s flour. Tough luck; the high rollers draw ’em in cocaine.”

“Jesus,” Sally said, an odd distance in her voice, squatting down, “I don’t believe
this.” Kumiko watched as she picked up the flask and sniffed at the contents.

“Drink it. It’s good shit. Fuckin’ better be. Nobody short-counts the oracle, not
if they know what’s good for em.”

“Finn,” Sally said, then tilted the flask and swallowed, wiping her mouth with the
back of her hand, “you gotta be crazy.…”

“I should be so lucky. A rig like this, I’m pushing it to have a little imagination,
let alone crazy.”

Kumiko moved closer, then squatted beside Sally.

“It’s a construct, a personality job?” Sally put down the flask of vodka and stirred
the damp flour with the tip of a white fingernail.

“Sure. You seen ’em before. Real-time memory if I wanna, wired into c-space if I wanna.
Got this oracle gig to keep my hand in, you know?” The thing made a strange sound:
laughter. “Got love troubles? Got a bad woman don’t understand you?” The laugh noise
again, like peals of static. “Actually I’m more into business advice. It’s the local
kids leave the goodies. Adds to the mystique, kinda.

And once in a while I get a skeptic, some asshole figures he’ll help himself to the
take.” A scarlet hairline flashed from the slit and a bottle exploded somewhere to
Kumiko’s right. Static laughter. “So what brings you this way, Moll? You and,” again
the pink light flicked across Kumiko’s face, “Yanaka’s daughter …”

“The Straylight run,” Sally said.

“Long time, Moll …”

“She’s after me, Finn. Fourteen years and that crazy bitch is on my ass.…”

“So maybe she’s got nothin’ better to do. You know how rich folks are.…”

“You know where Case is, Finn? Maybe she’s after him.…”

“Case got out of it. Rolled up a few good scores after you split, then he kicked it
in the head and quit clean. You did the same, maybe you wouldn’t be freezing your
buns off in an alley, right? Last I heard, he had four kids.…”

Watching the hypnotic sweep of the scanning pink ember, Kumiko had some idea of what
it was that Sally spoke with. There were similar things in her father’s study, four
of them, black lacquered cubes arranged along a low shelf of pine. Above each cube
hung a formal portrait. The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits
and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems
of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes
contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father’s evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more
fascinating than frightening. If they did contain ghosts, she reasoned, they would
be quite small, as the cubes themselves were scarcely large enough to contain a child’s
head.

Her father sometimes meditated before the cubes, kneeling on the bare tatami in an
attitude that connoted profound respect. She had seen him in this position many
times, but she was ten before she heard him address the cubes. And one had answered.
The question had meant nothing to her, the answer less, but the calm tone of the ghost’s
reply had frozen her where she crouched, behind a door of paper, and her father had
laughed to find her there; rather than scolding her, he’d explained that the cubes
housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their
souls? she’d asked. No, he’d said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was
a subtle one. “They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner
approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are
ghosts.”

After Sally’s lecture on the history and hierarchy of the Yakuza, in the robata bar
in Earls Court, Kumiko had decided that each of the men in the photographs, the subjects
of the personality recordings, had been an
oyabun
.

The thing in the armored housing, she reasoned, was of a similar nature, though perhaps
more complex, just as Colin was a more complex version of the Michelin guide her father’s
secretaries had carried on her Shinjuku shopping expeditions. Finn, Sally called it,
and it was evident that this Finn had been a friend or associate of hers.

But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan
the silent fall of midnight snow?

“Europe,” Sally began, “when I split from Case I went all around there. Had a lot
of money we got for the run, anyway it looked like a lot then. Tessier-Ashpool’s AI
paid it out through a Swiss bank. It erased every trace we’d ever been up the well;
I mean everything, like if you looked up the names we traveled under, on the JAL shuttle,
they just weren’t there. Case checked it all out when we were back in Tokyo, wormed
his way into all kinds of data; it was like none of it ever happened. I didn’t understand
how it could do that, AI or not, but nobody
ever really understood what happened up there, when Case rode that Chinese icebreaker
through their core ice.”

“Did it try to get in touch, after?”

“Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not
gone
gone, but gone
into
everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just
was
. And if it didn’t want you to see it, to know it was there, well, there was no way
you ever could, and no way you’d ever be able to prove it to anybody else even if
you did know.… And me, I didn’t wanna know. I mean, whatever it was, it seemed done
to me, finished. Armitage was dead, Riviera was dead, Ashpool was dead, the Rasta
tug pilot who took us out there was back in Zion cluster and he’d probably written
it all off as another ganja dream.… I left Case in the Tokyo Hyatt, never saw him
again.…”

“Why?”

“Who knows? Nothing much. I was young, it just seemed over.”

“But you’d left
her
up the well. In Straylight.”

“You got it. And I’d think about that, once in a while. When we were leaving, Finn,
it was like she didn’t care about any of it. Like I’d killed her crazy sick father
for her, and Case had cracked their cores and let their AIs loose in the matrix … So
I put her on the list, right? You get big enough trouble one day, you’re being got
at, you check that list.”

“And you figured it for her, right off?”

“No. I gotta pretty long list.”

Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally’s partner, never
reentered her story.

As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn’s
benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a
bishonen
hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally’s
matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to
follow, with its references to places and things she didn’t know, it was easy to imagine
her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of
bishonen
. But no, she thought, as Sally dismissed “a bad year in Hamburg,” sudden anger in
her voice—an old anger, the year a decade past—it was a mistake to cast this woman
in Japanese terms. There were no
ronin
, no wandering samurai; Sally and the Finn were talking business.

She’d arrived at her bad year in Hamburg, Kumiko gathered, after having won and lost
some sort of fortune. She’d won her share of it “up there,” in a place the Finn had
called Straylight, in partnership with the man Case. In doing so, she’d made an enemy.

“Hamburg,” the Finn interrupted, “I heard stories about Hamburg.…”

“The money was gone. How it is, with a big score, when you’re young … No money was
sort of like getting back to normal, but I was involved with these Frankfurt people,
owed ’em, and they wanted to take it out in trade.”

“What kinda trade?”

“They wanted people hit.”

“So?”

“So I got out. When I could. Went to London …”

Perhaps, Kumiko decided, Sally
had
once been something along
ronin
lines, a kind of samurai. In London, however, she’d become something else, a businesswoman.
Supporting herself in some unspecified way, she gradually became a backer, providing
funds for various kinds of business operations. (What was a “credit sink”? What was
“laundering data”?)

“Yeah,” the Finn said, “you did okay. Got yourself a share in some German casino.”

“Aix-la-Chapelle. I was on the board. Still am, when I got the right passport.”

“Settled down?” The laugh again.

“Sure.”

“Didn’t hear much, back here.”

“I was running a casino. That was it. Doing fine.”

“You were prizefighting. ‘Misty Steele,’ augmented featherweight. Eight fights, I
made book on five of ’em. Blood matches, sweetmeat. Illegal.”

“Hobby.”

“Some hobby. I saw the vids. Burmese Kid opened you right up, living color …”

Kumiko remembered the long scar.

“So I quit. Five years ago and I was already five years too old.”

“You weren’t bad, but ‘Misty Steele’ … Jesus.”

“Gimme a break. Wasn’t me made that one up.”

“Sure. So tell me about our friend upstairs, how she got in touch.”

“Swain. Roger Swain. Sends one of his boys to the casino, would-be hardass called
Prior. About a month ago.”

“Swain the fixer? London?”

“Same one. So Prior’s got a present for me, about a meter of printout. A list. Names,
dates, places.”

“Bad?”

“Everything. Stuff I’d almost forgotten.”

“Straylight run?”

“Everything. So I packed a bag, got back to London, there’s Swain. He’s sorry, it’s
not his fault, but he’s gotta twist me. Because somebody’s twisting him. Got his own
meter of printout to worry about.” Kumiko heard Sally’s heels shift on the pavement.

“What’s he want?”

“A rip, warm body. Celeb.”

“Why you?”

“Come on, Finn, that’s what I’m here to ask you.”

“Swain tell you it’s 3Jane?”

“No. But my console cowboy in London did.”