Mona Lisa Overdrive (9 page)

Now she watched him pose beside his suitcases, and it was hard to connect that up,
why she’d left with him next day on the Skoda, headed into Cleveland. The Skoda’d
had a busted little radio you couldn’t hear over the engine, just play it soft at
night in a field by the road. Tuner part was cracked so it only picked up one station,
ghost music up from some lonesome tower in Texas, steel guitar fading in and out all
night, feeling how she was wet against his leg and the stiff dry grass prickling the
back of her neck.

Prior put her blue bag into a white cart with a striped top and she climbed in after
it, hearing tiny Spanish voices from the Cuban driver’s headset. Then Eddy stowed
the gator cases and he and Prior got in. Rolling out to the runway through walls of
rain.

The plane wasn’t what she knew from the stims, not like a long rich bus inside, with
lots of seats. It was a little black thing with sharp, skinny wings and windows that
made it look like it was squinting.

She went up some metal stairs and there was a space with four seats and the same gray
carpet all over, on the walls and ceiling too, everything clean and cool and gray.
Eddy came in after her and took a seat like it was something he did every day, loosening
his tie and stretching his legs. Prior was pushing buttons beside the door. It made
a sighing sound when it closed.

She looked out the narrow, streaming windows at runway lights reflected on wet concrete.

Came down here on the train
, she thought,
New York to Atlanta and then you change
.

The plane shivered. She heard the airframe creak as it came to life.

She woke briefly, two hours later, in the darkened cabin, cradled by the long hum
of the jet. Eddy was asleep, his mouth half-open. Maybe Prior was sleeping too, or
maybe he just had his eyes closed, she couldn’t tell.

Halfway back into a dream she wouldn’t remember in the morning, she heard the sound
of that Texas radio, fading steel chords drawn out like an ache.

Jubilee and Bakerloo, Circle and District. Kumiko peered at the little laminated map
Petal had given her and shivered. The concrete platform seemed to radiate cold through
the soles of her boots.

“It’s so fucking old,” Sally Shears said absently, her glasses reflecting a convex
wall sheathed in white ceramic tile.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The tube.” A new tartan scarf was knotted under Sally’s chin, and her breath was
white when she spoke. “You know what bothers me? It’s how sometimes you’ll see ’em
sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don’t take down the old tile first.
Or they’ll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring and you can see all these
different layers of tile.…”

“Yes?”

“Because it’s getting
narrower
, right? It’s like arterial plaque.…”

“Yes,” Kumiko said dubiously, “I see.… Those boys, Sally, what is the meaning of their
costume, please?”

“Jacks. What they call Jack Draculas.”

The four Jack Draculas huddled like ravens on the opposite platform. They wore nondescript
black raincoats and polished black combat boots laced to the knee. One turned to address
another and Kumiko saw that his hair was drawn back into a plaited queue and bound
with a small black bow.

“Hung him,” Sally said, “after the war.”

“Who?”

“Jack Dracula. They had public hangings for a while, after the war. Jacks, you wanna
stay away from ’em. Hate anybody foreign …”

Kumiko would have liked to access Colin, but the Maas-Neotek unit was tucked behind
a marble bust in the room where Petal served their meals, and then the train arrived,
amazing her with the archaic thunder of wheels on steel rail.

Sally Shears against the patchwork backdrop of the city’s architecture, her glasses
reflecting the London jumble, each period culled by economics, by fire, by war.

Kumiko, already confused by three rapid and apparently random train changes, let herself
be hauled through a sequence of taxi rides. They’d jump out of one cab, march into
the nearest large store, then take the first available exit to another street and
another cab. “Harrods,” Sally said at one point, as they cut briskly through an ornate,
tile-walled hall pillared in marble. Kumiko blinked at thick red roasts and shanks
displayed on tiered marble counters, assuming they were made of plastic. And then
out again, Sally hailing the next cab. “Covent Garden,” she said to the driver.

“Excuse me, Sally. What are we doing?”

“Getting lost.”

Sally drank hot brandy in a tiny cafe beneath the snow-streaked glass roof of the
piazza. Kumiko drank chocolate.

“Are we lost, Sally?”

“Yeah. Hope so, anyway.” She looked older today, Kumiko thought; lines of tension
or fatigue around her mouth.

“Sally, what is it that you do? Your friend asked if you were still retired.…”

“I’m a businesswoman.”

“And my father is a businessman?”

“Your father
is
a businessman, honey. No, not like that. I’m an indie. I make investments, mostly.”

“In what do you invest?”

“In other indies.” She shrugged. “Feeling curious today?” She sipped her brandy.

“You advised me to be my own spy.”

“Good advice. Takes a light touch, though.”

“Do you live here, Sally, in London?”

“I travel.”

“Is Swain another ‘indie’?”

“He thinks so. He’s into influence, nods in the right direction; you need that here,
to do business, but it gets on my nerves.” She tossed back the rest of the brandy
and licked her lips.

Kumiko shivered.

“You don’t have to be scared of Swain. Yanaka could have him for breakfast.…”

“No. I thought of those boys in the subway. So thin …”

“The Draculas.”

“A gang?”

“Bosozoku,”
Sally said, with fair pronunciation. “ ‘Running tribes’? Anyway, like a tribe.” It
wasn’t the right word, but Kumiko thought she saw the distinction. “They’re thin because
they’re poor.” She gestured to the waiter for a second brandy.

“Sally,” Kumiko said, “when we came here, the route we took, the trains and cabs,
that was in order to make certain we were not followed?”

“Nothing’s ever certain.”

“But when we went to meet Tick, you took no precautions. We could easily have been
followed. You enlist Tick to spy on Swain, yet you take no precautions. You bring
me here, you take many precautions. Why?”

The waiter put a steaming glass down in front of her. “You’re a sharp little honey,
aren’t you?” She leaned forward and inhaled the fumes of brandy. “It’s like this,
okay? With Tick, maybe I’m just trying to shake some action.”

“But Tick is concerned that Swain not discover him.”

“Swain won’t touch him, not if he knows he’s working for me.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows I might kill him.” She raised the glass, looking suddenly happier.

“Kill Swain?”

“That’s right.” She drank.

“Then why were you so cautious today?”

“Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances
are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are.
Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the
Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter.
You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware
in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?”

“Yes.”

“You stim while he works?”

“Yes …”

“There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now.…”

Kumiko nearly overturned what was left of her chocolate.

“Hey.” The polished nails tapped Kumiko’s wrist. “Don’t worry about it. He wouldn’t’ve
sent you here like that, with a bug. Make you too easy for his enemies to
track. But you see what I mean? It’s good to get out from under, or anyway try. On
our own, right?”

“Yes,” Kumiko said, her heart still pounding, the panic continuing to rise. “He killed
my mother,” she blurted, then vomited chocolate on the café’s gray marble floor.

Sally leading her past the columns of Saint Paul’s, walking, not talking. Kumiko,
in a disjointed trance of shame, registering random information: the white shearling
that lined Sally’s leather coat, the oily rainbow sheen of a pigeon’s feathers as
it waddled out of their way, red buses like a giant’s toys in the Transport Museum,
Sally warming her hands around a foam cup of steaming tea.

Cold, it would always be cold now. The freezing damp in the city’s ancient bones,
the cold waters of Sumida that had filled her mother’s lungs, the chill flight of
the neon cranes.

Her mother was fine-boned and dark, the thick spill of her hair grained with gold
highlights, like some rare tropical hardwood. Her mother smelled of perfume arid warm
skin. Her mother told her stories, about elves and fairies and Copenhagen, which was
a city far away. When Kumiko dreamed of the elves, they were like her father’s secretaries,
lithe and staid, with black suits and furled umbrellas. The elves did many curious
things, in her mother’s stories, and the stories were magic, because they changed
with the telling, and you could never be certain how a tale might end on a given night.
There were princesses in the stories as well, and ballerinas, and each of them, Kumiko
had known, was in some way her mother.

The princess-ballerinas were beautiful but poor, dancing for love in the far city’s
heart, where they were courted by artists and student poets, handsome and penniless.
In order to support an aged parent, or purchase an organ for an ailing brother, a
princess-ballerina was sometimes obliged to voyage very far indeed, perhaps as far
as Tokyo, to
dance for money. Dancing for money, the tales implied, was not a happy thing.

Sally took her to a robata bar in Earls Court and forced her to drink a glass of sake.
A smoked fugu fin floated in the hot wine, turning it the color of whiskey. They ate
robata from the smoky grill, and Kumiko felt the cold recede, but not the numbness.
The decor of the bar induced a profound sense of cultural dislocation: it managed
to simultaneously reflect traditional Japanese design and look as though it had been
drawn up by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

She was very strange, Sally Shears, stranger than all of gaijin London. Now she told
Kumiko stories, stories about people who lived in a Japan Kumiko had never known,
stories that defined her father’s role in the world. The
oyabun
, she called Kumiko’s father. The world Sally’s stories described seemed no more real
than the world of her mother’s fairy tales, but Kumiko began to understand the basis
and extent of her father’s power.
“Kuromaku,”
Sally said. The word meant black curtain. “It’s from Kabuki, but it means a fixer,
someone who sells favors. Means behind-the-scenes, right? That’s your father. That’s
Swain, too. But Swain’s your old man’s
kobun
, or anyway one of them.
Oyabun-kobun
, parent-child. That’s partly where Roger gets his juice. That’s why you’re here now,
because Roger owes it to the
oyabun. Giri
, understand?”

“He is a man of rank.”

Sally shook her head. “Your old man, Kumi, he’s
it
. If he’s had to ship you out of town to keep you safe, means there’s some serious
changes on the way.”

“Been down the drinker?” Petal asked, as they entered the room, his eyeglass edges
winking Tiffany light from a bronze and stained-glass tree that grew on the sideboard.
Kumiko wanted to look at the marble head that hid the Maas-Neotek unit, but forced
herself to look out
into the garden. The snow there had become the color of London sky.

“Where’s Swain?” Sally asked.

“Guvnor’s out,” Petal told her.

Sally went to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of scotch from a heavy decanter.
Kumiko saw Petal wince as the decanter came down hard on the polished wood. “Any messages?”

“No.”

“Expect him back tonight?”

“Can’t say, really. Do you want dinner?”

“No.”

“I’d like a sandwich,” Kumiko said.

Fifteen minutes later, with the untouched sandwich on the black marble bedside table,
she sat in the middle of the huge bed, the Maas-Neotek unit between her bare feet.
She’d left Sally drinking Swain’s whiskey and staring out into the gray garden.

Now she took up the unit and Colin shuddered into focus at the foot of the bed.

“Nobody can hear my half of this,” he said quickly, putting a finger to his lips,
“and a good thing, too. Room’s bugged.”

Kumiko started to reply, then nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Smart girl. Got two conversations for you. One’s your host and his
minder, other’s your host and Sally. Got the former about fifteen minutes after you
stashed me downstairs. Listen …” Kumiko closed her eyes and heard the tinkle of ice
in a whiskey glass.