Nova Swing (10 page)

“So what’s this, Vic?” Paulie DeRaad wanted to know.

The kid heard Paulie’s voice. It sat up trembling and looked from one to the other of them. It caught Vic’s eye. It recognised him. He could see the operator far down inside, and the Point kid, and in there with them both the artefact, still white and unknown, some animal-like thing running towards Vic across the event site. There was no way to avoid the directness of this: something wrong was happening. Wherever Vic and Paulie situated themselves in the room they couldn’t hide from it. They still caught flashes of the Shadow Boy’s unhomely charm. For a moment the foul air would be full of rain falling through sunlight, the smell of the sea. Between moans from the proxy and bursts of code like music, they heard its voice.

“Am I here?” it appealed to Paulie. “I can’t seem to see myself.”

“This happened two or three days afterwards,” Paulie said to Vic. “I can’t pass this off on my buyer. I can’t use it for myself, even if I knew what it was. This ain’t good business, Vic.”

“I see that,” Vic said. “Can we get out of here?”

The Point kid laughed. “No one gets out of here,” it whispered, in three separate voices at once.

“I’m revolted,” Paulie DeRaad said.

He locked the kid back in and the rickshaw returned them to the Semiramide, where the evening had warmed up a little. The air was thick with music and talk. The tables were full. Monas wafted between them on four-inch urethane heels, reeking mainly of peppermint or vanilla essence, though some had chosen cinnamon when they bought the package. Images from EMC actions at Cor Caroli and Motel Splendido were showering across the walls, along with footage of Paulie DeRaad’s old ship, the
Hellflower,
going up in a silent flat-plane blast after it took a hit from some top-end Nastic asset. Vic and Paulie sat down in the office again, and Paulie had Alice Nylon shut the door to keep the noise out. They got drinks, and Paulie said, “You see the direction I’m thinking. I have to ask, Vic: did you bring something bad from in there?”

“Everything in there’s bad,” Vic said. “You know the risks.”

“I’m the buyer,” Paulie reminded him. “You’re the one with the professional skills.” He seemed to be having trouble with his swallow reflex. Also, his hands had a tremor which was new to Vic Serotonin. “You take the risks,” said Paulie. “Not me. What if I caught something from that thing?”

“Well, then, you would begin to feel bad. But you look fine to me, Paulie.”

“I ain’t fine,” Paulie said. “I got a temperature ever since this started. I don’t care about my food. You bring a Mona in, I even forget she’s there for a moment or two. I get vague. What sort of life is that?”

“One thing,” Vic advised, “you should shoot it.”

Paulie stared.

“I tried that right away. But it reassembles itself, Vic. White lights rolling together from all over the floor. Eeriest fucking thing you ever saw, crying and whining the whole time.” He added, as Vic got up to leave, “By the way, I got your boy Antoyne working for me now, that’s OK with you.”

Eleven p.m., too late to go anywhere, too early to go home. Vic was puzzled by everything he had seen and heard. He thought about going to visit Emil and Edith Bonaventure. He thought about going home to bed. In the end he didn’t do either of those things. On his way out he stopped at the table where Fat Antoyne Messner sat. Antoyne, who was wearing a brand new royal blue drape suit over a yellow shirt, had been joined by one of the club Monas. At close quarters this vision turned out to be Joe Leone’s ex-squeeze, Irene. Irene was leaning in close so Antoyne could see deep into the promise of her hot-ochre Mexican-style blouse. She had her fingers on his wrist as if she was taking his pulse, and they were both drinking those pink and yellow drinks he liked.

“Hi, Irene,” Vic said, “Fat Antoyne! Nice suit!”

He had to shout to be heard over the crowd. “Why don’t I sit down with you?” he suggested. When they looked at each other then back at Vic and didn’t answer, Vic made a
What can you do?
gesture, as if the general noise levels were causing him to mishear what everyone said, and sat down anyway. He ordered drinks.

“So: everyone works for Paulie now?”

“It’s temporary, Vic,” Fat Antoyne replied quickly, as if he had been expecting that question.

“It’s work,” Irene corrected him, at the same time giving Vic a look. “Everyone has to work,” she said. “I don’t care how direct I am when I say that.”

Naturally, a person with Antoyne’s skills sought port work, shipyard work, Irene went on to explain; but the civilian yards weren’t doing as well as anyone thought. “He looked everywhere, and evidently I found him this opportunity instead.” Things were tough all over, she reminded Vic, and in a shortening labour market you couldn’t always have your first choice: luckily Paulie DeRaad was there to fill the gap. She had always found Paulie to be a fair employer, also he was known for good pay. Vic could see how well it was working out, she said, by the new sharp way Antoyne could afford to dress.

Vic agreed he probably could.

“I didn’t have no real place there,” Antoyne said suddenly, meaning Liv Hula’s bar. As he saw it, that was the problem. “All I wanted was a chance to fit in, Vic.”

“Still,” Vic said, “don’t you miss those nights we caned it with Liv?”

“Another benefit is, here they just call me by my name. Which I prefer that. Not ‘Fat Antoyne’ like in some other joints.”

“It’s great you lost weight,” Vic said.

To Irene, with her honed Mona instincts for the feeling nature of life, Vic Serotonin had the face of someone who walked around the town a lot on his own. When he finished his drink and said goodbye to them both, and added courteously to Irene, “Be sure and have a nice night,” she felt all the things Vic didn’t know about himself quiver in her own nerves. She watched him make his way through the Semiramide crowd, passing a moment with Alice Nylon on the door, and told herself sadly, “I knew a million men like him.” With his black hair and sad hard eyes, he looked like the New Nuevo Tango itself, she had to allow. But he had no idea about other people, and less than no idea about himself. She couldn’t express it any other way. A man who walked around a lot on his own and despite that knew himself less well than others knew him. She put her hand over Fat Antoyne’s.

“Vic Serotonin,” she said, “will learn too late about the realness of the world, and how none of us is put here in it long.”

Fat Antoyne shrugged. “We don’t need to think about him.”

This was his signal they should return to the conversation they were having before Vic interrupted them. It was the same conversation they had every night since Joe Leone died, the mythodology of which was: they would soon leave Saudade and travel the Halo again, but this time together. Which was surely, as Irene pointed out, the simplest and most direct of gestures, since travel had by definition brought them both here and together in the first place. “I’ve washed so many planets out of my hair, why not this one?” she said. “Joe would want it for me,” she said. “I know he would!” Her eyes were reckless and bright. “Oh Antoyne, wouldn’t it be so nice?” Antoyne, less certain, was anyway pleased she said it. Each time they had this talk, he felt bound to warn Irene she could find more rewarding travel companions than himself—and better men, though he had had his day, that was certain. In response, he would always hear her say:

“Never talk yourself down, Antoyne!”

If he talked himself down, she warned him, a man wasn’t for her. She counted herself fortunate, she said, to meet Antoyne the awful night Joe died. She was known for her belief that life was follow your heart and never talk yourself down. The future was bright for both of them now, and sad men like Vic would never find that out.

Unaware of these harsh judgments, Vic Serotonin made his way down through Moneytown to the Corniche. Half an hour’s walk brought him to the shadows underneath an abandoned pier, where he stood looking out across the sand. The tide was neither in nor out. The sea had a light in it, as if something was happening just over the horizon. Where it fizzed and fumed at the perimeter of the event site, the surf was a violet colour, and gave off faint odours of oxidants and aftershave like an empty dance hall.

Vic had a familiarity with venues of this kind. He had instincts of his own about any place caught halfway between the event site and the city. But this one told him nothing, except he would not try to run anything across the line here. It didn’t strike Vic as a good way in. It didn’t strike him as a good way out. He smoked a cigarette. He looked and listened. Behind him, rickshaw girls stamped and panted in the crushed oystershell parking lot of the Café Surf, wasting their breath on the cool night air. Customers hurried towards the bar, laughing and batting out at the ads which fluttered in their hair. Every time someone opened the door, music spilled out. It wasn’t Vic’s kind of music, but he went inside anyway.

When he left an hour later, he was none the wiser. Fake Sandra Shen décor. Standing room only. Overflowing ashtrays, tables littered with screwed-up napkins, half-empty plates and Giraffe beer bottles. The smell of steam from the kitchen. And under the red neon sign,
Live Music Nightly,
a cheap two-piece to grind out endless bebop remixes of last year’s sentimental tunes. You couldn’t even get near the toilet for the stream of people coming out. Vic leaned on the bar, listening to the band and shaking his head; then he turned on his heel suddenly and pushed his way to the door. If something was happening there, he didn’t know what it was.

He took a rickshaw back into the city and made the girl stop outside the uptown police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe, where Lens Aschemann maintained an office. Past midnight, and damp winds chased wastepaper across the deserted pavement. A single second-floor window remained illuminated. Broken silhouettes came and went against the blind. It wasn’t hard to picture Aschemann up there, drinking rum while he methodically pasted Vic into the frame for some scheme Vic didn’t even know about. What had Site Crime stumbled over at the Café Surf? Paulie DeRaad’s EMC connexions, maybe, running an artefact-related operation of their own. But then why put Vic Serotonin in the frame for Paulie’s lack of discrimination?

“Hey,” the rickshaw girl reminded him, “you pay a horse to run.”

“So run,” Vic told her.

“You know I got to towel down if I stand around too long. People just don’t
get
that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Vic.

“Life’s too short to be sorry, hon.”

Vic paid her off on the edge of a weed-grown lot a few streets away from his rooms in South End, then took the roundabout route home. No one followed him, yet when he got into the hall of his building he couldn’t convince himself he was alone. A package had been left for him. When he opened it, he found a small leather-bound book, on the cover of which was a line-drawing of a hand holding some flowers. Though the flowers were all on the same stem, and the same shape, they were of different colours. For a moment, he thought that Edith Bonaventure had found her father’s diary and brought it to him. But the handwriting wasn’t Emil’s, and the first sentence Vic read began, “Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before my childhood?” Serotonin stared at this in exasperation, then ran upstairs to his room, where, instead of putting on the light, he stood by the window in the dark and looked down into the street. Ten or twenty yards away on the opposite side, someone looked back at him. It was the woman from Liv Hula’s bar, her face blanched by the vapour lamps, framed by the collar of her fur coat. By the time he had forced the window up and shouted, she was gone.

Some hours later, across the city, the man who resembled Einstein let himself into his dead wife’s bungalow by the sea.

The front door, swollen with salt moisture, must be lifted as you opened it; sometimes it stuck anyway. Sand feathered across the linoleum in the hall. Rather than switch on the lights, Aschemann paused and allowed his eyes to adjust to the faint sea-glimmer limning every surface. He made his way carefully to the kitchen, where he wiped the window and regarded the ocean. “How are you?” his wife’s voice said to him. “You see that ship out there?” It was the kitchen of an empty house, empty cupboards, empty shelves, dust and sand in a thin gritty layer on everything. Aschemann ran warm water from the faucet, catching it in his cupped hands to splash his face. Then he went back down the hall and took off his raincoat.

While he was doing that his wife’s voice said, “Can you see the same ship as me, those lights to the right of the Point?”

In life she had constantly asked him similar questions, whether he was standing next to her or lying in bed with some other woman halfway across the city. She had, somehow, never trusted her own eyes.

“I see the ship,” he reassured her. “It’s only a ship. Go to bed now.”

Comforted by this fragment of an exchange the rest of which lay at some inaccessible level of memory, he sat down in the lounge, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and dialled up his assistant, to whom he said, “I hope you have something good for me. Because we aren’t doing so well since the other day.” He knew this was ambiguous. Let it stand, he thought.

After the raid on the Semiramide Club, they had argued in the car. “I don’t like to have shots fired,” he had informed her. “Now I’ll have to apologise to Paulie.”

“Paulie is a violent creep.”

“Still. Shots fired is not my way. Find nothing and set light to a wall, is that a day’s work? Threaten some children! The problem with DeRaad will always be the same. He’s never quite intelligent enough for his own good, and never quite stupid enough for ours. That’s Paulie.” He touched her arm. “And drive slower,” he said. “I don’t want to lose this nice car. I don’t want to hurt someone.” She stared ahead, and, if anything, accelerated a little. Moneytown was all round them with rickshaws and pedestrians, the Cadillac embedded in early evening traffic one minute, prised free the next. Stop, start, stop, start: it made Aschemann feel ill.

“They aren’t children,” she said.