Nova Swing (11 page)

“You’re angry, I can understand that.”

The Semiramide raid had left him none the wiser. He had expected nothing less—who, after all, would store a proscribed artefact in the back room of a dance club? Not even Paulie DeRaad. Since then, without quite knowing why, Aschemann had returned repeatedly to the Café Surf, telling himself, Everything proceeds from there. To watch is best when you have no theory. He tracked his bebop golems into the night, observed their lateral slide and vanishment into the hustle of things in central Saudade. It was like a card trick. One in ten lasted a little longer, going as far, perhaps, as to negotiate for a room. “That must mean something,” he told his assistant now. “Ten per cent of them are more than ordinarily restless. They want something. Are they even artefacts as we know them?”

All this, she responded, served only to confirm what he already knew. Aschemann shrugged. “So it’s three in the morning,” he said, “and I don’t understand why you waste your time talking to an old man like me.”

“Vic Serotonin walked into the Café Surf tonight, half an hour after you walked out. I’ve been trying to reach you since.”

“Ah,” Aschemann said.

“I can’t report to you when you disconnect.”

“I suppose not.”

“You disconnect and wander about on your own,” she complained. When it became clear he wasn’t going to answer that, she said, “We got a little coverage. Would you like to see it now?”

Aschemann said he would.

The house lurched, then vanished from around him. He was looking down a nanocam feed, at jumpy visuals of people in some crowded space. His assistant’s voice came in across the top of that, its hollow, reverberant qualities an artefact of the transmission process. She seemed closer, but not quite in the room with him. “Is this all right?” she said. “Only they’re routing it down some kind of low priority EMC pipe. Ours are all down.”

“The pipe’s fine. The material itself is poor.”

“They had some technical problems with that too.”

It wasn’t anything like being there. The image stream wavered, held, dropped suddenly into greyscale while slow bars of black rolled queasily down Aschemann’s field of view. You could be the most experienced user, you would still throw up in the end. But there, quite visible, was Vic Serotonin, perhaps eight feet away from Aschemann, propping up the Long Bar at the Café Surf with his gabardine jacket open and his hat pushed to the back of his head, while the people around him conversed jerkily or ran fast-forward as if they lived in another world. “It looks as if he was waiting for someone,” Aschemann said, shaking his head irritably as if to dislodge something, while his eyes focused and refocused on a spot in the empty room. People often sought to clarify an incoming image this way. You would catch them squinting or banging their temple above one eye, it was a common reaction, which never worked.

“Do you have the same view as me?” the assistant said in an excited voice. “From about waist height? And there’s a woman in a red dress to the right of the bar?”

“That’s the view I have.”

“There he is. Do you see him? He said he never heard of the Café Surf, but there he is! This is exactly what we need!”

Aschemann wasn’t so sure. He asked her to close the pipe, and when his vision had returned to normal said, “All I see is a man having a drink in a bar. If that was illegal we would all be in the orbital correction facility. Where did Vic go after he left?”

“They don’t know.”

“That’s helpful.”

“If you watch the whole thing, the fault gets out of hand about two hundred and eighty seconds in, and they disconnect everything to fix it.”

Aschemann thanked her for the pictures. “Go home now,” he recommended. “Get some sleep. We have a lot to think about here.” He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room his wife had died in. He would be there until morning, sprawled in a stained yellow armchair and surrounded by her things. He would hear her voice, asking him what day it was, offering him a drink. He spent more time in that house than he would admit to his assistant; and missed his wife more than he would admit to himself.

Something in the Café Surf footage had caught Aschemann’s attention, but he couldn’t say what it was. Then, the evening of the next day, as he sat at the Long Bar listening to the two-piece, a young woman took the stool next to his and ordered a cocktail called “Ninety Per Cent Neon.” She was a Mona, so he thought at first, a Monroe look-alike in a red wrap-bodice evening dress and matching stilt-heel shoes.

“I’ve seen you here,” Aschemann said.

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the
Live Music Nightly
sign. She needed only a brushed aluminium frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He’d seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Serotonin. More importantly, perhaps, he’d seen it fourteen days ago, when she stumbled out of the toilet at the Café Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she was new in the world. She still had an unformed, labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

“I’m here a lot,” she said. “I like the band. Do you like them?”

He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little rum. “They’re as guilty as ever,” he said.

“Guilty?”

“Under his dexterity, this pianist hides neither intellect nor heart, only compulsion. If no one else is available he will play against himself; and then against the self thus created, and then against the self after that, until all fixed notion of self has leaked away into the slippage and he can relax for a second in the sharp light and cigarette smoke like someone caught fleetingly in an ancient black and white photograph. Do you see?”

“It’s only music, though,” she said.

“Perhaps,” Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself. He offered to buy her another cocktail, but all she did was look at him vaguely as if she hadn’t heard, so he went on:

“The older man has come to a different understanding of things, one which to his friend would seem bland and self-evident. He believes that it is only because no music is possible that any music at all is possible.” Here, Aschemann smiled briefly at his own cleverness. “As a result,” he finished, “the universe now remakes itself for him continually, out of two or three invariable rules and an obsolete musical instrument called the saxophone.”

“But guilty? Is that enough to make them guilty?”

The detective shrugged. “Complicit, then. It’s only a way of putting it. Myself, I prefer the New Nuevo Tango. There’s more heart.”

She stared at him, got down off the stool, laughed in a nervous way which revealed the flecks of lipstick on her white teeth. He caught briefly the smell of her, strong, warm, a little unwashed, a little cheap; in some way reassuring.

“Goodbye,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

Aschemann watched her leave, then finished his drink and shadowed her unhurriedly into the warm air and black heart of the city. He could smell the guilt and excitement that came up out of the street gratings to meet her. He could smell her excitement at being alive there, in Saudade among the sights. Did she know he was behind her? He wasn’t sure how she saw the world, but she hadn’t forgotten him. He was certain of that, but he wasn’t certain how dangerous she might be. He followed her to a coldwater walk-up behind the bottled-milk dairy at Tiger Shore, running up the last few metal risers of the outside staircase to catch her and lay his hand on her warm shoulder. His footsteps rang and scraped, she fumbled with the door. Dropped the key. Picked it up.

“Wait,” he ordered. “Police. Don’t go in without me.”

She stared at him in despair; then over his shoulder, less as if there was someone there than at the city itself. “Please!” she said. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

“Neither do I.”

Whatever happened next, he wanted to make sure he was there.

It was bare: grey board floor, bare bulb, a single bentwood chair. On the wall opposite the window, the shadow of the slatted blind fell across a poster with the logo
Surf Noir
. “Hey,” she said. “I know: why don’t you sit here—?” When she bent forward from the waist to undo his raincoat, the red dress presented her breasts to him in a flickering light. She knelt, and he could hear her breathing. It was placid, rather catarrhal. Later she lifted the hem of the dress and positioned herself astride him. So close, he saw that her gait, the shadows round her eyes, the foundation caked in the downy hairs by the corners of her mouth, had conspired beneath the Café Surf neon to make her seem older than she was. She whispered when he came, “There. There now.” She had been a month in the same dress. She was a victim, but of what? He wasn’t sure. He had no idea what she was. How had he smelled her excitement yet failed to smell his own? He felt weakened by it.

“Where do you sleep?” he said puzzledly. “There’s no bed in here.”

This idea let in a moment of confusion. It was very brief. But when he shook his head to clear it and turned to pay her, she was standing in the corner motionless with panic, facing the angle between the walls. She had learned enough to know what the city wanted but no more. New clothes were scattered across the floor, clean but disordered, as if she had tried to wear them but wasn’t sure how. She had collected objects too, some coloured feathers on a stick, an unopened bottle of “Ninety Per Cent Neon.” She started to fade as he watched, but he was out on the iron stairway long before the process was complete. He returned to the Long Bar, where he drank until he stopped shaking. Resting in the music and light he thought: does it matter who she was, when every night here the world is somehow touched? Guilt made him report to his assistant:

“I think I begin to see what’s happening.”

Two days later, hands in pockets at the end of an afternoon spent with his friend the bottle, Vic Serotonin lounged in the doorway of Liv Hula’s bar watching the cats flow back into the event site. He had been waiting there five minutes and Straint was still thick with them.

“Pay that tab any time,” Liv Hula reminded him from behind the zinc counter.

“Sure,” Vic said.

He stood there a minute or two more without saying anything then turned up his collar and left.

Liv Hula rubbed at a stain on the counter. She threw the rag into the sink. “Always good to see you, Vic,” she said quietly to herself. “Come again soon.” She went upstairs and turned on Radio Retro, but they were just then announcing the evening’s fights, and that only made her think of Joe Leone.

Outside it was Saudade.

At one end you got the tall black and gold business towers and tourist hotels, with the lights coming on in them in angular cyphers; at the other, the pastels of the Corniche dimming in a sunset of impure hot pinks and greens. Between them the sea; and the horizon somewhere past the tremendous roll of the surf, like a crease in a piece of paper the colour of doves. Onshore winds, persistent as a hand on your arm, came up the streets from the front, picking up in transit the rich smells of seafood and low-end mixed drinks. The hotels were emptying, the bars were filling up, surf noir basslines were bumping out of every open door.

Vic Serotonin passed all this, his shoulders in a permanent shrug.

Vic was puzzled. He had a leather-bound diary in one pocket and a Chambers gun in the other.

He walked down Straint to its intersection with the top end of Neutrino, where two rickshaw girls and their clients were already in a traffic altercation, then turned left on to Cahuenga which brought him eventually to Hot Walls. After that, he was five minutes finding the right door. It was one of those tall narrow townhouses, six floors split into apartments. Vic rang the bell. There was a long wait, during which he rang the bell a couple of times more. Then an uncertain voice said:

“Who’s there?”

“Remember me?” Vic said. “You want to see me. You want me to help you.”

“Come in, Mr Serotonin.”

He ran up the stairs two at a time.

Her diary had unsettled Vic, but he was unable to stop reading it. “I fear the unknown,” she had written, “but the fear of the known is
so much
worse.”

There were pages of this kind of thing. You got a list of expenses—a rickshaw downtown, meals at upscale venues like Els and Encientum, underwear from Uoest, clever books from Parker & Bright. Then a description of the fights—naphtha flares casting a kind of anti-illumination over the arena, burnt cinnamon smells, the cultivars strutting about, all tusks and tattoos, their erect cocks the size of horses’, the sudden flash of an eight-inch spur then something slick and ropey levered out and steaming in the shadows. “There’s a moral dimension here no one seems aware of,” was her conclusion about the fights. That was fine. It barely scratched the surface, but it was more than understandable. It was the travelogue you’d expect. But then she was off again:

“The known is slicked on to everything like a kind of grease. You would do anything to avoid the things you already know.”

It made her hard to place. She seemed like someone who had spent time in Saudade; then like someone who hadn’t. But if she belonged somewhere else, no clues were left where that might be. You got the impression of a woman who’d depended on privilege one planet past what she could handle, and who had inevitably become lost in space. Other than eat and shop and take rides around town, she stayed home and got tense. She loved her apartment, she said, but her relationship with the city was partial, unconstructive. Despite that, she didn’t just catch a ship out of there, which is what any tourist would have done.

“Am I meant to live this way?” she asked herself. “Is it the same for all these other creatures? Is that how they see things here?” Speaking as one of those creatures, Vic would like to know too.

But answers weren’t forthcoming, and the diary’s language was empty because its true object—her own anxiety—would always remain both present and unstated: so that every observation suggested more than it could ever contain. As a result even the physical object sometimes seemed packed and decodable. Pressed to the nose, its pages gave out the scents of midtown: coffee, perfume, polished wood. Then, very faintly, human sex. Vic couldn’t imagine that. The words rose from among these smells as if they were sensations too: “I dream entirely in tiny mad paintings. A man seems to be spewing up a snake. Someone else is helping him. The roof of their house is on fire. They recoil from one another yet seem entwined, bent in the shapes of a body language which no longer has any meaning.