Sleepless (19 page)

The tiny card door snapped shut.

Cager brought out the comb, raked the part, wiped it on his thigh, and put it in his pocket.

"Shabu?"

Looking at Cager's green eyes, Park had a moment when he was certain that he must be sleepless. It wasn't simply that the pupils were pinned tight, it was the sense of a vision that was perceiving a different wavelength of light. The look he saw in Rose's eyes when she began conversing with the past or with entire realities that had never existed. Then, just as quickly, Park realized his mistake. Cager wasn't sleepless; he just wasn't seeing the same world that most people saw. It was a look he recognized from childhood, from occasions when his family was required by the rules of protocol that governed his father's career to interact with the inhumanly wealthy.

He nodded.

"Yes. Shabu."

Cager's eyes took on a new focus as Park and his profession were fitted into his area of experience.

"Do you have it with you?"

"Yes."

Cager nodded.

"Imelda."

The bodyguard came to slight attention.

"Yes, boss?"

"Do you have any news for me?"

She unnecessarily touched the knob of a Bluetooth earbud.

"No, boss."

Cager looked Park down and back up.

"Okay."

He rose, slinging the bag over his shoulder, lifting the section of velvet rope closest to him.

"Come on."

Park ducked his head and stepped under the rope, Beenie following.

"Where?"

Cager waved his phone at the tournament room.

"Away from this."

He turned from them and touched a rivet on a strip of rusted iron trimming the scarlet wainscoting, and a secret panel swung open.

Adrian and several of the other followers rose to take their places in Cager's wake. He help up a hand.

"Guys, there won't be any rock stars to meet or have sex with, and I'm not going to be giving anything away. You may as well stay here and watch the hack-n-slash."

He pointed.

"You stay here too Beenie. I don't need any more middlemen."

Park shook his head.

"He's not a middleman."

"Then we don't need him to do business."

"I want him to come."

Cager popped open the keyboard on his new phone and started flicking buttons.

"Why?"

Park, tired and hitting the wrong side of the speed, was reminded of his years at Deerfield, the ruthlessness with which class warfare had been in practice there. Not of the purple himself, he had been close enough in terms of background, family wealth, connections, and physical appearance, that he'd been free to circulate with any given clique. And he found after his freshman year that the place where he felt most at ease was at the bottom of the food chain, with the scholarship and legacy students. Once there he found ample opportunities over the next three years to use his gifts when facing down bullies who had marked his friends as easy targets.

It took Rose, laughing hysterically at the thought that he'd never put it together, to point out that there might be some connection between that experience and his love of police work.

Thrown back to the school yard, he lost some of the dealer's natural subservience in the face of a rich client and slipped character.

"Because he's my friend."

Cager tilted his head to the side.

"He's your friend?"

"Yes."

Cager looked up from the phone.

"And what is that supposed to make me think about you?"

Park shook his head.

"I don't care what you think about me."

Cager smiled.

"Come on. You and your friend go first. That will give Imelda and Magda a better shot at you if you try to abuse my person."

Park looked down the passageway revealed by the open panel.

"So if there's no rock stars or freaky sex, why are we going?"

Cager used the comb again, pressed the tines to his chin, whitening the skin in stripes.

"To look at something beautiful."

The passageway had the feel of a disused maintenance access. Their feet clanked over steel grates laid on rusting train rails. A thin sluice of viscous reddish-brown liquid ran underneath, light came from a row of caged industrial lamps hanging from exposed conduit, all but two of them broken, dim, or flickering; the concrete walls seemed to sweat bile.

Park touched a wall and found it bone-dry and warm, could feel the delicate stipple of artfully layered paints.

Cager nodded.

"I told the designer that I wanted a secret passageway and that it should feel like you were being taken someplace to be tortured."

He pointed at a rust-mottled institutional door ahead, shifting light showing through a cracked panel of chicken-wire glass.

"This was going to be the insider's insider celebrity VIP lounge. Secret door, secret passage, establishing an expectation of decadence. Inside it was all luxury, of course. CCTV feeds from the dance floor and bathrooms, private bar and DJ, a majordomo you could send to fetch anyone you saw on the screens and wanted to bring behind the green curtain to see how the wizards of the world live. Ultimately it was just the same silly show that makes the rich and famous feel special. Or less bored for a few minutes. And I wasn't interested in catering to that crowd for very long."

He stepped past Park and Beenie and put a hand on the door.

"Money makes people stupid. They don't have to work as hard as people who don't have money. That's why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing."

Park thought about his father.

"They use it to make sure the people without it don't get any more."

Cager tilted his head.

"You're not stupid. What's your name?"

"Park."

Cager adjusted the hang of his shoulder bag.

"You know what I think, Park?"

"No."

"I think that pretty soon we're going to find out which is more powerful, knowledge or money. I think the worse things get, the more distance there's going to be between the smart poor people and the stupid rich people. And that the smart poor people are going to figure out how to live, and the stupid rich people are going to probably do something very dumb. Like pushing a bunch of red buttons and blowing everything up. That's what I think."

He combed his hair.

"What do you think?"

Park felt the chill of the frozen world, but the scenario being described was not one he could believe in. His baby did not allow such visions. There was no place for his baby in a world like the one this wealthy alien was describing, so how could it ever come to be?

He pointed at the door.

"I think we better make a deal before money stops having any value."

Cager took a prison movie key from his bag.

"Not stupid. But you lack imagination. Or maybe just the will to use it."

He put the key in the lock and gave it a grinding 360-degree turn.

"This may be wasted on you."

He gave the door a push, and it swung open.

"But you'll dream about it whether you want to or not."

He stepped inside, combing again, a series of tiny adjustments to the lay of his hair, imperceptible.

Park and Beenie followed, stepping into the hidden round chamber that had once been the pleasure dome for Cager's most exclusive clientele. Now, instead of coke-addled starlets and inbred eurotrash demiroyals, the room was populated by a hushed collection of aesthetes and aficionados, a highly select inner circle.

Almost exclusively male, perhaps one as old as forty, most of the others topping out at thirty, status, such as it was, outwardly displayed in the obscurity of the movies, bands, literary quotes, or bits of machine language code displayed on their T-shirts. Eyeglasses, of which there were many pairs, tending toward either retro-huge plastics or slight and unframed geometrics. Hair at similar extremes of long and unkempt or military-grade buzz. Jeans only, black preferred, khakis allowed if obviously ironic. Chuck Taylors, black, red, or white, high or low, the footwear of choice. None managing the austerity of Cager's geek perfection. Their tablets, smart phones, net books, cloud links, heavily modded and customized. Hardware signaling not only to one another directly and over the club's ubiquitous WiFi but also beaming otherwise unspoken detailed information about their owner's beliefs and loyalties within this particular conclave.

As in the tournament room they had just left, attention was focused on a series of screens. Mounted on the wall and running 180 degrees of the room's circumference, they were set at intervals that minimized light spill or peripheral distraction from screen to screen. Blow-up photographs of processor chips and detailed screen shots of 1980s golden era 8-bit video games hung from the ceiling and covered bare sections of wall, hiding the speakers while simultaneously baffling and focusing the surround sound on the middle of the room.

At that center were a cluster of five black and red Erro Aarnio Ball Chairs. Occupants engulfed by the globes, only their legs dangling or jutting free from the openings directed at the screens.

The screens themselves flashed and swooped, perspectives zooming and receding, plucking particulars from a series of popping and dropping menus, settling on a map, pulling close until it unfolded into a richly detailed scene of a central square in a city made entirely of iron. Forge, the City of Smiths. One of the entry points for Chasm Tide. A destination for parties looking either to arm themselves heavily or to have fabricated tools of special trade.

The five central screens showed varied characters' points of view. Just off the shoulder, from behind the character's eyes, well overhead, depending on player preference. The remaining screens displayed a collection of wider master shots of the action. The five avatars themselves: dark, light, human, non, scaled, armored, burly, lithe, bristling with blades, carrying only a staff, hooded and cloaked, fur-bikinied. The archetypes of the fantasy role-playing tradition. They materialized with a whoosh and a hum, resolving from an artful blurring of space, and stood there, inert amid the fuming wonders of Forge.

The audience, seated at cabaret tables or on a banquette that arced along the curve of wall opposing the screens, shifted, some making entries on their devices, one or two whispering into headsets.

Park heard an acne-scarred boy in an Atari-logo T-shirt speaking softly into a digital voice recorder.

"They're going classic. Knight, mage, thief, barbarian, elf. Can't tell if it's meant as camp or homage."

Cager's entrance caused a slight stir, attention shifting from the screens. Nods were tossed his way, returned in the form of a general wave of the comb before he turned his back to the audience and inspected the screens himself.

He scratched the side of his neck with the tines of the comb.

"They know their crowd."

He looked at Park, nodded him aside to a small bar.

Helmed by a very young girl in Harajuku anime-schoolgirl geisha chic, the service area was sunk several feet below the floor, putting the glossy surface of the bar, collaged with pornographic Disney-inspired animation cels, knee level to approaching customers. Cager knelt and nodded at the bartender. She dipped her head and began filling a small green bamboo pitcher with cold sake. Park squatted on his haunches, waiting as she placed the pitcher and two small, tightly tongue-and-grooved cypress masu boxes before them.

Cager poured both boxes full, picked one up, handed it to Park, took the other for himself, and lifted it.

"Kanpai!"

Park lifted his own.

"Kanpai."

They drank.

Cager drained and refilled his box.

"I went to Japan for the first time when I was nine. For a year with my dad. Business. I found it alienating until I discovered the otaku. In terms of geek immersion, they were years ahead of me in every way. Of course, they had a natural advantage. All the most interesting technology was being developed for their market. My edge was that, compared to them, I was socially advanced. They trusted me very quickly and gave me access to their kung fu. Not pure code, which I've never had a gift for, but they helped me unlock game levels I didn't know existed. Secret moves. When I came back here, I'd had six months on PlayStation and it hadn't even been released in the States. It became a pilgrimage for me. Culturally I never penetrated deep. Too opaque. I'm low-affect myself. Not many outbursts like that one you saw with the phone. And I generally have a hard time reading other people's moods. The Japanese in Japan are very hard for me. With otaku it doesn't matter. No one cares what you're feeling. My dad never grasped the fascination. He's smart enough, but too old. He was over fifty when he had me. A gap like that, we can scream at each other and still not be heard."

He combed his hair.