Vineland (18 page)

Having begun well inside the corporate embrace of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, high above the violet radiance of the city, through ghostly Marunouchi dusks he had dreamed of disengagement and freedom, of working as a
ronin
, or samurai without a master, out free-lancing in a dangerous world. By the time his life brought him here, down in the reeking beast-print, the hazy red, green, and yellow lights and striped barricades, the struggling in the mud and rain after a mystery that might at the end be only as simple as greed, become at least independent, though Professor Wawazume still kept sending a lot of business his way, no more corporate pin on his suit lapel, only the buttonhole unadorned, lordless, his one fixed address now a cubicle in outer Ueno he shared rent on, containing an armored file cabinet, a telephone, and the signed, framed photo of himself the Professor had given him when he left to go out on his own (an enlarged paparazzo shot, the Professor looking even more goofy than usual, lurching after a noted beauty in gold lamé, flip hairdo, and two-centimeter eyelashes outside a bar in Shinjuku, a lucent string of drool begun to descend from one corner of his mouth), Takeshi had already long been a nomad in the sky's desert, continuing to depart in kerosene fumes to seek another connection in another Pacific port, to nod to faces he had last seen coming out of the Yat Fat Building in Des Vœux Road, to check the body of the stewardess and what he could see out the window of the body of the airplane, and at last, when they began to lift, to commend himself to the gods of the sky. But despite his millions of passenger miles, he could never recall being in their domain, instead only groaning, laboring along, just above the webs of power lines, almost sharing expressway space, making unnumbered short hops between local airfields, places Takeshi had never heard of, invisible under industrial smoke and traffic exhaust, kept away from all promises of wild blue yonder.

He had arrived now at the bottom of the strange crater, far below sea level, after long detours and a sense of time forever lost. . . . Tech-squad people he'd tried to talk to had all, so far, been evasive. I knew it! he realized. I haven't been buying enough drinks! The rain clouds had settled in. Looking up, Takeshi could no longer see the rim he'd descended from. A group of Techs nearby had started shouting angrily at each other, their headlamp beams swooping and crossing. Takeshi recognized his acquaintance Minoru, a government bomb-squad expert. Not a genius, exactly, more like an idiot savant with X-ray vision. When the discussion moved on, Minoru remained, gazing at something cupped in his hands.

“Pretty strange today, Minoru-san!”

“Strange! Here, look at this!”

Familiar. “Eastern bloc,
ne?
”

“
. But now—watch!” Minoru rotated the fragment.

“
Hen na!
” But he allowed Minoru to ID the modification.

“South African!”

“
Motto hen na!
”

Finally Minoru waved and started away. “Never been in a hole like this one. Don't like it!”

“Let's go have drinks!” Takeshi called after him.

Whatever Minoru may have replied was lost in a sudden down-rush of noise, a terrific roaring quite close by in the mist. Everyone Takeshi could see stood or crouched, looking up, not really poised to flee—where in this mud deathtrap was there to go?—but relaxing helpless under some imminent unthinkable descent . . . and
what was it
, appearing out of the cloud cover, causing a reflex wave of
oh
's to sweep the paralyzed onlookers . . . what was this glistening surface of black scales, dripping with seawater and kelp, these giant talons, curving earthward?

“It's come back!” People began to scream and run. Others, producing cameras, tried to photograph the confusion, or angrily waved radiation meters and microphones at the approaching object. By the time Takeshi could even react, the mysterious visitor, smaller than at first supposed, had angled over toward a makeshift landing pad, where it turned out to be one of Chipco's fleet of customized jumbo passenger helicopters, whose underside its crew, a byword of practical jokery throughout the firm, had playfully disguised, with plastic sheet and fairings of appropriate textures, as a monster's sole. Everybody had been fooled!

The helicopter had come to evacuate everybody from the hole, immediately, according to an announcement over its speakers. Was this another joke? “Who cares?” Takeshi muttered out loud, “I'm ready! Enough work for one day!”

“I heard that,” said Minoru, climbing on board with him. “Were you serious—about those drinks?”

“Sure.” He had something on his mind—what was it?

“Think we can get—Singapore Slings?”

As they took off, rising up the mud cliffsides crumbling away now in dark roaring collapses, Takeshi remembered his car, still at the parking lot. Could he go to the rental company and plead force majeure yet again, thin as the excuse was by now? They ascended into deep clouds and flew in zero visibility for what could have been an hour or more. Passengers, mostly Techs and military, read tabloids and comic magazines, listened through earphones to pocket radios, played cards or go. Takeshi and Minoru headed aft to a small bar with a price list that made up in exorbitance for what it lacked in variety. There were no Singapore Slings, so they drank beer instead. As empties accumulated, rotor-throbbed into vibrations along the bar, Minoru grew more cryptic and sly. “I like it up here . . . it's like a toilet for me—a final, private space.”

“Ah—you fly a lot?”

“Business—much of it offshore these days. Last year I was in the sky—more than I was on the ground!”

Takeshi reminded himself that whenever his companion wasn't actually trying to take apart strange bombs in person, he was irrevocably ordering someone else to.

“We haven't flown together,” Minoru went on, beaming maliciously, “since Lhasa International, good old LHX!”

“Aw. Knew you'd bring that one up.”

“Been on my mind—especially today! Maybe you can guess why!”

The helicopter came out into midafternoon sunlight. They were flying over some vast yellow-gray industrial reservation full of buildings whose only purpose was to shield the activities inside from viewers overhead. There were also areas set aside as parkland, and what looked like shopping and amusement centers. The PA came on. “We are approaching the famous Chipco ‘Technology City,' home of ‘Chuck,' the world's most invisible robot.” Takeshi and Minoru tried to order two more beers, but the bar was closing. “How invisible,” the voice continued, “you might wonder, is ‘Chuck'? Well, he's been walking around among you, all through this whole flight! Yes, and now he could be right next to you—o-or you!” They began to descend, signs came on, Minoru sighed. “I'd rather stay up there!” The PA had begun to recite train information. Chipco had its own stop on the Tokaido Shinkansen, from which it would be a little under three hours to Tokyo.

On the train they got back to the Himalayan caper. There were similarities—assault on the inanimate, the Czech origins of both the initiator unit and the explosive, Semtex . . . and the dummy motive.

“So,” Takeshi said, “you don't think this was self-inflicted.”

“Who wrote the floater?”

“Professor Wawazume himself.” Same as the Himalayan incident. They looked at each other, the two weary old hands, feeling as usual like jungle indigenous going in after a firefight to scavenge brass for pennies a ton. Far above them some planetwide struggle had been going on for years, power accumulating, lives worth less, personnel changing, still governed by the rules of gang war and blood feud, though it had far outgrown them in scale. Chipco was in it up to their eyeballs, and it looked like the Professor might have been fading some of the action. Nothing surprised either Takeshi or Minoru by now about the game, in which the everyday pieces were pirate ships of the stratosphere and Himalayas held for ransom.

“Those Himalayas!” Takeshi reminisced. “Right at the worst part, that sudden blizzard sweeping in—”

“— and we'd lost our way—everything white! Couldn't find the pass! The seconds were—ticking down!”

“Your wristwatch—with the turquoise numbers—only thing in the storm anybody can see! The bomber is already back in Geneva—with a perfect alibi! Suddenly—who do we run into, in that little shack—at the edge of infinity . . . literally!”

“Kutsushita-san!” Both men collapsed in laughter. “Everybody thought he'd drunk himself to death—”

“Instead he'd gone off to Tibet—to save his soul!”

“My first nuke assignment,” Minoru recalled, after they'd finished laughing.

Takeshi nodded. “We called you—the Kid!” They had a nice spin in the time machine, but arrived at Tokyo Station with nothing about the present case any clearer. Minoru headed for a public phone while Takeshi waited, reaching for his Georgian silver snuff-box, where the
shabu
were. Minoru, growing agitated, made another call, hung up suddenly, and, with white now visible all the way around the irises of his eyeballs, came after Takeshi, who got ready to run the other way.

“Somebody we have to see! Right now! It could already be too late!” He grabbed Takeshi by the necktie and pulled him, protesting loudly, through the bustling station till they found a taxi. Minoru told the driver to go to the Tokyo Hilton International in west Shinjuku. There was a convention in town of prosecutors from all over the world, including Interpol heavies, big-city DA's, and restless global travelers, among whom Minoru could easily find half a dozen who'd tell him all about the initiator fragment, even get facsimiles while he waited of the sales slip, with the purchaser's current address, if he liked. Takeshi kept his hand on the door handle but forgot, each time the cab slowed, to jump out. It was '78, during a period of epic and bloody street war among all major factions of the yakuza, and no place public was safe from liability. Pedestrian life in Shinjuku shared the same nervous dread. Disco music coming out the club doors was all in minor keys tonight, the beat slower, undanceable. Through years of stately unfoldings of the deep actuarial mysteries that allowed him to go on making a living, Takeshi had come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond, and even discounting the effects of drug abuse, nothing about the city seemed quite right tonight, as if a day already tough was about to start getting worse. . . .

At the Hilton, Minoru found the names on his list all conscientiously engaged in scheduled evening activities, one at a Yak Doc Workshop, another at a Plea-Bargaining Clinic, yet another at a symposium titled “Funding That First Election Campaign.” Frustrated, they headed for the bar and sat drinking till somebody paged Minoru, who disappeared and remained that way. After a while Takeshi wandered off to the toilet, but could not immediately find his way back and after a couple of wrong turns walked into some sort of rear foyer, just off the street, where he could hear large V-8 engines idling. Two Americans in brown gabardine suits were arguing.

One of them was Brock Vond, who was saying, “We need time to round up some troops. Don't want them to know we found anything out, hm? They'll have their checkpoints between here and there, so what we need now is a plausible head and shoulders in the back seat. Who knows, Roscoe, you may even have to go in there.”

“They'll ID me in two seconds, Brock. Naw, what we need—” Looking around rhetorically, he spotted the mentally confused Takeshi. “Hey—this could be just the customer.
Kombanwa
, m' friend, you speak English?” Which is when Takeshi actually saw Brock Vond for the first time, moving forward into the light, and thought for a terrified second or two it was himself and something radical, like death, had just happened. It was a stressed and malevolent cartoon of his face, of what he shaved and had long looks at, but its steady glide forward had him hypnotized. Brock slid a rectangle of white plastic into the breast pocket of Takeshi's suit jacket. “Your passport to an evening you'll never forget,” whispered Brock, and “Don't say we never did nothing for you,” added Roscoe. And there was Takeshi in the back seat of a strange oversize American car, locked in, being borne through the streets of Shinjuku southward, crossing the Expressway, into Roppongi, expecting street mines, storms of automatic-weapon fire, convinced he had stumbled into the middle of some Japanese gang-war drama with a couple of
gaijin
bit players in it.

The car let him off beside a building the size of a warehouse, whose only light was next to a metal door, illuminating a slot the size of the card he'd been given. The neighborhood was deserted. Takeshi tapped on the car window, but the car only revved up and moved out and was soon around the corner and gone. Takeshi looked at the card. Next to a logo of a pleasant-looking young woman in provocative attire, it said, in English, “
GENTLEMEN TITS ASS CLUB
/ For the Connoisseur.” It sounded like Takeshi's sort of place, yet he knew Brock and Roscoe were sending him in as a decoy. “A tough call,” he admitted—“what would you have done?”