Nova Swing (9 page)

It was easier to be downstairs. Sweep, push tables about, wash glasses, breathe the stale air, splash cold water on your face from the bar sink. You unlocked the door, daylight poured in on the slant and the shadow operators flickered about in it for a minute or two like reef fish before retreating to their corners. At about the same time Liv Hula retreated behind the bar. She always stood in the same place. Polished the zinc with her elbows, moved the cash drawer in and out. By now her feet fit a dip in the springy floorboards. She didn’t want to remember how many years she spent behind the bar in Black Cat White Cat.

Check stock, order food, watch the chopshop traffic, watch the light swing slowly round the room, and by early afternoon she would have her first customer. She was glad to see anyone. Usually it would be Fat Antoyne, but Fat Antoyne hadn’t been in since Joe Leone died. Or if it wasn’t Antoyne it would be Vic Serotonin the travel agent, who at that hour hardly looked better than Liv herself.

Today it wasn’t either of them.

When Vic Serotonin did arrive, it was with that preoccupied air of his—hands in pockets, shoulders in a permanent shrug, needy eyes fixed away from everything—as if he was thinking so hard about his life he didn’t know what part of the city it was going on in. He leaned on the bar and said:

“Rum.”

“Hi, Vic,” Liv Hula said. “Nice to see you.”

After a pause she said in a fair imitation of Serotonin’s voice, “‘Nice to see
you,
Liv.’”

“Cut it out,” said Vic Serotonin.

“When you pay your tab I will,” she said sweetly. “Black Heart over ice? Well, how did I know that?” She let him drink it—standing a little back from the bar with something between satisfaction and amusement in her eyes—then said, “Your client’s back, Vic.”

Vic looked round and saw the client had been sitting there all the time on one of the window stools, staring out the misty glass into the street. Her face was tilted so the light fell evenly across it and, without disclosing anything, gave it a milky, transparent look. A cup of hot chocolate was in front of her. She didn’t seem to be drinking from it. The moment Vic saw her he was aware of other images spinning off her, too quick to really see. He had images of running, then a board fence green with lichen in the rain. An abandoned street from a wrong angle.

Generally Vic would walk away from anything difficult. Clients came to him, he looked them over; he knew a time-waster.

“I don’t want to see you here again,” he said.

He walked quietly up behind her where she sat on the stool and put his mouth near her neck and said, “I don’t want to see you here again.” He was startled by his own intensity. She stared at him for a moment, as if she was trying to understand something in a foreign language. Then she got to her feet and began to fumble in her bag, out of which eventually she took a business card. She said:

“This is where I live. I wish you would help me. If you change your mind, I still feel as if I want to go in there.”

“That’s the problem,” Vic said.

“I’m sorry?”

Vic said, “I know my mind. You don’t know yours.” He stood in the doorway and watched her walk away down Straint. This time she was dressed in a black tulip skirt to midcalf. Over that was a little silver fur peplum jacket with lightly padded shoulders; the jacket came with a matching pillbox hat. She hailed a rickshaw and got in it.

“She wishes you would help her, Vic,” Liv Hula called from behind the bar. Vic told her he would like another drink.

On the card the woman had given him was an address in Hot Walls, which Vic recalled as tall old-fashioned townhouses on the wrong side of being corporate, run down twenty years ago when the current generation of executives traded up into the purpose-built complexes of Doko Gin. He wished he hadn’t said anything to her at all, because that made a connection between them.

“Why would a tourist have an address on Hot Walls?” he asked Liv Hula.

“I’d ask how she got your
name,
Vic.”

“That too.”

Liv watched him tear the card up and toss the pieces on the bar. Later, though, he collected them together and put them in his pocket.

Vic got another call from Paulie DeRaad.

DeRaad seemed irritated. At the same time he was dissociated and vague. He wanted to talk about the artefact he had bought, he said. He said he was puzzled. He said he wasn’t sure what he had. But each time Vic asked him what was wrong, his attention seemed to be somewhere else. “Is something going on where you are, Paulie?” Vic asked him. “Because you should attend to it if there is, especially when you don’t have anything to say to me.”

“Hey, be polite, Vic,” Paulie advised him. Eventually, he said Vic should come over to his club, the Semiramide. That would be the best way of doing it, he thought. There was something Vic should see; he could see it for himself.

“I’ve got other things to do,” Vic said.

“You haven’t got things more important than this,” DeRaad said. “Hey, Vic, I’ll send someone to pick you up, save you any trouble.”

“There’s no need for that,” Vic said.

The Semiramide lay midtown like a cruise ship at dock, placed to attract a mix of tourists and local players, class and income to be decided by Paulie himself. When Vic got there, six-thirty p.m., he found an ongoing situation. It was empty but for the customary DeRaad footsoldiers, a dozen contract gun-kiddies sitting round the back tables excitedly comparing weapons and throwing dice. Some of the furniture was tipped over and a couple of charred holes in the walls indicated someone had let go recently with a reaction pistol. Paulie’s people seemed less connected than usual.

“Paulie won’t be happy you go in there,” one of the gun-punks informed Vic when he tried to get in the office.

“The fuck he won’t,” Vic said, looking down at her.

The punk’s name was Alice Nylon, she was eight years old and wore a blue plastic rainslicker buttoned up to the neck.
Café electrique
rotted Alice’s front teeth before she was seven, giving her an interesting speech defect. She enjoyed cookery, aquacise sessions at the local pool, and in her spare time was studying to do her own accountancy. “Vic,” she told him, “you
would not believe
the raid we had. No, really! Right here at the Semiramide Club.” She shook her head in disbelief, slowly from side to side. “Those losers from Site Crime, all over us like a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract. That guy who looks like Albert Einstein? We had to be tuff, Paulie said, and not do what comes naturally. We had to keep a tight rein.”

“I wish I’d seen that, Alice,” Vic said politely.

Alice shrugged. She was a professional. It was nothing to her.

“We would of iced them, Vic, but what do you do?” She gave him her tired, raddled little smile. “So maybe it would be best if you waited here? For Paulie?”

Vic said OK and went over to one of the tables.

“Hey, Vic,” Alice called after him. “This morning I cooked brownies on my own!”

Vic hated the Semiramide.

As a storefront it was an insult to the intelligence.

It wasn’t much of a joint either.

The instant you walked in you knew Paulie DeRaad made his money elsewhere. There were forty tables, each to seat four, in a circular high-ceiling space originally the premises of a predictable alien technology scam calling itself FUGA-Orthogen. (This scam founded itself on the ownership of three mining machines parked above some unknown gamma-emitter in Radio Bay. At best guess they’d been there one million years already, and no one knew how to operate them. “What those jockeys were going to dig up was also a little unclear,” Paulie used to say with a faint smile. “So we had to let them go.”) When he moved in he had the walls calcimined white and illuminated with selected UV frequencies. Paulie liked high-end light because it reminded him of his glory days. Holograms floated about, advertising product; Monas floated about, taking commissions for the back room where people could be more comfortable. Paulie’s customers could eat, they could play dice a little. He had a band so they could listen to music. Paulie’s only major proviso, they should dress well: his was a weakness, he completely acknowledged, for the glitterati.

Vic bought a drink.

To pass the time, he pieced together the visiting card his ex-client had left him when he threw her out of Black Cat White Cat. It puzzled him that a tourist would keep an apartment in Saudade—a Hot Walls address was too genteel to be cheap, not gentrified enough to be corporate.

It was seven by then, and the joint was beginning to fill, mainly with couples who would get a cocktail before they went on elsewhere. Seven-ten, Vic was surprised to see Antoyne Messner walk into the Semiramide and head for the tables at the back. “Antoyne!” he called, but though the fat man acknowledged him with a nod, he didn’t come over. Instead, he sat down with the gun-punks and they all threw dice together. “Well, fuck you, Fat Antoyne,” Vic said to himself. Just then the office door opened, and Paulie DeRaad’s voice was heard calling:

“Hey, Vic! You incompetent fuckhead! Where are you?”

Paulie DeRaad was younger than Vic Serotonin. He had a sharp nose, a shock of white-blond hair that went back in the famous “widow’s peak” of his service years, highlights of which sometimes played as holograms in the main room of the Semiramide Club.

Paulie was at Cor Caroli, fourteen years old. Later he was one of the three people who got out alive from
El Rayo X
after its orbital collision with the Nastic heavy cruiser
Touching the Void
. Since then he had been wiry and intense and bunched-up, and when he became excited the skin of his face would seem to get thinner and shinier and the blood would seem to lie too close to the surface. This was a legacy of radiation burns, and a general ablative thinning of his skin which he didn’t have repaired and wore like a badge. Paulie never stopped. He liked everything. He wanted everything. That, at least, was the first impression he gave you: behind that, you sensed almost immediately, his plan was to stay alive and prosper.

“You want to take a look at this?” Paulie asked Vic.

He meant his office, which was in worse condition than his club. The air smelled of ionisation and char, the furniture was strewn about. There had been some kind of fight in there. It was a small room for that. Worse for Paulie, though, Aschemann’s team had brought in equipment that went through his shadow operators as if they were a wooden filing cabinet. So now they were in the ceiling corners, folded up so tight across themselves it would take days to get them down again. They were in shock. They felt violated. They had nothing left to disclose. Paulie looked bad too. He was sweating, and his face had gone a hard, meaty colour.

“Do you know anything about this?”

Vic said he didn’t.

“Well, fuck, Vic, you ought to.”

Vic went and found a chair, which he tipped the right way up so he could sit down. This gesture allowed Paulie DeRaad to sit down too, and wipe his face. “Some new kind of artefact is coming out the site,” he said, “this is Aschemann’s story. He has us in the frame for it.” He put his fingers in his mouth then took them out again and stared at them. “Look in my mouth, Vic, tell me if my gums are bleeding.”

“Fuck off, Paulie.”

DeRaad laughed. “I nearly got you, though, Vic. You were halfway out the seat.” He was calming down, looking amused. He was enjoying his life again. He said, “You know this joint they call the Café Surf?”

“I never heard of it,” Vic said.

“Hey, you can talk to me, Vic, I’m your friend.”

If Vic was worried about nanocam coverage, he said, there was no need. Site Crime’s equipment was a disgrace. It was ten years old. It was insanely expensive to run. Ninety per cent of the time it was out of service. Paulie had EMC cover anyway, he implied. “You’re invisible, you go anywhere with me.” Vic, who until that moment hadn’t been remotely worried, stared at him, then shrugged.

“Is that why you brought me here?”

Paulie stopped looking amused.

“No,” he said. “There’s something I want you to see.” He got to his feet. “Well, come on,” he said. “Do you think I keep it here?”

“I wouldn’t know, Paulie.”

DeRaad called for his rickshaw girl. He winked at Vic. “We’re not going far, but why should we walk?” The evening had turned chilly. Marine airs swept through midtown, condensing out on the street furniture, the rickshaw shafts. You could hear service work going on in the military yards. Every so often a K-ship fired up and went for the parking orbit at Mach 40, capturing everything from Straint to the Corniche in its brutal torch glare, varnishing the side of Paulie DeRaad’s sharp face so that for a second you had the illusion you could see right down into the musculature. Paulie hung out the rickshaw. He loved all of that military stuff. “Look at the fucker, Vic! Just look at it!” You had to smile at Paulie, a bottle-rocket going off could put him in a good mood.

“Hey,” he told the rickshaw girl, who was running up hard into her shafts, “you needn’t kill yourself over this.”

“I ain’t got but the one pace, Paulie.”

“Your funeral, kid,” he advised her. “It’s just down here,” he said to Vic Serotonin.

Paulie had bolt-holes all over Saudade. This one was a bleak single room off Voigt Street in the noncorporate hinterland, no different from the rest except Paulie kept a military cot there, which he always made up himself; along with a few things he valued from his vacuum commando days. He also ran some of his communications through it, via the various FTL uplinkers and orbital routers which made him nationwide. As soon as he opened the door, a foul smell came out. It was like shit, urine and standing water.

“Jesus, Paulie,” Vic said.

Paulie told him he didn’t know anything yet. Along with the smell, there was a kind of bubbling sound. Lying on Paulie’s cot, partly out of its clothes, was the entity that called itself “the Weather.” Last time Vic saw it, they were at Suicide Point together. Somehow it had choked on Vic’s artefact, and the two of them were glued together at some level no one but another Shadow Boy could understand. A wedding had taken place. Whatever tied the knot had also wed them to the proxy. They were all three stuck with one another—although, to judge by the Point kid’s unfortunate condition, not for long. He looked frightened and ill. He had tried to undress himself and get under the blanket, for comfort as much as warmth. His shorts were half-down, his skin a fishy white under the low wattage illumination. Every so often he convulsed, his mouth gaped open and he threw up what looked like cold tapioca.