Fontaine displays the Smith & Wesson, his finger on the trigger, but he does not quite point it at the boy. He never points a gun at anyone he is not yet entirely willing to shoot, a lesson learned long ago from his father.
This kneeler, this breather on his glass, is not of the bridge. It would be difficult for Fontaine to explain how he knows this, but he does. It is a function of having lived here a long time. He doesn't know everyone on the bridge, nor would he want to, but he nonetheless distinguishes bridge dwellers from others, and with absolute certainty.
This one, now, has something missing. Something wrong; not a state bespeaking drugs, but some more permanent mode of not-being-there. And while the population of the bridge possesses its share of these, they are somehow worked into the fabric of the place and not inclined to appear thus, so randomly, as to disturb mercantile ritual.
Somewhere high above, the bay wind whips a loose flap of plastic, a frenzied beating, like the idiot wing of some vast wounded bird.
Fontaine, looking into brown eyes in the face that still refuses to come into focus (because, he thinks now, it is incapable), regrets having unlocked his door. Salt air even now gnaws at the bright metal vitals of his stock. He gestures with the barrel of his pistol: go.
The boy extends his hand. A watch.
“What? You want to sell that?”
The brown eyes register no language.
Fontaine, motivated by something he recognizes as compulsion, takes a step forward, his finger tightening on the pistol's double-action trigger. The chamber beneath the firing pin is empty, for safety's sake, but a quick, long pull will do the trick.
Looks like stainless. Black dial.
Fontaine takes in the filthy black jeans, the frayed running shoes, the faded red T-shirt hiked above a paunch that betrays the characteristic bloat of malnutrition.
“You want to show that to me?”
The boy looks down at the watch in his hand, then points to the three in the window.
“Sure,” Fontaine says, “we got watches. All kinds. You want to see?”
Still pointing, the boy looks at him.
“Come on,” Fontaine says, “come on in. Cold out here.” Still holding the gun, though his finger has relaxed, he steps back into the shop. “You coming?”
After a pause, the boy follows, holding the watch with the black dial as though it were a small animal.
Be nothing, Fontaine thinks. Army Waltham with the guts rusted out. Bullshit. Bullshit he's let this freak in here.
The boy stands, staring, in the center of the shop's tiny floor space. Fontaine closes the door, locks it once only, and retreats behind his counter. All this done without lowering the gun, getting within grabbing distance, or taking his eyes off his visitor.
The boy's eyes widen as he sees the tray of watches. “First things first,” Fontaine says, whisking the tray out of sight with his free hand. “Let's see.” Pointing at the watch in the boy's hand. “Here,” Fontaine commands, tapping the faded gilt Rolex logo on a padded round of dark green leatherette.
The boy seems to understand. He places the watch on the pad. Fontaine sees the black beneath the ragged nails as the hand withdraws.
“Shit,” Fontaine says. Eyes acting up. “Back up, there, a minute,” he says, gently indicating direction with the barrel of the Smith & Wesson. The boy takes a step back.
Still watching the boy, he digs in the left side pocket of the trench coat and comes up with a black loupe, which he screws into his left eye. “Don't you move now, okay? Don't want this gun to go off…”
Fontaine picks up the watch, affords himself a quick squint through the loupe. Whistles in spite of himself. “Jaeger LeCoultre.” He unsquints, checking; the boy hasn't moved. Squints again, this time at the ordnance markings on the caseback. “Royal Australian Air Force, 1953,” he translates. “Where'd you steal this?”
Nothing.
“This is near mint.” Fontaine feels, all at once, profoundly and unexpectedly lost. “This a redial?”
Nothing.
Fontaine squints through the loupe. “All original?”
Fontaine wants this watch.
He puts it down on the green pad, atop the worn symbol of a golden crown, noting that the black calf band is custom-made, handsewn around bars permanently fixed between the lugs. This work itself, which he takes to be either Italian or Austrian, may have cost more than some of the watches in his tray. The boy immediately picks it up.
Fontaine produces the tray. “Look here. You want to trade? Gruen Curvex here. Tudor ‘London,’ 1948; nice original dial. Vulcain Cricket here, gold head, very clean.”
But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him. Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails.
The boy is leaning forward over the tray, Fontaine forgotten.
“Here,” Fontaine says, sliding the tray aside and replacing it with his battered notebook. He opens it to the pages where he shops for watches. “Just push this, then push this, it'll tell you what you're looking at.” He demonstrates. A Jaeger with a silver face.
Fontaine presses the second key. “1945 Jaeger chronometer, stainless steel, original dial, engraving on case back,” says the notebook.
“Case,” the boys says. “Back.”
“This,” Fontaine shows the boy the stainless back of a gold-filled Tissot tank. “But with writing on, like ‘Joe Blow, twenty-five years with Blowcorp, congratulations.’”
The boy looks blank. Presses a key. Another watch appears on the screen. He presses the second key. “A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour, chrome, brassing at lugs, dial very good.”
“‘Very good,’” Fontaine advises. “Not good enough. See these spots here?” Indicating certain darker flecks scattered across the scan. “If it were ‘very fine,’ sure.”
“Fine,” says the boy, looking up at Fontaine. He presses the key that produces the image of another watch.
“Let me see that watch, okay?” Fontaine points at the watch in the boy's hand. “It's okay. I'll give it back.”
The boy looks from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith & Wesson away in its pocket. Shows the boy his empty hands.
“I'll give it back.”
The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.
“You gonna tell me where you got this?”
Blank.
“You want a cup of coffee?”
Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate. Smells its bitter brew, thickening.
The boy understands.
He shakes his head.
Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles into contemplation.
Damn. He wants this watch.
LATER in the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch, the Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine's gray tweed slacks, high-waisted and extravagantly pleated, but Fontaine knows that the watch is not his. The boy has been put in the back of the shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides Fontaine's business from his private life, and Fontaine has become aware of the fact that he can, yes, smell his visitor; under the morning's coffee smell a definite and insistent reek of old sweat and unwashed clothes.
As the bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine undoes the clips on his own box. Tempura today, not his favorite for bento, because it cools, but still he's hungry. Steam wafts from the bowl of miso as he unsnaps its plastic lid. He pauses.
“Hey,” he says, back into the space behind the shop, “you want some miso?” No reply. “Soup, you hear me?”
Fontaine sighs, climbs off his wooden stool, and carries the steaming soup into the back of the shop.
The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on his lap. Fontaine sees the image of a large, very complicated chronometer floating there on the screen. Something from the eighties,
by the look of it.
“You want some miso?”
“Zenith,” says the boy. “El Primero. Stainless case. Thirty-one jewels, 3019PHC movement. Heavy stainless bracelet with flip lock. Original screwdown crown. Crown dial and movement signed.”
Fontaine stares at him.
13. SECONDHAND DAYLIGHT
YAMAZAKI returns with antibiotics, packaged foods, coffee in self-heating tins. He wears a black nylon flight jacket and carries these things, along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.
He descends into the station through a crowd of only ordinary density, well before the evening rush hour. He has found it difficult to sleep, his dreams haunted by the perfect face of Rei Toei, who is in a sense his employer, and who in another sense does not exist.
She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions. She is a sea of code, the ultimate expression of entertainment software. Her audience knows that she does not walk among them; that she is media, purely. And that is a large part of her appeal.
If not for Rei Toei, Yamazaki considers, Laney would not be here now. It was the attempt to understand her, to second-guess her motivation, that had originally brought Laney to Tokyo. In the employ of Rez's management team, the singer Rez having declared his intention to marry her. And how, they asked, was that to be? How could any human, even one so thoroughly mediated, marry a construct, a congeries of software, a dream?
And Rez, the Chinese-Irish singer, the pop star, had tried. Yamazaki knows this. He knows as much about this as any living human, including Rez, because Rei Toei has discussed it with him. He understands that Rez exists as thoroughly, in the realm of the digital, as it is possible for a living human to exist. If Rez-the-man were to die, today, Rez-the-icon would certainly live on. But Rez's yearning was to go there, literally to go where Rei Toei is. Or was, she having now effectively vanished.
The singer had sought to join her in some realm of the digital or in some not-yet-imagined borderland, some intermediate state. And had failed.
But has she gone there now? And why had Laney fled as well?
Rez tours the Kombinat states now. Insists on traveling by rail. Station to station, Moscow his goal, rumors of madness flickering in the band's wake.
It is a dark business, Yamazaki thinks and wonders, taking the stairs to the cardboard city, what exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of nodal points in history, of some emerging pattern in the texture of things. Of everything changing.
Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental product of covert clinical trials of a drug that induced something oddly akin to psychic abilities in a small percentage of test subjects. But Laney isn't psychic in any non-rational sense; rather he is able, through the organic changes wrought long ago by 5-SB, this drug, to somehow perceive change emerging from vast flows of data.
And now Rei Toei is gone, her management claims, and how can that be? Yamazaki suspects that Laney may know why, or where, and that is a factor in Yamazaki's having decided to return here and find him. He has been extremely careful to avoid being followed, but he also knows that that can mean next to nothing.
The smell of the Tokyo subway, familiar as the smell of his mother's apartment, comforts him now. It is a smell at once utterly distinctive and impossible to describe. It is the smell of Japanese humanity, of which he very much feels himself a part, as manifested in this singular environment, this world of tubes, of white corridors, of whispering silver trains.
He finds the passageway between the two escalators, the tiled columns. He half suspects that the shelters will be gone.
But they are here, and when he dons a white micropore mask and enters the model-builder's brightly lit hutch, nothing has changed except the kit the old man concentrates on now: a multi-headed dinosaur with robotic hind limbs in navy and silver. The brush tip works in the eye of one reptilian head. The old man does not look up.
“Laney?”
Nothing from behind the square of melon-yellow blanket.
Yamazaki nods to the old man and crawls past on hands and knees, pushing his mesh bag of supplies before him.
“Laney?”
“Hush,” Laney says, from the narrow fetid dark. “He's talking.”
“Who is talking?” Pushing the bag past the limp, foam-filled fabric, its touch on his face reminding him of nursery school.
As Yamazaki enters, Laney activates a projector in the clumsy eye-phones: the images he sees splay across Yamazaki, blinding him. Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam. Sees figures framed in secondhand daylight. “—magine he does this on a regular basis?” Hand-held but digitally stabilized. “Something to do with phases of the moon?”
Zooms in on one of the figures, lean and male, as all are. Mouth obscured by a dark scarf. Stiff black hair above a high white forehead. “No evidence of that. Opportunistic. He waits for them to come to him. Then he takes them. These,” and the camera swings smoothly to frame the face and bare chest of a dead man, eyes staring, “are jackers. This one had dancer in his pocket.” There is a dark comma on the dead man's pale chest, just below the sternum. “The other one was stabbed through the throat, but somehow he managed to miss the arteries.”
“He would,” says the unseen man.
“We have profiles,” the man with the scarf says, off-camera, the face of the corpse thrown across Laney's cardboard wall, the melon blanket. “We have a full forensic psych run-up. But you ignore them.”
“Of course I do.”
“You're in denial.” Two pairs of hands, in latex gloves, grasp the dead man, flip him over. There is a second, smaller wound visible, beneath one shoulder blade; blood has pooled within the body, darkened. “He poses as real a danger to you as to anyone else.”
“But he's interesting, isn't he?”
The wound, in close-up, is a small unsmiling mouth. The blood reads black. “Not to me.”
“But you aren't interesting, are you?”
“No,” and the camera pans up, light catching a sharp cheekbone above the black scarf, “and you don't want me to be, do you?”
There is a faint chime as the transmission is terminated. Laney throws back his head, the image of the man with the scarf in freeze-frame across the ceiling of the carton, too bright, distorted, and Yamazaki sees that the cardboard there is shingled with tiny, self-adhesive printouts, dozens of different images of a bland-looking man, oddly familiar. Yamazaki blinks, his contacts shifting, and misses his glasses. He feels incomplete without them. “Who was that man, Laney?”
“The help,” Laney says.
“‘Help’?”
“Hard to get good help these days.” Laney kills the projector and removes the massive eyephones. In the sudden gloom, his face is reduced to a child's drawing, smudged black eyeholes against a pallid smear. “The man who was taking that call—”
“The one who spoke?”
“He owns the world. Near as anyone does.”
Yamazaki frowns. “I have brought medicine—”
“That was from the bridge, Yamazaki.”
“San Francisco?”
“They followed my other man there. They followed him, last night, but they lost him. They always do. This morning they found those bodies.”
“Followed who?”
“The man who isn't there. The one I'm having to infer.”
“These are pictures of Harwood? Of Harwood Levine?” Yamazaki has recognized the face replicated on the stickers.
“Spooks are his. Best money can buy, probably, but they can't get close to the man who isn't there.”
“What man?”
“I think he's someone Harwood… collected. Collects people. Interesting people. I think he might've worked for Harwood, taken commissions. He doesn't leave a trace, none at all. When he crosses someone's path, they're just gone. Then he erases himself.”
Yamazaki fumbles the antibiotics from his bag. “Will you take these, Laney? Your cough—”
“Where's Rydell, Yamazaki? He's supposed to be up there now. It's all coming toget
her.”
“What is?”
“I don't know,” Laney says, leaning forward to dig through the contents of the bag. He finds a coffee and activates it, tossing it from hand to hand as it heats. Yamazaki hears the pop, the vacuum hiss, as Laney opens it. Smell of coffee. Laney sips from the steaming can.
“Something's happening,” Laney says and coughs into his hand, slopping hot creamed coffee on Yamazaki's wrist. Yamazaki flinches. “Everything's changing. Or it's not, really. How I see it is changing. But since I've been able to see it the new way, something else has started. There's something building up. Big. Bigger than big. It'll happen soon, then there'll be a cascade effect…”
“What will happen?”
“I don't know.” Another fit of coughing requires that he set aside the coffee. Yamazaki has opened the antibiotics and tries to offer them. Laney waves them aside. “Have you been back to the island? Do they have any idea where she is?”
Yamazaki blinks. “No. She is simply not present.”
Laney smiles, faint gleam of teeth against the darkness of his mouth. “That's good. She's in it too, Yamazaki.” He reaches for the coffee. “She's in it too.”
14. BREAKFAST, COOKING
RYDELL found a place in one of those buildings that had clearly been a bank, when banks had needed to have buildings. Thick walls. Someone had turned it into an all-day breakfast-special place, and that was what Rydell was after. Actually it looked like it had been some kind of discount store before that, and who knew what else before, but it had that eggs-and-grease smell, and he was hungry.
There were a couple of size-large construction types, covered with white drywall dust, waiting for a table, but Rydell saw that the counter was empty, so he went over there and took a stool. The waitress was a distracted-looking woman of indeterminate ancestry, acne scars sprinkled across her cheekbones, and she poured his coffee and took his order without actually indicating she understood English. Like the whole operation could be basically phonetic, he thought, and she'd have learned the sound of “two eggs over easy” and the rest. Hear it, translate it into whatever she wrote in, then give it to the cook.