Rydell got the Brazilian glasses out, put them on, and scrolled for the number Yamazaki had given him in Tokyo. Someone picked up on the third ring, but the glasses didn't map a location for the answering phone. Probably meant another mobile.
Silence on the line, but it had a texture.
“Hey,” Rydell said, “Yamazaki?”
“Rydell? Laney—” Cut off by a burst of coughing and then dead silence as someone hit mute.
When Laney came back on, he sounded strangled. “Sorry. Where are you?”
“San Francisco,” Rydell said.
“I know that,” Laney said.
“In a diner on, on…” Rydell was scrolling the GPS menu, trying to get in, but he kept getting what looked like Rio transit maps.
“Never mind,” Laney said. Sounded tired. What time would it be in Tokyo? That would be in the phone menu, if he could find it. “What matters is you're there.”
“Yamazaki said you had something for me to do up here.”
“I do,” said Laney, and Rydell remembered his cousin's wedding, Clarence having sounded just about as happy, saying that.
“You want to tell me what it is?”
“No,” said Laney, “but I want to put you on retainer. Money up front for as long as you're up there.”
“Is it legal, Laney, what you want done?”
There was a pause. “I don't know,” Laney said. “Some of it hasn't ever been done before probably, so it's hard to say.”
“Well, I think I need to know a little more than that before I can take it on,” Rydell said, wondering how the hell he'd ever get back down to Los Angeles if this didn't pan out. Or indeed if there was any point in his going back.
“You could say it's a missing person,” Laney said after another pause.
“Name?”
“Doesn't have one. Probably has a few thousand, more like it. Listen, you like cop stuff, right?”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“No offense; you told me cop stories when I met you, remember? Okay: so this person I'm looking for is very, very good at not leaving traces. Nothing ever turns up, not in the deepest quantitative analysis.” Laney meant netsearch stuff; that was what he did. “He's just a physical presence.”
“How do you know he's a physical presence if he doesn't leave traces?”
“Because people die,” Laney said.
And just then there were people taking seats on either side of him and a sharp reek of vodka—
“Get back to you,” Rydell said, thumbing the pad and pulling the glasses off.
Creedmore grinning on his left. “Howdy,” said Creedmore. “This here's Marjane.”
“Maryalice.” On the stool to Rydell's right, a big old blonde with most of the top of her strapped up into something black and shiny, the unstrapped part forming a cleavage where Creedmore could easily have wedged one of those pint bottles. Rydell caught something deep in her tired eyes, some combination of fear, resignation, and a kind of blind and automatic hope: she was not having a good morning, year, or life probably, but there was something there that wanted him to like her. Whatever it was, it stopped Rydell from getting up with his bag and walking out, which was really what he knew he should be doing.
“Ain't you gonna say hi?” Creedmore's breath was toxic.
“Hey, Maryalice,” Rydell said. “Name's Rydell. Pleased to meet you.”
Maryalice smiled, about a decade's wear lifting, just for a second, from her eyes. “Buell here tells me you're from Los Angeles, Mr. Rydell.”
“Does he?” Rydell looked at Creedmore.
“Are you in the media down there, Mr. Rydell?” she asked.
“No,” Rydell said, fixing Creedmore with the hardest look he could muster, “retail.”
“I'm in the music business myself,” Maryalice said. “My ex and I operated one of the most successful country music venues in Tokyo. But I felt the need to get back to my roots. To God's country, Mr. Rydell.”
“You talk too much,” said Creedmore, across Rydell, as the waitress brought Rydell's breakfast.
“Buell,” Rydell said, with something approximating a tone of even good cheer, “shut the fuck up.” Rydell started cutting the hardened edges off his eggs.
“Beer me,” Buell said.
“Oh, Buell,” Maryalice said. She hauled a big plastic zip bag up off the floor, some kind of advertising giveaway, and rummaged inside. Came up with a tall sweaty can of something she passed to Creedmore over Rydell's lap, under the counter. Creedmore popped it, held it to his ear, as if admiring the hiss of carbonation.
“Sound of breakfast cooking,” he said, then drank.
Rydell sat there, chewing his leathery eggs.
“SO you go to this site,” Laney was saying, “give them my name, ‘Colin-space-Laney,’ cap C, cap L, first four digits of this phone number, and ‘Berry.’ That's your nickname, right?”
“Actually it's my name,” Rydell said. “Family name on my mother's side.” He was seated in a capacious but none too clean cubicle in the former bank's restroom. He'd gone there to get away from Creedmore and company, and so he could ring Laney back. “So I give them that. What'll they give me?” Rydell looked up at his bag, where he'd hung it on the sturdy chrome hook on the cubicle door. He hadn't wanted to leave it out in the restaurant.
“They'll give you another number. You take that to any banking machine, show it picture ID, key the number. It'll issue you a credit chip. Should be enough to hold you for a few days, but if it's not, phone me.”
Something about being in there made Rydell feel like he was in one of those old-fashioned submarine movies, the part where they shut off the engines and wait, really quiet, for the depth charges they know are on the way. It was that quiet in here, probably because the bank was so solidly built; the only sound was the running of the toilet tank, which he thought added to the illusion.
“Okay,” Rydell said, “assuming all that works, who is it you're looking for, and what was that you said about people dying?”
“European male, mid to late fifties, probably has a military background but that was a long time ago.”
“That narrows it to maybe a million probables, up here in NoCal alone.”
“How this is going to work, Rydell, is he'll find you. I'll tell you where to go and what to ask for, and one thing and another will bring you to his attention.”
“Sounds too easy.”
“Coming to his attention will be easy. Staying alive once you do will not be.”
Rydell considered. “So what am I supposed to do for you when he finds me?”
“Ask him a question.”
“What question?”
“I don't know yet,” Laney said. “I'm working on it.”
“Laney,” Rydell said, “what's this all about?”
“If I knew that,” Laney said, and suddenly he sounded very tired, “I wouldn't have to be here.” He fell silent. Clicked off.
“Laney?”
Rydell sat listening to the toilet run. Eventually he got up, took his bag down from the hook, and exited the cubicle. He washed his hands in a trickle of cold water that ran into a black imitation marble sink crusted with yellowish industrial soap and made his way back along a corridor made narrow by cartons of what he took to be janitorial supplies.
He hoped that Creedmore and the country music mamma would've forgotten about him, gone away.
Not so. The woman was working on her own plate of eggs, while Creedmore, his beer clipped between his denim thighs, was staring balefully at the two enormous, gypsum-dusted construction workers.
“Hey,” Creedmore said, as Rydell walked past, carrying his bag.
“Hey, Buell,” Rydell said, heading for the door to the street.
“Hey, where you going?”
“To work,” Rydell said.
“Work,” he heard Creedmore say and “shit,” but the door swung shut behind him, and he was on the street.
15. BACK UP HERE
<
br /> CHEVETTE stood beside the van, watching Tessa release God's Little Toy. The camera platform, like a Mylar muffin or an inflated coin, caught the day's watery light as it rose, wobbling, then leveled out, swaying, at fifteen feet or so.
Chevette felt very strange, being here, seeing this: the concrete tank traps, beyond them the impossible shape of the bridge itself. Where she had lived, though it now seemed a dream, or someone else's life, atop the nearest cable tower. Way up in a cube of plywood there, sleeping while the wind's great hands shoved and twisted and clawed, and she'd heard the tendons of the bridge groan all in secret, a sound carried up the twisted strands for only her to hear, Chevette with her ear pressed against the graceful dolphin back of cable that rose through the oval hole sliced for it through Skinner's plywood floor.
Now Skinner was dead, she knew. He'd gone while she was in Los Angeles, trying to become whoever it was she'd thought she wanted to be. She hadn't come up. The bridge people weren't big on funerals, and possession, here, was most points of the law. She wasn't Skinner's daughter, and even if she had been, and had wanted to hold his place atop the cable tower, it would've been a matter of staying there for as long as she intended it to be hers. She hadn't wanted that.
But she'd had no way to grieve him in Los Angeles, and now it all came up, came back, the time she'd lived with him. How he had found her, too sick to walk, and taken her home, feeding her soups he bought from the Korean vendors until she was well. Then he'd left her alone, asking nothing, accepting her there the way you'd accept a bird on a windowsill, until she'd learned to ride a bicycle in the city and become a messenger. And soon the roles had reversed: the old man failing, needing help, and she the one to go for soup, bring water, see that coffee was made. And that was how it had been, until she'd gotten herself into the trouble that had resulted in her first having met Rydell.
“Wind'll catch that,” she cautioned Tessa, who had put on the glasses that let her watch the feed from the floating camera.
“I've got three more in the car,” Tessa said, pulling a sleazy-looking black control glove over her right hand. She experimented with the touch pads, revving the platform's miniature props and swinging it through a twenty-foot circle.
“We've got to hire someone to watch the van,” Chevette said, “if you want to see it again.”
“Hire someone? Who?”
Chevette pointed at a thin black child with dusty dreadlocks to his waist. “You. What's your name?”
“What's it to you?”
“Pay you watch this van. We come back, chip you fifty. Fair?”
The boy regarded her evenly. “Name Boomzilla,” he said.
“Boomzilla,” Chevette said, “you take care of this van?”
“Deal,” he said.
“Deal,” Chevette said to Tessa.
“Lady,” Boomzilla said, pointing up at God's Little Toy, “I want that.”
“Stick around,” Tessa said. “We'll need a grip.”
Tessa touching fingers to black-padded palm. The camera platform executing a second turn and gliding out of sight, above the tank traps. Tessa smiling, seeing what it saw. “Come on,” she said to Chevette and stepped between the nearest traps.
“Not that way,” Chevette said. “Over here.” There was a path you followed if you were just walking through. To take another route indicated either ignorance or the desire to do business.
She showed Tessa the way. It stank of urine between the concrete slabs. Chevette walked more quickly, Tessa behind her.
And emerged again into that wet light, but here it ran not across the stalls and vendors of memory, but across the red-and-white front of a modular convenience store, chunked down front and center across the entrance to the bridge's two levels, LUCKY DRAGON and the shudder of video up the trademark tower of screens.
“Fucking hell,” said Tessa, “how interstitial is that?”
Chevette stopped, stunned. “How could they do that?”
“It's what they do,” Tessa said. “Prime location.”
“But it's like… like Nissan County or something.”
“‘Gated attraction.’ The community's a tourist draw, right?”
“Lots of people won't go where there's no police.”
“Autonomous zones are their own draw,” Tessa said. “This one's been here long enough to become the city's number-one postcard.”
“God-awful,” Chevette said. “It… ruins it.”
“Who do you think Lucky Dragon Corp is paying rent to?” Tessa asked, swinging the platform around for a pan across the store.
“No idea,” Chevette said. “It's right in the middle of what used to be the street.”
“Never mind,” Tessa said, moving on, into the pedestrian traffic flowing to and from the bridge. “We're just in time. We're going to document the life before it's theme-parked.”
Chevette followed, not knowing what it was exactly that she felt.
THEY ate lunch in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.
Chevette didn't remember it from before, but places changed names on the bridge. They changed size and shape too. You'd get these strange mergers, a hair place and an oyster bar deciding to become a bigger place that cut hair and sold oysters. Sometimes it worked: one of the longest-running places on the San Francisco end was an old-style, manual tattoo parlor that served breakfast. You could sit there over a plate of eggs and bacon and watch somebody get needled with some kind of hand-drawn flash.
But Dirty Is God was just Mexican food and Japanese music, a pretty straightforward proposition. Tessa got the huevos rancheros and Chevette got a chicken quesadilla. They both had a Corona, and Tessa parked the camera platform up near the tented plastic ceiling. Nobody noticed it up there apparently, so Tessa could do documentary while she ate.
Tessa ate a lot. She said it was her metabolism: one of those people who never gains any weight regardless of how much she ate, but she needed to do it to keep her energy up. Tessa put away her huevos before Chevette was halfway through her quesadilla. She drained her glass bottle of Corona and started fiddling with the wedge of lime, squeezing it, working it into the neck.
“Carson,” Tessa said. “You worried about him?”
“What about him?”
“He's an abusive ex, is what about him. That was his car back in Malibu, wasn't it?”
“I think so,” Chevette said.
“You think so? You aren't sure?”
“Look,” Chevette said, “it was early in the morning. It was all pretty strange. It wasn't my idea to come up here, you know? It was your idea. You want to make your movie.”
The lime popped down into the empty Corona bottle, and Tessa looked at it as though she'd just lost a private wager. “You know what I like about you? I mean one of the things I like about you?”
“What?” Chevette asked.
“You aren't middle class. You just aren't. You move in with this guy, he starts hitting you, what do you do?”
“Move out.”
“That's right. You move out. You don't take a meeting with your lawyers.”
“I don't have any lawyers,” Chevette said.
“I know. That's what I mean.”
“I don't like lawyers,” Chevette said.
“Of course you don't. And you don't have any reflex to litigation.”
“Litigation?”
“He beat you up. He's got eight hundred square feet of strata-title loft. He's got a job. He beats you up, you don't automatically order a surgical strike; you're not middle class.”
“I just don't want anything to do with him.”
“That's what I mean. You're from Oregon, right?”
“More or less” Chevette said.
“You ever think of acting?” Tessa inverted the bottle. The squashed lime wedge fell down into the neck. A few drops of beer fell on the scratched black plastic of the table. Tessa inserted the little finger of her right hand and tried to snag the lime wedge.
“No.”
&n
bsp; “Camera loves you. You've got a body makes boys chew carpet.”
“Get off,” Chevette said.
“Why do you think they were putting those party shots of you up on the website back in Malibu?”
“Because they were drunk,” Chevette said. “Because they don't have anything better to do. Because they're media students.”
Tessa hooked the lime wedge, what was left of it, out of the bottle. “Right on all three,” she said, “but the main reason's your looks.”
Behind Tessa, on one of Dirty Is God's recycled wall screens, a very beautiful Japanese girl had appeared. “Look at her,” Chevette said. “That's looks, right?”
Tessa looked over her shoulder. “That's Rei Toei,” she said.
“So she's beautiful. She is.”
“Chevette,” Tessa said, “she doesn't exist. There's no live girl there at all. She's code. Software.”
“No way,” Chevette said.
“You didn't know that?”
“But she's based on somebody, right? Some kind of motion-capture deal.”
“Nobody,” Tessa said. “Nothing. She's the real deal. Hundred-percent unreal.”
“Then that's what people want,” Chevette said, watching Rei Toei swan through some kind of retro Asian nightclub, “not ex bicycle messengers from San Francisco.”
“No,” Tessa said, “you've got it exactly backwards. People don't know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway.”
Chevette looked at Tessa across the two empty Corona bottles. “What are you getting at, Tessa?”
“The documentary. It has to be about you.”
“Forget it.”
“No. I've got vision thing working big-time on this. I need you for the focus. I need narrative traction. I need Chevette Washington.”
Chevette was actually starting to feel a little scared. It made her angry. “Don't you have a grant to do this one particular project you've been talking about? These innersitual things—”
“Look,” Tessa said, “if that's a problem, and I'm not saying it is, it's my problem. And it's not a problem, it's an opportunity. It's a shot. My shot.”