The air is thick with neon. Signs suspended over the discreet entrances to places with names like 'Pixie' and 'Dream II' stain the night a hazy, burnished pink. A small army of men in cheap suits stand before the doors, calling out to potential customers in muted voices or else gazing vacantly at the pavement in front of their shoes. Beside me, Taylor is smoking through a custom hole on the side of his mouthpiece. He comes to an arched doorway framed by fluorescent tubing and stops, a languid cloud of smoke drifting around his head.
"You ready to see some tits?" he asks.
After we'd finished questioning R we went looking for the bartender. Taylor had his address, an apartment on the second floor of a converted townhouse not far from 6th Bridge. We spent a few useless minutes banging on his door before Taylor tried calling one last time, but the bartender still wasn't picking up his phone. I was for going home, but Taylor insisted on dragging me out here.
"If this turns out to be a dead end I'm going to be upset," I say.
"I told you, Jared only works here part time. He might be here tonight, and he might not. But if not, maybe someone can tell us where he is."
"What makes you so sure this bartender friend of yours can find Parker?"
"Wherever the old man is, you can bet it was Jared who got him there. Nathaniel's not exactly mobile."
"Then let's go."
Taylor removes what's left of his cigarette from the modulator and flicks it to the ground. A stuttering of red-gold lights moves over the surface of his glasses. He considers me for a moment, and then he shakes his head and starts through the door.
The interior is wide and brightly lit. Two chest-high ferns flank the entrance, and on the left a fat, balding man in a tux is ensconced behind a glass partition. A wrinkled newspaper is spread in front of him, and beside that is a brass ashtray overflowing with the butts of old hand-rolleds. He glances up without interest, his stubby, pink fingers working to smooth a crease in the paper.
"It's twenty each," he announces. I pass the money through a slot in the bottom of the glass and wait for Taylor to do the same. He only looks at me.
"If you think I'm paying for you, forget it," I tell him.
"You wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for me."
"Forget it," I repeat, and at last he takes out his wallet, muttering. The fat man behind the partition waits with his eyes on the paper, paying less attention to us than he would to a pair of insects. Once he's paid, Taylor moves down the hall, at the end of which is a curved stairwell that leads to the basement. Two elderly drunks are seated on a leather couch at the foot of the stairs, talking together in low, unhurried voices. To their right is a wide doorway and next to that another potted fern and a vending machine stocked with beer and rice alcohol.
Pushing open the doors, I step into a dark, cramped room, heavy with the scent of hand-rolleds and spilled beer. A narrow stage runs the length of the back wall, with a kind of raised, circular platform positioned just in front of it. Four semi-circular rows of seats fan out from there. The crowd is sparse, and comprised almost entirely of middle-aged men. None of them look at us as we enter, sitting primly in their seats with the tight, constipated expressions of people waiting on the results of an STD test.
"I'll see if he's here," Taylor says, starting off in the direction of the small DJ booth in the corner. The stage lights are switched on, and as I move to find a seat a girl enters from a concealed doorway on the right. She is very short, with a slight, childish body and a thick bob of brown hair. A white, nearly translucent nightgown trails from her shoulders, falling in a straight line to her knees. Beneath the gown she's naked.
The girl steps forward, and a treacly, 10-year-old pop track starts up on the house speakers. The girl's toes are pointed like a dancer's and her thighs slip neatly from a long slit in the nightgown. She draws her arms in, pressing her wrists together at her neck and gazing innocently out at the crowd. In two quick motions she reaches the circular platform at the front of the stage and sits down, bringing a leg up to her chest and allowing the nightgown to climb almost as far as her hips. Her fingers trail slowly to her shoulders and she tugs at first one, and then the other of the straps. They fall to her elbows, and she arches her back, exposing her throat. The nightgown slips over her breasts. In the hard light of the stage the girl's skin takes on the molded, hyper-real cast of plastic, every minute detail, from the gooseflesh around her nipples to a small mole just above her left breast rendered in near perfect clarity.
She looks like a body laid out in an operating theatre, I think, and beneath her, the circular platform begins to rotate. It rises smoothly from the floor, lifting the girl over the crowd. As she's raised, a light like the flame of an acetylene torch kindles within the platform. It is small at first, but it spreads quickly, until at last the whole platform is glowing and the girl's skin is burnished the colour of a ripe peach.
Now she is pushing the nightgown over her slight hips, and in a moment she is on her hands and knees. She bites down on her lower lip and extends one of her legs at a 90 degree angle, the muscles in her thigh visibly trembling. The girl completes one full revolution in the same pose and as if on cue the men in the audience break into a muted round of applause. After this, the girl moves through a series of more and more complex positions, at one point turning her back to the platform and lifting herself up, crab-like, on her hands and feet; her stomach trembles, a few, taut beads of sweat standing on her skin. The light seems to hum in the air around her, casing her body, or defining it; I look away, but her after-image remains with me, like a projection of light against the black wall behind the stage.
Taylor falls heavily into the seat beside me, and I blink, trying to bring him into focus.
"He isn't here," he says. "The guy working tonight hasn't seen him in days."
"What now?" I ask. Taylor shrugs, and sets a fresh cigarette into the slot in his modulator. I glance back at the girl on the stage, but the odd hum or distortion is gone, leaving her humanized and diminished, a bored-looking stripper working a dull, unforgiving shift. Numbly, I rub at my eyes with the flat of my hand.
"I need a fucking drink," I say, edging past Taylor's knees and exiting the room. Compared to the closeness of the theatre, the air in the hallway is fresh and bracing. The two drunks have vanished, and after slotting some change into the machine and selecting a tall can of beer, I sit down at the couch. The sound of raised voices reaches me from the floor above, and then a fragmentary burst of laughter. Leaning back in the plush seat I crack open the beer and watch as a pair of men in black goggles make their way down the stairs.
"See?" says the taller of the two. "I told you tracking that bartender down wouldn't be a waste of time."
The other man is silent. He rubs his jaw with bony fingers, and it hits me that I've seen them both before. It was in Nathaniel's bar, the night I went to question Taylor and wound up eating that mantis. While they hadn't seemed to out of place in the basement of an underground techno club, down here they look like extras from a bad sci-fi film.
"That's an unusual colour," the tall one says, addressing me.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your line."
"My line?"
"I like it when they play dumb," he says, laughing.
"Sorry, but you mind telling me who the fuck you are?"
"You know," he muses. "In all my time hunting you people this is the first time any of you have us asked that."
"You people?"
"They also typically know that we're coming," the shorter man says thoughtfully.
"Maybe a yellow line means they're retarded," replies the taller one.
"You can see it?" I ask. The taller man taps his goggles.
"Latest technology," he says, leaning forward and leering at me. "You know, I'm always curious to ask why you bother to come here."
"Same reason you did I guess. To see some tits."
He laughs.
"What, there's no pussy in your universe?
"
"We never have seen a female," remarks the shorter man.
"Maybe they're all faggots," replies his friend. The shorter man smiles, a brief, stark break in the grim wasteland of his face, and all at once what they're saying begins to dawn on me.
"You think I'm an outsider?"
"Let's get on with this."
"True," the taller man says. "We can talk later."
He reaches into his coat. Just then, the doors to the theatre swing open and Taylor steps into the hall.
"Shit," he says.
The taller man reacts first, drawing something that might be a gun out of his coat. Without thinking I throw my beer, watching as the can spins end over end in a spray of golden white foam; there is a sharp, thunking sound as it connects with the side of the taller man's head. He shouts and his arm jerks up, a pair of wires shooting from the thing in his hand to ricochet harmlessly from the ceiling. The shorter man makes a low, snarling sound, and reaches into his own coat.
"Cover your ears!" Taylor shouts, and I have just enough time to obey before a piercing, needle-fine scream shatters the hall; the two men howl soundlessly, their voices drowned by the noise, dropping to the ground with their hands clutched to their ears. Suddenly the noise is gone, replaced by a toneless, metallic ringing. Repressing an urge to vomit, I stagger to my feet, dimly aware of Taylor grabbing hold of my arm.
"Let's go," he says, from a very long way off.
"What?" I manage. Spit is dribbling from my mouth.
He wrenches me forward, and my legs respond by reflex. A dancing flurry of black dots overtakes my eyes, and I can only barely make out the stairs. Somehow we reach the top, where the fat man in the tuxedo is standing, tottering on his feet and blinking dumbly.
"What was that noise?" he asks. Taylor pushes past him and we stumble out of the building and into the night and the cold bath of neon; my breath fogs the air, back-lit by the flickering red-gold light around the door.
"What the fuck was that?" I manage, but Taylor doesn't respond. He drags me forward, and the street retreats before us, neon-fronted doorways and old drunks and men in suits falling away one after another. At last we reach the end of the road. Taylor leaves me doubled over at the curb and sometime later he returns, holding the door of a car and helping me to crawl inside.
"I don't want him puking in my cab," says the man upfront, glaring at me in the rearview mirror.
"He's fine," Taylor tells him.
The driver shrugs and pulls away, slipping neatly into the traffic. I turn around and scan the road behind us, but there's no sign of the men in goggles. I rest my head against the leather seat cushion, closing my eyes. A dozen questions spin in my head, but none of them are as important as blacking out.