Noir (51 page)

“How nice for you.” She hadn’t come all this way—not just across the catwalks, but the hitch up from the hospital down south—to wind up listening to this idiot brag. At the same time, she didn’t want to blow him off too fast, maybe arouse his suspicions about what she was doing here. There was probably some kind of security detail around here, sleeping on the job at the moment, but capable of being roused. “You don’t seem to have that kind of a problem.”

“Nah—this is the perfect setup.” The cameraman turned a small chromed wheel, and the boom edged a few inches closer to November, as though the brachiosaur head had come awake to sniff her human scent. “Nice, big one; getting some good shots off it.” He patted the complicated flank of his videocamera equipment. “I’ve seen some of the ratings. Worldwide, this is beating the pack. Those enhanced
Lucy
reruns, with the Tarantino dialogue filters and the Peckinpah slo-mo death scenes—those were a good idea, but they just really can’t compete. People are just too hip to those reconstruct jobs; you can’t just add four minutes of ceegee’d special effects and have people plotz like in the old days.” He gave an appreciative nod. “You want the numbers, you gotta have something happening in real time. You get that event factor, people think they’re watching the news.” The cameraman shrugged. “Plus sex, of course. That always helps.”

“I’m sure it does.” November put her hands on the forward edge of the boom, balancing herself as she tried to slide around it on the catwalk. If she looked down, she could see the soft bones, loose collections of vital organs, and skeins of nervous tissue floating in the gel. “Give the people what they want.”

“Yeah, right.” The cameraman angled his head so he could look at November over the top of his glasses. His eyes had the red corners and pinpoint pupils of someone who had no way of remembering what sleep felt like. “Couldn’t have come at a better time, either. Sweeps week, you know.” He radiated a sweating intensity, excitement translating into a vein ticking at the corner of his forehead, as though November had laid her hands on a portion of his carnal anatomy, instead of just the machinery he controlled. “Sometimes it makes you wonder … like whether they
plan
it that way …”

She didn’t make a reply. She’d gotten to the point where she was half off the catwalk, holding on to the camera boom rather than just using it for balance.

“So like I said. No point in going in
there
.” The cameraman smiled and made another, tinier adjustment to the little chrome wheel. “All the action’s out here.”

The camera boom nudged her in the chest, pushing her all the way off the catwalk. November held on to the device’s platform, both hands digging into the various bolts and flanges. Her boots dangled a few inches above the gel’s surface membrane. Underneath, the outlines of the perpetually copulating forms grew more tangled and numerous, as though her shadow on the slow waves were a newly tattooed image, one that they hadn’t seen before.

“Cute—” November looked up into the face of the cameraman above her. “But not very.” It was made even more clear to her that she hadn’t fully recovered from her hospital stay. The delicate new skin of her fingertips and palms felt as if it were about to shred apart from her desperate clutching of the boom platform. Plus, she was too weak to climb up and kick this smirking sonuvabitch’s ass. “I’d appreciate it … if you’d put me down.…”

“What’s your rush?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the chrome wheel, as though it were the dial to a bank-vault safe. “There’s more than one party possible at a time. Why should we let these folks—or whatever they are—have all the fun?” He nodded to indicate the gel
and its interspersed contents. “World enough and time, sweetheart. Why miss the opportunity?”

“Thanks for the offer.” November could feel her hands beginning to either sweat or bleed. “But I’ve got business to take care of.”

“Bullshit.” The cameraman’s expression darkened, as though he were coming down from some minor chemical rush. Scowling, he picked up a handheld videocam from the platform by his feet; he held it to his eye, pointing the glassy lens toward November. The image of her face, in real time, showed up on the monitor mounted on top of the boom’s bigger camera. “You see?” He lowered the camera from his face, still keeping her in focus with it. He pointed his thumb toward the monitor screen. “You look like somebody who could use a little relaxation. You’re all tense.”

“That’s how I like it.” November had managed to grab hold of some kind of cable socket on the side of the boom platform, giving one hand, at least, a secure purchase. “Now stop connecting around and put me down.”

“All right, bitch.” With one hand, he spun the chrome wheel hard, jerking the boom into a quick horizontal arc. “Your loss.”

November clung to the edge of the boom until it slammed to a stop, harder than necessary. For a dizzying fraction of a second, she had an unnerving perception of the slow ocean below, blurred in her gaze, but with the things—or thing—inside it undoubtedly gazing up at her with inarticulate lust. The boom deposited her on the other end of the catwalk, closer to the ruins of the End Zone Hotel; the narrow pathway bowed toward the gel when she let go of the platform and dropped the few inches down. “Thanks.”

“Whatever.” The cameraman appeared seriously disgruntled; pushing a small black-knobbed lever in front of himself, he angled the boom away, without looking back at her. As though picking up on his disappointment, or expressing its own, the slow ocean roiled beneath the catwalk, its internal temperature taken up a notch from its previous simmer.

The lobby of the burnt hotel was flooded now, the gel extending past the former check-in counter with its steel grille—the open register book floated under the surface membrane like a preserved butterfly—and all the way to the wet stairs at the back. Standing on tiptoe on the swaying catwalk, November managed to reach the sill of one of the
second story’s windows. She jumped and scrambled her way in, the front of her jacket scraping across the cindery wood, and landed sprawling in ashes.

“Here you go, pal. You asked for it; you got it.”

The ultimate barfly stepped back, pushing the hotel room door farther open behind herself. She smiled and made a sweeping gesture, half inviting bow and half magician’s display, toward the room’s contents.

McNihil stepped in from the corridor, from the ashes and rubble that filled the core of the End Zone Hotel. He’d followed the barfly here from the other room, the metallic fabric of her dress glittering across the sway of her hips like the sparks of luminous insects, leading him on.
Die ewige Weibliche
, he’d thought, amused by the literary allusion that had popped inside his head. He doubted if Goethe could have meant anything else but that familiar movement, the kinder incarnation of Tlazoltéotl.

“Thanks,” said McNihil as he walked in front of the barfly. He could feel her behind him, standing in the doorway, watching him with that look of amusement, both tender and contemptuous, in her golden-veiled gaze.

This room had the same dimensions as the other one, with the single small window in the exact same position in the wall near the bed. The essential room, McNihil knew, was replicated throughout the hotel, space after space, distinctions annihilated in this world and the other one. He could have been walking on a treadmill out in the hallway, with the numbered doors going by him on some sort of assembly line, a factory where bad dreams were bolted together.

Same furnishings as well: the narrow bed with its sagging mattress, with the little table and the plastic Philco radio beside it, the chest of drawers with the clouded mirror on top. The fire that had consumed the other rooms seemed to have only penetrated partway into this one; the wallpaper’s scowling cabbage roses, faded to the pink of consumptive lung tissue, could still be deciphered beneath the tapering wipes of smoke damage. The chest of drawers was still standing; McNihil saw the mask of his own face in the angled glass, the peeling silver behind making his image look like some ancient daguerreotype from the first
American Civil War. The ashes on the floor were the ones that his own feet had brought in and trampled into the threadbare carpet.

He stopped in the middle of the room and turned to look back at the barfly. “This is the one?”

The ultimate barfly stood leaning against the side of the doorway, in a classic pose, a still from the old black-and-white movies that leaked out of McNihil’s eyes. She had another lit cigarette, for his benefit, held down in one hand, her other arm crossing beneath her low cleavage and holding her elbow. “Of course.” Her mocking smile made the image perfect. A wisp of smoke threaded past her breast. “Why would I lie to you?”

“No reason,” admitted McNihil. “Nobody has to around here, to connect me up.” He turned away from her, looking back toward the bed at the far side of the hotel room.

Lying on the bed was the same sleeping, dreaming girl as before. The cube bunny’s eyelashes dark against her skin, her parted mouth almost a kiss against the thin pillow. The same girl, but different; it didn’t take McNihil long to see that, even in the cloud-obscured light that seeped into the room. Her skin, from the bare curve of her shoulder to the sharper edge of her ankle, was unmarked. No tattoos, permanent or mobile, showed on her body. Her nakedness glowed, softly radiant, like a candle curtained behind transparencies of pink silk.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

McNihil nodded slowly. He reached down and let his fingertips touch the girl, a soft, minimal caress of her shoulder.
Don’t wake up
, he told her in silence.
Keep on dreaming
. It would be better that way, if the cube bunny stayed in whatever world she’d found behind her eyelashes. The one outside probably hadn’t been too kind to her.

He glanced over his shoulder at the woman standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The barfly looked older now, not just in comparison to the sleeping girl on the bed, but in some deeper, absolute sense. As though some part of her, which turned the expression on her face weary with understanding, had connected to a carnal wisdom as old as this world, as old as men’s desires.

She’s got it all wrong
, thought McNihil. There were limits even to that ancient wisdom. A current like electricity, a pale fraction of the spark that had leapt in the barfly’s kiss, passed from the sleeping girl’s skin and
into his fingertips. But that was all; the current didn’t move down his spine, didn’t connect with anything below the base of his stomach. He’d come here—to this room, this bed, this girl, this dreaming—to do a job. And that was all.

“Why this one?”

The barfly shrugged. “Why not?” She gazed past McNihil to the sleeping figure on the bed. “It had to be someone. It could’ve been anyone. Any of them.” McNihil knew what she meant:
Any woman here in the Wedge
. “When somebody—some man—comes looking for an FPC job, a Full Prince Charles, the total and terminal—it’s not necessarily with some specific woman that he wants it. It’s with women in general,
Woman
with a capital
W
.” Her look of wry amusement showed again, as though she were aware of what’d been in McNihil’s head as she’d led him down the hotel corridor to this room. “The eternal feminine—right?”

McNihil nodded again. “I guess so.”

“No guessing about it, pal. You got some major psychological imperatives going on here. Exclusively a male thing; women don’t have to go looking for this, ’cause they’re already carrying it around with them. A guy like this Travelt you’re trying to find, even when his thoughts and needs and everything else—his soul, if you want to call it that—even when he’s inside the head of a prowler body, he’s still looking for what every member of the male species is always looking for. Way deep down inside. He’s just brave enough to come out and say it, to ask for what he really wants. What all of you want, eventually. The complete and total reunion of the male and female principles.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. McNihil had heard the mystical, quasi-Jungian spiel about Full Prince Charles numbers before, all that weird alchemical, revised neo-Platonic line; he’d never been overly impressed by it.
Nice place to visit
, he’d always thought,
but that doesn’t mean I’d want to live there
.

Maybe Travelt hadn’t, either. The fact that the former DZ junior exec, who’d left his real and original body lying dead on the floor of his cubapt, had come all this way into the Wedge riding inside a prowler, had made the right connections and had gotten an FPC done on himself—that didn’t mean the guy had been operating out of some deep primal need.
Maybe
, thought McNihil,
he just didn’t have any alternative
.
He hadn’t been running so much as he’d been chased here. To the best hiding place Travelt could find; the ultimate, really.

McNihil stroked the sleeping girl’s bare shoulder; he’d sat down on the edge of the bed, his feet in the ashes smeared across the hotel room’s carpet. The cube bunny’s face was angled into the pillow, her profile hidden by shadows and the dark hair that fell loosened past the pink shell of her ear. This was what he’d come so far to find.

“You know just how it works, don’t you?” The barfly’s voice came from the doorway. “You’re up-to-speed on what’s involved with one of these?”

He nodded. Even if he’d never seen a Full Prince Charles before, in reality or dreaming or memory, McNihil knew all about them. When he’d headed the Collection Agency’s abortive investigation into the Wedge, there’d been file cabinets and databases full of reports on what the asp-heads might run into there. The report on FPC’s had even had pictures, color photographs that had managed to filter through McNihil’s black-and-white vision.

Even the etymology, where the term
Full Prince Charles
came from—he was hip to that as well. From that poor bastard, the guy who may or may not have become the king of the land he’d inherited from bloodlines and heraldry charts full of other poor bastards, his predecessors, who’d also never quite figured out the world they lived in—McNihil wasn’t sure of the exact history.