Nova Swing

"Vic Serotonin walked into the Cafe Surf tonight, half an hour after you walked out. I've been trying to reach you since."

5

Ninety Per Cent Neon

"Ah," Aschema

"I can't report to you when you disco

"I suppose not."

"You disco

Aschema

The house lurched, then vanished from around him. He was looking down a nanocam feed, at jumpy visuals of people in some crowded space. His assistant's voice came in across the top of that, its hollow, reverberant qualities an artefact of the transmission process. She seemed closer, but not quite in the room with him. "Is this all right?" she said. "Only they're routing it down some kind of low priority EMC pipe. Ours are all down."

"The pipe's fine. The material itself is poor."

"They had some technical problems with that too."

It wasn't anything like being there. The image stream wavered, held, dropped suddenly into greyscale while slow bars of black rolled queasily down Aschema

"Do you have the same view as me?" the assistant said in an excited voice. "From about waist height? And there's a woman in a red dress to the right of the bar?"

"That's the view I have."

"There he is. Do you see him? He said he never heard of the Cafe Surf, but there he is! This is exactly what we need!"

Aschema

"They don't know."

"That's helpful."

"If you watch the whole thing, the fault gets out of hand about two hundred and eighty seconds in, and they disco

Aschema

Something in the Cafe Surf footage had caught Aschema

"I've seen you here," Aschema

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminium frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He'd seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Serotonin. More importantly, perhaps, he'd seen it fourteen days ago, when she stumbled out of the toilet at the Cafe Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she was new in the world. She still had an unformed, labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

"I'm here a lot," she said. "I like the band. Do you like them?"

He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little rum. "They're as guilty as ever," he said.

"Guilty?"

"Under his dexterity, this pianist hides neither intellect nor heart, only compulsion. If no one else is available he will play against himself; and then against the self thus created, and then against the self after that, until all fixed notion of self has leaked away into the slippage and he can relax for a second in the sharp light and cigarette smoke like someone caught fleetingly in an ancient black and white photograph. Do you see?"

"It's only music, though," she said.

"Perhaps," Aschema

"The older man has come to a different understanding of things, one which to his friend would seem bland and self-evident. He believes that it is only because no music is possible that any music at all is possible." Here, Aschema

"But guilty? Is that enough to make them guilty?"

The detective shrugged. "Complicit, then. It's only a way of putting it. Myself, I prefer the New Nuevo Tango. There's more heart."

She stared at him, got down off the stool, laughed in a nervous way which revealed the flecks of lipstick on her white teeth. He caught briefly the smell of her, strong, warm, a little unwashed, a little cheap; in some way reassuring.

"Goodbye," she said. "Maybe I'll see you again."

Aschema

"Wait," he ordered. "Police. Don't go in without me."

She stared at him in despair; then over his shoulder, less as if there was someone there than at the city itself. "Please!" she said. "I don't know what I've done wrong."

"Neither do I."

Whatever happened next, he wanted to make sure he was there.

It was bare: grey board floor, bare bulb, a single bentwood chair. On the wall opposite the window, the shadow of the slatted blind fell across a poster with the logo SurfNoir. "Hey," she said. "I know: why don't you sit here-?" When she bent forward from the waist to undo his raincoat, the red dress presented her breasts to him in a flickering light. She knelt, and he could hear her breathing. It was placid, rather catarrhal. Later she lifted the hem of the dress and positioned herself astride him. So close, he saw that her gait, the shadows round her eyes, the foundation caked in the downy hairs by the corners of her mouth, had conspired beneath the Cafe Surf neon to make her seem older than she was. She whispered when he came, "There. There now." She had been a month in the same dress. She was a victim, but of what? He wasn't sure. He had no idea what she was. How had he smelled her excitement yet failed to smell his own? He felt weakened by it.