COUNT ZERO

“These other things,” she asked, falling into step beside him, “what are they?”

He smiled. “You think we haven’t tracked them, each one? We have They were” – here he frowned, exaggerating the effort of memory -”a number of rather unremarkable examples of contemporary folk art.”

“Was Roberts known to be interested in that sort of thing?”

“No,” he said, “but approximately a year before his death, we know that he made application for membership in the Institut de l’Art Brut, here in Paris, and arranged to become a patron of the Aeschma

Marly nodded The Aeschma

“We are reasonably certain,” Paco continued, taking her elbow and guiding her around a corner, into a side street, “that he made no attempt to use the resources of either, unless he employed an intermediary, and we regard that as unlikely. Señor, of course, has employed several dozen scholars to sweep the records of both institutions. To no avail...”

“Tell me,” she said, “why Picard assumed that he had recently seen Herr Virek. How is that possible?”

“Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation.”

Now he led her into a chrome-trimmed barn of a place, glittering with mirrors, bottles, and arcade games. The mirrors lied about the depth of the room; at its rear, she could see the reflected pavement, the legs of pedestrians, the flash of sunlight on a hubcap. Paco nodded to a lethargic-looking man behind the bar and took her hand, leading her through the tightly packed shoal of round plastic tables.

“You can take your call from Alain here,” he said. “We have arranged to reroute it from your friend’s apartment.” He drew a chair out for her, an automatic bit of professional courtesy that made her wonder if he might actually once have been a waiter, and placed his bag on the tabletop.

“But he’ll see that I’m not there,” she said. “If I blank the video, he’ll become suspicious.”

“But he won’t see that We’ve generated a digital image of your face and the required background We’ll key that to the image on this phone “He took an elegant modular unit from the bag and placed it in front of her. A paper thin polycarbon screen unfurled silently from the top of the unit and immediately grew rigid. She had once watched a butterfly emerge into the world, and seen the transformation of its drying wings. “How is that done?” she asked, tentatively touching the screen. It was like thin steel.

“One of the new polycarbon variants,” he said, “one of the Maas products...”

The phone purred discreetly He positioned it more carefully in front of her, stepped to the far side of the table, and said, “Your call. Remember, you are at home!” He reached forward and brushed a titanium-coated stud.

Alain’s face and shoulders filled the little screen. The image had the smudged, badly lit look of a public booth. “Good afternoon, my dear,” he said.

“Hello, Alain.”

“How are you, Marly? I trust you’ve gotten the money we discussed?” She could see that he was wearing a jacket of some kind, dark, but she could make out no details. “Your roommate could do with a lesson in housecleaning,” he said, and seemed to be peering back over her shoulder.

“You’ve never cleaned a room in your life,” she said

He shrugged, smiling. “We each have our talents,” he said. “Do you have my money, Marly?”

She glanced up at Paco, who nodded. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”

“That’s wonderful, Marly. Marvelous We have only one small difficulty.” He was still smiling.

“And what is that?”

“My informants have doubled their price. Consequently, I must now double mine.”

Paco nodded. He was smiling, too.

“Very well. I will have to ask, of course...” He sickened her now. She wanted to be off the phone.

“And they, of course, will agree.”

“Where shall we meet, then?”

“I will phone again, at five,” he said. His image shrank to a single blip of blue-green, and then that was gone as well.

“You look tired,” Paco said as he collapsed the screen and replaced the phone in his bag “You look older when you’ve talked with him.”

“Do I?” For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she’d been through the long season of youth.

16 LEGBA

“HEY, SHITHEAD.” RHEA poked him none too lightly in the ribs “Get your ass up.”

He came up fighting with the crocheted comforter, with the half-formed shapes of unknown enemies. With his mother’s murderers. He was in a room he didn’t know, a room that might have been anywhere. Gold plastic gilt frames on a lot of mirrors. Fuzzy scarlet wallpaper. He’d seen Gothicks decorate rooms that way, when they could afford it, but he’d also seen their parents do whole condos in the same style Rhea flung a bundle of clothes down on the temperfoam and shoved her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket.

The pink and black squares of the comforter were bunched around his waist. He looked down and saw the segmented length of the centipede submerged in a finger-wide track of fresh pink scar tissue. Beauvoir had said that the thing accelerated healing. He touched the bright new tissue with a hesitant fingertip, found it tender but bearable. He looked up at Rhea. “Get your ass up on this,” he said, giving her the finger.

They glared at each other, for a few seconds, over Bobby’s upraised middle finger. Then she laughed “Okay,” she said, “you got a point. I’ll get off your case But pick those clothes up and get ‘em on. Should be something there that fits Lucas is due by here soon to pick you up, and Lucas doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Yeah? Well, he seems like a pretty relaxed guy to me.” He began to sort through the heap of clothing, discarding a black shirt with a paisley pattern printed on it in laundered-out gold, a red satin number with a fringe of white imitation leather down the sleeves, a black sort of leotard thing with panels of some translucent material... “Hey,” he said, “where did you get this stuff? I can’t wear shit like this.”

“It’s my little brother’s,” Rhea said. “From last season, and you better get your white ass dressed before Lucas gets down here. Hey,” she said, “that’s mine,” snatching up the leotard as though he might be about to steal it.

He pulled the black and gold shirt on and fumbled with domed snaps made of black imitation pearl. He found a pair of black jeans, but they proved to be baggy and elaborately pleated, and didn’t seem to have any pockets “This all the pants you got?”

“Jesus,” she said. “I saw the clothes Pye cut off you, man. You aren’t anybody’s idea of a fashion plate. Just get dressed, okay? I don’t want any trouble with Lucas. He may come on all mellow with you, but ‘that just means you got something he wants bad enough to take the trouble. Me, I sure don’t, so Lucas got no compunctions, as far as I’m concerned.”

He stood up unsteadily beside the bedslab and tried to zip up the black jeans. “No zip,” he said, looking at her.

“Buttons In there somewhere. It’s part of the style you know?”

Bobby found the buttons. It was an elaborate arrangement and he wondered what would happen if he had to piss in a hurry He saw the black nylon thongs beside the slab and shoved his feet into them. “What about Jackie?” he asked, padding to where he could see himself in the gold-framed mirrors. ‘Lucas got any compunctions about her?” He watched her in the mirror, saw something cross her face.

“What’s that mean?”

“Beauvoir, he told me she was a horse”

“You hush,” she said, her voice gone low and urgent. “Beauvoir mention anything like that to you, that’s his business. Otherwise, it’s nothing you talk about, understand? There’s things bad enough, you’d wish you were back out there getting your butt carved up.”