COUNT ZERO

“He should have left, too,” he said.

“He hates the city,” she said. “Says it all comes in on line anyway, so why do you need to go there?”

“I went because there was nothing happening here Rudy could always find something to do. Still can, by the look of it.”

“You should’ve stayed in touch. He wanted you here when your mother was dying.”

“I was in Berlin. Couldn’t leave what I was doing.”

“I guess not. I wasn’t here then either I came later. That was a good summer. Rudy just pulled me out of this sleaze-ass club in Memphis; came in there with a bunch of country boys one night. and next day I was back here, didn’t really know why. Except he was nice to me, those days, and fu

She put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were level with the band of brown belly where her shorts rode low, her navel a soft shadow, and remembering Allison in the white hollow room, he wanted to press his face there, taste it all . He thought she swayed slightly, but he wasn’t sure.

“Turner,” she said, “sometimes bein’ here with him, it’s like bein’ here alone.”

So he stood, rattle of the old swing chain where the eye-bolts were screwed deep in the tongue and groove of the porch roof, bolts his father might have turned forty years before, and kissed her mouth as it opened, cut loose in time by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of memory, so that it seemed to him, as he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life weren’t beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he’d known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchell’s daughter.

“Hey,” she whispered, working her mouth free, “you come upstairs now “

18 NAMES OF THE DEAD

ALAIN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card she’d taken from Picard’s desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadn’t been there for Alain’s call.

She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. “I had a talk about your employer today,” she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. “Our academic was in from Nice. He’s baffled as to why I’d choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but he’s also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk.”

Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames lick around the coals.

“He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it,” Andrea continued, “and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth century, an American. He’s in the book as well, as a sort of proto-Virek I hadn’t known that Tessier-Ashpool had started to disintegrate... She went back to the counter and un-wrapped six large tiger prawns.

“They’re Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I think They own one of the big spas?”

“Freeside. It’s been sold now, my professor tells me. It seems that one of old Ashpool’s daughters somehow managed to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became increasingly eccentric, and the clan’s interests went to hell. This over the past seven years.”

“I don’t see what it has to do with Virek,” Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo.

“Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anachronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolution by watching them. He’s convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate.”

“But what did he say about Virek?”

“That Virek’s madness would take a different form.”

“Madness?”

“Actually, he avoided calling it that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daughter totally bizarre. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of ‘jump.’ ‘Jump was his word.”

“Evolutionary pressures?”

“Yes,” Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. “He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.”

After di

The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.

Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, students and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she assumed, were part of Virek’s machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Señor all his life.

“What’s wrong? You look as though you’ve just swallowed something.” Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut.

“No,” Marly said, and shivered, “But it occurs to me that I very nearly did...”

And walking home, in spite of Andrea’s conversation, her warmth, the shop windows had become boxes, each one, constructions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought. The books and furs and Italian cot-tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.

And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing. In a gray morning of Paris rain.

“No,” she told Paco, “I’ll go myself. I prefer it.”

“That is a great deal of money.” He looked down at the

Italian bag on the café table between them. “It’s dangerous, you understand?”

“There’s no one to know I’m carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn’t say I’d go alone, only that I don’t feel like company.’

“Is something wrong?” The serious deep lines at the corners of his mouth “You are upset?”

“I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, I’m sure you have the address.”