Virtual Light

“Just this.” Hefting his Samsonite.

“That’s Mr. Warbaby right over there” Freddie said, nodding in the direction of an exit-gate, where a uniformed chilanga was checking people’s seat-stubs before letting them out. Another black man loomed behind her, huge, broad as this Freddie, looking twice his height.

“Big guy.”

“Uh-huh” Freddie said, “and best we not keep him waiting. Leg’s hurting him today and he just insisted on walking in here from the lot to meet you.”

Rydell took the man in as he approached the gate, handing his stub to the guard. He was enormous, over six feet, but the thing that struck Rydell most was a stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face. It was a look he’d seen on the face of a black minister his father had taken to watching, toward the end there. You looked at that minister’s face and you felt like he’d seen every sad-ass thing there was, so maybe you could even believe what he was saying. Or anyway Rydell’s father had, maybe, at least a little bit.

“Lucius Warbaby” taking the biggest hands Rydell had ever seen from the deep pockets of a long olive overcoat stitched from diamond-quilted silk, his voice pitched so far into the bass that it suggested subsonics. Rydell looked at the proffered hand and saw he wore one of those old-fashioned gold knuckle-duster rings, WARBABY across it in diamond-chip sans-serif capitals.

Rydell shook it, fingers curled over diamond and bullion. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Warbaby.”

Warbaby wore a black Stetson set dead level on his head, the brim turned up all the way around, and glasses with heavy black frames. Clear lenses, windowpane plain. The eyes behind those lenses were Chinese or something; catlike, slanted, a weird goldy brown. He was leaning on one of those adjustable canes you get at the hospital. There was a carbon brace clamped around his left leg, big midnight-blue nylon cushions padding it. Ski

“Juanito says you’re a decent driver” Warbaby said, as though it was about the saddest thing he’d ever heard. Rydell hadn’t ever heard anybody call Hernandez that. “Says you don’t know the area up here…”

“That’s right.”

“Up-side of that” Warbaby said, “is nobody here knows you. Carry the man’s bag, Freddie.”

Freddie took Rydell’s soft-side with obvious reluctance, as though it wasn’t something he’d ordinarily care to be seen with.

The hand with the knuckle-duster came down on Rydell’s shoulder. Like the ring weighed twenty pounds. “Juanito tell you anything with regard to what we’re doing up here?”

“Said a hotel theft. Said IntenSecure was bringing you in on a kind of contract basis—”

“Theft, yes.” Warbaby looked like he had the moral gravity of the universe pressing down on him and was determined to bear the brunt. “Something missing. And all more complicated, now.”

“How’s that?”

Warbaby sighed. “Man who’s missing it, he’s dead now.”

Something else in those eyes. “Dead hozi’?” Rydell asked, as the weight at last was taken from his shoulder.

“Homicide” Warbaby said, low and doleful but very clear.

“You’re wondering about my name” Warbaby said from the backseat of his black Ford Patriot.

“I’m wondering where to put the key, Mr. Warbaby” Rydell said, behind the wheel, surveying the option-laden dash. American cars were the only cars in the world that still bothered to physically display the instrumentation. Maybe that was why there weren’t very many of them. Like those Harleys with chain-drives.

“My grandmother” Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China, “was Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit boy. Army man. Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didn’t stick around. My daddy, his son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.”

“Uh-huh” Rydell said, starting the big Ford and checking out the transmission. Saigon was where rich people went on vacation.

Four-wheel drive. Ceramic armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers you’d need a serious gun to puncture. There was a cardboard air-freshener, shaped like a pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-vent.

“Now the Lucius part, well, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Mr. Warbaby” Rydell said, looking back over his shoulder, “where you want me to drive YOU to?”

A modem-bleep from the dash.

Freddie, in the plush bucket beside Rydell, whistled. “Motherfuck” he said, “that’s nasty.”

Rydell swung back to watch as the fax emerged: a fat man, naked on sheets solid with blood. Pools of it, where the brilliance of the photographer’s strobes lay frozen like faint mirages of the sun.

“What’s that under his chin?” Rydell asked.

“Cuban necktie” Freddie said.

“No, man” Rydell’s voice up an octave, “what is that?”

“Man’s tongue” Freddie said, tearing the image from the slit and passing it back to Warbaby.

Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.

“These people” Warbaby said. “Terrible.”

Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Ski

“The razor is old” Yamazaki said. “You do not throw it away?”

Ski

“I make you laugh?”

“Not today” Ski

Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Ski

10. The modern dance

He’d made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridge’s program and the program of the city, but extracting Ski

Today, climbing to the lift that would carry him to Ski

Was it significant that Ski