Cryptonomicon

Chapter 34 SUIT

Randy's posture is righteous and alert: it is all because of his suit.

It is trite to observe that hackers don't like fancy clothes. Avi has learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable—the slacks that go with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight that is it not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style—this last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five years.

So it's like this: Avi has a spreadsheet on one of his computers, listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it to his tailor in Shanghai. Then, in a classic demonstration of the Asian just-in-time delivery system as pioneered by Toyota, the suits will arrive via Federal Express, twenty-four hours ahead of time so that they can be automatically piped to the hotel's laundry room. This morning, just as Randy emerged from the shower, he heard a knock at his door, and swung it open to reveal a valet carrying a freshly cleaned and pressed business suit, complete with shirt and tie. He put it all on (a tenth-generation photocopy of a bad diagram of the half-Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit perfectly. Now he stands in a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric numbers above an elevator count down, occasionally sneaking a glance at himself in a big mirror. Randy's head protruding from a suit is a sight gag that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.

He is pondering the morning's e-mail.

It is not at all interesting to watch the numbers over the elevators and try to predict which one will arrive first, but it is more interesting than just standing there. One of them has been stuck on the floor above Randy's for at least a minute; he can hear it buzzing angrily. In Asia many business men—especially some of the overseas Chinese—would think nothing of commandeering one of the hotel's elevators around the clock for their own personal use, stationing minions in it, in eight-hour shifts, to hold their thumbs on the DOOR OPEN button, ignoring its self-righteous alarm buzzer.

Ding. Randy spins around on the balls of his feet (just try that little maneuver in a pair of sneakers!). Once again he has backed the wrong horse: the winner is an elevator that was on the very top floor of the hotel last time he scanned it. This is an elevator with purpose, a fast-track lift. He walks towards the green light. The doors part. Randy stares squarely into the face of Dr. Hubert (the Dentist) Kepler, D.D.S.

Or perhaps you are referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years?

“Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like that, you remind me of one of my patients.”

“Good morning, Dr. Kepler.” Randy hears his words from the other end of a mile-long bumwad tube, and immediately reviews them in his own mind to make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit.

The doors start to close and Randy has to whack them open with his laptop case.

“Careful! That's an expensive piece of equipment, I'd wager,” says the Dentist.

Randy is about to say I go through laptops like a transvestite goes through nylons though maybe like a high-speed drill through a necrotic molar would be more thematically apropos, but instead he clams up and says nothing at all, finding himself in dangerous territory: he is carrying proprietary AVCLA information on this thing, and if the Dentist gets the impression that Randy's being cavalier with it, he might spew out a barrage of torts, like Linda Blair and the pea soup.

“It's, uh, a pleasant surprise to see you in Kinakuta,” Randy stammers.

Dr. Kepler wears eyeglasses the size of a 1959 Cadillac's windshield. They are special dentist eyeglasses, as polished as the Palomar mirror, coated with ultrareflective material so that you can always see the reflection of your own yawning maw in them, impaled on a shaft of hot light. The Dentist's own eyes merely haunt the background, like a childhood memory. They are squinty grey-blue eyes, turned down at the edges as if he is tired of the world, with Stygian pupils. A trace of a smile always seems to be playing around his withered lips. It is the smile of a man who is worrying about how to meet his next malpractice insurance payment while patiently maneuvering the point of his surgical-steel crowbar under the edge of your dead bicuspid, but who has read in a professional magazine that patients are more likely to come back, and less likely to sue you, if you smile at them. “Say,” he says, “I wonder if I could have a quick huddle with you sometime later.”

Spit, please.

Saved by the bell! They have reached the ground floor. The elevator doors open to reveal the endangered-marble lobby of the Foote Mansion. Bellhops, disguised as wedding cakes, glide to and fro as if mounted on casters. Not ten feet away is Avi, and with him are two beautiful suits from which protrude the heads of Eb and John. All three heads turn towards them. Seeing the Dentist, Eb and John adopt the facial expressions of B-movie actors whose characters have just taken small-caliber bullets to the center of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like a man who stepped on a rusty nail a week ago and has just felt the first stirrings of the tetanus infection that will eventually break his spine.

“We've got a busy day ahead of us,” Randy says. “I guess my answer is yes, subject to availability.”

“Good. I'll hold you to it,” says Dr. Kepler, and steps out of the elevator. “Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good morning, Dr. Föhr. Good morning, Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen.”

Nice to see you acting like one.

“The pleasure is ours,” Avi says. “I take it we'll be seeing you later?”

“Oh, yes,” says the Dentist, “you'll be seeing me all day.” This procedure will be a lengthy one, I'm afraid. He turns his back on them and walks across the lobby without further pleasantries. He is headed for a cluster of leather chairs nearly obscured by an explosion of bizarre tropical flowers. The occupants of those chairs are mostly young, and all smartly dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides towards them. Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla, but the women—inevitably referred to as Fates, Furies, Graces, Norns, or Harpies—are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.

“Who are those?” John Cantrell asks. “His hygienists?”

“Don't laugh,” Avi says. “Back when he was in practice, he got used to having a staff of women do the pick-and-floss work for him. It shaped his paradigm.”

“Are you shitting me?” Randy asks.

“You know how it works,” Avi says. “When you go to the dentist, you never actually see the dentist, right? Someone else makes the appointment. Then there's always this elite coterie of highly efficient women who scrape the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn't have to deal with it, and take your X-rays. The dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and looks at the X-rays—he deals with you as this abstract greyscale image on a little piece of film. If he sees holes, he goes into action. If not, he comes in and exchanges small talk with you for a minute and then you go home.”

“So, why is he here?” demands Eberhard Föhr.

“Exactly!” Avi says. “When he walks into the room, you never know why he's here—to drill a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in Maui.”

All eyes turn to Randy. “What went on in that elevator?”

“I—nothing!” Randy blurts.

“Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?”

“He just said he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“Well, shit.” Avi says. “That means we have to talk about it first.”

“I know that,” Randy says, “so I told him that I might talk to him if I had a free moment.”

“Well, we'd best make damn sure you have no free moments today,” Avi says. He thinks for a moment and continues, “Did he have a hand in his pocket at any time?”

“Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?”

“No,” Avi says, “but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired.”

“You mean, like a police informant?” John asks incredulously.

“Yeah,” Avi says, like it's no big deal. “He makes a habit of carrying a tiny digital recorder the size of a matchbook around in his pocket. Perhaps with a wire running up inside his shirt to a tiny microphone somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he's recording you.”

“Isn't that illegal or something?” Randy asks.

“I'm not a lawyer,” Avi says. “More to the point, I'm not a Kinakutan lawyer. But it wouldn't matter in a civil suit—if he slapped us with a tort, he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted.”

They all look across the lobby. The Dentist is standing flatfooted on the marble, arms folded over his chest, chin pointed at the floor as he absorbs input from his aides.

“He might have put his hand in his pocket. I don't remember,” Randy says. “It doesn't matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief.”

“He could still subject the recording to a voice-stress analysis, to figure out if you were lying,” John points out. He relishes the sheer unbridled paranoia of this. He's in his element.

“Not to worry,” Randy says, “I jammed it.”

“Jammed it? How?” Eb asks, not catching the irony in Randy's voice. Eb looks surprised and interested, It is clear from the look on his face that Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.

“I was joking,” Randy explains. “If the Dentist analyzes the recording, he'll find nothing but stress in my voice.”

Avi and John laugh sympathetically. But Eb is crestfallen. “Oh,” Eb says. “I was thinking that we could absolutely jam his device if we so wanted.”

“A tape recorder doesn't use radio,” John says. “How could we jam it?”

“Van Eck phreaking,” Eb says.

At this point, Tom Howard emerges from the cafe with a thoroughly ravished copy of the South China Morning Post under his arm, and Beryl emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and makeup. The men avert their eyes shyly and pretend not to notice. Greetings and small talk ensue. Then Avi looks at his watch and says, “Let's head over to the sultan's palace,” as if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at Mickey Ds.