Idoru

19. Arleigh

There was a fax from Rydell waiting for Laney when Blackwell dropped him at the hotel. It had been printed on expensive-looking gray letterhead that contrasted drastically with the body of the fax itself, which had been sent from a Lucky Dragon twenty-four-hour convenience store on Sunset. The smiling Lucky Dragon, blowing smoke from its nostrils, was centered just below the hotel’s silver-embossed logo, something Laney thought of as the Droopy Evil Elf Hat. Whatever it was supposed to be, the hotel’s decorators were very fond of it. It formed a repeating motif in the lobby, and Laney was glad that it didn’t seem to have reached the guest rooms yet.

Rydell had hand-printed his fax with a medium-width fiber-pen in scrupulously neat block capitals. Laney read it in the elevator.

It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUEST

I THINK THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. SHE AND THE DAY MANAGER HAD COFFEE IN THE LOBBY AND HE KEPT LOOKING AT ME. HE COULD’VE CHECKED THE PHONE LOG EASY. WISH I HADN’T CALLED YOU THERE. SORRY. ANYWAY, THEN SHE AND THE OTHERS CHECKED OUT FAST, LEFT THE TECHS TO PACK UP. A TECH TOLD GHENGIS IN THE GARAGE THAT SOME OF THEM WERE ON THEIR WAY TO JAPAN AND HE WAS GLAD HE WASN’T. WATCH OUT, OKAY? RYDELL

“Okay,” Laney said, and remembered how he’d walked to the Lucky Dragon one night, against Rydell’s advice, because he couldn’t sleep. There were scary-looking bionic hookers posted every block or so, but otherwise it hadn’t felt too dangerous. Someone had painted a memorial mural to J.D. Shapely on one side of the Lucky Dragon, and the management had had the good sense to leave it there, culturally integrating their score into the actual twenty-four-hour life of the Strip. You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting.

He re-read the fax, walking down the corridor, and used the cardkey to open his door.

There was a shallow wicker basket on the bed, spread with white tissue and unfamiliar objects. On closer inspection, these proved to be his socks and underwear, freshly laundered and arranged in little paper holders embossed with the Elf Hat. He opened the narrow, mirrored closet door, activating a built-in light, and discovered his shirts arranged on hangers, including the blue button-downs Kathy Torrance had made fun of. They looked brand new. He touched one of the lightly starched cuffs. “Stitch count,” he said. He looked down at Rydell’s folded fax. He imagined Kathy Torrance headed straight for him, on an SST from Los Angeles. He discovered that he couldn’t imagine her sleeping. He’d never seen her asleep and somehow it didn’t seem like something she’d willingly do. In the weird vibrationless quiet of supersonic flight, she’d be staring at the gray blank of the window, or at the screen of her computer.

Thinking of him.

The screen behind him came on with a soft chime and he jumped, four inches, straight up. He turned and saw the BBC logo. Yamazaki’s second video.

He was a third of the way through it when the door chimed. Rez was strolling along a narrow trail in the jungle somewhere, wearing sun-bleached khakis and rope-soled sandals. He was singing something as he went, a wordless little melody, over and over, trying different tones and stresses. His bare chest shone with sweat, and when the open shirt swung aside you’d catch a corner of his I Ching tattoo. He had a length of bamboo, and swung it as he walked, swatting at dangling vines. Laney had a sneaking suspicion that the wordless melody had subsequently turned into some global billion-seller, but he couldn’t place it yet. The door chimed again.

He got up, crossed to the door, thumbed the speaker button. “Yes?”

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

He touched the card-sized screen set into the doorframe and saw a dark-haired woman. Bangs. The tech from the appliance warehouse. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“Yamazaki thinks we should talk,” she said.

Laney saw that she was wearing a black suit with a narrow skirt, dark stockings.

“Aren’t you supposed to be shopping for a van?” He stepped back to let her in.

“Got one,” closing the door behind her. “When the Lo/Rez machine decides to throw money at a problem, money will be thrown. Usually in the wrong direction.” She looked at the screen, where Rez was still swinging along, swatting flies from his neck and chest, lost in composition. “Homework?”

“Yamazaki.”

“Arleigh McCrae,” she said, taking a card from a small black purse and handing it to him. Her name there, then four telephone numbers and two addresses, neither of them physical. “Do you have a card, Mr. Laney?”

“Colin. No. I don’t.”

“They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card here.”

He put the card in his shirt pocket. “Blackwell didn’t give me one. Neither did Yamazaki.”

“Outside the Lo/Rez organization, I mean. It’s like not having socks.”

“I have socks,” Laney said, indicating the basket on the bed. “Do you feel like watching a BBC documentary on Lo/Rez?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I can turn it off. He’ll know.”

“Try lowering the volume. Manually.” She demonstrated.

“A technician,” Laney said.

“With a van. And umpti-million yen worth of equipment that didn’t seem to do much for you.” She sat down in one of the room’s two small armchairs, crossing her legs.

Laney took the other chair. “Not your fault. You got me in there just fine. But it’s not the kind of data I can work with.”

“Yamazaki told me what you’re supposed to be able to do,” she said. “I didn’t believe him.”

Laney looked at her. “I can’t help you there.” There were three smiling suns, like black woodblock prints, down the inside of her left calf.

“They’re woven into the stockings. Catalan.”

Laney looked up. “I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain what it is people think they pay me to do,” he said, “because I can’t. I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just work here. But what I’m being paid to do, right now, is determine what it is we could give you that would allow you to do whatever it is that you’re alleged to be able to do.”

Laney looked at the screen. Concert footage now, and Rez was dancing, a microphone in his hand. “You’ve seen this video, right? Is he serious about that ‘Sino-Celtic’ thing he was talking about in that interview?”

“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”

“No.”

“Its not the easiest thing, deciding what Rez is serious about.”

“But how can there be ‘Sino-Celtic mysticism’ when the Chinese and the Celts don’t have any shared history?”

“Because Rez himself is half Chinese and half Irish. And if there’s one thing he’s serious about…”

“Yes?”

“It’s Rez.”

Laney stared glumly at the screen as the singer was replaced by a close-up of Lo’s playing, his hands on the black-bodied guitar. Earlier, a venerable British guitarist in wonderful tweeds had opined as how they hadn’t really expected the next Hendrix to emerge from Taiwanese Canto-pop, but then again they hadn’t actually been expecting the first one, had they?

“Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,” Arleigh McCrae said. “Up to a certain point.”

Laney closed his eyes.

“The show never aired, Laney. Out of Control dropped it. What happened?”

He’d taken to having breakfast beside the Chateau’s small oval pool, past the homely clapboard bungalows that Rydell said were a later addition. It was the one time of the day that felt like his own, or did until Rice Daniels arrived, which was usually toward the bottom of a three-cup pot of coffee, just prior to his eggs and bacon.

Daniels would cross the terra cotta to Laney’s table with what could only be described as a spring in his step. Laney privately wished to ascribe this to drug-use, of which he’d seen no evidence whatever, and indeed Daniels’s most potent public indulgence seemed to be multiple cups of decaf espresso taken with curls of lemon peel. He favored loosely woven beige suits and collarless shirts.

This particular morning, however, Daniels had not been alone, and Laney had detected a lack of temper in the accustomed spring; a certain jangled brittleness there, and the painful-hooking glasses seeming to grip his head even more tightly than usual. Beside him came a gray-haired man in a dark brown suit of Western cut, hawk-faced and wind-burnt, the blade of his impressive nose protruding from a huge black pair of sunglasses. He wore black alligator roping-boots and carried a dusty-looking briefcase of age-darkened tan cowhide, its handle mended with what Laney supposed had to be baling wire.

“Laney,” Rice Daniels had said, arriving at the table, “this is Aaron Pursley.”

“Don’t get up, son,” Pursley said, though Laney hadn’t thought to. “Fella’s just bringing you your breakfast.” One of the Mongolian waiters was crossing with a tray, from the direction of the bungalows. Pursley put his battle-scarred briefcase down and took one of the white-painted metal chairs. The waiter served Laney’s eggs. Laney signed for them, adding a 15-percent tip. Pursley was flipping through the contents of his case. He wore half a dozen heavy silver rings on the fingers of either hand, some of them studded with turquoise. Laney couldn’t remember when he’d last seen anyone carry around that much paper.

“You’re the lawyer,” Laney said. “On television.”

“In the flesh as well, son.” Pursley was on “Cops in Trouble,” and before that he’d been famous for defending celebrity clients. Daniels hadn’t taken a seat, and stood behind Pursley now with a hunched, uncharacteristic posture, hands in his trouser pockets. “Here we are,” Pursley said. He drew out a sheaf of blue paper. “Don’t let your eggs get cold.”

“Have a seat,” Laney said to Daniels. Daniels winced behind his glasses.

“Now,” Pursley said, “you were in a Federal Orphanage, in Gainesville, it says here, from age twelve to age seventeen.”

Laney looked at his eggs. “That’s right.”

“During that time, you participated in a number of drug trials? You were an experimental subject?”

“Yes,” Laney said, his eggs looking somehow farther away, or like a picture in a magazine.

“This was voluntary on your part?”

“There were rewards.”

“Voluntary,” Pursley said. “You get on any of that 5-SB?”

“They didn’t tell us what they were giving us,” Laney said. “Sometimes we’d get a placebo instead.”

“You don’t mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.”

Which was true, but Laney just sat there.

“Well?” Pursley removed his big heavy glasses. His eyes were cold and blue and set into an intricate topography of wrinkles.

“I probably had it,” Laney said.

Pursley slapped the blue papers on his thigh. “Well, there you are. You almost certainly did. Now, do you know how that substance eventually affected many of the test subjects?”

Daniels unclamped his glasses and began to knead the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed.

“Stuff tends to turn males into fixated homicidal stalkers,” Pursley said, putting his glasses back on and stuffing the papers into his case. “Comes on years later, sometimes. Go after media faces, politicians… That’s why it’s now one of themost illegal substances, any damn country you care to look. Drug that makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians, well, boy, it’ll getto be.” He grinned dryly.

“I’m not one,” Laney said. “I’m not like that.”

Daniels opened his eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that Slitscan can counter all our material by raising the possibility, the merest shadow, however remote, that you are.”

“You see, son,” Pursley said, “they’d just make out you got into your line of work because you were predisposed to that, spying on famous people. You didn’t tell them about any of it, did you?”

“No,” Laney said, “I didn’t.”

“There you go,” said Purshey. “They’ll say they hired you because you were good at it, but you just got too damn goodat it.”

“But she wasn’t famous,” Laney said.

“But heis,” Rice Daniels said, “and they’ll say you were after him. They’ll say the whole thing was your idea. They’ll wring their hands about responsibility. They’ll talk about their new screening procedures for quantitative analysts. And nobody, Laney, nobody at allwill be watching us.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Pursley said, standing. He picked up the briefcase. ‘That real bacon there, like off a hog?“

“They say it is,” Laney said.

“Damn,” Pursley said, “these Hollywood hotels are fast-lane.” He stuck out his hand. Laney shook it. “Nice meeting you, son.”

Daniels didn’t even bother to say goodbye. And two days later, going over the printout of his charges, Laney would notice that it all began, the billing in his own name, with a large pot of coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, and a 15-percent tip.

Arleigh McCrae was staring at him.

“Do they know that?” she asked. “Does Blackwell?”

“No,” Laney said, “not that part, anyway.” He could see Rydell’s fax, folded on the bedside stand. They didn’t know about that, either.

“What happened then? What did you do?”

“I found out I was paying for at least some of the lawyers they’d gotten for me. I didn’t know what todo. I sat out there by the pool a lot. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Know what I mean?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Then I heard about this job from one of the security people at the hotel.”

She slowly shook her head.

“What?” he said.

“Never mind,” she said. “You make about as much sense as the rest of it. Probably you’ll fit right in.”

“Into what?”

She looked at her watch, black-faced stainless on a plain black nylon band. “Dinner’s at eight, but Rez will be late. Come out for a walk and a drink. I’ll try to tell you what I know about it.”

“If you want to,” Laney said.

“They’re paying me to do it,” she said, getting up. “And it probably beats wrestling large pieces of high-end electronics up and down escalators.”