Virtual Light

9. When diplomacy fails

None of us are.” Reaching out to pat his khaki knee. “Not these days.” Kevin had said it was okay to keep the pants.

“Uh-huh” Rydell said, his hand feeling desperately for the recliner button, the little dimpled steel circle waiting to tilt him back into the semblance of sleep. He closed his eyes.

“I’m on my way to San Francisco to assist in my late husband’s transfer to a smaller cryogenic unit” she said. “One that offers individual storage modules. The trade magazines call them ‘boutique operations,’ grotesque as that may seem.”

Rydell found the button and discovered that CalAir’s seats allowed a maximum recline of ten centimeters.

“He’s been in cryo, oh, nine years now, but I’ve never liked to think of his brain tumbling around in there like that. Wrapped in foil. Don’t they always make you think of baked potatoes?”

Rydell’s eyes opened. He tried to think of something to say.

“Or like tennis shoes in a dryer” she said. “I know they’re frozen solid, but there’s nothing about it that seems like any kind of rest, is there?”

Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front of him. A plastic blank. Gray. Not even a phone.

“These smaller places can’t promise anything new in the way of an eventual awakening, of course. But it seems to me that there’s an added degree of dignity. I think of it as dignity, in any case.”

Rydell glanced sideways. Found his gaze caught in hers: hazel eyes, mazed there in the finest web of wrinkles.

“And I certainly won’t be there if he’s ever thawed, or, well, whatever they might eventually intend to do with them. I don’t believe in it. We argued about it constantly. I thought of all those billions dead, the annual toll in all the poor places. ‘David,’ I said, ‘how can you contemplate this when the bulk of humanity lives without air-conditioning?’”

Rydell opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Myself, I’m a card-carrying member of Cease Upon the Midnight.”

Rydell wasn’t sure what ‘card-carrying’ meant, but Cease Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia, and illegal in Tennessee. Though they did it there anyway, and someone on the force had told him that they left milk and cookies out for the ambulance crews. Did it eight or nine at a time, mostly. CUTM. ‘Cut ’em,’ the paramedics called it. Offed themselves with cocktails of legally prescribed drugs. No muss, no fuss. Tidiest suicides around.

“Excuse me, ma’am” Rydell said, “but I’ve got to try to catch a little sleep here.”

“You go right ahead, young man. You do look rather tired.”

Rydell closed his eyes, put his head back, and stayed that way until he felt the rotors tilting over into descent-mode.

“Tommy Lee Jones” the black man said. His hair was shaped like an upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it. Sort of like a Shriner’s fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall and his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide. The shirt was lemon-yellow and printed with life-size handguns, in full color, all different kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy blue shorts that came to way below his knees, Raiders socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the size of five-dollar coins.

“You got the wrong guy” Rydell said.

“No, man, you look like him.”

“Like who?”

“Tommy Lee Jones.”

“Who?”

“Was an actor, man.” For a second Rydell thought this guy had to be with Reverend Fallon. Even had those shades, like Sublett’s contacts. “You Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth.”

“You Freddie?” Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C… The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell’s class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those? Maybe Sublett had a great big one. But when they’d run the program on Rydell in the Academy, he’d come up a dead ringer for Howie Clacton, the Atlanta pitcher; he’d didn’t remember any Tommy Lee Jones. But then he hadn’t thought he looked all that much like Howie Clacton, either.

This Freddie extended a very soft hand and Rydell shook it. “You got luggage?” Freddie asked.

“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. Skinny black jeans, brand new and never washed, were tucked into spit-shined Texas dogger boots in three shades of black.

“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 Skinner shave. Skinner sat on the edge of his bed, scraping his face pink with a disposable razor, rinsing the blade in a dented aluminum basin that he cradled between his thighs.

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

Skinner looked at him, over the plastic razor. “Thing is, Scooter, they just don’t get any duller, after a while.” He lathered and shaved his upper lip, then paused. Yamazaki had been ‘Kawasaki’ for the first several visits. Now he was ‘Scooter.“ The pale old eyes regarded him neutrally, hooded under reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinner’s inward laughter.

“I make you laugh?”

“Not today” Skinner said, dropping the razor into the basin of water, suds and gray whiskers recoiling in a display of surface tension. “Not like the other day, watching you chase those turds around.”

Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinner’s ‘neighborhood.’ Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as he’d tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next. The hoses swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner had explained, a mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that carried it into the municipal system.