The Bridge Trilogy Part 102

Creedmore got out and went over to urinate on somebody's tire.

Rydell checked the interior to see they hadn't left anything, undid

~-the harness, leaned over to pull the pa.s.senger-side door shut, popped the trunk, opened the driver-side door, checked that he had the keys,

~ got out, closed the door.

"Hey, Buell. Your friend's gonna pick this up, right?" Rydell was pulling his duffel out of the Hawker-Aichi's weirdly narrow trunk, a s.p.a.ce suggestive of the interior of a child's coffin. There was nothing else in there, so he a.s.sumed Creedmore was traveling without luggage.

"No," Creedmore said, "they gonna leave it up here get all dusty."

He was b.u.t.toning his fly.

"So I give the keys to those Universal boys dowstairs?"

"No," Creedmore said, "you give 'em to me."

"I signed," Rydell said.

"Give 'em to me."

"Buell, this vehicle is my responsibility now. I've signed it in here."

He closed the trunk, activated the security systems.

"Please step back," said the I-Iawker-Aichi. "Respect my boundaries as I respect yours." It had a

beautiful, strangely genderless voice, gentle but firm.

Rydell took a step back, another.

']That's my friend's car and my friend's keys, and I'm supposed to

-ve 'em to him." Creedmore rested his hand on the big roper's buckle like it was the wheel of his personal s.h.i.+p of state, but he looked uncertam, as though his hangover were leaning on him.

"Just tell him the keys'll be here. That's how you do it. Safer all 'round, that way." Rydell shouldered his bag and started down the ramp,

~ glad to be stretching his legs. He looked back at Creedmore. "See you ~ 'round, Buell."

45.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to be more a reference to the universe that had created Rydell than to Rydell himself. Creedmore looked lost and disconnected, squinting under the greenish-white strip lighting.

Rydell kept walking, down the battered concrete spiral of the parking garage, five more levels, till he came abreast of the office at the entrance. The Universal guards were drinking coffee, watching the end of their nature show. Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.

They made a lot of nature shows there.

He went out into the street, looking for a cab or a place that made breakfast. Smelling how San Francisco was a different place than Los Angeles, and feeling that was fine by him. He'd get something to eat, use the Brazilian gla.s.ses to phone Tokyo.

Find out about that money.

48 WILLtAM GIBSON

11. OTHER GUY.

CHEVETTE had never driven a standard, so it fell to Tessa to drive them up to San Francisco. Tessa didn't seem to mind. She had her head full of the docu they were going to make, and she could work it out as she drove, telling Chevette about the different communities she wanted to cover and how she was going to cut it all together. All Chevette had to do was listen, or look like she was listening, and finally just fall asleep. She fell asleep as Tessa was telling her about a place called the Walled City, how there'd actually been this place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went back to being part of China. And then these crazy net people had built their own version of it, like a big communal website, and they'd turned it inside out, vanished in there. It wasn't making much sense when Chevette nodded out, but it left pictures in her head.

Dreams.

* "What about the other guy?" Tessa was asking, when Chevette woke from those dreams.

Chevette blinked out at the Five, the white line that seemed to reel up beneath the van. "What other guy?"

'The cop. The one you went to Los Angeles with."

"Rydell," Chevette said.

"So why didn't that work?" Tessa asked.

Chevette didn't really have an answer. "It just didn't."

"So you had to hook up with Carson?"

"No," Chevette said, "I didn't have to." What were those white things, so many of them, off in a field there? Wind things: they made electricity. "It just seemed like the thing to do."

"I've done a few of those myself," Tessa said.

ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES 47.

12. EL PRIMERO.

FONTAINE'S first glimpse of the boy comes as he starts to lay out the morning's stock in his narrow display window: rough dark hair above a forehead pressed against the armored gla.s.s.

Fontaine leaves nothing of value in the window at night, but he dislikes the idea of an entirely empty display.

He doesn't like to think of someone pa.s.sing and glimpsing that vacancy. It makes him think of death. So each night he leaves out a few items of relatively little value, ostensibly to indicate the nature of the shop's stock, but really as a private act of propitiatory magic.

This morning the window contains three inferior Swiss mechanicals, their dials flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with jigged bone handles and s.h.i.+eld, fair condition, and an East German military field telephone that looks as though it has been designed not only to survive a nuclear explosion but to function during one.

Fontaine, still on the morning's first coffee, stares down, through the gla.s.s, at the matted, spiky hair. Thinking this at first a corpse, and not the first he's discovered this way, but never propped thus, kneeling, as in att.i.tude of prayer. But no, this one lives: breath fogs Fontaine's window.

In Fontaine's left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase, manual wind, gold-filled case, in very nearly the condition in which it left the factory. In his right, a warped red plastic cup of black Cuban coffee. The shop is filled with the smell of Fontaine's coffee, as burnt and acrid as he likes it.

Condensation slowly pulses on the cold gla.s.s: gray aureoles outline the kneeler's nostrils.

Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his better stock, narrow divisions of faded green velour holding a dozen watches. He sets the tray aside, on the counter behind which he stands when he does business, transfers the red plastic cup to his left hand, and with his right rea.s.sures himself of the Smith & Wesson .32-.22 Kit Gun in the right side pocket of the threadbare trench coat that serves him as a dressing gown.

The little gun is there, older than some of his better watches, its worn walnut grip comforting and familiar. Probably intended to be kept in a freshwater fisherman's tackle box, against the dispatching of water snakes or the decapitation of empty beer bottles, the Kit Gun is Fontaine's considered choice: a six-shot rimfire revolver with a four-inch barrel. He doesn't want to kill anyone, Fontaine, though if truth be known, he has, and very probably could again. He dislikes recoil, in a handgun, and excessive report, and distrusts semi-automatic weapons. He is an anachronist, a historian: he knows that the Smith & Wesson's frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire round, long extinct, that was once the standard for American pocket pistols.

Rechambered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model, well into the middle of the twentieth century. A handy thing and, like most of his stock, a rarity.

He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the counter beside the tray of watches.

He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archaic one-handed duelist's stance, he has been known to pick the pips from a playing card. -

He hesitates before unlocking the shop's front door, a complicated process. Perhaps the kneeler is not alone. Fontaine has few enemies on the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have drifted in from either end, San Franciso or Oakland? And the wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of crazy.

But still.

He throws the last hasp and draws the pistol.

Sunlight falls through the bridge's wrapping of sc.r.a.p wood and plastic like some strange benison.

Fontaine scents the salt air, a source of Corrosion.

"You," he says, "mister." The gun in his hand, hidden by the folds of the trench coat.

Under the trench coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears faded plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved white thermal unders.h.i.+rt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process Black