“Here,” he says, “I’ll show you something.” Opening a cabinet. 160 Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with copper abstracts. Draws it from the waxed brown saddle leather. Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns.
The knife of Chevette’s memories, its grip scaled with belt-ground segments of phenolic circuit board.
“I saw that made,” she says, leaning forward.
“Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent ‘Black Lightning,’ 1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty years old too, then. Said there wasn’t ever a bike to match it. Kept the chain till he found this maker.” Passes the knife to her. Five inches of blade, five inches of handle. “Like you to have it.”
Chevette runs her finger along the flat of the blade, the crocodile pattern of light and dark steel that had been formed as the links were beaten out. “I was thinking about this before, Fontaine. Today. How we went to where the smith worked. Burned coke in an old coffee can.”
“Yes. I’ve seen it done.” Hands her the sheath.
“But you need to sell this stuff.” Tries to hand it back. “It wasn’t for sale,” he says. “I was keeping it for you.”
FONTAINE has a strange boy in the shop’s back room. Heavy, Hispanic, hair cut short. He sits the whole time, cross-legged, his head in an old eyephone rig that looks like it came out of some military robotics dump.
With a worn-out old notebook on his lap. Endlessly, steadily, clicking from one screen to the next.
“Who’s this?” she asks when they’re back, Fontaine putting on a
– – fresh pot of his terrible coffee. Thinking the boy can hear her.
“I don’t know,” Fontaine says, turning to regard the boy in the eye-phones. “He was outside this morning, breathing on my window.”
Chevette looks at Fontaine, not getting it.
“He likes watches,” Fontaine says, lighting the butane ring with a spark gun like a toy pistol. “Showed him how to hunt for watches this
– – morning, hasn’t done much since.” Fontaine crosses to where the boy sits, looks down at him. –
“I’m not sure how much he understands English,” Fontaine says. ‘Or he understands it but it gets through funny 161 “Spanish maybe?”
“I had big Carlos by here,” Fontaine says. “Didn’t seem to make much difference.”
“You live here now, Fontaine?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Not getting along with Clarisse.”
“How’s your kids?”
“They’re okay. Hell, Tourmaline’s okay too, by anybody’s standards but her own. I mean, not to live with, understand, but her health’s pretty good.”
Chevette picks up the sheathed Damascus boot knife and tries it in the inner, zippered pocket of Skinner’s jacket. It fit, if you zipped the pocket shut, as far as you could, to hold it upright. “What’s he doing with your notebook?”
“He’s hunting watches. I started him looking on the net auctions, but now he’s looking everywhere. Gets places I don’t understand how he does.”
“He gonna live here?”
Fontaine frowns. “I hadn’t planned on it.”
Chevette stands up, stretches, seeing the old man, Skinner, in memory, sitting up in his bed in the room atop the cable tower. What dancer she’d gotten off Creedmore has long since worn off, leaving an edge of tiredness. Long day. Very long day. “We’re sleeping in a van down the foot of Folsom,” she says.
“You and who?”
“Tessa. Friend of mine.”
“Know you’re welcome here.”
“No,” she says, “Tessa’ll be worried. I’m glad I saw you, Fontaine.” She zips the jacket. “Thank you for keeping his knife.” Whatever history it was she’d felt herself dodging, she hasn’t found it. She just feels tired now; otherwise, she doesn’t seem to feel.
“Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have it. Told me.” Looking up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gently says: “Asked us where you were, you know?”
Her fit with history, and how that hurts. 162 39. PANOPTICON LAN EY’S progress through all the data in the world (or that data’s progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does,
The Hole, that blankness at the core of his being, ceases to trouble him here. He is a man with a mission, though he readily admits to himself that he has no real idea what that mission may finally be.