Fontaine, seated on his high stool, behind the counter, sipping gingerly at his hot miso, wonders what exactly he would see, were he to follow the boy’s course today via the notebook’s recall function. That business with the Iockboxes, and Martial getting all worked up. Where else might the boy have been? But nowhere really dangerous, Fontaine decides, if he’s only chasing watches. But how was it he did that, got those lockbox lists? Fontaine puts the miso down and fishes the JaegerLeCoultre from his pocket. He reads the ordnance marks on its back: 200 bit of information makes its way into the stream. He puts the watch down on his Rolex pad and takes up the salty miso again. Looking down through the scratch-frosted glass countertop, he notices a recent purchase, not yet examined. A Helbros from the 1940s, styled after military watches but not an “issue” watch. Something he bought from a scavenger, down from the Oakland hills. He reaches into the counter and brings it out, a shabby thing after the G6B.
Its bezel is badly dinged, probably too badly to benefit from buffing, and the luminous on the dull black dial has gone a shade of silvery ash. He takes his loupe from his other pocket and screws it into his eye, turning the Helbros under his ten-power Cyclops gaze. The caseback has been removed, screwed back in, but left untightened. He turns it out with his fingers, to check inside for minute graven records of its repair history.
He squints through the loupe: the last repair date etched into the inside back is August 1945.
He turns it over again and studies it. The crystal is synthetic, some sort of plastic, definitely vintage and very probably original. Because, he sees, holding it at just this certain angle to the light, radiation from the original radium numerals has darkened the crystal focally, each number having in effect radiographed itself in the accidental plate of the crystal.
And somehow this, combined with the hidden date, gives Fontaine a shiver, so that he puts the caseback back into place, replaces the Helbros in the counter, checks the locks on the door, finishes his miso, and starts to ready himself for bed.
The boy, on his back, is no longer snoring, and that is a good thing.
When Fontaine lies down on his own narrow bunk, to sleep, the Smith & Wesson Kit Gun, as it is every night, is at the ready.
201 50. “MORE TROUBLE” RYDELL’S father, dying of cancer, had told Rydell a story. He claimed to have gotten it from a book of famous last words, or if not famous then at least memorable.
This man was being executed in England, back in the old days, when execution was made as deliberately hard a thing as possible, and after being burned with hot irons, broken on the wheel, and various other horrific punishments, the man was shown the block, the heads-man’s ax. And having been closed-mouthed and stolid throughout his various tortures, he had looked at the ax and the block and the burly headsman and made no reply at all.
But then another torturer arrived, carrying an assortment of terrible-looking tools, and the man was informed that he was to be disemboweled prior to his beheading.
The man sighed. “More trouble,” he said.
1F they want me,” RydelI said, wincing along beside the man with the tanto in his coat, “why don’t they just grab me?”
“Because you are with me.”
“Why don’t they just shoot you?”
“Because we have, these men and I, the same employer. In a sense.”
“He wouldn’t let them shoot you?”
“That would depend,” the man said.
Rydell could see that they were coming up on the nameless bar where he’d heard Buell Creedmore sing that old song. There was noise there: loud music, laughter, a crowd around the door, drinking beer and openly smoking cigarettes.
His side hurt with each step he took, and he thought of Rei Toei perched on his pillow, glowing. What, he wondered, did the projector slung over his shoulder mean to her? Was it her only means of manifesting here, of interacting with people? Did being a hologram feel like anything? (He doubted it.) Or did the programs that generated her 202 somehow provide some greater illusion of being there? But if you weren’t real in the first place, what did you have to compare not being there to?