Creedmore giggled.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rydell said, starting for the bridge. As he walked, he was trying to stuff the fanny pack back into his duffel and trying not to lose his precarious underarm grip on the GlobEx package. A twisting gust of wind blew grit into his eyes, and, blinking down to clear them, he noticed for the first time that the waybill was addressed
– – not to him but to “Cohn Laney.”
Cohn space Laney. So why had they let Rydell pick it up?
Then they were in the thick of the crowd, headed up the ramp of the lower level.
“What is this shit?” Creedmore asked, peering up.
“San Francisco-Oakland Bay,” Rydell said.
“Shit,” Creedmore said, squinting at the crowd, “smells like a fuckin’ baitbox. Bet you you could get you some weird-ass pussy, out here.”
“I need a drink,” the heavy man with the delicate mouth said softly.
“I think I do too,” said Rydell. – 93 22. VEXED FONTAINE has two wives. I
Not, he will tell you, a condition to aspire to.
They live, these two wives, in uneasy truce, in a single establishment, nearer the Oakland side. Fontaine has for some time now been opting to sleep here, in his shop.
The younger wife (at forty-eight, by some five years) is a Jamaican originally from Brixton, tall and light-skinned, whom Fontaine has come to regard as punishment for all his former sins.
Her name is Clarisse. Incensed, she reverts to the dialect of her childhood: “You tek de prize, Fonten.”
Fontaine has been taking the prize for some years now, and he is taking it again today, Clansse standing angrily before him with a shopping bag full of what appear to be catatonic Japanese babies.
These are in fact life-sized dolls, manufactured in the closing years of the previous century for the solace of distant grandparents, each one made to resemble photographs of an actual infant. Produced by a firm in Meguro called Another One, they are increasingly collectible, each example being to some degree unique.
“I don’t want them,” Fontaine allows.
“Listen up,” Clarisse tells him, folding her dialect smoothly away, “there is no way you are not taking these. You are taking them, you are moving them, you are getting top dollar, and you are giving it to me. Because there is no way, otherwise, that I am staying where you left me, cheek by jowl with that mad bitch you married”
Who I was married to when you married me, thinks Fontaine, and no secret about it. The reference being to Tourmaline Fontaine, aka Wife One, whom Fontaine thinks of as being only adequately described by the epithet “mad bitch.”
Tourmaline is an utter terror; only her vast girth and abiding torpor prevent her coming here.
“Clarisse,” he protests, “if they were ‘mint in box’-” 94 “These never mint in box, idiot! They always played with!”
“Then you know the market better than I do, Clarisse. You sell ’em.”
“You want to talk child support?”
Fontaine looks down at the Japanese dolls. “Man, those things ugly. Look dead, you know?”
“Cause you gotta turn ’em on, fool.” Clarisse sets the bag on the floor and snatches up a naked baby boy. She stabs a long emerald-green fingernail into the back of the doll’s neck. She is attempting to demonstrate the thing’s other, uniquely individual feature, digitally recorded infant sounds, or possibly even first words, but what they hear instead is heavy, labored breathing, followed by a childish giggle and a ragged chorus of equally childish fuck-you’s. Clarisse frowns. “Somebody been messing with it.”
Fontaine sighs. “I’ll do what I can. You heave ’em here. I’m not promising anything.”
“You better believe I leave ’em here,” Clarisse says, tossing the baby headfirst into the bag.
Fontaine glances into the rear of the shop, where the boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, barefoot, his head close-cropped, the notebook open on his lap, lost in concentration.
“Who the hell’s that?” Clarisse inquires, noticing theboy for the first time as she steps closer to the counter.
Which somewhat stumps Fontaine. He tugs at one of his locks. “He likes watches,” he says.