“I’m not,” said Fontaine.
“Be that as it may,” said Martial, “if you were, you might be able, through judicious application, and with all due secrecy, to use said technology to reveal certain lucrative market discontinuities. Follow me, Fontaine?”
“No,” said Fontaine.
“Put it this way: if you have a way of getting hold of documents nobody else can, you might want to talk about it with someone who’d have an idea of exactly which documents might be most lucratively obtained.”
“Hey, Martial, I’m not into-”
“Fontaine, please. Anyone who sells secondhand cutlery and old rat-sucked toys, I understand it’s an avocation. A calling. You are not in it for the money, I know. However, if you have a back channel into something else, I advise you to consult with your lawyer, me, at your very earliest. Hear me?”
“Martial, I don’t-”
“Clarisse has been making inquiries of another partner in our firm, Fontaine. I tell you that in confidence.”
Fontaine was not happy to hear it.
“She is talking divorce, my friend,”
“Gotta go, Martial. Customers.”
Fontaine hung up. Martial’s news about Clarisse was not all that new to Fontaine, but he had been so far successful in avoiding thinking about it.
He became aware of a soft, steady clicking and turned to see that the boy had put the eyephones back on.
147 CHEVETTE hadn’t closed her eyes when she’d pulled Creedmore down and kissed him, but with her arms locked around his neck, to hold him there and hide her from Carson, she couldn’t see past the sleeve of Skinner’s jacket. What she could see, past an out-of-focus view of Creedmore’s cheekbone and left ear, was an adrenaline-sharp shot of Carson’s progress through the crowd. This was sufficiently arresting that she had managed to ignore Creedmore’s response, which had his tongue trying apparently to subdue hers with a so-far unsuccessful combination of speed and leverage, and his hands, up under Skinner’s jacket, hunting frantically for nipple.
The crystal-clear shot of Carson was eclipsed by a close-up of Tessa, eyes wide with amazement and about to burst out laughing, just as Creedmore found one of the nipples he was after, and Chevette, in pure reflex, let go of his neck with her left arm and punched him, as hard and as discreetly as possible, in the ribs, going in with all the knuckle she could leverage.
Creedmore’s eyes flew open, blue and bloodshot, and Chevette let go of him, ducked off her chair, and rolled under the table, all on automatic now. She thought she heard Creedmore’s head hit the table as he tried to follow her, but now that he didn’t have his mouth actually on hers, she was aware of the taste of it, and something naggingly familiar there, but that was just something her mind was doing while her body took her out of there the quickest way it saw. Which was a scramble on hands and knees, still under the table; out on the floor, still crouching but getting up speed; sprinting, still bent low, arms up to block anyone who might try to stop her; out through the door.
Where instinct, something, some recollection, took her right, toward Oakland.
And she didn’t slow down until she felt it was safe to, but by then she’d realized what the taste in Creedmore’s mouth was: dancer, and she wondered how much of that she’d taken on. Not much, probably, 148 35. ON AUTOMATIC but she could feel it in the pounding of her heart, see it in a faint aura around every source of light now, and know it in the fact that none of what had just happened actually bothered her, very much.
Trouble could look abstract, on dancer.
Carson, she thought, was trouble, and seeing the look on his face then, a look she’d suspected, she now thought, but had never quite managed to catch there, had made her scared of him. She’d been scared of him since the time he’d hit her, but she hadn’t understood it in quite the same way. He hadn’t really hurt her much, not physically, when he’d hit her. She was coming from a place where she’d seen people maimed, hurt really bad, and this cute media boy, who didn’t even know how to punch, how dangerous was that?