“Mr. Rydell?”
The man with the tanto, carrying Rydell’s duffel in the crook of his arm as though it were a baby.
“Mr. Rydell, I don’t think it would be advisable for you to attempt to leave the bridge. A watch has almost certainly been posted, and they will shoot you rather than permit the possibility of your escape.” The pallid glare of the fluorescents chained overhead winked in the round lenses; this lean and concise man with perfectly blank, perfectly circular absences where eyes should be. “Are you with this young woman?”
“Yes,” Rydell said.
“We must start toward Oakland,” the man said, handing Rydell the duffel, the solid weight of the projector. Rydell hoped he’d gotten the power cable as well. “Otherwise, they will slip past and cut us off.”
Rydell turned to Chevette. “Maybe they didn’t see us together. You should just go.” 220 “I wouldn’t advise that,” the man said. “I saw you together. They likely did as well.”
Chevette looked up at Rydell. “Every time you come into my life, Rydell, I wind up in She made a face.
“Shit,” Rydell finished for her. A 221 THE Gunsmith Cats alarm watch taped to the wall of Laney’s box brings him home from the Walled City. It buzzes to announce the Suit’s impending arrival. The Suit has no watch of his own but is relentlessly punctual, his rounds timed to the clocks of the subway, which are set in turn by radio, from an atomic clock in Nagoya.
Laney tastes blood. It is a long time since he has brushed his teeth, and they feel artificial and ill-fitting, as though in his absence they have been replaced with a stranger’s. He spits into a bottle kept for this purpose and considers attempting the journey to the restroom. Importance of grooming. He feels the stubble on his cheeks, calculating the effort required to remove it. He could request that the Suit obtain an electric disposable, but really he prefers a blade. He is one of those men who has never grown a beard, not even briefly. (And now, some small voice, one always best ignored, suggests: he never will.)
He hears the old man, in the next box, say something in Japanese, and knows that the Suit has arrived. He wonders what model the old man is building now, and sees, in his mind’s eye, with hallucinatory clarity, the finishing touches being put on a model of Cohn Laney.
It is a “garage” kit, this Laney kit, a limited run produced for only the most serious of enthusiasts, the otaku of plastic model kits, and as such it is molded from styrene of a quite nauseous mauve. The plastic used in garage kits tends to uniformly ghastly shades, as the enthusiast-manufacturers know that no kit, assembled, will ever remain unpainted.
The Laney the old man is detailing is an earlier Laney, the Laney of his days in LA, when he worked as a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid television show of quite monumental viciousness: this Laney wears Padanian designer clothing and sports a very expensive pair of sunglasses, the frames of which are even now being picked out in silver by the old man’s narrowest sable, scarcely more than a single hair.
But this waking dream is broken now by the advent of the Suit’s 222 54. SOME THINGS NEVER HAPPEN head, his hair like the molded pompadour of some archaic mannequin. Laney feels, rather than sees, the precision with which the Suit’s black eyeglass frames have been most recently mended, and as the Suit crawls in, beneath the flap of melon blanket, Laney smells the rancid staleness the Suit’s clothing exudes. It is strange that any odor produced by a warm body should suggest intense cold, but the Suit’s somehow does.
The Suit is bringing Laney more of the blue syrup, more Regain, several large chocolate bars laden with sucrose and caffeine, and two liters of generic cola. The Suit’s painted shirtfront seems faintly self-luminous, like the numerals of a diver’s watch glimpsed far down in the depth of a lightless well, a sacrificial cenote perhaps, and Laney finds himself adrift for just an instant in fragments of some half-remembered Yucatan vacation.