He got up, crossed to the door, thumbed the speaker button. “Yes?”
“Hello?” A woman’s voice.
He touched the card-sized screen set into the doorframe and saw a dark-haired woman. Bangs. The tech from the appliance warehouse. He unlocked the door and opened it.
“Yamazaki thinks we should talk,” she said.
Laney saw that she was wearing a black suit with a narrow skin, dark stockings.
“Aren’t you supposed to be shopping for a van?” He stepped back to let her in.
“Got one,” closing the door behind her. “When the Lo/Rez machine decides to throw money at a problem, money will be thrown. Usually in the wrong direction.” She looked at the screen, where Rez was still swinging along, swatting flies from his neck and chest, lost in composition. “Homework?”
‘Yamazaki.”
“Arleigh McCrae,’ she said, taking a card from a small black purse and handing it to him. Her name there, then four telephone numbers and two addresses, neither of them physical. “Do you have a card, Mr. Laney?”
“Cohn. No. I don’t.”
“They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card 3 here,”
129 He put the card in his shirt pocket. “Blackwell didn’t give me one. Neither did Yamazaki.”
“Outside the Lo/Rez organization, I mean. It’s like not having socks.”
“I have socks,” Laney said, indicating the basket on the bed. “Do you feel like watching a BBC documentary on Lo/Rez?”
“No.” “I don’t think I can turn it off. He’ll know.”
“Try lowering the volume. Manually.” She demonstrated.
“A technician,” Laney said.
“With a van. And umpti-million yen worth of equipment that didn’t seem to do much for you.” She sat down in one of the room’s two small armchairs, crossing her legs.
Laney took the other chair. “Not your fault. You got me in there just fine. But it’s not the kind of data I can work with.”
“Yamazaki told me what you’re supposed to be able to do,” she said. “I didn’t believe him.”
Laney looked at her. ‘1 can’t help you there.” There were three smiling suns, like black woodblock prints, down the inside of her left calf.
“They’re woven into the stockings. Catalan.”
Laney looked up. “I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain what it is people think they pay me to do,” he said, “because I can’t. I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just work here. But what I’m being paid to do, right now, is determine what it is we could give you that would allow you to do whatever it is that you’re alleged to be able to do.”
Laney looked at the screen. Concert footage now, and Rez was dancing, a microphone in his hand. “You’ve seen this video, right? Is he serious about that ‘Sino-Celtic’ thing he was talking about in that interview?”
“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”
“No.” 130 William Gibson I- “Its not the easiest thing, deciding what Re2 is serious about.”
“But how can there be ‘Sino-Celtic mysticism’ when the Chinese and the Celts don’t have any shared history?”
“Because Rez himself is half Chinese and half Irish. And if there’s one thing he’s serious about
“Yes?”
“It’s Rez.”
Laney stared glumly at the screen as the singer was replaced by a close-up of Lo’s playing, his hands on the black-bodied guitar. Earlier, a venerable British guitarist in wonderful tweeds had opined as how they hadn’t really expected the next Hendrix to emerge from Taiwanese Canto-pop, but then again they hadn’t actually been expecting the first one, had they?
“Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,” Arleigh McCrae said. “Up to a certain point.”
Laney closed his eyes.
“The show never aired, Laney. Out of Control dropped it. What happened?”
He’d taken to having break&st beside the Chateau’s small oval pool, past the homely clapboard bungalows that Rydell said were a later addition. It was the one time of the day that felt like his own, or did until Rice Daniels arrived, which was usually toward the bottom of a three-cup pot of coffee, just prior to his eggs and bacon.
Daniels would cross the tern cotta to Laney’s table with what could only be described as a spring in his step. Laney privately wished to ascribe this to drug-use, of which he’d seen no evidence whatever, and indeed Daniels’s most potent public indulgence seemed to be multiple cups of decaf espresso taken with curls of lemon peel. He favored loosely woven beige suits and collarless shirts. This particular morning, however, Daniels had not been alone, 3 and Laney had detected a lack of temper in the accustomed spring; a 0 2 131 certain jangled brittleness there, and the painful-hooking glasses seeming to grip his head even more tightly than usual. Beside him came a gray-haired man in a dark brown suit of Western cut, hawk-faced and wind-burnt, the blade of his impressive nose protruding from a huge black pair of sunglasses. He wore black alligator roping-boots and carried a dusty-looking briefcase of age-darkened tan cowhide, its handle mended with what Laney supposed had to be baling wire.