ALAiN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card she’d taken from Picard’s desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadn’t been there for Alain’s call. She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. “I had a talk about your employer today,” she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. “Our academic was in from Nice. He’s baffled as to why I’d choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but he’s also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk.” Marly stood beside her, watching the nearly invisible flames lick around the coals. “He kept dragging the Tessier-Ashpools into it,” Andrea continued, “and Hughes. Hughes was mid to late twentieth century, an American. He’s in the book as well, as a sort of proto-Virek I hadn’t known that Tessier-Ashpool had started to disintegrate She went back to the counter and un- wrapped six large tiger prawns. “They’re Franco-Australian? I remember a documentary, I think They own one of the big spas?”
“Freeside. It’s been sold now, my professor tells me. It seems that one of old Ashpool’s daughters somehow managed to gain personal control of the entire business entity, became increasingly eccentric, and the clan’s interests went to hell. This over the past seven years.” “I don’t see what it has to do with Virek,” Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo. “Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anach- ronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolu- tion by watching them. He’s convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate “But what did he say about Virek?” “That Virek’s madness would take a different form.” “Madness?” “Actually, he avoided calling it’that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daugh- ter totally bizarm. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of `jump.’ `Jump was his word.” “Evolutionary pressures?” “Yes,” Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. “He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.”
After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Virek’s surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk through a city where things were simply themselves. In Virek’s world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Virek’s model of the Parque Guell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudi’s park, in an afternoon that never ended? Sefior is wealthy. Seiior enjoys any number of means of manifestation. She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea. The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided. Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, stu- dents and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she as- sumed, were part of Virek’s machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Sefior all his life. “What’s wrong? You look as though you’ve just swal- lowed something.” Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut. “No,” Marly said, and shivered, “But it occurs to me that I very nearly did. .” And walking home, in spite of Andrea’s conversation, her warmth, the shopwindows had become boxes, each one, con- structions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought. the books and furs and Italian cot- tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.