Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hong-Kong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sex-less and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll house. His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger. “You seem to be clean, old son,” said Deane’s disembodied voice. “Do come in.” Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in Deane’s makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start. Deane’s seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawer Ed cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes, scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling. “What brings you around, boy?” Deane asked, offering Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper. “Try one. Tins Ting Djahe, the very best.” Case refused the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. “Julie I hear Wage wants to kill me.” “Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?” “People.” “People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people? Friends?” Case nodded. “Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?” “I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?” “Haven’t been in touch, of late.” Then he sighed. “If I did know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they are, you understand.” “Things?” “He’s an important connection Case.” “Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?” “Not that I know of.” Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing the price of ginger. “If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and I’ll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.” “Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?” “Loose lips, old son!” Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a fortune in debugging gear. “Be seeing you, Julie. I’ll say hello to Wage.”
Deane’s fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.
He was less than a block from Deane’s office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone’s whores; it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a sub-cutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket? Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection of the passing crowd. There. Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses, dark clothing, slender. . . And gone. Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.