“Do you have an encyclopedia machine?” he asked the woman.
“Hell, no.” Worry appeared on her prunelike face. Prunelike—he withdrew the image; it did not seem fair. Her weathered face, he decided. That was more like it.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
“No, you tell me what you’re thinking,” Ruth said. “What’s on that big alpha-consciousness-type super-secret brain of yours?”
“Do you remember a girl named Monica Buff?” Jason asked.
“‘Remember her! Monica Buff was my sister-in-law for six years. In all that time she never washed her hair once. Tangled, messy, dark-brown ooze of dog fur hanging around her pasty face and dirty short neck.”
“I didn’t realize you disliked her.”
“Jason, she used to steal. If you left your purse around she’d rip you off; not just the paper scrip but all the coins as well. She had the brain of a magpie and the voice of a crow, when she talked, which thank God wasn’t often. Do you know that that chick used to go six or seven—sometimes, one time in particular—eight days without saying a word? Just huddled up in a corner like a fractured spider strumming on that five-dollar guitar she owned and never learned the chords for. Okay, she did look pretty in an unkempt messy sort of way. I’ll concede that. If you like gross tail.”
“How’d she stay alive?” Jason asked. He had known Monica Buff only briefly, and by way of Ruth. But during that time he and she had had a short, mind-blowing affair.
“Shoplifting,” Ruth Rae said. “She had that big wicker bag she got in Baja California … she used to stuff stuff into that and then go cruising out of the store big as life.”
“Why didn’t she get caught?”
“She did. They fined her and her brother came up with the bread, so there she was again, out on the street, strolling along barefoot—I mean it!—down Shrewsbury Avenue in Boston, tweaking all the peaches in the grocery-store produce sections. She used to spend ten hours a day in what she called shopping.” Glaring at him, Ruth said, “You know what she did that she never got caught at?” Ruth lowered her voice. “She used to feed escaped students.”
“And they never busted her for that?” Feeding or sheltering an escaped student meant two years in an FLC—the first time. The second time the sentence was five years.
“No, they never busted her. If she thought a pol team was about to run a spot check she’d quickly phone Pol Central and say a man was trying to break into her house. And then she’d maneuver the student outside and then lock him out, and the pols would come and there he’d be, beating on the door exactly as she said. So they’d cart him off and leave her free.” Ruth chuckled, “I heard her make one of those phone calls to Pol Central once. The way she told it, the man—”
Jason said, “Monica was my old lady for three weeks. Five years ago, roughly.”
“Did you ever see her wash her hair during that time?”
“No,” he admitted.
“And she didn’t wear underpants,” Ruth said. “Why would a good-looking man like you want to have an affair with a dirty, stringy, mangy freak like Monica Buff? You couldn’t have been able to take her anywhere; she smelled. She never bathed.”
“Hebephrenia,” Jason said.
“Yes.” Ruth nodded. “That was the diagnosis. I don’t know if you know this but finally she just wandered off, during one of her shopping trips, and never came back; we never saw her again. By now she’s probably dead. Still clutching that wicker shopping bag she got in Baja. That was the big moment in her life, that trip to Mexico. She bathed for the occasion, and I fixed up her hair—after I washed it half a dozen times. What did you ever see in her? How could you stand her?”
Jason said, “I liked her sense of humor.”
It’s unfair, he thought, comparing Ruth with a nineteen-year-old girl. Or even with Monica Buff. But—the comparison remained there, in his mind. Making it impossible for him to feel attraction toward Ruth Rae. As good—as experienced, anyhow—as she was in bed.
I am using her, he thought. As Kathy used me. As McNulty used Kathy.
McNulty. Isn’t there a microtrans on me somewhere?
Rapidly, Jason Taverner grabbed up his clothing, swiftly carried it to the bathroom. There, seated on the edge of the tub, he began to inspect each article.
It took him half an hour. But he did, at last, locate it. Small as it was. He flushed it down the toilet; shaken, he made his way back into the bedroom. So they know where I am after all, he realized. I can’t stay here after all.
And I’ve jeopardized Ruth Rae’s life for nothing.
“Wait,” he said aloud.
“Yes?” Ruth said, leaning wearily against the wall of the bathroom, arms folded under her breasts.
“Microtransmitters,” Jason said slowly, “only give approximate locations. Unless something actually tracks back to them locked on their signal.” Until then—He could not be sure. After all, McNulty had been waiting in Kathy’s apartment. But had McNulty come there in response to the microtransmitter, or because he knew that Kathy lived there? Befuddled by too much anxiety, sex, and scotch, he could not remember; he sat on the tub edge rubbing his forehead, straining to think, to recall exactly what had been said when he and Kathy entered her room to find McNulty waiting for them.
Ed, he thought. They said that Ed planted the microtrans on me. So it did locate me. But—Still, maybe it only told them the general area. And they assumed, correctly, that it would be Kathy’s pad.
To Ruth Rae he said, his voice breaking, “God damn it, I hope I haven’t got the pols oinking their asses after you; that would be too much, too goddamn much.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Do you have any coffee that’s super-hot?”
“I’ll go punch the stove-console.” Ruth Rae skittered barefoot, wearing only a box bangle, from the bathroom into the kitchen. A moment later she returned with a big plastic mug of coffee, marked KEEP ON TRUCKIN’. He accepted it, drank down the steaming coffee.
“I can’t stay,” he said, “any longer. And anyhow, you’re too old.”
She stared at him, ludicrously, like a warped, stomped doll. And then she ran off into the kitchen. Why did I say that? he asked himself. The pressure; my fears. He started after her.
In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked SOUVENIR OF KNOITS BERRY FARM. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, whispering it faintly. Barely forming the words. The newborn snakes twisted continually, in apology.
Jason said, “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll put a Band-Aid on it.” She started for the bathroom. “No,” he said, “I’m leaving. It’s a clean cut; it won’t get infected.”
“Why did you say that to me?” Ruth said hoarsely.
“Because,” he said, “of my own fears of age. Because they’re wearing me down, what’s left of me. I virtually have no energy left. Even for an orgasm.”
“You did really well.”
“But it was the last,” he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone God knew where. Probably to nark to the pols, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.
Hell, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn’t blame her.
10
“No,” Police General Felix Buckman said, shaking his head rigidly. “Jason Taverner does exist. He’s somehow managed to get the data out of all the matrix banks.” The police general pondered. “You’re sure you can lay your hands on him if you
have to?”
“A downer about that, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said. “He’s found the microtrans and snuffed it. So we don’t know if he’s still in Vegas. If he has any sense he’s hustled on. Which he almost certainly has.”
Buckman said, “You had better come back here. If he can lift data, prime source material like that, out of our banks, he’s involved in effective activity that’s probably major. How precise is your fix on him?”
“He is—was—located in one apartment of eighty-five in one wing of a complex of six hundred units, all expensive and fashionable in the West Fireflash District, a place called Copperfield II.”
“Better ask Vegas to go through the eighty-five units until they find him. And when you get him, have him air-mailed directly to me. But I still want you at your desk. Take a couple of uppers, forget your hyped-out nap, and get down here.”
“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said, with a trace of pain. He grimaced.
“You don’t think we’re going to find him in Vegas,” Buckman said.
“No, sir.”
“Maybe we will. By snuffing the microtrans he may rationalize that he’s safe, now.”
“I beg to differ,” McNulty said. “By finding it he’d know we had bugged him to there in West Fireflash. He’d split. Fast.”
Buckman said, “He would if people acted rationally. But they don’t. Or haven’t you noticed that, McNulty? Mostly they function in a chaotic fashion.” Which, he mediated, probably serves them in good stead … it makes them less predictable.
“I’ve noticed that—”
“Be at your desk in half an hour,” Buckman said, and broke the connection. McNulty’s pedantic foppery, and the fogged-up lethargy of a hype after dark, irritated him always.
Alys, observing everything, said, “A man who’s unexisted himself. Has that ever happened before?”
“No,” Buckman said. “And it hasn’t happened this time. Somewhere, some obscure place, he’s overlooked a microdocument of a minor nature. We’ll keep searching until we find it. Sooner or later we’ll match up a voiceprint or an EEG print and then we’ll know who he really is.”
“Maybe he’s exactly who he says he is.” Alys had been examining McNulty’s grotesque notes. “Subject belongs to musicians’ union. Says he’s a singer. Maybe a voiceprint would be your—”
“Get out of my office,” Buckman said to her
“I’m just speculating. Maybe he recorded that new pornochord hit, ‘Go Down, Moses’ that—”
“I’ll tell you what,” Buckman said. “Go home and look in the study, in a glassine envelope in the center drawer of my maple desk. You’ll find a lightly canceled perfectly centered copy of the one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi issue. I got it for my own collection but you can have it for yours; I’ll get another. Just go. Go and get the damn stamp and put it away in your album in your safe forever. Don’t ever even look at it again; just have it. And leave me alone at work. Is that a deal?”
“Jesus,” Alys said, her eyes alive with light. “Where’d you get it?”
“From a political prisoner on his way to a forced-labor camp. He traded it for his freedom. I thought it was an equitable arrangement. Don’t you?”
Alys said, “The most beautifully engraved stamp ever issued. At any time. By any country.”
“Do you want it?” he said.
“Yes.” She moved from the office, out into the corridor. “I’ll see you tomorrow. But you don’t have to give me something like that to make me go; I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and go to bed for a few hours. On the other hand, if you want to—”
“I want to,” Buckman said, and to himself he added, Because I’m so goddamn afraid of you, so basically, ontologically scared of everything about you, even your willingness to leave. I’m even afraid of that!
Why? he asked himself as he watched her head for the secluded prison ascent tube at the far end of his suite of offices. I’ve known her as a child and I feared her then. Because, I think, in some fundamental way that I don’t comprehend, she doesn’t play by the rules. We all have rules; they differ, but we all play by them. For example, he conjectured, we don’t murder a man who has just done us a favor. Even in this, a police state—even we observe that rule. And we don’t deliberately destroy objects precious to us. But Alys is capable of going home, finding the one-dollar black, and setting fire to it with her cigarette. I know that and yet I gave it to her; I’m still praying that underneath or eventually or whatever she’ll come back and shoot marbles the way the rest of us do.
But she never will.
He thought, And the reason I offered her the one-dollar black was because, simply, I hoped to beguile her, tempt her, into returning to rules that we can understand. Rules the rest of us can apply. I’m bribing her, and it’s a waste of time—if not much much more—and I know it and she knows it. Yes, he thought. She probably will set fire to the one-dollar black, the finest stamp ever issued, a philatelic item I have never seen for sale during my lifetime. Even at auctions. And when I get home tonight she’ll show me the ashes. Maybe she’ll leave a corner of it unburned, to prove she really did it.
And I’ll believe it. And I’ll be even more afraid.
Moodily, General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there. Dowland aires for four voices… he stood listening to one which he enjoyed very much, among all the songs in Dowland’s lute books.
…For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.
The first man, Buckman mused, to write a piece of abstract music. He removed the tape, put in the lute one, and stood listening to the “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan.” From this, he said to himself, came, at last, the Beethoven final quartets. And everything else. Except for Wagner.
He detested Wagner. Wagner and those like him, such as Berlioz, had set music back three centuries. Until Karlheinz Stockhausen in his “Gesang der Junglinge” had once more brought music up to date.
Standing by the desk, he gazed down for a moment at the recent 4-D photo of Jason Taverner—the photograph taken by Katharine Nelson. What a damn good-looking man, he thought. Almost professionally good-looking. Well, he’s a singer; it fits. He’s in show business.
Touching the 4-D photo, he listened to it say, “How now, brown cow?” And smiled. And, listening once more to the “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan,” thought:
Flow, my tears …
Do I really have pol-karma? he asked himself. Loving words and music like this? Yes, he thought, I make a superb pol because I don’t think like a pol. I don’t, for example, think like McNulty, who will always be—what did they used to say?—a pig all his life. I think, not like the people we’re trying to apprehend, but like the important people we’re trying to apprehend. Like this man, he thought, this Jason Taverner. I have a hunch, an irrational but beautifully functional intuition, that he’s still in Vegas. We will trap him there, and not where McNulty thinks: rationally and logically somewhere farther on.
I am like Byron, he thought, fighting for freedom, giving up his life to fight for Greece. Except that I am not fighting for freedom; I am fighting for a coherent society.
Is that actually true? he asked himself. Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are goddamn important to me, and that is why Alys threatens me; that’s why I can cope with so much else but not with her.
Thank God they’re not all like her, he said to himself. Thank God, in fact, that she’s one of a kind.
Pressing a button on his desk intercom he said, “Herb, will you come in here, please?”
Herbert Maime entered the office, a stack of computer cards in his hands; he looked harried.
“You want to buy a bet, Herb?” Buckman said. “That Jason Taverner is in Las Vegas?”
“Why are you concerning yourself with such a funky
little chickenshit matter?” Herb said. “It’s on McNulty’s level, not yours.”
Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. “Look at what this man has done. Somehow he’s managed to get all data pertaining to him out of every data bank on the planet and the lunar and Martian colonies … McNulty even tried there. Think for a minute what it would take to do that. Money? Huge sums. Bribes. Astronomical. If Taverner has used that kind of heavy bread he’s playing for big stakes. Influence? Same conclusion: he’s got a lot of power and we must consider him a major figure. It’s who he represents that concerns me most; I think some group, somewhere on earth, is backing him, but I have no idea what for or why. All right; so they expunge all data concerning him; Jason Taverner is the man who doesn’t exist. But, having done that, what have they achieved?”
Herb pondered.
“I can’t make it out,” Buckman said. “It has no sense to it. But, if they’re interested in doing it, it must signify something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t expend so much”—he gestured—“whatever they’ve expended. Money, time, influence, whatever. Maybe all three. Plus large slabs of effort.”
“I see,” Herb said, nodding.
Buckman said, “Sometimes you catch big fish by hooking one small fish. That’s what you never know: will the next small fish you catch be the link with something giant or”—he shrugged—“just more small fry to be tossed into the labor pool. Which, perhaps, is all Jason Taverner is. I may be completely wrong. But I’m interested.”
“Which,” Herb said, “is too bad for Taverner.”
“Yes.” Buckman nodded. “Now consider this.” He paused a moment to quietly fart, then continued, “Taverner made his way to an ID forger, a run-of-the-mill forger operating behind an abandoned restaurant. He had no contacts; he worked through, for God’s sake, the desk clerk at the hotel he was staying at. So he must have been desperate for ident cards. All right, where were his powerful backers then? Why couldn’t they supply him with excellent forged ID cards, if they could do all this else? Good Christ; they sent him out into the street, into the urban cesspool jungle, right to a pol informant. They jeopardized everything!”
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Page 10