by Eric Brown
He knew why Barney had failed to mention the case. There was not much to go on. So Nigeria had taken off for a week, absented herself from work and not told her lover where she was headed . . . But Villeux had agreed to pay five hundred dollars an hour for the agency to try to locate her lover, and that was incentive enough for Halliday.
In the contact notes appended to the case file, Halliday read that Villeux would be at home most nights after seven. On Thursday and Friday she spent her evenings at the Scumbar, East Village.
He tapped her home code into the keyboard and waited out the ringing tone for a couple of minutes. He considered whether to leave it until she was home, or brave the hostility of Scumbar in the hope of finding her. She had left an entry-card for the bar with Barney, another reason why Barney had not followed up the commission. The thought of Barney Kluger squaring his shoulders before the portals of a lesbian-separatist enclave like the Scumbar was as improbable as it was comic.
He located the card in a desk drawer and slipped it into his hip pocket. He left a note for Barney on the desk-com, then locked the door and made his way down the stairs to Barney’s battered Ford.
* * * *
Two
Frost covered the sidewalk with a treacherous, glittery film. Halliday turned up his collar and glanced into the night sky. For the first time in weeks, the cloud cover brooding over the city had cleared, revealing a bright scatter of scintillating stars. The cold gripped at his exposed flesh, burning. He ducked into the Ford, which started at the second attempt, and edged out into the street.
Pungent clouds of steam hung above the food-stalls lining the sidewalk, colourful with red, white and blue polycarbon awnings. Small knots of people congregated before each stall, stamping their feet as they awaited their orders. The food-stalls were open night and day and constantly busy, catering for the shift-workers from the nearby factories and warehouses, refugees and the occasional insomniac. There were perhaps fifty stalls on either side of the street, serving a variety of Oriental cuisine - Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Chinese - and Kim owned about ten of them, with one or two outlying stalls a block away. The night air was filled with a cacophony of strident voices, and the distant wail of patrolling police drones.
He turned onto East 106th Street towards Park Avenue. He passed down streets lined with tents, polycarbon boxes and any other container that could be pressed into service as a makeshift home. Some families were without even the luxury of cover: they camped out in the open, huddled around spitting braziers or flickering gas stoves. The arrival of refugees from the south had begun five years ago, with a steady trickle of refugees moving into the City following the Raleigh meltdown. The terrorist attacks on the other nuclear power stations at Memphis, Knoxville and Norfolk had displaced millions: not every refugee from the radiation-stricken areas had headed for New York - many had migrated south, to New Orleans and Florida - but the majority had come north, and the city, over-populated before the influx, was bursting at the seams. Last year had seen riots in New Jersey, street-fights between refugees and angry locals, and entire tracts of tenement housing had been put to the torch. As a consequence, these once densely populated, middle-income districts were strictly no-go, the haunt of gangs and, Halliday had heard rumoured, refugees irradiated in the blow-ups who had fallen through the welfare safety-net instituted by the Government after the first melt downs.
The damned thing was, he reflected, that the change had happened so gradually he found it hard to recall a time when New York had not resembled some run-down, Third World capital city. The authorities claimed they were working to solve the homeless problem, of course, but nothing ever seemed to improve. The poor still starved on the streets and daily more refugees poured into the city.
And Halliday had the job of locating missing persons among a population of some thirty million. It was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a scrapyard. The miracle was that he sometimes succeeded.
While the sidewalks were packed with the homeless, the streets themselves were quiet; he counted only half a dozen other vehicles on the road at any one time. That was another change that had hit the citizens of New York. Two years ago the Arab Union had increased the price of oil in anticipation of falling yields, and consequently the cost of fuel had had gone up some five hundred per cent. Gas now cost almost fifty dollars a gallon. Most people left their cars at home and used public transport; Halliday and Barney used the Ford sparingly, usually at night when coaches ran infrequently.
He eased the Ford past a knot of sleeping refugees which had spilled onto the road, turned onto Park Avenue and headed downtown, passing a row of buildings adorned with the latest holographic facades. He knew they were not what they seemed because last week he’d seen engineers covering the front of these buildings with arrays of holo-capillaries. At the flick of a switch they changed from dull brownstones to whatever architectural wonder their owners desired. For the most part they were tastefully decorated in the style of Victorian town houses, with honey-coloured columns and ornate cornices. Halliday had seen other, more ostentatious, examples of architectural extravagance: miniature versions of the Taj Mahal, the occasional pyramid concealing nothing more than a general store.
He had thought that the last thing in holographic wizardry had been the long-range persona projections favoured by business-people and the rich. He’d never considered the possibility of cosmetically-enhanced buildings. He wondered what the next holographic advance might herald ... if the technology was not superseded, as Barney was forever forecasting, by virtual reality.
He was considering what Barney had said earlier about virtual reality when he saw, in the distance, the city’s first VR Bar, or rather the holographic advertisement alerting citizens to the recently opened wonderland. Projected out above the intersection with East 72nd Street was a scene of tropical luxury: a golden beach enclosing an azure lagoon. A rolling header stretching between the buildings made the crass proclamation: Cold? Come in and feel the sun!
Halliday slowed as he passed the Bar. It was the old Paradiso, he saw; a holo-drama cinema that had closed down last year. He recalled Barney’s words, and wondered if this was a sign of things to come.
The sidewalk outside the Bar was packed with a two-abreast queue of citizens stretching back for a block. From time to time they shuffled forward minimally, and Halliday calculated that they must have been waiting for hours. Despite his earlier scepticism, his curiosity was piqued. If the experience really was as authentic as Barney had claimed, if you could enjoy ersatz sunlight in the middle of winter without being able to tell it from the real thing, then perhaps it was worth the price of a ticket. But that was another consideration: how much were they charging? He’d tackle Barney on that one in the morning. He accelerated past the Bar, heading south.
The Scumbar occupied a narrow side-alley off Christopher Street, a crimson neon in the shape of a double-bladed axe glowing in the darkness above a closed doorway. Halliday left the Ford on 7th Avenue and hurried along the street, chivvied by a wind that seemed to have come fresh off the tundra. The alley itself was lined with a dozen huddled figures wrapped in thin blankets, each one extending a hand into the icy air. ‘Dollar, man. Gimme a dollar!’
Ahead, the occasional dark-garbed figure approached the door of the Scumbar, showed a card at the grille and slipped inside.
When he reached the door he raised the card Villeux had given Barney. He waited, hunched against the cold, expecting to be told to take a hike. Perhaps a minute later, to his surprise, the door opened a fraction, and he turned sideways and slipped through into warmth and darkness. He was met by an adenoid-pinching chemical reek and the blinding glare of a flashlight in his face. Then something like the claw of a mechanical tree-planter gripped his upper arm, causing him to gasp. ‘What do you want?’
‘I have a damned card,’ he gasped.
The claw relaxed, minimally. ‘This way.’ He was pushed sideways and almost lost his footing. Another door opened into
a tiny side room, this one so brightly illuminated with fluorescents that the glare was like a supernova. He covered his eyes, blinking. The chemical reek intensified. When his vision adjusted he saw that the room was occupied by two women in dark suits. One sat behind a desk and the other, improbably, sat cross-legged on top of an antique safe.
They were inhaling spin from aerosol canisters.
The claw released its grip and Halliday almost gasped with relief. He looked around: his captor was smiling, sweetly. She looked about twelve, and as innocent as a schoolgirl, but her right hand winked silver with a steel metacarpal brace.
Behind the desk, the hatchet-faced dyke with a shock of blonde hair was staring at him. He wondered if the malice in her expression was drug-induced, or a manifestation of her political bias.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, punctuating the question with a long draught of spin. Ecstasy showed, briefly, in her glacier-blue eyes.
‘I have a card. I arranged to meet Carrie Villeux here.’
The woman held out a hand. ‘The card.’
Halliday handed it over. The woman stared at the silver rectangle, looked up at him. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘I told you - Carrie Villeux.’
‘What do you want with her?’
How much should he tell her? He wondered how favourably disposed she was towards private investigators. ‘She came to my office yesterday. Her lover’s missing - Sissi Nigeria. I’m trying to locate her.’
The woman looked disbelieving. ‘Why would she use your agency?’
‘She obviously heard that I’m good,’ he said.
The woman perched on the safe spoke - and Halliday didn’t understand a word. Some private Sapphic lingo?
‘My sister says, how do we know you didn’t attack Carrie and take the card?’
Paranoid, addled with spin, or just plain stupid?
‘Steal a card to gain admittance to this place? Why the hell would I do that?’
The two women conferred, the words meaningless but their tone angry.
‘Look,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m a friend, okay? Carrie trusted me and gave me the card. I’m on your side. Just let me into the club and talk to Carrie.’
Hatchet-face stared at him and inhaled more spin.
He tried the trump card, knowing that he might be making a big mistake. ‘Do you know Sue . . . Susanna Halliday?’
‘How do you know her?’ Hatchet-face asked.
‘She’s my sister. Note the family resemblance? Dark curly hair, cleft chin?’
They had always got along okay as kids, but when Sue hit adolescence and discovered things about herself, their relationship had deteriorated. About five or six years ago, with no explanation, Sue had stopped answering his calls, moved from the Solano Building without leaving a forwarding address.
Now Hatchet-face spoke to Claws, who took his arm again, his time with the little girl pinkies of her left hand. She smiled again, so innocently. ‘I’ll show you around, Mr Halliday.’ She giggled. ‘It’s a jungle in there and you’ll need a bodyguard.’
Before he left the room, Hatchet-face said, ‘Watch yourself, Halliday. Some of us aren’t so forgiving.’ She stared at him. ‘Remember that.’
He passed into the darkness of the foyer, the woman’s words echoing uneasily in his head. The little girl took the fingers of his right hand and led him through a swing door.
‘Told you it was a jungle in here, Mr Halliday. Stick close to me and you’ll be okay, okay?’
The Scumbar was an old holographic theatre, and playing tonight was a scene from some sylvan epic: holo-projectors beamed an optical illusion of trees for as far as the eye could see. They were fair projections, but discernible as fakes by the slight fuzziness of image at their peripheries. Mood music played, synthesised with appropriate bird song, and in the clearings between the tree trunks couples moved in rhythm to the beat.
They edged past dancers, his presence earning stares ranging from curious to overtly hostile. He was glad of the half-light which made his presence less conspicuous, but even so he felt uneasy.
She led him to a circular bar done out like someone’s idea of a jungle hut, with bamboo palisades and a straw roof. He hitched himself onto a high stool. ‘Care for a drink?’
‘Thanks. Beer. Brazilian, if you’re buying.’
The black-suited barmaid stared at him without expression.
Halliday ordered two Caribas and the barmaid uncapped the bottles and slid them along the bar. ‘That’ll be forty.’
He tried not to show any reaction to the robbery. He peeled off four notes and left them on the bar. The kid grabbed a bottle in her steel claw and suckled. Halliday sipped his beer and assessed the dancers. There were a lot of fashionably-shaven skulls bobbing in the twilight, and it seemed that the body voluptuous was back in vogue; the cycle had turned and the Earth Mother soma-type was all the rage, at least among the clients at the Scumbar.
‘I don’t see Carrie Villeux,’ he said, scanning the dancers.
Claws pulled her furled tongue from the bottle and peered. ‘She must be around somewhere, Mr Halliday. She always arrives at ten. Wait here, I’ll see if I can find her.’
Arms swinging to the music, the girl skanked across the dance floor, earning smiles from the dancers. Halliday found himself wondering if her mother knew where she spent her Friday nights. He smiled to himself. What had Sue accused him of? ‘A conditioned tendency to traditional bourgeois values?’ He supposed, being brought up by a father schooled in the military, that was to be expected.
The girl tapped and tugged at the occasional dancer, then stood on tiptoe and shouted into proffered ears. The women glanced at Halliday, frowned and shook their heads. The girl moved off, out of sight behind a spray of ferns.
Self-consciously, Halliday up-ended his Caribas and tried to appear as if he were enjoying the music. Two minutes later, the girl emerged through the trees, wiping imaginary sweat from her brow.
‘Carrie hasn’t shown yet. She was due in at ten. Some of her friends are at the next bar. You can buy me another drink, Mr Halliday.’
This time he ignored her hand and followed her through the trees. They arrived at another bar, identical to the first, where another crowd of dancers swayed to the same beat.
‘Two Caribas, Terri,’ Claws said. ‘My boyfriend’s paying.’
Halliday laid out another forty, writing it off to expenses, and finished his first beer. He found a stool and watched the dancers. Clearly, his assumption about what soma-types were in vogue had been premature; the women who had staked out this territory had nothing in common with their Earth Mother sisters across the way. They were, to a woman, slim, even angular, and a few had even had their breasts excised, low-cut shirts revealing the white sickle scars of the fashionable mutilation.
As he watched, a woman as tall and ebony as a Masai warrior disengaged herself from the dance and approached. Whereas Halliday had climbed onto the high stool, she lowered herself onto the neighbouring stool and crossed her long, trousered legs. She wore a double-breasted pin-stripe jacket and, as she leaned forward for a drink and the lapels of her suit buckled, Halliday saw that she’d opted for the radical mastectomy statement.
‘Hi, I’m Kia,’ she purred. ‘Kia Johansen.’
‘Halliday.’ He showed her his card. ‘I’m looking for Nigeria. Will Carrie Villeux be in later?’
‘She’s usually here by now, honey.’ She had the exaggerated camp femininity of a transsexual drag queen, and Halliday wondered if lesbians pretending to be men pretending to be women was the latest fashion in counter-cultural chic.
Kia was shaven-skulled, and the contours of her bony cranium would have been a phrenologist’s delight. Only when he stared, taken aback, did he see the inlaid beading of a silver implant circumnavigating her skull. A lead worked its way into her tiny right ear. He wondered if she really was rigged with a neural implant, or if the device was just a clever cosmetic simulation.
‘We
’re all very concerned about Nigeria,’ she said, laying fingers like cheroots on his forearm. ‘Do say you’ll be able to find her.’
‘You’re a good friend of hers?’
‘One of the best. I mean, we were lovers many moons ago, but that’s quite another story. Ain’t that right, Missy?’
‘Tell me about it, Kia,’ the girl smiled.
Halliday said, ‘Did you notice anything amiss in her attitude before she disappeared? She wasn’t acting strangely at all?’
Kia lifted her head to the swaying holo-branches overhead and shrilled a high laugh. ‘Man, it’d be odd if she wasn’t acting strangely.’ Kia shook her head. ‘No, she was just the same old dependable fun-loving Sissi as always.’
Halliday took a long swallow of beer. ‘Is it like Carrie not to show when she’d arrange to come here?’
Kia regarded him, frowning. ‘You know, hon, that is worrying. Long as I been coming here Friday nights, Carrie’s shown. You don’t think . . .?’