by Неизвестный
Pretty Howitzer rolled her eyes. “If that’s a mixed metaphor, you’re not even trying.”
Several sharp retorts jockeyed for position in Goku’s mind, but what he heard himself say was, “Get your fingers out of your mouth.”
To his surprise, she obeyed. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” The handcuffs rattled as she wiped her fingers on the front of her pink coverall. According to some expert, the color supposedly made prisoners feel physically and mentally less powerful. Pretty Howitzer looked like she was wearing a playsuit. “Most of the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it.”
“How do you cope in AR?” Goku asked. “Going without for hours must be real hard on you.”
“I don’t have to go without anything.” She looked down and to her left for a moment at something only she could see. Goku did likewise, but if her lenses were tapped, he wasn’t getting a copy. Civil service: he’d probably have to fill out eighty thousand forms in triplicate for a transcript. Which he could expect to receive in four to six weeks. “When they deregulated AR+, I sent a basket of flowers and a box of chocolates to my congresspeople,” Pretty Howitzer was saying. “And I can’t even vote.” Her upper body rose and fell with a deep sigh that was somehow both wistful and satisfied. “I don’t remember the last time I was stuck playing indoors.”
“Well, it’s the end of an era for you, Ms. Howitzer.” Goku leaned on the bare metal table between them and then was annoyed to find he had to pull his chair in farther. The legs shrieked on the floor, and he had to suppress the urge to pick the thing up and throw it across the room. “You don’t get AR or AR+ in prison. It’s just ground floor all day, every day, day in, day out. But the good news is, you can bite your nails whenever you feel like it. All the way down to your elbows, if you want.”
Pretty Howitzer wrinkled her cute little nose. “You talk like my grandfather. And that’s not a compliment. I hated that old f—”
“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”
She made a small, jerky movement, obeying reflexively before realizing she didn’t have her fingers in her mouth. “Hey!”
He grinned broadly without showing his teeth. “That why you’ve been picking on the old folks, because you hate your grandfather?”
“Oh, are you actually a head doctor? You gonna psychoanalyze me, figure out how I went bad? You want to put in some buttons, turn me good?” She wrinkled her nose again. “For. Get. It. Not giving up my free will, not for a hundred times what I took off that old bat. I’m pro choice all the way. I do whatever I choose to do, not because someone else controls me—”
“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”
Again, she started to obey before realizing she didn’t have to; he felt a surge of spiteful joy. “You fuckin’ cops,” she growled, infuriated. “Think you’re so genius—”
“I’m an Interpol 3 agent. I can show you my credentials,” he said, inflecting the last word carefully to trigger it.
She started to answer, then froze for half a second. Her eyes took on a brief faraway look before she closed them and moved her eyes from side to side a few times to dismiss the image he’d sent her. “If I want to see your fucking credentials, I’ll—oh, shit.” She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her thumbs against them.
Goku managed not to laugh. “That was your own fault. The way you said credentials.”
Again she stared distantly at nothing before she clapped her hands over her eyes. “Cut it out, asshole!” She knuckled her eye sockets.
“I’m sorry, that really was an accident,” he said, meaning it. “It’s a tone-of-voice trigger. If you can keep yourself from mocking me for at least two clock-minutes, it shouldn’t happen again. I don’t think. I don’t know what the system is here for jailhouse lenses.”
“Just proves my point.” Pretty Howitzer’s glare was slightly bloodshot. “Agent’s just a fancy name for cop and I3 agents are just free-range cops. You’re only interested in crimes in places you want to go so you can get a free paid vacation. Don’t give me that look. It’s true, everybody knows that about you agents.” Abruptly, she heard the way she’d said the last word and froze, looking dismayed. But agents wasn’t a trigger word. Today.
“I have to say, I’m gobsmacked.” He couldn’t help chuckling now. “That you would think I actually want to come here.”
“Gobsmacked?!” Pretty Howitzer threw back her head and hooted at the ceiling; the acoustic tiles swallowed her voice so quickly, she sounded almost staccato. The effect reminded Goku of a story he’d read long ago, about a man whose job involved cleaning leftover sounds out of empty rooms. Years later, he had started out in I3 doing something that he sometimes thought of as (vaguely, faintly) similar, just as a way to relieve (albeit very slightly) the stultifying tedium of surveillance.
“Do you ever hear yourself! ‘Oh, I say, old chap, I’m utterly gobsmacked by the whole bloody business.’ What’s that accent about anyway?”
“What accent?”
“Oh, veddy funny, old chap, veddy, pip pip cheerio and all that rot! Come on, what’s with you?”
Goku couldn’t help laughing. “Nothing. What’s with you, besides too much vintage TV?”
“Hey, I’m not puttin’ on an accent.”
“Neither am I. I was born and raised in England.”
“Yeah? You do all that English stuff ? Boarding school? Uniforms? Cricket, rum, sodomy, and the lash?”
Is this the vanguard of a new, more educated offender? he wondered, amused. “You’ll have lots of time to read about the lives of English schoolboys in the Mid-Atlantic Prison library.”
“What?!” Pretty Howitzer’s cute jaw dropped as she lost whatever cool she’d still had. “No! You can’t! I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t use a weapon, I didn’t even make threats! I’m a US citizen, you can’t sink me, you can’t!”
“I can. And the US apparently thinks it would be a good idea since they signed off on it.”
Her eyes moved rapidly as she searched for a pop-up that Goku knew wouldn’t be on her lenses. “Show me!”
“Paperwork’s still on the way,” Goku said smoothly, unsure if that were true. “Real paper. Sinking anyone, even a totally unapologetic and unrepentant career criminal like yourself, is serious business. Has to be done with hardcopy.”
“Who says I’m not apologetic?” Pretty Howitzer sat up straight and folded her cuffed hands on the table. “I said I was sorry! I always say I’m sorry! Look it up, it’s on the record!”
Goku leaned one elbow on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were thinking hard and not hiding a grin.
“Besides, I’m as much a victim here as Auntie Emmy,” she added, looking down her nose at him, or trying to. She came off more like an insolent child than a high-mileage felon, which Goku suspected was how she had managed to go as long as she had without doing any serious time.
He filed that for later consideration, along with Auntie Emmy. “What do you mean, you’re a victim? You knowingly sold a trusting old woman an invisible bag of vapor—”
“I didn’t knowingly do anything! It was supposed to be the real deal!”
Now he did laugh, a loud, hard, sarcastic sound that had little humor in it and was gone quickly, without even a hint of echo. The effect bothered the fuck out of him, Goku thought irritably. “There’s nobody—that’s capital No, capital Body—who would believe for one second—that’s capital One, capital Second—that you really, sincerely believed—”
“Okay, so you don’t believe me, but I swear, so help me freakin’ gods of techno—”
“—one hundred percent genuine—”
“—only because I knew it was the real thing—”
“—out door, egress, exit, whatever con artists are calling it these days—”
“I believed it because I tried it and it fucking worked!”
Goku stared at her for a long moment. Then he laughed again. “Whew, for a second there, the look on your face—you almost had me. Do you pr
actice in front of a mirror or is it just plain old hardcore desperation? Don’t answer that,” he said as she opened her mouth. “I think maybe you need some alone time in a holding cell to give your situation some serious thought. But just to make sure you don’t get too bored, I’ll tell the duty officer to load some brochures for you.” He stood up, paying no attention to her protests. “About the programs and facilities available at Mid-Atlantic. Underwater correctional institutions are the most advanced and best equipped in the world. You get used to the emergency drill fast, I’ve heard. They’ve got education programs from the top schools, your Ivy League, Eton, Cambridge—and I mentioned the library, didn’t I?”
As soon he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, her pleading cut off as if someone had flipped a switch, and the ambient noise of the police station suddenly assailed him. A bit disconcerted, he leaned against the wall for a moment; funny, he thought, the way you never noticed how much things echoed under ordinary conditions. Not to mention how much difference there was between quiet and the absence of sound.
The flicker at the left-hand edge of his vision came just as he thought of Konstantin, two separate things happening simultaneously. His initial reaction was reflexive now, a mental smile coupled with mild embarrassment for still not having reciprocated. It took a full clock-second for him to remember that according to what both Celestine and Ogada had told him, nobody had received any messages of any kind from Konstantin for at least four weeks; nobody could. Therefore, nobody had.
The flicker sure seemed like her, though. Even considered in the context of what he knew, there was a Konstantin-ness about it that he told himself to chalk up to wishful thinking. People saw what they wanted to see and more often than not the mind was only too happy to dance along. It didn’t take much fancy footwork to make music out of a stray fragment of noise.
And anyone who didn’t believe that could check out the millions of people who had been sold all those magic beans: beachfront in Kansas, the true Hope Diamond, a deposed king’s hidden gold, the blessing of never-ending good luck, the Deity’s unlisted phone number. Or the absolutely-positively-not-fake-not-a-simulation-but-real conversion code for the Out Door, derived by a scientist using the secrets of the Pharaohs and the Mayans, giving you unlimited access to everything you wanted and more—contact your more successful self in another timeline and see where you went right, ascend to a higher plane of being, join God’s private club! Or just go to Japan.
“To be honest, I felt sorry for her.”
The small round object in the bottom of Goku’s cup opened out into a blossom under the stream of boiling water from the spout of Emmy Eto’s fancy electric kettle. It amused him that most Americans referred to it as a teapot, even though they only heated water in it.
“That was why I gave her a freebie in the first place,” she added, pouring water into her own cup before replacing the kettle in its stand on the coffee table and sitting down on the couch beside him.
“A freebie?”
Emmy Eto chuckled. “On the house, gratis. You don’t have to pay.”
“Yes, I know. I’m just not sure what you mean by you gave her a freebie.”
“That’s a delightful accent. London, am I right?” Emmy Eto chuckled again, eyes twinkling in a way that made him think of Celestine’s smile, although there was no resemblance between the two women. Emmy Eto was ninety-five, with short, silvery hair carefully styled to look unruly and bright green contact lenses. Goku suspected her eyes would have been just as bright without them; no doubt she could be quite unruly too.
“Please, Ms. Eto,” he said, taking a sip of tea. The flower waved at him from the bottom of the cup.
“You’ll want to spoon that out,” she told him. “Unless you’re a typical Brit and like your tea thoroughly stewed.”
The flower went from graceful to drowned as he removed it to a saucer on the table. “Please, Ms. Eto?” he said again.
“I’m a professional relative,” she said. “Isn’t it in the case file?”
Goku felt his face grow warm. “I’m sorry, I obviously missed that.”
“Because you figured I’m just retired. Oh, don’t have a cow, dude,” she added, waving one hand as he started to apologize. “You want to know the truth, I’d have figured that too if I were in your place. Most of the people who live here are at leisure, shall we say. They’ve had two, three, even four careers—and that’s not counting all the McJobs for rent money in between. And they’ve had about as many families, formal and informal. Worked their asses off—well, their hips, knees, and shoulders anyway. There’s so much titanium around here we get more spam from salvage firms than funeral homes.
“Anyway, most of my neighbors are tired. They just want to hang out, spark a few bowls of medicinal, and watch a movie. With or without actually putting one on.”
Goku sipped some more tea, even though it was too hot, to keep himself from grinning.
“And I gotta admit, I do that too now and again. Careers and McJobs—I had ’em back to back. I traveled a lot, lived in a lot of different places. But I only ever had one family. One husband, one child, and I had the bad grace to outlive both of them.”
Goku blinked away the definition of McJobs that had popped up in the lower left-hand quadrant of his vision and said, “I’m sorry.”
“It was a very long time ago,” she said, waving away his words again. “You don’t set out to be a widow, but you live with the possibility and what happens is what happens. But surviving your child is an unnatural act, especially when she’s an actual child. Takes a long time to make up for it. So I rent myself out to people who need a nice old lady relative. Grandma for the kids, auntie for the grown-ups. Sometimes both at once, in which case I give them a special rate rather than just double-dipping. Anyone who has to hire a nice old lady relative in the first place deserves a break. And you’d be surprised at how many people that is.”
She picked up a small remote and pointed it at a large painting of wild horses running through a countryside under a stormy sky on the wall opposite. The image faded away to a white background, where color photos of various shapes and sizes began to appear. The people in them were various shapes, sizes, and colors as well. Many of the pictures had been taken at special occasions—birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, and holidays, big elaborate parties and smaller, more intimate get-togethers. But there were also plenty of Emmy Eto sitting with a toddler on her lap or walking in a park holding hands with a couple of small children. And a few not-so-small children.
He was grinning from ear to ear, Goku realized, and tried to tone it down without sobering too abruptly. “That’s quite a lot of people,” he said, “but if we could get back to—”
Nodding, she used the remote again. “You’re just lucky I didn’t cue up the soundtrack.” She chuckled. “You’d have sat through the whole six hours, weeping nonstop. Big, manly, silent tears, of course.” She put a hand to her lips. “Oh, no, wait, I forgot, it’s all stiff upper lip with you Brits.”
The words were out of his mouth before he’d even known he was going to speak. “But I’m also Japanese. Like you.”
“And?” Emmy Eto blinked at him. “Meaning what?”
“I was just thinking that you’re old enough remember Japan, the actual land, before the quakes—”
“Yes, we both existed at the same time, but I never went there.” She sighed heavily. “I’m as much a sansei as you are in that respect. What does that have to do with Pretty Howitzer?”
“It’s part of the special circumstances attached to the charges against her. She targeted you not only because you’re elderly but also because you’re Japanese.”
Emmy Eto sighed. “We’ve been vaccinating against plaque and vascular dementia and schizophrenia and all kinds of other head bugs for, what, seven decades? Almost eight? And everyone still thinks that if you’re over eighty, you got nothing above the neck but moths and cobwebs.”
“I
don’t feel that way,” Goku said, hoping he sounded kind rather than defensive. “And neither does anyone I know at I3 or—”
Emmy Eto shooed his words away with both hands. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s always some other, much less enlightened dude.” Abruptly, she grimaced. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry, Agent Mura, I’m taking things out on you and I shouldn’t. I just get so fucking cheesed off sometimes. You have no idea, the crap aimed at people my age. Nostalgia and religion, religion and nostalgia, like no older person is interested in anything else. Well, I’m all about today, right here, right now, and then what’s on for tomorrow. You know what I did yesterday? Went to the farmer’s market and bought green bananas. That’s right, you heard me, I’m ninety and I bought green bananas—in your face, mortality! Woke up this morning—in your face again, mortality! Just because I’m not concerned about getting pregnant—or not getting pregnant—and what the hell is it with all that pregnancy hoo-ha anyway? Pregnancy isn’t the permanent centerpiece of every woman’s life, even if they’re actually pregnant! It’s ageist, it’s sexist—” Putting a hand to her mouth, she looked down at her lap, smiling with embarrassment.
“Damn, I’m so sorry,” she said, laughing a little. “Once I get started, I can’t seem to stop, and it’s so rude. Please forgive me again, Agent Mura.”
He waited for her to look up, but apparently he’d have to forgive her first. “There’s no need to apologize, Ms. Eto. When you’re the victim of a crime, it’s quite normal to feel like the whole world is against you.”
Now she did look up, her face a mixture of surprise and relief. “Oh?”
He nodded. “It’s bad enough dealing with the complications, anything from overdue bills to repo men. Or losing something that means the world to you but has no monetary value to the shithead who took it and probably threw it away.” Emmy Eto gave a surprised giggle at the profanity. “But then there’s the indignity of how people keep referring to you as the victim rather than using your name. It adds insult to injury.”