Connie returned to the table, but did not sit. Her face was clean, but her eyes were puffy. She looked at Alexandra.
“I’m ready to go now,” Connie said. “I asked my questions, and I’m ready to go home.” She turned to Tanner. “Good-bye, Louis.”
“Connie...” But that was as far as he got. He still had no idea what to say. “Good-bye, Connie. Take care of yourself.”
Connie nodded. “Sure, Louis.”
Alexandra stood. “I’ll make sure she gets off okay tomorrow,” she said to Tanner. “Keep in touch, will you? And if you have a problem, go ahead and get to Rachel, she’ll find a way to help.”
“Thanks for everything,” Tanner said.
Alexandra nodded, then she and Connie walked away. He watched them cross the room and start down the stairs. Then he was alone.
O O O O
Tanner stood on the sidewalk and gazed across the street at Sookie, who was standing now, her back against the building, watching him. Though it was not raining, the air was heavy and tense with the damp heat. At a break in the traffic, he hurried across the street and joined her.
“You’ve been following me,” he said. When she did not deny it, he asked, “Why?”
“Why did you keep looking at me that way?” Sookie asked.
Tanner did not immediately reply, the pain returning once more. Her voice was nothing like Carla’s, but her face was just too damn similar. “You remind me of someone,” he finally said. “A woman I knew. You look a lot like she did when she was your age.”
Sookie’s eyes widened, and she gnawed at her lower lip. “Who is she?” Sookie asked, her voice hushed and tentative. “Maybe... maybe she’s my mother.” A brief pause, then, “I never knew her.”
Tanner shook his head. “She died before you were born.” He had wondered briefly about that himself when he had first made the connection; but if Carla had had a child before he had known her, the child would be close to twenty years old now.
Sookie kicked at the empty Chinese food cartons at her feet.
“So why were you following me?” Tanner asked again.
Sookie shrugged. “I don’t know.” She looked up at him. “To ask you that, I guess.” She gestured with her head at the building. “You going back into the Tenderloin?”
“Yes.”
“Even with Max after you?”
Tanner nodded. “Which is why you shouldn’t be following me. You should stay away.”
“You need someone following you,” Sookie said.
Tanner shook his head. “Don’t, Sookie. I’ll be fine, and I don’t want to be worrying about you. I mean it.”
“I know a safe way in,” she said.
“Don’t you understand?” Tanner wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “You know what Max is like.”
Sookie nodded. “I understand.” She looked down at the food cartons, crushed one slowly with her foot. Then she looked back at him. “Was she your daughter?” she asked.
Tanner did not reply at first, confused. Was she talking about Carla? “Who do you mean?”
Sookie glanced across the street, pointed at the windows of Joyce Wah’s. “The girl. You met her there.”
“No,” Tanner said. “She’s the daughter of a friend.”
Sookie nodded once, still gazing across the street. “You don’t want me to show you a way in.”
“I have my own ways.”
“And you want me to stay away from you.”
Tanner hesitated. He had the feeling something more was going on with her questions than he understood. “Because of Max, yes.”
Sookie kicked at the food cartons again, smiled softly, and looked at Tanner. “Good-bye, then.” She turned and walked quickly down the street.
“Sookie... wait.”
She kept on without slowing, without looking back. “Sookie...”
Tanner started forward, then stopped, letting it go, and wondering why he felt as if he had screwed up. What could he have said different? What should he have said? Christ. He watched her until, a block away, she slipped out of sight—into the crowd or into a building, he couldn’t tell. Tanner turned around and headed the other way.
TWENTY-FIVE
TANNER RETURNED TO the Euro Quarter, walking the hot night streets. He wore nightshades, which looked like mirrored sunglasses from the outside but did not actually cut down on the light that reached his eyes. And he had decided not to shave. He did not really expect the nightshades and a few days’ growth of beard to be much disguise, but he hoped it would at least make things more difficult for Max.
He had most of the money back on a new credit chip—replacing the chip had cost him five percent—and several hundred in cash. Having less money did not bother him, though; he suspected it would be more than enough. Tanner had the feeling that money was no longer a key issue in any of this.
But he felt a greater sense of urgency now. Part of that was Max—Tanner had to find Rattan before Max found him. But he also had the feeling that other things were coming to a head, all this stuff with Rattan and the cops. If they did, he might lose Rattan, one way or another, and he would be back where he had begun—nowhere. He had to find Rattan, and he had to find him soon.
O O O O
It was just after midnight, street life peaking, when Tanner stopped by the Turk Street Fascination Parlor. The place was jammed, every single Fascination machine being played, almost all of them worked by old Russian women in their sixties or seventies, a few even older. They rolled the pink rubber balls into their machines, hoping to eventually win enough game tickets to cash in for a Tenderloin Flight Coupon, good for a month in a Life-Sim Spa.
This time Lyuda, who owned and ran the parlor, was in. Tanner spotted her behind the bar in back, pouring comp Stolis for the old women. Two waiters, skinny old guys older than the Russian women, carted the tiny glasses of vodka from the bar to the machines. Tanner slowly worked his way to the bar, careful not to bump any of the players.
Lyuda, a small blond woman in her forties, was the only junkie Tanner had ever known who had managed to quit the stuff by slowly tapering off. She hadn’t any other choice. She had started shooting up in her teens and, defying the odds, had survived into her mid-thirties, when she decided she had to quit—or die. Twice she tried it cold, and both attempts nearly killed her—twenty years of doing junk had changed her body too much; she needed heroin to live.
But she was still determined. So she began slowly, patiently, cutting back. She set up a strict regimen, tapering off minutely and infrequently, sticking to it for more than three years until she thought she had cut back enough. Then she quit completely... and lived. Now she ran the Fascination Parlor, and generously kept the old Russian women tanked on imported Stolichnaya vodka.
As Tanner approached the bar, he watched Lyuda’s expression change from puzzlement to a smile and then to a tight frown. Tanner leaned against the counter, the two waiters left with full loads, and Lyuda shook her head.
“Didn’t recognize you at first,” she said. “Is that supposed to be some kind of disguise?” When Tanner shrugged, she said, “I gotta say I’m surprised to see you here, with that lunatic after you.”
Max? It was difficult for Tanner to believe that Max would go that route, taking it public. He thought Max would want to come after him as privately as possible. “What lunatic?” he asked.
“Dobler.”
“Dobler?”
“Yeah, Dobler, that lunatic, that amateur. You didn’t know?”
Tanner shook his head.
“Sure, he’s put the word out on the street. Wants you alive, if that’s any consolation.”
“What’s the price on my head?”
“Negotiable upon delivery.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
“I told you he was an amateur. Want a Stoli?” She held up a bottle, and when Tanner shook his head she poured one for herself and went on. “Anybody with any brains’ll just ignore the whole th
ing, but he’ll have other lunatics and amateurs shooting for you. And because they’re amateurs they won’t have too much control over the keeping-you-alive part of the deal.”
“Terrific.” Tanner scanned the Fascination Parlor, half expecting some psychotic moron to leap out from under one of the machines and take a potshot at him.
“So why you here?” Lyuda asked.
Tanner turned back to her. “I’m hoping you can help me out with something. I need to talk to you.”
Lyuda pressed a button, and a buzzer sounded faintly through the walls. “We’ll go to my office. Beyat can watch things.”
“How clear is your office?”
Lyuda raised one eyebrow. “Like that, is it?”
Tanner nodded.
“All right.”
A tall black woman in a shiny silver aviator jumpsuit appeared from the back hall, and Lyuda came around the bar.
“I’ll be gone, I don’t know how long,” Lyuda said to Beyat. “Watch things, all right?”
Beyat nodded, adjusting the Stolichnaya bottles. “Keep the old dames juiced.”
“Just keep them happy,” Lyuda said.
Beyat grinned. “That means keeping them juiced.”
Lyuda finally smiled and nodded. “All right.” She glanced at Tanner, then led the way to a bolted door between the two rest rooms. She unlocked it, and they walked down a narrow passage, then into a small room filled with cases of Stolichnaya. They went through another door at the back, then up a flight of stairs to a covered porch looking out over an alley filled with garbage cans, packing crates, loading docks. In the mist-filled cones of light, people moved about the alley, either on foot or narrow transport carts. There were three chairs in the room and Lyuda sat in one, gesturing at the other two.
Tanner chose the one farther from the window. He wondered if he was becoming paranoid.
“So what is it?” Lyuda asked.
“I should tell you, someone else is looking for me. Other than Dobler.” He waited for her to ask him who, but she didn’t. She sat silently, waiting for him to continue. “Max,” he said.
She did not respond immediately. Her gaze was steady, penetrating. Almost accusing. “You’ve got no business being in the Tenderloin,” she said. “You get out right now, quickest way you can.”
“I can’t,” Tanner said. “I’m looking for someone. Here. I have to find him.”
Lyuda shook her head. “Everybody’s looking for somebody. What the hell is all this?” She breathed in, expelled it slowly. “All right, who you looking for?”
“Rattan.”
Again there was a silence before she replied. He could not read her expression.
“You are not a good insurance risk,” Lyuda finally said.
“Can you help me find him?”
Lyuda slowly shook her head from side to side. “Shit, Tanner. I shouldn’t even try.”
“Will you?”
Lyuda did not answer.
O O O O
Tanner and Lyuda walked the crowded streets, headed deeper into the Tenderloin. Two Red Dragons had flown in from the Asian Quarter and now hovered thirty or forty feet above the street, engaged in mock combat while video ads for Red Dragon sake shimmered along the length of their bodies. Green sparks flashed from their eyes while smoke poured from the dragons’ nostrils and drifted down to street level. Tanner breathed in the smoke, which smelled faintly of incense and opium.
Lyuda had spent nearly three hours making phone calls and going out to talk to people, while Tanner waited on the porch. He had sat on the floor with his back against the wall, dozing, slipping in and out of a dreamlike state. At one point he thought he was involved in an intense, incomprehensible conversation with Carla, who was quite young, and who gradually transformed into Sookie. He only halfheartedly fought the exhaustion and the fragmented dream images, and several times nearly slipped into a deep sleep. Finally, close to four in the morning, Lyuda had returned and told him they would go meet someone who might know something. Now they were on their way as night came to a close, though there were not yet any traces of light in the sky.
By the time Lyuda turned into a busy alley lined with street-level shops, cafés, and taverns, they were very close to the Core. Tanner wondered again if that was where Rattan had gone to ground. But he could not believe it, could not believe that Rattan was that desperate.
They entered a crowded espresso bar and Lyuda led the way through it to the opposite entrance, which opened into a large lobby. Three people stood in the lobby, talking and sipping from paper cups. All the lobby windows were boarded over, but the lobby itself was brightly lit. This was, or had once been, an office building.
Lyuda nodded at the boarded windows. “Faces the Core,” she said. “Every window on the first seven floors of that side is boarded over, steel plating on the outside.”
“We’re that close?” Tanner said.
“Just across the street.”
One of the elevators was open and waiting. Inside, Lyuda pushed the ninth-floor button, the doors closed, and the elevator rose with a jolt. Tanner had been up and down a lot of floors in the last few days, but this was his first elevator ride since he had seen Teshigahara.
The elevator stopped at five, and three short, fat men got on. They wore business suits, but they smelled bad. Milky green fluid oozed from an open sore on one man’s forehead. They did not push any of the floor buttons.
At nine, Tanner and Lyuda got off. The elevator doors remained open for a minute, the three men standing silent and motionless. Then the doors closed, and the lighted arrow showed the elevator descending. Odd, Tanner thought.
The hall floor was beige linoleum, edged with ragged strips of rotten carpet that had once covered the floor. Offices on the Core side of the building were dark and silent. On the other side were lighted door windows of frosted glass, muffled voices, the clatter of machinery, music, and the whine of a dentist’s drill. At the end of the hall was a staircase, which they climbed to the tenth floor. Here, all the offices were dark and silent.
Lyuda unlocked a door on the Core side of the building, and they entered a dark room. She took Tanner’s hand and led him through the darkness, along a corridor, then into another room with two large windows. They stepped up to the windows, and looked out onto the Core.
The Core was four square blocks of hell. Some people thought the hell was literal, and believed supernatural demons and ghosts haunted the place. Most of the buildings were in ruins, and those that were not looked as if they soon would be. Unlike the rest of the Tenderloin, the streets and buildings of the Core were not brightly lit, though a few dim lights were visible in the ruins—wavering lights of candles or fires, pulsing blue glows, drifting clouds of pale phosphorescence. The streets were deserted except for the shadowy movement of animals.
Tanner had heard the stories, though no one really knew for sure what went on inside. The Core was populated by those who could not, or would not, cut it in either the city or the Tenderloin. For all that the Tenderloin functioned outside the laws of the city, state, and country, it did function quite well with a structure and order of its own. The Core, so the stories went, had no order, no structure, no laws or rules or morals. Nothing. Tanner suspected it was not quite the chaos-driven place it was said to be, but certainly the rules were different. The Core itself existed, but that was all that could be said of it.
Lyuda raised the window, and Tanner half expected to hear wild screams and wailing, but there was relative quiet. Several floors up in the building across the way, something resembling a large cat stuck its head out a window and growled. A huge, furred hand grabbed it and pulled it back inside.
“You don’t think Rattan’s in there, do you?” Tanner asked.
Lyuda shook her head. “He’s not insane.” She looked at her watch. “Quiet, now. Listen. It’s almost time.” She gestured at the Core.
For what? But Tanner kept quiet, and listened.
The Core, already quiet, gre
w quieter still, almost completely silent. Even the surrounding areas of the Tenderloin became quiet. An acoustic guitar began playing somewhere inside one of the buildings across the street. The sound, loud and clearly defined, echoed among the ruins, and Tanner could not pinpoint its origin. The music was classical and delicate, with a Latin feel. Then a woman’s voice joined it.
Her voice was strong and beautiful, a clean, high soprano. She sang something from an opera, Tanner thought, though he did not recognize it. The words were Spanish or Italian, he couldn’t be sure. Clearly, she’d had professional training. There was no way anyone could sing like that without years of training and practice. And here she was, singing from within the Core.
Tanner stood and listened, amazed at what he was hearing, amazed at where it came from. Spanish, he finally decided. A love song of some kind, filled with yearning, tempered with anxiety. He searched the ruins, looking for a light or something that would tell him where she was. He saw nothing.
The song ended. There was a brief silence, then the guitar started in on another song, playing a few measures before the woman joined it again. This song was sadder than the first, melancholy and quite moving, though again Tanner had no idea what any of the words meant. Her voice had great power, and Tanner felt a dull ache develop in his chest. During the most intense section of the piece, the woman hit a series of incredibly high notes with such painful perfection that a shiver ran through Tanner from his neck to the base of his spine, leaving a strange chill in its wake.
By the time the second song was finished, the sky had noticeably brightened, and morning was fully upon them. There was another extended silence, then the natural city sounds gradually resumed, filling the morning air. There was no more guitar, no more singing. Lyuda closed the window.
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