I found Suej’s hand in mine. She was pulling me toward the elevator. Her face was white with shock and surprise, and she ducked and twisted against things that weren’t even there. Nearly just stared at us, following, as we stumbled toward the elevator. Behind her the birds slithered and ran into invisible tracks in the air, tearing passage back the way they’d come.
We fell into the elevator and stared out into darkness as the doors closed and sealed us in.
“What the hell’s wrong with you guys?” Nearly shouted, stamping her feet. I ignored her and put my arms round Suej’s shoulders, as much for my own comfort as hers. She was trembling like an animal caught in headlights, rooted to the spot. I thought she’d been struck mute but suddenly she looked up, blue eyes staring straight into mine.
“You know what that was.” Her voice spiraled into accusation and terror. “You know”
“You saw the forest in the elevator before, didn’t you?” I asked. She nodded feverishly.
“What are they?” she wailed. “Where are they from?”
“Hello? Calling planet Jack…” Nearly shouted, as the doors opened onto 66. She was beside herself with anger and fear. “What are you guys talking about?”
“You didn’t see them?” Suej asked her incredulously, and Nearly just stared as if finally realizing that she’d spent the day with two people who should have been weaving baskets and knocking back Thorazine. I stepped quickly out of the elevator, my arm still round Suej. I was trying to work out what was happening, but it was all coming at me too fast. Some final penny had been thrown in my lap, some huge great hundred-dollar special edition coin out of the sky. I’d have done anything to be able to hurl it back before I worked out what it meant.
“See who?” Nearly demanded, hurrying along beside us.
“The birds,” I said, knowing she hadn’t. Suej shouldn’t have been able to either, and come to that, neither should I. They shouldn’t have been there at all, just like the scene in the elevator which I’d assumed was a Rapt-induced flashback. I was shaking violently, not feeling very tough at all.
“Suej,” I said. “What were you staring at in the bar, on the way out?”
“The door frame,” she said. “The wood was acting funny.”
Everest, wall-diving, the mad, happy birds. It was all leading to one place. The forest.
I wasn’t going back there again.
A rasping sprint along deserted corridors to the corner of Tyson and Stones; a huddle outside Nearly’s door. She was scrabbling for her keys and I was staring wildly around when the door lock spoke to us.
“There’s someone inside,” it said. “Just thought you might like to know.”
“Who?” Nearly yelped, as I pulled out my gun. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just have it surgically implanted in my hand.
“He didn’t say,” the lock replied mildly, as if its mind was on other things. “He had keys, so there wasn’t much I could do.”
“Howie?” I asked Nearly, trying not to panic.
She shook her head, backing away from the door. “He’s my manager, not my boyfriend.”
I took Nearly’s keys and stood in front of the door. Fresh clip into the gun. Not many left, but the way things were going I wouldn’t be around to need them for much longer.
Nearly tugged at my sleeve. “This is going to be bad news,” she opined. “Let’s find somewhere else to be. Seriously, I hear Florida’s nice…”
“It is, but I have to get Mal’s disk back,” I said. “It’s all that’s left of him.”
Nearly, very nervous now: “Like, I respect that and everything, but I really think we should…”
I put the keys in the door and turned. “Best of luck,” said the lock, and I took a step into the corridor beyond. A quiet sound from the living room, like feet moving on carpet.
“Who’s there?” I inquired. No reply. I walked a couple more steps down the hall. “I have a gun and I’m in a strange kind of mood,” I added. “So whoever you are, don’t fuck me around.”’
Still nothing, except that scuffling sound. It wasn’t going to go away, and neither was I, so what else could I do but just take a deep breath and burst into the room.
Johnny Vinaldi looked up impatiently, pacing around the floor.
“Where the hell have you been?” he said, and I just stared at him openmouthed.
Nearly dithered between coffee and a line of coke, and in the end opted for both. Suej went into the kitchen to help with the former, and I stayed in the living room with Vinaldi.
“He got away,” he said. “How, don’t ask me to tell you. He’s surrounded by a boatload of the guys I think of as my least disappointing men, not to mention hundreds of teenage dancing people, and he blows out of the club like a lungful of smoke and just disappears.”
“But he didn’t get you,” I said, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t know whether “I wanted to be having this conversation. Events had pushed Vinaldi and me together in ways I didn’t understand, but I still wanted him dead. Each sentence I spoke to him felt like unfaithfulness. I wasn’t going to waste many words.
“True, and I’m enormously psyched about that, as you can imagine, but Jaz—whom I know you have little respect for, and I can understand that but he is loyal to me beyond reason and good at hurting people, so what can I do?—is in the MediCenter with bullets in disturbing places. His brother Tony is dead, and three others are not as healthy as they used to be.”
“I just killed a guy who I think was an associate of the man with the lights,” I said. “In a bar on sixty-seven.”
Vinaldi looked up at me then, finally stopping his pacing. “I’m impressed,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “It’s been a long, long time for us. These guys, I think they’re still there.”
“Johnny, why are you here and what are you talking about?” I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t going to use it on him.
“I know who the man who came to my club was,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. The clattering in the kitchen seemed a hundred miles away. “And that’s why I know now it wasn’t you who sent me that box or was violent to me in the shadows of my business.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Jeq Yhandim,” Johnny said, suddenly looking older. “I knew him in the war.”
“The war? You?”
“You remember—the ‘training exercise.’ I was a Bright Eyes, too.”
“Bullshit,” I shouted, angry and light-headed with disbelief, but Vinaldi just shook his head.
“I had them removed after I got back. It was very expensive and quite painful and I wouldn’t recommend it as an experience.”
I tried to get my mind round this, to understand how it changed things. In some ways it made all the sense in the world. Vinaldi’s weirdly distanced and confident slant on life was perfectly consistent with what he was telling me—plus he dealt Rapt, which, as discussed, is not everyone’s idea of fun. It also helped some other things fall into place.
“What’s the highest mountain in the world?” I asked.
He frowned, said “Everest,” and that’s when I finally accepted what was going on.
“I’ve just seen the birds.” I watched him as I said this. His eyes sprang open wide. For a moment he didn’t look like the most successful gangster in New Richmond, but like the scared boy he must once have been. Seeing that look made it harder to hate him; I knew the expression only too well, had seen it on my own face many years ago. It also made it impossible for me to doubt that he had been in The Gap. The birds are like little pockets of marsh gas—bright lights which show something invisible is gathering. Vinaldi couldn’t have understood this without having been there.
“Christ on a bike,” he said.
“You could put it like that. I also saw the forest. For a moment it was like I was actually there. And there’s been reports all over the news about someone discovering a mountain higher than Everest. Mount Fyi, wh
ich doesn’t exist. You heard of wall-diving, incidentally?”
“Yeah, a couple of days ago. People jump…” Vinaldi stopped suddenly, brow furrowed. “Wait a minute. People can’t just leap out of windows with a stick. That’s fucking ridiculous.”
“True, but I met someone yesterday who does it,” I said. “Or thinks he does.” Internally I clocked the fact that Golson lived next to an apartment where either Yhandim or his accomplice had murdered someone.
“It’s The Gap, isn’t it,” Vinaldi said. “It’s the fucking Gap. It’s got to be. It’s making people think things that aren’t true.”
I told him that it was true now. That it was seepage, stuff that should be unconscious becoming conscious. The planet’s dreams, seeping through the wall like hallucinations on the edge of sleep.
“Randall,” Vinaldi said, shaking his head, “you’ve been taking far too many drugs.”
“Worse than that,” I added, remembering the small creature I’d half-glimpsed the night before near Shelley Latoya’s apartment. “It’s changing stuff for real.” Then another fact presented itself; Blue Lights had access to narcotics. I’d seen him dealing. Maybe Shelley hadn’t overdosed herself, after all.
“Why is this happening? What’s going on?”
“You tell me,” I said. “And start with Jeq Yhandim.”
Vinaldi’s eyes flicked away, and before he replied he walked over to the rearWindow, which was showing a view of the mountains in the distance, relayed from a camera somewhere high on the north face of the city. The look in his eyes was one I’d seen before, as if he were staring with calm enmity at something a great distance away. The “ten-click glare,” we used to call it. I got the idea before he even started that he was about to reveal something he didn’t talk about very often. Maybe never at all.
“He was in my unit,” Vinaldi said eventually. “We lost him.”
“Lost him?”
He turned to me then, and the words came out in a rush.
“You know what it was like. We were very deep in-country, of course. We were fucked up beyond all recognition, naturally. Suddenly, they hit us and the Lieutenant’s completely lost what little mind he has and is Gone Away all the time, and so it’s down to me and I can’t even tell which way is up.”
I nodded to show I understood. I did—all too well.
“Everyone’s running all over the place getting cut into little pieces and I’m trying to do something about it but I can’t think what it should be except just turning and running like hell. So that’s what we do. Half of us get killed in ten seconds and the rest run into each other, all fleeing in different directions. We just kept running, got out of there, happy to be even half alive.” Vinaldi stopped there, as if not wanting to go on.
“And?” I said.
He breathed out heavily, running a hand across his face. “Some people got left behind.”
He sat down, looking away. I remained standing, staring at him. “Left behind?”
“Some people didn’t get back with us, but they didn’t get killed.”
“When did you find this out?” I asked, still not really understanding.
“Tonight,” he said. “I didn’t realize until tonight.”
“Johnny, what are you telling me?”
“I’m saying Yhandim and some others got left in The Gap when everyone else left. He didn’t make it back to the camp, and he wasn’t there when we got side-lifted out at the end. I’d always assumed they were dead but, as you saw, he came for me last night. He never left The Gap. He’s been there for nearly twenty years.”
I’d known there was something about the man in the bar on 67, that he was still living some life which I’d left behind. What I couldn’t have believed was the reason for it. I still didn’t understand why Yhandim took the spares or wanted Suej. But I knew that he’d survived in The Gap for nearly two decades after everyone else had left.
And now he’d found some way of coming back from the dead, and Hell would be following after.
Much later, when Nearly and Suej had fallen asleep on the couch and Vinaldi and I were sitting on opposite sides of the room in silence, I passed a watershed. I’d put Mal’s disk in my pocket, along with the computer chip. Rachet must have given it to me for a reason, so I figured it was worth hanging onto. I was ready to go somewhere, or do something, but I didn’t know where, or what it was going to be.
Vinaldi’s eyes were very far away, maybe reliving something from The Gap. He’d called into whatever it is hoods have in place of an office and told people he’d be out of contact for a few hours. He had people on virtually every floor looking out for Yhandim, all of them carrying the finest in haute couture weaponry. Until someone called, there was nothing he and I could do except sit and watch each other. There were things I’d rather have done. Having Vinaldi sit there was like an open cancer on my face in the mirror; I didn’t want it, but if it was there I couldn’t help looking at it.
I knew there was one question I had to ask before anything else happened. I’d been sure of the answer for the last five years. Tonight, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure why I felt different; perhaps it was something in Vinaldi’s attitude toward me, or maybe The Gap was simply an older wound, which for this evening was taking precedence. Either way, I asked it.
“Johnny,” I said, “did you put out the order to have Henna and Angela killed?”
My voice sounded dry and constricted, but it came out evenly enough. Vinaldi came to attention immediately. I got the impression that he knew this was something which would come up sooner rather than later.
He looked me in the eyes, and then he looked away.
“No,” he said. And the strange thing was, I believed him.
At seven a.m. the phone rang. I was asleep on the sofa. Suej was sprawled over most of it, and Nearly was resting her head dopily on my shoulder. I was about as comfortable as if I’d been sleeping in a bookcase, but didn’t entirely mind.
Vinaldi appeared to have stayed awake, and reached crisply from his chair to press the phone.
“Er, it’s Howie,” said a voice, relayed perfectly into the room by the wall coupler. “Is Jack there?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “Howie, what’s happening?”
“I think you ought to come down here,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Are you alone?”
“No,” I said, though Suej and Nearly were still asleep.
“That’s what I assumed. I need to show you something. It relates to your friend with the lights in his head.”
Something in Howie’s tone struck me as very wrong. I stood up. “I’m on my way.”
“Great,” he said, sounding relieved. “And Jack—I’d leave the girls where they are, if you catch my meaning.”
The phone clicked off. I looked at Vinaldi.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes, it fucking will.” Vinaldi looked spruce and calm, as though he spent most nights awake in a chair. “Anything that relates to Yhandim relates to me.”
“I’d rather you stayed here.”
“I don’t give a shit what you’d rather, Randall. I’m coming.”
I looked at him for a moment. Last night had made a difference, but in daylight I wasn’t sure how much. Eventually I nodded. I scribbled a note for Nearly and we left, closing the door quietly behind us. The lock told us to take care—advice which I valued highly. The corridor to the elevator was filthy, overflowing with the detritus of the previous evening. Empty bottles, cracked vials, a used rubber. In the distance I heard the sound of a sweepteam vacuuming it up. Hazy light slanted in from the external window down at the end of the corridor, and for once it looked like it wasn’t raining outside.
We stood in silence in the elevator as it descended, and I thought momentarily about how weird it was to be standing next to New Richmond’s premier villain. Maybe he was mulling over his proximity to one of
its key losers. If so, he didn’t say. Perhaps, like me, he was mainly wondering whose head we were going to find this time. Howie had called me, not Vinaldi. I was thinking that was probably a clue.
It was nighttime on 8. I took us the quickest route, which happens also to be the noisiest, going down Bon Bon Street past bars full of revelers encouraging young (and not so young) ladies to remove their clothes. I can only watch that kind of stuff for a short while before being suffused with a feeling of utter futility—a kind of pornui, I guess—but the patrons down on 8 certainly seemed to be going for it. Vinaldi merely swept his gaze over it with a grimly professional eye, probably calculating if any of it was worth taking over. Bon Bon led us into a net of side streets where people were eating and drinking, overspilling out of diners onto the crowded streets. Here Vinaldi looked around more casually as we walked, and I figured it must all seem kind of small beer to him.
“I haven’t been down here in years,” he said suddenly, contradicting me. “Looks kind of fun.”
“What, more fun than Club Bastard?” I said, making the turn into Howie’s side street.
“Having someone drill a hole in your head and pour ants in is more fun than Club Bastard,” he said. “The young people these days, what do they know from fun?”
I felt that my own notions of what was enjoyable were open to question, and also that if age meant maturity, I should probably still be sucking my thumb. I was about to say so when I noticed Vinaldi had disappeared. One minute he was beside me, the next he was gone. Assuming he’d hung back in the preceding street to observe fun in progress, I entered Howie’s bar. I was actually kind of relieved to be able to handle this on my own. All the way down I’d been hoping that if I was going to see anyone’s head it would be the half-spare’s, and realizing that fate would be unlikely to help me out. Yhandim’s MO seemed to favor women rather exclusively, with the exception of the warning sent to Vinaldi. David and Mr. Two might very well be dead by now, but Yhandim’s present to me would have overtones of sexuality. It always does when that level of mangling is involved, and the manglers tend not to be switch-hitters.
Spares Page 18