“Yeah, love you too,” he said, holding the hand piece at arm’s length. Then he brought the speaking end back to his mouth. “I’ll be seeing you.” He made a kissing noise into the phone then he yanked the handset away from the console. The spiral cable stretched, then snapped like a piece of elastic. He threw the handset into the opposite corner of the storeroom.
I looked at the gun and I looked at Falzarano and Carmina. The pair was standing by Alfie. She looked pretty happy about the situation. Falzarano, less so. He looked at Alfie.
“What’s this, ah, ah? IA? But IA is—”
“International Automatic,” I said. I nodded at Alfie. “Your boy here is a company man, name of Francis Cane.”
Falzarano turned his head from me to Alfie—to Francis—and back again several times, jaw slack, jowls a-quiver.
IA. International Automatic. A robotics company. One with an apparent interest in me and Ada. But how he fitted into Falzarano’s organization I didn’t know.
I looked at Alfie’s gun again. Whatever it shot it wasn’t likely to be bullets. I had a feeling it was exactly the kind of gun you’d use against a robot. It probably beamed some kind of electromagnetic pulse, something that would tangle my circuits and scramble my processors and knock me out cold, if not worse.
I remembered something about the Hollywood sign and for a moment I saw a girl with black hair and thick black rings of makeup around her eyes like an Egyptian princess.
And then she was gone and I was looking at Alfie Micklewhite.
“What do you mean, you know where Ada is?” I asked. “The Electromatic Detective Agency is in the telephone directory. Look it up, I’ll give you the tour.”
Alfie cocked his head. “Oh, you mean that thing back at your office? All them bells and whistles? You think that’s Ada, eh? Ah well, not as clever a detective as you thought you were, eh?”
I didn’t say anything. As a matter of fact, I did think that Ada was back at the office. That was where Professor Thornton had put us, after all. Just a robot and his computer going about their business.
I thought about this for fifty-two microseconds. I thought about the sounds of Ada smoking, of her drinking coffee. I thought about her laugh.
They were nothing. Echoes. Fragments. A ghost in the machine, images, sensations, inadvertently imprinted on my template, the template that Professor Thornton had based on his own mind.
And then I thought about an older woman with big hair, smoking in the office, telling a younger couple how to reconnect something electrical as I lay in my alcove unable to move.
Was that an echo too?
Or was that something else.
A … memory?
“But, Alfie, my boy, my boy, I do not understand.” Falzarano had moved around, until he was almost standing on my side of the foursome. Perhaps unconsciously Carmina moved closer to Alfie at the same time. “What does International Automatic want here?”
“I would have thought that was as clear as crystal,” I said. “IA wants your factory, the plans, the works.” I looked at Carmina. “They want your roboticist too.”
Carmina cocked her head at me. “I have been in partnership with Mr. Cane and International Automatic for years. IA have been trying to break into the secrets of the old federal robot program in your country for just as long. With Falzarano’s collection in their possession, they will finally be able to decode Thornton’s master program.”
“A collection which now includes you, Charlie,” said Alfie. “Oh, and Ada, too. That’ll make it much easier. Of course it would have been much easier to just keep Mr. Falzarano’s operation going like we planned, but now we’ll just have to take the factory plans, and IA will have to try and get it built somewhere else. Still, it could be worse, eh?”
Falzarano looked at me and I looked at him and then I looked at Alfie.
“Handy,” I said, “having DORL knock at the door. Covers you pretty well.”
Alfie sniffed and checked his watch. Then he looked back at me.
“Covers me for what?”
“Your own incompetence,” I said. “Because if you wanted Falzarano’s factory operation, then killing Vaughan Delaney and Emerson Ellis is a strange way of going about it. Taking those two out would have played havoc with the schedule.”
Alfie grinned. “I don’t know if you remember, but Vaughan Delaney jumped out of a tall building. If you’re saying I had anything to do with that you need your circuits rewired.”
If I could have raised an eyebrow I would have. “I’m sure. Of course you had an accomplice. The piano was a good place to hide Emerson Ellis, at least until you could figure out a way of disposing of the body, so long as nobody played it. Carmina is the only pianist among us, so that took care of that.”
Something flickered between Alfie and Carmina. She shook her head a little and then Alfie raised his gun a fraction higher.
“What are you on about? Ellis is missing. You saying someone stashed him in the bleeding piano—”
Gunfire erupted, close by. It was followed by shouting and the sound of running feet. Then more gunshots and more shouts and then it was very quiet.
We were out of time and I knew it. I said the same to Alfie and he gave me a scowl while Carmina went to the door of the storeroom and peered beyond it.
“DORL aren’t going to let you out of here,” I said. “They’re here to reclaim their property, and that includes me.”
Alfie shook his head. “Not likely, Charlie. See, I’ve got something they haven’t, which is you. And you’re exactly what I need.”
“What, you hope to negotiate your way out of this mess?”
“No, no, come on, Charlie, use that calculator you have for a brain. I know what you did for the old man, at that place downtown. You can protect us. Now, let me see…”
He glanced around the storeroom. Then his gaze settled on the big silver spherical robot head. “Yeah, that’ll do,” he said, pointing with his gun. “We’ll take that one. As the old man said, each and every one of these things holds the entire master program of the federal robot project. All I need is one of them.”
I chuckled. It sounded like a truck starting on a cold winter’s morning and it made Alfie flick the gun again.
“Something funny, Charlie?”
“Oh, lots of things,” I said. “But you’re overlooking something.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that, eh?”
“I might be bulletproof,” I said, “but DORL also have plenty of guns that don’t shoot bullets. Like that piece you got off the agent in the woods. I have a feeling they were made just for an occasion like this one.”
Alfie stepped up to me and the gun never wavered. “All the better, then, ain’t it? They won’t want to damage the last robot in the world, now will they?” The gun twitched in his grip. “Time to move. You pick up that head, then lead the way out. The old man after you. He’s got enough gizmos inside him for this thing to work just as well as it would on you, Charlie.”
I looked at Falzarano. He was shaking his head, muttering something under his breath in his native tongue.
I went to the shelf and picked up the big round silver head. I wondered who it belonged to. I wondered if in another world we might have been friends.
I looked at Alfie and he waved the gun. I nodded and headed toward the door. Falzarano followed. Alfie next with Carmina behind him.
As we got closer to the gunfire I wondered what it was exactly that people had against robots.
What were they afraid of?
And what was Ada afraid of? Because she didn’t want Falzarano to build his factory and she didn’t want IA to get the master program either. She’d concocted this whole elaborate plan, in the guise of another job. Insurance, she called it. Against what? This wasn’t about people finding out about our new line of work.
This was much, much bigger than that, and I wasn’t even considering what Alfie had said about knowing where Ada was.
Where she really was.
The main computer room was humming with power as we walked in. Every system was active. A test program, perhaps, being run by Carmina, in a copy of her lab back in Colombia that would eventually be needed to run Falzarano’s factory.
The factory that would have needed its own power station. The thing about computers and robots is that they needed a lot of juice. The computer room was alive with a lot of high voltage. A lot of high voltage indeed.
I stopped in the middle of the room, the big silver head in my arms. I looked down at it. It was dead, and it had no face. All I could see was the distorted reflection of my own in the curved surface.
“Oi! Move it, Charlie!”
I turned around. Falzarano was behind me and watching without a sound, and behind him, Alfie and Carmina stepped through the door to the storage room. Alfie held the gun on me as he half-turned to fiddle with the sliding door control with his other hand. Out of habit, most likely.
It was a mistake, of course.
I tossed the silver head at Alfie. He ducked down and fired his magic gun, but he was well off target. Falzarano was in front of me and he caught the blast.
The old man’s back exploded in a shower of sparks. He groaned and fell against one of the computer consoles. Then his half-human body sparked again, enough to set the console shorting underneath him. The console fizzed and then exploded and the hum of power in the room went up more than a few decibels.
Alfie yelled something and lifted his gun again to fire a second time. I ducked to one side and he squeezed the trigger. He missed me but the blast caught one of the computer banks. The front of it exploded and flames began to lick out of the exposed circuitry behind.
“Idiota!” Carmina yelled, arms raised in front of her face as the computer consoles sparked like the Fourth of July. “His head! All we need is his head, take it!”
There was a bang. And then another. Carmina twisted in the air, the front of her lab coat popping with red as she was torn up by gunshots.
Falzarano slumped back onto the floor, 1938 Mauser Schnellfeuer sliding out of his hand. Alfie’s gun, the one that had jammed, the one he had left with Stefano’s body.
A body transferred to the computer room for Carmina’s robot experiment.
Another console exploded. Alfie stood by the storeroom door, his magic gun loose in his hand. One of the lenses of his glasses was chipped and his wavy hair was curling up along the edge.
I ran toward him. I looked into his eyes. I grabbed the wrist behind the gun. He offered no resistance.
More gunfire from outside. The DORL agents would be at the main office any time.
The fire was hot and getting hotter. It would consume the whole house, including Falzarano’s collection, including Falzarano himself and the body of Professor Carmen Blanco.
I looked around the burning computer room. The machinery in the room was big. Computers the size of refrigerators, the size of the kind of truck you’d deliver a refrigerator in. There was no way it had all been brought in through the house.
Alfie coughed, and didn’t stop coughing. I didn’t need to breathe but the smoke wasn’t any good for him.
And I wanted him alive just a little bit longer.
“There a way out the back?” I asked.
Alfie nodded as he heaved for breath, his hand fumbling for the sliding door controls. I knocked his hand away and got the door open. Then Alfie stumbled onward into the clear air of the storeroom.
I followed.
39
I drove through the hills and Alfie sat next to me. We drove in a thick, syrupy silence punctuated only by sporadic fits of coughing from my passenger that were just as heavy. It was nearly dawn. The sky was stars above and an orange band of light at the horizon and my time was nearly up.
The fire from the computer lab spread quickly and was licking at our heels as we came up out of a sunken loading bay at the back of Falzarano’s castle. The fire was a good distraction for Falzarano’s remaining men and the agents from DORL alike. Alfie and I made it through the pines, then I followed his head as we looped back around and came into the garage through a side door concealed from the driveway.
Once we were in the Buick we were fine, because the Buick was a special car. Reinforced, if not entirely armored. It made short work of the garage door and neither Falzarano’s boys nor the men from the DORL were fast enough to stop us as we powered up the driveway. Up on the main road were several black cars but none of them were ready to roll when we blasted past them and it was easy enough to shake the two that finally managed to get off their starting blocks. By the time that had happened we were too far ahead and the hill roads were steep and winding and there was a lot of them and I used every turn to my advantage, making sure the tails stayed shaken.
I was good at my job. I was programmed to be.
Falzarano was dead. Carmina was dead. Whatever was left after the fire, the DORL were welcome to it. Better for it to be in their hands than in the hands of IA.
That just left Alfie Micklewhite, real name, Francis Cane. The IA agent, if not entirely well then at least still breathing in the seat next to me.
A man with more than a few questions to answer. But not about himself or IA or the factory or anything else.
No, I was interested in something else entirely.
Ada.
Alfie had said that IA had found her. When I expressed a certain level of surprise, Alfie had said that Ada wasn’t at my office. He’d said that the computer room was … well, whatever it was, it wasn’t what I thought it was.
It wasn’t Ada. Ada, he’d said, was somewhere else. And IA knew where.
I wanted to know too.
We came around a corner. The hills were still high but there were fewer of them now as we approached the edge of the city. I pulled the car around the next bend. Our destination was just ahead, a dirt access road that I knew I had been on before, one that led to a makeshift parking lot cut into the hillside beside a green hut and behind a giant sign with letters forty feet high that looked out across the whole damn city.
I pulled in beside the hut. Alfie coughed and squinted ahead and then he sat up with a start, which set off another coughing fit. This didn’t stop him reaching inside his jacket for a packet of cigarettes.
“Where the bloody hell are we, eh?”
I killed the car. The telephone rang next to me. I knew who it was. I picked up.
“Ray?”
“Loose ends, Ada, loose ends.”
I hung up. I put the phone down. I turned to Alfie sitting next to me.
“You and I are going to have a certain kind of conversation, Alfie.”
He looked at me from behind his thick glasses. He blinked, he placed a cigarette between his lips and smiled.
“You got a light, Charlie?”
I lifted my fingers and ignited a spark and when, a little while later, I drove back down into Hollywood I was driving alone.
40
“You’re very quiet.”
I looked up into the corner of the computer room. All around me Ada’s lights flashed and her computers hummed and the reels of tape spun ever onwards.
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. So I got back to work. Ada blew smoke around my circuits and when I was done I folded the sheet of yellow legal paper in half lengthwise and slipped it in between the pages of the paperback book that was sitting on the small table. Then I took that book and I put it into the inside pocket of my short black trench coat that was over the back of the chair I was sitting on.
“Lottery numbers, Ray?” Ada asked. “Or do you have a good tip on a fast horse?”
I stood up. I looked at the clock over the door. It was either late or very early, depending on your point of view.
“Listen, chief, if it’s about the job, then you’ll understand why I had to do it.”
I got into my alcove.
“Insurance, Ray. A bit of initiative, that’s all. The bull and the horns and all that
jazz.”
I looked at the window opposite my alcove. I had forgotten to pull the blind again. It was dark outside and I looked at the reflection of myself in the bright computer room.
Or whatever kind of room it really was.
“They can’t find us, Ray,” said Ada. “You know that. We’re onto a good thing. You know that too. Something that nobody can find out about. I blew a fair chunk of change on the job. Turns out Hollywood hits don’t come cheap. And that’s not counting the work I had to pull you off of to attend to this little matter.”
I plugged myself in.
“They can’t find us, Ray.”
“I know that, Ada,” I said. “That’s why you had me kill Coke Patterson. Maybe you didn’t know he was a DORL agent but you knew he’d found out too much and was going to spill it somewhere he shouldn’t.”
Ada drew on her cigarette. Now it was her turn not to do any speaking.
“And Ellis too,” I said. “He’d been spooked. But he wanted to get out of Falzarano’s protection and quick. Maybe he would have talked. Maybe he wouldn’t. But there was too much of a risk of DORL getting their hands on him.” I shrugged. “And besides, he was part of the job anyway. No harm, no foul. All I had to do was wait until he made his bid for freedom. Shame about the guard. I guess I had no option. I had to get in without being seen and deal with the problem of Emerson Ellis one way or another.”
“We’ll make a detective out of you yet, chief.”
“Of course I don’t know what happened to Vaughan Delaney, other than the fact he fell out of a building. But that’s something people do. Maybe his good conscience got the better of him. The hell do I know?”
“You had to admit, it keeps everything tidy, Ray.”
“I know that.”
“A good night’s sleep is what you need, Ray. Everything will look better in the morning.”
“I know that too, Ada,” I said, “and I also know that I can’t do a damn thing about it.”
Ada laughed. Three full loops. And then when she was done she said, “Good night, Ray.”
And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California.
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