Idoru. Part 12

Inside, the Graceland was all burgundy velour, puffed up in diamonds, with little chrome nubs where the points of the diamonds met. It was about the tackiest thing Chia had ever seen, and she guessed Maryalice thought so too, because Maryalice, seated next to her, was explaining that it was an "image" thing, that Eddie had this very hot, very popular country-music club called Whiskey Clone, so he'd gotten the Graceland to go with that, and he'd also started dressing the way they did in Nashville. Maryalice thought that look suited him, she said.

Chia nodded. Eddie was driving, talking in j.a.panese on a speakerphone. They'd found Maryalice at a tiny little bar, just off the arrivals area. It was the third one they'd looked in, Chia got the feeling that Eddie wasn't very happy to see Maryalice, but Maryalice hadn't seemed to care.

It was Maryalice's idea that they give Chia a ride into Tokyo. She said the train was too crowded and it cost a lot anyway. She said she wanted to do Chia a &vor, because Chia had carried her bag for her. (Chia had noticed that Eddie had put one bag in the Graceland's trunk, but kept the one with the Nissan County sticker up front, next to him, beside the driver's seat.)

Chia wasn't really listening to Maryalice now; it was some time at night and the jet lag was too weird and they were on this big bridge that seemed to be made out of neon, with however many lanes of traffic around them, the little cars like strings of bright beads, all of them shiny and new. There were screens that kept blurring past, tall and narrow, with j.a.panese writing jumping around on some of them, and people on others, faces, smiling as they sold something.

And then a woman's face: Itei Toei, the idoru Rez wanted to marry. And gone.

04 "Rice Daniels, Mr. Lane>'. Out of control." Pressing a card of some kind to the opposite side of the scratched plastic that walled the room called Visitors away from those who gave it its name. Laney had tried to read it, but the attempt at focusing had driven an atrocious spike of pain between his eyes. He'd looked at Rice Daniels instead, through tears of pain: close-cropped dark hair, close-fitting sungla.s.ses with small oval lenses, the black frames gripping the man's head like some kind of surgical clamp.

Nothing at all about Rice Daniels appeared to be out of control.

"The series," he said. "'Out of Control.' As in: aren't the media? Out of Control: the cutting edge of counter-investigative journalism."

Laney had gingerly tried touching the tape across the bridge of his nose: a mistake. "Counter-investigative?"

"You're a quant, Mr. Laney." A quant.i.tative a.n.a.lyst. He wasn't, really, but that was technically his job description, "For Slitscan."

Laney didn't respond.

"The girl was the focus of intensive surveillance. Slitscan was all over her. You know why. We believe a case can be made here for Slitscan's culpability in the death of Alison Shires."

Lane>' looked down at his running shoes, their laces removed by the Deputies. "She killed herself," he said.

"But we know why."3 0.

2.

05.

9.Out of Control "No," Laney said, meeting the black ovals again, "I don't, Not exactly." The nodal point. Protocols of some other realm entirely.

"You're going to need help, Lane>'. You might be looking at a manslaughter charge. Abetting a suicide. They'll want to know why you were up there."

"I'll tell them why."

"Our producers managed to get me in here first, Lane>'. It wasn't easy. There's a spin-control team from Slitscan out there now, waiting to talk with you. If you let them, they'll turn it all around. They'll get you off, because they have to, in order to cover the show. They can do it, with enough money and the right lawyers. But ask yourself this: do you want to let them do it?"

Daniels still had his business card thumbed up against the plastic. Trying to focus on it again, Laney saw that someone had scratched something in from the other side, in small, uneven mirror-letters, so that he could read it left to right:

I NO U DIDIT.

'i've never heard of Out of Control."

"Our hour-long pilot is in production as we speak, Mr. Lane>'." A measured pause. "We're all very excited."

"Why?"

"Out of Control isn't just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your story-Alison Shires' story-is precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. They've done well, they're established, they've proven themselves; now they want to give something back-to restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective." The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. "Our producers are the producers of 'Cops in Trouble' and 'A Calm and Deliberate Fashion."

"A what?"

"Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry."

06 ~AiEtha.n G~bsnn .. .

"Counter-investigative'?" Yamazaki's pen hovered over the notebook.

"It was a show about shows like Slitscan," Laney explained. "Supposed abuses." There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Lane>' had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of acc.u.mulated nicotine and cooking smoke.

"Ah," Yamazaki said at last, "a meta-tabloid.'"

The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll's hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.

"Thanks," Lane>' said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.

In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of expensive-looking whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a hand-written brown paper sticker: the owner's name in j.a.panese. Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local vodka-a.n.a.log, on the rocks, Yamazaki was sticking to c.o.ke Lire. Laney had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky srraight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.

"So," Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking against his prosthetic, "they get you out so they can have a go at these other b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."3 0.

C.

-07.

'a "That wu it, basically," Laney said, They had their own Legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement I'd signed with Slirscan."

"And the second team had the bigger job," Blackwell said, shoving his empty gla.s.s toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.

"That's true," Laney said. He'd had no idea, really, of what he'd be getting into when he'd found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels' offer. But there was something in him that didn't want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires' kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some itason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)

And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they'd drop the sequence on Alison's actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world's steady accretion of data.

And Alison Shires' life, as he'd known it in all that terrible, ba.n.a.l intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable.

But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn't sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.

He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she'd become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.

It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.

08 1~~.

"Get me out of here," he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.

"Steady," said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laney's wrist, "You haven't even had your drink yet."

Lane>' had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.

Laney's suite, much larger than his apartment in Santa Monica, was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in turn overlooking a deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that was all that remained of the original gardens.

Lane>' thought it was a strange choice, considering his situation. He would have imagined they'd choose something more corporate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but Rice Daniels had explained that the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a good choice in terms of image, because it humanized Laney; it looked like a habitation, basically, something with walls and doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be living something akin to a life-not at all the case with the geometric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had deeply rooted a.s.sociations with the Hollywood star system, and with human tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday of old Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had