Idoru. Part 30

"Arleigh, dear, you wouldn't take the name in vain, would you?"

But he smiled at her.

"I'm explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I'd only just gotten up to the ma.s.sage parlor, and now you've ruined it."

"Never mind. Dinner's been moved up, at the request of his Rozzer. I'm here to take you. Change of venue as well. Hope you don't mind."

"Where?" Arleigh asked, as if not yet prepared to move.

"The Western World," said Blackwell.

"And me in my good shoes," she said.

22.Gomi Boy

The trains more crowded now, standing room only, everyone pressed in tight, and somehow the eye-contact rules were different here, but she wasn't sure how. Her hag with the Sandbenders was jammed up against Masahiko's back. He was looking at the control-face again, holding it up the way a commuter woLild hold a strategically folded newspaper.

On their way back to Mitsuko's father's restaurant, and then she didn't know what. She'd done the thing that Hiromi hadn't wanted her to do. And gotten nothing for it but a vaguely unpleasant idea of Rez as someone capable of being boring. And where did it leave her? She'd gone ahead and used Kelsey's cashcard, to pay for the train, and floW another train back. And Zona had said somebody was looking for her; they could track her when she used the cashcard. Maybe there was a way to cash it in, but she doubted it.

None of this had gone the way she'd tried to imagine it, back in

Seattle, hut then you couldn't be expected to imagine anyone like

Marya[ice, could you? Or Eddie, or even Hiromi.

Masahiko frowned at the control-face. Chia saw the dots and

squiggles changing.

That thing Maryalice had stuck in her bag. Right here under her arm. She should've left it at Mitsuko's. Or thrown it away, but then what would she say if Eddie or Maryalice showed up? What if it was full of drugs?

In Singapore they hung people, right in the mall, for that. Her

153.

father didn't like it and he said that was one of the reasons he never invited her there. They put it on television, too, so that it was really hard to avoid seeing it, and he didn't want her to see it. Now she wondered how far Singapore was from Tokyo? She wished she could go there and keep her eyes closed until she was in her father's apartment, and never turn the rv on, just be there with him and smell his shaving smell and put her face against his scratchy wool shirt, except she guessed you didn't wear those in Singapore because it was hot there. She'd keep her eyes closed anyway, and listen to him talk about his work, about the arbitrage engines shuttling back and forth through the world's markets like invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving fragments of advantage for traders like her father

Masahiko turned, accidentally knocking her bag aside, as the train stopped at a station-not theirs. A woman with a yellow shopping bag said something in j.a.panese. Masahiko took Chia's wrist and pulled her toward the open door.

"This isn't where we get off-"

"Come! Come!" Out onto the platform. A different smell here; something chemical and sharp. The walls not so clean, somehow. A broken tile in the ceramic ceiling.

"What's the matter? Why are we getting off?"

He pulled her into the corner formed by the tiled wall and a huge vending machine. "Someone is at the restaurant, waiting for you." He looked down at her wrist, as if amazed to find that he was holding it, and instantly released her.

"How do you know?"

"Walled City. There have been inquiries, in the last hour."

"Who?"

"Russians."

"Russians?"

"There are many from the Kombinat here, since the earthquake. They forge relationships with the gumi."

"What's gumi?'

"Mafia, you call it Yakuza. My father has arrangement with lo 154 cal gumi. Necessary, in order to operate restaurant. GuS representatives spoke about you to my father.'

Your neighborhood mafia is Russian?" Behind his head, on the side of the machine, the animated logo of something called Apple Shires.

"No. Yamaguchi-gumi franchise. My father knows these men. They tell my father Russians ask about you, and this is not good. They cannot guarantee usual safety. Russians not reliable."

"I don't know any Russians," Chia said.

"We go now."

"Where?"

He led her along the crowded platform, its pavement wet from hundreds of furled umbreUas. It must be raining now, she thought. Toward an escalator.

"When Walled City saw attention was being paid to our addresses, my sister's and mine, a friend was sent to remove my computer.

"Why?"

"Because I have responsibility. For Walled City. Distributed processing."

"You've got a MUD in your computer?"

"Walled City is not anywhere," he said, as they stepped onto the escalator. "My friend has my computer. And he knows about men who are waiting for you."

Masahiko said his friend was called Gomi Boy.

He was very small, and wore an enormous, balloon-bottomed pair of padded fatigue pants covered with at least a dozen pockets. These were held up with three-inch-wide Day-Gb orange suspenders, over a ratty cotton sweater with the cuffs rolled back. His shoes were pink, and looked like the shoes babies wore, but bigger. He was perched on an angular aluminum chair now and the baby shoes didn't quite touch the floor. His hair looked as though it had

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been sculpted with a spatula, gleaming swirls and dips, like your hand might stick there if you touched it. It was the way they painted

J. D. Shapely's hair on those murals in Pioneer Square, and Chia knew from school that that had something to do with that whole Elvis thing, though she couldn't remember exactly what.

He was talking with Masahiko in j.a.panese, over the crashing sound-surf of this gaming arcade. Chia wished she was wearing a translator, but she'd have to open her bag, find one, turn the Sand-benders on. And Gomi Boy looked like he'd be just as happy knowing she couldn't understand him.

He was drinking a can of something called Pocari Sweat, and smoking a cigarette. Chia watched the blue smoke settling out in layers in the air, lit by the glare of the games. There was cancer in that, and they'd arrest you in Seattle if you did it. Gomi Boy's cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn't gone through yet to digitally erase them, but the only other cigarettes she'd seen were the twisted-up paper ones they sold on the street in Seattle, or you could buy a little baggie of the tobacco stuff and the white squares of paper to roll it up in. Meshbacks in school did it.