The Bridge Trilogy Part 117

"Sue you?"

" Us. ~

"Huh," said Creedmore, absorbing this. "You in an ugly place."

"Maybe not," said Rydell. "Matter of witnesses."

"I hear you," said Randy Shoats, "but I'd have to talk to my label, see what the lawyers say."

"Your label," said Rydell.

"That's right."

Their beer arrived, brown long necks. Rydell took a sip of his. "Is Creedmore on your label?"

"No," said Randy Shoats.

Creedmore looked from Shoats to Rydell, back to Shoats. "All I did was poke him one, Randy. I didn't know it had anything to do with our

- - deal."

"It doesn't," said Shoats, "long as you're able to go into the studio arid record."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, Rydehl," said Creedmore, "I don't need you comin' in here and f.u.c.king things up this way."

Rydelh, who was fumbling under the table with his duffel, getting the f.a.n.n.y pack out and opening it, looked at Creedmore but didn't say

anything. He felt the Kraton grips of the ceramic switchblade. "You boys excuse me," Rydell said, "I've gotta find the can." He stood up, with the ClobEx box under his arm and the knife in his pocket and went to ask

- -the waitress where the Men's was.~A~ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES 101For the second time that day, he found himself seated in hut not using a toilet stall, this one considerably more odorous than the last. The plumbing out here was as makeshift as any he'd seen, with bundles of sc.u.mmy-looking transparent tubing snaking everywhere, and NoCal NOT POTABLE stickers peeling off above the sink taps.

He took the knife out of his pocket and pressed the b.u.t.ton, watching the black blade swing out and lock. Then he pressed it again, unlocking the blade, closed it, and opened it again. What was it about switchblades, he wondered, that made you do that? He figured that that was a big part of what made people want them in the first place, something psychological but dumb, monkey- brained.Actually they were kind of pointless, he thought, except in terms of simple convenience.

Kids liked them because they looked dramatic, but if somebody saw you open one, then they knew you had a knife, and they'd either run or kick your a.s.s or shoot you, depending on how they felt about it and how they happened to be armed. He supposed there could be very specific situations in which you could just click one open and stick somebody with it, but he didn't think they'd be too frequent.

He had the GlobEx box across his lap. Gingerly, remembering how he'd cut himself back in LA, he used the tip of the blade to slit the gray tape. It went through the stuff like a wire through b.u.t.ter. When he got it to the point where he thought he'd be able to open it, he cautiously folded the knife and put it away. Then he lifted the lid.

At first he thought he was looking at a thermos bottle, one of those expensive brushed-stainless numbers, but as he lifted it out, the heft of it and the general fineness of manufacture told him it was something else.

He turned the thing over, finding an inset rectangular section with a cl.u.s.ter of micro-sockets, but nothing else except a slightly scuffed blue sticker that said FAMOUS ASPECT. He shook it. it neither sloshed nor rattled. Felt solid, and there was no visible lid or other way to open it. He wondered about something like that going through customs, how the GlobEx brokers could explain what it was, whatever that was, and not something full of some kind of contraband. He could think of a dozen

102.

kinds of contraband you could stick in something this size and do pretty well if you got it here from Tokyo.

Maybe it did contain drugs, he thought, or something else, and he was being set up. Maybe they'd kick the stall's door in any second and handcuff him for trafficking in proscnbed fetal tissue or something

He sat there. Nothing happened.

He lay the thing across his lap and searched through the fitted foam packing for any message, any clue, something that might explain what this was. But there was nothing, so he put the thing back in its box, exited the stall, washed his hands in non-potable bridge water, and left,

intending to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when he'd picked up his bag, which he'd left them minding.

Now he saw that the woman, that Maryahice, the one from breakfast, had joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar somewhere,

a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a long

- - crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table

to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.

Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his wet-look streaked-blonde hair gleaming in the bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look there, an

exposed hunger, that made him feel funny, like he was seeing Creedmore want something through the wall of s.h.i.t he kept up around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very human, and that somehow made him even less attractive.

Now Shoats, absently, produced what looked like the top of an old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to play, using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with gla.s.s rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out.

The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had

ALl. TOMORROW'S PARTIES gone absolutely silent under the sc.r.a.ping, looping expressions of Shoats' guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like.

And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby.

How the red light was his mind.

104.

25 SUIT.

HAVING abandoned sleep, Laney, neither a smoker nor a drinker, has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown gla.s.s bottles of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still- popular j.a.panese remedy that consists of alcohol caffeine aspinn and liquid nicotine He knows somehow (somehow now he knows those things he needs to know) that this, along with periodic belts of a blue hypnotic cough syrup, is the combination he needs to continue.

Heart pounding, eyes wide to incoming data, hands cold and distant, he plunges resolutely on.

He no longer leaves the carton, relying both on Yamazaki (who brings medicines he refuses) and on a neighbor in the cardboard city, a

- -meticulously groomed madman whom he takes to be an acquaintance of the old man, the builder of models, from whom Laney has leased, or otherwise obtained, this s.p.a.ce.

Laney doesn't remember the advent of this mad one, whom he thinks of as the Suit, but that is not something he needs to know.

The Suit is, evidently, a former salaryman. The Suit wears a suit, the one suit, always. It is black, this suit, and was once a very good suit

indeed, and it is evident from its condition that the Suit, in whichever carton he dwells, has a steam iron, lint rollers, surely a needle and thread, and the skill to use them. It is unthinkable, for instance, that this suit's b.u.t.tons would be anything less than firmly and symmetrically

attached, or that the Suit's white shirt, luminous in the halogen of the master model-builder's carton, would be anything less than perfectly white.

But it is also obvious that the Suit has seen better days, as indeed must be true of any inhabitant of this place. It is obvious, for instance,

that the Suit's shirt is white because he paints it daily, Laney surmises (though he doesn't need to know) with a white product intended for the renovation of athletic shoes. The heavy black frames of his gla.s.ses are held together with worryingly precise ligatures of black electrical tape,

105.

upe cut to narrow custom widths with one of the old man's X-Acto knives and a miniature steel T- square and then applied with lapidary skill,

The Suit is as tidy, as perfectly squared away, as a man can be. But it has been a very long time, months or perhaps years, since the Suit has bathed. Every inch of visible flesh, of course, is scrubbed and spotless, bat when the Suit moves, he exudes an odor quite indescribable, a high thin reek, it seems, of madness and despair. He carries, always, three identical, plastic-wrapped copies of a book about himself. Laney, who cannot read j.a.panese, has seen that the three copies bear the same smiling photograph of the Suit himself, no doubt in better days, and holding, for some reason, a hockey stick. Laney knows (without knowing how he knows) that this was one of those self-advertising, Sm ugly inspirational autobiographies that certain executives pay to have ghostwritten. But the rest of the Suit's story is occluded, to Laney, and very probably to the Suit as well.