M. Harrison - Nova Swing

"What will you do?"

He got out of the Cadillac.

"Drink a glass of rum," he said. "Perhaps two."

She drove along the Corniche and back up the hill. The traffic was good until midtown, where the streets were packed with rickshaws. On her own she seemed less animated. If Aschemann had been able to observe her expression he would have described it as "inturned." But how useful a description was that? When she was alone, she knew, she was herself. When she was alone, she did only the things she did. She was a policewoman driving carefully. She was a policewoman glancing at her forearm datableed, then up at the street again. She was a policewoman consulting the driving mirror before she waved on a sweaty rickshaw girl in electric-blue lycra. She left Aschemann's car in the parking garage and went and sat quietly in his office and waited to feel calm. Thin from lack of appreciation, Aschemann's shadow operators crept out of the corners and took up their customary forms, whispering, "Is there any way we can help? Is there anything we can help with, dear?" They knew her. They liked her. She always tried to find them something to do. She had them adjust the slatted blinds so that the light fell across her face in precise lines of black and white. She had them bring her up to date. After a moment or two she asked them:

"Why is he the way he is?"

"All we know, dear," the shadow operators said, "is you don't make the kind of sacrifices that man has made, not without suffering."

"Oh no, dear."

"He's a saint, that man."

"Can you get me his records?"

Aschemann waited out the afternoon in the Cafe Surf. The colour was back in his face. He ate a dish of falafel. He watched pos-sesively the scraps of sunshine move across the floor, change shape, fade to a kind of eggy yellow, like a painting of sunshine, then vanish. The tide came up the sand outside, bringing a reflective violet light all its own. With that arrived the first customers of the evening, who began to talk and laugh-quietly at first, then with more animation.

By seven every table was taken and they were three deep at the bar. The place was rammed. Seven-thirty, the neon sign went on. Then the two-piece arrived, and after a gin rickey for its nerves rolled right over everyone. The keyboard guy-twenty years old, blond spiked hair and sly, mobile mouth-wore a plaid drape suit. He was a clown and a thief. He was a geek genius. Everything he played that evening, the audience understood, would be a joke at the expense of some other tune, some other musician, some other kind of music. They were delighted. They were complicit. Every so often even the saxophonist-an older man, the muscles round his mouth tightened into two deep grooves by years in the job-would stop playing and listen: it was as if he'd heard someone this good once before but now forgot who or when or where. Then, putting these speculations behind him, he would pull sharply on his cigarette, glance down at the saxophone, and pick things up a little. Rhythms flicked and ripped, tangled and separated. They tore into Parking Orbit, Entradista and New Venusport South. Things slipped a little toward the sentimental side with Moonlight in Moneytown; then came right back on track, to rising cheers and whistles, in the genuinely awesome hard bop autopsy and deconstructed chamame beats of Gravity Wave.

At the height of the wave, five men in eveningwear were squeezed from the Cafe Surf lavatory; then two dock-boys with dyed brush-cuts and steel-toed boots, arm in arm with an emaciated blonde who kept wiping her nose on her pliable white forearm.

Aschemann leaned forward tensely in his seat.

They looked half-formed, sticky, fresh from the chrysalis. Half an hour in, the music dried them out. Soon they were straggling aimlessly along the Corniche together, singing, linking arms, running suddenly for no reason. The detective followed, observing their amazement at the moth-haunted cones of light beneath the Corniche lamps. They were awed by everything. They visited another bar, called The Breakaway Station, and from there found their way down to the beach, where the blonde danced off on her own to trip and fall laughing in the thick sand while her new friends clung together in the wind at the edge of the sea. Then all eight of them turned inland and trudged solemnly up Maricachel in the warm scented darkness until they found themselves, as perhaps they had always intended, in Carmody.

Aschemann had the quarter pumped with nanodevices which, drifting like clouds of milt in the neon light, could detect two molecules of human pheromone in a kilometre cube of air, filter the DNA out of a Friday night, illuminate each casual exchange of fluids in wavebands from far infra-red to near ultraviolet. The results of this expensive, operator-rich technique were streamed to him as simultaneous separate edits of the data, which he built into composites and profiles at will. Even so he lost his quarry almost immediately among the bars and transsexual brothels, the streets that stank of perspiration, oil products and lemon grass.

Midtown they still clung together in a group. Then the men, quiet and greedy, peeled off one by one. They had a poor hold on things but they knew what they liked. Fried food, sex, hard drugs, smart tattoos, tank parlours, any kind of music from chamame to rockit dub. One minute they were still distinguishable, gawking up at buildings like black amp; gold cigarette packs against the sky: the next they had entered an alley, climbed a flight of stairs, paid cash to get processed through some pocked security door. They had merged somehow with the life around them. They were gone. Aschemann had a sense of them fading away in front of him. The hardware felt it too.

The blonde was the last to go. Where her friends had appetites, she had a sense of herself. She was puzzled by her own drives. She stood in her short white sleeveless satin dinner frock at the intersection of Montefiore and Bone, smiling at a lull in the traffic. She took off one shoe and rubbed her foot. She took off the other shoe and held them both in her hand. She looked one way, then the other, then back again, smiling expectantly each time as if she would suddenly see something new. But it had all stopped happening. The street remained empty, the neon blinked on and off. The smile faded. Aschemann looked away briefly and when he turned back she was gone.

"Can you confirm that?" he asked his team.

They could. Even so, he expected to look up and see her in the middle distance, trudging purposefully towards the next bar.

Something about the blonde reminded Aschemann of his wife- her sense of expectation, something, he didn't entirely know what. He remained in Carmody another hour, hoping the nanodevice operation would produce results. Things didn't work out that way; and although he could easily have returned to the Cafe Surf to collect a fresh group of suspects, in the end an impulse made him hail a rickshaw and take it down to Suicide Point, where his wife had lived.

By then it was nearly dawn. Along the concrete service road between her house and the beach, Point kids stood about in loose groups waiting for customers. One or two of them glanced up briefly at the rickshaw bowling past, trailing its coloured smoke of junk holographic ads, then away again. They all had small heads and blank faces. Sand blew round Aschemann's shoes as he stood on his wife's doorstep and raised his hand to knock. Before he could complete the gesture he heard his own voice say clearly, "What are you doing?"

He didn't have to knock. He had the key. He could go in any time, nevertheless he went back and sat in the rickshaw and explained to the rickshaw girl:

"My wife's dead."

"It's a problem we'll all have."

"I forgot for a moment," he said.