William Gibson - Count Zero

“Could you tell me, please, where your New York branch obtained the work in question?”

Picard’s face fell. He looked at Paco, then back at Marly.

“You don’t know? They haven’t told you?”

“Could you tell me, please?”

“No,” Picard said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t. You see, we don’t know.”

Marly stared at him “I beg your pardon, but I don’t quite see how that is possible.”

“She hasn’t read the report, Picard. You tell her. It will be good for her intuition, to hear it from your own lips.”

Picard gave Paco an odd look, then regained his composure. “Certainly,” he said. “A pleasure…”

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked Paco as they stepped out into Faubourg St. Honoré and summer sunlight. The crowds were thick with Japanese tourists.

“I went to the Sprawl myself,” Paco said, “and inter-viewed everyone involved. Roberts left no record of the purchase, although ordinarily he was no more secretive than the next art dealer.”

“And his death was accidental?”

He put on a pair of mirrored Porsche glasses. “As accidental as that sort of death ever is,” he said. “We have no way of knowing when or how he obtained the piece We located it, here, eight months ago, and all’ our attempts to work backward end with Roberts, and Roberts has been dead for a year Picard neglected to tell you that they very nearly lost the thing. Roberts kept it in his country house, along with a number of other things that his survivors regarded as mere curiosities. The whole lot came close to being sold at public auction. Sometimes I wish it had been.”

“These other things,” she asked, falling into step beside him, “what are they?”

He smiled. “You think we haven’t tracked them, each one? We have They were” — here he frowned, exaggerating the effort of memory — “a number of rather unremarkable examples of contemporary folk art.”

“Was Roberts known to be interested in that sort of thing?”

“No,” he said, “but approximately a year before his death, we know that he made application for membership in the Institut de l’Art Brut, here in Paris, and arranged to become a patron of the Aeschmann Collection in Hamburg”

Marly nodded The Aeschmann Collection was restricted to the works of psychotics.

“We are reasonably certain,” Paco continued, taking her elbow and guiding her around a corner, into a side street, “that he made no attempt to use the resources of either, unless he employed an intermediary, and we regard that as unlikely. Señor, of course, has employed several dozen scholars to sweep the records of both institutions. To no avail…”

“Tell me,” she said, “why Picard assumed that he had recently seen Herr Virek. How is that possible?”

“Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation.”

Now he led her into a chrome-trimmed barn of a place, glittering with mirrors, bottles, and arcade games. The mirrors lied about the depth of the room; at its rear, she could see the reflected pavement, the legs of pedestrians, the flash of sunlight on a hubcap. Paco nodded to a lethargic-looking man behind the bar and took her hand, leading her through the tightly packed shoal of round plastic tables.

“You can take your call from Alain here,” he said. “We have arranged to reroute it from your friend’s apartment.” He drew a chair out for her, an automatic bit of professional courtesy that made her wonder if he might actually once have been a waiter, and placed his bag on the tabletop.

“But he’ll see that I’m not there,” she said. “If I blank the video, he’ll become suspicious.”

“But he won’t see that We’ve generated a digital image of your face and the required background We’ll key that to the image on this phone “He took an elegant modular unit from the bag and placed it in front of her. A paper thin polycarbon screen unfurled silently from the top of the unit and immediately grew rigid. She had once watched a butterfly emerge into the world, and seen the transformation of its drying wings. “How is that done?” she asked, tentatively touching the screen. It was like thin steel.

“One of the new polycarbon variants,” he said, “one of the Maas products…”

The phone purred discreetly He positioned it more carefully in front of her, stepped to the far side of the table, and said, “Your call. Remember, you are at home!” He reached forward and brushed a titanium-coated stud.

Alain’s face and shoulders filled the little screen. The image had the smudged, badly lit look of a public booth. “Good afternoon, my dear,” he said.

“Hello, Alain.”

“How are you, Marly? I trust you’ve gotten the money we discussed?” She could see that he was wearing a jacket of some kind, dark, but she could make out no details. “Your roommate could do with a lesson in housecleaning,” he said, and seemed to be peering back over her shoulder.

“You’ve never cleaned a room in your life,” she said.

He shrugged, smiling. “We each have our talents,” he said. “Do you have my money, Marly?”

She glanced up at Paco, who nodded. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”

“That’s wonderful, Marly. Marvelous We have only one small difficulty.” He was still smiling.

“And what is that?”

“My informants have doubled their price. Consequently, I must now double mine.”

Paco nodded. He was smiling, too.

“Very well. I will have to ask, of course…” He sickened her now. She wanted to be off the phone.

“And they, of course, will agree.”

“Where shall we meet, then?”

“I will phone again, at five,” he said. His image shrank to a single blip of blue-green, and then that was gone as well.

“You look tired,” Paco said as he collapsed the screen and replaced the phone in his bag “You look older when you’ve talked with him.”

“Do I?” For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she’d been through the long season of youth.

“HEY, SHITHEAD.” RHEA poked him none too lightly in the ribs “Get your ass up.”

He came up fighting with the crocheted comforter, with the half-formed shapes of unknown enemies. With his mother’s murderers. He was in a room he didn’t know, a room that might have been anywhere. Gold plastic gilt frames on a lot of mirrors. Fuzzy scarlet wallpaper. He’d seen Gothicks decorate rooms that way, when they could afford it, but he’d also seen their parents do whole condos in the same style Rhea flung a bundle of clothes down on the temperfoam and shoved her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket.

The pink and black squares of the comforter were bunched around his waist. He looked down and saw the segmented length of the centipede submerged in a finger-wide track of fresh pink scar tissue. Beauvoir had said that the thing accelerated healing. He touched the bright new tissue with a hesitant fingertip, found it tender but bearable. He looked up at Rhea. “Get your ass up on this,” he said, giving her the finger.

They glared at each other, for a few seconds, over Bobby’s upraised middle finger. Then she laughed “Okay,” she said, “you got a point. I’ll get off your case But pick those clothes up and get ’em on. Should be something there that fits Lucas is due by here soon to pick you up, and Lucas doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Yeah? Well, he seems like a pretty relaxed guy to me.” He began to sort through the heap of clothing, discarding a black shirt with a paisley pattern printed on it in laundered-out gold, a red satin number with a fringe of white imitation leather down the sleeves, a black sort of leotard thing with panels of some translucent material… “Hey,” he said, “where did you get this stuff? I can’t wear shit like this.”