William Gibson - Count Zero

“I don’t see what it has to do with Virek,” Marly said, watching Andrea skewer each prawn on a long needle of bamboo.

“Your guess is as good as mine. My professor maintains that both Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools are fascinating anachronisms and that things can be learned about corporate evolution by watching them. He’s convinced enough of our senior editors, at any rate.”

“But what did he say about Virek?”

“That Virek’s madness would take a different form.”

“Madness?”

“Actually, he avoided calling it that. But Hughes was mad as birds, apparently, and old Ashpool as well, and his daughter totally bizarre. He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of ‘jump.’ ‘Jump’ was his word.”

“Evolutionary pressures?”

“Yes,” Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi. “He talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.”

After dinner, they went out walking. Marly found herself straining, at times, to sense the imagined mechanism of Virek’s surveillance, but Andrea filled the evening with her usual warmth and common sense, and Marly was grateful to walk through a city where things were simply themselves. In Virek’s world, what could be simple? She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Virek’s model of the Parque Guell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudi’s park, in an afternoon that never ended? Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation . She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.

The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.

Andrea paused at a kiosk to buy her English cigarettes and the new Elle. Marly waited on the pavement, the pedestrian traffic parting automatically for her, faces sliding past, students and businessmen and tourists. Some of them, she assumed, were part of Virek’s machine, wired into Paco. Paco with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt. Paco, who had worked for Señor all his life.

“What’s wrong? You look as though you’ve just swallowed something.” Andrea, stripping the cellophane from her twenty Silk Cut.

“No,” Marly said, and shivered, “But it occurs to me that I very nearly did…”

And walking home, in spite of Andrea’s conversation, her warmth, the shop windows had become boxes, each one, constructions, like the works of Joseph Cornell or the mysterious boxmaker Virek sought. The books and furs and Italian cot-tons arranged to suggest geometries of nameless longing.

And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing. In a gray morning of Paris rain.

“No,” she told Paco, “I’ll go myself. I prefer it.”

“That is a great deal of money.” He looked down at the Italian bag on the café table between them. “It’s dangerous, you understand?”

“There’s no one to know I’m carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn’t say I’d go alone, only that I don’t feel like company.’

“Is something wrong?” The serious deep lines at the corners of his mouth “You are upset?”

“I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, I’m sure you have the address.”

“That is true,” he said. “But for you to carry several million New Yen, alone, through Paris He shrugged.

“And if I were to lose it? Would Señor register the loss? Or would there be another bag, another four million?” She reached for the shoulder strap and stood.

“There would be another bag, certainly, although it requires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Señor would not ‘register’ its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find.”

“Nonetheless. I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me with my thoughts.”

“Your intuition.”

“Yes.”

If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he had given her that morning would already be a focus of their attention, whether he were there or not.

She felt a new strength today She had stood up to Paco It had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art. She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger Too perfect.

She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator carried her down into the métro, pleased with the cut of her dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the black Porsche glasses she’d bought that morning. Good lips, she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm.

I’m in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New Yen, and he will give me something in return A name, or an address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to Virek.

The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern suburb, was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic rubber bag stuffed with Alain’s fortune. How queer to stroll through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm, on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with these bales of New Yen.

There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment’s numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had arrived, leaving you to wait there in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. “Alain?” Nothing.

She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoon’s watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. “ Cher Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly.“ As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse She found the flat little green tin flashlight she’d carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit.