William Gibson - Count Zero

“You like it, huh?” She sprinkled the foam with powdered cinnamon from a heavy old glass shaker. “ ’Bout as far from Barrytown as you been, some ways.”

Bobby nodded, his eyes confused by the thousand colors and textures of the things in the stalls, the stalls themselves. There seemed to be no regularity to anything, no hint of any central planning agency. Crooked corridors twisted off from the area in front of the espresso booth. There seemed to be no central source of lighting either. Red and blue neon glowed beyond the white hiss of a Primus lantern, and one stall, just being opened by a bearded man with leather pants, seemed to be lit with candles, the soft light reflecting off hundreds of polished brass buckles hung against the reds and blacks of old rugs. There was a morning rattle to the place, a coughing and a clearing of throats. A blue Toshiba custodial unit whirred out of a corridor, dragging a battered plastic cart stacked with green plastic bales of garbage. Someone had glued a big plastic doll head to the Toshiba’s upper body segment, above the clustered camera eyes and sensors, a grinning blue-eyed thing once intended to approximate the features of a leading stimstar without violating Sense/Net copyrights. The pink head, its platinum hair bound up in a length of pale blue plastic pearls, bobbed absurdly as the robot rolled past. Bobby laughed.

“This place is okay,” he said, and gestured to the girl to refill his cup.

“Wait a sec, asshole,” the countergirl said, amiably enough. She was measuring ground coffee into a dented steel hopper on one end of an antique balance. “You get any sleep last night, Jackie, after the show?”

“Sure,” Jackie said, and sipped at her coffee “I danced their second set, then I slept at Jammer’s. Hit the couch, you know?”

“Wish I’d got some. Every time Henry sees you dance, he won’t let me alone…” She laughed, and refilled Bobby’s cup from a black plastic thermos.

“Well,” Bobby said, when the girl was busy again with the espresso machine, “what’s next?”

“Busy man, huh?” Jackie regarded him coolly from beneath the gold-pinned hat brim. “Got places you need to go, people to see?”

“Well, no. Shit. I just mean, well, is this it?”

“Is what it?”

“This place. We’re staying here?”

“Top floor. Friend of mine named Jammer runs a club up there. Very unlikely anyone could find you there, and even if they do, it’s a hard place to sneak up on. Fourteen floors of mostly stalls, and a whole lot of these people sell stuff they don’t have out in plain view, right? So they’re all very sensitive to strangers turning up, anyone asking questions. And most of them are friends of ours, one way or another Anyway, you’ll like it here. Good place for you. Lots to learn, if you remember to keep your mouth shut.”

“How am I gonna learn if I don’t ask questions?”

“Well, I mean keep your ears open, more like it. And be polite. Some tough people in here, but you mind your biz, they’ll mind theirs. Beauvoir’s probably coming by here late this afternoon. Lucas has gone out to the Projects to tell him whatever you learned from the Finn. What did you learn from the Finn, hon?”

“That he’s got these three dead guys stretched out on his floor. Says they’re ninjas.” Bobby looked at her. “He’s pretty weird…”

“Dead guys aren’t part of his usual line of goods. But, yeah, he’s weird all right. Why don’t you tell me about it? Calmly, and in low, measured tones. Think you can do that?”

Bobby told her what he could remember of his visit to the Finn. Several times she stopped him, asked questions he usually wasn’t able to answer. She nodded when he first mentioned Wigan Ludgate. “Yeah,” she said, “Jammer talks about him, when he gets going on the old days. Have to ask him…” At the end of his recitation, she was lounging back against one of the green pillars, the hat very low over her dark eyes.

“Well?” he asked.

“Interesting,” she said, but that was all she’d say.

“Right,” Jackie said, taking in the tight black jeans, the heavy leather boots with spacesuit-style accordion folds at the ankles, the black leather garrison belt trimmed with twin lines of pyramidal chrome studs. “Well, I guess you look more like the Count Come on, Count, I got a couch for you to sleep on, up in Jammer’s place.”

He leered at her, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of the black Levis.

“Alone,” she added, “no fear.”

“I want some new clothes,” Bobby said when they’d climbed the immobile escalator to the second floor.

“You got any money?” she asked.

“Shit,” he said, his hands in the pockets of the baggy, pleated jeans. “I don’t have any fucking money, but I want some clothes. You and Lucas and Beauvoir are keeping my ass on ice for something, aren’t you? Well, I’m tired of this God-awful shirt Rhea palmed off on me, and these pants always feel like they’re about to fall off my ass. And I’m here because Two-a-Day, who’s a lowlife fuck, wanted to risk my butt so Lucas and Beauvoir could test their fucking software. So you can fucking well buy me some clothes, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, after a pause. “I’ll tell you what.” She pointed to where a Chinese girl in faded denim was furling the sheets of plastic that had fenced a dozen steel-pipe garment racks hung with clothing. “You see Lin, there? She’s a friend of mine. You pick out what you want, I’ll straighten it out between Lucas and her.”

Half an hour later, he emerged from a blanket-draped fitting room and put on a pair of Indo-Javanese mirrored aviator glasses. He grinned at Jackie. “Real sharp,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” She did a thing with her hand, a fanning movement, as though something nearby were too hot to touch. “You didn’t like that shirt Rhea loaned you?”

He looked down at the black T-shirt he’d chosen, at the square holodecal of cyberspace on his chest. It was done so you seemed to be punching fast-forward through the matrix, grid lines blurring at the edges of the decal. “Yeah. It was too tacky.”

“Right,” Jackie said, taking in the tight black jeans, the heavy leather boots with spacesuit-style accordion folds at the ankles, the black leather garrison belt trimmed with twin lines of pyramidal chrome studs. “Well, I guess you look more like the Count. Com on, Count, I got a couch for you to sleep on, up in Jammer’s place.”

He leered at her, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of the black Levis.

“Alone,” she added, “no fear.”

PACO SLUNG THE Citroen-Dornier down the Champs, along the north bank of the Seine, then up through Les Halles. Marly sank back into the astonishingly soft leather seat, more beautifully stitched than her Brussels jacket. And willed her mind to blankness, lack of affect. Be eyes, she told herself. Only eyes, your body a weight pressed evenly back by the speed of this obscenely expensive car. Humming past the Square des Innocents, where whores dickered with the drivers of cargo hovers in bleu de travail , Paco steering effortlessly through the narrow streets.

“Why did you say, ‘Don’t do this to me’?” He took his hand from the steering console and tapped his ear-bead into position.

“Why were you listening?”

“Because that is my job. I sent a woman up, up into the tower opposite his, to the twenty-second floor, with a parabolic microphone. The phone in the apartment was dead; otherwise, we could have used that. She went up, broke into a vacant unit on the west face of the tower, and aimed her microphone in time to hear you say, ‘Don’t do this to me.’ And you were alone?”