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telling her about a place called the Walled City, how there'd actually been
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this place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went back
to being part of China. And then these crazy net people had built their own
version of it, like a big communal website, and they'd turned it inside out,
vanished in there. It wasn't making much sense when Chevette nodded out, but
it left pictures in her head.
Dreams.
" "What about the other guy?" Tessa was asking, when Chevette woke from
those dreams.
Chevette blinked out at the Five, the white line that seemed to reel up
beneath the van. "What other guy?"
'The cop. The one you went to Los Angeles with."
"Rydell," Chevette said.
"So why didn't that work?" Tessa asked.
Chevette didn't really have an answer. "It just didn't."
"So you had to hook up with Carson?"
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"No," Chevette said, "I didn't have to." What were those white things, so many
of them, off in a field there? Wind things: they made electricity. "It just
seemed like the thing to do."
"I've done a few of those myself," Tessa said.
ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES 47
12. EL PRIMERO
FONTAINE'S first glimpse of the boy comes as he starts to lay out the
morning's stock in his narrow display window: rough dark hair above a forehead
pressed against the armored glass.
Fontaine leaves nothing of value in the window at night, but he dislikes the
idea of an entirely empty display.
He doesn't like to think of someone passing and glimpsing that vacancy. It
makes him think of death. So each night he leaves out a few items of
relatively little value, ostensibly to indicate the nature of the shop's
stock, but really as a private act of propitiatory magic.
This morning the window contains three inferior Swiss mechanicals, their dials
flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with jigged bone handles and shield,
fair condition, and an East German military field telephone that looks as
though it has been designed not only to survive a nuclear explosion but to
function during one.
Fontaine, still on the morning's first coffee, stares down, through the glass,
at the matted, spiky hair. Thinking this at first a corpse, and not the first
he's discovered this way, but never propped thus, kneeling, as in attitude of
prayer. But no, this one lives: breath fogs Fontaine's window.
In Fontaine's left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase, manual wind,
gold-filled case, in very nearly the condition in which it left the factory.
In his right, a warped red plastic cup of black Cuban coffee. The shop is
filled with the smell of Fontaine's coffee, as burnt and acrid as he likes it.
Condensation slowly pulses on the cold glass: gray aureoles outline the
kneeler's nostrils.
Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his better
stock, narrow divisions of faded green velour holding a dozen watches. He sets
the tray aside, on the counter behind which he stands when he does business,
transfers the red plastic cup to his left hand, and with his right reassures
himself of the Smith & Wesson .32-.22 Kit
Gun in the right side pocket of the threadbare trench coat that serves him as
a dressing gown.
The little gun is there, older than some of his better watches, its worn
walnut grip comforting and familiar. Probably intended to be kept in a
freshwater fisherman's tackle box, against the dispatching of water snakes or
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the decapitation of empty beer bottles, the Kit Gun is Fontaine's considered
choice: a six-shot rimfire revolver with a four-inch barrel. He doesn't want
to kill anyone, Fontaine, though if truth be known, he has, and very probably
could again. He dislikes recoil, in a handgun, and excessive report, and
distrusts semi-automatic weapons. He is an anachronist, a historian: he knows
that the Smith & Wesson's frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire round,
long extinct, that was once the standard for American pocket pistols.
Rechambered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model, well into the
middle of the twentieth century. A handy thing and, like most of his stock, a
rarity.
He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the counter beside the tray of
watches.
He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archaic one-handed
duelist's stance, he has been known to pick the pips from a playing card. -
He hesitates before unlocking the shop's front door, a complicated process.
Perhaps the kneeler is not alone. Fontaine has few enemies on the bridge
proper, but who is to say what might have drifted in from either end, San
Franciso or Oakland? And the wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a
more feral sort of crazy.
But still.
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He throws the last hasp and draws the pistol.
Sunlight falls through the bridge's wrapping of scrap wood and plastic like
some strange benison.
Fontaine scents the salt air, a source of Corrosion.
"You," he says, "mister." The gun in his hand, hidden by the folds of the
trench coat.
Under the trench coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears faded plaid
flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved white thermal undershirt rendered
ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process
Black
49
shoes, sockless and unlaced, their gloss gone matte in the deeper creases.
Dark eyes look up at him, from a face that somehow refuses to come into focus.
"What you doing there?"
The boy cocks his head, as if listening to something Fontaine cannot hear.
"Get away from my window."
With a weird and utter lack of grace that strikes Fontaine as amounting to a
species of grace in itself, this person gets to his feet. The brown eyes stare
at Fontaine but somehow do not see him, or do not recognize him, perhaps, as
another being.
Fontaine displays the Smith & Wesson, his finger on the trigger, but he does
not quite point it at the boy. He never points a gun at anyone he is not yet
entirely willing to shoot, a lesson learned long ago from his father. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]