Jake took a square look at him. Short-haired, fresh-faced, he seemed to be not much older than his collar-size. If he had appeared a little more intelligent, she told herself, she might have fucked him.
‘Yes, it is hot.’
The young American smiled bitterly. ‘What is your problem?’
‘Right now it’s that aftershave, sonny.’ Jake shifted on her stool. ‘Run along before it affects my contact lenses.’
The American’s face took on a nasty look. His lips pursed several times before he thought of something to say back to her.
‘Ball breaker,’ he snarled and then stalked away.
Jake snorted with contempt, although she knew that was what she was: that and a bit more. She could almost have been lesbian except that she hadn’t much liked it when she tried it. Faith, a lesbian friend at Cambridge, had once told her that Jake’s sexuality reminded her of something Jeremy Bentham had said about John Stuart Milclass="underline" he rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many. It wasn’t, Faith had said, that Jake loved women but that she hated men.
Her hatred of men was every bit as intense as aversions to heights, open spaces, and spiders were for other people; and it had been learned in much the same way as a rat is conditioned to press a lever in order to avoid an electric shock.
The instrument of her own aversive conditioning, a term with which she became familiar when she studied natural sciences at Cambridge, was less direct than electricity, and left no visible scar tissue; but the particular stimulus produced an effect that was just as painful as anything that might have been inflicted with a couple of strategically-placed electrodes; and while the injuries may have been invisible, they felt just as permanent as if they had been burnt into her naked flesh.
An ungrateful child was no match for the venom in the cerebro-spinal needle of a father’s hatred.
She finished her drink and ordered another. The barman mixed it quickly as if he had learned his trade in the pits at the Indianapolis 500. But there was nothing wrong with the way it tasted and Jake nodded appreciatively at him.
She glanced at her wristwatch. Before she went to bed she ought to read the information file Gilmour had given to her. There wasn’t much to stay in the bar for. Easy to see why Frankfurt was host to so many international trade fairs and conferences, she thought. It was the kind of city with absolutely no distractions: no nightlife, no scenery to speak of, no historical buildings, no theatres, no decent cinemas. About the most interesting place she had seen was Frankfurt airport. She finished her drink, signed the bill and then went out to the lobby.
The lift arrived in a rush of air and Jake stepped in. She told the computer the floor number and watched the doors close. They were not quite quick enough to prevent the young American who had talked to her at the bar from squeezing his way into Jake’s lift at the last second.
‘You should be more friendly,’ he said, and touched her breast.
Jake smiled, the better to catch him off his guard. She was still smiling as she raked his shin with the side of her shoe. The man yelled and clutched instinctively at his injured leg. Which left him leaning nicely into the smart uppercut that was already rising like a piston towards the point of his chin. It was all over in a few seconds. The lift door was opening at Jake’s floor and she was rubbing her knuckles and stepping over the American’s supine body.
‘Ground floor,’ she said to the computer and walked onto the landing, the lift doors closing silently behind her. The hotel corridor was as long as an autobahn. She hoped to be back in her room before the man recovered himself and made it back up from the lobby. Outside the door of her room she stopped and fumbled in her bag for her key. Then she remembered there was no key. The door was voice-print activated.
‘Jakowicz,’ she said, and the door sprang open.
Halogen light escaping from the four enormous glass parapets which dominated the top of the hotel’s two wings poured through the embrasure-sized window like a cinema projection. Jake lit a cigarette, nicotine free, but the smoke felt good in her lungs, and picked up her PC and inserted Gilmour’s information disk.
PROPERTY OF METROPOLITAN POLICE INFORMATION DEPARTMENT. DISK LMP/2000/LOMBROSO PROGRAM/GENERAL FILE.
MENU
1. WHAT IS LOMBROSO?
2. BACKGROUND TO LOMBROSO:
a. FAILURE OF PREVENTION STRATEGIES FOR VIOLENT CRIME.
b. SOCIAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND.
3. SOMATOGENIC DETERMINANTS OF VIOLENT CRIME.
4. IMPLEMENTATION.
5. TREATMENT AND INTEGRATION.
PRESS ‘RETURN’ TO RUN INFORMATION BRIEF IN NUMERICAL ORDER.
When she had read the menu she pressed the ‘Return’ key as instructed.
L.O.M.B.R.O.S.O. stands for Localisation of Medullar Brain Resonations Obliging Social Orthopraxy. A machine based on the old Proton Emission Tomographer, and developed by Professor Burgess Phelan of the Nuffield Science Institute at Cambridge University, is able to determine those males whose brains lack a Ventro Medial Nucleus (VMN) which acts as an inhibitor to the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus (SDN), a preoptic area of the male human brain which is the repository of male aggressive response. A computerised national survey of British males was started in 2010 with the aim of offering therapy, and/or counselling, to those who have been tested VMN-NEGATIVE. While the Lombroso computer’s program first decretal protects with a codename the identity of those who have tested VMN-negative, the computer is, however, linked with the central police computer at Kidlington: should the name of a suspect fed into the police computer within the course of an inquiry into a violent crime be that of a male who has tested VMN-negative, the Lombroso computer will inform the CPC of this fact. The very fact of being VMN-negative is, however, not admissible in criminal evidence. During the 2 years that the Lombroso Program has been in operation, over 4 million men have been scanned and of these, 0.003 per cent have been discovered to be VMN-negative. Of these, only 30 per cent were in prison or had some kind of a criminal record. At the time of writing, the Lombroso Program has been instrumental in the apprehension of 10 murderers.
Jake read this first section of the information program, yawned and then went to the window of her hotel room. In the distance she could see the Main River which was the same washed-out colour of grey as the sky. A barge the size of a high street hooted as it made its slow, smooth way across the riverscape. She didn’t care for Frankfurt anymore than she cared to spend her evening reading about crime prevention strategies. The truth was that Jake had little faith in any of these. She saw it all as a great waste of money when criminal investigation was still comparatively under-resourced.
Thoroughly distracted now, she turned the Nicamvideo set on and flicked through the 42 cable-channels. Her German was good but there were no programmes that seemed to make it worth the trouble of listening. Briefly she found herself detained with a sex film in which a couple were taking a bath together. The girl reminded her of Grace Miles: a strong, athletic-looking black woman with large breasts and a behind like a well-stuffed haversack. But when she started to suck the man’s cock with all the languorous concentration of a child eating an ice-cream, Jake wrinkled her lip with distaste and turned the set off.
Could they actually imagine that a woman enjoyed doing that kind of thing? She shrugged. Perhaps they just didn’t care.
She lit another Nicofree and returned reluctantly to her PC to read the rest of the information disk.