Dont know. A kid. He shrugged.
Fucking hell, Rudy said. Im amazed she can walk.
He opened a little lab freezer and came up with a frosted bottle of Moskovskaya Want it out of the bottle? he asked.
Maybe later.
Rudy sighed, looked at the bottle, then returned it to the fridge. So what do you want? Anything as weird as whats in that little girls head, somebodys going to be after it soon. If they arent already.
They are, Turner said. I dont know if they know shes here.
Yet. Rudy wiped his palms on his grubby white shorts.
But they probably will, right?
Turner nodded.
Where you going to go, then?
The Sprawl.
Why?
Because Ive got money there Ive got credit lines in four different names, no way to link em back to me Because Ive got a lot of other connections I may be able to use. And because its always cover, the Sprawl. So damned much of it, you know?
Okay, Rudy said. When?
You that worried about it, you want us right out?
No I mean, I dont know Its all pretty interesting, whats in your girl friends head. Ive got a friend in Atlanta could rent me a function analyzer, brain map, one to one; put that on her, I might start to figure out what that thing is. Might be worth something.
Sure If you knew where to sell it.
Arent you curious? I mean, what the hell is she? You pull her out of some military lab? Rudy opened the white freezer door again, took out the bottle of vodka, opened it, and took a swallow.
Turner took the bottle and tilted it, letting the icy fluid splash against his teeth. He swallowed, shuddered. Its corporate. Big. I was supposed to get her father out, but he sent her instead Then somebody took the whole site out, looked like a baby nuke. We just made it. This far. He handed Rudy the bottle. Stay straight for me, Rudy You get scared, you drink too much.
Rudy was staring at him, ignoring the bottle. Arizona, he said. It was on the news. Mexicos still kicking about it. But it wasnt a nuke. Theyve had crews out there, all over it.
No nuke.
What was it?
They think it was a railgun They think somebody put up a hypervelocity gun in a cargo blimp and blew hell out of some derelict mall out there in the boonies. They know there was a blimp near there, and so far nobodys found it You can rig a railgun to blow itself to plasma when it discharges. The projectile could have been damn near anything, at those velocities. About a hundred and fifty kilos of ice would do the trick. He took the bottle, capped it, and put it down on the counter beside him. All that land around there, it belongs to Maas, Maas Biolabs, doesnt it? Theyve been on the news, Maas. Cooperating fully with various authorities. You bet. So that tells us where you got your little honey from, I guess.
Sure. But it doesnt tell me who used the railgun Or why.
Rudy shrugged.
You better come see this, Sally said from the door.
Much later, Turner sat with Sally on the front porch. The girl had lapsed, finally, into something Rudys EEG called sleep. Rudy was back in one of his workshops, probably with his bottle of vodka. There were fireflies around the honeysuckle vines beside the chainlink gate. Turner found that if he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch swing, he could almost see an apple tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire. There were fire-flies then as well, and Rudys heels thumping a bare hard skid of earth as he pumped himself out on the swings arc, legs kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the stars. .
Tongues, Sally said, Rudys woman, from the creaking rattan chair, her cigarette a red eye in the dark Talking in the tongues.
Whats that?
What your kid was doing, upstairs. You know any French?
No, not much. Not without a lexicon.
Some of it sounded French to me. The red amber was a short slash for an instant, when she tapped ash When I was little, my old man took me one time to this stadium, and I saw the testifying and the speaking in tongues. It scared me I think it scared me more, today, when she started Rudy taped the end of it, didnt he?
Yeah. You know, Rudy hasnt been doing too good.
Thats mainly why I moved back in here. I told him I wasnt staying unless he straightened himself out, but then it got real bad, so about two weeks ago I moved back in. I was about ready to go when you showed up The coal of the cigarette arced out over the railing and fell on the gravel that covered the yard.
Drinking?
That and the stuff he cooks for himself in the lab You know, that man knows a little bit of damn near everything. Hes still got a lot of friends, around the county; Ive heard em tell stories about when you and him were kids, before you left.
He should have left, too, he said.
He hates the city, she said. Says it all comes in on line anyway, so why do you need to go there?
I went because there was nothing happening here Rudy could always find something to do. Still can, by the look of it.
You shouldve stayed in touch. He wanted you here when your mother was dying.
I was in Berlin. Couldnt leave what I was doing.
I guess not. I wasnt here then either I came later. That was a good summer. Rudy just pulled me out of this sleaze-ass club in Memphis; came in there with a bunch of country boys one night. and next day I was back here, didnt really know why. Except he was nice to me, those days, and funny, and he gave my head a chance to slow down. He taught me to cook. She laughed. I liked that, except I was scared of those Goddamn chickens out back. She stood up then and stretched, the old chair creaking, and he was aware of the length of her tanned legs, the smell and summer heat of her, close to his face.
She put her hands on his shoulders. His eyes were level with the band of brown belly where her shorts rode low, her navel a soft shadow, and remembering Allison in the white hollow room, he wanted to press his face there, taste it all . He thought she swayed slightly, but he wasnt sure.
Turner, she said, sometimes bein here with him, its like bein here alone.
So he stood, rattle of the old swing chain where the eye-bolts were screwed deep in the tongue and groove of the porch roof, bolts his father might have turned forty years before, and kissed her mouth as it opened, cut loose in time by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of memory, so that it seemed to him, as he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life werent beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as hed known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchells daughter.
Hey, she whispered, working her mouth free, you come upstairs now
18 NAMES OF THE DEAD
ALAIN PHONED AT FIVE and verified the availability of the amount he required, fighting to control the sickness she felt at his greed. She copied the address carefully on the back of a card shed taken from Picards desk in the Roberts Gallery. Andrea returned from work ten minutes later, and Marly was glad that her friend hadnt been there for Alains call.
She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition. Andrea had wedged a kind of plywood shelf there, on the stone ledge, wide enough to support the little hibachi she kept beneath the sink. Now she was arranging the black squares of charcoal neatly on the grate. I had a talk about your employer today, she said, placing the hibachi on the plywood and igniting the greenish fire-starter paste with the spark gun from the stove. Our academic was in from Nice. Hes baffled as to why Id choose Josef Virek as my focus of interest, but hes also a horny old goat, so he was more than glad to talk.