By tomorrow morning Christmas Day she would probably be on her way to Hispaniola.
She glanced around the deep shade, looked up at the gray black and orange of the foot at the tiny sparkles of Meissner efficacy warning lights. Mirrors on north and east combs across the city changed position preparing for night, and this jag neighborhood came into its allotted dusk.
Mary Choy hooked a ride on a passing pd transport mini-bus and sat sipping coffee and talking with fellow pd while waiting for a traffic knot to ease. She tried to relax and ease her own jam of discouragement, the tightness that came when she was truly scanning blank.
“You’re on Goldsmith, aren’t you?” asked a walk duty officer she had tutored during his rookie month, Ochoa, big Hispanic with broad face and dark calm eyes. He sat across from her with his partner, a lightweight wiry Anglo female named Evans.
“Am indeed,” she said.
Ochoa nodded wisely. “I thought you should know. There’s word down in Silverlake that Goldsmith was contract murdered by a big man, father of one of the victims.”
She regarded him dubiously.
“That’s the word,” he said. “I don’t vouch for any of it, I just pass it on.”
Mary’s turn to nod wisely. Ochoa gave her a small smile. “You don’t believe it?”
“He’s alive,” she said.
“Much more satisfying to bring them back alive,” Ochoa agreed. His partner leaned her head to one side.
“Or bring them down yourself,” Evans said. Ochoa made a face of official disapproval.
“So therapy me,” Evans said.
Mary defocused and blindsaw them, thinking, prying up mental rocks to see the bugs of ideas beneath.
Maybe there was something to the word in Silverlake. Perhaps someone was hiding Goldsmith, a literary connection. A loyal reader even in the combs among the therapied might go that far, exercising a free spirit of doubt about social justice. Her anger grew. She wanted to take this hypothetical loyal reader doubtful of society and justice and push him or her into the frozen apartment to see the sights. Hypothetical dialogue: Yes but can you prove it was Goldsmith.
Not much doubt.
Scientific analysis. How reliable is that? Relying on machines to convict a man without a jury.
No conviction here. Jury comes later. Just need to find him.
The hypothetical doubter expressed a disbelief in pd tactics, equated them with Raphkind’s political thugs, sneered at the excesses of law and order. Wild healthy USA infuriating doubt. The expression of Ochoa’s Anglo partner: Bring them down yourself. Only way of being sure. Unless a Selector gets to your miscreant first.
Her lapel phone chimed and she put aside her coffee.
“Mary, this is Ernest. I have your interview. Tonight late, twenty-two, and it’s in a comb so you should be reasonably safe.”
“Are your contacts in refuge?”
“They must be, but I don’t know hows or whys. Powerful connections. You promise not to ask me how I know them.” Not a question, a demand.
“I promise.”
He gave her the numbers and she noted them on her pocket slate. The minibus moved up a service tunnel into pd Central and dropped her off. Ochoa regarded her solemnly through the curved window. On impulse she flashed him a girlish grin and waved with her splayed fingers. Ochoa frowned and turned away.
In her small permanent office hung three framed prints—Parrish, El Greco and Daumier—given to her by a lover years past. On hinges, they covered the usual metro displays which carried status boards that gave city sense to all pd. She opened the prints wide now and spent a few minutes staring at the boards, biting her lower lip.
Just a tourist sojourn. But the idea of meeting with Colonel Sir John Yardley under compulsion of federal powers mainland…
She closed the door, propped up an antique round makeup mirror on the narrow desktop and unzipped her belt cinch, pulling down pants and shorts and inspecting the crease of her buttocks. Still blanched. Maybe she would revert all the way. What would Sumpler have to say then? The thought or perhaps the touch of cold on her ass made her shiver. Murmuring irritation, she zipped up and put away the mirror.
Dinner hour coming. She could call it in from the downstairs kitchens, good nanofood, or she could take her slate out, loaded with a full pd library file on Haiti, and eat and research in a private booth in some expensive comb restaurant on the way.
She chose the latter loaded her slate through the office terminal left a message with Dr. Sumpler’s office that would undoubtedly not get processed until after the holidays and departed, noting on the outside message board that she would not be back for at least a week.
Darkness is the home that when you go there you wont admit you know it.
22
West Comb Two had a reputation. It was common among citizens of the shade to hold a stereotyped view of comb dwellers: staid respectable always calm and dull. But West Comb Two north of Santa Monica overlooking Pacific Palisades, one of the most expensive and exclusive combs in LA, was the locus of LitVid industry workers as well as the comb of choice for all propmedia creators. It also happened to be the neighborhood of employment agency executives and actors, those who sold their images and personalities for LitVid Hand—a queer translingual pun derived first from manipulation through Spanish mano to the English. When you were Handed, you were given royalties for whatever your ghost did—a computer generated image usually indistinguishable from the real thing. Some of the Handed retained choice of use, face or body rights; others sold all.
Few LitVids chanced real actor performances or even appearances now much less real settings; the LitVid entertainment sector and even much of the documentary sector was in the control of the multitalented unseen gods of the machine image. Consequently the Handed were by and large rich enough and with sufficient leisure time to do whatever they chose whether it was ramp up into eloi status and play endless law yabber with pd and courts or engage in experimental politics.
West Comb Two was home to some of the strangest therapied and naturals in LA. Every city had to have such, even a city whose elite shunned destructive eccentricity. Employment agency executives loved to shed their longsuit broker images by associating with the Handed and other therapied and natural extremes.
Mary Choy had dealt with a good many citizens of this comb, especially in her early years in the pd. Rookies were often assigned to comb patrol here because the work was rough the demands huge and the physical dangers minimal. What was more, these comb citizens had considerable power in government; dealing with them required delicacy and diplomacy.
Had she not already known, Mary would have guessed Ernest was leading her to West Comb Two; she did not yet dispel the possibility that Goldsmith himself was kept in hiding here.
Ernest met her on the comb’s first foot in a ten-hectare esplanade beside the comb’s lower reservoir. He sat at a waterside table watching spotlighted fountains take on abstract and fantasy shapes: tonight they were duplicating the stolid dark tower images seen on AXIS transmissions.
Three longsuited men surrounded Ernest, all comb citizens all mild transforms. To her eye they appeared to be high level agency execs. They appeared reasonably normal but instinct and empathy told her their interiors were a maze of customization. Prime candidates for legal triple century extension; possibly eloi. Very likely they were augmented mentally as well as physically. Oddly she felt uncomfortable around this variety of transform. She would never in her entire life earn as much money as they might amass in a month.
“No names,” Ernest said by way of introduction. “That’s agreed.”