I hung the chain around my neck. Then I gave Marta Aguirre the fifty.
“Fix the window,” I said.
18 ~ Hard Drive
It looked okay to me.
YOU’RE INVITED!!!
TO A WAKE!!!!
FOR MAX GROVER
THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN
PARAGON BALLROOM, 7:30 P.M.
TRY OUT YOUR COSTUME!!!! WIN PRIZES!!!!!!
GRAND PRIZE: COMPLETE G. I. JOE OUTFIT
(VERY ALDO RAY) WITH…
SOLID GOLD DOG TAGS!!!!!
“Nothing about the holy water?” Ferris Hanks’s feelings were hurt.
“Let’s make it a surprise,” I said. In the Sunday-afternoon light streaming through the window of Nite Line, Ferris’s face was as orange as a carrot. He’d chosen to meet the world in a sober gray business suit, conservative in cut, made out of elephant hide. His eyes were green today, to go with his tie, which was wide enough to serve as an apron for a sumo wrestler and covered in shamrocks. The knot was the size of a fist.
“You don’t know this audience,” Ferris said from above his knot. “This is just the audience for holy water.” Henry stood behind him, soaking up daylight. His black T-shirt said HAVE WE MET? on the front and HAVE ME WET? on the back.
“How do we know it’s real holy water?” asked Joel Farfman, Nite Line’s editor, ad salesman, head reporter, and circulation manager. Farfman, a compact man with weight lifter’s shoulders and a toupee that appeared to be made out of recycled lint, had a journalist’s professionally suspicious face, and at the mention of holy water he looked like someone who’d just been handed a Xeroxed hundred.
“Oh, please,” Ferris said disdainfully. “ Nite Line is suddenly worried about truth in advertising? Your classified pages would be blank.”
“You’ve answered them, have you?” Farfman wasn’t awed by Ferris Hanks.
Hanks started to say something, and Henry spoke up. “Looks fine,” he said. Hanks closed his mouth.
“And you’re sure,” I said, “that you can get this into Monday’s-tomorrow’s-paper.”
“Piece of cake,” Farfman said. I noticed that he had a punctured pupil in his left eye, almost as wide as the iris. The damaged eye lagged slightly behind the good one when he shifted his gaze from Henry to me. “Ready-mix.”
“I thought, with typography and everything-”
Farfman allowed himself a lofty smile, a smile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the face of a Druid high priest, the one who knew how eclipses worked. His eye made the smile slightly mysterious, as befits a keeper of secrets. “There’s no such thing as type any more,” he said. “We use soft fonts, graphics, really, composed on the computer, and then we send the layout over the wire to the hard drive on the computer at the printing house. They park it there, on their drive, until it’s time to print, which in this case will be…” He looked at his watch. “Ninety minutes from now.”
A little bell went off in my head. Not much of a bell, probably in the egg-timer class on the international bell scale, but it got my attention. I hadn’t been hearing a lot of bells lately.
“I notice you don’t question the ‘solid gold’ bit,” Ferris said, still rankling.
“Gold I can check,” Farfman said resolutely. “Holy water? It could be bottled Arrowhead for all we’ll be able to tell.”
Hanks took his knot in both hands, apparently warming up to strangling himself.
“There isn’t room for the holy water, Ferris,” I said soothingly. “How much will that be?”
Farfman held up a hand so inky that I suspected him of inking it on purpose. “Gratis. For Max.”
“I’m paying for this,” Ferris said severely. “I don’t want to owe you any favors.”
“I hope it keeps you awake nights,” Farfman said.
“Who sleeps nights?” Hanks snapped.
Farfman wasn’t having any. “What I hear, I’m surprised you can sleep at all.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Tell me about how it gets printed again.”
“We compose it here,” Farfman said, using his hands to show me where here was and then moving them to the phone, “and send it over the wire to the-” I interrupted his hands halfway to there. “Jesus,” I said. I looked at the three of them looking at me. “You know, I’m really too stupid for this job.”
Grizzly Jack was dubious. “On my hard drive?”
“Why not? He had the telephone hookup. He probably had a macro so he wouldn’t even have to dial the number. What easier place to park stuff?”
“Without telling me?” There was betrayal in the tone. In the living room the phone boys whispered digital nothings over the wire.
“He was keeping secrets,” I said.
His fingers tangled themselves up in the beard, found a knot, and broke it. He didn’t even wince. “That’s not like Max.”
I searched for an explanation that would be like Max and came up with one. “He didn’t want to hurt Christy.”
This time the knot got dissolved in a gentle rolling motion between thumb and forefinger. “It would be an archive file,” he said, “one that you can’t access without a password.” My spirits plunged. “Probably in the library. That’s where we put the archives.”
“But if you can’t access it-”
His hands emerged from the beard and waved me off. “No, no, no. You can’t access it. From outside. I can access anything.” He led me through the hallway toward the computer room. “I have to be able to read it all,” he said. “Do you know who the bulletin-board cops are? The fucking Secret Service, that’s who. You’d think they’d have their hands full protecting the president, but no, they’ve got lots of time to sneak around on boards. All the time in the world. First they lurk-”
“Lurk?” We were in the bedroom.
“That’s what we call people who just read the stuff and don’t post anything, lurkers. There are lots of them, shy geeks afraid to write anything. So the computer cops lurk a while until they stub their toes on the adult part of the board and then they like to try a little entrapment. Some of the filthiest, most lurid stuff I’ve ever read was posted by the Secret Service, just seeing who’ll answer. Wetware at its worst. They love gay boards.”
He rolled his chair to the big desk, hit the keyboard three or four times, and watched the screen. “Oh, well, it keeps them off the streets,” he said. “Shame we can’t run over a couple of them with a local bus. Computer joke.”
“Local bus,” I said, mystified.
He made a disapproving clucking noise and shook his head at the clutter on the display. “The whole world is online today. This always happens before Halloween. Something about Halloween just brings them out of the woodwork. Let’s just disconnect a couple of lines, speed things up, or we’ll be here all day.” He reached up and turned off five modems, killing their little red lights and stranding people all over the information highway.
“Can you put something online for me?” I asked, watching him. “An invitation to a wake for Max?”
“No problem. All levels?”
“What’s that mean?”
He gave me a look that said are you kidding! and decided I wasn’t. “All levels means anyone who logs on can read it. If you don’t want that, we can restrict it to certain levels of membership.”
“All levels,” I said. “Wakes shouldn’t be restrictive.”
“Library,” he announced, peering at the screen. “Let’s go down a subdirectory, to the archives.”
“Let’s.” I’d rarely felt so useless.
“Why, the little dickens,” Jack said. “Look here.”
I looked there. The screen held a list of subdirectories, and Jack’s finger underlined one in a swift cutting motion. The type said
MAXPVT.
“PVT?”
“Private. Not very subtle, is it?” I withheld comment. It had been subtle enough for me.
Jack brought up the contents of the MAXPVT subdirectory. It read:
LETTER. ONE
LETTER. TWO
LETTER. THR
“Three,” I guessed.
He turned to me, his beard brushing the keyboard. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”
“I’m okay with applications,” I said defensively. “It’s computers I don’t understand. Can you bring the documents up?”