One of Us (14 page)

Laura took it hard when we walked into the Cafe. I guess the place offended her aesthetic sensibilities. The Prose was started by a bunch of Hollywood writers who wanted somewhere dark to sulk between meetings. The service sucks. You have to book a table for about an hour before you actually want it, because the management works on the assumption that the clientele will deliver themselves late. It takes you years to attract a waiter's attention; they'll change your order in the kitchen without consulting you; and if your meal does ever arrive, then someone you haven't seen in months will pop up from nowhere and take ten percent of your food. The interior has never been properly finished, because the contractors completed only half the work before getting decorators' block, and now spend the whole time revising what they've already done and whining about merchandising rights.

Deck and I go there because it's the only public place in all of California where you're allowed to smoke. Also I like the layout, although I sense I'm in the minority. It's a huge room, two stories high, with a big circular bar in the center. Drink orders come through pretty quickly: I think they're considered a priority. There's also a huge piece of sculpture to one side, in the shape of—well, I don't know what it's in the shape of, to be honest. It was clearly designed to be a conversation piece, but I fancy the conversation generally goes like this:

"What the
fuck
 is that?"

"Fucked if I know."

"It's fucking
hideous
."

"Yeah. Let's burn it."

All around the sides of the room are wooden nooks and crannies with tables, tiered at irregular heights like paddy fields. In one corner, if you can be bothered, you can clamber up to a platform that is only a little lower than the ceiling. There you sit gazing regally down upon a mini-cloud system of secondhand smoke.

I headed us in that direction. I don't get a chance to act regal very often.

The top table had the additional advantage of being the position that would be most difficult for Laura to run from. She'd been quiet for the rest of the afternoon, sitting silently in the backseat and refusing a tofu burrito when offered one. Which was, to be honest, a relief: Neither Deck nor I had wanted to compromise our carnivore integrity by ordering one. We left her in the car a few times when we got out to stretch our legs, but we didn't go far. She seemed docile, but I wasn't going to let that fool me. Before the night was out I had every confidence she would do something irritating. The only question was when.

When we'd gotten up to the high table. Deck volunteered to go get some drinks, leaving the two of us alone. I lit a cigarette happily and offered Laura one, but she just glared at me. "I don't smoke."

"Yeah, you do. Kims."

"I took control of my life and quit."

I laughed. "When, two days ago?"

"Three, actually."

"Bully for you," I said, and turned away. Though it was only six, most of the tables below us were already occupied, so I sat and watched the people for a while. I used to find it difficult to believe that other humans have lives, that they're more than bit-part players in the B movie of my life. Only when you see them somewhere like a bar do you realize that they've come there for a reason, that they have relationships with the folks they've come to see, and that—appearances sometimes to the contrary— they must be actual people. Since I started memory work, however, I didn't find that so hard to believe. Sometimes, when I'm tired, I feel the distinctions fading away. I can almost believe that instead of being an individual I'm merely part of some continuum of experience: But glimpsing the reality of other people's lives doesn't make them any easier to understand, unfortunately. As far as I knew, no one in the whole history of the world had ever been party to as large a chunk of someone's actual life as I was of Laura Reynolds's, and yet I still found her incomprehensible. I couldn't see how she had gone from the girl she had been, the girl standing by the stream, to the woman she was.

"Does it have to be this way?" she asked suddenly, startling me. I'd assumed I was in for long-term mute treatment.

"What?" I said. "I mean, okay, the decor's kind of patchy, but. . ."

"The transfer," she said. "Do I really have to take it back?"

She looked tired, blue shadows like faint bruises under her eyes. The long sleeves of her dress covered the scars on her wrists, but I knew they must be uncomfortable.

"Yeah. I'm sorry, but you do. They catch me with your memories in my head and I'll end up doing your time. And worse."

She put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands, looking up at me in a way that was clearly supposed to be appealing. It was, as it happens. "Why worse? Just because you're a guy, or because you've got a record?"

"I don't. Never got caught, and no outstanding warrants. Except one." I hesitated, then thought, what the hell. When she wasn't being obnoxiously rude, she was pleasant company. "A few years ago I was involved in a bad incident. Wasn't my fault: I didn't know it was going to go down that way. But some people got killed, and one cop in particular was extremely pissed about it. He chased me around the country for a couple years, but then I hired someone to wipe the crime. He had nothing left to hang on me and had to give it up."

"Couldn't this cop just whack you anyway? Or frame you for something?"

The same thought had occurred to me, many times. "Apparently not. From what I can make out, he's a pretty honorable guy."

The corner of her mouth twitched sourly. "The last of a dying breed."

"Hey—I have my moments. Anyhow, this cop is leading the investigation into the murder of the man you killed."

Laura raised her eyebrows and seemed to accept that this might represent a problem. "Kind of a coincidence, isn't it?"

I shook my head. "He's a top homicide detective, and Ray Hammond was LAPD brass. It's the obvious choice. And if he can get me on something legitimate, I'm fucked."

"But there's nothing to link you to the murder. You know that. Like you said, if I'm unlucky, someone could connect me. You weren't even there."

"Someone's already made the connection. Those guys in gray. I'm not spending the next five years looking over my shoulder. I've spent too much of my life doing that already." Down below I saw that Deck had made it through to the bar and was ordering drinks in bulk. Sensible man.

Laura wasn't giving up. "But does it have to come back to me? Can't you just fire it off into the wild blue yonder?"

I shook my head. "Doesn't get rid of it. You do that, all that happens is that it will coalesce somewhere random, on a street or by some stream, and hang around like a cloud. Somebody walks through that cloud, and at least some of it will get into their head. They end up with False Memory Syndrome, think bad things have happened to them and blame the people closest to them. In the early days a lot of families got hurt that way."

"But—"

"And even if you don't give a shit about them," I interrupted, "there's forensic recallists who can build up a profile of where the memory originally came from. Either way, I'm not doing it."

"So that's it? You just dump it back in me and run away?"

I shrugged. "Give me your account details and I'll get your money back to you—which I think is fairly cool of me, considering you've cost me a week's work and a whole stack of brownie points with my employer."

"But what am I supposed to—"

Suddenly I felt tired. "I'm sick of answering questions, Laura. Why don't you try it for a change? This is your mess, not mine. Why did you kill him? Why did you try to kill yourself last night? What are your problems, and why can't you deal with them?"

"Mind your own business, asshole," she said, and turned away.

At that moment Deck arrived at the table, followed by a couple of waiters struggling under the weight of trays loaded with drinks.

"Having fun, are we?" Deck asked.

"Unimprovable," I said.

AT TWENTY TO ElGHT l was standing at the bar, checking my watch. I was considering the best way to approach the pickup, and getting another round of drinks. Laura had insisted, as she'd already done several times. She was pretty drunk, and had gotten that way quickly. It took me a little while to realize that she might have been draining the bottle in her bag during the afternoon. When I did so, I felt embarrassed for her. I'm no stranger to alcohol-based beverages. But I drink for fun, and because I like the taste. And occasionally as a cheap escape hatch from life, real or otherwise. Laura didn't take it that way. Nobody but Russians drink vodka for the flavor, and Russians seldom mix it with cranberry juice. Laura drank in gulps, as if swallowing medicine, and with a grim determination—like some part of her mind was prescribing a remedy she knew could only make things worse. It was none of my business, and there was nothing I could do about it. I needed her to stay where she was and not give us grief, so I ordered her another drink.

I was fairly confident that just as soon as the bartender had finished being cool, he'd serve it to me, along with the others I'd ordered. He was one of those people who have to load every single action with a little flourish and twirl, and he was really getting on my nerves. I don't want added value from bartenders; I just want my fucking drink.

My plan was that Deck should stay up at the table with Laura, and that at eight I'd come back down and walk the floor. Quat would presumably have furnished the hacker with a description of me, and he'd implied that the guy would be fairly easy to spot. Once the exchange was made, we'd return to The Falkland, I'd bribe someone to baby-sit Laura for a few minutes or lock her in the car, and Deck and I would fetch the receiver from my apartment. Deck disagreed with this part of the plan, and had done so all afternoon. He insisted we should have gone and gotten the receiver first. Going back to my apartment constituted taking a risk, and I didn't want to have to do that until as late in the day as possible. Assuming that part of the evening passed without incident, I'd find a motel, effect the transfer, and tell Laura she was free to go. A night full of paid dreams, and tomorrow would see me right back where I had been a week ago. I felt keyed up, but no more than that.

I was waiting to finger the credit slip, and glaring at the frieze painted around the top of the bar, when the evening started to go weird. The painting showed, in stylized daubs, the gods and goddesses of classical mythology, and I was thinking how dull our understanding of gods was. A Goddess of Love, a God of War, a God in charge of Being Drunk: all like Vice-Presidents in some Earth Inc., under the Chairmanship of Mr. Zeus, Sr. No vague spirits, no shadowed presences, no essence in spaces and gaps; just a good old line-management structure. Modern religions are even worse, on the whole: simply a streamlining. In the old days at least God was a kind of Howard Hughes figure, with a bit of pizzazz: Now He comes across like the aging senior partner of a provincial firm of accountants. A small office above the main drag in some backwater town, the ticking of clocks on slow afternoons, dusty rooms full of guys who belong to the Rotary and genuinely give a shit when the new Buick's coming out.

Yet people reach out, like they still want to believe in UFOs. You'd think by now, when there have been so many false alarms, and so much waiting, and still the black obelisk hasn't turned up, we'd have lost interest in the idea of aliens. But we wait for little guys with pointy ears anyway, to ask politely to be taken to our leader, just as we still go to psychiatrists and faith healers when the only reality they offer is their bills. We don't trust ourselves with our lives, and we're all still waiting for the deus ex machina.

Something made me turn around. By this time I was a few beers down myself, and I thought maybe I'd caught a reflection of someone I recognized in the mirror behind the bar. I couldn't tell whether it had been a man or a woman, and when I looked I didn't see anyone I knew. Bunch of people sitting at tables, talking too loud and too fast: young guys in overdesigned suits; women buoyant with the kind of unnecessary attractiveness that makes you wish they'd go somewhere else so you wouldn't waste your evening covertly staring at them. I panned my eyes slowly over the throng, seeing nothing more out of the ordinary than you'd expect in a Griffith bar. Yet suddenly I felt on edge.

"Sir?" The bartender was waving the credit slip at me. Everything in his demeanor suggested he'd been waiting for me a couple of days instead of a few seconds. Still distracted and scoping the crowds, I rested my finger on the pad at the bottom of the slip, where the sensor would read my DNA, cross-reference to my bank account, and debit the amount required. "There's a space there for a tip," the bartender pointed out helpfully.

"So there is," I said, and put a line through it. "Thanks for warning me." He huffily snatched the slip and went off to serve someone nicer.

I flagged a passing waiter and put my drinks on his tray. "You know the most inconvenient table in the bar?" I asked. I had to speak loudly, above the music now being generated by a couple of musos in the corner of the room. The waiter nodded glumly. He was small and cowed, much more my type of guy. "Take these there. And wait a second."

I found a scrap of paper in my pocket and scribbled a note to Deck. This I stuck under his glass on the tray, then reached for my wallet, remembering only when it was in my hand that I didn't have any cash. "Tell him I said to give you a big tip," I told the troll, and waved him on his way.

This done, I moved away from the bar and slipped into the crowd. The note to Deck told him to stay put but keep an eye out. Maybe I was just getting a little dose of pre-handover nerves, but something made me want to keep on the move. I sipped my beer and wandered around, trying to look inconspicuous while at the same time placing myself at one remove from what was going on around me. It was like a flashback to an earlier period in my life—dope deals and danger—and I didn't like it. Not much, anyway.

Then I saw the guy standing by the other side of the bar. Mid-twenties, long hair, a big nose and glasses, wearing a ratty red sweatshirt with the legend programmers do it recursively. A glass of what looked like Jolt was in his hand, and there was a small suitcase by his feet.