Seven

 

The Hard Prose Café is over in the warehouse district of Griffith. It's not really a warehouse district, of course, just another chunk of reality-flavoured life. During the 80s and 90s people got so used to over-priced bars and restaurants being in cavernous old buildings that they forgot they weren't originally planned that way. So, when they were laying Griffith out, they built a couple blocks of looming edifices and redeveloped them during construction – building walls and then knocking them out again immediately, to get that authentic feel. The block the Café is on actually has a fake wharf out front: it's only when you walk right up to it and look down that you realize the ‘river’ is a Plexiglas roof over the subway. Sometimes I think we've got so used to chocolate-flavoured drinks that real chocolate would bring us out in a rash.

Laura took it hard when we walked in the Café. I guess it offended her aesthetic sensibilities. It was started by a bunch of Hollywood writers, who wanted somewhere dark to sulk between meetings. The service sucks, it has to be said. You have to book a table for about an hour before you 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 10 per cent of your food. The interior has never been properly finished, because the contractors only completed 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 place in the whole of California where you're allowed to smoke in a public place. Also I quite like the layout, though I sense I'm in a minority. It's a huge room, two storeys high, with a big circular bar in the centre. Drinks orders come through pretty quickly: I think they're considered a priority. There's also a large 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 which is only a little lower than the ceiling, and sit gazing regally down upon a mini-cloud system of second-hand 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 back seat and refusing a tofu burrito when offered one. Which was a relief, to be honest: 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 very 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 trying. The only question was when.

When we'd got 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 her one, but she just stared 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 taken, 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 I didn't find that so hard to believe. Sometimes, when I'm tired, I feel the distinctions fading away, and can almost believe that instead of being an individual I'm merely part of a 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 with Laura Reynolds, and yet I still found her incomprehensible. I couldn't see how she had gone from the girl she had been 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 said. ‘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.’ I hesitated, then thought what the hell. When she wasn't being 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 round 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 he just whack you anyway? Or frame you for something?’

I shook my head. The same thought had occurred to me, many times. ‘Apparently not. From what I can make out, he's a pretty honourable guy.’

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

‘Hey – I have my moments. Anyhow, this guy 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. The guys in grey. 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 wide blue?’

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. Lot of families got hurt that way in the early days.’

‘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, given that 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 eight I was standing at the bar, checking my watch. I was considering the best way to run the pick-up, and getting another round of drinks. Laura had insisted, as she'd already done several times. She was pretty drunk, and had got 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, nor unfamiliar with their effects. But I drink for fun, and because I like the taste. 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 flavour, and they seldom mix it with cranberry juice. Laura drank in gulps, as if taking medicine, and with a grim determination – as if some part of her mind was prescribing a remedy which 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 that was done we'd return to the hotel, I'd get 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, saying we should have gone and got the receiver first. Going back to the 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 off 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, Snr. 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 ageing 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 still 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, that we'd have lost interest in the idea of aliens. But still we wait for little guys with pointy ears 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 are 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 loud and fast: young guys in over-designed 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 barman was waving the credit slip at me, everything in his demeanour suggesting he'd been waiting for 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 gratuity,’ the young man helpfully pointed out.

‘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 onto his tray. ‘You know the most inconvenient table in the bar?’ I asked. I had to speak loudly, against 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. I stuck it 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 mass of people. 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 a guy standing by the other side of the bar. He was mid-twenties, had long hair, a big nose and glasses, and was 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.

Something told me he might be the one.

I walked slowly over, giving him plenty of time to see me approaching.

‘Hi,’ I said. He was about six inches shorter than me, and aware of it. He nodded, a couple of quick jerks of the head, and turned away from the bar. Out of the corner of his mouth: ‘Are you Hap?’

‘As far as I know. And you are?’

This time he shook his head – nervy tics from side to side. Quat had been right about this guy: he came across like the dictionary definition of the word ‘spooked’.

Melodrama: ‘You don't need to know.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying not to roll my eyes. ‘You get the money?’

Greed briefly lit up his pinched features. ‘Yes. Er, thank you.’

‘Great. So why don't you finish your drink while you tell me where you want the case dropped tomorrow morning, and then just walk away.’

‘I can't do that. I'm going to have to tell you how to operate the machine.’

‘I'm wise in the ways of silicon-based shit – I'll pick it up.’

Another head shake. ‘Dude, you won't. I built the thing, and even I have to work it from notes. All of the codes have to be entered manually in real time.’

‘So email me instructions when you get back to your crib.’

‘I don't trust the Net for this.’

‘Jeez – you and Quat are going to get along just fine.’ I breathed out heavily. ‘Okay, so let's look at it,’ I said, wanting it over with.

‘Let me take you through the codes first,’ he said, pulling a notebook out of his back pocket. ‘There's three phases to a transfer. Accepting the dream, coding it for transmission to a specific receiver, and the actual transmission itself. The first stage is a no-brainer – a set of passwords which I've written down – the last two are hairy factorial. The transmission code is generated in real time, a random function of the serial numbers of the transmitting and receiving machines. You have to wait until the two machines are synched, then watch out for the match code signal.’

‘Which I see where, exactly? Show me on the machine.’

‘Listen to the sequence first,’ he said. ‘And would you mind, like, keeping your voice down?’

I was starting to get impatient. ‘I've paid you a lot of money for this. Show me the fucking machine.’

The hacker held his hands up placatingly. ‘Okay, look: I saw a big empty room out back. Can we go through there?’

I turned on my heel and walked, trying not to lose my temper. Friday and Saturday nights they have big parties at the Café, and through an archway in the rear of the main bar there's a large area for people to chill out when they've had too much fun to stand up convincingly. Before I went through I looked up into the cop corner of the room, hoping Deck would catch a glimpse of me, but there was so much smoke in the air I doubted I was more than a blur to anyone above the second tier.

The room was dark, lit only by electric candles arrayed around the edges and in a pool in the middle of the floor, and empty apart from a couple of guys necking on a sofa. One was young and muscular, the other much older and running to flab. They were far too engrossed in each other to represent a problem. I walked to the opposite corner, sat down. The nerd followed, eyes darting suspiciously across at the lovebirds, then perched on the edge of a sofa at right angles to me.

‘I'm waiting,’ I said.

He dithered for a moment, then hauled the case onto his lap. Angling it so only he and I could see, he flicked the latches. Inside was a jumble of components, motherboard fragments and display units, junction-clipped together by wires of every colour of the rainbow.

‘Jesus H,’ I said.

‘See what I'm saying? It's not exactly in showroom condition.’

‘But it works?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, nodding vigorously. He glanced over at the door once more, and I finally understood what was really bugging me. I watched him closely as he pulled a mini-keyboard out of the mess of wires, and saw that his hands weren't shaking. Mixed signals: the super-nervousness didn't tally with his desire to explain everything in brain-ache detail; a voice that jumped all over the place, but steady hands. Everything about him said he wanted to be somewhere else, like he regarded me as a kind of semi-dangerous wild animal, and yet he wouldn't just hand the goods over and let me figure it out for myself. He'd got the money – what did he care? It seemed odd. Also, I didn't like his shirt.

I leaned in close, so we were in a huddle with the rest of the room shut out. ‘All this is written down, right?’ He nodded, started to say something. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Give me the notes.’

‘You won't be able to work it.’

I reached forward and slammed the case shut, nearly taking off his fingers – then pulled out my gun and rested it in the middle of the hacker's forehead. His adam's apple jumped like a salmon going upstream, and his mouth fell open with a dry click. ‘Just give me the fucking notes. I want to be out of here.’

‘You ain't going nowhere,’ said a voice, and I heard the sound of a safety being flicked off. Someone stuck a gun in the back of my neck. ‘Stand up and throw down your weapon.’

‘And you would be?’ I asked, slowly standing, but keeping my gun right where it was.

‘LAPD,’ said a voice, young, a little shaky. He yanked my left arm behind my back.

The hacker looked relieved. ‘You fuck,’ I said to him. ‘You set me up.’

‘That's right,’ said another voice, and someone came round to stand in front of me and to the left. The older guy from the necking couple. He was holding up a badge, and looking pretty pleased with himself. ‘Drop the piece,’ he said, favouring me with a strong gust of second-hand alcohol. ‘I want to get back to clinching with Barton here. Got the feeling he kind of liked it.’

‘Fuck you, grandad,’ Barton said, and jammed the gun harder into my neck. ‘Look, just drop the gun, godammit.’

‘Don't know whether I want to do that,’ I said, pointlessly playing for time. ‘Seems to me that while I'm standing like this, there's not a great deal you guys can do. Push me around, and the gun could go off. Citizen all over the walls.’

‘Yeah, like we're going to give a shit,’ Barton snarled, causing the hacker to look nervous again.

I glanced across at the doorway. No way I could make it there before getting shot even if Deck turned up, which it didn't look like he was going to do. ‘Five thousand dollars,’ I said quietly to the older cop. ‘To make this situation go away.’

‘You hear that?’ beer-breath said to his partner, ‘Scumbag's impugning the morality of the Los Angeles Police Department.’

‘I walk out of here with the case, you get the money. Stranger things have happened.’

‘No way, Thompson.’ A new voice. I turned to see that two more cops had entered the room, and were walking fast towards us. The speaker was tall, grey-haired, distinguished – with a suit that was smart enough to prove he was senior, but not smart enough to say he was on the take.

Lieutenant Travis.

For the next few seconds I couldn't even speak. Partly I was trying to put it all together, to work out how things could suddenly have got so bad. Mainly I could only watch numbly as the most matter-of-fact section of my mind ticked off all the things that weren't going to happen in the rest of my life. Sitting outside a bar and drinking a beer; seeing a view other than grey walls; doing anything that wasn't stupid and brutal and merely a way of whiling away the years until one morning I woke up dead in my cell. All these things fell like rain in front of my inner eye, like they'd just been waiting to be visualized.

Travis stopped a couple of yards away, looked me up and down. He'd aged a little, but not much: mainly just lost a few pounds on his face, had his hair cut a little shorter. He was pretty much how I'd pictured him, in the times when I half-expected him to turn up in whatever town I was bunked in. The strange thing was that last time I'd seen him face to face we'd been heading towards friendship, wary acquaintances from different sides of the law-and-order divide. Operating in different fields, and deciding to live and let live: people who knew how to play the game and let the small things slide. Then I stepped outside that, in a compound bout of stupidity, and every line round his eyes said things were different now.

‘Put the gun down, Hap,’ he said.

I hesitated for a moment, then let my hand drop so that the gun was pointing at the floor. I switched it round in my hand and held it towards him, butt first.

He took it, dropped it into his pocket. ‘I'm arresting you for attempted lease of an illegal memory transferral device, and for the use of said device to caretake recollections of felonious acts.’ Matter-of-fact, with no trace of the triumph he must have been feeling. ‘And feel honoured, because I'm taking a few minutes off a far more important investigation to deal with you.’

‘The first is entrapment, the second you can't prove.’

‘We'll prove it,’ he said. ‘I'll lock you in a room, jack you full of sodium verithol and ask you about every crime ever committed in the history of mankind, back to and possibly including parking offences in the Garden of Eden. Sooner or later I'll find enough of something to pin on you.’

I understood two things simultaneously: this wasn't about Ray Hammond, and that after I'd been in that room for two seconds it would be. For a second I thought I starkly understood the concept of honour, knowing that there was no way I'd be prepared to turn Laura Reynolds in, even to cop a plea: then I realized it was just pragmatism. I was going down. There was no point dragging anyone else along for the ride, even if they were the one who was really guilty.

‘Er, can I like, go?’ The hacker said. He stuck his hand up his sweatshirt and pulled out the radio microphone it had been concealing.

‘I wish you would,’ Travis said.

‘And I'm clean now?’

Travis turned to him. ‘In terms of your rap file, yes, assuming I ever find it. In every other meaningful sense you're a lowlife asshole, and if I ever hear of you putting one toe over any line whatsoever you'll find yourself squashed like a bug.’

The hacker slid off towards the door, ducking and bobbing, trying not to run. Heading off back to his life between the cracks, saved by cancelling the life of someone he didn't even know.

Travis took another look at me, something unreadable in his face, and then nodded to Barton, who still had my arm held tight around my back. It was beginning to hurt, but I was confident that was going to be the least of my problems for the foreseeable future. Travis might use drugs and close interrogation, but there were policemen whose interview techniques were more straightforward. Chances were I'd be meeting some of them soon.

‘Cuff him,’ Travis said, and then to me: ‘Hope you got some living done in the last three years, Hap.’

I didn't get the chance to reply.

At the sound of the explosion our five heads turned towards the doorway at once. The hacker was lying on the ground, a couple of yards from the door, a splash of biology arcing away from his body.

‘Holy fuck,’ Barton squeaked, dropping my arm and going for his gun. From outside I heard screams in the main room, the sound of lots of people running in every direction at once. The cops around me dropped into shooter positions, only Travis having the presence of mind to reach out and grab hold of my other arm.

Four men walked into the room.

They were of identical heights, all wearing the same grey suits and sunglasses. Each carried a pump-action at port arms, and they walked like they had nothing to fear. They stopped five yards into the room, just the other side of the forest of candles. Simultaneously the four guns were dropped to firing position, a muzzle locked solid on every cop. Four 38s pointed back in the opposite directions, their aim a lot more shaky.

Silence, apart from the sound of squealing chaos in the main room. I heard the same thought go through all of the cops' minds at once, as if it had been said out loud:

If anybody fires, we're dogmeat.

‘Put the guns down,’ Travis said, his voice admirably steady. If called on to speak, I think any utterance I'd have made would have been so high-pitched only dogs would have heard it. The men shook their heads simultaneously.

‘Give Hap to us,’ the one on the end said, voice so deep it felt like the floor should vibrate.

‘No,’ Travis said, tightening his grip on my arm. ‘Put the guns down. Now.’ Then to me, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’

‘I don't know,’ I said, equally quietly.

‘Give Hap to us,’ repeated one of the other men. The voice was exactly the same, the inflection identical. It was like I was so drunk I was seeing not double, but quadruple.

There was a moment of screaming quiet, a stand-off, and then suddenly there was an arm round my neck and a gun at my temple.

‘Put the fucking guns down,’ Barton screamed at the men, his mouth very close to my ear, ‘or I'm going to blow his fucking head off.’

The only answer was the sound of four shells being racked into breaches, and I made my peace with the world.