Up— and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, rolled up in white sheets, looked like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knucklewalking through the crowd, butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.
The taxi-drivers converged on Nell too, and she picked out the biggest one and haggled with him, holding up fingers and essaying a few words in Shanghainese. When the numbers had climbed into the right range for him, he spun around suddenly to face the crowd. The suddenness of the movement drove people back, and the meter-long bamboo stick in his hand didn't hurt either. He stepped forward and Nell hurried after him, ignoring the myriad tuggings at her long skirts, trying not to wonder which of the beggars was a Fist with a concealed knife. If her clothes hadn't been made of untearable, uncuttable nanostuff, she would have been stripped naked within a block.
Madame Ping's was still doing a decent business. Its clientele were willing to put up with some inconvenience to get there. It was only a short distance from the bridgehead, and the Madame had put a few truculent taxi-drivers on retainer as personal escorts. The business was startlingly large given the scarcity of real estate in Shanghai; it occupied most of a five-story reinforced-concrete Mao Dynasty apartment block, having started out with just a couple of flats and expanded room by room as the years went on.
The reception area reminded one of a not-bad hotel lobby, except that it had no restaurant or bar; none of the clients wanted to see or be seen by any other. The desk was staffed by concierges whose job was to get the clients out of view as quickly as possible, and they did it so well that an uninitiated passerby might get the impression that Madame Ping's was some kind of a walk-in kidnapping operation.
One of these functionaries, a tiny woman who seemed oddly prim and asexual considering that she was wearing a black leather miniskirt, briskly took Nell to the top floor, where the large apartments had been built and elaborate scenarios were now realized for Madame Ping's clients.
As the writer, Nell of course never actually entered the same room as the client. The woman in the miniskirt escorted her into a nearby observation room, where a high-res cine feed from the next room covered most of one wall.
If she hadn't known it already, Nell would have seen from the client's uniform that he was a colonel in Her Majesty's Joint Forces. He was wearing a full dress uniform, and the various pins and medals on his coat indicated that he had spent a good deal of his career attached to various Protocol Enforcement units, been wounded in action several times, and displayed exceptional heroism on one occasion. In fact, it was clear that he was a rather important fellow. Reviewing the previous half-hour, Nell saw that, not surprisingly, he had arrived in mufti, carrying the uniform in a leather satchel. Wearing the uniform must be part of the scenario.
At the moment he was seated in a rather typical Victorian parlor, sipping tea from a Royal Albert china cup decorated with a somewhat agonistic briar rose pattern. He looked fidgety; he'd been kept waiting for half an hour, which was also part of the scenario. Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about having to wait too long for an orgasm; that men could do that to themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business leading up to it that they would pay for. The biological readouts seemed to confirm Madame Ping's rule: Perspiration and pulse were rather high, and he was about half erect.
Nell heard the sound of a door opening. Switching to a different angle she saw a parlormaid entering the room. Her uniform was not as overtly sexy as most of the ones in Madame Ping's wardrobe department; the client was sophisticated. The woman was Chinese, but she played the role with the mid-Atlantic accent currently in vogue among neo-Victorians: "Mrs. Braithwaite will see you now."
The client stepped into an adjoining drawing room, where two women awaited him: a heavy Anglo in late middle age and a very attractive Eurasian woman, about thirty. Introductions were performed: The old woman was Mrs. Braithwaite, and the younger woman was her daughter. Mrs. was somewhat addled, and Miss was obviously running the show.
This section of the script never changed, and Nell had been over it a hundred times trying to troubleshoot it. The client went through a little speech in which he informed Mrs. Braithwaite that her son Richard had been killed in action, displaying great heroism in the process, and that he was recommending him for a posthumous Victoria Cross.
Nell had already done the obvious, going back through the Times archives to see whether this was a reconstruction of an actual event in the client's life. As far as she could determine, it was more like a composite of many similar events, perhaps with a dollop of fantasy thrown in.
At this point, the old lady got a case of the vapors and had to be helped from the room by the parlormaid and other servants, leaving the client alone with Miss Braithwaite, who was taking the whole thing quite stoically. "Your composure is admirable, Miss Braithwaite," said the client, "but please be assured that no one will blame you for giving vent to your emotions at such a time." When the client spoke this line, there was an audible tremor of excitement in his voice.
"Very well, then," said Miss Braithwaite. She withdrew a small black box from her reticule and pressed a button. The client grunted and arched his back so violently that he fell out of his chair onto the rug, where he lay paralyzed.
"Mites— you have infected my body with some insidious nanosite," he gasped. "in the tea."
"But that is impossible— most mites highly susceptible to thermal damage— boiling water would destroy them."
"You underestimate the capabilities of CryptNet, Colonel Napier. Our technology is advanced far beyond your knowledge— as you will discover during the next few days!"
"Whatever your plan is— be assured that it will fail!"
"Oh, I have no plan in particular," Miss Braithwaite said. "This is not a CryptNet operation. This is personal. You are responsible for the death of my brother Richard— and I will have you show the proper contrition."
"I assure you that I was as deeply saddened-"
She zapped him again. "I do not want your sadness," she said. "I want you to admit the truth: that you are responsible for his death!"
She pressed another button, which caused Colonel Napier's body to go limp. She and a maid wrestled him into a dumbwaiter and moved him down to a lower floor, where, after descending via the stairway, they tied him to a rack.
This was where the problem came in. By the time they had finished tying him up, he was sound asleep.
"He did it again," said the woman playing the role of Miss Braithwaite, addressing herself to Nell and anyone else who might be monitoring. "Six weeks in a row now."
When Madame Ping had explained this problem to Nell, Nell wondered what the problem was. Let the man sleep, as long as he kept coming and paid his bill. But Madame Ping knew her clients and feared that Colonel Napier was losing interest and might shift his business to some other establishment unless they put some variety into the scenario.
"The fighting has been very bad," the actress said. "He's probably exhausted."
"I don't think it's that," Nell said. She had now opened a private voice channel direct to the woman's eardrum. "I think it is a personal change."
"They never change, sweetheart," said the actress. "Once they get the taste, they have it forever."
"Yes, but different situations may trigger those feelings at different times of life," Nell said. "In the past it has been guilt over the deaths of his soldiers. Now he has made his peace. He has accepted his guilt, and so he accepts the punishment. There is no longer a contest of wills, because he has become submissive."
"So what do we do?"
"We must create a genuine contest of wills. We must force him to do something he really doesn't want to do," Nell said, thinking aloud. What would fit that bill?
"Wake him up," Nell said. "Tell him you were lying when you said this wasn't a CryptNet operation. Tell him you want real information. You want military secrets."
Miss Braithwaite sent the maid out for a bucket of cold water and heaved it over Colonel Napier's body. Then she played the role as Nell had suggested, and did it well; Madame Ping hired people who were good at improvisation, and since most of them never actually had to have sex with clients, she had no trouble finding good ones.