When you can't get what you want, I reasoned, settle for what you can get. I went to Birdie's desk and looked at his phone. It was a technological miracle, full of what the people who sell you phones like to refer to as “extra features.” Down its right-hand side were sixteen auto-redial buttons. In other words, jackpot.
Touch-tone technology has turned the telephone system into music: every number that you press sounds a different note. A phone number is like a musical snowflake, in that no two are alike. I pressed a pocket tape recorder against the earpiece of the phone and pushed each of the redial buttons in turn. When the beep pattern had sounded, I hung up and went to the next button. After about a minute I had them all on tape. Then I turned my attention to the reason I had come in the first place.
The computer was nothing special, an IBM clone. I pulled it around so I could fool with the keys and switched it on. A little bit late, I thought about disks, nonsystem disk or drive error, the screen signaled me. insert system disk
AND PRESS ANY KEY.
A disk holder was stashed in the third drawer down on the right. I pulled out the DOS diskette I'd bought and put it in. When the A Prompt blinked at me, I put another of the disks into the B drive, dir b: I typed.
The machine whirred and the screen lit up with a long list of meaningless file names. I pulled the DOS disk out of drive A and inserted one of my own, one of the ones I'd bought at Computerland, in its place. Then I typed copy b:*.* a:. In human talk, that meant copy everything on the disk in the B drive onto the disk in the A drive.
After some whirring and some beeping, the machine told me that the disk I'd inserted wasn't formatted. I should have known that. A computer disk is like a long-playing record without any grooves until you format it. Only then can it figure out into which grooves it should place the information you're copying onto it. I put the DOS diskette back into drive A and formatted all the disks I'd bought at Computer-land. Then I repeated the steps that told the machine to copy everything on disk A onto disk B.
It took nine of the ten disks I'd bought to copy the contents of Birdie's diskette file. Then, just to make sure, I copied his DOS diskette, which I found in the back of the holder, as well. DOS doesn't take up an entire diskette, and who knew what else he had hidden there? I finished up by labeling all the diskettes. Birdie had just numbered them, one through nine plus DOS, so I copied his system. Then I put back everything I'd touched.
With the diskettes tucked back into the box I'd bought them in, a thick square of cold hard cardboard pressing up against my stomach beneath the belt of my jeans, I went over the office again in search of the secret passkey to the Flash Gordon door. Still no deal. Feeling defeated, I went back out through the front and into the fog of the evening.
L.A. glittered at me like the jewels in the Seven Dwarfs' mine as I drove back west toward the ocean. Somewhere out there, socked away among the semiprecious stones, was Aimee Sorrell. Or maybe not. What had Mrs. Brussels asked me about Jessica? Was she free to travel? Something like that. Travel how far? I wondered. Rio? Japan? Saudi Arabia? The white slave trade, I knew, extended into all the black, brown, yellow, and coffee-colored countries. And into the white countries as well.
Great, I thought as I killed Alice at the foot of my driveway and climbed up the hill, I'd eliminated none of the world's continents except Antarctica. And if anyone lived on Antarctica, it would still be on my list. Good work.
When I opened the door of my house, it was just as I'd left it, only colder. I pulled a sixteen-ounce bottle of Singha out of the refrigerator, and sat down in my only chair, feeling sorry for Aimee, and a little sorry for myself. Coyotes howled in the distance, and I went out onto the deck and howled back. The clouds had cleared briefly and the full moon shone down like a cue for Lon Chaney Jr. to appear and start mumbling. I was absolutely getting a little old for all this, I thought. I'd gone back inside to put the diskettes into the computer when I noticed that the light on the answering machine was blinking. If Eleanor had been in America, or anyplace closer than Nanjing, China, I would have noticed it earlier. I always checked the machine when Eleanor was around.
I pushed the button marked Replay. First came some garbage: a tape-recorded voice asking me whether I had ever thought about gold futures, followed by a kid who asked me if my refrigerator were running. I skipped the part where he (or she) told me that I'd better go out into the street and chase it, and got Mrs. Sorrell's voice.
“Mr. Grist?” it said. “Are you home?” The voice waited, and in the background I could hear horns honking. “If not,” she said, “just listen to me. Stop looking for Aimee. Don't do anything more. Just forget it. Send me a bill. If you have to talk to me about this, don't call at night. And don't do anything, do you hear me? It's all going to be all right. I've paid the ransom, and it's all going to be all right.”
She hung up. I took the plastic box of diskettes out of the front of my pants and tossed it onto the floor, next to the wadded-up motel stationery. So she'd paid the ransom, I thought, knocking back about three inches of Singha. So it's going to be all right.
Somehow, I didn't think so.
15
“Don't you listen?” she snapped, long-distance from Kansas City. She sounded like Aurora's imitation of an adult talking to a child. “I said that you weren't to do anything.” I'd awakened late, but even in Kansas it was only noon, so it was safe for me to calclass="underline" the Pork King couldn't be home.
“You paid the ransom,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that I mailed the money. Please, Mr. Grist, just send me a bill and forget about it.”
“Mailed it?” I asked. I was pretty sure that she was speaking English, but to me it didn't make any more cognitive sense than running water. “Mailed it where?”
“To an address he gave me. In Los Angeles. Now, please, leave us alone.”
“Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Park and idle for a minute. He gave you an address?”
“Yes.”
“In Los Angeles.”
“I believe I just said so.”
“Mrs. Sorrell,” I said. I was developing a headache. “Kidnappers don't give out their addresses.”
“This one did,” she said in the tone of a threatened child. “Ask Aurora.”
“I don't want to ask Aurora. Aurora's a kid and Aimee's her sister. What do you mean, he gave you an address? Was it a he?” I asked, backtracking.
“You heard him on the tape. And when I say he gave me an address, I mean a number and a street and a zip code, all the things that usually make up an address.”
“What is it?”
“I'm not going to tell you that,” she said. “Just send me a bill.”
“How long are you supposed to wait?”
“Four days. Aimee will be home in four days.”
“She won't,” I said, without thinking.
“Oh, yes she will. And listen, you, don't do anything. This is my daughter's life you're fooling around with.” She hung up. When I called back there was no answer. I noodled around with the phone for a few minutes, dialing numbers at random and hanging up when they started to ring. I didn't like any of it, and I needed to do something meaningless while my subconscious sorted it out and came up with something for me to do.
So I didn't have a client anymore. So bill the client. I made out a bill for a few days' work, addressed it, remembered to add the receipts from the Sleep-Eze, and slogged down the unpaved muddy driveway to the mailbox. I raised the red flag to get the attention of my brain-damaged mailman. Then I stuck the letter halfway out and closed the mailbox on it to get a little more of his attention. After twenty years of sizzling his neurons with anything he could buy cheap, his attention needed a lot of getting.