Laney found his wallet, produced the blank card with the pencilled number. Blackwell took it. Ta. He stood up. Shame to waste a good breakfast that way. Ring the hotel doctor from your room and get yourself sorted. Sleep. Ill deal with this. He tucked the card into the breast pocket of his aluminum jacket.
And as Blackwell left the room, Laney noticed, centered on the bodyguards squeegeed plate and standing upright on its broad flat head, a one-and-a-half-inch galvanized roofing-nail.
Laneys ribs, an ugly patchwork of yellow, black, and blue, were sprayed with various cool liquids and tightly bound with micropore. He took the hypnotic the doctor had offered, showered at great length, climbed into bed, and was suggesting the light turn itself off when a fax was delivered.
It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUEST:
DAY MANAGER GAVE ME MY WALKING PAPERS. FRATERNIZING. ANYWAY, IM SECURITY HERE AT THE LUCKY DRAGON, MIDNITE ON, YOU CAN GET ME FAX, E-MAIL, PHONES BIZ ONLY BUT THE PEOPLE ARE OKAY. HOPE YOURE OKAY. FEEL RESPONSIBLE. HOPE YOURE ENJOYING JAPAN, WHATEVER. RYDELL
Good night, Laney said, putting the fax on the bedside module, and fell instantly and very deeply asleep.
And stayed that way until Arleigh phoned from the lobby to suggest a drink. Nine in the evening, by the blue clock in the corner of the module-screen. Laney put on freshly ironed underwear and his other blue Malaysian button-down. He discovered that White Leather Tuxedo had sprung a few seams in his only jacket, but then the boss Russian, Starkov, hadnt let the man come with them in the van, so Laney figured they were even.
Crossing the lobby, he encountered a frantic-looking Rice Daniels, so tense that hed reverted to the black head-clamp of his Out of Control days. Laney! Jesus! Have you seenKathy?
No. Ive been asleep.
Daniels did a strange little jig of anxiety, rising on the toes of his brown calfskin loafers. Look, this is toofucking weird, but I swearI think shes been abducted.
Have you called the police?
We did, we did, but its all fucking Martian, all these forms they tick through on their notebooks, and what blood typewas she You dont knowwhat blood type she is, do you, Laney?
Thin, Laney said. Sort of straw-colored.
But Daniels didnt seem to hear. He seized Laneys shoulder and showed him teeth, a rictus intended somehow to indicate friendship. I have real respect for you, man. How you dont have any issues.
Laney saw Arleigh wave to him from the entrance to the lounge. She was wearing something short and black.
You take care, Rice. Shaking the mans cold hand. Shell turn up. Im sure of it.
And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw that she was smiling back.
44. La Puirissima
Chia was on the bed, watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was like a drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had watched, after her father had left.
But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been Mitsuko, only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were spinning huge wooden tops at a long table. They could really spin them, too; keep them up forever. It was a contest. The console could translate, but it was even more relaxing not to know what they were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the close-ups of the tops spinning.
Shed used the translation to check out the NHK coverage of the death hoax on the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.
Shed seen a very satisfyingly pudgy Hiromi Ogama denying she knew who had nuked her chapters site and then issued the call to mourning from its ruins. It had not been a member of the club, Hiromi had stressed, either locally or internationally. Chia knew Hiromi was lying, because it had to have been Zona, but the Lo/Rez people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told Chia the whole thing had been launched out of a disused website that belonged to an aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant that Zona had blown her country, because now she wouldnt be able to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to be, Chia hadnt told her anything about Zona.)
And shed seen the helicopter shots of the vigil, a field of the baffled tactical squads facing an estimated twenty-five hundred teary-eyed girls. The injury count was low, everything fairly minor except for one girl whod slid down a freeway embankment and broken both her ankles. The real problem had been getting everyone out of there, because a lot of them had arrived five or six to a cab, and had no way of getting home. Some had taken the family car and then abandoned it in their hurry to reach the vigil, and that had created another kind of mess. There had been a few dozen arrests, mostly for trespassing.
And shed seen the message Rez had recorded, assuring people he was alive and well, and regretting the whole thing, which of course hed had nothing to do with. He wasnt wearing the monocle-rig, for this, but he had on the same black suit and t-shirt. He looked thinner, though; someone had tweaked it. Hed played it light, at first, grinning, saying hed never been to the Hotel Di and in fact had never visited a love hotel, but now maybe he should. Then hed turned serious and said how sorry he was that people had been inconvenienced and even hurt by someones irresponsible prank. And hed capped it, smiling, by saying that the whole thing had been quite uniquely moving for him, because how often do you get to watch your own funeral?
And shed seen the people who owned and managed the Hotel Di, expressing their regret. They had no idea, they said, how any of this had happened. She got the feeling that expressing regret was a big thing here, but the owners of the Di had also managed to explain how there was no on-site staff at their hotel, in the interest of the guests greater privacy. Arleigh, watching this, had said that that was the commercial, and that she bet the place was going to be booked solid for the next two months. It was famous, now.
All in all, the coverage seemed to treat the whole thing as some kind of silly-season item that might have had serious repercussions if the police hadnt acted as calmly and as skillfully as they eventually had, bringing in electric buses from the suburbs to ferry the girls to collection-points around the city.
Arleigh was from San Francisco and she worked for Lo/Rez and knew Rez personally, and she was the one whod driven the van out through the crowd. And then shed lost a police helicopter by doing something completely crazy on that expressway, a kind of u-turn right over the concrete bumper-thing down the middle.
Shed brought Chia and Masahiko to this hotel, and put them in these adjoining rooms with weirdly angled corners, where they each had a private bath. Shed asked them both to please stay there, and not to port or use the phone without telling her, except for room service, and then shed gone out.
Chia had had a shower right away. It was the best shower shed ever had, and she felt like she never wanted to wear those clothes again as long as she lived. She didnt even want to have to look at them. She found a plastic bag you were supposed to put your clothes in to be laundered, and she put them in that and put it in the wastebasket in the bathroom. Then shed put on all clean clothes from her bag, everything kind of wrinkled but it felt great, and shed blow-dried her hair with the machine built into the bathroom wall. The toilet didnt talk and it only had three buttons to figure out.