`Where are we?'
`Home. Cheap Hotel.'
`Where's Armitage?'
`Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl.' She touched his shoulder. `Roll over. I give a good massage.'
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
`How come you're not at the Hilton?'
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
`It's okay,' she said, `I can see.' Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. `Don't,' she said, `fingerprints.'
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.
On Ninsei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
`You seen Wage, Ratz?'
`Not tonight.' Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
`You see him, tell him I got his money.'
`Luck changing, my artiste?'
`Too soon to tell.'
`Well, I gotta see this guy,' Case said, watching his reflection in her glasses. `I got biz to cancel out of.'
`Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.' She stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
`The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people, you know?'
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
`I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza, and they'll go down,understand?' he lied, his hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. `Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?'
`Not what I'm paid for.'
`What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is something else.'
`Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check us out with your smuggler.' She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
`Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head. What is this about, exactly?' Deane's ghostly cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
`Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.'
`You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other way.'
`Okay,' she said. `Go. But five minutes. Any more and I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you try to figure something out.'
`What's that?'
`Why I'm doing you the favor.' She turned and walked out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
`Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie.
`Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?'
The bolts worked. `Slowly, Case,' said the voice.
`Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,' Case said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
`It's on all the time,' Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. `Just taking care, you understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want.'
`I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.'
`What's moving, old son?' Deane's shirt was candy-striped cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
`Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?'
`Go-to on whom, old son?'
`Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.'
Deane put the pistol down. `Sit still, Case.' He tapped something out on a lap terminal. `It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history. You said history.' He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it directly at Case. `What sort of history?'
`The war. You in the war, Julie?'
`The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks.'
`Screaming Fist.'
`Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians'~ defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.' Deane shrugged. `Turkey shoot for Ivan.'
`Any of those guys make it out?'
`Christ,' Deane said, `it's been bloody years... Though I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special Forces types.' Deane sniffed. `Bloody hell.'
Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.
`I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,' Deane said, putting the gun down. `Lovely place, Lisbon.'
`In the service, Julie?'
`Hardly. Though I did see action.' Deane smiled his pink smile. `Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.'
`Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.'
`Hardly, Case. And goodbye.'
And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting...
They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
`Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
`How's that? You want one?' He held the pill out to her.
`Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.' She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. `You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'