‘Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge.’
‘You’re going there? Tonight?’
‘Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,’ I said patiently. ‘Of course I’m going there tonight.’
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.
‘It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.’
This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.
‘I’m sending the map,’ she said stiffly.
Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.
Miriam Bancroft.
There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ’caster and the image kept fizzling out.
I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.
I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests – you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.
I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.
‘Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.’
I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.
‘Stiff?’
Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.
‘Do you want cabins or bar?’
I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. ‘What’s the deal in the bar?’
‘Ha ha ha.’ Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. ‘The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.’
‘Cabins,’ I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.
‘Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.’
I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.
The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.
I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.
‘Do you want to see me see me see me…?’
Cheap echo box on the vocoder.
I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.
‘Do you want to touch me touch me touch me…?’
Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.
‘Tell me what you want, honey,’ she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.
I cleared my own. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?’
Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.
‘You remember a girl used to work here?’ I asked.
She was working on my belt now. ‘Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—’
‘She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.’
Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.
‘What the fuck is this? You the Sia?’
‘The what?’
‘Sia. The heat.’ Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. ‘We had this, man—’
‘No.’ I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. ‘No, I’m her mother.’
Taut silence. She glared at me.
‘Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.’