Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Charlotte,” says Lorenzo. “Turns out Charlotte’s about to quit her job at American Express and is pretty pissed at her boss.”

  “She let you peak at Jenka’s credit card records?”

  “For the time he was in Malaysia, where he dropped thirty grand at a place called Allah Bling.”

  “Allah Bling?”

  “That’s what I said, but I asked around. It’s Islamic hip-hop jewelry, really high end. Lots of ice. But that’s all they sell. From your description of Jenka, anal retentive, uptight white-suit guy, doesn’t feel like his kind of gear.”

  “No,” says Lion, “doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Also, guy who runs it, his crew, heavy cats. He’s this gangster artist type. Master jeweler, does some kind of nano-engraving, synthetic biology something or other. Also, from what I hear, likes to shoot people.”

  Lion crosses over to a pale blue club chair by the window, sits down. “Did you say nano-engraving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get this guy’s name?”

  “The jeweler, yeah, I got his name. The hard way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I was in the store, checking shit out, when this little big Malay dude with a red silk shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest steps right up to me, says: ‘Hey man, you read the sign?’”

  “The sign?” asks Lion.

  “Once again, that’s what I said. What he said was, ‘The one that says this is Tajik Tabbara’s joint, and Tajik don’t commerce with fat white dudes.’”

  “Tajik Tabbara?”

  “You know the name?”

  “Remember the silver snuff container I found, the one with Muad’Dib’s name inside? The engraver: Tajik Tabbara.” Thinking about it a moment. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Not if you don’t want to get shot.”

  “Or,” says Lion, thinking of Jenka dropping thirty grand on bling he won’t bling, “maybe all you have to do is spend enough money on jewelry.”

  Lion gets out of the chair, crosses to his sling-pack on the dresser, and tugs open the zippered compartment to make sure he’s got his passport. Another old journalism habit, always traveling with it, because you never know. Also, tucked behind the passport, a skinny black vial. He’d given the dragon box back to Bo, but not before tucking a joint in here in case of emergency.

  “Could work,” says Lorenzo, “if you happen to have a spare thirty large.”

  Lion glances at the joint. Not yet an emergency. He glances at his wallet. About five hundred dollars left. But then he notices Arctic’s Amex card.

  “How many more days you staying in Kuala Lumpur?” he asks Lorenzo.

  “Another week.”

  Lion brings up a travel site on his phone, checks a couple of things. “The night after tomorrow,” he says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Assume your dance card is full.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking the little big Malay dude was pretty judgmental. Did you tell him it was baby fat and you’d grow out of it?”

  GOT TO SEE A MAN ABOUT SOME BABY FAT

  The bank, the one with the human tellers, is about five blocks down the road from the Holiday Inn. He gets there a few minutes before 9:00 A.M. While waiting for the manager to unlock the doors, Lion notices a shop selling pre-paid phones across the street. The shop solves his second problem. Actually, now that he’s thinking about it, he should solve his second problem first.

  He crosses the street, buys a pre-paid phone, and carries it out of the store and onto the sidewalk. Pulling out his own cell, he hunts through his texts until he finds one from Sir Richard. Reads off the phone number, punches it into the burner cell, and hears it start to ring.

  “Yes?” says Richard.

  “Shit,” says Lion; the last thing he’d been expecting was the billionaire to answer.

  “Pardon?”

  “Richard, it’s Lion.”

  A pause. “Where are you? Jenka says you vanished on him, Penelope too.”

  “Penelope?”

  “We haven’t heard from her in days.”

  “I don’t know where she is. The last time I saw her was in San Francisco. She said she was heading back to New York.”

  “She’s not in New York.” Then he does that subject-shift thing again. “Did you meet Shiz? Where are you now?”

  Lion glances at his phone, wondering how long it would take Richard to trace the call, wondering if Richard even has that capability. Decides he doesn’t know, so decides to almost tell the truth.

  “Met Shiz, in New Mexico, chasing a lead.”

  “Have you found Muad’Dib?”

  “No,” hesitates, “but I found a clue. I may need to take a little cash advance on the Arctic credit card to explore it further.”

  “You can’t just use the card?”

  “It’s not that kind of transaction.”

  Silence on the line. “Where in New Mexico?”

  Lion looks around, sees a sign that says WELCOME TO TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, hanging across Main Street. “I’m in Albuquerque, but I’m about to split and will be out of cell range for a few more days. I should be back in New York before the weekend, Monday latest. I can tell you about it in person.”

  “I’d rather you tell me about it right now.”

  “I’m sure you would,” trying to think on his feet, “but I’ve got to see a man about some baby fat.”

  Not exactly what he had in mind.

  “Baby fat?”

  “I’ll explain everything when I see you,” he says. “Can you authorize that cash advance.”

  “Authorized.”

  “Thanks. Gotta go. Bye.”

  Lion hangs up, takes the battery out of the burner, throws the parts in separate trash cans, and walks into the bank.

  A short line.

  He stares at photos on the wall of Truth or Consequences from bygone eras. Wide streets, a skinny church made from white adobe, pinion trees taller than houses. Then it’s his turn. The teller informs him that the cash advance limit on the Amex is enough to purchase a small island nation. But he can’t exactly fly into Malaysia with fifty large. Settles on nine thousand dollars, just under what he’s legally required to report upon entering most countries.

  After leaving the bank, Lion recrosses the street and buys another burner phone. He dials a number he knows by heart.

  “Hello?”

  “Lorenzo, it’s me.”

  “What’s with the new number?”

  “I’m trying to stay off familiar channels.”

  “You just talked to me on a familiar channel.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. Question, is Charlotte still around?”

  “In Malaysia, yeah.”

  “She hasn’t quit her job yet, has she?”

  “Left Amex? No, she’s waiting until after she gets her year-end bonus.”

  “Great,” says Lion, “I need another favor, actually two.” Thinking about it a little more, “Maybe four.”

  And then he fills Lorenzo in on what he wants, hangs up, and for the second time in thirty minutes breaks a phone apart and deposits the pieces in separate trash cans. It takes another ten minutes to hike back to the hotel, five more to repack and head down to the front desk to check out. Afterward, Lion asks the clerk if he can call him a cab.

  “You’re a cab.”

  “Funny.”

  While he waits out front, Lion digs the joint out of his sling-pack. He’s got almost twenty-four hours of nonstop air travel in front of him. Clicks his lighter.

  Sounds like an emergency to him.

  LOOKING FOR THE SHIT

  Lion’s first impression of Kuala Lumpur is traffic. By the airport, on the freeway, in the city. And now, an accident blocking the lane where they’re supposed to turn for the hotel. Looks like a Proton Saga executing a guillotine choke on a Honda Jazz, and two Malaysian men spitting insults at each o
ther across crumpled hoods. His driver, an elderly Indian in a black linen Nehru, has been furnishing a running translation.

  “Belacan, valiangkati,” he says, “Tricky in English. It means ‘shrimp paste who stands and watches while others work.’”

  “Shrimp paste?”

  “Maratel ooki,” he says, ignoring Lion’s question. “Easy one. Tree fucker.”

  “People do that here?”

  “Ju tou mo lo—brainless pig head.”

  It takes ten minutes to edge around the accident. His driver stays on Jalan Sultan Ismail for a few more blocks, then takes a left onto Jalan Raja something, and a right into a short maze of impossibly narrow side streets, the names of which go by too quickly for Lion to catch. He sees laundry strung up on makeshift clotheslines between neighboring apartment complexes that look one Richter hiccup away from total collapse. One thing for sure, between the chaos of the city and the relentless jet lag, he’s glad he asked Lorenzo for favor number one: Find him a driver in Kuala Lumpur who is discreet, takes cash, and will pick him up at the airport.

  The second favor involved finding him a hotel, one where he wouldn’t have to officially check in. Passport control will still have him landing in Kuala Lumpur—who knows if Jenka can drum up that bit of information—but it’s a big city, easy to get lost in, and if he’s not officially registered at a hotel, his ruse might be enough to keep him off Arctic’s radar.

  The driver screeches to a halt in front of a twelve-story gray building, its main entranceway up a short flight of concrete steps and beneath a curved awning made from bamboo. The Kuala Lumpur Journal, a boutique hotel, adjacent to a throng of kebab kiosks lining a small park. It’s the same hotel Lorenzo’s been staying at. With Hank’s connection to the owner, wasn’t a problem getting him a reservation under the band’s name.

  The lobby is eclectic art deco: blue cloth chairs surrounding low tables made of wood, brightly colored plastic radios tucked into little nooks, a shiny black marble floor. To his right, a white neon sign reads EAT WELL, TRAVEL OFTEN. To his left, a long black wall decorated with eighteen miniature barber poles, their stripes rotating beneath silver end caps and looking more like tired lava lamps than anything advertising a haircut.

  The third favor, the desk clerk informs him, is waiting for him when he checks in. Thank you, Charlotte. It’s an oversized bank envelope containing thirty thousand dollars, a sum advanced to him on the Arctic Amex, delivered to the hotel by messenger, and hopefully large enough to bribe Tajik Tabbara. Lion can’t be certain. The only thing he knows about Malaysian gangsters was gleaned from the appropriately named KL Gangster, which he watched on the flight over. Shirtless men, oiled up and wielding long knives. Also how he learned that the oil isn’t just decorative. It makes the combatant harder to grab, a street-fighting tactic disguised as a cheap cinematic effect—though, usually, it’s the other way round.

  The desk clerk points him toward the elevators, but he mishears the directions and finds himself dragging his carry-on up an iron spiral staircase, painted orange, and clunking with every step. He tops out one floor up, at the Shack, a rooftop beer garden, now closed. Bright yellow chairs stacked atop distressed wooden tables. Apparently also where the band has been playing, because Lion sees a makeshift stage in a far corner.

  A wave of fatigue when he realizes his mistake. T minus one minute. Back down the stairs and across the lobby to the elevators, and by the time he makes it to his room, sheep are counting him.

  No time for the fast unpack.

  Blurry visuals as he heads for the bed. Pale bamboo paneling on the walls, floor and desk. Covering nearly an entire wall, an enormous black-and-white photograph of dark men in white tunics crossing a city street. And the bed itself, thankfully, which executes a guillotine choke of its own the second he touches down.

  Hours later, he tries to get up. Hours and hours later, he actually succeeds.

  With a little help. A pounding on his door yanks him out of his slumber, snarling, “What the fuck,” upon opening it.

  “First of the Ninth was an old cavalry division that had cashed in their horses for choppers and gone tear-assing around ’Nam looking for the shit.”

  Lorenzo. Brown Carhartt work pants, brown cowboy shirt, brown cowboy boots, smiling.

  “Good to see you, man,” says Lion, stepping out into the hallway to wrap him up in a bear hug.

  “Get dressed,” says Lorenzo midsqueeze. “I’ve got to play a gig in like two hours. If you hurry, we can get stinking drunk first.”

  Lion looks down. He has no memory of undressing before he got into bed. But he does, now that he takes in the view, appear to be standing in the hotel’s hallway wearing nothing but his underwear.

  “Jesus,” he says, “I think I need to be conscious before I can get unconscious.”

  “That flight doesn’t fuck around.”

  “No,” stepping back into the room to slide into jeans and a T-shirt, “it does not.”

  “Not to worry,” says Lorenzo, reaching into the long pocket of his work pants, coming back with a vial of this, a vial of that, a couple of joints, a pile of reds, blues, and something that looks like Mickey Mouse cryopreserved in Jell-O. “I’ve got supplies.”

  “Shut the damn door,” says Lion. “Are you insane? Isn’t all of that a capital crime in this country? I heard the pilot announce that upon landing. On the plane, man, on the damn plane, they warned us that you get killed for that shit over here.”

  “They did,” says Lorenzo. “Standard practice. But, seriously, when in history did fear of death ever come between a man and his drugs?”

  “Fair point,” says Lion, plucking a joint from Lorenzo’s hand, shoving it between his lips, and looking around for his lighter.

  “Jesus, man, not in here. Are you fucking insane? Don’t you know what happens to druggies in Malaysia?”

  XING TEN

  Lorenzo leads him down the hallway to the elevators. Fast drop to the ground floor. On the way through the lobby, Lion sees a series of wrought-iron railway trellises hanging from the ceiling, three in a row beside the check-in counter. He didn’t notice them before. And back up the orange spiral staircase to the rooftop beer garden.

  Emerging into the open air, Lion feels a wave of Asian city noise wash over him. It’s different from American city noise, though he couldn’t say how exactly.

  The bar is bustling. A multinational array of coeds drinking cans of Tiger beer and smoking Mild Seven cigarettes interspersed with cocktail waitresses wearing early Pan Am stewardess costumes in their distinctive baby blue, though updated with some kind of liquid metal woven through the fabric. Also, those little round hats.

  They make it through the crowd and around the side of the stage, to a cordoned-off area, hidden behind a square of white curtains. “They built us a greenroom,” says Lorenzo, pushing through a break in the drapes. “It’s probably the safest spot in town to light that joint.”

  Lion follows Lorenzo through. He’d been hoping for a quiet place to talk shop and smoke up, a toehold in the firmament from which he could reel in the part of his soul that doesn’t understand transatlantic travel and maybe sort through his feelings about Penelope. What he gets is the entire band, Hank Mudd and the K-Holes, splayed out on couches and chairs. Sherlock and Scheherazade, the brother-and-sister duo responsible for rhythm guitar and keyboards respectively, sitting with their backs to him on a red leather deco couch, talking to Luke on horns and Kevin on drums, both in matching red leather armchairs. Luke doesn’t notice their arrival, but Kevin, skinny and dark-skinned, in a fedora and an old hobo suit, tips his hat to Lion.

  “Evening, Kevin,” he calls.

  Everyone turns to look at him.

  Hank, lead guitarist and vocals, his red hair combed into a rockabilly pompadour and wearing blue jeans, a studded belt, and a skintight black motorcycle jacket, actually a scooter jacket, as Lion sees a Vespa patch over his right breast, walks over and gives him a hug. Surprising too, as Hank
and Lion have not always seen eye-to-eye. Actually, rarely have they seen eye-to-anything. Hank’s a bow hunter, of the persuasion that killing animals is just fine if it takes skill. “You fucking sadist” is how Lion typically counters. But, hopefully, not tonight. So he returns the hug.

  “Haven’t seen you since?” says Hank, as they pull apart.

  “Alabama,” says Lion.

  “No, Venice,” says Lorenzo.

  “When did we play Italy?” asks Sherlock.

  “California,” says Lorenzo, “Dog-Town. Gig on the pier. Remember the pink-haired Japanese girl?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Sherlock.

  “Yeah, yeah, you stared at her so much you got two bars behind on ‘Stormy Monday,’” scowls Hank. “It was fuckin’ Wednesday by the time you caught up.”

  “Bygones be bygones,” says Lorenzo, walking over to the parapet, gazing at the nighttime traffic. He clicks his Zippo. A crackle as he lights the joint. Passes it to Lion. Beers follow. A couple of women follow the beers.

  Hank is chatting up a Vietnamese runway model. Sherlock talks to a new species of poly-tribe: rainbow leather bodice, tartan bondage pants, ghost-white goth makeup, Shiz-style red dread-hawk, and hundreds of miniature stars shaved into the side of her head, each with a tiny gem gleaming back from its center. Implants? Glued on? Hard to tell.

  And so goes the evening, at least for a while.

  Before things get too hazy on account of the jet lag, the shots of tequila Lorenzo made them do together, and the couple of beers Lion drank on his own, he decides to drill down into the details of Operation Tajik Tabbara.

  “How far away is Allah Bling?”

  “The store’s sort of tucked back behind Merdeka Square,” explains Lorenzo, “near the Bird Park. You’ve got to check out the park. Two words, ‘rhinoceros hornbill,’ like the bird walked right out of a DMT trip.”

  “What time do they open?”

  “The bird park? Ten A.M., I think, maybe earlier.”

  “Not the park. Allah Bling.”

  “Noon,” says Lorenzo, “but I did a little recon. Malaysian gangsters like to sleep in. Sometimes things don’t get going until one.”