by Neil Clarke
Three stories below me, Market Street was as empty as the rest of the city. Just a couple of plain janes in walking shoes and a granny in a blanket and sandals. She was sitting on the curb in front of a dead Starbucks, strumming street guitar for pocket change, hoping to find a philanthropist in hell. Her singing was faint but sweet as peach ice cream. My guy, talking ’bout my guy. Poor old bitch, I thought. There are no guys—not yours, not anyone’s. She stopped singing as a devil flapped over us, swooping for a landing on the next block. It had been a beautiful June morning until then, the moist promise of spring not yet broken by summer in our withered city. The granny struggled up, leaning on her guitar. She wrapped the blanket tight around her and trudged downtown.
My sidekick did chirp then, but it was Sharifa, my about-to-be ex-lover. She must have been calling from the hospital; she was wearing her light blue scrubs. Even on the little screen, I could see that she had been crying. “Hi, Fay.”
I bit my lip.
“Come home tonight,” she said. “Please.”
“I don’t know where home is.”
“I’m sorry about what I said.” She folded her arms tight across her chest. “It’s your body. Your life.”
I loved her. I was sick about being seeded, the abortion, everything that had happened between us in the last week. I said nothing.
Her voice was sandpaper on glass. “Have you had it done yet?” That made me angry all over again. She was wound so tight she couldn’t even say the word.
“Let me guess, Doctor,” I said, “‘Are we talking about me getting scrubbed?”
Her face twisted. “Don’t.”
“If you want the dirt,” I said, “you could always hire me to shadow myself. I need the work.”
“Make it a joke, why don’t you?”
“Okey-doke, Doc,” I said and clicked off. So my life was cocked—not exactly main menu news. Still, even with the window open, Sharifa’s call had sucked all the air out of my office. I told myself that all I needed was coffee, although what I really wanted was a rich aunt, a vacation in Fiji, and a new girlfriend. I locked the door behind me, slogged down the hall and was about to press the down button when the elevator chimed. The doors slid open to reveal George, the bot in charge of our building, and a devil—no doubt the same one that had just flown by. I told myself this had nothing to do with me. The devil was probably seeing crazy Martha down the hall about a tax rebate or taking piano lessons from Abby upstairs. Sure, and drunks go to bars for the peanuts.
“Hello, Fay,” said George. “This one had true hopes of finding you in your office.”
I goggled, slack-jawed and stupefied, at the devil. Of course, I’d seen them on vids and in the sky and once I watched one waddle into City Hall but I’d never been close enough to slap one before. I hated the devils. The elevator doors shivered and began to close. George stuck an arm out to stop them.
“May this one borrow some of your time?” George said.
The devil was just over a meter tall. Its face was the color of an old bloodstain and its maw seemed to kiss the air as it breathed with a wet, sucking sound. The wings were wrapped tight around it; the membranes had a rusty translucence that only hinted at the sleek bullet of a body beneath. I could see my reflection in its flat compound eyes. I looked like I had just been hit in the head with a lighthouse.
“Something is regrettable, Fay?” said George.
That was my cue for a wisecrack to show them that no invincible mass-murdering alien was going to intimidate Fay Hardaway.
“No,” I said. “This way.”
If they could’ve sat in chairs, there would’ve been plenty of room for us in my office. But George announced that the devil needed to make itself comfortable before we began. I nodded as I settled behind my desk, grateful to have something between the two of them and me. George dragged both chairs out into the little reception room. The devil spread its wings and swooped up onto my file cabinet, ruffling the hardcopy on my desk. It filled the back wall of my office as it perched there, a span of almost twenty feet. George wedged himself into a corner and absorbed his legs and arms until he was just a head and a slab of gleaming blue bot stuff. The devil gazed at me as if it were wondering what kind of rug I would make. I brought up three new icons on my desktop. New Case. Searchlet. Panic button.
“Indulge this one to speak for Seeren?” said George. “Seeren has a bright desire to task you to an investigation.”
The devils never spoke to us, never explained what they were doing. No one knew exactly how they communicated with the army of bots they had built to prop us up.
I opened the New Case folder and the green light blinked. “I’m recording this. If I decide to accept your case, I will record my entire investigation.”
“A thoughtful gesture, Fay. This one needs to remark on your client Rashmi Jones.”
“She’s not my client.” It took everything I had not to fall off my chair. “What about her?”
“Seeren conveys vast regret. All deaths diminish all.”
I didn’t like it that this devil knew anything at all about Rashmi, but especially that she was dead. I’d found the body in Room 103 of the Comfort Inn just twelve hours ago. “The cops already have the case.” I didn’t mind that there was a snarl in my voice. “Or what’s left of it. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“A permission, Fay?”
The icon was already flashing on my desktop. I opened it and saw a pix of Rashmi in the sleeveless taupe dress that she had died in. She had the blue ribbon in her hair. She was smiling, as carefree as a kid on the last day of school. The last thing she was thinking about was sucking on an inhaler filled with hydrogen cyanide. Holding her hand was some brunette dressed in a mannish chalk-stripe suit and a matching pillbox hat with a veil as fine as smoke. The couple preened under a garden arch that dripped with pink roses. They faced right, in the direction of the hand of some third party standing just off camera. It was an elegant hand, a hand that had never been in dishwater or changed a diaper. There was a wide silver ring on the fourth finger, engraved with a pattern or maybe some kind of fancy writing. I zoomed on the ring and briefly tormented pixels but couldn’t get the pattern resolved.
I looked up at the devil and then at George. “So?”
“This one notices especially the digimark,” said George. “Datestamped June 12, 2:52.”
“You’re saying it was taken yesterday afternoon?”
That didn’t fit—except that it did. I had Rashmi downtown shopping for shoes late yesterday morning. At 11:46 she bought a thirteen-dollar pair of this season’s Donya Durands and, now missing. At 1:23 she charged eighty-nine cents for a Waldorf salad and an iced tea at Maison Diana. She checked into the Comfort Inn at 6:40. She didn’t have a reservation, so maybe this was a spur of the moment decision. The desk clerk remembered her as distraught. That was the word she used. A precise word, although a bit high-brow for the Comfort Inn. Who buys expensive shoes the day she intends to kill herself? Somebody who is distraught. I glanced again at my desktop. Distraught was precisely what Rashmi Jones was not in this pix. Then I noticed the shoes: ice and taupe Donya Durands.
“Where did you get this?” I said to the devil.
It stared through me like I was a dirty window.
I tried the bot. I wouldn’t say that I liked George exactly, but he’d always been straight with me. “What’s this about, George? Finding the tommy?”
“The tommy?”
“The woman holding Rashmi’s hand.”
“Seeren has made this one well aware of Kate Vermeil,” said George. “Such Kate Vermeil takes work at 44 East Washington Avenue and takes home at 465 12th Avenue, Second Floor Left.”
I liked that, I liked it a lot. Rashmi’s mom had told me that her daughter had a Christer friend called Kate, but I didn’t even have a last name, much less an address. I tu
rned to the devil again. “You know this how?”
All that got me was another empty stare.
“Seeren,” I said, pushing back out of my chair, “I’m afraid George has led you astray. I’m the private investigator.” I stood to show them out. “The mind reader’s office is across the street.”
This time George didn’t ask permission. My desktop chirped. I waved open a new icon. A certified bank transfer in the amount of a thousand dollars dragged me back onto my chair.
“A cordial inducement,” said George. “With a like amount offered after the success of your investigation.”
I thought of a thousand dinners in restaurants with linen tablecloths. “Tell me already.” A thousand bottles of smoky scotch.
“This one draws attention to the hand of the unseen person,” said the bot. “Seeren has the brightest desire to meeting such person for fruitful business discussions.”
The job smelled like the dumpster at Fran’s Fish Fry. Precious little money changed hands in the pretend economy. The bots kept everything running, but they did nothing to create wealth. That was supposed to be up to us, I guess, only we’d been sort of discouraged. In some parts of town, that kind of change could hire a Felony 1, with a handful of Misdemeanors thrown in for good luck.
“That’s more than I’m worth,” I said. “A hundred times more. If Seeren expects me to break the arm attached to that hand, it’s talking to the wrong jane.”
“Violence is to be deplored,” said George. “However, Seeren tasks Fay to discretion throughout. Never police, never news, never even rumor if possible.”
“Oh, discretion.” I accepted the transfer. “For two large, I can be as discreet as the Queen’s butler.”
2.
I could’ve taken a cab, but they’re almost all driven by bots now, and bots keep nobody’s secrets. Besides, even though I had a thousand dollars in the bank, I thought I’d let it settle in for a while. Make itself at home. So I bicycled over to 12th Avenue. I started having doubts as I hit the 400 block. This part of the city had been kicked in the head and left bleeding on the sidewalk. Dark bars leaned against pawnshops. Board-ups turned their blank plywood faces to the street. There would be more bots than women in this neighborhood and more rats than bots.
The Adagio Spa squatted at 465 12th Avenue. It was a brick building with a reinforced luxar display window that was so scratched it looked like a thin slice of rainstorm. There were dusty plants behind it. The second floor windows were bricked over. I chained my bike to a dead car, set my sidekick to record and went in.
The rear wall of the little reception area was bright with pix of some Mediterranean seaside town. A clump of bad pixels made the empty beach flicker. A bot stepped through the door that led to the spa and took up a position at the front desk. “Good afternoon, Madam,” he said. “It’s most gratifying to welcome you. This one is called . . .”
“I’m looking for Kate Vermeil.” I don’t waste time on chitchat with bots. “Is she in?”
“It’s regrettable that she no longer takes work here.”
“She worked here?” I said. “I was told she lived here.”
“You was told wrong.” A granny filled the door, and then hobbled through, leaning on a metal cane. She was wearing a yellow flowered dress that was not quite as big as a circus tent and over it a blue smock with Noreen embroidered over the left breast. Her face was wide and pale as a hardboiled egg, her hair a ferment of tight gray curls. She had the biggest hands I had ever seen. “I’ll take care of this, Barry. Go see to Helen Ritzi. She gets another needle at twelve, then turn down the heat to 101.”
The bot bowed politely and left us.
“What’s this about then?” The cane wobbled and she put a hand on the desk to steady herself.
I dug the sidekick out of my slacks, opened the PI license folder and showed it to her. She read it slowly, sniffed and handed it back. “Young fluffs working at play jobs. Do something useful, why don’t you?”
“Like what?” I said. “Giving perms? Face peels?”
She was the woman of steel; sarcasm bounced off her. “If nobody does a real job, pretty soon the damn bots will replace us all.”
“Might be an improvement.” It was something to say, but as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. My generation was doing better than the grannies ever had. Maybe someday our kids wouldn’t need bots to survive.
Our kids. I swallowed a mouthful of ashes and called the pix Seeren had given me onto the sidekick’s screen. “I’m looking for Kate Vermeil.” I aimed it at her.
She peered at the pix and then at me. “You need a manicure.”
“The hell I do.”
“I work for a living, fluff. And my hip hurts if I stand up too long.” She pointed her cane at the doorway behind the desk. “What did you say your name was?”
The battered manicure table was in an alcove decorated with fake grapevines that didn’t quite hide the water stains in the drop ceiling. Dust covered the leaves, turning the plastic fruit from purple to gray.
Noreen rubbed a thumb over the tips of my fingers. “You bite your nails, or do you just cut them with a chainsaw?”
She wanted a laugh so I gave her one.
“So, nails square, round, or oval?” Her skin was dry and mottled with liver spots.
“Haven’t a clue.” I shrugged. “This was your idea.”
Noreen perched on an adjustable stool that was cranked low so that her face was only a foot above my hands. There were a stack of stainless steel bowls, a jar of Vaseline, a round box of salt, a bowl filled with packets of sugar stolen from McDonald’s, and a liquid soap dispenser on the table beside her. She started filing each nail from the corner to the center, going from left to right and then back. At first she worked in silence. I decided not to push her.
“Kate was my masseuse up until last week,” she said finally. “Gave her notice all of a sudden and left me in the lurch. I’ve had to pick up all her appointments and me with the bum hip. Some days I can’t hardly get out of bed. Something happen to her?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“But she’s missing.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know where she is, but that doesn’t mean she’s missing.”
Noreen poured hot water from an electric kettle into one of the stainless steel bowls, added cool water from a pitcher, squirted soap and swirled the mixture around. “You soak for five minutes.” She gestured for me to dip my hands into the bowl. “I’ll be back. I got to make sure that Barry doesn’t burn Helen Ritzi’s face off.” She stood with a grunt.
“Wait,” I said. “Did she say why she was quitting?”
Noreen reached for her cane. “Couldn’t stop talking about it. You’d think she was the first ever.”
“The first to what?”
The granny laughed. “You’re one hell of a detective, fluff. She was supposed to get married yesterday. Tell me that pix you’re flashing ain’t her doing the deed.”
She shuffled off, her white nursemate shoes scuffing against dirty linoleum. From deeper in the spa, I heard her kettle drum voice and then the bot’s snare. I was itching to take my sidekick out of my pocket, but I kept my hands in the soak. Besides, I’d looked at the pix enough times to know that she was right. A wedding. The hand with the ring would probably belong to a Christer priest. There would have been a witness and then the photographer, although maybe the photographer was the witness. Of course, I had tumbled to none of this in the two days I’d worked Rashmi Jones’s disappearance. I was one hell of a detective, all right. And Rashmi’s mom must not have known either. It didn’t make sense that she would hire me to find her daughter and hold something like that back.
“I swear,” said Noreen, leaning heavily on the cane as she creaked back to me, “that bot is scary. I sent down to City Hall for it just last week and already it knows my
business left, right, up, and down. The thing is, if they’re so smart, how come they talk funny?”
“The devils designed them to drive us crazy.”
“They didn’t need no bots to do that, fluff.”
She settled back onto her stool, tore open five sugar packets and emptied their contents onto her palm. Then she reached for the salt box and poured salt onto the sugar. She squirted soap onto the pile and then rubbed her hands together. “I could buy some fancy exfoliating cream but this works just as good.” She pointed with her chin at my hands. “Give them a shake and bring them here.”
I wanted to ask her about Kate’s marriage plans, but when she took my hands in hers, I forgot the question. I’d never felt anything quite like it; the irritating scratch of the grit was offset by the sensual slide of our soapy fingers. Pleasure with just the right touch of pain—something I’d certainly be telling Sharifa about, if Sharifa and I were talking. My hands tingled for almost an hour afterward.
Noreen poured another bowl of water and I rinsed. “Why would getting married make Kate want to quit?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something to do with her church?” Noreen patted me dry with a threadbare towel. “She went over to the Christers last year. Maybe Jesus don’t like married women giving backrubs. Or maybe she got seeded.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Everybody does eventually.”
I let that pass. “Tell me about Kate. What was she like to work with?”
“Average for the kind of help you get these sorry days.” Noreen pushed at my cuticles with an orangewood stick. “Showed up on time mostly; I could only afford to bring her in two days a week. No go-getter, but she could follow directions. Problem was she never really got close to the customers, always acting like this was just a pitstop. Kept to herself mostly, which was how I could tell she was excited about getting married. It wasn’t like her to babble.”
