Count Zero

by William Gibson

  There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment’s numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had arrived, leaving you to wait there in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. “Alain?” Nothing.

  She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoon’s watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. “Cher Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly.” As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse. She found the flat little green tin flashlight she’d carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit . . .

  And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two levels below. She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for centuries: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a diabetic syringe . . . She held the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she clicked off her light.

  “Damn you,” she said. “O Jesus.”

  She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.

  Rapping on the door again. It was pressboard, laminated with a ghastly imitation of rosewood, the lithographed grain just visible in the light from the long corridor’s single strip of biofluorescence. “Damn you. Alain? Alain!” The myopic fisheye of the door’s little spyglass looking through her, blank and vacant. The corridor held a horrible smell, embalmed cooking odors trapped in synthetic carpeting.

  Trying the door, knob turning, the cheap brass greasy and cold, and the bag of money suddenly heavy, the strap cutting into her shoulder. The door opening easily. A short stretch of orange carpet flecked with irregular rectangles of salmon-pink, decades of dirt ground into it in a clearly defined track by thousands of tenants and their visitors . . .

  “Alain?” The smell of black French cigarettes, almost comforting . . .

  And finding him there in that same watery light, silver light, the other tower blocks featureless, beyond a rectangle of window, against pale rainy sky, where he lay curled like a child on the hideous orange carpet, his spine a question mark beneath the taut back of his bottle-green velour jacket, his left hand spread above his ear, white fingers, faintest bluish tint at the base of his nails.

  Kneeling, she touched his neck. Knew. Beyond the window, all the rain sliding down, forever. Cradling his head, legs open, holding him, rocking, swaying, the dumb sad animal keening filling the bare rectangle of the room. . . . And after a time, becoming aware of the sharp thing under her palm, the neat stainless end of a length of very fine, very rigid wire, that protruded from his ear and between the spread cool fingers.

  Ugly, ugly, that was no way to die; it got her up, anger, her hands like claws. To survey the silent room where he had died. There was no sense of him there, nothing, only his ragged attaché. Opening that, she found two spiral notebooks, their pages new and clean, an unread but very fashionable novel, a box of wooden matches, and a half-empty blue packet of Gauloise. The leather-bound agenda from Browns was gone. She patted his jacket, slid fingers through his pockets, but it was gone.

  No, she thought, you wouldn’t have written it there, would you? But you could never remember a number or an address, could you? She looked around the room again, a weird calm overtaking her. You had to write things down, but you were secretive, and you didn’t trust my little book from Browns, no; you’d meet a girl in some café and write her number in a matchbook or on the back of some scrap, and forget it, so that I found it weeks later, straightening up your things.

  She went into the tiny bedroom. There was a bright red folding chair and a slab of cheap yellow foam that served as a bed. The foam was marked with a brown butterfly of menstrual blood. She lifted it, but there was nothing there.

  “You’d have been scared,” she said, her voice shaking with a fury she didn’t try to understand, her hands cold, colder than Alain’s, as she ran them down the red wallpaper, striped with gold, seeking some loose seam, a hiding place. “You poor stupid shit. Poor stupid dead shit . . .”

  Nothing. Back into the living room, and amazed, somehow, that he hadn’t moved; expecting him to jump up, hello, waving a few centimeters of trick wire. She removed his shoes. They needed resoling, new heels. She looked inside, felt the lining. Nothing. “Don’t do this to me.” And back into the bedroom. The narrow closet. Brushing aside a clatter of cheap white plastic hangers, a limp shroud of drycleaner’s plastic. Dragging the stained bedslab over and standing on it, her heels sinking into the foam, to slide her hands the length of a pressboard shelf, and find, in the far corner, a hard little fold of paper, rectangular and blue. Opening it, noticing how the nails she’d done so carefully were chipped, and finding the number he’d written there in green feltpen. It was an empty Gauloise packet.

  There was a knock at the door.

  And then Paco’s voice: “Marly? Hello? What has happened?”

  She thrust the number into the waistband of her jeans and turned to meet his calm, serious eyes.

  “It’s Alain,” she said, “he’s dead.”

  19

  HYPERMART

  HE SAW LUCAS for the last time in front of a big old department store on Madison Avenue. That was how he remembered him, after that, a big black man in a sharp black suit, about to step into his long black car, one black, softly polished shoe already on the lush carpet of Ahmed’s interior, the other still on the crumbling concrete of the curb.

  Jackie stood beside Bobby, her face shadowed by the wide brim of her gold-hung fedora, an orange silk headscarf knotted at the back of her neck.

  “You take care of our young friend, now,” Lucas said, pointing the knob of his cane at her. “He’s not without his enemies, our Count.”

  “Who is?” Jackie asked.

  “I’ll take care of myself,” Bobby said, resenting the idea of Jackie being seen as more capable, yet at the same time knowing that she almost certainly was.

  “You do that,” Lucas said, the knob swinging, lined up now with Bobby’s eyes. “Sprawltown’s a twisty place, my man. Things are seldom what they seem.” To illustrate his point, he did something to the cane that caused the long brass splines below the ball to open smoothly, for an instant, silently, extended like the ribs of an umbrella, each one glinting sharp as a razor, pointed like needles. Then they were gone, and Ahmed’s wide door swung shut with an armor-plated thud.

  Jackie laughed. “Shee-it. Lucas still carryin’ that killin’ stick. Bigtime lawyer now, but the street leaves a mark on you. Guess it’s a good thing . . .”

  “Lawyer?”

  She looked at him. “You never mind, honey. You just come with me, do like I tell
you, you be okay.”

  Ahmed merged with the sparse traffic, a pedicab jockey blaring pointlessly at the receding brass bumper with a hand-held air horn.

  Then, one manicured, gold-ringed hand on his shoulder, she led him across the sidewalk, past a sleeping huddle of rag-bundled transients, and into the slowly waking world of Hypermart.

  Fourteen floors, Jackie said, and Bobby whistled. “All like this?” She nodded, spooning brown crystals of rock sugar into the tan foam atop her coffee glass. They sat on scrolly castiron stools at a marble counter in a little booth, where a girl Bobby’s age, her hair dyed and lacquered into a kind of dorsal fin, worked the knobs and levers of a big old machine with brass tanks and domes and burners and eagles with spread chrome wings. The countertop had been something else, originally; Bobby saw where one end was bashed off in a long crooked jag to allow it to fit between two green-painted steel pillars.

  “You like it, huh?” She sprinkled the foam with powdered cinnamon from a heavy old glass shaker. “ ’Bout as far from Barrytown as you been, some ways.”

  Bobby nodded, his eyes confused by the thousand colors and textures of the things in the stalls, the stalls themselves. There seemed to be no regularity to anything, no hint of any central planning agency. Crooked corridors twisted off from the area in front of the espresso booth. There seemed to be no central source of lighting either. Red and blue neon glowed beyond the white hiss of a Primus lantern, and one stall, just being opened by a bearded man with leather pants, seemed to be lit with candles, the soft light reflecting off hundreds of polished brass buckles hung against the reds and blacks of old rugs. There was a morning rattle to the place, a coughing and a clearing of throats. A blue Toshiba custodial unit whirred out of a corridor, dragging a battered plastic cart stacked with green plastic bales of garbage. Someone had glued a big plastic doll head to the Toshiba’s upper body segment, above the clustered camera eyes and sensors, a grinning blue-eyed thing once intended to approximate the features of a leading stimstar without violating Sense/Net copyrights. The pink head, its platinum hair bound up in a length of pale blue plastic pearls, bobbed absurdly as the robot rolled past. Bobby laughed.

  “This place is okay,” he said, and gestured to the girl to refill his cup.

  “Wait a sec, asshole,” the countergirl said, amiably enough. She was measuring ground coffee into a dented steel hopper on one end of an antique balance. “You get any sleep last night, Jackie, after the show?”

  “Sure,” Jackie said, and sipped at her coffee. “I danced their second set, then I slept at Jammer’s. Hit the couch, you know?”

  “Wish I’d got some. Every time Henry sees you dance, he won’t let me alone . . .” She laughed, and refilled Bobby’s cup from a black plastic thermos.

  “Well,” Bobby said, when the girl was busy again with the espresso machine, “what next?”

  “Busy man, huh?” Jackie regarded him coolly from beneath the gold-pinned hat brim. “Got places you need to go, people to see?”

  “Well, no. Shit. I just mean, well, is this it?”

  “Is what it?”

  “This place. We’re staying here?”

  “Top floor. Friend of mine named Jammer runs a club up there. Very unlikely anyone could find you there, and even if they do, it’s a hard place to sneak up on. Fourteen floors of mostly stalls, and a whole lot of these people sell stuff they don’t have out in plain view, right? So they’re all very sensitive to strangers turning up, anyone asking questions. And most of them are friends of ours, one way or another. Anyway, you’ll like it here. Good place for you. Lots to learn, if you remember to keep your mouth shut.”

  “How am I gonna learn if I don’t ask questions?”

  “Well, I mean keep your ears open, more like it. And be polite. Some tough people in here, but you mind your biz, they’ll mind theirs. Beauvoir’s probably coming by here late this afternoon. Lucas has gone out to the Projects to tell him whatever you learned from the Finn. What did you learn from the Finn, hon?”

  “That he’s got these three dead guys stretched out on his floor. Says they’re ninjas.” Bobby looked at her. “He’s pretty weird . . .”

  “Dead guys aren’t part of his usual line of goods. But, yeah, he’s weird all right. Why don’t you tell me about it? Calmly, and in low, measured tones. Think you can do that?”

  Bobby told her what he could remember of his visit to the Finn. Several times she stopped him, asked questions he usually wasn’t able to answer. She nodded when he first mentioned Wigan Ludgate. “Yeah,” she said, “Jammer talks about him, when he gets going on the old days. Have to ask him . . .” At the end of his recitation, she was lounging back against one of the green pillars, the hat very low over her dark eyes.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Interesting,” she said, but that was all she’d say.

  “I want some new clothes,” Bobby said when they’d climbed the immobile escalator to the second floor.

  “You got any money?” she asked.

  “Shit,” he said, his hands in the pockets of the baggy, pleated jeans. “I don’t have any fucking money, but I want some clothes. You and Lucas and Beauvoir are keeping my ass on ice for something, aren’t you? Well, I’m tired of this God-awful shirt Rhea palmed off on me, and these pants always feel like they’re about to fall off my ass. And I’m here because Two-a-Day, who’s a lowlife fuck, wanted to risk my butt so Lucas and Beauvoir could test their fucking software. So you can fucking well buy me some clothes, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, after a pause. “I’ll tell you what.” She pointed to where a Chinese girl in faded denim was furling the sheets of plastic that had fenced a dozen steel-pipe garment racks hung with clothing. “You see Lin, there? She’s a friend of mine. You pick out what you want, I’ll straighten it out between Lucas and her.”

  Half an hour later, he emerged from a blanket-draped fitting room and put on a pair of Indo-Javanese mirrored aviator glasses. He grinned at Jackie. “Real sharp,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah.” She did a thing with her hand, a fanning movement, as though something nearby were too hot to touch. “You didn’t like that shirt Rhea loaned you?”

  He looked down at the black T-shirt he’d chosen, at the square holodecal of cyberspace on his chest. It was done so you seemed to be punching fast-forward through the matrix, grid lines blurring at the edges of the decal. “Yeah. It was too tacky . . .”

  “Right,” Jackie said, taking in the tight black jeans, the heavy leather boots with spacesuit-style accordion folds at the ankles, the black leather garrison belt trimmed with twin lines of pyramidal chrome studs. “Well, I guess you look more like the Count. Come on, Count, I got a couch for you to sleep on, up in Jammer’s place.”

  He leered at her, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of the black Levis.

  “Alone,” she added, “no fear.”

  20

  ORLY FLIGHT

  PACO SLUNG THE Citroen-Dornier down the Champs, along the north bank of the Seine, then up through Les Halles. Marly sank back into the astonishingly soft leather seat, more beautifully stitched than her Brussels jacket, and willed her mind to blankness, lack of affect. Be eyes, she told herself. Only eyes, your body a weight pressed evenly back by the speed of this obscenely expensive car. Humming past the Square des Innocents, where whores dickered with the drivers of cargo hovers in bleu de travail, Paco steering effortlessly through the narrow streets.

  “Why did you say, ‘Don’t do this to me’?” He took his hand from the steering console and tapped his ear-bead into position.

  “Why were you listening?”

  “Because that is my job. I sent a woman up, up into the tower opposite his, to the twenty-second floor, with a parabolic microphone. The phone in the apartment was dead; otherwise, we could have used that. She went up, broke into a vacant unit on the west face of the tower, and aimed her microphone in time to hear you say, ‘Don’t do this to me.’ And you were alone?”

  �
�Yes.”

  “He was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you say it, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who did you feel was doing something to you?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps Alain.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Being dead? Complicating matters? You tell me.”

  “You are a difficult woman.”

  “Let me out.”

  “I will take you to your friend’s apartment . . .”

  “Stop the car.”

  “I will take you to—”

  “I’ll walk.”

  The low silver car slid up to the curb.

  “I will call you, in the—”

  “Good night.”

  “You’re certain you wouldn’t prefer one of the spas?” asked Mr. Paleologos, thin and elegant as a mantis in his white hopsack jacket. His hair was white as well, brushed back from his forehead with extreme care. “It would be less expensive, and a great deal more fun. You’re a very pretty girl . . .”

  “Pardon?” Jerking her attention back from the street beyond the rain-streaked window. “A what?” His French was clumsy, enthusiastic, strangely inflected.

  “A very pretty girl.” He smiled primly. “You wouldn’t prefer a holiday in a Med cluster? People your own age? Are you Jewish?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Jewish. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “You have the cheekbones of a certain sort of elegant young Jewess. . . . I’ve a lovely discount on fifteen days to Jerusalem Prime, a marvelous environment for the price. Includes suit rental, three meals per diem, and direct shuttle from the JAL torus.”

  “Suit rental?”

  “They haven’t entirely established atmosphere, in Jerusalem Prime,” Mr. Paleologos said, shuffling a stack of pink flimsies from one side of his desk to the other. His office was a tiny cubicle walled with hologram views of Poros and Macau. She’d chosen his agency for its evident obscurity, and because it had been possible to slip in without leaving the little commercial complex in the metro station nearest Andrea’s.