Standard Hollywood Depravity--A Ray Electromatic Mystery

by Adam Christopher

  But the first thing I did was a surprise, even to myself. I watched myself in the mirror and I watched myself do it and I wondered all the time why I was doing it. Because the first thing I did was turn to face the first sink and look at myself in the mirror. And I told myself I was doing that because I had noticed that the top button of my coat had come undone again and I was just using the reflection to make sure I did it up right. The coat was extra large and the buttons were pretty big but I had fat fingers made of a magical steel and titanium alloy that federal scientists had spent five years and as many millions of dollars getting just right, and those fat fingers just hadn’t done the button up properly earlier.

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  I tugged at the button and I tugged at the buttonhole and I brought them toward a happy meeting. Afterward the coat felt tight.

  I paused and looked at myself and in the mirror I saw a man in a wheelchair and I heard a lot of noise and then both things were gone.

  Then I looked at myself and then I undid the top button and then all the rest and then I pulled the lapels of my coat apart. Underneath I was wearing a brown suit with yellow pinstripes and under that a cream shirt that had a nice weave to the cotton and a tie that was blue with a green stripe. I thought it all went rather well against my chassis, which was bronzed and the color of those sculptures by that guy who did sculptures in bronze.

  I didn’t know how I knew that. It was a memory. A nugget of knowledge wedged behind a bank of hot transistors. An echo of Professor Thornton, my creator, whose mind had been used as the template of my own. Maybe he liked bronze sculptures. Maybe he collected them.

  This happened sometimes. Echoes. Flashes. Sometimes it was little things, like the smell of pipe smoke and the feel of wool against the back of my neck and that feeling you get when someone you don’t know very well makes you a meal and you’re not sure they are a good cook and then it turns out they aren’t a good cook but a great cook and the meal is wonderful and you’re happy and relieved and eager for another glass of wine.

  Like I said. Little things.

  Sometimes the echoes were not so little. Echoes like a man in a wheelchair and a lot of noise and the feeling of heat and the feeling that my trench coat should button up just fine but it didn’t.

  Echoes like that make me feel something. I don’t know what that feeling is. I don’t have a name for it. It’s that feeling that’s like paranoia but isn’t. That feeling that there’s something else going on in the world that you don’t know about and you’re not sure if everyone else is in on it or not or has the same feeling.

  Maybe that is paranoia.

  I looked in the mirror and that feeling came and went like a lapping tide and I remembered a fire and someone talking in a language I didn’t know and someone talking with a voice that sounded like a chainsaw going through a stand of bamboo.

  And then it was gone. The tape in my chest wound ever onward.

  I blinked, or at least my optics did the mechanical equivalent, and I looked in the mirror and I realized I had not only unbuttoned my coat but my jacket and shirt too and I had pulled my tie to one side. I hoped that nobody had to use the facilities, because walking in on a robot taking a look at his own chassis was bound to make someone feel a little uncomfortable.

  But that’s what I was doing. Looking. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. There was my chest. Metal. Thick metal. Bulletproof, in fact. I was built for law enforcement, so that was probably a good idea. There was a lot of stuff going on underneath that shell that a bullet would be no good for at all.

  Most important was my memory tape. A high-density reel-to-reel magnetic record. It wasn’t my brain. That was sitting snugly behind my optics. It wasn’t my permanent store. That was a set of silicon chips on which were recorded Webster’s unabridged, the traffic regulations of California, the flags of the world, and the address of my tailor. Among other things.

  But the tapes were me because I was really just like anybody else, the sum total of my experiences and memories. Most of these were back at the office, in the storeroom behind the locked door. Only the last day’s worth of me was sitting in my chest.

  Something bugged me about that, so I did what I had to do and I took a look. Just to be sure. I undid the catch on the inside of my chest with a stray thought and popped the hinge and then my fingers did the rest.

  My chest swung open. The tape was there, behind the door, the reel reflected on the left slowly feeding the reel reflected on the right. There was some other stuff there too. Lights that flashed. Some switches. The master data port I used to plug myself into Ada back at the office and beside that a larger port that was my power inlet, which I used to charge myself back at the office when the day was done.

  The tape moved slowly and silently and a couple of lights flashed.

  I closed the door in my chest. Then I looked at the door itself. It was the same alloy as the rest of me but different. It wasn’t bronzed. It was still shiny silver.

  If I didn’t know any better I would have said it was new. It fitted snugly but it arched outward. Not by that much but enough to make my cotton shirt a tight fit, and by the time I’d buttoned the suit jacket up and then the trench coat over that, the top button of the coat was pulled tight. Not a lot. But just enough to draw the big button out of its home.

  I didn’t know if it was important. It probably wasn’t. I did all the buttons up and I straightened my tie.

  Then the echo flashed in front of my optics. The memory fragment of the fire, the movie theater, the someone in a wheelchair.

  “Okay,” I said to my reflection.

  Okay. Maybe I’d been damaged and Ada had had me repaired. Nothing wrong with that—quite the opposite. I looked at myself in the optics and let my optics focus on the scratch on my cheek. It wasn’t deep. It curved down like a sickle. I liked it, in a way. It wasn’t that noticeable but if you did notice it you might call it distinctive. I remembered something about the noblemen of Germany working real hard on getting a facial scar from fencing back in the old days. Classy.

  I guess Thornton had read a history book sometime.

  I made a note to ask Ada about it. If I remembered, which, given the amount of tape left on my reel, was perhaps unlikely. So as I turned from the mirror and surveyed the cubicles I pulled a small yellow legal pad from one coat pocket and a mechanical pencil from the other and as I walked toward the only cubicle that had a closed door I made a note to myself to ask Ada about the repair. I don’t know why I wanted to know, but I did, so I didn’t argue.

  When I got to the cubicle with the closed door I stowed the pad and the pencil and then I pushed the cubicle door open. What I saw beyond the door made me stop thinking about my new chest panel and returned my attention to where it was supposed to be.

  On Honey.

  The man’s body was lying on the floor of the cubicle. He was wearing a suit. He was lying on his back and he was shoved up against the bottom of the toilet so his chin was pressed against his chest and his arms were up and dangling and the best description for his legs was “akimbo.” It didn’t look very comfortable but I figured he didn’t mind on account of the hole in the middle of his forehead and the fair amount of red liquid leaking out from behind him down the toilet pedestal. The hole in his head was small and I didn’t need to check the caliber. I patted my inside coat pocket and felt the mouse gun Honey had ditched in the Dumpster.

  I took a snap of the body. I didn’t much feel like touching it. I didn’t much feel like being caught standing over it either. If the club was filled with patrons of a criminal disposition and they found a strange robot standing over the body of one of their buddies I was fairly sure they wouldn’t be too happy about it.

  Being a hit man—hit robot—is an interesting business. It requires a certain level of what I like to call not being caught. There were ways to avoid that particular outcome and I liked to think I was pretty good at a few of them. I had several advantages in my f
avor. I didn’t leave fingerprints, for a start.

  But there was a strange thing about being a robot. Being the last robot. And that was that if people did see me, they filed themselves neatly into one of two groups: they were either pleased to see me, or they weren’t.

  Those who were pleased usually expressed that pleasure with smiles and folded arms. Admiration from a safe distance. Those who didn’t like me just kept away. They grimaced and frowned and some even shuddered, and then they turned away, man, woman, and child. It was like it was a natural reaction. An instinct that could be inherited and could not be controlled by the conscious mind.

  There was even a word for it: robophobia. Ultimately it was robophobia that got the federal robot program cancelled, my permanent memory store told me. Some people liked robots but most people didn’t. And most people were voters and voters are a slice of the population that people in power like to keep happy.

  So the robots came and the robots went and the world kept on turning.

  But the last robot in the world getting caught standing over the body of a gangster in the restroom of a famous club on Sunset Strip was just going to make my job a whole lot harder than it was already and I hadn’t even killed the guy.

  No. Honey had.

  So I left and I left quickly.

  I had a call to make.

  5

  Someone else was using the phone. The man had taken his hat off and had ducked under the green plastic dome and as he spoke he looked around like a deep-sea diver on a great underwater adventure.

  I parked myself by the coat check and pulled down the corner of my hat. The coat-check girl was back and hard at work with her ifle. The man on the phone glanced at me, but then he turned his back and he kept talking.

  I turned my audio receptors up and I heard the man say the following sequence of words into the mouthpiece of the telephone:

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  I assumed there was a voice on the other end of the line but I couldn’t hear it. I tried to, but when I turned my audio receptors up all I got was the scratch of the coat-check girl’s nail file.

  Then the man in the green dome nodded and hung up. He had turned back around to face me and he stood there for a moment, staring at me through the misty green. Then he ducked out of the dome and without taking his eyes off me he put his hat on and he pulled it down over his forehead. It looked a little small and he tugged it twice but it just stayed floating where it was. Hat like that was bound to give him a headache.

  He walked over to me and he leaned on the other end of the coat-check counter. The girl stopped filing her nails and looked at him and he gave her a look that I would have called lewd. Her only reaction was to bend her head back to the task at hand. Then the man sniffed and he nodded at the top of the girl’s head but it was clear he was talking to me.

  “Saw you before,” he said.

  I frowned on the inside. When I didn’t answer the man glanced up at me from beneath the brim of his hat and that same brim dipped as he gave me a nod as tight as his hatband.

  “You from out East?”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t from out East but I didn’t quite want to tell him that.

  The man nodded toward the telephone. “Heard you talking earlier. Thought you might be from Tieri’s mob.”

  He’d heard me talking. That was careless of me. Of course, I should have realized—the men assembled in the club might have been watching the dancers but they were also watching each other. Listening to each other.

  And that included me because in the dark I was easy to mistake for one of their number. So he had heard me on the telephone, which meant he had heard my accent. Perfect, artificially programmed Brooklyn. Or so I’ve been told. I’ve never been east of the Sierras. Or so I’ve been told.

  But I said, “That I am, pal,” in a quiet voice while I contemplated the fact that a man named Tieri from New York had gone to the trouble of sending someone out to a club in Hollywood on a weeknight. I needed to talk to Ada to see if she’d found out more about the kind of business that was going on here and this guy in the too-small hat was currently stopping me from doing just that.

  “Figured,” said the man. He returned his attention to the top of the coat-check girl’s head and he cocked his own as he watched her work on her nails. “I hope you brought a good deal of dough with you. Word is it’ll go north of a cool million.”

  The man made a sound with his tongue behind his teeth that wasn’t a bad imitation of a small caliber round exiting the barrel of a mouse gun like the one I’d liberated from the Dumpster. I guess he’d heard a few of those in his time.

  I glanced over to the front door of the club and I wondered if Honey had come back in yet.

  I looked back at the man and I made a similar kind of sound. What I actually did was play him back a recording of himself, the pitch lowered just a hair.

  The man liked this. He nodded. Then he seemed to change his mind and he shook his head. “Falzarano, am I right?” He shook his head again. “It’s always like this when he’s around. I mean, where does he get it from, eh? It’s like he’s a gangster or something.”

  I said nothing. The man looked at me. Then he laughed and he reached forward and he slapped me on the arm. Then he withdrew the hand and shook it a little like my arm had been a little harder than he expected.

  “Hey, pal, I like you. I like you a lot. Tell Tieri I said hello. He’s a great guy, great guy. Hey, I’ll come see him soon. You tell Tieri that. Tell him to break out the Chianti, huh? Huh?”

  Then he spun on his heel and he headed back toward the big double doors. “I’ll see you in there,” he said without turning around. And then the doors swung and he was gone.

  I stayed where I was next to the coat check. I didn’t have lips but I pretended to purse them like I’d seen people do on television. Or maybe it was Thornton who had watched TV. Whatever the case, it seemed to help with the process of thinking.

  Then I walked over to the telephone booth. When I got there I lifted the receiver off the cradle and then I turned around to the coat-check girl. She was still leaning on her counter but now the file was still and she was looking at me.

  “We’re out of milk,” she said. “And motor oil.” She smiled.

  “Cute,” I said, and then I put the telephone back on the cradle. I put both hands in the pockets of my coat and then I used an elbow to point toward the club doors. “You know who that guy was?”

  The coat-check girl shrugged. “Never seen him.”

  More of that lip pursing went on behind the flat immobile metal plates that made up my face. I liked the feeling so I kept doing it.

  “Don’t tell me, you never seen any of the others before either, right?”

  The girl straightened up and she smiled. “A girl has to earn a living somehow,” she said. “I’m hardly mining gold here.”

  She had a point. I nodded at her and she smiled again. Then she nodded. We seemed to have reached an understanding and she turned and disappeared.

  I pulled the telephone back to the side of my head and I dialed the number that was soldered into my permanent store. The line rang, then clicked, then went dead. That was how it worked. Contact had been established and nobody could break in on the line for a listen. Ada and I spoke to each other via an encoded signal. Not even the FBI could hear what we said.

  “I think I need a TV for the office,” said Ada.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Y’know,” she said, “what with you out most nights, a girl gets lonely. And a TV is less work than knitting. Or petting a cat.”

  I glanced over a shoulder and aimed an audio receptor at the doors that led to the dance floor. Just then the kick drum was kicked and a symbol crashed and the Hit List were back on the st
age.

  I turned back around. “Did you get the pictures?” I asked.

  I heard a tinkle that was the unmistakable sound of someone stirring a cup of coffee with a spoon and then there was a clatter like that spoon had been put down on a hard dull surface. I made a note to check the desk in the office for stains.

  “I got them,” said Ada, “but you’re not going to win the Pulitzer. The composition is lousy and you can forget about the lighting, believe me.”

  “Thanks for the critique. Did you make any of them?”

  Ada laughed. It was light and airy like someone laughing at a dinner party before crushing the olive from their dry martini between two molars.

  “You were right,” she said. “A finer bunch of no-good hoods you will hardly find in the greater Los Angeles area. In fact, you wouldn’t find any at all, as they all seem to be at the club.”

  “So I was right? They’re villains?”

  “I can name six out of seven.”

  “Care to share?”

  “It’s not the individual names that are of interest,” she said. “It’s who they represent.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “One of those they represent is a guy called Tieri who operates out of New York City.”

  “Sounds like I didn’t quite wipe all of the detective programming from your memory banks. I’m going to have to do some more tinkering. Tieri is a big name out east. Where did you hear about him?”

  “I met a guy.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Here, at the club. He thinks I’m from Tieri’s mob.”

  “Now, that’s fairly interesting,” said Ada. “Is he in one of the snaps you sent?”

  “I think so. Who else did you pick?”

  I could have sworn I heard the sound of sliding papers. Heavy papers. Photographic paper. Like there was someone in my office right now playing solitaire at the desk with my pictures.

  “Well, now, we’ve got two boys who work for a guy called Malone. We’ve got two more boys who work for a guy called Pavone.”