Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

  I swallowed hard and tried to smile. There was a lot I wanted to ask, but Kornfeld seemed to like it better when I kept my mouth shut. There were healthier ways of advancing an investigation than trying to grill an inquisitor. I nudged the second triangle of sandwich with my thumb, and a shiny cube of egg white fell out onto the wax paper.

  "I've got nothing but respect for a private eye, really," said Morgenlander. He smiled at me, and his tongue looked like you could strike a match against it "You just have to know when to lay off," he explained. "This is when to lay off." He pushed himself wearily to his feet and shook out the sleeves of his coat.

  Kornfeld hadn't spoken a syllable during their visit. Now he took his hat off and said, "Good day" in a squeaky voice, then opened the door for Morgenlander. The big guy turned once in the doorway and gave me another view of his twisted smile. I held up my hand, palm out. They shut my door, and I listened as they shuffled through the outer office, past the rabbits, and back to the elevator, leaving me alone with my egg salad sandwich and a mouthful of questions.

  I turned to my window and rolled up the shade. The view faced east, but I could see the colors of the sunset reflected on the hills over Oakland, glints of sun studding the banner of windows opposite the bay, like bits of tinsel worked into a tapestry. Yeah, the hills looked pretty good, from a distance. I turned back to my desk, pushed the sandwich aside, and spilled some blend out onto the wooden desktop. I chopped it up with my pocketknife, and was bending over to sniff it up when the phone rang.

  "Metcalf," I said into the receiver.

  "It's me, Orton Angwine," said the voice on the line. "I need to talk to you."

  "That's fine," I said.

  "I hear you're working on the case," he said uncertainly.

  "Right. Why don't you come up to my office. I'll wait around."

  "No. I don't want to run into the inquisitors. You come to me."

  "I'm sure the inquisitors know where you are," I suggested gently. "You're the focus of a certain amount of attention."

  "No, I don't think so. I think I lost my tail. I'm in the bar of the Vistamont Hotel."

  "All right," I said. "Stay there." I hung up.

  I leaned down and sucked up the make on my desk, then put the half sandwich and the wax paper into the garbage pail. I took one last glance at the pinkish hills, then I pulled down the shade and went downstairs to find my car.

  CHAPTER 7

  I PULLED OVER TO THE CURB AND BOUGHT AN EVENING edition of the Oakland Photographic from a crabby old goat working a newsstand. The printed word had been dwindling in the news media, but it hadn't disappeared completely until a year ago, when it was outlawed. That did the trick. I double-parked and took a look at the paper. There were the usual captionless pictures of the government busy at work: the President shaking hands with the Inquisitor General, the congressmen shaking hands with the special-interest groups, the Governor shaking hands with Karmic Achiever of the Month. I flipped through to the local stories, and found a series of graphic photographs of the hotel room where Stanhunt had been killed. There was a chalk line indicating his sprawl across the carpet and a bloody smear on the hotel bedspread. The inquisitors were shown holding up a corner of the curtain, which had a bloody handprint, and then there was a picture of the corpse draped in white and being loaded into the back of a van. It reminded me of the standard photographs of the karma-defunct being shipped to the holding freezers for an indefinite term of storage. Same difference, I guess.

  The last photograph was Inquisitor Morgenlander waving an open hand and talking to someone out of the frame to his left. Inquisitor Kornfeld stood behind him, jaw clamped shut as usual. The gist of the story was that our noble inquisitors were on the job again, righting wrongs. It was a gross oversimplification. A murder didn't happen in a void, like some kind of hiccough. It was the outcome of an inexorable series of past events climaxing in the act, and with repercussions stretching into the future far beyond the usual inquisition. I listened to myself thinking this way and had to laugh. A murder was a garage sale. A murder was a stag party. A murder was a fire drill. A murder was whatever the Inquisitor's Office wanted it to be.

  I tossed the paper onto the passenger seat and started up into the hills. It was dark now. Ashby Avenue was quiei: and mostly scenic, and I let my mind wander freely over the events of the day, hoping for some fresh associations, but I didn't get anywhere except up into the hills. I'd just snorted my blend, and I guess the fresh Acceptol in my blood was dulling the necessary sense of outrage. I probably would have better spent the time listening to the car radio.

  The Vistamont Hotel was a high-class operation, a far cry from the kind of fleahouse Stanhunt had been unlucky enough to get himself nixed in. Killings, if they happened in the Vistamont at all, were probably peeled off the floor, fingerprints and all, and transferred to some less prestigious joint before the inquisitors were called. Who knew—maybe that was what happened to Stanhunt. The Vistamont was a place where rich folks stayed when they wanted to be able to say they had visited Oakland but didn't really want to dirty their shoes. It was big and labyrinthine, and contained enough different restaurants and spas to keep you from ever having to sample the big bad world outside.

  I parked the car in the Vistamont lot and tucked the newspaper under my arm. I figured the pictures might provoke some kind of response from a guilty party, whether he'd seen them before or not. Actually, they were probably strong enough meat to unsettle Angwine either way, but I was desperate for clues. I'm not known for my subtlety or tact.

  I paused to let the doorman give me the once-over. He was an elderly black human, one of the last you could see in a menial service job. Evolved animals filled pretty much any position they were capable of filling these days, but the Vistamont prided itself on stubborn traditions, and this was one of them. He gave me a nice smile and held open the door and I tipped my hat to him.

  The bar was a dark, sunken affair, with detached tables floating in the murk. The way to make a bundle in architecture right now was to devise new ways for people to pretend to gather while actually keeping their distance, and this was a sterling example. I stepped down into the pit and searched out Angwine. I had to admit that at least he'd found a good place to lose himself. I found him against the farthest wall, in a swivel chair at a table built for two. I slid into the chair opposite him, with my back to the wall. The chair was, plush, and I sank into it.

  "You took long enough," said Angwine, looking up. His face was less utterly ravaged, more hardened to the bitter realities of existence without the cushion of a few points of karma on his card.

  "You're not paying me for my time yet," I replied.

  Angwine snickered. "You like to keep it mercenary, don't you, Metcalf." He reached into his coat, pulled out an envelope, and tossed it onto the table between us. I picked it up.

  Inside was fourteen hundred dollars. "Today and tomorrow," he said when he knew I'd counted it.

  "Today was my own time. I'll take this as a retainer through Friday." I pocketed the cash and left the envelope on the table. I couldn't make out the address in the darkness, but it might be a mistake to take aboard anything that could be associated with Angwine.

  "That's optimistic," he, said glumly.

  "What is?"

  "Assuming you'll still have a job on Friday."

  "Actually, I don't understand why the inquisitors haven't hauled you in already. But the fact that we're talking right now is cause for a certain amount of optimism. Morgenlander is edgy. He doesn't have enough to sew it up, and it's bothering him."

  "He seemed pretty confident to me."

  "Don't sulk, Angwine. You're not used to dealing with the inquisitors. Morgenlander's just a middleman, ultimately. They went public with this one, and now the spotlight is on. There's pressure on him to deliver, but he's got to get it right, or at least make getting it wrong very convincing."

  "I don't understand."

  "Neither do I, but I propose to." I
tried to signal a waitress, but it was like trying to flag down a helicopter from inside a foxhole. "I'll find out who killed Stanhunt, and why. If you're guilty, I suggest you take your money back and spend it on drugs or women, real fast, because I'm in no position to cover for you."

  "I'm not guilty."

  I dropped the newspaper on the table, but the effect was lost in the darkness. "What've they got on you?" I asked.

  There was a pause. I looked into Angwine's face, but I couldn't read anything. "I threatened him," he said finally. "They've got a letter I wrote. But they're misinterpreting—"

  "Morgenlander said it was blackmail. Did you have something on Stanhunt?"

  "It was more personal than that. My sister worked for him, and it was ruining her life. I let him know how I felt about it."

  "Tell me more."

  "She's raising a child for him, a babyhead. It's a little monster—"

  "All babyheads are monsters," I said, and then I made a guess and knew I was right. "Is your sister named Pansy Greenleaf?"

  I'd gotten Angwine's attention, and maybe a little more of his respect. He leaned forward so his features were in the light. "That's right," he said. "You must have spoken with her already."

  "No, but I should have, and I will tomorrow if I can. Go on with your story."

  He slipped back into the shadows. "I'm less sure than I was at first," he said. "I think he got my sister pregnant and he's paying her to keep it quiet."

  "From the look of that house, it's a pretty nice deal for her," I said.

  "You don't understand. Before I left for L.A. my sister had some kind of life of her own. Now she's—cowering. She's afraid to tell me what's the matter. Stanhunt was treating her like some kind of puppet."

  "So you wanted to cut the strings," I suggested, "or collect some money not to."

  "Go on insulting me, Metcalf. Thanks a million."

  "You're welcome a thousand. Come on, Angwine. Your story doesn't look clean, even in the dim light of what little I've learned." Sometimes my source of metaphors is remarkably close at hand. "Morgenlander's got you pegged as a blackmailer, and Dr. Testafer showed the inquisitors your name in the appointment book, more than once. You and Stanhunt went for more than a stroll around the block together:"

  He folded his hands across the table like a schoolboy. "I went to visit him about what I said, originally. I got pretty worked up, called him names, trying to get a reaction." His hands twitched in a way that told me the recollection wasn't fiction. "But he didn't defend himself. He was obviously hiding something, and he practically forced the money on me."

  "Okay, slow down. So the two of you worked out some kind of compromise—you traded off your anger for cash in hand."

  "He tried to scare me—he said I was in 'deeper water' than I knew, and he asked me to go away. He could see that I was down and out, so he offered me money, which I took. It obviously didn't mean anything to him, but it made a big difference to me."

  "He made you part of the family. One of the puppets."

  "Go to hell."

  I smiled. "Where'd you come from, Angwine? Where did you study up on how to play the fall guy? You're the punch line to everybody's worst jokes."

  Questions are rude, and this was a question embedded in a morass of insults. I was surprised when he picked the question out and answered it straight, but I guess he was a desperate man.

  "I came up here from L.A.," he said soberly. "I spent six years in the Army, trying to work out a degree in military sociology, but I kept getting bounced by the military inquisitors. They were getting their toilets cleaned cheap, was how I started to see it. So I got out, with a bit of karma and a bit less cash. That's when I came up here to see my sister."

  "Where are you staying?"

  "I was with a friend in Palo Alto at first, then with my sister for a few nights, before Celeste Stanhunt moved in. Now, nowhere." He opened his hand as if to demonstrate. "Morgenlander made it clear I wasn't to go anywhere near the house on Cranberry Street. I've spent a couple of nights at the Y, but they've got a minimum karma requirement I can't pass anymore."

  I was warming up to him, but that was just the generic effect someone more pathetic than I am has on me. I was as predictable—and sloppy—as Pavlov's drooling mutts.

  A waitress finally looked at her map somewhere and figured out we were on it. She bent low over the table and asked if we wanted anything. I ordered a shot of tequila and told her to bring a mirror to the table. Angwine just shook his head in the darkness, and the waitress went away.

  I had a realization. "You're paying me with Stanhunt's money, aren't you?"

  He thought about it for a while, but decided on the truth. "Yeah. I suppose you're going to give it back and tell me to forget it again."

  "No," I said. "I just think it's funny. We've both been sucking at the same nipple, only now it's dry." I patted my pocket. "This the last?"

  "Just about."

  The waitress came back. She set down my drink, a small beveled pocket mirror, and a plastic snorting straw imprinted with the Vistamont logo and phone number. I paid her with a twenty, and while my wallet was out I unfolded a foil packet of my blend and laid it on the table. Halfway through chopping it up with my pocketknife, I looked up to see Angwine watching me intently.

  "You don't snort, do you?"

  "No."

  "The military?"

  "No. I just never did."

  I experienced another twinge of pity for the guy, but it was tempered with scorn. "You make a pretty humorous blackmailer, Angwine. Stanhunt was a Forgettol user, in a pretty big way. For you to go in there and threaten him without knowing what he knew or didn't know at the time—that's awfully stupid. The version you were talking to might not have even remembered who your sister was."

  I bent over and sniffed through the plastic tube, then leaned back and let the excess drain down the back of my throat. When I'd had enough, I wiped the mirror on my sleeve and pocketed the complimentary straw. Angwine must have spent the entire time working out a speech in his head, because when it came out, it sounded rehearsed.

  "It's just a sophisticated version of good cop/bad cop," he said.

  "What?"

  "You're not really working for me at all. You're just a shill for the inquisitors. You keep tabs on me and ask me questions. You play on my fears of them, but there's no real difference." He snickered. "It's just a game. They take my karma and you take my money and then the game is over. You like to act disenchanted and cynical, like you're something more than a cog in the machine, but it's just a pose." There was a hysterical rise in his voice, the sound of a man convincing himself. "You live and work under their protective wing, or else they'd cut you off."

  "You've got it wrong, Angwine. It's more complicated than that."

  "Sure it is," he said. "Tell me how." He had the look of a rabbit frightened into fierceness by dire circumstance.

  "First of all, I wouldn't have taken up your case if I didn't believe you when you first walked in. The inquisitors specialize in nifty solutions at the expense of the truth; that's one of the reasons I went private. You're right to observe a certain symbiosis in our relationship, but they're perfectly capable of enacting good cop/bad cop without my help and they know it. I've spent a lot of time figuring out why I'm tolerated by the Office and it's not simple, and I don't think I particularly want to try to explain it to you now.

  "Like I said the first time, you're not buying yourself a new best friend. I'm working for you, but you're not my boss, because I know better than you how to proceed. If I make you uncomfortable, well, join the local chapter of the lodge. You already paid membership dues. I learned a long time ago that my job consists of uncovering the secrets people keep from themselves as much or more than the ones they keep from each other."

  I let Angwine chew that over while I nursed my drink and took a look around. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dim lighting, and I could make out the other patrons of the bar at the far-off t
ables—but only just. I was a little surprised to see an evolved kangaroo drinking alone near the window, his furry face backlit with moonlight. He was staring at our table and looked away when I glared at him, but there was no way he could hear what we were saying and I wrote it off. The rules barring the evolved were slackening everywhere, and bigots like me were just going to have to get used to it.

  "I've thought it out," said Angwine. "I'm going to be frozen." I turned back to the table. He was a rabbit again, but not a fierce one. He was a frightened rabbit, frightened and tired.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's inevitable. You just aren't saying so, but I've thought it out and it's obvious. I should be preparing for it. I don't know the first thing about it."

  "It's pretty simple," I said. "They tag you and stack you up, and if you've got a good lawyer or a family member in a high place, then they keep good track of you and eventually you get defrosted. It's always worked that way as far as I can tell."

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  I tried not to make it too rough. "The only difference between prison and the freezer is that in prison you play cards and celebrate birthdays and build up a healthy resentment of society, whereas frozen you don't do any of that, and it's cheaper and cleaner for them to manage and pay for. You still come out stupid and poor and with your girlfriend hitched up to some other guy. But as for who gets off light and who pays for the whole menu, it's always been and always will be money and connections that decide it. Do you have someone who'll look out for you?"

  "My sister," he said feebly. "She's it."

  "No pals from L.A.? No army buddies?"

  "Not really."

  "Your sister isn't exactly in the clear," I pointed out. "Raising the kid of the man you're supposed to have killed. When's the last time you two spoke?"