Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

  This case was like some kind of invasive malignancy. It filled whatever space it was given, and worse, blended itself into the healthy tissue so you didn't know where to make the cut. It had blended itself into my life. I'd already lost most of my karma to it, and my client was already frozen and shipped. I thought about Celeste Stanhunt and Catherine Teleprompter and decided it was also fair to say I'd lost my sense of objectivity.

  With that cheery thought I put away the mirror, closed up the glove compartment, and started the car. It was time to find the babyheads. One in particular.

  CHAPTER 20

  TELEGRAPH AVENUE IN OAKLAND WAS A DUMP, AND IF there was an exception to that rule, the babybar on 23rd Street wasn't it. The bar took up the bottom floor of an abandoned transient hotel, and the facade of the building was brownstone eroding into dust, like some kind of urban archaeological dig. The windows above the storefront were boarded up or sealed with sheets of tin, and the long narrow window of the bar itself was crammed full of dusty cardboard Santas and wreaths of archaic tinsel. The babyheads were reputed to sleep upstairs in the hotel when they didn't feel like going home to their parents—and judging from what I'd seen at Cranberry Street, they didn't go home to their parents very often. I was hoping to find Barry Greenleaf at the bar, and I was hoping he wouldn't be too soused to talk. If Barry was like the other babyheads I'd met in my work, he was drinking himself to death trying to counteract the unpleasant side effects of the evolution therapy he'd undergone, and in a babybar the drinking started early.

  There weren't any signs of life beyond the glimmer of lights in the window and the creaky strains of music seeping out to where I stood in the street, but compared to the surrounding neighborhood it seemed almost inviting. I stepped into the shadow of the entrance and tried the door. It was locked. I rattled the handle, and the door opened a crack and a bahyhead looked up at me from behind it, his distended bald head gleaming with reflections from the barroom behind him. He was dressed in a toddler's red jumper with a little embroidered yellow fish on the chest, and he had a cig-. arette tucked behind his ear. "Let's see some ID," he said gruffly, in a high-pitched voice.

  "What?"

  "ID, pal. You look over-age to me."

  I showed my license. He took it and shut the door, and I heard the bolt slide back into place.

  After a couple of minutes it occurred to me that I'd just given away the same piece of paper that last night I roughed up an inquisitor to keep. I knocked a few times with my knuckles, then slapped at the door with the flat of my hand, and then I started kicking it.

  I was getting ready to bust it down with my shoulder when the door opened again. A different babyhead appeared in the space and said: "You ought to cut that out."

  I grabbed the edge of the door and forced myself past him, into the gloom of the babybar.

  A row of shiny heads at the bar turned as I stumbled in, and clusters of them bobbed at the table. The place was lousy with babyheads, more than I'd ever seen in one place at a time, more than I really wanted to believe existed. The interior of the bar, like the window, was draped with dusty, out-of-date holiday decorations, obviously leftovers from the bar's previous life: a red-faced Irishman guzzling a mug of draft which never emptied, a winking, leering Santa with an unhappy reindeer in tow, and a New Year's banner that read 2008! LOVE IT OR DRINK AT AL'S. The fluorescent fixtures were carpeted with dust, and the one behind the bar flickered lazily, scattering flashes of light and shadow across the ceiling like an ambulance parked in a narrow alley. Music oozed out of the back room.

  I scanned the place for the babyhead who'd made off with my license, but he wasn't in the room, or if he was, I couldn't pick him out of the crowd. The kid I'd bowled over coming in was back on his feet, and he scooted around me from behind like I was a pylon in the middle of the road, and disappeared into the back room.! went and sat down at the bar. Conversation in the room hadn't been impressive; now it stopped completely.

  "Whiskey and soda," I said.

  The babyhead behind the bar was elevated to my level by a crudely constructed ramp, and he moved over to where I was sitting and put his face in front of mine.

  "You've got no business here," he said sneeringly, his smooth, elongated brow wrinkling in exaggerated disgust.

  "If I didn't before, I do now," I said. "One of you kids took my license. I need it back."

  "What type of license?"

  "Private inquisitor."

  By now the whole room was listening. I could hear the stirring of little feet behind me. I considered the possibility of a physical confrontation with a roomful of babyheads all clinging to my legs and climbing on my back, and decided I wanted to avoid it. The image of piranhas kept coming up.

  "A question asker," said the bartender. "That's delicious. We don't need your license, Mr. Inquisitor. Take it somewhere else. We don't need a license to ask questions. We ask questions any time and any place we like." The kid smirked, and his eyes bugged under the hood of his forehead.

  "Congratulations," I said. "Big fucking deal."

  There wasn't any answer. I took another one of Angwine's hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and tore it in half on the counter, then put half back in my shirt pocket, but slow, making sure everybody got a good look. Then I wiped my brow with my sleeve and crossed my legs, to draw the moment out. "That's for three things," I said. "I want my license back, and I want to talk to a kid named Barry Greenleaf." I paused. "And I ordered a whiskey and soda. Then you'll see the other half."

  I must have made an impression. The bartender turned and began fixing me a drink. A couple of the babyheads behind me scuttled nervously into the back room. I guess the babyheads were short on cash this week. I heard a couple of quietly muttered conversations resume under the music.

  A drink appeared on the counter in front of me, and I tilted it back and poured some past my teeth. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good. The whiskey was real, but what should have been soda was more like effervescent dishwater. I drank about half, then set the glass on the bar. The bartender came over and plucked away the ripped half hundred. I felt in my pocket to make sure the other half was still there, and then I knocked back the rest of the whiskey, doing my best to keep my tongue to one side as it passed through my mouth.

  Another babyhead came out of the back and waddled purposefully to where I was sitting. He was dressed in a sheet pinned up like a Roman toga, high-top sneakers without any socks, and a plastic digital wristwatch. He vaulted in one motion onto the seat beside me and put his hands on the bar, fingers spread, as if he were feeling for vibrations in a Ouija board. After a minute like this he turned to me and reached under the sheet, pulled out my license, and slid it to where my hand was resting on the bar, running it through a pool of spilled drink in the process. I took it and put it in my pocket without saying anything.

  "Barry's upstairs," the babyhead said. "You mean to take him away?" His voice was high and inquisitive—almost like a child's, come to think of it. I could smell the liquor on his breath. Despite that, and despite the way he was dressed—or maybe because of it—I had the feeling I was in the presence of the baby-boss.

  "No," I said. "I just want to ask him a few questions."

  "He doesn't want to come downstairs."

  "I'll go up."

  "What do you want?"

  An idea occurred to me. "I'm working for an inheritance lawyer Barry may be due to come into some karma, plus a house and cash. If he's not interested, he can sign a waiver and it'll go to his little sister. She's a cat."

  "Let me see."

  "Don't waste my time. If Barry isn't here—"

  "He's upstairs. Give me the money."

  "Take me upstairs."

  The bartender came over and showed the babyhead in the toga the ripped half of the hundred. "Take him upstairs," he said. "Let Barry decide."

  The babyhead looked down at his wristwatch and then back up at me and nodded, as if the time was a factor in his decision. Maybe it was.
"Okay," he said. "Come on." He hopped off the stool, gathered his skirts up around his ankles, and scuttled quickly into the back I followed.

  The babyheads had the back room converted into a dark, musty-smelling conversation pit, and a group of them were seated there in a circle, passing an enormous fuming pipe back and forth across a low wooden table with peeling veneer and a cinder block in place of one of the legs. A radio hung from a nail on the wall behind them, and music came out of it shrouded in static. I almost gagged on the sweet, humid smell of the smoke from the pipe.

  "I've got a full house: three questions and two answers," one of them was saying.

  "A dunce cap is just an ornamented cone," came the reply.

  As we passed through the room, the talk halted, and they looked me over with jaded, indifferent eyes. I couldn't make sense of the conversation from that one little snippet, but I didn't let it bother me. I probably couldn't have made sense of the stuff from a big fat dictionary full of it. The babyhead in the toga led me through a service door in the back of the room, and as he closed it, I heard the conversation pick up again.

  We emerged into the moldering lobby of the hotel. The windows were boarded up, but enough light leaked through for me to tell that what felt like moss under my feet was actually rotting chunks of old carpet, and what felt like rain on my shoulders was spiderwebs. I was a decade or so early—rain and moss would make their appearance here, just not yet. I paused at the elevators, but the babyhead went on, to the stairwell, and started waddling up the steps. Either the elevators didn't work anymore, or the babyheads weren't tall enough to reach the buttons.

  I followed him through the hotel to a room on the second floor. There were four of them inside, including the kid with the fish on his jumper who'd taken my license, and a couple that looked like girls. I went in. The one lying stretched out on the bed picked up his head and stared at me, and I recognized him immediately from my days of peeking in the window at Cranberry Street.

  For a second I thought he had a full head of hair, but then I saw it was a woman's blond wig cut so short that it stood out like a ragged, overgrown crew cut. It didn't fool me long. I don't even think it was meant to. Underneath it Barry Greenleaf was as bald as the rest of them.

  No one said anything. I tried my best to find a resemblance in his features to Pansy Greenleaf, Maynard Stanhunt, or just about any of the other principals in the case, but I came up empty. The distortion of the evolution therapy had warped any resemblance beyond recognition.

  The other babyheads were sitting in a loose circle by Barry's bed, and they scuttled away on their haunches to make a space for me in the middle of the room. Barry propped himself up on one side, his head braced against his arm, and the matted'blond wig slid sideways, covering his ear. There wasn't anywhere for me to sit except the floor, and after taking a good look at that, I opted to stay on my feet.

  "Hello, Barry," I said. "My name is Conrad Metcalf. I'm working for your uncle Orton."

  "Uncle who? I don't think I know who you mean." His voice was soft but it dripped contempt.

  "Orton Angwine, Pansy's brother—"

  "Okay, okay. What do you want?"

  "I'm working on your family tree, only there's a couple of missing branches. Who's your father, Barry?"

  "I don't have a father."

  "Is it Maynard Stanhunt?"

  "My father's Dr. Theodore Twostrand. That's the inventor of evolution therapy. He's everybody's father" He turned to his little audience. "Who's your father?" he asked.

  "Dr. Twostrand," echoed one of the other babyheads obligingly.

  Barry looked back at me. "He's everybody's father."

  "I was visiting an architect this morning," I said. "He'd drawn up plans for a babyhead quarters for the backyard at Cranberry Street. Somebody paid him to do it, and I don't think it was Dr. Twostrand."

  "Go ahead," said Barry. "Make your point."

  "Somebody cares about you, Barry. Somebody thinks you'll come back home and is willing to spend a lot of money making sure you'll want to stay when you do. I knew Maynard Stanhunt. He had plenty of money, but it doesn't fit. I don't see him spending it all on you."

  Barry pretended to yawn.

  "Who's your father, Barry?"

  "The architect, probably. What's your theory?"

  "The closer I look, the more connection I see between Danny Phoneblum and the Cranberry Street property. His name was on the blueprints, not Stanhunt's. Pansy is supposed to have worked for him, but nobody will say what she did. Maybe carry the big man's baby, that's my guess. She bore him a son and got paid off with a house and a lifetime supply of illegal make and needles."

  It was only a theory before I said it, but once it was out, it sounded good. Good enough to work with, anyway. I probably couldn't get confirmation from the kid, though. The more relevant question was whether he even knew.

  "You've got all the answers," said Barry. "What do you need me for?"

  "You're a member of a family, Barry. It may not be much of a family, and you may want nothing to do with it, but that doesn't change anything. You're right at the heart of this case. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to make a move, but you're still a player. When I find out more, I'll be back. In the meantime, here's my number." I handed him one of my business cards. He took it without looking at it and tucked it under the bare mattress.

  I turned to leave. I wasn't disappointed. I'd found Barry, and now I had an angle I could work from. I was eager to get to it. But when I reached for the door handle, Barry said: "Wait a minute. I want to ask you a couple of questions."

  I turned. "Yeah?"

  "Who's paying you?"

  I thought about it. "No one, anymore."

  "What happened to my uncle what's-his-name?"

  "The Office took him away."

  "You don't like the Office much, do you?"

  "I don't like the Office," I said. "But maybe I don't like it in a different way than you don't like it."

  He chewed on that for a minute, then let it go. "Is Pansy very unhappy?"

  "You should ask her yourself."

  "Maybe I will." He looked down from the bed at his balloon-headed compatriots. "What about it? Anybody want to go for a picnic in the fancylands?"

  "If that's it, I'll leave," I said.

  "One more question," said Barry. His eyes lit up, as if they were opening for the first time, and I had a glimpse of some demonic intelligence at least glancingly in residence there.

  "Yeah?" I said.

  "How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?"

  CHAPTER 21

  BARRY'S FASCINATING QUESTION TURNING ITSELF OVER IN my brain, I went downstairs, passing back through the dark back room and the dilapidated bar—where I forked over the other half of Angwine's hundred—and out into the afternoon sun on Telegraph Avenue. It was time for me to go find Walter Surface, the detective who'd stepped into my shoes in the Stanhunt case—the first Stanhunt case. He might turn out to be Phoneblum's stooge, and he might not, but either way he was sure to supply some interesting answers, provided I could come up with the right questions—and get my foot in the door long enough to ask them.

  His address and phone number were listed in the public directory I kept in my car trunk, but when I pulled up alongside a phone booth, my search for change on the floor of my car turned up nothing but some empty packets of my blend and the anti-grav pen the kangaroo had slapped out of my shirt. I considered stopping at one of the storefronts on Telegraph for change and then decided not to bother. If a private inquisitor couldn't drop in on another private inquisitor without calling ahead, who could?

  Surface's office was on the top floor of a seven-story building on the edge of the warehouse district. It was the kind of neighborhood where you give your car a little involuntary glance back over your shoulder after you park it, and if you have any doubt whether you locked it, any doubt at all, you walk all the way back just to check From the look of the neighborhood,
Phoneblum had managed to dig up the one P.I. in the book in worse need of a buck than me. It made sense. Desperation was a quality Phoneblum obviously prized when he found it—and cultivated when he didn't.

  The voice that called me in from the hallway was female, and I figured it for a secretary, which was a happy surprise in my otherwise low estimation of Surface's setup. But there wasn't anything behind the door beyond a single office, and the woman had her feet up across the only desk. The office was a little smaller than mine, a little uglier, a little dirtier: That was the way it went in my head. I compared his office with mine, and I knew that when I met Surface, I'd search his features for clues to the face I saw when I looked in the mirror;

  "I'm looking for Walter Surface," I said.

  "I'm taking messages," said the woman. She was either looking good for fifty or bad for thirty-five, and the latter seemed the safer bet. She turned to face me and her feet came off the desk, which left a scuff in the otherwise perfect coat of dust that covered it.

  "I need to see him," I said. "And I'm in a hurry." I put my photostat on the desk.

  "He's not here," she said.

  "Can you call him?" I pointed at the telephone. The dust over it was just as thick as the dust on the desk.

  "I don't want to get him out of bed," she said. "I'll take a message. You should have come sooner. He could have used you a week ago."

  "What happened?"

  "You didn't see the blood in the lobby, I guess. Walter got hit. He can't see visitors now. I think you understand."

  "Who are you?" I asked her. She didn't seem to notice the questions. I guess she'd spent a lot of time around inquisitors.