Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

  About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to come by and cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the bleach smell was the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable cocktail, all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street.

  She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food stalls. Her stomach started growling at the smell, but she didn’t trust street food, not if she didn’t have to, and there were licensed places in the mall that would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpet in the asphalt square that had been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced and distorted off the concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the market. A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man’s eyes flashed God’s wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona turned left, between rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in pyramids on their battered metal carts.

  She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent businesses: sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters serving a dozen kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little quieter. She found a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The Chinese cook spoke to her in Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her soup in a plastic bowl; she paid him with the smallest of her bills, and he made change with eight greasy cardboard tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she wouldn’t be able to use them; if they stayed in Florida, she could always get some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go, gotta. She shoved the worn yellow disks back across the painted plyboard counter. "You keep ‘em." The cook swept them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue plastic toothpick fixed at the corner of his mouth.

  She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded noodle from the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the cook’s pots and burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else, white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she thought. But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He was pretending to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his mouth set in what he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the suit, what you could see of him behind the beard and the glasses. The smile wasn’t pretty, though; it was kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his teeth. She shifted a little on the stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if you did it right, got the tax chip and everything. She was suddenly aware of the cash in her pocket. She pretended to study the laminated foodhandling license taped to the counter; when she looked up again, he was gone.

  She spent fifty on the clothes. She worked her way through eighteen racks in four shops, everything the mall had, before she made up her mind. The vendors didn’t like her trying on so many things, but it was the most she’d ever had to spend. It was noon before she’d finished, and the Florida sun was cooking the pavement as she crossed the parking lot with her two plastic bags. The bags, like the clothes, were secondhand: one was printed with the logo of a Ginza shoe store, the other advertised Argentinean seafood briquettes molded from reconstituted krill. She was mentally mixing and matching the things she’d bought, figuring out different outfits.

  From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant, like he’d warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he’d cut the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture’s coming.

  Mona turned a corner at random, automatic reflex avoiding a crazy, and found herself walking past sunfaded card tables spread with cheap Indo simstim sets, used cassettes, colored spikes of microsoft stuck in blocks of pale blue Styrofoam. There was a picture of Angie Mitchell taped up behind one of the tables, a poster Mona hadn’t seen before. She stopped and studied it hungrily, taking in the star’s clothes and makeup first, then trying to figure out the background, where it had been shot. Unconsciously, she adjusted her expression to approximate Angie’s in the poster. Not a grin, exactly. A sort of half-grin, maybe a little sad. Mona felt a special way about Angie. Because — and tricks said it, sometimes — she looked like her. Like she was Angie’s sister. Except her nose, Mona’s, had more of a tilt, and she, Angie, didn’t have that smear of freckles out to her cheekbones. Mona’s Angie half-grin widened as she stared, washed in the beauty of the poster, the luxury of the pictured room. She guessed it was a kind of castle, probably it was where Angie lived, sure, with lots of people to take care of her, do her hair and hang up her clothes, because you could see the walls were made of big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels. The writing across the bottom would say where it was, maybe, but Mona couldn’t read. Anyway, there weren’t any fucking roaches there, she was sure of that, and no Eddy either. She looked down at the stim sets and briefly considered using the rest of her money. But then she wouldn’t have enough for a stim, and anyway these were old, some of them older than she was. There was whatsit, that Tally, she’d been big when Mona was maybe nine . . .

  When she got back, Eddy was waiting for her, with the tape off the window and the flies buzzing. Eddy was sprawled out on the bed, smoking a cigarette, and the suit with the beard, who’d been watching her, was sitting in the broken chair, still wearing his sunglasses.

  Prior, he said that was his name, like he didn’t have a first one. Or like Eddy didn’t have a last one. Well, she didn’t have a last name herself, unless you counted Lisa, and that was more like having two first ones.

  She couldn’t get much sense of him, in the squat. She thought maybe that was because he was English. He wasn’t really a suit, though, not like she’d thought when she’d seen him in the mall; he was onto some game, it just wasn’t clear which one. He kept his eyes on her a lot, watched her pack her things in the blue Lufthansa bag he’d brought, but she couldn’t feel any heat there, not like he wanted her. He just watched her, watched Eddy smoke, tapped his sunglasses on his knee, listened to Eddy’s line of bullshit, and said as little as he needed to. When he did say something, it was usually funny, but the way he talked made it hard to tell when he was joking.

  Packing, she felt light-headed, like she’d done a jumper but it hadn’t quite come on. The flies were fucking against the window, bumping on the dust-streaked glass, but she didn’t care. Gone, she was already gone.

  Zipping up the bag.

  It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of a nowhere sky. She’d never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.

  Prior’s car was a white Datsun rental that drove itself and played elevator music through quad speakers. It left them beside their luggage in a bare concrete bay and drove away in the rain. If Prior had a bag, it wasn’t with him; Mona had her Lufthansa bag and Eddy had two black gator-clone suitcases.

  She tugged her new skirt down over her hips and wondered if she’d bought the right shoes. Eddy was enjoying himself, had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders tilted to show he was doing something important.

  She remembered him in Cleveland, the first time, how he’d come out to the place to look at a scoot the old man had for sale, a three-wheel Skoda that was mostly rust. The old man grew catfish in concrete tanks that fenced the dirt yard. She was in the house when Eddy came, long high-walled space of a truck trailer up on blocks. There were windows cut down one side, square holes sealed over with scratched plastic. She was standing by the stove, smell of onions in sacks and tomatoes hung up to dry, when she felt him there, down the length of the room, s
ensed the muscle and shoulder of him, his white teeth, the black nylon cap held shyly in his hand. Sun was coming in the windows, the place lit up bare and plain, the floor swept the way the old man had her keep it, but it was like a shadow came, blood-shadow where she heard the pumping of her heart, and him coming closer, tossing the cap on the bare chipboard table as he passed it, not shy now but like he lived there, right up to her, running a hand with a bright ring back through the oiled weight of his hair. The old man came in then and Mona turned away, pretended to do something with the stove. Coffee, the old man said, and Mona went to get some water, filling the enamel pot from the roof-tank line, the water gurgling down through the charcoal filter. Eddy and the old man sitting at the table, drinking black coffee, Eddy’s legs spread straight out under the table, thighs hard through threadbare denim. Smiling, jiving the old man, dealing for the Skoda. How it seemed to run okay, how he’d buy it if the old man had the title. Old man getting up to dig in a drawer. Eddy’s eyes on her again. She followed them out into the yard and watched him straddle the cracked vinyl saddle. Backfire set the old man’s black dogs yelping, high sweet smell of cheap alcohol exhaust and the frame trembling between his legs.

  Now she watched him pose beside his suitcases, and it was hard to connect that up, why she’d left with him next day on the Skoda, headed into Cleveland. The Skoda’d had a busted little radio you couldn’t hear over the engine, just play it soft at night in a field by the road. Tuner part was cracked so it only picked up one station, ghost music up from some lonesome tower in Texas, steel guitar fading in and out all night, feeling how she was wet against his leg and the stiff dry grass prickling the back of her neck.

  Prior put her blue bag into a white cart with a striped top and she climbed in after it, hearing tiny Spanish voices from the Cuban driver’s headset. Then Eddy stowed the gator cases and he and Prior got in. Rolling out to the runway through walls of rain.

  The plane wasn’t what she knew from the stims, not like a long rich bus inside, with lots of seats. It was a little black thing with sharp, skinny wings and windows that made it look like it was squinting.

  She went up some metal stairs and there was a space with four seats and the same gray carpet all over, on the walls and ceiling too, everything clean and cool and gray. Eddy came in after her and took a seat like it was something he did every day, loosening his tie and stretching his legs. Prior was pushing buttons beside the door. It made a sighing sound when it closed.

  She looked out the narrow, streaming windows at runway lights reflected on wet concrete.

  Came down here on the train, she thought, New York to Atlanta and then you change.

  The plane shivered. She heard the airframe creak as it came to life.

  She woke briefly, two hours later, in the darkened cabin, cradled by the long hum of the jet. Eddy was asleep, his mouth half-open. Maybe Prior was sleeping too, or maybe he just had his eyes closed, she couldn’t tell.

  Halfway back into a dream she wouldn’t remember in the morning, she heard the sound of that Texas radio, fading steel chords drawn out like an ache.

  9

  Underground

  Jubilee and Bakerloo, Circle and District. Kumiko peered at the little laminated map Petal had given her and shivered. The concrete platform seemed to radiate cold through the soles of her boots.

  "It’s so fucking old," Sally Shears said absently, her glasses reflecting a convex wall sheathed in white ceramic tile.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "The tube." A new tartan scarf was knotted under Sally’s chin, and her breath was white when she spoke. "You know what bothers me? It’s how sometimes you’ll see ‘em sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don’t take down the old tile first. Or they’ll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring and you can see all these different layers of tile . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Because it’s getting narrower, right? It’s like arterial plaque . . ."

  "Yes," Kumiko said dubiously, "I see . . . Those boys, Sally, what is the meaning of their costume, please?"

  "Jacks. What they call Jack Draculas."

  The four Jack Draculas huddled like ravens on the opposite platform. They wore nondescript black raincoats and polished black combat boots laced to the knee. One turned to address another and Kumiko saw that his hair was drawn back into a plaited queue and bound with a small black bow.

  "Hung him," Sally said, "after the war."

  "Who?"

  "Jack Dracula. They had public hangings for a while, after the war. Jacks, you wanna stay away from ‘em. Hate anybody foreign . . ."

  Kumiko would have liked to access Colin, but the Maas-Neotek unit was tucked behind a marble bust in the room where Petal served their meals, and then the train arrived, amazing her with the archaic thunder of wheels on steel rail.

  Sally Shears against the patchwork backdrop of the city’s architecture, her glasses reflecting the London jumble, each period culled by economics, by fire, by war.

  Kumiko, already confused by three rapid and apparently random train changes, let herself be hauled through a sequence of taxi rides. They’d jump out of one cab, march into the nearest large store, then take the first available exit to another street and another cab. "Harrods," Sally said at one point, as they cut briskly through an ornate, tile-walled hall pillared in marble. Kumiko blinked at thick red roasts and shanks displayed on tiered marble counters, assuming they were made of plastic. And then out again, Sally hailing the next cab. "Covent Garden," she said to the driver.

  "Excuse me, Sally. What are we doing?"

  "Getting lost."

  Sally drank hot brandy in a tiny café beneath the snow-streaked glass roof of the piazza. Kumiko drank chocolate.

  "Are we lost, Sally?"

  "Yeah. Hope so, anyway." She looked older today, Kumiko thought; lines of tension or fatigue around her mouth.

  "Sally, what is it that you do? Your friend asked if you were still retired . . ."

  "I’m a businesswoman."

  "And my father is a businessman?"

  "Your father is a businessman, honey. No, not like that. I’m an indie. I make investments, mostly."

  "In what do you invest?"

  "In other Indies." She shrugged. "Feeling curious today?" She sipped her brandy.

  "You advised me to be my own spy."

  "Good advice. Takes a light touch, though."

  "Do you live here, Sally, in London?"

  "I travel."

  "Is Swain another ‘indie’?"

  "He thinks so. He’s into influence, nods in the right direction; you need that here, to do business, but it gets on my nerves." She tossed back the rest of the brandy and licked her lips.

  Kumiko shivered.

  "You don’t have to be scared of Swain. Yanaka could have him for breakfast . . ."

  "No. I thought of those boys in the subway. So thin . . ."

  "The Draculas."

  "A gang?"

  "Bosozoku," Sally said, with fair pronunciation. " ‘Running tribes’? Anyway, like a tribe." It wasn’t the right word, but Kumiko thought she saw the distinction. "They’re thin because they’re poor." She gestured to the waiter for a second brandy.

  "Sally," Kumiko said, "when we came here, the route we took, the trains and cabs, that was in order to make certain we were not followed?"

  "Nothing’s ever certain."

  "But when we went to meet Tick, you took no precautions. We could easily have been followed. You enlist Tick to spy on Swain, yet you take no precautions. You bring me here, you take many precautions. Why?"

  The waiter put a steaming glass down in front of her. "You’re a sharp little honey, aren’t you?" She leaned forward and inhaled the fumes of brandy. "It’s like this, okay? With Tick, maybe I’m just trying to shake some action."

  "But Tick is concerned that Swain not discover him."

  "Swain won’t touch him, not if he knows he’s working for me."

  "Why?"

 
; "Because he knows I might kill him." She raised the glass, looking suddenly happier.

  "Kill Swain?"

  "That’s right." She drank.

  "Then why were you so cautious today?"

  "Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?"

  "Yes."

  "You stim while he works?"

  "Yes . . ."

  "There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now . . ."

  Kumiko nearly overturned what was left of her chocolate.

  "Hey." The polished nails tapped Kumiko’s wrist. "Don’t worry about it. He wouldn’t’ve sent you here like that, with a bug. Make you too easy for his enemies to track. But you see what I mean? It’s good to get out from under, or anyway try. On our own, right?"

  "Yes," Kumiko said, her heart still pounding, the panic continuing to rise. "He killed my mother," she blurted, then vomited chocolate on the café’s gray marble floor.

  Sally leading her past the columns of Saint Paul’s, walking, not talking. Kumiko, in a disjointed trance of shame, registering random information: the white shearling that lined Sally’s leather coat, the oily rainbow sheen of a pigeon’s feathers as it waddled out of their way, red buses like a giant’s toys in the Transport Museum, Sally warming her hands around a foam cup of steaming tea.