City-of-Sensors-27

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Standing in front of the mirror, I put on my new gray Aliano suit I’d bought in the markets, ready to blend in with Mercier and his ring of petty criminals at the Core Club. And yet when I saw myself in the mirror, I hesitated. I looked just like him. Like Mercier. The gray suit, the hairstyle—they were like his when I saw him that night outside the Core Club.

Suddenly I wanted to erase my reflection, wipe it right off the mirror. Even the suit I was wearing I’d bought with dirty money.

I left the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind me.

Soon after, I met Mercier at an intersection.

“You keep your distance from me tonight, alright?” I said. “We have to pretend we’re buddies, but we’re not. Don’t talk to me, and above all else, don’t touch me.”

“Just keep your mouth shut. If you blow our cover, both of us are dead.” His speech was already sloppy, the smell of alcohol trailing him in a cloud. He walked beside me encased in a huge trench coat with the collar buttoned right up to his bloodshot eyes.

We made our way down Tenth Avenue enveloped by the city’s Babel yell: the bellows of drunks, laughter, and the occasional darker note of a taunt or threat, aggressive men jostling each other. The lights of the city looked beautiful but distant, strung along the lines of the orderly web that was the city, its strands made of wireless networks and sensor sightlines stretching out long and deep into every street. But that orderly network had gone cold, as though it were far away from me.

Mercier and I turned down a familiar alley, and the voices receded into the distance. When we reached the rear door, the alley was silent. Mercier entered his code. The new face on the Expo-Screen would disguise me.

The door swung open, revealing a new bouncer. He glanced at Mercier, then at me. “Another one of your guests, Mercier?” he said.

“Business partner,” Mercier said.

In the pause that followed, music pulsed from downstairs. The bouncer looked me up and down.

“If you’re with Mercier then get in,” he grunted.

We passed through a doorframe with peeling red paint into a dark hallway. Music rose up from below, shuddering in the floor and walls, shuddering in my chest until it replaced my heartbeat with its own, darker beat. Last time, I’d watched this place from outside, trying to see into the depths of this sick heart without going inside myself. But that was impossible. There were no windows here—no rear windows, only doors, and to see into the depths, I needed to go inside myself. The rear door shut behind us. The sounds of the city and the lights of its grid vanished.

I followed Mercier down the staircase, thick, moist air rushing into my lungs. The stairwell led us to a corridor, long and curved and lined with doors on both sides. Most were closed, sounds drifting through the wood as we walked by. Raised, angry voices from one door. Laughter from another. Female cries of pleasure. The hallway wound onwards, twisted like the veins of a human body.

We arrived in a crowded, velvet-carpeted room, hard neon pounding from the ceiling. I followed Mercier across the room and took a seat at the bar, just as a G-string fell around the ankles of the woman dancing on top of it.

“Double gin and tonic with two limes,” I told the bartender through the pair of neon-drenched legs swaying on the counter between us. “Mercier’s got my tab.”

As the bartender passed me my drink, I surveyed my surroundings. It was incredible. The room was fucking full of them. The super-rich, those dark swarms of Sentrac money, all of them drenched in it, dirty with it like the suits at the Indigo Palace. Data bigwigs, corrupt cops, CEOs, all the high and mighty from the Core basked in their playground, crowded around square tables heaped with glasses, their bodies melting into plush leather sofas, naked women on every counter. At the back of the room, neon circles spun on an electronic wall in quick, random movements. The crowds, the grime on the bar, the moral filth all around me—it was hard to breathe, the air full of the dirtiness of these people. The crowd writhed and pressed, threatening to swallow me and make me one with it.

I’m just in this to help Yury, then I’m out. The thought made it easier to breathe.

Help Yury, then I’m out.

My drink was already empty. “Another,” I told the bartender.

He brought it, then poured a beer for the man beside me, a drunkard slumped on the bar with his head rocking back and forth on his arms. A profusion of thick orange hair sprouted from his scalp, but his face wasn’t visible.

My gaze tracked to the booth left of the bar. Empty. “That’s Jay’s spot?” I whispered to Mercier.

He nodded.

“You said he and Donaldson are here every fucking Saturday,” I said. “If they’re not, you’ll pay the price.”

“They’ll be here.”

We waited and we drank. I should’ve stayed sober to keep myself sharp, but each drink made the crowd feel more distant, more separate from me. Mercier sat, hunched and red-eyed, and drowned himself in liquor along with me. The music thudded as customers came and went, but Jay’s booth remained empty.

“Another gin and tonic?” the bartender asked over the music.

I nodded. A new stripper replaced the old one on our bar, dark hair shaking all the way down to the small of her back when she danced. Her hair looked like Celeste’s. Absent-mindedly, I started ripping label shreds off an empty bottle on the bar.

“You like Rosie, huh?” the bartender said, making me start. He was smirking at me over my heap of empty gin and tonic glasses. “She’s one of our best.”

Rosie was climbing down now, sitting on the bar with one high-heeled leg on either side of me. She ran her fingers over her bikini top.

In the corner of my vision I saw Mercier shaking his head, his eyes narrowed into slits. “Filthy hypocrite,” he muttered.

“You can see the rest in the back,” Rosie said. “Two hundred dollars.”

I hesitated. “Maybe some other time,” I forced myself to say. “I need to talk with my friend here.”

My eyes turned to a new scene: Jay’s booth, now occupied by a thin man sandwiched between two strippers, sipping a drink with his dress shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel. One of his companions ran her fingers through the blond shell of his slicked back undercut.

That would be my Jay. None other than Jason Shutter, the richest man in the country, heir to the legacy of Aaron Shutter, a recently deceased genius of big data tech. The Shutter Gardens, down on Eighth Avenue by where Maclean had been shot, had been built in honour of his father Aaron Shutter and the institute he’d founded for data research. Since his death, his son Jason had taken over. Jason kept his public persona pretty private, which is why Mercier didn’t recognize him—when you owned huge portions of the information in the country, you could find ways to keep your profile quiet—but I knew his face. I’d lost money to Jason Shutter at the Indigo Palace Gemini tables more than once.

“Jay!” the bartender shouted over the music. “The usual?”

Shutter heard the question and his head turned towards us. He nodded at the bartender and then paused. His eyes fell on me. But the screen did its work; he scanned me up and down then looked away, turning his gaze to something behind me.

A wave of the familiar smell of Ruz came next, washing over me from behind. Donaldson glided past me towards the booth and took a seat across from Shutter. The back of Donaldson’s shirt read: FIGHTING FOR ANIMAL WELFARE ACROSS THE GLOBE.

“Show’s over girls,” Shutter said, shooing the women away. A waitress brought drinks and the two men appeared to exchange greetings, but the music drowned out their conversation. Before I could figure out a way to get closer, they stood up and headed towards the hallway with the chambers.

As Donaldson and Shutter passed by me, only a few inches away, I spotted the nearly invisible blotches on their necks, the faint yellowish hue of their skin. They headed down the hallway, entered a chamber about three doors down, and shut the door behind them. Damn.

My mind groped for a solution. I scanned the hall with the chambers and caught sight of an open door beside Jay’s and Donaldson’s room.

“Mercier,” I said under my breath, “how thin are the walls here?”

“What?”

“Don’t try to pretend you haven’t been in one of those rooms with one of these strippers before.”

“You think I pay attention to the walls when I’m in there?”

I turned back to the hall. An employee sat on a stool near the entry to the hallway, keeping an eye on the traffic through the chamber doors. I’d have no excuse to go in there alone. I glanced up at Rosie dancing on the bar, an idea starting to take shape.

“Rosie,” I said, standing up, “I changed my mind. I’m convinced.”

She turned her head, flipping her hair over her shoulder with one hand. “Two hundred dollars, then.”

I slapped Mercier on the shoulder, ignoring his muttered curses. “My friend Mercier here, he’s got my tab. Charge it to his account, alright?” I laughed.

When Rosie and I walked down the hall together, the employee barely glanced at us.

“In here,” I said, turning into the room beside Donaldson’s and Shutter’s.

She shrugged and followed me into the chamber, a dark cell with a single disintegrating couch. The couch was pushed up against the wall separating our room from Donaldson’s and Shutter’s, and in the middle of the wall behind the sofa was another door connecting the two rooms, tightly shut and secured with a digital lock. The rooms must have been adjoined at some point. The connecting door was painted red, long cracks stretched across the wood.

Treading cautiously in the moist, stale air, I approached the couch and inspected it. A dark stain. Sticky white pools of human residue. Maybe I could still back out of this.

But then Shutter’s voice drifted through the door in the wall, just loud enough for me to hear him over the distant pulse of music. “We’ve already had to talk once before about you getting greedy, August.”

I forced myself to sit down on patch of sofa that looked cleaner than the rest.

“We’re all friends here,” Donaldson said, his voice unsteady. “Are you talking about that extra money I was funnelling on the side? There’s no connection between that and the ring. I did that on my own.”

“You did that without asking us and you got caught for it. The fact is, August, soon you’ll be going to fucking court for that.”

“That’s all fine, just fine—my lawyers will take care of it. It won’t put you at risk. None of you. I swear it, friend, I swear it. There’s no way they’ll find the rest of it. They’d have to know about Sara helping me to find it.”

“Maclean found out about the rest of it.”

“We already dealt with her, right, friend?”

Vermin. That was the only word I could think of to describe them, talking about Maclean that way. I fucking knew they’d killed her. I’d known it from the beginning.

Donaldson’s voice started up again. “And—and the new detective on my case is just a rookie, a nobody who doesn’t know a damn thing about the bigger picture—”

Rosie tapped a device in the corner of the room, and blaring music pounded from an overhead speaker.

“No music!” I shouted over the noise.

Staring at me, she switched it off. “You want me to dance without music?”

“Yeah—that’s right, I just like the quiet. I’ve got a thing for the quiet. And be careful not to touch my face. Just another pet peeve of mine.” She wouldn’t be able to see the Expo-Screen, but she might be able to feel it.

With a sigh, she started swaying to imaginary music, her hips and ass shaking in unbearable silence. I shifted awkwardly. She seemed not to notice the faint voices; she was on the other side of the room and lost in the slow, swaying movements of her dancing.

“Maclean may be gone,” Shutter said, “but I don’t like the idea of you going to court, with everything you know in your head.”

There was a pause. Then muffled sounds floated through the door. Dull scraping, a thud, a cry of pain.

“Don’t try to run,” said a new voice. Another man seemed to have joined Donaldson and Shutter.

More thuds. The sounds were nauseating. The awareness of the stains around us swelled in my head. Rosie was swaying back and forth just a few inches in front of me. “That’s fine,” I said, looking away from her. “That’s enough. I’ve had enough.” It was hideous, the sight of her dancing while those sounds came from the next room. More grotesque thumps floated through the door behind me.

“I think I drank too much,” I said, standing up and clutching my stomach as a flash of nausea crippled me.

“Fine. You’re still paying.” She strode out of the room.

Donaldson spoke between gasps. “Jay, friend, you know me, you know me. I’m not going to say a word in court. Not a word. On my honour, and you know me, you know I—”

A crash and the rasp of choked breathing.

“Give me a good reason why I should let you live.”

“I’ll give you two million—”

Faint, dull thuds drifted through the door. The door shook and rattled when something fell against it. I knew it when I heard it. Those were the sounds of a man dying.

It was quiet.

“Two million wasn’t enough,” Shutter said. “He was too dangerous to have around, going to court like that. He got greedy and he paid the price. You take care of this body.”

I hurried out the door into the hall and back towards the exit. God only knew what else was happening in those chambers, each its own private cell in the dark labyrinth of this basement. The pumping bass receded as I made my exit through the rear door and stepped into a thick white sky. Shreds of snow swarmed like flies under streetlamps. The night was mute, the whiteness muffling the noises of the city. As the head of the Institute his father founded, Jason Shutter owned the digital gardens down on Eighth Avenue. I recalled standing in the yellow ring of a streetlamp at the scene of Maclean’s murder, smoke refracting the light of a nearby sign that read: SHUTTER GARDENS.