Читать книгу Riviera Blues - Jack Batten - Страница 9

Whatever Mike Rolland came to fetch in Jamie Haddon’s apartment, it wasn’t shirts. Hell, the guy hadn’t been in the bedroom. Didn’t know where the light switch was. Hadn’t even taken in the erotic glories of the crotch collection.

Whatever Mike came to fetch was probably in the den. Where the whistling had issued from. Where the desk lamp was switched on. Where Mike had apparently been poking around when I put in my unexpected appearance.

I walked back down the hall to the den. Its decor was in a masculine motif, crimson and military wallpaper, soldiers marching, horses rearing. The rug was Indian, and the desk was black and sleek. Along one wall, there was a large-screened TV set, a VCR, a CD player, and a stack of CDs. One short shelf held eight or nine books. All dealt with the esoterica of computers. A computer sat beside the shiny black desk. The computer was called a NeXT in jaunty colours. Tidy-looking machine, as black as the desk.

I went over to examine it at a closer range. On my way, behind the desk, I stepped on something that went crunch under my foot. It was a rectangular metal disk, a couple of inches wide, about three inches long, and not much thicker than a wafer. I picked it up. My foot hadn’t cracked it. An elephant’s foot wouldn’t have cracked it. The thing felt indestructible in my hand.

I hefted it. Very light. It was black all over except for a silver band down the middle. I knew vaguely what it was, a disk that went into the computer. And a dozen more like it were scattered at my feet.

I sat in the chair behind the black desk. Comfy. The chair was upholstered in soft red leather. Jamie kept a clean desk top, nothing on it except the lamp, a red touch-tone telephone, and a pair of pens mounted in a clear glass holder. The pens looked like they were used for ceremonial purposes only.

I leaned out of the desk chair and scooped up the disks strewn on the floor. There were twelve of them, thirteen counting the one I’d stepped on. I turned over the first disk. It had a strip of paper taped across the bottom. On the paper someone had printed four words in neat block letters: “INVESTMENTS — STOCKS AND BONDS.”

The printing was probably Jamie’s, and he probably kept a record of his dabblings on the stock market on it. With Pamela’s backing and his own salary he ought to have enough cash to take a modest flyer on the market.

Each of the other disks had the same sort of neatly printed label. “Correspondence and letters,” I read on one. “Dictionary, thesaurus, quotations” on another. Well, okay, Jamie was hooked on self-improvement. Build up his word power. Stagger Pamela with his erudition.

I riffled through the rest of the disks. Nothing set off alarm bells. All struck me as straightforward and aboveboard, the kind of stuff a computer guy, which Jamie apparently was, might store on his computer disks.

So why were the disks scattered on the floor and not filed in the tray next to the NeXT where they clearly belonged? Jamie wouldn’t have left his disks in disarray.

Pamela had been in the apartment after Jamie’s departure. If she had seen the disks on the floor, and she would have if she’d been thorough in her rummaging, she would have put them back in their proper place. Pamela’s motto had always been “tidying as you go is half the fun.”

That left my new best friend, Mike Rolland of Monaco.

Mike had been in Jamie’s library when I arrived, and he went out of the apartment wearing the face of a man unhappy with what he was leaving behind. Why was he unhappy? Because he’d been in the apartment on a search and hadn’t found the object of his search.

That was a surmise on my part, but not a bad surmise. Another pretty fair surmise: he was looking for a computer disk, one that fit into the NeXT.

I pulled open the drawers to Jamie’s desk. Time to launch my own search. The desk drawers didn’t hold much. Stacks of computer paper. The Toronto telephone directory. A guide book to Monaco. I flipped through it. The proper adjective wasn’t Monacan or Monesque. The book said it was Monégasque.

I got down on my hands and knees and rubbed my hands across the bottoms of the drawers. No disk was taped to the undersides.

I shook out the books in Jamie’s single-minded little library, removed the CDs from their plastic containers, lifted the pillows off the maroon leather sofa against the opposite wall and jammed my hand into its lining. No disk.

I rolled up the Indian rug and rolled it down again. I unscrewed the base of the lamp and re-screwed it. I spent thirty minutes in the den. The room, I would’ve sworn, was clean of concealed disks.

I gave the same treatment to the living room, the dining room, the undersized kitchen, and the bedroom that Dante Renzi must have once occupied. It was empty of Dante and his effects and of a disk. I had narrowed the search to Jamie’s bedroom. I made my way methodically through its closets, the two bedside tables, and a high bureau that held a few stray socks, some briefs in shocking shades, and nothing else. I pulled the drawers out of the bureau and turned them over. I patted the thick white carpeting for unnatural lumps. Nothing. I stuck my hand under the mattress. Nothing.

Had I exhausted all possibilities? All potential places of secrecy? Was there an ingenious hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment? Inspiration failed me.

I sat on the bed. It had a white satin spread. The pillows had satin covers. Seven pillows, one in mauve, two in silver, one in apple green … seven pillows? What practices did Pamela and Jamie get up to in bed?

I stretched out on the satin spread and dropped my head on a white satin pillow. From where my head was positioned, I was staring at the Dennis Burton garter-belt painting. The woman in the garter belt was bending to one side. She showed a lot of haunch.

I stared some more. And noted a flaw. Either the woman was bending at a very tricky angle or the painting was hanging crooked on the wall.

I skidded off the satin and walked over to the painting. The garter belt was black, the haunch was pink, and the painting was tilting an inch too much to the right.

I straightened it and stepped back.

Nah. I’d made it worse, a couple of inches too far left.

I put my fingers under the bottom of the frame and started to ease the picture back into line.

On the back of the painting, at the bottom, the fingers of my right hand were touching something that definitely wasn’t frame.

I unhooked the painting and turned it over.

Paydirt.

Layers of Scotch tape held something that looked remarkably like a disk to the back of the frame. I peeled off the Scotch tape. It was a disk under there, and it had a label with the familiar neat printing.

“Operation Freeload.”

I rehung the lady in the garter belt and backed off two steps. She looked straight to me.

In the den, a small liquor cabinet nestled into the panelled wall beside the desk. Bottles, glasses, an ice-making machine. Jamie kept Russian vodka on hand. Or Pamela kept it for him. Stolichnaya. I built a drink on the rocks, raised the glass in a toast to my own perspicacity, and sat in the chair behind the NeXT.

As a rule, I’ll take the quill pen over the computer any day. That isn’t a smart attitude in my profession and getting less smart awfully fast. Somewhere around fifty percent of my clients are charged with crimes of fraud, and lately too many of the people who beat a path to my door are accused of perpetrating their frauds with the accursed computer. I have to refer them to computer-friendly lawyers. It’s embarrassing, especially when the computer-friendly lawyers don’t send any quill-pen felons my way.

I had a stiff swallow of Stolichnaya and thought, what the hell. Take a flyer. Fire up the NeXT. Stick “Operation Freeload” into the thing. Maybe divine its contents. Solve the mystery right out of the box. Why not? What was the worst that could happen? I considered the question, but I didn’t know what the worst could be.

A button on the NeXT’s keyboard was labelled “Power.” A logical starting place. I pressed it, and the machine went into a mild convulsion of drones and quavers. When the dust cleared and silence reigned again, a box in the computer’s screen, black letters on an off-white background, seemed to require the answers to two questions. Name and Password.

Name.

Well, not mine.

Jamie’s.

I typed “Jamie” into the indicated space.

Password?

I typed in “Freeload.” It was worth a try.

Did the NeXT like what I’d fed it? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it needed to chew on a disk. I looked around for an appropriate slot and found one on another black box that seemed to be a partner to the main computer. I slid in “Operation Freeload.” The disk disappeared into the slot, making a polite slurping sound in the process, and right away, the screen blipped up a bunch of lines.

First, “Loading from disk.”

Then, “Checking disk.”

“Checking network.”

“Starting system services.”

Was this fun or what, a NeXT in high gear?

Something titled “Directory Browser” settled onto the screen. Under it, there was a long list of one-word titles. Browser? Jeez, computerspeak was turning mundane. Whatever happened to “interface” and “IBM-compatible”?

I gathered I was supposed to select something from the “Directory Browser,” and move on to the next step.

Uh huh. I tried tapping keys on the keyboard, but nothing happened.

Hovering in the corner of the screen was a tiny arrow. Intuition told me the arrow was the little devil that handled the selecting chore. But how did I make the damn thing move?

To the right of the computer, resting on the table, there was a small rectangular gizmo. It was in the usual black, and it fed into the computer through a cable arrangement. Something about the little gizmo … what was it? The rodent? The rat? The bug? Wait a minute, it was the mouse. I’d picked up that piece of dope somewhere along the line from one of the computer-friendly lawyers. The mouse acted as a sort of remote-control guide to the arrow on the screen.

Right.

I began to move the mouse around, and, presto, magic, computer science at work, the arrow moved around the screen.

Oh-kay.

The mouse had a button on top. I moved the arrow on the screen to a title under “Directory browser,” and pushed the button on the mouse. Did I know what I was doing? Hell, no, but at least things were happening on the screen.

One by one, positioning the arrow and clicking the mouse, I got a series of lines of type popping up on the screen. I rattled through “NeXT Developer” and “Demos” and “Score Player.”

Fascinating. I hadn’t a clue what it all meant.

Could I penetrate into “Operation Freeload”?

Well, anything was possible.

On the screen, I had somehow summoned up a curious list of titles. The list was stacked vertically, and it read, “clouds, eagle, fish, gravity, holey, hotspin, mosaic …”

“Holey?”

I moved the arrow to “holey” and clicked the mouse.

All of a sudden it was like Chicago and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre on the screen. Bullet holes, authentic-looking bullet holes, shreds around the edges and everything, studded across the screen, and the sounds of gunfire erupted into the room.

I jumped in the chair and spilled vodka on my pants.

“Holey?” Bullet holes! Was this a computer joke? Swell sense of humour, guys.

The screen went quiet. I mopped my pants and poured a new drink.

The weird list was back on the screen. “Clouds, eagle, fish, gravity …”

Was any of this going to lead me to Operation Freeload? Or had I stumbled into some kind of computer backwater? I couldn’t fathom what was happening, but there didn’t appear to be any turning back. Where could I turn back to? I pointed the arrow at another entry on the list, “Bach fugue.” Well, why not? And I pushed the mouse’s button. I got sound again, music this time. Or something approximating music. A Bach fugue came out of the computer, but the guy at the piano wasn’t Glenn Gould. In fact, the closer I listened, the more I realized it wasn’t a person at the piano and it wasn’t a piano. The computer was playing a synthesized brand of Bach. Disillusionment was beginning to replace the euphoria I’d had when I embarked on this journey into the computer universe. The answer to Operation Freeload lurked somewhere inside the computer, but did I want to have a relationship with an instrument that sullied the works of a revered eighteenth-century German composer? Gimme a break. I went back to the oddball list and pointed the arrow at “fish.” No surprises there. A fish swam across the screen. Actually a drawing of a fish. Lot of detail in the drawing too. Same thing with “eagle.” The eagle swooped and dived and generally behaved like a patriotic American bird. I drank some more vodka and pondered the wisdom of pushing ahead. I could be sitting at the damn machine all night and never come within hailing distance of Operation Freeload. Or I could go home and think about rounding up someone who would handle the computer detail for me.

I positioned the arrow opposite “gravity” and clicked the mouse.

Everything on the screen bounced and vibrated. Words and symbols and boxes trembled as if an earthquake had struck.

Then — zip — nothing. The screen went blank, nothing except a sea of off-white.

Was this a silent metaphor? Was there a hidden message in the damn blank screen? Was the computer telling me to sign up for a course at George Brown College? Study up your Disk Drive 101 and come back in a year, fella.

“Well, thank you very much,” I said to the NeXT.

Talking out loud to an inanimate object. Bad omen. Maybe a sign I should bid adieu to the NeXT. But not to the disk. I pushed the Power button, and the machine went into another round of hums and drones. As they dwindled toward silence, the light on the screen faded to black and the slot on the annex box beside the main computer burped out the disk. Good old Operation Freeload, whatever it was.

I stuck the disk in my pocket, made one more small vodka, and organized myself to head home. The hell with technology.