Tea From an Empty Cup (4 page)

The kid had had his choice of places to go – other countries, other worlds, even other universes, a la the legendary exhortation of e. e. cummings, oddly evocative in its day, spookily prescient now. But the kid’s idea of a hell of a good universe next door had been a glitzed-out, gritted-up, blasted and blistered post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. It wasn’t a singular sentiment – post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty was topping the hitline for the thirteenth week in a row, with post-Apocalyptic Ellay and premillennial Hong Kong holding steady at two and three, occasionally trading places but defending against all comers.

Dore Konstantin didn’t understand the attraction. Perhaps the kid could have explained it to her if he had not come out of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty with his throat cut.

Being DOA after a session in the Sitty wasn’t singular, either; immediate information available said this was the eighth death in as many months. So far, no authority was claiming that the deaths were related, although no one had specifically denied it, either. Konstantin wasn’t sure what any of that meant except that, at the very least, the Sitty would have one more month at the number-one spot.

The video parlor night manager was boinging between appalled and thrilled. ‘You ever go in the Sitty?’ she asked Konstantin, crowding into the doorway next to her. Her name was Guilfoyle Pleshette and she didn’t make much of a crowd; she was little more than a bundle of sticks wrapped in a gaudy kimono, voice by cartoonland, hair by van der Graaf. She stood barely higher than Konstantin’s shoulder, hair included.

‘No, never have,’ Konstantin told her, watching as DiPietro and Celestine peeled the kid’s hotsuit off him for the coroner. It was too much like seeing an animal get skinned, only grislier, and not just because most of the kid’s blood was on the hotsuit. Underneath, his naked flesh was imprinted with a dense pattern of lines and shapes, Byzantine in complexity, from the wires and sensors in the ’suit.

They’ll start calling that the latest thing in nervous systems
, Konstantin thought, mesmerized.
They’ll give it a jumped-up name, like neo-exo-nervous system, and they’ll say it’s generated by hotsuit wear, every line and shape having a counterpart on the opposite side of the skin barrier. With its own astrological sign
.

The coroner’s cam operator leaned in for a shot of the kid’s head and shoulders, forcing the stringer from
Police Blotter
back against the facing wall. Unperturbed, the stringer held her own cam over her head, aimed the lens downward and kept taping. This week,
Police Blotter
had managed to reverse the injunction against commercial networks at crime scenes that had been reinstated last week. Konstantin couldn’t wait for next week.

As the ’suit cleared the kid’s hips, the smell of human waste fought with the heavy odor of blood and the sour stink of sweat for control of the air in the room, which wasn’t much larger than the walk-out closet that Konstantin had shared with her ex. The closet had looked a lot bigger this morning now that her ex’s belongings were gone, but this room seemed to be shrinking by the moment. The coroner, her cam operator, the stringer, and DiPietro and Celestine had all come prepared with nasal filters. Konstantin’s were sitting in the top drawer of her desk.

Putting her hand over her nose and mouth, she stepped back into the hallway where her partner Taliaferro was also suffering, but from the narrow space and low ceiling rather than the air, which was merely over-processed and stale. Pleshette followed, fishing busily in her kimono pockets.

‘So
bad
,’ she said, looking from Konstantin to Taliaferro. Taliaferro gave no sign that he had heard her. He stood with his back to the wall and his shoulders up around his ears, head thrust forward over the archiver while he made notes, as if he expected the ceiling to come down on him. From Konstantin’s angle, the archiver was completely hidden by his hand, so that he seemed to be using the stylus directly on his palm.

Never send a claustrophobe to do an agoraphobe’s job
, Konstantin thought, feeling surreal. Taliaferro, who pronounced his name ‘Tolliver’ for reasons she couldn’t fathom, was such a big guy anyway that she wondered if most places short of an arena didn’t feel small and cramped to him.

‘
Real
goddam
bad
,’ Pleshette added, as if this somehow clarified her original statement. One bony hand came up out of a hidden pocket with a small spritzer; a too-sweet, minty odor cut through the flat air.

Taliaferro’s stylus froze as his eyes swiveled to the manager. ‘That
didn’t
help,’ he said darkly.

‘Oh, but wait,’ she said, waving both hands to spread the scent. ‘Smellin’ the primer now but soon,
nothing
. Deadens the nose, use it by the
pound
here. Trade puts out a
lot
of body smell in the actioners. ’Suits
reek
.’ She gestured at the other doors lining the long narrow hall. ‘Like that
Gang Wars
module? Strapped the trade down on chaises, otherwise they’d a killed the ’suits, rollin’ around on the floor, bouncin’ offa the walls, jumpin’ on each other. Real easy to go native in a
Gang Wars
module.’

Go native?
Taliaferro mouthed, looking at Konstantin from under his brows. Konstantin shrugged. ‘I didn’t see a chaise in here.’

‘Folds down outa the wall. Like those old Murphy beds?’

Konstantin raised her eyebrows, impressed that the manager was even acquainted with the idea of Murphy beds and then felt ashamed. Her ex had always told her that being a snob was her least attractive feature.

‘Most people won’t use the chaises except for the sexers,’ Pleshette was saying. ‘Not if they got a choice. And there was this one blowfish, he hurt himself on the
chaise
. Got all heated up struggling, cut himself on the straps, broke some ribs. And
that
–’ she leaned toward Konstantin confidentially ‘–
that
wasn’t even the
cute
part. Know what the
cute
part was?’

Konstantin couldn’t imagine.

‘The
cute
part was, his pov was in this fight at the
exact same time
and broke the
exact same ribs
.’ Pleshette straightened up and folded her arms, lifting her chin defiantly as if daring Konstantin to disbelieve. ‘This’s
always
been non-safe, even before it was fatal.’

‘That happen here?’ Taliaferro asked without looking up.

‘Nah. Some other place. East Hollywood, North Hollywood. I don’t remember now.’ The manager’s kimono sleeve flapped like a wing as she gestured. ‘We all heard about it. Stuff gets around.’

Konstantin nodded, biting her lip so she wouldn’t smile. ‘Uh-huh. Is this the same guy who didn’t open his parachute in a skydiving scenario and was found dead with every bone in his body shattered?’

‘Well, of
course
not.’ Pleshette looked at her as if she were crazy. ‘How could it be?
That
blowfish
died
. We all heard about that one, too. Happened in D.C. They got it going on in D.C. with those sudden-death thrillers.’ She leaned toward Konstantin again, putting one scrawny hand on her arm. ‘You oughta check D.C. sources for death-trips. Life is so cheap there. It’s a whole different world.’

Konstantin was trying to decide whether to agree with her or change the subject when the coroner emerged from the cubicle with the cam op right on her heels.

‘– shot everything
I
shot,’ the cam op was saying unhappily.

‘And
I
said never mind. We can probably subpoena her footage and see if it really is better than yours. Probably isn’t.
Go
.’ She gave him a little push.

‘But I just
know
she was in some of my shots –’

‘We can handle that, too.
Go. Now
.’ The coroner shooed him away and turned to Konstantin. She was a small person, about the size of a husky ten-year-old – something to do with her religion, Konstantin remembered. The Church of Small-Is-Beautiful, something like that. The faithful had their growth inhibited in childhood. Konstantin wondered what happened to those who lost the faith, or came to it later in life.

‘Well, I can say without fear of contradiction that the kid’s throat was cut while he was alive.’ The coroner looked around. ‘And in a place like this. Imagine that.’

‘Should I also imagine how?’ Konstantin asked.

‘How? Classic ear-to-ear.’ The coroner smoothed down the wiry copper cloud that was her current hair. It sprang back up immediately. ‘Most likely with a weapon made for that sort of thing, and not just any old sharp edge that might have been lying around. Probably a boning blade. Boning blades’re all the rage out there. Or rather,
in
there. In the actioners. They all like those boning blades. And definitely not self-inflicted. Even if we couldn’t tell by the angle, this kid was an AR softy. He wouldn’t have had the strength to saw through his own windpipe like that.’

Konstantin made a face. ‘Great. You know what’s going to be on the news inside an hour.’

The coroner fanned the air with one small hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gameplayers’ stigmata. Everybody’s heard about somebody who got stabbed in a module and came out with a knife wound it took sixteen stitches to close and what about the nun who was on TV with the bleeding hands and feet. It’s part of the modern myth-making machine. There’ve been some people who fell off their perch in AR, got all mixed up about what was real and hurt themselves or somebody else. But the stigmata stuff – everybody conveniently forgets how the stigmata of Sister Mary Blood of the Sacred Etceteras got exposed as a hoax by her own order. The good sister did a turn as a stage magician before she got religion. There’s a file about how she did it floating around PubNet. Look it up sometime – fascinatin’ rhythms. The real thing would be
extremo ruptura
, very serious head trouble, which the experts are pretty sure nobody’s had since St. Theresa."’

‘Which one?’ asked Konstantin.

The coroner chuckled. ‘That’s good. “Which one?” You know your stuff, doncha.’ She laughed some more. ‘I’ll have my report in your in box tomorrow.’ She went up the hall, still laughing.

‘
Well
,’ said the night manager, sniffing with disdain. ‘
Some people
ought better stick with what they know than mock what they
don’t know squat about
.’ She called the last four words at the coroner’s retreating back, but the coroner didn’t hear.

‘My apologies if she offended your beliefs,’ Konstantin said briskly. ‘Is there some other way into the room that nobody knows about – vents, conduits, emergency exit, access?’

Pleshette’s fuzzy head wagged from side to side. ‘No. Nothing.’

Konstantin was about to ask for the building’s blueprints when Taliaferro snapped the archiver closed with a sound like a rifle shot. ‘Right. Some great place you got here. We’ll interview the clientele now. In the parking lot.’

‘
Got
no parking lot,’ Pleshette said, frowning suspiciously.

‘Didn’t say
your
parking lot. We’ve corralled everyone at a car rental place down the block, we can do it there.’ Taliaferro looked at Konstantin meaningfully. ‘Spacious. Lots of room to move around in.’

Konstantin sighed. ‘First let’s weed out everyone who was in the same scenario and module with the kid and see if anyone remembers him doing or saying anything that would give hints about what was happening to him.’

Pleshette gave a sharp bark of laughter. ‘You know how many people that could be?’

Konstantin nodded glumly. ‘We’ll start just with the locals. The clients here, I mean.’ She started up the hall after Taliaferro.

‘But you
can
see what the kid was doing when he took it in the neck.’

Konstantin stopped and looked back at the manager. ‘I can?’

‘Yeah. Surveillance’ll have it.’

‘Surveillance?’ Konstantin repeated, unsure she had heard correctly.

‘Well, yeah.’ The night manager gave her a sideways look. ‘You think we let the blowfish come in here and
don’t
keep an eye on them?
Anything
could happen. Liability, that’s a monster.’

Konstantin decided not to ask her why she hadn’t mentioned this minor detail a couple of hours before. ‘Can I screen this surveillance record in your office?’

‘Just screen it?’ Pleshette looked puzzled.

‘Is that some kind of problem?’ Konstantin moved toward the open doorway of the room where she could hear DiPietro and Celestine bantering with the stringer.

‘No.’ The night manager shrugged. ‘You just want to screen it, my office, sure.’

Konstantin didn’t know what to make of the look on Pleshette’s funny little face. Maybe that was all it was, a funny little face on a funny little person who lived in a funny little open-all-night world. A funny little open-all-night artificial world at that. For all Konstantin knew, the night manager hadn’t seen true daylight for years. Not her problem, she thought as she stuck her head through the doorway of the cubicle where Celestine and DiPietro were now busy jockeying for the stringer’s attention while the stringer pretended she wasn’t pumping them for information and they pretended they didn’t know she was pretending not to pump them for information. No one had to pretend the dead kid had been forgotten.

‘Pardon me for interrupting,’ Konstantin said a bit archly. DiPietro and Celestine turned to her simultaneously. In their identical white coveralls, they looked like unfinished marionettes.

‘Attendants’ll be coming for him. Before you do a final search of the room, you might want to, oh’ – she gestured at the body – ‘cover him up.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Celestine, and then suddenly tossed something round and wrapped in plastic at her. ‘Think fast!’

Konstantin caught it by instinct. The shape registered on her before anything else. The kid’s head, she thought, horrified. The cut across his throat had been so deep, he’d been decapitated when they peeled him.