One of the two b.u.t.tons, he thought, must be a safety.

And the other filled the air outside with flame, recoil close to breaking his wrist, but n.o.body, really n.o.body, was going to be reloading anything.

Not over there.

237.

57. EYE.

AND when they are cleaning up, the next day, Fontaine will find a cardboard canister of coa.r.s.e Mexican salt, holed, on the floor, in the back room.

And he will pick it up, the weight wrong somehow, and pour the salt out into the palm of his hand, through the entrance hole in the side, until out falls the fully blossomed exotic hollow-point slug that had penetrated the plywood part.i.tion, then straight into this round box of salt, upon its shelf, spending its energy there as heat. But it will be cold then, like a fanged bronze kernel of popcorn, evidence of the ways in which its makers intended it to rend flesh.

And he will place it on a shelf beside a lead soldier, another survivor of the war.

But now he can only move as in a dream, and what comes to him most strongly in this silence, this tangible silence through which he feels he moves as if through glycerine, is the memory of his father, against his mother's ardent fear, taking him briefly out, into the yard behind a house in tidewater Virginia, to experience the eye of a hurricane.

And in that eye, after the storm's initial rage, nothing moves. No bird sings. Each twig of each leafless tree defined in utter stillness, yet perhaps on the very edge of perception there can be some awareness of the encircling system. Something subsonic; felt, not heard. Which will return.

That is certain.

And it is like that now as he rises and moves, seeing the boy's hands frozen, trembling, above the notebook's keys, head still helmed with that old military set. And thinks for a moment the boy is injured, but he sees no blood. Frightened only.

All guns exist to be fired, he knows, and Rydell has proven this by firing Martial's, that ugly thing, Russian, vicious booty out of the Kombinat states by way of Africa, out of wars of an abiding stupidity, ethnic struggles smoldering on for centuries, like airless fires down in the heart of a dry bog. A gun for those unable to be trained to shoot.

238.

Reek of its propellant charge in the hack of his throat, harsh and chemical. A frosting of shattered gla.s.s beneath his shoes.

Rydell stands at the door, the ungainly chain gun dangling from his hand like a duelist's pistol, and now Fontaine stands beside him, looking out into the bridge's narrow covered thoroughfare as into a tableau or diorama, and opposite, there, all glitters with red. Though surely in the shadows one would find more solid, substantial evidence, bone and gristle perhaps, and that automatic gun.

"Chevette," Rydell says, not to her but as if reminding himself of her, and turns, crunching back through the gla.s.s, to find her.

Fontaine blinks at the queer red glitter over there, the smear that someone has so instantly become, and catches something moving, high up in the periphery of vision. Silver.

Flinches, but it's a balloon, a cushiony oblate of inflated Mylar, with, it looks like, little caged articulated props and a camera. This draws even with the front of his shop, halts itself with reversing props, then neatly rotates, so that the lens looks down at him.

Fontaine looks up at the thing, wondering if it has the wherewithal to hurt him, but it simply hangs there, staring, so he turns and surveys the damage to his shop. All this gla.s.s is the most evident breakage, bullet holes themselves being not so visible. Two of them, though, have punched through a round enamel c.o.ke sign that previously would've rated an eighty percent, but now is scarcely "very good."

It is the counter that draws him, though he dreads what he will find:

his watches there beneath shards of gla.s.s, like fish in a shattered aquarium. Plucking up a Gruen "Curvex" by its faux-alligator band, he finds it not to be ticking. He sighs. Clarisse has been after him for some time now, to buy a fire safe in which to place his more valuable stock at night. Had he done so, the watches would still be ticking. But this one is, the Doxa chrono with the gently corroded dial, a favorite of his which customers pa.s.s over repeatedly. He holds it to his ear, hearing the sound of a mechanism a.s.sembled years before his own birth.

But here he sees something which will make Clarisse more unhappy still: her Another One babies lie tumbled in a heap, like some tabloid photo from a nameless atrocity, their ruptured heads and torsos

239.

oozing silicone (which is either a liquid that behaves like a solid or vice versa, Fontaine can never remember which). Not one of them has survived intact, and as he bends for a closer look he hears one repeating, endlessly, an apparent single syllable, though whether in j.a.panese or English he cannot tell. This briefly and deeply fascinates him, and he remembers a similar feeling, as a

child, when he viewed through a police line the rubble of a movie theater in Harlem; the fire that had gutted the place had stopped short of the candy counter, but everything in that counter had melted, had poured out and solidified into a frozen stream of refined sugar, smelling much better, even over the sourness of damp ashes, than this silicone does.

And hears Chevette and Rydell talking, arguing it seems, and he wishes they would stop.

He is in the eye, and he wishes simply to know it.

240.

THE close-up, hand-held, shows Laney this small blue absence just in from the corner of the dead man's eye, like some radical experiment with mascara. A bullet hole, entry wound, of the most modest circ.u.mference.

"You'll note the lack of powder burns," says the one holding the camera. "Done from a distance."

"Why are you showing me this?" Harwood asks, once more the disembodied voice.

The frame pulls back, revealing the dead man, blonde in a black leather jacket, reclining against some vertical surface fogged with whorls of aerosol enamel. He looks surprised and slightly cross- eyed. Pulls back farther, revealing a second body, this one in a black armored vest, facedown on worn pavement.

"One shot each. We weren't expecting him to have a gun."

"The bridge isn't noted for adherence to firearms regulations, you know."

The man with the camera reverses it, his face appearing from an odd angle, shot from the level of his waist. "I just wanted to tell you 'I told you so.'"

"If he leaves the vicinity alive, your firm will find itself in more than contractual difficulties. You signed on to take care of anything, remember?"

"And you agreed to listen to our suggestions."

"I listened."

"I came out here with a five-man team. Now two of them are dead, I've lost radio contact with the other three, and I've just heard what sounded like an explosion. This environment is inherently unstable: an armed anthill. These people have short fuses and no coordinating authority. We could have a riot on our hands, and once that happens, we'll have no hope at all of taking out your man, or of capturing Rydell."

"Recapturing Rydell, you should say."

"I have one last suggestion." The man raises the camera slightly, so

241.

58. SMALL BLUE ABSENCE.

that his face fills the screen, his black scarf blanking the bottom third of the image.

"Yes?"

"Burn it."

"Burn what?"

"The bridge. It's a tinderbox."

"But wouldn't that take time to arrange?"

"It's already arranged." The man shows the camera a small rectangle, a remote, that he holds in his other hand. "We've been planting radio-activated incendiaries. We like to cover the options."

"But aren't our two men likely to escape in the ensuing confusion? You tell me you're afraid of a

riot, after all. .

"n.o.body's getting off this thing. It'll burn from both ends, from Bryant Street to Treasure Island."

"And how are you getting off yourself?"

"That's been taken care of."

Harwood falls silent. "Well," he says, at last, "I suppose you should."