Nightside CIty (10 page)

I found one, too—a com address, not a street.
I unplugged, fed that com address back into the system for a little
research, and was able to give it a street address.

At that point I figured I might need to go
out and do a little fieldwork, because usually, from what I had,
you can’t get an exact room or apartment without getting into the
building, but I was wrong. The street address was a house—a
single-family dwelling in the East End.

I couldn’t put a name to it from any
directory—full privacy on everything. Whoever this was, he or she
wasn’t making it easy. I ran it through the tax records office,
though, and finally got a name.

The name was Sayuri Nakada.

I looked at that for a long, long moment,
acutely aware of the spy-eye hanging around outside; I hoped nobody
had a new way of cracking a window shield that I hadn’t heard about
yet. If I was going to be dealing with Sayuri Nakada, I didn’t want
it on public access.

I mentioned Nakada earlier when I was talking
about the New York, of course, but I hadn’t really expected the
trail to lead right to
her
. Even if you’d never heard of the
New York, the name Nakada ought to get a beep out of the system,
and Sayuri was the only Nakada in the City. She was the family’s
representative on Epimetheus, overseeing everything they did on the
planet. She hadn’t been around all that long, but she was
definitely an established part of Nightside City’s elite.

I knew who was buying the West End, it
seemed. That explained the connection with the New York,
anyway.

What it didn’t explain was what the hell she
wanted with the West End. I knew who; I didn’t know why.

More than anything, I needed to know why.

After a moment’s thought, my questions started
multiplying like the output of a runaway do-loop.

Was
it really Sayuri Nakada buying the
West End, or was it someone else in her household?

If it was she, was she acting alone, or as
her family’s agent?

How did Paulie Orchid get involved with it?
Why use him instead of some more respectable employee? Just how did
he fit in?

Why keep everything so damn secret?

Why start so suddenly six weeks back? What
had happened then to convince her to buy?

And just like a baby do-loop, I kept coming
back to the same place, over and over: Why buy the West End? What
did she plan to do with it?

I punched for “hold and meditate,” sat back,
and watched weirdly-distorted humanoids dance along the big wall
holoscreen as the com tried to synthesize music images that might
help me think. Pointed legs stretched, thickened, and shrank as
they lifted in broken rhythms, while stylized arms thrust out
horizontally.

I could guess at part of it. It had to be
Sayuri Nakada buying; who else had the money? Who else would dare
work out of that house?

Even so, I figured that this was
not
a
family operation. That would explain the secrecy, and the use of a
local small-time operator like Orchid instead of someone who might
report back to Grandfather Nakada on Prometheus.

Presumably she started her project as soon as
she thought of it, or at least as soon as she became convinced it
was worth doing; that was why it began suddenly six weeks ago. What
had convinced her?

Well, I wouldn’t know that until I knew what
she thought she was doing.

I still needed that one simple answer: Why
buy the West End?

My job was to stop whoever was buying the
West End from driving out the squatters. I knew now who it
was—maybe I didn’t have enough evidence for legal proof, but I was
pretty sure. To make her stop, though, I had to know why she was
doing it in the first place. It wasn’t any obvious scam; Sayuri
Nakada really
was
buying the property. There weren’t any
tricks with the deeds or the money, or at least none I could see,
and of course, with the juice she had, Nakada didn’t need any
tricks. She really had bought the buildings. I had no simple, legal
way to stop the evictions; she was within her rights to raise the
rents. If I wanted to collect the rest of my fee I had to somehow
convince her not to try and collect her rents.

A red holo figure spun on one spike-tipped
ankle, arms slashing, while a blue one ducked below, knees bent,
torso swaying. If I wanted to convince Nakada not to collect rent,
I figured I probably had to know what she was doing with the
property in the first place.

I had never met Sayuri Nakada. I knew almost
nothing about her. She was rich, powerful, reclusive—beyond that, I
drew a blank. What could she want with doomed real estate?

The obvious thing to do was to simply call
and ask her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. It’s not that
I have anything against simplicity, it’s just that I didn’t think
it would work, and in fact I guessed it would have the opposite
effect. From everything I knew about her and about this case, she
wouldn’t want me prying into her affairs, and once she knew that I
was
prying she could make it more difficult.

So I didn’t want to be quite that
obvious.

As I saw it, I had three lines of approach:
Nakada, Orchid, and the West End itself. Those were the three
elements I had uncovered so far. The connection with the New York
was probably only that it belonged to Nakada’s family and was under
her personal control; I hadn’t found anything else to tie it in.
The money led back to Nakada and Orchid, which didn’t help.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t checked every
transaction; maybe other money would lead me elsewhere.

It seemed unlikely, though. I’d keep that in
reserve for the moment; I still didn’t like the way I had lost that
searcher, and I didn’t care to get too fancy with the com system
for a while.

In fact, I didn’t think I wanted to do much
of anything with the com just then.

Nakada and Orchid protected their privacy,
and wouldn’t like me poking my nose into their affairs, but the
West End didn’t care. Maybe I could learn something if I took a
look at just what Nakada was buying. Maybe I could learn something
from what the squatters had seen and heard, what the rent
collectors had said.

I brushed the dancers away and called a cab
and took a ride—after a pause to fill my pockets, anyway. When I
stepped out the door into the wind Mishima’s spy-eye dropped like a
meteor, then caught itself two meters up and followed me up to the
cab.

I didn’t bother to look, but I knew it
followed the cab, too.

This cab was nothing special, just another
Midnight Hyundai. It didn’t make any small talk, it just left me
alone, which was what I wanted. It dropped me at Western and Wall
without comment.

The spy-eye was still with me, of course. I
spat at it, just for form’s sake, as I got out of the cab.

I wasted three hours out there in the West
End talking to squatters, and damn it, I knew it was a waste even
while I was doing it. It was obvious they wouldn’t have anything to
tell me. Anybody out that far had to be not just down on his luck,
and not even just stupid, but both, so what could I get out of
them?

It didn’t help any that some of them saw the
spy-eye and got nervous. The air out there was empty, since nobody
had any messages to deliver, or money to spend on advertised
products, or information worth spying out; Mishima’s eye was the
only floater in sight, and it was pretty damn obvious it was with
me. With it hanging there I only talked indoors, well back in the
inside rooms, but I think some of those losers still thought the
spy-eye was listening.

Hell, it probably was, but even if Mishima
knew I was interested in rent collectors, he wouldn’t know why—any
more than I knew why Nakada sent them. If she did.

Even if the spy-eye hadn’t been there, I
don’t think the squatters had much to tell me.

Sure, I got a description of the muscle that
had come around, but so what? Muscle is cheap. I didn’t get a
single decent door reading that would have named the muscle for me;
the equipment out that way’s all shot, either just worn or been
stripped out for parts. That was one reason I had to go out there
in person; there wasn’t a single com line I trusted to still work
properly.

Shielding against spy-eyes? Not a chance, not
on those buildings. I had a jammer in my pocket, and I’d have used
it if I saw any good reason to, but I didn’t. It was a pretty good
jammer, put out a wide field, which meant it was illegal to use it
around any electronics advanced enough to have civil rights, which
meant that it was illegal everywhere in the Trap and most of the
burbs—but out in the West End? No problem. I didn’t think it would
actually hurt the spy-eye, but the damn thing would be blind and
deaf while the jammer was on.

But I didn’t hear anything that said go to
jammer, so it stayed down in my pocket while I heard about the rent
collectors.

The squatters agreed that the muscle came in
two sizes. The small one was a slick-hair, face rebuilt and wired,
and the consensus was that he thought the only thing better than
him was sex, and he knew that all the women of all the
human-inhabited worlds were eager to try combining the two, even
including some of the female squatters, which seemed pretty
extreme. I figured that had to be Paulie Orchid—the description was
just right.

The big muscle was just meat; didn’t talk
beyond what he’d been told, but was big enough he didn’t have to.
One person told me he growled, but someone else said that was just
stomach trouble.

The two of them worked together, and I
guessed that if the little one was Orchid, the big one might be
Bobo Rigmus.

I’d hoped I’d run into these charmers, but it
didn’t happen. At least, not then, in the West End. I met them
later; I’ll get to that.

While I was out there talking, I was looking
around, too; I had some equipment up and humming in my pocket—not
the jammer, but some wide-band recorders. I was using what my genes
gave me, as well—both the ones my parents put together to start
with, and the symbiotic ones added later.

I saw a lot of decaying buildings, damp with
mist blown in from the crater rim. The crater wall loomed up behind
everything like the edge of the world, which in a way it was, and
the stars hung above it in a sky that was still comfortingly
dark—but even there in the west I noticed that it wasn’t really
black any more, but dark blue.

A couple of the highest towers were ablaze
with light at the top, as if there was a perpetual silent explosion
blowing out their uppermost corners, and I felt a little twist of
fear in my gut and the base of my brain when I realized that that
was early sunlight glinting off them. It was horribly, blindingly
bright.

I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for
the entire city to be lit like that—it would be as if it were on
fire, as if the walls and streets were burning magnesium. I
wondered if the glass would melt, then told myself I was being
silly. Glass didn’t melt on Earth or Prometheus; it wouldn’t melt
on the dayside. It wasn’t
that
hot.

But it
looked
that hot. That light
looked hotter than hell.

And that was just dawn. Most of the dayside
had to be worse. Noon, which the city would never see, would be
incomprehensible. And I couldn’t even be sure that what I saw on
the towers was direct sunlight and not a reflection or
refraction.

It was something to see, certainly, something
worth looking at—but didn’t the tourists see suns all the time, on
other planets? And this could be seen free of charge from the
street, just as I saw it.

Besides, the properties Nakada was buying
weren’t all towers. That stabbing glare couldn’t be her reason.

The wind wasn’t as harsh there in the West
End as it was in most of the City; I was in the lee of the crater
wall. There weren’t many machines around, either, and no music was
playing anywhere. That had an odd effect on conversation; talking
on the street was almost, but not quite, like talking indoors. In
the Trap, or my own neighborhood on Juarez, street talk was always
shouted, to carry over the wind and noise, but here that wasn’t
necessary. The squatters seemed to be used to it, but it gave me a
little trouble at first.

Not that I did much talking in the streets;
mostly it was limited to, “Let’s go inside.” But the street talk
was different.

I couldn’t see any commercial potential in
that, either. Who pays to talk on the street?

I looked over the whole area, checked out
everything on the list of recent real estate transactions. The
properties Nakada was buying had nothing in common. Some were
towers, some were parkland, and at least one was nothing but a hole
in the ground.

I’d had an idea that maybe Nakada just wanted
to blackmail the squatters into doing something for her, but the
only thing
they
all had in common was that they were all
losers, and no good to anybody. They were fat, thin, short, tall,
dark, pale, male, female, young, old—and stupid, ugly, dirty, and
disagreeable. A couple were visibly diseased, with stuff clogging
their noses, or their pores—if they’d ever had decent symbiotes,
the symbiotes were obviously dead. These people couldn’t possibly
be of any value to Nakada or anyone else. I wasn’t sure they were
even of value to themselves.

I began to see how Zar Pickens, with his
runny eyes and clogged jack and dead worksuit, got chosen to come
talk to me—he was the best of the lot. What I didn’t see was how
they’d managed to collect even the pitiful fee they’d promised
me.

And I didn’t see any commercial potential,
except maybe if they were deposited in front of the Ginza and the
Excelsis and the Luna Park and everywhere but the New York, to
drive customers away from the competition and into Nakada’s place
just by being there.