The Cracked Earth (4 page)

“Yes, I'm sure she is.” He pointed at the painting. “Can you hear it?”

She shook her head. “I can't do that either. Lee has all the luck. She even had lunch with Brad Pitt once.”

T
HE RECEPTIONIST SQUINTED AT HER COMPUTER SCREEN, AP
parently unable to get the words on it to do what she wanted. “Way bad,” she murmured.

The logo on the dark gray wall behind her was a stylized beanie with a propeller on top, and beside it were six TV screens let into the wall, all but one showing duplicates of a video game where a little round-faced boy with a sword flailed away at what looked like a crushed Buick with legs. As fast as the multiple swords dispatched the Buicks with bright puffs, new ones waddled out of the scenery. The sixth screen, on the right edge of the array, was dead.

“I'd like to see Dae Kim.”

“So would I,” she said. She might have been about nineteen and the heavy eye makeup gave her a permanently startled look. Office professionalism seemed to have gone south with the California economy. She leaned in over a dozen toppled vitamin bottles and a pile of Skittles to peer at the screen.

“Do you know Lee Borowsky?”

“Sure. Do you know WordPerfect?”

“A bit.”

“How do you get it to turn that list of numbers into columns?”

“No one in the known universe has been able to get WordPerfect to do columns. Could you, perhaps, tell Dae Kim I'm here?”

“He doesn't really work here. He's, like, whatayacallit,
contract.
Dae's doing Matrix for us, mostly he's out shooting or something. I could put something on his E-mail for you.”

“Could I talk to someone else?” He opened a leather ID wallet briefly, the kind police and feds carried, but his had a card with a gold stamp and a fine-print statement that he'd passed a course on investigation and dispute mediation at World Wisdom College of East Orange, New Jersey. Even that wasn't true.

“Oh, like, sure. Sorry. Maybe you better see Bruce.”

She hit a function key and what looked like an architect's blueprint of the floor came up on her screen. Superimposed on the rooms were small grinning faces, sometimes two to a room. She tapped a face that had a tiny dark goatee and the loudspeaker on her computer came on with a hiss and a faraway voice.

“Uh, Bruce, uh,” canting her head, as if she needed to get the icon's attention. “There's a guy here, a cop, wants to see Dae. Could you, like, talk to him?”

“I'll be right out.”

She punched the screen back to word processor and grinned. “Cool, isn't it? I can track 'em all over, even to the bathroom. 'Course, they're always dumping their trackers in somebody else's lunch bucket when they get in their question-authority mood.”

“I think I can understand.”

Two young Asians with fade haircuts walked past kicking a hackey sack to one another.

“… So I go, ‘It's just a cubicle,' and he goes, ‘Man, don't tell me doors aren't important. Doors are mega-important. They're the defense of your identity.' ”

“I think you are your favorite application.”

“Unless you're just empty-file.”

They went in the inner double door and then the man with the goatee peered out into the reception area. He was thirtysomething with a dark ponytail below his shoulders.

“G'day, Officer,” he said. “I'm Bruce Parfit. Why don't we shoot on through.”

The man barely opened his mouth when he spoke, and he had one of the strongest Australian accents Jack Liffey'd ever heard.

“Jack Liffey.”

He followed into a long corridor with a lot of doors. It had oyster-colored walls and plum carpeting. “I'm not actually a cop. I'm an investigator.”

“Stone the crows,” Parfit said with a thin smile.

They passed an open door where two young men played Whiffle basketball. One was in a wheelchair. Above the Far Side cartoons taped up beside their door was a sign:
THE IMMINENT DEATH OF THE NET IS PREDICTED
. Inside the next door, a woman was being fitted out in a pink antebellum ball gown. Over her head was a big inflated shark. A bay off the corridor held a dozen young people working at screens that all seemed to show the same 3-D view of glowing pipelines receding in perspective.

“That's Dae's show,” Parfit said. “Backgrounds. That's the matrix. We're going flat out on it.”

Parfit took him into a big sunny office that looked out over the city. They were on the fourth floor and Little Santa Monica bustled below, split off from Big Santa Monica by a dirt strip that had once been the red-car line. A billboard to the east had flickering neon digits that professed to report the exact number of smokers who had died since the beginning of the year.

“Take a pew.”

Jack Liffey sat in a black leather Mies van der Rohe chair. The wall displayed a lot of stills from video games behind a long band of Plexiglas. On a sideboard was an open jar of chunky Jiff with a spoon in it and a pyramid of Tab cans.

“Thanks.”

“You're interested in Dae Kim?”

“I'm more interested in Lee Borowsky. I think she was his part-time production assistant.”

The man seemed to go very still. “I knew that one was trouble.”

“Why is that?”

“She's the daughter of a director who does a lot of work for Monogram Pictures. PH and Monogram have been in a feud for a year. A real argy-bargy.”

“PH?”

“That's us. Monogram would love to sink us without a trace and this girl showing up was just too big a coincidence, so I told Dae to keep her out of the building. She's also like fourteen or something, and there are labor laws. Now, can I ask what you're on about?”

Suddenly there was a crash and they both jumped. A naked pink Barbie doll had caromed into the room off the open door. A sheepish-looking twentysomething peered in clutching a nine iron. “Sorry, Brucie.”

When the golfer had left, Bruce Parfit got up and shut the door.

“Bruce, the damn sprite keeps disappearing when you change the level of armaments.” It was a tinny voice out of the dark computer.

“Not now, Bobby.” He hit a key, but there was no discernible change in the machine. Peace seemed to return to the room gradually, like liquid filling a pool.

“Lee is missing, and her mom wants me to find her. Probably off with a boyfriend. I just want to talk to Dae Kim.”

He rattled his fingers on the desktop. “Too right. Maybe I best have him call you.”

“You mean in case the girl is holed up in his bedroom, being underage and all?”

“Something like that. Frankly, Matrix is half shot in a very distinctive Kim style and I don't need to lose my director and rubbish the project. We needed a director of his horsepower and his particular sensibility and he's damn good.”

Jack Liffey noticed all of a sudden that one of the man's eyes was blue and the other was green. It made him look like a Siamese cat. “I'm not going to the cops.”

Parfit beckoned and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder at the floor-length glass wall. The height made him nervous, the glass going right down to his toes. The man pointed and he saw the Lumina, parked conspicuously on a red zone with an elbow out the window.

“I saw them roll up just before Bambi buzzed you in. They following you?”

“You spend that much time watching the window?”

“A bit.”

“If this were a video game, I suppose you could zap them with your ray gun.”

“If this were a video game, I don't think I've got the juice yet. My worlds are very rational, in a plodding sort of way. You've got to earn your power to kill.”

“What's your problem with Monogram Pictures?”

He seemed to think about it.

“I don't know if you'd understand.”

“I'll probably get the little words.”

The Australian smiled. “It's differences of metaphysics, or maybe just meta-
phors.
” He seemed pleased with himself. He unscrewed a little metal vial, shook it between thumb and forefinger, then rubbed his nostrils. It was just a taste, but Jack Liffey was astonished the man would be so blatant. He'd stepped into another world.

“How do you know I'm not a narc?”

“They're all little guys with long hair.”

“That's vice.”

“Whatever. Monogram is an old-style Hollywood studio, run by fat guys with cigars, even if a lot of them aren't fat anymore and don't smoke cigars. What's crucial is the way they think of the world—they want to build a big dam, store up a lot of water, then bust the dam and everybody grabs as much water as they can when it's rushing out. The dam is a Schwarzenegger movie, and everybody snatches what they can off the profit train as it steams past. Him most of all, but also the studio and the director and the publicists and all the crafts. Then they go out and build another dam. What's important is being there to grab the water.”

Down on the street a black-and-white police car pulled up next to the Lumina. Words were exchanged and the hand dangling out of the Lumina seemed to give the finger. The patrol car revved up and pulled away. Bruce Parfit chuckled.

“We're Silicon Valley. We want to build the widest swiftest river that we can and keep it flowing past all the time. We know people are going to siphon off as much as they can, so we just keep making it faster and wider so they'll want to use our river. What I'm saying is, we rely on our expertise and being light on our feet to stay ahead of the game rather than a narrow sense of property rights. It's a different way of thinking, so you can see you could have two companies, both operating within their lights, both feeling justified and honorable, and there could be serious misunderstandings.”

Suddenly a riderless horse appeared on the dusty median between the two Santa Monicas, galloping westward. It had an English saddle and looked panicky. Sergeant Flor got out of the Lumina and tried to wave it down, but the horse reared and ran past. Then it was out of sight, the kind of thing that left you wondering if you'd seen it at all. The only proof was a bit of dust on the air and Flor standing there with his hands on his hips.

“Is that a way of saying you stole some of their product?”

Bruce Parfit smiled and his ponytail swished a little from side to side as he made a theatrical shrug. “Information wants to be free.”

For some reason, Parfit gave him the address of Dae Kim's studio, and on his way out Jack Liffey noticed that the receptionist had given up on the computer and was hunched forward nearsightedly, nose too close to a New Age paperback with a misty picture of an East Indian with a lot of hair on the cover.

“Wow, killer,” she said. “The baboo says only the present really exists.”

He leaned close to her and whispered, “But it'll be over any minute now.”

T
HE
address was on the north edge of Koreatown, where the mansions of Hancock Park petered out into big frame houses and stucco apartments with those doodad lamps plastered on the front like giant bugs on the windshield. It was a no-man's-land between Korea and Central America. In some areas the old homes had been cut into eightplexes and the lawns were shaggy, and ailing Oldsmobiles with signs that said
YO AMO QUERETARO
leaked oil onto the crowded streets. Whole pockets of the area, however, had been done up and tidied and had grilles on the windows. Aging Korean grandmothers squatted beside empty bus benches, caught between two or three worlds, and the old churches had been resignboarded for Missionary Korean Baptist denominations.

He slowed past a big Italianate house that a crew of workers was painting up in horizontal bands of bright green and purple, right across doors and window sashes and the too skinny Corinthian columns. He stopped to stare, wondering if it was possible that somewhere someone liked a paint scheme like that, or if it was an elaborate practical joke. It was like living in a damaged reality.

Actually he hadn't been slowing to see the house, but to twit the cops who pulled to the curb a half block behind. Jack Liffey picked up a black water bottle someone had given him that was shaped like a car phone and pretended to talk to someone for a long time. He hoped they had some kind of scanner and were frantically trying to trace his call.

Then he drove to Serrano Avenue. Two blocks north of Wilshire, but it looked like something from the Midwest, big two-story single-family homes behind trees. Dae Kim's house had a telescope dome on the roof and an old panel van in the driveway. Parfit had called it Kim's studio, but it looked like an ordinary house. The front door had a little sign that said,
DO GO AROUND BACK. DO-BE-DO.

In back, a screened vestibule had its door open and Jack Liffey stepped inside gingerly to a kitchen piled with Styrofoam cups and hardening Danish on paper plates, like the kitchenette of a real estate office. “Dae Kim?”

“Is that the gumshoe?” The voice came out of the front room, so nasal and suburban he pictured some blond surfer.

“Jack Liffey.” Bruce Parfit must have called ahead to make sure no half-dressed fifteen-year-olds were lolling on his sofa.

“Come through but watch your step.”

Jack Liffey came to a dead stop in the doorway. Beyond the kitchen the whole downstairs had been hollowed out and most of the floor was a miniature city, like a train layout. Kim lay on his stomach adjusting a long metal gooseneck that depended from a complex grid crisscrossing the room just above head level.

“Downtown L.A., 2099,” he said. “Stay over there a bit.” He wore bib overalls over a black turtleneck and gave a pleasant oval smile for a moment before going back to tweaking his model. Despite the surfer drawl, he was definitely Asian. He also seemed tall, though it was hard to tell from his position.

“I'm sorry to bother you.”

“No trouble. Bruce apologized for giving out the address, but I'm in the book. Of course there's quite a few Kims in the area. Even a few Dae Kims. It could take you a while.”