Nova Swing by M. John Harrison Page B

matching pillbox hat. She hailed a rickshaw and got in it.
    “She wishes you would help her, Vic,” Liv Hula called from behind the bar. Vic told her he would like another drink.
    On the card the woman had given him was an address in Hot Walls, which Vic recalled as tall old-fashioned townhouses on the wrong side of being corporate, run down twenty years ago when the current generation of executives traded up into the purpose-built complexes of Doko Gin. He wished he hadn’t said anything to her at all, because that made a connection between them.
    “Why would a tourist have an address on Hot Walls?” he asked Liv Hula.
    “I’d ask how she got your name, Vic.”
    “That too.”
    Liv watched him tear the card up and toss the pieces on the bar. Later, though, he collected them together and put them in his pocket.
    Vic got another call from Paulie DeRaad.
    DeRaad seemed irritated. At the same time he was dissociated and vague. He wanted to talk about the artefact he had bought, he said. He said he was puzzled. He said he wasn’t sure what he had. But each time Vic asked him what was wrong, his attention seemed to be somewhere else. “Is something going on where you are, Paulie?” Vic asked him. “Because you should attend to it if there is, especially when you don’t have anything to say to me.”
    “Hey, be polite, Vic,” Paulie advised him. Eventually, he said Vic should come over to his club, the Semiramide. That would be the best way of doing it, he thought. There was something Vic should see; he could see it for himself.
    “I’ve got other things to do,” Vic said.
    “You haven’t got things more important than this,” DeRaad said. “Hey, Vic, I’ll send someone to pick you up, save you any trouble.”
    “There’s no need for that,” Vic said.
    The Semiramide lay midtown like a cruise ship at dock, placed to attract a mix of tourists and local players, class and income to be decided by Paulie himself. When Vic got there, six-thirty p.m., he found an ongoing situation. It was empty but for the customary DeRaad footsoldiers, a dozen contract gun-kiddies sitting round the back tables excitedly comparing weapons and throwing dice. Some of the furniture was tipped over and a couple of charred holes in the walls indicated someone had let go recently with a reaction pistol. Paulie’s people seemed less connected than usual.
    “Paulie won’t be happy you go in there,” one of the gun-punks informed Vic when he tried to get in the office.
    “The fuck he won’t,” Vic said, looking down at her.
    The punk’s name was Alice Nylon, she was eight years old and wore a blue plastic rainslicker buttoned up to the neck. Café electrique rotted Alice’s front teeth before she was seven, giving her an interesting speech defect. She enjoyed cookery, aquacise sessions at the local pool, and in her spare time was studying to do her own accountancy. “Vic,” she told him, “you would not believe the raid we had. No, really! Right here at the Semiramide Club.” She shook her head in disbelief, slowly from side to side. “Those losers from Site Crime, all over us like a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract. That guy who looks like Albert Einstein? We had to be tuff, Paulie said, and not do what comes naturally. We had to keep a tight rein.”
    “I wish I’d seen that, Alice,” Vic said politely.
    Alice shrugged. She was a professional. It was nothing to her.
    “We would of iced them, Vic, but what do you do?” She gave him her tired, raddled little smile. “So maybe it would be best if you waited here? For Paulie?”
    Vic said OK and went over to one of the tables.
    “Hey, Vic,” Alice called after him. “This morning I cooked brownies on my own!”
    Vic hated the Semiramide.
    As a storefront it was an insult to the intelligence.
    It wasn’t much of a joint either.
    The instant you walked in you knew Paulie DeRaad made his money elsewhere. There were forty tables, each to seat four, in a circular