Jonny felt relief when Ice sat beside him on the thin foam mattress.
'Forgive me if I seem to be pushing things,' said Groucho. 'I know about your run-in with Zamora. In fact, I may know more about old Pere Ubu's motives than you. How did you escape?'
'I didn't. Zamora let me go,' Jonny replied, sniffing the tart wine. His stomach won the battle over his brain. He set the down glass down beside his foot.
'Yes, that makes sense in light of everything else.' Groucho nodded, off somewhere.
'In light of what?'
The anarchist frowned, rolling the crystal glass between his palms. 'Things are afoot, Jonny. I don't know the specifics yet. There are layers that are still hidden to me. Did you know that we've been trying to contact you, but couldn't because there was a tail on you for the last few weeks?'
'I had no idea.'
'I thought not. Then old Ubu catches you and releases you a few hours later. Nimble Virtue turned you, by the way.'
'I know. I saw her at detention center.'
Ice chuckled. 'I hope you shook that old bitch up. She's playing finger for Zamora, sucking up to old bastard. Got Easy Money working for her now, too.'
'The slime leading the slime,' said Jonny.
'Exactly,' said Groucho. Over the anarchist's shoulder, Skid flashed Nimble Virtue's ravaged face. He stuck a finger up his nose, making a great production out of examining what he found there. He pulled his ears, rolled his eyes back in his sockets. A very un-Zombie thing to do. Jonny laughed in spite of himself.
'I understand that Easy Money's sticky fingers have gotten him in deep shit with Conover,' Groucho said. 'Did you hear that the Colonel is getting political heat from Sacramento about the smuggler lords? I believe he's getting set for a big move against them. There's talk that the Army's trying to get it together and take the moon back from the Alpha Rats. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you fit in, Jonny. Your name is all over town. Someone even mentioned Arabs.'
Jonny rubbed at his sore shoulder. To Groucho, he said, 'Look, if this is some simple trick to get me to join your army, you can forget it. The Colonel picked me up because he's trying to queer some deal of Conover's.'
Groucho sipped his wine. He stared at the floor. 'I doubt that. If anything, Zamora's trying to angle himself in for a piece of the action. That's why his move against the lords is so important. Not only will it satisfy the politicians, but if it succeeds, it will force the lords to deal with him directly. And that's what we're waiting for- when Zamora makes his move so do we. An all out attack on the Committee.'
Jonny nodded. Something prickled along his spine as he realized that the anarchist was completely sincere. Jonny smiled and shivered at the same time. He thought of war.
'Why exactly did you come here?' asked Groucho.
'I need to get out town,' Jonny said. 'You've just said I'm being watched. That means I can't use any of my normal contacts. I heard that the Croakers have some smuggling routes that'll get me out onto the desert.'
Groucho smiled and opened his hands. 'I'd love to help you, Jonny. You're center stage in fat Ubu's carnival. Whatever we can do to trip him up if fine by me.'
'There's one more thing,' Jonny said. 'I have to get Sumi, the woman I live with. I won't leave the city without her.'
'That might be more difficult,' said Groucho. He ran a finger around the rim of his glass, producing a clear, high ringing tone. 'The Committee must know where you live by now.'
'I don't think so. If they did, why would they pay Nimble Virtue to tip them that I was at the Pit? Wouldn't it be better to surprise me at home?'
'Not necessarily,' said Ice. 'They probably assumed we'd booby-trapped the apartment, so you'd be easier to pick off in the street.'
Jonny looked at Groucho. 'Your mind is made up?' asked the anarchist.
'I won't go without her.'
'You're loyalty's commendable. Ice, what do you think?'
'Sumi means a lot to me, too, Groucho,' Ice said. 'I don't like the idea of leaving her out there alone. She's not equipped to deal with that kind of craziness.'
Ice sat with her legs bent. Jonny looped an arm around one of her knees. It was just like old times. The two of them taking care of Sumi. That was assuming, he reminded himself. that Sumi was all right. That no one had gotten to her yet.
'What's your answer?' Jonny asked.
Groucho leaned back in his plastic folding chair, pointed to the wall over Jonny's head. 'You see those photos, Jonny?' he asked quietly. 'The one on the right is from the uprising in Paris, nineteen sixty eight. The other is the Spanish war against the fascists, in thirty seven. Yet here we are, over a hundred years later, in a mad city in a sick century fighting exactly the same battles they fought. Isolated, alienated, bored and drugged beyond caring. We're the trained dogs of the Spectacle. Zamora whistles, and we jump through his hoops.'
'The Committee is the Spectacle's ultimate tool. It's devoured our lives, all art, our dignity. But existence is not predicated on the whim of politicians.' The anarchist took a sip of wine.
'A hundred and fifty years ago the surrealists proclaimed themselves the revolt of the spirit. The spark in the wind, seeking the powder keg.' The anarchist nodded in satisfaction. 'So, we'll get your friend and we'll get you out of town and, with any luck at all, we'll humiliate fat King Ubu in the process. How does that sound?'
Jonny smiled at the anarchist, he just could not resist. 'Yeah, but what if you get caught?'
Ice began to recite, and Skid joined in:
Well, then, rent me a tomb, whitewashed and outlined in cement Far, far underground.
Jonny frowned and fingered the musty volume of poetry.
'Rimbaud, right? Terrific. By the way, where'd that wine go?'
FIVE
An acid rain, the sins of the fathers, blew down hard and cold, etching obscure messages into the faces of the graceless old buildings. A few blocks to the south, beyond the fifty-story torus housing Lockheed's business offices, carbon arcs burned a pure white nimbus of light into the fat, menacing clouds. Pemex-U.S. was out there somewhere, Jonny knew. Exxon; Krupp International. And Sony- a flat black silicon sphere, almost invisible at night, like a hole punched in the sky. Wilshire Boulevard.
Hushed evening crowds hurried by. Business men, anonymous in their Gucci snake skin goggles and respirators. Groups of giggling teenage girls in matching state school ponchos. A stoned young boy, shirtless chest aglow with bio-luminescent tattoos, kicked up wings of water on a skateboard. When Ice reached Jonny's side, the boy circled once in the street, gave them the finger, and took off. Ice laughed once. 'Don't say it,' said Jonny. She laughed again.
'I don't have to, doll. It's plain as day. That's your lean and hungry youth just skated by.'
Jonny shook his head. 'I was never that skinny,' he said. A great knot of tension was uncoiling in his chest. He kicked at some weeds sprouting through a crack in the pavement. Outside again, in the street, a cold wind blowing stinking sulfur rain. There was a siren fading somewhere, far off. He was home. It felt great.
'Where to?' he asked.
Ice nodded up the street, started that way and Jonny followed. He could see Groucho and Skid a few meters ahead.
They had left the old subway terminal perhaps twenty minutes before. Jonny had been surprised at how easily they reached the surface, cutting through sewers and abandoned underground shopping malls full of rotting acoustical tiles and dismembered mannequins. They had emerged in the back of a heavy equipment warehouse surrounded by the smell of rust and slow leaking canisters of toluene. Jonny had been the first one out the door. The first one into the rain. Ice had given him a belted Army raincoat before they left the clinic. Now, walking with
