on raw ingenuity and imagination.' He picked a set of forceps off a metal tray table, turning them over in his hands. 'We learn to improvise.'
'What did you improvise?'
'You have your sight again.'
'What's wrong with me?' He scanned the room again. 'Have I got the virus? he asked.
'Nothing like that,' said Conover. 'I just want you to understand the context of your operation.'
By then Jonny was up, pushing the Russians out of his way, looking for something. Near the scrub sink, a chrome cabinet on the counter. Leaning on the Formica (white flecked with gold) he pressed his face close to the metal. And cursed, his fist denting the side of the cabinet before he could think. 'What have you done to me?' he yelled.
'We gave you back something you had lost.'
Jonny looked back at the dented metal, searching for his face, but it was not there. Sockets black and threaded with the purple and red of broken blood vessels. Something alien stared back at him.
Yellow-eyed, with pupils that ran vertically from lid to lid. At certain angles, there were flashes of light, green and metallic. Tapetums, he thought.
'That tiger I blew away,' Jonny whispered, feeling the strange machinery in his head. 'You gave them to me.'
'We had no choice,' Conover said.
Jonny turned to him. 'Great trade, man. One short hop. Cripple to freak.'
'You're no more a freak than I,' Conover said. His face tightened, smoke trailing from the scar of his nose. 'Do you think I always looked like this? You learn to live with it.'
Jonny kept staring. 'Look at me. I ought to be in a fucking carnival.'
Conover moved up beside him. 'You wanted eyes, you have them.'
Jonny walked numbly back to the examination chair, fell into the seat, covering his face with his hands. 'Oh, man-'
'It was the best we could do,' the smuggler lord told him. He smiled. 'And you have to admit- in this city, they're really not such a strange sight. In a few weeks, they'll be old friends.'
'Oh Christ.' Jonny looked at his hands. 'Don't get the idea I'm sorry about the operation,' he said. The grid was still visible, subtly, clipping the tips of his fingers straight across. He looked at Conover. 'I'm glad I can see again, really. It's just kind of a shock.'
Conover nodded. 'I understand.' He looked at his watch.
'Listen, I'm going to have to leave for a business meeting. You should go to your room and try to get some rest. I'll send Ricos by later. You can tell him then if you want to go tonight or wait.'
'Right,' said Jonny. As Conover started to leave the room, he called out. 'Mister Conover-'
The smuggler lord stopped in the door. 'Yes?'
Jonny shrugged. 'Thanks,' he said.
'My pleasure.'
'Think you could do me one more favor?'
'What is it?' Conover asked.
'Could you have somebody take the mirrors out of my room?'
Conover smiled. 'Done,' he said, and left.
Jonny leaned on the counter, letting his nearly bald head fall back against the laminated cupboard doors, and stared at the Russians staring at him. Yukiko brought him tea in a white styrofoam cup. With a little effort, she looked at him and smiled.
'Thank you,' he said.
The trip back to his room was a nightmare. He kept his head down, but the peculiar layout of the house forced him to look up frequently and his reflection seemed to always be there, waiting for him in the glazing on a Ming vase, in the glass front of an antique china cabinet, the polished chrome of a seismic meter.
Golden-eyed monster.
He had refused the induction chair; a couple of the Russian techs followed him from the clinic, keeping a respectful distance.
When he got to his room, he closed the door in their faces.
Inside, he remained by the door and looked the room over, checking for any reflective surfaces. When he found none, he went straight to the bed and lay down.
The transparent lameness of Conover's story had been so obvious to Jonny that he knew it had to be deliberate. That meant that giving him the freakish eyes was, to one degree or other, a calculated move. The smuggler lord had obviously planned to show his displeasure with Jonny in some way, and Jonny's blindness presented him with a convenient method. The eyes were a punishment and a warning. Punishment for stealing the car and running away, and a warning that he had better not do it again. Like a Yakuza ritual, Jonny thought. Make a mistake, lose a finger joint.
Look for the guys with no fingers, they're the real fuck ups.
What does that make me? he wondered.
It surprised him, but he felt no real anger toward Conover for what he had done. He could have done a lot worse, Jonny knew. And the smuggler lord had been right all along. The moment Jonny had left the hill, he had set himself on a course that led right back into Zamora's hands. Living with funny eyes, he thought, would be a hell of a lot easier than living with whatever the Colonel had planned for him.
'Hey, maricon.'
Jonny sat upright in bed. He had no memory of falling asleep and feeling himself shaken awake, the loss of control it implied, frightened him. Jonny looked at Ricos and saw that he was not the only one who was startled.
'Joder, man,' Ricos whispered. He was wearing a red motorcycle jacket and stripped leather pants. 'What you let them do that to you for?' Ricos was staring at Jonny as he might have stared at an open sore or a road kill, not trying to hide his disgust. For that, Jonny was grateful.
'I didn't have a lot of choice,' said Jonny, swinging his legs off the bed and getting up.
'Carajo. I kill anyone do that to me.'
'Your boss included?'
'Anyone.'
Jonny smiled at the man. 'You're really full of shit. You know that?' He went to the dresser, found a pair of black slacks his size and started to put them on. 'We're going to need ID,' he said. 'Something corporate. Multinational.'
'No problem,' said Ricos.
On the top of the dresser somebody had left a dozen pairs of sunglasses, laid out neatly in horizontal three rows. Their sleek designs, so out of place against the pale wood of the French antiques, reminded Jonny of one of the Croakers' strange sculptures. Without thinking, he picked up the mirrored aviators and put them in the breast pocket of the gray tweed jacket he had taken from the closet.
'All right,' Jonny said. 'We'll pick up the ID, get you some better clothes and be on our way.'
'What's wrong wi' my clothes?' asked Ricos, offended.
'Nothing man, if we were going to Carnaby's Pit.' He headed out the door, Ricos a few steps behind him.
'So where you takin' me, maricon?'
Jonny spun and jammed a finger into the man's stomach. 'Little Tokyo,' he said. 'Where they shoot people like you and me on sight.'
The car was an old alcohol-powered Brazilian coupe, modeled on a turn-of-the-century Mercedes design. Ricos drove; he wore a powder blue Italian suit and tugged constantly at the collar of his pearl-gray shirt. Jonny and he were carrying the ID chips of dead men.
They abandoned the car near Union Station, an art deco hulk, sprouting cracked brick and I-beams like exposed ribs. A ruin of stripped cranes and power generators surrounded it, heaps of ferro-ceramic track turning black under the moon, under the Alpha Rats' gaze, waiting for the bullet train that never arrived.
A maintenance shaft beneath the battered transformers of an out-of-commission Pacific Gas and Electric sub-station ended in a short crawl-space that gave out at the false bottom in a section of vent, part of the massive
