watched the losing dog's body being dragged out of the enclosure, its humiliated owner and assistant careful not to get blood on their white shirts.
A moment later, the whole thing was starting again. The doughy-faced man made an announcement in rapid-fire Japanese and blessed each corner of the arena with salt. Then two more dogs, enormous Tosas again, bigger than the previous pair, easily a hundred and fifty kilos each, were lead in from opposite sides of the pen at the end of heavy carbide steel chains. The money chips were out; Jonny caught the flash of silicon embossed with gold phoenixes as the crowd surrounded the house bookmakers, touching their chips to the little multiplexer he carried, hoping to get their bets in before the dogs were released and the odds started dropping. Jonny looked around for an exit and found one, down by the far end of the enclosure. He was just starting for it when he heard the dogs hit, the dull thud of meat on meat, low-throated animal grunts, primal death-talk. He looked around for Ricos, nodded when he saw the man on the other side of the pen, eyes wide, watching the animals tear each other apart. Jonny smiled. Ditching Ricos had been easier than he had ever expected.
Heading down the tiers toward the exit, Jonny heard one of the dogs yelp frantically, the sound of it painful through the club's P.A. system. Jonny was almost to the floor when he turned and darted back into the crowd. Sometime during the few seconds it had taken him to find Ricos and walk down the steps, a Meat Boy had stationed himself at the exit. Jonny shouldered his way through the screaming mob, moving back the way he had come, eyes on the gambler's faces, trying to keep the dog fight out of his sight. Animal screams and human cheers. He spotted another Meat Boy by the entrance to the bar. The giant was talking to someone. The doorman. Jonny looked around, hoping that maybe there was an exit he had missed. But he found none, and when he turned back the way he had come in, he saw the doormanpointing right at him. Jonny ducked back into the crowd, scrambling along the top tier, the Meat Boy moving through the crowd like a pock-marked ice breaker.
Up, one leg over the rim of the dog pit. For an instant, the crowd fell silent. Then he had the gun out and the noise came back, shrill and frantic this time. He fired twice, but the stampede was already underway, and when the shells hit, blasting away one end of the dog pen, the frightened Tosas took off, all teeth and claws, headed for only way out. The Meat Boy chasing him, big as he was, was helpless, dragged back by the press of bodies. The last Jonny saw of Ricos, he, too, was being swept along by the human tide. His gun was out, his eyes wide and furious. Jonny did not stick around to see what happened.
He headed for the rear of the club, which was nearly deserted, and made it out the rear exit. Down the alley for the rest of the block.
When he came out onto the street again, he fell in with a crowd that was staring back at the club. Dark- suited men were still pouring out the front. The Tosas were headed down the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians and snarling the evening traffic.
Jonny took the long way around the block, just make sure he did not run into anybody from the dog club. Eventually, he ended up back at the man-made lake. Small hovercrafts churned-up the water.
The pagoda glittered on its small island, its finial a solid chunk of carved rose quartz, twenty meters high. Around the pagoda's base was a grove of crystal trees, a tangled thicket of prisms. The Forest of Incandescent Bliss.
No more screwing around. It was time to find Easy Money.
ELEVEN
'Good evening,' said the little hovercraft as Jonny stepped aboard. 'For your safety and comfort, please hold onto the handrail provided. The trip across will take two minutes.' Under normal circumstances, Jonny would have ignored the synthesized voice, but for some reason, tonight, the obsequious tone of the warning annoyed him.
'Fuck you,' he told the machine.
'Very good, sir,' it said. The non-skid rubberized matting on the passenger platform vibrated softly through the soles of his feet as the craft's engine rose faintly in pitch, lifting him and the vehicle out and over the water. A light mist of warm water blew up from the sides of the craft, settling on his skin. The feel of Sumi's fevered body, Groucho's theories on art and revolution came back to him as he skimmed toward the bright pagoda in the distance. Flashes of carp and fat prawns below the surface of the lake. His thoughts of Sumi disturbed him. The images revolved around plastic tubes and pumps, dumb machines that could never know or understand her, that might, in their ignorance, fail, not perceiving her value, the absolute need he had for her to be alive. Revolution, when he considered it, was a phantom pain, nothing more. Like his eyes. He felt them itch, but he knew that they were plastic and unreal, and therefore, they could not itch, yet his desire to rub them was constant. Revolution was like that. A delusion, a pipe-dream that when the lid closed over the eye, it could be rubbed and the itch would go away, that the flesh would be restored, the machinery vanished.
Before he had run into the Croakers, Jonny had known a number of revolutionaries. Bomb-throwers and pamphleteers, graffiti artists and assassins. Some of them had meant it, others were revolutionaries of fashion, of convenience. In the end, they had all failed. Jonny had already spotted a dozen of the old faces in the corporate crowds of Little Tokyo. Maybe they were the smart ones, he thought. The ones who went over. Maybe they were the ones who were dead before they started. He could not decide.
The crystal trees at the base of the pagoda grew in detail and complexity (molten glass light webbed through with burning diamonds) as the hovercraft approached. A battery of white-gloved attendants shaped the trees, carving the branches and leaves from a base of modified aluminum sulfate crystals. Easy Money was somewhere in the structure beyond, Jonny knew. He would get the second vial from Easy, kill him if he got the chance (because he had not forgotten Raquin's murder). That was all the revolution he could expect. As for the other, Groucho's anarchist dreams, there wasn't a chance in hell for those. The best that could be hoped, Jonny decided, was for Sumi to get better and for Ice to come back, to not get hurt for delusions, for dreams of old eyes.
Once inside the Forest of Incandescent Bliss, he went straight to the bar. It was a low affair, horse shoe- shaped, attempted art deco, with gilded mirrors behind the bottles and ridged tiles that glowed with a soft internal illumination. The two bartenders, an Asian male and a blonde caucasian female, were each under a meter tall, but perfectly proportioned. Everything behind the bar, bottles and corks, sponges and mixing utensils, was scaled down to their size.
Everything except the glasses in which they served the drinks; these were meant for someone Jonny's size and looked absurdly large in the bartenders' child-like hands.
Jonny ordered gin and tonic, watched as the little man retrieved a hundred year old bottle of Bombay gin that had been sealed, at sometime in its past, in dull blue wax. Jonny sipped his drink and handed the man his ID chip. It failed to register the first time the bartender tried to call up the account, and when it failed a second time, Jonny started to get nervous. On the third try, though, the transaction went through, the computer deducting the amount of the drink and a large tip from the dead man's company account.
Swirling the cool antiseptic-tasting gin in his mouth, Jonny swallowed one of Conover's endorphin tabs. His new eyes were hurting, a constant pain cutting right through his head to the back of his skull.
Something was moving in the gilded mirror behind the bottles.
Jonny turned to the darkened lounge which took up most of the pagoda's ground floor. Aged oyabuns playing endless games of Go, moving with the ancient and deliberate grace of mantises, younger men talking earnestly, toasting each other, skull-plugged into tabletop translators. Mostly Japanese faces, but many American and Mexican, too. Jonny knew a few, had seen others in the newsrags.
Many of the Japanese were missing finger joints. Yakuza. Must be their hang-out, he thought. Neutral ground. Mafia, the Panteras Aureo, Triad families, they were all there, criminals in a league beyond anything Jonny had ever known or experienced. They were like him, but, he understood, their immense wealth had insulated them, enabled them to live far enough removed from ordinary life that they were almost mythological figures, shaping the course of nations with their wealth.
Kaleidoscoping in the air above the gangsters' heads was a crystalline holographic light display, like a sculpted cloud. It seemed to follow the shifting mood of the room, colors brightening when the voices rose, muting when the talk was low. The man next to Jonny addressed the bartender in Portuguese. He wore an Irezumi jacket-
