Valley. You might check back with us if you win your trials.” He glanced at his watch. “I better tune in on Squidboy again. Good-bye.”
I went into Los Perros to seek out the consolation of my soft-chinned, bell-haired Gretchen.
“Look who’s here,” said Susan Poker as I entered Welsh amp; Tayke.
“Oh hi, Jerzy,” said Gretchen, looking up from some papers on her desk. “What’s new?”
“Are you busy?”
“Kind of. We’re putting the paperwork through on two properties today. It’ll take most of the afternoon. I get off at four-thirty.”
“You really should buy that house you were living in,” said Susan Poker. “It’s just standing empty, and Mr. Nutt’s ready to accept a very low offer. Have you asked West West about it?”
“Don’t you ever give up?” I asked her.
“Not me!”
“Hey, Gretchen, come outside for just a minute so I can tell you something in private.”
“Secrets from moi?” exclaimed Susan Poker.
“I’ll come,” said Gretchen. “But just for a minute.”
So out there on the sidewalk I told her. “We finished that robot I’ve been working on, and now I’ve been fired.”
“Oh. Poor Jerzy. And your trial starts day after tomorrow. This is a bad week for you.” She patted my cheek and kissed me. “We should do something fun tonight, to take your mind off your woes.”
“I’ll try to think of something. Meanwhile I think I’ll get a drink.”
“It’s barely two o’clock, Jerzy.”
“Hey, I’m unemployed!”
“Be back here at four-thirty, don’t forget.”
“Okay.”
I walked very slowly down the street. As an unemployed person, I had all the time in the world. It was a funny feeling not to be in a rush.
I’d been racing from one job to another for more than twenty years now. For awhile I’d been a math professor, then I’d had a job selling textbooks, and then we’d moved to California and I’d become a hacker. Rush, rush, rush, and for what? To age and to die. Despite my big dreams, I’d never been anything more than a struggling shrimp in the world’s big water, nothing but a gnat in the blank California sky.
My job and family were gone, but at least Queue and Keith were being nice to me these days-of course I was paying them rent. I wished I’d brought a joint with me today. This was not a day when I felt like being the real me.
I walked a little farther and found myself in front of the Los Perros bakery. I’d been avoiding the place ever since my big night at the Vos‘, but today it seemed natural to drift in for a sandwich. There was Nga behind the counter as usual, dressed in black and with her hair poufed up on one side. Her quick eyes twinkled when she saw me, and her kissy red lips curved in a smile.
“Jerzy! How you doing!”
“Not so well. I have to go to court day after tomorrow.”
“I know. The D.A. want one of us testify, but we no see nothing.”
“That’s good.”
Now Nga’s mother Huong Vu looked up and noticed me.
“We no want talk to you,” she said flatly.
“I’m sorry about the neighbor’s dog.”
She shook her head. “We glad dog is gone, but we no want you come back our house ever again.”
“I understand. Uh, Nga, I’ll take a medium croissant with turkey and Swiss cheese. To go.”
“No problem, Jerzy,” said Nga. “Five thirty-four.” A tingle went up my arm from the sly caress of her fingertips when she gave me my change. “Come back soon,” smiled Nga, though Huong Vu snapped at her in Vietnamese.
Nga Vo’s cousin Kanh Pham followed me out of the store. He flipped his long hair and cleared his throat.
“What?” I said.
“My cousin Vinh Vo still very interest do business with you.”
“What kind of business?” For a minute I really couldn’t remember.
“He say you company going need some Y9707 chip for robot.”
“Oh yes, I remember that. But I don’t work for a company anymore.”
“Maybe you tell somebody anyhow.”
“Maybe.” If Vinh Vo really had access to a big stash of cheap Y9707 chips, this could be an opportunity for me to play middleman and make some good bread. With the Adze and Veep kits on the market, the demand for Y9707s could run way ahead of the supply. Y9707s were wholesaling at twelve hundred bucks per chip and, I now recalled, Vinh had offered to sell me several hundred of them for $120 a chip. If I could find a way to resell them, I could make a thousand dollars profit on each chip. “Where would somebody reach Vinh Vo?”
Khanh Pham wrote a phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
“Just out of theoretical curiosity, Khan, how does Vinh Vo get hold of his chips?”
“Many Vietnamese people who work in the fab and component plants give some chips to him. They bring chips home from assembly line. Vinh Vo is like a godfather to them.”
In other words Vinh Vo was running a protection racket that victimized his newly arrived fellow nationals. Those of them who were computer workers were allowed to pay Vinh Vo with chips instead of cash. Well, that explained how he could afford to sell the chips in the black market for one dollar on the ten. When Vinh had originally made me the offer, I’d been put off by the obvious criminality of the deal, but with my trials coming up and West West about to cut me loose, I had less and less to lose.
“I’ll think about calling him. Give my best to Nga.”
“She has two new boyfriend.” He giggled sputter-ingly and tossed his hair several times.
“Oh well!” I laughed along with him. He was a nice boy.
“Did you see my new motorcycle?” asked Khanh Pham. “Vinh Vo bought it for me!” There was indeed a black Kawasaki parked in front of the bakery.
“Congratulations!”
I took my sandwich down the street to a scuzzy bar called the Night Watch. This was not a yuppie watering hole like D. T. Finnegan’s; no, the Night Watch had black plywood walls, plastic furniture, and a resident motorcycle club: people with leather jackets that said KNIGHTS OF THE NIGHT WATCH on them. The Knights weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels-this was, after all, still Los Perros-but they were a fairly scurvy crew. Three of them were at a table in the rear: a fat man, a thin man, and a fat woman. I sat up at the bar to the left of a kid with shoulder-length brown hair. I ordered a beer and started in on my turkey croissant.
The wall to my left was covered with bright colored lights. There was a TV showing a vintage Porky Pig cartoon, a neon beer sign shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge, a 3-D magnetic pinball machine, a dollar-a-minute cyberspace game with a bicycle seat and handlebars, and a big Abbott wafer screen showing music videos from the Total Video Library in cyberspace. The current video was a horrible, yelling antique number captioned as being by somebody called Tom Jones singing something called “Delilah.” The bartender was lustily singing along.
“Jesus this is bad,” I couldn’t help saying. “This is the worst thing I’ve heard in my whole life.”
“The mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the vocal arts,” said the bartender. He was a blond, limp man with a mustache and a dirty T-shirt. He had a winningly sniggering way of talking. “Watch the finale. That’s when all the women throw their underwear onstage. It’s really choice.”
“I need another beer for this shit.”
“Punch up some country music after this, Lester,” twanged the boy next to me. “That’ll make us feel even more like drinkin‘.” His voice trailed off at the end of every sentence. He had something on the bar in front of him, a little car or-I looked closer. It was a little car with the rubber head of a cow. This was the same boy who’d come up to me outside Queue’s gate. The bartender gave me another beer and drifted down to the other end of the bar to talk with the bikers.
“What’s up, doc?” said the boy to me, waggling his eyebrows. He tossed his head to get his rasta tangles out of his face. His thin lips pulled back in a stretching motion that was more wince than smile. His breath smelled of
