Riviera Blues. Jack Batten
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Nothing.
Had I exhausted all possibilities? All potential places of secrecy? Was there an ingenious hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment? Inspiration failed me.
I sat on the bed. It had a white satin spread. The pillows had satin covers. Seven pillows, one in mauve, two in silver, one in apple green … seven pillows? What practices did Pamela and Jamie get up to in bed?
I stretched out on the satin spread and dropped my head on a white satin pillow. From where my head was positioned, I was staring at the Dennis Burton garter-belt painting. The woman in the garter belt was bending to one side. She showed a lot of haunch.
I stared some more. And noted a flaw. Either the woman was bending at a very tricky angle or the painting was hanging crooked on the wall.
I skidded off the satin and walked over to the painting. The garter belt was black, the haunch was pink, and the painting was tilting an inch too much to the right.
I straightened it and stepped back.
Nah. I’d made it worse, a couple of inches too far left.
I put my fingers under the bottom of the frame and started to ease the picture back into line.
On the back of the painting, at the bottom, the fingers of my right hand were touching something that definitely wasn’t frame.
I unhooked the painting and turned it over.
Paydirt.
Layers of Scotch tape held something that looked remarkably like a disk to the back of the frame. I peeled off the Scotch tape. It was a disk under there, and it had a label with the familiar neat printing.
“Operation Freeload.”
I rehung the lady in the garter belt and backed off two steps. She looked straight to me.
In the den, a small liquor cabinet nestled into the panelled wall beside the desk. Bottles, glasses, an ice-making machine. Jamie kept Russian vodka on hand. Or Pamela kept it for him. Stolichnaya. I built a drink on the rocks, raised the glass in a toast to my own perspicacity, and sat in the chair behind the NeXT.
As a rule, I’ll take the quill pen over the computer any day. That isn’t a smart attitude in my profession and getting less smart awfully fast. Somewhere around fifty percent of my clients are charged with crimes of fraud, and lately too many of the people who beat a path to my door are accused of perpetrating their frauds with the accursed computer. I have to refer them to computer-friendly lawyers. It’s embarrassing, especially when the computer-friendly lawyers don’t send any quill-pen felons my way.
I had a stiff swallow of Stolichnaya and thought, what the hell. Take a flyer. Fire up the NeXT. Stick “Operation Freeload” into the thing. Maybe divine its contents. Solve the mystery right out of the box. Why not? What was the worst that could happen? I considered the question, but I didn’t know what the worst could be.
A button on the NeXT’s keyboard was labelled “Power.” A logical starting place. I pressed it, and the machine went into a mild convulsion of drones and quavers. When the dust cleared and silence reigned again, a box in the computer’s screen, black letters on an off-white background, seemed to require the answers to two questions. Name and Password.
Name.
Well, not mine.
Jamie’s.
I typed “Jamie” into the indicated space.
Password?
I typed in “Freeload.” It was worth a try.
Did the NeXT like what I’d fed it? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it needed to chew on a disk. I looked around for an appropriate slot and found one on another black box that seemed to be a partner to the main computer. I slid in “Operation Freeload.” The disk disappeared into the slot, making a polite slurping sound in the process, and right away, the screen blipped up a bunch of lines.
First, “Loading from disk.”
Then, “Checking disk.”
“Checking network.”
“Starting system services.”
Was this fun or what, a NeXT in high gear?
Something titled “Directory Browser” settled onto the screen. Under it, there was a long list of one-word titles. Browser? Jeez, computerspeak was turning mundane. Whatever happened to “interface” and “IBM-compatible”?
I gathered I was supposed to select something from the “Directory Browser,” and move on to the next step.
Uh huh. I tried tapping keys on the keyboard, but nothing happened.
Hovering in the corner of the screen was a tiny arrow. Intuition told me the arrow was the little devil that handled the selecting chore. But how did I make the damn thing move?
To the right of the computer, resting on the table, there was a small rectangular gizmo. It was in the usual black, and it fed into the computer through a cable arrangement. Something about the little gizmo … what was it? The rodent? The rat? The bug? Wait a minute, it was the mouse. I’d picked up that piece of dope somewhere along the line from one of the computer-friendly lawyers. The mouse acted as a sort of remote-control guide to the arrow on the screen.
Right.
I began to move the mouse around, and, presto, magic, computer science at work, the arrow moved around the screen.
Oh-kay.
The mouse had a button on top. I moved the arrow on the screen to a title under “Directory browser,” and pushed the button on the mouse. Did I know what I was doing? Hell, no, but at least things were happening on the screen.
One by one, positioning the arrow and clicking the mouse, I got a series of lines of type popping up on the screen. I rattled through “NeXT Developer” and “Demos” and “Score Player.”
Fascinating. I hadn’t a clue what it all meant.
Could I penetrate into “Operation Freeload”?
Well, anything was possible.
On the screen, I had somehow summoned up a curious list of titles. The list was stacked vertically, and it read, “clouds, eagle, fish, gravity, holey, hotspin, mosaic …”
“Holey?”
I moved the arrow to “holey” and clicked the mouse.
All of a sudden it was like Chicago and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre on the screen. Bullet holes, authentic-looking bullet holes, shreds around the edges and everything, studded across the screen, and the sounds of gunfire erupted into the room.
I jumped in the chair and spilled vodka on my pants.
“Holey?” Bullet holes! Was this a computer joke? Swell sense of humour, guys.
The screen went quiet. I mopped my pants and poured a new drink.
The weird list was back on the screen. “Clouds, eagle, fish, gravity …”
Was any of this going to lead me to Operation Freeload? Or had I stumbled into some kind of computer backwater? I couldn’t fathom what was happening, but there didn’t appear to be any turning back. Where could I turn back to? I pointed the arrow at another entry on the list, “Bach fugue.” Well, why not? And I pushed the mouse’s button. I got sound again, music this time. Or something approximating music. A Bach fugue came out of the computer, but the guy at the piano wasn’t Glenn Gould. In fact, the closer I listened, the more I realized it wasn’t a person at the piano and it wasn’t a piano. The computer was playing a synthesized brand of Bach. Disillusionment was beginning to replace the euphoria I’d had when I embarked on this journey into the computer universe. The answer to Operation Freeload lurked somewhere inside the computer, but did I want to have a relationship with an instrument that sullied the works of a revered eighteenth-century German composer? Gimme a break. I went back to the oddball list and pointed