That Nietzsche Thing (5 page)

“Nope.”

“How do you know it’s even a book? Maybe Dark
liked practical jokes. Maybe he thought it was all just some big
wheeze.”

“There’s a whole school of thought that
agrees with you, Sasha. But that hasn’t dampened people’s
curiosity. Dark released the encrypted text in published form. He
paid for a run of ten thousand copies himself. Do you know what
that cost in 1964? If it was an elaborate hoax, he fronted a mighty
lot of money for a joke only he could laugh at.”

“Let me get this straight: Dark published a
whole book no one could read?”

“Not at the time of publication, no. But Dark
stated in interviews that when the technology existed to decode the
book, humanity would be ready to read its contents.”

“How humble.” I laughed. “But we still can’t
decode it? Even ninety years later?”

“Nope. And it’s not through a lack of trying.
There are whole on-line communities dedicated to the novel.
Websites, chat-rooms. Shit, you’re telling me you’ve never heard
about any of this?” I shrugged at my phone. Day went on. “The
prevailing wisdom is that he made some mistake in his mathematics.
He did the whole thing by
hand,
remember. All the
multiplication of primes, then typed out the encrypted text on an
Underwood. If he made one tiny error in the whole process, one
misplaced decimal point, hit one wrong key, then the whole thing
would be...”

“Gibberish,” I finished his sentence.

“Right, gibberish. That’s the conclusion our
best computer scientists have come to, that Dark’s last novel has
been lost. That all we have is a locked copy with no key.”

“But I’m guessing Dark’s Rosicrucian cult
hasn’t accepted that.”

“Possibly. But they’re all dead now. Defunct.
The whole order, en masse, took the Geneing dope at the beginning
of the epidemic. Before people really understood what the shit did.
The Rosicrucians no long exist as an organization. Cult or
otherwise.”

“But the girl had the novel on an
e-reader...” I said to the empty jail cell.

“What’s that, Sasha?” O’Day asked over the
phone.

“Nothing. Thanks for your help. I owe you a
beer.”

“No problem,” O’Day said casually. “What
about the e-reader?”

“Keep it,” I said.

“Thanks. Well, then, talk to you later,”
O’Day said, finishing the call.

“Wait!” I called out. “What was the title of
this guy’s encrypted novel?”

“Well, that was encrypted, too,” O’Day
replied, “so no one knows...”

“So people just call it
Dark’s Last
Novel
?”

“Pretty much. But, in the encryption
community, it’s casually known as
Quelle
. You know, after
the theoretical gospel of the Bible, the one Mathew and Luke both
draw from. The one no one will actually ever get to read, because
it’s long since been lost to history. Get it?”

“Yeah, yeah.
Quelle
, huh?”

“Yeah. Though, like whoever owned this
e-reader of yours, that’s usually shortened to just
Q.”

Chapter 7

By the time I’d finished with my call with
O’Day and emerged from the cell, Constantine had long since hung up
on the Duty Officer. He’d left orders that I was to join him in
front of the Town Hall, in his Cobra Commander Missile
Headquarters, ASAP. I asked the Duty Officer if he’d really said
ASAP. He had.

Dickwad.

I meandered up there, after taking my morning
shower in the police union’s locker room. It was my routine:
sleeping the night in whatever drunk tank wasn’t occupied and
showering at the gym.

I hadn’t had a steady apartment for, maybe,
two years. I bunked down every month or two with whatever girl I
could sweet talk into taking me in. But that never lasted long. I
didn’t make good company. Cops don’t, coming and going at all
hours. The drunk tanks were always there.

As long I stayed light on your feet, living
rough wasn’t too bad. The trick is to keep your personal
possessions to a minimum. What I had, I kept in the trunk of the
Accord.

The glamorous life of a Homicide detective.
Just like
Law & Order,
huh?

Anyway, I was late for Constantine’s little
party, and his operation was already underway. I climbed up the
folding steps into the darkened trailer of his Command HQ. A whole
brace of computer geeks were running ops for some Special Forces
deal. Constantine was watching it all unfold on a large bank of
monitors. The techs were muttering things like “Indigo seven,
sitrep” and “Eyes on your six, Charlie Captain.” It all looked
pretty cool, like some video game. It took me a few seconds to
realize it wasn’t. That real men with guns were running around with
deadly intent.

“What’s this?” I asked, sliding up to
Constantine, knocking a Kools from my pack.

“Tac-30 is serving a warrant, connected to
the Montavez murder,” Constantine said, not looking away from the
monitors. SWAT officers were breaching a door and button-hooking
through the entryway.

“Warrant? What warrant?” I asked, watching
the action. The fire team woke up some poor old man and tossed him
out of his bed, face first onto the floor.

“We got a flag on the phone records. A felony
arms conviction. We’re bring him in for questioning.”

“You sent a tactical team to bring in one
guy?”

“As I said, he has an arms conviction.”

“How old is his sheet?” I asked.

Constantine just shrugged.

The Tactical Team had the old man cuffed and
were pulling a black sack over his head.

“What judge did you get out of bed in the
middle of the night to sign off on that?” I took my lighter out of
my pocket and flicked it open.

“No smoking in here,” Constantine said. I
flicked my lighter closed, leaving the cigarette unlit. “No judge.
We have broad-based FISA warrant covering or presence in
Seattle.”

“FISA?” I snorted. “He’s no terrorist.”

Constantine finally turned to look at me. The
coldness of his glare told me he really didn’t understand the
distinction.

I’d seen enough. I turned, climbed back down
out of the trailer and lit my smoke.

Constantine followed me out, joining me at
the curb as I smoked away. “That was good work, yesterday,” he
began.

The compliment took me by surprise.
“Work?”

“The report you submitted last night...the
interviews with Montavez’s neighbors...”

“Oh,” I drew a breath through my cigarette.
“Yeah, well, you know, standard procedure.”

“Forensics came up blank. Only your
suggestion to run the phone records has, so far, bore any
fruit.”

I looked back at the command trailer. I
decided not to tell him what I thought of his fucking fruit. “Be
careful, Special Agent,” I said instead. “Any more compliments, and
I might start to think I’m demonstrating competency.”

Constantine ignored me. “We’re heading out
again,” he commanded, straightening his tie.

“Got a black sack to throw over the head of
another telemarketer?” I tossed the butt of my smoke into the
gutter and squashed it under the toe of my boot.

“No, Tac-30 can handle those warrants.” He
reached into his suit pocket and removed a small tablet. He quickly
pulled up some information. “What we have is a lead on Q,” he said
casually.

I coughed, spluttered, then began to choke.
Was he kidding me? Did he know about the e-reader? When I’d cleared
my throat, I looked him over, curiously. No, he was serious. He
wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of me.

“Q? Like Q, the mysterious mastermind behind
the whole Gening epidemic?” I feigned shock. I did a pretty good
job of it, if I do say so myself.

“That’s the one.”

“What does he have to do with the Montavez
murder?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Constantine said, sighing
in a fashion that let me know he really didn’t care. “But we
scrubbed Vivian’s email exchanges with her family. She stated on
more than one occasion, in correspondences with her brother, that
she was in Seattle to track down Q. There’s very little else,
however, to go one. Except she made a single transaction with her
father’s credit card for $1264 at a book store here.” He showed me
an address on the tablet. I knew the place, it was a used bookstore
by the university. “Otherwise, she was self-sufficient. Curious
that she’d make such a large purchase with no other history of
spending her father’s money. We should run the lead down.”

“We?” I asked, prodding the bear.

“You know this location, correct?” He showed
me the tablet again. “I bet you’ve even met the proprietor...”

“I have.”

“Then the interview will go smoother with you
present.”

“You need my help?” I said. I wasn’t going to
let it go. Not after his speech yesterday.

Constantine just looked at me with an angry
stare.

“You need a cop,” I answered for myself. And
it was true. That was what Constantine needed. Where did that fit
into his three C’s?

I still hadn’t let it go as we sped north on
the Interstate in the black, roaring Charger.

“I’m just saying that you can’t swoop in and,
day one, be better cops and firemen and teachers and social workers
and council members and mayors than the people who’ve done those
jobs for years.”

Constantine took the exit for the university.
“You honestly think we can do worse?” he said.

I don’t know why we were debating it. I just
couldn’t stop poking the bear. Truth be told, Constantine’s
existence irritated me. I might not have had any serious political
convictions, but I knew what I didn’t like. And I didn’t like
politicians getting into my shit. NeoCon or Prog.

“Look around, look at this town,” he said as
we pulled to a stop to merge on to the surface streets, he gestured
at the town around him. Forty-fifth at the Interstate was not
exactly Seattle at its best, but he had a fair point. “Incompetence
has run this city into the ground. You’re paralyzed by a
bureaucracy you can’t alter or get rid of. It would take a forest
fire to burn out the dead wood.” The light changed, Constantine
rolled forward.

“And you’re the match, huh?” I reached for my
pack of Kools. I rolled down my window as the car rolled to a halt
again at the light crossing Roosevelt.

A greasy Genie stood on the corner, holding a
cardboard sign, begging for change. “Spare a buck,” he said through
the open window. His face was a halo of beard and unkempt hair. He
had the glazed-over eyes of something seriously Geneing. The
pinhole irises, surrounded by milky white. I dismissed him with a
wave as I took a cigarette from my pack, but Constantine leaned
over to the open window.

“Here you go,” he said, snatching my Kools
from my hand and handing them out to the Genie.

“Oh, thank you, God Bless,” the bum said as
the light turned green. Constantine pulled away and the Genie
continued to call after us in gratitude.

I was beside myself. My smokes! “What the
fuck?” was all I could say. “Those were my smokes.”

“Be happy, you helped out a poor soul,”
Constantine said as he drove.

“Yeah, but they were
my
smokes,” I
repeated.

“Would you rather have given him a dollar?
What would he have spent that on?”

“I don’t know, food?”

“No,” Constantine gave me a condescending
laugh. “Cigarettes. Why not give him the cigarettes directly?”

“Because
I
wanted to smoke them?” I
said, totally consumed with disgust.

“Smoking is bad for your health. You should
quit, Detective.”

“But it’s okay for him to smoke?
My
cigarettes?” I looked back. Perhaps if we swung around...

“He’s far beyond any concerns about his
health. You are not. You are redeemable. It’s the compassionate
thing to save you from dying a slow death. That Genie will be long
dead before the effects of cigarettes consume him. It’s
compassionate to give him cigarettes if they lessen his
suffering.”

“And you get to decide this?”

“It’s the greatest good for the greatest
number of people, Detective.”

“But, now I have no cigarettes,” I said
slowly, fuming. “You can see how that totally, fucking sucks, can’t
you?”

“You think like a Prog,” Constantine said,
turning right onto University Way and pulling to the curb. “What
did your hero say? From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs? You have both the ability and the need to
stop smoking, Fonseca. Just as this town has the ability and the
need to reform itself. What you both need is a hard kick in the ass
to send you in the right direction. That’s me.” Constantine killed
his engine and opened his door. “I’m not a match, Detective, I’m a
boot.”

#

The old bookstore was as musty and forgotten
as it vast collection of leather-bound books. In the age of
e-readers and digital content, bookstores like
Quintessence
Books
were quickly on their way to joining places like the malt
shop and the drive-in movie theater in the shitter of history.

What few books stores remained stayed in
business mostly dealing in rare books and collectibles. Shit that
had value, not because of what was written inside the damn things,
but because of some book collecting fetish. By the looks of the
bookshelf back at Montavez’s apart,
Quintessence Books
was
just the sort of place she’d frequent. Row after row of dusty, old
volumes, smelling of leather and history. A veritable playground of
smells and tactile sensations.

Not my kind of join. Still, it had a sort of
retro charm, I guess. Like the girl’s apartment. There was
something
about books that was inescapable.

Constantine was showing his badge and his
tablet to the old dear behind the counter, inquiring about the
$1200 transaction, as I busied myself looking at the stacks. I
didn’t want to scare the old girl, one cop was enough at a time,
but I slowly meandered over into earshot.