14
Club Young
Chicago, Illinois
April 1943 C.E.
The Club Young was dark, smoky, and packed, every table in the place occupied. Half the patrons were soldiers or sailors in uniform. A tall and willowy brunette torch singer in a black silk sheath dress stood in a spotlight on the stage, backed by a small swing band. The singer’s voice was as dark and smoky as the atmosphere in the room as she sang “Mean to Me.”
Her facial features bore a passing resemblance to Rachel, Jay thought. Maybe that was just him.
Save for an occasional clink from a highball glass, the place was quiet as the patrons listened to the singer.
A voluptuous blond cigarette girl in a skimpy costume, complete with black silk fishnet stockings and six-inch stiletto heels, came by and smiled at Jay. She leaned over, showing a good amount of breast cleavage, offering her tray. “See anything you want, sir?”
Jay shook his head. “No, I’m good. Thank you.”
After a couple of verses, the trumpet player took a short solo with his muted horn, adding a little wah-wah effect by moving the mute in and out of the bell with one hand.
Seated next to Jay, Rachel Lewis said, “Like it?”
It was another of her scenarios, and a well-built one. You could smell the smoke, taste the liquor. “Very nice,” he said.
In this milieu, Rachel had altered her appearance just a little. She had long hair, done up in what Jay had always thought of as the WWII look—smooth, flowing, the ends somehow rolled under, like a teardrop. She wore a pale brown dress with padded shoulders, and had a cigarette in an ivory holder. As far as Jay could tell, everybody in the place was smoking, save for him, and not a filter in the bunch. There was a package of CareFree cigarettes by Rachel’s elbow, featuring a picture of a blonde seated on a beach in a bathing suit, looking at the crotch of a rugged fellow standing in front of her in his boxer swimsuit. There was a small box of matches on the table. The logo on the matchbox showed a hot-pink, stylized, fat letter Y, presumably from the club’s name, though the logo looked somehow mildly obscene.
“So, what have you come up with?” he asked.
She took a drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “I think I’ve got a line on the backbone server he hacked into for distribution.”
“Really? How did you manage that? I couldn’t get a fix on it.”
The singer finished her song. The audience applauded, the sound of that coming in a rhythmic wave that swelled, then receded. The lights came up—still not bright, but brighter—and the band segued into Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
A woman laughed behind Jay, a deep and almost sexual sound.
Most of crowd got up and headed for the dance floor. The walla of their voices was happy, excited, full of fun. That kind of music.
Rachel stood and held out her hand. “Come on, Jay, let’s cut a rug.”
He shook his head. “I’m not a dancer.”
“You are in my scenario. Just let yourself go, I guarantee you’ll be king of the jitterbug.”
“Rachel . . .”
“Up, Jay. It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.”
Reluctantly, Jay got to his feet. Rachel grabbed his hand.
On the polished wood floor, Jay found that if he relaxed, he had the moves Rachel had promised—the steps, twirls, even grabbing her and shooting her between his legs, then up into the air. Her skirt flared, revealing silk stockings held up by a black garter belt.
She definitely had an eye for the little details.
A very athletic dance, this.
The tune wound up to its frenetic crescendo, then ended.
Jay smiled at Rachel, who smiled back.
The band started to play again, this time a slow one—“Stormy Weather.”
Rachel smiled and raised an eyebrow at him. “One more?”
Jay shrugged. He caught her right hand in his left, and put his right hand in the small of her back, leaving about three inches of space between them.
She pressed herself against him, chest and hips, and put her head on his shoulder.
They swayed to the music.
Very nice was his first thought.
Bad idea quickly followed.
“Rachel,” he began.
“Let’s finish the dance, Jay, then we can get back to business.”
“Okay.” It was just VR, after all, right?
But it didn’t feel okay. Or rather, it felt a lot more okay than it should. As he danced, he tried to think about Saji and his little boy, but that was hard, and Lewis wasn’t making it any easier.
He thought about disabling the feedback again, to keep his VR body from mirroring his RW reaction, but his arms were around her, and he couldn’t lift his hand just yet without breaking character.
She knew that, of course, which was undoubtedly why she had brought him out onto this dance floor.
What was she up to?
He gritted his teeth and tried to conjure up images of Saji and their son.
As they danced, Lewis allowed herself to feel Jay’s body against hers. Yes, it was an illusion, courtesy of top-grade electronics and biofeedback gear; still, it was easy enough to suspend your disbelief. They could be in a nightclub in Chicago during the war years, moving now to the music made famous by Billie Holliday, who had died long before Rachel had been born. Jay here wasn’t a bad-looking guy, and he was smart and as sharp as a box of fresh sewing needles. She’d always been a sucker for a bright man. Of course, she had to keep him off balance because he was dangerous to her. But it didn’t have to be an unpleasant chore. What could be done in VR could eventually be done in the real world, too. . . .
She wasn’t exactly dull herself. She had filled her scenario with priming elements—little devices designed to evoke a subconscious response in anybody who played it. It was an old psychological trick—give somebody a word test, making short sentences out of a jumble of five or six words, and put a theme into it by carefully choosing words in each sentence to point in a particular direction. The unconscious brain’s autopilot, used to making snap choices, would fasten upon those words: bury terms like “confident,” “reliant,” “smart,” “clever,” “capable” in a session, then send the person to take a short exam? He would do better than normal.
Put the terms “dull,” “stupid,” “inept,” “confused,” and “slow” in that same kind of little quiz and send him to the test, he would do worse than normal.
Attitude, it turned out, was more important than most people knew. Affecting that attitude via the subconscious was much easier to manipulate than most people would believe. The autopilot took certain things for granted; it tended to mirror societal beliefs. Tall, good-looking, smiling people were generally viewed as more intelligent, somehow superior. Short, ugly, frowning people came across as inferior—at least subconsciously, regardless of whether people would ever admit to it if asked. Way more company CEOs were tall than short. That said a lot.
Rachel’s scenario practically reeked with hints for Jay Gridley to let himself go and indulge in sensual pleasure, with Rachel as the prime focus of that pleasure. The songs being played by the band would invoke sympathy for the women singers—“Mean to Me” and “Stormy Weather.” The instrumental “In the Mood”? That one was pretty obvious. The cigarette girl’s hooters and offer, the package of cigarettes on the table, the overt control of the jitterbug, wherein Jay moved her as he wished, the close contact of the slow number, even the horn player moving his mute in and out of the trumpet, those were all aimed at pointing Jay down the garden path—to her bedroom door.
She smiled into his shoulder at the thought. VR sex wasn’t illegal, nor grounds for divorce, unless unfaithfulness in your mind counted, and it didn’t. Not legally, anyway. Of course, her intent was to befuddle Jay, and when it came down to the real world—which it would, eventually—certainly his sense of guilt would help. Happily married man with a child suddenly finds himself in an affair with a colleague? That would give him plenty more to think about so he wouldn’t have a clue that Captain Rachel Lewis was the bad guy he was chasing. . . .
Jay was good at what he did, but so was she. And a man facing a bright and not-unattractive woman who was intent on having him? He was at a definite disadvantage. . . .
The music ended, and the dance stopped. She saw that her plan was working, to judge from the uncomfortable expression on Jay’s face. She smiled. “Well, that was nice. So, let’s get back to work, shall we?”
As they headed for their table, the swing band began playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Indeed, it did.
Pinehurst, Georgia
Amos Jefferson Lowe invited Thorn to take a walk so the dog could stretch a little. Thorn agreed.
Amos was a big man, half a head taller and probably thirty pounds heavier than Thorn, and while there was white in his closely cropped hair, he moved like a man much younger than one in his late seventies or early eighties, which he had to be. He wore a work shirt and overalls over lace-up work boots, and there was no fat on him Thorn could see.
They started up the graveled driveway. The nearest house was probably a quarter of a mile away. The wind was cold and blowing pretty good, and Thorn felt it even through his jacket. If the cold bothered the other man, there was no sign of it.
The dog ranged back and forth, snuffling the ground, as if tracking some critter, limping a bit, but not looking unhappy about it.
Neither man said anything for a few moments. Thorn remembered walks like this with his grandfather when he’d been a boy. Sometimes they’d walk for an hour without saying anything; then the old man would stop and point at some sign on the ground: “See that? Deer tracks—doe and a fawn, see the little prints, here and there?”
The old man could spot things invisible to Thorn’s eyes—and, he suspected, to most anybody else’s eyes. He was tuned to the earth in ways most people never were.
Thorn smiled at the memory.
Amos raised an eyebrow.
“Just remembering my grandfather,” Thorn said. “We used to do a lot of walking when I was a boy.”
“He passed?”
“Yes, sir, some time back.”
“You miss him.”
“I do.”
The older man nodded. He bent, picked up a stick. “Sheila!”
The dog turned, saw the stick. Amos tossed it—not very far—and the dog gimped off to fetch it. The old man smiled.
“So, is this my premarriage interview?”
Amos chuckled. “Marissa made her choice, and you’re it. If she doesn’t have enough on the ball to get something this important right by now, nothing we can say now’s gonna make much difference.”
Thorn nodded. “But . . . ?”
“Nope, no ‘buts.’ Grandma and I, we want to be able to see in you what Marissa sees. Ruth liked you the minute you stepped into the house. She feels things quickly; me, I’m a little slower—I usually have to think on it some.”
The dog brought the stick back and dropped it in front of Thorn. He bent and picked it up, threw it a few feet. Sheila trotted off to fetch it again.
“Ruth’s always been a quick and accurate judge of character. If she’d thought you were a threat to our little granddaughter, she’d have put poison in your biscuits.”
Thorn blinked. It took a second for him to realize the old man was pulling his leg. At least he hoped that’s what Amos’s grin meant.
“Let me ask you something. You date many women of color?”
“No, sir.”
The dog returned. Dropped the stick. Thorn picked it up and tossed it again.
“Why start now?”
Thorn felt the urge to shrug, but stifled it. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow. “Usually, I found myself attracted to tall and brainy Nordic women. College professors, programmers, a doctor, once. Marissa doesn’t flaunt her intelligence—but she’s smarter than I am. And she’s funny, and she’s . . . wise, in a way I’m not. And she’s gorgeous. I wouldn’t much care if she were green or blue. I’m not sure what she sees in me.”
The dog returned again, but she was panting as she dropped the stick at Thorn’s feet. “That’s enough, Sheila,” Amos said. “I don’t want you so tired I have to carry you up the stairs when we get home.”
Thorn would have sworn the dog nodded and smiled. She left the stick, turned around, and wandered off the graveled driveway, sniffing the ground again.
“Gonna rain this afternoon,” Amos observed. “Couple degrees colder, it’d be snow, but we don’t get much of that down here.”
Thorn nodded.
“You have a pretty good job with the government,” Amos said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You like it okay?”
“Most of the time. There are days when I feel like walking away.”
“Every job is like that. So you can take care of our granddaughter if she decides to quit and stay home? Maybe have a baby?”
Thorn grinned.
“Am I missing something funny?”
“Marissa didn’t mention that I had my own business before I went to work for Net Force?”
“I don’t recall that it came up.”
Thorn chuckled. “I was lucky enough to have developed some software that was popular. Sold out at the right time. If the government fires me, we, uh, won’t miss any meals.”
The older man nodded. “Good enough. Marissa tells us you are a fencer?”
“I train on my own, but my best moves were twenty years ago.”
“Foil, épée, or saber?”
Thorn blinked again, surprised. “Mostly épée.”
Amos answered Thorn’s unasked question. “I expect she also told you I’m a big Shakespeare fan. Some of the roles require a little stage swordplay. I learned a bit of that over the years.”
“Ah.”>
“Well, I don’t want to overtire my old dog here, so maybe we should just head on back. Ruth’ll be fixin’ lunch pretty soon, and I want to tell her to make sure not to put any poison in yours.”
He extended his hand. Thorn took it. Amos had a firm grip. “Welcome to the family.”
“Just like that?”
“Marissa picked you, Ruth likes you.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, no problem there—I knew you were okay when my dog brought you the stick. She’s a better judge of character than either Ruth or I am.”