Horse Latitudes | Page 4

all true. I know somebody that has copies of the FBI reports."
The band finished their set and left the stage to distracted applause. I stood and dropped a jiffy bag on Virilio's side of the table. "I've got go now. Thanks for the ID," I said. Virilio slipped some of the bills from the end of the bag and riffled through them. "Non- sequential twenties," I said, "just like you wanted."
He smiled and put the bag in his pocket. "Just to prevent any problems, just to short circuit any second thoughts you might be having about why you should give a person like me all this money for some paper you could have gotten yourself, I want to make sure you understand that the nature of my work is facilitation. I'm a facilitator. I'm not a dealer, or muscle, or a thief, but I can do all those things, if required. What I got you wasn't a birth certificate; any asshole could have gotten you a birth certificate. What I got you was the birth certificate. One that matches you, close enough so that getting you a passport, letting you move around, will be no problem. I had to check over two years of obituaries, contact the right agencies, grease the right palms. It's knowing which palms to grease and when that you're paying me for. Not that piece of paper."
I slid my new identity into my jacket. "Thanks," I said.
Outside Cafe Juju, the warm, immobile air had taken on the quality of some immense thing at rest--a mountain or phantom whale, pressing down on the city, squeezing its Sargasso dreams from the cracks in the walls out onto the streets. I pulled put my emergency hip flask and took a drink. I was reminded of the region of windless ocean known at the Horse Latitudes, called that in remembrance of the Spanish galleons that would sometimes find themselves adrift in those dead waters. The crews would strip the ship down to the bare wood in hopes of lightening themselves enough to move in the feeble breeze. When everything else of value had been thrown overboard, the last thing to go were the horses. Sometimes the Horse Latitudes were carpeted for miles with a floating rictus of palominos and Arab stallions, buoyed up by the immense floating kelp beds and their own churning internal gases. The Horse Latitudes were not a place you visited, but where you found yourself if you allowed your gaze to be swallowed up by the horizon, or to wander on the map to places you might go, rather than where you were.
I'd walked a couple of blocks up Ninth Street when I realized I was being followed. It was my habit to stop often in front of stores, apparently to window shop or admire the beauty of my own face. In fact, I was checking the reflections caught in the plate glass, scanning the street behind me for faces that had been there too long. This time I couldn't find a face, but just beyond a wire pen where a group of red-faced campasenos were betting on cock fights, I did see a jacket. It was bulky and black, of some military cut, and one side was decked with the outline of a bird skull done in clusters of purple and white rhinestones. The jacket's owner hung back where vehicles and pedestrians blocked most of the streetlight. It was only the fireworks in the rhinestones that had caught my eye.
Just to make sure it wasn't simple paranoia, I went another block up Ninth and stopped by the back window of a VW van full of caged snakes. When I checked again, the jacket had moved closer. I cut to my right, down a side street, then left, back toward the market. The jacket hung behind me, the skull a patch of hard light against the dark buildings.
I ran down an alley between a couple of closed shops and kept going, taking corners at random. The crumbling masonry of the ancient industrial buildings was damp where humidity had condensed on the walls. I found myself on a dark street where the warehouses were lost behind the blooms of pink and purple orchids. The petals looked like frozen fire along the walls. Behind me, someone kicked a bottle, and I sprinted around another corner. I was lost in the maze of alleys and drivethrus that surrounded the rotting machine shops and abandoned wrecking yards. Sweating and out of breath, I ran toward a light. When I found it, I stopped.
It was a courtyard or a paved patch of ground where a building had once stood. Fires were going in a few battered oil drums, fed by children with slabs of dismantled billboards, packing crates, and broken furniture.