Thinking of him.

The screen behind him came on with a soft chime and he jumped, four inches, straight up. He turned and saw the BBC logo. Yamazaki’s second video.

He was a third of the way through it when the door chimed. Rez was strolling along a narrow trail in the jungle somewhere, wearing sun-bleached khakis and rope-soled sandals. He was singing something as he went, a wordless little melody, over and over, trying different tones and stresses. His bare chest shone with sweat, and when the open shirt swung aside you’d catch a corner of his I Ching tattoo. He had a length of bamboo, and swung it as he walked, swatting at dangling vines. Laney had a sneaking suspicion that the wordless melody had subsequently turned into some global billion-seller, but he couldn’t place it yet. The door chimed again.

He got up, crossed to the door, thumbed the speaker button. “Yes?”

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

He touched the card-sized screen set into the doorframe and saw a dark-haired woman. Bangs. The tech from the appliance warehouse. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“Yamazaki thinks we should talk,” she said.

Laney saw that she was wearing a black suit with a narrow skirt, dark stockings.

“Aren’t you supposed to be shopping for a van?” He stepped back to let her in.

“Got one,” closing the door behind her. “When the Lo/Rez machine decides to throw money at a problem, money will be thrown. Usually in the wrong direction.” She looked at the screen, where Rez was still swinging along, swatting flies from his neck and chest, lost in composition. “Homework?”

“Yamazaki.”

“Arleigh McCrae,” she said, taking a card from a small black purse and handing it to him. Her name there, then four telephone numbers and two addresses, neither of them physical. “Do you have a card, Mr. Laney?”

“Colin. No. I don’t.”

“They can make them up for you at the desk. Everyone has a card here.”

He put the card in his shirt pocket. “Blackwell didn’t give me one. Neither did Yamazaki.”

“Outside the Lo/Rez organization, I mean. It’s like not having socks.”

“I have socks,” Laney said, indicating the basket on the bed. “Do you feel like watching a BBC documentary on Lo/Rez?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I can turn it off. He’ll know.”

“Try lowering the volume. Manually.” She demonstrated.

“A technician,” Laney said.

“With a van. And umpti-million yen worth of equipment that didn’t seem to do much for you.” She sat down in one of the room’s two small armchairs, crossing her legs.

Laney took the other chair. “Not your fault. You got me in there just fine. But it’s not the kind of data I can work with.”

“Yamazaki told me what you’re supposed to be able to do,” she said. “I didn’t believe him.”

Laney looked at her. “I can’t help you there.” There were three smiling suns, like black woodblock prints, down the inside of her left calf.

“They’re woven into the stockings. Catalan.”

Laney looked up. “I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain what it is people think they pay me to do,” he said, “because I can’t. I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just work here. But what I’m being paid to do, right now, is determine what it is we could give you that would allow you to do whatever it is that you’re alleged to be able to do.”

Laney looked at the screen. Concert footage now, and Rez was dancing, a microphone in his hand. “You’ve seen this video, right? Is he serious about that ‘Sino-Celtic’ thing he was talking about in that interview?”

“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”

“No.”

“Its not the easiest thing, deciding what Rez is serious about.”

“But how can there be ‘Sino-Celtic mysticism’ when the Chinese and the Celts don’t have any shared history?”

“Because Rez himself is half Chinese and half Irish. And if there’s one thing he’s serious about…”

“Yes?”

“It’s Rez.”

Laney stared glumly at the screen as the singer was replaced by a close-up of Lo’s playing, his hands on the black-bodied guitar. Earlier, a venerable British guitarist in wonderful tweeds had opined as how they hadn’t really expected the next Hendrix to emerge from Taiwanese Canto-pop, but then again they hadn’t actually been expecting the first one, had they?

“Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,” Arleigh McCrae said. “Up to a certain point.”

Laney closed his eyes.

“The show never aired, Laney. Out of Control dropped it. What happened?”

He’d taken to having breakfast beside the Chateau’s small oval pool, past the homely clapboard bungalows that Rydell said were a later addition. It was the one time of the day that felt like his own, or did until Rice Daniels arrived, which was usually toward the bottom of a three-cup pot of coffee, just prior to his eggs and bacon.

Daniels would cross the terra cotta to Laney’s table with what could only be described as a spring in his step. Laney privately wished to ascribe this to drug-use, of which he’d seen no evidence whatever, and indeed Daniels’s most potent public indulgence seemed to be multiple cups of decaf espresso taken with curls of lemon peel. He favored loosely woven beige suits and collarless shirts.

This particular morning, however, Daniels had not been alone, and Laney had detected a lack of temper in the accustomed spring; a certain jangled brittleness there, and the painful-hooking glasses seeming to grip his head even more tightly than usual. Beside him came a gray-haired man in a dark brown suit of Western cut, hawk-faced and wind-burnt, the blade of his impressive nose protruding from a huge black pair of sunglasses. He wore black alligator roping-boots and carried a dusty-looking briefcase of age-darkened tan cowhide, its handle mended with what Laney supposed had to be baling wire.

“Laney,” Rice Daniels had said, arriving at the table, “this is Aaron Pursley.”

“Don’t get up, son,” Pursley said, though Laney hadn’t thought to. “Fella’s just bringing you your breakfast.” One of the Mongolian waiters was crossing with a tray, from the direction of the bungalows. Pursley put his battle-scarred briefcase down and took one of the white-painted metal chairs. The waiter served Laney’s eggs. Laney signed for them, adding a 15-percent tip. Pursley was flipping through the contents of his case. He wore half a dozen heavy silver rings on the fingers of either hand, some of them studded with turquoise. Laney couldn’t remember when he’d last seen anyone carry around that much paper.

“You’re the lawyer,” Laney said. “On television.”

“In the flesh as well, son.” Pursley was on “Cops in Trouble,” and before that he’d been famous for defending celebrity clients. Daniels hadn’t taken a seat, and stood behind Pursley now with a hunched, uncharacteristic posture, hands in his trouser pockets. “Here we are,” Pursley said. He drew out a sheaf of blue paper. “Don’t let your eggs get cold.”

“Have a seat,” Laney said to Daniels. Daniels winced behind his glasses.

“Now,” Pursley said, “you were in a Federal Orphanage, in Gainesville, it says here, from age twelve to age seventeen.”

Laney looked at his eggs. “That’s right.”

“During that time, you participated in a number of drug trials? You were an experimental subject?”

“Yes,” Laney said, his eggs looking somehow farther away, or like a picture in a magazine.

“This was voluntary on your part?”

“There were rewards.”

“Voluntary,” Pursley said. “You get on any of that 5-SB?”

“They didn’t tell us what they were giving us,” Laney said. “Sometimes we’d get a placebo instead.”

“You don’t mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.”

Which was true, but Laney just sat there.

“Well?” Pursley removed his big heavy glasses. His eyes were cold and blue and set into an intricate topography of wrinkles.