Flashback

The security people at the entrance checkpoint were ex-DPD and remembered Nick and treated him well, and the magical black card that Nakamura had recently sent to him via Sato settled all other issues. One of the guards phoned ahead to alert Danny Oz to be ready for a visitor and even led Nick through the thick maze of hovels, tents, abandoned amusement park rides, and open-air kiosks.

“It looks like they have everything right in here,” said Nick, just to make conversation.

“Oh, yeah,” said the guard, a retired patrolman named Charlie Duquane, “the camp’s pretty self-sufficient. They have their own doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and a decent medical clinic. They’ve even got six synagogues.”

“What’s the resident count?”

“Around twenty-six thousand,” said Charlie. “Give or take a couple a hundred.”

The resident count six years ago had been a little over thirty-two thousand. Nick knew that many of the Israeli refugees were older and cancer was rampant in all the camps. Almost none were released into the general population.

He met with the poet in an otherwise empty mess tent under the rusting steel coils and pillars of some upside-down high-speed scream ride.

The hand behind the handshake was listless, clammy, bony, and weak. Nick had just seen Danny Oz in his flashback preparation and in the 3D crime-scene re-creation back at Keigo Nakamura’s LoDo apartment complex and there was no doubt that the man had aged horribly in the past six years. Oz had been thin and graying and vaguely tubercular-looking six years ago in a properly poetic way, his hair already turned mostly gray in his early fifties, but there had been a coiled-spring energy to the thin figure then and the eyes had been as animated as the poet’s conversation. Now he was an animated corpse: skin and eyes a jaundiced yellow; gray hair as yellowed as the teeth of the heavy smoker; laugh lines and somewhat attractive scholarly wrinkles transformed to grooves and furrows in skin pulled far too tight over an eagerly emerging skull.

Nick knew that Danny Oz had come out of what the Jews called the Second Holocaust with some sort of radiation-induced cancer (all eleven of the bombs had been made very dirty indeed by the True Believers who’d built them), but he couldn’t remember what kind of cancer it was.

It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was slowly killing the poet.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Detective Bottom. Did you ever catch young Mr. Nakamura’s killer?”

“No ‘Detective’ before my name any longer, Mr. Oz,” said Nick. “They fired me from the force more than five and a half years ago. And no, they’re no closer to getting Keigo Nakamura’s killer than they were six years ago.”

Danny Oz drew deeply from his cigarette—Nick belatedly realized that it was cannabis, possibly for the cancer pain—and squinted through exhaled smoke. “If you’re not with the police any longer, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Bottom?”

Nick explained that he’d been hired by the victim’s father while he noticed that, even allowing for the joint and the possibility that they’d wakened Oz for this visit, the poet’s eyes were too unfocused, set in a stare above and beyond Nick’s right shoulder. Nick recognized that kind of thousand-yard stare from those mornings when he decided to shave. Danny Oz was using a lot more flashback than he’d been on six years ago.

“So do we go through the same questions as six years ago or come up with new ones?” asked Danny Oz.

“Have you thought of anything else that might be of help, Mr. Oz?”

“Danny. And no, I haven’t. You and your fellow investigators are still going on the assumption that it was something that came up during his video interviews that got Keigo Nakamura killed?”

“There aren’t any ‘fellow investigators,’ ” said Nick with a ghost of a smile. “And I don’t have anything as elegant or advanced as a theory. Just going over old ground, I’m afraid.”

“Well, it’s still a pleasure to talk to a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Oz. “And I’ve often thought of what you told me.”

“What’s that?”

“That you didn’t know that you were a character in Shakespeare’s play until your wife told you.”

Nick did grin now. “You have a damned good memory, Mr… Danny.” Unless you flashed on our last meeting, too. But why would you waste money and drug for that? To keep your story straight? “But Dara wasn’t my wife yet when she broke the news of the other Nick Bottom to me. We were dating… sort of. She was an undergraduate and I was already a cop, going back to school to get hours toward my master’s degree.”

“How did you take the news? Of your ears and possible sexual intimacy with the Queen of the Fairies, I mean.”