The Robot and the One You Love | Page 7

and the mirrored door slid aside.
He reached into the white-lit interior and pulled the cold bag from
behind stacked black suitcases. He laid the cold bag on the double bed,
split the opening seam, and took out the package. He unwrapped the
package and with a small scalpel carved away a sliver of the lump of
pink flesh inside and placed the sliver in a small black tube.
Connie looked at the diener, which was plugged into a wall socket. "I'm
sorry," Jerome said, but she ignored him; she was looking wildly about
as if for something that was not there.
The short one nodded his head and began to repack the cold bag. The
tall one fired a shot that hit Connie in the middle of the forehead. The
impact slammed her against the wall, and the shooter walked over to
where she sprawled with her legs and arms flung wide, and put another
shot into the inside curve of her left breast, into the heart.
"Go home," he said to Jerome in the flat voice of a poker player asking
the dealer for two cards. "Someone will be along to take care of
things--the woman, the car. Don't say anything to anybody, and don't
ever bother us again. Understand?"
With her blood on him and the smell of her death in his nostrils, Jerome
understood. The two men didn't wait for him to say so. They were
gone.
The shuttle to Reno lifted straight up from a pad of cracked cement on
the edge of the almost-town. Inside the old swing-wing jet, the stink of
sweat came off tattered green upholstery. Over the mountains the plane
swayed and bucked in rough air that penetrated Jerome's stunned grief
and guilt and made him white with nausea.
In Reno the airport was bright blue cement, red steel, and a forest of
mirrors, and Jerome and the diener were insignificant among thousands
returning east, most having blown sensible amounts, a few telling
stories of big casino wins, a few more nursing the gut ache that comes
with big-time loss, the one you can't afford.

"You're sure the compartment is pressurized," Jerome said to the
woman behind the United counter. The diener had already been
checked through, but Jerome was anxious.
"Hey, Jackie," the woman said. "This guy's shipping a robot. You
wanna talk to him? I'm busy." She was in her early twenties with bright,
sexy eyes, and obviously did not give a shit.
"Fuck you," Jerome said. And walked away.
"Next," the woman said.
On the flight to Washington, the cabin was dark, and Jerome sat
sleepless in the gloom, confronting the blank recognition that he had
known little about Connie Stone, and he wondered who she was, and
more... wondered about them... what were the odds that their passion
would have endured past the moment's hot radioactive burn? At Dulles
there was rain and fog and crowds dispersing quickly off two incoming
flights.
The diener rolled up a ramp into the rear compartment of an airport
limo; Jerome sat among the half-dozen glum people inside. As the limo
moved along the Dulles Parkway, no one said a word, which was fine
with Jerome. He could barely imagine trying to talk to anyone about
anything.
Late afternoon the following day, Jerome sat on the minute terrace
outside his bedroom. Through open glass doors he could hear the quiet
swish of the diener as it moved through the room.
Jerome's voyeurism was gone, its energies extinct. He thought that
maybe his curiosity had gone with it, though he did wonder about one
thing.
"Diener," he called, and the robot came onto the terrace. "How do you
think I.G. Biochemie found us?" Jerome asked. He breathed in the
burned hydrocarbons from the street ten stories below. The diener
stayed silent. "I used to think I was pretty good at this game," Jerome

went on, "but they burned me down, they caught us."
"No," the diener said. "Not your fault."
"Of course it is."
"No. I told them."
Coming out of the chair, Jerome put his hands under the edge of the
diener's porcelain shell . He thought, Of course you did, in a moment
more of recognition than of discovery. He grunted as he levered the
diener's body sideways so that it rested against the white-painted
terrace railing. The diener's tentacles quivered like agitated black
worms.
"To save your life," the diener said. "I made a deal with them. They
would never have forgotten you, they would have killed you. Why do
you worry about that woman? She was a thief, a murderer"
"You little shit."
Under the diener's weight and Jerome's push, the rail came free, and the
diener tumbled in bright sunlight. Smashing through a sculpture of
black wrought iron, it