The Empress File Read Free

“?” flashed on the upper left corner of my screen. I typed
Hivaoa
, my code name on Bobby’s system. It’s taken from Gauguin’s 1902 painting
The Magician of Hivaoa
, which hangs in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Liège. As a password
Hivaoa
may seem pretentious, but it fills the two main requirements of any computer code word: It’s easy to remember,and you don’t have to worry that somebody will stumble on it by accident.
    Bobby came back instantly:
    Friend bad-needs face-to-face ASAP.
    When/Where?
    Today/Memphis.
    Short notice.
    Asking favor.
    I’ll check airlines.
    Already booked 4:47 Northwest Airlines Minn-St. Paul-Memphis arrive 7:20.
    Booking the plane was presumptuous, but Bobby’s a computer freak. Computer freaks are like that. Besides, he was virtually a full-time resident of the Northwest reservation system, so it probably didn’t cost him anything.
    Bobby and I had met inside a GM design computer back in the old days and had enlarged our friendship on the early pirate boards, the good ones that the teenyboppers never saw. Over the years we’d dealt a lot of data and code to each other. I’d never met him face-to-face, but I’d talked to him on voice lines. A black kid, I thought, still young, early to mid-twenties. A southerner. He had a hint of a speech impediment, and something he said suggested a physicalproblem. Cerebral palsy, like that. A while back he helped me out of a jam involving the mob, several murders, and a computer attack that wrecked a defense contractor. I still flash on it from time to time, like visitations from an old acid trip. In return for his help, I sent a bundle of cash Bobby’s way. So we were friends, but only on the wires. I went back to him:
    Where go Memphis?
    He meets plane.
    OK
.
    After Bobby signed off, I went back to the bedroom, reset the alarm for eleven o’clock, and crawled into bed. Chaminade smelled of red wine and garlic sauce, a little sweat and a tingle of French scent. She’s a large woman, with jet black hair and eyes that are almost powder blue; both her genes and her temper are black Irish. She does electronic engineering, specializing in miniaturization. She was one of the first to crack the new satellite-TV scrambling system and makes a tidy income on pirate receivers.
    She was lying on her side, facing away from me. I put my back against hers; the cat turned a couple of circles at my feet. Chaminade said, “Wha?” one time before we all went back to sleep.
    I LIVE IN a paid-off condominium apartment in St. Paul’s Lowertown, a few hundred feet up the bank from the Mississippi River. The building is a modern conversion of a redbrick turn-of-the-century warehouse.
    I have a compact kitchen, a dining area off the front room, a bedroom, a painting studio with north windows, and a study jammed with small computers and a couple of thousand books. I keep a brand-new seventeen-foot Tuffy Esox fishing boat and an older Oldsmobile in a private parking garage up the block. There’s another place, quite a bit like it, also paid off, in New Orleans.
    When I say the apartments are paid off, I’m not bragging. I’m worried. I screwed up. The run-in with the mob generated quite a bit of cash. I’d never been rich before, and when the money came in, I managed to ignore the annoying buzzing sound in the background. The buzzing sound was my accountant, of course, and she was trying to remind me that I lived in Minnesota, that 40 percent of every dime I earned went for income taxes, either state or federal, plus a couple of more percentages for Social Security and etc. The etc., I suspect, is something I don’t want to know about.
    Looking back, I shouldn’t have paid off the houses. And the trip to Paris and the Côte sometimesseems a tad excessive. I spent a lot of money on food, booze, and women and thoroughly field-tested a faulty baccarat system on the tables at Monte Carlo and what was left, I wasted.
    When I got back from France, I was still fairly