Burning Chrome by William Gibson Page B

night. And, that night, her eyes were green.
    He pushed resolutely between the empty chrome-and-Formica tables until he reached the bar, where he ordered a straight bourbon. He took off his duffle coat, and wound up holding it on his lap when he sat down one stool away from her. Great, he screamed to himself, she’ll think you’re hiding an erection. And he was startled to realize that he had one to hide. He studied himself in the mirror behind the bar, a thirtyish man with thinning dark hair and a pale, narrow face on a long neck, too long for the open collar of the nylon shirt printed with engravings of 1910 automobiles in three vivid colors. He wore a tie with broad maroon and black diagonals, too narrow, he supposed, for what he now saw as the grotesquely long points of his collar. Or it was the wrong color. Something.
    Beside him, in the dark clarity of the mirror, the green-eyedwoman looked like Irma La Douce. But looking closer, studying her face, he shivered. A face like an animal’s. A beautiful face, but simple, cunning, two-dimensional. When she senses you’re looking at her, Coretti thought, she’ll give you the smile, disdainful amusement – or whatever you’d expect.
    Coretti blurted, ‘May I, um, buy you a drink?’
    At moments like these, Coretti was possessed by an agonizingly stiff, schoolmasterish linguistic tic. Um . He winced. Um .
    â€˜You would, um, like to buy me a drink? Why, how kind of you,’ she said, astonishing him. ‘That would be very nice.’ Distantly, he noticed that her reply was as stilted and insecure at his own. She added, ‘A Tom Collins, on this occasion, would be lovely.’
    On this occasion? Lovely? Rattled, Coretti ordered two drinks and paid.
    A big woman in jeans and an embroidered cowboy shirt bellied up to the bar beside him and asked the bartender for change. ‘Well, hey,’ she said. Then she strutted to the jukebox and punched for Conway and Loretta’s ‘You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.’ Coretti turned to the woman in green, and mumured haltingly:
    â€˜Do you enjoy country-and-western music?’ Do you enjoy… ? He groaned secretly at his phrasing, and tried to smile.
    â€˜Yes indeed,’ she answered, the faintest twang edging her voice, ‘I sure do.’
    The cowgirl sat down beside him and asked her, winking, ‘This li’l terror here givin’ you a hard time?’
    And the animal-eyed lady in green replied, ‘Oh, hell no, honey, I got my eye on ’im.’ And laughed. Just the right amount of laugh. The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasingand inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass.
    â€˜The name’s Coretti,’ he said, his verbal poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing tough-guy mode, ‘Michael Coretti.’
    â€˜A pleasure,’ she said, too softly for the other woman to hear, and again she had slipped into the lame parody of Emily Post.
    â€˜Conway and Loretta,’ said the cowgirl, to no one in particular.
    â€˜Antoinette,’ said the woman in green, and inclined her head. She finished her drink, pretended to glance at a watch, said thank-you-for-the-drink too damn politely, and left.
    Ten minutes later Coretti was following her down Third Avenue. He had never followed anyone in his life and it both frightened and excited him. Forty feet seemed a discreet distance, but what should he do if she happened to glance over her shoulder?
    Third Avenue isn’t a dark street, and it was there, in the light of a streetlamp, like a stage light, that she began to change. The street was deserted.
    She was crossing the street. She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair