Read Online Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 by The Long Fall - Free Book Online

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    I TOOK A bus downtown and got off three blocks from Tiny Bateman’s Charles Street address.
    Charles was a narrow street of mostly four- to six-story apartment buildings built of brick and thickly coated with decades of city grime. Most had concrete stoops and little barred gates that led down to the basements. Tiny worked in an underground apartment half a block from Hudson Street. I descended the seven granite stairs and gave that week’s secret code. I felt like a fool with a magic decoder ring but Tiny would never answer unless I tattooed the right sequence on his buzzer.
    After three minutes there was a loud click and I pushed open the reinforced steel door that was painted a fanciful shamrock green.
    It was more of a compartment than an apartment. Each room, even the toilet, had worktables along the walls. These tables were crowded with wires and chip boards, computers without casings and cameras that looked like ceramic dolls, single-cigar humidors, a copy of The Old Man and the Sea , and other, less recognizable items. There were clusters of cell phones on the tables; some were wired to computers, others wired together. Tiny could do things with modern technology that even the inventors had not yet imagined. He supplied people like me with surveillance tools, hacked information, and general advice. Most of his work was done over the Internet but he allowed a select few into his dark and dusty domain.
    I passed through three packed rooms before coming to Tiny’s office. This had once been the master bedroom of the subterranean abode. Huge light-gray, plastic-encased computers lined the southern wall. They were humming and throwing off a lot of heat, I was sure, but Tiny had enough air-conditioning running to freeze a penguin.
    The fat young caramel-colored man was seated in a swivel chair perched in a cockpit cut into a round Formica table that was, by my estimation, eleven feet in diameter. Surrounded by keyboards, he wore overalls but no shirt and glasses with one blue and one green lens, both of them iridescent. There were twelve screens hanging from the ceiling, tilting so he could see them by turning his head or, at the outside, swiveling his butt. There was a huge screen behind him broken into various-sized boxes that displayed shifting TV images—numbers, foreign characters, and sometimes nothing but continually shifting and amorphous forms.
    “Hey, Tiny,” I said.
    I didn’t sit because there was no visitor’s chair in Tiny’s laboratory. He once told me that he only ever had four visitors. I didn’t know the others’ names but it was a good bet that one of them was his father.
    Simon Bateman had introduced me to his nerd-to-the-max son. I helped the elder Bateman once when he was in serious trouble, and he paid me by getting Bug to agree to work for me now and again.
    “How’d that phone work out?” the thirty-something misanthrope asked in a high voice that seemed to want to get higher.
    “Fine. Fine. I think I might need another couple soon.”
    “The blue and pink ones near the front door,” he said.
    Bug owned, and slept in, the apartment above his workplace. The people he did business with dropped their deliveries and picked up their orders in a sealed antechamber that he constructed up there. That way he didn’t have to see anyone for weeks at a time.
    “I wanted to talk to you,” I said.
    “ ’Bout what?”
    I explained about the e-mails that Twill had sent and received.
    “I’m worried about my son,” I said.
    “Maybe he’s got a good reason,” Tiny said, removing the glasses that had earned him the insect nickname.
    His eyes were small and his fleshy limbs chubby. He was both the technically smartest and physically unhealthiest person I’d ever known.
    Tiny called himself a techno-anarchist. He believed that humanity would slowly separate into what he called monadic particulates : self-sufficient individuals who depended only upon technology and their