Idolon

Chapter One

1


White-hot fog. It boiled over the halogen-lighted streets-scalding to look at but cool against the skin.

Kasuo van Dijk pulled his overcoat tighter against the dank mist, shut the door to his unmarked car, and stepped onto gritty concrete.

This part of North Beach was philmed in classic noir. Most of the storefronts and apartment building facades were a melange of grays and blacks lifted from The Maltese Falcon, Raw Deal, and half a dozen other celluloids from the 1930s and '40s. In places, some of the architectural and decorative elements had been colorized. Vivid greens, reds, and blues bled from the shadows, saturating the landscape with flamboyant contusions of color borrowed from Romare Bearden and Warhol.

Nothing was ever what it seemed, he reminded himself. Nor was it otherwise.

A few blocks east of Hyde, toward Telegraph Hill, the decor changed abruptly to the delirious exuberance of Gaudi and Hundertwasser. Organic transmogrifications not unlike the Peter Max-, Bob Masse-, and Roger Dean-fueled psychedelia of Haight-Ashbury. To the southwest, van Dijk could just make out the staid browns and clean, if somewhat stark, Edward Hopper lines of Pacific Heigh ... read full excerpt from Idolon ebook