"When Gravity Fails" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

Chapter 6

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it’s going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can’t do it. It’s not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven’t you ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it’s reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent.

Yasmin and I made love again when we woke at last, this time on our sides, with her back to me. We held each other close when we finished, but only for a few moments, because Yasmin wanted to live life to the fullest again. I reminded her that this, too, was just not in human nature — at least as far as I was concerned. I wanted a little longer to savor the gardenia, which was still pretty fresh in my mind. Yasmin really wanted another gardenia. I told her to wait another minute or two.

“Sure,” she said, “tomorrow, with the apricots.” That’s the Levantine equivalent of “when pigs fly.”

I would have loved to jam her right then until she cried for mercy, but my flesh was still weak, “This is the part they call the afterglow,” I said. “Sensitive, voluptuous people like me value it as much as the jamming itself.”

“Fuck that, man,” she said, “you’re just getting old.” I knew she wasn’t being serious, that she was just riding me — or trying to. Actually, I was beginning to feel my weak flesh beginning to stir already, and was almost ready to proclaim my remaining youth, when there was a knock at the door.

“Uh oh, there goes your surprise,” I said. For a recluse, I was sure entertaining a lot of visitors lately.

“I wonder who it is. You don’t owe anyone any money.”

I grabbed my jeans and crammed myself into them. “Then it’s got to be somebody trying to borrow,” I said, heading for the peephole in the door.

“From you? You wouldn’t give a copper fiq to a beggar who knew the Secret of the Universe.”

As I got to the door, I looked back at Yasmin. “The universe doesn’t have secrets,” I said cynically, “only lies and swindles.” My indulgent mood vanished in a split second when I looked through the peephole. “Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath. I went back to the bed. “Yasmin,” I said softly, “give me your bag.”

“Why? Who is it?” She found her purse and passed it to me.

I knew she always carried a low-grade seizure gun for protection. I don’t carry a weapon like that; alone and unarmed I walked among the cutthroats of the Budayeen, because I was special, exempt, proud, and stupid. I had these delusions, you see, and I lived a kind of romantic fallacy. I was no more eccentric than your average raving loon. I took the gun and went back to the door. Yasmin watched me, silently and anxiously.

I opened the door. It was Selima. I held the seizure gun pointed between her eyes. “How nice to see you,” I said. “Come on in. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“You won’t need the gun, Marîd,” said Selima. She brushed by me, seemed unhappy to see Yasmin, and looked in vain for somewhere to sit. She was extremely uncomfortable, I noticed, and very upset about something.

“So,” I said cruelly, “you just want to get in a few last whacks before somebody lays you out like Tami?”

Selima glowered, reached back, and slapped me hard across the face. I’d earned it.

“Sit on the bed, Selima. Yasmin will move over. As for the gun, it would have come in handy when you and your friends dropped by and started my morning with such a bang. Or don’t you remember about that?”

“Marîd,” she said, licking her glossy red lips, “I’m sorry about that. It was a mistake.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all better, then.” I watched Yasmin cover herself with the sheet and crawl as far away from Selima as she could, with her knees drawn up and her back in the corner. Selima had the immense breasts that was the trademark of the Black Widow Sisters, but otherwise she was almost unmodified. She was naturally prettier than most sex-changes. Tamiko had turned herself into a caricature of the modest and demure geisha; Devi accentuated her East Indian heritage, complete with a caste mark on her forehead to which she was not entitled, and when she was not working, she wore a brightly-colored silk sari, embroidered in gold. Selima, on the contrary, wore the veil and the hooded cloak, a subtle fragrance, and the demeanor of a middle-class Muslim woman of the city. I think, but I’m not sure, that she was religious; I can’t imagine how she squared her thievery and frequent violence with the teachings of the Prophet, may prayers and peace be upon him. I’m not the only self-deluded fool in the Budayeen.

“Please, Marîd, let me explain.” I’d never seen Selima — or either of her Sisters, for that matter — in such a state of near-panic. “You know that Nikki left Tami’s.” I nodded. “I don’t think she wanted to go. I think someone forced her.”

“That isn’t the message I got. She wrote me a letter about some German guy and what a wonderful life she was going to have, and that she had a real fish on the line here and she was going to play him for everything he had.”

“We all got the same letter, Marîd. Didn’t you notice anything suspicious about it, though? Maybe you don’t know Nikki’s handwriting as well as I do. Maybe you didn’t pay attention to her choice of words. There were clues in the note that made us think she was trying to get something across between the lines. I think someone was standing over her, making her write the letters so no one would think twice when she disappeared. Nikki was right-handed, and the letters were written with her left hand. The script was awful, nothing like her usual writing. She wrote our notes in French, although she knows perfectly well that none of us understands that language. She spoke English, and both Devi and Tami could have read that; that’s the language she used with them. She never mentioned an old German friend of her family; there may well have been such a man when she was younger, but the way she called herself ‘a shy, introverted little boy,’ well, that just underlined the bad feeling we had about the whole letter. Nikki told lots of stories about her life before she had her change. She was vague about most of the details — where she was really from, things like that — but she always laughed about what a terror she — he — had been. She wanted to be just like us, and so she went into these biographical accounts of her hell-raising. She was anything but shy and introverted. Marîd, that letter smelled from beginning to end.”

I let my hand with the gun drop. Everything Selima had said made sense, now that I thought about it. “That’s why you’re so shaken up,” I said thoughtfully. “You think Nikki’s in some kind of trouble.”

“I think Nikki’s in trouble,” said Selima, “but that’s not why I’m so rabbity. Marîd, Devi’s dead. She’s been murdered, too.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. Yasmin gave a loud gasp; she uttered another superstitious formula — “far from you” — to protect us from the evil that had just been mentioned. I felt weariness, as if I’d overdosed on shocking news and just couldn’t work up the proper reaction. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “let me guess: just like Tami. Burn marks, bruises around her wrists, jammed coming and going, strangled, and her throat cut. And you think someone’s out to get all three of you, and you’re next.”

I was astonished by her reply. “No, you’re wrong. I found her lying in her bed, almost like she was peacefully asleep. She’d been shot, Marîd, with an old-fashioned gun, the kind that used metal bullets. There was a bullet hole exactly centered on her caste mark. No signs of a fight or anything. Nothing disturbed in her apartment. Just Devi, part of her face blown away, a lot of blood splattered on the bedclothes and the walls. I threw up. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those old weapons were so bloody and, well, brutal.” This from a woman who’d slashed enough faces in her time. “I’ll bet no one’s been shot with a bullet in fifty years.” Selima evidently didn’t know about my Russian, whatever his name had been; dead bodies didn’t cause much scandal and gossip in the Budayeen; they weren’t all that rare. Corpses were more of an inconvenience than anything else. Getting large quantities of bloodstains out of nice silk or cashmere is a tedious job.

“Have you called Okking yet?” I asked.

Selima nodded. “It wasn’t his shift. Sergeant Hanar came and asked all the questions. I wish it’d been Okking instead.”

I knew what she meant. Hajjar was the kind of cop I think of when I think of “cop.” He walked around as if he had a cork up his ass, looking for petty rowdies to blast into grand mal seizures. He had a particular hard-on for Arabs who were inattentive to their spiritual duties: people like me and almost everyone else in the Budayeen.

I put the gun back in Yasmin’s bag. My mood had changed entirely; now suddenly, and for the first time, I felt sympathy for Selima. Yasmin put her hand on Selima’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said. I looked at the last Black Widow Sister. “Or would you rather have tea?”

She was grateful for our kindness, and our company, too, I think. “Tea, thank you,” she said. She had begun to calm down.

I put the kettle on to boil. “So just tell me one thing: why did the three of you work out your kinks on my body the other day?”

“Allah have mercy on me,” said Selima. She took a folded scrap of paper from her bag and brought it to me. “This is Nikki’s usual handwriting, but it’s obvious she was in a terrible hurry.” The words were written in English, scrawled quickly on the back of an envelope.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Selima glanced at me and quickly looked back down at the paper. “It says, ‘Help. Hurry. Marîd.’ That’s why we did what we did. We misunderstood. We thought you were responsible for whatever trouble she was in. Now I know that you had done her the service of negotiating her release from that pig Abdoulaye, and that she owed you money. She wanted us to let you know that she needed help, but didn’t have time to write anything more. She was probably lucky just to scribble this down.”

I thought about the beating they’d given me; the hours of unconsciousness; the pain I’d suffered and still suffered; the long, nightmarish wait at the hospital; the anger I’d felt toward Nikki; the thousand kiam it had cost me. I added all that up and tried to cancel it. I couldn’t. I still felt an unaccustomed rage inside me, but now it seemed I had no one to vent it on. I looked at Selima. “Just forget it,” I said.

Selima wasn’t moved. I thought she’d meet me halfway at least, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. “It isn’t all right, you know,” she reminded me. “I’m still worried about Nikki.”

“The letter she wrote might be true, after all,” I said, pouring tea into three cups. “Those clues you mentioned, they might all have some innocent explanation.” I didn’t believe a word of it, even as I said it. It was only to make Selima feel better.

She took her cup of tea and held it. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said.

“It may be some crazy trick is after all three of you,” Yasmin suggested. “Maybe you ought to hide out for a while.”

“I thought of that,” Selima said. Yasmin’s theory didn’t sound likely to me: Tamiko and Devi had been killed in such completely different ways. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility of a creative murderer. Despite all the old cop truisms about a criminal’s modus operandi, there wasn’t a reason in the world why a killer couldn’t use two offbeat techniques. I kept quiet about this, too.

“You could stay in my apartment,” said Yasmin. “I could stay here with Marîd.” Both Selima and I were startled by Yasmin’s offer.

“That’s good of you to offer,” said Selima. “I’ll think about it, sugar, but there are a couple of other things I want to try. I’ll let you know.”

“You’ll be all right if you just keep your eyes open,” I said. “Don’t do any business for a few days, don’t mix with strangers.” Selima nodded. She handed me her tea, which she hadn’t even tasted.

“I have to go,” she said. “I hope everything is straight now between us.”

“You have more important things to worry about, Selima,” I said. “We’ve never been very close before. In a morbid way, maybe we’ll end up better friends because of this.”

“The price has been high,” she said. That was all too true. Selima started to say something else, then stopped. She turned and went to the door, let herself out, and closed the door quietly behind her.

I stood by the stove with three cups of tea. “You want one of these?” I asked.

“No,” said Yasmin.

“Neither do I.” I dumped the tea into the sink.

“There’s either one mighty twisted bastard out there killing people,” mused Yasmin, “or what’s worse, two different motherfuckers working the same side of the street. I’m almost afraid to go to work.”

I sat down beside her and stroked her perfumed hair. “You’ll be all right at work. Just listen to what I told Selima: don’t pick up any trick you don’t already know. Stay here with me instead of going home alone.”

She gave me a little smile. “I couldn’t bring a trick here to your apartment,” she said.

“You’re damn straight about that.” I said. “Forget about turning tricks at all until this business is over and they’ve caught the guy. I’ve got enough money to support both of us for a little while.”

She put her arms around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. “You’re all right,” she said.

“You’re okay, too, when you’re not snoring like a go-devil,” I said. In reprisal, she raked my back hard with her long, claret-colored fingernails. Then we stretched out on the bed and played around again for half an hour.

I got Yasmin out of bed about two-thirty, made her something to eat while she showered and dressed, and urged her to get to work without getting fined for being late: fifty kiam is fifty kiam, I always reminded her. Her answer to that was, “So why worry? One fifty-kiam bill looks just like all the others. If I don’t bring home one, I’ll bring home another.” I couldn’t quite get her to see that if she just hustled her bustle a little more, she could bring them both home.

She asked me what I was going to do that afternoon. She was a little jealous because I’d earned my money for the next few weeks; I could sit around in some coffeehouse all day, bragging and gossiping with the boyfriends of the other dancers and working girls. I told her that I had some errands to run, and that I’d be busy, too. “I’m going to see what the story is with Nikki,” I said.

“You didn’t believe Selima?” Yasmin asked.

“I’ve known Selima a long time. I know she likes to go overboard in these situations. I’d be willing to bet that Nikki is safe and happy with this Seipolt guy. Selima just had to invent some story to make her life sound exotic and risky.”

Yasmin gave me a dubious look. “Selima doesn’t have to make up stories. Her life is exotic and risky. I mean, how can you exaggerate a bullet hole through the forehead? Dead is dead, Marîd.”

She had a point there, but I didn’t feel like awarding it to her out loud. “Go to work,” I said, kissing her and fondling her and booting her out of the apartment. Then I was all alone. “Alone” was much quieter now than ever before; I think I almost preferred having a lot of noise and people and provocation around. That’s a bad sign for a recluse. It’s even worse for a solitary agent, for a tough character who lives for action and menace, the kind of bold, competent guy I liked to think I was. When the silence starts to give you the nervous jimjams, that’s when you find out you’re not a hero, after all. Oh, sure, I knew a lot of truly dangerous people, and I’d done a lot of dangerous things. I was on the inside, one of the sharks rather than one of the minnows; and I had the respect of the other sharks as well. The trouble was that having Yasmin around all the time was getting to be enjoyable, but that didn’t fit the lone wolf profile.

I said all of this to myself while I shaved my throat, looking in the bathroom mirror. I was trying to persuade myself of something, but it took me a while to do it. When I did, I wasn’t happy about my conclusion: I hadn’t accomplished very much during the last several days; but three times now, people had dropped dead near me, people I knew, people I didn’t know. If this trend went on, it could endanger Yasmin.

Hell, it could endanger me.

I had said that I thought Selima was getting excited over nothing. That was a lie. While Selima was telling me her story, I was recalling the brief, frantic phone call I’d gotten: “Marîd? You’ve got to—” I hadn’t been sure before that it had been from Nikki; but I was certain now, and I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t acted on it. If Nikki had been hurt in any way, I was going to have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life.

I put on a white cotton gallebeya; covered my head with the familiar Arab headdress, the white keffiya, and held it in place with a rope akal. I put some sandals on my feet. Now I looked like every other poor, scruffy Arab in the city, one of the fellahin, or peasants. I doubt if I’d dressed like this more than ten times in all the years I’d lived in the Budayeen. I’ve always affected European clothing, in my youth in Algeria and later when I’d wandered eastward. I did not now look like an Algerian; I wanted to be taken for a local fellah. Maybe only my reddish beard whispered a discordant note, but the German would not know that. As I left my apartment and walked along the Street toward the gate, I didn’t hear my name called once or catch a glance of recognition. As I walked among my friends, they did not know me, so unusual was it for me to dress this way. I felt invisible, and with invisibility goes a certain power. My uncertainty of a few minutes before evaporated, replaced by my old confidence. I was dangerous again.

Just beyond the eastern gate was the broad Boulevard il-Jameel, lined with palm trees on both sides. A spacious neutral ground separated the north- and southbound traffic, and was planted with several varieties of flowering shrub. There was something blooming every month of the year, filling the air along the boulevard with sweet scents, distracting the eyes of those who passed by with their blossoms’ startling colors: luscious pinks, flaming carmine, rich pansy purple, saffron yellow, pristine white, blue as varied as the restless sea, and still more. In the trees and lodged high above the street on rooftops sang a multitude of warblers, larks, and ringdoves. The combined beauties moved one to thank Allah for these lavish gifts. I paused on the neutral ground for a moment; I had emerged from the Budayeen dressed as what I truly was — an Arab of few kiam, no great learning, and severely limited prospects. I had not anticipated the feeling of excitement this aroused in me. I felt a new kinship with the other scurrying fellahin around me, a kinship that extended — for the moment — to the religious part of daily life that I had neglected for so long. I promised myself that I would tend to those duties very soon, as soon as I had the opportunity; I had to find Nikki first.

Two blocks north of the Budayeen’s eastern gate in the direction of the Shimaal Mosque, I found Bill. I knew he’d be near the walled quarter, sitting behind the steering wheel of his taxi, watching the people passing by on the sidewalk with patience, love, curiosity, and cold fear. Bill was almost my size, but more muscular. His arms were covered with blue-green tattoos, so old that they had blurred and become indistinct; I wasn’t even certain what they had once represented. He hadn’t cut his sandy-colored hair or beard in years, many years; he looked like a Hebrew patriarch. His skin, where it was exposed to the sun as he drove around the city, was burned a bright red, like forbidden crayfish in a pot. In his red face, his pale blue eyes stared with an insane intensity that always made me look quickly away. Bill was crazy, with a craziness he’d chosen for himself as carefully as Yasmin had chosen her high, sexy cheekbones.

I met Bill when I first came to the city. He had already learned to live among the outcasts, wretches, and bullies of the Budayeen years before; he helped me fit myself easily into that questionable society. Bill had been born in the United States of America — that’s how old he was — in the part that is now called Sovereign Deseret. When the North American union broke into several jealous, balkanized nations, Bill turned his back on his birthplace forever. I don’t know how he earned a living until he learned the way of life here; Bill doesn’t remember, either. Somehow he acquired enough cash to pay for a single surgical modification in his body. Rather than wiring his brain, as many of the lost souls of the Budayeen choose to do, Bill selected a more subtle, more frightening bodmod: He had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a large, artificial gland that dripped a perpetual, measured quantity of some fourth-generation psychedelic drug into his bloodstream. Bill wasn’t sure which drug he’d asked for, but judging from his abstracted speech and the quality of his hallucinations, I’d guess it was either l-ribopropyime-thionine — RPM — or acetylated neocorticine.

You can’t buy RPM or acetylated neocorticine on the street. There isn’t much of a market for either drug. They both have the same long-term effect: After repeated doses of these drugs, a person’s nervous system begins to degenerate. They compete for the binding sites in the human brain that are normally used by acetylcholine, a neuro-transmitter. These new psychedelics attack and occupy the binding sites like a victorious army swooping down upon a conquered city; they cannot be removed, either by the body’s own processes or by any form of medical therapy. The hallucinatory experiences are unparalleled in pharmacological history, but the price in terms of damage is exorbitant. The user, more literally than ever before, burns out his brain, synapse by synapse. The resulting condition is symptomatically indistinguishable from advanced Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Continued use, when the drugs begin interfering with the autonomic nervous system, probably proves fatal.

Bill hadn’t reached that state yet. He was living a daylong, nightlong dreamlife. I remembered what it had been like sometimes, when I had dropped a less-dangerous psychedelic and had been struck by the crippling fear that “I would never come down,” a common illusion that you use to torture yourself. You feel as if this time, this particular drug experience, unlike all the pleasant experiences in the past, this time you’ve gone and broken something in your head. Trembling, terrified, promising that you’ll never take another pill again, you huddle up against the onslaught of your own darkest dreams. At last, however, you do recover; the drug wears off, and sooner or later you forget just how bad the horror was. You do it again. Maybe this time you’ll be luckier, maybe not.

There were no maybes with Bill. Bill was never coming down, ever. When those moments of utter, absolute dread began, he had no way to lessen the anxiety. He couldn’t tell himself that if he just held out long enough, in the morning he’d be back to normal. Bill would never be back to normal. That’s the way he wanted it. As for the cell-by-cell death of his nervous system. Bill only shrugged. “They all gonna die someday, right?”

“Yes,” I replied, clinging nervously to the rear seat of his taxi as he plunged through narrow, twisting alleys.

“And if they go all at once, everybody else has a party at your funeral. You don’t get nothin’. You get buried. This way, I get to say good-bye to my brain cells. They all done a lot for me. Good-bye, good-bye, farewell, it’s been good to know ya. Give each goddamn little fucker its own little send-off. If you die like a regular person, bam! you’re dead, violent stopping of every goddamn part of you, sugar in the gas tank, water in the carburetor, come to a grinding halt, you get one second, maybe two seconds, to scream to God that you’re on your way. Awful way to come to an end. Live a violent life, live a violent death. Me, I’m sneaking across the bar one neuron at a time. If I have to go into that good night, I’m goin’ gentle; the hell with whoever said not to. That sucker’s dead. man, so what did he know? Not even the courage of his convictions. Maybe after I’m dead the afrit won’t know I’m there if I keep my mouth shut. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. I don’t want to be fucked with after I’m dead, man. How can you protect yourself after you’re dead? Think about that, man. I’d like to get my hands on the guy who invented demons, man. And they call me crazy.”

I didn’t want to discuss it any further.

Bill drove me out to Seipolt’s. I always had Bill drive me when I went into the city for any reason. His insanity distracted me from the pervasive normalness all around, the lack of chaos imposed on everything. Riding with Bill was like carrying a little pocket of the Budayeen around with me for security. Like taking a tank of oxygen with you when you went into the deep, dark depths.

Seipolt’s place was far from the center of the city, on the southeast edge. It was within sight of the realm of the everlasting sand, where the dunes waited for us to relax just a little, and then they’d cover us all like ashes, like dust. The sand would smooth out all conflicts, all works, all hopes. It would swoop down, a victorious army upon a conquered city, and we would all lie in the deep, dark depths beneath the sand forever. The good night would come — but not just yet. No, not here, not yet.

Seipolt saw that order was maintained and the desert held back; date palms arched around the villa, and gardens bloomed because water was forced to flow in this inhospitable place. Bougainvillea flowered and the breeze was perfumed with enticing aromas. Iron gates were kept in repair, painted and oiled; long, curving drives were kept clean and raked; walls were whitewashed. It was a magnificent residence, a rich man’s home. It was a refuge against the creeping sand, against the creeping night that waits so patiently.

I sat in the back of Bill’s taxi. His engine idled roughly, and he muttered and laughed to himself. I felt small and foolish — Seipolt’s mansion awed me, despite myself. What was I going to say to Seipolt? The man had power — why, I couldn’t hold back even a handful of sand, not if I tried with all my might and prayed to Allah at the same time.

I told Bill to wait, and I watched him until I saw that somewhere down in his careening mind he understood. I got out of the taxi and walked through the iron gate, up the white-pebbled drive toward the front entrance to the villa. I knew that Nikki was crazy; I knew that Bill was crazy; I was now learning that I wasn’t entirely well, either.

As I listened to my feet crunching the small stones, I wondered why we all just didn’t go back where we’d come from. That was the real treasure, the greatest gift: to be where you truly belonged. If I was lucky, someday I would find that place. Inshallah. If Allah willed.

The front door was a massive thing made of some kind of blond wood, with great iron hinges and an iron grille. The door was swinging open as I raised my hand to grasp the brass knocker. A tall, lean, blond European stared down at me. He had blue eyes (unlike Bill’s, this man’s eyes were the kind you always hear described as “piercing” and, by the Prophet’s beard, I felt pierced); a thin, straight nose with flaring nostrils; a square chin; and a tight-lipped mouth that seemed set in a permanent expression of mild revulsion. He spoke to me in German.

I shook my head. “ ‘Anaa la ’alham.” I said, grinning like the stupid Arab peasant he took me for.

The man with the blond hair looked impatient. He tried English. I shook my head again, grinning and apologizing and filling his ears with Arabic. It was obvious that he couldn’t make any sense out of my language, and he wasn’t going to try any harder to find another that I might understand. He was just on the point of slamming the heavy door in my face, when he saw Bill’s taxi. That made him think. I looked like an Arab; to this man, all Arabs were pretty much the same, and one of their shared qualities was poverty. Yet I had hired a taxi to drive out to the residence of a rich and influential man. He was having trouble making sense of that, so now he wasn’t so ready to dismiss me out of hand. He pointed at me and muttered something; I supposed it was “Wait here.” I grinned, touched my heart and my forehead, and praised Allah three or four times.

A minute later, Blondie returned with an old man, an Arab in the employ of the household. The two men spoke together briefly. The old fellah turned to me and smiled. “Peace be upon you!” he said.

“And upon you,” I said. “O neighbor, is this man the honored and excellent one, Lutz Seipolt Pasha?”

The old man laughed a little. “You are mistaken, my nephew,” he said. “He is but the doorman, a menial even as I am.” I really doubted that they were all that equal. Evidently the blond man was part of Seipolt’s retinue, brought from Germany.

“On my honor, I am a fool!” I said. “I have come to ask an important question of His Excellency.” Arabic terms of address frequently make such use of elaborate flattery. Seipolt was a businessman of some sort; I had already called him Pasha (an obsolete title used in the city for ingratiation) and His Excellency (as if he were some sort of ambassador). The old, leather-skinned Arab understood what I was doing well enough. He turned to the German and translated the conversation.

The German seemed even less pleased. He replied with a single, curt sentence. The Arab spoke to me. “Reinhardt the doorman wishes to hear this question.”

I grinned into Reinhardt’s hard eyes. “I’m only looking for my sister, Nikki.”

The Arab shrugged and relayed the information. I saw Reinhardt blink and make the beginning of some gesture, then catch himself. He said something to the old fellah. “There is no one by that name here,” the Arab told me. “There are no women at all in this household.”

“I am certain that my sister is here,” I said. “It is a matter of my family’s honor.” I sounded threatening; the Arab’s eyes opened wide.

Reinhardt hesitated. He was undecided whether to slam the door in my face, after all, or kick this problem upstairs. I figured him for a coward; I was right. He didn’t want to take the responsibility for the decision, so he agreed to convey me somewhere inside the cool, lavishly furnished house. I was glad to get out of the hot sun. The old Arab disappeared, returning to his duties. Reinhardt did not deign to look at me or address a word in my direction; he merely walked deeper into the house, and I followed. We came to another heavy door, this one of a fine-grained dark hardwood. Reinhardt rapped; a gruff voice called out, and Reinhardt answered. There was a short pause, then the gruff voice gave an order. Reinhardt turned the doorknob, pushed the door open just a little, and walked away. I entered the room, putting the dumb-Arab look back on my face. I pressed my hands together in supplication and dipped my head a few times for good measure. “You are His Excellency?” I asked in Arabic.

I was looking at a heavy, coarse-featured, bald man in his sixties, with a moddy and two or three daddies plugged into his sweat-shiny skull. He sat behind a heavily-littered desk, holding a telephone in one hand and a large, blued-steel needle gun in the other. He smiled at me. “Please do me the honor of coming closer,” he said in unaccented Arabic; it was probably a language daddy speaking for him.

I bowed again. I was trying to think, but my mind was like a blank parchment. Needle guns do that to me sometimes. “O Excellent One,” I said, “I beg your pardon for intruding.”

“To hell with all that ‘Excellent One’ bull. Tell me why you’re here. You know who I am. You know I don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

I pulled Nikki’s letter from my shoulder bag and gave it to him. I guessed he’d figure it out quickly enough.

He read it through and then put down the telephone — but not the needle gun. “You’re Marîd, then?” he said. He’d stopped smiling.

“I have that privilege,” I said.

“Don’t get smart with me,” said Seipolt. “Sit down in that chair.” He waved me aside with the pistol. “I’ve heard one or two things about you.”

“From Nikki?”

Seipolt shook his head. “Here and there in the city. You know how Arabs like to gossip.”

I smiled. “I didn’t realize I had such a reputation.”

“It’s nothing to get excited about, kid. Now, what makes you think this Nikki, whoever she is, is here? This letter?”

“Your house seemed like a good place to start looking. If she’s not here, why is your name so prominent in her plans?”

Seipolt looked genuinely bewildered. “I don’t have any idea, and that’s the truth. I’ve never heard of your Nikki, and I don’t have the least interest in her. As my staff will attest, I haven’t had an interest in any woman in many years.”

“Nikki’s not just any woman,” I said. “She’s a simulated woman built on a customized boy’s chassis. Maybe that’s what’s been stirring your interest during those years.”

Seipolt’s expression grew impatient. “Let me be blunt, Audran. I no longer have the apparatus to get sexually interested in anyone or anything. I no longer have the desire to have that condition repaired. I have found that I prefer business. Versteh’?”

I nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d allow me to search your lovely home,” I said. “I needn’t disturb you while you work: don’t mind me, I’ll be quiet as a jerboa.”

“No,” he said, “Arabs steal things.” His smile grew slowly until it was an evil thing.

I don’t taunt easily, so I just shook that one off. “May I have the letter back?” I asked. Seipolt shrugged; I went to his desk and picked up Nikki’s note, tucked it back in my shoulder bag. “Import-export?” I asked.

Seipolt was surprised. “Yes,” he said. He looked down at a stack of bills of lading.

“Anything in particular, or the usual odds and ends?”

“What the hell difference does it make to you what I—” I waited for him to reach the middle of his outraged reply, then swiftly hit the inside of his right forearm with my left hand, swinging the muzzle of the needle gun away, and slapped him across his plump, white face with my right hand. Then I tightened my grip on his left wrist. We struggled silently for a moment. He was sitting, and I was standing over him, balanced, with momentum and surprise on my side. I twisted his wrist outward, abusing the small bones in his forearm. He grunted and dropped the needle gun to the desk, and with my right hand I swept it all the way across the room with one motion. He made no attempt to retrieve it.

“I have other weapons,” he said softly. “I have alarms to summon Reinhardt and the others.”

“I do not doubt that,” I said, not relaxing my hold on his wrist. I felt my little sadistic streak beginning to enjoy this. “Tell me about Nikki,” I said.

“She’s never been here, I don’t know a damn thing about her,” said Seipolt. He was starting to suffer. “You can hold the gun on me, we can fight and wrestle around the room, you can battle my men, you can search the house. Goddamn it, I don’t know who your Nikki is! If you don’t believe me now, there isn’t a damn thing in the world I can say that will change your mind. Now, let’s see how smart you really are.”

“At least four people received that same letter,” I said, thinking out loud. “Two of them are dead now. Maybe the police could find some clue here, even if I couldn’t.”

“Let go of my wrist.” His voice was icy and commanding. I let go of his wrist; there didn’t seem to be much point in holding it any longer, anyway. “Go ahead and call the police. Let them search. Let them persuade you. Then after they leave, I will make you sorry you ever stepped onto my property. If you don’t get out of my office right now, you uncivilized idiot, you may never get another chance. Versteh’?”

“Uncivilized idiot” was a popular insult in the Budayeen that doesn’t translate well. I was doubtful that it had been included in Seipolt’s daddy vocabulary; I was amused that he had picked up the idiom in his years among us.

I cast a quick glance at his needle gun, lying on the carpet about a dozen feet from me. I would have liked to take it with me, but that would be bad manners. I wasn’t going to fetch it for Seipolt, though; let him have Reinhardt pick it up. “Thanks for everything,” I said, with a friendly look on my face. Then I changed my expression to the very respectful, dumb Arab. “I am obliged to you, O Excellent One. May your day be happy, may you awaken tomorrow in health!” Seipolt only stared at me hatefully. I backed away from him — not because of any wariness, but only to exaggerate the Arabic courtesy I was mocking him with. I passed through the office door and closed it softly. Then I stared up into Reinhardt’s face again. I grinned and bowed; he showed me out. I paused on my way to the front door to admire some shelves filled with various kinds of rare artworks: pre-Columbian, Tiffany glass, Lalique crystal, Russian religious icons, ancient Egyptian and Greek statuary fragments. Among the hodgepodge of periods and styles was a ring, obscure and inconspicuous, a simple band of silver and lapis lazuli. I had seen that ring before, around one of Nikki’s fingers while she played endlessly, twisting the locks of her hair. Reinhardt was studying me too closely; I wanted to grab the ring, but it was impossible.

At the door, I turned and began to give Reinhardt some Arabic formula of gratitude, but I didn’t have the chance: this time, with great relish, the blond Aryan bastard flung the door shut, almost breaking my nose. I went back along the pebble drive, lost in thought. I got into Bill’s cab. “Home,” I said.

“Huh,” Bill grunted. “Play hurt, play with pain. Easy for him to say, the son of a bitch. And there’s the best defensive line in history waiting for me to twitch my little pink ass, waiting to tear my head off and hand it to me, right? ‘Sacrifice.’ So I hoped they’d call some dinky pass play and let me rest; but no, not today. The quarterback was an afrit, he only looked like a human being. I had him spotted, all right. When he handed it off, the ball was always hot as coals. I should have guessed something was up, even back then. Fire demons. A little bit of burning brimstone and smoke, see, and the referee can’t see them grabbing at your facemask. Afrits cheat. Afrits want you to know what it’s going to be like for you after you’re dead, when they can do anything they want to you. They like to play with your mind like that. Afrits. Kept calling off-tackle plunges all afternoon. Hot as hell.”

“Let’s go home, Bill,” I said more loudly.

He turned to look at me. “Easy for you to say,” he muttered. Then he started his old taxi and backed out of Seipolt’s drive.

I called Lieutenant Okking’s commcode during the ride back to the Budayeen. I told him about Seipolt and Nikki’s note. He didn’t seem to be very interested. “Seipolt’s nobody,” said Okking. “He’s a rich nobody from reunited Neudeutschland.”

“Nikki was scared, Okking,” I told him.

“She probably lied to you and the others in those letters. She lied about where she was going, for some reason. Then it didn’t work out the way she’d planned, and tried to get in touch with you. Whoever she’d gone with didn’t let her finish.” I could almost hear him shrug. “She didn’t do a smart thing, Marîd. She’s probably been hurt because of it, but it wasn’t Seipolt.”

“Seipolt may be nobody,” I said bitterly, “but he lies very well under pressure. Have you figured out anything about Devi’s murder? Some connection with Tamiko’s killing?”

“There probably isn’t any connection, buddy, as much as you and your criminal colleagues want there to be. The Black Widow Sisters are the kind of people who get themselves murdered, that’s all. They ask for it, so they get it. Just coincidence that the two of them were postmarked so close together.”

“What kind of clues did you find at Devi’s?”

There was a brief silence. “What the hell. Audran, all of a sudden I have a new partner? Who the fuckin’ hell do you think you are? Where do you get off questioning me? As if you didn’t know I couldn’t talk police business with you like that, even if I wanted to, which is not in the most minute sense true. Go away, Marîd. You’re bad luck.” Then he snapped the connection.

I put my phone in my bag and closed my eyes. It was a long, dusty, hot ride back to the Budayeen. It would have been quiet, except for Bill’s constant monologue; and it would have been comfortable, except for Bill’s dying taxi. I thought about Seipolt and Reinhardt; Nikki and the sisters; Devi’s killer, whoever he was; Tamiko’s mad torturer, whoever he was. None of it made any sense to me at all.

Okking had just been telling me that very thing: It didn’t make sense because there was no sense. You can’t find a point in a pointless killing. I had just become aware of the random violence in which I had lived for years, part of it, ignoring it, believing myself immune to it. My mind was trying to take the unrelated events of the last several days and make them fit a pattern, like making warriors and mythical beasts out of scattered stars in the night sky. Senseless, pointless; yet the human mind seeks explanations. It demands order, and only something like RPM or Sonneine can quiet that clamoring or, at least, distract the mind with something else.

Sounded like a great idea to me. I took out my pill case and swallowed four sunnies. I didn’t bother offering anything to Bill; he’d paid in advance, and anyway he had a private screening.

I had Bill let me out at the eastern gate of the Budayeen. The fare was thirty kiam; I gave him forty. He stared at the money for a long time until I took it back and pushed it into the pocket of his shirt. He looked up at me as if he’d never met me before. “Easy for you to say,” he murmured.

I needed to learn a few things, so I went directly to a modshop on Fourth Street. The modshop was run by a twitchy old woman who’d had one of the first brain jobs. I think the surgeons must have missed what they’d been aiming for just slightly, or else Laila had always made you feel like getting out of her presence as quickly as possible. She couldn’t talk to you without whining. She crooked her head and stared up at you as if she were some kind of garden mollusc and you were about to step on her. You sometimes considered stepping on her, but she was too quick. She had long, straggly gray hair; bushy gray eyebrows; yellow eyes; bloodless lips and depopulated jaws; black skin, scaled and scabrous; and the same crooked, clawed fingers that a witch ought to have. She had one moddy or another plugged in all day, but her own personality — and it wasn’t a likable personality at all — bled through as if the moddy weren’t exciting the right cells, or enough of them, or strongly enough. You’d get Janis Joplin with static-like flashes of Laila, you’d get the Marquise Josephine Rose Kennedy with Laila’s nasal whine, but it was her shop and her merchandise, and if you didn’t want to put up with her, you went elsewhere.

I went to Laila because even though I wasn’t wired, she let me “borrow” any moddy or daddy she had in stock, by plugging it into herself. If I needed to do a little research, I went to Laila and hoped that she didn’t distort what I had to learn in any lethal way.

This afternoon she was being herself, with only a bookkeeping add-on and an inventory-management add-on plugged in. It was that time of the year again; how the months fly when you take a lot of drugs.

“Laila,” I said. She was so much like the old hag in Snow White that you couldn’t think of more to say to her. Laila was one person with whom you didn’t make small talk, whatever you wanted from her.

She looked up, her lips mumbling stock numbers, quantities, markups, and markdowns. She nodded.

“What do you know about James Bond?” I asked.

She put her microrecorder down and tapped it off. She stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes getting very round, then very narrow. “Marîd,” she said. She managed to whine my name.

“What do you know about James Bond?”

“Videos, books, twentieth-century power fantasies. Spies, that kind of action. He was irresistible to women. You want to be irresistible?” She whined at me suggestively.

“I’m working on that on my own, thanks. I just want to know if anybody’s bought a James Bond moddy from you lately.”

“No, I’m sure of it. Haven’t even had one in stock for a long time. James Bond is kind of ancient history, Marîd. People are looking for new jams. Cloak-and-dagger is too quaint for words.” When she stopped talking, numbers formed on her lips as her daddies went on speaking to her brain.

I knew about James Bond because I’d read the books — actual, physical books made out of paper. At least, I’d read some of them, four or five. Bond was a Eur-Am myth like Tarzan or Johnny Carson. I wish Laila had had a Bond moddy; it might have helped me understand what Devi’s killer was thinking. I shook my head; something was tickling my mind again …

I turned my back on Laila and left her shop. I glanced at a holographic advertisement playing on the sidewalk outside her display window. It was Honey Pílar. She looked about eight feet tall and absolutely naked. When you’re Honey Pílar, naked is the only way to go. She was running her lascivious hands over her superluminally sexy body. She shook her pale hair out of her green eyes and stared at me. She slid the pink tip of her tongue across her unnaturally full, luscious lips. I stood watching the holoporn, mesmerized. That was what it was for, and it was working just fine. At the edge of my consciousness, I was aware that several other men and women had stopped in their tracks and were staring, too. Then Honey spoke. Her voice, enhanced electronically to send chills of desire through my already lust-ridden body, reminded me of adolescent longings I hadn’t thought of in years. My mouth was dry; my heart was pounding.

The hologram was selling Honey’s new moddy, the one Chiri already owned. If I bought one for Yasmin …

“My moddy lies over the ocean,” said Honey in a breathy, soft voice, while her hands slid slowly down the copious upper slopes of her perfect breasts …

“My moddy lies over the sea.” Her hands tweaked her nipples hard, then found their way to the delicious undersides of those breasts and continued southward …

“Now someone is jamming my moddy,” she confided, as her fiery fingernails lightly touched her flat belly, still searching, still seeking …

“Now he knows what it’s like to jam me!” Her eyes were half-closed with ecstasy. Her voice became a drawn-out moan, pleading for the continuation of that pleasure. She was begging me as her hands at last slipped out of sight between her suntanned thighs.

As the hologram faded, another woman’s voice over-dubbed the details of manufacturer and cost. “Haven’t you tried modular marital aids? Are you still using holoporn? Look, if using a rubber is like kissing your sister, then holoporn is like kissing a picture of your sister! Why stare at a holo of Honey Pílar, when with her new moddy you can jam the livin’ daylights out of her again and again, whenever you want! Come on! Give your girlfriend or boyfriend the new Honey Pílar moddy today! Modular marital aids are sold as novelty items only.”

The voice faded away and let me have my mind back. The other spectators, similarly released, went on about their business a little unsteadily. I turned toward the Street, thinking first about Honey Pílar, then about the moddy I would give Yasmin as an anniversary present (as soon as possible, for the anniversary of anything. Hell, I didn’t care), and at last the tantalizing thing that had been bothering me. I’d thought of it first after I spoke with Okking about the shooting in Chiriga’s nightclub, and again today.

Someone who just wanted to have a little Fun With Murder wouldn’t have used a James Bond moddy. No, a Bond moddy is too specialized and too sterile. James Bond didn’t get pleasure from killing people. If some psychotic wanted to use a personality module to help him murder more satisfyingly, he might have chosen any of a dozen rogues. There were underground moddies, too, that weren’t on sale in the respectable modshops: for a big enough pile of kiam, you could probably get your hands on a Jack the Ripper moddy. There were moddies of fictional characters, or real people, recorded right from their brains or reconstructed by clever programmers. I felt ill as I thought about the perverse people who wanted the illicit moddies, and the black-market industry that catered to them with Charles Manson modules or Nosferatu modules or Heinrich Himmler modules.

I was sure that whoever had used the Bond module had done so for a different purpose, knowing in advance that it wouldn’t give him much pleasure. It wasn’t pleasure the false James Bond had been after. His goal had not been excitement, but execution.

Devi’s death — and, of course, the Russian’s — had not been the work of a mad slasher among the dregs of society. Both murders had been, in fact, assassinations. Political assassinations.

Okking would not listen to any of this without proof. I had none. I wasn’t even certain in my own mind what this all meant. What connection could there be between Bogatyrev, a minor functionary in the legation of a weak and indigent Eastern European kingdom, and Devi, one of the Black Widow Sisters? Their worlds didn’t intersect at all.

I needed more information, but I didn’t know where it was going to come from. I found myself walking determinedly somewhere. Where was I going? I asked myself. Devi’s apartment, of course. Okking’s men would still be combing the premises for clues. There’d be barriers up, and a cordon with signs warning crime scene. There d be -

Nothing. No barriers, no cordon, no police. A light was on in the window. I went up to the green shutters that were used to cover the doorway. They were thrown open, so that Devi’s front room was clearly visible from the sidewalk. A middle-aged Arab was down on his hands and knees, painting a wall. We greeted each other, and he wanted to know if I wanted to rent the place; it would be fixed up in another two days. That’s all the memorial Devi got. That’s all the effort Okking would put into finding her killer. Devi, like Tami, didn’t deserve much of the authorities’ time. They hadn’t been good citizens; they hadn’t earned the right to justice.

I looked up and down the block. All the buildings on Devi’s side of the street were the same: low, whitewashed, flat-roofed houses with green-shuttered doors and windows. There would have been no place for “James Bond” to hide, to waylay Devi. He could only have concealed himself inside her apartment in some way, waiting for her to come home after work; or else he’d waited someplace nearby. I crossed the old, cobbled street. On the opposite side, some of the houses had low stoops with iron handrails. Directly across from Devi’s house, I sat on the topmost step and looked around. On the ground below me, to the right of the stairs, were a few cigarette butts. Someone had sat on this stoop, smoking; maybe it was the person who lived in the house, maybe not. I squatted down and looked at the butts. There were three gold bands on each, around the filters.

In the James Bond books, he smoked cigarettes made up specially for him of some particular mixture of tobaccos, and his blend was marked with the three gold bands. The assassin took his job seriously; he used a small-caliber pistol, probably a Walther PPK, like Bond’s. Bond kept his cigarettes in a gunmetal cigarette case that held fifty; I wondered if the assassin had one of those, too.

I put the cigarette butts in my shoulder bag. Okking wanted proof, I had proof. That didn’t mean Okking would agree. I looked up into the sky; it was getting late, and there would be no moon tonight. The slender sliver of the new moon would appear tomorrow night, bringing with it the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan.

The already-frantic Budayeen would get more hysterical after nightfall tomorrow. Things would be deathly quiet during the day, though. Deathly quiet. I laughed softly as I walked in the direction of Frenchy Benoit’s bar. I’d seen enough of death, but the notion of peace and quiet sounded very inviting.

What a fool I was.