Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  If that wasn’t the right word, then hole seemed to fit the other well enough. The moldy ceiling of the windowless space came within a half-inch of the top of McNihil’s head. If he’d risen on his toes, he could’ve scraped gray, wet plaster flakes onto his scalp, like some kind of sebaceous organ donation.

  “Forgive the mess,” the bishop had said as he’d held open the warped fiberboard door. “I’ve been rather busy of late.” He’d gone right back to the terminal and the ministrations to his flock.

  “Me too,” McNihil had answered. Standing in the center of the dingy room, he tried to keep his shoulders away from the damp-rot patches that blossomed on the book spines and disordered stacks of paper lining the swaybacked shelves. With each breath, fungus spores collected in his nostrils like the silt of an invisible, stagnating river. “That’s life these days.”

  “It’s so much work,” moaned the bishop. His forehead, with its strands of sweat-pasted black hair, nearly touched the terminal’s screen. “I should never have answered the ad on that matchbook.”

  McNihil wondered if he’d really heard that last bit, or if it’d been some overlaid auditory fragment, a piece of his world that he somehow heard rather than saw. He glanced around while the bishop went on tapping and clicking, the little sounds forming a monotonous repeated pattern. He’d been down here a long time ago, with the same bishop or a different one-it didn’t matter. But it’d been before he had the surgery done on his eyes, had this perceived black-and-white world layered in. And the place-he supposed that it was technically a cathedral, no matter how small, since it was the official seat of the bishop-had looked exactly the same. Which meant that it came across the reality line unaltered. Nothing had to be done to it, no visual alterations, to make it fit into the world he saw. The hole and its contents were already dark enough, with all the shabby accoutrements that made it look like one of the ancient German Expressionist film sets that’d preceded the old Warner Bros. B-movie thrillers.

  “Think of all the spiritual merit you’re accumulating.” McNihil didn’t care to listen to the bishop’s eternal complaints. There was supposedly another world, brighter than this one or the hard reality that everyone else saw, that the bishop’s carefully tended faith was supposed to evoke. “You’ll get your reward in heaven.”

  The bishop sighed, hunched shoulders lifting and then collapsing like a deflated black balloon over his shoulder blades. “Sometimes…” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  McNihil wasn’t surprised by the existence of doubting bishops. He would’ve been more surprised by any sign of faith at all.

  He turned away from the moldering stacks of papers, and looked over the bishop’s shoulder. On the terminal screen appeared a low-rez image of a stylized human face, without identity or gender. Then a dialogue balloon with tail, straight out of the ancient comic strips, and the words Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Mechanically, the bishop went about his pastoral duties, hand shifting back and forth across an old-fashioned clickpad, hitting the download-confession button on the screen and waiting as the communicant’s compressed file zipped over the wire. McNihil wondered where it went from there; maybe to the bishop’s storage unit, or passed along some fiber-optic trunk line to the Vatican bunkers. Surely nobody actually read or listened to these monotonous litanies of transgressions. Maybe the anonymity of the confessional booth was maintained by the wire terminating nowhere, the PVC sheath exposing bare metal at the end, connected to nothing, coiled or slackly dangling in the waste-flow conduits below the Gloss. Maybe, thought McNihil, that’s okay, too. A ubiquitous deity would be able to listen in the sewer as well as anywhere else.

  The rest of the communion clicked by. On the terminal screen, the bishop moved the chalice icon over to the cartoon face’s open mouth, then the consecrated-host icon. A final tap on the blessing button-log off in peace-and the communicant’s face disappeared, replaced a split-second later by the next one in the queue.

  “Did you come here to ask me something?” The bishop didn’t glance around from the terminal. “It’s all right-we can talk while I’m doing this.”

  “Yeah,” said McNihil. “I need some information. Something I need you to take a look at.” He held out the little metal cross, the one he’d palmed off the corpse, dangling from his hand. “This one of yours?”

  The bishop turned his head just enough to see the cross. “Probably.” He tapped the clickpad again, and another of the faithful was made one with his or her God. At least for the time being. “I don’t know of any other franchises that’ve been allowed to open up in this area. I wish there were-I could use a smaller congregation.”

  “Could you check it out?”

  Host halfway to communicant, the bishop paused. He raised one gray-specked frowsy eyebrow as he glanced back at McNihil. “You know,” said the bishop, “that’s not strictly… umm… kosher. The faithful are enjoined to keep their devotions private.”

  McNihil shook his head. “This guy isn’t private anymore. He’s dead. And I already know his name. I just want to know a little more.”

  “In that case, then, it’s just expensive.” The computer terminal beeped impatiently; barely glancing at the screen, the bishop maneuvered the chalice image to the waiting mouth. “I imagine you expected that, though.”

  With the cross’s chain wrapped around his hand, McNihil extracted several hard-currency bills from his wallet. “This’ll have to do,” he said. “I’m on a budget.”

  The bishop looked both hungry and disappointed. “Your employers?” His voice arched hopefully. “Maybe they can be approached regarding unforeseen expenses?”

  “There are no employers,” said McNihil. “I’m acting on my own, this time.”

  “How unusual.” The bishop regarded him thoughtfully. “I didn’t think that was something your kind did. You’re an asp-head, aren’t you?”

  “I used to be.” He still was, technically, but it tended to stop questions cold if he said he wasn’t.

  The bishop’s face grew heavy with his deliberations, as if his thoughts were some grainy sedimentary substance collecting in the bags under his eyes and in the folds of his throat. “I wonder about that…” He rubbed the bristles of white hairs on his chin. “About that ‘used to be.’ I wonder if it’s as easy as that.” One hand gestured toward the terminal. “You see, I deal a lot with the sinful and the guilty.” The screen crawled with flashing lights, the line into the confessional stacking up. “I’ve gotten so I can smell it on people.” One black-nailed hand patted the top of the monitor. “Even through something like this.”

  “Then you should blow your nose,” said McNihil. “People who don’t care for the Collection Agency… they might enjoy imagining people like me suffering all sorts of mental racks. But we don’t. So sniff for what you want somewhere else.”

  “Well… it was worth a try.” The bishop brought his gaze back around to the terminal and clicked through a couple more on-line communicants. He held out an open palm for the cross. “Lemme see what you got.”

  McNihil dropped the tiny bit of metal into the other’s hand, the fine chain-links piling into a little glistening hill between the ragged life and fate lines.

  The bishop swiveled his chair around, holding the crucifax beneath a goose-necked worklamp. “Oh, yes…” He nodded. “Definitely one of mine.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s a discontinued model-see the little beveling on the ends of the arms?” The bishop dangled the cross from his thumb and forefinger, as though letting McNihil admire it. “Nice touch, but the manufacturer figured the tooling was too expensive for his profit margin. I got a good deal on ’em, down at one of the big trinket liquidators over on La Cienega. I bought all they had; it was a couple gross, complete with mailing envelopes and these little holy cards of Saint Sebastian with the arrows poking out of him. The scriptures on the flip side of the cards were all in some kind of mid-West cracker pidgi
n-Nebraskonics, I believe-but I didn’t think anybody would mind.”

  With one fingernail, McNihil tapped the cross so it swung back and forth on the chain the bishop held. “What’s it say on it?”

  “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum…”

  “Not that. The other bit, on the back. The personal code.”

  The bishop laid the crucifax in his cupped palm, running the index finger of his other hand across the scratch-blurred area. “Shut up,” he said irritably; the computer terminal had started beeping again. He reached over and three-fingered a group of keys, silencing the machine. “Excuse me,” he said to McNihil. “I haven’t done this in a while.”

  “Take your time.” McNihil thrust his hands into his coat pockets. “As I said before, I’m not on the clock.”

  As he waited, the bishop rummaged through the nailed-up plastic shelves above the computer terminal, finally taking down a can of WD-40. The bishop sprayed the tip of his index finger, then started to rub away the accumulated dirt and grease with a not-much-cleaner rag.

  Personal hygiene held no fascination for McNihil. He looked away, over to the terminal screen. The confessional and altar-rail images had been replaced by numbers. Percentage statements, in a column headed TRAN and another headed CON; as he watched, the numbers following the decimal points shifted, TRAN going up to fifty-three, CON dropping to forty-seven.

  “That’s the direct line from the College of Cardinals,” said the bishop as he scrubbed his fingertip. “Well, except that anybody really can log on and vote. The church has gotten very democratic that way. You have to change with the times.”

  McNihil nodded toward the screen. “What’s the big debate?”

  “Oh, the transubstantiation versus consubstantiation thing.” The bishop held his index finger close to his eyes, dabbing at it with the wet part of the rag. “It’s been going on for a while.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. It was on the last time I was here. And that was years ago.”

  The bishop shrugged. “Well, the doctrine of the E-charist is a big issue. Personally, I think the consubstantialists are coming pretty connectin’ close to being Protestants; I mean that’s essentially the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence. To say that the body and blood of Christ are present ‘in, with, and under’ the electrons moving down the wires…” His voice had risen in anger, before he managed to calm himself. “I suppose you can see where I stand on the issue. I mean, it has to be transubstantiation. The electrons are changed into the holy substance, and the communicant is downloading the actual body and blood of Christ.” The bishop waved the solvent-damp rag in his excitement. “If that’s not the case, then really, it’d mean we were just connecting around here.”

  “That’s what it would mean, all right,” said McNihil.

  A sulky cloud settled over the weighted landscape of the bishop’s face. “I can tell that these things aren’t important to you.”

  “Hey.” McNihil pointed a thumb toward the computer terminal. “You were the one bitching about your job.”

  The bishop scrubbed even more determinedly at his fingertip. “I can’t help it if I’ve started to believe.” A dry streambed of tears grated in his voice. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

  McNihil took pity on him. “Why don’t you just read the code,” he said softly. “That’s all I came here for.”

  From the corner of his eye, McNihil saw the numbers disappear from the monitor screen; enough time had gone by with no clicks or taps, to bring the automatic screen-saver up. He had just a glimpse of the image, a skeletal form with wild eyes and streaming black hair, clothed in pennantlike rags of human skin, before the bishop’s hand shot past him, hitting the monitor’s power button. The image disappeared, replaced by dead blankness.

  “You weren’t supposed to see that,” the bishop said stiffly. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone.”

  What else McNihil had caught on the monitor screen had been a single word, in letters of fire. Tlazoltéotl. “What is it?”

  The bishop drew back, holding the cross against his chest. When he spoke, he sounded abashed and sullen. “I didn’t say what I’ve started to believe.”

  McNihil let it drop. He watched as the other man hunched over the little bit of metal.

  After a few seconds, the bishop ran his fingertip across the minutely incised coding on the back of the crucifax. “Okay, I’m getting a read on this.” The contact point at the end of the bishop’s index finger shone like a sliver of broken glass. “The guy’s name was… Trummel? Trabble?”

  “Something like that.”

  Gazing up at the mottled ceiling, the bishop continued to sort out the info. “Pretty recently updated,” he said. “The stats aren’t too bad; received communion on a regular enough basis to get the volume discount. Just the standard five percent, though. That’s a shame, kinda; with a little extra effort, this person could’ve gone up to the platinum Gen-U-Flex™ level, where you start getting the really good merchandise promotions.” The bishop shot a hopeful glance over at McNihil. “The ID card’s good at over ten thousand retail outlets in the central Gloss alone-”

  “Don’t bother with the pitch.” McNihil held up a hand to ward off the other’s flow of words. “My credit rating couldn’t take the hit.”

  The bishop sighed and went back to deciphering the crucifax. “You can’t blame a guy for trying,” he mumbled. “Gotta keep the flock’s numbers up. I mean, this poor bastard’s not going to be at the rail anymore. You said he was… um… deceased?”

  “Dead.”

  “I’ll have to log a candle on for him. That’s a freebie; we don’t charge for that.” The bishop’s fingertip moved across the last of the incised code. “Now that’s interesting…”

  McNihil looked down at the hand and the cross, as though the tiny marks had been converted into something easily legible. “What’s that?”

  “This Trabble person…”

  “Travelt, actually.”

  “He wasn’t just an on-line communicant.” The bishop peered curiously at the crucifax. “He actually came around here to see me, and received the sacraments directly. Now that’s very unusual. Pretty old-fashioned, if you ask me; hardly anybody does that anymore.” The bishop nodded toward one of the larger tomes on the shelves. “I actually had to look it up in the operating manual, to see how it’s done-live and in person, I mean.” A visible shiver ran across the man’s flesh. “It was kind of creepy, you know? All that touching.”

  “Next time it happens,” said McNihil, “put in for hazard pay.” He pointed to the cross in the bishop’s hand. “Would that tell you what he talked about when he was here?”

  “Naw…” The bishop shook his head. “There’s not enough room for that kind of content, even if you overwrote the baptismal records. But-come to think of it-I might actually remember this guy. I mean, remember in my head.” The hand without the cross stroked the bishop’s stubbled chin. “I’m trying to recall what he looked like…”

  McNihil dug another bill out of his wallet, one of the old kind with a still portrait of a famous dead person on it. “He didn’t look anything like this, I suppose.”

  “You’re right; he was younger.” The bishop stuck the bill into a hidden pocket of his vestments. “I can see him plain as day now, though.”

  I bet, thought McNihil. “So what did he talk about? He must’ve come to see you for some reason. Some special reason.”

  “Of course.” The bishop showed a yellow-toothed smile. “The only reason people would come to see someone like me would be because they’re connected-up. Or more connected-up than usual.”

  “And that’s what Travelt was?”

  “Connected-up? Oh, yeah.” The smile had gaps in it, through which the bishop’s tongue showed like a wet lizard. “I was B.S.-ing you. Of course I remember the guy. Not just for the rarity of his visit here… but the severity of it. Severe on him, I mean; even before he got here. He looked like quivering hell.” A slow shake of the
head. “Or at least that’s what he said he was afraid of.”

  “Really?” The poor bastard sounded like an even sorrier case than before. “Of going to hell?”

  “No-” A damp glittering had collected around the rims of the bishop’s eyes. “Of going back there.”

  “Right,” said McNihil. Like he would’ve known-that was always the problem with these junior-exec types, leading their sheltered lives in their little corporate rabbit warrens. They get a little experience, thought McNihil, and they figure it’s the end of the world. “Not even firsthand experience,” he mused aloud. “The jerk was using a prowler to go out and get his stimulation for him. It’s not like the Wedge ever saw him step inside its limits.”

  “Maybe his way of enjoying himself wasn’t as safe as all that.” The bishop spoke in a tone of mild reproof. “The man is-as you’ve said-no longer with us.”

  “Just goes to show,” said McNihil. “Accidents will happen.”

  One of the disordered eyebrows rose in skepticism, creasing the bishop’s forehead. “Would someone like you be here… if you really thought it was an accident?”

  “‘It?’” McNihil’s sharp gaze fastened on the man in front of him. “What ‘it’ do you mean?”

  The bishop spread his hands apart, the cross dangling on its chain from his fingers. “Whatever happened. I wouldn’t know-the ways of this world are not my concern. I’m paid to be concerned with matters of the soul.”

  “And that’s what Travelt came and talked to you about? His soul?”

  “Of course.” The bishop studied the cross’s swaying pendulum. “Like the way people would take their cars into the garage for repairs. They didn’t do that if the machines were working fine. Same way with this poor fellow. Only I’m not sure his could be fixed.”

  “That’s what you told him?”

  The bishop nodded slowly.

  “I thought,” said McNihil, “it was different in your line of work. A matter of doctrine. That all things could be fixed. Washed clean.” With his forefinger, McNihil gave the cross a gentle push, setting it in motion again. “Forgiven.”