Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “I wear no man’s collar,” said November. “Except for pleasure, and then only on a time-limited basis. What I mean is that I prefer to be an independent operator.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” McNihil took his shoe away from her wrist. “When you work for the Collection Agency, you get full medical and dental coverage.” He took a step back. “It’s the benefits, not the salary, that’s important.”

  November sat up, massaging the blood back into her hand. “I don’t worry about things like that.”

  “You should.” He kept the gun aimed at her, though his grip had relaxed slightly. “Believe it or not, someday you’ll be as old as me.”

  “No, I won’t.” If the numbers blinking from her palm got much lower, she wouldn’t have to worry about even getting into her thirties, let alone through them.

  “Whatever.” He let her stand up, the gun lowered in his hand. “But as I said before. If you want to talk to me, punch in the number. People who walk in on me while I’m doing business are likely to get hurt.”

  “I don’t mind.” November showed him a three-quarter profile, her gaze emitted from the corners of her eyes. “That could be fun, actually.” She stepped closer to him. “Like you also said… I’m young. Flexible, as it were.”

  This time, McNihil made no reply.

  It’s too easy, thought November. It was always too easy. She wasn’t used to an encounter of this nature, with its familiar accelerating ramp-up and its foreordained conclusion, happening out in the open. But the smoke folding above their heads gave a comforting claustrophiliac illusion, the heat from the burning hotel beneath them completing the sense of giant machinery rushing toward an endlessly receding destination. There were even syringes and pads underfoot, debris left from the tenants who’d preferred to ingest in the stars’ cold view. If she closed her eyes, November could feel the world narrowing in around her shoulders, the corset or casket of desire, as she moved past McNihil’s gun and inside the perimeter of his defenses. Close enough to sense the human temperature of his body, close enough to bring the awareness of her body-she knew-into his machinelike percept systems.

  November stood next to him, her narrow hip against the front of his thigh, the curve of one small breast deformed by the pressure against his torso. She looked up into McNihil’s face, then stood on tiptoe, reaching her hand to caress the corner of his brow, the soft touch of her fingers brushing the side of his head. Just as she had done so many times before, with other men, in other places that had collapsed down to the non-space held between her body and his.

  She wanted to punish him, just a little bit. For being such a smart-ass, for holding an ugly gun in her face, for standing on her wrist; that still ached somewhat. But mainly to show him that he should pay serious attention to her. She let the localized magnetic-resonance pulse travel through one arm and into her palm, a paralyzing spark leaping from between her heart and life lines and into the sonuvabitch’s skull…

  For a moment, the clouds of roiling smoke parted, enough to let her see the cold points of light in the dark sky. If that’s what they were; in another moment, she wondered if she might be gazing into the blackness at the center of McNihil’s eyes.

  Then she realized she was lying flat on her back once more, the fire-heated rooftop beneath her spine. Bits and pieces of the world slotted together again, replacing the blank daze inside her head.

  November realized that her arm, the one with which she had reached up to McNihil’s face, was numb and trembling; the first pinpricks of sensation had started. They felt as if they were happening to a piece of meat disconnected to her body. She managed to raise her head-the rooftop tilted dizzyingly-and could see her cupped palm, the one without the red numbers written there. A burn mark had been seared into the flesh, as though she had laid hold of a high-voltage cable; the pain from the wound had begun working its way up her stunned arm.

  She lifted her gaze from the marked hand to McNihil, standing nearly a meter away from her. The shock must have been powerful enough to launch her through the air, like a crumpled tissue he’d discarded.

  “Don’t try that one again.” McNihil had put away the gun. He smiled. “I’m wired, shielded, and all zipped up against your kind of action.”

  No shit, thought November. With her still-functioning hand, she rubbed the corner of her brow, feeling a massive traumatic headache coming on. That kind of subcranial block, with a feedback and amplification circuit built in, wasn’t standard asp-head issue; he must have paid for that with his own money, somewhere along the line. Worse, she hadn’t known that McNihil had it, when she’d been operating under the assumption that she had him down cold, all his little details. Now, there was no telling what kind of stuff he had.

  That was the kind of surprise for which she had no liking. I’m screwed. All her calculations were meaningless now. And at the same time, she was too far into this situation to abandon it and start over somewhere else. The red numbers in her palm would scroll down to zero before she had a chance of scoring another paying gig. If she had been looking into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, there weren’t any stars there; nothing but empty black, the unknown. For better or worse, her fate was welded to his.

  A liquid shiver traced down the center of her spine, as though some central element of her self were being dissected by an asp-head’s clever little knives. A sex twinge, the feeling of things beyond her control, opened below her gut. If she hadn’t been worried about sheer survival, she could almost have been grateful to him.

  “Gotta run.” Carrying the trophy container in one hand like an oversized scepter, McNihil moved toward the farther edge of the rooftop. “But like I said. You want to talk? Give me a call.”

  November watched as he leapt easily over to the adjacent building. Then he was gone. For a while longer, November stayed where she was, regarding the flames and smoke rising on all sides.

  A little too long.

  When the rooftop gave way, a section collapsing beneath her as quick as a sprung trap, she found herself falling into smoke and flames. And then she wasn’t falling, and she could only marvel-for a few seconds, before she lost consciousness-at how much it truly hurt.

  TWELVE

  AMYGDALIC SHUNT OR THUS EVER TO VIOLATORS OF COPYRIGHT

  Even after he washed up, he smelled of fire and smoke and burnt things. McNihil came out of the bathroom, into a sonic ambience of vintage Haitink conducting Mahler, the acoustics of the old abandoned Amsterdam Concertgebouw cranked up loud enough to be heard through his whole apartment. He took the towel from across his shoulders and rubbed his gray-flecked hair dry as the contralto came on.

  O Röschen roth!

  Der Mensch liegt in grö β ter Noth!

  Der Mensch liegt in grö β ter Pein!

  Je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein…

  Little red rose, thought McNihil. He always agreed with the singer, about preferring to be in heaven. A goal he had come close to achieving, when he’d been out there taking care of business. Like most asp-heads, or at least the ones who weren’t born cold-blooded, McNihil had an amygdalic shunt microsurgeried into his brain, a tiny shutoff valve triggered by the adrenaline levels in his system; when the juices got high enough, fear became an abstract concept. Even the contemplation of his own death-he’d had time to consider it while he’d been hanging on that disintegrating fire escape-seemed like no more than an assemblage of words, something he’d read about in a book. It worked better than a straight hormonal tamp-down; the adrenal fluids kept the body revved and fast-reacting, while the head contents lived up to the agents’ collective nickname.

  “Knock knock,” said the door. The sound got only a slight irritated reaction from McNihil.

  When he’d moved into this place, forking over the rent and deposits and key money from one of his last bonus checks from the agency, he’d taken his Swiss Army knife to the workings of the hallway security system, trying to dismantle the annoying visitor-announcement protocols, so that if so
mebody came to see him, on business or pleasure, he’d hear the sound of actual human knuckles on reinforced simulated-wood-grain fiberboard. He’d been defeated, though; the circuits kept repairing themselves, usually while he was out of town on an extended assignment. McNihil would come home, sometimes bleeding and with the crap almost literally beaten out of him-not every piece of business had gone as easily as this last one had-and would find that the circuits had healed over, soft boards and severed wires seeking each other out and knitting themselves back together again. Though usually in some increasingly crippled manner, the announcement sounds devolving through an entire programmed auditory repertoire after McNihil’s attempts at a permanent silence. He and the system had worked their way through lisping trombones, Everett Dirksenoid kazoos, and splintering glass that shouted in Provençal French before arriving at a compromise: the system remained functional, McNihil put away his miniature tools, and the circuits announced visitors with a realistic-enough simulation of knuckles on wood. McNihil no longer cared beyond that point.

  “Knock knock,” said the door again. Leaving the towel draped around his neck, McNihil pulled the door open.

  A delivery, the one he’d been expecting; McNihil tipped the kid, an agency intern he vaguely recognized, and carried the long package back to the flat’s living area. The package’s contents had weighed more when he’d been hauling them around, freshly harvested, inside his old trophy container. A note had been tagged on the wrappings, signed by the agency’s head prep tech.

  Nice job, McN. Haven’t lost your touch. Keep cutting. R.

  He placed the package on the flat glass kidney of the Noguchi knockoff coffee table. For a moment, McNihil idly wondered if he should tie a red ribbon around the package’s middle; it was, after all, intended to be something of a gift. A favor, something nice done for a person he admired-the other red ribbons, the shining wet ones that had pooled around the vivisected body, counted for nothing against that sentiment. He finally decided to omit any fancy wrappings, to just leave the completed trophy adorned in its plain, matter-of-fact agency routing-and-shipping labels. The person for whom it was intended went in, McNihil knew, for that kind of procedural detail. It was something left over from when the guy had still been working and writing, cranking out his trashy and sublime thrillers, and always on the lookout for real-life bits he could stick in to establish an air of authenticity.

  McNihil had a row of those books himself, in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled shelf unit. Thinking about them, about the chapters and sentences and carefully strung-together words on the pages, put McNihil in a good mood. Or as good a one as he could be in, considering the aches and bruises he’d garnered while bringing this trophy back from the city farther north on the rim. When he’d first gotten back here and stripped off his smoke-ridden, bloodstained clothes, he’d examined himself in the bathroom mirror and had seen the rickety fire escape’s imprint from his chest to his chafed-raw ankle. I’m getting too old for this, he’d told himself. Way too old. Like those characters in the books; McNihil had found out-eventually-what it was like to be tired and more than a little burnt-out, yet still handing people’s asses back to them. Like that smart-ass little number up there on the roof of the en-flamed End Zone Hotel; he’d seen her eyes go wide when he’d come right back at her, knocking her off-balance in more ways than one. That was the part of his condition that felt as good for him as it did for the fictional old bastards in the yellowing pulp novels; he’d enjoyed that.

  O glaube: du wardst nicht umsonst geboren!

  Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!

  “Yeah, right.” He spoke aloud his rejoinder to the soprano. Though he didn’t feel cynical at all, not this time, as he finished buttoning his shirt, the cloth dragging across that of the bandages he’d plastered across his ribs. “And I’ll live forever, too.” As it was, he knew he was doing better than that November person. If she was still alive at all; when he’d gotten home, he’d phoned one of his remaining friends at the Collection Agency and asked for some kind of readout on her. The agency’s database already had her logged as being in a hospital burn ward, in one of those sterile-nutrient chambers where the most badly crisped wound up. From long practice, McNihil found it easy to stop thinking about things like that. He pulled on his jacket, picked up the package from the table, and headed for the door.

  Still in a good mood, package tucked under his arm like a furled umbrella, when he got to Turbiner’s place. Of the old, yellowing paperbacks on McNihil’s preserving bookshelf, just under a fifth of them had been written by Alex Turbiner. Who was still alive, though his schlock-o literary career had ended a couple of decades ago; the old guy’s color was gray around the edges rather than that browning tinge that low-quality paper developed from time and oxygen. Still alive, which meant that his copyrights were one-hundred-percent enforceable, and a mean bastard, which meant that he’d get a kick out of the present McNihil was about to lay on him. But then, all writers were mean bastards. Must come with the territory, McNihil figured. And approved.

  “Anybody home?” McNihil leaned his thumb against the call button beneath a grille of rusted metal. Or what artfully appeared to be rust, made to look that way from the beginning. “Got something for you.”

  He stepped back and looked up the building’s facade of perpetually crumbling cement and broken windows interspersed with the ones that people actually lived behind. Turbiner had moved in here during his peak earning years, paying cash outright for a stationary unit; being a freelancer, he never had to put up with that cube-shuffling business that the big corporations put their employees through. The building was a ruin, but deliberately and fashionably so, designed during one of the severer deconstructionist, nostalgie de la boue crazes, when everybody who could afford it wanted to reside in something that looked like an arson-bait crack house.

  “Sounds like that evil McNihil.” The speaker grille crackled and spit, just enough, without ever cutting out completely. The old man’s voice would have sounded like a frayed wire even without the additional effects. “Come on up.”

  McNihil carried his package down a corridor lined with broken plaster and nondenominational graffiti, chosen for its aesthetics rather than turf-staking capabilities. At one time-McNihil could remember it-there had been programmed mechanical rats scuttling up and down the hallways, even a Mumbling Junkie™ mannequin in the urine-scented stairwell, but the building’s residents had finally voted to stop paying for those decorative services. The rats had kept flipping over on their backs and scrabbling their feet in the air in an unrealistic way, and the partially animated addict had begun declaiming Yeats in a Shakespearean actor’s voice; old, poorly erased programming had risen up from the mannequin’s circuits, like dreams of a former life. To be confronted by a rag-bag, needle-tracked scarecrow expostulating about widening gyres and Bethlehem-ward slouches was considered a bit much by the more fastidious of the building’s residents. There were limits.

  The Mahler Second was on Turbiner’s stereo as well, as an example of the universe’s secret, synchronistic workings. Or not: McNihil had just started his up when he’d phoned Turbiner, to tell the old man that he was coming over. Turbiner might’ve heard it in the background, behind McNihil’s voice, and decided he wanted to hear Emmy Loose or Beverly Sills or any of the other celestial voices, long dead and gone, still audible on the ancient recordings. The sopranos and the contraltos and the big, booming choruses stepped through the even more ancient words of the Klopstock ode, and none of them ever died.

  Aufersteh’n…

  “Good to see you.” Turbiner turned down the volume as his visitor pushed the door shut behind himself. “How ya been keepin’?”

  McNihil nodded slowly. “‘You will rise again…’”

  “Huh?” Over the tops of his trifocal lenses, Turbiner peered at him with age-clouded eyes. “Oh, yeah; right.” He glanced toward the nearest loudspeaker, listened for a moment, then translated the next line to be sung. “‘Y
ou will rise again, my dust, after a short repose…’” When Turbiner shrugged, he looked shambling and diminished, like the most moth-eaten bear in the zoo, the one the keepers debated about-whether it would be a kindness to put him down. “Well, maybe that’s true. Old Gustav M. would know better than I would. For the time being, at least.”

  The massed voices, whispering now, surrounded McNihil as he followed Turbiner into the cluttered lair. The flat’s space had grown so tight with the old writer’s possessions-mainly boxes of books and stacked rows of CD’s, tapes, datachips, even some antiquated vinyl-that McNihil had to hold the package vertical against himself, to keep from knocking anything over.

  Turbiner’s housekeeping had gone all to shit after his wife had died, ten years back or thereabouts. McNihil remembered her as elegant and sarcastic, and not overly given to sweating the small details like dust, but still with enough ingrained female instincts to keep the disorder somewhat at bay.

  Thinking about dead wives, while McNihil stood in the middle of this heavily past-filled space, took his good mood down a few degrees. Guilt had a way of doing that. Turbiner had loved his wife (And didn’t I love mine? thought McNihil glumly), enough to scrape close to the bone a couple of his savings and investment accounts, all to pay off whatever debts she’d had when she died. Thus buying her a quiet grave, free from the reanimating forays of the bill collectors.

  Aufersteh’n, my ass-right now, lyrics about the desirability of resurrection weren’t striking McNihil the right way. His wife, when she had died… he hadn’t done as well by her as old Turbiner had. Though he’d meant to, and there was still a chance; it still might happen. Guilt could be bought off. All it took was enough money. More money now than before; he hadn’t been keeping up with even the interest payments on his wife’s debts. The numbers kept ticking upward, compounding like hammer blows, one after another. It would take a lot to pay it all off now, to set his dead wife sleeping in the ground along with the late Mrs. Turbiner, dreaming the endless, empty dreams of the really and truly dead. And I’m good as retired now, thought McNihil. To come up with that kind of money, he’d have to find some way of going back full-time with the Collection Agency, plus hustle up every kind of on-the-side gig he could manage. Instead of doing little favors for old writers that nobody read anymore.