Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “I’ll make some coffee.” Turbiner was already in the flat’s kitchen area, on the other side of the counter, rinsing a glass pot out at the sink. “That okay by you?”

  “Sure.” Horizontal slices of sunlight fell across McNihil’s face, from the barely opened blinds at one side of the flat. “I wasn’t planning on hanging around very long.” He held up the package. “Like I said on the phone, I just wanted to drop something off for you.”

  “Yeah, so I see.” Turbiner fiddled with the coffeemaker’s pieces, rinsing them off and putting them back together, watching his hands at work rather than glancing back at McNihil. “It’s amazing, the kinds of things people walk around on the streets with, these days.” The old man turned a thin smile toward his visitor. “What a world we live in.”

  McNihil sat on the couch, moving aside a stack of papers and cascading books to make room for himself. He started taking apart the package’s wrappings, figuring that it would take Turbiner a while to get around to it. That was one of the ways you could tell when somebody was really old. Or older than me, thought McNihil. They all acted as if they had forever to do things, rather than a rapidly diminishing remainder of time. He wondered if it was just wishful thinking on Turbiner’s part.

  “So what is it you got there?” Gurgling and hissing noises came from the kitchen area; Turbiner had come back around to the flat’s larger open space. “Anything cool?”

  The old man knew what was inside the package; it wasn’t a secret. Turbiner himself had been the one to tell McNihil about what was going on in the Gloss a little farther to the north, about the kid ripping off his old copyrights, selling them to the collectors’ market that still existed for that sort of thing. McNihil would’ve despised those sorts of people, even if he’d never worked for the agency. How could you be into something, into it enough that you wanted all you could get of it, and not want to pay for it? Really pay, not in terms of paying lots of money for it, but just making sure that the money went to the right person. The person who’d created it. Written it, composed it, sung it… whatever.

  True bastardliness, McNihil had always figured, lay with people-and he’d encountered more than a few of them-who’d shell out nearly the same amount or even more to a pirate, some copyright rip-off specialist, rather than see the same money or even less go to the rightful creator. He’d had a lot of time recently to think about stuff like that, and had started to formulate a general theory of evil, pieced together from those things that he’d just instinctively gotten pissed off about before. The way he saw it now, there were certain people who loved the art-the music, the books, the pictures, whatever it might be-but who actively hated the creators of the same. Hated them from envy, jealousy, spite-from just that gnawing, infuriating sense that the creators could do something they couldn’t, could make something happen on a page or a canvas or with the sequence of one pitched sound after another. The basic criminal mentality says to itself, Why should that person have something that I don’t have? Where’s the justice, the fairness, in that? And thus thievery and vandalism are justified, not only by the brain, but deep in the outraged heart of anyone who can’t get over the notion that he’s not the center of the universe.

  So they don’t steal things-McNihil had thought this before-just so they can have them. That would be too simple. When he’d been working for the agency, he’d encountered too many idiots who could’ve easily paid for their stolen desirables. They stole to prove that they could steal, that they had the right to steal. And to punish anyone, particularly the creators, all those smug writers and musicians and artists, all those busy, talented hands and mouths and brains, the possessors of which swaggered around as if God loved them more than those who burned with a righteous envy. To steal from the creators was an act of justified vengeance; it showed them that they couldn’t get away with that infuriating shit. It proved that the books and the music and the paintings and everything else really belonged to the thieves, that it was all theirs by right; in some strange way, the thieves and not the creators had brought it all into being. So it wasn’t really thievery at all, then, was it? It was the returning of stolen property to its rightful owners. Or such was the belief of the thieves, written upon the cracked tablets of their souls.

  “Here’s your coffee.”

  McNihil heard the voice behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Turbiner shoving aside a stack of papers on a low table and setting down a nominally washed mug; steam rose from its glistening black contents. Turbiner straightened up somewhat creakily, and headed back into the kitchen area.

  “Thanks,” said McNihil. His attention dropped back into present time, into this shuttered space. He’d stopped halfway through unwrapping the package he’d brought for the old man, and had been sightlessly gazing at the crammed bookshelves on the other side of the flat. They stretched from floor to ceiling, running the whole extent of the flat’s longest unbroken wall, and were stuffed with old paperbacks and a few hardbounds. Some of them were Turbiner’s own books, the ones he’d written, including various translations; the rest were the ones that other people had written, that Turbiner had read along the way, that bit by bit he’d constructed the world inside his head from.

  Not a particularly nice world, but one that McNihil was comfortable living in. It’d become real for him when he’d had the work done on his eyes, as though the contents of Turbiner’s head and books had seeped out into the larger universe and taken it over. Or maybe it’d been the real world all along, the one that Turbiner and all the writers like him had seen in its true lineaments, and the surgery had merely been an extraction, the removal of some kind of invisible cataracts that had prevented it from being seen in all its dark, annihilating beauty.

  He and Turbiner had talked about this before. A little flashback unreeled through McNihil’s brain:

  “You see, that’s the way it is, when you’re talking about noir.” Turbiner had been kicking back with the single malt, an inch of Bruichladdich with a stable polymer ice-cube substitute drifting in the glass. “It’s a literature of anxiety. Somebody’s always getting screwed over.”

  The word had been floating around in the room, cold and false as the imitation ice. It had come up in the general course of conversation, while McNihil had been slouched down in the armchair opposite the couch, his own nervous system slightly buzzed from the effects of the same bottle that Turbiner had opened. McNihil hadn’t cared where the word came from ultimately, and hadn’t supposed that Turbiner cared, either. French intellectuals talking about low-brow American culture, ages ago, ancient black-and-white movies filled with shadows, garish paperback cover art that seemed equally devoted to guns, lip-dangling cigarettes, and off-the-shoulder cleavage-no one cared anymore. Not about the word itself, which had gotten applied to so many things that it now meant-according to Turbiner-nothing at all.

  “You see, that’s where the later variations, especially in the movies, that’s where they all went wrong.” Turbiner had gotten into full lubricated lecture mode. “They mistook the images, the look of some old Billy Wilder masterpiece, and they thought that was the only thing that mattered. Really, it was only the people still cranking out books-like me-that had any fucking notion.” He had taken another swallow, hard enough to rock his head back; from where he sat, McNihil had been able to watch the alcohol rolling down the other man’s tendon-corded neck. “Any fucking notion at all, about what the essence, the soul of noir was all about.” The words themselves had been drunk; no wonder the old writer loved them. “The look, all that darkness and shadow, all those trite rain-slick streets-that was the least of it. That had nothing to do with it.”

  McNihil had ingested enough alcohol to make his own eyelids feel like lead-weighted curtains. He’d looked out from underneath them at the old man. “So what was it, then?”

  “Oh… it’s betrayal.” Turbiner had taken his glass down to the last brown remnant. “That’s what it’s always been. That’s what makes it so realistic, even when
it’s the most dreamlike and shabby, when it looks like it’s happening on some other planet. The one we lost and can’t even remember, but we can see it when we close our eyes…”

  The flashback was interrupted as McNihil, on autopilot, took a sip of the coffee that had been set down in front of him. It tasted like hot acid on his tongue, pulling him back into real time. Not unpleasantly so, or at least not unexpectedly.

  Listening to the old man, McNihil knew he’d been speaking the truth. It came from somebody who’d loved his dead wife enough to put her in the ground for good, debt-free and gone. Or perhaps she was ashes in a jar, tucked somewhere in the general clutter of Turbiner’s flat; either way, it didn’t matter. The words about betrayal ran knifelike through somebody who’d loved just as much, but hadn’t kept the same faith with the dead.

  And the old man had known that, too. McNihil had never spoken to Turbiner about his own domestic affairs, but still, there it was somehow. Maybe from somebody else in the Collection Agency, another asp-head; Turbiner had been having his copyrights protected by the standard means for so long, there were bound to be other operatives with whom he was on a friendly basis. So for Turbiner to be talking about betrayal and things like that… McNihil had to admit, the old man had never claimed to be any kind of a nice guy.

  “So what’ve we got here?” Turbiner had sat down in the plush chair with his own cup. He nodded toward the partially unwrapped package. “Not big enough for an automatic rifle, at least not a good one.”

  McNihil ignored the comment. He knew the old man was going to dig the present; if nothing else, it would complete the set Turbiner already had.

  “Check it out,” said McNihil. He pulled off the rest of the wrappings, balled them up in his fist, and tossed them onto the rubble-strewn floor. An elongated black leatherette case was revealed on the low table; the standard agency presentation job, nothing too fancy-the little metal hinges and clasp were just a cut above cheap and flimsy-but good enough. “A little something for you.”

  “How sweet.” Turbiner leaned forward and drew the box around toward himself. “Ah.” He nodded in appreciation as he looked over the contents. “Very, very nice.”

  “I figured, the way you’ve got your system set up, you’d need about twelve feet.” McNihil took another sip of coffee. “Think that’ll do you?”

  “Perfect.” Turbiner’s voice went down into a pleased murmur, his grayed eyes glazing in happy anticipation. “It’ll be perfect.”

  McNihil watched as the old man lifted out the presentation box’s main contents, letting the snakelike object lie dangling across his level palms. It even glistened in a proper herpetoid fashion, the decorative polyethylene sheathing put on by the agency’s techs shimmering with a subtle faceted pattern.

  The scale finish was on the outside; what was on the inside was actual human spinal tissue, the last living remains of McNihil’s visit to the city farther north in the Gloss. That was what he’d brought back from the End Zone Hotel, that he’d returned with, safely tucked inside the regulation asp-head trophy container. He’d been worried about it on the trip back, what with all the knocking about it’d gotten, when he’d been scrambling up and then clinging to that disintegrating fire escape. And then the fire itself, up on top of the burning transient hotel, the tarry roof smoking and bubbling beneath him and that would-be severe female who’d rescued him. With all that heat-including the lethal radiation from the young woman’s eyes, when she’d finally caught on that McNihil wasn’t the gratitude-ridden type-the spinal and cerebral matter he’d scooped out of the pirate kid’s carcass might have been cooked inside the long tube he’d been carrying. Stupid broad, thought McNihil, seeing her tough-cookie little face pop up on his mental screen for a moment. She’d saved his ass and kept the trophy intact; the techs, when McNihil had finally dropped it off at the agency, had told him it was in fine shape, nothing to worry about. And what had she gotten out of it, whoever she was? Nada. By this time, McNihil had stopped wondering whether she’d even try to get in touch with him again. If anything, she was probably too embarrassed by an old connect like him having gotten the drop on her. And so easily, too; that thought came to him with a certain measure of satisfaction.

  “Absolutely perfect.” Turbiner’s voice held the same bright emotion. Still holding the present across his palms, he looked up at McNihil. “I’ve wanted this for a long time.” He glanced over at the rack of stereo equipment, then back again. “Finally, man; you’re not really optimized until the cables all match.”

  Or match close enough; McNihil knew, and was sure the old man knew as well, that there’d be no way that the long, dangling object, with the snakey texture and the gold-plated tips at each end, could perfectly match what he already had in his system. But it was certainly the next best thing.

  There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner’s music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last of the classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10’s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish-they looked, in fact, like two swollen anacondas forming horizontal S’s across the threadbare Afghan carpet that was the bottom layer beneath all the other strata of books and sloppily stacked papers. The agency’s trophies had been bulkier back when Turbiner had been presented with those; the techs hadn’t quite gotten down the miniaturization for the cables’ life-support and oxygen-delivery processes, all the silent workings that kept the encased tissue alive.

  McNihil figured that those archaic cables must be at least twenty, twenty-five years old; they still had the big grapefruit-sized bulge close to the amp ends, where the scooped-out cerebral matter was lodged in its own thermo-insulated padding. He remembered dropping off to other clients cables and similar trophies, back when he’d first started working for the agency. Nowadays, the techs had come closer to perfecting their microsurgical crafts; the new cable was narrower-it could’ve slid through the circle formed by McNihil’s thumb and forefinger-and the same diameter from end to end, minus the smaller connector spades at the very tips. The new cable held just as much of the brain of a pirate-in this case, the kid that McNihil had worked over up north-only condensed and stripped of any unnecessary synapses and neurons, and dispersed evenly rather than bunched up in one unsightly lump.

  Thus ever to violators of copyright, thought McNihil as he watched the other man admiring the trophy. This was the part of the job, when he’d still been working for the agency, that he’d always enjoyed the most.

  “The only way it could be better…” Turbiner held the cable up higher, squinting one eye as though examining the object through a magnifying glass. “The only way it could possibly be improved”-his glance and a sly smile darted in McNihil’s direction-“is if the first two guys, and then this one, had been triplets. A three-way identical match, boom-boom-boom with the genetics. Wouldn’t that be a hot-rod rig?”

  “To end all rigs,” agreed McNihil. He was starting to get a contact high, partially enhanced by the caffeine, from Turbiner’s obvious enjoyment of the gift. The crack about what would’ve been the perfect rig, the ultimate cable setup for a hard-core music lover’s stereo, wasn’t meant as criticism, McNihil knew. How likely was it that a set of identical triplets would get into copyright piracy? Not if they had one person’s smarts amongst themselves. Turbiner had lucked out as it was, back when the Folichman twins had glommed onto some of his old titles, and had then made the mistake of thinking nobody would catch them if they scanned the yellowing pages, encrypted the digitized results, and offered them for sale through a Djakarta phone-bank front operation that hadn’t been any smarter than they were. Turbiner’s copyrights hadn’t been the only ones infringed, but he’d been near the top of the agency’s list for trophy handout when the hammer had come down on the pirate operation. Plus McNihil had been the agent in charge, so he could pull a few strings, make sure that the top goodies went to his personal heroes. He’d al
ready met Turbiner, at one of the agency’s semiannual PR-banquet functions, and had been into the old guy’s books-when he’d been able to find them-for some time before that. McNihil had assembled nearly a complete set of Turbiner’s backlist, had gotten him to inscribe and sign them, the whole trip; that was when he’d found out about Turbiner’s significant music fixation, particularly in regard to the equipment angle. That also being the moment McNihil had decided on scoring the ultimate upgrade for the old writer, something to put the final cherry gloss on his antique, perfectly preserved stereo setup.

  Which was what pirates, copyright violators, were good for. If they could be said to be good for anything. Trophies; the final, tangible, and fitting result of the draconian enforcement of the laws protecting the ownership of creative content and intellectual property. If there were assholes out there stupid enough to attempt violating copyright-and there always were; the Collection Agency would never go out of business-then asp-heads like McNihil had no compunctions about putting the points of their field scalpels into the hinges and locks of the pirates’ skulls. The consequences of screwing around were so well-known-the agency put a lot of effort into its various public-information programs, cluing in the world on how the system’s sharp-edged gears meshed-that most asp-heads, McNihil included, figured their prey were into some sort of self-destruction imperative, sure and certain suicide by means of the law’s swift, implacable enforcers. What else could it be? If any asp-heads had ever had pangs of conscience about the bloody nature of their work-McNihil himself had always slept well enough at night-then the notion that the agency’s operatives were giving the pirates not only what they deserved, but what they wanted as well, should have been enough to ease those feelings.