When Gravity Fails

by George Alec Effinger

  It was still early in the night, so we ordered beers, but virile old Saied the Half-Hajj, still listening to his manly moddy, got himself a double shot of Wild Turkey to go with his beer. No one asked the undernourished Fuad if he wanted anything. “That’s her over there,” he said in a loud whisper, pointing to a short, plain girl who was working on a European in a business suit.

  “She’s no girl,” said Mahmoud. “Fuad, she’s a deb.”

  “Don’t you think I can tell the difference between a boy and a girl?” responded Fuad hotly. No one wanted to voice an opinion about that; as far as I was concerned, it was too dark for me to read her yet. I’d know later, when I saw her better.

  Saied didn’t even wait for his drink. He stood up and sort of strolled over to Joie. You know, “nothing can touch me because, deep inside, I’m Attila the Hun, and all you other faggots better watch your asses.” He engaged Joie in conversation; I couldn’t hear a word, and I didn’t want to. Fuad followed the Half-Hajj like a pet lamb, piping up in his shrill voice now and then, agreeing vigorously with Saied or denying vigorously the new whore.

  “I don’t know nothing about this chump’s thirty kiam,” she said.

  “She’s got it, look in her purse,” screeched the Unlucky One.

  “I got more than that, you son of a bitch,” cried Joie. “How you gonna prove some of it is yours?”

  Tempers were igniting fast. The Half-Hajj had the sense to turn and send Fuad back to our table, but Joie followed the scrawny fellah, pushing him and calling him all kinds of foul names. I thought Fuad was almost on the verge of tears. Saied tried to pull Joie away, and she turned on him. “When my people gets here, he’s gonna climb into your ass,” she shouted.

  The Half-Hajj gave her one of his little, heroic smiles. “We’ll see about that when he gets here,” he said calmly. “In the meantime, we’re giving my friend here his money back, and I don’t want to hear about you shaving him or any of my other friends again, or you’ll have so many cuts on your face you’ll have to turn tricks with a bag over your head.”

  It was at just this moment, with Saied holding Joie’s wrists together, with Fuad standing on her other side, blithering loudly into her ear, that Joie’s pimp came into the bar. “Here we go,” I murmured.

  Joie called to him and quickly told him what was happening. “These cocksuckers are trying to take my money!” she cried.

  The pimp, a big, one-eyed Arab named Tewfik who everybody called Courvoisier Sonny, didn’t need to hear a word from anyone. He slapped Fuad aside without so much as a glance. He put one hand around Saied’s right wrist and made him release Joie’s hands. Then he shoved the Half-Hajj’s shoulder and sent him backward, staggering. “Messing with my girl like that can get you cut, my brother,” he said in a deceptively soft voice.

  Saied strolled back to our table. “She is a deb,” he said. “Just a man in a dress.” He and Sonny were standing right above me, and I wished they’d take their negotiations outside. The disturbance hadn’t seemed to draw the attention of either Fatima or Nassir. Meanwhile, Fanya had ended her turn on stage, and a tall, lanky black sex-change, American, began to dance.

  “Your ugly, thieving, syphilitic whore took thirty kiam of my friend’s money,” said Saied in the same soft voice as Sonny.

  “You gonna let him call me names, Sonny?” demanded Joie. “In front of all these other bitches?”

  “Praise Allah,” said Mahmoud sadly, “it has turned into an affair of honor. It was a lot simpler when it was just larceny.”

  “I won’t let nobody call you nothing, girl,” said Sonny. He had put a little growl into his soft voice. He turned to Saied. “I’m telling you now to shut the fuck up.”

  “Make me,” said Saied, smiling.

  Mahmoud, Jacques, and I grabbed our beers and got halfway out of our seats; we were too late. Sonny had a knife in the rope belt around his gallebeya; he reached for it. Saied got his knife out quicker. I heard Joie cry a warning to Sonny. I saw Sonny’s eyes get narrow as he backed away a step. Saied swung his left fist hard at Sonny’s jaw, and Sonny ducked away. Saied took a step forward, blocked Sonny’s right arm, bent a little, and drove his knife into Sonny’s side.

  I heard Sonny make a little sound, a quiet, gurgling, surprised groan. Saied had slashed Sonny’s chest and cut some big vessels. Blood spurted in all directions, more blood than you would think possible for one person to carry around. Sonny stumbled one step to his left, then two steps forward, and fell onto the table. He grunted, jerked and thrashed a few times, and slipped off the table to the floor. We were all staring at him. Joie hadn’t made another sound. Saied hadn’t moved; he was still in the same position he’d been in when his knife had cut open Sonny’s heart. He slowly rose up straight, his knife-hand falling to his side. He was breathing heavily, loudly. He turned around and grabbed his beer; his eyes were glassy and expressionless. He was soaked with blood. His hair, his face, his clothing, his hands and arms, all were covered with Sonny’s blood. There was blood all over the table. There was blood all over us. I was almost drenched in blood. It had taken me a moment, but now I realized how much blood I had on me, and I was horrified. I stood up, trying to pull my blood-soaked shirt away from my body. Joie began to scream, again and again; someone finally slapped her a few times, and she shut up. At last Fatima called Nassir out of the back room, and he called the police. The rest of us just sat down at another table. The music stopped, the girls went into their dressing room, the customers slipped out of the bar before the police could arrive. Mahmoud went to Fatima and got a pitcher of beer for us.

  Sergeant Hajjar took his time coming around to see the aftermath. When he arrived at last, I was surprised to see that he’d come alone. “What’s that?” he asked, indicating Sonny’s corpse with the toe of a boot.

  “Dead pimp,” said Jacques.

  “They all look the same, dead,” said Hajjar. He noticed the blood splashed all over everything. “Big guy, huh?”

  “Sonny,” said Mahmoud.

  “Oh, that motherfucker.”

  “He died for thirty lousy kiam,” said Saied, shaking his head unbelievingly.

  Hajjar looked around the bar thoughtfully, then looked straight at me. “Audran,” he said, stifling a yawn, “come with me.” He turned to walk back out of the bar.

  “Me?” I cried. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  “With what?” asked Hajjar, puzzled.

  “With that knifing.”

  “The hell with the knifing. You got to come with me.” He led me to his patrol car. He didn’t care at all about this murder. If some rich-bitch tourist gets done in, the police break their buns lifting fingerprints and measuring angles and interrogating everybody twenty or thirty times. But let someone nip this gorilla one-eyed stable-boss or Tami or Devi, and the cops act as bored as an ox on a hill. Hajjar wasn’t going to question anybody or take pictures or anything. It wasn’t worth his time. To the officials, Sonny had only gotten what he had coming; in Chiriga’s philosophy, “Paybacks are a motherfucker.” The police didn’t mind if the whole Budayeen decimated itself, one worthless degenerate at a time.

  Hajjar locked me into the back seat, then slid behind the steering wheel. “Are you arresting me?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Audran.”

  “Are you arresting me, you son of a bitch?”

  “No.”

  That brought me up short. “Then what the hell are you holding me for? I told you I didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with that killing in the bar.”

  Hajjar glanced back over his shoulder. “Will you forget about that pimp already? This doesn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  Hajjar looked around again and gave me a sadistic grin. “Papa wants to talk to you.”

  I felt cold. “Papa?” I’d seen Friedlander Bey here and there, I knew all about him, but I’d never actually been summoned into his presence before.

  “And
from what I hear, Audran, he’s spitting mad. You’d be better off if I did bring you in for murder.”

  “Mad? At me? What for?”

  Hajjar just shrugged. “I don’t know. I was just told to fetch you. Let Papa do his own talking.”

  Just at this moment of growing fear and menace, the tri-phets decided to kick in and race my heart even harder. It had started out to be such a nice evening, too. I’d won some money, I was looking forward to a pleasant meal, and Yasmin was going to spend the night again. Instead I was in the back of a police cruiser, my shirt and jeans still damp with Sonny’s blood, my face and arms beginning to itch as the blood dried on them, heading toward some foreboding meeting with Friedlander Bey, who owned everybody and everything. I was sure it was some sort of accounting, but I couldn’t imagine for what. I’ve always been extremely careful not to tread on Papa’s toes. Hajjar wouldn’t tell me any more; he only grinned wolfishly and said that he wouldn’t want to be in my boots. I didn’t want to be in my boots, either, but that’s where I’d found myself too often lately. “It is the will of Allah,” I murmured anxiously. Nearer My God to Thee.

  8

  Friedlander Bey lived in a large, white, towered mansion that might almost have qualified as a palace. It was a large estate in the middle of the city only two blocks from the Christian Quarter. I don’t think anyone else had such a great expanse of property walled off. Papa’s house made Seipolt’s look like a Badawi tent. But Sergeant Hajjar didn’t drive me to Papa’s house: we were going in the wrong direction. I mentioned this to Hajjar, the bastard.

  “Let me do the driving,” he said in a surly voice. He called me “il-Maghrîb.” Maghrîb may mean sunset, but it also refers to the vast, vague part of North Africa to the west, where the uncivilized idiots come from—Algerians, Moroccans, semi-human creatures like that. Lots of my friends will call me il-Maghrîb, or Maghrebi, and then it’s only a nickname or an epithet; when Hajjar used it, it was definitely an insult.

  “The house is back the other way about two and a half miles,” I said.

  “Don’t you think I know that? Jesus Christ, would I love to have you handcuffed to a pole for fifteen minutes.”

  “Where on Allah’s good, green earth are you taking me?”

  Hajjar wouldn’t answer any more questions, so I just gave up and watched the city go by. Riding with Hajjar was a lot like riding with Bill: you didn’t learn very much and you weren’t sure where you were going or how you were going to get there.

  The cop pulled into an asphalt driveway behind a cinder-block motel on the eastern outskirts of the city. The cinder blocks were painted a pale green, and there was a small hand-lettered sign that said simply motel no vacancy. I thought a motel with a permanent No Vacancy sign was a trifle unusual. Hajjar got out of the cop car and opened the back door. I slid out and stretched a little; the tri-phets had me humming in a high-velocity way. The combination of the drugs and my nervousness added up to a headache, a very sick stomach, and fidgeting that flirted with total emotional collapse.

  I followed Hajjar to room nineteen of the motel. He rapped on the door in some kind of signal. The door was opened by a hulking Arab who looked like a block of sandstone that walked. I didn’t expect him to be able to talk or think; when he did, I was astonished. He nodded to Hajjar, who didn’t acknowledge it; the sergeant went back toward his car. The Stone looked at me for a moment, probably wondering where I’d come from; then he realized that I must have come with Hajjar, and that I was the one he was waiting to let into the damn motel room. “In,” he said. His voice sounded like sandstone that spoke.

  I shuddered as I passed by him. There were two more men in the room, another Stone That Speaks on the far side, and Friedlander Bey, sitting at a folding table set up between the king-sized bed and the bureau. All the furnishings were European, but a little worn and shabby.

  Papa stood when he saw me come in. He was about five feet two inches tall, but almost two hundred pounds. He wore a plain, white cotton shirt, gray trousers, and slippers. He wore no jewelry. He had a few wisps of graying hair brushed straight back on his head, and soft brown eyes. Friedlander Bey didn’t look like the most powerful man in the city. He raised his right hand in front of his face, almost touching his forehead. “Peace,” he said.

  I touched my heart and my lips. “And on you be peace.”

  He did not look happy to see me. The formalities would protect me for a short while and give me time to think. What I needed to plan was a way to bowl over the two Stones and get out of that motel room. It was going to be a challenge.

  Papa seated himself at the table again. “May your day be prosperous,” he said. He indicated the chair across from him.

  “May your day be prosperous and blessed,” I said. As soon as I could, I was going to ask for a glass of water, and take as many Paxium as I had with me. I sat down.

  His brown eyes caught mine and held them. “How is your health?” he asked. His voice was unfriendly.

  “Praise Allah,” I said. I felt the fear growing.

  “We have not seen you in some time,” said Friedlander Bey. “You have made us lonely.”

  “May Allah never let you feel lonely.”

  The second Stone served coffee. Papa took a cup and sipped from it to show me it wasn’t poisoned. Then he handed it to me. “Be pleased,” he said. There was little hospitality in his voice.

  I took the cup. “May coffee be found forever in your house.”

  We drank some coffee together. Papa sat back and regarded me for a moment. “You have honored us,” he said at last.

  “May Allah preserve you.” We had come to the end of the short form of the amenities. Things would begin to happen now. The first thing that happened was that I took out my pill case, dug up every tranquilizer I could find, and swallowed them with some more coffee. I took fourteen Paxium; some people would find that a large quantity. It wasn’t, for me. I know lots of people in the Budayeen who can drink me under the table—Yasmin, for one—but I bow to no one in my capacity for pills and caps. Fourteen 10-milligram Paxium, if I was lucky, would only unscrew the tension a little; they wouldn’t even begin to make me really tranquil. Right then, I’d need something with a little more velocity to it for that. Fourteen Paxium was barely Mach 1.

  Friedlander Bey held out his coffee cup to his servant, who refilled it. Papa sipped a little of it, watching me over the rim of the small cup. He set it down precisely and said, “You understand that I have a great number of people in my employ.”

  “Indeed yes, O Shaykh,” I said.

  “A great number of people who depend on me, not only for their livelihoods, but for much more. I am a source of security in their difficult world. They know that they may depend on me for wages and certain favors, as long as they perform their work for me in a satisfactory way.”

  “Yes, O Shaykh.” The blood drying on my face and arms irritated me.

  He nodded. “So when I learn that one of my friends has, indeed, been welcomed by Allah into Paradise, I am distressed. I am concerned for the well-being of all who represent me in the city, from my trusted lieutenants down to the poorest and most insignificant beggar who aids me however he can.”

  “You are the people’s shield against calamity, O Shaykh.”

  He waved a hand, tired of my interruptions. “Death is one thing, my nephew. Death comes to all, there is no one who can run from it. The jar cannot remain whole forever. We must learn to accept our eventual demise; and more, we must look forward to our eternal delight and refreshment in Paradise. Yet death before death is due is unnatural. That is another thing completely; it is an affront to Allah, and must be set right. One cannot recall the dead to life, but one can avenge a murder. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, O Shaykh.” It hadn’t taken Friedlander Bey long to hear about Courvoisier Sonny’s premature end. Nassir probably called Papa even before he called the police.

  “Then, let me put this question to you: How does one revenge
a murder?”

  There was a long, glacial silence. There was only one answer, but I took a while to frame my reply in my mind. “O Shaykh,” I said at last, “a death must be met with another death. That is the only revenge. It is written in the Straight Path, ‘Retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the murdered’; and also, ‘One who attacketh you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you.’ But it also says elsewhere, ‘The life for the life, and the eye for the eye, and the nose for the nose, and the ear for the ear, and the tooth for the tooth, and for wounds retaliation. But whoso forgoeth it in the way of charity, it shall be expiation for him.’ I am innocent of this murder, O Shaykh, and to seek revenge wrongfully is a crime worse than the killing itself.”

  “Allah is Most Great,” murmured Papa. He looked at me in surprise. “I had heard that you were an infidel, my nephew, and it caused me pain. Yet you have a certain knowledge of the noble Qur’ân.” He stood up from the table and rubbed his forehead with his right hand. Then he crossed to the large bed and laid down on the bedspread. I turned to face him, but a huge brown hand clamped itself on my shoulder and forced me to turn around again. I could only stare across the table, at Friedlander Bey’s empty chair. I could not see him, but I could hear him when he spoke. “I have been told that of all people in the Budayeen, you had most reason to want to murder this man.”

  I thought back over the recent months; I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d even said hello to Sonny. I stayed out of the Red Light; I had nothing to do with the kind of debs, changes, and girls Sonny ran on the street; our circles of friends didn’t seem to intersect at all, except for Fuad il-Manhous—and Fuad was no friend of mine and, I’m sure, no friend of Sonny’s, either. Yet the Arab’s concept of revenge is as fully developed and patient as the Sicilian’s. Maybe Papa was thinking of some incident that had happened months, even years, ago, something I had forgotten completely, that could be construed as a motive to kill Sonny. “I had no reason at all,” I said shakily.