Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “The girl,” David said, “she was wearing a bracelet, how do you say it, retro-action, ah, you know, stimulation neural.” His inflection was French.

  For a moment it didn’t mean anything to her. Stimulation neural, neural stimulation. Then it did. A self-stimulating system, a neuro-feedback bracelet. It set up feedback to stimulate the wearer’s own nervous system, banish fatigue, increase awareness and induce a mild state of euphoria.

  A goddamned slave bracelet.

  That was the jewelry business, making slave bracelets. Extremely addicting. “Christ,” Mayla said. “You’re sure?” But as soon as she understood him she knew it was true.

  “I have never seen one before, except on the vid,” David said. “Maybe that is not what it is.”

  “Did you understand what they wanted?” Mayla said.

  “They want money, for this business, yes?”

  Yes. Oh yes. Oh Christ. Oh Madre de Diós. It wasn’t illegal for her to cut the loan because they had never told her what they were going to do. And their papers would check out. Oh, sure, they would check out.

  “What are you going to do?” David asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Ah,” David said. Nothing else, just “ah.” As if she had told him something.

  The beads clattered across the street and out of the restaurant came two boys and a girl, her bright hair burgundy under the light. She was stumbling and the boys had hold of her arms. They were laughing and she was laughing, but hers was a high, nervous laugh, the sound of a drunk who didn’t quite know what the joke was.

  “You’re okay,” one of the boys said, a delicate-looking Indian boy whose bare arms were smooth and muscled.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” the other boy said. “You’re fine. Come on.”

  “I have to go home now,” she said. “I have to go home.” The boys were laughing. She flicked her hair back and the red dot of her caste mark stood like a stigmata on her forehead, the color of her dyed hair. “I have to go home now,” she said helplessly.

  “You’re okay,” the first boy said, looking over her at the other boy.

  The boys on the corner were still watching Mayla and David. But then an intoxicated girl wouldn’t be very interesting to them.

  David was waiting, his face neutral, the way it had been in the jai alai game. What did all this look like to him? Down here in the wrong part of Marincite, making loan deals with people who fabricated illegal neural-stimulation devices.

  She had never done anything like this in her life.

  “We should not stay here,” David said quietly.

  Her boots were meant to be worn to a nice restaurant, not for the streets of Cathedral in Marincite. They clicked as she walked. David’s sandals were noiseless. David was mostly noiseless. Carefully unobtrusive.

  “The boys are walking behind us,” he said, sotto voce. “Do not turn around. I think they are just bored.”

  “Okay,” she said, but her voice was too small for him to hear. Not that it mattered. Click click click click. Her boots were so damned loud. A target. Why hadn’t Saad arranged the loan in her office? An amateur. It was all just too wrong. Slave bracelets.

  What was she doing here?

  In thirty minutes she would be back at her room, and this would all be over.

  She wanted to go home. She wanted to sleep in her own bed. She was afraid of this place. She hated Marincite.

  It was a longer walk than the way they had come, but at least they didn’t have to go through the tunnel the way they had come out.

  “Are they still following us?” she asked.

  “I do not think so,” David said. “I think, you know, they are just bored.”

  White tile on the walls with blue letters—Cathedral.

  What the hell was she doing here? It’s your job, she thought. She didn’t want to get pulled into this. What if they wanted more? The bank would love it, a foothold in Marincite. As long as they could keep their paperwork clean. But she didn’t want it, didn’t want Saad Shamsi or Moustache in her office. It was too easy to imagine, a couple of years from now, being in bed with these people. If she continued in A&M, if she kept getting larger loans, what kind of people was she going to get into bed with?

  Danny Tumipamba in his coffin. Who had he been in bed with?

  “It isn’t worth it,” she said. And as soon as she did she felt a faint trembling through the soles of her feet. The chute coming to take her out of here. A sign, a portent, a reward from on high. God played dice with the universe, generating random numbers, or maybe only almost random numbers.

  David looked at her, curious.

  “I’m not doing the loan,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said, not surprised.

  * * *

  “What kind of problems?” Saad said. “With the paperwork? I can call someone, get it cleaned up, whatever it is.”

  “No,” Mayla said. “It’s not that. I just think you need another banker.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, she thought. And yet, she could make up a problem, something small, and he could go off and get it fixed up and then she would make the two loans, Moustache’s and the clinic.

  “You think it won’t pan out? It’ll be fine,” Saad said. “The bank is clean.”

  “I don’t like your business partner,” Mayla said.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” He sat down in a chair, his knees wide. “It’s some kind of popularity contest? He has the strings and the expertise. You think I know anything about manufacturing that stuff?”

  “How did you get into this?”

  “Everyone has a racket in this city. Everyone.”

  “So you had to have one, too,” she said. “Don’t you realize that once you get into bed with these people they mark you? You never get out again?”

  “Wrong,” he said. “One time is all I need. Three million in U.S. dollars. Then I qualify for resident alien status.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “A blonde wife and three blonde daughters in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

  “That was a joke,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not going to emigrate to Cincinnati, Ohio, Saad. This is my home. And I don’t have any desire to crawl between the sheets with your partner.”

  “So you’re clean,” he said. “Everything you’ve ever done is clean.”

  “What difference does it make,” she said. “Whether I’m clean or not, right now I’m telling you to find another banker.”

  He ran his hands over his hair. “Okay,” he said.

  She waited for him to say more.

  “What else do you want me to do?” he said. “If you won’t touch the deal, you won’t touch the deal. I’ll take my clinic loan to someone else. Someone in Marincite.”

  She wanted to go home. The longing for her own house, her own kitchen and living room and bedroom, drowned her, and then washed off her. Time to go home, she thought.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope you get to Cincinnati.”

  He looked at her, a gazelle-eyed Pakistani, Saad-rhymes-with-odd. “Polly Navarro will hear about this,” he said.

  The MaTE loan was big, too big for Polly to jeopardize it for something like this, wasn’t it?

  “Let me think about it and get back to you,” she said.

  “Don’t take too long,” he said.

  * * *

  The secretary ushered her in to Polly’s office. This time the suit was cinammon and the cuffs and slips in his eyes were tourmaline green. Polly had his back to her, working at a console, and he glanced back over his shoulder, his face flat.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

  He didn’t let her off the hook, didn’t say it was all right, just wheeled his chair around.

  “I need to get back to Julia,” she said. Work piling up there, and she needed some of the bank’s resources to work on the MaTE loan
, too.

  Hong Kong was out the window. If it had been the lions coming down to drink then she would have been worried, but didn’t Hong Kong just mean “Business is business”? She waited for him to bring it up, obliquely. Something about how were her other leads in the city going, or was First Hawaiian picking up some business in Marincite.

  “We’ll see you soon, then,” Polly said.

  It would be all right when she got home. Things would be normal.

  * * *

  So she went back to work. Up the elevator, gray, bone and red tweed reflecting in the polished elevator door. She ran the paperwork through for the renewal of a note for Asset Corp., talked on the phone about the possibility of upping a line of credit and ran it through to see what the credit committee would think of the numbers. With one thing and another she was there until after six, and when she came down the hall she saw David sitting in reception, reading.

  He stood up as she came down the hall, sticking one thumb in his book to mark the page.

  “Good evening, David.”

  “Good evening, Mayla.”

  Max was gone for the evening, but the elevator recognized David so he palmed it and they waited. So ordinary. Into the elevator.

  “I’ll get the car,” he said when the door opened.

  She didn’t want to wait so she said, “Don’t bother.”

  “Busy this afternoon?” he asked.

  “Not so bad—”

  He shoved her behind one of the concrete supports. She hit it with both palms, holding it and he kept pushing, pushing her down. She didn’t even realize she’d heard the shot. In fact, what she heard first was the shattering of the back window of the car behind them and she thought—there’s a bomb in the car.

  Everything was so normal and she had the insane desire to ignore it, to step backwards, into normality.

  The heel of her hand scraped along concrete, the air tasted of dry concrete dust. His hand was between her shoulder blades, holding her down. He sprinted to the next pillar, his run liquid if uneven with his bad knee, and she could still feel his hand between her shoulder blades, although when she concentrated she could feel that it was gone, that her skin just remembered it. Time to think of all this, but outside of time. She watched him flatten against the concrete support, he had a gun, where had he been wearing the gun?

  He held the gun out, aimed, it jumped twice, and then he dropped but did not fall. Afterwards she could not remember hearing the sound of those two shots. It must have shattered that concrete garage, echoed. An engine hummed, whined into high gear, she heard that. The headlights flashed across the wall and towards the exit. The car was gone.

  Then she ground her teeth. She could make a noise and she tried, and for a moment nothing would come, but then she managed, “David?” And she was back into time. Then she was afraid.

  David stood from his crouch, unhurt. Until he stood up it hadn’t occurred to her that he might be. He came back, looking over his shoulder, around the garage.

  “You are all right,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said clearly, and then realized that she was, and that this had happened to her. She didn’t know what it meant that it had happened to her. “Yes, I am.”

  He stood and looked at where the car had disappeared.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  Every sentence hung in the air, unconnected to the others. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, standing above her, tension making him all cord and wire. His eyes followed the walls of the garage all the way around and if she tried it was as if she could see where he was looking. He held the gun pointed up and away in a manner that made her think he knew how to use a gun, the way cops do on the vid. Then he looked down and frowned and helped her up, looked at her hand where she had scraped it. His fingers were cool, cradling her hand.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said, apologizing. “I just sat there.”

  “You did fine,” he soothed.

  “I didn’t even know what was going on.”

  “Nobody does the first time.” He smiled. “It is like sex. But it is all right now.” Still watching he put his hand in the small of her back—like we’re dancing, she thought—and walked her to the car.

  “Looks like you’re earning your keep,” she said, trying to joke. Grace under pressure and all that.

  He opened her door. “I did not do right,” he said.

  “You did fine,” she said.

  He slammed the car door, surely that was not as loud as those two shots, but she couldn’t find them in her memory. “I did not go get the car,” he said. “I should get the car, not walk with you.”

  “I told you to do that. I did that, and I didn’t do anything at all when they were shooting. They could have done anything.” They could have killed her, the stupid bystander in the background of the im, the one with her mouth open, not running, not ducking, just standing there, the one that she always looked at and thought, “I wouldn’t be like that.”

  “Mayla,” he said, “you aren’t supposed to do anything except stay out of the way.” He put the car in gear.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  He put the car back in park and leaned across the gearstick. “It’s all right,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. His shoulder, even leaning across the gearstick, was bony and solid. “It’s over.” She wanted to be reassured.

  His heart was beating, she could hear it with her ear against him. “You’re scared, too.” That was a relief, maybe she could learn how to know what to do even when she was scared, although she hadn’t been scared, she hadn’t been anything.

  Anna Eminike did this, all the time. What kind of person would have a life like this? What kind of person would willingly be this afraid?

  Anna Eminike was probably in that car. She felt sick.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll go to the police.”

  She wanted to say that nothing like this had ever happened to her, she wanted to protest the outrage. It sounded so banal she didn’t say anything.

  5

  Mephistofeles

  The police station was as cold inside as it was outside on the street—but every place in Caribe was cold, David just always expected it to be warmer. At the high front desk the uniformed sergeant was talking to another officer in tan and the console was chiming a call. The sergeant gestured as he talked, “I’ve got five people on it already, but they’re telling me to send another team out, what am I supposed to do?”

  “I hate that son of a bitch, Claude,” the uniformed officer said, “I told you, I don’t want to work under him.”

  The sergeant raised his voice over the chirp of the console. “I know, I know, but if I don’t send you out, Mardalin will.”

  Goddamn frigging third-world country, David thought. He was still full of the anger that came with adrenaline.

  “What am I supposed to say?” Mayla asked softly.

  “Tell him there was a shooting,” David said.

  “It sounds like we fell out over a pachinko debt or something.” Her voice quivered on the edge of control. He thought about putting his arm around her but that would probably start her crying. He wished the sergeant would answer the call.

  “I’ll explain,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I should.”

  Maybe it made her feel more in control. She stood at the front of the desk until the sergeant waved off the man in tan. “Officer,” she said, “My name is Mayla Ling, I’m an executive with First Hawaiian, and someone just shot at me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, over the insistent call, “What did you say your name was?”

  “Mayla Ling.”

  David wondered if the call was an emergency. Why didn’t they have someone else answer?

  “Can you spell it for me? Last name first.” He keyed her name into his console and picked up the call while he rifled through screens.

  “He’s checking my credi
t record,” Mayla said. David smiled back. She was trying. His smile was a crocodile smile to hide his anger.

  One of the walls was broken as if it had been kicked in and there was a piece of plastic and some tools on the floor. The color scheme was a kind of grimy institutional rose. He’d seen army bases in Africa that looked better than this. The sergeant transferred the call.

  “Ms. Ling,” the desk officer said, “Someone will be out in a moment.”

  No maintenance. No sense of urgency. They stood. David’s knee ached. A shooting, he thought, and these people are unconcerned. Terrorists were shooting at people, and he and Mayla were waiting, as if they were at the doctor’s office or something. Too much violence, these people were so jaded by violence they didn’t even respond. Like Africa, this rundown police station and the feeling that there was too little money and no energy.

  It was fifteen minutes before a woman in street clothes came out and introduced herself as Sergeant Andre-Baptiste. She took them down a hall lined with old plastic filing cabinets, then through a maze of cubicles. The big room full of cubicles was the same dirty rose as the front. Most of the desks were dark. Well, it was after six. David counted aisles, they turned right at the fourth and hers was the first cubicle. Her name-sign was stuck on top of the chest-high wall of the cubicle. The ‘p’ in Andre-Baptiste was missing.

  She didn’t look Haitian, even if she had a Haitian name; her hair was fine, pale brown, crinkly, and her skin was the color of her hair. Her eyes were spaced too wide. She motioned towards the chair by the desk and Mayla hesitated, then sat down. Sergeant Andre-Baptiste flicked through screens and said (apparently to the screen), “This interview is being recorded, do you understand that a rec is being made of everything you say? Please answer vocally.”

  “Yes,” Mayla said.

  “You just had an incident, didn’t you?”

  Incident?

  “Yes,” Mayla said, “two people approached David in the parking at work, what, a week ago?”