The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.

  “Who, then?”

  She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”

  Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most sensible answer.

  “The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “Their intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”

  At that point, the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee, along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick. Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.

  “I love ice cream,” she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.

  Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and, between sobs, choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.

  The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.

  Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?

  The latter, for preference.

  He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.

  His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con – a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for . . .

  Eventually, the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another cigarette.

  He tapped his wedding ring on the table top, something he did when thinking. “Shouldn’t you contact the local police?” he asked. “You know something about this . . . death.” For some reason he was reluctant to use the word murder. It was as if using the word would make something true, not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some kind of power over him.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it.”

  “Because of this copyright.”

  Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “That’s right.”

  “It’s not a literary copyright, I take it.”

  She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.

  “Your friend was a biologist.” He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the next question.

  “Is it a weapon?” he asked.

  She wasn’t surprised by the question. “No,” she said. “No, just the opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. “It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly.”

  “Listen,” Stephanie said. “Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is still there – the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be greased – all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more ‘inspectors’ and ‘tax collectors,’ more ‘customs agents’ and ‘security directorates’ than there ever were under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want.”

  “Trashcanistans,” Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into freedom for the fatherland.

  Stephanie nodded. “And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria.”

  She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.

  The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not wanting Stephanie to think he wanted to get her in the sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while Stephanie disposed herself more comfortably, sitting cross-legged in its center.

  “Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by Stalin,” she said. “It was made up of Bessarabia, which was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the beginning of the Second World War, plus a strip of industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the Soviet Union went down, Moldova became ‘independent’ – ” Terzian could hear the quotes in her voice. “But independence had nothing to do with the Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet elites going off on their own account once their own superiors were no longer there to restrain them. And Moldova soon split – first the Turkish Christians . . .”

  “Wait a second,” Terzian said. “There are Christian Turks?”

  The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his Armenian-American worldview.

  Stephanie nodded. “Orthodox Christian Turks, yes. They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their own autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova.”

  Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and her lighter.

  “Uh,” Terzian said. “Would you mind smoking out the window?”

  Stephanie made a face. “Americans,” she said, but she moved to the window and opened it, letting in a blast of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill, sheltered her cigarette from the wind, and lit up.

  “Where was I?” she asked.

  “Turkish Christians.”

  “Right.” Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale. “Gagauzia was only the start – after that, a Russian general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types created a rebellion in the bit of Moldova that was on the far side of the Dniester – another collection of Soviet elites, representing no one but themselves. Once the Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanian-speaking oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped in as ‘peacekeepers,’ complete with blue helmets, and created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other government. And that meant more military, more border guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and customs duties, and uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees who could be put in camps while the administration stole their supplies and rations . . .

  “But – ” She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer. “Transnistria had a problem. No other nation recognized their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural resources, barring the underage girls they enslaved by the thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the population was leaving as fast as they could, restrained only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer people whose productivity the elite could steal to support their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a lot of obsolete Soviet heavy industry geared to produce stuff no one wanted.

  “But they still had the infrastructure. They had power plants – running off Russian oil they couldn’t afford to buy – and
they had a transportation system. So the outlaw regime set up to attract other outlaws who needed industrial capacity – the idea was that they’d attract entrepreneurs who were excused paying most of the local ‘taxes’ in exchange for making one big payoff to the higher echelon.”

  “Weapons?” Terzian asked.

  “Weapons, sure,” Stephanie nodded. “Mostly they’re producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s guns, but the guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking and data havens, but the authorities couldn’t restrain themselves from ripping those off – banks and data run on trust and control of information, and when the regulators are greedy, shortsighted crooks, you don’t get either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech. They’ve got companies creating cheap generic pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents . . .” Her look darkened. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that, not when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t afford to cure. And they’ve also got other companies who are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to the elite, these companies remain completely unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows what they’re doing in those factories, and the government gives them security free of charge.”

  Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant plants with untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an unsuspecting world. Transgenic elements drifting down the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its saline environment . . .

  “The news,” Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the television.

  Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that announced the news began to fade.

  The murder on the Ile de la Cité was the second item on the broadcast. The victim was described as a “foreign national” who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests had been made. The motive for the killing was unknown.

  Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same item on another channel. The story was unchanged.

  “I told you,” Stephanie said. “No suspects. No motive.”

  “You could tell them.”

  She made a negative motion with her cigarette. “I couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find them. All I could do is put myself under suspicion.”

  Terzian turned off the TV. “So what happened exactly? Your friend stole from these people?”

  Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “He stole something that was of no value to them. It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay. And – ” She turned to the window and spun her cigarette into the street below. “I’ll take it out of here as soon as I can,” she said. “I’ve got to try to contact some people.” She closed the window, shutting out the spring breeze. “I wish I had my passport. That would change everything.”

  I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the white face so completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.

  He was so fucking sick of death.

  He opened his eyes. “I can get your passport back,” he said.

  Anger kept him moving until he saw the killers, across the street from Stephanie’s hotel, sitting at an outdoor table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately – he didn’t need to look at the heavy shoes, or the broad faces with their disciplined military mustaches – one glance at the crowd at the café showed the only two in the place who weren’t French. That was probably how Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn’t dress or carry himself like a Frenchman, for all that he’d worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away before they saw him gaping at them.

  Anger turned very suddenly to fear, and as he continued his stride toward the hotel he told himself that they wouldn’t recognize him from the Norman restaurant, that he’d changed into blue jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker, and carried a soft-sided suitcase. Still he felt a gunsight on the back of his neck, and he was so nervous that he nearly ran head-first into the glass lobby door.

  Terzian paid for a room with his credit card, took the key from the Vietnamese clerk, and walked up the narrow stair to what the French called the second floor, but what he would have called the third. No one lurked in the stairwell, and he wondered where the third assassin had gone. Looking for Stephanie somewhere else, probably, an airport or train station.

  In his room Terzian put his suitcase on the bed – it held only a few token items, plus his shaving kit – and then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it in his hand. The key was simple, attached to a weighted doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.

  The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him on first sighting the two men began to shift again into rage.

  They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair of empties as well.

  Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk.

  Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone simply through drunkenness.

  Perhaps they already had.

  He was angry when he left his room and took the stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in the hall. He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door behind him.

  He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed that the sun seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe France was very far to the west for its time zone.

  Stephanie didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic bag she already carried. He took it from the little closet, and enough of Terzian’s suspicion remained so that he checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was Steph. Pais, and not another.

  He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel documents from the bedside table and tossed them in. He added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed her toothbrush and shaver into her plastic travel bag and put it in the duffel.

  The plan was for him to return to his room on the upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising suspicion by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning, carrying two bags, he’d check out and rejoin Stephanie in his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room, and where the air would by now almost certainly reek with her cigarette smoke.

  Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a double handful of Stephanie’s T-shirts, underwear, and stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d done this was when he cleaned Claire’s belongings out of the Esplanade house.

  Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his hands and let the fury rage like a tempest in his skull.

  And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the corridor, and then a stumbling thud.

  Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk baboons in them.

  Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this room, this dead-end where he could be trapped and killed. He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and stepped to the bed and picked up the duffel in one hand. Another step took him to the door, which he opened with one hand while using the other to fling the duffel into the surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other side.

  Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years, not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain reflexes don’t go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands of times – certainly not the front kick that hooked upward under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless into the corridor wall opposite.

  A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact that he was bigger than these guys. He could really knock them around.

  The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol, but Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and drove the point of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the automatic with both hands, took a further step down the corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and
seventy degrees and drove him headfirst into the corridor wall. When he’d finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into the barrel of his own gun.

  Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue echoed it. It was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the trigger.

  Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?

  Except that the first man hadn’t realized that his side had just lost. He had drawn a knife – a glittering chromed single-edged thing that may have already killed once today – and now he took a dangerous step toward Terzian.

  Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized at just this moment it wasn’t his partner who held it.

  Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing happened his rage melted into terror and he ran. Behind him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner and crash to the floor.

  Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard the thick-soled military boots clatter on the risers above him. He dashed through the small lobby – he sensed the Vietnamese night clerk, who was facing away, begin to turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door and ran into the street.

  He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun still in his fist, and he put it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  Some moments later, he realized that he wasn’t being pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s passport was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife man and hadn’t retrieved.

  For a moment, rage ran through him, and he thought about taking out the gun and fixing whatever was wrong with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting the documents one way or another.