Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “Oh, I would’ve wanted the cremation.” His dead wife nodded as she reached for a book of matches. “Definitely. Even before finding out what I know now. About what happens after things die.” She lit the cigarette. “It’s so much cleaner.”

  It was more or less the same conversation they wound up having every time he came down here. Not so much because she wanted to talk about these things-from the beginning, she had displayed a casual acceptance about her transformed condition that had left him somewhat stunned and mystified, until he’d figured out why she was doing it. All the better to twist the knife inside him. Which was the same reason McNihil thought and talked about these things. As the ancient sage had said, As long as you use a knife, there’s still some love left. It just depended on whether you used the knife on yourself or not.

  That was the trouble with death and money combined. They could be either evil or innocuous on their own, but when they were wrapped up together, when they slept in the same coldly burning bed, that was when things got messy and weird.

  “Connect this,” said McNihil. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” Some other time, when he wasn’t being leaned on by Harrisch and his crew, he could dig the past up from its unsilent grave, and dissect with his dead wife how he’d screwed her over, spent the insurance payout on his asp-head gear, and somehow never got far enough ahead on his Collection Agency salary and bonuses to pay off her living debts and stick her ashes in that little jar she coveted for her final residence. “Right now,” he said aloud, “I’ve got other things on my mind.”

  “Sure.” His dead wife let the new cigarette burn, without bringing it to her pale lips. “You came here for advice. Analysis of the situation you’re in. People have been calling on the dead for these services, for a long time now. Before, though, they usually didn’t get any answers.”

  “Lucky for them.” A grim mood had descended upon McNihil. It was easier to deal with guilt and the past than the present situation. He knew where he was with the past.

  “Didn’t I tell you enough? You know more than when you came here.” His dead wife shrugged, cigarette held aloft. “I can’t figure out everything for you. Even if I could… why should I?”

  She dealt in fragments, he knew, fragmentary info, fragmentary answers. The scraps and pieces that came drifting on hidden, subterranean currents into the dead territory. Proof that she was on a much higher functioning level than the scavengers he’d spotted so many times from the train windows. Her existence, this little bubble of ersatz bourgeois comfort amidst the rubble and decay, was financed from her earnings as an analyst of discarded data banks, medical records, consumer surveys of products that had been taken off the market decades ago, bins full of old credit-card receipts; all the informational flotsam that washed up on this terminal shore. A couple of small-time research services, including one university sociology/ethnobiology department, kept her and a few dead colleagues on minuscule retainers and piece-work schedules. That brought in enough to pay the interest on her debts and even chip away a little on the principal amounts. At the rate she was going, sometime in the next century she might be able to keep her long-delayed appointment at the crematorium.

  “Why should you?” An old question. “Maybe just because you love me. Still.”

  “Do I?” Her dark, empty eyes regarded him.

  “Maybe.” His turn to shrug. “You tell me.”

  Her gaze shifted to the spark at the tip of the cigarette. “That’s one of the things I’m not ever going to tell you.” A speck of ash touched her wrist, then drifted the rest of the way down to the table. “It’d be just too easy on you.”

  “Fine,” said McNihil. “I’m way beyond needing anyone to be that kind. So why don’t you just tell me instead, something about what I came down here to find out?”

  “These people you’re dealing with? What more do you need to know?” The smoke drew a smudged gray line beside her face. “You know enough to be cautious.”

  “I knew that before I came down here.” He couldn’t tell if she was jerking him around or not. Sometimes, from the random backwash of information into the dead territory, she extracted worthwhile answers; other times, not. The luck of the draw. “I could use something a little more practical. Something that would help save my ass.”

  “Is that all?” His dead wife smiled behind the cigarette. “Might be rather late for that. Like I said. They’ve been scheming on you for a while.”

  “Then I’ll have to take my chances. I don’t have anything to lose.”

  “Fine.” She set the cigarette down on the edge of the table, inside a row of small burn marks. Unsmiling, she leaned toward him. “You want something more? Something you can use? I’ll tell you right now. What you probably know already, because if you don’t, you’re too stupid to live.” Her voice grated harsh, as though sand were caught in her corded throat. “It’s not that guy Harrisch and the rest of those corporate types that you have to worry about. They’re nothing. They’ve got their plans for you-there’s something they want from you, something different from what they’ve said-but you might be able to handle that. You’ve got a chance. But where you’re connected-and you are; you know that, don’t you?-that’s nothing much to do with them. It’s what they want you to get involved in. That’s the problem for you. Where they want you to go.” She picked up the cigarette again and held it aloft. When she spoke again, it was in a quieter, scarier voice. “And who’s waiting for you there.”

  It took a few moments before McNihil was able to ask the next question. “And who’s that? Who’s waiting?”

  “Come on.” His dead wife shook her head in mock exasperation. “You know perfectly well. The same thing that’s always been your downfall. You’re just one of those guys who’s cursed by women. It wasn’t just me that you have problems with. There’s always some other woman that you have to deal with, that you can’t deal with. One that decides your fate. And you know who it is.”

  “You mean…” McNihil frowned, trying to puzzle out her words. “There’s one that’s been tailing me around; a young one. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Is that the one you’re talking about?”

  “For Christ’s connecting sake.” Genuine anger flashed from his wife’s deep-socketed eyes. “Stop messing around. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If you want to pull your ass out of the fire, you’d better get your mind straight. For once. I don’t know anything about some ‘young one.’” The anger darkened, as though transmuting for a moment into sexual jealousy, an emotion that even death hadn’t managed to render out of her. “You idiot. God knows what you’re imagining now.” She managed an actual draw on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into her inert lungs, then exhaling a dragonish cloud. “You know who it is. The same one as before. The same one who screwed you over as badly as you did to me.” The tobacco haze slowly dispersed in the airless room. “It’s Verrity. It’s always been her.”

  Rage beyond anger blossomed inside his heart, a fist shattering his breastbone from inside, as though some rapid feedback loop had taken her disdain and amplified it toward murder. As if the dead could be killed again-if so, he would have lunged across the table and seized her neck in his hands, pressed his thumbs against her throat until small bones had snapped like dry wood. It was how he knew she still hated him as much as she loved him-She wouldn’t have said that name to me, otherwise.

  “You’re wrong.” Whatever emotion was inside his dead wife, it had compressed itself into a coldly hardened gaze. “I’d say that name to you, no matter what. Because you know it’s true.”

  The fury dwindled as quickly as it had sprung up at his core, leaving an ashen hollow there. McNihil opened his fists, laying his hands flat against the table to control their residual trembling. He nodded slowly.

  “I know,” he said. Defeated, for now if not forever. “Like you said… I’ve always known.” Just who was waiting for him, in that place he’d been before. And didn’t want to go to, ever again. “It’s her. It�
��s always been her.”

  EIGHT

  MAYBE THE SKY EXPLODED

  When the explosions hit the train, McNihil thought to himself, I should’ve walked home.

  Loud enough that there were no longer words after the first reaction: the derailing charges made a hammer out of the air, ringing McNihil’s lungs like soft percussion instruments. He found himself suspended, thrown loose from any mooring or balance as the passenger car tilted around him. His arms reached backward instinctively, hands level with his head, to catch the dizzily tumbling wall, to keep it from shattering his spine.

  “Shit…” Spoken through clenched teeth, blood oozing salt from his bitten lower lip; McNihil was more irritated than afraid, even as one of the metal window surrounds struck him in the small of the back. Whatever breath had been left in his lungs was expelled in a last raw-throated semi-word. The catch holding the door between cars had disintegrated, the round-tipped metal claw twisting like a broken finger as the mating latch rotated and deformed; the door slid open with enough violence to splinter the passenger car’s interior panels, sending soft daggers of foam-core insulation tumbling through the space. Through the doorway, as though it were a suddenly exposed video billboard, could be seen the dark outlines of the world outside, spinning on multiple axes. For a second, McNihil had the kinesthetic hallucination that the train was still, gravityless, and the landscape beyond had erupted into chaos.

  A warm black velvet filled McNihil’s sight; he blinked it away, and saw blurred light piercing the thin fabric. The light focused itself into stars; for a moment, he wondered how they had wound up scattered across the rubbish dunes of the dead territory through which he’d been traveling, heading back toward the inhabited zones of the Gloss-inhabited by the living-and his own tiny apartment therein. Maybe the sky exploded, he thought. And all the pieces had landed on the ground; that could account for it.

  Gravity reasserted itself, along with his perception of it; he realized he was lying on his back now, with the open doorway of the baggage car above him. The view of the night stars was veiled by drifting smoke, which he supposed was connected to the acrid burning smell in his nostrils. One foot and leg were pinned by debris; he managed to kick himself loose without leaving more than tatters of cloth and a few square centimeters of bloodied skin behind.

  Silence had replaced the explosion’s shock wave; his own breath and pulse, and the hissing of something like steam, were all McNihil heard as he climbed toward the doorway above. The derailed train, or at least this section of it, had landed at less than a ninety-degree displacement, leaving him an off-vertical slope to claw his fingers into.

  He managed to get his elbows up over what had been the lower sill of the baggage car’s sliding door. The bent metal tracks cut into the flesh of McNihil’s arms as he let himself hang for a minute, catching his breath. Smoke and the burning smell hung low in the air, forming a thick knot at the back of his throat as he breathed it in.

  The salt of his own blood trickled into the corner of McNihil’s mouth. A billow of smoke, invisible in the darkness, stung his eyes; he wiped them clear against his shoulder, then hoisted himself farther onto the doorway’s tilted sill. Another shove with his feet, and he toppled out and onto the loose gravel lining the tracks below.

  As soon as he’d managed to get to his knees, the sharp-edged stones cutting through the stained and torn trousers, he could hear the soft human sound of ragged breath and preconscious moaning. He got to his feet and stumbled a few meters alongside the overturned cars. His eyes had adjusted well enough that he could see the starlight glistening off the iron wheels, some of them still slowly turning, hubs thrust higher than his head. Flakes of rust peeled off and drifted snowlike into the spreading pools of oil; the glossy liquid mirrored the stars and smoke as though it were polished obsidian.

  He found the source of the human noises. A female, condition not good: she lay on her back, arms outstretched, blind face and neck darkened with red that shone like ink in the partial illumination. A piece of one of the broken cars, a beam studded with rivets and twined cables, lay diagonally across her breast, its weight crushing the ribs beneath the grease-smeared leather of her jacket.

  For a few moments longer, McNihil stood beside her, letting his own breath and pulse slow, and whatever strength he had left settle back into his limbs. Shouldn’t even bother, he told himself. He’d already figured out that, whoever she was, she was the one who’d been following him on the sly. Otherwise, she would’ve been inside the train’s passenger car with him.

  “Hey.” McNihil knelt down, bending close to her red-webbed face. “You still with us?”

  The young woman blinked, her eyes focused at some point past him; one pupil dilated large and black, the other small and trembling. “Connect you,” she said. A blood-streaked bubble popped on her lower lip. “Goddamn… idiot…”

  “Yeah, I’m charmed as well.” He set his fingertips against the side of her throat, gauging her fluttering pulse. “You’re in a bad way. You know that, don’t you?”

  She made no answer. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, showing only white, as though the effort of answering him had knocked her out.

  “She’ll be all right.” A voice came from behind McNihil. “Or maybe she won’t. It doesn’t really matter much, either way.”

  Still crouching beside her, McNihil turned his head and looked up at the figure standing only a few feet away. Though actually, not standing; he saw that now. More like hovering. A familiar face, with a too-familiar smile. “For Christ’s sake,” said McNihil, shaking his head in disgust. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Pretty much the same as you.” Harrisch’s voice was mockingly gentle. “Looking to make some kind of connection.” He used the word in its nonslang form. “Aren’t we all?”

  McNihil already regretted at least one of his own words. The DZ exec was obviously on some kind of redeemer-image kick, without needing it pointed out to him. Harrisch, in his sharp Arma-Ni-Lite™ suit, stood with arms stretched straight out to the sides and ankles overlapped, fastened to a glistening white crucifix. Which in turn was mounted on a circle equally luminous; the top of his head, the tips of his palm-outward fingers, and the soles of his well-shod feet were just grazed by the circumference. Harrisch could just as well have been modeling one of the positions of da Vinci’s measurement of man as parodying any ancient Nazarene.

  “Like it?” Some of the silvery glow caught on the teeth in Harrisch’s smile. “I hope you do.”

  “Yeah, it’s great.” The soft light had made its little internal adjustments to McNihil’s vision; he could make out now the way in which the cross-imposed circle was suspended a few feet above the rubble-strewn ground. “Real impressive.” Some kind of minor-league earth-moving equipment, with caterpillar treads and a bored DynaZauber employee at the levers, had crept out of the low hills. An articulated crane arm dangled the circle and its occupant on a length of heavy-linked chain. The operator had his name stitched above the DZ logo on his grease-stained jumpsuit’s breast pocket; he nudged one of the control sticks, the chain clanked and retracted, lifting Harrisch another meter higher in the air. “But really,” said McNihil, looking up at him. “You shouldn’t have gone to the effort.”

  “It’s no trouble.” Even with his arms pinioned out, Harrisch managed a nonchalant shrug. “And… you know… I even rather like it.”

  I bet, thought McNihil. He nodded toward the cross and circle. “Your own creation?”

  “This old thing?” Harrisch laughed. “I inherited it. Or let’s say… the company did. Look.” He turned his head, glancing up at the rim just above his head. “Can’t you see the letters there?” His gaze darted back toward McNihil. “Stuff like this doesn’t have a corporate emblem on it. It has insignia. There’s a difference.”

  He saw what the exec was talking about. The letters R and A, stylized in an echt Teutonic manner, intertwined with each other so their legs stuck out at broken forty-five degree an
gles; the result was halfway between a Manx triskelion and a deformed swastika.

  “The Rail Amalgam,” said McNihil. “What, they’ve been absorbed by DynaZauber? They’re one of your corporate divisions now?”

  “They wish.” A sneer formed on Harrisch’s face. “DZ wouldn’t have them; we have our standards. Those people are all talk and no action. Strictly yesterday’s news.”

  That might or might not be the case. Like most people in the Gloss-or at least those who weren’t sunk too far into their own bleak, inner L.A.-McNihil heard various rumors about what was going on with their world’s circular lifeline, the extended skein of rail lines reaching around the Pacific Ocean, from the old True Los Angeles core, up through where the urban metastasis thinned out in Alaska, across the fragile Bering Strait connections and down toward the Vladivostok financial centers and the transformed eastern edge of China, the little and now-aging dragons of Myanmar and Brunei, then back around the even more fragile and dangerous southern crossing, frozen tracks running across the floes and crevasses of the Ross Ice Shelf, in the shadows of the Transantarctic Mountains, and up the spine of South and Latin America, picking up maquiladoristas and boutique organic white-powder drugs before hitting the impacted Hispanic sprawl of Baja Los Angeles.

  “Does that thing work?”

  “You bet,” said Harrisch. “Check it out.” His middle finger pressed a button in the center of his palm, right where a rusted iron nail would have fit. The circle surrounding the cross grew brighter, sending hard-edged shadows, McNihil’s included, from the spot. “You see it?” Harrisch looked up at the rim above his head. “Great, huh?”