Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “So what do we have here?” He squeezed her trapped wrist, enough to make her fingers splay out trembling. “Your heart line… well, that’s pretty much as to be expected, isn’t it?” His small eyes glanced up to hers. “Kind of a narrow little scratch, that doesn’t lead to much. And your life line…” He pressed his thumb into the middle of her palm. “That one doesn’t look good at all.”

  “I’ll do the worrying about that one.”

  “Oh, no; we all have to worry. Don’t we?” The wide ball of his thumb rubbed sweat between her skin and his. “Because if something happened to you-then we’d be out quite a bit. We’ve invested a lot of money in you.”

  “Right.” November managed to nod her head, scraping against the wall behind her. “And you’ve gotten it back. With interest.”

  “Not all of it. And not enough interest-not what you’re down for at least, sweetheart.” The man raised his thumb from her palm. “Let’s add ’em up.”

  She said nothing, but watched as he turned her hand toward the light slicing down the alley. The invisible numbers, written in the cup of her palm, were visible to him as well. He had a master filter cut into his eyes-when he’d looked up at her, she’d been able to spot the dull silver worm at the far depth of his pupils. So he could read not only what was there in her hand, but in the hands of all those who’d signed themselves over to his sharkoid employers.

  “Honey, you’re way into us.” He sucked his breath in between his teeth. “You taken a look at this lately? I knew we loved your ass, but I didn’t think we loved it this much.”

  “I know what it says.” The jacket’s leather, drawn up by the man’s hold, had gathered under her arms; November felt as if she were being softly crucified. “You don’t have to make a big production number out of this.”

  He leaned his broad face close to hers. “Then you’re the one who should be tap-dancing.” His breath smelled like hydrogenated fat and Thai peppers. “Just as fast as you can.”

  Taking a step backward, he let go of her collar. The back of her head skidded down the wall, the friction enough to snap a match into flame. Her butt hit the ground, jamming her spine upward; it felt as if the topmost vertebrae had crunched against the inside curve of her skull.

  She had no time to react; the man jerked her arm up by the wrist he still held. He reached down with his other hand and grabbed a fistful of her hair, rocking her head back.

  “Look up here, cunt.” The sweetheart rhetoric was over. “Up here where the numbers are.”

  Her throat was stretched so taut that she could barely whisper. “I see them…”

  “Oh, take a good look. Because I don’t think you know what they are at all. You must not have checked them very recently, that’s for sure.” He gave a quick rap with the back of her head against the wall. “Otherwise, you’d be a lot more scared than you are now.”

  “All right. All right; just give me a moment…” November knew the guy wasn’t playing around now; it didn’t matter whether he might be enjoying this part more than the cute stuff that’d preceded it. She gazed up at her hand, focusing on the numbers written in her palm, just below the little black symbol, just above the knuckled cuff of the thug’s fist. The filter in her eyes rendered the numbers visible to her, the secret history of her accounts…

  “Christ.” The single appalled word escaped from her lips. She saw what he’d meant. And just as he’d predicted, she was afraid. “What happened?”

  The numbers had always been in red; that meant nothing, just the way the filters made them appear, like legible, luminous blood. But at the bottom of one of the columns, the total blinked on and off, speeding ahead of her pulse. That meant a great deal. None of it good.

  “Things can change on you. Really fast.” He looked down at her with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The Djakarta quarterlies-and the peek-ahead from the Vladivostok exchanges-their output figures were way up. The teneviki put out a regulatory call, and the bank conglomerates jacked their prime rates. Get the picture?” He gave her arm a tug, not for pain, just for emphasis. “Your main account, the one in which you’ve been rolling over all the others-you didn’t lock in the interest. You wanted that discount from going with an adjustable. That was stupid of you.”

  “It seemed like a good idea.” November still felt a little dazed. The numbers kept on blinking, like intermittent stigmata. “At the time, it did.”

  “That was then. This is badly now. Bad for you, sweetheart.” His voice had actually softened. “You got the picture, didn’t you?” He brought her palm down nearer to her face. “We can call in our markers right now. We can foreclose on you. We can have your ass on toast, if that’s what we want.”

  She looked up hopefully into his face. “Is it?”

  A smile showed at one corner of his mouth. “That’s a tempting offer, sweetheart, but not right now. I don’t mix business with pleasure. And at this particular moment, my business is telling you what the score is.”

  “Please… you really don’t have to.” November hoped the guy wasn’t about to go into details, all of which she was familiar enough with. She’d spent enough time down there, south of True Los Angeles, talking with the dead and indeadted, including McNihil’s deceased wife, to know what happened to people who couldn’t pay their bills. Especially the kind she’d run up; the loan sharks were always hardest on speculators and hustlers such as herself. Maybe out of some ruthless Darwinian motivation: weeding out the failures was how a tougher, faster species was bred into existence.

  “Look,” said November. Her thoughts had pulled together, enough that she could at least talk, even if she didn’t know what hustling verbiage to use. “Maybe we can work something out…”

  “I told you. I’m not interested in that right now.”

  “No, no-I mean some kind of, uh, financing arrangement.” She could feel her brain kicking into overdrive; all she needed was some traction on this slippery ground. “You know I’m about to score here. Really. All I need is a little more time.” The words started coming faster and faster. “It’d be a shame, I mean a shame for you people, if you had to write off my account, all that money down the toilet, just because you couldn’t cut me a few extra days-”

  “Don’t sweat it.” The man shook his thick-necked head in a combination of amusement and disgust. “We’re not writing you off. You want some more time? Great, that’s what I’m here for.”

  She drew back, eyeing him. “What’s the catch?”

  “What do you want it to be?”

  November frowned in puzzlement. “I didn’t follow that one…”

  He used her trapped hand to pull her upright. “Like I said: Whatever you want.” He pushed her palm toward her face, almost touching her nose.” How do you like these numbers? Better?”

  The red numbers were so close, she could just bring them into fuzzy focus. But that was enough for November to see that the baleful total wasn’t blinking anymore.

  “Does that do your heart good?” The man smiled at her from the other side of the hand in front of her face. “Think you can breathe now?”

  “I don’t get it…” The tips of her fingers felt numb, detached. “What did you do…”

  “No big thing.” The man let go of her wrist. “I just took care of your problems, that’s all. Or let’s say… they were already taken care of.” He wiped her sweat off against the front of his coat. “You’re a lucky girl. Today, at least.”

  They refinanced me, thought November. She moved her hand away, bringing the numbers sharper. Without needing any authorization from her; the sharks had that option, if they wanted to, when somebody’s account went into the foreclosure zone.

  “Look, I appreciate this…” November lowered her hand. “But I don’t know if I can take any higher interest rate than what I had already. You’re gonna be slicing my margins pretty tight…”

  “I wouldn’t know about tight. Like I said, I’m not interested in that.” The man’s heavy shoulders lifted in a no
ncommittal shrug. “Besides, you don’t have anything to fret about. We haven’t jacked up your rates. We’re doing you a favor: your terms have been rolled back to what they were when you signed for the adjustable, and we’ve frozen ’em there. Plus we’re cutting you an extension on the due date.”

  “What?” November stared at him in amazement. “Nobody does that.”

  “So what can I say. We’re connectin’ saints.”

  “No, you’re not.” She pressed her hands flat against the alley wall behind her. “I know that much.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right about that.” The man looked out at the empty street, then back toward her. “Maybe there is something we want in exchange.” He brought his face close to hers, his exhaled breath as fiery as before. “For being so understanding of your problems.”

  She said nothing. Just waited, without moving.

  “Don’t fuck up.” No smile, nothing but the black holes of his eyes, capturing the tiny images of her face. “You got that? That’s what we want. Don’t connect up this one.”

  His voice, without shouting, had efficiently pinned her to the wall. It’s not about money, realized November. Or at least not about the money I owe them. Something else was going on. Deep shit, with its own negative luminosity, like some dead and malignant sun.

  She spoke at last. “I got it,” said November.

  “That’s why you don’t have to say thank you.” The man stepped back from her. “It’s not really necessary, is it? Strictly business, that’s all.”

  That got a nod from her. “Strictly business.”

  “Maybe next time…” His smile floated lazily to the surface once more. “Maybe next time, we can talk about that other business. Between me and you.”

  “I don’t think so.” November regarded him coldly. “Like you said; you’re not doing me any favors. So I don’t have to be nice to you. So connect off.”

  He laughed, then turned and walked away, steering his wide bulk toward the alley’s mouth.

  When he was gone, November turned her gaze back toward the building she’d been watching. Her target, McNihil, would be arriving soon, she knew. She’d kept her vigil; all the time the loan sharks’ man had been harassing her, she’d been able to keep a minimum eye on the building’s doorway.

  The connector didn’t know how important he was. For a lot of reasons, and not just for her. She wondered, as she folded her arms across her breast and leaned back against the damp bricks, just what some of those other reasons might be.

  McNihil leaned back into the padding of the taxicab’s backseat and watched massive, vaguely Stalinist buildings slide by. For a moment, he wondered if he had actually overshot his destination and wound up in some entirely different segment of the Gloss, over on the Pacific’s Asian shores. He checked his watch; it hadn’t adjusted for moving into a new time zone, so he knew he was still on the West Coast of the North American continent. Plus, he simply hadn’t been traveling long enough to have looped around the Bering Strait and south toward Vladivostok. I may be losing it these days, he thought, but not that much.

  He figured this had to be around Sea-Tac, where the international airport had been, back when the Noh-flies hadn’t taken up residence in the gray, endless clouds and people could still take jetliners from one point to another on the earth’s surface. McNihil just hadn’t been up this way for a while-months, at least-and the rate of new construction piling out of Seattle’s core had gotten away from him. The architecture, great brutal slabs and cubes of poured and uptilted ferroconcrete, was the manifested embodiment of the lowering weather and the population’s taste in bloodstream additives. There was a certain smack grandeur, the confluence of De Quincey and Cobain, to such massive, raw vistas. Places where one could be borne to the sepulchre in a crystal, sound-proofed coffin by leering hallucinations of alligators, streets cleaved between towers to the frozen center of the earth, the annihilation by scale of all that was puny and human.

  Settled in the cab’s stained upholstery, McNihil let bleak architectural musings seep from his thoughts. He took comfort in the knowledge that he was heading into the center of the old city, that the business he’d come here to take care of was located in a zone of comprehensible and familiar decay.

  “Here?” The cabbie sounded incredulous. “This is where you want off? You’re kidding, right?”

  The vehicle had come to a stop, after the push and pull of the interstate feeder traffic. McNihil glanced out the window. “Doesn’t look that risky to me.” He’d seen worse places. He lived in one.

  “Of course not. It’s just such a tourist trap.” Disappointment filtered into the cabbie’s voice, as well as expectation of a stiffed tip. “I took you for some kind of exec type.”

  “Yeah, there’s that kind of aura about me. It’s a curse.” From his wallet, McNihil extracted his debit card and poised it at the slot of the reader mounted on the dividing panel. “What’s the damages?”

  A string of blue LED’s blinked on beside the reader. “There’s a hazard add-on.” The cabbie didn’t sound apologetic. “I don’t usually bring people from the station out this way.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I take it off my taxes.” He ran the card through the slot, the reader taking a recorded bite from his only operational account. “And it’s not even a scam.” Or not much of one, thought McNihil.

  The cabbie gave him a reappraising look. “Maybe you want me to stick around? For when you’re ready to go back?”

  McNihil shook his head. He’d gotten out and slammed the passenger door shut. “I’ll take my chances.”

  Scanning the area, as the cab’s engine noise faded down the narrow street, McNihil’s gaze took in a withered park, a little urban pocket of dead greenery. Lack of sunshine hadn’t killed it; the buildings surrounding it were ancient nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructs, nowhere near high enough to form a well-like canyon of steel and faux-marble facades. Another channel of light had been cut by a crashed 747, one of the first Noh-fly victims to have its unshielded cockpit electronics HERF’d out and rendered useless. The plane had gone down here as though, in its terminal arc, it had been trying to return to its vanished Boeing birthplace. It had almost made it; a few miles farther south and it would have slept in the factories of its ancestors.

  McNihil passed under the skeletal shade of the airliner’s tail section, like tripartite shark fins angled into the air. The swath that the fuselage had dug through the city lay to the west; he could see a wedge of ocean, framed by avalanched brick rubble and twisted steel girders, at the bottom of the city’s slope. He picked his way over the denuded struts of the wing lying tonguelike across the sidewalk and into the cracked asphalt of the street. This close, he could see down into the old subterranean levels of the city, the 747 having torn a stratified hole the way a table knife would have parted an anthill. Scuttling noises, the flicker of battery-operated lights and peering eyes, revealed the presence of the hole’s occupants, charity-resistant scavengers making their homes in the tunnels where tour groups had been led a long time ago. Some of the cave dwellers who were still comfortable with daylight had extended their realm up into the stripped aircraft fuselage, stringing hammocks and clamber-nets between the rows of charred, rain-soaked seat remnants. Whatever baggage survived the crash had been looted and converted into nominal curtain walls, barriers stitched together from business suits and lingerie, the aged rags all fluttering in the salt wind coming off the ocean. The empty suitcases, broken-locked Samsonites and American Touristers, a few shabby imitation Vuittons, had been strung up on the surrounding power lines; they swung and banged like giant castanets.

  As he passed by the nose-buried plane wreckage, McNihil saw a cobbled-together gantry arm, corroded sewer pipes hinged with telephone-pole bolts, swing up like an improvised construction crane. Its blind head, guided by a system of rope pulleys, jerked toward him.

  “This is an official panhandling station.” An unamplified voice traveled up a duct-taped hose,
dangling in loops like throat wattles from the gantry. A funnel was aimed toward McNihil; the other end of the tube ran down into the hole. “Charity expands the heart. Literally-the cardiovascular benefits are immense, buddy.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” With one hand, McNihil pushed aside the funnel. “Not today.”

  “We accept cash, but prefer wire debits.” The gantry’s head, steered by the ropes and pulleys, followed along beside him. “See the reader there? I’m sure you do. You look like a smart sonuvabitch. Just dash the ol’ plastic down the groove, and reap the rewards in the world to come.”

  “Pie in the sky.” McNihil could see the scam as well. The card reader was a fake, a slit mouth with either glue at the bottom or some kind of clamp trap, ready to be triggered by another, smaller line running down the gantry neck. No data conduit behind the red-dotted LED’s; the ferrite-sheathed cables were as bogus as the hidden beggar’s pitch. Anybody stupid and tenderhearted enough to fall for the gag would have his card snatched out of his hand, then disappeared back down into the dimly lit tunnel world; the gantry was strung with tensioned elastic, synthetic rubber sliced from the downed 747’s landing gear and depolymerized to a taut and stretchy consistency. The panhandlers wouldn’t have to do anything more than pop the restraining clutch in their grubby hands, to have the thin rectangular prize come flying their way. “I’m not falling for this one,” said McNihil as he walked on.

  “Don’t be such a hard case.” The talking funnel floated near his face. “God loves a cheerful giver.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Come on-” The funnel’s voice continued pleading. “Money is just information, a concept, infinitely replicable without generation loss. That’s the way it is in this new world.”

  “Don’t be a connecting idiot,” said McNihil. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal.”

  “Watch it-” The voice coming through the tube turned huffy. “Connecting isn’t a dirty word around here.” A little shriller: “It’s people like you, with your antiquated anti-connectivity mind-sets, that are going to be dead meat someday! You just watch! Wait and see!”