When Gravity Fails

by George Alec Effinger

  I smiled. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Friedlander Bey wanted me to make sure you hadn’t turned up any new evidence lately. I really don’t want to disrupt your investigation. Just tell me what I should do next.”

  He made a face. “I’d suggest that you go on a fact-finding mission to Tierra del Fuego or New Zealand or somewhere out of my hair, but you’d only laugh and not take my seriously. So check on anyone who had a grudge against Abdoulaye, or if anyone particularly wanted to kill the Black Widow Sisters. Find out if any of the Sisters had been seen with an unknown or suspicious person just before she was killed.”

  “All right,” I said, standing up. I’d just been given a first-class runaround, but I wanted Okking to think he had me snowed. Maybe he had some definite leads that he didn’t want to share with me, despite what Papa had said. That might explain his offhand lying. Whatever the reason, I planned to come back soon—when Okking wasn’t around—and use the computer records to dig a little deeper into the backgrounds of Seipolt and Bogatyrev.

  When I got home, Yasmin pointed to the table. “Somebody left a note for you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Just slipped it under the door and knocked. I went to the door, but there wasn’t anybody there. I went downstairs, but there was nobody on the sidewalk, either.”

  I felt a chill. I tore open the envelope. There was a short message printed out on computer paper. It said:

  audran:

  you’re next!

  james bond is gone.

  i’m someone else now. can you guess who?

  think about selima and you’ll know.

  it won’t do you any good, because

  you’ll be dead soon!

  “What does it say?” asked Yasmin.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. I felt a little tremor in my hand. I turned away from Yasmin,

  crumpled the paper, and stuffed it in my pocket.

  15

  Since the night Bogatyrev had been killed in Chiriga’s place, I had felt almost every strong emotion a person can. There had been disgust and terror and elation. I had known hate and love, hope and despair. I had been by turns timid and bold. Yet nothing had filled me so completely as the fury that surged in me now. The preliminary jostling was over, and ideas like honor, justice, and duty were submerged beneath the overpowering need to stay alive, to keep from being killed. The time for doubt had passed. I had been threatened—me, personally. That anonymous message had gotten my attention.

  My rage was directed immediately at Okking. He was hiding information from me, maybe covering up something, and he was endangering my life. If he wanted to endanger Abdoulaye or Tami, well, I guess that’s police business. But endangering me—that’s my business. When I got to his office, Okking was going to learn that. I was going to teach it to him the hard way.

  I was striding fiercely up the Street, seething and rehearsing what I was going to say to the lieutenant. It didn’t take me long to get it all worked out. Okking would be surprised to see me again, only an hour after I’d left his office. I planned to storm in, slam his door so hard the glass would rattle, shove the death threat into his face, and demand a complete recitation of facts. Otherwise I would haul him down to one of the interrogation rooms and bounce him off his own walls for a while. I bet Sergeant Hajjar would give me all the help I wanted, too.

  As I got to the gate at the eastern end of the Budayeen, I faltered a bit between steps. A new thought had rammed its way into my mind. I had felt that little tickle of unfinished business this morning when I’d talked to Okking; I’d felt it after seeing Selima’s corpse, too. I always let my unconscious mind work on those tickles, and sooner or later it puzzled them out. Now I had my answer, like an electric buzzer going off in my head.

  Question: What is missing from this picture?

  Answer: Let’s take a close look. First, we’ve had several unsolved murders in the neighborhood in the last several weeks. How many? Bogatyrev, Tami, Devi, Abdoulaye, Nikki, Selima. Now, what do the police do when they hit a brick wall in a homicide investigation? Police work is repetitive, tedious, and methodical; they bring in all the witnesses again and make them go over their statements in case some vital clue has been neglected. The cops ask the same questions five, ten, twenty, a hundred times. You get dragged down to the station, or they wake you up in the middle of the night. More questions, more of the same dull answers.

  With a Scoreboard showing six unsolved, apparently related killings, why hadn’t the police been doing more plodding and inspecting and badgering? I hadn’t had to go through my stories a second time, and I doubt that Yasmin or anyone else had to, either.

  Okking and the rest of the department had to be laying off. By the life of my honor and my eyes, why weren’t they pursuing this thing? Six dead already, and I was sure that the count would go higher. I had been personally promised at least one more corpse—my own.

  When I got to the copshop I went by the desk sergeant without a word. I wasn’t thinking about procedures and protocol, I was thinking about blood. Maybe it was the look on my face or a midnight-black aura I was carrying with me, but no one stopped me. I went upstairs and cut through the maze of corridors until I came to Hajjar, sitting outside Okking’s meager headquarters. Hajjar must have noticed my expression, too, because he just jerked a thumb over his shoulder. He wasn’t going to stand in my way, and he wasn’t going to take his chances with the boss, either. Hajjar wasn’t smart, but he was tricky. He was going to let Okking and me beat on each other, but he wasn’t going to be nearby himself. I don’t remember if I said anything to Hajjar or not. The next thing I recall, I was leaning over Okking’s desk with my right fist wrapped tightly in the bunched cotton cloth of his shirt. We were both screaming.

  “What the hell does this mean?” I shouted, waving the computer paper in front of his eyes. That’s all I could get out before I was spun around, dropped, and pinned to the floor by two policemen, while three more covered me with their needle guns. My heart was already racing, it couldn’t beat any faster without exploding. I stared at one of the cops, looking into the tiny black mouth of his pistol. I wanted to kick his face in, but my mobility was restricted.

  “Let him go,” said Okking. He was breathing hard, too.

  “Lieutenant,” objected one of the men, “if—”

  “Let him go. Now.”

  They let me go. I got to my feet and watched the uniforms holster their weapons and leave the room. They were all muttering. Okking waited for the last one to cross the threshold, then he slowly closed the door, ran a hand through his hair, and returned to his desk. He was spending a lot of time and effort calming himself. I suppose he didn’t want to talk to me until he got himself under control. Finally he sat down in his swivel chair and looked at me. “What is it?” he asked. No bantering, no sarcasm, no cop’s veiled threats or wheedling. Just as my time for fear and uncertainty had passed, so had Okking’s time for professional disdain and condescension.

  I laid the note on his blotter and let him read it. I sat down in a hard, angular plastic chair beside Okking’s desk and waited. I saw him finish reading. He closed his eyes and rubbed them wearily. “Jesus,” he murmured.

  “Whoever that James Bond was, he traded in that moddy for another one. He said I’d know which one if I thought about it. Nothing rings any bells with me.”

  Okking stared at the wall behind me, calling up the scene of Selima’s murder in his mind. First his eyes got a little wider, then his mouth fell open a bit, and then he groaned. “Oh my God,” he said.

  “What?”

  “How does Xarghis Moghadhil Khan sound?”

  I’d heard the name before, but I wasn’t sure who Khan was. I knew that I wasn’t going to like him, though. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “It was about fifteen years ago. This psychopath proclaimed himself the new prophet of God in Assam or Sikkim or one of those places to the east. He said a gleaming blue angel presented him with revelations and divine proclamat
ions, the most urgent being that Khan go out and jam every white woman he could find and murder anybody who got in his way. He bragged about settling two or three hundred men, women, and children before he was stopped. Killed four more in prison before they executed him. He liked to hack organs out of his victims as sacrifices to his blue metal angel. Different organs for different days of the week or phases of the moon or some goddamn thing.”

  There was anxious silence for a few seconds. “He’s going to be a lot worse as Khan than he was as Bond,” I said.

  Okking nodded grimly. “Xarghis Moghadhil Khan by himself makes the whole of the Budayeen’s collection of thugs look like cartoon cats and mice.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling helpless. “We’ve got to find out if he’s just some lunatic hatchet man or if he’s working for somebody.”

  The lieutenant stared past me at the far wall for a moment, turning some idea over in his mind. His right hand toyed nervously with a cheap bronze figure of a mermaid on his desk. Finally he looked at me. “I can help you there,” he said softly.

  “I was sure you knew more than you were telling. You know who this Bond-Khan guy is working for. You know I was right about the murders being assassinations, don’t you?”

  “We don’t have time for back-patting and medal-pinning. That can come later.”

  “You’d better come across with the whole story now. If Friedlander Bey hears that you’re holding back this information, he’ll have you out of your job before you have time to say you’re sorry.”

  “I don’t know that for sure, Audran,” said Okking. “But I don’t want to test it.”

  “So spell it out: Who was James Bond working for?”

  The cop turned away again. When he glanced back at me, there was anguish in his expression. “He was working for me, Audran.”

  The plain truth is, that wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. I didn’t know how to react. “Wallâhi il-’azîm,” I murmured. I just let Okking take care of explaining it however he wanted.

  “You’re stumbling around in something bigger than a few serial murders,” he said. “I guess you know that, but you don’t have any idea how much bigger. All right. I was getting money from a European government to locate somebody who had fled to the city. This person was in line to rule another country. A political faction in the fugitive’s homeland wanted to assassinate him. The government I work for wanted to find him and bring him back unharmed. You don’t need to know all the details of the intrigue, but that’s the basic idea. I hired ‘James Bond’ to find the man, and also to disrupt the other party’s attempt to assassinate him.”

  I took a few seconds to take that all in. It was a pretty good sized chunk to swallow. “Bond killed Bogatyrev. And Devi. And Selima, after he became Xarghis Khan. So I was on the right track from the beginning—Bogatyrev was iced on purpose. It wasn’t an unfortunate accident, as you and Papa and everybody else kept insisting. And that’s why you haven’t been digging deeper into these murders. You know exactly who killed them all.”

  “I wish I did, Audran.” Okking looked tired, and a little sick. “I don’t have the slightest idea who’s working for the other side. I have enough clues—the same awful M.O., the bruises and handprints on the tortured bodies, a pretty good description of the killer’s size and weight, a lot of little forensic details like that. But I don’t know who it is, and it scares me.”

  “You’re scared? You got a hell of a lot of nerve. Everybody in the Budayeen has been hiding under their covers for weeks, wondering if these two psychos would tap them next, and you’re scared. What the hell are you scared of, Okking?”

  “The other side won, the prince was assassinated; but the murders didn’t stop. I don’t know why. The assassination should have ended the matter. The killers are probably eliminating anyone who might identify them.”

  I chewed my lip and thought. “I need to back up a little,” I said. “Bogatyrev worked for the legation of one of the Russian kingdoms. How does he tie up with Devi and Selima?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to give out all the details. This gets dirty, Audran. Can’t you be satisfied with what I’ve already told you?”

  I felt myself getting furious again. “Okking, your fucking hit man is coming after me next. I’ve got a goddamn right to know the whole story. Why can’t you tell your killer to lay off now?”

  “Because he’s disappeared. After the prince was killed by the other side, Bond dropped out of sight. I don’t know where he is or how to get in contact with him. He’s working on his own, now.”

  “Or else someone else has given him a new set of instructions.” I couldn’t suppress a shudder when the first name that crossed my mind was not Seipolt’s—the logical choice—but Friedlander Bey’s. I knew then that I’d been kidding myself about Papa’s motives: fear for his own Me, and a laudable interest in protecting the other citizens of the city. No, Papa was never so straightforward. But could he somehow be behind these terrible events? It was a possibility I could neglect no longer.

  Okking was lost in thought, too, a glint of fear in his eyes. He played with his little mermaid some more. “Bogatyrev wasn’t just a minor clerk with that Russian legation. He was the Grand Duke Vasili Petrovich Bogatyrev, the younger brother of King Vyacheslav of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. His nephew, the crown prince, had gotten to be too much of an embarrassment at court and had to be sent away. Neo-fascist parties in Germany wanted to find the prince and bring him back to Byelorussia, thinking that they could use him to topple his father from the throne and replace the monarchy with a German-controlled ‘protectorate.’ Remnants of the Soviet Communists supported them; they wanted the monarchy destroyed, too, but they planned to replace it with their own sort of government.”

  “A temporary alliance of the far right wing and the far left,” I said.

  Okking smiled wanly. “It’s happened before.”

  “And you were working for the Germans.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Through Seipolt?”

  Okking nodded. He wasn’t enjoying any bit of this. “Bogatyrev wanted you to find the prince. When you did, the duke’s man, whoever he is, would kill him.”

  I was astonished. “Bogatyrev was setting up the murder of his own nephew? His brother’s son?”

  “To preserve the monarchy at home, yes. They’d decided it was unfortunate but necessary. I told you it was dirty. When you wander into the highest level of international affairs, it’s almost always dirty.”

  “Why did Bogatyrev need me to find his nephew?”

  Okking shrugged. “In the past three years of the prince’s exile, he’d managed to disguise himself and hide pretty well. Sooner or later, he must have realized his life was in danger.”

  “Bogatyrev’s ‘son’ wasn’t killed in a traffic accident, then. You lied to me; he was still alive when you told me the matter was closed. But you say the Byelorussians did kill him, after all.”

  “He was that sex-change friend of yours. Nikki. Nikki was really the Crown Prince Nikolai Konstantin.”

  “Nikki?” I said in a flat voice. I was unnerved by the accumulated weight of the truths I’d demanded to hear, and by the weight of regret. I remembered Nikki’s terrified voice during that short, interrupted telephone call. Could I have saved her? Why hadn’t she trusted me more? Why didn’t she tell me the truth, tell me what she must have suspected? “Then Devi and the other two Sisters were killed—”

  “Just because they were too close to her. It didn’t make any difference whether or not they really knew anything dangerous. The German killer—Khan, now—and the Russian guy aren’t taking any chances. That’s why you’re on the list, too. That’s why . . . this.” The lieutenant opened a drawer and took something out, flipped it across his desk toward me.

  It was another note on computer paper, just like mine. Only it was addressed to Okking.

  “I’m not leaving the police station until this is all over,” he said. “I’m staying righ
t here with a hundred fifty friendly cops watching my back.”

  “I hope none of them is Bogatyrev’s knifeman,” I said. Okking winced. The idea had already occurred to him, too.

  I wished I knew how long the hit lists were, how many names followed mine and Okking’s. It was a shock when I realized that Yasmin could very well be on them. She knew at least as much as Selima had; more, because I’d told her what I knew and what I guessed. And Chiriga, was her name there? What about Jacques, Saied, and Mahmoud? And how many other people that I knew? Thinking about Nikki, who’d gone from prince to princess to dead, thinking about what I had ahead of me, I felt crushed; I looked at Okking and realized that he was crushed, too. Far worse than I. His career in the city was over, now that he had admitted to being a foreign agent.

  “I don’t have any more to tell you,” he said.

  “If you learn something, or if I need to get in touch with you . . .”

  “I’ll be here,” he said in a dead voice. “Inshallah.” I got up and left his office. It was like escaping from prison.

  Outside the station house, I unclipped my phone and spoke into it as I walked. I called the hospital and asked for Dr. Yeniknani.

  “Hello, Mr. Audran,” came his deep voice.

  “I wanted to find out about the old woman, Laila.”

  “It’s too soon to tell, to be quite frank. She may recover with the passage of time, but it doesn’t seem likely. She is old and frail. I have her sedated and she’s under constant observation. I’m afraid she might fall into an irreversible coma. Even if that doesn’t happen, there’s an extremely high probability that she will never regain her intelligent faculties. She will never be able to care for herself or perform the simplest tasks.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. I felt that I was to blame.

  “All is as Allah ordains,” I said numbly.

  “Praise be to Allah.”