A Fire in the Sun

by George Alec Effinger

  He raised a plump hand in denial. "No," he insisted, "I had nothing to do with that. Speak to your Lieutenant Hajjar about it."

  Lot of good that would do. "O Shaykh, may I ask you another question? There's something I don't understand about your relationship to Abu Adil."

  Suddenly he looked bored again. That put me on my guard. I gave a reflexive glance over my shoulders, half expecting to see the Stones That Speak moving in close behind me. "Your wealth comes from selling updated data files to governments and heads of state, doesn't it?"

  "That is greatly oversimplified, my nephew."

  "And Abu Adil pursues the same business. Yet you told me you do not compete."

  "Many years before you were born, before even your mother was born, Abu Adil and I came to an agreement." Papa opened a plain clothbound copy of the holy Qur'ân and glanced at the page. "We avoided competition because someday it could result in violence and harm to ourselves or those we love. On that long-ago day we divided the world, from Morocco far in the west to Indonesia far in the east, wherever the beautiful call of the muezzin awakens the faithful from sleep."

  "Like Pope Alexander drawing the Line of Demarcation for Spain and Portugal," I said.

  Papa looked displeased. "Since that time, Reda Abu Adil and I have had few dealings of any sort, although we live in the same city. He and I are at peace."

  Yeah, you right. For some reason, he wasn't going to give me any direct help. "O Shaykh," I said, "it's time for me to go. I pray to Allah for your health and prosperity." I came forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  "You will make me lonely for your presence," he replied. "Go in safety."

  I left Friedlander Bey's office. In the hallway, Kmuzu tried to take my briefcase from me. "It is unseemly for you to carry this, when I am here to serve you," he said.

  "You want to go through it and look for drugs," I said with some irritation. "Well, there aren't any in there. I got them in my pocket, and you'll have to wrestle me to the ground first."

  "You are being absurd, yaa Sidi," he said.

  "I don't think so. Anyway, I'm not ready to leave for the office yet."

  "It is already late."

  "Goddamn it, I know that! I just want to have a few words with Umm Saad, now that she's living under this roof again. Is she in the same suite?"

  "Yes. This way, yaa Sidi."

  Umm Saad, like my mother, stayed in the other wing of the mansion. While I followed Kmuzu through the carpeted halls, I opened my briefcase and took out Saied's moddy, the tough, ruthless personality. I chipped it in. The effect was remarkable. It was the opposite of the Half-Hajj's dumbing-down module, which had narrowed and blurred my senses. This one, which Saied always called Rex, seemed to focus my attention. I was filled with purpose; but more than that, I was determined to drive straight toward my goal, and I'd crush anything that tried to obstruct me.

  Kmuzu knocked lightly on Umm Saad's door. There was a long pause, and I heard no one stirring inside. "Get out of the way," I said to Kmuzu. My voice was a mean growl. I stepped up to the door and rapped on it sharply. "You want to let me in?" I called. "Or you want me to let myself in?"

  That got a response. The boy swung the door open and stared at me. "My mother isn't—"

  "Out of the way, kid," I said. I pushed him aside.

  Umm Saad was sitting at a table, watching the news on a small holoset. She looked up at me. "Welcome, O Shaykh," she said. She wasn't happy.

  "Yeah, right," I said. I sat in a chair across the table from her. I reached across and tapped the holoset off. "How long you known my mother?" I asked. Another shot in the dark.

  Umm Saad looked perplexed. "Your mother?"

  "Goes by Angel Monroe sometimes. She's staying down the hall from you."

  Umm Saad shook her head slowly. "I've only seen her once or twice. I've never spoken to her."

  "You must've known her before you came to this house." I just wanted to see how big this conspiracy was.

  "Sorry," she said. She gave me a wide-eyed, innocent smile that looked as out of place on her as it would have on a desert scorpion.

  Okay, sometimes a shot in the dark doesn't get you anywhere. "And Abu Adil?"

  "Who's that?" Her expression was all angelic and virtuous.

  I started to get angry. "I just want some straight answers, lady. What I got to do, bust up your kid?"

  Her face got very serious. She was doing "sincere" now. "I'm sorry, I really don't know any of those people. Am I supposed to? Did Friedlander Bey tell you that?"

  I assumed she was lying about Abu Adil. I didn't know if she'd been lying about my mother. At least I could check that out later. If I could believe my mother.

  I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Yaa Sidi?" said Kmuzu. He sounded afraid that I might rip Umm Saad's head off and hand it to her.

  "All right," I said, still feeling wonderfully malignant. I stood up and glared down at the woman. "You want to stay in this house, you're gonna have to learn to be more cooperative. I'm gonna talk to you again later. Think up some better answers."

  "I'll be looking forward to it," said Umm Saad. She batted her heavy fake eyelashes at me. It made me want to punch her face in.

  Instead, I turned and stalked out of the apartment. Kmuzu hurried behind me. "You can take the personality module out now, yaa Sidi," he said nervously.

  "Hell, I like it. Think I'll leave it in." Actually I did enjoy the feeling it gave me. There seemed to be a constant flood of angry hormones in my blood. I could see why Saied wore it all the time. Still, it wasn't the right one to wear around the station house, and Shaknahyi'd promised to annihilate any moddy I wore in his presence. I reached up reluctantly and popped it out.

  I could feel the difference immediately. My body was still quivering from the leftover adrenalin, but I calmed down pretty quick. I returned the moddy to my briefcase, then grinned at Kmuzu. "I was pretty tough, huh?" I said.

  Kmuzu didn't say a word, but his look let me know just how low his opinion was.

  We went outside, and I waited while Kmuzu brought the car around. When Kmuzu let me out at the station house, I told him to go back home and keep Angel Monroe out of trouble. "And pay attention around Umm Saad and the boy too," I said. "Friedlander Bey is sure she's somehow connected to Reda Abu Adil, but she's playing it very cagey. Maybe you can learn something."

  "I will be your eyes and ears, yaa Sidi," he said.

  As usual, the crowd of hungry young boys was loitering outside the copshop. They'd all begun waving and screaming when they saw my Westphalian sedan pull up to the curb. "O Master!" they cried. "O Compassionate!"

  I reached for a handful of coins as I usually did, but then I remembered the Lamb Lady I'd helped the week before. I took out my wallet and dropped a five-kiam bill on each of the kids. "God open upon you," I said. I was a little embarrassed to see that Kmuzu was watching me closely.

  The boys were astonished. One of the older kids took my arm and steered me away from the rest. He was about fifteen years old, and already there was a dark shadow of beard on his narrow face. "My sister would be interested to meet such a generous man," he said.

  "I'm just not interested in meeting your sister."

  He grinned at me. Three of his yellow teeth had been broken off in some fight or accident. "I have a brother as well," he said. I winced and went past him into the building. Behind me, the boys were yelling my praises. I was real popular with them, at least until tomorrow, when I'd have to buy their respect all over again.

  Shaknahyi was waiting for me by the elevator. "Where you at?" he said. It seemed that no matter how early I got to work, Shaknahyi got there earlier.

  "Aw right," I said. Actually, I was still tired and I felt mildly nauseated. I could chip in a couple of daddies that would take care of all that, but Shaknahyi had me intimidated. Around him I functioned with just my natural talents and hoped they were still enough.

  It wasn't that long ago that I prided myself on having an un-wir
ed brain as smart and quick as any moddy in the city. Now I was putting all my confidence in the electronics. I'd become afraid of what might happen if I had to face a crisis without them.

  "One of these days, we're gonna have to catch Abu Adil when he's not chipped in," said Shaknahyi. "We don't want to make him suspicious, but he's got some tough questions to answer."

  "What questions?"

  Shaknahyi shrugged. "You'll hear 'em next time we pass by there." For some reason, he wasn't confiding in me any more than Papa had.

  Sergeant Catavina found us in the corridor. I didn't know much about him except he was Hajjar's right-hand man, and that meant he had to be bent one way or another. He was a short man who lugged around too much weight by about seventy pounds. He had wavy black hair parted by a moddy plug, always with at least one daddy chipped in because he didn't understand five words in Arabic. It was a total mystery to me why Catavina had come to the city. "Been lookin' for you two," he said. His voice was shrill, even filtered through the Arabic-language daddy.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  Catavina's predatory brown eyes flicked between me and Shaknahyi. "Just got a tip on a possible homicide." He handed Shaknahyi a slip of paper with an address on it. "Go take a look."

  "In the Budayeen," said Shaknahyi.

  "Yeah," said the sergeant.

  "Whoever called this in, anybody recognize the voice?"

  "Why should anybody recognize the voice?" asked Catavina.

  Shaknahyi shrugged. "We got two or three leads like this in the last couple of months, that's all."

  Catavina looked at me. "He's one of these conspiracy guys. Sees 'em everywhere." The sergeant walked away, shaking his head.

  Shaknahyi glanced at the address again and jammed the slip of paper into a shirt pocket. "Back of the Budayeen, spitting distance from the graveyard," he said.

  "If it isn't just a crank call," I said. "If there is a body in the first place."

  "There will be."

  I followed him down to the garage. We got into our patrol car and cut across the Boulevard il-Jameel and under the big gate. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic on the Street that morning, so Shaknahyi angled south on First Street and then west along one of the narrow, garbage-strewn alleys that wind between the flat-roofed, stucco-fronted houses and the ancient brick tenements.

  Shaknahyi drove the car up onto the sidewalk. We got out and took a good look at the building. It was a pale green two-story house in terrible disrepair. The entryway and front parlor stank of urine and vomit. The wooden lattices covering the windows had all been smashed some time ago, from the look of things. Everywhere we walked, we crunched broken brick and shards of glass. The place had probably been abandoned for many months, maybe years.

  It was very still, the dead hush of a house where the power is off and even the faint whir of motors is missing. As we made our way up from the ground floor to the family's rooms above, I thought I heard something small and quick scurrying through the trash ahead of us. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, and I missed the sense of calm competence I'd gotten from Complete Guardian.

  Shaknahyi and I checked a large bedroom that had once belonged to the owner and his wife, and another room that had been a child's. We found nothing except more sad destruction. A corner of the house had entirely collapsed, leaving it open to the outside; weather, vermin, and vagrants had completed the ruin of the child's bedroom. At least here the fresh air had scoured out the sour, musty smell that choked the rest of the house.

  We found the corpse in the next room down the hall. It was a young woman's body, a sexchange named Blanca who used to dance in Frenchy Benoit's club. I'd known her well enough to say hello, but not much better. She lay on her back, her legs bent and turned to one side, her arms thrown up above her head. Her deep blue eyes were open, staring obliquely at the water-stained ceiling above my shoulder. She was grimacing, as if there'd been something horrible with her in the room that had first terrified her and then killed her.

  "This ain't bothering you, is it?" asked Shaknahyi.

  "What you talking about?"

  He tapped Blanca's hand with the toe of his boot. "You're not gonna throw up or nothing, are you?"

  "I seen worse," I said.

  "Just didn't want you throwing up or nothing." He bent down beside Blanca. "Blood from her nose and ears. Lips drawn back, fingers clutching like claws. She was juiced at close range by a good-sized static gun, I'll bet. Look at her. She hasn't been dead half an hour."

  "Yeah?"

  He lifted her left arm and let it fall. "No stiffness yet. And her flesh is still pink. After you're dead, gravity makes the blood settle. The medical examiner will be able to tell better."

  Something struck me as kind of odd. "So the call that came into the station—"

  "Bet you kiams to kitty cats the killer made the call himself." He took out his radio and his electronic log.

  "Why would a murderer do that?" I asked.

  Shaknahyi gazed at me, lost in thought. "The hell should I know?" he said at last. He made a call to Hajjar, asking for a team of detectives. Then he entered a brief report in his log. "Don't touch nothing," he said to me without looking up.

  He didn't have to tell me that. "We done here?" I asked.

  "Soon as the gold badges show up. In a hurry to travel?"

  I didn't answer. I watched him pocket his electronic log. Then he took out a brown vinyl-covered notebook and a pen and made some more notations. "What's that for?" I asked.

  "Just keeping some notes for myself. Like I said, there been a couple of other cases like this lately. Somebody turns up dead and it seems like the bumper himself tips us off."

  By the life of my eyes, I thought, if this turns out to be a serial killer, I'm going to pack up and leave the city for good. I glanced down at Shaknahyi, who was still squatting beside Blanca's body. "You don't think it's a serial killer, do you?" I asked.

  He stared through me again for a few seconds. "Nah," he said at last, "I think it's something much worse."

  8

  I REMEMBERED how much Hajjar's predecessor, Lieutenant Okking, had liked to harass me. Still, no matter how hard it had been to get along with Okking, he'd always gotten the job done. He'd been a shrewd if not brilliant cop, and he'd had a genuine concern for the victims he saw in a day's work. Hajjar was different. To him it was all a day's work, all right, but nothing more.

  It didn't surprise me to learn that Hajjar was next to useless. Shaknahyi and I watched as he went about his investigation. He frowned and looked down at Blanca. "Dead, huh?" he said.

  I saw Shaknahyi wince. "We got every reason to think so, Lieutenant," he said in a level voice.

  "Any ideas who'd want to shade her?"

  Shaknahyi looked at me for help. "Could be anybody," I said. "She was probably wearing the wrong moddy for the wrong customer."

  Hajjar seemed interested. "You think so?"

  "Look," I said. "Her plug's bare."

  The lieutenant's eyes narrowed. "So what?"

  "A moddy like Blanca never goes anywhere without something chipped in. It's suspicious, that's all."

  Hajjar rubbed his scraggly mustache. "I guess you'd know all about that. Not much to go on, though."

  "The plainclothes boys can work miracles sometimes," Shaknahyi said, sounding very sincere but winking to let me know just how little regard he had for them.

  "Yeah, you right," said Hajjar.

  "By the way, Lieutenant," said Shaknahyi, "I was wondering if you wanted us to keep after Abu Adil. We didn't get very far with him last week."

  "You want to go out there again? To his house?"

  "To his majestic palatial estate, you mean," I said.

  Hajjar ignored me. "I didn't mean for you to persecute the guy. He throws a lot of weight in this town."

  "Uh huh," said Shaknahyi. "Anyway, we're not doing any persecuting."

  "Why do you want to bother him again in the first place?" Hajjar looked at me, but
I didn't have an answer.

  "I got a hunch that Abu Adil has some connection to these unsolved homicides," said Shaknahyi.

  "What unsolved homicides?" Hajjar demanded.

  I could see Shaknahyi grit his teeth. "There've been three unsolved homicides in the last couple of months. Four now, including her." He nodded toward Blanca's body, which the M.E.'s boy had covered with a sheet. "They could be related, and they could be connected to Reda Abu Adil."

  "They're not unsolved homicides, for God's sake," said Hajjar angrily. "They're just open files, that's all."

  "Open files," said Shaknahyi. I could tell he was really disgusted. "You need us for anything else, Lieutenant?"

  "I guess not. You two can get back to work."

  We left Hajjar and the detectives going over Blanca's remains and her clothes and the dust and the moldy ruins of the house. Outside on the sidewalk, Shaknahyi pulled my arm and stopped me before I got into the patrol car. "The hell was that about the bitch's missing moddy?" he asked.

  I laughed. "Just hot air, but Hajjar won't know the difference. Give him something to think about, though, won't it?"

  "It's good for the lieutenant to think about something now and then. His brain needs the exercise." Shaknahyi grinned at me.

  We were both ready to call it a day. The sky had clouded over and a brisk, hot wind blew grit and smoke into our faces. Angry, grumbling thunder threatened from far away. Shaknahyi wanted to go back to the station house, but I had something else to take care of first. I undipped the phone from my belt and spoke Chiri's commcode into it. I heard it ring eight or nine times before she answered it. "Talk to me," she said. She sounded irked.

  "Chiri? It's Marîd."

  "What do you want, motherfucker?"

  "Look, you haven't given me any chance to explain. It's not my fault."

  "You said that before." She gave a contemptuous laugh. "Famous last words, honey: 'It's not my fault.' That's what my uncle said when he sold my mama to some goddamn Arab slaver."

  "I never knew—"

  "Forget it, it ain't even true. You wanted a chance to explain, so explain."