When Gravity Fails Read online

  “Fifteen hundred more, tomorrow,” he said.

  “Inshallah,” I said mockingly.

  Abdoulaye raised a hand to strike me, but Hassan caught it and restrained him. Hassan muttered a few words to Abdoulaye, but I couldn’t make them out. I shoved the remaining fifty in my pocket, and realized that I had no other money with me. I should have had some—the money I’d had the day before plus Nikki’s hundred, less whatever I’d spent last night. Maybe Nikki had clipped it, or one of the Black Widow Sisters. It didn’t make any difference. Hassan and Abdoulaye were having some sort of whispered consultation. Finally Abdoulaye touched his forehead, his lips, and his chest, and walked away. Hassan grasped my elbow and led me back into his luxurious, glossy black automobile. I tried to speak; it took a moment. “Where?” I asked. My voice sounded strange, hoarse, as if I hadn’t used it in decades.

  “I will take you to the hospital,” said Hassan. “If you will forgive me, I must leave you there. I have pressing obligations. Business is business.”

  “Action is action,” I said.

  Hassan smiled. I don’t think he bore me any personal animosity. “Salaamtak,” he said.

  He was wishing me peace.

  “Allah yisallimak,” I replied. I climbed out of the car at the charity hospital, and went to the emergency clinic. I had to show my identification and wait until they called up my records from their computer memory. I took a seat on a gray steel folding chair with a printed copy of my records on my lap, and waited for my name to be called. I waited eleven hours; the sunnies faded after ninety minutes. The rest of the time was a delirious hell. I sat in a huge room filled with sick and wounded people, all poor, all suffering. The wail of pain and the shrieks of babies never ended. The air reeked of tobacco smoke, the stink of bodies, of blood and vomit and urine. A harried doctor saw me at last, muttered to himself as he examined me, asked me no questions at all, taped my ribs, wrote out a prescription, and ordered me away.

  It was too late to get the scrip filled at a pharmacy, but I knew I could score some expensive drugs on the Street. It was now about two in the morning; the action would be strong. I had to limp all the way back to the Budayeen, but my rage at Nikki fueled me. I had a score to settle with Tami and her friends, too.

  When I got to Chiriga’s club, it was half-empty and oddly quiet. The girls and debs sat listlessly; the customers stared into their beers. The music was blaring as loud as usual, of course, and Chiri’s own voice cut through that noise with her shrill Swahili accent. But laughter was missing, the undercurrent of double-edged conversations. There was no action. The bar smelled of stale sweat, spilled beer, whiskey, and hashish.

  “Marîd,” said Chiri when she saw me. She looked tired. It had evidently been a long, slow night with little money in it for anybody.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” I said. “You look like you could use one.”

  She managed a tired smile. “When have I ever said no to that?”

  “Never that I can recall,” I said.

  “Never will, either.” She turned and poured herself a drink out of a special bottle she kept under the bar.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Tende. An East African specialty.”

  I hesitated. “Let me have one of those.”

  Chiri’s expression became very mock-serious. “Tende no good for white bwana. Knock white bwana on his mgongo.”

  “It’s been a long, rotten day for me, too, Chiri,” I said. I handed her a ten-kiam note.

  She looked sympathetic. She poured me some tende, and raised her glass in a toast. “Kwa siha yako,” she said in Swahili.

  I picked up my drink. “Sahtayn,” I said in Arabic. I tasted the tende. My eyebrows went up. It tasted fiery and unpleasant; still I knew that if I worked at it, I could develop a taste for it. I drained the glass.

  Chiri shook her head. “This nigger girl scared for white bwana. Wait for white bwana to throw up all over her nice, clean bar.”

  “Another one, Chiri. Keep ’em coming.”

  “Your day’s been that bad? Honey, step over here by the light.”

  I went around the edge of the bar where she could see me better. My face must have looked ghastly. She reached up gently to touch the bruises on my forehead, around my eyes, my purple, swollen lips and nostrils. “I just want to get drunk fast, Chiri,” I said, “and I’m broke, too.”

  “You couped three thousand off that Russian, didn’t you tell me about that? Or did I hear that from somebody else? Yasmin, maybe. After the Russian ate that bullet, you know, both of my new girls quit, and so did Jamila.” She poured me some more tende.

  “Jamila is no great loss.” She was a deb, a pre-op transsexual who never intended to get the operation. I started on my second drink. It seemed to be on the house.

  “Easy for you to say. Let’s see you lure tourists in here without naked boobies shaking on stage. You want to tell me what happened to you?”

  I shook the glass of liquor back and forth, gently. “Another time.”

  “You looking for anybody in particular?”

  “Nikki.”

  Chiri gave a little laugh. “That explains some of it, but Nikki couldn’t bust you up that bad.”

  “The Sisters.”

  “All three?”

  I grimaced. “Individually and in concert.”

  Chiri glanced upward. “Why? What did you do to them?”

  I snorted. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Chiri cocked her head and looked at me sideways for a moment. “You know,” she said softly, “I did see Nikki today. She came by my place about ten this morning. She said to tell you ‘thank you.’ She didn’t say why, but I suppose you know. Then she went off looking for Yasmin.”

  I felt my anger starting to bubble up again. “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No.”

  I relaxed again. If anyone in the Budayeen knew where Nikki was, it would be Tamiko. I didn’t like the thought of facing that crazy bitch again, but I was sure as hell going to. “You know where I can seize some stuff?”

  “What you need, baby?”

  “Oh, say, half a dozen sunnies, half a dozen tri-phets, half a dozen beauties.”

  “And you say you’re broke, too?” She reached down under the bar again and found her bag. She rummaged through it and came up with a black plastic cylinder. “Take this into the men’s room and pocket what you need. You can owe me. We’ll work something out—maybe I’ll take you home with me tonight.”

  That was an exciting though daunting thought. I haven’t been intimidated by many women, changes, debs, or boys in my time; I mean, I’m no superhuman sex machine, but I get along. Chiri, though, was a scary proposition. Those evil, patterned scars and filed teeth. . . . “I’ll be right back,” I said, palming the black cylinder.

  “I just got Honey Pílar’s new module,” Chiri called after me. “I’m dying to try it out. You ever want to jam Honey Pílar?”

  It was a very tempting suggestion, but I had other business for the next hour or so. After that . . . with Honey Pílar’s personality module plugged in, Chiri would become Honey Pílar. She’d jam the way Honey had jammed when the module was recorded. You close your eyes and you’re in bed with the most desirable woman in the world, and the only man she wants is you, begging for you . . .

  I took some tabs and caps from Chiri’s caddy and came back out into the club. Chiri looked down along the bar casually as I put the black cylinder in her hand. “Nobody’s making no money tonight,” she said dully. “Another drink?”

  “Got to run. Action is action,” I said.

  “Business is business,” said Chiri. “Such as it is. It would be if these cheap motherfuckers would spend a little money. Remember what I said about my new moddy, Marîd.”

  “Listen, Chiri, if I get finished and you’re still here, we’ll break it in together. Inshallah.”

  She gave me that grin of hers that I liked so much. “Kwa heri, Marî
d,” she said.

  “As-salaam alaykum,” I said. Then I hurried out into the warm, drizzling night, taking a deep breath of the sweet scent of some flowering tree.

  The tende had lifted my spirits, and I had swallowed a tri-phet and a sunny. I’d be doing all right when I booted my way into Tamiko’s phony geisha rat’s nest. I practically ran the whole way up the Street to Thirteenth, except I discovered I couldn’t. I used to be able to run a lot farther than that. I decided it wasn’t age that had slowed me down, it was the abuse my body had taken that morning. Yeah, that was it. Sure.

  Two-thirty, three in the morning, and koto music is coming out of Tami’s window. I pounded on her door until my hand started to hurt.

  She couldn’t hear me; it was either the loud music or her drugged state. I tried to force the door and found that it was unlocked. I went slowly and quietly up the stairs. Almost everyone around me in the Budayeen is modified somehow, with personality modules and add-ons wired down deep into their brains, giving them skills and talents and inputs of information; or even, as with the Honey Pílar moddy, entirely new personalities. I alone walked among them unaltered, relying on nerve and stealth and savvy. I out-hustled the hustlers, pitting my native wits against their computer-boosted awareness.

  Right now, my native wits were yelling at me that something was wrong. Tami wouldn’t have left her door open. Unless she did it for Nikki, who’d left her key behind. . . .

  At the top of the stairs I saw her, in much the same position I’d seen her in the day before. Tamiko’s face was painted the same stark white with the same gruesome black highlights. She was naked, though, and her unnatural, surgically enhanced body was pale against the hardwood floor. Her skin had a wan, sick pallor to it, except for the dark burn marks and the bruises around her wrists and throat. There was a wide slash from her right carotid artery to the left, and a great pool of blood had formed, into which her white makeup had run off a little. This Black Widow would never sting anyone again.

  I sat near her on the cushions and looked at her, trying to understand it. Maybe Tami had just picked up the wrong trick, and he’d pulled his weapon before she could uncap hers. The burn marks and the bruises spelled torture, long, slow, painful torture. Tami had been paid back many times over for what she’d done to me. Qadaa oo qadar—a judgment of God and fate.

  I was about to call Lieutenant Okking’s office when my phone rang on my belt. I was so lost in thought, staring at Tami’s corpse, that the ringing startled me. Sitting in a room with a staring dead woman is scary enough. I answered the phone. “Yeah?” I said.

  “Marîd? You’ve got to—” And then I heard the line go dead. I wasn’t even sure whose voice it had been, but I thought I recognized it. It sounded like Nikki’s.

  I sat there a little longer, wondering if Nikki had been trying to ask me for something or warn me. I felt cold, unable to move. The drugs took effect, but this time I barely noticed. I took a couple of deep breaths and spoke Okking’s commcode into the phone. No Honey Pílar tonight.

  5

  I learned an interesting fact.

  It didn’t make up for the particularly foul day I’d had, but it was a fact I could file in my highly regarded cerebrum: police lieutenants are rarely enthusiastic about homicides reported less than half an hour before they’re supposed to go off duty. “Your second cadaver in less than a week,” Okking observed, when he showed up at the Thirteenth Street apartment. “We’re not going to start paying you commissions on these, if that’s what you’re after. On the whole, we try to discourage this sort of thing, if we can.”

  I looked at Okking’s tired, florid face and guessed that in the middle of the night, this passed for wry cop humor. I don’t know where Okking was from—one or another dilapidated, bankrupt European country I guess, or one of the North American federations—but he had a genuine gift for getting along with the innumerable squabbling factions residing under his jurisdiction. His Arabic was the worst I’d ever heard—he and I usually held our acerbic conversations in French—yet he was able to handle the several Muslim sects, the devoutly religious and the nonpracticing, Arab and non-Arab, the rich and poor, honest and slightly bent, all with the same elegant touch of humanity and impartiality. Believe me, I hate cops. A lot of people in the Budayeen fear cops or distrust cops or just plain don’t like them. I hate cops. My mother had been forced into prostitution when I was very young, to keep us both fed and sheltered. I remember with painful clarity the games the cops had played with her then. That had been in Algeria a long time ago, but cops were cops to me. Except for Lieutenant Okking.

  The medical examiner’s usually stoic expression showed a little distaste when he saw Tamiko. She had been dead about four hours, he said. He could get a general description of the murderer from the handprints on her neck and other clues. The killer had plump, stubby fingers, and mine are long and tapered. I had an alibi, too: I had the receipt from the hospital stamped with the time of my treatment, and the written prescription. “Okay, friend,” said Okking, still jovial in his sour way, “I guess it’s safe to let you back out on the streets.”

  “What do you think?” I asked, indicating Tami’s body.

  Okking shrugged. “It looks like we’ve got some kind of maniac. You know these whores end up like this every so often. It’s part of their overhead, like face paint and tetracycline. The other whores write it off and try not to think about it. They’d better think about it, though, because whoever did this is likely to do it again; that’s been my experience. We might end up with two or three or five or ten dead people before we catch up with him. You go tell your friends what you saw. You tell it to them so they listen. Get the word around. Spread it among the six or eight sexes we’ve got in these walls not to accept dates with men about five and a half feet tall, heavyset, with short, fat fingers and a yen for the ultimate sadism while he’s getting laid.” Oh, yeah: the M.E. found that the killer had taken a trip around the world while he’d been beating Tami, branding her naked skin, and strangling her. Traces of semen had been found in all three orifices.

  I did my best to get the word out. Everyone agreed with my own secret opinion: whoever had killed Tami had better watch his awn ass. Anybody who jammed with the Black Widow Sisters usually got himself jammed up, and trashed. Devi and Selima would be picking up every guy they could find who fit the general description, just in the hope he was the right one. I had the feeling they wouldn’t slip the toxin to him at the first chance, either. I’d learned how much they enjoyed what they thought of as foreplay.

  The next day was Yasmin’s day off, and about two in the afternoon I gave her a call. She hadn’t been home all night; it was none of my business where she’d been. I was amused and startled to find out that I was, however, just the least bit jealous. We made a date for dinner at five at our favorite café. You can sit at a table on the terrace and watch the traffic on the Street. Only two blocks from the gate, the Street isn’t so tawdry. The restaurant was a good place to relax. I didn’t tell Yasmin about any of the previous day’s trouble over the phone. She would have kept me talking all afternoon, and she needed the three hours to make the dinner date on time.

  As it was, I had two drinks while I waited for her at the table. She arrived about quarter to six. Three quarters of an hour late is about average for Yasmin; in fact, I hadn’t really expected her until after six o’clock. I wanted to get a couple of drinks ahead. I’d had only about four hours of sleep, and I struggled with terrible nightmares the whole time. I wanted to get some liquor into me, and a good meal, and have Yasmin hold my hand while I told her of my ordeal.

  “Marhaba!” she called gaily as she wove her way between the iron tables and chairs.

  I signaled to Ahmad, our waiter, and he took Yasmin’s drink order and left menus. I looked at her as she studied her menu. She was wearing a light cotton European-style summer dress, yellow with white butterflies. Her black hair was brushed down sleek and lustrous. She wore a silver crescent on a
silver chain around her darkly tanned neck. She looked lovely. I hated to bother her now with my news. I decided to put it off as long as I could.

  “So,” she said, looking up at me and grinning, “how was your day?”

  “Tamiko’s dead,” I said. I felt like a fool. There must have been a way to begin the story with less of an awful thud.

  She sort of goggled at me. She murmured an Arabic superstitious phrase to ward off evil.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. Then I started with dawn, yesterday morning, and my enthusiastic wake-up call from the Sisters. I went through the whole day, ending with my dismissal by Okking and my weary and lonely walk home.

  I saw a tear slide slowly down one of her carefully blushed cheeks. She wasn’t able to speak for several seconds. I didn’t know she’d be so upset; I berated myself for my clumsiness.

  “I wish I’d been with you last night,” she said at last. She didn’t realize how hard she was squeezing my hand. “I had a date, Marîd, some guy from the club. He’s been coming in to see me for weeks, and finally last night he offered me two hundred kiam to go out with him. He’s a nice guy, I suppose, but—”

  I raised a hand. I didn’t need to hear this. I didn’t care how she paid her rent. I would have liked to have had her with me last night, too. I would have liked to have held her between the nightmares. “It’s all over now, I guess,” I said. “Let me blow the rest of my fifty kiam on this dinner, and then let’s go for a long walk.”

  “Do you really think it’s all over?”

  I chewed my lip. “Except for Nikki. I wish I knew what that phone call meant. I just can’t understand her running out on me like that, sticking me for Abdoulaye’s three thousand. I mean, in the Budayeen, you can never be sure how loyal your friends are; but I’d gotten Nikki out of one or two scrapes before. I thought that might have counted for something with her.”