When Gravity Fails Read online

  The German seemed even less pleased. He replied with a single, curt sentence. The Arab spoke to me. “Reinhardt the doorman wishes to hear this question.”

  I grinned into Reinhardt’s hard eyes. “I’m only looking for my sister, Nikki.”

  The Arab shrugged and relayed the information. I saw Reinhardt blink and make the beginning of some gesture, then catch himself. He said something to the old fellah. “There is no one by that name here,” the Arab told me. “There are no women at all in this household.”

  “I am certain that my sister is here,” I said. “It is a matter of my family’s honor.” I sounded threatening; the Arab’s eyes opened wide.

  Reinhardt hesitated. He was undecided whether to slam the door in my face, after all, or kick this problem upstairs. I figured him for a coward; I was right. He didn’t want to take the responsibility for the decision, so he agreed to convey me somewhere inside the cool, lavishly furnished house. I was glad to get out of the hot sun. The old Arab disappeared, returning to his duties. Reinhardt did not deign to look at me or address a word in my direction; he merely walked deeper into the house, and I followed. We came to another heavy door, this one of a fine-grained dark hardwood. Reinhardt rapped; a gruff voice called out, and Reinhardt answered. There was a short pause, then the gruff voice gave an order. Reinhardt turned the doorknob, pushed the door open just a little, and walked away. I entered the room, putting the dumb-Arab look back on my face. I pressed my hands together in supplication and dipped my head a few times for good measure. “You are His Excellency?” I asked in Arabic.

  I was looking at a heavy, coarse-featured, bald man in his sixties, with a moddy and two or three daddies plugged into his sweat-shiny skull. He sat behind a heavily-littered desk, holding a telephone in one hand and a large, blued-steel needle gun in the other. He smiled at me. “Please do me the honor of coming closer,” he said in unaccented Arabic; it was probably a language daddy speaking for him.

  I bowed again. I was trying to think, but my mind was like a blank parchment. Needle guns do that to me sometimes. “O Excellent One,” I said, “I beg your pardon for intruding.”

  “To hell with all that ‘Excellent One’ bull. Tell me why you’re here. You know who I am. You know I don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  I pulled Nikki’s letter from my shoulder bag and gave it to him. I guessed he’d figure it out quickly enough.

  He read it through and then put down the telephone—but not the needle gun. “You’re Marîd, then?” he said. He’d stopped smiling.

  “I have that privilege,” I said.

  “Don’t get smart with me,” said Seipolt. “Sit down in that chair.” He waved me aside with the pistol. “I’ve heard one or two things about you.”

  “From Nikki?”

  Seipolt shook his head. “Here and there in the city. You know how Arabs like to gossip.”

  I smiled. “I didn’t realize I had such a reputation.”

  “It’s nothing to get excited about, kid. Now, what makes you think this Nikki, whoever she is, is here? This letter?”

  “Your house seemed like a good place to start looking. If she’s not here, why is your name so prominent in her plans?”

  Seipolt looked genuinely bewildered. “I don’t have any idea, and that’s the truth. I’ve never heard of your Nikki, and I don’t have the least interest in her. As my staff will attest, I haven’t had an interest in any woman in many years.”

  “Nikki’s not just any woman,” I said. “She’s a simulated woman built on a customized boy’s chassis. Maybe that’s what’s been stirring your interest during those years.”

  Seipolt’s expression grew impatient. “Let me be blunt, Audran. I no longer have the apparatus to get sexually interested in anyone or anything. I no longer have the desire to have that condition repaired. I have found that I prefer business. Versteh’?”

  I nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d allow me to search your lovely home,” I said. “I needn’t disturb you while you work: don’t mind me, I’ll be quiet as a jerboa.”

  “No,” he said, “Arabs steal things.” His smile grew slowly until it was an evil thing.

  I don’t taunt easily, so I just shook that one off. “May I have the letter back?” I asked.

  Seipolt shrugged; I went to his desk and picked up Nikki’s note, tucked it back in my shoulder bag. “Import-export?” I asked.

  Seipolt was surprised. “Yes,” he said. He looked down at a stack of bills of lading.

  “Anything in particular, or the usual odds and ends?”

  “What the hell difference does it make to you what I—” I waited for him to reach the middle of his outraged reply, then swiftly hit the inside of his right forearm with my left hand, swinging the muzzle of the needle gun away, and slapped him across his plump, white face with my right hand. Then I tightened my grip on his left wrist. We struggled silently for a moment. He was sitting, and I was standing over him, balanced, with momentum and surprise on my side. I twisted his wrist outward, abusing the small bones in his forearm. He grunted and dropped the needle gun to the desk, and with my right hand I swept it all the way across the room with one motion. He made no attempt to retrieve it. “I have other weapons,” he said softly. “I have alarms to summon Reinhardt and the others.”

  “I do not doubt that,” I said, not relaxing my hold on his wrist. I felt my little sadistic streak beginning to enjoy this. “Tell me about Nikki,” I said.

  “She’s never been here, I don’t know a damn thing about her,” said Seipolt. He was starting to suffer. “You can hold the gun on me, we can fight and wrestle around the room, you can battle my men, you can search the house. Goddamn it, I don’t know who your Nikki is! If you don’t believe me now, there isn’t a damn thing in the world I can say that will change your mind. Now, let’s see how smart you really are.”

  “At least four people received that same letter,” I said, thinking out loud. “Two of them are dead now. Maybe the police could find some clue here, even if I couldn’t.”

  “Let go of my wrist.” His voice was icy and commanding. I let go of his wrist; there didn’t seem to be much point in holding it any longer, anyway. “Go ahead and call the police. Let them search. Let them persuade you. Then after they leave, I will make you sorry you ever stepped onto my property. If you don’t get out of my office right now, you uncivilized idiot, you may never get another chance. Versteh’?”

  “Uncivilized idiot” was a popular insult in the Budayeen that doesn’t translate well. I was doubtful that it had been included in Seipolt’s daddy vocabulary; I was amused that he had picked up the idiom in his years among us.

  I cast a quick glance at his needle gun, lying on the carpet about a dozen feet from me. I would have liked to take it with me, but that would be bad manners. I wasn’t going to fetch it for Seipolt, though; let him have Reinhardt pick it up. “Thanks for everything,” I said, with a friendly look on my face. Then I changed my expression to the very respectful, dumb Arab. “I am obliged to you, O Excellent One. May your day be happy, may you awaken tomorrow in health!” Seipolt only stared at me hatefully. I backed away from him—not because of any wariness, but only to exaggerate the Arabic courtesy I was mocking him with. I passed through the office door and closed it softly. Then I stared up into Reinhardt’s face again. I grinned and bowed; he showed me out. I paused on my way to the front door to admire some shelves filled with various kinds of rare artworks: pre-Columbian, Tiffany glass, Lalique crystal, Russian religious icons, ancient Egyptian and Greek statuary fragments. Among the hodgepodge of periods and styles was a ring, obscure and inconspicuous, a simple band of silver and lapis lazuli. I had seen that ring before, around one of Nikki’s fingers while she played endlessly, twisting the locks of her hair. Reinhardt was studying me too closely; I wanted to grab the ring, but it was impossible.

  At the door, I turned and began to give Reinhardt some Arabic formula of gratitude, but I didn’t have the chance: this time, with
great relish, the blond Aryan bastard flung the door shut, almost breaking my nose. I went back along the pebble drive, lost in thought. I got into Bill’s cab. “Home,” I said.

  “Huh,” Bill grunted. “Play hurt, play with pain. Easy for him to say, the son of a bitch. And there’s the best defensive line in history waiting for me to twitch my little pink ass, waiting to tear my head off and hand it to me, right? ‘Sacrifice.’ So I hoped they’d call some dinky pass play and let me rest; but no, not today. The quarterback was an afrit, he only looked like a human being. I had him spotted, all right. When he handed it off, the ball was always hot as coals. I should have guessed something was up, even back then. Fire demons. A little bit of burning brimstone and smoke, see, and the referee can’t see them grabbing at your facemask. Afrits cheat. Afrits want you to know what it’s going to be like for you after you’re dead, when they can do anything they want to you. They like to play with your mind like that. Afrits. Kept calling off-tackle plunges all afternoon. Hot as hell.”

  “Let’s go home, Bill,” I said more loudly.

  He turned to look at me. “Easy for you to say,” he muttered. Then he started his old taxi and backed out of Seipolt’s drive.

  I called Lieutenant Okking’s commcode during the ride back to the Budayeen. I told him about Seipolt and Nikki’s note. He didn’t seem to be very interested. “Seipolt’s nobody,” said Okking. “He’s a rich nobody from reunited Neudeutschland.”

  “Nikki was scared, Okking,” I told him.

  “She probably lied to you and the others in those letters. She lied about where she was going, for some reason. Then it didn’t work out the way she’d planned, and tried to get in touch with you. Whoever she’d gone with didn’t let her finish.” I could; almost hear him shrug. “She didn’t do a smart thing, Marîd. She’s probably been hurt because of it, but it wasn’t Seipolt.”

  “Seipolt may be nobody,” I said bitterly, “but he lies very well under pressure. Have you figured out anything about Devi’s murder? Some connection with Tamiko’s killing?”

  “There probably isn’t any connection, buddy, as much as you and your criminal colleagues want there to be. The Black Widow Sisters are the kind of people who get themselves murdered, that’s all. They ask for it, so they get it. Just coincidence that the two of them were postmarked so close together.”

  “What kind of clues did you find at Devi’s?”

  There was a brief silence. “What the hell, Audran, all of a sudden I have a new partner? Who the fuckin’ hell do you think you are? Where do you get off questioning me? As if you didn’t know I couldn’t talk police business with you like that, even if I wanted to, which is not in the most minute sense true. Go away, Marîd. You’re bad luck.” Then he snapped the connection.

  I put my phone in my bag and closed my eyes. It was a long, dusty, hot ride back to the Budayeen. It would have been quiet, except for Bill’s constant monologue; and it would have been comfortable, except for Bill’s dying taxi. I thought about Seipolt and Reinhardt; Nikki and the sisters; Devi’s killer, whoever he was; Tamiko’s mad torturer, whoever he was. None of it made any sense to me at all.

  Okking had just been telling me that very thing: It didn’t make sense because there was no sense. You can’t find a point in a pointless killing. I had just become aware of the random violence in which I had lived for years, part of it, ignoring it, believing myself immune to it. My mind was trying to take the unrelated events of the last several days and make them fit a pattern, like making warriors and mythical beasts out of scattered stars in the night sky. Senseless, pointless; yet the human mind seeks explanations. It demands order, and only something like RPM or Sonneine can quiet that clamoring or, at least, distract the mind with something else.

  Sounded like a great idea to me. I took out my pill case and swallowed four sunnies. I didn’t bother offering anything to Bill; he’d paid in advance, and anyway he had a private screening.

  I had Bill let me out at the eastern gate of the Budayeen. The fare was thirty kiam; I gave him forty. He stared at the money for a long time until I took it back and pushed it into the pocket of his shirt. He looked up at me as if he’d never met me before. “Easy for you to say,” he murmured.

  I needed to learn a few things, so I went directly to a modshop on Fourth Street. The modshop was run by a twitchy old woman who’d had one of the first brain jobs. I think the surgeons must have missed what they’d been aiming for just slightly, or else Laila had always made you feel like getting out of her presence as quickly as possible. She couldn’t talk to you without whining. She crooked her head and stared up at you as if she were some kind of garden mollusk and you were about to step on her. You sometimes considered stepping on her, but she was too quick. She had long, straggly gray hair; bushy gray eyebrows; yellow eyes; bloodless lips and depopulated jaws; black skin, scaled and scabrous; and the same crooked, clawed fingers that a witch ought to have. She had one moddy or another plugged in all day, but her own personality—and it wasn’t a likable personality at all—bled through as if the moddy weren’t exciting the right cells, or enough of them, or strongly enough. You’d get Janis Joplin with static-like flashes of Laila, you’d get the Marquise Josephine Rose Kennedy with Laila’s nasal whine, but it was her shop and her merchandise, and if you didn’t want to put up with her, you went elsewhere.

  I went to Laila because even though I wasn’t wired, she let me “borrow” any moddy or daddy she had in stock, by plugging it into herself. If I needed to do a little research, I went to Laila and hoped that she didn’t distort what I had to learn in any lethal way.

  This afternoon she was being herself, with only a bookkeeping add-on and an inventory-management add-on plugged in. It was that time of the year again; how the months fly when you take a lot of drugs.

  “Laila,” I said. She was so much like the old hag in Snow White that you couldn’t think of more to say to her. Laila was one person with whom you didn’t make small talk, whatever you wanted from her.

  She looked up, her lips mumbling stock numbers, quantities, markups, and markdowns. She nodded.

  “What do you know about James Bond?” I asked.

  She put her microrecorder down and tapped it off. She stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes getting very round, then very narrow. “Marîd,” she said. She managed to whine my name.

  “What do you know about James Bond?”

  “Videos, books, twentieth-century power fantasies. Spies, that kind of action. He was irresistible to women. You want to be irresistible?” She whined at me suggestively.

  “I’m working on that on my own, thanks. I just want to know if anybody’s bought a James Bond moddy from you lately.”

  “No, I’m sure of it. Haven’t even had one in stock for a long time. James Bond is kind of ancient history, Marîd. People are looking for new jams. Cloak-and-dagger is too quaint for words.” When she stopped talking, numbers formed on her lips as her daddies went on speaking to her brain.

  I knew about James Bond because I’d read the books—actual, physical books made out of paper. At least, I’d read some of them, four or five. Bond was a Eur-Am myth like Tarzan or Johnny Carson. I wish Laila had had a Bond moddy; it might have helped me understand what Devi’s killer was thinking. I shook my head; something was tickling my mind again. . . .

  I turned my back on Laila and left her shop. I glanced at a holographic advertisement playing on the sidewalk outside her display window. It was Honey Pílar. She looked about eight feet tall and absolutely naked. When you’re Honey Pílar, naked is the only way to go. She was running her lascivious hands over her superluminally sexy body. She shook her pale hair out of her green eyes and stared at me. She slid the pink tip of her tongue across her unnaturally full, luscious lips. I stood watching the holoporn, mesmerized. That was what it was for, and it was working just fine. At the edge of my consciousness, I was aware that several other men and women had stopped in their tracks and were staring, too. Then Honey spoke. H
er voice, enhanced electronically to send chills of desire through my already lust-ridden body, reminded me of adolescent longings I hadn’t thought of in years. My mouth was dry; my heart was pounding.

  The hologram was selling Honey’s new moddy, the one Chiri already owned. If I bought one for Yasmin. . . .

  “My moddy lies over the ocean,” said Honey in a breathy, soft voice, while her hands slid slowly down the copious upper slopes of her perfect breasts. . . .

  “My moddy lies over the sea.” Her hands tweaked her nipples hard, then found their way to the delicious undersides of those breasts and continued southward. . . .

  “Now someone is jamming my moddy,” she confided, as her fiery fingernails lightly touched her flat belly, still searching, still seeking. . . .

  “Now he knows what it’s like to jam me!” Her eyes were half-closed with ecstasy. Her voice became a drawn-out moan, pleading for the continuation of that pleasure. She was begging me, as her hands at last slipped out of sight between her suntanned thighs.

  As the hologram faded, another woman’s voice overdubbed the details of manufacturer and cost. “Haven’t you tried modular marital aids? Are you still using holoporn? Look, if using a rubber is like kissing your sister, then holoporn is like kissing a picture of your sister! Why stare at a holo of Honey Pílar, when with her new moddy you can jam the livin’ daylights out of her again and again, whenever you want! Come on! Give your girlfriend or boyfriend the new Honey Pílar moddy today! Modular marital aids are sold as novelty items only.”

  The voice faded away and let me have my mind back. The other spectators, similarly released, went on about their business a little unsteadily. I turned toward the Street, thinking first about Honey Pílar, then about the moddy I would give Yasmin as an anniversary present (as soon as possible, for the anniversary of anything. Hell, I didn’t care), and at last the tantalizing thing that had been bothering me. I’d thought of it first after I spoke with Okking about the shooting in Chiriga’s nightclub, and again today.