Noir Page 27

  “Really?” The man sitting on the other side of the desk wasn’t a doctor, not a real one; not even an imitation of a fake one. He was just an Adder clome, the commercial cloned replica of the maybe-fictional character that was always found running one of these Snake Medicine™ franchises. For his costume, the Adder clome wore a doctor’s white examining-room coat and had a prop stethoscope tucked in the breast pocket. The brow of his hatchetlike face, the surgical embodiment of the corporate image, was encircled by a headband with that mysterious metal disk on it, which always indicated somebody was a doctor in the old movies. “Who was it?” the Adder clome asked.

  “You’re not really interested…”

  “No,” said the Adder clome. “But tell me anyway.”

  “It was a woman,” said McNihil. “In a bar.” He didn’t need to tell what kind of a bar it’d been. He wasn’t sure, himself. He’d let himself fall so far beneath the opacity of his vision, into the world leaking out of his eyes, that any details from the other world had been completely obscured. There wasn’t any less pain to feel that way, but it seemed more appropriate, at least. He could exist as a beat-up operative on a cracked leatherette barstool, downing a shot and a chaser, in a place with beer spilled on the floor and neon flickering like ionic discharge in the mirror behind the nameless bottles. “Ironic discharge,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said McNihil. “A misfire in the brain. Some of the connections are still loose.” The woman in the bar had offered to tighten them for him. Or a similar service. She’d sat down on the stool next to his, so close that he’d been able to tell the difference between her flesh and his, through the thin layers of his trousers and her skirt. Which was all right; it fit in perfectly with the world he saw, that he preferred to see. McNihil had brought his gaze up from the depths of his glass and looked over at her. What he’d seen had made him both remember and forget the cube bunny that had so briefly visited his shabby apartment. The woman had been the ultimate barfly, a movie vision of glamour and lust, like the dream of what nameless women in a dive bar should look like. Complete with luminous golden hair in a soft curve along one side of her face, à la Veronica Lake. But with a radiation as bemusedly intelligent as Lizabeth Scott, giving a hard time to Humphrey Bogart in the ’47 classic Dead Reckoning. Her gaze, the unhidden part of it that McNihil had been able to see, was colder than his dead wife’s.

  “You have to watch out for ones like that,” said the Adder clome. “It’d be better if they wanted money. Then you could deal with them. But all they want is trouble.”

  McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d spoken anything else aloud. About the woman or the bar. But then, the man on the other side of the desk, sitting beneath nonsensical framed diplomas-he was supposed to know. It was his business to know things like that. If someone possessed bad longings, kundalinic warps, guiltily sweating desires, this was the place to have them read out. As though the non-doctor could spread one’s heart open on his palms and decipher the quivering lines that spelled out life and destiny.

  “That must be why she came my way.” McNihil leaned back in the office’s smaller chair, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. “She figured I had enough to spare.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  McNihil didn’t answer. He was wishing himself back in the bar, preferring it to this place, with its smells of disinfectant-swabbed chrome and blood-soaked cloths thrown in the plastic bags marked For Biological Waste Only. Which was what he felt like at the moment, but he was trying to maintain.

  The ultimate barfly, the woman with the cold dead gaze, had asked him the same thing. To which he’d replied, I’ve got an appointment nearby. Just killing time till then. Her hand had smelled of nicotine and lust as she’d touched him, stroking the side of his neck as she’d leaned toward him. Is that, she’d asked, all that you want to kill?

  “I asked you a question.” The Adder clome’s voice tapped at McNihil’s ear. “We’re not going to get very far if you don’t tell me.”

  McNihil pulled his darkened gaze away from memory and toward the white-coated figure. “You know already,” he said. “Why I’m here. Harrisch told me to come and see you.”

  “Oh, well… sure.” The Adder clome shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of work for Harrisch over the years. Him and the rest of his pals over there at DynaZauber. Regular customers. Anything they want, from one of those silly little iris tattoos on a secretary’s ankle, to a Full Prince Charles job, we’re happy to provide. We’ve got a corporate account set up and everything.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Standard business practice.” Leaning back in his leather-clad swivel chair, the Adder clome made a cage of his elongated fingers. “There’s a certain natural… shall we say?… interface between their operations and mine.”

  “‘Natural,’” said McNihil, “isn’t the word I would’ve used.”

  “Already with the sarcasm.” A slow shake of the head. “And we hardly know each other.”

  “I know you well enough.” Slouched in the smaller chair, McNihil gestured at the office’s confines, at the ersatz medical diplomas and the regrettably accurate photographs of procedures and results. “I’ve been inside a Snake Medicine™ franchise before. You Adders are all alike.”

  “From one reptile to another, then.” The white-coated figure’s gaze sharpened, stripped of a layer of civility. “I suppose an asp-head such as yourself has a certain… authority in these matters. You should already know, then, that if we’re all alike, it’s because we’re supposed to be that way. There are standards we have to maintain that come right down from the SM headquarters itself. Not just hygiene requirements and surgical quotas and the advertisements we run on the shellbacks-all that stuff.” Whatever nerve had been struck was wired to simmering grievances. The Adder clome’s voice tightened to a rasp. “The only reason I’m taking the time to meet with you at all is because DynaZauber bought out a fifty-one-percent share in the SM holding company. Now that Harrisch is on our board of directors, all of the franchisees have got his boot on their necks. We either produce or the head office’s goons will come out and strip the signs off the building.”

  “I’m bleeding for you.” McNihil was past taking consolation in other people’s miseries. “So we’re working for the same guy. Do I look overjoyed about it?”

  The Adder clome moodily pushed a blunted scalpel around on the desk. “All right; so Harrisch sent you here. And I’m supposed to talk to you. About what?”

  “Beats me,” said McNihil. “I wasn’t provided with an agenda for the meeting.”

  “What’s the job you’re doing for Harrisch? Maybe that’d help, if I knew that.” The Adder clome picked up the metal instrument and pointed it toward McNihil. “You at least know that much, don’t you?”

  “I’m looking for something…”

  “Everybody who comes in here says that. One way or another.”

  “Something that belongs to Harrisch. Or to DynaZauber.” McNihil saw a triangular section of his own face reflected in the scalpel’s blade. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a distinction between those two anymore.” The polished metal made his face look just as bright and hard. “But it’s something he lost. Or it got lost for him. And he wants it back.”

  “Oh?” The Adder clome showed no sign of doubting him. “Mr. Harrisch does, indeed, set great store at not losing… things. Just what kind of thing are we talking about?”

  McNihil shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”

  “Now that,” said the Adder clome, “is very much like Harrisch. Rather a private individual. Where did this certain item get lost?”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you.” McNihil tilted his head back, a gesture indicating the office’s door and the nocturnal world beyond the Snake Medicine™ franchise. “It’s out there in the Wedge. That’s where it got lost.”

  “Ah.” An understanding nod. “Lots of things get lost there. Tha
t’s where things go to get lost. Badly lost. You know what I mean.”

  For a moment, McNihil wondered if that was some kind of personal comment. How much would some Adder clome, a scrabbling sexual-services franchisee, know about what had happened years ago? Not much, maybe even nothing at all, unless their mutual employer had filled him in.

  “I’m a little surprised, though,” continued the Adder clome. “I wouldn’t have thought Harrisch would be hanging around that particular zone. Either in person, or by proxy. So to speak.”

  “Knock it off.” Irritation filtered through McNihil’s voice. “I don’t need all the cute stuff from you.”

  “Doesn’t cost anything extra.” The Adder clome had a creepy nonsmile that he could easily have picked up at the DZ executive suites. “I throw it in as a bonus, as part of my operating-table-side manner. You might as well try to enjoy it; like a lot of things in this world, there’s no escaping.”

  “That’s why I don’t live in this world.” The faces in the framed photos regarded McNihil with a blank absence of envy. “Or at least I try not to.”

  “I thought that was the case.” Leaning across the desk, the Adder clome studied McNihil’s eyes as though they were soft, inanimate objects. “When you’re in the business like I am-the surgical business-there’s little signs, indicators that professionals can pick up on.” He sat back in his chair. “You must’ve had it done a while back.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The work’s too good. You can hardly see the stitches around the corneas.” The Adder clome sighted through his tangent fingertips. “The only problem is the one you already know about. This world is what you can’t escape from. It always comes seeping back into your little private existence.”

  McNihil had said as much to the cube bunny not too long ago. So it must be true, he thought now. Or true enough-he’d had that proved to him at the last place he’d been before walking into the SM clinic with Harrisch’s card tucked in his jacket pocket.

  “That woman,” said McNihil. “At the watering hole down the block. Sitting on the barstool next to me.” The whole dimly lit space had been empty except for the two of them, as she’d leaned her cigarette breath and decaying-rose scent toward him-she’d been proof enough. Even in that black-and-white gloom, with the shadows leaking out of McNihil’s eyes and stacking up in the bar’s corners like strata of negative ghosts, the ultimate barfly’s unsunned flesh had glowed with pale mycologic fire. But not all her flesh; some of it had been cut away and replaced, probably right here at this SM franchise, perhaps with the scalpel with which the Adder clome idly played. An oval window, in that space bounded by her throat and her naked shoulders, the bottom edge touching the first swell of her breasts; a soft window, made of some bio-mimetic polymer that was so expensive it got weighed out by the microgram like all the better or at least more effective drugs. McNihil had seen the price sheets on that kind of thing; the woman’s elective surgery hadn’t come cheap. She was either seriously in hock or rich enough to enjoy trolling around the Wedge’s blurred circumference.

  “Yeah, that’s one of mine.” The Adder clome nodded when McNihil reached that part of the description. “I’ve done a lot of work on her.” He smiled. “She loves it.”

  “I could’ve guessed that much.” McNihil had known, as he’d looked at the woman in the bar, his gaze moving away from her dead empty eyes, down to the window above her breasts, that if he’d touched that transparent substance, it would’ve felt as warm and soft as real flesh. That if he’d closed his eyes, his hand at least might’ve been fooled. But he didn’t close his eyes. McNihil had left them open, and had seen, like smooth white coral under the slow rising and falling of a blood-temperature ocean, the woman’s bones. Faintly luminous, laced with fine red threads: manubrium, clavicle, trachea, and farther behind, deeper in that soft ocean, the herpetoid segments of her spine.

  Or would you rather be somewhere else? The next thing the woman in the bar said to him, with a turn of her head and a lowering of her dark lashes over the cold emptiness of her gaze, so that the message being radiated in a tight beam at him was made even clearer.

  McNihil hadn’t replied, but had gone on looking into the depths of her exposed body. To where the elegant, blackened engraving had turned her bones into fragile scrimshaw. The black, swirling lines were only slightly wavered by the flesh substitute’s gelatinous layers. Rococo motifs, thorned rose stems and sickly fin-de-siècle lilies twined to frame a motto written in an antique Teutonic font.

  I RUNNE TO DEATH, AND DEATH MEETS ME AS FAST

  He’d let himself be drawn closer to her, so that he could bring his lips close to her ear.

  “‘And all my pleasures,’” he’d whispered, “‘are like yesterday.’”

  The remembered darkness of the bar ebbed a little, as the Adder clome’s voice cracked the thin eggshell of McNihil’s thoughts. “Quoting John Donne to barflies-” The voice was brittle with sarcasm. “There’s a wasted effort.”

  “Is it?” McNihil looked up. “It’s always worked really well for me.”

  “Gotten you this far.” With one finger, the Adder clome balanced the scalpel against the desktop. “I suppose that’s a good thing.” The scalpel dug into the already marked-up wood. “You should’ve picked up on that number at the bar. She’s not the kind that needs a lot of sweet talk. Some of my other clients have told me that she’s a real experience. The kind that leaves marks. Inside your skull.”

  “Sounds great. But I’m working right now.” McNihil felt like knocking the scalpel skittering across the desk. “Maybe some other time.”

  “And that’s why you came here. Not to reminisce about the chances you’ve let fall out of your hands. So get on with it.” The Adder clome used the scalpel as a pointer again. “Ask me a question, why don’t you?”

  “All right,” said McNihil quietly. “Why did Harrisch tell me to come here?”

  “I told you already. I don’t know.” The Adder clome scratched the side of his face with the blade’s point, leaving a white mark on the skin. “Obviously, it wasn’t to get information from me. You know too much already.”

  “What’s ‘too much’?”

  “More than I know,” said the Adder clome. “That’s too much. You haven’t even told me the name of this person. The one who lost Harrisch’s precious whatever-it-is. Or what happened to him.”

  “He’s dead. And his name was Travelt.”

  “Ah.” The doctor admired his reflection in the scalpel. “Now it becomes a little clearer. I do believe I remember something about a certain Travelt; one of Harrisch’s associates, a junior exec over at DynaZauber. Right?”

  McNihil nodded. “You’ve got that one.”

  “I did a little job for this Travelt-”

  “He came in here?”

  “No,” said the Adder clome. “I don’t think I ever set eyes on the man. No, I did something for him. A commission on his behalf, a business gift ordered up by another party. By Harrisch, in fact.”

  “You put together the prowler.” That made sense to McNihil. “That Harrisch and the other DZ execs gave to Travelt.”

  “That’s right. Though I don’t know how much anyone else at DynaZauber had to do with it.” The Adder clome gave a shrug. “It all seemed like Harrisch’s little project. A personal thing. Harrisch is, as you might’ve already noticed, a hands-on kind of executive.”

  “That’s him, all right.” McNihil regarded the other man with a flat, level gaze. “But you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

  “Well. There you go.” Another false smile floated up on the narrowly angled face. “You see? It’s just like I told you. You know too much already. Or if not enough-that’s not my problem. You’re the one who’s supposed to be finding out things. That’s your job, isn’t it? What Harrisch is paying you for. Why should I make it any easier for you? Even if I could.” The smile curdled into a sneer. “I don’t think that’s what Harrisch is paying me for,
why he’s underwriting our time together-”

  “He’s paying you? For this?”

  “Of course. He’s a businessman who understands a fellow businessman’s problems, the need for a little cash flow. There was a transfer of funds-nothing too big; nothing I can retire on-before you came over here. For unnamed services to be performed for a certain individual named McNihil.” The Adder clome rolled the blunt scalpel between his palms. “That’s you, right? You told me as much. So what is it you’d like me to do for you?”

  McNihil looked at the man with welling distaste. “There’s nothing you can do for me.”

  “Oh, I think otherwise.” The Adder clome’s voice took on a steel edge, as though by some transference of essence from the surgical tool. “You’re underestimating the range of services we provide in this establishment.” Even his eyes glittered as brightly. “Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve paid one of our franchises a visit. There’s all the old classics… and some new ones.”

  The Adder clome’s spiel washed up against McNihil, like the waves of a polluted ocean.

  “Frankly,” said the Adder clome, “you look rather unmarked to me. For somebody who’s had all your, shall we say, life experiences. You’re a blank slate. But that was always the word in old-fashioned tattoo parlors, sailor. We can do so much more for you now. Just in terms of your skin. We can put your biography on your flesh, in as many animated chapters as you’d like-so you could read yourself in the mirror, if you wanted to. Everybody’s favorite book. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “Not particularly.” McNihil glared back at the other man. “There are plenty of parts I’m still trying to forget.”

  “Then we’ll make shit up for you. Whatever you want. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, in detail so fine you’ll need a microscope to shave. Actually, I’ve done that before; more than once. It’s more popular than you might think among the extreme crowd, especially some of the later chapters where the decadence gets way rotten and shiny. Who was the empress who regretted that she only had three altars at which she could receive libations for the gods?”