Noir Read online

  “I thought you didn’t smoke.” McNihil pulled his legs up and slapped dust and ashes from his trousers. “That’s what you told me in the bar.”

  “That’s right, I don’t.” The barfly made no move to take a draw from the cigarette. “I’m just doing it for your sake. To set the scene. Complete the picture.”

  “Don’t bother.” The floor was covered thick in ash, the hotel room’s walls broken open by the long-ago fire, shattered plaster revealing the burnt beams and studs of the framing inside. The door stood open, showing its brass number in the center and an expanse of similarly damaged hallway. “I’ve got these.” With a smudged fingertip, McNihil tapped the corner of his eye. “They already show me things pretty much the way I want them.”

  “Thank God.” The barfly stubbed the cigarette out against the narrow bed-frame. “It’s a filthy habit.” She flicked the dead cigarette out into the rubble in the middle of the floor, then tossed her golden hair back behind her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have made it back then, in those old movies. All that smoking all the time-looks great, a real air of mystery, but I would’ve started coughing and wouldn’t have been able to stop.” The barfly smiled at him, eyes half-lidded. “Not very glamorous, huh?”

  “Depends.” He wasn’t making much progress in cleaning himself up. His clothes looked as if he’d been rolling in the ashes and charred bits of wood for hours, like some rummy undergoing the DT’s in an abandoned building. “There might be a few lung specialists in the audience. They always get a thrill out of the death scene in La Traviata.”

  “Yeah, I love that part where she says she feels so much better, and then she croaks.”

  McNihil looked around the ruins of the End Zone Hotel. “This is stuff I’m remembering-right? From when I kissed you.” He figured this room must be on one of the upper floors; the brass number on the door started with a five. “I like it better this way. That fire shit was making me nervous.”

  The barfly shook her head in mock exasperation. “We work so hard on your behalf, and what do we get? Complaints. You should hear yourself sometimes. Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

  He ignored that comment. “What happened to the other one? The Adder clome?” McNihil stood up; he leaned over in a futile attempt to brush more gray ash from the knees of his trousers, then straightened. “He still around here?”

  “That guy? The connector’s a stone nuisance.” On the barfly’s face, the exasperation was genuine this time. “Always hanging around here-”

  “What? In my memories?”

  “No, you idiot.” The barfly shook her head. “In the place where your memories came from-these memories, at least.”

  “Where’s that?” McNihil tried to wipe the black traces of ash from his hands. “The Wedge?”

  “Bigger than that,” replied the woman. “Bigger and older. Come on-you know all about it. You must, or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have come around looking for me.” She smiled, as if enjoying her own reminiscence. “You wouldn’t have found me. And we wouldn’t have had that kiss.” A tilt of the head, the golden hair falling past one flirty eye. “I enjoyed it.”

  “I bet you did. Leaving men on the floor must be a kick.”

  Her smile broadened. “Maybe you should try it sometime.”

  “Yeah, in my next life.” McNihil straightened out his jacket. He could feel the weight of the coiled cable dragging it to one side; he rummaged with one hand in the pocket, to check if everything he’d been carrying with him was still there. With all the banging around and getting decked senseless he’d gone through recently, there was a chance it might have fallen out along the way. “If I get one.”

  “Shouldn’t be that hard.” The barfly shrugged. “All you gotta do is finish up the job you came here for… and then you can go wherever you want. And do whatever you want to do.”

  “Where’s ‘here’? The Wedge? The ur-Wedge? Wedge Beyond Wedge?” He couldn’t think of anything else to call it. “Or just the End Zone Hotel?”

  “Like I’ve been trying to tell you.” She leaned back, balancing herself against the charred mattress with one hand; her gaze radiated sultry languor. “We’re very accommodating here. You can have it however you want.”

  “That sounds like the pitch the Adder clome was making to me.”

  The barfly’s gaze hardened. “I told you: that guy’s a nuisance. At least he is around here. We only tolerate him because we have to.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s got the right.” The barfly gave a shrug. “Somebody like that… he stands outside the gates of the palace. Typical male mentality; half worshiper, half guardian. So he serves a function, in his own way. Both here and on the outside, out in that other world. He’s the first circle you have to pass through to get to where you want to go. If you can’t get past him-if you find the things you see at a Snake Medicine™ clinic too scary or too disgusting to deal with, or maybe you find them too fascinating to get past-then you’re not ready for the real thing. It takes a little courage. Even a little wisdom.” Her free hand gestured lazily toward McNihil. “That’s why you’re here. You must have what it takes. Even if you don’t know it.”

  “I’ll take it on faith,” said McNihil.

  “You pretty much have to. There aren’t any other options. Not around here.” The barfly pointed to the room’s single window. “Take a look outside. Tell me what you see.”

  McNihil picked his way across the rubble-strewn floor, over water-soaked scraps of wall plaster, timbers that had fallen from the ceiling, carpeting that had once been industrial gray and threadbare and was now crisped black, an empty bureau that had toppled over in the fire, spilling its drawers like a stack of lidless boxes lined with yellowing newspaper. The glass had shattered out of the window frame, leaving jagged splinters that crunched beneath McNihil’s steps. He brushed any sharp bits from the blackened sill and leaned his hands on it.

  Outside was the urban zone, a slice of remote-north Gloss, that he remembered from before-from the world outside, his real memories-when he’d come up here to take care of another job, icing the would-be pirate kid. Like coming home: the remains of the kid, a living length of neural and cortical tissue, were now the fat coiled loop in McNihil’s jacket pocket. The buildings looked the same, at least; McNihil could see the one a couple of blocks down that had the shabby movie theater on the ground floor, where he’d done the hit on the kid, and from where he’d dragged the face-muffled and squirming body back here to the End Zone Hotel. And farther away, past the corner of the tallest building McNihil could see, was the open space where he’d gotten panhandled via remote control from the burnt-out ’net-twit headcases in the downed jetliner…

  “Pretty good view from up here, huh?” The barfly’s voice was soft and patient. “You can see all sorts of things… if you try.”

  The woman was right about that. McNihil’s eyes felt tense in their sockets, as though the pupils were somehow being overwhelmed with the rush of optical information from outside. A fierce clarity seemed to fill the air, as though the smoke from the hotel fire had managed to scrub the constant, obscuring impurities that had hung between each atom of oxygen and the next. I can see for miles and miles, thought McNihil. It had been a long time since that had been the case. If the End Zone Hotel had been tall enough, or if the Noh-flies would’ve let him ascend into the sky, he could have seen all the way across the Pacific, to the far shores of the Gloss, Kamchatka and Xinjiang. The godlike headiness of the sensation rushed through McNihil’s body like pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine, sparking every cell and setting his heart stumbling until it hit the right up-tempo beat. This is what Harrisch wanted, he realized. When he climbed up on that cross. To see everything at once, all the universal data flowing into the receptors in your palms, like reverse stigmata. Jesus bled for the world; Harrisch and the rest of the execs at DynaZauber would improve on that, and let the world bleed for them.

  “Yes…” McNihil’s voice was a murmur, words tinged
with awe. “I can see… everything…”

  “Except for what’s different. About how you see.” From behind him, the barfly pushed another hint in McNihil’s direction. “It’s not just what you see. Come on. You gotta think about it, pal.”

  Then he did see it. McNihil looked up to the sky, just as the heavy, dark-gray-bellied clouds parted, as if on cue to help him along, a hand parting the curtain. His gaze dropped back to the zone’s surrounding buildings; their shadows etched sharp and knifelike across the streets and against each other in a way that he hadn’t seen for a long time. Long enough to have forgotten.

  “It’s daylight,” said McNihil. The realization struck him with wonder. Ash slid under his palms as he gripped the windowsill tighter, as though the view beyond it might slip away if not held to him. “That’s what it is. The sun’s out.” He turned his head, glancing back over his shoulder toward the woman sitting on the bed. “I haven’t seen that… in years.” How long had it been? That was lost as well, along with so many other things. “Because of…”

  “I know, sweetheart.” The barfly regarded him with outright sympathy. “Because of the eye thing. What you had them do to you. And the way you see. All that eternal-night business. But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “Back then.” McNihil slowly nodded, looking out at the bright window’s view again. The direction of the building’s shadows indicated early morning. That makes sense, he thought. Just as if a real night had ended. Hours or centuries could’ve passed while he’d been wandering around in this version of the End Zone Hotel; millennia-or seconds-since he’d met up with the barfly in that dive at the Wedge’s neon-lit perimeter. For all he knew, he was still lying on the floor of the bar, hammered beneath the memory load her scarred tongue had given him. His lips could be just parting from hers, the blue spark of contact fading into the taste of battery metal in his own mouth. He didn’t know. Just like a lot of things, he mused. “You think you know,” he said aloud. “What you want. And then you change your mind.” He turned back toward the woman behind him. “Or you have it changed for you.”

  “You should be grateful.” She gave a small shrug. “Most people aren’t so lucky. They don’t get the opportunity. They have to live with what they decide on. Usually, there’s no going back.”

  The hotel room’s window faced east; McNihil could see his own shadow now, black cast across the ashes and rubble. The top of his shadow, his head, just barely reached the tip of one of the barfly’s spike-heeled shoes, as though genuflecting there. Not in worship of her, the vessel, the instrument of transmission. But what was behind her. The other one, that he’d had that momentary glimpse of, back in the bar. Verrity-he’d never thought he’d actually see her. And for good reason.

  “There shouldn’t have been for me, either.” The implications of what had happened, what he was able to see now, had started to work themselves out inside McNihil’s head. With one fingertip, he touched the corner of his eye. “There’s no way you should’ve been able to get inside here. It’s private. It’s locked in. What’s in here-” He tapped the curve of bone at the side of his face. “It’s not in this world… or the other. It’s all my own, the way I see things.”

  “You should’ve known better than that.” The barfly looked unimpressed. “You underestimate what-and who-you’re dealing with. At least the other guy, the Adder clome, is up to speed on the situation.”

  “Really? So who am I dealing with?” McNihil knew he’d have to ask just this question, eventually. “If it’s Verrity, then I’ve been here before.”

  “That’s one name she goes by.” The unsmiling gaze of the barfly annihilated the space between herself and McNihil. “There’s hundreds of others. She’s been around for a long time.”

  “But not going by the name of Verrity.” It was McNihil’s turn to smile, both grim and rueful. “That’s something I know for sure.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I made Verrity up,” said McNihil. “She never existed. She was a lie. A fiction. The excuse I gave to the Collection Agency, about why my team of asp-heads and our investigation of the Wedge went wrong. Why we wound up getting our asses handed back to us.” The words rasped in McNihil’s throat. “And some of us worse than others. Some of the asp-heads-a lot of them-they died out here.”

  “And after all that happened… that many of your friends getting killed… and you thought that Verrity didn’t exist?” The barfly shook her head in amazement. “What would it take to convince you?”

  “It’s kind of hard to believe in something when you know you thought it up yourself.” Telling his secret history was oddly painless for McNihil; the story had lain next to his heart for so long that it had developed its own calluses and system of anesthesia. “And that’s what I had done-way before the Wedge investigation went wrong.” The words came easily, as though well rehearsed; he’d told them to himself often enough, lying awake in the dark of his crummy apartment, in a room not much bigger than this one, all through those hours of the endless night. “I knew it was going to go wrong, that there was no way we were going to pull it off-”

  “Because you knew it was bogus,” said the barfly. “From the beginning. It was a fraud, a number you were running on the agency.”

  McNihil gave a quick, humorless laugh. “You must’ve heard this story already.”

  “It’s not much of a secret. Not from the side I come from, that is.” The barfly made a gesture with one hand that took in all of the End Zone Hotel beyond the little room, and beyond. “You may have fooled everyone you worked for, everyone at the Collection Agency… but over here in the Wedge, we knew what the score was. You were in over your head, weren’t you?”

  He nodded slowly, keeping his silence.

  “How far in debt?” The barfly peered closer at him. “How much did you owe?”

  McNihil shrugged. “Plenty. It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want to talk about that part of the story, the bit about his dead wife and how he’d connected her over. Leaving her not quite dead enough. He hoped that the barfly, and the others on this side, didn’t know about that part. Not because he cared what they thought about him. I just don’t want to hear it, thought McNihil. Not in their mouths. “There’s always some way to owe money, and not be able to pay it.”

  “So you found a way,” said the barfly, coolly and evenly. “To make the money. All you had to do was lie and hand a wad of bullshit off to the Collection Agency. You were smart enough to do that, at least. Fabricate the evidence that something was going on in the Wedge, that down among the perverts and prowlers, there was major copyright infringement going on, that the agency’s clients were getting ripped off in a big way. Big enough to be worth doing something about.”

  “It was easy.” Talking about this part wasn’t so bad; he could still manage a certain feeling of self-congratulation, even though he knew how it’d all turned out, eventually. “Fooling the Collection Agency doesn’t take much work at all. Or much brains. Because the agency wants to be fooled. That’s its fatal flaw. The agency exists for the sole purpose of looking for copyright infringement, for theft of intellectual property; if it doesn’t find that, it ceases to exist. So I wasn’t the only one in trouble, if there wasn’t enough work for us asp-heads. As a matter of fact, you could say I was doing the agency a favor by lying to it. In my own way-I was keeping the Collection Agency alive.”

  “You… and how many others like you?” The barfly looked both amused and disgusted. “How many other asp-heads were doing the same thing, all through the agency? Going out and finding evidence of copyrights being messed with, agency clients not getting paid for use of their property, all of that, from little punks with a modem and a hokey encryption program to some bootleg polycarbonate being cranked out in the basement of the Gtsug-lag-khang in Lhasa. Once the bullshit starts, it’s hard to say where it ends, isn’t it?”

  McNihil nodded. That had been one of his meager comforts, in those endless nights back in his a
partment, with the water stains on the ceiling etching themselves into his sleepless eyes. The comfort of knowing that he wasn’t the only one, that there were others caught up in lies as deeply as he’d buried himself. Lies going both ways: the asp-heads lied to the Collection Agency, which in turn smiled its collective smile, and lied and said that it believed them. For all either side of the equation knew, the game would be over if it weren’t for the mutual quasi-deceptions, the lies that the liars and the lied-to tacitly agreed not to expose. At this point, there might not be enough copyright infringement going on anywhere in the Gloss to justify the agency’s continued existence and the asp-heads’ continued employment. Maybe the Collection Agency and its asp-heads had done their job too well; now, to find anybody stupid enough to violate intellectual-property rights, given the lethal consequences, they were reduced to scraping up idiot punk kids like the one whose strung-out brains McNihil was carrying in his pocket.

  The big copyright-protection battles-the shutting-down of the Chinese bootleg factories, the absorption of the Vladivostok bourse and their teneviki holding corporations into the millennial Geneva agreements-had been fought and won; the wars were over. Or at least for the time being. Which was, McNihil knew, the age-old problem of the garrison state, applied to matters of intellectual property and its protection. Just because the war was over, that didn’t mean you could disband the military; if that happened, there wouldn’t be a convenient army of asp-heads to call on when the pirates, the big ones, saw a whole new world of opportunity lying before them, property rights that couldn’t be defended against depredation. At the same time, if a standing army was going to be maintained, something had to be found for it to do; an unused gun turns to rust. So if the asp-heads, on their own initiative, concocted their own assignments out of thin air, all the better as far as the Collection Agency was concerned. Anything went wrong, the agency could deny responsibility, and the individual asp-head, the lying prime motivator of the fraud, was left hanging out to dry. Just like I was, thought McNihil. There might not have been anyone fooled at all, by what he’d told them.