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  He wondered how much the late Travelt had ever given in to those provoked desires. A little bruise, partly healed and fading, could be seen at the hinge of her jaw, just below her delicate ear. Given the stupid shit that the dead man had gotten into, it was entirely possible that the mark came from him, that the corpse’s thumb and fingers would match up, like an ID handprint to buzz him through the door and into that private space where desires were satisfied.

  “Why did you come here?”

  She twisted about on the couch and looked back up at him. She shook her head. “I don’t have a reason.”

  “People always have a reason,” said McNihil. “At least in the world I live in. The one I see.”

  “I… I don’t know.” The cube bunny’s open gaze locked on to his narrower one. “Maybe… I was lonely.”

  “You came to the wrong place, then. We’ve already got plenty of that here.” McNihil laid his hands on her shoulders. The warmth of her skin rose through the layers of thin cotton and wool and into his palms. “But Mr. Travelt is dead, isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Yes…”

  “Well, I can’t replace him for you.” He let one hand, with its own will, brush softly against the side of her neck. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

  “That’s all right.” The cube bunny gave him an understanding, forgiving smile. “It’d still be okay.”

  “Just as long,” said McNihil, “as you understand that.”

  The cube bunny nodded again, without speaking.

  He came around to the front of the couch and took her hand, pulling her up toward him. When he’d led her down the apartment’s dimly lit hallway, he stopped suddenly at the door of the bedroom. “Wait a second.”

  Back in the kitchen, McNihil pulled the plug of the coffeepot. The burnt smell of the residue inside had already tinged the air; it could be tasted at the back of the throat, like the awareness of sin. He reached over and pulled the thin chain dangling in the middle of the kitchen, switching off the light.

  “You said you were lonely.” In the bedroom’s darkness, the cube bunny’s softness was still wrapped in the firmed Lupino-like illusion. Close to him, she laid her hand against his chest, as though reading his heartbeat. “Who are you lonely for?”

  McNihil knew why she asked. So she could try to be that other person, another layer of illusion, for him. It came with the territory: that was part of her job and survival skills as well.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. Sitting at the edge of a concave mattress, he brought his face close to the hand he’d combed into her dark hair. His lips grazed the skin of her cheekbone. “Probably just my wife.”

  The cube bunny drew away from him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Like I said. Don’t worry about it.” McNihil drew the girl down to the field of the thin blanket. “She’s dead.” The same hand stroked the girl’s brow. “When I tell her about things like this… she doesn’t mind at all.”

  The girl said nothing, but reached up for him with her bare arms.

  Later, when the only illumination in the bedroom was the glow from the cube bunny’s skin-McNihil’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that a naked woman burned like a faint, ghostly lantern-he sat on the edge of the mattress, watching her sleep. She didn’t wake as he drew the thin blanket back from her. Confirming what he’d seen while she’d been in his arms: there was no mark on her body, other than the random bruise.

  No tattoos, either moving about or still. The blue-black capital V, with its knife-pointed serifs, that he’d seen embossed over the corpse’s rib cage… if he saw it now, it was only in his memory. The image of the corpse… and ones farther back. He closed his eyes, not to see them better, but so they wouldn’t be superimposed, branded, on the sleeping girl.

  In the bathroom at the end of the apartment’s hallway, McNihil heard her gathering up her clothes. He splashed cold water in his face, letting it run down his neck as he raised his head to look at himself in the mirror. Taking his time, giving her time.

  She was already gone when McNihil walked out to the kitchen. He pulled the chain dangling from the center of the ceiling, flooding the space with an eye-stinging brilliance. The whole apartment seemed as bare and empty as the specimen freezer in an abandoned morgue.

  McNihil leaned back against the sink, arms folded across his chest, the edge of the counter’s cracked tile pressing against the skin just above the waistline of the trousers he’d picked up from the bedroom floor and pulled on. The cold from the linoleum, with its worn-through patches like black islands on an unlabeled map, seeped into his bare feet. From here, he could see out the kitchen’s tiny window with its tattered roller blind, down to the street in front of the building. The homeless were parading by, in strict formation, just as they were supposed to do. In that other world, the one he didn’t see anymore, he knew they were all shellbacks, humping along the personal-sized portable refuges into which they retreated when off-duty. He’d always hated the sequential billboards mounted on the shells’ hardened exterior casings, the lights usually spelling out an ad slogan about some sleazy low-budget operation, like whatever Snake Medicine™ clinic was nearby, with its resident Adder clome offering everything from minor decorative tattoos to Full Prince Charles jobs. McNihil was glad he didn’t see things like that anymore; now the homeless parade looked like a long line of sandwich-board men, trudging down the sidewalk one right after another, like some Depression-era film that had slipped loose in the universe’s projector, stuttering the same frames over and over again.

  This time, the sandwich boards hanging in front and back of the shuffling homeless men were advertising something McNihil didn’t recognize. There was just one big alphabet letter on each board; they spelled out, in sequence, the word TLAZOLTÉOTL.

  McNihil wondered what the connect that meant. Maybe a new Central American restaurant opening up somewhere in the Gloss. Or maybe nothing at all; maybe the sandwich-board men had gotten mixed up and out of order, creating some random anagram out of the actual word. A back part of McNihil’s brain idly worked on it. After a few seconds, a memory scrap floated to the top of his thoughts. Tlazoltéotl had been the indecipherable word in the banner scroll tattooed on the corpse’s abdomen, right beneath the big initial V.

  Probably not a good thing, decided McNihil. He also decided not to think about it anymore.

  He didn’t bother drawing down the blind, to shut out the image of the homeless parade going down the street below. Instead, McNihil closed his eyes and thought about the things he’d told the cube bunny. Which were all true, as far as they went.

  I’m used to it, McNihil thought. The world he saw… he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  There was only one thing he missed.

  Just once in a while, he would’ve liked to have seen daylight again. Instead of this world’s eternal, clockless night.

  FIVE

  RENAISSANCE ANGELS TURNED TO BURROWING MOLES

  Some kind of church service was going on underneath the grates. Underground from economic necessity, not from any actual persecution; big spaces, cathedrals vaulted with sewage pipes and bundles of ancient copper wiring, black-sheathed fiber-optic snakes, suitable for large congregations of the faithful. Of whatever denomination:

  • subterranean mosques, like minarets laid on their sides, the cries of the muezzin echoing beneath cracked and patched asphalt;

  • Holy Rollers, interbred clans, toothless and fervid, calling on Zion and awash in the blood of a pompadoured, lazy-eyed lamb of Memphis grace, wrestling high-voltage cables like Teflon-insulated serpents;

  • supply-side Republicans, cutting each other with little razor knives and lapping up red puddles among the discarded condoms;

  • post-Reformation Lubavitchers awaiting a messiah with hands of fire.

  The man loitering in the alley felt a shiver of disgust roll up his arms, mutating into a sour ball of spit at the back of his tongue. He’d just as soon
not have been there at all, listening to multipartite hymnody-was it Latin? Old Tridentine ritual?-wafting up from below his feet, as though Renaissance angels had turned to burrowing moles. Flickering candlelight, from staggered ranks of small yellow flames, streamed up past his legs and across his chest, working his face into a network of spook-pocked shadows. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a black puddle at the alley’s edge, the thin water shimmering with solvent rainbows; his face looked like a campfire parody, a ghost story with a flashlight under the chin. The anachronism bothered him more than the actual visual effect.

  Come on, he called out inside his head. Come on, hurry up. An Asian storm-front, edge leakage from monsoons on the other side of the circle, drizzled under his jacket collar. He thrust his gloved hands deeper into his pockets as a show of irritated impatience. He’d left a black Daimler do Brasil repro of a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Cabriolet C, a one-off historic Sindelfingen design, hunkered down at the mouth of the alley, the machine a top-of-the-line product of the maquiladores on the other side of what had once been the Mexican border. They did good work in that arc of the Gloss; the vehicle’s finish, rubbed to a deep brilliance by the nimble hands of ten-year-olds, glistened as though it contained infinite space, as though a piece of the night sky complete with stars had fallen there.

  Other black shapes, smaller but with the same basic curvature, had started to gather near the Daimler. They were attracted by the residual engine heat seeping out to the damp air. Connectin’ freeloaders-the appearance of the beetle-armored homeless bugged him even more. The man glowered balefully at the dull black carapaces, made shiny only by the rain, that had been grafted onto the limbs and torsos of the recipients of the do-gooder shelter agencies’ charity. The cracks between segments of the shells opened and closed tight again as the vaguely human figures inside jostled for position against each other, getting nearer to the car’s attractive force with each squatting step.

  The loitering man had turned off the car’s various alarms, not so much because there was no point to them-the turtlelike homeless were technically within their rights, moving up on anything left out on the streets-but because he knew that most of them had sonic-energy converters inside their shells. They could suck a few microvolts out of the wailing siren noises that would have otherwise split the air, convert those wisps of energy either into heat for their shoulder-wide homes or battery storage for the Crawlman™ music systems that stoppered their ears.

  It’s a welfare scam, he brooded as more of the black domes crept along the oil-spattered sidewalks. One of the hard-shell bastards had come across the cigar stub that the loiterer had discarded when he’d started his wait in the alley. A random find; the rain had snuffed out the last orange spark in the saliva’d tobacco, so there hadn’t been any thermal trail for the crawler to zero in on. As the man watched, the black dome sealed itself down onto the wet asphalt and cement; a moment later, a puff of blue-gray smoke pulsed out of a tiny ventilation hatch. The ripe smell of the Cohiba Eisner y Katzenberg stung the man’s nose; he had to resist the impulse to stride up to the dome, pry it loose and roll it over on its back, and snatch the cigar butt from the scrounging sonuvabitch. An unpleasant vision came to him, that he’d had before, any time he’d been on a nonprivate street; of the black beetle shapes swarming up around him, the way they were doing now with his car, and likewise sucking the heat from him, the way his old granny had told him that cats did with the breath of newborn infants in their cradles. He shuddered from both nausea and moral revulsion.

  Luckily, the person for whom he was waiting showed up then, sliding out of a service doorway beside the deactivated dumpskers lining the far pocket of the alley. The big cubist elephant shapes, their dead proboscises rooted in the multistratified trash and garbage they were no longer capable of snuffling up, towered above the girl’s fragile image as she carefully eased the door back into place. The teeth of the vertical row of locks snagged back together, as though nothing more than a shadow had passed through them. That was all part of her talents, the loitering man knew; to go in and out of places she wasn’t supposed to. And to know which places.

  “About time.” He let his voice rattle gravel in his throat. “I was just about to leave. I don’t have time to hang around waiting for people like you.”

  “Oh, no-” Genuine dismay showed in the cube bunny’s widening eyes. She stepped up close to him and touched his arm with a child’s delicate fingers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harris-”

  “Harrisch,” he corrected. For the hundredth time. “There’s a difference. Try to get it right.”

  “Gosh, I really am sorry. I’m so stupid.” The touch turned into something more, her fingers gripping his forearm just tight enough to transfer heat from her skin into his flesh. A tiny electrical charge connected with a spot between his shoulder blades and rolled down his spine. “But he was talking. You know? He wanted to talk to me-”

  “Sure.” Harrisch nodded. “Of course he did.” The poor bastard up in one of the building’s filthy live/work spaces-Christ, he thought with a shudder, probably not any better than out here in the street-would naturally have wanted to talk to something like her. A scrabbling down-on-his-luck asp-head didn’t get many chances along those lines. “So you talked.”

  Her turn to nod. “Some of the craziest stuff, too.” She had a child’s squeaky little voice as well, all innocence and fun. The sound of it made men’s teeth grow longer in their sockets. “Like you never heard.”

  “Really?” Harrisch supposed it was a good idea to know what was going on inside McNihil’s head. That was the problem with using these freelancers; you couldn’t just ring up the human-resources department and get a readout on them. “Such as?”

  “Oh… all kinds of things.” The cube bunny shrugged her bare, pretty shoulders. Raindrops made soft jewels on her artfully exposed skin. “Like the way he sees things. He’s got these funny eyes, you know? And the way he saw me. Stuff like that.”

  It was pretty much what he expected to hear from her. Sadly so; in this life, there were no surprises. “And you did everything else? That you were supposed to?”

  The cube bunny nodded happily, perfect white face and cherry-red lips. “Then I fell asleep-kinda-and he got up and went to the bathroom. That’s what I was waiting for. So I could get away, without him noticing.” An impish glint appeared in her eyes. “Or at least not right away.”

  Harrisch smiled back at her. You little conniver, he thought approvingly. He supposed her cute mind was part of her pretty genetics, her way of getting through this world of thorns and lust. Who could stay mad at someone like that? It would be like rage directed at the berry you were about to crush between your teeth.

  “That’s fine,” said Harrisch. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m sure you did a good job.”

  The glint in the cube bunny’s eye hardened to steel, or an even hungrier metal. “Does that mean I get paid now?”

  “Sure.” He reached into his jacket pocket.

  From below them, from the grating beneath his and the cube bunny’s feet, the wavering candlelight poured upward, as though a new sun had been discovered at the center of the earth. How good they sound, thought Harrisch, listening to the hidden chorus. They had shifted keys, to a bright C major, the notes of simple and universal triumph. The basses and tenors had dropped out; the female voices were slowly rising, not toward resurrection but to some even brighter apotheosis. Harrisch felt a little door open inside his heart as he lifted a weight of black metal from his pocket.

  “Maybe I could do something like this for you again some time.” The cube bunny didn’t see what he had in his hand. Her childish and seductive gaze was locked on Harrisch’s eyes, looking for some other door to open up inside him. “’Cause it was easy. All I had to do was tell him the truth. About what happened to poor Mr.Travelt. It wasn’t like I had to lie or anything. So it really was easy.”

  “Great,” said Harrisch. “Speaking from the viewpoint of upper
management, I think it’s good that people get some sense of satisfaction from what they do. Every once in a while, at least.” Actually, he didn’t care. He raised and aimed the gun at a point equidistant between the cube bunny’s small breasts and slightly higher, just below the hollow in her white throat. “But I don’t really think you’ll be working for us again.”

  Genuine tears welled at the bottoms of her eyes; the trembling lashes darkened. “That’s not fair,” she said in a small voice, a whisper almost lost against the choir’s gentle murmur.

  “No, it’s not.” He had to agree. He could almost regret the tightening of his finger on the gun’s trigger.

  “But I did what you asked me to-”

  He watched her fly, propelled by the bullet’s imparted grace. The unmuffled shot echoed along the alley’s walls, shivering dust and bird droppings from the ancient bricks. At times like these-Harrisch had done this before; he never left jobs like this to underlings-time smoothly ratchetted down to slow motion. An occasional pleasure in his stressful executive life; I deserve this, he thought. That part at least was fair. For him. The Denkmann book agreed, which was one of the reasons it was popular with high-level execs.

  The impact of the bullet had lifted the cube bunny from her feet, tilting her onto her back as though on a feather bed of empty night air, her blond hair coming loose to form a radiant haloed pillow. Her bare arms flung back, as though wings. The petals of an intricate rose spattered against her chin. Then she fell, yards farther from where she had stood in front of Harrisch. She changed from angel to human, a wordless question in her clear eyes, and then to something that had the same shape and thermal signature of human, but wasn’t anymore. The pretty thing sprawled in the alley’s decaying litter, the side of her face turned against the base of the wall.