K Jeter: Noir

He saw the same thing, of which he’d caught the scent on the corpse’s non-breath. Tasted on the back of his tongue when he’d inhaled. Metal and spit, mercury and a blue dancing spark. It was in the glistening of their lips, the knowing half-smiles, the smug certainty that badged a brotherhood of the senses.

They’re all in on it , thought McNihil. It hadn’t been just the late Travelt, the corpse at the bottom of the well their expensive suits and corporate white shirts formed. That was why Harrisch and the other execs had wanted him to check it out, to kneel down and bring his special qualifications to bear on the dead thing in their midst. So he’d have that scent in his nostrils, that inhaled taste at the back of his mouth, when he’d stood back up and looked at them.

“You see?” Harrisch’s voice poked at him again. “It really is the kind of job for which you have a special knack. It fits into your realm of experience. If not professionally, then personally. Or perhaps at that point where professional and personal meet.”

Hated the guy before, hated him even more now; McNihil weighed the consequences of just leaning back and cocking his fist, unloading it in the exec’s face. Satisfaction would be high, the grief afterward higher, the payment at the end close to total. People like Harrisch walked around inviolable, secure in their perch on the ladder. They invited fists, they hung their faces out like smiling targets, asking for it. Knowing that if you fired one off, the blow your arm ached to deliver, they had ways of paying you back a thousandfold. And if you didn’t, if you just let your white-knuckled fist hang at your side like a rock extracted from the sweating core of the earth, the knot in your gut was their reward. They got you either way.

That was how they worked it. McNihil knew that. He’d worked for Harrisch, and for people just like him. The only thing to do was to turn and walk away, to push past the encircling wall of suits and carry your fist, heavy as lead, out the door and down the unnumbered elevator, all the way to the little space called home. Where you could soak your fist in alcohol and morphine, applied from the inside out, through gut and vein. Until you forgot, or forgot enough.

They wanted me to know , thought McNihil. What they do for fun . They weren’t ashamed; on the contrary. Harrisch and the other company execs had wanted him to know, had wanted McNihil to catch the same scent from them as he had from the corpse’s mouth. Spit and mercury and blood. All of that and more, and none of it. The only marks on their bodies would be the scars on their tongues, the channel tracks, the contact points, the rain-wet battery terminals of their pleasures. The place where the blue spark leapt from emissary to recipient. The kiss , he thought, that passeth understanding . From one to the other, from the other to the one.

He let his fist unclench itself. These things didn’t bother him so much anymore; they just made him feel older and more tired and disgusted. McNihil scanned across the faces of the execs waiting for his answer.

“Well?” Harrisch smiled at him. And didn’t smile.

“Connect you, mother-connector.” McNihil felt even more disgusted than before. “I’m outta here.” He turned and walked. The circle broke, the nearest execs stepping back out of his way, before he could even shove them aside. Depriving him of that justifiable pleasure.

Harrisch called after him. “There’s some details you should know about. Before you make your final decision.”

Fingers touching the door’s brass knob, McNihil stopped and glanced over his shoulder. “I already have.”

“Perhaps.” The smile didn’t waver. “Though there’s one more thing you should see. One more detail.” He stepped back and reached down to the corpse, his hand drawing away the tousled shirt from one side, where the skin was still intact above the curve of ribs. “Our late friend seems to have gotten around.” Harrisch watched for McNihil’s reaction. “Quite a lot, wouldn’t you say?”

He could see what the exec was showing him, from all the way across the room. A tattoo, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t move around. Big and dark enough that McNihil, standing by the door, could easily make out what it was.

A classic banner scroll, curling around at each end, with some name or word that McNihil couldn’t make out inscribed inside. That wasn’t the important part; what mattered was the emblem above the banner. An ornate capital V , its point at the corpse’s bottom rib, the serifed arms reaching to either side of his armpit. Exact and intricately detailed, as though the artist had completed half of a slanting cross, redeemer to be added later…

All of McNihil’s restraining wisdom evaporated. When the red haze had flared, then faded behind his eyes, he saw Harrisch sprawled awkwardly across the corpse. The exec pushed himself up on one arm and rubbed his jaw, smearing the blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth.

That was what they really wanted me to see . McNihil wiped his torn knuckles against his shirt. Nobody in the room had taken a step closer, laid a hand on him. They had gotten what they wanted.

“You’re the one, all right.” Harrisch sat up, balancing himself with one hand on the corpse’s chest. His smile showed red around the edges. “You’re the one we want.”

McNihil pulled open the door.

“Don’t call me,” said McNihil. “And I won’t call you.”

In the corridor outside the cubapt, he sensed someone else watching him, as he turned and headed toward the elevator. A glance over his shoulder and he saw her, down at the end of the hallway’s flickering yellow pools of light. McNihil wasn’t surprised; there was always one, sometimes several in these buildings. A cube bunny, this one prettier than most, and with large, sad eyes reddened with weeping. For Travelt, he figured; she must know that the object of her mercantile affections was dead.

McNihil could also tell that the cube bunny wanted to talk to him, that she’d been waiting there in the building’s hallway to do just that. The girl looked up at him and started to say something; but he didn’t feel like talking. Not just now. McNihil kept walking toward the elevator at the opposite end of the hallway, and thumbed the down button soon as he reached it.

The machinery groaned, rising toward him. He pulled the rattling cage open and stepped inside. Falling slowly and out of sight, McNihil dug into his pocket and took out the little golden pendant he’d palmed off the corpse.

A bit of metal like this might have its uses. The kind of thing that would tell him what Harrisch might not want him to know.

McNihil turned the cross-shaped crucifax over at the tips of his fingers and rubbed his thumb along the tiny bar code incised into the metal. In the row of lines, more delicate than his own thumbprint, he could almost read the dead man’s profession of faith.

He wondered if-at the end, when the poor bastard’s mouth had filled with ashes-it’d done any good at all.

Maybe , thought McNihil. He closed his eyes and let the grinding chain continue lowering him to the earth.

He doesn’t have a prayer.” The living woman spoke to the dead woman. “They’ll get him. And then he’ll have to do what they want.”

The other woman was only somewhat dead. Technically so. At the center of her eyes, where other people, the living ones, had darkness, she had white and two little black The corneas the woman had when she’d been alive, officially so, had been sliced out and sold when there’d been an upward tick in that segment of the organ market. Now she looked out at the world through crosses tilted on their sides, cheap Taiwanese knockoffs, low-resolution scanning lenses.