Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

She persuaded Benedetta to come to Milano to handle the money for her. Benedetta didn’t handle the funds herself, but she knew people, who knew people, who knew people who could handle money. Benedetta bought her a Milanese designer furoshiki, which was beautiful and useful, and a big Indonesian network server, which was useful and beautiful. Maya returned to Praha and the actress’s apartment, wearing the furoshiki and carrying the server in its shatterproof case.

The Indonesian server came with an elaborate set of installation procedures in sadly mangled English. Maya booted the server, failed, wiped it, rebooted it, failed again. So she fed the actress’s cats. Then she wiggled all the loose connections, booted the server, failed much worse than before, and had a frappé to calm down. She booted it again, achieved partial functionality, searched the processing crystal for internal conflicts, eliminated three little nasty ones. The system crashed. She ran a diagnostic test, cleaned out a set of wonky buffers, picked the main processor up and dropped it. After that, it seemed to work. She installed a network identity. Finally she plugged into the net.

The server rang immediately. It was a voice call from Therese.

“How did you know I was on-line?” Maya said.

“I have my ways,” said Therese. “Did they really throw you out of the Tête because you killed a cop’s dog?”

“Word gets around in a hurry, and no, I didn’t do that, I swear it was somebody else.”

“If word travels any slower than the speed of light now, it only means we’re not paying attention,” Therese said. “I was paying plenty of attention. Because I need a big favor from you.”

“Is it the favor, Therese?”

“It is the favor, Maya, if you are discreet.”

“Therese, I’m in so much trouble of my own now that I don’t think yours can possibly affect me. What is it that you need?”

“I need a very private room in Praha,” Therese said somberly. “It has to be a nice room with a very nice bed. Not a hotel, because they keep records. And I need a car. It doesn’t have to be a very nice car, but it has to be very private. Not a rented car, because they keep records. I need the room for one night and I need the car for two days. After that, I don’t need any questions, from anybody, ever.”

“No questions and no records. Right. When do you need these things?”

“Tuesday.”

“Let me call you back.”

The actress’s room was out of the question. Novak? She couldn’t. Paul? Maybe, but, well, certainly not. Klaus? Since she’d become a regular at the Tête, she’d come to realize that Klaus was a very interesting man. Klaus had many resources through every level of Praha society. Klaus was a genuine doyen. Klaus was universally known and respected in Praha, and yet Klaus seemed to owe nothing to anyone; Klaus belonged to nobody at all. Klaus even liked her, but …

Emil. Perfect.

She did what she could for Therese. The arrangements required a serious investment of time, energy, and wiles, but they seemed to work well enough.

At two in the morning on Tuesday she got a priority call from Therese. “Are you awake?”

“I am now, darling.”

“Can you come and have a drink with me? I’m in the Café Chyba on the forty-seventh floor of this big rabbit nest you found for me.”

“Are you all right, Therese?”

“No, I’m not all right,” said Therese meekly, “and I need you to come and have a little drink with me.”

Maya dressed in a hurry and went to the café. It took her forty minutes. When she arrived at the Café Chyba she found it deserted. It was a perfectly clean and perfectly soulless little bar, entirely automated, just the sort of place where one would end up at three in the morning when one was having an emotional crisis in an eighty-story modern Czech high-rise. Emotional crises seemed to be pretty rare in the high-rise, to judge by the lack of customers. This high-rise was inhabited by Emil’s parents, who were, conveniently, in Finland for a month. In Suomen Tasavalta, rather.

Maya ordered a mineralka from a disgustingly cute little novelty robot. She sipped it and waited.

Therese appeared around half past three. She perched on the edge of a barstool and tried to smile. She had been weeping.

“Maya,” she said, and took her hand. “You’ve grown up so much.”

“This wig makes me look a lot more mature,” Maya lied cheerfully.

“You’re so chic! You’re so … Well, I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t, truly. Can I still trust you?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, Therese. I’ll see if I can figure out the rest of that later.”

“He beat me.”

“He did? Let’s go and kill him.”

“He’s doing that already,” Therese said, and began to cry.

Therese’s boyfriend had never beaten her before, but since he was on the point of suicide, he seemed to feel a need to put a sharper point to their relationship. He’d whipped her on the back and bottom with a leather belt. Therese’s boyfriend was a Corsican gangster.

Therese’s boyfriend wasn’t a cute gangster. There was nothing cute about him. He was a career criminal, a consigliore in the Black Hand organization; protection racketeers, pimps, hardcase tincture people. Major-league money launderers. Influence peddlers. Bribers of judges, suborners of police. Murderers. Men who put people’s feet in buckets of cement. He was sixty years old and he called himself Bruno when he wasn’t calling himself something else.

“How’d you come to know this character?”

“How do you think? I run a gray-market shop in the rag trade. I got mixed up with the rackets. Mafiosi dress very flash, and sometimes they steal clothes and sell them. The rag trade is very old. You know? It’s very old and it has some strange things in its closets. I do little illegal things. Mafiosi do big illegal things. They counterfeit couture sometimes, they give people protection sometimes. It happens. It just happens.” Therese shrugged.

Maya drummed her fingers slowly on the top of the bar.

“He likes the apartment you found for us,” Therese offered. “It’s funny to steal a last night from bourgeois people.”

“I can’t believe this,” Maya said.

“Bruno’s a real man,” Therese said slowly. “I love real men. I like it when they can’t be polite about it. I like it when men really …” She thought about it. “When they really come unwound. ”

“That’s not a healthy hobby, darling.”

“Life is a risk. I like it when they’re truly men. When nothing else matters to them but being a man. It’s exciting. It really feels like living. I didn’t think he’d beat me. But I was doing anything he wanted tonight. So he wanted to beat me. It’s his last night on earth. I shouldn’t have cried so much. I shouldn’t have called you. I’m being a big baby.”

“Therese, this is really sick.”

“No, it’s not,” Therese said, wounded. “It’s just old-fashioned.”

“How do you know he’s not going to murder you?”

“He’s a man of honor,” Therese said. “Anyway, I’m doing him a big favor tomorrow.”

Bruno was dying. Therese’s best guess was liver cancer. It was impossible to tell for certain, because Bruno hadn’t been near official diagnostic machinery in forty years. First his rap sheet had caught up with him, and denied him access to life-extension treatments. Then he’d begun to do a number of extremely interesting and highly illegal things to himself through the medical black market. The extra testicle, apparently, was just the least of it.

Bruno was determined to die outside the reach of the polity. Should the authorities happen to render his corpse in one of those necropolitan emulsifiers, then alarm bells would ring from Dublin to Vladivostok. The Black Hand had been founded on the ancient tradition of omertà , silence until death. Nowadays, silence after death was just as necessary.