George Effinger - A Fire in the Sun

I was trying to be sarcastic, but it was definitely the wrong thing to say. “I would make you stop,” said Kmuzu, and his voice was as cold as any I’ve ever heard.

I think my jaw dropped. “I didn’t mean that, you know,” I said. Kmuzu gave a slight nod of his head, and the tension passed. “Help me with this, will you? I think the necktie is winning.”

Kmuzu’s expression softened a little, and he seemed glad to perform this little service for me. “It is fine now,” he said when he finished. “I will get your breakfast.”

“I don’t eat breakfast.”

“Yaa Sidi, the master of the house directed me to make sure that you eat breakfast from now on. He believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

Allah save me from nutrition fascists! “If I eat in the morning, I feel like a lump of lead for hours.”

It didn’t make any difference to Kmuzu what I thought. “I will get your breakfast,” he said.

“Don’t you have to go to church or something?”

He looked at me calmly. “I have already been to worship,” he said. “Now I will get your breakfast.” I’m sure he’d note every calorie I took in and file a report with Friedlander Bey. It was just another example of how much influence Papa exerted.

I may have felt a little like a prisoner, but I’d certainly been given compensations. I had a spacious suite in the west wing of Friedlander Bey’s great house, on the second floor near Papa’s own private quarters. My closet was filled with many suits of clothes in different styles and fashions — Western, Arab, casual, formal. Papa gave me a lot of sophisticated high-tech hardware, from a new Chhindwara constrained-AI data deck to an Esmeraldas holo system with Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer. I never worried about money. Once a week, one of the Stones That Speak left a fat envelope stuffed with cash on my desk.

All in all, my life had changed so much that my days of poverty and insecurity seemed like a thirty-year nightmare. Today I’m well fed, well dressed, and well liked by the right people, and all it’s cost me is what you’d expect, my self-respect and the approval of most of my friends. Kmuzu let me know that breakfast was ready. “Bis-millah,” I murmured as I sat down: in the name of God. I ate some eggs and bread fried in butter, and swallowed a cup of strong coffee.

“Would you like anything more, yaa Sidi?” asked Kmuzu.

“No, thank you.” I was staring at the far wall, thinking about freedom. I wondered if there was some way I could buy my way out of the police-liaison job. Not with money, anyway, I was sure of that. I don’t think it’s possible to bribe Papa with money: Still, if I paid very close attention, I just might find some other means of leverage. Inshallah.

“Then shall I go downstairs and bring the car around?” Kmuzu asked. I blinked and realized that I had to get going. I didn’t have Friedlander Bey’s long black limousine at my disposal, but he’d given me a comfortable new electric automobile to use. After all, I was his official representative among the guardians of justice.

Kmuzu, of course, would be my driver now. It occurred to me that I’d have to be very clever to go anywhere without him. “Yes, I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.

I ran a hand through my hair, which was getting long again. Before I left the house, I put a rack of moddies and daddies in my briefcase. It was impossible to predict what sort of personality I’d need to have when I got to work, or which particular talents and abilities. It was best just to take everything I had and be prepared.

I stood on the marble stairs and waited for Kmuzu. It was the month of Rabi al-Awwal, and a warm drizzle was falling from a gray sky. Although Papa’s estate was carved out of a crowded neighborhood in the heart of the city, I could almost pretend that I was in some quiet garden oasis, far from urban grime and noise. I was surrounded by a green lushness that had been coaxed into existence solely to soothe the spirit of one weary old man. I heard the quiet, peaceful trickling of cool fountains, and some energetic birds warbled nearby from the carefully tended fruit trees. On the still air drifted a heavy, sweet perfume of exotic flowers. I pretended that none of this could seduce me.

Then I got into the cream-colored Westphalian sedan and rode out through the guarded gate. Beyond the wall I was thrown suddenly into the bustle and clamor of the city, and with a shock I realized how sorry I was to leave the serenity of Papa’s house. It occurred to me that in time I could come to be like him.

Kmuzu let me out of the car on Walid al-Akbar Street, at the station house that oversaw the affairs of the Budayeen. He told me that he’d be back to drive me home promptly at four-thirty. I had a feeling that he was one of those people who was never late. I stood on the sidewalk and watched as he drove away.

There was always a crowd of young children outside the station house. I don’t know if they were hoping to see some shackled criminal dragged in, or waiting for their own parents to be released from custody, or just loitering in the hopes of begging loose change. I’d been one of them myself not so very long ago in Algiers, and it didn’t hurt me any to throw a few kiam into the air and watch them scramble for it. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a clutch of coins. The older, bigger kids caught the easy money, and the smaller ones clung to my legs and wailed “Baksheeshf” Every day it was a challenge to shake my young passengers loose before I got to the revolving door.

I had a desk in a small cubicle on the third floor of the station house. My cubicle was separated from its neighbors by pale green plasterboard walls only a little taller than I was. There was always a sour smell in the air, a mixture of stale sweat, tobacco smoke, and disinfectant. Above my desk was a shelf that held plastic boxes filled with dated files on cobalt-alloy cell-memories. On the floor was a big cardboard box crammed with bound printouts. I had a grimy Annamese data deck on my desk that gave me trouble-free operation on two out of every three jobs. Of course, my work wasn’t very important, not according to Lieutenant Hajjar. We both knew I was there just to keep an eye on things for Friedlander Bey. It amounted to Papa having his own private police precinct devoted to protecting his interests in the Budayeen.

Hajjar came into my cubicle and dropped another heavy box on my desk. He was a Jordanian who’d had a lengthy arrest record of his own before he came to the city. I suppose he’d been an athlete ten years ago, but he hadn’t stayed in shape. He had thinning brown hair and lately he’d tried to grow a beard. It looked terrible, like the skin of a kiwi fruit. He looked like a mother’s bad dream of a drug dealer, which is what he was when he wasn’t administering the affairs of the nearby walled quarter.

“How you doin’, Audran?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s all this?”

“Found something useful for you to do.” Hajjar was about two years younger than me, and it gave him a kick to boss me around.

I looked in the box. There were a couple of hundred blue cobalt-alloy plates. It looked like another really tedious job. “You want me to sort these?”

“I want you to log ’em all into the daily record.”

I swore under my breath. Every cop carries an electronic log book to make notes on the day’s tour: where he went, what he saw, what he said, what he did. At the end of the day, he turns in the book’s cell-memory plate to his sergeant. Now Hajjar wanted me to collate all the plates from the station’s roster. “This isn’t the kind of work Papa had in mind for me,” I said.

“What the hell. You got any complaints, take ’em to Friedlander Bey. In the meantime, do what I tell you.”