George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

“Where’s Chiri?” I asked.

“She’s coming in at nine. You want something to drink?”

“Bingara and gin over ice, with a little Rose’s.”

Jamila nodded and turned away to mix it. “Oh,” she said, “you had a call. They left a message. Let me find it.”

That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine who would leave a message for me, how they’d known I’d come in here tonight.

Jamila returned with my drink and a cocktail napkin with two words scrawled across it. I paid her and she left without another word. The message was Call Okking . What a fitting beginning to my new life as a superman: urgent police business. No rest for the wicked; it was becoming my motto. I unclipped my phone and growled Okking’s commcode, then waited for him to answer. “Yeah?” he said at last.

“Marîd Audran,” I said.

“Wonderful. I called the hospital, but they said you’d been discharged. I called your house, but there wasn’t any answer. I called your girl friend’s boss, but you weren’t there. I called your usual hangout, the Café Solace, but they hadn’t seen you. So I tried a few other places, and left messages. I want you here in half an hour.

“Sure, Lieutenant. Where are you?”

He gave me a room number and the address of a hotel run by a Flemish conglomerate, in the most affluent section of the city. I’d never been in the hotel, or within so much as ten blocks of it. That wasn’t my part of town.

“What’s the situation?” I asked.

“A homicide. Your name has come up.”

“Ah. Anyone I know?”

“Yes. It’s odd that as soon as you went into the hospital, these bizarre killings stopped. Nothing unusual for almost three weeks. And the day you’re released, we’re right back in the Reign of Terror.”

“Okay, Lieutenant, you’ve got me and I’ll have to confess. If I’d been smart, I would have arranged a murder or two while I was in the hospital, to throw off suspicion.”

“You’re a wise guy, Audran. That just makes your predicament worse, all the way around.”

“Sorry. So you never told me: who’s the victim?”

“Just get here fast,” he said, and hung up.

I gulped my drink, left Jamila half a kiam tip, and hurried out into the warm night air. Bill was still missing from his usual place on the wide Boulevard il-Jameel outside the Budayeen. Another cab driver agreed to the fare I offered him, and we rumbled across town to the hotel. I went straight up to the room, and was stopped by a police officer standing inside the yellow tape crime scene barrier. I told him Lieutenant Okking was expecting me. He asked me my name, and then let me pass.

The room was like the inside of a slaughterhouse. There was blood everywhere — pools of blood, streaks of blood on the walls, blood spattered on the bed, on the chairs and bureau, all over the carpet. A murderer would have had to spend a lot of time and energy making certain his victim was sufficiently dead to splash all that blood so much, thoroughly soaking the room. He’d have to kill the wretch with stab after stab, like a ritual human sacrifice. It was inhuman, grotesque, and demented. Neither James Bond nor the nameless torturer had worked this way. This was either a third maniac, or one of the first two with a brand-new moddy. In both cases our scanty clues were now obsolete. That’s all we needed at this point.

The police were completing the job of bundling the corpse into a body bag on a stretcher, and moving it out the door. I found the lieutenant. “So who the hell got the business tonight?” I asked.

He looked at me closely, as if he could gauge my guilt or innocence from my reaction. “Selima,” he said.

My shoulders slumped. I felt immensely exhausted all of a sudden. “Allah be merciful,” I murmured. “So why did you want me here? What does this have to do with me?”

“You’re investigating all this for Friedlander Bey. And besides, I want you to look in the bathroom.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see. Be prepared, though; it’s pretty sickening.”

That just made me less eager to go into the bathroom. I did, though. I had to, there was no choice. The first thing I saw was a human heart, hacked from Selima’s chest, sitting in the bathroom sink. That made me retch right there. The sink was fouled with her dark blood. Then I saw the blood smeared all over the mirror above the sink. There were uneven borders and geometric patterns and unintelligible symbolic marks drawn on the glass. The most unsettling part were the few words written in blood in a dripping handwriting, that said Audran , you next .

I felt a faint, unreal sensation. What did this insane butcher know about me? What connection did I have with the monstrous slaying of Selima, and of the other Black Widow Sisters as well? The only thought I had was that my motivation up until now had been a kind of gallant desire to help protect my friends, those who might be future victims of the unknown mad murderers. I had had no personal interest, except possibly a desire for revenge, for Nikki’s killing and for the others. Now, though, with my name written in congealing blood on that mirror, it had been made personal. My own life was at stake.

If anything in the world could induce me to take the final step and chip in my first moddy, this was it. I knew absolutely that from now on, I’d need every bit of help I could get. Enlightened self-interest, I called it; and I cursed the vile executioners who had made it necessary.

First thing the next morning, I paid a call on Laila at her modshop on Fourth Street. The old woman was just as creepy as ever, but her costume had undergone some slight revision. She had her dirty, thin gray hair shoved up under a blond wig full of ringlets; it didn’t look so much like a hairpiece as something your great-aunt would slip over a toaster to hide it from view. Laila couldn’t do much with her yellowed eyes and wrinkled black skin, but she sure tried. She had so much pale powder on her face that she looked like she’d just busted out of a grain elevator. Over that she had smeared bright cerise streaks on every available surface; to me it appeared that her eye shadow, cheek blush, and lipstick had all come out of the same container. She wore a sparkly pair of plastic sunglasses on a grimy string around her neck — cat’s-eye sunglasses, and she had chosen them with care. She hadn’t bothered to find herself some false teeth, but she had swapped her filthy black shift for an indecently tight, low-cut slit-skirted gown in blazing dandelion yellow. It looked like she was trying to shove her head and shoulders free of the maw of the world’s biggest budgie. On her feet she wore cheap blue fuzzy bedroom slippers. “Laila,” I said.

“Marîd.” Her eyes weren’t quite focused. That meant that she was just her own inimitable self today; if she had been chipping in some moddy, her eyes would have been focused and the software would have sharpened up her responses. It would have been easier to deal with her if she had been someone else, but I let it go.

“Had my brain wired.”

“I heard.” She snickered, and I felt a ripple of disgust.

“I need some help choosing a moddy.”

“What you want it for?”

I chewed my lip. How much was I going to tell her? On one hand, she might repeat everything I said to anyone who came into her shop; after all, she told me what everybody else said to her. On the other hand, nobody paid any attention to her in the first place. “I need to do a little work. I got wired because the job might be dangerous. I need something that will jack up my detective talent, and also keep me from getting hurt. What do you think?”

She muttered to herself for a while, wandering up and down the aisles, browsing through her bins. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, so I just waited. Finally she turned around; she was surprised that I was still there. Maybe she’d already forgotten what I’d asked. “Is a made-up character good enough?” she said.