George Effinger: When Gravity Fails

Frenchy’s barmaid, Dalia, came over to me, trailing her wet towel on the counter. She made a couple of passes at the spot just in front of me and plopped a cork coaster down. “Beer?” she asked.

“Gin and bingara with a hit of Rose’s,” I said.

She squinted her eyes at me. “Marîd?”

“My new look,” I said.

She dropped her towel onto the bar and stared at me. She didn’t say a word. That went on until I started to get self-conscious. “Dalia?” I said.

She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Frenchy,” she cried, “here he is!”

I didn’t know what that meant. People all around turned to look at me. Frenchy got up from his seat near the cash register and lumbered over to me. “Marîd,” he said, “heard about you taking on that guy that wiped the Sisters.”

It dawned on me that I was a bigshot now. “Oh,” I said, “it was more like he took me on. He was doing pretty well, too, until I decided to get serious.”

Frenchy grinned. “You were the only one that had the balls to go after him. Even the city’s finest were ten steps behind you. You saved a lot of lives, Marîd. You drink free in here and every other place on the Street from now on. No tips, either, I’ll give the word to the girls.”

It was the only meaningful gesture Frenchy could make, and I appreciated it. “Thanks, Frenchy,” I said. I learned how quickly being a big shot can get embarrassing.

We talked for a while. I tried to get him to see that there was still another killer around, but he didn’t want to know about it. He preferred to believe the danger was over. I had no proof that the second assassin was still in the city, after all. He hadn’t used a cigarette on anybody since Nikki’s death. “What are you looking for?” asked Frenchy.

I stared up at the stage, where Blanca was dancing. She was the one who had actually discovered Nikki’s corpse in the alley. “I have one clue and an idea of what he likes to do to his victims.” I told Frenchy about the moddy Nikki had in her purse, and about the bruises and cigarette burns on the bodies.

Frenchy looked thoughtful. “You know,” he said, “I do remember somebody telling me about a trick they turned.”

“What about it? Did the trick try to burn her or something?”

Frenchy shook his head. “No, not that. Whoever it was said that when she got the trick’s clothes off, he was all covered with the same kind of burns and marks.”

“Whose trick was it, Frenchy? I need to talk to her.”

He gazed off toward the middle of next week, trying to remember. “Oh,” he said, “it was Maribel.”

“Maribel?” I said in disbelief. Maribel was the old woman who occupied a stool at the angle of the bar. She always took that stool. She was somewhere between sixty and eighty years old, and she’d been a dancer half a century ago, when she still had a face and a body. Then she stopped dancing and concentrated on the aspects of the industry that brought more immediate cash benefits. When she got even older, she had to lower her retail markup in order to compete with the newer models. Nowadays she wore a red nylon wig that had all the body and bounce of the artificial lawns in the European district. She had never had the money for physical or mental modifications. Surrounded by the most beautiful bodies money could buy, her face looked even older than it was. Maribel was at a distinct disadvantage. She overcame that, however, through shrewd marketing techniques that stressed personalized attention and customer satisfaction: for the price of one champagne cocktail, she would give the man next to her the benefit of her manual dexterity and her years of experience. Right at the bar, sitting and chatting as if they were all alone in a motel room somewhere. Maribel subscribed to the classical Arab proverb: the best kindness is done quickly. She had to carry most of the conversation, of course; but unless you watched closely — or the guy couldn’t keep the glazed look off his face — you’d never know that an intimate encounter was taking place.

Most girls wanted you to buy them seven or eight cocktails before they’d even begin to negotiate. Maribel’s clock was running out, she didn’t have time for that. If Yasmin was the Neiman-Marcus — and she was, in my opinion — then Maribel was the Crazy Abdul’s Discount Mart of hustlers.

That’s why I found Frenchy’s story hard to believe.

Maribel would never have the opportunity to see scars on her trick. Not sitting at the corner of the bar like that. “She took this guy home,” said Frenchy, grinning.

“Who’d go home with Maribel?” It was hard to believe.

“Someone who needed the money.”

“Son of a bitch. She pays men to jam her?”

“Money cycles through this world like anything else.”

I thanked Frenchy for the information and told him I needed to talk to Maribel. He laughed and went back to his stool. I moved over to the seat beside her. “Hi, Maribel,” I said.

She had to look at me a while before she recognized me. “Marîd,” she said happily. Between the first syllable and the second, her hand plopped in my lap. “Buy me a cocktail?”

“All right.” I signaled to Dalia, who put a champagne cocktail in front of the old woman. Dalia gave me a crooked smile and I just shrugged helplessly. The girls and changes in Frenchy’s club always got a tall stainless-steel cup of ice water with their drinks. They said it was because they didn’t like the taste of liquor, and to get all that alcohol down they had to drink ice water with it. They sipped some champagne or some hard liquor, then went to the ice water. The marks thought it was tough on these poor girls, having to guzzle two or three dozen drinks every night if they didn’t enjoy the stuff. The truth was that they never swallowed the drink; they spit it out into the metal cup. Every so often Dalia would take the cup away and empty it on the pretext of freshening up the ice water. Maribel didn’t want the spit-back cup. She liked her booze.

I had to admit, Maribel’s hand was as skilled as any silversmith’s. Practice makes perfect, I guess. I was about to tell her to stop, but then I said to myself, what the hell. It was a learning experience. “Maribel,” I said, “Frenchy told me you saw somebody with burn marks and bruises all over his body. Do you remember who?”

“I did?”

“Somebody you went home with.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. If I could find that person, he might be able to tell me something that would save some lives.”

“Really? Would I get some kind of reward for that?”

“A hundred kiam, if you can remember.”

That stopped her. She hadn’t seen a hundred kiam in one lump since her glory days, and they belonged to another century. She hunted through her disordered memories, desperately trying to come up with a mental picture. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “there was somebody like that, I remember that much; but I can’t for the life of me remember who. I’ll get it, though. Will the reward still be good—”

“Whenever you remember, give me a call or tell Frenchy.”

“I won’t have to split the money with him, will I?”

“No,” I said. Yasmin was on stage now. She saw me sitting with Maribel, she saw Maribel’s arm moving up and down. Yasmin gave me a disgusted look and turned away. I laughed. “Thanks, but that’s all right, Maribel.”

“Going, Marîd?” asked Dalia. “That didn’t take very long.”

“Rotate, Dalia,” I said. I left Frenchy’s, worried that my friends, like Okking, Hassan, and Friedlander Bey, believed they were all safe now. I knew they weren’t, but they didn’t want to listen to me. I almost wished something terrible would happen, just so they’d know I was right; but I didn’t want to bear the guilt for it.