A Fire in the Sun (6 page)

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."

"Yeah, you right," I said. I glared at Hajjar's back as he walked out.

"By the way," he said, turning toward me again, "I got someone for you to meet later. It may be a nice surprise."

I doubted that. "Uh huh," I said.

"Yeah, well, get movin' on those plates. I want 'em finished by lunchtime."

I turned back to my desk, shaking my head. Hajjar annoyed the hell out of me. What was worse, he knew it. I didn't like giving him the satisfaction of seeing me irked.

The funny thing was that Hajjar was in Friedlander Bey's pocket too, but he liked to pretend he was still his own man. Since he'd been promoted and given command, though, Hajjar had gone through some startling changes. He'd begun to take his work seriously, and he'd cut back on his intrigues and profiteering schemes. It wasn't that he'd suddenly discovered a sense of honor; he just realized he'd have to work his tail off to keep from getting fired as a crook and an incompetent.

I selected a productivity moddy from my rack and chipped it onto my posterior plug. The rear implant functions the same as everybody else's. It lets me chip in a moddy and six daddies. The anterior plug, however, is my own little claim to fame. This is the one that taps into my hypothalamus and lets me chip in my special daddies. As far as I know, no one else has ever been given a second implant. I'm glad I hadn't known that Friedlander Bey told my doctors to try something experimental and insanely dangerous. I guess he didn't want me to worry. Now that the frightening part is over, though, I'm glad I went through it. It's made me a more productive member of society and all that.

When I had boring police work to do, which was almost every day, I chipped in an orange moddy that Hajjar had given me. It had a label that said it was manufactured in Helvetia. The Swiss, I suppose, have a high regard for efficiency. Their moddy could take the most energetic, inspired person in the world and transform him instantly into a drudge. Not into a stupid drudge, like what the Half-Hajj's dumbing-down hardware did to me, but into a mindless worker who isn't aware enough to be distracted before the whole assignment is in the Out box. It's the greatest gift to the office menial since conjugal coffee breaks.

I sighed and took the moddy, then reached up and chipped it in.

The immediate sensation was as if the whole world had lurched and then caught its balance. There was an odd, metallic taste in Audran 's mouth and a high-pitched ringing in his ears. He felt a touch of nausea, but he tried to ignore it because it wouldn 't go away until he popped the moddy out. The moddy had trimmed down his personality like the wick of a lamp, until there was only a vague and ineffectual vestige of his true self left.

Audran wasn 't conscious enough even to be resentful. He remembered only that he had work to do, and he pulled a double handful of cobalt-alloy plates out of the box. He slotted six of them into the adit ports beneath the battered data deck's comp screen. Audran touched the control pad and said, "Copy ports one, two, three, four, five, six." Then he stared blankly while the deck recorded the contents of the plates. When the run was finished, he removed the plates, stacked them on one side of the desk, and loaded in six more. He barely noticed the morning pass as he logged in the records.

"Audran." Someone was saying his name.

He stopped what he was doing and glanced over his shoulder. Lieutenant Hajjar and a uniformed patrolman were standing in the entrance to his cubicle. Audran turned slowly back to the data deck. He reached into the box, but it was empty.

"Unplug that goddamn thing."

Audran faced Hajjar again and nodded. It was time to pop the moddy.

There was a dizzy swirl of disorientation, and then I was sitting at my desk, staring stupidly at the Helvetian moddy in my hand. "Jeez," I murmured. It was a relief to be fully conscious again.

"Tell you a secret about Audran," Hajjar said to the cop. "We didn't hire him because of his wonderful qualities. He really don't have any. But he makes a great spindle for hardware. Audran's just a moddy's way of gettin' its daily workout." The cop smiled.

"Hey, you gave me this goddamn moddy in the first place," I said.

Hajjar shrugged. "Audran, this is Officer Shaknahyi."

"Where you at?" I said.

"All right," said the cop.

"You got to watch out for Audran," Hajjar said. "He's got one of those addictives personalities. He used to make a big deal out of not havin" his brain wired. Now you never see him without some kind of moddy stuck in his head."

That shocked me. I hadn't realized I'd been using my moddies so much. I was surprised anyone else had noticed.

"Try to overlook his frailties, Jirji, 'cause you and him are gonna be workin' together."

Shaknahyi gave him a sharp look. I did the same. "What do you mean, 'working together'?" said the cop.

"I mean what I said. I got a little assignment for you two. You're gonna be workin' very closely for a while. "You taking me off the street?" asked Shaknahyi.

Hajjar shook his head. "I never said that. I'm pairin' Audran with you on patrol."

Shaknahyi was so outraged, I thought he was going to split down the middle. "Shaitan take my kids first!" he said. "You think you're teaming me up with a guy with no training and no experience, you're goddamn crazy!"

I didn't like the idea of going out on the street. I d idn't want to make myself a target for every loon in the Budayeen who owned a cheap needle gun. "I'm supposed to stay here in the station house," I said. "Friedlander Bey never said anything about real cop work."

"Be good for you, Audran," said Hajjar. "You can ride around and see all your old buddies again. They'll be impressed when you flash your badge at them."

"They'll hate my guts," I said.

"You're both overlooking one small detail," said Shaknahyi. "As my partner, he's supposed to guard my back every time we walk into some dangerous situation. To be honest, I don't have a lick of faith in him. You can't expect me to work with a partner I don't trust."

"I don't blame you," said Hajjar. He looked amused by the cop's opinion of me. My first' impression of Shaknahyi wasn't so good, either. He didn't have his brain wired, and that meant he was one of two kinds of cop: Either he was a strict Muslim, or else he was one of those guys who thought his own naked, unaugmented brain was more than a match for the evildoers. That's the way I used to be, but I learned better. Either way, I wouldn't get along with him.

"And I don't want the responsibility of watching his back," I said. "I don't need that kind of pressure."

Hajjar patted the air in a kind of soothing motion. "Well, forget about that. You're not gonna be chasin' down bad guys on the street. You're gonna be conductin' an unofficial investigation."

"What kind of investigation?" asked Shaknahyi suspiciously.

Hajjar waved a dark green cobalt-alloy plate. "Got a big file here on Reda Abu Adil. I want you two to learn it backwards and forwards. Then you're gonna meet the man and stick to him like shadows." "His name's come up a couple of times at Papa's house," I said. "Who is he?"

"He's Friedlander Bey's oldest rival." Hajjar leaned against the pale green wall. "They got a competition goes back a hundred years."

"I know about him," said the cop gruffly.

"Audran only knows about small-time thugs in the Budayeen. Abu Adil don't come near the Budayeen. Keeps his interests far away from Papa's. Carved out a little kingdom for himself on the north and west sides of town. Even so, I got a request from Friedlander Bey to put him under surveillance."

"You're doing this just because Friedlander Bey asked you to?" asked Shaknahyi.

"You bet your ass. He's got a suspicion that Abu Adil is thinkin' about breakin' their truce. Papa wants to be ready."

Well, until I found my leverage with Friedlander Bey, I was his puppet. I had to do whatever he and Hajjar told me to do.

Shaknahyi, however, didn't want any part of it, "I wanted to be a cop because I thought I could help people," he said. "I don't make a lot of money, I don't get enough sleep, and every day I mix into one goddamn crisis after another. I never know when somebody's gonna pull a gun on me and use it. I do it because I believe I can make a difference. I didn't sign on to be some rich bastard's personal spy. How long has this outfit been for sale, anyway?" He glowered at Hajjar until the lieutenant had to look away.

"Listen," I said to Shaknahyi, "what's your problem with me?"

"You're not a cop, for one thing," he said. "You're worse than a rookie. You'll hang back and let some creep nail me, or else you'll get itchy and shoot a little old lady. I don't want to be teamed with somebody unless I think I can count on him."

I nodded. "Yeah, you right, but I can wear a moddy. I've seen plenty of rookies wearing police officer moddies to help them through the routines."

Shaknahyi threw up his hands. "He just makes it worse," he muttered.

"I said not to worry about a rough time on the street," said Hajjar. "This is just an investigation. Mostly desk-job stuff. I don't know what's got you so spooked, Jirji."

Shaknahyi rubbed his forehead and sighed. "All right, all right. I just wanted to have my objection on the record."

"Okay," said Hajjar, "it's been noted. I want to hear regular reports from both of you, 'cause I got to keep Friedlander Bey happy. That's not as easy as it sounds, either." He tossed the cell-memory plate to me.

"Want us to start on this right away?" I asked.

Hajjar gave me a wry look. "If you can fit it into your busy social calendar."

"Make a copy for me," said Shaknahyi. "I'll study the file today, and tomorrow we'll take a ride by Abu Adil's place."

"Fine," I said. I slipped the green plate into my data deck and copied it onto a blank.

"Right," said Shaknahyi, taking the copy and walking out of my cubicle.

"You two didn't hit it off real well," said Hajjar.

"We just have to get the job done," I said. "We don't have to go dancing together."

"Yeah, you right. Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off? Go home and look through the report. I'm sure you got any questions, Papa can answer them for you."

He left me alone too, and I called Friedlander Bey's house through the data deck. I spoke to one of the Stones That Speak. "Yeah?" he said bluntly.

"This is Audran. Tell Kmuzu to pick me up at the police station in about twenty minutes."

"Yeah," said the Stone. Then I was listening to a dial tone. The Stones make up in curtness what they lack in eloquence.

Twenty minutes later on the dot, Kmuzu swung the electric sedan in toward the curb. I got into the backseat, and he began driving home.