When Gravity Fails (21 page)

Beauties, it seemed, were scarce. Chiriga didn’t have any, but she gave me a free drink of tende while she told me about how much trouble she was having with a new girl working for her, and that she was still saving her Honey Pílar moddy for me. I remembered the holoporn ad outside old Laila’s shop. “Chiri,” I said, “I’m just getting over the flu or something; but I promise, we’ll go have dinner some night next week. Then,
inshallah,
we’ll burn your moddy out.”

She didn’t even smile. She looked at me as if she were watching a wounded fish flopping in the water. “Marîd, honey,” she said sadly, “now really, listen to me: you got to cut out all these pills. You’re wrecking yourself.”

She was right, but you don’t ever want to hear that kind of advice from anybody else. I nodded, gulped the rest of the tende, and left her club without saying good-bye.

I caught up with Jacques, Mahmoud, and Saied at Big Al’s Old Chicago. They said they were all tapped out, financially and medicinally. I said, “Fine, see you around.”

“Marîd,” said Jacques, “maybe it’s none of my—”

“It’s not,” I said. I passed by the Silver Palm: no action there, either. I passed by Hassan’s shop, but he wasn’t in the back and his American chicken just gazed at me with sultry eyes. I ducked into the Red Light—that’s how desperate I was beginning to feel—and Fatima told me that one of the white girls’ boyfriends had a whole suitcase full of different stuff, but that he wouldn’t be in until maybe five in the morning. I said that if nothing else turned up by then, I’d come back. No free drink from Fatima.

Finally, at Jo-Mama’s Hellenic hideaway, I ran into a little luck. I bought six beauties from Jo-Mama’s second barmaid, Rocky, another hefty woman with short, brushy black hair. Rocky stung me a little on the price, but at that point I didn’t care. She offered me a beer on the house to wash them down, but I told her I was just going to go home and take them and climb back into bed.

“Yeah, you right,” said Jo-Mama, “you got to get to sleep early. You got to get up in the morning, dawlin’, and have your skull drilled.”

I shut my eyes briefly and sighed. “Where did you hear about that?” I asked her.

Jo-Mama pasted a slightly offended, wholly innocent look on her face.
“Everybody’s
been knowin’ it, Marîd. Ain’t that the truth, Rocky? It’s what everybody’s been having trouble believing. I mean,
you
getting your brain wired. F’sure, the next thing we be hearing, Hassan’ll be giving away free rugs or rifles or handjobs to the first twenty callers.”

“I’ll take that beer,” I said, very tired. Rocky drew one; for a moment nobody knew if this was the free beer or if I’d turned that one down and this was another one that I had to pay for.

“It’s on me,” said Jo-Mama.

“Thanks, Mama,” I said. “I’m not getting my brain wired.” I took a big gulp of the beer. “I don’t care
who
told
who,
I don’t care who
they
heard it from. This is me, Marîd, talking: I am
not
getting my brain wired.
Comprendez
?”

Jo-Mama shrugged like she didn’t believe me; after all, what was
my
word against the word of the Street? “I got to tell you what happened in here last night,” she said, about to launch into one of her endless but entertaining stories. I half-wanted to hear it because I had to keep up with the news, but I was rescued.

“There
you are!” shouted Yasmin, banging into the bar and whacking a vicious swipe at me with her purse. I ducked my head, but she cracked me in the side.

“What the hell—” I started to say.

“Take it outside,” said Jo-Mama automatically. She looked as astonished as I felt.

Yasmin wasn’t in the mood to listen to either of us. She grabbed me around the wrist—her hand was as strong as mine, and my wrist was
grabbed.
“You come with me, you cocksucker,” she said.

“Yasmin, shut the fuck up and leave me alone,” I said. Jo-Mama got off her stool; that ought to have been a warning, but Yasmin paid her no attention. She still had my wrist, and her fingers closed even tighter. She yanked on my arm.

“You’re going to come with me,” she said in an ominous voice, “because I got something pretty to show you, you goddamn yellow-bellied pussy.”

I was really angry; I’d never been this angry with Yasmin before, and I still didn’t know what she was talking about. “Slap her face for her,” said Rocky from behind the bar. That always works in the holoshows for excitable heroines and panicking junior officers; I didn’t think, though, that it would quiet Yasmin down. She’d probably just beat the living hell out of me, and then we’d go do whatever she wanted in the first place. I raised the arm she was still clutching, turned it outward a little, broke her grasp, and grabbed
her
wrist. Then I twisted her arm and forced it up behind her back in a tight hammerlock. She cried out in pain. I pushed her arm further, and she yelped again.

“That’s for calling me those names,” I said, growling softly, close to her ear. “You can do that at home if you want, but not in front of my friends.”

“You want me to hurt you bad?” she said angrily.

“You can try.”

“Later,” she said. “I still got something to show you.”

I let go of her arm, and she rubbed it for a moment. Then she snatched up her purse and kicked open Jo-Mama’s door. I raised my eyebrows at Rocky; Jo-Mama was giving me an amused little smile, because all of this would eventually make a better story than the one she never got to tell me. Jo-Mama, at least, was going to come out ahead.

I followed Yasmin outside. She turned to me; before she could say a word, I put my right hand tightly around her throat and flung her up against an ancient brick wall. I didn’t care how much I hurt her. “You’re
never
going to do that again,” I said in a dangerously calm voice. “You understand me?” And just for the pure sadistic pleasure of it, I knocked her head roughly against the bricks.

“Fuck you,
asshole!”

“Anytime you think you’re man enough, you mutilated, gelded son of a bitch,” I said. And then Yasmin started to cry. I felt myself collapse inside. I felt I had done the worst thing I could ever do, and there was no way I could make up for it. I might crawl on my knees all the way to Mecca to pray for forgiveness, and Allah would forgive me, but Yasmin wouldn’t. I would have given anything I had, anything I could steal, if the last few minutes hadn’t happened; but they had, and they would be difficult for either of us to forget.

“Marîd,” she whispered between sobs. I held her. Right then, there wasn’t a damn thing in the world to say. We clasped each other that way, close together, Yasmin weeping, me wanting to but unable, for five or ten or fifteen minutes. A few people passed by on the sidewalk and pretended they didn’t see us. Jo-Mama stuck her head out of the door and ducked back inside. A moment later, Rocky looked out as if she were just casually counting the crowd that didn’t exist on this dark street. I wasn’t thinking anything, I wasn’t feeling anything. I just clung to Yasmin, and she clung to me.

“I love you,” I murmured at last. When you find the appropriate time, it’s always the best and only thing to say.

She took my hand and we started walking slowly toward the back of the Budayeen. I thought we were just wandering, but after a few minutes I realized that Yasmin was leading me somewhere. The grim certainty grew in me that I didn’t want to see what she was going to show me.

A body had been stuffed into a large plastic trash bag, but someone had disturbed the pile of bags; Nikki’s bag had split open, and she lay sprawled on the damp, filthy bricks of a tight blind alley. “I thought it was your fault she was dead,” said Yasmin with a little whimper. “Because you didn’t do very much to try and find her.” I held Yasmin’s hand and we just stood there for a while, staring down at Nikki’s corpse, not saying anything more for a while. I
knew
that I’d see Nikki like this sometime, finally. I think I knew it from the beginning, when Tamiko had been murdered and Nikki made that short, frantic phone call.

I let go of Yasmin’s hand and knelt down beside Nikki. There was a lot of blood all over her, in the dark green trash bag, on the moss-covered bricks of the pavement. “Yasmin, baby,” I said, looking up into her bleak face, “you don’t want to see this anymore. Why don’t you call Okking, then go home? I’ll be there in a little while.”

Yasmin made a vague, meaningless gesture. “I’ll call Okking,” she said in a toneless voice, “but I got to go back to work.”

“Frenchy can go fuck himself tonight,” I said. “I want you to go home. Listen, honey, I
need
to have you there.”

“All right,” she said, smiling a little through the tears. Our relationship hadn’t been destroyed, after all. With a little care it would be just as good as new, maybe even better. It was a relief to feel hopeful again.

“How did you know she was here?” I asked, frowning.

“Blanca found her,” said Yasmin. “Her back door’s down there, and she passes by here on her way to work.” She pointed further up the alley, where a peeling, gray-painted door was set into the blank brick wall.

I nodded and watched Yasmin walk slowly toward the Street. Then I turned back to Nikki’s ruined body. It had been the throat-slasher, and I could see the bruises on Nikki’s wrists and neck, the burn marks, and a lot of small cuts and wounds. The killer had invested more time and expertise in finishing Nikki than he had with Tami or Abdoulaye. I was sure the medical examiner would find the traces of rape, too.

Nikki’s clothing and purse had been thrown into the trash bag with her. I looked through her clothes, but I didn’t find anything. I reached for the purse, but I had to lift Nikki’s head. She had been clubbed cruelly and savagely until her skull and hair and blood and brains were all crushed together into a repellent mass. Her throat had been cut so brutally that her head was almost severed. I had never seen such profane, desecrating, perverse savagery in my life. I cleared the strewn refuse from a space and rested Nikki’s corpse gently on the broken bricks. Then I walked away a few steps, knelt, and vomited. I heaved and retched until my stomach muscles began to ache. When the sickness passed, I made myself go back to look through her purse. I found two curious and noteworthy objects: a brass reproduction that I’d seen in Seipolt’s house of an ancient Egyptian scarab; and a crude, almost homemade-looking moddy. I put both in my shoulder bag, chose the trash bag with the least stench surrounding it, and made myself as comfortable as I could. I addressed a prayer to Allah on behalf of Nikki’s soul. Then I waited.

“Well,” I said quietly, looking around at the squalid, mucky place where Nikki had been abandoned, “I guess I get up in the morning and get my brain wired.”
Maktoob,
all right: It was written.

12

Muslims are often, by nature, very superstitious. Our co-travelers through Allah’s bewildering creation include all sorts of
djinn, afrit,
monsters, and good and bad angels. Then there are legions of sorcerous people armed with dangerous powers, the evil eye being the most frequently encountered. All of this makes the Muslim culture no more irrational than any other; every group of people has its own set of unfriendly, unseen things waiting to pounce on the unwary human being. Commonly there are far more enemies in the spirit world than there are protectors, although there are supposed to be uncountable armies of angels and the like. Maybe they’ve all been on R&R since the deparadisation of Shaitan, I don’t know.

Anyway, one of the superstitious practices clung to by some Muslims, particularly the nomadic tribes and the uncivilized
fellahîn
of the Maghrîb—i.e., my mother’s people—is to name a newborn with an affliction or a dreadful quality to ward off the envy of whatever spirit or witch might be paying too much attention. I’m told that this is done all over the world by people who have never even heard of the Prophet, may peace be on his name. I am called Marîd, which means “illness,” and I was given it in the hope that I would not, in fact, suffer much illness in my lifetime. The charm seems to have had a certain positive effect. I had a burst appendix removed a few years ago, but that’s a common, routine operation, and it is the only serious medical problem I’ve ever had. I guess that may be due to the improved treatments available in this age of wonders, but who can say? Praise Allah, and all that.

So I haven’t had much experience with hospitals. When the voices woke me, it took me quite some time to figure out where I was, and then another while to recall why the hell I was there in the first place. I opened my eyes; I couldn’t see anything but a dim blur. I blinked again and again, but it was like someone had tried to paste my eyelids closed with sand and honey. I tried to raise my hand to rub my eyes, but my arm was too weak; it wouldn’t travel the negligible distance from my chest to my face. I blinked some more and squinted. Finally I could make out two male nurses standing near the foot of my bed. One was young, with a black beard and a clear voice. He held a chart and was briefing the other man. “Mr. Audran shouldn’t give you too much trouble,” he said.

The second man was a good deal older, with gray hair and a hoarse voice. He nodded. “Meds?” he asked.

The younger man frowned. “It’s unusual. He can have almost anything he wants, with approval from his doctors. The way I understand it, he’ll get that approval just by asking. As much and as often as he wants.”

The gray-haired man let out an indignant breath. “What did he do, win a contest? An all-expense-paid drug holiday in the hospital of his choice?”

“Lower your voice, All He isn’t moving, but he may be able to hear you. I don’t know who he is, but the hospital has been treating him like a foreign dignitary or something. What’s being spent to ablate every little twinge of his discomfort could relieve the pain of a dozen suffering poor people on the charity wards.”