When Gravity Fails (3 page)

I thought I was an expert on reading people. What did I know? That’s why I stuck myself out on a limb and handed down an ax to whoever felt like taking a whack.

Outside in the hall, the tri-phets finally flowered. It was like the whole world suddenly took a deep breath, expanding like a balloon. I caught my balance by grabbing at the railing, and then started downstairs. I didn’t exactly know what I was going to do, but it was about time to start hustling up some money. The rent was coming due, and I didn’t want to have to go to The Man to borrow it. I shoved my hands in my pockets and felt bills. Of course. The Russian had given me three big ones the night before. I took the money out and counted it; there was about twenty-eight hundred kiam left. Yasmin and I must have had some wild party on the other two hundred. I wished I remembered it.

When I hit the sidewalk, I was almost blinded by the sun. I don’t function very well in the daytime. I shaded my eyes with a hand and looked up and down the street. No one else was about; the Budayeen hides from the light. I headed toward the Street with the vague idea of running a few errands. I could afford to run them now, I had money. I grinned; the drugs were pumping me up, and the twenty-eight hundred kiam lifted me the rest of the way. I had my rent made, all my expenses paid for the next three months or so. Time to lay in supplies: replenish the stock in the pill case, treat myself to a few luxury caps and tabs, pay off a couple of debts, buy a little food. The rest would go in the bank. I have a tendency to fritter away money if it sits around too long in my pocket. Better to salt it away, turn it into electronic credit. I don’t allow myself to carry a credit charge-card—that way I can’t bankrupt myself some night when I’m too loaded to know what I’m doing. I spend cash, or I don’t spend at all. You can’t fritter bytes, not without a card.

I turned toward the eastern gate when I got to the Street. The nearer I came to the wall the more people I saw—my neighbors going out into the city like me, tourists coming into the Budayeen during the slack time. The outsiders were just fooling themselves. They could get into just as much trouble in broad daylight.

There was a little barricade set up at the corner of Fourth Street, where the city was doing some street repair. I leaned against the posts to overhear the conversations of a couple of hustlers out for the early trade—or, if they hadn’t yet made enough money to go home, it might still be last night for them. I’d listened to this stuff a million times before, but James Bond had got me pondering moddies, and so these negotiations took on a slightly new meaning today.

“Hello,” said this short, thin mark. He was wearing European clothing, and he spoke Arabic like someone who had studied the language for three months in a school where no one, neither teacher nor pupils, had ever come within five thousand miles of a date palm.

The bint was taller than he by about a foot and a half, but give some of that to the black spike-heeled boots. She probably wasn’t a real woman, but a change or a pre-op deb; but the guy didn’t know or care. She was impressive. Hustlers in the Budayeen
have
to be impressive, just to be noticed. We don’t have a lot of plain, mousy housewives living on the Street. She was dressed in a kind of short-skirted black frilly thing with no back or sleeves, lots of visibility down the front, cinched around the waist with a solid silver chain with a Roman Catholic rosary dangling from it. She wore dramatic purple and pink paints and a beautiful mass of auburn hair, artfully arranged to frame her face in defiance of all known laws of natural science. “Lookin’ to go out?” she asked. When she spoke, I read her for someone who still had a masculine set of chromosomes in every one of her refurbished body’s cells, whatever was beneath that skirt.

“Maybe,” said the trick. He was playing it cagey.

“Lookin’ for anybody special?”

The man licked his lips nervously. “I was hoping to find Ashla.”

“Uh uh, baby, sorry. Lips, hips, or fingertips, I don’t do no Ashla.” She looked away for a second and spat. “You go by that girl, I think she got Ashla.” She pointed to a deb I knew. The trick nodded his thanks and crossed the street. I accidentally caught the first whore’s eyes. “Fuck, man,” she said, laughing a little. Then she was watching the Street again, looking for lunch money. A couple of minutes later another man came up to her and had the same conversation. “Lookin’ for anybody special?”

This guy, a little taller than the first and a lot heavier, said “Brigitte?” He sounded apologetic.

She dug in her black vinyl purse and brought out a plastic rack of moddies. A moddy is a lot bigger than a daddy, which usually just chips right into a socket on the side of the moddy you’re using, or onto the cory plug in your skull if you’re not wired for moddies or if you just feel like being yourself. The girl held a pink plastic moddy in one hand and put the rack back in her purse. “Here she go, your main woman. Brigitte, she be real popular, she get a lot of airplay. She cost you more.”

“I know,” said the trick. “How much?”

“You tell me,” she said, thinking he might be a cop setting her up. That kind of thing still happened whenever the religious authorities ran out of infidels to persecute. “How much you got to spend?”

“Fifty?”

“For
Brigitte,
man?”

“A hundred?”

“An’ fifteen for the room. You come with me, sugar.” They walked off along Fourth Street. Ain’t love grand.

I knew who Ashla was and who Brigitte was, but I wondered who all the other moddies in that rack might be. It wasn’t worth a hundred kiam a throw to find out, though. Plus fifteen for the room. So this Titian-haired hustler goes off with her sweetheart and chips Brigitte in, and she
becomes
Brigitte, and she’s everything he remembers her being; and it would always be the same, whoever used a Brigitte moddy, woman, deb, or sex-change.

I went through the eastern gate and I was halfway to the bank when I stopped suddenly in front of a jewelry store. Something was gnawing at the edge of my mind. There was some idea trying to burst its way into my consciousness. It was an uncomfortable, ticklish feeling; there didn’t seem to be any way to help it, either. Maybe it was only the tri-phets I’d taken; I can get pretty carried away with meaningless thoughts when I’m humming like that. But no, it was more than just drug inspiration. There was something about Bogatyrev’s murder or the conversation I’d had on the phone with Okking. There was something wrong.

I thought over as much of that business as I could remember. Nothing stood out in my memory as unusual; Okking’s bit had been a brush-off, I realized, but it was just the standard cop brush-off: “Look, this is a matter for the police, we don’t need you sticking your nose into it, you had a job last night but it blew up in your face, so thank you very much.” I’ve heard the same line from Okking before, a hundred times. So why did it feel so wonky today?

I shook my head. If there was something to it, I’d figure it out. I filed it away in my backbrain; it would stew there and either boil away into nothing or simmer down into a cold, hard fact that I could use. Until then, I didn’t want to bother about it. I wanted to enjoy the warmth and strength and confidence I was getting from the drugs. I’d pay for that when I crashed, so I wanted to get my money’s worth.

Maybe ten minutes later, just as I was getting to the bank’s sidewalk teller terminals, my phone rang again. I plucked it off my belt. “Yeah?” I said.

“Marîd? This is Nikki.” Nikki was a crazy change, worked as a whore for one of Friedlander Bey’s jackals. About a year ago I had been pretty friendly with her, but she was just too much trouble. When you were with her, you had to keep track of the pills and the drinks she was taking; one too many and Nikki got belligerent and completely incoherent. Every time we went out, it ended up in a brawl. Before her modifications, Nikki had been a tall, muscular male, I guess—stronger than I am. Even after the sex change, she was still impossible to handle in a fight. Trying to drag her off the people she imagined had insulted her was an ordeal. Getting her calmed down and safely home was exhausting. Finally I decided that I liked her when she was straight, but the rest of it just wasn’t worth it. I saw her now and then, said hello and gossiped, but I didn’t want to wade into any more of her drunken, screaming, senseless conflicts.

“Say, Nikki, where you at?”

“Marîd, baby, can I see you today? I really need you to do me a favor.”

Here we go, I thought. “Sure, I guess. What’s up?”

There was a short pause while she thought about how she was going to phrase this. “I don’t want to work for Abdoulaye anymore.” That was the name of Friedlander Bey’s bottleholder. Abdoulaye had about a dozen girls and boys on wires all around the Budayeen.

“Easy enough,” I said. I’ve done this kind of work a lot, picking up a few extra kiam now and then. I’ve got a good relationship with Friedlander Bey—within the walls we all called him Papa; he practically owned the Budayeen, and had the rest of the city in his pocket, as well. I always kept my word, which was a valuable recommendation to someone like Bey. Papa was an old-timer. The rumor was that he might be as much as two hundred years old, and now and then I could believe it. He had an archaic sense of what was honor and what was business and what was loyalty. He dispensed favors and punishments like an ancient idea of God. He owned many of the clubs, whorehouses, and cookshops in the Budayeen, but he didn’t discourage competition. It was all right with him if some independent wanted to work the same side of the street. Papa operated on the understanding that he wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother him; however, Papa offered all kinds of attractive inducements. An awful lot of free agents ended up working for him after all, because they couldn’t get those particular benefits for themselves. He didn’t just
have
connections; Papa
was
connections.

The motto of the Budayeen was “Business is business.” Anything that hurt the free agents eventually hurt Friedlander Bey. There was enough to go around for everybody; it might have been different if Papa had been the greedy type. He once told me that he used to be that way, but after a hundred and fifty or sixty years, you stop wanting. That was about the saddest thing anyone ever said to me.

I heard Nikki take a deep breath. “Thanks, Marîd. You know where I’m staying?”

I didn’t pay that much attention to her comings and goings anymore. “No, where?”

“I’m staying by Tamiko for a little while.”

Great, I thought, just great. Tamiko was one of the Black Widow Sisters. “On Thirteenth Street?”

“Yeah.”

“I know. How about if I come by, say, two o’clock?”

Nikki hesitated. “Can you make it one? I’ve got something else I need to do.”

It was an imposition, but I was feeling generous; it must have been the blue triangles. For old times’ sake I said, “All right, I’ll be there about one,
inshallah.”

“You’re sweet, Marîd. I’ll see you then. Salaam.” She cut the connection.

I hung the phone on my belt. It didn’t feel, at that moment, like I was getting into something over my head. It never does, before you take the leap.

3

It was twelve forty-five when I found the apartment building on Thirteenth Street. It was an old two-story house, broken up into separate flats. I glanced up at Tamiko’s balcony overlooking the street. There was a waist-high iron railing on three sides, and in the corners were lacy iron columns twined with ivy, reaching up toward the overhanging roof. From an open window I could hear her damn koto music. Electronic koto music, from a synthesizer. The shrieking, high-pitched singing that accompanied it gave me chills. It might have been a synthetic voice, it might have been Tami. Did I tell you that Nikki was a little crazy? Well, next to Tami, Nikki was just a cuddly little white bunny. Tamiko’d had one of her salivary glands replaced with a plastic sac full of some high-velocity toxin. A plastic duct led the poison down through an artificial tooth. The toxin was harmless if swallowed, but loose in the bloodstream, it was horribly, painfully lethal. Tamiko could uncap that tooth anytime she needed to—or wanted to. That’s why they called her and her friends the Black Widow Sisters.
 

I punched the button by Tami’s name, but no one responded. I rapped on the small pane of Plexiglas set into the door. Finally I stepped into the street and shouted. I saw Nikki’s head pop out of the window. “I’ll be right down,” she called. She couldn’t hear anything over that koto music. I’ve never met anybody else who could even
stand
koto music. Tamiko was just bughouse nuts.

The door opened a little, and Nikki looked out at me. “Listen,” she said worriedly, “Tami’s in kind of a bad mood. She’s a little loaded, too. Just don’t do or say anything to set her off.”

I asked myself if I really wanted to go through with this, after all. I didn’t really need Nikki’s hundred kiam that much. Still, I’d promised her, so I nodded and followed her up the stairs to the apartment.

Tami was sprawled on a heap of brightly patterned pillows, with her head propped against one of the speakers of her holo system. If that music had sounded loud down in the street, I was now learning what “loud” meant. The music must have been throbbing in Tami’s skull like the world’s worst migraine, but she didn’t seen to mind. It must have been throbbing in time to whatever drug she had in her. Her eyes were half-closed and she was slowly nodding. Her face was painted white, as stark white as a geisha’s, but her lips and eyelids were flat black. She looked like the avenging specter of a murdered Kabuki character.

“Nikki,” I said. She didn’t hear me. I had to walk right up next to her and shout into her ear. “Why don’t we get out of here, where we can talk?” Tamiko was burning some kind of incense, and the air was thick with its overwhelming sweet scent. I really wanted some fresh air.

Nikki shook her head and pointed to Tami. “She won’t let me go.”