Black Man (32 page)

His hand needed glue, and there were still minute fragments of glass in the wound. He sat in a UN medical unit in Fenerbahçe and waited patiently while a nurse cleaned him up. Glare of overhead lighting and—something he could have lived without—a screen in one corner with a microscopic blowup of the wound as it was treated. He looked fixedly elsewhere.

Ertekin had wanted the COLIN facilities on the European side instead, but couldn’t argue with the immediacy of the UN hospital’s location. It took them less than five minutes in a taxi—the bloodied promenade and gathering, gawping crowds dumped for the quiet residential streets of Fenerbahçe and the welcome-beacon lamps out front at the medical center’s modestly appointed nanobuild façade. Now Ertekin was gone, along with Battal Yavuz and Nevant, down the corridor to wherever they were treating the Frenchman’s injuries. He guessed she wanted a shot at hearing the other thirteen’s side of the story. He also judged she was still a little numb from the action, and couldn’t blame her much. The strain of the encounter with Nevant still twanged in his own blood, more than he showed.

The door opened and a Turk in a suit slipped in, yawning. Grizzled hair and matching, close-clipped mustache, not quite clean-shaven slate-gray chin. The suit was expensive and came with a carefully knotted silk tie. Only the sleep-swollen eyes and the yawn suggested the bed he’d been called out of. The sleepy gaze calibrated Carl for a moment, then the newcomer murmured something to the nurse, who immediately laid down his microcam-enhanced tools and excused himself. The door shut quietly behind him. Carl raised an eyebrow.

“Am I going to have to pay for this?”

The Turk smiled dutifully. “Very droll, Mr. Marsalis. Of course, as a licensed UNGLA accountant, you have a health plan with us. That’s not why I’m here.”

He came forward and offered his hand. “I am Mehmet Tuzcu, UNGLA special liaison.”

Carl took the hand, careful of his wound. He stayed seated. “And what can I do for you, Mehmet bey?”

“Your Colony Initiative escort is on the next floor.” Tuzcu’s gaze flicked toward the ceiling. “There is transport waiting for you in the street at the back of this building. We will leave by the bulk elevator, unseen. In half an hour we can have you on a suborbital to London, but”—a glance at a heavy steel watch—“we will have to hurry.”

“You’re. Rescuing me?”

“If you like.” The patient smile again. “They expected you in New York, but events seem to have overtaken us. Now we really must—”

“I, uhm.” Carl gestured with his nearly repaired hand. “I don’t really need rescuing. COLIN aren’t holding me under any kind of duress.”

The smile paled out. “Nevertheless, you are part of an unauthorized retrieval operation. COLIN are in breach of the Munich Accords by employing you in this capacity.”

“I’ll mention it to them.”

Tuzcu frowned. “You are refusing to come with me?”

“Yeah.”

“May I ask why?”

Ask away,
he was tempted to say.
Been asking myself the same thing, don’t have an intelligent answer yet
.

“Do you know Gianfranco di Palma?”

Tuzcu’s eyes were careful. “Yes. I have met Signor di Palma a number of times.”

“Slimy piece of shit, isn’t he?”

“What is your point, please?”

“You were asking me for a reason. Tell di Palma this is what happens when you run your licensed operatives on a no-win/no-fee bounty and a three-month delay on expense reimbursement. They start to have loyalty issues.”

The UNGLA man hesitated. He glanced back at the door. Carl stood up.

“Don’t let’s force this, Mehmet,” he said easily.

Sevgi found him later, seated in the ground-floor waiting area watching some low-grade global music show on an overhead screen. A miked-up and dyed blonde pranced back and forth on stage in clothing that wasn’t much more than slashed ribbons, stances, and motion designed to maximize the display of the tanned flesh beneath. A dance troupe of young men and women, similarly unclad, followed her in mindless body echo. The song wittered on, backed by instruments you couldn’t see being played.

“See anything you like?” she asked.

“It’s better than what I was watching earlier.” He glanced past her. “What did you do with Nevant?”

“He’s coming down.”

“Right.” Marsalis’s eyes drifted back to the screen. “Got to hand it to you people, this is something you do really well.”

“You people?”

“Humans. Look at that.” He waved his bandaged hand up at the gaily colored images. “Perfect lockstep.

Group mind. No wonder you guys make such good soldiers.”

“Kind of ironic, coming from you,” she said waspishly. “Compliments from the state-of-the-art gene warrior.”

He smiled. “Ertekin, you don’t want to believe everything they tell you on the feeds.”

The elevator chimed, and Battal Yavuz exited, shepherding Nevant. The pale thirteen wore a mask of bandaging across the middle of his face and a similar wrapping on his broken hand. He seemed in good spirits.

“See you again,” he said to Marsalis. He lifted the damaged hand. “When this is back to functional, maybe.”

“Sure. You know where I live. Look me up soon as you get out.”

Yavuz looked sheepish. “Sorry about this, Carl. If I’d known he was going to—”

“Skip it. No harm done.” Carl got up and clapped the Turk on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming out.

Been good to see you.”

Sevgi hovered, watching Nevant peripherally.

“You want me to come with you to the heliport?” she asked Yavuz.

He shook his head. “No need.”

“But if—”

Marsalis grinned. “Show her your ankle, Stefan.”

As if they were all sharing a joke, the Frenchman pulled up the left leg of his pants. Tight at the bottom of his shin, a slim band of shiny, pored black fiber wrapped around. It wasn’t much larger than a man’s watch, but a tiny green light winked tirelessly on and off at one edge. She shouldn’t really have been surprised, but her breath still hitched to a halt for a moment as she saw.

“Excursion restraint,” said Yavuz. “No one comes off the tract without one. Stefan here’s not going to give me any trouble.”

“And if he slips it? Finds a way to cut it loose?”

“It’s anti-tamper,” said Nevant, curiously gentle. “Wolf-trap-formatted. Any interference, it triggers. Want to know what happens then?”

She already knew. The wolf-trap cuffs had a long and unpleasant history, made worse in her case by close personal connection. News stories of mutilated Muslim prisoners of war in American custody had dogged her father in his choice of émigré destination—his mail in the last weeks before he left Istanbul for good had been sprinkled with badly spelled death threats. Controversy raged in the feeds, cheap and violent vitriol overshadowing Murat’s personal struggle with culture and conscience—Western pundits retorted angrily to the war-crime accusations with detail on modified cuff use for Sharia punishments in many of the self-declared Islamic republics, a rebuttal that stood for a while, then rang increasingly hollow as it became apparent who was selling the Islamic purists their mutilative technology. Murat, tasting a sour expedient hypocrisy whichever fruit he bit into, stormed out of Turkey anyway, and never looked back.

But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.

“She’s a cop, Stefan.” Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. “I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.”

She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her
familiarity with the hardware
. Internal Affairs landed on the 108th like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hard-core suspects, apparently—but who the fuck could
really
fathom the logic of it—in an attempt to scare up a usable confession. During the interrogation, the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape-crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.

Welcome to NYPD.

Small consolation—
look at it this way, Sev,
an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time—that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the 108th via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement—of course—still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.

Look at it this way, Sev;

IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into Midtown Homicide.

Look at it this way, Sev;

The dead men in the field would not be much missed—all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labor among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.

She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it
that way,
but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early-morning mist.

Something changed in her that day—she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterward. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.

Nevant dropped his pants leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.

“I thought those were illegal in Europe,” she said, to break the silence.

“On humans,” agreed Nevant, darting a glance at Marsalis. “With thirteens, though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?”

The black man shrugged. “Depends how bright they are, I’d say.”

He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could, either.

So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it wasn’t really cold outside or really late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the street-finder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda Caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down toward the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.

At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question. “When did you know he was going to try for you?”

He shrugged. “When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.”

“And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?”

“If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.”

They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahçe loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Atatürk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed, and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. NE MUTLU TURKUM IYENE. What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.

“What’s that say?” he asked her.

She groped after a translation. “Uhm, ’male-pattern baldness—it’s a bigger problem than you think.’”

He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.

“Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.”

She shook her head. “Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humor. They would have just defaced it.”

“And you?”

“It’s not my country,” she said flatly.

At a second-story balcony ahead, an old man leaned amid pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.

“So
did
you get anything useful out of Nevant?” He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.

“I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambarén.”

“In Peru?”

“Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there.

Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.”

“It’s your ground, too, isn’t it?” He thought she smiled. “Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?”

“If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it awhile ago.”

“I know,” she said. “I was joking.”

“Oh.”

They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred meters farther on, the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word moda.

They climbed in hard-breathing silence.

“That cuff,” she said as they spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on.

“You knew Nevant was wearing it.”

“Never really thought about it.” He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.”

“It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.”

“Well, those things are slow acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have gotten my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stefan would have buried that knife in my spine.” He paused, reviewing the fight. “Or my eye.”

“That’s not what I mean.” There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.

“Well, what do you mean then?”

“I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her
Are you
sure
you dated a thirteen, I mean a
real
one?
He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the pavement along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.

“Look,” he said experimentally. “First of all, Stefan Nevant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.”

“But that’s fucking stupid,” she flared.

“Is it?” This time he stopped on the pavement, turned toward her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-soled boots she wore them with. “I put Nevant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or an UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometers, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot—which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment—you ask
yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.”

“Worth dying for?”

“You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.”

“I meant you might have killed him.”

Carl shrugged. “I might. You’re also forgetting that Nevant was a soldier.
Kill or be killed
is pretty much the job description.”

She locked her gaze on his.

“Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t gotten there first?”

He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist.

Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand molded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment house entryway.

It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts, and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and inner thighs, his fingers worked the moistness apart. She shuddered, groped vaguely at the swollen lump in his trousers, finally got both hands on his belt and opened it. He flopped out, tightened to fully erect in the cool air. She laughed, short and throaty as she felt the length of his prick, ghosted an open palm up and down the underside of it.

Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose.

No luck—the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” She stopped, bent toward him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. “Look, stop, wait.”

She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place.

She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet, and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.

She felt the change, made a muffled, querying noise and went to work in earnest, mouth and fingers; he felt himself climbing the curve again, but knew again he would not make it. His hands uncurled, came loose from the wall, hung there. He stared at the shadows.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Look, I’m—”

“No,
you
look.” Sudden instruction in her voice, it hooked his gaze downward and she grinned up at him.

With her left hand, she gathered her exposed breasts up and together. She gripped his shaft hard in the other hand, pushed the glans back and forth in the press of her cleavage. He felt something leap violently in his chest. She grinned again, bent her head and spat gently, drooled spit onto the head of his prick and then, still gripping hard, pushed the wet-gleaming flesh back between her breasts, rubbed it there, in and out, in and out, for the ten or twenty more seconds it took before he felt the furious heat come raging up through him, no hitch now, no stopping…

And out.

He made a noise like a drowning man hauled back aboard, like the sound he’d made the day the rescue ship hailed
Felipe Souza
for the first time, and he sagged back against the wall, then slid down it, as if shot. He felt her fingers let go, stickily, felt her gathering her disordered clothing together, and put out his hand.

“Wait.”

“We should go, it’s—”

“You’re going. Nowhere,” he said unsteadily. “Stand up.”

He pushed her upright again, where she’d been, against the wall, and this time he crouched, slid hands up the insides of the long thighs to part them, pulled the scrap of lace cotton firmly to one side, and sank his tongue in her as deep as it would go.