Black Man (34 page)

He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambarén. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet lag and the showdown with Nevant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s services net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard wearing—
like me,
he thought sourly—and top-of-the-line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amid a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.

Out of sheer contrariness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.

“He’s late,” she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.

“Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.”

Through the windshield, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuamán rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white-clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of color against the somber stone.

It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuamán, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which—he glanced at his watch—they had been.

“You think he’s making a point with this as well?” Ertekin nodded forward at the walls. “Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so?”

He shot her a side glance. “Did I say that?”

“You might as well have.”

He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Nevant grinned at him out of a bloodstained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting.
Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit
.

He made an effort.

“You could be right,” he admitted. “The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.”

Ertekin nodded. “Thought so.”

Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armored black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked-glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet lag folded away.

“Here we go.”

The new arrival braked to a halt, and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambarén stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-colored suit and flanked by bodyguards in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America; Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá. The mirror patches Bambarén and his guards had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bombproof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.

Carl climbed out of the jeep.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ertekin quickly.

“Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.”

He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambarén, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two guards, and—Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

He reached the
familia
chief and stopped, just out of reach.

“Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.”

“Black man.” Manco jerked his chin. “Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?”

Carl nodded. “South Florida State.”

“Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.”

Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. “Yeah, going to be a major fashion anytime now.”

“It was my understanding,” said the
familia
chief urbanely, “that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?”

Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had gotten out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

He held down a grin. “That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.”

“A thirteen with friends.” Bambarén’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. “Must go against the grain for you.”

“We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?”

Manco Bambarén nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their
tayta
. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the
familia
chief squinting sideways behind his sun lenses, toward the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

“So you work for COLIN now?”

“With.” Carl let his grin out. “I work
with
COLIN. It’s a cooperative venture. You should understand that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of coexisting with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.”

Bambarén shook his head. “I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.”

“No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.”

“And this is what you wanted to talk about?”

“No. I want to talk about Stefan Nevant.”

“Nevant?” A frown wrinkled the
tayta
’s forehead. “What about him?”

“Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.”

Bambarén stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the
familia
chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

“How far it
went
? Black man, I
gave
Nevant to you. How far do you think it went?”

“You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.”

The
tayta
took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed.

“Stefan Nevant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.”

“But he might have, given time.”

“I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Nevant himself?”

Carl grinned. “I did. He tried to kill me.”

Bambarén’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

“That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,” he said tonelessly. “In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.”

“Quite.”

They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks, each the size of a small car. It was instinctive: the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

Manco Bambarén’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood, and stone itself.

“I’m not suggesting you personally bought in to Nevant’s plans,” Carl offered.
Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with?
“But you’re not the only
tayta
around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.”

Bambarén paced in silence for a while.

“My
familiares
share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.”

“Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterward. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.”

“Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,” said the other man coldly. “More of a species gap.”

Carl coughed a laugh. “Oh you
wound
me, Manco. To the core.”

“And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other
tayta,
to be had from association with your kind.”

“We make very convenient monsters.”

Bambarén shrugged. “The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.”

“Yeah, like the
pistacos,
right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.”

A sharp glance. “Heard from who?”

“Nevant.”

“You told me Nevant tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame
pistaco,
maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?”

“No.” The
familia
chief appeared to consider. “Nevant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.”

Carl nodded. “But you still kept him around.”

Bambarén spread his hands. “He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways, he had a skill in this.”

Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Nevant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist maneuvered them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him.
A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level,
Jacobsen had found,
and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires
. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines.
We understand,
he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand.
Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ’s sake
.

Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged.
How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It’s the rest of you people who don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level
.

Later, hungover, he’d apologized. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.

Beside him, Bambarén was still talking.

“…cannot tell, but if his schemes did include this genetic
pistaco
fantasy, then he was a fool. You do not need real monsters to frighten people. Far from it. Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumor, is a far greater power.”

Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.

“Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.”

The
tayta
must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two bodyguards twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambarén’s throat while he grabbed right-handed at the
tayta
’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the guards drew whatever probable high-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men
down in time…

He saw her falling, outgunned, or just not fast enough…

“Easy, Manco,” he murmured. “You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?”

The
tayta
’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. “You think you can kill me, twist?”

“I know I can.” Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown.

“I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem anymore, that’s a promise.”