When Gravity Fails (38 page)
Read When Gravity Fails Online
Authors: George Alec Effinger
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Crime, #Serial Murderers, #Virtual Reality, #Psychopaths, #Revenge, #Middle East, #Implants; Artificial, #Suspense Fiction
I even got to give the waiting room a miss. One of the Stones That Speak appeared in front of me, did an about-face, and marched off. I followed. We went into Friedlander Bey’s office, and I took a few steps toward Papa’s desk. He stood up, his old face so shriveled up in smiles that I was afraid it would snap into a million pieces. He hurried toward me, took my face, and kissed me. “O my son!” he cried. Then he kissed me again. He couldn’t find the words to express his joy.
For my part, I was a little uncomfortable. I didn’t know whether I should play the brick-fronted hero or the aw-shucks kid who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The truth was, I only wanted to get out of there as fast as I could with another thick envelope of reward money, and never have anything to do with the old son of a bitch again. He was making it difficult. He kept kissing me.
At last it got thick, even for an old-fashioned Arab potentate like Friedlander Bey. He let me go and retreated behind the formidable bastion of his desk. It seemed that we weren’t going to share a pleasant lunch or tea and swap stories of mangled corpses while he told me how terrific I was. He just stared at me for a long time. One of the Stones crept up beside me, just behind my right shoulder. The other Stone planted himself behind my left shoulder. It felt eerily reminiscent of my first interview with Friedlander Bey, in the motel. Now, in these grander surroundings, I was somehow reduced from the conquering hero to some slimy miscreant who’d been caught with his hand in someone else’s pocket, and was now on the carpet. I don’t know how Papa did it, but it was part of his magic. Uh oh, I thought, and my stomach started to grumble. I still hadn’t learned what his motives had been.
“You have done well, O excellent one,” said Friedlander Bey. His tone was thoughtful and not wholly approving.
“I was granted good fortune by Allah in His greatness, and by you in your foresight,” I said.
Papa nodded. He was used to being yoked together with Allah that way. “Take, then, the token of our gratitude.” One of the Stones shoved an envelope against my ribs, and I took it.
“Thank you, O Shaykh.”
“Thank not me, but Allah in His beneficence.”
“Yeah, you right.” I pushed the envelope into a pocket. I wondered if I could go now.
“Many of my friends were slain,” mused Papa, “and many of my valued associates. It would be well to guard against such a thing ever happening again.”
“Yes, O Shaykh.”
“I have need of loyal friends in positions of authority, on whom I can rely. I am shamed when I recall the trust I put in Hassan.”
“He was a Shiite, O Shaykh.”
Friedlander Bey waved a hand. “Nevertheless. It is time to repair the injuries that have been done to us. Your task is not finished, not yet, my son. You must help build a new structure of security.”
“I will do what I can, O Shaykh.” I didn’t like the way this was going at all, but once again I was helpless.
“Lieutenant Okking is dead and gone to his Paradise,
inshallah.
His position will be filled by Sergeant Hajjar, a man whom I know well and whose words and deeds I need not fear. I am considering a new and essential department—a liaison between my friends of the Budayeen and the official authorities.”
I never felt so small and so alone in my life.
Friedlander Bey went on. “I have chosen you to administer that new supervisory force.”
“Me, O Shaykh?” I asked in a quivery voice. “You don’t mean me.”
He nodded. “Let it be done.”
I felt a surge of rage and stepped toward his desk. “The hell with you and your plans!” I shouted. “You sit there and manipulate—you watch my friends die—you pay this guy and that guy and don’t give a good goddamn what happens to them as long as your money rolls in. I wouldn’t doubt that you were behind Okking and the Germans
and
Hassan and the Russians.” Suddenly I shut up quick. I hadn’t been thinking fast, I’d just been letting my anger out; but I could tell by the sudden tightness around Friedlander Bey’s mouth that I’d touched something pretty goddamn sensitive. “You
were,
weren’t you?” I said softly. “You didn’t give a flying fuck
what
happened to anybody. You were playing
both
sides. Not against the middle—there
wasn’t
any middle. Just
you,
you walking cadaver. You don’t have a human atom in you. You don’t love, you don’t hate, you don’t care. For all your kneeling and praying, you got nothing in you. I’ve seen handfuls of sand with more conscience than you.”
The really strange thing was that during that whole speech, neither of the Stones That Speak came any nearer or shoved me around or broke my face for me. Papa must have given them a signal to let me have my little oration. I took another step toward him, and he lifted the corners of his mouth in a pitiful, ancient man’s attempt at a smile. I stopped short, as if I’d walked into an invisible glass wall.
Baraka.
The charismatic spell that surrounds saints and tombs and mosques and holy men. I couldn’t have harmed Friedlander Bey and he knew it. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a gray plastic device that fitted nicely into the palm of his hand. “Do you know what this is, my son?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“It is a portion of you.” He pressed a button, and the screaming nightmare that had made an animal of me, that had driven me to rend and tear Okking and Hassan, flooded my skull in its full, unstoppable fury.
I came to in a fetal position on Papa’s rug.
“That was only fifteen seconds,” he told me calmly.
I stared at him sullenly. “That’s how you’re going to make me do what you want?”
He gave me that piece of a smile again. “No, my son.” He tossed the control device in a gentle arc, and I caught it. I looked at him. “Take it,” he said. “It is your loving cooperation I desire, not your fear.”
Baraka.
I pocketed the remote control unit and waited. Papa nodded. “Let it be done,” he said again. And just like that, I was a cop. The Stones That Speak moved closer toward me. In order to breathe, I had to keep skipping a couple of feet in front of them. They squeezed me out of the room and down the hall and out of Friedlander Bey’s house altogether. I didn’t have another chance to say anything. I was standing in the street, a lot richer. I was also some kind of imitation law-enforcement agent with Hajjar as my immediate boss. Even in my worst drug-induced half-crazed nightmares, I’d never concocted anything as horrible as that.
As the word does, it got around fast. They probably knew about it before I did, while I was still recuperating and playing solitaire with the Sonneine. When I went into the Silver Palm, Heidi wouldn’t serve me. At the Solace, Jacques, Mahmoud, and Saied stared about six inches above my shoulder into humid air and talked about how much garlic was enough; they never even acknowledged my presence. I noticed that Saied the Half-Hajj had inherited custody of Hassan’s American kid. I hoped they’d be very happy together. I finally went into Frenchy’s, and Dalia set a coaster in front of me. She looked very uncomfortable. “Where you at, Marîd?” she asked.
“I’m all right. You still talking to me?”
“Sure, Marîd, we been friends a long time.” She gave a long, worried look down at the end of the bar, though.
I looked, too. Frenchy stood up from his stool and came slowly toward me. “I don’t want your business, Audran,” he said gruffly.
“Frenchy, after I caught Khan, you told me I could drink free in here for the rest of my life.”
“That was before what you done to Hassan and Okking. I never had no use for either of them, but what you did . . .” He turned his head aside and spat.
“But Hassan was the one who—”
He cut me off. He turned to the barmaid. “Dalia, if you ever serve this bastard in here again, you’re fired. You got that?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking nervously from Frenchy to me.
The big man turned back to me. “Now get out,” he said.
“Can I talk to Yasmin?” I asked.
“Talk to her and get out.” Then Frenchy turned his back on me and walked away, the way he’d walk away from something he didn’t want to have to see or smell or touch.
Yasmin was sitting in a booth with a mark. I went up to her, ignoring the guy. “Yasmin,” I said, “I don’t—”
“You best go away, Marîd,” she said in an icy voice. “I heard what you did. I heard about your sleazy new job. You sold out to Papa. I’d have expected that from anybody else; but you, Marîd, I couldn’t believe it at first. But you did it, didn’t you? Everything they say?”
“It was the daddy, Yasmin, you don’t know how it made me feel. Anyway,
you’re
the one who wanted me to—”
“I suppose it was the daddy that made you a cop, too?”
“Yasmin . . .” Here I was, the man whose pride sufficeth, who needed nothing, who expected nothing, who wandered the lonely ways of the world unappalled because there were no more surprises. How long ago had I believed that, actually been conned by it, seen myself that way? And now I was pleading with her. . . .
“Go away, Marîd, or I’ll have to call Frenchy. I’m working.”
“Can I call you later?”
She made a small grimace. “No, Marîd. No.”
So I went away. I’d been on my own before, but this was something new in my experience. I suppose I should have expected it, but it still hit me harder than all the terror and ugliness I’d gone through. My own friends, my former friends, found it simpler to draw a line through my name and cut me out of their lives than to deal with the truth. They didn’t want to admit to themselves the danger they’d been in, the danger they might be in again some day. They wanted to pretend that the world was nice and healthy and worked according to a few simple rules that somebody had written down somewhere. They didn’t need to know what the rules were, precisely; they just needed to know they were there just in case. I was now a constant reminder that there
were
no rules, that insanity was loose in the world, that their own safety, their own lives, were always in jeopardy. They didn’t want to think about that, so they made a simple compromise: I was the villain, I was the scapegoat, I took all the honor and all the punishment. Let Audran do it, let Audran pay for it, fuck Audran.
Okay, if that’s how it was going to be. I thundered into Chiri’s place and threw a young black man off my usual stool. Maribel got off a stool down at the end of the bar and wobbled drunkenly toward me. “Been looking for you, Marîd,” she said in a thick voice.
“Not now, Maribel. I’m not in the mood.”
Chiriga looked from me to the young black man, who was thinking about starting something with me. “Gin and bingara?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. That’s as much expression as she showed me. “Or tende?”
Maribel sat down next to me. “You got to listen, Marîd.”
I looked at Chiri; it was a tough decision. I went with vodka gimlets.
“I remember who it was,” Maribel said. “The one I went home with. With the scars, who you was looking for. It was Abdul-Hassan, the American kid. See? Hassan must have put them scars on him. I
told
you I’d remember. Now you owe me.”
She was pleased with herself. She tried to sit up straight on the stool.
I looked at Chiri, and she gave me just the merest hint of a smile.
“What the hell,” I said.
“What the hell,” she said.
The young black man was still standing there. He gave us each a puzzled look and walked out of the club. I probably saved him a small fortune.