When Gravity Fails (6 page)

Nikki? I couldn’t believe that Nikki’d do this to me. “It isn’t noon yet,” I said. It was a lame maneuver, but it was all I could think of.

Hassan nodded. “We will make ourselves comfortable.” They sat on my mattress and stared at me with fierce eyes and voracious expressions I didn’t like at all.

What was I going to do? I thought of calling Nikki, but that was pointless; Hassan and Abdoulaye had certainly already visited the building on Thirteenth Street. Then I realized that Nikki’s disappearance and the working-over I’d gotten from the Sisters were very likely related in some way. Nikki was their pet. It made some sort of sense, but not to me, not yet. All right, I thought, it looked as if I was going to have to come across with Abdoulaye’s money, and wring it out of Nikki when I caught up with her. “Listen, Hassan,” I said, wetting my swollen split lips, “I can give you maybe twenty-five hundred. That’s all I have in the bank right now. I’ll pay the other five hundred tomorrow. That’s the best I can do.”

Hassan and Abdoulaye exchanged glances. “You will pay me the twenty-five hundred today,” said Abdoulaye, “and another
thousand
tomorrow.” Another exchange of glances. “I correct myself: another
fifteen hundred
tomorrow.” I got it. Five hundred to repay Abdoulaye, five hundred juice to him, and five hundred juice to Hassan.

I nodded sullenly. I had no choice at all. Suddenly, all my pain and anger were focused on Nikki. I couldn’t wait to run into her. I didn’t care if it was in front of the Shimaal Mosque, I was going to put her through every copper fîq’s worth of hell she’d caused me, with the Black Widow Sisters and these two fat bastards.

“You seem to be in some discomfort,” said Hassan pleasantly. “We will accompany you to your bank machine. We will use my car.”

I looked at him a long time, wishing there was some way I could excise that condescending smile from his face. Finally I just said, “I am quite unable to express my thanks.”

Hassan gave me his negligent wave of the hand. “No thanks are needed when one performs a duty. Allah is Most Great.”

“Praise be to Allah,” said Abdoulaye.

“Yeah, you right,” I said. We left my apartment, Hassan pressed close against my left shoulder, Abdoulaye close against my right.

Abdoulaye sat in the front, beside Hassan’s driver. I sat in the back with Hassan, my eyes closed, my head pressed back against the genuine leather upholstery. I’d never in my life before been in such a car, and at that moment I couldn’t care less. The pain was grinding and growing. I felt droplets of sweat run slowly down my forehead. I must have groaned. “When we have concluded our transaction,” Hassan murmured, “we must see to your health.”

I rode the rest of the way to the bank wordlessly, without a thought. Halfway there the sunnies came on, and suddenly I was able to breathe comfortably and shift my weight a little. The rush kept coming until I thought I was going to faint, and then it settled into a wonderful, lambent aura of promise. I barely heard Hassan when we arrived at the teller machine. I used my card, checked my balance, and withdrew twenty-five hundred and fifty kiam. That left me with a grand total of six kiam in my account. I handed the twenty-five big ones to Abdoulaye.

“Fifteen hundred more, tomorrow,” he said.

“Inshallah,”
I said mockingly.

Abdoulaye raised a hand to strike me, but Hassan caught it and restrained him. Hassan muttered a few words to Abdoulaye, but I couldn’t make them out. I shoved the remaining fifty in my pocket, and realized that I had no other money with me. I should have had
some
—the money I’d had the day before plus Nikki’s hundred, less whatever I’d spent last night. Maybe Nikki had clipped it, or one of the Black Widow Sisters. It didn’t make any difference. Hassan and Abdoulaye were having some sort of whispered consultation. Finally Abdoulaye touched his forehead, his lips, and his chest, and walked away. Hassan grasped my elbow and led me back into his luxurious, glossy black automobile. I tried to speak; it took a moment. “Where?” I asked. My voice sounded strange, hoarse, as if I hadn’t used it in decades.

“I will take you to the hospital,” said Hassan. “If you will forgive me, I must leave you there. I have pressing obligations. Business is business.”

“Action is action,” I said.

Hassan smiled. I don’t think he bore me any personal animosity.
“Salaamtak,”
he said.
 

He was wishing me peace.

“Allah yisallimak,”
I replied. I climbed out of the car at the charity hospital, and went to the emergency clinic. I had to show my identification and wait until they called up my records from their computer memory. I took a seat on a gray steel folding chair with a printed copy of my records on my lap, and waited for my name to be called. I waited eleven hours; the sunnies faded after ninety minutes. The rest of the time was a delirious hell. I sat in a huge room filled with sick and wounded people, all poor, all suffering. The wail of pain and the shrieks of babies never ended. The air reeked of tobacco smoke, the stink of bodies, of blood and vomit and urine. A harried doctor saw me at last, muttered to himself as he examined me, asked me no questions at all, taped my ribs, wrote out a prescription, and ordered me away.

It was too late to get the scrip filled at a pharmacy, but I knew I could score some expensive drugs on the Street. It was now about two in the morning; the action would be strong. I had to limp all the way back to the Budayeen, but my rage at Nikki fueled me. I had a score to settle with Tami and her friends, too.

When I got to Chiriga’s club, it was half-empty and oddly quiet. The girls and debs sat listlessly; the customers stared into their beers. The music was blaring as loud as usual, of course, and Chiri’s own voice cut through that noise with her shrill Swahili accent. But laughter was missing, the undercurrent of double-edged conversations. There was no action. The bar smelled of stale sweat, spilled beer, whiskey, and hashish.

“Marîd,” said Chiri when she saw me. She looked tired. It had evidently been a long, slow night with little money in it for anybody.

“Let me buy you a drink,” I said. “You look like you could use one.”

She managed a tired smile. “When have I ever said no to that?”

“Never that I can recall,” I said.

“Never will, either.” She turned and poured herself a drink out of a special bottle she kept under the bar.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tende. An East African specialty.”

I hesitated. “Let me have one of those.”

Chiri’s expression became very mock-serious. “Tende no good for white bwana. Knock white bwana on his mgongo.”

“It’s been a long, rotten day for me, too, Chiri,” I said. I handed her a ten-kiam note.

She looked sympathetic. She poured me some tende, and raised her glass in a toast.
“Kwa siha yako,”
she said in Swahili.

I picked up my drink.
“Sahtayn,”
I said in Arabic. I tasted the tende. My eyebrows went up. It tasted fiery and unpleasant; still I knew that if I worked at it, I could develop a taste for it. I drained the glass.

Chiri shook her head. “This nigger girl scared for white bwana. Wait for white bwana to throw up all over her nice, clean bar.”

“Another one, Chiri. Keep ’em coming.”

“Your day’s been that bad? Honey, step over here by the light.”

I went around the edge of the bar where she could see me better. My face must have looked ghastly. She reached up gently to touch the bruises on my forehead, around my eyes, my purple, swollen lips and nostrils. “I just want to get drunk fast, Chiri,” I said, “and I’m broke, too.”

“You couped three thousand off that Russian, didn’t you tell me about that? Or did I hear that from somebody else? Yasmin, maybe. After the Russian ate that bullet, you know, both of my new girls quit, and so did Jamila.” She poured me some more tende.

“Jamila is no great loss.” She was a deb, a pre-op transsexual who never intended to get the operation. I started on my second drink. It seemed to be on the house.

“Easy for you to say. Let’s see
you
lure tourists in here without naked boobies shaking on stage. You want to tell me what happened to you?”

I shook the glass of liquor back and forth, gently. “Another time.”

“You looking for anybody in particular?”

“Nikki.”

Chiri gave a little laugh. “That explains some of it, but Nikki couldn’t bust you up that bad.”

“The Sisters.”

“All three?”

I grimaced. “Individually and in concert.”

Chiri glanced upward. “Why? What did you do to them?”

I snorted. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Chiri cocked her head and looked at me sideways for a moment. “You know,” she said softly, “I did see Nikki today. She came by my place about ten this morning. She said to tell you ‘thank you.’ She didn’t say why, but I suppose you know. Then she went off looking for Yasmin.”

I felt my anger starting to bubble up again. “Did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

I relaxed again. If anyone in the Budayeen knew where Nikki was, it would be Tamiko. I didn’t like the thought of facing that crazy bitch again, but I was sure as hell going to. “You know where I can seize some stuff?”

“What you need, baby?”

“Oh, say, half a dozen sunnies, half a dozen tri-phets, half a dozen beauties.”

“And you say you’re broke, too?” She reached down under the bar again and found her bag. She rummaged through it and came up with a black plastic cylinder. “Take this into the men’s room and pocket what you need. You can owe me. We’ll work something out—maybe I’ll take you home with me tonight.”

That was an exciting though daunting thought. I haven’t been intimidated by many women, changes, debs, or boys in my time; I mean, I’m no superhuman sex machine, but I get along. Chiri, though, was a scary proposition. Those evil, patterned scars and filed teeth. . . . “I’ll be right back,” I said, palming the black cylinder.

“I just got Honey Pílar’s new module,” Chiri called after me. “I’m dying to try it out. You ever want to jam Honey Pílar?”

It was a very tempting suggestion, but I had other business for the next hour or so. After that . . . with Honey Pílar’s personality module plugged in, Chiri would
become
Honey Pílar. She’d jam the way Honey had jammed when the module was recorded. You close your eyes and you’re in bed with the most desirable woman in the world, and the only man she wants is you, begging for
you . . .

I took some tabs and caps from Chiri’s caddy and came back out into the club. Chiri looked down along the bar casually as I put the black cylinder in her hand. “Nobody’s making no money tonight,” she said dully. “Another drink?”

“Got to run. Action is action,” I said.

“Business is business,” said Chiri. “Such as it is. It
would
be if these cheap motherfuckers would spend a little money. Remember what I said about my new moddy, Marîd.”

“Listen, Chiri, if I get finished and you’re still here, we’ll break it in together.
Inshallah
.”

She gave me that grin of hers that I liked so much.
“Kwa heri,
Marîd,” she said.

“As-salaam alaykum,”
I said. Then I hurried out into the warm, drizzling night, taking a deep breath of the sweet scent of some flowering tree.

The tende had lifted my spirits, and I had swallowed a tri-phet and a sunny. I’d be doing all right when I booted my way into Tamiko’s phony geisha rat’s nest. I practically ran the whole way up the Street to Thirteenth, except I discovered I couldn’t. I used to be able to run a lot farther than that. I decided it wasn’t age that had slowed me down, it was the abuse my body had taken that morning. Yeah, that was it. Sure.

Two-thirty, three in the morning, and koto music is coming out of Tami’s window. I pounded on her door until my hand started to hurt.

She couldn’t hear me; it was either the loud music or her drugged state. I tried to force the door and found that it was unlocked. I went slowly and quietly up the stairs. Almost everyone around me in the Budayeen is modified somehow, with personality modules and add-ons wired down deep into their brains, giving them skills and talents and inputs of information; or even, as with the Honey Pílar moddy, entirely new personalities. I alone walked among them unaltered, relying on nerve and stealth and savvy. I out-hustled the hustlers, pitting my native wits against their computer-boosted awareness.

Right now, my native wits were yelling at me that something was wrong. Tami wouldn’t have left her door open. Unless she did it for Nikki, who’d left her key behind. . . .

At the top of the stairs I saw her, in much the same position I’d seen her in the day before. Tamiko’s face was painted the same stark white with the same gruesome black highlights. She was naked, though, and her unnatural, surgically enhanced body was pale against the hardwood floor. Her skin had a wan, sick pallor to it, except for the dark burn marks and the bruises around her wrists and throat. There was a wide slash from her right carotid artery to the left, and a great pool of blood had formed, into which her white makeup had run off a little. This Black Widow would never sting anyone again.

I sat near her on the cushions and looked at her, trying to understand it. Maybe Tami had just picked up the wrong trick, and he’d pulled his weapon before she could uncap hers. The burn marks and the bruises spelled torture, long, slow, painful torture. Tami had been paid back many times over for what she’d done to me.
Qadaa oo qadar
—a judgment of God and fate.

I was about to call Lieutenant Okking’s office when my phone rang on my belt. I was so lost in thought, staring at Tami’s corpse, that the ringing startled me. Sitting in a room with a staring dead woman is scary enough. I answered the phone. “Yeah?” I said.

“Marîd? You’ve got to—” And then I heard the line go dead. I wasn’t even sure whose voice it had been, but I thought I recognized it. It sounded like Nikki’s.

I sat there a little longer, wondering if Nikki had been trying to ask me for something or warn me. I felt cold, unable to move. The drugs took effect, but this time I barely noticed. I took a couple of deep breaths and spoke Okking’s commcode into the phone. No Honey Pílar tonight.