Noir (23 page)

Real subtle
. November sighed, feeling sorry for the poor old bastard. Why not just show up in town and blow up the whole place, like some old vintage Schwarzenegger flick? She smiled at one corner of her mouth, thinking maybe that was the real reason McNihil had gone to the movies, in hope of picking up a few destructive tips.

She didn’t feel like following him into the theater. She knew that he’d be out soon enough, with his “business” in tow.

With the red, invisible numbers ticking down inside her palm, November leaned back against the alley wall and waited.

A
ll
right
,” said the business. His hand rooted around in the grease and unpopped kernels at the popcorn tub’s bottom. “This is a good part. I really wanted to see it again.”

From the next seat over, McNihil glanced up at the screen. This month’s disnannie, all bright cartoon colors and state-of-the-art CGI, was playing. A week ago, it’d been fresh and coming over the wires to the upscale movie houses. Now its earnings had already dropped off enough for it to be printed out on old-fashioned film reels and dumped at flea-pits like this. There hadn’t even been a marquee or a pretense of a ticket window outside, but just an old woman on a folding chair, a debit-card reader and a cashbox on her
schmatta
’d lap.

“What’s it about?” McNihil pushed away the popcorn tub that the pimply kid extended toward him.

“Beats me.” The kid shrugged. “I never pay attention to that story stuff.”

The kid was in his early twenties; that was what McNihil pegged him at. All skinny arms and legs, folded up in the seat with his knees against the one in front of him, looking like a whooping-crane carcass dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans. The reflection of the movie images made bright, shifting rectangles out of his glasses.

“It’s the visuals,” said the kid. “You just gotta go with that.” His hand operated by itself, feeding more fluffy shrapnel into his mouth. “That’s all that’s important.”

“Really? How can you tell?” In places like this, the standards were always shoddy. McNihil pointed to the wedge of light, filled with dust motes, above their heads. “They’ve got their projector element canted backward. Look at that keystoning on the screen.”

“Huh?” The kid bent forward, spine arched, squinting through his glasses. “What’re you talking about?”

“You can’t see it? The image is wider across the top than the bottom. That’s why everybody looks like some kind of hydrocephalic.”

“Aww …” A moan of disappointment escaped from the folded scarecrow figure. He hadn’t been able to see the aberration until it’d been pointed out to him, but now he wouldn’t be able to keep from seeing it. “That sucks.” He glanced toward the simple plywood door behind him. “I oughta get my money back.”

Like there’s a chance of that
. McNihil let his gaze travel around the theater, such as it was. In the dark, smelling of sweat and urine and spilled wet sugar, the screen’s soft radiance fell on just a few scattered faces. And some of those were asleep, or looked so narcotized that if the film had broken and nothing but white light had filled their blank eyes, they wouldn’t have protested. They’d probably just have thought it was their own brain cells imploding into some territory of opiated bliss. McNihil looked back at the kid. “Don’t sweat it.”

The eyes behind the lenses were glaring at him with real hatred. “You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”

McNihil shrugged. “On occasion.”

“Smart enough to figure out why I wanted you to meet me here? At the movies?”

A song had started coming out of the theater’s rinky-dink speakers,
mounted on the walls with cables dangling. McNihil glanced up at the misshapen screen image, remembering now that this month’s disnannie was a cartoon adaptation of the ancient black-and-white film
The Lodger
, transformed into something called
Jackie Upstairs
. A teenage Ripper was serenading a fogbound period London from his boardinghouse window, while a trio of cutely animated viscera—Kidney, Liver, and Uterus—danced and wisecracked around him.

“Beats me,” said McNihil. He looked back over at the kid. “If you feel like telling me, go ahead.”

“Because …” The kid leaned across the armrest between the seats. A yellow fleck of popcorn kernel hung on his lower lip. “I figured you might not be on the level, mister. Maybe you’re not a book collector at all. Maybe you’re a copyright thug. What do they call ’em? A snake-head.”

“Asp-head,” corrected McNihil. “It’s one of those bilingual confusions. Deutsch-lish, German and American muddled together.
Asp
from the English,
kopf
the German for head. So you get
asp-head
; it’s what they call a back-formation, from the name of the old twentieth-century organization ASCAP. They were the ones who used to round up the money for composers and musicians, until the Collection Agency came together from the old software protection and copyright defense outfits, so there was just one rights authority for all intellectual-property forms.”

The kid goggled at him in distaste. “Did I ask you for some connectin’ historical lecture?”

“No …” McNihil shook his head. “You didn’t. But you figured asp-heads, or whatever you want to call them, don’t go to the movies?”

“Connect if I know. But they carry lotsa big clunkin’ metal around with ’em. Guns and stuff. ’Cause they’re
bad
.” The kid couldn’t keep an excited gleam from appearing in his eyes. “They like to hurt people.”

“Do they?” McNihil put away his smile. “I better watch out for them, then.”

“But you don’t have to. Not here. At the movies.” The kid displayed horsey teeth. “You can’t get into the movies, even in a crummy place like this, without walking through the metal detectors. Everything past the front door’s got a detection grid wired around it. If you’d walked in carrying a gun, man, every alarm in the place would’ve gone off.”

“Really?” McNihil let his own eyes go wide and round. “Gosh.”

The kid’s expression darkened. “Maybe if they didn’t have to spend so much on security procedures, places like this could get better projection equipment.”

“Naw …” McNihil shook his head. “They’re probably just cheap-ass bastards in general.” A shrug. “I’m older than you. I don’t have expectations about people anymore.”

“‘Older.’” The kid nodded appraisingly. “Yeah, an old guy like you … I figured you’d be the kind who’d be interested in this kind of stuff.” He shifted in the broken-hinged theater seat, so he could dig a chip out of his jeans pocket. “Not my kind of thing, but it should be right up your alley.”

“What the hell’s this?” McNihil took the featureless gray square from the kid and examined it between his thumb and forefinger. “I thought we were talking about bookscans.”

“Scans? Are you kidding?” The kid sneered at him. “You think I’m gonna walk around with prima facie evidence of copyright violation in my pockets? You’re out of your mind.”

“I thought you weren’t worried about asp-heads. And all sorts of other bad things.”

The song on the movie’s soundtrack had ended. The animated uterus, specked with bright cartoon blood, was perched on the young hero’s shoulder, dispensing its feminine wisdom.

“Not,” said the kid. “I’m just
careful
.” He tilted his back toward the doors. “That’s another reason for wanting to do the deal in a place with metal detectors. This way, somebody like you—if you were an asp-head or some other kind of uptight intellectual-property freak—you can’t read out what’s there on the merchandise.” The kid smiled even bigger. “You couldn’t get the hardware you need in here. The readers and outside lines.”

“Huh.” McNihil smiled and nodded in appreciation. “Pretty clever.”
You poor bastard
. It took some effort to keep his pity for the kid from showing through. The little schmuck wouldn’t know what hit him—except that McNihil would make sure he did. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” McNihil held up the chip. The ghost light from the projector beam made it sparkle like a blank postage stamp. “What good is it to me?”

The kid’s smile oozed self-satisfaction. “Plenty. If you want those scans of those old Turbiner titles, complete with cover art—” The kid nodded toward the chip in McNihil’s hand. “That’s how you get ’em.”

Another scene popped up inside McNihil’s head, a little private show, blanking out for a moment the images up in front of the theater’s seats. McNihil could see the book covers the kid meant, all perfect retro, the color version of McNihil’s own black-and-white world. Guns, women, and angst. It all seemed like home to him.

Those books, the words in them, all sadly out of print—that was the merchandise the kid was peddling. Stolen merchandise. McNihil carefully maintained his pulse and blood pressure at a normal level.

“Look.” The kid leaned over and took the chip back from McNihil. “Here’s all you have to do,” he said with elaborate faux patience. “You take this, you go home, you pry off the back of your phone—it’s easy, there’s just a little thumbplate there—you take out the regulation bellchip you’ll see there, you pop this baby in its place. You don’t need to know anything about how it works.” The kid had a superior smirk, the attitude that the young and hip always took toward the old and out-of-it. “Then you’ll be able to dial right into a nice little on-line database down in Lima. They’re good people; they got a real commitment to information being free.”

McNihil knew the site the kid was talking about. What the kid didn’t know was that it was an entrapment front maintained by the Collection Agency.

The kid handed the chip back to McNihil. “That’s all there is to it.”

“I don’t quite see it …” McNihil studied the chip, turning it back and forth. “I thought you were being so careful and all. About asp-heads and bad stuff like that.” He held the chip up between himself and the kid. “Now, if you sell this to me … if I give you money for it, an exchange of legal currency for merchandise, and I put it in my pocket …” His words were meant to give the kid every conceivable out, every incentive for backing away from the deal. Not that McNihil figured the kid would; he just didn’t want to have what was about to happen on whatever remained of his own conscience. “Aren’t you violating Alex Turbiner’s copyrights? They’re his books. The writing and all.”

“No, man …” The kid laughed and shook his head. “Don’t you get it? I’m not selling you any
words
. I’m selling you a key.” He nodded toward the chip. “There’s no pirated, copyrighted material on there.” He
left the popcorn tub so he could raise his open hands. “There’s no pirated shit on me, period. Nobody’s gonna bust me and trophy me out, just for selling you a phone number. Little bit of trunk-line access code, some block-switching jive … that’s all you’re buying from me.” The chip made black squares in the center of the kid’s glasses. “If the copyright sonsabitches want to send their asp-heads down to Peru, let ’em. That’s the Lima bunch’s lookout. It’s no skin off
my
ass.” A sneering shake of the head. “Besides, even if you were with the asp-heads, I’d be long gone from here by the time you got through to the data. There’s a delay routine built into that puppy. Forty-eight hours from firing it up, you get your goods, all those crappy old books. You wanna read that shit, it’s up to you. Whatever you want. You just gotta wait a little bit. That’s the deal.”

McNihil felt even older and sadder. He could hardly believe it, the whole song and dance the kid was going through. Whole generations of freelance pirates must have come and gone, risen up and been scythed down, and left no one to clue the poor child in. McNihil hadn’t heard that spiel about selling a key in decades, since he’d first started working as an asp-head.
And that bit about a forty-eight-hour delay
, he thought. That had never worked. It didn’t keep someone like this punk off the hook, either legally or in hard practice. It wouldn’t keep the trophy knives away from him. McNihil felt like a killing priest, as though he should lay his cupped palm against the kid’s spotty brow and give him the absolution that idiots earned.

He thinks he’s so clever
. That was the sad part. The kid was doing it, illegally trading in copyrighted material, because he wanted to see if he could do it and get away with it. There wasn’t even that much of a profit to be made, relative to the time and effort the kid had put into this little project. The ego rewards would’ve been the big thing for him, if he were to get away with it. And the scary risk factor, the adrenaline crawl that came with scooting up close to the edge, sailing past the asp-heads’ teeth. However the kid had come into possession of the scanned-in Turbiner books—there were always tiny low-level transactions that even the asp-heads couldn’t keep track of—if he’d just kept his head down, kept them to himself or traded them with other little scurrying rats, he’d probably have gotten away with that much. The risk, the exciting part, was in going commercial, in putting out a carefully worded hook ad on the lines, looking for a buyer. Looking for a cash exchange.
A fatal error, like something from a great old fantasy novel, where the character puts on the ring or the Tarnhelm or the cloak of subtler appearance, and becomes invisible to everybody, everything … except the cold annihilating scan that he would otherwise have never been seen by. This kid had raised his head—more than once, less than half a dozen times—and been sighted. He’d gotten a customer with a wallet stuffed with money, every bill of which had a grinning skull where a dead president should be.

“All right,” said McNihil. “It’s a deal.” He slipped the chip into his jacket pocket, the left outside one where his bag of tricks was built into the lining.

“Uh-uh.” The kid waggled one of his long, large-knuckled fingers at him. “Not so fast. You gotta pay. Remember that part?”

McNihil smiled. “What if I just rip you off for it?” He was giving the kid one more chance.
Must be getting sentimental in my old age
, he thought.