Noir (29 page)

“Knock knock,” said the door again. Leaving the towel draped around his neck, McNihil pulled the door open.

A delivery, the one he’d been expecting; McNihil tipped the kid, an agency intern he vaguely recognized, and carried the long package back
to the flat’s living area. The package’s contents had weighed more when he’d been hauling them around, freshly harvested, inside his old trophy container. A note had been tagged on the wrappings, signed by the agency’s head prep tech.

Nice job, McN. Haven’t lost your touch. Keep cutting. R
.

He placed the package on the flat glass kidney of the Noguchi knockoff coffee table. For a moment, McNihil idly wondered if he should tie a red ribbon around the package’s middle; it was, after all, intended to be something of a gift. A favor, something nice done for a person he admired—the other red ribbons, the shining wet ones that had pooled around the vivisected body, counted for nothing against that sentiment. He finally decided to omit any fancy wrappings, to just leave the completed trophy adorned in its plain, matter-of-fact agency routing-and-shipping labels. The person for whom it was intended went in, McNihil knew, for that kind of procedural detail. It was something left over from when the guy had still been working and writing, cranking out his trashy and sublime thrillers, and always on the lookout for real-life bits he could stick in to establish an air of authenticity.

McNihil had a row of those books himself, in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled shelf unit. Thinking about them, about the chapters and sentences and carefully strung-together words on the pages, put McNihil in a good mood. Or as good a one as he could be in, considering the aches and bruises he’d garnered while bringing this trophy back from the city farther north on the rim. When he’d first gotten back here and stripped off his smoke-ridden, bloodstained clothes, he’d examined himself in the bathroom mirror and had seen the rickety fire escape’s imprint from his chest to his chafed-raw ankle.
I’m getting too old for this
, he’d told himself.
Way too old
. Like those characters in the books; McNihil had found out—eventually—what it was like to be tired and more than a little burnt-out, yet still handing people’s asses back to them. Like that smart-ass little number up there on the roof of the en-flamed End Zone Hotel; he’d seen her eyes go wide when he’d come right back at her, knocking her off-balance in more ways than one. That was the part of his condition that felt as good for him as it did for the fictional old bastards in the yellowing pulp novels; he’d
enjoyed
that.

“Yeah, right.” He spoke aloud his rejoinder to the soprano. Though he didn’t feel cynical at all, not this time, as he finished buttoning his shirt, the cloth dragging across that of the bandages he’d plastered across his ribs. “And I’ll live forever, too.” As it was, he knew he was doing better than that November person. If she was still alive at all; when he’d gotten home, he’d phoned one of his remaining friends at the Collection Agency and asked for some kind of readout on her. The agency’s database already had her logged as being in a hospital burn ward, in one of those sterile-nutrient chambers where the most badly crisped wound up. From long practice, McNihil found it easy to stop thinking about things like that. He pulled on his jacket, picked up the package from the table, and headed for the door.

Still in a good mood, package tucked under his arm like a furled umbrella, when he got to Turbiner’s place. Of the old, yellowing paperbacks on McNihil’s preserving bookshelf, just under a fifth of them had been written by Alex Turbiner. Who was still alive, though his schlock-o literary career had ended a couple of decades ago; the old guy’s color was gray around the edges rather than that browning tinge that low-quality paper developed from time and oxygen. Still alive, which meant that his copyrights were one-hundred-percent enforceable, and a mean bastard, which meant that he’d get a kick out of the present McNihil was about to lay on him. But then, all writers were mean bastards.
Must come with the territory
, McNihil figured. And approved.

“Anybody home?” McNihil leaned his thumb against the call button beneath a grille of rusted metal. Or what artfully appeared to be rust, made to look that way from the beginning. “Got something for you.”

He stepped back and looked up the building’s facade of perpetually crumbling cement and broken windows interspersed with the ones that people actually lived behind. Turbiner had moved in here during his peak earning years, paying cash outright for a stationary unit; being a freelancer, he never had to put up with that cube-shuffling business that the big corporations put their employees through. The building was a ruin, but deliberately and fashionably so, designed during one of the severer deconstructionist,
nostalgie de la boue
crazes, when everybody who could afford it wanted to reside in something that looked like an arson-bait crack house.

“Sounds like that evil McNihil.” The speaker grille crackled and spit, just enough, without ever cutting out completely. The old man’s voice would have sounded like a frayed wire even without the additional effects. “Come on up.”

McNihil carried his package down a corridor lined with broken plaster and nondenominational graffiti, chosen for its aesthetics rather than turf-staking capabilities. At one time—McNihil could remember it—there had been programmed mechanical rats scuttling up and down the hallways, even a Mumbling Junkie™ mannequin in the urine-scented stairwell, but the building’s residents had finally voted to stop paying for those decorative services. The rats had kept flipping over on their backs and scrabbling their feet in the air in an unrealistic way, and the partially animated addict had begun declaiming Yeats in a Shakespearean actor’s voice; old, poorly erased programming had risen up from the mannequin’s circuits, like dreams of a former life. To be confronted by a rag-bag, needle-tracked scarecrow expostulating about widening gyres and Bethlehem-ward slouches was considered a bit much by the more fastidious of the building’s residents. There were limits.

The Mahler Second was on Turbiner’s stereo as well, as an example of the universe’s secret, synchronistic workings. Or not: McNihil had just started his up when he’d phoned Turbiner, to tell the old man that he was coming over. Turbiner might’ve heard it in the background, behind McNihil’s voice, and decided he wanted to hear Emmy Loose or Beverly Sills or any of the other celestial voices, long dead and gone, still audible on the ancient recordings. The sopranos and the contraltos and the big, booming choruses stepped through the even more ancient words of the Klopstock ode, and none of them ever died.

Aufersteh’n
…

“Good to see you.” Turbiner turned down the volume as his visitor pushed the door shut behind himself. “How ya been keepin’?”

McNihil nodded slowly. “‘You will rise again …’”

“Huh?” Over the tops of his trifocal lenses, Turbiner peered at him with age-clouded eyes. “Oh, yeah; right.” He glanced toward the nearest loudspeaker, listened for a moment, then translated the next line to be sung. “‘You will rise again, my dust, after a short repose …’” When Turbiner shrugged, he looked shambling and diminished, like the most moth-eaten bear in the zoo, the one the keepers debated about—whether
it would be a kindness to put him down. “Well, maybe that’s true. Old Gustav M. would know better than I would. For the time being, at least.”

The massed voices, whispering now, surrounded McNihil as he followed Turbiner into the cluttered lair. The flat’s space had grown so tight with the old writer’s possessions—mainly boxes of books and stacked rows of CD’s, tapes, datachips, even some antiquated vinyl—that McNihil had to hold the package vertical against himself, to keep from knocking anything over.

Turbiner’s housekeeping had gone all to shit after his wife had died, ten years back or thereabouts. McNihil remembered her as elegant and sarcastic, and not overly given to sweating the small details like dust, but still with enough ingrained female instincts to keep the disorder somewhat at bay.

Thinking about dead wives, while McNihil stood in the middle of this heavily past-filled space, took his good mood down a few degrees. Guilt had a way of doing that. Turbiner had loved his wife (
And didn’t I love mine?
thought McNihil glumly), enough to scrape close to the bone a couple of his savings and investment accounts, all to pay off whatever debts she’d had when she died. Thus buying her a quiet grave, free from the reanimating forays of the bill collectors.

Aufersteh’n, my ass
—right now, lyrics about the desirability of resurrection weren’t striking McNihil the right way. His wife, when she had died … he hadn’t done as well by her as old Turbiner had. Though he’d meant to, and there was still a chance; it still might happen. Guilt could be bought off. All it took was enough money. More money now than before; he hadn’t been keeping up with even the interest payments on his wife’s debts. The numbers kept ticking upward, compounding like hammer blows, one after another. It would take a lot to pay it all off now, to set his dead wife sleeping in the ground along with the late Mrs. Turbiner, dreaming the endless, empty dreams of the really and truly dead.
And I’m good as retired now
, thought McNihil. To come up with that kind of money, he’d have to find some way of going back full-time with the Collection Agency, plus hustle up every kind of on-the-side gig he could manage. Instead of doing little favors for old writers that nobody read anymore.

“I’ll make some coffee.” Turbiner was already in the flat’s kitchen
area, on the other side of the counter, rinsing a glass pot out at the sink. “That okay by you?”

“Sure.” Horizontal slices of sunlight fell across McNihil’s face, from the barely opened blinds at one side of the flat. “I wasn’t planning on hanging around very long.” He held up the package. “Like I said on the phone, I just wanted to drop something off for you.”

“Yeah, so I see.” Turbiner fiddled with the coffeemaker’s pieces, rinsing them off and putting them back together, watching his hands at work rather than glancing back at McNihil. “It’s amazing, the kinds of things people walk around on the streets with, these days.” The old man turned a thin smile toward his visitor. “What a world we live in.”

McNihil sat on the couch, moving aside a stack of papers and cascading books to make room for himself. He started taking apart the package’s wrappings, figuring that it would take Turbiner a while to get around to it. That was one of the ways you could tell when somebody was really old.
Or older than me
, thought McNihil. They all acted as if they had forever to do things, rather than a rapidly diminishing remainder of time. He wondered if it was just wishful thinking on Turbiner’s part.

“So what is it you got there?” Gurgling and hissing noises came from the kitchen area; Turbiner had come back around to the flat’s larger open space. “Anything cool?”

The old man knew what was inside the package; it wasn’t a secret. Turbiner himself had been the one to tell McNihil about what was going on in the Gloss a little farther to the north, about the kid ripping off his old copyrights, selling them to the collectors’ market that still existed for that sort of thing. McNihil would’ve despised those sorts of people, even if he’d never worked for the agency. How could you be into something, into it enough that you wanted all you could get of it, and not want to pay for it? Really pay, not in terms of paying lots of money for it, but just making sure that the money went to the right person. The person who’d created it. Written it, composed it, sung it … whatever.

True bastardliness, McNihil had always figured, lay with people—and he’d encountered more than a few of them—who’d shell out nearly the same amount or even more to a pirate, some copyright rip-off specialist, rather than see the same money or even less go to the rightful creator. He’d had a lot of time recently to think about stuff like that, and
had started to formulate a general theory of evil, pieced together from those things that he’d just instinctively gotten pissed off about before. The way he saw it now, there were certain people who loved the art—the music, the books, the pictures, whatever it might be—but who actively hated the creators of the same. Hated them from envy, jealousy, spite—from just that gnawing, infuriating sense that the creators could do something they couldn’t, could make something happen on a page or a canvas or with the sequence of one pitched sound after another. The basic criminal mentality says to itself,
Why should that person have something that I don’t have? Where’s the justice, the fairness, in that?
And thus thievery and vandalism are justified, not only by the brain, but deep in the outraged heart of anyone who can’t get over the notion that he’s not the center of the universe.

So they don’t steal things
—McNihil had thought this before—
just so they can have them
. That would be too simple. When he’d been working for the agency, he’d encountered too many idiots who could’ve easily paid for their stolen desirables. They stole to prove that they could steal, that they had the right to steal. And to punish anyone, particularly the creators, all those smug writers and musicians and artists, all those busy, talented hands and mouths and brains, the possessors of which swaggered around as if God loved them more than those who burned with a righteous envy. To steal from the creators was an act of justified vengeance; it showed them that they couldn’t get away with that infuriating shit. It proved that the books and the music and the paintings and everything else really belonged to the thieves, that it was all theirs by right; in some strange way, the thieves and not the creators had brought it all into being. So it wasn’t really thievery at all, then, was it? It was the returning of stolen property to its rightful owners. Or such was the belief of the thieves, written upon the cracked tablets of their souls.

“Here’s your coffee.”