Half the Day Is Night (10 page)

At the police station, David was seated in front of a pale screen, empty of everything but light. Mayla closed her eyes and the afterimage of the pale screen was a red square. She could hear the hiss of the air-circulating system. “We will be monitoring your pulse rate, your eye movements and pupil contraction,” the blue and white told David. “We will be showing you ims. If you can identify them, please name them for us.”

“This is the same equipment that they use for interrogation?” David asked.

She flinched at the word “interrogation” but did not open her eyes.

The blue and white said, “You are not being interrogated, Mr. Dai.”

“I understand,” David said. “But these—” in his pause she imagined him searching for the English, “I was in the military, they use these things.”

She thought of Tumipamba's white coffin and it was there in her mind's eye, tilted up, with Tumipamba watching her from behind the glare of light on the glass. She couldn't get it out of her head so she opened her eyes. The screen was empty and bright, and Tumipamba's coffin was whited out.

People had sat in this room and been interrogated.

If it had been an interrogation, how would they make someone look at the screen? How would they keep someone's eyes open? Cut off their eyelids?

She blinked.

“Have you yourself ever been a subject before?” the blue and white asked David. “Conducted a session?”

David had not.

“Fine. Just relax. You won't feel any discomfort.”

The first im was her own face in a less than flattering image. Oh God, it was from her driver's license.

“Mayla Ling,” David said, “my employer.”

Another im.

“Mr. Talsing, I worked for him in France.”

Tim's. A woman he didn't know. Another woman. “Not familiar,” David said.

Another woman.

“The President of France,” he said, sounding amused.

Mayla let out her breath, not aware until that moment that she had been holding it.

A man.

“Familiar, but I cannot place him.”

A square-faced oriental with deep lines around his mouth. “My father, Philippe Dai,” he said so softly she leaned forward. Where did they get these images?

More people, some he knew, some he didn't.

Then they told him it was not necessary to talk although he could make any comments he chose. The system would measure the way he reacted and build off of the features he found familiar or resonant to construct her face. He should not try to picture the woman.

David frowned. “Do not picture her?”

“That's really a bit of a trick,” the blue and white said, friendly. “It's like the old recipe to turn water into gold. Put it in a big pot on the back of the stove and stir it and stir it, all the time not thinking about a white rhinoceros. After I say it, all you can think of is the white rhino. Now eyes on the screen, Mr. Dai.”

Ims began to flicker in front of him. Faces: some light, some dark, and most (but not all) female, shifting in a plastic blur, liquid chins and noses and cheeks and foreheads brightening and shading. They began to show certain characteristics: black eyes looked out, arrested, became fixed, while features shifted around them, melting and moving. Some alchemy measured the way David looked at things, how his pupils expanded, how his eyes moved when the face was familiar, what his heart did.
This
is familiar, their measurements told them,
that
is not.

Voudoun, she thought. Technological voodoo.

He started to turn his head and the blue and white said, “Eyes on the screen, Mr. Dai.”

The features became less plastic, solidified. David was leaning away; in the light reflected from the screen she could see his shoulders and hands tense, pushing against the arms of the chair as if he were pushing up and back, over the back of the chair, getting away from the image in front of him. A woman's face was drawn out of him. Pulled out of him. It did not seem possible that they could do this. It did not seem right, or fair.

The ims flickered, slowed, stopped. There was a woman's thin black face with hard round apple cheeks and great dark eyes. David said, “It is the woman at the casino.” He turned in his seat to look back at Mayla, “When we had dinner at Aphrodite.”

The blue and white looked at her but she could only shake her head.

She couldn't remember the woman at all. Was the memory hiding somewhere in her unconscious? Could they have pulled that face out of her, arising, all unknowing? What else was down there that someone could pull out?

Stir and stir and stir, and at no time think of a white rhinoceros.

They wanted David to register for a course in defensive driving and a course on personal security. She wished he could have stayed while she talked to the blue and whites about what she should do now, but they wanted him to do some ID for their records; retinal scans, DNA samples.

An officer, a blue and white with sergeant's bars on the sleeves of her uniform told Mayla that she had to continue with her life, that she must not allow terrorism to keep her from functioning. The phrases the officer used were phrases from the paper and the vid, so familiar that Mayla heard them in capitals. “If you Allow yourself to Succumb to Fear,” the officer told her, “They have Succeeded. They have Disrupted Society. The Only Way to Fight Terrorists is make them Powerless.”

On the other hand, she was supposed to take certain precautions. She was supposed to do A Few Simple Things. “Vary your schedule. Leave for work at different times, change the route you take.” She lived on a dead-end street, she worked at the bank, no matter how she varied her routine she had to start at the same place and end at the same place.

There was a Delicate Balance between disruption and Normal Common Sense. What, Mayla wondered, would Abnormal Common Sense be?

“Who was the woman who approached David?” she asked.

“Her name is Anna Eminike, she is wanted for a number of charges both here and abroad. We are conducting an investigation and we are closing in on these people. In the meantime, just be a little careful.”

Be a Little Careful, Mayla thought. “Is she part of
La Mano de Diós
?”

The blue and white said, “I'm sorry, this matter is under investigation, that is not information I can give out.”

“Why is she after me?”

“I'm sorry, Ms. Ling, but during an investigation we cannot talk about the particulars.”

Had this woman singled her out because of the im in the newspaper? Or because they had seen her in the casino? But when they'd seen her in the casino, how did they find out who she was? David had told the blue and whites that the woman had said she was an instrument of God, that she was God's surgeon. Wasn't that what
La Mano de Diós
believed? That God told them what to do?

That there was providence in the fall of a sparrow? That God selected them to be the instrument of the sparrow's fall?

“Ms. Ling,” the blue and white said, “your dossier indicates you travel quite a bit on business. It might be a good idea to go somewhere for a few days, perhaps the U.S. or Marincite?”

*   *   *

“Mayla,” Polly Navarro said. “I'm sorry to hear about your trouble, but glad Marincite could help.”

“It's actually a wonderful opportunity to work with your people on the MaTE restructuring,” she said.

Polly's office was as formal as a royal court. The door was tall and wooden, like the doors of the Cathedral St. Nicolas. The whole right side of the office was virtual window. The scene was a city.

A secretary brought them coffee. He was a young man in a vanilla suit with amethyst cufflinks and buttons. He had amethyst slips in his eyes, too. He was absolutely silent, like a good waiter. Her coffee tasted like surface coffee. She glanced at the window again, not meaning to, and saw Polly follow her eyes. “Hong Kong?” she asked.

He nodded. “Hong Kong, 2038.”

Okay. Although why he would want to look at Hong Kong in that particular year eluded her. “Quite a display,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I like it.” He tapped a little brass control panel set in the desk. “Clear,” he said, “orchids.”

The window dimmed and came bright, and this time the wall looked into a greenhouse of orchids.

“Clear, Hokkaido.” Twisted pine trees and mountains, mist and stone. At least they weren't as bright.

“Clear, Serengeti.”

Desert at dusk and below them a muddy drinking hole.

“Impressive,” she said. Voice activated. The money spent on this office would probably buy her a house.

“Set,” he said. “I like the space in this one.”

Lots of it, the plain falling away in a long sweep, darkening to blue in the dusk. Tim would like it, she thought, but it wasn't exactly her taste.

“I wonder if you would be willing to talk to someone here regarding a loan for a city project,” Polly said.

For a moment she was surprised. Not that she should have been, deals usually required favors. “Certainly,” she said. “Mr. Navarro, First Hawaiian would like very much to establish presence in Marincite in any way possible.”

“I'll have him call you. Watch a minute,” Polly said, “the lions will come down.”

She looked at the window. And after a moment they came, bellies swaying and lean hips rocking, to crouch at Polly Navarro's waterhole and drink with long pink tongues.

*   *   *

Polly Navarro's “someone” came calling. Saad Shamsi was a gazelle-eyed Pakistani. “Just Saad,” he said, and added, smiling, “rhymes with ‘odd'.” He was an aide with the Marincite City Department of Education and Health (he gave her his card). Aide could mean anything. His job may even have been a real job, although aide could mean anything.

He wanted a loan for a nursing school and clinic to be built in an area of town called, whimsically, Castle. “Are you familiar with Castle?” he asked, convincingly sincere. “It's not a very good part of the city. This way we can address two problems at the same time, the need to educate young people and provide jobs, and a way to increase health care.”

Politician talk. She dropped the chip into her reader and looked at the figures. She could structure a loan proposal, it wasn't even a very complicated loan. “I don't foresee any problems,” she said. There was no reason for Polly to send her this loan, it was a nothing loan.

There was nothing to be understood from Saad-rhymes-with-odd Shamsi, either. He was about her age. He spoke impeccable English, sounded North American rather than Caribbean. Maybe slightly British in his diction but it was hard to say. His suit was appropriate, that kind of neutral gold color that meant he could have bought the suit yesterday or five days ago. Not too expensive, so if he was skimming, he wasn't making big money, or at least not spending it on clothes. Not flashy.

“It looks straightforward,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I mean, I didn't expect much problem.”

“So why are you working with me?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Anyone could do this loan.”

“Mr. Navarro suggested you,” Saad said. He was not evasive. He looked at her clear-eyed, his face open.

Maybe Polly really did just want to send some business First Hawaiian's way. This was a token, easy enough.

“Who knows why Mr. Navarro does anything,” Saad said. “He sits in the middle of his web and pulls us all together.” He shook his head. “Have you spent much time in Marincite?”

“Business trips,” she said.

“Maybe I could take all of you around the city some evening?”

Then it will come, Mayla thought, whatever the secret cost of this loan would be. A loan for his mother at low interest. Financing something. “That would be wonderful,” she said.

“Do you like jai alai?”

Tim loved jai alai. Terrific, Saad would get some tickets and they would go see some jai alai.

*   *   *

Saad Shamsi collected the three of them that evening after dinner. He didn't seem put off by having to take her security, seemed in fact to get on very well with Tim. He had tickets for good seats, although Mayla didn't know, she had never been to a jai alai match.

Jai alai players leaped, arms top-heavy with
cestas
like flamingo beaks whipping the ball. The games were fast, the slap of feet against the floor, an explosion and a yell. The odds changed constantly and she didn't understand the betting. A player leaped, flicking the ball across the court. His gear was brilliant red and he looked like a barbarian in armor covered at the vulnerable points: head, knees and elbows. He had silver streamers like tinsel tied around his biceps on his
cesta
arm. She wondered if that meant something, but not enough to ask.

It was hard to concentrate on the game. She didn't feel tired, not physically; fatigued, maybe. Eventually he would ask for it: a loan for a company run by a friend or that the administration of the monies for the construction work be handled by another company—selling the loan to him so he made half a percentage point a year.

If he'd just get it over with, then she could be done with this nonsense of jai alai and evenings of entertainment and get on with the MaTE loan. More meetings with Polly Navarro.

She wanted to see him again, wanted to talk to him, the way he had started to talk at the funeral. About terrorists. About security. What would it be like to work for Polly Navarro?

The red player with the silver streamers scooped the ball, whirled and fired it, streamers tracing a fluid arc. Tim went to his feet, he had money on the game.

She felt out of touch. She thought of
La Mano de Diós
and suddenly she could not manage to care about the jai alai game or about Polly Navarro or MaTE.

She glanced to her left just as David looked her way and their eyes met. Nothing in his face. Her face felt the same way, nothing. They were just here, not part of this place at all, two people for whom the game and the excitement meant nothing. And then he quirked a tiny smile and shrugged ever so slightly, just a little gallic twist of his shoulders. “What can you say?” his shoulders said. And she felt herself smile back a bit.