Noir (33 page)

All through the Gloss, in their scrappy or plush flats or other living-spaces, old writers like Alex Turbiner, and composers and musicians, artists and programmers, symbolic manipulators all—they were listening to their bloodily enhanced stereos or dropping slices of bread into their silently screaming toasters, maybe not even thinking about the little thieves canned inside. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter whether the writers and others, including Turbiner sitting here, knew as well what a shuck the trophies were. If they knew that the cerebral material, the boiled-down residue of pirates, really didn’t improve the sound any, really didn’t make the toast come out any closer to a perfect golden brown … so what? In an imperfect world, it was not just the thought that counted, but the consequences as well.

Turbiner raised his eyelids a bare fraction of an inch and glanced over as McNihil sat back down on the couch. “You enjoying this?” One eyebrow lifted slightly higher. “You must be.” Turbiner held his glass up in a toast. “My thanks are hereby extended to you. And my congratulations.”

“You’re welcome. My pleasure.” McNihil had drained his glass; he let it dangle at the tips of his fingers. The alcohol had slowed his thought processes; it took a moment for the puzzled frown to draw across his face. “Congratulations for what? Just doing my job …”

“I thought you weren’t working anymore. That you were on the outs with the agency.”

“Somewhat.” McNihil shrugged. “But I can still do a favor for my friends.”

Turbiner picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and thumbed the
mute
button. The music vanished between one chord and the next, all harmonic progression left unresolved. “Doing favors for people … that’s a nice thing.” Silence had filled the flat again, the contrast making Turbiner’s voice seem louder than before. “You know, in my world … that one I used to write about … there are no favors. Nobody does favors for other people.”

“I guess we’re lucky,” said McNihil. “That we don’t live there.” He rubbed his thumb across the rim of the empty glass. “We live in this one. Or at least some of the time we do.”

“Maybe that’s the way it is.” Turbiner gave a judicious nod. He looked like a shabby owl dressed in thrift-store feathers. “Some of the time.”

The silence thickened, more oppressive than the music could ever have been. Time, stabbed by alcohol, had congealed in the spaces of the flat.

“Well.” McNihil tried to shake himself free, by leaning forward and setting the glass down on the low table. “I’m glad you like the … present.” It had taken him a few seconds to think of the right word. “Maybe I should be taking off.”

“Not just yet. Stick around for a moment or two.” Turbiner’s words were clipped and precise, as businesslike as the sharp gaze studying his guest. “I wanted to ask you a couple questions. About the … present.”

“Like what?”

Turbiner shifted in the chair, redirecting himself in McNihil’s direction rather than to the point between the main loudspeakers. “The fellow you got this from. The donor, as it might be put.” Turbiner’s voice sounded unusually loud and distinct, as though he were setting each word down in a row of numbered stones. “He was ripping me off, wasn’t he? My copyrights, my old thriller titles, that is. He had some kind of scam going.”

“What’re you talking about? You know that.” McNihil’s puzzlement deepened. “You were the one who told me about it.” That was true: he remembered getting the call from Turbiner a couple of weeks ago. He tried smiling. “Are you starting to forget things?”

“Maybe I am.” The voice held no hesitancy, but was still loud and forceful. “Because I don’t remember telling you anything about some guy like this.”

A few seconds slid by, the flat’s silence weighing upon McNihil’s shoulders. “You know … perhaps I really should leave now.” He felt uncomfortably sober, the scotch doing nothing more than souring the contents of his gut. “I’m not sure where this is headed.”

“Sit down. It’ll all be over soon.”

Something’s going on
—he felt stupid, even reaching a conclusion that obvious. At the same time, a degree of tension ebbed out of his muscles, a fatalistic relaxation taking over. So many times, he’d been the agent of enclosure, his own voice the click of the lock snapping shut, the last thing somebody heard with any degree of freedom at all. Autonomy fled, control begun; now he was going to find out what that felt like.

“What’s the deal?” A last measure of resistance was summoned up. “What’s with the weird questions?”

“I just want to make sure.” Turbiner’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “About the details.”

“Like what?”

“Like your claim that this person—the one you rolled over, the one whose head is inside this cable you just brought me—that this guy was ripping me off. Violating my copyrights.”

“That’s not a claim,” said McNihil. “It’s the truth.”

Turbiner nodded. “And your knowledge of this copyright infringement is based on … what? What I’m supposed to have told you?”

For a moment, McNihil studied the empty glass on the table, then looked back over at the other man. “You’re saying you didn’t tell me?”

“No. I’m just saying you can’t
prove
I told you anything like that.”

“Well, yeah …” That was true as well. “I’m not in the habit of recording phone calls from my friends.”

“Maybe you should be more careful about that.”

Another shrug. “Or maybe about my friends.”

“Now that’s something—” Turbiner gave an approximation of a smile. “You can’t be too careful about.”

“I’ve got a feeling that it’s a little late for this kind of advice.” The feeling was actually a certainty, like a rock in McNihil’s stomach. “So why would I need to prove anything at all? About what you told me?” He picked up the glass from the table, remembered that it was empty, and set it back down. “This kid was ripping you off. He told me so himself. He was bragging about it.”

“What a foolish young man.” Turbiner glanced over at the cable
running to the subwoofer, then slowly shook his head. “He must not’ve actually read those titles he was stealing from me. That’s the problem with those collector and dealer mentalities.” He looked back around at McNihil. “If they ever bothered to read the stuff—especially the old noir classics—they’d know that’s how you get into trouble. By not clamming up when you’ve got the chance. You let your mouth run on, you can talk yourself into the grave.” He nodded toward the snakelike cable. “Or worse.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t the smartest one I ever encountered.”

“I suppose not,” said Turbiner. “I don’t suppose you bothered recording your little encounter with him, either. Even though that’s standard agency procedure, isn’t it?”

McNihil made no reply.
I should have
—instead of doing the job on the cheap, trying to economize on the nonessentials. When he’d still been working for the agency, even the smallest field assignments he’d gone on had been secretly—and expensively—bugged and taped. Some of them, his prize hits, had even been converted by the agency into training videos, instructional adjuncts for getting new hires up to speed on the asp-head way of doing business. But recording cost money, especially with all the masking and counterfeed-suppression technology that had to be added on, to make sure that the pirates, with their funky but effective hair-trigger alarm systems, didn’t catch on to the fact that they were being taped in all their hard-evidence glory. Money that an effectively retired asp-head, doing a favor, might not want to tap into his own pocket to shell out.

“All right,” said McNihil finally. “I didn’t record you, and I didn’t record the kid I worked over. What does it matter? As long as he was stealing from you, as long as he was violating your copyrights, his ass was mine.”

This time, it was Turbiner who kept silent. He shifted in the chair so he could dig his wallet from his back pocket. Flipping the wallet open, he extracted a PDA card; its tiny display panel illuminated when he pressed the top right corner between his thumb and forefinger. With the edge of his nail, Turbiner scrolled down through the listed data.

“You’ve seen this before.” Turbiner had found the entry he’d been looking for; he extended the card toward McNihil. “Standard issue, right?”

Most writers that McNihil had dealt with, or the composers or
other creative types, had something similar with which they kept track of their copyrights. He’d had this one in his hand on previous occasions, when he’d been checking Turbiner’s records against the agency’s central database. He glanced at the little screen, tilting it away from the light sifting in through the flat’s window blinds. “So what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Bottom of the file. Most recent entry.”

A name that McNihil didn’t recognize. “Who’s Kyle Wyvitz?”

“That’s the name,” said Turbiner, “of the kid whose brain is in that cable you just brought me.” The words had been spoken softly, no added emphasis required. “Your latest trophy job.”

“Ah.” He could just about see it all now; the relaxation in McNihil’s bones and muscles was echoed by a similar expansion in time, the appreciable gulf between one second and the next. Just as the would-be pirate kid’s senses must have gone into slow motion as soon as the snaring hydro-gel had leapt up from the plastic cup; the way the small animal in the triggered leg-hold trap must have been able to study every tooth of the metal jaw slicing down toward its pelt and flesh. “And why … just
why
… would his name be here in your copyright tracking?” As if he couldn’t figure it out, already. “What’s that mean?”

“Other than that you’re totally screwed?” Turbiner sounded almost sympathetic, as though he were in fact sorry to see the trap snapping shut. “But you know that already, don’t you?”

“I know all sorts of things. Some of them I just learned.” He looked at Turbiner, as though seeing him for the first time, unoccluded. In the flat’s musicless silence, McNihil could almost hear the blood singing in his own veins. “I’m just interested in these particular details, that’s all.”

“You can work it out.” Turbiner shrugged. “It’s all there. I keep very accurate records—you know that. Just read the listing.”

He hardly needed to; nothing on the little screen of the card came as a surprise to him. Not now. McNihil scrolled across the tiny words and numbers, the black marks like legible flyspecks beneath his fingernail. Beside the kid’s name was a coded list of properties, old thriller copyrights of Turbiner’s early writing days; McNihil was familiar enough with the account at the agency to recognize them without using the hyperkeys. He knew which tides matched up with the numbers: they were all the ones that the Wyvitz kid had been peddling.

McNihil drew his fingertip to the end of the line. The date for the
licensing of the copyrights was barely forty-eight hours ago, the day that he’d gone up north on the rim to take care of this business. To do this favor for Turbiner. There was even a time stamp for the transaction: exactly when he’d been sitting in the theater with the kid.

They were watching me
, thought McNihil. “They” being the ones Turbiner had been working with, cooperating on setting up this little sharp-toothed trap. McNihil already had a good idea who they were.

“The kid didn’t know.” McNihil looked up from the card and its info. “Did he? You used him.”

A moment passed before Turbiner gave another nod. “Somebody did.” He reached over to take the card from McNihil. “I wasn’t in on that part.”

“I’ll just bet,” said McNihil, “that the timing is exactly right on this one.” He laid the card in Turbiner’s outstretched hand. “A short-term licensing of your copyrights—what, ninety days?”

Turbiner shook his head. “Thirty. I don’t like to let go of them for too long.” He opened his wallet and tucked the card back inside. “If I can help it.”

“And it was all set up to go through with the push of a button, I imagine. Soon as they saw how the deal was going to go down with the kid.”

A nod this time. “They got it on tape.” The wallet returned to Turbiner’s hip pocket. “I’ve seen it. You know, you really should’ve checked around for surveillance gear. Even before you walked in there.”

“Well, I guess I didn’t know.” McNihil leaned back against the couch’s upholstery. “I didn’t know what I was walking into. I thought I did. But I was wrong.”

“You were wrong.” Turbiner’s agreement was a simple stating of fact, uninflected by emotion.

“Because if your records there are correct—”

“They are,” said Turbiner. “Unfortunately.”

“Then that means I murdered the kid.” He could feel his heart opening up, as though to some perfect, damnable grace.
So this is what it feels like
, thought McNihil.
Absolutely
. He could almost understand how people got into it, enjoyed the element of control being stripped away from themselves.
At least you know where you stand
. It might be rock bottom, but it was certain. In this world—he supposed it was in fact, had been all along, the kind of world that Turbiner and the ones like him
had always written about—there was a certain comfort in that knowledge. “And I thought,” said McNihil with the barest fragment of a smile, “that I was doing you a favor. Something I didn’t have to do, but just because I wanted it that way.
Por nada
—or maybe just because I liked your books.”

“Actually, you did do me a favor.” Turbiner picked up his own glass and then set it, empty now, beside the other one on the low table. “I got paid for the rights. Not by the kid, of course; as you said, he didn’t know what the hell was going on. He got used as much as you did. But the people who set the whole deal up—they had to pay me.”

“Not just for the rights, though. They paid you for keeping quiet. At least until I was through getting connected over.”

“But you’re not through,” said Turbiner. “There’s more to come. Once somebody is in your position, there’s
always
more to come.”

McNihil didn’t need to be reminded about that. Even though there was still a part of the Wyvitz kid living, the cortical matter imbedded in the trophy cable, the little wanna-be pirate was legally dead. Or illegally, as the case now seemed to be. If the kid had had the rights to the old Turbiner titles licensed over to him—even if the kid hadn’t been aware that he had the rights, even if he mistakenly believed he was a thief and was bragging about it—then carving him up for the desired bits wasn’t a sanctioned agency operation. It was as much murder as if McNihil had gone out on the street and put the muzzle of his tannhäuser against the brow of the first person he ran into, and pulled the trigger.