Black Man / Thirteen Read online

  Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

  Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger olé, wiped his fingers, and went.

  He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.

  He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s announcement that they were starting their descent into Miami and that the airport was locked down under a security scare, so no connecting flights would be taking off for the foreseeable future. Local accommodation options could be accessed through—

  Fuck.

  The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Banners and his own bed under the tree-flanked eaves of the Crouch End flat. Could have drifted awake late the next morning to the sound of birds outside the window and cloud-fractured sunlight filtering through the bright leaves. Some British summer downtime at last—with the wound, the Agency would have no choice—and the whole Atlantic between him and the emotional topography of MarsPrep.

  Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two-meter holoscreens that admonished think it’s all red rocks and airlocks? think again and we only send winners to mars. Miami was a transamericas hub, and that meant a hub for every company involved in the Western Nations Colony Initiative. Some color-supplement journalist with access to more mainframe time than she deserved estimated, for a piece of inflight fluff he’d read a couple of years ago, at present every seventh person passing through Miami International does so on business related, directly or indirectly, to Mars and the COLIN program. That figure is set to rise. These days it was probably more like one in four.

  He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view, and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit—working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions, which he then had to claim back as part of his fee—but with a worst-case couple of days left till he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.

  Time to use it.

  In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor, and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalog of bruises he could feel through the thinning veils of codeine. The glued wound in his side tugged at him every time he moved.

  He dried himself with big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound, and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

  The in-house doctor was a personable young Latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner-city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.

  “Been in Miami long?” she asked him.

  He smiled, shook his head. “It didn’t happen here. I just got in.”

  “I see.” But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. “So are you one of our illustrious military advisers?”

  He switched to English. “What, with this accent?”

  A tiny bend to the lips now as she moved around to face him again. “You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—”

  “Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers, too.” That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. “You got family in Venezuela?”

  “Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.” She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a handheld echo imager. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me.”

  Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogotá a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

  “No, I would believe you,” he said.

  She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways-slanted eyes at what had just happened.

  “There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,” she said, a little hurriedly. “Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?”

  “Yeah, they did.”

  “Do you want anything for the pain?”

  “The pain’s under control.”

  “Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.”

  “I’ve just had a shower.”

  “Okay, well, in that case I can leave—”

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  She smiled then, properly.

  “I’m married,” she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. “I don’t do that.”

  “Oh hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,” he lied.

  “No problem.” She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it, and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. “Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.”

  “No, I’m all right,” he said.

  So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.

  He went out.

  It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.

  An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open—LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from offshore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beachhead-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone, Carl would have blended in well enough—it was one of the few things he liked about Miami—but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes, and a bradbury bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.

  In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was se
edy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the Latina doctor—well, a close substitute, anyway—in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the homestretch to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s nighttime home.

  Well, you got the shadows, he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink—they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t—and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him—the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.

  But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.

  “Hi. Give me a whiskey cola. Lot of ice. Hey there.”

  This last, Carl realized, was directed at him. He looked up from the dregs of his latest beer and nodded, trying to calibrate in the dim light. Trying to decide if she was working.

  “You don’t look like you’re having a whole lot of fun there,” she said.

  “I don’t?”

  “No. You don’t.”

  She was no doctora from the Marriott—her features were sharper and paler, her body curves less generous, and her mestiza hair less groomed. No wedding band, either, just a scatter of cheap and ornate silver rings across both hands. Bodice top made to look like it was sculpted metal, too, clasping her to just below the armpits, midthigh skirt in dark contrast, the inevitable wrenching heels. There was taut coffee-colored flesh on display, thighs below the skirt, shoulders and the slope of pushed-up breasts above the bodice, belly button slice between where the two garments didn’t quite meet—but no more than street standard in this heat, didn’t have to mean anything either way. Makeup a little on the heavy side, a little caked in the pores on the side of her nose. Yeah, she was working. He stopped trying to kid himself, hung for a moment over his decision like a skydiver in the hatch, then let go.

  “I just got in,” he said. “Business trip, I’m still kind of wired.”

  “Yeah?” She tipped her head on one side, crossed her legs in his direction. The skirt slid up her thighs. “You want some help with that?”

  Later, elsewhere, and helped out of his tension like it was a tight pair of leather trousers he couldn’t take off alone, he lay slumped up against the headboard and watched her move about in the white-blasted cubic environment of the en suite. From the foot of the bed to the open bathroom door wasn’t much more than a meter, but it felt as if she’d stepped off into a parallel universe. Her actions seemed to be taking place at a profound distance; even the small bathroom noises, splash and swill of water, click of makeup utilities, were all somehow muffled as if he were staring through a thick-glassed observation panel into some cramped vivarium in an alien-world zoo.

  Come see the humans.

  See them mate in authentic surroundings.

  A grimace twitched through him, too deeply buried to register in the muscles of his face.

  See the female’s postcoital douching ritual.

  Another buried tremor of intent told him to get up off the bed, get dressed, and get the fuck out. There was really nothing else left to do. She’d run his wafer as soon as they’d gotten through the door—swiped it up the crack in the reader with the same clinical competence that she’d later employed to spray-coat his swollen cock and slot it inside her. Then he got some basic pay-per-view tricks—sucking her own fingers as he thrust into her, squeezing her own breasts as she rode him—a couple of well-timed posture changes, and a crescendo of throaty moaning until he blew. Now streetlighting and a tree outside made yellowish swaying shadows across the wall and ceiling of the darkened room, the alkaline smell of recent sex seeped out of the sheets tangled around his waist, and suddenly he felt old and tired and very slightly ill. The wound in his side had started to hurt again, and he thought the dressing might be coming off.

  Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up, and by the time she came out he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

  “You going?” she asked dully.

  “Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.” He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. “I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?”

  Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realized that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and halfway into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “No, you go.” The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

  Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

  He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he—idiot grin—was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she were accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

  “Well,” he said experimentally. “I mean, can’t you. You know.”

  Her shoulders shook. “This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.”

  “And there’s no one here who—”

  “Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal, man.”

  A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. “Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.”

  She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the streetlight falling into the room. She snorted. “Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back-alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly: “How much do you need?”

  Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritatio
n at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

  When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying, and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand, and he guessed she was terrified that if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighborhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

  The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighborhood was low-end semi-residential, and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the storefronts; bright yellow decals announced the anti-tampering charges lurking in the metal. A couple of bars were still open, showing dim neon signs over corner doorways like weak urban lighthouses. Outside one, a flock of aspiring street thugs propped themselves against walls and perched on parked vehicles, staring dangerously at the few passersby. Carl felt the mesh come gently, suggestively online. He ignored it and avoided gazes instead, put an arm around the girl’s shoulder, and picked up the pace a little. He heard the boys talking about him in a densely arcane dialect of Spanglish as they fell behind. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was being said. Fucking tourists, fucking foreigners, fucking our women. The age-old plaint. He couldn’t really blame them. Then they were lost around a corner and instead music floated down from a window jacked open for the heat, clumpy Cuban jazz that sounded like someone playing the piano with their fists.