Noir

happened sometimes, the result being a small box arriving at the agency headquarters, a box that leaked from the bottom and smelled like the dumpsker behind a butcher shop by the time it got opened and the pieces identified for a proper burial. McNihil, just starting with the agency and totally green, had been in on the tail end of the raids on the last Guangzhou holdouts, deep inside the Guangdong FEZ in the Chinese mainland-data forgery, mastering and distribution facilities so entrenched that they had their own military, way beyond Beijing control. A lot of older asp- heads had gone home in crates before that had been wrapped up; McNihil owed at least part of his rise in the agency to the holes that had been shot through the ranks above him. Also his caution, and his more-than- willingness to keep his chops and equipment up-to-date. But that cost money.

“The good things in life always do,” said the dead woman sitting across from him. “That’s the difference between life and death. When you’re the way I am… prices really don’t matter anymore.”

“How the hell should I know?” McNihil didn’t feel like smiling back at her. “I’m not dead yet. I’m trying to avoid that.”

“Because you’re smart. Smarter than I was, at any rate.” She contemplated the unlit cigarette in her hand. “Inasmuch as I trusted you.”

Which she shouldn’t have. For both our sakes, thought McNihil. He supposed he could’ve quit the Collection Agency, gotten some other job where the consequences for failure weren’t quite so grim. Or if he had to stick it out as an asp-head, for whatever reasons he carried around in the dark rooms of his head and heart, he could’ve found some other way to finance the upward motion of his career there. Some other way besides spending the insurance payout that fell into his hands upon his wife’s death. The payout that would have otherwise wiped off her indeadted status and bought her a nice, quiet resting place in the ground or a crematory urn.

“Oh, I would’ve wanted the cremation.” His dead wife nodded as she reached for a book of matches. “Definitely. Even before finding out what I know now. About what happens after things die.” She lit the cigarette. “It’s so much cleaner.”

It was more or less the same conversation they wound up having every time he came down here. Not so much because she wanted to talk about these things-from the beginning, she had displayed a casual acceptance about her transformed condition that had left him somewhat stunned and mystified, until he’d figured out why she was doing it. All the better to twist the knife inside him. Which was the same reason McNihil thought and talked about these things. As the ancient sage had said, As long as you use a knife, there’s still some love left. It just depended on whether you used the knife on yourself or not.

That was the trouble with death and money combined. They could be either evil or innocuous on their own, but when they were wrapped up together, when they slept in the same coldly burning bed, that was when things got messy and weird.

“Connect this,” said McNihil. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” Some other time, when he wasn’t being leaned on by Harrisch and his crew, he could dig the past up from its unsilent grave, and dissect with his dead wife how he’d screwed her over, spent the insurance payout on his asp-head gear, and somehow never got far enough ahead on his Collection Agency salary and bonuses to pay off her living debts and stick her ashes in that little jar she coveted for her final residence. “Right now,” he said aloud, “I’ve got other things on my mind.”

“Sure.” His dead wife let the new cigarette burn, without bringing it to her pale lips. “You came here for advice. Analysis of the situation you’re in. People have been calling on the dead for these services, for a long time now. Before, though, they usually didn’t get any answers.”

“Lucky for them.” A grim mood had descended upon McNihil. It was easier to deal with guilt and the past than the present situation. He knew where he was with the past.

“Didn’t I tell you enough? You know more than when you came here.” His dead wife shrugged, cigarette held aloft. “I can’t figure out everything for you. Even if I could… why should I?”

She dealt in fragments, he knew, fragmentary info, fragmentary answers. The scraps and pieces that came drifting on hidden, subterranean currents into the dead territory. Proof that she was on a much higher functioning level than the scavengers he’d spotted so many times from the train windows. Her existence, this little bubble of ersatz bourgeois comfort amidst the rubble and decay, was financed from her earnings as an analyst of discarded data banks, medical records, consumer surveys of products that had been taken off the market decades ago, bins full of old credit-card receipts; all the informational flotsam that washed up on this terminal shore. A couple of small-time research services, including one university sociology/ethnobiology department, kept her and a few dead colleagues on minuscule retainers and piece-work schedules. That brought in enough to pay the interest on her debts and even chip away a little on the principal amounts. At the rate she was going, sometime in the next century she might be able to keep her long-delayed appointment at the crematorium.

“Why should you?” An old question. “Maybe just because you love me. Still.”

“Do I?” Her dark, empty eyes regarded him.

“Maybe.” His turn to shrug. “You tell me.”

Her gaze shifted to the spark at the tip of the cigarette. “That’s one of the things I’m not ever going to tell you.” A speck of ash touched her wrist, then drifted the rest of the way down to the table. “It’d be just too easy on you.”

“Fine,” said McNihil. “I’m way beyond needing anyone to be that kind. So why don’t you just tell me instead, something about what I came down here to find out?”

“These people you’re dealing with? What more do you need to know?” The smoke drew a smudged gray line beside her face. “You know enough to be cautious.”

“I knew that before I came down here.” He couldn’t tell if she was jerking him around or not. Sometimes, from the random backwash of information into the dead territory, she extracted worthwhile answers; other times, not. The luck of the draw. “I could use something a little more practical. Something that would help save my ass.”

“Is that all?” His dead wife smiled behind the cigarette. “Might be rather late for that. Like I said. They’ve been scheming on you for a while.”

“Then I’ll have to take my chances. I don’t have anything to lose.”

“Fine.” She set the cigarette down on the edge of the table, inside a row of small burn marks. Unsmiling, she leaned toward him. “You want something more? Something you can use? I’ll tell you right now. What you probably know already, because if you don’t, you’re too stupid to live.” Her voice grated harsh, as though sand were caught in her corded throat. “It’s not that guy Harrisch and the rest of those corporate types that you have to worry about. They’re nothing. They’ve got their plans for you-there’s something they want from you, something different from what they’ve said-but you might be able to handle that. You’ve got a chance. But where you’re connected-and you are; you know that, don’t you?-that’s nothing much to do with them. It’s what they want you to get involved in. That’s the problem for you. Where they want you to go.” She picked up the cigarette again and held it aloft. When she spoke again, it was in a quieter, scarier voice. “And who’s waiting for you there.”

It took a few moments before McNihil was able to ask the next question. “And who’s that? Who’s waiting?”

“Come on.” His dead wife shook her head in mock exasperation. “You know perfectly well. The same thing that’s always been your downfall. You’re just one of those guys who’s cursed by women. It wasn’t just me that you have problems with. There’s always some other woman that you have to deal with, that you can’t deal with. One that decides your fate. And you know who it is.”

“You mean…” McNihil frowned, trying to puzzle out her words. “There’s one that’s been tailing me around; a young one. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Is that the one you’re talking about?”

“For Christ’s connecting sake.” Genuine anger flashed from his wife’s deep-socketed eyes. “Stop messing around. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If you want to pull your ass out of the fire, you’d better get your mind straight. For once. I don’t know anything about some ‘young one.’” The anger darkened, as though transmuting for a moment into sexual jealousy, an emotion that even death hadn’t managed to render out of her. “You idiot. God knows what you’re imagining now.” She managed an actual draw on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into her inert lungs, then exhaling a dragonish cloud. “You know who it is. The same one as before. The same one who screwed you over as badly as you did to me.” The tobacco haze slowly dispersed in the airless room. “It’s Verrity. It’s always been her.”

Rage beyond anger blossomed inside his heart, a fist shattering his breastbone from inside, as though some rapid feedback loop had taken her disdain and amplified it toward murder. As if the dead could be killed again-if so,