Noir

take care of was located in a zone of comprehensible and familiar decay.

“Here?” The cabbie sounded incredulous. “This is where you want off? You’re kidding, right?”

The vehicle had come to a stop, after the push and pull of the interstate feeder traffic. McNihil glanced out the window. “Doesn’t look that risky to me.” He’d seen worse places. He lived in one.

“Of course not. It’s just such a tourist trap.” Disappointment filtered into the cabbie’s voice, as well as expectation of a stiffed tip. “I took you for some kind of exec type.”

“Yeah, there’s that kind of aura about me. It’s a curse.” From his wallet, McNihil extracted his debit card and poised it at the slot of the reader mounted on the dividing panel. “What’s the damages?”

A string of blue LED’s blinked on beside the reader. “There’s a hazard add-on.” The cabbie didn’t sound apologetic. “I don’t usually bring people from the station out this way.”

“Don’t worry about it. I take it off my taxes.” He ran the card through the slot, the reader taking a recorded bite from his only operational account. “And it’s not even a scam.” Or not much of one, thought McNihil.

The cabbie gave him a reappraising look. “Maybe you want me to stick around? For when you’re ready to go back?”

McNihil shook his head. He’d gotten out and slammed the passenger door shut. “I’ll take my chances.”

Scanning the area, as the cab’s engine noise faded down the narrow street, McNihil’s gaze took in a withered park, a little urban pocket of dead greenery. Lack of sunshine hadn’t killed it; the buildings surrounding it were ancient nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructs, nowhere near high enough to form a well-like canyon of steel and faux-marble facades. Another channel of light had been cut by a crashed 747, one of the first Noh-fly victims to have its unshielded cockpit electronics HERF’d out and rendered useless. The plane had gone down here as though, in its terminal arc, it had been trying to return to its vanished Boeing birthplace. It had almost made it; a few miles farther south and it would have slept in the factories of its ancestors.

McNihil passed under the skeletal shade of the airliner’s tail section, like tripartite shark fins angled into the air. The swath that the fuselage had dug through the city lay to the west; he could see a wedge of ocean, framed by avalanched brick rubble and twisted steel girders, at the bottom of the city’s slope. He picked his way over the denuded struts of the wing lying tonguelike across the sidewalk and into the cracked asphalt of the street. This close, he could see down into the old subterranean levels of the city, the 747 having torn a stratified hole the way a table knife would have parted an anthill. Scuttling noises, the flicker of battery-operated lights and peering eyes, revealed the presence of the hole’s occupants, charity-resistant scavengers making their homes in the tunnels where tour groups had been led a long time ago. Some of the cave dwellers who were still comfortable with daylight had extended their realm up into the stripped aircraft fuselage, stringing hammocks and clamber-nets between the rows of charred, rain-soaked seat remnants. Whatever baggage survived the crash had been looted and converted into nominal curtain walls, barriers stitched together from business suits and lingerie, the aged rags all fluttering in the salt wind coming off the ocean. The empty suitcases, broken-locked Samsonites and American Touristers, a few shabby imitation Vuittons, had been strung up on the surrounding power lines; they swung and banged like giant castanets.

As he passed by the nose-buried plane wreckage, McNihil saw a cobbled-together gantry arm, corroded sewer pipes hinged with telephone-pole bolts, swing up like an improvised construction crane. Its blind head, guided by a system of rope pulleys, jerked toward him.

“This is an official panhandling station.” An unamplified voice traveled up a duct-taped hose, dangling in loops like throat wattles from the gantry. A funnel was aimed toward McNihil; the other end of the tube ran down into the hole. “Charity expands the heart. Literally-the cardiovascular benefits are immense, buddy.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” With one hand, McNihil pushed aside the funnel. “Not today.”

“We accept cash, but prefer wire debits.” The gantry’s head, steered by the ropes and pulleys, followed along beside him. “See the reader there? I’m sure you do. You look like a smart sonuvabitch. Just dash the ol’ plastic down the groove, and reap the rewards in the world to come.”

“Pie in the sky.” McNihil could see the scam as well. The card reader was a fake, a slit mouth with either glue at the bottom or some kind of clamp trap, ready to be triggered by another, smaller line running down the gantry neck. No data conduit behind the red-dotted LED’s; the ferrite-sheathed cables were as bogus as the hidden beggar’s pitch. Anybody stupid and tenderhearted enough to fall for the gag would have his card snatched out of his hand, then disappeared back down into the dimly lit tunnel world; the gantry was strung with tensioned elastic, synthetic rubber sliced from the downed 747’s landing gear and depolymerized to a taut and stretchy consistency. The panhandlers wouldn’t have to do anything more than pop the restraining clutch in their grubby hands, to have the thin rectangular prize come flying their way. “I’m not falling for this one,” said McNihil as he walked on.

“Don’t be such a hard case.” The talking funnel floated near his face. “God loves a cheerful giver.”

“I don’t.”

“Come on-” The funnel’s voice continued pleading. “Money is just information, a concept, infinitely replicable without generation loss. That’s the way it is in this new world.”

“Don’t be a connecting idiot,” said McNihil. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal.”

“Watch it-” The voice coming through the tube turned huffy. “Connecting isn’t a dirty word around here.” A little shriller: “It’s people like you, with your antiquated anti-connectivity mind-sets, that are going to be dead meat someday! You just watch! Wait and see!”

Blah blah blah. McNihil wasn’t surprised that the broken airliner was a nest of pirasites, that aging-hippie combination of pirate and parasite, with their warped premillennium notions about information, concepts-and concepts about concepts-being as real for them as the world outside their shaggy, graying heads. The business he’d come up here to take care of was with a copyright thief, but at least one who was doing it for money, rather than from some outdated crackpot ideology. That was the kind of thing that ticked him off even more than simple, straightforward larceny.

It was just like these ’net-twit types as well, to have a bug up their collective ass about what’d become the popular usage of the verb connect. These idiots had never gotten it through their soft skulls that the only ones who really believed connecting was an unalloyed good thing were people who had something to sell and rapists, two categories that weren’t that far apart in this world.

McNihil took a knife from his coat pocket, flicked its small blade open, reached over, and sliced through one of the thick black rubber bands. It sounded a pizzicato viola note as it snapped loose, followed by a twanging chorus, a chain reaction all the way down the length of the gantry. The articulated device swooped out of control, hinge pins squealing as the eyeless head jerked up toward the gray-clouded sky. The violent motion ripped loose the phony card reader; it went spinning in a high arc across the street.

McNihil was impressed in spite of himself. With a certain childlike, pure delight in random destruction- You never grow too old, he thought, for this kind of stuff-he watched as the gantry went wild, raking its terminal claw in the airliner’s row of broken-out passenger-section windows. The gantry end snagged in the window hole closest to the raised tail, with enough force to snap loose a few critical bolts and struts. The dead plane shivered and began to disintegrate, the remains of its laminated exterior peeling away like shed snakeskin, the structural elements wrenching loose from one another. The urban scavengers who had been making their homes in the fuselage were revealed as their sheltering curtain rags were torn away, the network of spun ropes snapping and whipping in air. A Brueghelian scene tilted in the midst of the city, of compressed, interwoven sleep and copulation, chemical ingestion and little meals prepared on tinder-fed campfires. Tilted to briefly vertical, the awake and sleeping inhabitants, in narcotized or other dreams, tumbled down the fuselage’s central aisle as the hooked gantry swung the other direction, upsetting the wreckage’s fragile balance. Their screams and surprised shouts echoed off the surrounding buildings.

With a metallic groan, the downed 747’s spine snapped, the rusted cylinder folding in the middle at a ninety- degree angle. Rag-ensembled bodies dropped to the ground below, the fortunate ones being able to shake their dazed heads and scramble to their feet before more debris fell upon them. McNihil had prudently backed away, retreating to the littered sidewalk on the other side of the street. From there, he watched as the broken fuselage now arced sideways, the motion uprooting the nose section from its grave in the tunnels. The operators of the panhandling gantry could be seen behind the cockpit’s shattered windows; a gray-bearded face displayed terror as the figure desperately clung to the useless levers and ropes.