Noir

like that, and had started to formulate a general theory of evil, pieced together from those things that he’d just instinctively gotten pissed off about before. The way he saw it now, there were certain people who loved the art- the music, the books, the pictures, whatever it might be-but who actively hated the creators of the same. Hated them from envy, jealousy, spite-from just that gnawing, infuriating sense that the creators could do something they couldn’t, could make something happen on a page or a canvas or with the sequence of one pitched sound after another. The basic criminal mentality says to itself, Why should that person have something that I don’t have? Where’s the justice, the fairness, in that? And thus thievery and vandalism are justified, not only by the brain, but deep in the outraged heart of anyone who can’t get over the notion that he’s not the center of the universe.

So they don’t steal things-McNihil had thought this before-just so they can have them. That would be too simple. When he’d been working for the agency, he’d encountered too many idiots who could’ve easily paid for their stolen desirables. They stole to prove that they could steal, that they had the right to steal. And to punish anyone, particularly the creators, all those smug writers and musicians and artists, all those busy, talented hands and mouths and brains, the possessors of which swaggered around as if God loved them more than those who burned with a righteous envy. To steal from the creators was an act of justified vengeance; it showed them that they couldn’t get away with that infuriating shit. It proved that the books and the music and the paintings and everything else really belonged to the thieves, that it was all theirs by right; in some strange way, the thieves and not the creators had brought it all into being. So it wasn’t really thievery at all, then, was it? It was the returning of stolen property to its rightful owners. Or such was the belief of the thieves, written upon the cracked tablets of their souls.

“Here’s your coffee.”

McNihil heard the voice behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Turbiner shoving aside a stack of papers on a low table and setting down a nominally washed mug; steam rose from its glistening black contents. Turbiner straightened up somewhat creakily, and headed back into the kitchen area.

“Thanks,” said McNihil. His attention dropped back into present time, into this shuttered space. He’d stopped halfway through unwrapping the package he’d brought for the old man, and had been sightlessly gazing at the crammed bookshelves on the other side of the flat. They stretched from floor to ceiling, running the whole extent of the flat’s longest unbroken wall, and were stuffed with old paperbacks and a few hardbounds. Some of them were Turbiner’s own books, the ones he’d written, including various translations; the rest were the ones that other people had written, that Turbiner had read along the way, that bit by bit he’d constructed the world inside his head from.

Not a particularly nice world, but one that McNihil was comfortable living in. It’d become real for him when he’d had the work done on his eyes, as though the contents of Turbiner’s head and books had seeped out into the larger universe and taken it over. Or maybe it’d been the real world all along, the one that Turbiner and all the writers like him had seen in its true lineaments, and the surgery had merely been an extraction, the removal of some kind of invisible cataracts that had prevented it from being seen in all its dark, annihilating beauty.

He and Turbiner had talked about this before. A little flashback unreeled through McNihil’s brain:

“You see, that’s the way it is, when you’re talking about noir.” Turbiner had been kicking back with the single malt, an inch of Bruichladdich with a stable polymer ice-cube substitute drifting in the glass. “It’s a literature of anxiety. Somebody’s always getting screwed over.”

The word had been floating around in the room, cold and false as the imitation ice. It had come up in the general course of conversation, while McNihil had been slouched down in the armchair opposite the couch, his own nervous system slightly buzzed from the effects of the same bottle that Turbiner had opened. McNihil hadn’t cared where the word came from ultimately, and hadn’t supposed that Turbiner cared, either. French intellectuals talking about low-brow American culture, ages ago, ancient black-and-white movies filled with shadows, garish paperback cover art that seemed equally devoted to guns, lip-dangling cigarettes, and off-the-shoulder cleavage-no one cared anymore. Not about the word itself, which had gotten applied to so many things that it now meant-according to Turbiner- nothing at all.

“You see, that’s where the later variations, especially in the movies, that’s where they all went wrong.” Turbiner had gotten into full lubricated lecture mode. “They mistook the images, the look of some old Billy Wilder masterpiece, and they thought that was the only thing that mattered. Really, it was only the people still cranking out books-like me-that had any fucking notion.” He had taken another swallow, hard enough to rock his head back; from where he sat, McNihil had been able to watch the alcohol rolling down the other man’s tendon-corded neck. “Any fucking notion at all, about what the essence, the soul of noir was all about.” The words themselves had been drunk; no wonder the old writer loved them. “The look, all that darkness and shadow, all those trite rain-slick streets-that was the least of it. That had nothing to do with it.”

McNihil had ingested enough alcohol to make his own eyelids feel like lead-weighted curtains. He’d looked out from underneath them at the old man. “So what was it, then?”

“Oh… it’s betrayal.” Turbiner had taken his glass down to the last brown remnant. “That’s what it’s always been. That’s what makes it so realistic, even when it’s the most dreamlike and shabby, when it looks like it’s happening on some other planet. The one we lost and can’t even remember, but we can see it when we close our eyes…”

The flashback was interrupted as McNihil, on autopilot, took a sip of the coffee that had been set down in front of him. It tasted like hot acid on his tongue, pulling him back into real time. Not unpleasantly so, or at least not unexpectedly.

Listening to the old man, McNihil knew he’d been speaking the truth. It came from somebody who’d loved his dead wife enough to put her in the ground for good, debt-free and gone. Or perhaps she was ashes in a jar, tucked somewhere in the general clutter of Turbiner’s flat; either way, it didn’t matter. The words about betrayal ran knifelike through somebody who’d loved just as much, but hadn’t kept the same faith with the dead.

And the old man had known that, too. McNihil had never spoken to Turbiner about his own domestic affairs, but still, there it was somehow. Maybe from somebody else in the Collection Agency, another asp-head; Turbiner had been having his copyrights protected by the standard means for so long, there were bound to be other operatives with whom he was on a friendly basis. So for Turbiner to be talking about betrayal and things like that… McNihil had to admit, the old man had never claimed to be any kind of a nice guy.

“So what’ve we got here?” Turbiner had sat down in the plush chair with his own cup. He nodded toward the partially unwrapped package. “Not big enough for an automatic rifle, at least not a good one.”

McNihil ignored the comment. He knew the old man was going to dig the present; if nothing else, it would complete the set Turbiner already had.

“Check it out,” said McNihil. He pulled off the rest of the wrappings, balled them up in his fist, and tossed them onto the rubble-strewn floor. An elongated black leatherette case was revealed on the low table; the standard agency presentation job, nothing too fancy-the little metal hinges and clasp were just a cut above cheap and flimsy-but good enough. “A little something for you.”

“How sweet.” Turbiner leaned forward and drew the box around toward himself. “Ah.” He nodded in appreciation as he looked over the contents. “Very, very nice.”

“I figured, the way you’ve got your system set up, you’d need about twelve feet.” McNihil took another sip of coffee. “Think that’ll do you?”

“Perfect.” Turbiner’s voice went down into a pleased murmur, his grayed eyes glazing in happy anticipation. “It’ll be perfect.”

McNihil watched as the old man lifted out the presentation box’s main contents, letting the snakelike object lie dangling across his level palms. It even glistened in a proper herpetoid fashion, the decorative polyethylene sheathing put on by the agency’s techs shimmering with a subtle faceted pattern.

The scale finish was on the outside; what was on the inside was actual human spinal tissue, the last living remains of McNihil’s visit to the city farther north in the Gloss. That was what he’d brought back from the End Zone Hotel, that he’d returned with, safely tucked inside the regulation asp-head trophy container. He’d been worried about it on the trip back, what with all the knocking about it’d gotten, when he’d been scrambling up and then