Noir

at the exec from the corner of one eye. Just for sarcastic effect. “Sometimes people get all confused about other people, about what it is they exactly do. I wouldn’t have thought somebody in your exalted position would have that kind of problem, but still. If you think that just because there were dead bodies, or parts of them, left over after I got done with any particular job, that just because of that I must have some kind of general connection to stiff meat… then you’ve really gotten your wires crossed. It doesn’t work that way. Even with asp-heads who are still in the business.” Another tilt of the head, angled down toward the corpse between them. “Why don’t you just get the police to take care of this? They’re cheap enough.”

“Police don’t have the…” The ugly executive nonsmile appeared again. “The qualifications that you do.”

“Again with the qualifications.” McNihil shook his head. He glanced toward the cubapt’s tall view window and the gray sky on the other side of the glass. Let the fire fall, he told himself. He’d be willing to let it rain on his own head, if that would’ve meant being able to get out of this sucked-airless space. “If sheer connecting nausea were a qualification”-he let his voice shift into a dull-toothed rasp-“then I’d be your man.”

“Oh, you’re our man, all right.” Harrisch’s thing-like-a-smile tugged into a snarl at one corner. “You just don’t know it yet.”

“You will, though.” The little flunky piped up. “Just wait.”

“If you don’t mind,” said McNihil, “I’ll wait at home.” He turned and headed toward the door.

Not fast enough. Harrisch caught him again by the arm. “I think,” said the exec, “that if you just took the time to exercise some of those special qualifications-special even for asp-heads-then you’d have a better idea. About why we wanted you to come here.”

A microsuspicion tickled at the back of McNihil’s skull. The other man had carefully pitched his voice, its faint hinting undertones, not so that it was rich with implications, but just enough to be an appetizer, the bait on the hook. He peeled the other’s hand from him. “What do you mean?”

“Come on.” Harrisch stepped back and gestured toward the corpse. “You haven’t even really checked it out. Simple dead means nothing. You might as well take a good look. Before we do let the police come and take it away.”

He knew he should just turn and start walking again, and make it all the way to the door this time. There would be no stopping him; none of the execs would say anything more to him. Harrisch and the rest would scratch him off their list and move on to Plan B, whoever else they figured they could rope in on their problems. Whatever they were.

McNihil knew that was what he should go ahead and do. But he didn’t.

“All right.” He was already regretting the impulse, the momentary weakening of resolve. “You win. This much: I’ll check this poor bastard out.”

He didn’t care if a little triumphant smile got passed around the room, from one smug company exec to another. If it did, he didn’t see it; that was all that mattered. McNihil had already got down on one knee, that much closer to the corpse. And to its face, the empty, gray-silvery gaze focused on nothing. As I am, said the corpse inside McNihil’s thoughts. So will you be. To which McNihil answered, Not me, pal. I’ll kill myself first. Some way that left nothing but ashes.

Almost a kiss; he had brought his face that near to the corpse’s. McNihil had known what he would find, that there wouldn’t be any surprises. There never were. That was why he’d wanted to leave, to have no part of this. No matter how much the company might have been willing to pay.

He smelled it. Not how the man had died. McNihil didn’t care about that. But what this Travelt person had been doing when he was alive. That mattered.

A slow exhalation, the way the dead breathed; so slow, the air didn’t stir, but hung suspended in their mouths. The corpse’s bluish lips were slightly parted, as though it wanted to whisper something more to the face above its own.

It didn’t need to speak. McNihil had already caught the trace, the sparse molecules inhaled down his throat, past the receptors of taste and scent and into his memory. He’d smelled it before. Something like wet metal, sulphuric corrosion on battery terminals, the ion discharge of aroused and insatiable desire. He could taste the metal on his tongue, as though he could spit out a bright rolling bead of mercury.

He hooked a thumb behind the corpse’s teeth and pried its stiff jaw open. Wide enough that McNihil could run the tips of two fingers across its tongue. Through the film of congealed saliva, he felt the tiny scars, as though the wet flesh had been nicked again and again with the corner of a razor blade. They weren’t scars; he knew what they were. The living Travelt’s habits had evoked new sensory channels from his own flesh, at the center of his head, close as possible to the red jelly of his brain. It wasn’t the worst case McNihil had ever encountered; he’d come across other corpses where the tongues had felt like some kind of stitched and restitched corduroy, the channel tracks wide as the tip of his little finger. Those were the ones who’d indulged themselves for so long that they might just as well have rewired their entire nervous systems, like ancient embroideries from which the word human had been picked out and some new, unreadable word needlepointed in.

The space around him had subtly diminished; McNihil looked up and saw Harrisch and the other company execs, even the little corporate rep, standing closer to him. Their faces formed a circle, the base of an inverted cone, with its point set right between his own eyes.

“So?” Harrisch smiled as unpleasantly as before. “What did you find out?”

A bit of metal glittered at the corpse’s throat. Four-armed and golden, bilaterally symmetrical, strung on a thin chain. McNihil passed his hand across the cold skin, shielding his movements with his own back. When he took his hand away, the bit was gone, the broken chain slithered out from the white shirt collar.

McNihil stood up; the cone collapsed into a circle, his head at the center, the watching execs all around the circumference. Every one of them had the same hungry dark inside his eyes. The little black mirrors: McNihil could have turned slowly around and seen the tiny reflection of his face, over and over…

If only, he thought. If his own face were all that he saw. It was their faces that bothered him. And what he saw there.

He saw the same thing, of which he’d caught the scent on the corpse’s non-breath. Tasted on the back of his tongue when he’d inhaled. Metal and spit, mercury and a blue dancing spark. It was in the glistening of their lips, the knowing half-smiles, the smug certainty that badged a brotherhood of the senses.

They’re all in on it, thought McNihil. It hadn’t been just the late Travelt, the corpse at the bottom of the well their expensive suits and corporate white shirts formed. That was why Harrisch and the other execs had wanted him to check it out, to kneel down and bring his special qualifications to bear on the dead thing in their midst. So he’d have that scent in his nostrils, that inhaled taste at the back of his mouth, when he’d stood back up and looked at them.

“You see?” Harrisch’s voice poked at him again. “It really is the kind of job for which you have a special knack. It fits into your realm of experience. If not professionally, then personally. Or perhaps at that point where professional and personal meet.”

Hated the guy before, hated him even more now; McNihil weighed the consequences of just leaning back and cocking his fist, unloading it in the exec’s face. Satisfaction would be high, the grief afterward higher, the payment at the end close to total. People like Harrisch walked around inviolable, secure in their perch on the ladder. They invited fists, they hung their faces out like smiling targets, asking for it. Knowing that if you fired one off, the blow your arm ached to deliver, they had ways of paying you back a thousandfold. And if you didn’t, if you just let your white-knuckled fist hang at your side like a rock extracted from the sweating core of the earth, the knot in your gut was their reward. They got you either way.

That was how they worked it. McNihil knew that. He’d worked for Harrisch, and for people just like him. The only thing to do was to turn and walk away, to push past the encircling wall of suits and carry your fist, heavy as lead, out the door and down the unnumbered elevator, all the way to the little space called home. Where you could soak your fist in alcohol and morphine, applied from the inside out, through gut and vein. Until you forgot, or forgot enough.

They wanted me to know, thought McNihil. What they do for fun. They weren’t ashamed; on the contrary. Harrisch and the other company execs had wanted him to know, had wanted McNihil to catch the same scent from them as he had from the corpse’s mouth. Spit and mercury and blood. All of that and more, and none of it. The only marks on their bodies would be the scars on their tongues, the channel tracks, the contact points, the rain-wet battery terminals of their pleasures. The place where