Noir

enhanced stereos or dropping slices of bread into their silently screaming toasters, maybe not even thinking about the little thieves canned inside. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter whether the writers and others, including Turbiner sitting here, knew as well what a shuck the trophies were. If they knew that the cerebral material, the boiled-down residue of pirates, really didn’t improve the sound any, really didn’t make the toast come out any closer to a perfect golden brown… so what? In an imperfect world, it was not just the thought that counted, but the consequences as well.

Turbiner raised his eyelids a bare fraction of an inch and glanced over as McNihil sat back down on the couch. “You enjoying this?” One eyebrow lifted slightly higher. “You must be.” Turbiner held his glass up in a toast. “My thanks are hereby extended to you. And my congratulations.”

“You’re welcome. My pleasure.” McNihil had drained his glass; he let it dangle at the tips of his fingers. The alcohol had slowed his thought processes; it took a moment for the puzzled frown to draw across his face. “Congratulations for what? Just doing my job…”

“I thought you weren’t working anymore. That you were on the outs with the agency.”

“Somewhat.” McNihil shrugged. “But I can still do a favor for my friends.”

Turbiner picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and thumbed the mute button. The music vanished between one chord and the next, all harmonic progression left unresolved. “Doing favors for people… that’s a nice thing.” Silence had filled the flat again, the contrast making Turbiner’s voice seem louder than before. “You know, in my world… that one I used to write about… there are no favors. Nobody does favors for other people.”

“I guess we’re lucky,” said McNihil. “That we don’t live there.” He rubbed his thumb across the rim of the empty glass. “We live in this one. Or at least some of the time we do.”

“Maybe that’s the way it is.” Turbiner gave a judicious nod. He looked like a shabby owl dressed in thrift-store feathers. “Some of the time.”

The silence thickened, more oppressive than the music could ever have been. Time, stabbed by alcohol, had congealed in the spaces of the flat.

“Well.” McNihil tried to shake himself free, by leaning forward and setting the glass down on the low table. “I’m glad you like the… present.” It had taken him a few seconds to think of the right word. “Maybe I should be taking off.”

“Not just yet. Stick around for a moment or two.” Turbiner’s words were clipped and precise, as businesslike as the sharp gaze studying his guest. “I wanted to ask you a couple questions. About the… present.”

“Like what?”

Turbiner shifted in the chair, redirecting himself in McNihil’s direction rather than to the point between the main loudspeakers. “The fellow you got this from. The donor, as it might be put.” Turbiner’s voice sounded unusually loud and distinct, as though he were setting each word down in a row of numbered stones. “He was ripping me off, wasn’t he? My copyrights, my old thriller titles, that is. He had some kind of scam going.”

“What’re you talking about? You know that.” McNihil’s puzzlement deepened. “You were the one who told me about it.” That was true: he remembered getting the call from Turbiner a couple of weeks ago. He tried smiling. “Are you starting to forget things?”

“Maybe I am.” The voice held no hesitancy, but was still loud and forceful. “Because I don’t remember telling you anything about some guy like this.”

A few seconds slid by, the flat’s silence weighing upon McNihil’s shoulders. “You know… perhaps I really should leave now.” He felt uncomfortably sober, the scotch doing nothing more than souring the contents of his gut. “I’m not sure where this is headed.”

“Sit down. It’ll all be over soon.”

Something’s going on-he felt stupid, even reaching a conclusion that obvious. At the same time, a degree of tension ebbed out of his muscles, a fatalistic relaxation taking over. So many times, he’d been the agent of enclosure, his own voice the click of the lock snapping shut, the last thing somebody heard with any degree of freedom at all. Autonomy fled, control begun; now he was going to find out what that felt like.

“What’s the deal?” A last measure of resistance was summoned up. “What’s with the weird questions?”

“I just want to make sure.” Turbiner’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “About the details.”

“Like what?”

“Like your claim that this person-the one you rolled over, the one whose head is inside this cable you just brought me-that this guy was ripping me off. Violating my copyrights.”

“That’s not a claim,” said McNihil. “It’s the truth.”

Turbiner nodded. “And your knowledge of this copyright infringement is based on… what? What I’m supposed to have told you?”

For a moment, McNihil studied the empty glass on the table, then looked back over at the other man. “You’re saying you didn’t tell me?”

“No. I’m just saying you can’t prove I told you anything like that.”

“Well, yeah…” That was true as well. “I’m not in the habit of recording phone calls from my friends.”

“Maybe you should be more careful about that.”

Another shrug. “Or maybe about my friends.”

“Now that’s something-” Turbiner gave an approximation of a smile. “You can’t be too careful about.”

“I’ve got a feeling that it’s a little late for this kind of advice.” The feeling was actually a certainty, like a rock in McNihil’s stomach. “So why would I need to prove anything at all? About what you told me?” He picked up the glass from the table, remembered that it was empty, and set it back down. “This kid was ripping you off. He told me so himself. He was bragging about it.”

“What a foolish young man.” Turbiner glanced over at the cable running to the subwoofer, then slowly shook his head. “He must not’ve actually read those titles he was stealing from me. That’s the problem with those collector and dealer mentalities.” He looked back around at McNihil. “If they ever bothered to read the stuff-especially the old noir classics-they’d know that’s how you get into trouble. By not clamming up when you’ve got the chance. You let your mouth run on, you can talk yourself into the grave.” He nodded toward the snakelike cable. “Or worse.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t the smartest one I ever encountered.”

“I suppose not,” said Turbiner. “I don’t suppose you bothered recording your little encounter with him, either. Even though that’s standard agency procedure, isn’t it?”

McNihil made no reply. I should have-instead of doing the job on the cheap, trying to economize on the nonessentials. When he’d still been working for the agency, even the smallest field assignments he’d gone on had been secretly-and expensively-bugged and taped. Some of them, his prize hits, had even been converted by the agency into training videos, instructional adjuncts for getting new hires up to speed on the asp- head way of doing business. But recording cost money, especially with all the masking and counterfeed-suppression technology that had to be added on, to make sure that the pirates, with their funky but effective hair-trigger alarm systems, didn’t catch on to the fact that they were being taped in all their hard-evidence glory. Money that an effectively retired asp-head, doing a favor, might not want to tap into his own pocket to shell out.

“All right,” said McNihil finally. “I didn’t record you, and I didn’t record the kid I worked over. What does it matter? As long as he was stealing from you, as long as he was violating your copyrights, his ass was mine.”

This time, it was Turbiner who kept silent. He shifted in the chair so he could dig his wallet from his back pocket. Flipping the wallet open, he extracted a PDA card; its tiny display panel illuminated when he pressed the top right corner between his thumb and forefinger. With the edge of his nail, Turbiner scrolled down through the listed data.

“You’ve seen this before.” Turbiner had found the entry he’d been looking for; he extended the card toward McNihil. “Standard issue, right?”

Most writers that McNihil had dealt with, or the composers or other creative types, had something similar with which they kept track of their copyrights. He’d had this one in his hand on previous occasions, when he’d been checking Turbiner’s records against the agency’s central database. He glanced at the little screen, tilting it away from the light sifting in through the flat’s window blinds. “So what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Bottom of the file. Most recent entry.”

A name that McNihil didn’t recognize. “Who’s Kyle Wyvitz?”

“That’s the name,” said Turbiner, “of the kid whose brain is in that cable you just brought me.” The words had been spoken softly, no added emphasis required. “Your latest trophy job.”