Noir

a fake one. He was just an Adder clome, the commercial cloned replica of the maybe-fictional character that was always found running one of these Snake Medicine™ franchises. For his costume, the Adder clome wore a doctor’s white examining-room coat and had a prop stethoscope tucked in the breast pocket. The brow of his hatchetlike face, the surgical embodiment of the corporate image, was encircled by a headband with that mysterious metal disk on it, which always indicated somebody was a doctor in the old movies. “Who was it?” the Adder clome asked.

“You’re not really interested…”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “But tell me anyway.”

“It was a woman,” said McNihil. “In a bar.” He didn’t need to tell what kind of a bar it’d been. He wasn’t sure, himself. He’d let himself fall so far beneath the opacity of his vision, into the world leaking out of his eyes, that any details from the other world had been completely obscured. There wasn’t any less pain to feel that way, but it seemed more appropriate, at least. He could exist as a beat-up operative on a cracked leatherette barstool, downing a shot and a chaser, in a place with beer spilled on the floor and neon flickering like ionic discharge in the mirror behind the nameless bottles. “Ironic discharge,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said McNihil. “A misfire in the brain. Some of the connections are still loose.” The woman in the bar had offered to tighten them for him. Or a similar service. She’d sat down on the stool next to his, so close that he’d been able to tell the difference between her flesh and his, through the thin layers of his trousers and her skirt. Which was all right; it fit in perfectly with the world he saw, that he preferred to see. McNihil had brought his gaze up from the depths of his glass and looked over at her. What he’d seen had made him both remember and forget the cube bunny that had so briefly visited his shabby apartment. The woman had been the ultimate barfly, a movie vision of glamour and lust, like the dream of what nameless women in a dive bar should look like. Complete with luminous golden hair in a soft curve along one side of her face, a la Veronica Lake. But with a radiation as bemusedly intelligent as Lizabeth Scott, giving a hard time to Humphrey Bogart in the ’47 classic Dead Reckoning. Her gaze, the unhidden part of it that McNihil had been able to see, was colder than his dead wife’s.

“You have to watch out for ones like that,” said the Adder clome. “It’d be better if they wanted money. Then you could deal with them. But all they want is trouble.”

McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d spoken anything else aloud. About the woman or the bar. But then, the man on the other side of the desk, sitting beneath nonsensical framed diplomas-he was supposed to know. It was his business to know things like that. If someone possessed bad longings, kundalinic warps, guiltily sweating desires, this was the place to have them read out. As though the non-doctor could spread one’s heart open on his palms and decipher the quivering lines that spelled out life and destiny.

“That must be why she came my way.” McNihil leaned back in the office’s smaller chair, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. “She figured I had enough to spare.”

“Why did you come here?”

McNihil didn’t answer. He was wishing himself back in the bar, preferring it to this place, with its smells of disinfectant-swabbed chrome and blood-soaked cloths thrown in the plastic bags marked For Biological Waste Only. Which was what he felt like at the moment, but he was trying to maintain.

The ultimate barfly, the woman with the cold dead gaze, had asked him the same thing. To which he’d replied, I’ve got an appointment nearby. Just killing time till then. Her hand had smelled of nicotine and lust as she’d touched him, stroking the side of his neck as she’d leaned toward him. Is that, she’d asked, all that you want to kill?

“I asked you a question.” The Adder clome’s voice tapped at McNihil’s ear. “We’re not going to get very far if you don’t tell me.”

McNihil pulled his darkened gaze away from memory and toward the white-coated figure. “You know already,” he said. “Why I’m here. Harrisch told me to come and see you.”

“Oh, well… sure.” The Adder clome shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of work for Harrisch over the years. Him and the rest of his pals over there at DynaZauber. Regular customers. Anything they want, from one of those silly little iris tattoos on a secretary’s ankle, to a Full Prince Charles job, we’re happy to provide. We’ve got a corporate account set up and everything.”

“I bet you do.”

“Standard business practice.” Leaning back in his leather-clad swivel chair, the Adder clome made a cage of his elongated fingers. “There’s a certain natural… shall we say?… interface between their operations and mine.”

“‘Natural,’” said McNihil, “isn’t the word I would’ve used.”

“Already with the sarcasm.” A slow shake of the head. “And we hardly know each other.”

“I know you well enough.” Slouched in the smaller chair, McNihil gestured at the office’s confines, at the ersatz medical diplomas and the regrettably accurate photographs of procedures and results. “I’ve been inside a Snake Medicine™ franchise before. You Adders are all alike.”

“From one reptile to another, then.” The white-coated figure’s gaze sharpened, stripped of a layer of civility. “I suppose an asp-head such as yourself has a certain… authority in these matters. You should already know, then, that if we’re all alike, it’s because we’re supposed to be that way. There are standards we have to maintain that come right down from the SM headquarters itself. Not just hygiene requirements and surgical quotas and the advertisements we run on the shellbacks-all that stuff.” Whatever nerve had been struck was wired to simmering grievances. The Adder clome’s voice tightened to a rasp. “The only reason I’m taking the time to meet with you at all is because DynaZauber bought out a fifty-one-percent share in the SM holding company. Now that Harrisch is on our board of directors, all of the franchisees have got his boot on their necks. We either produce or the head office’s goons will come out and strip the signs off the building.”

“I’m bleeding for you.” McNihil was past taking consolation in other people’s miseries. “So we’re working for the same guy. Do I look overjoyed about it?”

The Adder clome moodily pushed a blunted scalpel around on the desk. “All right; so Harrisch sent you here. And I’m supposed to talk to you. About what?”

“Beats me,” said McNihil. “I wasn’t provided with an agenda for the meeting.”

“What’s the job you’re doing for Harrisch? Maybe that’d help, if I knew that.” The Adder clome picked up the metal instrument and pointed it toward McNihil. “You at least know that much, don’t you?”

“I’m looking for something…”

“Everybody who comes in here says that. One way or another.”

“Something that belongs to Harrisch. Or to DynaZauber.” McNihil saw a triangular section of his own face reflected in the scalpel’s blade. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a distinction between those two anymore.” The polished metal made his face look just as bright and hard. “But it’s something he lost. Or it got lost for him. And he wants it back.”

“Oh?” The Adder clome showed no sign of doubting him. “Mr. Harrisch does, indeed, set great store at not losing… things. Just what kind of thing are we talking about?”

McNihil shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”

“Now that,” said the Adder clome, “is very much like Harrisch. Rather a private individual. Where did this certain item get lost?”

“That’s why I’m talking to you.” McNihil tilted his head back, a gesture indicating the office’s door and the nocturnal world beyond the Snake Medicine™ franchise. “It’s out there in the Wedge. That’s where it got lost.”

“Ah.” An understanding nod. “Lots of things get lost there. That’s where things go to get lost. Badly lost. You know what I mean.”

For a moment, McNihil wondered if that was some kind of personal comment. How much would some Adder clome, a scrabbling sexual-services franchisee, know about what had happened years ago? Not much, maybe even nothing at all, unless their mutual employer had filled him in.

“I’m a little surprised, though,” continued the Adder clome. “I wouldn’t have thought Harrisch would be hanging around that particular zone. Either in person, or by proxy. So to speak.”

“Knock it off.” Irritation filtered through McNihil’s voice. “I don’t need all the cute stuff from you.”

“Doesn’t cost anything extra.” The Adder clome had a creepy nonsmile that he could easily have picked up at the DZ executive suites. “I throw it in as a bonus, as part of my operating-table-side manner. You might as well try to enjoy it; like a lot of things in this world, there’s no escaping.”