Noir

then I’ve been here before.”

“That’s one name she goes by.” The unsmiling gaze of the barfly annihilated the space between herself and McNihil. “There’s hundreds of others. She’s been around for a long time.”

“But not going by the name of Verrity.” It was McNihil’s turn to smile, both grim and rueful. “That’s something I know for sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I made Verrity up,” said McNihil. “She never existed. She was a lie. A fiction. The excuse I gave to the Collection Agency, about why my team of asp-heads and our investigation of the Wedge went wrong. Why we wound up getting our asses handed back to us.” The words rasped in McNihil’s throat. “And some of us worse than others. Some of the asp-heads-a lot of them-they died out here.”

“And after all that happened… that many of your friends getting killed… and you thought that Verrity didn’t exist?” The barfly shook her head in amazement. “What would it take to convince you?”

“It’s kind of hard to believe in something when you know you thought it up yourself.” Telling his secret history was oddly painless for McNihil; the story had lain next to his heart for so long that it had developed its own calluses and system of anesthesia. “And that’s what I had done-way before the Wedge investigation went wrong.” The words came easily, as though well rehearsed; he’d told them to himself often enough, lying awake in the dark of his crummy apartment, in a room not much bigger than this one, all through those hours of the endless night. “I knew it was going to go wrong, that there was no way we were going to pull it off-”

“Because you knew it was bogus,” said the barfly. “From the beginning. It was a fraud, a number you were running on the agency.”

McNihil gave a quick, humorless laugh. “You must’ve heard this story already.”

“It’s not much of a secret. Not from the side I come from, that is.” The barfly made a gesture with one hand that took in all of the End Zone Hotel beyond the little room, and beyond. “You may have fooled everyone you worked for, everyone at the Collection Agency… but over here in the Wedge, we knew what the score was. You were in over your head, weren’t you?”

He nodded slowly, keeping his silence.

“How far in debt?” The barfly peered closer at him. “How much did you owe?”

McNihil shrugged. “Plenty. It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want to talk about that part of the story, the bit about his dead wife and how he’d connected her over. Leaving her not quite dead enough. He hoped that the barfly, and the others on this side, didn’t know about that part. Not because he cared what they thought about him. I just don’t want to hear it, thought McNihil. Not in their mouths. “There’s always some way to owe money, and not be able to pay it.”

“So you found a way,” said the barfly, coolly and evenly. “To make the money. All you had to do was lie and hand a wad of bullshit off to the Collection Agency. You were smart enough to do that, at least. Fabricate the evidence that something was going on in the Wedge, that down among the perverts and prowlers, there was major copyright infringement going on, that the agency’s clients were getting ripped off in a big way. Big enough to be worth doing something about.”

“It was easy.” Talking about this part wasn’t so bad; he could still manage a certain feeling of self- congratulation, even though he knew how it’d all turned out, eventually. “Fooling the Collection Agency doesn’t take much work at all. Or much brains. Because the agency wants to be fooled. That’s its fatal flaw. The agency exists for the sole purpose of looking for copyright infringement, for theft of intellectual property; if it doesn’t find that, it ceases to exist. So I wasn’t the only one in trouble, if there wasn’t enough work for us asp- heads. As a matter of fact, you could say I was doing the agency a favor by lying to it. In my own way-I was keeping the Collection Agency alive.”

“You… and how many others like you?” The barfly looked both amused and disgusted. “How many other asp- heads were doing the same thing, all through the agency? Going out and finding evidence of copyrights being messed with, agency clients not getting paid for use of their property, all of that, from little punks with a modem and a hokey encryption program to some bootleg polycarbonate being cranked out in the basement of the Gtsug- lag-khang in Lhasa. Once the bullshit starts, it’s hard to say where it ends, isn’t it?”

McNihil nodded. That had been one of his meager comforts, in those endless nights back in his apartment, with the water stains on the ceiling etching themselves into his sleepless eyes. The comfort of knowing that he wasn’t the only one, that there were others caught up in lies as deeply as he’d buried himself. Lies going both ways: the asp-heads lied to the Collection Agency, which in turn smiled its collective smile, and lied and said that it believed them. For all either side of the equation knew, the game would be over if it weren’t for the mutual quasi-deceptions, the lies that the liars and the lied-to tacitly agreed not to expose. At this point, there might not be enough copyright infringement going on anywhere in the Gloss to justify the agency’s continued existence and the asp-heads’ continued employment. Maybe the Collection Agency and its asp-heads had done their job too well; now, to find anybody stupid enough to violate intellectual-property rights, given the lethal consequences, they were reduced to scraping up idiot punk kids like the one whose strung-out brains McNihil was carrying in his pocket.

The big copyright-protection battles-the shutting-down of the Chinese bootleg factories, the absorption of the Vladivostok bourse and their teneviki holding corporations into the millennial Geneva agreements-had been fought and won; the wars were over. Or at least for the time being. Which was, McNihil knew, the age-old problem of the garrison state, applied to matters of intellectual property and its protection. Just because the war was over, that didn’t mean you could disband the military; if that happened, there wouldn’t be a convenient army of asp-heads to call on when the pirates, the big ones, saw a whole new world of opportunity lying before them, property rights that couldn’t be defended against depredation. At the same time, if a standing army was going to be maintained, something had to be found for it to do; an unused gun turns to rust. So if the asp- heads, on their own initiative, concocted their own assignments out of thin air, all the better as far as the Collection Agency was concerned. Anything went wrong, the agency could deny responsibility, and the individual asp-head, the lying prime motivator of the fraud, was left hanging out to dry. Just like I was, thought McNihil. There might not have been anyone fooled at all, by what he’d told them.

“Except in your case, things went way bad.” The barfly had read his thoughts as though they had gone scrolling down the blank mask of his face. “People-or at least other asp-heads-they died. Right here in the Wedge. And not very prettily, either.” She casually examined the deep scarlet nails of her hand. “They were the ones who paid the price. Not you.”

“I didn’t know,” said McNihil. “That there was going to be one.”

“Then you’re even stupider than you look. Even with your original face.” The barfly’s voice hardened, contemptuous. “You should’ve known, but you were too much of a smart-ass for that. What did you think you were connecting around with down here? A bunch of losers and perverts, all just banging away at each other all night long? Just so we could provide lots of sensory raw material for the prowlers to come down and pick up, so they could take it home to their owners? Real nice for them, I suppose, if that’d been the way it was; all the fun and none of the risks. But then, that’s how the guy you’re working for, that’s how he pitches the arrangement, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.” A slow nod. “That’s how somebody else got roped in. Name of Travelt.”

“You don’t have to tell me about him,” said the barfly. “I know all about that story. More than you do.”

“That’s why I came here. To find out what I don’t know.”

“How flattering.” With a wry grimace, the barfly shook her head. “Really, pal-you don’t have to come right out and tell a girl that you’ve got some other reason for putting the moves on her. Like I didn’t know, or something. Like I’m as dumb as you are. You couldn’t let me keep a few illusions?”

“Why should I?” McNihil let the mask of his face show a thin smile. “Why should you get to keep them, when nobody else does?”

“You seem to still have a few of yours. That’s either a tribute to your stubbornness… or your stupidity. Even that Travelt guy learned his lesson after a while.”

“And what was that? What did he learn?”

“He learned,” said the barfly, “that there wasn’t anything he could do here. Not in this world. His bosses over on the other side-the same ones you’re working for-they may have let him think he was a big deal, a take-charge kind of guy, somebody who got things done. But he was way out of his league here. Out of his league, and off his turf. The Wedge, and what’s beyond it-that doesn’t belong to the DynaZauber corporation, or