“The only thing we probably know for sure is that both of them use their moddies not only to kill but to spread a little terror. It’s working fine, too,” I said. “Your guy—” Okking shot me an ugly look, but hell, it was the truth. “Your guy’s changed from Bond to Khan. The other guy is the same as he was, as far as we know. I just hope the Russians’ bumper has gone home. I wish we could know for sure that we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“Yeah,” said Okking.
“Did you get anything useful out of Trudi before you sent her downstairs?”
Okking shrugged and flipped over half a sandwich on the tray. “Just the polite information. Her name and all that.”
“I’d like to know how she got involved with Seipolt in the first place.”
Okking raised his eyebrows. “Easy, Audran. Seipolt was the highest bidder this week.”
I let out an exasperated breath. “I figured that much, Lieutenant. She told me she’d been introduced to Seipolt by somebody.”
“Mahmoud.”
“Mahmoud? My friend, Mahmoud? The one who used to be a girl over by Jo-Mama’s before his sex change?”
“You right.”
“What’s Mahmoud got to do with this?”
“While you were in the hospital, Mahmoud got promoted. He took over the position that was left vacant when Abdoulaye got creased.”
Mahmoud. Gone from sweet young thing working in the Greek clubs to petty shakedown artist to big-time white slaver in a couple of easy steps. All I could think was “Where else but in the Budayeen?” You talk about equal opportunity for all. “I’ll have to talk to Mahmoud,” I muttered.
“Get in line. He’s coming in here in a little while, as soon as my boys can roust him.”
“Let me know what he tells you.”
Okking sneered. “Of course, friend; didn’t I promise you? Didn’t I promise Papa? Anything else I can do for you?”
I got up and leaned over his desk. “Look, Okking, you’re used to looking at pieces of bodies splashed around nice peoples’ living rooms, but I can’t do it without throwing up.” I showed him my latest message from Khan. “I want to know if I can get myself a gun or something.”
“What the hell do I care?” he said softly, almost hypnotized by Khan’s note. I waited. He looked up at me, caught my eye, and sighed. Then he pulled open a lower drawer in his desk and took out some weapons. “What do you want?”
There were a couple of needle guns, a couple of static pistols, a big seizure gun, and even a large automatic projectile pistol. I chose a small Smith Wesson needle gun and the General Electric seizure cannon. Okking put a box of formatted needle clips on his blotter for me, twelve needles to a magazine, a hundred magazines in the box. I scooped them all up and tucked them away. “Thanks,” I said.
“Feel protected now? They give you a sense of invulnerability?”
“You feel invulnerable, Okking?”
His sneer tilted over and crashed. “The hell,” he said. He waved me out of there; I went, as grateful as ever.
By the time I got out of the building, the sky was getting dusky in the east. I heard the recorded cries of muezzins from minarets all over the city. It had been a busy day. I wanted a drink, but I still had some things to do before I could let myself ease off a little. I walked into the hotel and went up to my room, stripped off my robe and headgear, and took a shower. I let the hot water pound against my body for a quarter of an hour; I just rotated under it like lamb on a spit. I washed my hair and soaped my face two or three times. It was regrettable but necessary: the beard had to come off. I had gotten clever, but Khan’s reminder in my mailbox made it plain that I still wasn’t clever enough. First, I cut my long reddish-brown hair short.
I hadn’t seen my upper lip since I was a teenager, so the short, harsh swipes with the razor gave me some twinges of regret. They passed quickly; after a while I was actually curious about what I looked like under it all. In another fifteen minutes I had eliminated the beard completely, going back over every place on my neck and face until the skin stung and blood stood out along bright red slashes.
When I realized what I reminded myself of, I couldn’t look at my reflection any longer. I threw cold water on my face and toweled off. I imagined thumbing my nose at Friedlander Bey and the rest of the sophisticated undesirables of the city. Then I could find my way back to Algeria and spend the rest of my life there, watching goats die.
I brushed my hair and went into the bedroom, where I opened the packages from the men’s store. I dressed slowly, turning some thoughts over in my mind. One notion eclipsed everything else: whatever happened, I wasn’t going to chip in a personality module again.
I would use every daddy that offered help, but they just extended my own personality. No human thinking machine of fact or fiction was any good to me — none of them had ever faced this situation, none of them had ever been in the Budayeen. I needed to keep my own wits about me, not those of some irrelevant construct.
It felt good to get that settled. It was the compromise I’d been searching for ever since Papa first told me I’d volunteered to get wired. I smiled. Some weight — negligible, a quarter-pound, maybe — lifted from my shoulders.
I won’t say how long it took me to get my necktie on. There were clip-on ties, but the shop where I’d bought everything frowned on their existence.
I tucked my shirt into my trousers, fastened everything, put on my shoes, and threw on the suit jacket. Then I stepped back to look at my new self in the mirror. I cleaned some dried blood from my neck and chin. I looked good, faster than light with a little money in my pocket. You know what I mean. I was the same as always: the clothes looked first-rate. That was fine, because most people only look at the clothes, anyway. It was more important that for the first time, I believed the whole nightmare was close to resolution. I had gone most of the way through a dark tunnel, and only one or two obscure shapes hid the welcome light at the end of it.
I put the phone on my belt, invisible beneath the suit coat. As an afterthought, I slipped the little needle gun into a pocket; it barely made a bulge, and I was thinking “better safe than sorry.” My malicious mind was telling me “safe and sorry”; but it was too late at night to listen to my mind, I’d been doing that all day. I was just going down to the hotel’s bar for a little while, that’s all.
Nevertheless, Xarghis Khan knew what I looked like, and I knew nothing about him except that he probably didn’t look anything like James Bond. I remembered what Hassan had said only a few hours ago: “I trust nobody.”
That was the plan, but was it practical? Was it even possible to go through a single day being totally suspicious? How many people did I trust without even thinking about it — people who, if they felt like getting rid of me, could have murdered me quickly and simply? Yasmin, for one. The Half-Hajj, I’d even invited him up to my apartment; all he needed to be the assassin was the wrong moddy. Even Bill, my favorite cabbie; even Chiri, who owned the hugest collection of moddies in the Budayeen. I’d go crazy if I kept thinking like that.
What if Okking himself was the very murderer he was pretending to track down? Or Hajjar?
Or Friedlander Bey?
Now I was thinking like the Maghrebi bean-eater they all thought I was. I shook it off, left the hotel room, and rode the elevator down to the mezzanine and the dimly lighted bar. There weren’t many people there: the city had few enough tourists to begin with, and this was an expensive and quiet hotel. I looked along the bar and saw three men on the stools, all leaning together and talking quietly. To my right there were four more groups, mostly men, sitting at tables. Recorded European or American music played softly. The theme of the bar seemed to be expressed in potted ferns and stucco walls painted pastel pink and orange. When the bartender raised his eyebrows at me, I ordered a gin and bingara. He made it just the way I liked, down to the splash of Rose’s. That was a point for the cosmopolitans.