“Curtis will be bringing the limousine round,” she said. “I’ll have to go. It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Kovacs.”
We both watched her stride away across the lawn, her tennis skirt tilting back and forth. Even allowing for Bancroft’s apparent indifference to his wife as a sexual being, Miriam’s wordplay was steering fractionally too close to the wind for my liking. I had to plug the silence with something.
“Tell me something, Bancroft,” I said with my eyes still on the receding figure. “No disrespect intended, but why does someone who’s married to her, who’s chosen to stay married, spend his time in quote purchased sexual release?”
I turned casually back and found him watching me without expression. He said nothing for several seconds, and when he spoke his voice was carefully bland.
“Have you ever come in a woman’s face, Kovacs?”
Culture shock is something they teach you to lock down very early on in the Corps, but just occasionally a blast gets through the armour and the reality around you feels like a jigsaw that won’t quite fit together. I barely chopped off my stare before it got started. This man, older than the entire human history of my planet, was asking me this question. It was as if he’d asked me had I ever played with water pistols.
“Uh. Yes. It, uh, it happens if—”
“A woman you paid?”
“Well, sometimes. Not especially. I—” I remembered his wife’s abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. ”I don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine, and—
“Nor of mine,” snapped the man in front of me, with rather too much emphasis. “I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of us that are better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a civilised context.”
“I’d hardly counterpose civilisation with spilling semen.”
“You come from another place,” said Bancroft broodingly. “A brash, young colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The UN declarations fossilised into global conformity, there was a—” he gestured “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.”
“You talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t fight your way free?”
Bancroft smiled thinly. “Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her flesh with other men and women. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, Mr. Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear. While all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?”
I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a centuries-old soul and Bancroft was in full flow.
“No,” he answered his own question. “How could you? Just as your culture is too shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience cannot possibly encompass what it is to love the same person for two hundred and fifty years. In the end, if you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration with the sordid desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time? I tell you, you cannot.”
“So instead you vent yourself on prostitutes?”
The thin smile returned. “I am not proud of myself, Mr. Kovacs. But you do not live this long without accepting yourself in every facet, however distasteful. The women are there. They satisfy a market need, and are recompensed accordingly. And in this way I purge myself.”
“Does your wife know this?”
“Of course. And has done for a very considerable time. Oumou informs me that you are already aware of the facts regarding Leila Begin. Miriam has calmed down a lot since then. I’m sure she has adventures of her own.”
“How sure?”
Bancroft made an irritated gesture. “Is this relevant? I don’t have my wife monitored, if that’s what you mean, but I know her. She has her appetites to contend with just as I do.”
“And this doesn’t bother you?”
“Mr. Kovacs, I am many things, but I am not a hypocrite. It is the flesh, nothing more. Miriam and I understand this. And now, since this line of questioning doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, can we please get back on track. In the absence of any guilt on the part of Elliott, what else do you have?”
I made a decision then that came up from levels of instinct way below conscious thought. I shook my head. “There’s nothing yet.”
“But there will be?”
“Yes. You can write Ortega off to this sleeve, but there’s still Kadmin. He wasn’t after Ryker. He knew me. Something’s going on.”
Bancroft nodded in satisfaction. “Are you going to speak to Kadmin?”
“If Ortega lets me.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the police will have run whatever satellite footage they’ve got over Oakland this morning, which means they can probably identify me leaving the clinic. There must have been something overhead at the time. I don’t suppose they’ll be at their most co-operative.”
Bancroft permitted himself another of his splintered smiles. “Very astute, Mr. Kovacs. But you need have nothing to fear on that count. The Wei Clinic—what little you left of it—is reluctant to either release internal video footage or press charges against anyone. They have more to fear in any investigation than do you. Of course, whether they choose to seek more private reprisals is, shall we say, a more protracted question.”
“And Jerry’s?”
A shrug. “The same. With the proprietor dead, a managing interest has stepped in.”
“Very tidy.”
“I’m glad you appreciate it.” Bancroft got to his feet. “As I said, it has been a busy morning, and negotiations are by no means at an end. I would be grateful if you could limit your depredations somewhat in future. It has been costly.”
Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports … for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying … Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.
Someone else was paying.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.