`Homesick?' Case asked.
`Place sucks,' the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
`Hey, Jersey,' Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them, `where'd this guy get his stuff installed?'
`In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented.' The Mercedes swerved avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. `I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever...'
``What you see is what you get,' yeah,' the Finn said. `I seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy.'
`You have told this to your woman friend?' Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. `In Turkey, women are still women. This one...'
The Finn snorted. `She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed.'
`I do not understand this idiom.'
`That's okay,' Case said. `Means shut up.'
The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. `The spice bazaar, sometimes called the Egyptian bazaar,' the car said, `was erected on the site of an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...'
`Drugs,' Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and recross the bulletproof Lexan. `What's that you said before, Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?'
`A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.' The Armenian went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.
`Demerol they used to call that,' said the Finn. `He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with, Case.'
`Never mind,' Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket, `we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.'
Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.
`Hey, Christ,' the Finn said, taking Case's arm, `looka that.' He pointed. `It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?'
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. `Saw one in Maryland once,' the Finn said, `and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak.'
The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses of tea.
Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. `Come,' he said, `he is moving. Each night he rides the tunelto the bazaar to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come.'
The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. `Can't see shit,' he whispered to the Finn. `That's okay for sweetmeat,' the Finn said. `Quiet,' said Terzibashjian, too loudly.
Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
`Now,' Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands white and pathetic.
The floodlight never wavered.
The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.
Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed [18] past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a crouch.
The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.
Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her hand.
`Use the radio,' the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. `Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place.'
`Little prick nearly made it,' the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. `You were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well, help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth.'
Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. `A Nambu,' she said. `Nice gun.'
Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle finger was missing.
With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take them to Topkapi. The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian, who seemed on the verge of fainting.
`You're an asshole,' Molly told the man, opening the ear door for him. `You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped out.' Terzibashjian glared at her. `So we're through with you anyway.' She shoved him in and slammed the door. `Run into you again and I'll kill you,' she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunelterminal and sped past mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.