The word had been floating around in the room, cold and false as the imitation ice. It had come up in the general course of conversation, while McNihil had been slouched down in the armchair opposite the couch, his own nervous system slightly buzzed from the effects of the same bottle that Turbiner had opened. McNihil hadn’t cared where the word came from ultimately, and hadn’t supposed that Turbiner cared, either. French intellectuals talking about low-brow American culture, ages ago, ancient black-and-white movies filled with shadows, garish paperback cover art that seemed equally devoted to guns, lip-dangling cigarettes, and off-the-shoulder cleavage-no one cared anymore. Not about the word itself, which had gotten applied to so many things that it now meant-according to Turbiner-nothing at all.
“You see, that’s where the later variations, especially in the movies, that’s where they all went wrong.” Turbiner had gotten into full lubricated lecture mode. “They mistook the images, the look of some old Billy Wilder masterpiece, and they thought that was the only thing that mattered. Really, it was only the people still cranking out books-like me-that had any fucking notion.” He had taken another swallow, hard enough to rock his head back; from where he sat, McNihil had been able to watch the alcohol rolling down the other man’s tendon-corded neck. “Any fucking notion at all, about what the essence, the soul of noir was all about.” The words themselves had been drunk; no wonder the old writer loved them. “The look, all that darkness and shadow, all those trite rain-slick streets-that was the least of it. That had nothing to do with it.”
McNihil had ingested enough alcohol to make his own eyelids feel like lead-weighted curtains. He’d looked out from underneath them at the old man. “So what was it, then?”
“Oh… it’s betrayal.” Turbiner had taken his glass down to the last brown remnant. “That’s what it’s always been. That’s what makes it so realistic, even when it’s the most dreamlike and shabby, when it looks like it’s happening on some other planet. The one we lost and can’t even remember, but we can see it when we close our eyes…”
The flashback was interrupted as McNihil, on autopilot, took a sip of the coffee that had been set down in front of him. It tasted like hot acid on his tongue, pulling him back into real time. Not unpleasantly so, or at least not unexpectedly.
Listening to the old man, McNihil knew he’d been speaking the truth. It came from somebody who’d loved his dead wife enough to put her in the ground for good, debt-free and gone. Or perhaps she was ashes in a jar, tucked somewhere in the general clutter of Turbiner’s flat; either way, it didn’t matter. The words about betrayal ran knifelike through somebody who’d loved just as much, but hadn’t kept the same faith with the dead.
And the old man had known that, too. McNihil had never spoken to Turbiner about his own domestic affairs, but still, there it was somehow. Maybe from somebody else in the Collection Agency, another asp-head; Turbiner had been having his copyrights protected by the standard means for so long, there were bound to be other operatives with whom he was on a friendly basis. So for Turbiner to be talking about betrayal and things like that… McNihil had to admit, the old man had never claimed to be any kind of a nice guy.
“So what’ve we got here?” Turbiner had sat down in the plush chair with his own cup. He nodded toward the partially unwrapped package. “Not big enough for an automatic rifle, at least not a good one.”
McNihil ignored the comment. He knew the old man was going to dig the present; if nothing else, it would complete the set Turbiner already had.
“Check it out,” said McNihil. He pulled off the rest of the wrappings, balled them up in his fist, and tossed them onto the rubble-strewn floor. An elongated black leatherette case was revealed on the low table; the standard agency presentation job, nothing too fancy-the little metal hinges and clasp were just a cut above cheap and flimsy-but good enough. “A little something for you.”
“How sweet.” Turbiner leaned forward and drew the box around toward himself. “Ah.” He nodded in appreciation as he looked over the contents. “Very, very nice.”
“I figured, the way you’ve got your system set up, you’d need about twelve feet.” McNihil took another sip of coffee. “Think that’ll do you?”
“Perfect.” Turbiner’s voice went down into a pleased murmur, his grayed eyes glazing in happy anticipation. “It’ll be perfect.”
McNihil watched as the old man lifted out the presentation box’s main contents, letting the snakelike object lie dangling across his level palms. It even glistened in a proper herpetoid fashion, the decorative polyethylene sheathing put on by the agency’s techs shimmering with a subtle faceted pattern.
The scale finish was on the outside; what was on the inside was actual human spinal tissue, the last living remains of McNihil’s visit to the city farther north in the Gloss. That was what he’d brought back from the End Zone Hotel, that he’d returned with, safely tucked inside the regulation asp-head trophy container. He’d been worried about it on the trip back, what with all the knocking about it’d gotten, when he’d been scrambling up and then clinging to that disintegrating fire escape. And then the fire itself, up on top of the burning transient hotel, the tarry roof smoking and bubbling beneath him and that would-be severe female who’d rescued him. With all that heat-including the lethal radiation from the young woman’s eyes, when she’d finally caught on that McNihil wasn’t the gratitude-ridden type-the spinal and cerebral matter he’d scooped out of the pirate kid’s carcass might have been cooked inside the long tube he’d been carrying. Stupid broad, thought McNihil, seeing her tough-cookie little face pop up on his mental screen for a moment. She’d saved his ass and kept the trophy intact; the techs, when McNihil had finally dropped it off at the agency, had told him it was in fine shape, nothing to worry about. And what had she gotten out of it, whoever she was? Nada. By this time, McNihil had stopped wondering whether she’d even try to get in touch with him again. If anything, she was probably too embarrassed by an old connect like him having gotten the drop on her. And so easily, too; that thought came to him with a certain measure of satisfaction.
“Absolutely perfect.” Turbiner’s voice held the same bright emotion. Still holding the present across his palms, he looked up at McNihil. “I’ve wanted this for a long time.” He glanced over at the rack of stereo equipment, then back again. “Finally, man; you’re not really optimized until the cables all match.”
Or match close enough; McNihil knew, and was sure the old man knew as well, that there’d be no way that the long, dangling object, with the snakey texture and the gold-plated tips at each end, could perfectly match what he already had in his system. But it was certainly the next best thing.
There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner’s music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last of the classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10’s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish-they looked, in fact, like two swollen anacondas forming horizontal S’s across the threadbare Afghan carpet that was the bottom layer beneath all the other strata of books and sloppily stacked papers. The agency’s trophies had been bulkier back when Turbiner had been presented with those; the techs hadn’t quite gotten down the miniaturization for the cables’ life-support and oxygen-delivery processes, all the silent workings that kept the encased tissue alive.