‘That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,’ he said tonelessly. ‘In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.’
‘Quite.’
They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks each the size of a small car. It was instinctive, the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.
Manco Bambaren’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood and stone itself.
‘I’m not suggesting you personally bought into Névant’s plans,’ Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? ‘But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.’
Bambaren paced in silence for a while.
‘My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.’
‘Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterwards. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.’
‘Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,’ said the other man coldly. ‘More of a species gap.’
Carl coughed a laugh. ‘Oh, you wound me, Manco. To the core.’
‘And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.’
‘We make very convenient monsters.’
Bambaren shrugged. ‘The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.’
‘Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.’
A sharp glance. ‘Heard from who?’
‘Névant.’
‘You told me Névant tried to kill you.’
‘Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?’
‘No.’ The familia chief appeared to consider. ‘Névant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.’
Carl nodded. ‘But you still kept him around.’
Bambaren spread his hands. ‘He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow, he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways; he had a skill in this.’
Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Névant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist manoeuvred them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him. A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobsen had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints which embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown-construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking football, for Christ’s sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic? It’s the rest of you people that don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.
Later, hungover, he’d apologised. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.
Beside him, Bambaren was still talking.
‘…cannot tell, but if his schemes did include this genetic pistaco fantasy, then he was a fool. You do not need real monsters to frighten people. Far from it. Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power.’
Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.
‘Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.’
The tayta must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two minders twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambaren’s throat, while he grabbed right-handed at the tayta’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the minders drew whatever probable hi-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men down in time…
He saw her falling, outgunned, or just not fast enough…
‘Easy, Manco,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?’
The tayta’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. ‘You think you can kill me, twist?’
‘I know I can.’ Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown. ‘I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem any more, that’s a promise.’
The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of grey cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.
Oh, fuck…
The familia chief drew a hard breath.
His fists uncurled.
His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twinned there instead.
The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.
Bambaren laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.
‘You’re a fool, black man,’ he said harshly. ‘Just as Névant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumours about the pistacos? You think I need an army of monsters, real or imagined, to maintain order? Men will do that for me, ordinary men.’
He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away towards the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thinned to something more general and weary.
‘Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honour the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains. The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We – my people – invented the pistacos to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they cannot obtain what they want by other means. I pass no rumours of the pistaco, black man, because the lie of the pistaco is already in us all, and it comes to life time and time again on the altiplano without any encouragement from me.’