The phone.
He rolled awake in the still-darkened room, convinced he’d only just closed his eyes. Steady blue-glow digits at the bedside disputed the impression. 17:09. He’d slept through the day. He held up his wrist, peering stupidly at the watch he’d forgotten to take off, as if a hotel clock could somehow be wrong. The wrist ached from the fumbled blow he’d hit Merrin with. He turned it a little, flexing. Might even be–
Phone. Answer the fucking-
He groped for it, dragged the audio receiver up to his ear.
‘Yeah, what?’
‘Marsalis?’ A voice he should know but, sleep scrambled, didn’t. ‘Is that you?’
‘Who the fuck is this?’
‘Ah, so it is you.’ The name came just ahead of his own belated recognition of the measured tones. ‘Gianfranco di Palma here. Brussels office.’
Carl sat up in bed, frowning.
‘What do you want?’
‘I have just been speaking to an agent Nicholson in New York.’ Di Palma’s perfect, barely accented UN English floated urbanely down the line. ‘I understand that COLIN have no further use for your services, and that they have arranged that all charges against you in the Republic will be dropped forthwith. It seems you will be returning to Europe very shortly.’
‘Yeah? News to me.’
‘Well, I don’t think we need to wait around on formalities. I’ll have a UNGLA shuttle despatched to SFO tonight. If you would care to be at the suborbital terminal around midnight—’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘I am sorry?’
South Florida State swirled up into his mind, like dirty water backing up from a blocked drain. A sudden decision gripped him, cheery as the lettering on his S(t)igma jacket.
‘I said you can fuck off, di Palma. Write it down. Fuck. Right. Off. You let me sit in a Jesusland jail for four months and I’d still be there for all the fucking efforts you made to get me out. And you still owe me expenses from fucking January.’ And just like that, out of nowhere he was furious, trembling with the sudden rage. ‘So don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to jump into line just because you finally got your dick out of your own arse. I am not done here. I am very far from done here, and I’ll come home when I’m fucking good and ready.’
There was a stiff pause at the other end of the line.
‘You understand, I assume,’ said di Palma silkily, ‘that you are not authorised to operate outwith UNGLA jurisdiction. Of course, your time is your own to dispose of, but we cannot agree to you having any further professional contact with COLIN or the Rim States Security Corps. In the interests of—’
‘What’s the matter with you, di Palma. Don’t you have a pen there? I told you to fuck off. Want me to spell it?’
‘I strongly advise you not to take this attitude.’
‘Yeah? Well, I strongly advise you to go and get a caustic soda enema. Let’s see which of us takes direction best, shall we.’
He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.
So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?
It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.
They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.
The phone sat in his hand.
Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a pay-rise when you get back.
The phone.
Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favours, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.
Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.
Oh, how very alpha male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.
He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realised suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.
Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.
There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.
You don’t know that.
He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.
You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.
He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.
Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.
He grimaced. Dialled from memory.
Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holo signs that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.
It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.
‘Yeah, Ertekin.’
‘Alcatraz control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?’
‘Patched?’ She frowned. ‘Patched from where?’
‘New York, apparently. A detective Williamson?’
She grappled with memory – saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amidst uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.
‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’
Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. ‘Ms Ertekin?’
‘Speaking.’ A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.
‘Is this a bad time?’
‘No worse than any other. What can I do for you, detective?’
‘It’s more what I can do for you, Ms Ertekin. We have some information you might like.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.’
She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now – they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorised to listen electronically who knew where.
‘That’s very kind of Larry.’ She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amidst menswear, hopped half to a halt and dodged round them. ‘And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?’