14

First thing the next morning, I paid a call on Laila at her modshop on Fourth Street. The old woman was just as creepy as ever, but her costume had undergone some slight revision. She had her dirty, thin gray hair shoved up under a blond wig full of ringlets; it didn’t look so much like a hairpiece as something your great-aunt would slip over a toaster to hide it from view. Laila couldn’t do much with her yellowed eyes and wrinkled black skin, but she sure tried. She had so much pale powder on her face that she looked like she’d just busted out of a grain elevator. Over that she had smeared bright cerise streaks on every available surface; to me it appeared that her eye shadow, cheek blush, and lipstick had all come out of the same container. She wore a sparkly pair of plastic sunglasses on a grimy string around her neck—cat’s-eye sunglasses, and she had chosen them with care. She hadn’t bothered to find herself some false teeth, but she had swapped her filthy black shift for an indecently tight, low-cut slit-skirted gown in blazing dandelion yellow. It looked like she was trying to shove her head and shoulders free of the maw of the world’s biggest budgie. On her feet she wore cheap blue fuzzy bedroom slippers. “Laila,” I said.

“Marîd.” Her eyes weren’t quite focused. That meant that she was just her own inimitable self today; if she had been chipping in some moddy, her eyes would have been focused and the software would have sharpened up her responses. It would have been easier to deal with her if she had been someone else, but I let it go.

“Had my brain wired.”

“I heard.” She snickered, and I felt a ripple of disgust

“I need some help choosing a moddy.”

“What you want it for?”

I chewed my lip. How much was I going to tell her? On one hand, she might repeat everything I said to anyone who came into her shop; after all, she told me what everybody else said to her. On the other hand, nobody paid any attention to her in the first place. “I need to do a little work. I got wired because the job might be dangerous. I need something that will jack up my detective talent, and also keep me from getting hurt. What do you think?”

She muttered to herself for a while, wandering up and down the aisles, browsing through her bins. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, so I just waited. Finally she turned around; she was surprised that I was still there. Maybe she’d already forgotten what I’d asked. “Is a made-up character good enough?” she said.

“If the character is smart enough,” I said.

She shrugged and mumbled some more, snagged a plastic-wrapped moddy in her clawlike fingers, and held it out to me. “Here,” she said.

I hesitated. I recalled thinking that again she reminded me of the witch from Snow White; now I looked at the moddy like it was a poisoned apple. “Who is it?”

“Nero Wolfe,” she said. “Brilliant detective. Genius for figuring out murders. Didn’t like to leave his own house. Someone else did all his legwork and took the beatings.”

“Perfect,” I said. I sort of remembered the character, although I don’t think I ever read any of the books.

“You’ll have to get somebody to go ask the questions,” she said. She held out a second moddy.

“Saied’ll do it. I’ll just tell him he’ll get to knock some heads together whenever he wants, and he’ll jump at the chance. How much for both of them?”

Her lips moved for a long time while she tried to add two figures together. “Seventy-three,” she whined. “Forget the tax.”

I counted out eighty kiam and took my change and the two moddies. She looked up at me. “Want to buy my lucky beans?” I didn’t even want to hear about them.

There was still one little item troubling me, and it may have been the key to the identity of Nikki’s killer, the torturer and throat-slasher who still needed silencing. It was Nikki’s underground moddy. She may have been wearing it when she died, or the killer may have been wearing it; as far as I knew, goddamn nobody may have been wearing it. It may just be a big nothing. But then why did it give me such a sick, desperate feeling whenever I looked at it? Was it only the way I recalled Nikki’s body that night, stuffed into trash bags, dumped in that alley? I took two or three deep breaths. Come on, I told myself, you’re a damn good stand-in for a hero. You’ve got all the right software ready to whisper and chuckle in your brain. I stretched my muscles.

My rational mind tried to tell me thirty or forty times that the moddy didn’t mean anything, nothing more than a lipstick or a crumpled tissue I might have found in Nikki’s purse. Okking wouldn’t have been pleased to know that I’d withheld it and two other items from the police, but I was getting to the point where I was beyond caring about Okking. I was growing weary of this entire matter, but it was succeeding in pulling me along in its wake. I had lost the will even to bail out and save myself.

Laila was fiddling with a moddy. She reached up and chipped it in. She liked to visit with her ghosts and phantoms. “Marîd!” She whined this time in the thrilling voice of Vivien Leigh from Gone With the Wind.

“Laila, I’ve got a bootleg moddy here and I want to know what’s on it.”

“Sure, Marîd, nevah you mind. Just you give me that little ol’—”

“Laila,” I cried. “I don’t have time for any of that goddamn Southern belle! Either pop your own moddy or force yourself to pay attention.”

The idea of popping out her moddy was too horrifying for her to consider. She stared at me, trying to distinguish me in the crowd. I was the one between Ashley, Rhett, and the doorway. “Why, Marîd! What’s come ovah you? You seem so feverish an’ all!”

I turned my head away and swore. For the love of Allah, I really wanted to hit her. “I have this moddy,” I said, and my teeth didn’t move apart a fraction of an inch. “I have to know what’s on it.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, Marîd, what’s so important?” She took the moddy from me and examined it. “It’s divided into three bands, honey.”

“But how can you tell what’s recorded on it?”

She smiled. “Why, that’s just the easiest thing in the world.” With one hand, she popped the Scarlett O’Hara moddy and tossed it carelessly somewhere beside her; it hit a rack of daddies and skittered into a corner. Laila might never find her Scarlett again. With the other hand she centered my suspect moddy and chipped it in. Her slack face tightened just a bit. Then she dropped to the floor.

“Laila?” I said.

She was twisting into grotesque positions, her tongue protruding, her eyes wide and staring and sightless. She was making a low, sobbing sound, as if she’d been beaten and maimed for hours and didn’t even have the strength left to cry out. Her breathing was harsh and shallow, and I heard it rasp in her throat. Her hands were bundles of dry black sticks, scrabbling uselessly at her head, desperate to pop the moddy out, but she couldn’t control her muscles. She was crying deep in her throat, and rocking back and forth on the floor. I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know what to do. If I’d come any closer, she might have clawed me.

She wasn’t human anymore, it was horribly easy to see that. Whoever had designed that moddy liked animals—liked to do things to animals. Laila was behaving like a large creature; not a housecat or small dog, but a caged, furious, tormented jungle animal. I could hear her hiss, I could see her snapping at the legs of the furniture and striking out at me with her nonexistent fangs. When I stooped near her, she swung on me quicker than I thought possible. I tried to grab at the moddy and came away with three long, bloody slashes down my arm. Then her eyes locked on mine. She crouched, pulling her knees forward.

Laila leaped, her thin, black body launched toward me.

She gave a shrieking, wailing cry and stretched out her hands for my neck. I was sickened by the sight, by the change that had come over the old woman. It wasn’t just Laila attacking me: it was the old hag’s body possessed by the corrupt influence of the moddy. Ordinarily, I could have held Laila away with one hand; today, however, I found myself in mortal danger. This beast-Laila would not be happy merely with cornering me or wounding me. It wanted me dead.

As she flew toward me, I sidestepped as neatly as I could, giving her a lot of movement with my arms the way a matador fools the eye of the bull. She crashed into a bin of used daddies, flipped on her back, and drew her legs up as if to disembowel me. I brought my right fist down hard on the side of her face. There was a muffled crack of bone, and she collapsed limply in the bin. I bent down and chipped out the bootleg moddy and tucked it away with my other software. Laila wasn’t unconscious long, but she was stunned. Her eyes wouldn’t focus, and she was muttering deliriously. When she felt better she was going to be very unhappy. I looked quickly around her shop for something to fit her vacant implant. I ripped open a new moddy package—it was an instructional unit, I think, because it came with three daddies. Something about giving dinner parties for Anatolian bureaucrats. I was sure Leila would find that one fascinating.

I undipped my phone and called the hospital where I’d had my own amping done. I asked for Dr. Yeniknani; when he answered at last, I explained what had happened. He told me an ambulance would be on its way to Laila’s shop in five minutes. He wanted me to give the moddy to one of the paramedics. I told him that whatever he learned about the moddy was confidential, that he shouldn’t divulge the information to the police or even Friedlander Bey. There was a long pause, but finally Dr. Yeniknani agreed. He knew and trusted me more than he trusted Okking and Papa put together.

The ambulance arrived within twenty minutes. I watched the two male paramedics carefully lift Laila on a stretcher and put her into the wagon. I committed the moddy to one of them and reminded him to give it to no one but Dr. Yeniknani. He nodded hurriedly and climbed back behind the steering wheel. I watched the ambulance drive off, out of the Budayeen, toward whatever medical science might or might not be able to do for Laila. I clutched my own two purchases and locked and shut the door to the old woman’s shop. Then I got the hell out of there. I shuddered on the sidewalk.

I’d be jammed if I knew what I’d learned. First—granting the huge condition that the bootleg moddy originally belonged to the throat-cutter—did he wear it or did he give it to his victims? Would a timber wolf or a Siberian tiger know how to burn a helpless person with cigarettes? No, it made better sense to picture the moddy chipped into a raging but well-secured victim. That accounted for the wnst bruises—and Tami, Abdoulaye, and Nikki had all had their skulls socketed. What did the assassin do if the victim wasn’t a moddy? Probably just iced the sucker and sulked all afternoon.

All I could figure was that I was looking for a pervert who needed a savage, caged carnivore to get his juices flowing. The notion of resigning flashed through my mind, the often-played scene of quitting despite Friedlander Bey’s soft-spoken threats. This time I went as far as to imagine myself beside the cracked roadway, waiting for the ancient electric bus with its crowd of peasants on top. My stomach was turning, and it had only just so much room to move.

It was too early to find the Half-Hajj and talk him into being my accomplice. Maybe about three or four o’clock he’d be at the Café Solace, along with Mahmoud and Jacques; I hadn’t seen or spoken to any of them in weeks. I hadn’t seen Saied at all since the night he’d sent Courvoisier Sonny on the Great Circle Route to paradise, or somewhere. I went back home. I thought I might take the Nero Wolfe moddy out and look at it and turn it over in my hand a couple of dozen times and maybe peel off the shrinkwrap and find out if I’d have to swallow a few pills or a bottle of tende to get the nerve to chip the damn thing in.

Yasmin was in my apartment when I got there. I was surprised; she, however, was upset and hurt. “You got out of the hospital yesterday, and you didn’t even call me,” she cried. She dropped down on the corner of the bed and scowled at me.

“Yasmin—”

“Okay, you said you didn’t want me to visit you in the hospital, so I didn’t. But I thought you’d see me as soon as you came home.”

“I did want to, but—”

“Then why didn’t you call me? Ill bet you were here with somebody else.”

“I went to see Papa last night. Hassan told me that I was supposed to report in.”

She gave me a dubious look. “And you were there all night long?”

“No,” I admitted.

“So who else did you see?”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I saw Selima.”

Yasmin’s scowl turned into a grimace of utter contempt. “Oh, is that what tricks you these days? And how was she? As good as her advertisements?”

“Selima’s on the list now, Yasmin. With her sisters.”

She blinked at me for a moment. “Tell me why I’m not surprised. We told her to be careful.”

“You just can’t be that careful,” I said. “Not unless you go live in a cave a hundred miles from your nearest neighbor. And that wasn’t Selima’s style.”

“No.” There was silence for a while; I guess Yasmin was thinking that it wasn’t her style, either, that I was suggesting that the same kind of thing might happen to her. Well, I hope she was thinking that, because it’s true. It’s always true.

I didn’t tell her about the blood-o-gram Selima’s killer left for me in the hotel suite’s bathroom. Somebody had figured Marîd Audran for an easy mark, so it was time for Marîd Audran to play things close to the chest. Besides, mentioning it wouldn t improve Yasmin’s mood, or mine, either. “I got a moddy I want to try,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Anybody I know?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s a detective out of some old books. Thought he might help me stop these murders.”

“Uh huh. Did Papa suggest it?”

“No. Papa doesn’t know what I’m really going to do. I told him I was just going to follow along after the police and look at the clues through a magnifying glass and all that. He believed me.”

“Sounds like a waste of time to me,” said Yasmin.

“It is a waste of time, but Papa likes things orderly. He operates in a steady, efficient, but dreary and minimal-velocity way.”

“But he gets things done.”

“Yes, I have to admit that he gets things done. Still, I don’t want him looking over my shoulder, vetoing every other step I take. If I’m going to do this job for him, I have to do it my way.”

“You’re not doing the job just for him, Marîd. You’re doing it for us. All of us. And besides, remember the I Ching? It said no one would believe you. This is that time. Do what you think is right, and you’ll be vindicated in the end.”

“Sure,” I said, smiling grimly, “I only hope my fame doesn’t come posthumously.”

“ ‘And covet not that which Allah hath made some of you excel others. Unto men a fortune from that which they have earned, and unto women a fortune from that which they have earned. Do not envy one another, but ask Allah of His bounty. Behold! Allah is the Knower of all things.’ ”

“Right, Yasmin, quote at me. Suddenly you’re all religious.”

“You’re the one worrying about where your devotions lie. I already believe; I just don’t practice.”

“Fast without prayer is like a shepherd without a crook, Yasmin. And you don’t even fast, either.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nothing.”

“You’re evading the subject again.”

She was right about that, so I changed evasions. “To be or not to be, sweetheart, that is the question.” I tossed the moddy a few inches into the air and caught it. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind—”

“Will you plug the goddamn thing in already?”

So I took a aeep breath, murmured “In the name of God,” and plugged it in.

The first frightening sensation was of being suddenly engulfed by a grotesque glob of flesh. Nero Wolfe weighed a seventh of a ton, 285 pounds or more. All Audran’s senses were deceived into believing he had gained a hundred and thirty pounds in an instant. He fell to the floor, stunned, gasping for breath. Audran had been warned that there would be a time lag while he adjusted to each moddy he used; whether it had been recorded from a living brain or programmed to resemble a fictional character, it had probably been intended for an ideal body unlike Audran’s own in many ways. Audran’s muscles and nerves needed a little while to learn to compensate. Nero Wolfe was grossly fatter than Audran, and taller as well. When Audran had the moddy chipped in he would walk with Wolfe’s steps, take things with Wolfe’s reach and grasp, settle his imaginary corpulence into chairs with Wolfe’s care and delicacy. It hit Audran harder than he had even expected.

After a moment Wolfe heard a young woman’s voice. She sounded worried. Audran was still writhing on the floor, trying to breathe, trying merely to stand up again. “Are you all right?” the young woman asked.

Wolfe’s eyes narrowed to little slits in the fat pouches that surrounded them. He looked at her. “Quite all right, Miss Nablusi,” he said. He sat up slowly, and she came toward him to help him stand. He waved at her impatiently, but he did lean on her a bit as he got to his feet.

Wolfe’s recollections, artfully wired into the moddy, mixed with Audran’s submerged thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. Wolfe was fluent in many languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Serbo-Croatian, and others. There wasn’t room to pack so many language daddies into a single moddy. Audran asked himself what the French word for al-kalb was, and he knew it: le chien. Of course, Audran spoke perfect French himself. He asked for the English and Croatian words for al-kalb, but they eluded him, right on the tip of the tongue, a mental tickle, one of those frustrating little memory lapses. They—Audran and Wolfe—couldn’t remember which people spoke Croatian, or where they lived; Audran had never heard of the language before. All this made him suspect the depth of this illusion. He hoped they wouldn’t hit bottom at some crucial moment when Audran was depending on Wolfe to get them out of some life-threatening situation. “Pfui,” said Wolfe.

Ah, but Nero Wolfe rarely got himself into life-threatening situations. He let Archie Goodwin take most of those risks. Wolfe would uncover the Budayeen’s assassins by sitting behind his familiar old desk—figuratively. of course—and ratiocinating his way to the killers’ identities. Then peace and prosperity would descend once more upon the city, and all Islam would resound with Marîd Audran’s name.

Wolfe glanced again at Miss Nablusi. He often showed a distaste for women that bordered on open hostility. How did he feel toward a sex-change? After a moment’s reflection, it seemed the detective had only the same mistrust he held for organically grown, nothing artificially added, lo-cal, high-fiber females in general. On the whole, he was a flexible and objective evaluator of people; he could hardly have been so brilliant a detective otherwise. Wolfe would have no difficulty interviewing the people of the Budayeen, or comprehending their outré attitudes and motivations.

As their body grew more comfortable with the moddy, Marîd Audran’s personality retired even further into passivity, able to do little more than make suggestions, while Wolfe assumed more control. It became clear that wearing a moddy could lead to the expenditure of a lot of money. Just as the murderer who’d worn the James Bond moddy had reshaped his physical appearance and his wardrobe to match his adopted personality, so too did Audran and Wolfe suddenly want to invest in yellow shirts and yellow pajamas, hire one of the world’s finest chefs, and collect thousands of rare and exotic orchid plants. All that would have to wait. “Pfui,” grumbled Wolfe again.

They reached up and popped the moddy out.

There was another dizzy swirl of disorientation; and then I was standing in my own room, staring stupidly down at my hand and at the module it held. I was back in my own body and my own mind.

“How was it?” asked Yasmin.

I looked at her. “Satisfactory,” I said, using Wolfe’s most enthusiastic expression. “It might do,” I admitted. “I have the feeling that Wolfe will be able to sort through the facts and find the explanation, after all. If there is one.”

“I’m glad, Marîd. And remember, if this one isn’t good enough, there are thousands of other moddies you can try, too.”

I put the moddy on the floor beside the bed and lay down.

Maybe I ought to have had my brain boosted a long rime ago. I suspected that I’d been missing a bet, that I’d been wrong and everybody else had been right. Well, I was all grown-up and I could admit my mistakes. Not out loud, of course, and never to someone like Yasmin, who’d never let me forget about it: but deep down inside I knew, and that’s what counted. It had only been my pride and fear, after all, that had kept me from getting wired sooner—my feeling that I could show up any moddy with my own native good sense and one cerebral hemisphere tied behind my back. I unclipped my phone and called the Half-Hajj at home; he hadn’t gone out yet for lunch, and he promised to pass by my apartment in a few minutes. I told him I had a little gift for him.

Yasmin lay down beside me while we waited for Saied to arrive. She put a hand across my chest and rested her head on my shoulder. “Marîd,” she said softly, “you know that I’m really proud of you.”

“Yasmin,” I said slowly, “you know that I’m really scared out of me wits.”

“I know, honey; I’m scared, too. But what if you hadn’t done your part in all this? What about Nikki and the others? What if more people are killed, people you could have saved? What could I think about you then? What would you think?”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Yasmin: I’ll go on and do what I can and take whatever chances I can’t avoid. Just stop telling me all the time that I’m doing the right thing and that you’re so glad I may be dead in the next halt-hour. All the cheering in the reserved seats is great for your morale; but it doesn’t help me in the least, after a while it gets kind of tiresome, and it won’t make bullets or knives bounce off my hide. Okay?”

She was, of course, hurt, but I meant exactly what I’d said; I wanted to nip all this “Go out there and get ’em, boy!” choo in the bud. I was sorry that I’d been so hard on Yasmin, though. To cover it, I got up and went to the bathroom. I closed the door and ran a glass of water. The water is always warm in my apartment, summer or winter, and I rarely had ice in the little freezer. After a while you can drink the tepid water with its swirling, suspended particles in it. Not me, though. I’m still working on that. I like a glass of water that doesn’t stare back at you.

I took my pill case from my jeans and scrabbled out a cluster of Sonneine. These were the first sunnies I’d taken since I got out of the hospital. Like some kind of addict I was celebrating my abstinence by breaking it. I dropped the sunnies into my mouth and took a gulp of warm water. There, I thought, that’s what will keep me going. A couple of sunnies and a few tri-phets are worth a stadium full of well-wishers with their bedsheet banners. I closed the pill case quietly—was I trying to keep Yasmin from hearing? Why—and flushed the toilet. Then I went back into the big room.

I was halfway across the floor when Saied knocked or the door. “Bismillah,” I called, and swung it open.

“Yeah, you right,” said the Half-Hajj. He came into the room and dropped himself on the corner of the mattress “What you got for me?”

“He’s amped now, Saied,” said Yasmin. He turned toward her slowly and gave her that rough-and-tough glare of his. He was in that bitter frame of mind again. A woman’s place is in certain areas of the home, seen and not heard, maybe not even seen if she knows what’s good for her.

The Half-Hajj looked back at me and nodded. “I was wired when I was thirteen years old,” he said.

I wasn’t going to arm-wrestle with him about anything. I reminded myself that I was asking him to help me, and that it would truly be dangerous for him. I flipped the Archie Goodwin moddy to him, and he caught it easily with one hand. “Who is it?” he asked.

“A detective from some old books. He works for the greatest detective in the world. The boss is big and fat and never leaves his home, so Goodwin does all the legwork for him. Goodwin is young and good-looking and smart.”

“Uh huh. And I suppose this moddy is just an end of Ramadan gift, a little late, right?”

“No.”

“You took Papa’s money, and you took his wire-job, and so you’re really going out after whoever’s been disenfranchising our friends and neighbors. Now you want me to chip in sturdy, reliable Goodwin and ride along with you after adventure or something.”

“I need someone, Saied,” I said. “You were the first person I thought of.”

He looked a little flattered by that, but he was still far from enthusiastic. “This just isn’t my line,” he said.

“Chip it in, and it will be.”

He looked at that one from both sides and realized I was right. He took off his keffiya. which he’d shaped into a kind of turban, popped out the moddy he was wearing, and plugged in Archie Goodwin.

I walked by him, toward the sink. I watched as his expression lost focus and then reformed subtly into something else. He seemed more relaxed, more intelligent now. He gave me a wry, amused smile, but he was measuring me and the new contents of his mind. His eyes took in everything in the room, as if he’d have to make an item-by-item catalog of it all later. He waited, giving me a look that was part insolence and part devotion. He wasn’t seeing me, I knew; he was seeing Nero Wolfe.

Goodwin’s attitudes and personality would appeal to Saied. He’d love the chance to jazz me with Goodwin’s sardonic remarks. He liked the idea of being devastatingly attractive; wearing that moddy, he’d even be able to overcome his own aversion to women. “We’d have to discuss the matter of salary,” he said.

“Of course. You know that Friedlander Bey is underwriting my expenses.”

He grinned. I could see visions of expensive suits and intimate dinners and dancing at the Flamingo whirl through his rectified mind.

Then, suddenly, the grin receded. He was riffling through Goodwin’s artificial memories. “I’ve been punched around more than a little, working for you,” he said, thoughtfully.

I wiggled a finger at him, in Wolfe’s manner. “That is part of your job, Archie, and you are well aware of it I surmise it is the part you enjoy most.”

The grin filled his face again. “And you enjoy surmising about me and my surmising. Well, go ahead, it’s the only exercise you get. And you might be right about that. Anyway, it’s been a long time since we had a case to work on.”

Maybe I should have had my Wolfe moddy chipped in, too; without it, watching the Half-Hajj do his sidekick imitation solo was almost embarrassing. I gave a Wolfe grunt because it was expected, and paused. “Then you’ll help me?” I asked.

“Just a minute.” Saied popped the moddy out and chipped in his old one. It took less time for him to get used to going from a moddy to his own naked brain and into a second moddy. Of course, as he said, he’d been doing it since he’d been thirteen; I’d only done it once, a few minutes ago. He looked me over sourly, from my face down to the floor and back up again. When he started talking, I knew immediately that he wasn’t in a good mood. Without Goodwin’s moddy to make it all seem fun and romantic and excitingly risky, the Half-Hajj was having none of it. He stepped closer to me and spoke with his jaws clenched tightly together. “Look,” he said, “I’m real sorry Nikki got killed. It bothers me that somebody’s aced out the Black Widow Sisters, too, though they were never friends of mine; it’s just a bad thing all the way around. As for Abdoulaye, he got what was coming to him and, if you ask me, he got it later than he deserved. So it comes down to a grudge match between you and some blazebrain on account of Nikki. I say wonderful. you got the whole Budayeen and the city and Papa himself on your side. But I don’t see where you get the goddamn nerve”—and he poked me real hard in the chest with a forefinger that was like a heavy iron rod—“to ask me to screen you from everything bad that might happen. You’ll take the reward, all right, but the bullet holes and the stab wounds you figure you can palm off onto me. Well, Saied can see what you’re doing, Saied isn’t as crazy as you think he is.”

He snorted, almost amazed at my audacity. “Even if you get out of all this alive, Maghrebi, even if everybody in the world thinks you’re some kind of hero, we’re going to have to settle this business between us.” He looked at me, his face fierce and red, his jaw muscles working, trying to cool down enough to get his rage out coherently. At last he gave up; for a few seconds I thought he was going to slug me. I didn’t move an inch. I waited. He raised his fist, hesitated, then grabbed the Archie Goodwin moddy from his other hand. He threw the moddy to the floor, chased it a few yards as it skidded across the room, then raised one foot and brought it down, crushing the plasty moddy beneath the heavy wooden stacked heel of his leather boot. Shattered pieces of the plastic case and bright, colored bits of the circuitry within flew in all directions. The Half-Hajj stared down at the ruined moddy for a moment, his eyes blinking stupidly. Then he slowly looked up at me again. “You know what that guy drinks?” he shouted. “He drinks milk, goddamn it!” Deeply offended, Saied headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Yasmin timidly.

He glanced at her. “I’m going to find the biggest porterhouse steak in the city and put it where it belongs. I’m going to have a hell of a good time in honor of how close I came to getting conned to death by your boyfriend here.” Then he threw open the front door and stalked out, slamming the door shut behind him.

I laughed. It had been a great performance, and just the release I had been needing. I wasn’t looking forward to the reckoning Saied had threatened; but if the two assassins didn’t make the matter trivial, I was sure that the Half-Hajj would get over his anger soon enough. If I did end up a hero, unlikely as it seemed, he’d be in an unpopular minority, sounding spiteful and envious. I was sure that Saied would never stay in any unpopular group if he could do anything about it. I’d just have to keep breathing long enough, and the Half-Hajj would eventually be my friend again.

My good humor, I guessed, coincided with the rising of the sunnies. See, I told myself, how already they’re helping you stay in control? What good would it have done to get into a fistfight with Saied?

“Now what?” asked Yasmin.

I wished she hadn’t asked that. “I’ll go find another moddy, as you suggested. In the meantime, I have to put all the information together the way Papa wants, and try to sort all this out and see if there’s a definite pattern or line of investigation to follow.”

“You weren’t being a coward, were you, Marîd? About getting the brain implants?”

“Sure, I was afraid. You know that. I wasn’t being a coward about it, though. It’s more as if I was putting off the inevitable. I’ve felt like Hamlet a lot lately. Even when you admit that the thing you fear is inevitable, you’re not sure it’s still the correct thing to do. Maybe Hamlet could have solved things with less bloodshed another way, without forcing his uncle’s hand. Maybe getting my brain amped only seems right. Maybe I’m overlooking something obvious.”

“If you just diddle with yourself like this, more people will die, maybe even yourself. Don’t forget, if half the Budayeen knows you’re on the killers’ trail, the killers know it, too.”

That hadn’t yet occurred to me. Even the sunnies couldn’t buoy me up after that piece of news.

An hour later I was in Lieutenant Okking’s office. As usual, he didn’t show much enthusiasm when I looked in on him. “Audran,” he said. “Collected another dead body for me? If all’s right with the world, then you’re dragging yourself in here mortally wounded, desperate for my forgiveness before you kick off.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” I said.

“Well, I can dream, can’t I?”

Ya salaam, he was always so goddamn amusing. “I’m supposed to work more closely with you, and you’re supposed to cooperate willingly with me. Papa thinks it best if we pool all our information.”

He looked like he’d just sniffed something decomposing nearby. He muttered a few words unintelligibly under his breath. “I don’t like his high-handed butting in, Audran, and you can tell him that for me. He’s going to make it harder for me to close this case. Friedlander Bey’s only endangering himself more by having you interfere with police business.”

“He doesn’t see it that way.”

Okking nodded glumly. “All right, what do you want me to tell you?”

I sat back and tried to look casual. “Everything you know about Lutz Seipolt and the Russian who was killed in Chiri’s club.”

Okking was startled. It took him a moment to compose himself. “Audran, what possible connection could there be between the two?” he asked.

We’d been through this before; I knew he was just stalling. “There have to be overlapping motives or some broad conflict we don’t understand, being played out in the Budayeen.”

“Not necessarily,” said the lieutenant. “The Russian wasn’t part of the Budayeen. He was a political nobody who set foot in your quarter only because you asked him to meet you there.”

“You’re doing a good job of changing the subject, Okking. Answer the question: Where is Seipolt from and what does he do?”

“He came to the city three or four years ago, from someplace in the Fourth Reich, Frankfurt, I think. He set himself up as an import-export agent—you know how vague a description that is. His main business is food and spices, coffee, some cotton and fabrics, Oriental rugs, junk copper and brass pieces, cheap jewelry, Muski glass from Cairo, and other minor things. He’s big in the European community, he seems to turn a nice profit, and he has never shown any signs of being involved in any high-level illicit international trade. That’s about all I know.”

“Can you imagine why he pulled a gun on me when I asked him a few questions about Nikki?”

Okking shrugged. “Maybe he just likes his privacy. Look, you aren’t the most innocent-looking guy in the world, Audran. Maybe he thought you were there to put the arm on him and run off with his collection of ancient statuary and scarabs and mummified mice.”

“Then you’ve been to his place?”

Okking shook his head. “I get reports,” he said. “I’m an influential police administrator, remember?”

“That’s right, I keep forgetting. So the Nikki-Seipolt angle is a dead end. What about the Russian, Bogatyrev?”

“He was a mouse working for the Byelorussians. First his kid went missing, and then he had the bad luck to stop this James Bond’s slug. He has even less of a connection to the other murders than Seipolt does.”

I smiled. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Friedlander Bey wanted me to make sure you hadn’t turned up any new evidence lately. I really don’t want to disrupt your investigation. Just tell me what I should do next.”

He made a face. “I’d suggest that you go on a fact-finding mission to Tierra del Fuego or New Zealand or somewhere out of my hair, but you’d only laugh and not take me seriously. So check on anyone who had a grudge against Abdoulaye, or if anyone particularly wanted to kill the Black Widow Sisters. Find out if any of the Sisters had been seen with an unknown or suspicious person just before she was killed.”

“All right,” I said, standing up. I’d just been given a first-class runaround, but I wanted Okking to think he had me snowed. Maybe he had some definite leads that he didn’t want to share with me, despite what Papa had said. That might explain his offhand lying. Whatever the reason, I planned to come back soon—when Okking wasn’t around—and use the computer records to dig a little deeper into the backgrounds of Seipolt and Bogatyrev.

When I got home, Yasmin pointed to the table. “Somebody left a note for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Just slipped it under the door and knocked. I went tc the door, but there wasn’t anybody there. I went downstairs, but there was nobody on the sidewalk, either.”

I felt a chill. I tore open the envelope. There was a short message printed out on computer paper. It said:

AUDRAN:

YOU’RE NEXT!

JAMES BOND IS GONE.

I’M SOMEONE ELSE NOW. CAN YOU GUESS WHO?

THINK ABOUT SELIMA AND YOU’LL KNOW.

IT WONT DO YOU ANY GOOD, BECAUSE YOU’LL BE DEAD SOON!

“What does it say?” asked Yasmin.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. I felt a little tremor in my hand. I turned away from Yasmin, crumpled the paper, and stuffed it in my pocket.