Carl nodded. Since leaving the hospital, he’d found himself thinking with a faintly adrenalized clarity that was like a synadrive hit. Sevgi was gone now, shelved in some space he could access later when he’d need the rage, and in her absence he was serene with vectored purpose. He looked back down the chain of association to Ferrer and saw the angle he needed.
“Norton.”
The COLIN exec grunted.
“How easy would it be for you to get access to unreleased Marstech?”
On the northern fringes of Chinatown, more or less at random, he found an unassuming frontage with the simple words clean phone picked out on the glass in green LCLS lozenges. He went inside and bought a pack of one-shot audio-phones, walked out again and found himself standing in the cold evening air, abruptly alone. In the time he’d been in the shop, everyone else seemed to have suddenly found pressing reasons to get off the street. He suffered an overpowering sense of unreality, and a sudden urge of his own to go back into the shop and see if the woman who’d served him had also disappeared, or had maybe ceded her place behind the counter to a grinning Elena Aguirre.
He grimaced and glanced around, picked out Telegraph Hill and the blunt finger of the Coit Tower on the skyline. He started walking toward it. The smoky evening light darkened, and lights began to glimmer on across the vistas of the city. He reached Columbus Avenue, and it was as if the city had suddenly jerked back to life around him. Teardrops zipped past in both directions, the muted chunter of their motors filling his ears. He joined other human beings at the crosswalk, waited with them for a space in the traffic flow, hurried with them when it came, across to Washington Square. More life here, more lives being lived. There was a softball match just packing up in the center of the grass, people headed home from under the spread of the trees. A tall, gaunt man dressed in ragged black stopped him and held out a begging bowl in hands that spasmed and shook. There was a sign in Chinese characters pinned to his shirt. Carl shot him a standard-issue get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, but it didn’t work.
“Bearliunt,” the man said in a hoarse voice, pushing the bowl at him. “Bearliunt.”
He met hollowed-out eyes in a stretched parchment face. He held down the easy-access fury with an effort.
“I don’t understand you,” he told the derelict evenly. He jabbed a finger at the Chinese script. “I can’t read this.”
“Bearliunt. Rike you. Needy Nero.”
The eyes were dark and intelligent, but they darted about. It was like being watched by something avian. The bowl came back, prodding.
“Bearliunt. Brack Rab from.”
And Carl felt understanding pour down the back of his neck like cold water, like Elena Aguirre’s touch. The man nodded. Saw the recognition.
“Yes. Brack Rab from. Bearliunt. Rike you.”
Chilled out of nowhere, fucked up in some indefinable way, Carl reached into his pocket and fished out a wafer at random. He dumped it into the bowl without checking for denomination. Then he shouldered past the man and headed away fast, toward the rising slope of Telegraph Hill. When he got out of the park, he looked back and the man was staring after him, standing awkwardly with one arm raised stiffly like some kind of scarecrow brought barely to life. Carl shook his head, not knowing what he was denying, and fled for the tower.
He got to the top, out of breath from the speed he’d climbed.
The tower was closed up; he had the place to himself apart from a young couple propped against the seaward viewing wall in each other’s arms. He stood and watched them balefully for a while, wondering how much he might also look like a living scarecrow in their eyes. Finally they grew uncomfortable, and the girl tugged her boyfriend away toward the exit stair. He was a muscular boy, tall and handsome in a pale Nordic fashion, and at first he wasn’t going to go. He stared back at Carl, blue eyes marbled wet with tension. Carl concentrated on not killing him.
Then the girl leaned up and murmured in the blond boy’s ear, and he contented himself with a snort, and they left.
Somewhere inside Carl, something clicked and broke, like ice in a glass.
He went to the wall and looked out across the water. Watched the lights glimmer on the Alcatraz station, out along the bridge, over at the shoreline on the Marin side. Sevgi was there in all of it, a thousand memories he didn’t need or want. He blew hard breath through his nose, pulled one of the phones loose from the pack, and dialed a number he’d never expected to need.
“Sigma Frat House,” said a jeering voice. “This ain’t the time to be calling neither, so you leave a message and it better be a fucking good one.”
“Danny? Let me speak to the Guatemalan.”
The voice scaled upward, derisive. “Guatemalan’s sleeping, motherfucker. You call back in office hours, you hear?”
“Danny, you listen to me very carefully. If you don’t go and wake the Guatemalan up right fucking now, I’m going to hang up. And when he hears that you took some fucked-up decision about what he did and didn’t need to hear, all on your own pointed little head, he’ll have you bunking with the Aryans for a reward, I fucking guarantee you.”
Incredulous silence.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“This is Marsalis. The thirteen. Couple of weeks back I carried one of your shanks into the chapel after Dudeck, remember? Then I walked out the front gate. I’ve got something out here for the Guatemalan he’s going to like. So you go wake him up and tell him that.”
The voice at the other end went away. Soft, prison-wall static sang in the space it left. Carl stared across the hazed evening air in the bay, screwed up his eyes, and rubbed a tear out of one corner with his thumb. Grumbling voices in the background, then the bang of someone grabbing the phone. The Guatemalan rumbled down the line, amused and maybe slightly stoned.
“Eurotrash? That you?”
“Like I told Danny, yeah.” Carl picked his angle of entry with care. “Dudeck out of the infirmary yet?”
“Yeah, he is. Moving a little slow right now, though. You do good work, Eurotrash, I gotta give you that much. Dudeck what this is about? You feelin’ nostalgic, calling to talk about old times?”
“Not exactly. I thought we could do a little business, though. Trade a little data. They say you’re a good man to see for that. So I’ve got something I need to know, you can maybe help me with it.”
“Data?” The other man chuckled. “Seems to me you told me you’d hooked up with the Colony Initiative. You telling me I got data that COLIN don’t?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, yeah.”
There was a long pause.
“Want to tell me what my end of this is, Eurotrash?”
“Let’s see what you’ve got first. You remember a low-grade familia gangbanger came through SFS on a three-spot, got out a couple of years ago?”
Another rumbling chortle. “Niggah, I remember a whole graveyard of those andino boys. They bounce in and out of this place like they tied to it on a rubber line. Muscle up sooooo proud to the brothers and the Aryans and every other fucker that’ll look them in the eye, and mostly they get stretchered out again. So which particular skull you picking over?”
“Name of Ferrer, Suerte Ferrer. Likes to call himself Maldición. He went out walking, so he’s either tougher or smarter than average. That ought to ring some bells.”
“Yeah, Maldición. Smart, I’m not convinced on, but he certainly fit tough. Sure. Think I could be induced to remember that boy.”
“Good. You think you could be induced to tell me where he is now?”
“You talking about where he is outside population?”