“Well, he was talking about Jesusland.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She sat up suddenly. “See, Marsalis, my father left this country for a reason. His father and his uncle both died back on that fucking square in Taksim because the illustrious Turkish military suddenly decided freedom of speech was getting a little out of hand. You know, you fucking Europeans, you think you’re so fucking above it all with your secular societies and your soft power and your softly softly security forces that no one likes to talk about. But in the end—”
“In the end,” he said, a little harshly because Battal was a friend, and he didn’t have many, “Turkey’s still in one piece. They had a psychotic religious element here, too, you know, and a problem with rabid patriotic dogma. But they solved it. The ones who stayed, the ones who didn’t cave in to fundamentalist idiocy or just make a run for some comfortable haven elsewhere—in the end they made the difference, and they held it together.”
“Yeah, with some judicious funding from interested European parties, is what I heard.”
“None of which invalidates the fact that Jesusland is a fucking barbaric society, which you’re not from anyway, so what’s your point?”
She glared back at him. He sighed.
“Look. My head hurts, too, all right. Why don’t you talk to Battal when he gets here? He’s the one filled me in on local history, guy used to teach in a prison before he got this gig, he knows his stuff. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Turkey and the old US, how they were more similar than you’d think. Talk to him.”
“You think he’ll come here?”
“If Nevant comes, he’ll have to have an escort. And I don’t see Battal passing up the chance to see his teahouse friends in Istanbul at someone else’s expense. Yeah, he’ll come.”
Ertekin sniffed. “If Nevant comes.”
“Don’t worry about Nevant. Just the fact I’m asking for his help is going to be enough to get him here. He’s going to love that.”
“Maybe he’s going to love turning you down.”
“Maybe. But he’ll come here to do it. He’ll want to see my face. And besides—” Carl spread his hands, gave her a crooked grin. “—there’s a good chance this’ll be his only opportunity to get off the internment tract for the next decade.”
She nodded slowly, like someone assimilating a new concept. Gaze still on her coffee. He had the sudden, uneasy feeling that what she’d just grasped wasn’t much to do with what he’d just been saying.
“Of course,” she said, “there’s really no need for either of them to come here at all. We could just as easily have gone out to them, couldn’t we?” And her gaze flipped up, locked onto his face. “Out to the tract?”
It was only a beat, but she had him.
“Yeah, we could have,” he answered, smoothly enough. “But we’re both hungover, and I like the view from this place. So—why bother going there, if we can get him to come to us?”
She got up from the table and looked down at him.
“Right.”
For a moment, he thought she was going to push the point, but she just smiled, nodded again, and left him sitting there in the kitchen, memories of the tract and those he’d dragged back to it swirling through his mind in hungover free association.
He was still sitting there when Nevant called.
CHAPTER 26
“Knew I’d come, eh?”
“Yeah.”
Nevant drew on his cigarette, let the smoke gush back out of his mouth, and sucked it in hard through his nose. “Fuck you did.”
Carl shrugged. “All right.”
“Want to know why I did come?”
“Sure.”
The Frenchman grinned and leaned across the table, mock confidential. “I came to kill your ass, Mars man.”
Out beyond the glass-panel frontage of the restaurant, sunset bruised and bloodied the sky over the Sea of Marmara. Torn cloud, clotted with red. Carl met Nevant’s gaze and held it.
“That’s original.”
“Well.” Nevant sat back again, stared down at the tabletop. “Sometimes the old gene-deep reasons are the best, you know.”
“Is that why you tried to persuade Manco Bambarén to give you house room? Gene-deep reasons?”
“If you like. It was a question of survival.”
“Yeah, survival as a cudlip.”
Nevant looked up. Carl saw the twitch of a suppressed fight instruction flowing down the nerves of one arm. Like most thirteens, the Frenchman was physically powerful, broad in chest and shoulders, long limbs carrying corded muscle, head craggy and large. But somehow, in Nevant, the bulk seemed to have whittled down to a pale, lycanthropic coil of potential. He’d lost weight since Carl saw him last, and his nose and cheekbones made sharp angles out of his flesh. The narrowed gray-green eyes were muddy dark with anger, and the smile when it came was a slow-peeling, silent snarl. He’d been fast, back in Arequipa three years ago—it had taken the mesh for Carl to beat him. If he came across the table now, it would be like a whip, like snake-strike.
“Don’t like your jacket much. What is that, fucking incarceration chic?”
Carl shrugged. “Souvenir.”
“That’s no excuse. What’d it cost you?”
“About four months.”
Brief pause. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. What happened, your license expire?”
“No, that’s still good.”
“Still doing the same shit, huh?” Nevant plumed a lungful of smoke across the table. “Still hunting your brothers down for the man?”
“Oh, please.”
“You know, it wouldn’t just be for me, Mars man.”
“Sorry?”
“Killing you. It wouldn’t just be for me. You have a large fan club back there in the tract. Can hardly blame them, right? And if I killed you, and they knew about it.” Nevant yawned and stretched, loosening the combat tension from his frame. “Well, I’d probably never have to buy my own cigarettes again.”
“I’d have thought they’d want to kill me themselves.”
The Frenchman gestured. “The limits of revenge. They can’t all kill you, and stuck where they are right now none of them can. You learn a kind of wisdom in the tract—settle for what you can get, it’s better than nothing.”
“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”
The wolfish grin came back. “Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.”
“They had their chance, Stefan. You all did. You could have gone to Mars.”
“Yeah, it’s not all red rocks and air locks, apparently. Saw the ads on my way in.” Nevant touched the raki glass on the table in front of him with one fingernail. He hadn’t yet picked it up, or touched the tray of meze laid out between the two men. “Sounds great. Hard to see why you came back.”
“I won the lottery.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so much fun on Mars that the grunts buy a ticket every month to see if they can’t get the fuck out of there and home again.”
Carl shrugged. “I didn’t say it was paradise. It was an option.”
“Look, man. You came back, and the reason you came back is that life on Mars is a pile of shit.” Nevant blew more smoke at him. “Some of us just didn’t need to make the trip to work that one out.”
“You were busy making plans to spend the rest of your life up on the altiplano when I caught up with you. That’s just Mars with higher gravity.”
Nevant smiled thinly. “So you say.”
“Why should I lie?”
Outside, streetlights were glimmering to life along the seawall walkway. Sevgi Ertekin sat with Battal Yavuz on tall stools at a salep stall a dozen meters down the promenade. They sipped their drinks in cupped hands and were apparently getting along okay. Nevant tipped his head in their direction.
“Who is she, then?”
“No, I’m not his partner.” Sevgi struggled to keep the edge out of her voice. “This is strictly a temporary thing.”