"Why?" Hejar asked again, patiently.
Berke stumbled. "Isn't ... isn't there anything else you want? The trunk isn't spoken for."
"No wonder."
"I'm not with you."
"The man has been struck by a car," said Hejar with exaggerated diction. He might have talked thus to a retarded child — if he had ever spared a little of his surface warmth for a creature who could do him no good. "Digestive chemistry, kidney system, circulation ... they're all finished. At most, there may be a dozen organs worth salvaging, and we don't have time for that. Besides, our clients pay more money for bits and pieces."
"Uh-huh." Berke slotted away the piece of business acumen. Sooner or later, he would have to take his chance on the outside — he was fast running out of apprenticeships. And he was determined to sample the lush pastures of the thoroughfare section, with its easy pickings and its first-come-first-served credo. There was small reward, by comparison, in industrial accidents or domestic mishaps.
"Now," said Hejar, "is there anything else?" He made it sound like a polite inquiry, but Berke knew that he delayed the man further at his peril. He didn't want to leave his room one morning and find Hejar waiting to follow him. He shifted from one foot to another.
"Oh, yes. Forgive me." Hejar reached in his pocket and tossed a handful of notes across to Berke. They fluttered on to the separation table. In the time it took Berke to wipe them clean of tell-tale stains, Hejar was gone.
Jolo Trevnik locked the weathered door of his downtown Adonis League and wondered, as he wondered every night, why he tried to carry on. Once, his culture clinic had been definitely uptown and well filled with rounded young men who slung medicine balls at each other and tested their biceps in crucifix poses on the wall-bars.
Ironic how, when you had survived everything else from social stigma to national laziness, finally location turned against you. The people had moved away into apartment blocks on the town periphery, leaving the centre purely for business and only that which was conducted in skyscraper settings.
These days, Trevnik exercised alone, moving slowly from one piece of apparatus to another, not because he had himself slowed up, but because now only time hung heavily on the wall-bars.
His suit grew progressively shabbier and his fortune, body-built in the days of blind, rootless activity that followed the tobacco ban, grew correspondingly smaller. As did his steaks and his health food orders. He was still in fine shape ... and frustrated as only a man can be whose sole talent has become redundant.
He turned away from the door and walked towards the main rotor quay. A shadow in a doorway down the street moved to follow him.
Hejar had made only a token attempt at concealment and Trevnik knew of his presence. It was part of the new fatal system that had emptied Trevnik's clinic and all others around the town, and all football grounds and all places where excitement or over-exertion might bring unexpected eclipse. The body that had once been so envied in life was now attractive only in terms of death.
I guess I ought to be honoured, Trevnik thought. But I feel like a cat in heat. I'll make the pink punk work for his money.
At the rotor quay, he selected the slow track, and moved quickly along it. He wanted to put the idlers in his pursuer's way and they made no protest, silent, turned inward with the sea-shells in their ears filling their minds with hypnotic rhythms and whispered words.
Above the whine of the rotor and the passing traffic, he heard the man stumbling after him, heard him cursing, and laughed.
At the next junction, he transferred to a faster track, still walking rapidly, weaving neatly between the younger mutes, with their frondular arms and snapping fingers.
Hejar was less adept and less gentle. Once, he jostled a young man so violently that his earpiece slipped to the moving pavement.
The youth recovered it and pursued the pursuer long enough to tap his heels and send him headlong before returning to his reverie.
Trevnik heard the resultant tumble and allowed the pavement to bear him along until the dishevelled Hejar regained his feet. Then he back-pedalled until the man drew level, still dusting himself down. He raised the pitch of his voice a deceptive shade.
"I hope you didn't hurt yourself," he said, fussily ... too fussily. "Perhaps we should walk a little more slowly."
Hejar eyed him warily. "I'm quite recovered now," he said. "Thanks for your concern."
If the guy knows why I trail him, he wondered, why doesn't he show it? Why this spectacular concern?
"Perhaps I should walk with you in case you feel suddenly faint," said Trevnik. "If you're shaky, you ought to get to bed. Are you sure I can't help you?"
The attitude jarred on Hejar's sensitivity. He began to notice other things about the man. How he moved — almost mincingly. The breeze that played on their faces as they were drawn along the track brought a musky aroma to the nostrils grown acute with death. Hejar swallowed and looked at the man again.
"Really," he said, almost defensively. "It's all right. The next quay is as far as I go."
"As you please," said Trevnik. His lips tightened with a hint of petulance. "But if there's the smallest thing ... "
"Nothing," said Hejar, savagely.
Trevnik rode beside him, barely glancing at him but carrying the smug conviction of a man who has done a good turn only to meet an ungracious response.
Smug? Hejar, sneaking glances at Trevnik from the shelter of his hat-brim, became even more apprehensive.
Trevnik's finely developed limbs and torso were bound to fetch a good price. Or were they? Trying to sell internal organs marred by chromosomatic complications or a brain whose motivations were neither particularly masculine nor blatantly feminine but in some twilight in-between ... that had definite set-backs.
At the quay closest to his office, he disembarked. "Thanks for everything," he said.
"I hope we meet again," said Trevnik. He waved until the rotor bore him out of sight.
There was no doubt Trevnik had a physique rarely seen among the squat inhabitants of 1983; a body which, if properly marketed, could still prove profitable despite ...
Hejar chewed his sensual lower lip. Despite nothing. He had kept observation for weeks now, at first unnoticed and lately unheeded. In the beginning there had been no such doubts proffered. It was just today? Hejar could not be sure that the disturbing traits had not been there for some time. Certainly, they had not been apparent when he began his vigils. And that was it — a device, dated from the time Trevnik first noticed that the snatchers were on to him, or at least some time subsequent to that ... when he thought of it.
Hejar felt better. The fall had shaken him, had made his heart pound alarmingly. But now he had rumbled the man, his good spirits returned.
Any fresh measures to protect the remains after death intrigued him. There was, after all, no pain, no occupancy and postmortem activities were unlikely to disturb the main participant. But the sanctimonious sproutings of the sixties and early seventies still persisted though even the government had officially classed them out of date. There remained in certain circles a horror of disturbing the corpse. Hejar had long ago shouldered and forgotten the inferences of obscenity and laughed all the way to the credit pile when somebody called him a ghoul, a cannibal, a necrophile.
"I do mankind a service," he would tell people who questioned his motives. "The burial grounds have been used up, built over, defiled in asphalt. The crematorium has a use, but it is a great leveller. How do you identify ashes? Items that could be vital to the living are wasted in the flames. Far better, is it not, to have a scroll stating that even in death, your dearest are unselfishly helping those who continue to suffer. I aid medical science. I am trained to the task and my spirit is right."