Sounded like a great idea to me. I took out my pill case and swallowed four sunnies. I didn’t bother offering anything to Bill; he’d paid in advance, and anyway he had a private screening.
I had Bill let me out at the eastern gate of the Budayeen. The fare was thirty kiam; I gave him forty. He stared at the money for a long time until I took it back and pushed it into the pocket of his shirt. He looked up at me as if he’d never met me before. “Easy for you to say,” he murmured.
I needed to learn a few things, so I went directly to a modshop on Fourth Street. The modshop was run by a twitchy old woman who’d had one of the first brain jobs. I think the surgeons must have missed what they’d been aiming for just slightly, or else Laila had always made you feel like getting out of her presence as quickly as possible. She couldn’t talk to you without whining. She crooked her head and stared up at you as if she were some kind of garden mollusc and you were about to step on her. You sometimes considered stepping on her, but she was too quick. She had long, straggly gray hair; bushy gray eyebrows; yellow eyes; bloodless lips and depopulated jaws; black skin, scaled and scabrous; and the same crooked, clawed fingers that a witch ought to have. She had one moddy or another plugged in all day, but her own personality — and it wasn’t a likable personality at all — bled through as if the moddy weren’t exciting the right cells, or enough of them, or strongly enough. You’d get Janis Joplin with static-like flashes of Laila, you’d get the Marquise Josephine Rose Kennedy with Laila’s nasal whine, but it was her shop and her merchandise, and if you didn’t want to put up with her, you went elsewhere.
I went to Laila because even though I wasn’t wired, she let me “borrow” any moddy or daddy she had in stock, by plugging it into herself. If I needed to do a little research, I went to Laila and hoped that she didn’t distort what I had to learn in any lethal way.
This afternoon she was being herself, with only a bookkeeping add-on and an inventory-management add-on plugged in. It was that time of the year again; how the months fly when you take a lot of drugs.
“Laila,” I said. She was so much like the old hag in Snow White that you couldn’t think of more to say to her. Laila was one person with whom you didn’t make small talk, whatever you wanted from her.
She looked up, her lips mumbling stock numbers, quantities, markups, and markdowns. She nodded.
“What do you know about James Bond?” I asked.
She put her microrecorder down and tapped it off. She stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes getting very round, then very narrow. “Marîd,” she said. She managed to whine my name.
“What do you know about James Bond?”
“Videos, books, twentieth-century power fantasies. Spies, that kind of action. He was irresistible to women. You want to be irresistible?” She whined at me suggestively.
“I’m working on that on my own, thanks. I just want to know if anybody’s bought a James Bond moddy from you lately.”
“No, I’m sure of it. Haven’t even had one in stock for a long time. James Bond is kind of ancient history, Marîd. People are looking for new jams. Cloak-and-dagger is too quaint for words.” When she stopped talking, numbers formed on her lips as her daddies went on speaking to her brain.
I knew about James Bond because I’d read the books — actual, physical books made out of paper. At least, I’d read some of them, four or five. Bond was a Eur-Am myth like Tarzan or Johnny Carson. I wish Laila had had a Bond moddy; it might have helped me understand what Devi’s killer was thinking. I shook my head; something was tickling my mind again …
I turned my back on Laila and left her shop. I glanced at a holographic advertisement playing on the sidewalk outside her display window. It was Honey Pílar. She looked about eight feet tall and absolutely naked. When you’re Honey Pílar, naked is the only way to go. She was running her lascivious hands over her superluminally sexy body. She shook her pale hair out of her green eyes and stared at me. She slid the pink tip of her tongue across her unnaturally full, luscious lips. I stood watching the holoporn, mesmerized. That was what it was for, and it was working just fine. At the edge of my consciousness, I was aware that several other men and women had stopped in their tracks and were staring, too. Then Honey spoke. Her voice, enhanced electronically to send chills of desire through my already lust-ridden body, reminded me of adolescent longings I hadn’t thought of in years. My mouth was dry; my heart was pounding.
The hologram was selling Honey’s new moddy, the one Chiri already owned. If I bought one for Yasmin …
“My moddy lies over the ocean,” said Honey in a breathy, soft voice, while her hands slid slowly down the copious upper slopes of her perfect breasts …
“My moddy lies over the sea.” Her hands tweaked her nipples hard, then found their way to the delicious undersides of those breasts and continued southward …
“Now someone is jamming my moddy,” she confided, as her fiery fingernails lightly touched her flat belly, still searching, still seeking …
“Now he knows what it’s like to jam me!” Her eyes were half-closed with ecstasy. Her voice became a drawn-out moan, pleading for the continuation of that pleasure. She was begging me as her hands at last slipped out of sight between her suntanned thighs.
As the hologram faded, another woman’s voice over-dubbed the details of manufacturer and cost. “Haven’t you tried modular marital aids? Are you still using holoporn? Look, if using a rubber is like kissing your sister, then holoporn is like kissing a picture of your sister! Why stare at a holo of Honey Pílar, when with her new moddy you can jam the livin’ daylights out of her again and again, whenever you want! Come on! Give your girlfriend or boyfriend the new Honey Pílar moddy today! Modular marital aids are sold as novelty items only.”
The voice faded away and let me have my mind back. The other spectators, similarly released, went on about their business a little unsteadily. I turned toward the Street, thinking first about Honey Pílar, then about the moddy I would give Yasmin as an anniversary present (as soon as possible, for the anniversary of anything. Hell, I didn’t care), and at last the tantalizing thing that had been bothering me. I’d thought of it first after I spoke with Okking about the shooting in Chiriga’s nightclub, and again today.
Someone who just wanted to have a little Fun With Murder wouldn’t have used a James Bond moddy. No, a Bond moddy is too specialized and too sterile. James Bond didn’t get pleasure from killing people. If some psychotic wanted to use a personality module to help him murder more satisfyingly, he might have chosen any of a dozen rogues. There were underground moddies, too, that weren’t on sale in the respectable modshops: for a big enough pile of kiam, you could probably get your hands on a Jack the Ripper moddy. There were moddies of fictional characters, or real people, recorded right from their brains or reconstructed by clever programmers. I felt ill as I thought about the perverse people who wanted the illicit moddies, and the black-market industry that catered to them with Charles Manson modules or Nosferatu modules or Heinrich Himmler modules.
I was sure that whoever had used the Bond module had done so for a different purpose, knowing in advance that it wouldn’t give him much pleasure. It wasn’t pleasure the false James Bond had been after. His goal had not been excitement, but execution.
Devi’s death — and, of course, the Russian’s — had not been the work of a mad slasher among the dregs of society. Both murders had been, in fact, assassinations. Political assassinations.
Okking would not listen to any of this without proof. I had none. I wasn’t even certain in my own mind what this all meant. What connection could there be between Bogatyrev, a minor functionary in the legation of a weak and indigent Eastern European kingdom, and Devi, one of the Black Widow Sisters? Their worlds didn’t intersect at all.