I thrashed awake, bleary and still tired. I squinted at the phone, then picked it up. A voice said, “Good morning. Seven o’clock.” Then there was a click. I put the phone back and sat up in bed. I took a deep breath that hesitated and hitched two or three times on the way in. I wanted to go back to sleep, even if it meant nightmares. I didn’t want to get up and face another day like yesterday.
Trudi wasn’t in bed. I swung my feet to the floor and walked naked around the small hotel room. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either, but she had written a note for me and left it on the bureau. It said:
Dear Marîd —
Thanks for everything. You’re a dear, sweet man. I hope we meet again sometime.
I have to go now, so I’m sure you won’t mind if I borrow the fare from your wallet.
Love ya,
Trudi
(My real name is Gunter Erich von S. You mean you really didn’t know, or were you just being nice?)
There is very little I’ve missed in my life, as far as sex goes. My secret fantasies don’t concern what, they concern who. I’d seen and heard everything, I thought. The only thing I’d never heard faked — until, evidently, last night — was that involuntary animal catch in a woman’s breathing, the very first one, before the lovemaking has even had time to become rhythmical. I glanced down at Trudi’s note again, remembering all the times Jacques, Mahmoud, Saied, and I had sat at a table at the Solace, watching people walk by. “Oh, her? She’s a female-to-male sex-change in drag.” I could read everybody. I was famous for it.
I swore I’d never tell anyone anything ever again. I wondered if the world ever got tired of its jokes; no, that was too much to hope for. The jokes would go on and on, getting worse and worse. Right now I was certain that if age and experience couldn’t stop the jokes, there was nothing about death that would make them stop, either.
I folded my new clothing carefully and packed it in the zipper bag. I wore my white robe and keffiya again today, making yet another new look — Arab costume but cleanshaven. The man of a thousand faces. Today I wanted to take Hajjar up on his promise to let me use the police computer files. I wanted to fill in a little background, on the police themselves. I wanted to find out as much as I could about Okking’s link to Bond/Khan.
Instead of walking, I took a cab to the police station. It wasn’t that I was getting spoiled by the luxury Papa was paying for; I just felt the urgent pressing of events. I was killing time as fast as it was killing me. The daddies were buzzing in my head, and I didn’t feel muscle-weary, hungry, or thirsty. I wasn’t angry or afraid, either; some people might have warned me that not being afraid was dangerous. Maybe I should have been afraid, a little.
I watched Okking eat a late breakfast in his flimsy fortress while I waited for Hajjar to get back to his desk. When the sergeant came in, he gave me a distracted look. “You’re not the only bakebrain I have to worry about, Audran,” he said in a surly voice. “We’ve got thirty other jerks giving us fantasy information and inside words they dig out of dreams and teacups.”
“You’ll be glad I don’t have a goddamn piece of information for you, then. I came to get some from you. You said I could use your files.”
“Oh, yeah, sure; but not here. If Okking saw you, he’d split my skull. I’ll call downstairs. You can use one of the terminals on the second floor.”
“I don’t care where it is,” I said. Hajjar made the phone call, typed out a pass for me, and signed it. I thanked him and found my way down to the data bank. A young woman with Southeast Asian features led me to an unused screen, showed me how to get from one menu to the next, and told me that if I had any questions, the machine itself would answer them. She wasn’t a computer expert or a librarian; she just managed traffic flow in the big room.
First I checked the general files, which were much like a news agency’s morgue. When I typed in a name, the computer gave me every fact available to it concerning the person. The first name I entered was Okking’s. The cursor paused for a second or two, then lettered steadily across the display in Arabic, right to left. I learned Okking’s first name, his middle name, his age, where he’d been born, what he’d done before coming to the city, all the stuff that gets put on a form above the important double line. Below that line comes the really vital information; depending on whose form it is, that can be the subject’s medical record, arrest record, credit history, political involvement, sexual preference(s), or anything else that may one day be pertinent.
As for Okking, below that double line there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Al-Sifr, zero.
At first I assumed there was some kind of computer problem. I started over again, returning to the first menu, choosing the sort of information I was looking for, and typing in Okking’s name. And waited.
áÇ ÔìÁ. Nothing.
Okking had done this, I was sure. He had covered his tracks, just as his boy Khan was now covering his own. If I wanted to travel to Europe, to Okking’s birthplace, I might learn more about him, but only to the point when he left there to come to the city. Since then, he did not exist at all, not officially speaking.
I typed in Universal Export, the code name of James Bond’s espionage group. I had seen it on an envelope on Okking’s desk once. Again, there were no entries.
I tried James Bond without hope, and turned up nothing. Similarly with Xarghis Khan. The real Khan and the “real” Bond had never visited the city, so there was no file on either of them.
I thought about other people I might spy on — Yasmin, Friedlander Bey, even myself — but I decided to leave my curiosity unsatisfied until a less urgent occasion. I entered Hajjar’s name and was not astonished by what I read. He was about two years younger than I was, Jordanian, with a moderately long arrest record before coming to the city. A psychological profile agreed point for point with my own estimation of him; you didn’t dare trust him as far as he could run with a camel on his back. He was suspected of smuggling drugs and money to prisoners. He was once investigated in connection with the disappearance of a good deal of confiscated property, but nothing definite came of it. The official file put forth the possibility that Hajjar might be profiting from his position on the police force, that he might be selling his influence to private citizens or criminal organizations. The report suggested that he might not be above such abuses of authority as extortion, racketeering, and conspiracy, among other law-enforcement frailties.
Hajjar? Come now, what ever gave you that idea? Allah forfend.
I shook my head ruefully. Police departments all over the world were identical in two respects: they all have a fondness for breaking your head open for little or no provocation, and they can’t see the simple truth if it’s lying in front of them naked with its legs spread. The police don’t enforce laws; they don’t even get busy until after the laws are broken. They solve crimes at a pitifully low rate of success. What the police are, to be honest, is a kind of secretarial pool that records the names of the victims and the statements of the witnesses. After enough time passes, they can safely shove this information to the back of the filing system to make room for more.
Oh yeah, the police help little old ladies across the street. So I’m told.
One by one, I entered the names of everyone who’d been connected to Nikki, beginning with her uncle, Bogatyrev. The entries on the old Russian and on Nikki matched exactly what Okking had finally told me about them. I figured that if Okking could excise himself from this system, he could alter its remaining records in other ways, too. I wouldn’t find anything useful here except by accident or Okking’s oversight. I went on with a diminished hope of success.