Black Man / Thirteen

Then again, it had served its purpose.

Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.

He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.

“Can you talk?”

“Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?”

“Queensboro Bridge. On my way to the airport.”

“You’re still here, in town?” Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. “What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?”

“I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?”

Norton blew out a long breath. “Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN mandate is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.”

“That old-time corporate power, huh?” Carl grew serious. “Think they’ll try and nail you, though?”

“Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on till you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.”

“Sounds kind of thin.”

“It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful nongovernmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.”

“On my way.”

He hung up and looked out the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.

The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin Headlands two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.

Sevgi.

coda. PISTACO

CHAPTER 53

The path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge here and there, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if u

The bridge was not much more user-friendly than the path that led to it. The materials employed in its construction didn’t look to have been renewed in decades, and where the planking had cracked and holed, the locals had placed rocks so there was no downward view into the water that might scare the mules—which were still the only viable means of heavy transport down from the towns on the canyon rim. Infrastructural neglect was a general feature of the region—significant distance from the nearest prep camps meant no possible return on corporate funds deployed here, tourism was the only staple, and the tourists liked their squalor picturesque—but here the process had been allowed to run a little farther than elsewhere. Here visitors other than known locals were not encouraged, and tour companies had been persuaded to route their itineraries away to other sections of the canyon. Here, comings and goings on the path were watched by men carrying weapons whose black and metal angles gleamed new and high-tech in the harsh, altiplano sun. Here, it was rumored, there lived a witch who, lacking the normal human capacity to survive the whole of the dry season awake, must fall into an enchanted sleep before the end of each year and could only be roused when the rains came, and only then by the call and ministrations of her pistaco lover.

“You ca

“Better now than later,” Carl told him soberly. “The more the dust settles, the more chance Bambarén and Onbekend have to take stock, and for them I’m a big black mark in the negative asset column. They don’t know about Sevgi, but they know the work I do for UNGLA, and they know I know about Onbekend. And they’re both cautious men. Leave it long enough, they’re going to start wondering where I am and what I’m doing. But right now, they figure I’m scrambling for cover just like everybody else.”

“Yeah, you should be.”

“Getting hard to hold the line, is it?”

“No, and that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying you need to think about what you’re going to do when this is over.”

Carl stared out at the slow nighttime crawl of the cross-border traffic in the checkpoint lanes. “I’ll worry about that when it is over. Meantime—you made me a promise.”

“And I came ru

He had a point. RimSec’s Immigration Division was widely recognized as the shitty end of the organization’s sprawling jurisdiction, and the unlovely interior of the observation lodge offered mute testimony. Gray pressed-carbon lockers stood ranked along the back wall; a random scatter of cheap tables and chairs crowded one half of the limited floor space, and a pool table clothed in garish orange baize took up the rest. A plastic rack held the warped and battered cues pi

They’d been sitting there since before it got dark.

Carl got up and prowled the room for the fifteenth time. He was begi

It wasn’t much of a place to say his farewells to Norton.

“NYPD still giving you a lot of grief?” he asked.

Norton gestured. “Sure, they’re pushing. They’d like to know where the hell you are, that’s for sure. Why you walked out like that. I’ve got you down as officially helping COLIN with its internal investigation, witness-protected as part of the deal. They don’t buy it, but hey, they’re just cops. They don’t get to argue with us about stuff like this.”