Black Man / Thirteen

He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.

Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.

In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognized—codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up, and started washing the white shit off his face. It took awhile. When he’d gotten the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’s pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth, and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then shrugged and extinguished the light.

He went downstairs to wait.

“You don’t have to do this,” Norton told him.

Carl walked past him around the table, eyeing up the angles. “Yeah, I do.”

“It isn’t going to bring her back.”

He settled to a long, narrow shot down the side cushion. “I think we’ve already had this argument.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not arguing with you, Marsalis. I’m trying to make you see sense, maybe stop you throwing your life away down there. Look, Saturday is Sevgi’s funeral. I can get you cleared through Union immigration, and keep the police off your back for the time it’d take. Why don’t you come?”

“Because, as far as I can see, that won’t bring her back, either.”

Norton sighed. “This isn’t what she would have wanted, Marsalis.”

“Norton, you don’t have the faintest fucking idea what Sevgi would have wanted.” He rolled the shot, shaved the angle too fine, and watched it knock the object ball into the cushion and away from the pocket. “And neither do I.”

“Then why are you going down there?”

“Because someone once told me the key to living with what you’ve done is to only do those things you’re happy to live with. And I can’t live with Sevgi dead and Onbekend still walking around.”

Carl braced his arms wide on the edge of the table and nodded at the messed-up tangle of balls on the table.

“Your shot,” he said. “See what you can make of that.”

CHAPTER 54

The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking halfheartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there, either. Something was in the way.

He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.

It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin County, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the Queensboro Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone, his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead. For the ancient Central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone, some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone, let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her, and finally get rid of this fucking ache.

So.

Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay—think she might be over there? Or in among all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.

For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.

And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest and the stinging salve of the hate.

And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.

There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate—both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.

The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down toward the water, building another rock wall on its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror-imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight, and pa

And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean. He sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal. Who the fuck she expecting, man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blow jobs or something.

Like Stefan Nevant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.