Black Man / Thirteen

The face on screen colored slightly. “I don’t think—”

“No, really. That’s the message. Thanks.”

Noises from the corridor. He cut the call and broke another simit. Found an unexpected grin in the corner of his mouth, frowned it away. Ertekin used the bathroom, went back to the bedroom by the sound of it, and for a moment he thought she was going to go back to sleep. Then he heard footfalls in the corridor again, approaching. He leaned back in his chair to watch her come into the kitchen. Wondering if she’d still be in the T-shirt. His hangover, he noticed vaguely, was receding.

She was dressed. Hair thickly untidy, face a freshly scrubbed scowl.

“Morning. Sleep well?”

She grunted. “What are you doing?”

“Working.” He gestured at the phone. “Waiting for a callback on Nevant. Why, what did you think? I’d skip out on you as soon as you passed out? Perfidious, self-regarding thirteen motherfucker that I am.”

“I didn’t pass out.”

“Well, you dropped your glass while you were resting your eyes then. I figured you’d finished drinking anyway, so I went to bed. How’s your head?”

The look she gave him was answer enough.

“Coffee still in the pot, but it must be nearly cold. I can—”

The phone chimed. He raised an eyebrow and prodded it to life. Ertekin busied herself with the coffee, and he dropped his gaze to the screen. A picture fizzled into focus, grainy with patch-through. Wide angle on an arid backdrop through the dust-plastered windshield and side window of an all-terrain prowl truck. Battal Yavuz in the driver’s seat, chubby features narrowed in peering disbelief.

“Carl? No fucking way that’s you.”

“The one and only.”

“They had you in a Jesusland jail, man. Di Palma told us. Special powers invoked, indefinite retention without trial. How the fuck you get out of that?”

“I got out of Mars, Battal. What did you think, Jesusland was going to hold me?”

“Man, you never know. They’ve got a history of that indefinite retention shit. Fucking barbarians.”

Across the table from him, Sevgi Ertekin snorted. Carl flashed her a quizzical look. She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

“So what are you doing in Istanbul, anyway? You coming out to visit?”

“Don’t think I’ve got time for that, Battal. But listen, I was hoping you could do me a favor.”

When he’d hung up, Ertekin was still slumped opposite, staring a hole in the bottom of her coffee cup. He eyed her curiously.

“So what was that about?”

“What was what about?”

He mimicked her snort. “That.”

“Oh. Yeah. Just kind of amusing to hear a Turk talking about someone else’s barbarism.”

“Well, he was talking about Jesusland.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She sat up suddenly. “See, Marsalis, my father left this country for a reason. His father and his uncle both died back on that fucking square in Taksim because the illustrious Turkish military suddenly decided freedom of speech was getting a little out of hand. You know, you fucking Europeans, you think you’re so fucking above it all with your secular societies and your soft power and your softly softly security forces that no one likes to talk about. But in the end—”

“In the end,” he said, a little harshly because Battal was a friend, and he didn’t have many, “Turkey’s still in one piece. They had a psychotic religious element here, too, you know, and a problem with rabid patriotic dogma. But they solved it. The ones who stayed, the ones who didn’t cave in to fundamentalist idiocy or just make a run for some comfortable haven elsewhere—in the end they made the difference, and they held it together.”

“Yeah, with some judicious funding from interested European parties, is what I heard.”

“None of which invalidates the fact that Jesusland is a fucking barbaric society, which you’re not from anyway, so what’s your point?”

She glared back at him. He sighed.

“Look. My head hurts, too, all right. Why don’t you talk to Battal when he gets here? He’s the one filled me in on local history, guy used to teach in a prison before he got this gig, he knows his stuff. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Turkey and the old US, how they were more similar than you’d think. Talk to him.”

“You think he’ll come here?”

“If Nevant comes, he’ll have to have an escort. And I don’t see Battal passing up the chance to see his teahouse friends in Istanbul at someone else’s expense. Yeah, he’ll come.”

Ertekin sniffed. “If Nevant comes.”

“Don’t worry about Nevant. Just the fact I’m asking for his help is going to be enough to get him here. He’s going to love that.”

“Maybe he’s going to love turning you down.”

“Maybe. But he’ll come here to do it. He’ll want to see my face. And besides—” Carl spread his hands, gave her a crooked grin. “—there’s a good chance this’ll be his only opportunity to get off the internment tract for the next decade.”

She nodded slowly, like someone assimilating a new concept. Gaze still on her coffee. He had the sudden, uneasy feeling that what she’d just grasped wasn’t much to do with what he’d just been saying.

“Of course,” she said, “there’s really no need for either of them to come here at all. We could just as easily have gone out to them, couldn’t we?” And her gaze flipped up, locked onto his face. “Out to the tract?”

It was only a beat, but she had him.

“Yeah, we could have,” he answered, smoothly enough. “But we’re both hungover, and I like the view from this place. So—why bother going there, if we can get him to come to us?”

She got up from the table and looked down at him.

“Right.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to push the point, but she just smiled, nodded again, and left him sitting there in the kitchen, memories of the tract and those he’d dragged back to it swirling through his mind in hungover free association.

He was still sitting there when Nevant called.

CHAPTER 26

“Knew I’d come, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Nevant drew on his cigarette, let the smoke gush back out of his mouth, and sucked it in hard through his nose. “Fuck you did.”

Carl shrugged. “All right.”

“Want to know why I did come?”

“Sure.”

The Frenchman gri

Out beyond the glass-panel frontage of the restaurant, sunset bruised and bloodied the sky over the Sea of Marmara. Torn cloud, clotted with red. Carl met Nevant’s gaze and held it.

“That’s original.”

“Well.” Nevant sat back again, stared down at the tabletop. “Sometimes the old gene-deep reasons are the best, you know.”

“Is that why you tried to persuade Manco Bambarén to give you house room? Gene-deep reasons?”

“If you like. It was a question of survival.”

“Yeah, survival as a cudlip.”

Nevant looked up. Carl saw the twitch of a suppressed fight instruction flowing down the nerves of one arm. Like most thirteens, the Frenchman was physically powerful, broad in chest and shoulders, long limbs carrying corded muscle, head craggy and large. But somehow, in Nevant, the bulk seemed to have whittled down to a pale, lycanthropic coil of potential. He’d lost weight since Carl saw him last, and his nose and cheekbones made sharp angles out of his flesh. The narrowed gray-green eyes were muddy dark with anger, and the smile when it came was a slow-peeling, silent snarl. He’d been fast, back in Arequipa three years ago—it had taken the mesh for Carl to beat him. If he came across the table now, it would be like a whip, like snake-strike.

“Don’t like your jacket much. What is that, fucking incarceration chic?”

Carl shrugged. “Souvenir.”

“That’s no excuse. What’d it cost you?”

“About four months.”

Brief pause. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. What happened, your license expire?”