Black Man / Thirteen

The elevator chimed, and Battal Yavuz exited, shepherding Nevant. The pale thirteen wore a mask of bandaging across the middle of his face and a similar wrapping on his broken hand. He seemed in good spirits.

“See you again,” he said to Marsalis. He lifted the damaged hand. “When this is back to functional, maybe.”

“Sure. You know where I live. Look me up soon as you get out.”

Yavuz looked sheepish. “Sorry about this, Carl. If I’d known he was going to—”

“Skip it. No harm done.” Carl got up and clapped the Turk on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming out. Been good to see you.”

Sevgi hovered, watching Nevant peripherally.

“You want me to come with you to the heliport?” she asked Yavuz.

He shook his head. “No need.”

“But if—”

Marsalis gri

As if they were all sharing a joke, the Frenchman pulled up the left leg of his pants. Tight at the bottom of his shin, a slim band of shiny, pored black fiber wrapped around. It wasn’t much larger than a man’s watch, but a tiny green light winked tirelessly on and off at one edge. She shouldn’t really have been surprised, but her breath still hitched to a halt for a moment as she saw.

“Excursion restraint,” said Yavuz. “No one comes off the tract without one. Stefan here’s not going to give me any trouble.”

“And if he slips it? Finds a way to cut it loose?”

“It’s anti-tamper,” said Nevant, curiously gentle. “Wolf-trap-formatted. Any interference, it triggers. Want to know what happens then?”

She already knew. The wolf-trap cuffs had a long and unpleasant history, made worse in her case by close personal co

But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.

“She’s a cop, Stefan.” Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. “I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.”

She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her familiarity with the hardware. Internal Affairs landed on the 108th like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hard-core suspects, apparently—but who the fuck could really fathom the logic of it—in an attempt to scare up a usable confession. During the interrogation, the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape—crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.

Welcome to NYPD.

Small consolation—look at it this way, Sev, an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time—that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the 108th via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement—of course—still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.

Look at it this way, Sev;

IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into Midtown Homicide.

Look at it this way, Sev;

The dead men in the field would not be much missed—all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labor among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.

She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it that way, but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early-morning mist. Something changed in her that day—she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterward. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.

Nevant dropped his pants leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.

“I thought those were illegal in Europe,” she said, to break the silence.

“On humans,” agreed Nevant, darting a glance at Marsalis. “With thirteens, though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?”

The black man shrugged. “Depends how bright they are, I’d say.”

He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could, either.

So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it wasn’t really cold outside or really late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the street-finder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda Caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down toward the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.

At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question. “When did you know he was going to try for you?”

He shrugged. “When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.”

“And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?”

“If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.”

They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahçe loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Atatürk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed, and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. NE MUTLU TURKUM DIYENE. What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.

“What’s that say?” he asked her.

She groped after a translation. “Uhm, ‘male-pattern baldness—it’s a bigger problem than you think.’”