Black Man / Thirteen

Carl climbed out of the jeep.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ertekin quickly.

“Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.”

He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an u

Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.

“Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.”

“Black man.” Manco jerked his chin. “Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?”

Carl nodded. “South Florida State.”

“Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.”

Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. “Yeah, going to be a major fashion anytime now.”

“It was my understanding,” said the familia chief urbanely, “that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?”

Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had gotten out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

He held down a grin. “That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.”

“A thirteen with friends.” Bambarén’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. “Must go against the grain for you.”

“We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?”

Manco Bambarén nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sun lenses, toward the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

“So you work for COLIN now?”

“With.” Carl let his grin out. “I work with COLIN. It’s a cooperative venture. You should understand that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of coexisting with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.”

Bambarén shook his head. “I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.”

“No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.”

“And this is what you wanted to talk about?”

“No. I want to talk about Stefan Nevant.”

“Nevant?” A frown wrinkled the tayta’s forehead. “What about him?”

“Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.”

Bambarén stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the familia chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

“How far it went? Black man, I gave Nevant to you. How far do you think it went?”

“You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.”

The tayta took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed. “Stefan Nevant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.”

“But he might have, given time.”

“I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Nevant himself?”

Carl gri

Bambarén’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

“That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,” he said tonelessly. “In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.”

“Quite.”

They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks, each the size of a small car. It was instinctive: the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

Manco Bambarén’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood, and stone itself.

“I’m not suggesting you personally bought in to Nevant’s plans,” Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? “But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.”

Bambarén paced in silence for a while.

“My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You ca

“Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterward. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.”

“Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,” said the other man coldly. “More of a species gap.”

Carl coughed a laugh. “Oh you wound me, Manco. To the core.”

“And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.”

“We make very convenient monsters.”

Bambarén shrugged. “The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.”

“Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.”

A sharp glance. “Heard from who?”

“Nevant.”

“You told me Nevant tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe fu

“No.” The familia chief appeared to consider. “Nevant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.”

Carl nodded. “But you still kept him around.”

Bambarén spread his hands. “He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways, he had a skill in this.”

Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Nevant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist maneuvered them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him. A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobsen had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ’s sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It’s the rest of you people who don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.