Black Man / Thirteen

Later, hungover, he’d apologized. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.

Beside him, Bambarén was still talking.

“…ca

Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.

“Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.”

The tayta must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two bodyguards twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambarén’s throat while he grabbed right-handed at the tayta’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the guards drew whatever probable high-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men down in time…

He saw her falling, outgu

“Easy, Manco,” he murmured. “You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?”

The tayta’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. “You think you can kill me, twist?”

“I know I can.” Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown. “I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem anymore, that’s a promise.”

The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of gray cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.

Oh fuck…

The familia chief drew a hard breath.

His fists uncurled.

His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twi

The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.

Bambarén laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.

“You’re a fool, black man,” he said harshly. “Just as Nevant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumors about the pistacos? You think I need an army of monsters, real or imagined, to maintain order? Men will do that for me, ordinary men.”

He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away toward the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thi

“Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honor the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains. The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We—my people—invented the pistacos to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they ca

Carl glanced back toward the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.

“So,” he said breezily. “Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?”

Bambarén drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.

“Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?”

“It’s my intention, tayta, to get some straight answers out of you. And speechifying on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.”

“You dismiss—”

“I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.”

“I have to have the respect of my men.”

“Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.”

Beneath the sunglasses, Bambarén’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. “What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every—”

“British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman.”

“It makes no difference. You.” The familia chief’s face twitched. “Nevant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonized women too poverty-stricken to afford children of their own—”

“Go fuck yourself, Manco.”

But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.

“Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day—”

“Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.” Now he had the tone, the drawl. “We’re not here to discuss my family history.”

But tayta Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive. “Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be harvested of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel, twist?”

And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambarén’s death at the edge of his striking hand. There was no art in this; this was thumbs hooked into the familia chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite—