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PART TWO. THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
"This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ot- toman Istanbul," purred the Mercedes. "So it's gone downhill," Case said.
"The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi," Molly said. She settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
"How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a headache.
"'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against
it. He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a
neat incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy
walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, ar-
cologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and
corrugated iron.
The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was
waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour arm-
chair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.
"Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
They crossed the lobby.
"How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?" She
lowered her bag beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you
get for wearing that suit, huh?"
The Finn' s upper lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat. "
He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. "You're
registered already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This
town sucks."
"You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome.
Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key
around a finger. "You here as valet or what?"
"I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
"How about my deck?" Case asked.
The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker
of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
"Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head
in the direction of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case
followed her with both bags.
Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd
first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning,
almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel
across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had
taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in
sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still
enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He
watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell
conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers
in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the
street.
He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness
struck him. She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in
their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected
part of the room's light fixture.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring
twice. "Glad you're up," Armitage said.
"I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think it's maybe
time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a
little more about what I'm doing."
Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
"You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
"You think so?"
"Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in
about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian." The phone
bleated softly. Armitage was gone.
"Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
"I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
"We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
"You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Ar-
menian. That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me
up."
Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and
gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the
collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first
mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black
Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick
black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
"We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy."
He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed
the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched
the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. "It is
better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror
into mirror.... You particularly," he said to her, "must take
care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
modifications."
Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack,"
she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked
her lips. "I know about you. Stool for the military, right?" Her
hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with
the fletcher. Case hadn't known she had it.
"Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china
thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.
She extended the gun. "Maybe you get the explosives, lots
of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You
won't feel it for months."
"Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight...."
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and
get your ass out of here." She put the gun away.
"He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1
have his tunel route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most
recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modem place in the
style turistik, but it has been arranged that the police have
shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir man-
agement has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some
metallic aftershave.
"I want to know about the implants," she said, massaging
her thigh, "I want to know exactly what he can do."
Terzibashjian nodded. "Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the
subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.
"On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a
maze of rainy streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he
was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street
was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case saw a gutted loco-
motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble.
Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
"Homesick?" Case asked.
"Place sucks," the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting
to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of
kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
"Hey, Jersey," Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind
them, "where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
"In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted,
is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this
one is most talented." The Mercedes swerved, avoiding a bal-
loon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have followed him in the
street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find
the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
poised beside a brake lever...."
"'What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I
seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he
imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and
fry a retina over easy."
"You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian
leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey,
women are still women. This one. . ."
The Finn snorted. "She'd have you wearing your balls for
a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
"I do not understand this idiom."
"That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of after-
shave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange
salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English.
The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung
smoothly around a corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes called
the Egyptian bazaar," the car said, "was erected on the site of
an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the
city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...."
"Drugs," Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and
recross the bulletproof Lexan. "What's that you said before,
Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?"
"A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes." The Armenian
went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.
' Demerol, they used to call that," said the Finn. "He's a
speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with,
Case."
"Never mind," Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,
"we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened notice-
ably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and
the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along
a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and
green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand
suspended ads writhed and flickered.
"Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka
that." He pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head.
It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a
place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been
worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. "Saw
one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and that was a good
three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to
code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as
they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core
of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it
had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys
in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, bal-
ancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
of tea.
Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the
door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. "Come," he
said, "he is moving. Each night he rides the tunel to the bazaar,
to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come."
The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from
blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled
of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone.
"Can't see shit," he whispered to the Finn. "That's okay for
sweetmeat," the Finn said. "Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too
loudly
Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the
alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened.
A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving
the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
"Now," Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white
light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the
market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden
door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the
man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay
face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
white and pathetic.
The floodlight never wavered.
The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood
splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long,
rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing
seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert,
bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood
on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly
to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It
was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth,
if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined
with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black
chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took
a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.
Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed
the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through
a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol
from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock
whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a
crouch.
The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis-
matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam.
His ears rang.
Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad-
ows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face
very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched
blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man,
whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her
fletcher in her hand.
"Use the radio," the Armenian said, through gritted teeth.
"Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a
good place."
"Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees crack-
ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of
his trousers. "You were watching the horror-show, right? Not
the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well,
help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before
he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth."
Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. "A Nambu,"
she said. "Nice gun."
Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most
of his middle finger was missing.
With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes
to take them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named
Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley.
Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian
who seemed on the verge of fainting.
"You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car
door for him. "You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights
as soon as he stepped out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So
we're through with you anyway." She shoved him in and
slammed the door. "Run into you again and I'll kill you," she
said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city
woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past
mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that
reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
"What is this thing?" he asked Molly, as the Mercedes
parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the
Scraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of
styles that was Topkapi.
"It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King," she said,
getting out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a
museum. Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in
there big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the
Baptist...."
"Like in a support vat?"
"Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch
on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off
the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust
the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic."
Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case
walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept
grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path
of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere
in the Balkans.
"That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret
police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of
money Armitage was offering." In the wet trees around them,
birds began to sing.
"I did that job for you," Case said, "the one in London. I
got something, but I don't know what it means." He told her
the Corto story.
"Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in
that Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She stroked the rusted
flank of an iron doe. "You figure the little computer pulled
him out of it? In that French hospital?"
"I figure Wintermute," Case said.
She nodded.
"Thing is," he said, "do you think he knows he was Corto,
before? I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time
he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just. . ."
"Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah..." She turned and
they walked on. "It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have
any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a
guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's
alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then
something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for
Wintermute."
"So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
"Maybe he doesn't know about it," she said. "Maybe it's
just in his name, right?"
"I don't get it," Case said.
"Just thinking out loud.... How smart's an Al, Case?"
"Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost
a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the
Turing heat is willing to let 'em get."
"Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-
out fascinated with those things?"
"Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are
military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's
where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the
Turing cops, and that's bad heat." He looked at her. "I dunno,
it just isn't part of the trip."
"Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled
the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose
pebble in and watched the ripples spread.
"That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks
to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there,
but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to
Wintermute."
"I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
"Try."
"Can't be done."
"Ask the Flatline."
"What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked, hoping
to change the subject.
She spat into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him
as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive
Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying
the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have
to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was
easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here
three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably
Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out. He's done
eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to twenty-five.
It kept Terzi in dissidents." She thrust her hands into her jacket
pockets. "Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make
sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a Modern's
suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in
a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about
human nature, I guess." She stared at the white flowers and
the sluggish fish, her face sour. "I think I'm going to have to
buy myself some special insurance on that Peter." Then she
turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
"What's that mean?"
"Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something
like breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect
his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the
bazaar and buy him some drugs...."
"Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
She laughed. "He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And
it looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you
better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She smiled.
"So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."
Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
"Time to pack," he said, and Case tried to find the man
called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask.
He thought of Wage, back in Chiba. Operators above a certain
level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But
Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, chil-
dren. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
"Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare
down into the street. "What kind of climate?"
"They don't have climate, just weather," Armitage said.
"Here. Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee
table and stood.
"Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
"Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage
smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some
insect's antenna. His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out
to prod Case in the chest. "Don't get too smart. Those little
sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much."
Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the bro-
chures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and
Turkish.
FREESIDE--WHY WAIT?
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yes-
ilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in
the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse
bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Ar-
mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape,
stood in the shop's entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac-
centless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have
been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally
stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was
a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core
of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod-
ding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the
shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Ri-
viera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed
the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job,
nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces.
The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and
distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted,
seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion
of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of
his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case
watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of
sculpture.
Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to
the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining
their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug
run. He looked up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right
now, asshole," he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian
matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche
glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul-
dered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered
if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. "See ya
lady," he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses
back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish
talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located
a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of
pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small
dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach-
ronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
"Yeah?"
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some
orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
"Hello. Case."
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled
out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
"Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
It was a chip voice.
"Don't you want to talk, Case?"
He hung up.
On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.