Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [129]
Maya ordered a mineralka from a disgustingly cute little novelty robot. She sipped it and waited.
Therese appeared around half past three. She perched on the edge of a barstool and tried to smile. She had been weeping.
“Maya,” she said, and took her hand. “You’ve grown up so much.”
“This wig makes me look a lot more mature,” Maya lied cheerfully.
“You’re so chic! You’re so … Well, I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t, truly. Can I still trust you?”
“Why don’t you just tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, Therese. I’ll see if I can figure out the rest of that later.”
“He beat me.”
“He did? Let’s go and kill him.”
“He’s doing that already,” Therese said, and began to cry.
Therese’s boyfriend had never beaten her before, but since he was on the point of suicide, he seemed to feel a need to put a sharper point to their relationship. He’d whipped her on the back and bottom with a leather belt. Therese’s boyfriend was a Corsican gangster.
Therese’s boyfriend wasn’t a cute gangster. There was nothing cute about him. He was a career criminal, a consigliore in the Black Hand organization; protection racketeers, pimps, hardcase tincture people. Major-league money launderers. Influence peddlers. Bribers of judges, suborners of police. Murderers. Men who put people’s feet in buckets of cement. He was sixty years old and he called himself Bruno when he wasn’t calling himself something else.
“How’d you come to know this character?”
“How do you think? I run a gray-market shop in the rag trade. I got mixed up with the rackets. Mafiosi dress very flash, and sometimes they steal clothes and sell them. The rag trade is very old. You know? It’s very old and it has some strange things in its closets. I do little illegal things. Mafiosi do big illegal things. They counterfeit couture sometimes, they give people protection sometimes. It happens. It just happens.” Therese shrugged.
Maya drummed her fingers slowly on the top of the bar.
“He likes the apartment you found for us,” Therese offered. “It’s funny to steal a last night from bourgeois people.”
“I can’t believe this,” Maya said.
“Bruno’s a real man,” Therese said slowly. “I love real men. I like it when they can’t be polite about it. I like it when men really …” She thought about it. “When they really come unwound.”
“That’s not a healthy hobby, darling.”
“Life is a risk. I like it when they’re truly men. When nothing else matters to them but being a man. It’s exciting. It really feels like living. I didn’t think he’d beat me. But I was doing anything he wanted tonight. So he wanted to beat me. It’s his last night on earth. I shouldn’t have cried so much. I shouldn’t have called you. I’m being a big baby.”
“Therese, this is really sick.”
“No, it’s not,” Therese said, wounded. “It’s just old-fashioned.”
“How do you know he’s not going to murder you?”
“He’s a man of honor,” Therese said. “Anyway, I’m doing him a big favor tomorrow.”
Bruno was dying. Therese’s best guess was liver cancer. It was impossible to tell for certain, because Bruno hadn’t been near official diagnostic machinery in forty years. First his rap sheet had caught up with him, and denied him access to life-extension treatments. Then he’d begun to do a number of extremely interesting and highly illegal things to himself through the medical black market. The extra testicle, apparently, was just the least of it.
Bruno was determined to die outside the reach of the polity. Should the authorities happen to render his corpse in one of those necropolitan emulsifiers, then alarm bells would ring from Dublin to Vladivostok. The Black Hand had been founded on the ancient tradition of omertà, silence until death. Nowadays, silence after death was just as necessary.
The romance between Bruno and Therese had been very simple. He’d met her in Marseilles when she was twenty. Bruno was always beautifully dressed, reeking of mystery, and entirely menacing. For Therese this combination was catnip. Bruno liked her because she was young, and cute, and no trouble for him, and pretty much