Rule 34 - Charles Stross [82]
Pull yourself together; it’s only a fucking suitcase.
(Yes, but there could be anything in it! You saw his eyes! Body parts, heroin . . . it’s locked, of course. And it’s not one of those dualkey jobs. There’s no undetectable way of looking inside short of running it through the left-luggage X-ray machine at Waverley, and you’re not about to do that.)
You drag the suitcase behind you like a guilty conscience. Slouch along Princes Street, keeping to the garden side, oblivious to the rumble and skirr of the trams. Trudge past the Waverley Steps, past the shopping mall and the stony classical frontage of the art gallery, across the road, past the sunken gardens and the big Christian temple with the mossy graveyard below street level. Up Lothian Road towards the bus-stop. A police car whines past, and for a moment you are dizzy with terror. But it doesn’t stop, and your heartbeat slows in time with your steps. The clammy cold sweat in the small of your back slowly dries as you repeat to yourself, It’s only a fucking suitcase.
You should have let the Gnome pick it up for you; he is entirely to blame for your being in this invidious position, after all. The injustice claws at your stomach. “The angle, dear boy, is money—and how you, and I, and a couple of friends, are going to make a great steaming pile of it.” May Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, have a special inferno set aside for the scheming bald arse-bandit and his great glistening pile of dosh. It’s not him who has to—
The bus kneels and the glass doors slide apart like a mouth to swallow you down into hell.
You’ve tried to avoid this ever happening, and for the most part you’ve been successful. You have rubbed shoulders with hard men, violent men, thugs: But you’ve always got a place to go where you can be free of them. You have indulged your base urges in public toilets and other men’s bedrooms, but never where you might be recognized and shamed by people who know you. You have done your absolute best to obey this single iron rule: Men’s laws mean less to you than those of Allah, but this solitary unwritten one you cleave to like a drowning sailor to his life-belt. Until now.
You ride in a haze of misery, barely noticing your surroundings until it’s time to get off. The suitcase is a drag on your wrist, as intolerable as a screw’s handcuff, growing heavier with every step. You turn the corner, take the slope with ever-sinking heart, fumble in your pocket for the key, and carry the nightmare across the threshold and up the stairs to your den in the attic.
For the first time ever, you have broken the one unbreakable rule: Never let work follow you home.
Colonel Datka’s man didn’t give you a choice in the matter.
“You have an envelope waiting for me. I believe you live at”—the bastard has your home address on the tip of his tongue—“is that correct? You will take my suitcase home with you and store it. I may need to stay in your spare room, from tomorrow, for a few days. I trust you will have a spare key waiting for me here.”
His smile was insectile, twitching mouth parts flexing around immobile mandibles, coldly inhuman eyes watching you through the wraparound display screens of his eyeware.
“If anybody enquires, you will tell them I am Peter Manuel, and I am a business representative.”
“What kind . . . of . . . ?”
The mandibles clattered and chomped like those of an angry hornet: “I am here to sell toys.”
“But my wife and children—”
“They will not be inconvenienced.” His gaze was as unseeing as a corpse. “It is a fall-back position. Hopefully it will not be needed.”
“But I—”
“Do you want more money?” He cocked his head to one side, scanning, sensing, focussing but not feeling. “Are we not paying you enough?”
You hastened to reassure him that indeed you were being paid an adequate sufficiency.
“Then what’s the problem?” His stare went through you, bulletblunt and tearing as it tumbled.