Work Text:
REVY
I have a sucky memory for names.
They're overrated, if you ask me. It's nice to pin one to a face when you're doing business, in case you need to track them down later and put a gun to their head, but for drinking or fucking or dying? You don't need a name. In this town you can bet that any shit-for-brains you meet is Quetzalcoatl Diamond-Cock or the Crochet Needle Killer Of The East anyway, it just becomes meaningless after a while. Try walking into a Roanapur bar and getting someone to answer to Bobby or Yoko or anything their mother's likely to recognize, you'd be shit out of luck. Grade inflation, Dutch calls it.
'Course, any one of those assholes probably gave their mother a shiv and a pair of concrete shoes for Christmas, so that only goes to show.
I don't remember my mother's name, best efforts aside. For all I know I never heard it: when she wasn't Mommy she was You Stupid Bitch, pretty much all the time. As for that particular waste of air, I'd forget his name if I could. I sure as hell never took it voluntarily.
'Course, shit's not that simple. I shortened the name I went by until it was no more than what I needed, but the pieces I left behind aren't gone. They're just behind. Me. Most of the time my bad memory takes care of the rest, but the universe never lets you off that easy.
She was a Rebecca too, see.
Sister Rebecca.
Nothing like those crazy bitches over at the Church of Violence, but that's a story for another day.
* * *
JONKER WALK NIGHT MARKET
Malacca Town:
A red-tarnished pearl adorning the choked throat of the Strait. Storied name, thousand-year playground of pirates! Ships crawled over her brown waves like beads of sweat on a woman's skin, pooling where her collarbones met at the bright lion-pendant of Singapore. Wildfire haze in the air, the night as warm and sticky as blood.
It was a tourist trap. Revy scowled, took the last bite of her barbecued cuttlefish and dumped the leaf wrapping in a nearby trash can, pushing past the gourmets who had gathered around a particularly felicitous vendor of dimsum. Karen Carpenter wafted from the Chinese seniors' association nearby. Baby baby baby baby oh baby I love you, I really do. Come back to me again and play your sad guitar... Childhood sounds and odors of cooking. Revy felt memory lurch and viciously preferred the local tuk-tuks with their payload of plastic flowers and blaring dancepop, even though that very afternoon she'd shoved a 9mm Beretta under a driver's chin if he wasn't going to shut off that fucking noise, the pig fucker, did he hear her or had he gone deaf. The tuk-tuks slept lightly, now, like tropical birds, their owners awaiting closing time as was the wont of taxi drivers wherever night shifts are worked. The crowd jostled and eddied around palm trees and trinket-covered picnic tables and steaming carts lit neon-red.
Rock was up ahead, talking to yet another local with his ass parked on yet another plastic folding chair. As Revy watched from the vantage of discreet distance he straightened, and money exchanged hands. Rock started to make his way back down the street, only to pause halfway in front of a souvenir stall. Revy rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette.
Half the stick had gone to join the haze by the time Rock arrived at her side. "You're wasting time," she complained as soon as he was within reach. "We're not here to play slumming Japanese tourists. No one's going to look at you and believe you're seriously looking to score, they're just giving you the runaround. Probably get a beer and laugh about it later."
"You would've scared them off," Rock said, in that infuriating voice of reason. "I told them I was looking for a disgraced relative. Besides, you said you were hungry."
"Yeah, or this'd already be over... what?"
Rock just smiled and held out his hand. There were two objects in it; Revy took both, automatically.
The first was a slip of paper on which was scrawled an address. The second was a palm-sized cloth doll, the sort of toy one might hang from a school bag or rear view mirror. A little pirate in technicolour rags and cocked hat, a brace of oversized pistols clutched in fingerless fists and crossed over its chenille chest... and no face. No features. Just a bright round of mirror that flashed with borrowed neon and glimpses of passers-by.
"They're all the rage right now," Rock added, a trace of apology entering his tone willy-nilly, probably at the look on Revy's face. "Mirror babies. People collect them. This is a knockoff but... that's the idea, anyway."
"You've got fucking terrible taste," Revy said, and nailed him with another second of the hairy eyeball for good measure.
* * *
72 HOURS EARLIER
"Sam Kelberwitz," said Balalaika, passing them each an eight-by-twelve glossy and a photocopied sheet of paper. "Otherwise known as Sam Martin, otherwise known as Brother Samuel, otherwise known as Sam Kalpa. American, probably East Coast, but based in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Currently thought to be in Thailand. Has himself some sort of cult group, members numbering unknown but thought to be over a hundred, to whom he serves as prophet, patriarch—"
"Nice work if you can get it," Benny muttered.
"—And all-around leader both holy and temporal. They're known as the Brotherhood of Right Resolve, as in samyak sankalpa.
"Over the past year, a new drug has begun circulating around the Strait. The junkies call it bua phut. It's a hallucinogen, legal and undetectable by standard drug tests, but with a physical addictiveness close to that of heroin. Rumours are that it's produced and distributed by Kalpa's outfit, presumably under his orders. This is of interest to Hotel Moscow because we own the formula for that particular substance, and it's not us selling it.
"Your assignment is in two parts: assess the rumours' veracity. If they check out, find the guy."
"Does he need to be talking," Revy said, half-raising a hand. Balalaika smiled, thinly.
"He does," she said. "We have a lot of questions for him to answer. Bring him back in one piece if you can – that's the best-case scenario – but if not, a verified location will suffice. Hotel Moscow will handle the rest. You'll get your money either way, but not if you spook him. Under no circumstances do you let it be known that the Russians are looking for Brother Sam Kalpa."
"Understood," Dutch said. "Any other leads you can give us? What about his people?"
"Excellent question," Balalaika said. "These are out of date, so take them with a grain of salt. The bastard's camera-shy like a fourteen-year-old virgin on her first porn shoot."
More glossies, a pile of them, single-copy this time. Revy flipped through the sheets, scanning faces, and stopped.
Sam Kalpa looked the prophet at least: short, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, with a salt-and-pepper mane and beard. The man standing behind him was taller than him by a head. The lines of his frame had blurred over the years, fat accumulating at belly and neck, but one could tell that when he was younger he had been rail thin. The receding blond hair, too, had been more luxuriant. The eyes were narrow-set, their colour indistinguishable.
(Sodium street lamplight pooling on asphalt, turning whites yellow and shadows black. Fire escapes like bars on prison windows. Had he really been blond? Reds, too, reds had been black.)
"What is it?" Dutch asked, a note of curiosity rumbling in his voice.
Astute as always. Revy shuffled the photograph to the back of the stack, only to find the blond man staring out at her again. Dutch gave her a hard look.
"Revy," he said.
"Nothing," she said, "nothing much. Hey, Balalaika, does this guy have a name? He's in quite a few of these."
"No name," said Balalaika. "Seems like a bodyguard. Either one of the cultists, or an outside contractor. Hard to tell, but that's what I pay you for. Think you know him?"
"Trick of the light," Revy said.
* * *
TAKE A SPIN IN MY TIME MACHINE
"If you're not out of there in thirty minutes," Rock warned. Revy waved him off and strode out of the shadows, up the steps to the front door of the house. It was metal, shut tight, and the white paint was peeling. The porch light was on, though, its translucent plastic cover a puppet show of shrivelled insect silhouettes.
Revy knocked, three hard raps. After a minute she heard some sort of panel hiss on the other side of the door.
"Ramlan Makmur down market said go see you," she said.
There was an expectant silence.
"He said..." She cursed internally and switched languages. "I heard you keep a time machine in the back. I'd like to take a spin in it, if it's free."
Another pause. Then a voice like dry leaves said in heavily accented English, "Nothing free, miss."
Revy dug into her pocket and flashed the top edge of a wad of ringgits, ruffling them with a thumb. Another drawn-out wait, then the sound of bolts being slid back – multiple bolts.
The man who opened the door looked Chinese, and was old, bony and slope-shouldered. He held up his right hand facing her, fingers splayed as if in greeting, then turned it palm-upward and waited. Revy counted out ten fifty-ringgit bills without looking and passed them over. The man stepped aside.
Inside was poorly lit, and reeked of jasmine incense.
Revy, who had never had a sensitive gag reflex, found the cuttlefish trying to force its way back up. The incense was an indifferent mask for the ordinary notes of stale sweat, mildewed damp, and mice, but underneath the rest lay a sickly organic sweetness that the subconscious shied from fully identifying. Revy thought of metal coffins curving under the weight of seawater, and banished the image with intent.
Worn linoleum flooring, a staircase in the hallway, a single incandescent bulb dangling on a string beyond. It cast shadows within which something moved, at below waist height. Revy discerned long lumpen shapes on what seemed like low beds pushed up against the walls of a large room.
It was Waste-Of-Air on welfare cheque day all over again.
"You guys do takeout?" she asked. "I've got a nice clean hotel room back in town with my name on the register."
The old man only gazed at her a moment, then started up the stairs without a word. Revy shrugged and followed.
Upstairs was an oval, wooden-railed landing from which opened more rooms, mostly empty from what she could see – the doorways gaped, but the lighting conditions were no better. And the stench was worse.
Bua phut, she thought. The great putrescent flesh-flower of the jungle.
A parasite.
The old man shuffled into one of the rooms and drew back a curtain, allowing a square of moonlight to fall on – yes – a bare folding camp bed under the window.
"Sit," he said, "wait." And turned and left the room again.
Revy remained standing. After a moment the old man returned, a red lacquer case cradled between his arms. He extended it before Revy, popped the latch, and raised the lid.
Inside lay five clear ampoules, nestled in green velvet inlay of the sort that commonly protected antique revolvers. They were filled halfway each with a dark, oily-looking liquid. The old man waited a second for Revy's presumable inspection – like a sommelier with the bottle label – then removed one of the ampoules and held it up to Revy's face.
"Sit," he said again.
Revy caught his wrist. The old man did not jerk back in protest, although his black eyes shifted minutely, tracking something in her face.
"I'd really rather get takeout," she said.
"No," said the old man. "Dangerous. First time, not always come back. Better in past, not want come back. Difficult know before go."
"What's that to you? It'd make less trouble if I pop off somewhere else." Revy let her grip tighten a little. "I'll be open with you, Gramps. I'm looking for someone. A cousin of mine ran off and we heard he joined some kind of cult down here. Something sankalpa, they're called. You know what I mean, right?"
"No," said the old man. His eyes shone in the dim light like jet beads.
"Sure you do. They told me down at the market that I could talk to someone here. Just a friendly chat, Gramps. There's money for you in it."
The man's face never changed, but a tremor of tension ran down his arm. Revy understood, suddenly, that he was terrified. And there was no heavy here to back him up – that she had seen—
She dropped his wrist and took a step backward, reaching for her Berettas, but her shin bumped the edge of the camp bed and there was nowhere to go. The old man's outstretched arm convulsed, hand fisting, and the air was—
* * *
EIGHT MILLION STORIES IN THE NAKED CITY
—drenched in the pungent smell of iodine disinfectant. The bottle had shattered on the tiled floor and there was glass all over the place. The tray of bandages had overturned in the mess, cotton balls and gauze scattered and soaking up the liquid here and there, turning reddish brown.
"Fuck you!" Revy screamed. "Fuck you!"
It came out shrill and wrong in her child's voice, like a cassette deck on fast forward.
"You stupid bitch! Stupid lying bitch! There's no God who gives a shit about me, if He did why would this even happen, what kind of God would let this happen, why don't you just go fuck yourself and die! Die!"
She kicked the foot of the mobile medical cart, making it scoot forward.
Sister Rebecca jumped, like someone startled out of a daydream. She didn't look angry. Her face had gone white and her eyes were very wide, space all around the irises, such that her black lashes stood out stark against her skin. As silence fell Revy had the thought that they looked like spiders.
She turned and ran. Out of the infirmary, out of the building altogether before anyone could spot and stop her, half falling down the steps and pounding down the sidewalk. The plastic heels of her dirty canvas shoes half-detached and flapping.
Slowed, finally, one long block away, adrift in the crowd.
The very tail-scrap of the endless summer afternoon, now: asphalt still warm from the day's heat, the sky dimming to a dark cloudless blue. Vendors closing up shop, neon lights coming on. Twinned smells of grease fire and organic garbage from restaurants. Snatches of syrupy music.
The iodine-swabbed cuts on her bare arms and legs stung with sweat.
The police had caught her climbing in the window of the tenement from which she and her father had been evicted the day before. She had been supposed to sleep in the infirmary: Sister Rebecca had said so. She had nowhere to go, now. Two days ago she would have been frightened at the thought, but now it brought a dark satisfaction that warred with the rage in her belly. Some illusion had torn down the middle, like paper.
Why fear losing what she'd never had?
Better out here than false comfort indoors. Besides, there was always somewhere to go. It was obvious now.
She kept moving.
Further away from the commercial bustle: the brick walls and closed metal shutters were increasingly graffiti-daubed, the windows filthy. Seemingly one street light out of three was broken. Dealers owned this area, she knew, which was all right because they drove out other undesirables – the perverts, the recruiting pimps. It was dangerous to draw unnecessary attention, and Revy had always sought to avoid notice. But the dealers were Dragons, and the tong had money. Money and guns.
Guns could wait until later, she thought. Soon.
There was a single parked car at the corner, a nondescript grey sedan that had managed to retain the integrity of its windows. Revy saw a shape huddled in the front seat, and made to cross to the other side.
"Revy!"
It was Sister Rebecca.
Revy froze, too astonished for anger. The pause was fatal: Sister Rebecca spotted her and broke into a trot, gray skirt flapping around her calves.
Revy turned and fled straight down the block, past the parked car and around the corner. Before the sister could come into view again she skidded into the shadow of a fire escape, crouched, and flattened herself against the wall. It was the instinct of a small animal going to earth.
How had she been followed?
"Revy! Rebecca!"
Sister Rebecca had turned the corner and come to a stop, uncertain, directly under one of the working street lights. From Revy's vantage she appeared as if she were spotlit on a stage, ready to dance or sing. Instead she turned in a slow half-circle, hands half extended like a blind woman trying to see. Which was exactly what she was: with the light at her back there was no way she would be able to spot Revy, huddled in the shadows, even from less than fifty feet away.
She was so stupid, Revy thought. So helpless. She imagined Sister Rebecca hurrying through the streets of Chinatown, girl-slim in her white veil and grey skirt suit, stopping to beg answers in halting English from shopkeepers; stared at, laughed at, dismissed, getting lucky. Or did she come straight to this neighbourhood because it bordered Revy's haunts, because she understood the underlying meaning of the words Revy had thrown in her face?
Why did she do it?
Behind her, the door of the grey sedan opened, and a man stepped out.
He was tall and thin, dressed in casual dark clothes; in the sodium light his hair was yellow. He began to walk, unhurried, in their direction.
* * *
MATTHEW 22:21
"Holy shit, it's a mirror baby," Eda said. "Can I have it? I'm collecting them."
"You would," Revy said. "And no, fuck off."
She dangled the doll by its loop of string and blew at it, watching it spin idly in a wreath of smoke. Eda batted at her hand like a cat.
"Come on, I've never seen a pirate one. Where'd you get it? Was it Rock? Hey, tell him if he spots a nun one I'll buy him a beer."
"I said fuck off," Revy groaned, stubbing her butt out in the empty beer can beside her and sitting up. "Here, pass me a cold one."
Eda complied, and they drank companionably. The ceiling fan spun at maximum speed, succeeding only at stirring up the tepid air, but the floor was reasonably cool. They were in the deserted... sacristy? Vestry?... Revy was unclear on the terminology. Eda's room had air conditioning, but it was a windowless and featureless closet where Revy wanted to spend as little time as humanly possible. She didn't see the point of raking in the dirty money in order to sleep in a cell at night – let alone donning head-to-toe black wool when even the social-worker sisters of Revy's fucked-up childhood hadn't bothered, in New York City summers as bad as Roanapur's heat and humidity. Of course, events of said childhood had established that nuns were crazy. Even the Church of Violence kind, apparently.
On the other hand, she knew for a fact Eda wasn't wearing panties underneath.
"So," said Eda. "Other than Rock having to drag you out of an opium den by your ankles, how did the job go?" She snapped her gum and cackled. "How was that, by the way? See, now you've got me curious. Maybe we oughta crunch the numbers on that business, get in on the ground floor."
"It was sunshine and lollipops. Like a return to the pure unsullied joy of childhood. Can't wait to do it again."
"Seriously?"
"Fuck no. It sucked donkey balls." Revy tipped the can back, swallowed, and launched the empty across the room. "Eda. Do you remember the Son of Sam?"
"Sure," Eda said promptly. "David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer, back in '77. Shot thirteen, killed six, and was busted by a parking ticket. He would send letters to the NYPD taunting them. I read about it in the papers."
"Fuck me, I guess you were old enough to."
"What?"
"I'll let you in on something funny, Eda," said Revy. She swiped a thumb across the mirror baby's face, leaving a smear, then made a fist and squeezed. "It wasn't Berkowitz. At least, it wasn't just him."
"Berkowitz did claim he was involved in some kind of Satanic cult," Eda noted, not so much as quirking an eyebrow – at least, not visibly behind her sunglasses. "A few journos even bought it. What brought this up?"
"I was thinking," said Revy.
"Yeah? Leaving yourself open for the punchline there, hon."
"Fuck you, listen. Benny dug around some, after we got back. Ended up pulling files on the main guy from the Feds' mainframe. Brother Samuel, remember? Turns out he was in 'Nam as a medic, but before and after that he operated out of New York City – shady surgeries for the Cosa, two-bit psychic 'cures', that type. Then he vanished off the map."
"Only to surface in Southeast Asia, sure."
"Only to surface in '92. Whole new file, no relation to the first, nothing to show for the fifteen-year gap. Benny says the goods used to be there, but they were wiped or someone put a lock on them. Like they didn't want anyone to know what had happened to the guy." Revy retrieved her pack of smokes and tapped another out. "Guess what year the file ended? Go on, give it a shot."
"Long shot is more like it, Revy—"
"I got another one for you. That time, Rock found the back door swinging open and me passed out with half a dozen junkies in the same shape. Two days later the old guy was spotted floating face down by the pier. We had a little chat with the coroner in charge: he was done in by a .44 gauge. Point blank in the chest."
There was a pause. Eda chewed gum thoughtfully, and Revy smoked. Eventually Eda blew a pink bubble, which expanded and deflated without sound.
"You gonna take him out, then?" she said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but it's not your style. Smacks too much of civic pride."
"Not my business let alone my style. Benny tracked down their headquarters and Hotel Moscow stepped in. It's the Russians' raid now."
And that doesn't add up either, she didn't say. If Balalaika wanted to stop the bua phut trade, all she had to do was send goons to beat up dealers and runners until the right message got taken up the command chain. Scaring Kalpa off was supposed to be the point, so why the song and dance? Why raid the cult's compound? Why hire us at all?
"Thank the Lord," Eda said. "For a second I figured you were planning on getting me involved."
"You? Involved?"
"For a price, honey. To quote Jesus Christ our Saviour: if this were a charity it'd be Mother Teresa's face on the hundred dollar bill. Matthew chapter 22, verse 21."
Revy flipped her the bird without looking.
* * *
MIRRORS AND DOLLS
The raid was set for a Saturday night. That much wasn't hard to figure out.
In the small hours of Saturday morning, Revy swung her legs over a stone railing and dropped to a crouch, soundlessly, on a second floor balcony.
She'd left a trail of wire-cutter holes and unconscious guards. Shooting to kill would have been more efficient; ultimately it was what these guys were interested in anyway, she thought. Dying to serve their prophet, their Almighty God who loved them best out of all His fucked-up children in the world. In the right mood she would have obliged them. But tonight required a more delicate balance between stealth and discovery.
He had to be waiting for her. She assumed he was at least that good.
The bedroom was empty. She padded over to the door and listened: silence.
The knob turned without resistance in her hand. She stepped out into darkness, the wall cold and smooth against her back.
Then—
Lights!
Lights arrayed in dizzying infinity!
She saw herself a thousand times over, ever-diminishing simulacra of a dark shape crouched amidst eye-tearing illumination. Reflective glass from floor to ceiling, then over the ceiling in cathedral angles. Rows of incandescent bulbs, a stage built of dressing-room mirrors. Windows that were ajar doors cutting across lines of sight, leading into yet more spaces, yet more bright rooms. Or were they echoes too?
She had the barest of instants to resolve her surroundings before a whine sounded in her ears, followed by the silvery noise of breaking glass.
And the duel was on.
She rolled out of instinct, came up with Berettas out. Her first shot followed the trajectory of the bullet that had missed her; she saw a flicker of darkness, then, that did not correspond to the motion in her own body, and fired with her second. Glass exploded twice: reflection. Then she was running and weaving, ducking behind an open door as slugs slammed into its other side, shattering glass and splintering wood.
She ignored it. Looked straight ahead of her, down the corridor in the opposite direction, and for a split second met her opponent's eyes in the mirror.
It was him.
She spun and shot, still mostly covered by the door, and he was disappearing around a corner. The sound of running steps, leading away rather than approaching.
Not a retreat, she surmised: there was another way to get to her. The crazy bastards had built a maze. She cursed and took a chance, dashing across the room beyond the other side of the doorway. If it had been a dead end she would have been pinned.
It wasn't, and she got there first. The room led into the one next to it, and that one to the next, paralleling the corridor all the way down.
Another flicker out of the corner of her right eye, but she didn't turn that way. She was learning to watch the reflections. She shot through the doorway to her left, instead, and received a burst of fire in exchange. Light bulbs burst, filaments fizzing out like white-hot bees.
Reload for both of them. More running, then silence. Which direction would he take?
She took another chance and slipped into the next room, trying to keep to dead angles. Four, no, five panels down, more space for either of them to hide. But he had the advantage of knowing the layout.
It was still. Each of them calculating sightlines, waiting for the other to fuck up.
Long seconds passed.
He was old enough to have been in 'Nam, Revy thought. Like Dutch; like David Berkowitz. Or maybe he'd been NYPD himself. Maybe he'd been a wise guy, maybe he'd trained elsewhere. Who the fuck knew.
The mirror baby was in her back pocket, along with a keychain penlight. She took these out, careful not to make a sound.
Angled the face of the doll carefully, then turned the penlight on.
The reflected dot went skittering over the corridor's far wall, beyond the room. Two shots rang out, and Revy was up and running before she registered glass exploding overhead. Shards flew at her, drew white-hot lines across her arms and legs and throat. She covered her face and aimed with body-instinct, not eyes. The Berettas roared, one after the other.
Something heavy fell, and clattered when it hit the floor. Another shot; more breaking glass.
Revy saw the gun at her feet before she registered its owner. She moved before he could reach out, sending it spinning across the floor with a kick. Then she half-crouched in nearly the same movement, the mouth of a Beretta coming up to rest against the man's face where he was slumped on the ground, arm still outstretched. He breathed heavily and stared, unmoving now.
A stain was spreading from his side, further darkening the black fabric of his shirt.
She met his eyes. They were grey, she noted absently.
"I've got two questions for you," she said, "and then I'll stop taking up your time. First. Was it you who shot and killed a nun in the Lower East Side of New York City, near Chinatown, on the evening of July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-seven?"
The man stared up at her for a moment longer, then gave a short, dry gasp that might have been a laugh.
"Revenge?" he said. "That's it? That's what you want?"
His accent was too-familiar, ludicrous given the setting. It grounded the conversation somehow.
"Are you stupid?" said Revy. "Why the fuck would I want revenge? I want an answer to my second question."
The man was silent.
"Why did you leave me alive?"
When you walked up to her I was so pissed off, I thought you meant to give me away. You must've seen where I was hiding. Couldn't have missed it. After she fell you looked straight at me. Just the way you're doing it now: the expression draining from your face and eyes slowly, slowly, the way blackness oozed from the sprawl of her body. Spreading on the sidewalk like spilt gasoline. Leaving nothing behind for God to take.
And she was suddenly sure that their faces were the same, now, like dolls looking at each other, mirroring only the void.
No smile on the man's face. He didn't need one.
"Why wouldn't I have?" he said. "You were just like me."
And then his gaze shifted – wrenched – violently, past her. Revy saw motion directly ahead, and knew it was a reflection. She spun, arm coming up and trigger flying back.
Stared into Balalaika's eyes, a split second before the image shattered into a thousand shards of ice blue.
Behind her, the man grunted, softly.
Turned back again, Berettas ready, superceded by realization:
The foreshortened barrel of Balalaika's Stechkin APSB an inch from her face.
In her peripheral vision the man at her feet twitched once, twice, and was still.
"Drop them," Balalaika said.
Revy didn't move.
"Drop them!"
Revy gritted her teeth. She let the Berettas dangle from her fingers, then fall. Dull clunks on the floor amidst mirrored fragments, a dozen sudden reflections of gunmetal.
"The desantniki have this place surrounded," said Balalaika. "The raid was tonight, not tomorrow night. If Kalpa escapes thanks to your games you won't see a dime of payment."
She lowered the Stechkin, an abrupt, precise gesture, and stepped over the body stretched between them. The empty sleeve of the greatcoat slung over her shoulders brushed Revy's arm, making her cuts sting. Revy didn't flinch. She gazed at Balalaika, eyes narrowed.
"You let me in on this game," she said. "You don't even really want Kalpa, do you? Not in the grand scheme of whatever the fuck. There's something else you're after."
"Right now I'm after putting a slug through your forehead," said Balalaika. "Get the fuck out of my sight before I make my dream a reality."
* * *
THE FOREVER WAR
It had begun to rain several hours earlier, and had not let up: the lingering tail end of monsoon, perhaps. Even with the windshield wipers on at full it was impossible to see more than fifty metres down the road. The high beams simply cut off, as if they'd met a wall.
Sam Kalpa huddled in the passenger seat. He was thoroughly drenched, water trickling in rivulets down his face. The black-clad sister in the driver's seat was in better shape, although rain had darkened her veil in the short space of time she'd emerged from the car to help him up from the side of the road. The blond strands that escaped from underneath clung damply to her skin. She gazed out through the windshield, seemly unperturbed by either her passenger or the weather. Her hands on the wheel were steady; the speedometer held at a glacial 45 clicks per hour.
She was chewing gum. Every minute or so Kalpa could hear it pop.
He shifted in his seat and passed a trembling hand over his face.
"The Almighty must have sent you, Sister."
Another popping noise, the gum audibly shifted to the side of the mouth. "I reckon He must've. No other reason for me to be driving on a night like this. Bad weather straight down the road to Roanapur, Father, and Lord only knows why you want to go there. You should have stayed in."
Sam Kalpa shivered convulsively, looking out at the rainswept darkness.
"I had no choice. The wickedness that was afoot tonight, Sister! What they did to my people... If you only knew."
"Sure you had a choice, Father. The Russians wanted you alive. All things considered, you'd've been better off throwing yourself on their mercy than on the Almighty's. Funny thing, mercy."
Sam Kalpa gasped. He groped blindly behind him, but the space at his back was empty.
"I took it when I helped you into the car. Calm down, Father. Let's have a little talk."
Sam Kalpa screamed, a clipped sound, and struggled wildly with the passenger side door. It flew open, and he tumbled out into the dark.
Eda sighed. "Fucking used cars," she observed to no one in particular. She pulled a U-turn onto the opposite shoulder and got out, letting the motor idle. Raindrops splattered against her sunglasses. She took them off and folded them, hooking the earpiece under her wimple.
Sam Kalpa had crawled to the side of the road and was attempting to pull himself to his feet, using a young palm tree as leverage. The car's high beams had found and seemingly pinned him there, a butterfly struggling. As Eda approached she realized he was mumbling something, his lips moving as if in prayer. The road ran fifty metres from the sea, here, and the sound of the surf whited out the words.
She got closer, enough to speak and hear.
"—Said it wasn't any good," Kalpa was saying. "You couldn't debrief them more than once, they got hooked on it and snapped, went crazy. Berkowitz was crazy to begin. I had to dose them again and again. Some of them didn't come back from the trip. But they weren't responsive during the playback, they couldn't answer questions."
"They remembered afterward, but they could lie," said Eda. "I know."
"It wasn't any good. I was done after New York, you people cut me loose." Kalpa turned his face away. "The war's over. It was over twenty years ago."
"You know better than that, Sam. A war's always on. Who knows if it's the same war, but the old familiar faces crop up. The Russians. You. Me."
"You're too young to have been in Langley then, Sister."
"Am I?"
The rain plummeted through the twin headlight beams like a swarm of glass insects. Eda moved, out of the light, and Kalpa had to close his eyes. The afterimage a smear of blue.
"I didn't give the extraction process to the Russians," he said. "Your leak came from somewhere else."
"I know," said Eda. "That was your bad luck. And your mistake, too."
"I don't—"
"The process they have is partial, Sam. They needed you, if they only so much as knew you existed. For a long time they didn't. But then they found you, because there you were, peddling the real deal to junkies on the street. And after tonight they'll know to look for someone like me." She moved again, receding further into the dark. "Those guys were the reason this began in the first place, way back when. Remember? We can't afford to let them get to you, Sam. Iron curtain or no, non-state actor or no."
Her hand moved, a gun in it now. Not her own; his. She would wipe the prints off afterward, curve his fingers around the grip.
"Commend your soul to God, Sam, if it's not all a con."
A long moment, and then Sam Kalpa slowly knelt, in the mud. The surf swelled in his ears, and he never heard the shot.
* * *
EDA
I don't forget faces.
I forgot what my own looked like, though.
There was a girl once; I can even describe her to you. She had long blond hair and big blue eyes and really fucking great tits. In senior year she was cheer captain of her school's football team. Got that, bitch? Cheer captain. She popped her gum and had a voice like iced tea on a sticky summer afternoon. There must've been tens of thousands like her from Birmingham to Pensacola.
But I can't picture her face.
These days there's poly-fill in a nun's habit and pink sunglasses, drinking Johnny Walker on the rocks and clocking the days as they run into each other. Sister Eda smiles when I smile, frowns when I frown, chews gum when I chew gum. It's a neat trick.
Professional bias. Disappear into a cover story until you start believing it yourself, then assume no one will find you out because there's nothing to see.
It's a fallacy: just ask Sam Kalpa.
This won't last forever. A timer turned, somewhere out there, and I felt the stream of sand reversing. Pieces of a scattered puzzle magnetically drawn together, old debts coming due. Will it be the Russians calling them in, or the cartels, or the CIA's pervasive hand waking me from coded sleep? Will we be comrades or foe?
Whose face will I wear then? Speak, mirror...
But that's a story for another day.