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 tunelinfinity, 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 Ingilizmaking 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 Kchk Glhane Djaddesi 14. I have his tunelroute, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik,but it has been arranged that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir management 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 locomotive 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 balloon-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 aftershave. 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 noticeably, 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, balancing 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 tunelto 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.