Noir Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked at them.
    “You see?” Harrisch’s voice poked at him again. “It really is the kind of job for which you have a special knack. It fits into your realm of experience. If not professionally, then personally. Or perhaps at that point where professional and personal meet.”
    Hated the guy before, hated him even more now; McNihil weighed the consequences of just leaning back and cocking his fist, unloading it in the exec’s face. Satisfaction would be high, the grief afterward higher, the payment at the end close to total. People like Harrisch walked around inviolable, secure in their perch on the ladder. They invited fists, theyhung their faces out like smiling targets, asking for it. Knowing that if you fired one off, the blow your arm ached to deliver, they had ways of paying you back a thousandfold. And if you didn’t, if you just let your white-knuckled fist hang at your side like a rock extracted from the sweating core of the earth, the knot in your gut was their reward. They got you either way.
    That was how they worked it. McNihil knew that. He’d worked for Harrisch, and for people just like him. The only thing to do was to turn and walk away, to push past the encircling wall of suits and carry your fist, heavy as lead, out the door and down the unnumbered elevator, all the way to the little space called home. Where you could soak your fist in alcohol and morphine, applied from the inside out, through gut and vein. Until you forgot, or forgot enough.
    They wanted me to know
, thought McNihil.
What they do for fun
. They weren’t ashamed; on the contrary. Harrisch and the other company execs had wanted him to know, had wanted McNihil to catch the same scent from them as he had from the corpse’s mouth. Spit and mercury and blood. All of that and more, and none of it. The only marks on their bodies would be the scars on their tongues, the channel tracks, the contact points, the rain-wet battery terminals of their pleasures. The place where the blue spark leapt from emissary to recipient.
The kiss
, he thought,
that passeth understanding
. From one to the other, from the other to the one.
    He let his fist unclench itself. These things didn’t bother him so much anymore; they just made him feel older and more tired and disgusted. McNihil scanned across the faces of the execs waiting for his answer.
    “Well?” Harrisch smiled at him. And didn’t smile.
    “Connect you, mother-connector.” McNihil felt even more disgusted than before. “I’m outta here.” He turned and walked. The circle broke, the nearest execs stepping back out of his way, before he could even shove them aside. Depriving him of that justifiable pleasure.
    Harrisch called after him. “There’s some details you should know about. Before you make your final decision.”
    Fingers touching the door’s brass knob, McNihil stopped and glanced over his shoulder. “I already have.”
    “Perhaps.” The smile didn’t waver. “Though there’s one more thing you should see. One more detail.” He stepped back and reached downto the corpse, his hand drawing away the tousled shirt from one side, where the skin was still intact above the curve of ribs. “Our late friend seems to have gotten around.” Harrisch watched for McNihil’s reaction. “Quite a lot, wouldn’t you say?”
    He could see what the exec was showing him, from all the way across the room. A tattoo, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t move around. Big and dark enough that McNihil, standing by the door, could easily make out what it was.
    A classic banner scroll, curling around at each end, with some name or word that McNihil couldn’t make out inscribed inside. That wasn’t the important part; what mattered was the emblem above the banner. An ornate capital
V
, its point at the corpse’s bottom rib, the serifed arms reaching to either side of his armpit. Exact and intricately detailed, as though the artist had completed half of a slanting cross, redeemer to be added