Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (5 page)

Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored medley of old Abba songs.

Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.

The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.

Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And—for God’s
sake
—was that band now playing
Oasis?
Those chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like “Wonderwall.” “Wonderwall” on Spanish guitars, reed flutes, and a mandolin!

Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.

The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.

Idiots,
Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.

There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.

Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.

And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. “
Wonderwall
.”

Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the fallen man—
someone
had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.

The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.

Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A
French
doctor? All his French seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as
Are you all right?
and
How are you feeling?
seemed beyond him now. The first-aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school was
ages
ago.

Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that mirrored his own.

Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward him from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.

He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.

“Please,” she said in English a bit too musical to be American. “Take me out of here.”

The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.

He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen of plane trees.

Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass. Surreptitiously, he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still there.

“Wonderwall,”
he thought.
Christ
.

He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely distressed.

“I suppose he’ll be all right,” he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.

The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. “He’s dead,” she murmured into his jacket. “Couldn’t you tell?”

For Terzian, death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.

He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.

Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.

Reflex kept him talking. “The police were coming,” he said. “They’ll—they’ll call an ambulance or something.”

“I only hope they catch the bastards who did it,” she said.

Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the victim fall, and then dashed through the square for his papers. For some reason, all he could remember about them were their black-laced boots, with thick soles.

“Who were they?” he asked blankly.

The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. “I suppose they think of themselves as cops,” she said.

Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have to bolt at any moment.

Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.

Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. “No,” she said suddenly. “I want ice cream.”

Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age, twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but
which
races? The flat nose could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a knot behind her head could be African or East Indian, or, for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be beautiful—and also too striking, Terzian thought, to belong to a successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.

The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still there.

“My name’s Jonathan,” he said.

“I’m,” hesitating, “Stephanie.”

“Really?” Terzian let his skepticism show.

“Yes.” She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. “Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you know my real name or not.”

“Then you’d better give me the whole thing.”

She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. “Stephanie América Pais e Silva.”

“America?”

Striking a match. “It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name.”

He looked at her. “But you’re not Portuguese.”

“I carry a Portuguese passport.”

Terzian bit back the comment,
I’m sure you do
.

Instead he said, “Did you know the man who was killed?”

Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.

“Did you know him well?”

“Not very.” She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.

“He was a colleague. A biochemist.”

Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.

“Shit,” she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.

“Are you a biochemist, too?” Terzian asked.

“I’m a nurse.” She looked at him with her pale eyes. “I work for Santa Croce—it’s a—”

“A relief agency.” A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant
Holy Cross
.

She nodded.

“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” he asked. And then his skepticism returned. “Oh, that’s right—it was the police who did the killing.”

“Not the
French
police.” She leaned across the table toward him. “This was a different sort of police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the same thing. You look at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or any suspects.” Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a new thought. “Unless they somehow manage to blame it on me.”

Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.

“Who, then?”

She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”

Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most sensible answer.

“The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “Their intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”

At that point, the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee, along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick. Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.

“I love ice cream,” she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.

Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and, between sobs, choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.

The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.

Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?

The latter, for preference.

He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.

His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con—a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for. . . .