Half the Day Is Night Read online

  He drove cautiously and he seemed to regard stop signs as little time outs. He got to the intersection at the end of her street, stopped the car and sighed, then carefully looked around and drove on. She wanted to turn on the news but felt that if she moved she would distract him, so she decided to wait until they were on automatic. He was all white knuckles getting onto the beltway until he could reach forward and punch 2 on the automatic guidance—preprogrammed for the bank. Then he sighed again.

  The news was still talking about mandatory sterilization for incorrigibles and what a wonderful idea it was and how it would work to break the cycle of poverty. That was the only thing she had read in the newspaper this morning so she half-listened and half-watched traffic. At least David’s silence was language-related, not directed at her.

  “—Danny Tumipamba, an executive in a subsidiary of Marincite Corp.,” the news said. The name snagged her. “Although there is no confirmation from Marine Security, it is widely believed that radical extremists are behind the killing. If so, Tumipamba would be the seventh Marincite executive to fall victim in the last nine months.”

  “I know him,” she said, startled into speaking out loud.

  “I am sorry?” David said, not having heard her. Or maybe not having understood.

  “Shhh!” she said, but they were talking about someone named Ybarra who’d been killed ten weeks ago. “I know him,” she said. “The man in the news. I am working with him on a bank deal.” Her Marincite deal, a very big bank deal.

  “He was arrested?” David asked.

  “No,” she said, “He’s dead. He was murdered.” Murdered. It seemed melodramatic when she said it. Tumipamba was murdered. She knew someone who had been murdered. Had anybody at the bank heard?

  “He was a friend of yours?”

  “No,” she said. Not a friend at all. Danny Tumipamba had a broad Mayan face and hook nose; a face like the Olmec man. He was hard to work with because she never knew where she stood with him, or what he thought of either her or the bank. And now he was dead. A bomb? she wondered, or shooting? She should have been paying attention.

  “I’m sorry,” David said uncertainly, but the car was slowing down to come off the beltway and his attention was taken by the intricacies of driving.

  She didn’t have the deal yet, they had still been courting. No papers signed. And now he was dead. Another dead executive in Marincite City, Christos, was it open season on executives over there?

  She tried to think of how she felt. Murdered. Dead. Tumipamba was dead.

  Dead was something that she didn’t understand when someone told her. It was like when her Gram had died, it was the little habits of thought that made her understand Gram was dead. Like thinking that she had to call Gram, she hadn’t talked to her in—and then when she started to think about how long, when she started to really think about it, she’d realized that Gram was gone.

  Danny Tumipamba was dead. She didn’t have a deal with Marincite yet. She needed that deal.

  She would have to talk to her boss. She would have to find out who was taking Tumi’s place. She couldn’t call this morning, the place would be coming apart. The bank should send flowers, she should find out when the funeral was going to be.

  If she was going to get the loan with Marincite Technical Exchange she was going to have to find out who would be deal making.

  Maybe she could go to the funeral and see who represented the company. At the funeral she might be able to talk to someone, get a sense of how things might shake down. A couple of hours in a sub, and if the funeral was early she could go in the morning and come back in the afternoon. She would only lose half a day. David could go with her, there was no driving in Marincite. She wouldn’t have to take Tim at all.

  * * *

  Tumipamba’s funeral was on Thursday morning, two days after he died. Attending meant that Mayla and David had to catch a sub to Marincite City at 6:30 a.m.

  Marincite was a labyrinth.

  On the map it was a lot of overlapping circles, hubs with roads leading away from them, so the map looked like a drawing of bicycle wheels lying helter-skelter.

  It was Mayla’s experience that Marincite was an easy place to get lost in. It was older than the capital, and it wasn’t a planned city at all. Once it had been a cluster of mining complexes and fish farms, each one dug into the bedrock. Some of them were a single level, some of the mining complexes had been cones going down six or eight levels. Now they were all neighborhoods, overlapping circles, and the streets ran every which way, from hub to neighborhood hub to neighborhood hub.

  The funeral was at the Cathedral St. Nicolas in a neighborhood called Wallace. From the sub port they took a shuttle to a place called Sauteuse, and from Sauteuse David used her map to get them to Wallace. He was quite good with the map. Good sense of spatial relationships, she supposed.

  The last moving sidewalk dumped them off at a security post manned by Marine Security. Les Tontons, “The Uncles.” A young man in Marincite maroon stopped her and asked her business. He had that Marincite sound, slightly deeper than Julia. Not surface but different. Everybody’s voice was a little deeper in Marincite because it was about twenty meters higher and the air mix was different. He checked her smart card in his reader and flicked a light pen in her eyes for a retinal scan.

  David was wearing the gray suit he’d arrived in. Have to have him get some clothes, she thought. He was a skinny little Asian. With his long hair, the suit made him look like a Hong Kong hood in an outdated vid.

  He dropped David’s smart card in his reader. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, “Marine Security records show your security to be a man named Tim Bennet.”

  “He used to be,” she said, “but David has replaced him. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I needed to let you know.”

  “Without clearance I cannot let him attend you,” the young man said. He handed David his smart card with the air of someone finished with a transaction.

  “Wait,” she said, “Tim doesn’t work for me anymore. I have to take David.”

  The officer frowned, all sharp cheekbones under his polished visor. He looked Haitian. He checked his reader, and then looked icily from under his visor. “His account is still active and linked with yours, so you’re still paying him.”

  She hadn’t known they were going to check bank accounts. Now she looked as if she were lying to Marine Security.

  “He will be leaving in about four weeks,” she said. “But David’s account is linked with mine, can’t you check that?”

  No, he wasn’t interested in checking on David, that would take a search which would tie up his reader for a few minutes. The trace to Tim’s account was already in place from when Marincite Corp. had registered them.

  He was pissed with her, too. Great, just what she needed, problems with Les Tontons. Security was everywhere in Marincite; sneeze and an Uncle said, “Good Health.” “I really have to go to this funeral. Is there some way I can get clearance?”

  “You can go,” the officer said. “He can’t.”

  Her insurance said she wasn’t to attend public functions in her capacity as a banker without security. But the Cathedral was obviously secure, and who was going to tell the insurance company? Unless she did something stupid like fall down the escalator and broke her leg.

  She fumbled with her purse. “Look,” she said to David, “go get yourself a cup of coffee, come back in—” how long would a funeral take? An hour? “—an hour and a half.”

  “Wait,” he said. “The problem is what?”

  “Marine Security doesn’t have any record of you,” she said. She didn’t want to be late, she wanted to get there early to see if she could maybe talk to Owen Cleary, Tumi’s assistant, and she didn’t want to explain all this to David. “Take this,” she pushed money at him, “find yourself a place to get breakfast or something.” She hadn’t had breakfast, either. She could never eat when she first got up, but she was hungry now. Oh well, you weren’t suppose
d to have breakfast before mass, anyway. Even if she wasn’t Catholic anymore.

  “Excuse me,” David said to the officer. He pulled out a passport folder and opened it, it was full of his documents. “I have here my papers, no? I have a work permit, here, see, Ms. Ling’s name? She is my employer?”

  The officer shrugged.

  “Also,” David pulled out a flimsy, “here, it is my, what do you call it, like a permission, autorisation, to drive a car. See, she has insurance, you know? The insurance says she must have a driver? She, she has paid for my insurance to drive her car, here is her signature? Why would she bring me, arrange this permission to have a car, if I am not her security?”

  The officer frowned.

  David handed him the folio. The officer didn’t want it, he held up his hands as if he were going to say no but David pushed it on him and he took it without really wanting to. Then he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He read the driving permit, paged uncertainly through the passport and ran his pen across the information band. Finally he held it up so he could compare David against the im.

  He sighed and handed David back the documents. “All right, but you’ll have to wear a telltale. It’ll take awhile to get one up here, wait over there, please.”

  David nodded to the officer and to her, a crisp, know-your-place-in-the-hierarchy kind of nod.

  “That was good,” she whispered.

  “It is like being in the army,” he whispered. “If you make it easier for them to do it than not to do it, then they will do it.” Then he grinned at her, a sharp little grin.

  She grinned back. He was smart, she thought. Smarter than he liked to let on.

  She liked that. She could live with that. Once she got rid of Tim, maybe things would work out pretty well.

  * * *

  The telltale was a plastic strip like a hospital bracelet. “Don’t fiddle with it,” the officer said, “it has a dye packet in it. If you try and take it off, it explodes. The bracelet will let us keep track of you, and it can be triggered either by a security officer or by passing a sensor.”

  “Where are the sensors?” she asked.

  The officer shrugged. “Banks, checkpoints.”

  David turned his wrist over studying it, then shot his cuff over it to hide it. He didn’t look happy. Mayla couldn’t blame him.

  They took an escalator down. She checked the time. Probably too late to get a chance to talk to someone, maybe after the funeral she could find Owen Cleary for a moment.

  The courtyard in front of the cathedral wasn’t empty yet so mass hadn’t started. The courtyard was bordered by rows of columns etched with palm leaves and capped with cherubim. Behind them were people in dark clothes and headsets. The Uncles, watching and listening.

  Too late, Tumipamba was already dead.

  David was watching the Uncles, too. “Why so many police?” he asked.

  “Tumi was murdered by extremists,” she said. She had told him he was murdered—proof that his English really wasn’t very good, he missed a lot.

  David frowned, “Say again?”

  “Murdered by extremists. You know, terrorists. The radical arm of La Mano de Diós, the Catholic Socialists.” Or some other splinter group, but La Mano de Diós was as good an example as any, there were a lot of Catholic Socialists.

  “He was a politician?”

  “No,” Mayla said. “He was an executive for a subsidiary of Marincite Corporation. Marincite Corporation runs this city, it’s a company town, so some of the radical groups have started targeting executives.”

  She wasn’t sure how much he had followed but he was intent on her. “This man who is murdered, he is a zaibatsu for Marincite?” he asked.

  “I guess,” she said. She didn’t really think of Marincite as a zaibatsu kind of corporation, sing the company anthem and live in a company enclave—Marincite wasn’t an enclave for corporate types, it was a city.

  “You are in danger?” he asked.

  “Me?” she asked.

  “Like this man,” he gestured towards the cathedral.

  She resisted the impulse to laugh. “No,” she said. “I’m just a banker, not CFO for a company.”

  “I am not a person who can protect you,” he said. “I think this is a mistake. I was security for the Consulate, but that is just sitting at a desk, watching the monitors. That is just walking around the building, closing the doors.”

  “It’s only insurance,” she said. She looked up at the church, suddenly nervous. Funerals. When she was a little girl at school they went to all the funerals during school hours. She never thought anything about them then except that they were longer than regular masses. When they were schoolchildren they attended so many funerals that they knew all the responses. They knew them better than anyone except the priest and the sisters.

  “It is not right,” he said.

  Her Gram had been buried on a Saturday. Schoolgirls in blue uniforms had not said the responses at her funeral. Not that many people had attended: a couple of old men from when De Silva was Minister of Finance and her grandfather had been a persona de influencia. De Silva had come. The skin on her grandfather’s hands had looked like crumpled paper.

  David was looking at her, demanding more. Explain, his face said, explain.

  “It’s just insurance,” she said again vaguely.

  The church was like the churches from her childhood, white walls climbing to clerestory windows. Light angled down from the east windows, sharp and brilliant columns that marched up the center of the nave as if this were the surface and the sun were shining in. Such an unnatural hard-edged light that when Mayla was little she thought it was the light of the saints.

  They were going to be late if they didn’t go in and get seats. At the end of the nave the altar was outlined in tiny blinking colored lights. When she was in school in New York she only saw those lights at Christmas. The white coffin was tilted at an angle and faced from the waist up in glass, so the deceased could watch the mourners come in. She couldn’t see Tumi looking at her, from where they stood the light reflected off the glass in a glare of white.

  “Look,” she said, “we’ll talk about it later, okay?”

  He stood, all tense, not wanting to let it go and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t. Were the Uncles watching them squabble? But he softened and they went in.

  They sat on the side, close to where the votive candles flickered in blue and white jars in front of the statue of the virgin. An Erzulie-Virgin, she noticed, a Haitian voudoun madonna in a lace veil and white dress embroidered with rose-colored flowers and hearts. She wore ropes of pearl necklaces and Mayla thought that her wedding ring might actually be Erzulie’s three gold rings. The pillars that flanked her niche were striped blue and rose and white, the colors of the loa. Under the candles on the hard concrete floor were a bar of perfumed soap and a handful of wilted pink carnations.

  Some woman asking for help in her love life? At home in Julia they would never allow it, never allow any of the signs of Haitian voudoun in the church. She had heard rumors that the execs who ran Marincite Corp asked advice of the loa but it was hard to imagine Tumipamba bringing rum to a mambo in a white headcloth. Even harder to imagine Tumi ecstatic, possessed by spirits.

  The priest wore white vestments, like Easter. “Behold, I tell you a mystery,” he read, his arms out and his head bowed. “We shall all indeed rise again: but we shall not all be changed.” He was a very young man and his hands trembled slightly. The gestures of priests were always effeminate.

  After the mass she got in line to pass the coffin. Owen Cleary, Tumi’s assistant, stood on the left and a woman with Tumi’s square face and Mayan nose stood on the right. Mayla smoothed the folds out of her dress from where she had been sitting.

  Owen was white and tired. “Good of you to come,” he said when he shook her hand.

  “It’s a shock,” she said and glanced at the coffin but only saw the wash of white. She turned around and a young woman d
ressed casually in tights and a sweater was taking an im. For the paper? Mayla wasn’t supposed to have her picture in the paper, especially not at a funeral for a man murdered by radical extremists.

  But the woman had already picked up her bag and was backing down the aisle, and Mayla couldn’t think of what she would have said anyway. The woman would have taken other ims. The Uncles were probably taking ims, too.

  And then she was out in the atrium with its angel-headed columns and David was coming out to find her. That was it. She had come all the way from Julia by sub to shake Owen’s hand. And Owen probably wouldn’t even remember she had been here.

  She looked around hoping to catch sight of someone to talk to, something to make this trip worthwhile, but she didn’t see any familiar faces. People were clustered and the Uncles were standing against the walls like kabuki stagehands. The family would go on back to the house, Owen would probably go, too.

  David was waiting for her to tell him what next.

  She looked back down the length of the church, at the shafts of hard white light falling at angles. Dust glittered in the light. Imagine light so bright that dust glittered. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  He patted his pockets and came up with their tickets for the sub and showed them to her. At least, she thought, she hadn’t had to deal with Tim. And once David understood that she wasn’t likely to be the subject of terrorist attacks he seemed as if he’d do the job very well. He had a sense of propriety about him, he kept his distance. In the evening she would be able to sit in her living room and not worry about Tim.

  Privacy! She had built a house and she had no privacy! It was almost as bad as living with her grandfather.

  Which made her think of Gram and the dust glittering. The mote in God’s eye. She had never understood that before and now she’d seen it, bright dust motes in a column of light. She felt lightheaded—not physically so much as her thoughts skittered around.