Free Noir by K. W. Jeter

over again.
    This time, the sandwich boards hanging in front and back of the shuffling homeless men were advertising something McNihil didn’t recognize. There was just one big alphabet letter on each board; they spelled out, in sequence, the word
TLAZOLTÉOTL
.
    McNihil wondered what the connect that meant. Maybe a new Central American restaurant opening up somewhere in the Gloss. Or maybe nothing at all; maybe the sandwich-board men had gotten mixed up and out of order, creating some random anagram out of the actual word. A back part of McNihil’s brain idly worked on it. After a few seconds, a memory scrap floated to the top of his thoughts.
Tlazoltéotl
had been the indecipherable word in the banner scroll tattooed on the corpse’s abdomen, right beneath the big initial
V
.
    Probably not a good thing
, decided McNihil. He also decided not to think about it anymore.
    He didn’t bother drawing down the blind, to shut out the image of the homeless parade going down the street below. Instead, McNihil closed his eyes and thought about the things he’d told the cube bunny. Which were all true, as far as they went.
    I’m used to it
, McNihil thought. The world he saw … he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
    There was only one thing he missed.
    Just once in a while, he would’ve liked to have seen daylight again. Instead of this world’s eternal, clockless night.

FIVE
RENAISSANCE ANGELS TURNED TO BURROWING MOLES
    S ome kind of church service was going on underneath the grates. Underground from economic necessity, not from any actual persecution; big spaces, cathedrals vaulted with sewage pipes and bundles of ancient copper wiring, black-sheathed fiber-optic snakes, suitable for large congregations of the faithful. Of whatever denomination:
    • subterranean mosques, like minarets laid on their sides, the cries of the muezzin echoing beneath cracked and patched asphalt;
    • Holy Rollers, interbred clans, toothless and fervid, calling on Zion and awash in the blood of a pompadoured, lazy-eyed lamb of Memphis grace, wrestling high-voltage cables like Teflon-insulated serpents;
    • supply-side Republicans, cutting each other with little razor knives and lapping up red puddles among the discarded condoms;
    • post-Reformation Lubavitchers awaiting a messiah with hands of fire.
    The man loitering in the alley felt a shiver of disgust roll up his arms, mutating into a sour ball of spit at the back of his tongue. He’d just as soon not have been there at all, listening to multipartite hymnody—was it Latin? Old Tridentine ritual?—wafting up from below his feet, as though Renaissance angels had turned to burrowing moles. Flickering candlelight, from staggered ranks of small yellow flames, streamed up past his legs and across his chest, working his face into a network of spook-pocked shadows. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a black puddle at the alley’s edge, the thin water shimmering with solvent rainbows; his face looked like a campfire parody, a ghost story with a flashlight under the chin. The anachronism bothered him more than the actual visual effect.
    Come on
, he called out inside his head.
Come on, hurry up
. An Asian storm-front, edge leakage from monsoons on the other side of the circle, drizzled under his jacket collar. He thrust his gloved hands deeper into his pockets as a show of irritated impatience. He’d left a black Daimler do Brasil repro of a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Cabriolet C, a one-off historic Sindelfingen design, hunkered down at the mouth of the alley, the machine a top-of-the-line product of the
maquiladores
on the other side of what had once been the Mexican border. They did good work in that arc of the Gloss; the vehicle’s finish, rubbed to a deep brilliance by the nimble hands of ten-year-olds, glistened as though it contained infinite space, as though a piece of the night sky complete with stars had fallen there.
    Other black shapes, smaller but with the same basic