William Gibson. Neuromancer

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. Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case’s head; the Finn jerked him down into a crouch. The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis- matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang. Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad- ows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet. Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her hand. “Use the radio,” the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. “Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place.” “Little prick nearly made it,” the Finn said, his knees crack- ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. “You were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well, help ’em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money’s worth.” Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. “A Nambu,” she said. “Nice gun.” Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle finger was missing.

With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting. “You’re an asshole,” Molly told the man, opening the car door for him. “You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped out.” Terzibashjian glared at her. “So we’re through with you anyway.” She shoved him in and slammed the door. “Run into you again and I’ll kill you,” she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street. Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris. “What is this thing?” he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the Scraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi. “It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King,” she said, getting out stretching. “Kept a lotta women there. Now it’s a museum. Kinda like Finn’s shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the Baptist….” “Like in a support vat?” “Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing, ’cause it’s an infidel relic.” Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans. “That Terzi, he’s grade-A scum,” she said. “He’s the secret police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage was offering.” In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing. “I did that job for you,” Case said, “the one in London. I got something, but I don’t know what it means.” He told her the Corto story.

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