Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  When next I look it is gone. I turn back to the waves and watch the ocean heave slowly back and forth like a great grinding set of lungs, dead fish and chunks of wood and brightly-colored plastics disgorged upon the beach. Somewhere north a flare goes off, but I don’t think this is a job for me. Frankly, too bad if it is. I thumb the Toecutter’s card from my vest again and tickle the corner with my finger as I contemplate the number.

  There’s one more person who might be able to help.

  *

  TWILIGHT INSISTS ON meeting me at Barcadia. I have phoned ahead and tentatively laid out what I know, what I want him to tell me. It’s awkward, like watching baby fish feeding from each other’s mouths. Their lives depend on it, but one false move and it just looks like kissing. And Twilight is one guy I desperately do not want to send the wrong signals.

  Barcadia is a bar within the glittering Hang Tsien Building on Ottoman and Ray. Designed by Germans with a Chinese budget and Ming Dynasty influence, the end result is an iron-and-glass prism lit within like a postmodern canary cage. At each of the sixteen levels almost everything is transparent, and Barcadia emerges from the tangled topiary of a six-star Chinese restaurant, the waiters lined up at the entrance ready to guide you to a table or throw a punch or possibly both. They resemble Jet Li in any one of his period pieces, the long pony tails and shaved foreheads a unique look unlikely to come into fashion again.

  Twilight lounges at the bar like any regular six-and-a-half foot Joe in grey spandex and shadowed cloak. The hardbodies melt away at my approach, and half-sozzled already, the big guy grants me his best cheeky grin as I ease my butt onto the high stool, the friction of leather-on-leather leaving the way open to fart jokes and various other comments about my ass. Touchy territory.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I tell him.

  “Not at all. Thanks for the excuse to get out.”

  I nod to no one in particular and order a Stoli. Twilight makes it two. There’s some kind of implied homo-eroticism in copying my drinks order that leaves us in uncomfortable silence for two or three seconds that feels as long as spring break. When I speak, so does he, and suddenly we’re in a David Mamet play. Twilight laughs, the bray like a lycanthropic camel that stills the room and tosses heads our way. In the one tableau I recognize Konstantin Karlsson, King Albert of Belgium, Denzel Washington, Matt Groening, Nancy Drew, Jean-Claude Van Damme, John Woo, Jenna Jameson, Renee Zellweger, Justin Bieber and Julian Clary dressed to the nines as a film noir detective, except wearing fishnet stockings, of course.

  “What’s been keeping you at home?” I ask eventually.

  “You know. The old problem.”

  The name Ras Algethi sits uncomfortably between us. I have a brief flash of the Hell Gate Bridge covered in ice and my teenage daughter slumped on the edge of defeat.

  “Jesus,” I remark. “You haven’t got a handle on that yet?”

  “Jeez, Zeph. What about you? How’s the new team going?” Twilight fires back with the same kind of expectant irony I have come to forget.

  Clearly allowing an alien god free on the prime material plane has left Twilight a bit tetchy.

  “Well, um. . . .”

  “Not exactly settin’ the world on fire like I expected, you and these Sentinels,” he says.

  “Yeah, well my head’s not really been into it.”

  “No?”

  “My . . . mum . . . died . . . I think.”

  The handsome grey-clad devil opens his mouth and closes it again. When he puts his suede gauntlet over my hand I snatch it away.

  “For fuck’s sake, Twilight. . . .”

  “Oh what, too gay for ya?”

  “Jesus. Just a bit.”

  “Oh well excuse me,” Twilight says with a self-deprecatory laugh. “And here was me thinking we’d sorta moved on. You don’t get it, do you, ya big lug? I’m about as gay for you as I am for Jenna McCarthy.”

  “Still. . . .”

  “Hey, you’re a handsome guy. I’ve told you that before. But really I’m only into you when I’m, you know, someone else. Projecting.”

  “As a woman,” I say.

  “As a woman,” he repeats.

  “It’s still . . . a bit crazy.”

  “Sheesh. Comin’ from the guy who plays with lightning bolts for a living?”

  The drinks come and we toast with a tap like we always used to, as if we haven’t even just had this conversation. Twilight grins a tad and then the expression erases.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And I’m sorry to hear about your ongoing demon problems.”

  “Demon?”

  “Uh, you know, the living star guy. . . .”

  “Oh,” Twilight says. “Him. Yeah. Well, funny thing about that. . . .”

  But I cut him off, ploughing into a stream-of-consciousness account of what’s happened in my private life that would read like a Tim Powers novel if only it had a good editor. Instead, my story comes across like the garbled confessional it is. I explain the John Lennon thing, my possibly evil time-travelling half-brother Julian, the Yoko Ono/Maxine connection, and even the island. And I really can’t explain why this urge to come clean always hits me with Twilight, of all the people. It’s like there is a comfort and objectivity in his grey demeanor. I feel at least I can expect his reaction to be genuine, however unpalatable it might be.

  When I look up from the bottle I’ve been cradling – it’s gone warm now in my awkward grasp – my pal the anti-hero is staring at me with a mix of shellshock and dread.

  “Christ, I need another drink,” he says.

  He holds up two fingers and a blonde with Aphrodite’s cleavage quickly brings another pair of Stolis.

  “Only cure I’ve ever known for a fuck-storm like that is to go on a bender, buddy,” Twilight says.

  He takes a drink like he’s dousing a fire and emits a burp from between clenched teeth like it hurts him. He wipes a tear from his eye and motions to me with the end of the bottle he’s just been sucking.

  “How long have you known about all this shit?”

  “It’s been going on for a while,” I say.

  “Have you got a plan of action or something?”

  The noun sounds like something vast and alien to him. I’m not sure Twilight has known a plan of action his entire life. Raised in the sort of illicit wealth that drives a young man to solve his existential ennui by dabbling in black magic sort of elevates him above the petty concerns of comparatively ordinary folks like me.

  From one of my belt compartments, I tug the small notebook in which I have lately taken to writing feverishly. The Ikea pencil is with it. I flip past old leaflets covered in women’s phone numbers and find a shaky-handed list with just the first item crossed out.

  “I’ve been trying to figure it all into one piece, you know?”

  “Shit, Zephyr. How long have you known about this island?”

  “A few days. Or a week, maybe.”

  “And you haven’t gone there yet?”

  “Well . . . things keep popping up. Like this stuff with your uncle.”

  Twilight just looks at me and shakes his head like I’m a disappointment.

  “Fuck, man. I thought you were a man of action. Did your wife take your balls when she took you to the cleaners?”

  I decide not to tell him that technically it’s my wife who owes me alimony.

  “You think I’m . . . chickening out or something?”

  “You gotta ask yourself why haven’t hit that island yet, Zephyr.”

  The realization that perhaps he is right and the whole thing terrifies me more than I’d ever want to know strikes me as Twilight shifts slightly in his seat and his eyes go past mine and into the foyer.

  “Oh good. He’s here,” the big guy says.

  Almost shaking with successive waves of reality, I am more than a little distracted as I see who he means. Tony Azzurro and a suite of Armani-clad goons shuffle into the foyer like a
bunch of cashed-up pallbearers.

  “You asked the Toecutter to come here?”

  “Life’s short,” Twilight says. “The man owes you a favor. Better to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  And we stand from our chairs as the old man approaches.

  Zephyr 5.13 “Talking Mass Murder”

  AZZURRO STUDIES ME like a piece of modern art and only ends up grasping my shoulders and doing the wop kiss thing reluctantly. Twilight is absented from the whole thing, ignored like the disappointing nephew he is – you’d think the guy went into dentistry rather than thaumaturgy – and someone gets the drinks in, and by the time the Toecutter and I are eyeballing each other across the smoked glass table we’re all nursing twenty-dollar shots of rye.

  “Zephyr,” the old man says, seemingly aged a little since last we spoke. “My brother’s son tells me you had some questions about associates of mine.”

  I nod, run a finger under my nose and sniffle and try to put my recent emotional flutter in the past as Azzurro winces and moves in his chair like a man with a bad case of piles.

  “You would’ve heard about my run-in with Infernus.”

  “Infernus isn’t one of my boys,” Azzurro replies.

  “He was with T-Bird, Frost . . . Gravitas.”

  The Toecutter makes a noise.

  “These people, too, they’re no longer with me.”

  “There’s a, uh, scientist, name of Thurson? Authorities found him dead. Autopsy suggests some unusual cellular activity.”

  “Yeah?”

  A goon steps forward with a light for the old man’s cigar. After a couple of puffs, I realize there’s no mechanism, just the yellow flame flickering from the black suit’s finger. I look up and the guy deadpans me, so I wink.

  “Careful,” I say, thinking of my mother. “That thing could get you killed.”

  The suit starts to move and Azzurro slaps his palm up and into the ape’s chest. I note the other half-dozen mooks sneering at me, buddies perhaps of the few of them I waxed while fighting with Twilight earlier this year. I can’t help wonder if they’re all packing abilities – and if so, that should worry me, as it confirms my suspicions and means the scene really is getting out beyond me. I imagine it’s what veteran musicians must feel with the proliferation of today’s numerous boy bands – too many to keep track.

  “I’m a busy man, Zephyr,” the old man says. “What did you want to ask me?”

  I start to open my mouth and it turns into a wicked grin. I know the question, but this is a dance, if not a full-blown Michael Jackson video. I can’t just come right out with it, so instead there’s a change of tack.

  “Toecutter,” I say, and smile again as it conjures the effect I desire, the old man rocking back in his seat in surprise at the gear change and maintaining his disaffected tough guy routine to the very end. “Why’d they call you that?”

  Azzurro considers me a moment and then there’s the slow evolution of a smile. Like a velociraptor in a $3000 suit or something, Tony lifts ring-studded fingers to wipe the concession to a smirk from his hard-shaven chin.

  “You’re talkin’ about a hangover from my youth,” the old man says.

  “Go on.”

  “You know what they say about the big toe, Zephyr?”

  “Uh, only men, apes and elephants have one?”

  “No. They say a man can’t keep his balance without one.”

  Azzurro smirks. He shrugs and lifts a hand, the whole Godfather routine.

  “When I was just startin’ out in this business, there seemed a certain poetry in this idea, this principle. You ain’t got no balance because you crossed the wrong people, you dig?”

  I silently quoth you dig? but say nothing, nod.

  “First few fellas crossed me, I had their big toes cut off. We snipped them, like with those things for cuttin’ sheet metal.”

  He looks away, less mirthful now.

  “But it’s not really true what they say. Maybe it plays hell for a man’s balance, not havin’ any big toes an’ that, but really you got to be a particularly stupid breed of individual to have a man cut off your toes and still go around behind his back. Tenacity o’ the human spirit, I think they call it.

  “These days it makes sense just to fuckin’ whack the guy. Then there ain’t no comin’ back.”

  “So is that what happened to Martin Thurson?”

  “I don’t know no Martin Thurson,” Azzurro says.

  “He developed the patents you used when you set up Mys-tech,” I say. “You know Mys-tech? The same place Infernus and his other pals robbed?”

  “Tried to rob,” Azzurro says. “I had my girl Frost there. You got in the middle of a little somethin’ there Zephyr. Not the first time for you, I know. I’m sorry. You tell me what I can do? We still owe you a big one for saving junior here.”

  At this the Mafioso points at Twilight, propped up at the bar behind the table we’ve taken and working on possibly his fourth or fifth glass.

  “I’m just trying to work out what’s going on, Mr Azzurro,” I say.

  I’m trying to be the straight guy here, so I hold up my hands to show there’s no hard feelings.

  “Infernus and a few of your ex-employees – including your girl Frost, I should point out – tried to break a villain free from Rikers known as Crescendo. You heard of him?”

  “. . . guy who levelled that Yid hospital or somethin’. . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “Bad character.”

  “A friend of Kingmaker, apparently.”

  The old man’s face closes up and suddenly I know I’ve got him. Azzurro signals to his goons and one of them comes forward with his overcoat as the Mafioso stands. I stand too. Twilight just watches, eternal and uncaring.

  “Mr Azzurro, what you do with your own time that doesn’t affect the city is your own business, but these people are dangerous,” I say. “Crescendo is dangerous. He’s a rank eight or nine villain. If he got free, you’re talking mass murder.”

  “I told you, none of them people is with me now.”

  “Not even Frost?”

  He eyes me like a shark, which is to say side-on.

  “Not even Frost,” he says sadly.

  He fucks with his scarf and lapels a moment and his hired men, practically glowing with their illicit and recently-bestowed powers, bristle with their barely contained wishes to kill me. And suddenly the old man turns to me face-on.

  “Stan Vinci is the man you want to speak to,” Azzurro says.

  “Uncle Stan?” Twilight says from behind us, no longer so remote after all, but downright aghast.

  Tony nods once. “Plastic Stan.”

  And with no further whiff of explanation he leaves.

  *

  THE ROOM SEEMS to shake a little as I sit, deflated, and Twilight moves swiftly to reclaim the chair warmed by his uncle – actualization of a metaphor that, if it applied anywhere else would have the Wop gangs of old New York gunning for him faster than he could blink.

  “So who is this Plastic Stan? Another uncle?”

  “Not a real uncle,” Twilight says. He is paler than before. “A family friend growing up. One I thought hadn’t been touched by all this.”

  “All this?”

  “The business,” Twilight explains.

  We stare at the table a moment. I want to ask him about Cusp, but it seems like this isn’t going to be the time. Then suddenly Twilight speaks again.

  “I was going to tell you before and it seems like there’s no way other than to come right out with it,” he says and looks me defiantly in the eye.

  “I know where to find Ras Algethi,” he says.

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  Twilight nods and his hair model looks break into a genuinely evil grin. All that’s missing is a torch beneath his chin.

  “Jocelyn.”

  “Jocelyn?”

  “Lady Macbeth.”

  “Yes. What about her?” I ask.


  “She’s carrying him as her child.”

  I am gobsmacked. And I seem to recover only in time for the entire glittering building to give a lurch.

  With a burst of adrenaline, it seems like time slows and I am able to see the cuneiform ripple of air molecules and trampled lines of kinetic energy as the closest glass walls shatter inwards.

  There is screaming and a nearby roar from the collapse of the elevator shaft. My first thought is for a terrorist attack. But German architects designed the building and it holds firm as what feels like a high number earthquake rolls across the city.

  The external glass sheathing us from the city street below is gone, and like the nervous will-o’-the-wisps we are, Twilight and I flit from the building just in time to see a more elderly structure across the street groan and lose one of the big Ghostbusters-inspired gargoyle structures on its upper northerly tip.

  It’s too big and travelling too fast and too far gone for either of us to do anything about it. Although there are pedestrians, the quake has driven most the people to the edges of the street so I’m not really worried until I note the massive granite sculpture tumbling directly for the stretch limousine into which Tony Azzurro hurries.

  There’s a flash of blue-white light as one of Azzurro’s minders makes a pathetic attempt to save the old man’s life. And then there’s simply the noise of gravity and mass doing their business as the falling obstacle dwarfs the men and vehicle it demolishes. Twilight and I are there a split-second later, but like I said, just too late.

  The Toecutter and at least three of his black-clad mooks are collateral in the city’s soon-to-be-expanded dry-cleaning bill.

  Zephyr 5.14 “The Death Of Galaxies”

  I DESCEND TO what I guess Darwin would argue is still natural selection, Twilight just moments behind me.

  The huge chunk of masonry has flattened the car before rolling off and turning two of the black-suited goons to bucket-loads of hairy red paste clad in Italian suits. Azzurro was halfway into the limo when the block hit and it’s not a pretty sight.

  The two survivors from the Toecutter’s entourage pick themselves up, a guy with a labret piercing and bleach-blonde quaff, and a darker ethnic type with bad acne scarring along his throat and the sides of his face. As they take in the scene of their former boss’s devastation and then glance at Twilight and I, well aware the grey-clad Adonis beside me is more than just technically a relative, they’re as expressive as claymation and not quite as clever.