by Eoin Colfer
The only thing or person that Clayton actually loved was his mother, Nancy. He had often asked himself why he felt so strongly about his mother and not about his father or TV, but he could never find an answer that satisfied him. Perhaps I came from her and so she is part of me, and the closest I can come to loving myself is to love her.
Clayton had no interest in making friends, but he did accept a young Hispanic neighbor, Luis Chavez, as a companion, as the boy was desperate for a buddy and willing to do whatever Clayton suggested in order to strengthen their bond. He had no way of knowing that Clayton valued him about as much as he did the frogs from biology.
Clayton’s suggestions included hiking out to the scrublands with their rifles and shooting at rabbits and buzzards. Real-world shooting helped Clayton refine his technique and adapt to the unexpected. He felt not a shred of remorse for littering the brush with bloody animal corpses. Those creatures had served their purpose, and they meant no more to Clay than drawings of them would.
Clayton Sr. was over the gosh-danged, star-spangled moon. His boy—HIS BOY, who folks said had a strangeness about him—was ripping up tournaments all over the country. He whipped that army brat Jennings Kreuger, and that snot-nosed Ivy Leaguer Holt Whitsun-Bang. The press were all over Whitsun-Bang when he won silver at the nationals; wait till they got a load of his Clay. At the last qualifiers, fourteen-year-old Clayton put a cluster of three in the bull, so tight it looked like a goddamn shamrock.
Clayton allowed his father to be happy, and he practiced smiling in the mirror so his mom would stop asking him what was the matter. And as long as his parents didn’t interfere with his development, he could let them stay alive.
It was not strange for Clayton to seriously consider killing people. He thought about it every day. And surely the ultimate point of weapons training was to kill humans. And didn’t his father support that by buying him a gun in the first place?
Clayton fired his competition weapon as often as he could over the next few years and trekked out into the wilderness for night shoots with Luis whenever possible. Pretty soon the wild critters presented no challenge and Clay felt himself losing his edge. After placing second in the prestigious Green Creek Shootout, he decided that the stakes would have to be higher.
Luis and Clay spent a couple of weeks picking off neighborhood pets, but that was tiresome, as the bodies had to be removed and buried, an arduous task that was of no benefit to Clay’s development, as far as he could see. And so one night, when Clay sent Luis into a garden to fetch the corpse of Laddie the Labrador from old Mrs. Wang’s garden, he found himself drawing a bead on his young friend and wondering whether shooting a human would affect him like books and TV said it would. Would he be traumatized, or permanently scarred, even? Clay doubted it, and almost before he knew what he was doing, he thumbed a round into the breech of his rifle, screwed an eye to the night vision sights, and shot Luis from five hundred yards.
Hell of a shot, Clay, he said quietly, impersonating his father. Hell of a shot.
He sat and waited for something to happen inside his brain. Hoping that he would feel something. But nothing came. Shooting a human was like shooting a paper target. He knew that now, and so the experience had been worthwhile.
When the police arrived, Clayton was sitting on the bluff, finishing a bag of Oreos he’d brought along as a snack.
The gun went off, he said over and over again, doing the sad face he’d learned from TV police procedurals. The gun went off.
And they had believed him, as he knew they would, for he was a clean-cut honors student, and the alternative was too terrible.
Three months later, Clayton was accepted into West Point in New York State. The army was a natural place for a boy like him and, truth be told, relationships had been more strained than usual in the Box house since Luis’s shooting, so his father was glad to see him pack his gear.
Two years and this boy will make the Olympic team, the admissions officer told Clay Sr. and Nancy.
Nancy cried because she would miss her son terribly, but also because a part of her was relieved to have Clay and his bag of lethal tricks out of the house. Maybe now the whispers would stop.
Clay felt an unfamiliar jauntiness as he boarded the Greyhound bus for New York. There were big things ahead for him. He was certain of it.
CAMDEN CATACOMBS, LONDON, 1899
The zealot’s smile that had been pasted across Vallicose’s face since meeting Clayton Box was shaken a bit by the Blessed Colonel’s quarters. In the future, these quarters would be preserved for posterity, but they would not look like this. On the historical tour she would take, this room was undecorated except for a painting based on Michelangelo’s Pietà. A room that made it abundantly clear that the inhabitant cared not a jot for worldly possessions, and, in fact, Vallicose had modeled her own quarters in the academy’s officers’ wing on Box’s. No embellishments besides a miniature version of the same print. And now she found herself in an underground palace that was more opulent than even the Jax president’s residence, which was said to have carpet so deep that small dogs had gotten lost in it, and so much gold leaf that the floors had to be reinforced against the weight. Vallicose had seen a photograph taken with a spy-cam.
It was disgustingly decadent.
But this chamber was sumptuous beyond even the Palais de l’Élysée. Lavish beyond words. The individual pieces could be described, but the combined effect left the visitor overwhelmed. The walls were lined with illuminated tapestries depicting medieval Crusades to the Holy Land. The hard floor was heaped unevenly with Oriental rugs weighed down on the corners with vases veined in gold. Several chandeliers hung from the ceiling, all gleaming with electric light, their crystals casting rainbows on the walls and furniture. The gilded chairs were hand-carved and strewn with velvet cushions. Incense burned from golden pots, making the cavernous chamber with its high arches seem like some form of temple.
Box waved vaguely at the decoration. “All this. The decoration. I’m toying with it. I’m not sure if it’s a good fit for me. Gadhafi made it work. And old Saddam. Saddam spent millions on his homes. Billions. And to a lot of cultures, wealth is power. They don’t understand modesty, just can’t fathom it as a concept.” The colonel flicked one of the several dozen tassels in the room. “But if you want the military’s loyalty, then you need to appeal to their basic instincts. Traditional values: country, family, self-sacrifice.” Box tipped a jade warrior statue with his foot. “This hardly says self-sacrifice, does it?”
Witmeyer kept her face bland, unwilling to respond one way or the other.
“No, Lord Colonel,” said Vallicose, eyes respectfully downcast. “It does not.”
Box sat on the lip of his desk. “No. It doesn’t. I think humble might be the way to go for appearances’ sake. Perhaps with a holy picture.”
“The Pietà,” blurted Vallicose.
Box turned his striking blue eyes on her. “The Pietà. Yes. Son and mother together. It doesn’t get much more family values than that. Well done, soldier.”
“Thank you, Lord,” said Vallicose.
Box pushed out his lower jaw, then moved it from side to side, as though working out a kink. This was his thinking face.
“Lord,” he said finally. “You referred to me as Lord. That’s interesting. I can only surmise that my plan was—will be even more successful than I anticipated.”
“The Boxite Empire covers most of the globe, Lord.”
“Most?”
“France, Lord. France holds out. And parts of South America.”
Box frowned. “That is…inefficient. The Boxite Empire, my empire, should be more efficient.”
“The Thundercats are making headway in Normandy.”
“Thundercats?” Box did his version of a smile, which seemed more like a grimace. “Ah yes, my cartoon friends. I found that show mildly amusing. And so I
must have appropriated the name for my police. Which branch are you?”
“Sister Witmeyer and I are special agents in security and counterintelligence,” said Vallicose.
Box walked around the desk, folded his lanky frame into a chair, and opened a ledger on the leather tabletop.
“Very well, my Thundercat future soldiers. I need you to tell me everything, starting with the history of that striking symbol on your coat.”
Vallicose began to talk, slowly at first, but soon the future facts flowed out so fast that Box had trouble writing them all down. When she paused to draw breath, Witmeyer took over. And as the Thundercats filled in the details, Clayton Box experienced a warmth in his chest that he rarely felt.
I am happy, he realized. I am satisfied.
When Vallicose and Witmeyer had finished describing their snapshots of the future, Box looked over what he had written.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes. That all sounds most efficient. Most efficient.”
Though the Thundercats could not have realized it, this was the highest compliment the colonel could have paid, and in a roundabout way, he was paying it to himself.
Box called Rosenbaum and issued some commands.
“Destroy the landing pad on Half Moon Street. I want things to stay the way they are going to be. No one comes, no one leaves.”
“Yes, Colonel. I’ll get a squad over there right away.”
“And I need death warrants written up, date sensitive, for Professor Charles Smart, who will live on Half Moon Street. And Cadet Chevron Savano, who will be a student in the Boxite Academy, which I will found after the second round of Boxstrike, apparently.”
Rosenbaum jotted down the details in a notebook.
“Method of execution?” he asked.
Box waved his hand. “Oh, at the executioner’s discretion, but both terminations must take place at Smart’s residence.”
“Discretionary, Colonel,” said Rosenbaum. “Noted.”
“I need a picture of the Pietà to hang behind my desk, and begin moving all this junk out of here.”
Rosenbaum could have pointed out that they were leaving the catacombs the following day, but the colonel was not fond of people questioning his orders.
“Send a cleanup crew to the Orient. I want all those bodies dumped in case they lead back to us at this crucial moment.”
“At once, Colonel.”
Box pointed at Vallicose’s coat. “And I would like this symbol, the Boxite symbol, stitched onto all uniforms.”
Rosenbaum nodded. “The dual symbolism is quite clever.”
“It is efficient,” corrected Box. “It conveys our ethos and loyalties in the minimum amount of strokes.” He bent to his ledger and was sketching the Boxite symbol when Farley entered the room, looking a little the worse for wear but a lot less terminal than he had when the Thundercats had found him in the orchestra pit.
“Colonel,” he said, “Malarkey’s bug is pinging loud and clear. He has run to his Grosvenor Square address. I would wager that Savano is with him. Let me take a small group of men…”
The colonel raised his large, bottom-heavy head from the twin waves of his ledger.
“No, Major,” he said. “I need you at the Hidey-Hole, to make the offer. The Rams know you. And Grosvenor Square is a privileged area; there will be plenty of police around. We need someone quiet and deadly. Rosenbaum, you are the sneakiest of us. Do you think Malarkey is a man you could kill?”
Woodrow clicked his pen. He was tired of being the secretary; it was not what he had been trained to do. He was trained to kill people without drawing attention to himself, and he hadn’t had a mission in months.
He could have answered: I can kill Malarkey in a heartbeat.
Or:
I could end his life in a flash.
Or his favorite from the Godfather movies.
Malarkey will be sleeping with the fishes.
But imagery and metaphor would simply confuse the colonel, who prized plain-speaking above all else.
So he said, “Yes, Colonel, I can kill Malarkey.”
“Good,” said Box. “Do it tomorrow morning.”
The thing that nobody ever factors in is personality. Time is like water: big people make a big splash.
—Professor Charles Smart
THE BATTERING RAMS’ HIDEY-HOLE, ROGUES’ WALK, LONDON, 1899
The distance in miles from Grosvenor Square to the Haymarket was barely a single unit, but measured with a moral ruler, the divide between Otto Malarkey’s town residences could fairly be judged as worlds apart. Where Grosvenor Square was the genteel, garden park where lords and dukes were happy to pay in excess of fifty thousand of Her Majesty’s guineas for a single dwelling and spend such a fortune on brocaded Louis Seize boudoirs that it would have in fact been more economical to paper every wall with pound notes, the Haymarket thoroughfare was such a concentrated collection of vice and crime that its environs were religiously avoided by all but the most corrupt bluebottles on the beat. If Grosvenor Square might be described as the jewel of the capital, then the Haymarket could be fairly called London town’s phony diamond. From a distance it glittered, but at close quarters it became clear that its glitter came not from a precious stone, but from the blade of the dagger coming to slit Johnny Punter’s throat.
And this is where they have sent me, thought Michael Figary, as he stepped down from a carriage on the top end of Regent Circus. This is where Missus Figary’s only son must go for his master.
The Haymarket rolled out before him in all its tawdry glory. Even at this time of the late morning, with the sun barely rising from the chimney pots, the revelers had begun to shake their musty feathers and make the pilgrimage to the market for their opium pipes, gin jars, and gambling parlors; clustering around these sporting gents, eager to lighten their purses with or without consent, were the shoals of sharp-faced rogues, thieves, and shamsters.
Michael Figary pinched a handkerchief over his nose as he picked his way along the sidewalk, stepping nimbly over fallen troopers in the brandy wars, and skirting the splashes from droppings carelessly deposited by wilted cab horses. The handkerchief was not an effective barrier against the assault on his nostrils, but then, how could a mere square of perfumed lace hope to compete against the odor of a hundred years’ unchecked decadence?
On first listen, Figary’s instructions had seemed simple: Gain access to the Hidey-Hole and find the lie of the land viz the Rams’ loyalties, then skip smartly to Grosvenor Square with any informations.
Straightforward it sounded, but this forthrightness crumbled under examination. Firstly, how to gain entrance to the Rams’ citadel? How then to remain during a war council? Finally, how to emerge unscathed with a pan full of intelligence to convey to his master?
Michael Figary mulled over these questions as he approached the double doors to the Hidey-Hole, definitely the most notorious den of vice in all of London, and certainly in the top five in Europe. The answer to all his problems was as plain as it had been since he arrived at it in Grosvenor Square: hard cash would open doors for both his casual admittance and hurried exit. Shining sovereigns would buy the nuggets of information he sought. These men were the princes of corruption, and princes of every court had one thing in common: a desire for currency to pay their tailors and romance their ladies. There was not enough money in the world to satisfy princes.
Well, perhaps for one night, thought Figary, feeling the weight of sovereigns in the pockets of a second pair of breeches he wore beneath the outer tweeds, breathing deeply to feel the shift of the pound notes tied to his chest. The commodore had given him over two hundred pounds to spend at his own discretion this evening.
And were I less loyal, or indeed more sober, then I would book a first-class berth on a steamer to Dublin.
But Figary was both loyal and slightly drunk,
and he intended to see his mission through. For although Michael Figary affected an Irish Catholic innocence, in actuality he had once been employed by the Dublin crime boss Lord Brass as a dipper on commission in the Monto area of Dublin, which bore some resemblance to the Haymarket. In fact, Michael Figary had operated as one of the best pickpockets in the city until he saved enough money to relocate to London, where he reinvented himself as Missus Figary’s only son and butler extraordinaire. So Figary was perhaps not as out of place as he pretended; indeed, he was more familiar with the goings-on in this class of place than he cared to admit.
The Hidey-Hole was open for business, and though Figary had never been in this particular establishment, he trotted up the steps with the confidence of an inveterate degenerate.
There were a couple of real beauties guarding the door—beauties in the ironic sense that even their own mothers could not refer to these mugs as beautiful, or even handsome. Plain would be stretching it. Ugly would be closer to the mark, and terrifying would be spot-on.
I suppose that’s why they are at the door, thought Figary.
He addressed the men as though answering their question.
“Yes indeed, it is a brisk morning, so it is.”
“So it is, what?” asked malevolent bludger number one, who Figary could now see sported a glass eye in the place of his own right eye. A glass eye with a purple skull instead of an iris.