Hell's Horizon

by Shan, Darren

  I spotted a flock of Troops gathered by a table near the door and slotted in. Jerry and Mike were the only ones from my shift but I knew the rest of them. Most members of The Cardinal’s personal army got to know each other over the years. There weren’t that many of us, and we were all bound to the city, so we were a close-knit group.

  “Back from vacation,” Jerry noted, welcoming me with a raise of his mug. That led to questions about where I’d been, and I spent a pleasant quarter of an hour describing my fishing trip.

  “Wish I could get up there,” a sad-eyed guy called Oisin remarked. “I’ve been working weekends since New Year’s. Going up midweek ain’t the same.”

  “Switch shifts,” somebody told him.

  “No point. The wife works weekends too. If I took a weekend off without her, she’d think I was doing the dirty.”

  “Women don’t understand fishing,” Mike agreed. “I went when I was younger. Every time I came back, my girl went through my stuff, looking for evidence. Got sick of it in the end, gave up the fishing. Should have given up her.”

  We all muttered and spent a few silent seconds reflecting on the ways of women. My coffee and toast arrived and I tucked in. I always started the day on a light meal.

  “Anything happen while I was away?” I asked.

  “A couple of new boys started,” Jerry informed me. “Been showing them the ropes.”

  “Tasso and Weld are at it again,” Mike added. Ford Tasso was The Cardinal’s right-hand man. Used to be commanding officer of the Troops. Frank Weld replaced him several years ago but Tasso continued to think of the Troops as “his men” and was constantly criticizing Frank’s handling of them. I had sympathy for Frank but I liked Tasso and had to admit that life had been more interesting when he was head honcho.

  “What’s it this time?” I asked.

  “Some broad was killed in the Skylight last Friday,” Jerry told me. “Wasn’t authorized. The Cardinal’s furious. He chewed out Tasso, and Tasso chewed out Frank. The two have been screaming at each other all weekend. Tasso’s saying nobody would have gotten past the Troops when he was in charge. Frank’s going on again about the security arrangements at the Skylight.”

  Frank had been looking to upgrade security at the Skylight since he took over from Tasso. It was one of The Cardinal’s key establishments, where many of his staff and clients stayed when in town. But unlike Party Central—which was pretty much impregnable—it was poorly guarded. The Cardinal liked it that way—it made his guests feel more relaxed—but Frank, who took the flak whenever anything went wrong, hated the setup.

  “Guess he’ll be bitching at us all week,” I sighed.

  “We’ve already had a day of it,” Jerry said. “Yesterday will go down as one of the biggest pain-in-the-ass Mondays in history. You were lucky you missed it.”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, checking his watch and drinking up, “but it’ll be even worse if we’re late today. Slightest excuse, he’ll be on our case. Let’s split.”

  “But we’ve half an hour yet,” I protested.

  “You think Frank will give a shit?” Mike replied. “I was ten minutes early yesterday and almost got my marching orders.”

  “Great to be back,” I grumbled, finished my coffee and grabbed the last slice of toast. “OK if I stick my bike in the back of the van and come with you guys?”

  Jerry’s got a soft spot for his van and normally vetoes such requests. But he took pity on me this once and helped me load it in, making sure I didn’t scratch the paint.

  Frank spotted us entering and made a production of checking the clock in the downstairs locker room of Party Central. We were a good eighteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  “Come in this time again,” he growled, “and it’ll be to pick up your personals.”

  While Frank stormed out to berate latecomers, we got into uniform. Dark blue pants and jacket, light blue shirt (a similarly shaded sweater for cooler seasons). Green-blue beret. Black shin-length boots. No tie, thank God. I had three uniforms, which I kept spotlessly clean. Ford Tasso hadn’t paid much attention but Frank was big on presentation. Rightfully so. It was different in the old days, when the Troops were an illegal band of thugs. The Cardinal had grown in stature and we were a city-approved force now, with all the trappings of respectability. We even got the occasional tourist stopping by Party Central to check us out. We worked for a gangster, sure, but we were one of the public faces of his organization, and as such we had to present a smart, professional front.

  Jerry studied the shine of his boots, shook his head and started working up a mouthful of spit. Mine were OK so I headed up a flight of stairs to one of the building’s many conference rooms, where my duties for the day would be posted.

  The room was half-full of soldiers, some coming on watch like me, some going off, some on their break. I found my name on the bulletin board and scanned to the right. Front door till lunch, yard patrol in the afternoon. That meant a rifle. Damn. I hated any weapon that required more than a single hand to operate.

  I signed for the Kalashnikov—a throwback to Tasso’s time—and a pretty young girl called Anra handed it over.

  “Missed you yesterday,” she said.

  “Vacation,” I explained.

  “Anywhere exciting?”

  “Upriver. Fishing.”

  “You on for some overtime this week?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What suits you?”

  “Tonight and tomorrow. I’ll see after that.”

  Overtime was never a problem in the Troops. I’d been putting in a lot of extra hours the last year or so. Nothing better to do with my time. Besides, keeping busy made it easier to stay off the bottle. Back when Ellen and I split, I hit it hard. Almost got drummed out of the Troops. Sunk about as low as you can get without going under, before Bill pulled me out of the slump.

  I spent the early part of the day out front of Party Central with nine other Troops and a couple of red-suited doormen. We were the first line of defense. We looked pretty lifeless to the hordes of people passing in and out, as if we were only there for show, but we were on constant alert, observing all who entered, ready to open fire at the first sniff of a threat. We weren’t on the lookout for weapons—the X-ray machines would pinpoint those—but telltale facial expressions and tics. Our job was to spot people who didn’t belong.

  Each of us had spent years studying the art of body language. You didn’t simply join the Troops and go on watch at Party Central. There was a six-month induction period, followed by five years in various branches and posts. Only then, if deemed worthy, were you introduced to the Party Central setup. A couple of months patroling the middle floors of the building, where you couldn’t do too much harm, then a gradual drift toward ground level. Several months pounding the beat in the rear yard, eventually moving out to guard the fences, and finally the front of the building and the lobby, where only the best were placed.

  An unofficial extra requirement for front-line Troops was that they’d drawn blood during their tenure. All of the ten guards on duty had killed at least once in the name of The Cardinal.

  I’d killed three times. The first was a butcher, after a mere eleven months in the service. He hadn’t been scheduled for execution. I’d gone around to his shop with a couple of more experienced Troops to squeeze protection money out of him. He was a stubborn, foolish old man. Lost his head. Let swing with a thigh-length blade. My colleagues ducked. That left me with a clear shot. I drew, took aim and—as he raised the knife high and roared like a bull—put four bullets through the center of his forehead, neat as you please.

  It was a month before they let me back into uniform. A month of psychiatric analysis. I didn’t think that was necessary—as I kept telling them, I didn’t enjoy killing but wasn’t afraid of it—but this was back when The Cardinal was fighting to have the Troops legalized. We were in the public eye, a topic of hot debate, and a lot of people claimed we were no better than hired assassins. Ta
sso and his administrators had to play things cautiously. Hence the kid-glove treatment.

  It was four years until I killed again, in a free-for-all shoot-’em-up with Russian mafia muscling in on The Cardinal’s territory. A hundred of us against thirty Ivans. The fighting raged through an apartment block they’d annexed. I was part of the third phalanx of Troops sent in. Ran up against a teenager in a dark, smoky hallway. He had a sock filled with coins and stones. I had a dagger that could have slit a bear’s chest open.

  I started at Party Central a couple of weeks after that.

  The third was three years ago. A crooked cop. It was the first time I’d been specifically sent to kill. I broke into his home while he was out. Gagged and tied up his wife and kid. Stood behind his bedroom door when I heard him entering downstairs. When he came in, I stepped out and put the lips of my gun to the back of his head.

  Boom.

  I nearly quit the Troops after that. It wasn’t the killing that got to me, but his status. He could just as easily have been a straight cop. Could have been Bill. You don’t make choices when you’re in the Troops—you go where told, shoot when ordered. I’d always known I might one day cross swords with Bill, but I only seriously contemplated the possibility after my run-in with the cop.

  I came close to packing it in. Life would have been so different if I had. I might have patched things up with Ellen. I won’t say the job’s what came between us, but it didn’t help. If I’d found legitimate employment and spent more time working on my marriage than polishing my guns…

  But past is past. No changing it. I dithered, drank, broke up with Ellen, drank some more. Bill finally weaned me off the bottle in his own inimitable way—he dragged me out of my apartment one drunken night and stuck a gun in my mouth. Told me his father drank himself to death. Said he wouldn’t let it happen to me. He’d rather kill me himself. Quicker that way. I stared into his eyes, found not even the ghost of a bluff, and went cold turkey the next day.

  I had a long talk with Tasso once I sobered up. Told him I was thinking of quitting. Spilled my fears. He listened silently. Doubtless he’d heard it all before. When I finished, he shrugged his impossibly broad shoulders and sighed.

  “What do you want me to say? Promise not to send you out to kill one of your friends? I can’t. Killing’s what you’ve been trained for. It took a long time to make a Troop of you, Algiers. If you want out, fine, you’re out. But if you stay, you carry on the same as before. You don’t get to choose your targets. You kill who you’re told, and if you don’t, you’ll be killed too.”

  Tasso always served it to you straight.

  I thought it over, weighed up the options and decided I was better off here than anywhere else. At least in the Troops I knew the score. So I carried on as normal and prayed I’d never have to go face-to-face with Bill or any of my friends.

  I spent lunch in an underground canteen watching sports on the TV. One of those world-sports programs, cutting from surf trials to beach buggies to cliff-diving. It was on most days around this time and was the only kind of regular show on my itinerary—I didn’t have a TV at home.

  Frank turned up toward the end of my break. Three-quarters of the people present sprang to their feet and started back to their posts, but he waved a hand at them and smiled ruefully. “It’s OK. I’m back to normal. No need to rush off.”

  There were some cheers and everybody sat down again. That was the good thing about Frank—his moods passed quickly.

  “Have a good weekend, Al?” he asked, taking the seat beside me.

  “So-so.”

  “How’s Bill?”

  “Fine.”

  Lots of people knew Bill. He ran a lucrative sideline in fireworks and had staged many private displays for friends and associates of The Cardinal’s. Bill was honest but realistic. If you were a cop in this city you could be straight but not antagonistic. It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of The Cardinal.

  “Hear about the stairs?” Frank asked.

  “What about them?”

  “We’re to keep off them, nights, till further notice.”

  “How come?”

  Frank shrugged. “Orders from above. No patrols. No guards on the doors.” He wasn’t happy. “You use the stairs a lot, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Keeps me in shape.”

  He glanced about to make sure no one was listening. “You working overtime this week?”

  “Three or four nights, most likely.”

  “Mind if I assign you to the upper floors?”

  I smiled. “I go where I’m told.”

  “Good. And, y’know, I might send word a few times a night that I need to see you down below, and, when you’re coming—”

  “—I’ll take the stairs?”

  “Right,” he grinned. “Unofficially, of course. Just taking the opportunity to grab a spot of exercise.” He stood, checked the TV—two bare-chested giants were using their teeth and lengths of rope to haul trucks in a race against each other—and shook his head. “Don’t like leaving the stairs unguarded. The orders come from The Cardinal, but try reminding him of that if something goes wrong…”

  Still shaking his head and muttering, he clapped me on the back and went about his rounds.

  Cloak-and-dagger stuff like that was par for the course in Party Central. The Cardinal moved in mysterious ways. You often saw men and women of power roaming the corridors of Party Central, pulling their hair out by the roots. The braver ones—like Tasso and Frank—took matters into their own hands and plotted behind The Cardinal’s back, doing their best to protect him from his crazy flights of whimsy. It was fine if he didn’t find out, but if he did…

  I wasn’t looking forward to taking the upper-floors watch—not much happened up there at night—but it always paid to do a man like Frank Weld a favor. You never knew when you might need one in return.

  I spent the afternoon in the massive rear yard of Party Central. This was my favorite spot. Business was brisk, as a result of which time—the foe of bodyguards worldwide—flew by. Cars had to be checked and rechecked. The fence had to be probed hourly for weak points. Delivery teams, chauffeurs, executives—all were subjected to our scrutiny and tracked into the building if they looked in the least suspicious. The yard could have been Party Central’s Achilles’ heel if not properly policed. As it was, you had a better chance of blasting your way through the front than squeezing in by the back.

  At the end of an uneventful shift I ducked out to grab a pizza. Shared it with a couple of guys in the canteen when I got back. Jerry was among them.

  “Frank get onto you about the stairs?” he asked as we ate.

  “Yeah.”

  Jerry made a face. “I hate the espionage shit. If The Cardinal says leave the stairs alone, we should leave ’em the hell alone. For all we know, he plans on running a team of cannibal ninja bastards up and down them all night long.”

  Cannibal ninja bastards. I had to smile. “You could have said no.”

  “To Frank?” Jerry snorted. “I also could have said, ‘Here’s my ass—ram a stick of dynamite up there and blow me to fuck.’ It was different with Tasso—he didn’t sulk if you turned him down. But Frank…”

  I nodded. Frank did tend to take things personally.

  “Wanna go out later?” Jerry asked. “I’m meeting a coupla guys in a club.”

  “I’ll pass,” I told him. “It’s been a long day.”

  Pizza finished, we took the elevator up, Jerry to the sixteenth, me a couple of stories higher. Offices were few and far between up here. Most petered out at the fourteenth. The Cardinal occupied the fifteenth. Beyond that sprawled the legendary floors of files—room after room packed with newspapers, reports, data sheets, populace surveys, birth and death certificates, volumes of city history, housing plans, income tax returns. The myth ran that The Cardinal had a detailed dossier on every one of the city’s millions. That couldn’t be true, of course, but he probably had something on the majority of them.<
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  I made the rounds of the mainly deserted rooms, breaking off two or three times an hour to meander down the stairs and back up again. I ran into other similarly deployed Troops a couple of times but we never acknowledged one another’s presence.

  I was on my way up from the third floor at about half past nine when Frank came storming down, his face a furious twist of lines.

  “Jeery!” he snapped. “What are you doing on these stairs? Haven’t you heard they’re off-limits?”

  I paused, wondering if he was joking or testing me. “You want me off the stairs?” I asked cautiously.

  “Of course I want you off the fucking—,” he started to roar, then caught himself and forced the bleakest of grins. “I know what I said earlier, but those orders are canceled, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Frank studied my face, daring me to question him. When I didn’t, he relaxed slightly and drew a long, disparaging breath. “Know what the crazy bastard’s done now? Ripped three-quarters of the guard out of the yard. Told me it was an exercise.”

  “What do you reckon he’s up to?” I asked.

  “Fucked if I know,” Frank replied. “Seems like he’s clearing the way for an invasion. There’s a gap out back that you could drive a fleet of tanks through. But what do I know? I’m just the head of this goddamn army. I’m a nobody.”

  He fumed for a few seconds, then grimaced. “Anyway, with this other shit going on, we may as well forget about the stairs. Let the lunatic have his way. Finish your shift, then do whatever the hell you want the rest of the week.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And pass on the word, would you?”

  “You’re the boss, Frank.”

  “Ha!”

  I saw the shift out, then took an elevator down to the basement and made for my locker. It had been a long night and I was looking forward to changing clothes and getting home. When I opened the door, something rolled out of the bottom and spun away down the floor. I thought it was a coin and I wasn’t going to bother with it, but then I noticed the dark sheen of the rolling object and hurried after it. I stopped it with my foot, then picked it up and studied it with incredulous suspicion.