Stealing Life

by Antony Johnston

  He took a right and merged into the sea of shoppers drifting slowly down the street. His stomach growled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since before setting out for the businessman’s apartment. He sidestepped his way through the crowd, weaving with a practised air toward the door of a small café. A hand-written sign declared the owner’s politics: NO WIZARDS, NO VARNIANS. Nicco reckoned he could get away with it. He pushed open the door, ignored the owner’s grunted greeting and entered, letting the door shut behind him. He found an empty booth in the back corner, as far away from the street as possible, and sank into the leather seats with a tired sigh. A holovid projector above the booth was running a news stream with the sound turned off.

  For the first time since the previous night, he thought of Tabby. Had she made it out of the apartment okay? Was she safely back at Zentra’s? He considered calling her, but then remembered he was still wearing the same clothes from the previous night, and never took his phone on a job. He wasn’t stupid enough to leave the ringer on, but that wasn’t the problem. Every cell phone broadcast its location, accurate to within a few feet, to the network. Even switching the phone off didn’t help. The only way to stop it broadcasting your location was to remove the battery, rendering it useless. So you might as well just leave it at home.

  But Nicco was pretty sure Tabby would be fine. Even if the john had recovered before she left, what could he have done? Any cops he called would be more interested in him than a working girl. Azbatha was a pit, sure, and the police often turned the other cheek; but that didn’t mean they’d blatantly ignore a crime happening right under their noses.

  Nicco decided to get the swag fenced first, but call in at Madame Zentra’s before going back to his apartment. Tabby wouldn’t mind that he probably stank like a tramp by now, especially if he showed up with pockets full of beer money.

  “Sign says no Varnians.”

  Nicco looked up into the sour face of an old woman scowling down at him. She wore a faded pinafore, covered in twenty-year-old stains, and clutched a notepad to her bosom.

  He was pretty sure it said Café above the door, not Abattoir, but she must be what passed for a waitress in this place. Nicco smiled up at her. “No, no, exactly! I am from the Shalith, you know. To the East of Turith.”

  The woman peered at Nicco, then sniffed in contempt. “All right,” she said. “What do you want?”

  He ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and smiled to himself as the woman lumbered away to the counter. His impersonation of Xandus had been pretty poor, but there was as much chance of this woman having actually met someone from the other side of the country as Nicco himself—until last night, anyway. Added to his plain, rumpled wardrobe—Varnians were famous for their bright, garish costumes—it was enough to convince her.

  Besides, he was only half Varnian.

  Nicco leaned back to watch the holovid stream. Local news showed a few council members on the steps of City Hall. There was the mayor, smug as ever with his ex-model wife in her ridiculous hat, who happened to be half his age, on his arm. The usual rubbish, or so it seemed until a caption ran across the bottom of the stream. It read: HISTORIC TRADE VISIT FROM HURRUNDAN GOVERNOR.

  The sour-faced waitress returned with his order. Nicco was ravenous, but kept his eyes on the silent news stream as he tucked into his lunch. Xandus wasn’t kidding about Werrdun being old. The man’s skin was paper-thin, tight across his bones and tendons. His skin had so many liver spots it would be easier to count the clear patches. Nevertheless he looked in comparatively good health, keeping good posture as his groundcar convoy rolled up to city hall, and when they showed him greeting the mayor he walked without sticks.

  Not without bodyguards, though. Nicco counted at least ten burly, serious-looking men with suits as dark as their skin and one hand permanently stationed inside their jackets. Perhaps they were worried someone would try to steal Werrdun’s magic necklace.

  The necklace itself was a large, gold thing. It looked ceremonial, like it belonged on a tribal chieftain, and the news stream captioned it the FAMOUS SYMBOL OF WERRDUN’S OFFICE. It couldn’t be too famous, at least around here; it had been so long since Turith had done any trade with Varn that he doubted anyone in Azbatha knew where Hurrunda even was, much less the gaudy necklace worn by its governor. Apart from Xandus, it seemed. Nicco wondered if the necklace really was magical. Even assuming it was, did Werrdun wear the real thing? Or was it just a paste and nickel copy, while the real necklace stayed firmly locked up in a secure Varnian vault?

  Nicco finished his sandwich. It wasn’t his job to worry about it. Let some other mug take on the trigger-happy gorillas shadowing their governor; Nicco had stolen goods to fence. He slotted his card into the table’s paypod, settled up and walked out. He didn’t leave a tip.

  NICCO HADN’T EVEN walked a hundred yards when he spotted two pale faces heading for him through the crowd. The mass of people parted as they advanced, backing away with startled expressions and low, uneasy whispers. “Thinmen,” the whispers said. But these thinmen weren’t Xandus’. Their faces were blank.

  Bazhanka’s goons.

  Nicco made a sharp turn, hoping to lose them in the crowd and make off down a side alley, but there were another two behind him approaching fast. He was cornered, and the rapidly-thinning crowd only made him more exposed.

  “Salarum.” The voice was a slightly deeper-pitched imitation of Bazhanka’s own, the mob boss’s one concession to vanity. “Mr Bazhanka is waiting for his payment.”

  Nicco was backed against a wall, with the thinmen crowding around him. The smell of wax hit his nostrils again. He felt sick. “I know, and I’m going to pay, I’m on my way to get some money now...”

  “Mr Bazhanka has been very patient.”

  “I know. I appreciate that.”

  “But even a patient man has limits.”

  “I know. I’m going to pay. I just need to... dispose of some inventory.”

  The thinman cocked his head, considering this for a moment. Finally he said, “You have twenty-four hours. We will find you again. Do you understand?”

  Nicco nodded, exhaling at last.

  “Goodbye, Salarum.”

  Nicco watched them go, parting the street crowds like a royal procession and leaving gossiping afternoon shoppers in their wake. Those nearest Nicco looked at him with suspicion. No-one bothered to ask if he was all right.

  THE EXTERIOR SIGN read International House of Hair. It was an upmarket unisex salon catering to the wives of rich men, the husbands of rich women and kids doing their best to make their parents less rich by the day. Nicco entered, ignoring the customers and approached the reception desk. A pale-skinned young woman with outrageously big hair—red as blood on snow—sat behind the desk. She wore a sharp suit and low-cut blouse underneath, and her name badge informed the world her name was Shenney. She gave Nicco a lopsided smile and raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Salarum. How can I help you?”

  Nicco rubbed a hand over his cropped dark hair and smiled. “Afternoon, Shenney. I’d like to make an appointment for follicle therapy treatment, please.”

  Shenney pressed a button on her desk phone. “One moment please, sir, while I check the diary.” Nicco couldn’t see it, but he knew that behind her was a monocell camera transmitting a stream through to the backroom. He exaggerated a smile for its benefit. “Mr Salarum wishes to make a therapy appointment,” said Shenney towards her desk.

  “Eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” replied a tinny voice.

  Shenney looked back up at Nicco. “Eight o’clock—”

  “Actually, I was hoping you might have something this afternoon. Possibly even right away?” Nicco leant on the desk, emphasising the urgency.

  Shenney pursed her lips. “As sir knows, we can only see clients according to the appointment calendar—hey!”

  Nicco leant all the way over Shenney and hit the button himself. “Allad, you lazy son of a squid,�
�� he hissed into the microphone. “Let me in right now or I’ll tell Shenney here where we really went for your last birthday.”

  Shenney looked at Nicco with surprise. “You told me it was a nightclub,” she whispered. “Where did you take him?”

  “It was a bloody nightclub!” said the tinny voice.

  Shenney pouted. “A nightclub that just happened to be right above a brothel, I’ll bet!”

  “Are you coming, or what?” said the tinny voice. A door behind the desk buzzed, signalling the lock was deactivated.

  Nicco strode through, winking back at Shenney.

  Behind the door was a short corridor leading to store rooms and an office. A handsome man the same age as Nicco stepped out of the office and glared at him. “I should skin you alive, you sneaky son of a squid. What in the fifty-nine hells is so urgent?”

  “I’m fine, thanks, Allad. It’s great to see you too.”

  “Come on, into the back room.” Allad led Nicco down the corridor to a heavy metal door with a keypad lock. He punched a code into the pad and the door swung open.

  Nicco followed Allad into the windowless room. “You know,” he said, “One of these days I’m going to come in here and actually ask for a haircut.” The door swung shut behind them. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were lined with the same metal as the door, and a metal table stood in the middle of the space. “What’s wrong with a betting shop, anyway? Or a strip bar? I never understood the hairdresser thing.”

  Allad leaned on the table and sighed. “Your problem, Nicco, is that you’re too old-fashioned. Card dens, gentleman’s clubs, they’re old hat. Too obvious. No-one suspects a hairdresser.”

  “Until they raid you for bad taste.” Nicco hefted his pack onto the metal table. “Are we closed?”

  “Hold on...” said Allad. He crossed to the back of the room and pressed a button set in the metal wall. A deep hum, barely above subsonic, vibrated through the floor. The button activated an omniscrambler loop embedded in all six sides of the room, surrounding it with charged black noise particles that shielded the space from recording and surveillance equipment. So long as the loop remained active, nobody could spy on them.

  Allad returned to the table. “Done. So what have you got for me?”

  Nicco opened his pack and took out the soap dish and bath plug. A scrap of paper tumbled out of the pack with them, and Allad picked it up from the table.

  “Who’s ‘Xandus’?” he said.

  “What? Give that here.” Nicco took the note from Allad. In neat handwriting, it read:

  Xandus

  Phone: 207212-578707

  Nicco felt violated. Being knocked unconscious and tied up was one thing, but the wizard must have rifled through his pack while he was out cold too. That was just rude. “It’s nothing,” Nicco said, shoving the paper into his pocket. “Just some crank I met.”

  “Cranks often give you their phone numbers, do they?”

  “I can’t help my raw sex appeal,” Nicco said with a smirk. He held up the soap dish and bath plug. “Anyway, I got these from an apartment last night. I’ve got Bazhanka on my back, and I need to come up with some quick cash. What do you reckon?”

  Allad picked the items up and turned them over, then shrugged and replaced them on the table. He walked to one of the metal walls and placed his hand on a barely-discernible plate in the surface; a green band of light moved down the plate, scanning Allad’s hand, and a panel slid back to reveal several shelves full of goods: watches, holovid boxes, statuettes, paintings and more. All of it was stolen, some by Nicco himself. Allad bent to retrieve a gadget from the floor of the hidden cupboard and brought it back to the table, picked up the soap dish and held the gadget to it. It was small, black and smooth-cased, with only a tiny vidscreen to break up the polished contours.

  Allad frowned at the vidscreen display. “Not solid, then.”

  Nicco cursed. “I thought they were. Still, even plated, that’s a fair bit of gold. The wars may be over, but Varn hasn’t exactly opened its mines to the public. There’s enough there to melt down and sell...” Nicco trailed off. Allad was looking from the vidscreen readout to the soap dish and back again, his frown growing deeper. “What’s up?”

  Allad looked up at him in confusion. “Nicco, these aren’t gold.”

  “You already said that. Come on, they’re still worth a couple of grand. I just need—”

  “No, no... It’s not even gold plate. This is an alloy knock-off.”

  “What?” Nicco snatched the soap dish from Allad and stared at it. He rubbed it hard on the edge of the metal table. The ‘gold’ started to flake away. “But... but...”

  “Sorry, Nicco, but these are useless to me. I’m not running a boot sale, here.”

  Nicco stared at the flaking alloy in disbelief. The cheap bastard! He thanked the watery saints he hadn’t tried to lug the Praali rug out of there, or the Ven Ladall paintings. If even the soap dish was fake, chances were everything in that apartment was a cheap knock-off to impress girls and clients. Nicco cursed himself for not noticing. Tabby, the businessman, the screaming globe... He hadn’t been thinking a hundred per cent. He should have aborted as soon as he saw Tabby in the bedroom, turned back and given it up as a bad job.

  Except that he desperately needed to pay Bazhanka something, even just a few thousand, to keep those thinmen from breaking his legs. Nicco had no doubt they’d find him, if not at his apartment then at Zentra’s, or in a club, or even on the street like they had earlier that day.

  He cursed and took the scrap of paper from his pocket.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “SALARUM.”

  It was the same deep voice Nicco had heard the day before, but he couldn’t tell if the thinman standing at the door of Wallus Bazhanka’s club was the same one who had accosted him in the street. From what Nicco could remember, thinmen only lived three to four months before the charm ran out; for all he knew, the one who threatened him yesterday had crumbled to dust by now.

  “I’m here to see—”

  “Mr Bazhanka is expecting you.” The golem opened the door to the club and stood back to let Nicco pass.

  Nicco walked through the steel-backed door into a dark entrance corridor, past the cloakroom and through a pair of large glass doors into the main room. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, thirty minutes before Bazhanka’s thinmen came looking for him and several hours before the club opened for business, but you could have been forgiven for thinking it was just a slow night. The lights were low, the music was playing and two dancers writhed and bumped up on the stage. But the only patron was a middle-aged man who sat in a dark corner far from the stage, with two heavies—real people, not thinmen—flanking him.

  The man was grossly overweight and completely hairless. Even his heavy brow was bald, though it did little to improve the appearance of his small, heavily-lidded eyes—the left of which was lopsided, drooping down toward his cheek. The man’s skin bore the washed-out pallor of a born-and-bred Azbathan: his thick pink lips and heavy jowls seemed almost to float on it as he devoured hishuge lunch. His lips smacked and sauce dripped down his chin, onto the napkin protecting his bulging suit.

  Wallus Bazhanka.

  Under normal circumstances, Nicco would never have taken the skycar heist job from Bazhanka. He was a lone operator, and he liked it that way. Also, the man just plain creeped him out. When Nicco was arrested for the bank job, Bazhanka sent his own lawyers to defend the young thief. He asked the mob boss why he’d helped him, but Bazhanka would only make some vague references to knowing Nicco’s mother many years ago—which was odd, because his mother had only ever mentioned Bazhanka to Nicco once.

  He was nine, and already a young thief, boosting holovids and fencing them for fifty lire apiece; and his mother had implored him not to join the mob, to never get in bed with the man who, even back then, already ruled Azbatha’s underworld with a meaty fist. “A debt to Wallus Bazhanka will never be paid,” she’d said. It was the
first and last time she ever spoke his name, and one of the few pieces of advice from his mother that Nicco had listened to. And he’d never regretted it.

  But when Bazhanka’s lawyers had turned up at the city jail pro bono, what choice did he have? Nicco couldn’t afford a decent lawyer himself, and the evidence included video footage that clearly showed him entering the basement of the building next to the bank carrying one tool bag, then leaving half an hour later with two.

  Somehow, Bazhanka’s men had cleared all that up. One of the holovid files went missing, and they argued the other one into a corner. Then they ran rings round the prosecution. Three days later Nicco was a free man—legally, at least. He knew he wouldn’t be free of Bazhanka until that debt was paid.

  And standing here now in the man’s club, Nicco thought back to his mother’s words. He’d tried to pay off the debt with the skycar theft, but it had only made things worse. Now he owed Bazhanka not just a favour, but ninety thousand lire.

  He strolled across the floor of the club, one of Bazhanka’s bodyguards watching him warily. When Nicco was ten feet away, the goon held up a beefy hand and motioned for Nicco to stop.

  The mob boss replaced his cutlery and wiped sauce and crumbs from his mouth with the napkin. “Nicco,” he said without looking up. “I am so happy to see you. So very happy. Always the eleventh hour with you freelancers, isn’t it? Always just the right side of late. And you could have been so very, very late.”

  Nicco ignored the implied threat and held up a plain black briefcase. It contained twenty-five thousand lire in cash.