Fun City Punch (Joe Dylan Crime Noir, #5)

by James Newman

  “The present moment is not what it once was. I’m an old man... I grew hungry in the afternoons. My physician demanded that I retire from the cloth, is it not fair?”

  “All is fair that happens, Ajarn.”

  “Like the loss of paper money? Well, any purely quantitative factor by nature must devalue over time. The awful moment may come in your lifetime. No money or credit will buy anything and the whole show will simply collapse. And you, Joe Dylan, still haunted by the Demon Dreams?”

  “Something new troubles me.”

  “Explain...”

  “I wonder if you can tell me something,” I took out the spider and handed it to him, “about this?”

  He looked at it for the length of time it took a cockroach to walk the length of the room. He weighed the metallic spider in his hand and grunted twice, the lines in his face tightened before an exclamation of tired air relaxed the furrows. “Follow me, inside.”

  Through a beaded curtain and into a dark room with a tiled floor, two mattresses surrounded by an opium bowl, and both the room and the bowl were empty. The old man approached a cabinet and took out a book, leather cover, pages made from rice paper, opened it. “This here is similar, is it not?”

  Swirling patterns, faint greens, reds and blues, I looked closer to see a long-legged beast with fangs dripping with blood, behind the spider spirals in black Indian ink. “What is this?”

  “The spider’s name is Opus. He is, according to ancient beliefs, an evil spirit who feeds from the Three Distractions.”

  “The three what?”

  “Distractions. At least the closest word I can think of distraction or maybe hindrance. These three activities stray the pupil from the noble path. Rule one is the use of mind or mood altering chemicals, alcohol, drugs. The second is the pursuit of sex outside of a loving relationship. Vice, I think you call it. Sex and Drugs outside of family and medicine was once frowned upon by the once inhabitants of the land on which this city now rests.”

  “And the third?”

  “The third law is violence. Violence with reason is sometimes permitted. The attack of a nation or a person for personal gain, monetary or otherwise, is not encouraged. The kind of thing you Westerners enjoy doing. You see, money is not a good enough reason to go to war. To protect your family, you may defend yourself, but you must not go out attacking families to protect your family. It does not work that way.”

  “Perhaps. Tell me the history the story of this Opus.”

  Ajarn clears his throat and stares into the middle distance as if the knowledge is somehow visible, and he only has to visualize it and then capture it in order to explain it. He clears his throat, sounds of winds in cherry blossom trees from Japanese gardens, and begins. “Master Fern was a son of a prince. As a young man, the palace thought him to be a promising warrior and a huntsman of great skill. The subjects enjoyed his early wisdom. But his mind wandered and eventually nature became him, and thus his body did follow his mind. In the year of 1888, this is the ancient Buddhist calendar, not your western model, Master Fern has left behind a life of wealth and luxury to become a kind of prophet poet drunkard who believes he can find the answers to the universe through the derangement of the senses and pleasures of the flesh. He is twenty-one years old and he stumbles into the town, which would eventually become the city in which we now both stand and talk in. In a way, you could say that Master Fern founded Fun City. Come, sit down.”

  A rosewood sofa, a sea chest, a table, Ajarn laid the book down and slowly turned the pages to reveal images of Master Fern as a young man living in the palace, hunting in the forest, concubines in the palace, elaborate silk and cloth furnishings, great feasts, roasted jungle fowl, musicians, poets, fortune tellers. Luxury entwined around him like the roots of a giant strangling fig tree as he spent more and more of his inherited wealth and explored excess in all its guises. Drugs, potions, serums, spells, and the Goddess in the lake with a body as firm and as solid as the rocks her pool is founded on. Caves, mountains; lizards with the attribute of speech. The book transfigured for several chapters to a kind of karma sutra, brush illustrations of the prince’s son in various sexual positions, mostly passive. Then the pages become darker as we assume addiction and decay did set in. He is sitting in lowly lit rooms alone with his pipe and his bottle to one side while writing in a journal. The caves and the outdoors are forgotten, apparent only in dreams as the story unravels.

  “The palace had to do something about this,” Ajarn continued. “It was both a shame and an embarrassment as stories of Master Fern’s excess became renowned folklore in surrounding kingdoms. Word got back to the palace. The shame of it led to Master Fern having a massive stroke. The mother, for by this time the father had died in shame, employed the services of a Forest Woman, a woman with knowledge of holistic medicine.”

  “A witch?”

  “Almost,” the old man turned the pages. “Here she is, her name is given as Zeline,” Ajarn pointed at a picture of the woman in the book. She had dark waist length hair. Her eyes were wild, large, and colored hazel, her body was thin, birdlike. “Zeline put together a medicine, a type of magical potion from four hundred and six different plants and flowers found in the jungles surrounding the City. Whoever drank the potion, which she called Loma, was said to drive out the Spider demon Opus from their body, and the taker of the medicine was said not to be effected by the city’s intoxicants and pleasures of the flesh. Some say that these stimuli simply had no impact on the user, and others said that the user would recoil back in pain once exposed to these sinful acts.”

  “But Master Fern was given the potion?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. After sending a beautiful woman to seduce Master Fern and give him the potion, Zeline was taken hostage by an old enemy. That was last anyone saw of her. Only she could reverse the spell and Master Fern traumatized by his new unwanted purity, took his own life, leaving only this book.”

  “The text,” I pointed to the scroll that captioned each of the images, “Is it written by Master Fern’s hand?”

  “This is a reproduction of course, but yes, these are his words.”

  “Can you read them?”

  “Bits and pieces, but the language is old, maybe there is someone...”

  “I want to retain you to have this book translated, invoice me the price for the job and the expected time frame and I will credit you once the job is complete.”

  “All these demands.”

  “I am what I am what I am,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” Ajarn replied. “Indeed you are.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  HALE SAT on his usual seat in the corridor looking like a man in a hurry to get nowhere soon. There were no other customers in the bar and the woman running the joint was sitting out back playing on her life-enhancer device. Outside on the street, two young women walked with an otter off the leash. I’d seen them the year before walking the otter, and back then, the animal was slim and held tight on a lead. Now the animal, plump from too much feeding, walked unleashed. The otter didn’t stray more than two steps away from the two women. The wild animal had been fed and cared for and had somehow become domesticated, and this gave you a sense of hope for the citizens of Fun City, or the citizens of any city.

  I ordered a soda water, no ice. “What do we have on the French kid?”

  “He was a tunnel brat,” Hale said, before realizing. “I’m sorry. I know you were close to Jimmy.”

  “I tried to find a way to meet The Resistance,” I said, and it was true, after Jimmy ran with The Resistance, there was no way to find any of the other members, the ones still alive had vanished. “There’s a way down, I know it exists. Before Kurt died, he was seen staring down at the sewers. But why did he leave them and why didn’t he go back to them?”

  “Perhaps they couldn’t risk it. Perhaps he was working for the City?” Hale took a long hard bite on his bottle of Tiger Sweat. “I found out through one of the theater mob. They have that Bizarre show
on the Darkside. Kurt was seen there many times. Apart from that, we don’t have much. He was in credit according to my source. He hadn’t been Punched yet. What is it like, The Punch?”

  “Listen, Hale, I don’t want to talk about it. You may find out at some point, but I hope you don’t. The Eye and the shit spotters cultivate an inconspicuous appearance; many of them are around us each and every day. The Punch rewires your conceptions. Much of it happens while you are out cold. You wake up and you SEE things. This is the worst trip you could imagine. We are not talking little fluffy clouds.”

  “Uh uh.”

  “I tried scopolamine. A dry mouth and terrible visions.”

  “Are you sure? You might still be under the influence, you’re looking a bit green around the gills, Joe.”

  “I’m fine. Just need to reconnect and straighten out.”

  “You still with the woman?”

  “Nah, I found out she was playing me. Turns out she was a shit spotter.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “The private dick beat at his own game.”

  “Almost.”

  “C’mon,” Hale said. “Let’s hit Happy Street, go to a go-go bar, watch some dwarf sex, throw some cats up at the ceiling. You know there’s this new bar opened called Hobbit House, completely staffed by dwarfs who, get this, they all wear these little Velcro suits with handles attached to the suits. They serve beer, you know, like real beer, none of this local moonshine, and you pick up the dwarfs and you throw them right up at the ceiling, the walls and the ceilings are made of this Velcro too. So you pick up the little fellow and you throw them at the wall and they just hang there, like, stuck.”

  “Not tonight, Hale. I’ve got a date with immigration this afternoon and then I have a lost American to find. Hugh Simmons. Put the word out.”

  “Sure,” Hale took out a notebook and wrote something inside it. “You aren’t up for the dwarf show?”

  “Nah.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  IMMIGRATION.

  LOVE it or go crazy trying.

  The City liked short-term visitors. Fly in. Exchange your money for Fun credits and get the hell out when the well runs dry. Those foreigners that tried to make the city home faced intense resistance from the F.C. Immigration who were run by the F.C. Police department. Located behind the Beach Road, the Immigration Department bustled with stagnant activity. Processing was painfully slow as grey officials scrutinized documentation with full intent of rejecting all applications, unless they had little choice but to concur. In the event papers were in order, the pen pushing psychopaths explored moral or ethical reasons to deny applications. Some applications were denied on the applicant’s physical appearance, the color of his skin, the cut of his cloth, the make of his shoes, or the crookedness of his teeth.

  Corruption was rife.

  Applications were processed based on the morality point system. Those who engaged in socially conscious activities such as reeducation and attitude adjustment programs were awarded morality points. These points were crucial in obtaining a visa or visa extension. Those who were seen partaking in Fun City’s nightlife were deducted morality points. CCTV and facial recognition software worked in tandem with the immigration’s internal computer systems to filter out undesirable applicants. How any foreigner managed to obtain a visa was anybody’s guess, but it is likely that morality points were rewarded in exchange for cash donations to the morality fund. Immigration officials were, like all Fun City officials, corruptible. I slipped a credit token code inside a tourist map and wandered into the building looking for the most corrupt looking official. Didn’t take long to find her, she had the nose job and the boob job and looked like she was saving up for the ass implants. She had fine legs for going to and fro in the City and walking up and down on it. The ass was sitting on a chair and I took the chair opposite to the ass. Waved the photo of Kurt at her, gave her the name and the date of birth and she tapped a few keys into the terminal. Tip, tap, tap, tip. She smiled painfully as she did so.

  Better watch it, I thought. Botox isn’t cheap in the city.

  “Landed fourteen months back. Tourist visa. Hopped over some borders and reapplied for a new visa. Never worked. Didn’t study. He is now overstaying his visa,” she told me.

  “Well, the over-staying is over. Kurt is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, fell from a balcony.”

  “But the computer tells me he is still living here.”

  “Is the computer ever wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Was he on the list?”

  “List?” The officer pretended she didn’t know of the government list. She was lying. The list contained names of those whom were considered undesirable subjects fit for attitude realignment or deportation. The list is what is compiled each night over whiskey and a game of cards. I knew for a fact that I was on it. Took her coyness as a yes and stood.

  “Thank you for all your help.”

  “No problem.”

  “I have one more name.”

  “Yes.”

  “Trixie Sloane.”

  The woman made an enquiry into the terminal and read the print back. “Age twenty-nine. Work visa. Employed by the council.”

  “What as?”

  “She is on the tech development team.”

  “She works for the Eye?”

  “The exact position is classified, sir.”

  I nodded, stood, and got the hell out of there.

  Thinking Trixie was in undercover to find out something, but what? What did that make Sloane? An officer? All immigration had told me about Kurt was that he was legal ‘til not long ago, and all she had indicated was that Kurt was being watched by the immigration because of his perhaps immoral behavior. That narrowed him down to one of a couple of hundred thousand in Fun City. At least no alarm bells rang when I mentioned Kurt’s name, and that told me he wasn’t into anything criminal or ethically suspect. That reduced the bill by quite a few thousand. I had a hunch that Kurt wasn’t murdered, but I didn’t think that he had committed suicide. He was somewhere in the difficult middle. He died because of something, not because of someone, but just what was that thing and why did he die because of it?

  Seek and you shall find.

  The Windmill Hotel, once a proud establishment had grown tired and miserable. Fun City’s monsoon picked up acid from the Dark Side and threw it down as rain on the Beach Side buildings. What was once white block was now a mottled grey and yellow. Six floors, large rooms and balconies, old school style, high railings, low rates, cockroaches and rats. The cigar smoking American’s kid had a room on the third floor.

  Knocked on the door. It opened. A bronzed woman stood there and I kid you not, she spun around three hundred and sixty degrees as if she was on some sort of catwalk. She was spilling out of black lace underwear, and, yes, it was quite a sight. Yes, sir, large of hip and bust and a tattoo of a temple on her back she hailed from somewhere in the Far East, she smiled wide, revealing perfect rows of white teeth and the world stopped being so bloody self-assured and aggressive for a moment. Told her I was a friend of Hugh’s and she bowed and said, “Welcome to the party.” Walked in as you do. High on some sort of psychedelic enhanced by a stimulant, she brushed against me as I took a seat and looked into her eyes, ecstatic eyes wide with something close to full-blown enlightenment. Her breasts were full, and her nipples were hard, strong and pushing through the lace. She stood there in front of me, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, half naked, full woman, bursting out of it all. Her cheekbones were high and her mouth was wide and it always amazed me why all the beautiful ones were always crazy, and I’d developed theories about it. Like the beautiful ones don’t have to develop a sense of character, as they never need to, they just get opportunities handed to them time after time after time. Perhaps that wasn’t it. I didn’t know, but what I did know is that you will find it hard to meet a woman who is a bigger pain in the ass than an ex beauty q
ueen or film star who has gone to seed, and sits drinking the gin watching the new wave of female enter the scene and steal her show. Resentment and fear are both angry horses to be pulling your carriage, especially when they’re running in different directions.

  This one was in the final stages of being top shelf, mid-thirties perhaps, but taking into account the drugs; she could have been twenty-three.

  The American was sitting lotus position on the floor. Eyes closed, hands in a prayer motion. “He has finally discovered himself,” the semi-naked bronze exclaimed.

  He’s discovered more than that, I thought.

  “Does he come out of the trance?”

  “Now and again. He can’t hear us now. We can do whatever we want. He usually comes out of the trance to eat, late afternoon. You know, sometimes, he’s just like a little tortoise, sleepy little tortoise head.”

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “One day, maybe two. Little tortoise has to phone home, little tortoise has to phone home for money,” she cackled. “Spent a few hours crying and this...Little tortoise...” She waved her arm at him, her left breast partially liberated from the black lace bra. My god she was beautiful, but crazier than a cut snake this bitch was.

  “Are you his girlfriend? I mean how long have you...?”

  She gave me a look that suggested marriage between her and Hugh hadn’t been on the cards. She put both arms on her hips and pouted. “We are together. Sort of,” she cackled. I held up two fingers to indicate twenty credits and said, “Okay, put your clothes back on. Time to go home.”

  She looked at me as if I were a Fun City sewer rat so I tapped another ten into the life-enhancer and swiped her wrist. She started to undress. She was changing her underwear. The black lace was replaced by blue cotton. Finding a pair of shorts and a tank top, she slipped them on in record speed and grabbed a handbag from the kitchen. Turned towards Hugh and lifted him to his feet. The apartment was the same as many in the city, dishes piling up in the kitchen, an unmade bed, and a shower that I got him under and twisted the faucet. Wondered for a minute if he was catatonic before he responded by opening his eyes and trying to say a word, what was that word, it was useless, dead to the world. I got him back into the living area. He made a gesture as if wanting to pay a bill in a restaurant. Some paper sat on the table. Passed him the paper and pen and let him draw it.