New York Nights [Virex 01]

by Eric Brown

  Anna felt her pulse quicken. ‘What happened to Hal?’

  Kia shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. No sign of him, no blood, no body parts. I reckon he got out through the window, managed to escape.’

  ‘What did the police do?’

  ‘What do you think, girl? They took a statement, photographed the place. Said they’d put someone on the case. I’ll believe that when I see it. Too many of those damned tin-pot drones around these days, and not enough flesh-and-blood cops.’

  ‘What’s going on, Kia?’

  ‘Search me, girl.’

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ she began. ‘You don’t think this guy with the cutter had anything to do with Sissi and Nigeria’s . . . with their disappearance?’

  ‘Like I said, Anna, search me. Whole thing’s so shitful weird . . .’ She paused. ‘Hey, don’t fret. I’m sure Sissi and Carrie are okay.’

  Anna glanced at Kia. She wanted to say that she wasn’t so sure, but stopped herself.

  They finished their coffee and drove home. The sun had gone down behind the skyscrapers, creating a cold, dark interregnum that was neither day nor night. Anna looked out at the anonymous blanket-shrouded figures of the homeless, settling down for another cold night.

  Five minutes later she jumped from the car and ran up the steps to her apartment. The lounge received them with its hospitable warmth.

  While Kia showered, Anna checked her email. There were half a dozen messages awaiting her. Three were from friends, inviting Anna and Kia out tonight. One was from Felicity: she thought the rewrite was just terrific. Another was from a demented dyke in Ohio who just loved Sapphic Island and wanted to look Anna up if she ever made it to the Big Apple.

  The last message was from the editor of a literary press, who had very much enjoyed reading the manuscript of her latest novel, but who in the ‘present publishing climate didn’t think it was quite the right type of novel to engage the public’s imagination,’ etc. et cetera . . .

  And that was from the editor of a supposed literary publishing house.

  She accessed the file containing the manuscript of her novel in progress. The first draft was almost finished: she had a short epilogue to complete, and then she could begin the leisurely process of the re-write. She skimmed the last few pages, liked what she read, and wondered what she had to do to make the breakthrough.

  She didn’t want to be remembered as the pseudonymous hack writer of Sapphic Island. She told herself she was better than that.

  The wallscreen chimed with an incoming. She accepted the call and sprawled on the sofa as the screen flared into life.

  She sat up, startled. Carrie Villeux stared out at her. She was sitting in an armchair in what looked like a hotel bedroom, one long leg cocked over the arm.

  ‘Anna, I’ve been trying to contact you all afternoon.’

  ‘Carrie. Where are you? We’ve been worried.’ She considered what Kia had told her about the guy with the cutter. ‘Carrie, is Sissi okay?’

  Carrie was perhaps forty, her thin, tanned face made even longer by her shaven skull, patterned with tattoos. She wore stylish cords, a black bolero jacket, and looked stunning.

  ‘I need to talk, Anna. I ... I need to talk to someone who understands people. We’ll meet somewhere. I’ll call tomorrow and we’ll arrange a meeting . . .’

  ‘Carrie, where’s Sissi?’

  Carrie hesitated. ‘I’m with her in a hotel.’ She spoke with a distinct Quebecois accent. ‘She was gone for five days, then yesterday she called me up and said that she needed to see me.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘What’s going on, Carrie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I met Sissi in the hotel, but she was acting very strange. It wasn’t drugs,’ she said, as if to dispel the notion. ‘I don’t know what was wrong with her. It was as if she didn’t know me. She sometimes goes out for a few hours, but in disguise. Then she comes back and everything is normal, she’s herself again, and everything’s fine for a few hours.’ She hesitated. ‘You understand, people, Anna. I need to see you, tell you about what’s been happening.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Carrie looked pained. ‘Sissi claims that people are after her, that she needs to hide - which is why she wears the disguises.’

  ‘It sounds as though she needs help,’ Anna said. Psychiatric help, she thought to herself.

  Carrie looked up suddenly, stared off-screen. ‘She’s coming back. I’ll call you later, okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Anna began, but Carrie had already cut the connection.

  It seemed almost as if Carrie was afraid of her lover.

  She moved to the kitchen and fixed herself a coffee. Kia was still in the shower. She carried the coffee back to the lounge, stared through the window, and waited for Kia to emerge from the bathroom, disturbed by the thought of what might be happening to Sissi Nigeria.

  * * * *

  Four

  At eight that morning Barney Kluger found Halliday’s note on the desk-com: Looking into the Nigeria case, Barney - gone to the Scumbar. Be back around eight.

  Barney fixed himself a coffee and lowered his bulk into the swivel chair. The chair was getting to be a tight fit these days. He’d been on a diet the past three months, cut out all the pastrami on rye he’d become addicted to over the years. The Ukrainian wheat beer they served along at Olga’s, though, was harder to kick. Maybe if he could cut his daily consumption by a couple of bottles. . . ‘You’ve got the circulation of a stone, Barney,’ Doc Symes had warned him. ‘Don’t know how your heart keeps on going. Lose some weight, okay?’

  Well, he’d done his best, shed half a stone in twelve weeks, but his waistline didn’t seem to be getting any thinner. Maybe he’d invest in a new swivel.

  He wiped Hal’s note from the screen, called up the case file and sat back with his coffee. He’d look through his notes on a few cases for an hour, before heading downtown for his appointment at Mantoni Entertainments.

  He was pleased to see that Hal had taken the Nigeria case. He hadn’t fancied it himself, and not only because it would have meant him asking questions where he wasn’t welcome. He’d had a hunch about the situation as soon as Villeux had walked in and told her story the other day. So her lover was missing and Villeux was concerned, but Barney had seen it all before: the girls had had a tiff, fallen out, Nigeria had gone back to stay with some old lover for a period of cooling off. In a few days she’d be back, and when Barney’s bill came in at five hundred dollars per hour, Carrie Villeux would wish she hadn’t bothered hiring his services.

  He had to hand it to Hal, he had a hide as thick as a rhino’s. Barney had no qualms about showing his face in some of the gambling dives in the area - at least, he hadn’t a few years ago, when he’d been a bit younger, a little leaner - but the thought of asking questions around the Scumbar did not appeal.

  He’d made a good move five years ago when he’d invited Hal to join him at the agency. They got on fine from their police days down at the Department. It was not long after Estelle’s death, and the thought of running the agency alone had filled him with despair. When Estelle was alive, he’d had someone he could bring his troubles home to, someone he could talk to about a case. The months after her death had been hard. Looking back, he wondered how he’d seen them through. The cases came in, and he’d put his head down and worked hard. Some cases he solved and others he didn’t, and the usual proportion ended up as suicides or murder victims. So soon after losing his wife of almost thirty-five years, the succession of tragic stories wore him down, and it was either quit the agency, sell it for peanuts, or get someone else in to shoulder some of the workload.

  One day he’d bumped into Hal out on patrol, and the guy had looked as down as Barney felt. His long-term affair with an old girlfriend was through - she’d chucked him out, Barney gathered - and the file work was getting him down, so Barney made him the offer. Hal had said he’d think about it, get back to him by the end of the week, and what did
you know, but a day later Barney got a call and Hal said that if the offer was still on, he’d take it.

  Kluger and Halliday, Private Detectives: Missing Persons A Speciality. It had a certain ring.

  Barney glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty, and while Hal was usually punctual from his days with the force, he had been known to be half an hour late before. Even so, it was unlike Hal not to call him and explain what was happening.

  He tapped Hal’s code into the desk-com and waited. There was no reply . . . Barney smiled to himself. Hal was probably in Olga’s, warming himself with a coffee, his com turned off.

  A year ago, business had been going through a bad patch. The cases hadn’t been coming in, and those that had had been bummers, bad earners that had lasted barely a day or two. Hal had seemed pretty low, though it was hard to tell with Hal: he wasn’t the kind of guy to open up with his emotions and spill his heart out. He hadn’t had a woman, so far as Barney was aware, for years. He was beginning to get that haunted, introverted look in his eyes that Barney recognised from his dealings with no-hopers and terminal sociopaths.

  Barney started noticing this kid around the place, ten months or so ago. Tiny Chinese girl, slim as a broom, cute-faced, always running upstairs to the loft with Chinese take-outs. So Barney, knowing how Hal would never get round to saying anything if he wasn’t asked, had delayed him as he was about to go out on a case, and said, ‘Hey, Hal, notice you’re eating a little Chinese these days . . .’

  Hal had opened his mouth to say something, closed it again and just stared at Barney, nonplussed. Finally he’d said, ‘Trust Barney, Manhattan’s finest private detective.’

  ‘What’s her name, Hal?’

  So Hal had told Barney about her. He was still at that stage with the girl where he didn’t believe his luck - she had just stepped into his life and demanded that he love her - a tall order for someone as distant as Hal. He’d seen him change over the months, though, come in some small degree to reciprocate the affection that Kim Long lavished on him. Not that it was all sweetness and light. The kid had a temper like a Chinese dragon and could go off like a firecracker, to mix metaphors. Then Hal would go quiet, tend to lie low, and spend a few hours with Barney at Olga’s, sampling the whole range of wheat beers imported from the Ukraine.

  Barney had got to know Kim over the weeks after she moved in, saw that beneath the cutesy exterior she was a shrewd businesswoman. She knew how to turn a quick profit and was on top of all the latest scams. Barney had listened to her about savings and investment, but he drew the line one day when she came into the office, took a long look around the place, snub nose turned up in distaste, and declared that the room was losing energy like a stuck pig loses blood and needed some changes. He’d complimented her on her imagery and said that he was perfectly happy with the office as it was, thank you. She tut-tutted and said that if he remained sitting at the desk with his back to the window, along with a dozen other things he was doing wrong, then he’d have a week of bad luck - and hell, if they didn’t have a week of bad luck. They lost a case to a competitor; a customer left the country owing them a couple of grand; his sciatica had gotten worse . . .

  So the next time she showed her smug little grin around the door, he called her in and said, ‘About this . . . this sheng-phooey malarkey, Kim . . . run it past me again.’

  And he’d moved the desk and the chesterfield as she instructed, more with amusement than a belief that it might affect anything. He’d hung a picture of the sunset on the south wall and positioned a vase of dried flowers in the south-east corner of the room. Kim had painted the office door green and placed a fern on a stand just outside the door, to counter the bad yin rushing up the straight staircase. She’d advised him to keep a pet, preferably a cat, but Barney had never had a pet in his life, and he was damned if he was going to start now. He did agree to keep the loo seat down in the bathroom, though, and to move his bed into the corner of his room.

  Kim had told him that it might take a few days for the good chi to start flowing, and Barney had looked at her as if she had lost her marbles.

  But gradually, over the course of the next week, things began to change for the better. Lucrative contracts came in; they solved cases they’d struggled with for weeks - and even his sciatica cleared up. Barney told himself that the sudden success of the business was due mostly to Hal’s renewed enthusiasm for life. Over the weeks he’d watched Hal lose his apathy, begin to enjoy his life and work again.

  The transformation of his partner soon made Barney realise something that he’d tried to push to the back of his mind for a long time. Despite it being almost six years since Estelle’s. death, and despite thinking he’d managed to get over the worst of the grief, the simple fact was that he still missed her like hell.

  It was a combination of many things, not just the obvious. Hal had spent a lot of time with Kim in the early days; they ate out frequently, went to the holo-dramas, once or twice went skiing upstate. Barney missed doing the big things with Estelle, but it was the smaller details that he missed, too; the things which, when he noticed them pass between Hal and Kim, made him wish, with a kind of hopeless envy, that Estelle were still with him: the glances, the quick touches they assumed no one else noticed, the phrases and sayings that meant so much to each other.

  Christ, but he still missed her, and her absence was like an open wound.

  He hadn’t seen anyone else since her death: that wasn’t the solution. Other women were pale imitations of Estelle. Whenever he met women through the business, he was forever comparing them with his wife, and finding them lacking. They had been together for thirty-five years, ever since New Year’s Eve, 2000. They’d met at a party to see in the New Year, the new century, the new millennium - he twenty years old, Estelle just seventeen - and while he never claimed that it had been love at first sight, there had been an attraction, and they had seen each other for a year before getting married. He’d been a rookie cop, she a secretary for a legal firm, and they’d lived in a tiny, damp, and dirty walk-up in Brooklyn, and it had been the happiest time in all his twenty-one years.

  And their marriage had survived. They’d had their rocky moments. They’d never had children, and at first this forced them apart, until they reconciled themselves to the fact of childlessness, and found comfort in each other. Estelle had been special, the kindest woman he had ever known, quiet and gentle and without a bad word to say about anyone. Christ knew what she’d seen in him, who, he told himself, possessed the reverse of all these qualities. She’d laughed when he’d told her this, said that he was so stuck on playing the tough-guy cop ever to admit to being human, and who knows perhaps she was right.

  Thirty-five years . . .

  She’d died of kidney failure six years ago come March, after a year of illness during which she had been assured that she would get a transplant in time . . . But the nuclear power station in Georgia had suffered meltdown, and the refugees had flooded into New York. The health service had been stretched beyond its means, and the week Estelle fell acutely ill coincided with an intake of radiation burn victims at St Vincent’s. The search for a donor kidney for Estelle was given low priority, and she had died in his arms in the early hours of a cold Sunday morning.

  Another reason, he told himself, that he gave Hal the graveyard shift. Those cold, quiet hours before dawn just cut him up.

  He glanced at his watch. It was after nine and Hal hadn’t showed. Again Barney tapped Hal’s code into the desk-com and listened to the ring tone. No reply.

  Frowning, he shut the link.

  A month ago Barney had run into an executive he knew in Mantoni Entertainments. He’d worked as a bodyguard for the executive, as well as for some of the company’s most beautiful actresses, on and off over the years when business at the agency was slack. So he and this guy had downed a few beers for old time’s sake, and three beers became six, and Barney had started to run off at the mouth. He told the guy about Estelle, and how much he missed he
r.

  Couple of days later, the guy calls Barney at the office.

  ‘About what we were discussing the other day. I have just the thing, Barney . . .’

  ‘No introductions, pal. I’m past it.’

  ‘No, nothing like that, Barney. Trust me on this one, won’t you? Hear me out. . .’

  So Barney heard him out, and liked what he heard, and every week for the past couple of months he’d been having regular sessions with the guy and his team at the swish Mantoni headquarters in Manhattan.

  He left a note on the screen for Hal, saying he’d be back around one, then grabbed his coat and locked the door. He’d take a taxi downtown. Hal had taken the Ford last night - something of a luxury, these days, which they’d probably review at the end of the month.