Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets

by Alessio Lanterna

  “All right. Let’s hear it then, what do I have to do?”

  “Now is not the time.”

  “Fantastic. Anyway, I’d like to buy an amulet.”

  “The talisman you want is ready, but it’s not for sale,” she says, annoyed and supported by an exasperated meow of solidarity.

  “Then how can I get it?”

  “I went to get it in a second and I shall give it to you.”

  I give up trying to find any logic in this conversation and stick my hands in my pockets with the vague feeling that I’m being taken for a ride. While Ugube’s henchmen are doing their utmost to find me I’m here, wearing a jacket that stinks of pig biker and subjecting myself to this inspection from a demented caryatid. After a few seconds I’ve had enough.

  “I suppose you’re really enjoying yourself.”

  “No. You were supposed to bring me some cough syrup that day.”

  “Yeah… well, goodbye.” I set about leaving.

  “I won’t give you the amulet if you leave this place too soon. This is not how this matter proceeds.”

  “Listen, my dear old lady, I don’t know about you but I’m in a hurry. So, if you have to give me something, tell me something or do something, just do it and let’s call it a day. What are we waiting for?

  She makes an odd disapproving face.

  “I watched the man who burnt the mountain. Fate will choose an unusual needle to weave his story.

  A symphony of creaking wood accompanies her when she lifts her weight off the rocking-chair, she adds a couple of coughs. One tiny step at a time I follow her inside the shop, it’s an actual walled place like the Alchemist’s. The magic district is almost certainly protected by some spell or another, which compensates for the immobility handicap. The entrance is a simple door, next to it there’s a stone plaque, well-worn and impossible to read, the door closes without any further sinister creaking.

  Inside it’s a jumble of containers for reactants, bog-coloured vials, bubbling stills, dried toads hanging by their feet next to garlic, bones, knick-knacks and trinkets, all precariously balanced on the edge of confusion. The classic cauldron is hanging over the flames of the fireplace. The fire isn’t drawing well and this is at the root of the sooty smoke screen inside the inhospitable shop. The witch picks up a ladle and tastes the contents of the cauldron, then she transfers a generous portion into a small container divided into squares, like an ice-cube tray. The mixture is dense, it looks like vegetable soup or something. A sinister magical concoction.

  “I got so fed up with those shop-bought stock cubes, so I said to myself: why not make them myself? It was easy, they’re bound to be a lot better.” She waves her kitchen utensil around for emphasis.

  “Right.”

  “It’ll be on the table where you look,” she explains, stirring the mixture before filling a second segmented container.

  “Which table? There are...” I look around until my eye falls upon a pendant, composed of a glossy stone, secured by four feathers which cover it, like palm leaves tied to a trunk. If you ask me, I’d say it’s a trinket made out of a piece of obsidian and pigeon feathers. I pick it up by the string which forms the necklace and ask the sorceress for confirmation.

  “Yes, that’s the one. You should be going now, through the other exit,” she adds, with more urgency, indicating a side door.

  “Why?”

  “The ogres came to ask to find you with art.”

  I understand as much as I need to, I slip out of the back a fraction of a second before the three pigs fling the main door wide open, knocking over a crystal ball in the process. The object crashes to the ground, spreading mild panic amongst the thugs, who scramble to produce a series of contrite apologies in their native language. In the middle of all this confusion, which triggers a chain of clumsy accidents, the Witch waves at me and whispers, “You’ll remember the syrup, I’m certain of it.”

  I too take advantage of the confusion and slip out unseen. As soon as I’m outside I put the talisman round my neck and cross my fingers, hoping that the old hag really does know her stuff the way she makes out. I stay hidden and check that the ogres haven’t left any guards outside, then I dive into the nearest alley, after a couple of uncertain changes in direction I end up in the popular area of the Bazar. The signs back to the car park are unusually simple and direct, just a few turns and I’m there. I wouldn’t know if this means that the guild wants to help me or is just trying to get rid of me as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. In any case, the important thing is to get my arse out of here. And fast.

  Despite the makeshift clean-up I got by taking advantage of the rain shower, it is an indisputable fact that I look fucking awful. I look like a lush who got the worst of a street fight, who woke up in a ditch after being dumped there by his adversary who thought he’d accidentally killed him. Only the stench is different: instead of booze, a mixture of ogre, blood, polluted rainwater, and a faint whiff of sandalwood, rose petals and opium. I make a mental note that I must complain about the complete ineffectiveness of the neutral deodorant as soon as I get the chance, I lean on the cream-coloured counter and ring the bell.

  It’s unusual to see oriental humans in the Federation. Occasionally the odd brave family manages to illegally emigrate from the Ecatomb area for the love of their bonsai brood. They hope to be able to give their children a less macabre future by means of this terribly heroic act. The stuff of soap operas.

  “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “I want a room,” I answer the desk clerk who’s popped out of his cupboard, TV noise in the background. It’s absurd that someone with that face is actually asking me if I need help. I slap a hundred in front of him.

  “Oh… of course, of course. I need ID—“

  “.No ID.” Another hundred big ones.

  “It’s against regulations...”

  We’re up to three hundred.

  “Honestly, it’s not about the money, I can’t register you if—“

  “If I’m not registered, the money doesn’t need to go through the books, am I right?” Four hundred.

  He slides his tongue over his lips.

  “With a phone and shower.”

  “How long will you be staying with us?”

  “A couple of nights, tops. No cleaning or fresh towels. As long as I’m here, it has to be as though that room doesn’t exist, clear?”

  “But the telephone calls will go on the bill—“

  “I promise I’ll only make local calls.”

  Five hundred. I bet it’s more than half he makes in a month. And here’s me thinking I didn’t need money. But I’m paying him all right. Oh yes, I’d rather be skint than not make it.

  “If your boss asks any questions,” I suggest as I pick up the magnetic key card, “tell him you were having phone sex with your girlfriend.”

  I have no problem finding Room Twenty-Two, it’s a magnificent cell overlooking the rail tracks. The ground floor and first floor of the city are essentially a gigantic logistic hub, where there is a proliferation of hotels and motels suited to all tastes proliferate, from vacuum cleaner salesmen to corporate managers, including degenerates and gangsters here on legitimate and less legitimate business. The two transit levels are heavily policed, but the apparent order which reigns here is more the result of a compromise than the effective success of security policy. The infinite swarms of parasites feeding off the life blood of Nectropis would not benefit from killing the great beast. Consequently, the regular working of incoming and outgoing traffic is as essential to them as it is to the council. This is why I didn’t want to risk going to one of the third-rate places, where a yellow dwarf would never ever ask any questions and he’d certainly be happy with a few coins in exchange for the closest thing to a presidential suite he could offer me. The clans in the urban underworld use wallpaper made of 100% pure spy in those hovels.

  Leaving the inflated price to one side for a moment, the room isn�
�t actually that bad. The limescale-encrusted shower shows the signs of age and regular use, but at least it’s been disinfected recently. The bar of soap is new, for which I am heartily grateful, and in some way it makes up for the wonky jet of water. I give myself a quick once-over to check for any crap that got trapped under my skin during the unnatural instantaneous regeneration produced by the potion. Okay, all in order, so I try and crack one off to release some tensions, my curled-up reproductive equipment is not collaborating at all. Nothing doing, the rising number of threats to my difficult existence makes a racket inside my brain, ruining the poetry of this romantic interlude with myself. Clearly when she talked about ‘burning the mountain’, the witch wasn’t referring to this. It would be difficult not to feel embarrassed at the thought of an old woman watching me when I wank myself off. That’s if she was, in fact, referring to something in particular, she might have just been rambling.

  Feeling defeated, I stretch out on the bed, wearing only a burning cigarette and the talisman. The feathers tickle my nose, I might catch bird flu off them. My good heart suggests that a man who’s escaped death by the skin of his teeth twice in one week deserves a more full-bodied rest, in fact, a couple of rests if possible with fishnet stockings and perverted ideas; unfortunately, my brain has the thankless task of putting my feet back on the ground, and reminding me of the noticeable target they recently tattooed on my forehead.

  Thinking back to the advice in the police manual regarding coincidences and by performing a straightforward algebra calculation of the recent events within my grotesque marathon towards the pearly gates, it’s safe to say that old lardarse is controlled by the Lovl dynasty. If that weren’t the case, why else would that swine Ugube want to deny himself of my ‘comic contribution’? Okay, bollocks aside, it’s thanks to me that he managed to get tons of unspecified shit into the city, naturally lining his pockets in the process. Imagining myself as a valid industrial asset makes me feel like a fork-lift truck. Alternatively, getting rid of me isn’t an easy choice. The request must have been one of those you can’t refuse, and there is only one type of sentient who can make someone like Khan pass up the chance of accumulating more cash.

  In a way, it’s nice to think that Ugube is also being exploited by the elves, and I can congratulate myself on being the one who discovered the most carefully-guarded secret of the head of what is probably the most successful mafia in Nectropis in recent years. It would be even more of a pleasure if the context weren’t quite so desperate.

  But of course, you brainless dolt. If only half of your suppositions are right, Gilder is looking for you, bloody idiot. You’re the only one he can trust, how many times have you said to yourself inside that uninhabited skull of yours that they pinned on your shoulders? He doesn’t have your phone number, obviously, and he can’t risk calling you at work. Shit, maybe he was hoping you would track him down at Cicisbeo, but he didn’t expect you to bring company. Of course only a retarded ass would be afraid of Cohl, but how could he know? He saw me with a guy who wasn’t supposed to be there and he ran for it, he doesn’t realise that he’s just a dick-head I picked-up in an alley? And anyway I already thought he had good reason to run.

  I’m looking for him and he’s looking for me, it’s just that everyone else is trying to kill the both of us. If I had a fluffy blonde mane, a ripped body, two pointy ears with a pedigree and a column of blood-filled flesh weighing two tons between my legs, where would I go to look for Arkham the phenomenon? At his house.

  Right, that’s if he somehow managed to find out where I live. I bet my adorable drug stash that there are two stinking oranges making the tobacco companies rich outside my house, anxious to relieve themselves of all those extra bullets they have. With the irony that is typical of real life, they’re sitting in the car comparing the size of their cocks and swapping hard-nut stories in a bid to suppress their homosexual love for each other and preserve their virile fraternity, completely oblivious to the fact that the most valuable prey in Nectropis is sitting all alone in another car just a short distance away. It would be hilarious if I parked next to them, it would be like a variation of hide and seek where nobody counts.

  My mobile is turned off, just like it was the last time I checked. I take the battery out too, just to be absolutely certain, you never know. In any case I’m not going anywhere unless I rest for at least an hour or so. I set the obsolete old-fashioned alarm clock on the scratched bedside table. Unperturbed by the din and vibrations caused by the constant traffic of trains, fatigue quickly overcomes tension and dulls my senses and body. The memories of the incredible past few days mix and fuse together, and turn into stock cubes for stew.

  Somewhere within that foggy place halfway between sleep and consciousness, I dream that I’m dancing with Kart Nofym in the desert, surrounded by dancing crustaceans who make little holes in the sand with their chitinous claws. Kart Nofym has got Gilder’s face, and he starts writing a message on his phone, apologising for the interruption.

  “You see” he says, seriously, “it’s all here.”

  Inside this cubist condiment, not only do I have to dance, I also have to play second fiddle to his crap.

  I get up late on Sunday

  The first thing I notice when I wake up is that I’m not dead, this in itself is a remarkable achievement. Particularly if you consider this in relation to the second detail, my utter immunity to the alarm clock, it went off six hours earlier and disappeared into oblivion. The third detail is the feeling that I’ve understood something important, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I light a cigarette while I’m sitting on the toilet. Kart Nofym… I’ve looked through a whole pile of notes, papers and cards that Cohl collected from all over the house, and nobody attracted my attention apart from him. Why? Perhaps it’s just because the note was in the raincoat pocket. But it’s as though it struck a chord in my memory.

  Gilder… when he floored me the second time. He said something, something like…

  Call…

  Kart Nofym!

  Wait, the sentence was longer and it didn’t sound like that, even though we’re close to the meaning. There was more. I close my eyes and force myself to remember the scene. He didn’t say ‘Call me’, but he did mime a phone. He said ‘number’ and then the name, but the sentence is still too short.

  Number kart full stop nofym.

  It wasn’t a name, it wasn’t an email address either. It’s the alphabetic pronunciation of a telephone number. A trick used to hide information but also make it easier to remember than a string of numbers in sequence. Using the keypad on my mobile I interpret the full stop as standing for one and I save the number in my address book, separate from the net so as to avoid any further risks of being identified. May the Gods be damned, he tried to get in touch with me and how. When I come out of the bathroom I sit on the bed and call the number from the phone on the bedside table.

  No ringtone.

  Shit! Another dead end. Maybe I got it wrong, or maybe the full stop stands for something else. Disheartened, I look at the hands on the clock, a quarter past twelve. If I have to die, it might be a good idea to go and look at the sun, there’s still time today. No one can say if in twenty-four interminable hours I’ll still have my freedom. Anyway, they’re much more likely to kill me when I’m awake, so at least I’ll get the chance to cause some damage before I’m put out of my misery. Depressed, I rub my face. The Inspector of MetroPo could be a good bodyguard. All I have to do is keep him on a short leash and the henchmen will have to take care of two cops instead of one; they may have to delay the attack in order to reorganise themselves. At this point in the proceedings maybe I ought to bite the bullet and ask Reinart for help. She’ll throw it back in my face forever as “the time she saved my arse”, but she’s hard and I suspect she gets aroused when killing ogres. If we skin enough hides, Ugube will run out of heavies, or at least overdraw. Heroically surreal.

  A ringing sound. The phone in the room is ringing.

/>   I clear my throat and pick up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Communicating with you is an arduous task,” whispers a voice at the other end.

  “Let’s meet straightaway,” I say quickly.

  “My house on the edge, in four hours. Come alone, make sure you’re not followed.”

  “As places for secret meetings go, that seems a bit reckless.”

  “Trust me, I know the way he moves and I’m sure he won’t expect it. Furthermore, our clandestine status is inevitably destined to come to an end,” argues the whisperer, and reaffirms definitively, “in exactly four hours.”

  He hangs up. Happiness and anxiety. Just like a first date with a girl.

  “Because I’m calling you from a different phone,” I explain into the mouthpiece, while I finish doing up the buttons on my shirt. “… No, tell me all about it later… that’s right… the café where you bought me that sandwich yesterday, that way I can have some lunch… do you remember where it is? Don’t say it on the phone, just to be on the safe side… yes, now.”

  The Inspector certainly isn’t much help, but he’s better than nothing. I tuck my shirt into my trousers and tighten my belt. I’ve lost weight and gone down one hole. The miracle of stress. I put my police gun holster under my jacket, light a cigarette and head for the hallway, twirling the car keys around my finger.

  A noise. The jangle of the keys covered it, but there it goes again, shortly afterwards. The sound of a gun being loaded, maybe? Animated shadows under the door.

  Oh shit. I throw myself behind the bed just before I hear the shots. Splinters of wood cover the carpet as soon as I duck, thrown around the room by a second blast and subsequently moved aside by a gigantic boot.

  The beast crashes into the room tearing off what remains of the door. The largest ogre I’ve ever seen is brandishing two sub-machine guns, one in each hand as though they were a couple of bananas. He has to pull his head into his shoulders in order to cross the threshold, wreaking havoc on the woodwork.