Steel Kisses

by Laura Strickland

  Pete came out from the back room. “Sasha—”

  He got no further. Reynold had Sasha up against the wall before either of them could blink, one arm across his scrawny throat and toes off the floor. Energy—that of rage—fired his muscles and lifted him beyond himself.

  “Don’t talk about her that way.”

  “Her?” Sasha still sneered, though it appeared more a rictus. “Not a her, but an it. Admit the truth Rey; you went and poked a machine. Ha—joke is on you.”

  Reynold eased his grip on Sasha but only so he could slam him against the wall again, still harder. The boards shuddered, and tools fell to the floor. Pete swore in alarm.

  “Rey! Let go of him.”

  “Da, Rey,” Sasha mocked. “Better let go of me, if you know what is good for you.”

  “Give me more money,” Reynold growled. “Give me money, and I’ll let you live. Otherwise I’ll kill you, I swear.”

  “Jesus!” Pete leaped on Reynold from behind, only partially hampered by his broken hand. Reynold barely felt the impact.

  “What?” Belsky could barely speak now, most of his air cut off, yet he ground the words out. “You want to go see her again, even though she is nothing but fancy steel that other men have used over and over again?”

  He wanted to go see her again—doubly so now that fear for her safety rode him. “Give me thirty dollars.” With what he had left from before and his stash back home, that would be enough.

  Sasha coughed. His face had begun to turn purple. “You zadrota. I will have the law on you.”

  Now Reynold sneered. “What, not man enough to fight your own battles?”

  “Rey—” Pete attempted once more.

  “You stay out of it. He’s got this coming.”

  “Maybe. But you’ll get in trouble if you kill him.”

  In trouble. Jail. Then how would he find out what had happened to Lily?

  He pressed Sasha into the wall still harder.

  “I don’t have thirty dollars,” Sasha croaked.

  “You can get it.”

  “Why should I? Visit the whores on the waterfront if you want it so bad. At least they are flesh and blood.”

  “You played me for a fool. Set me up and laughed at me behind my back.”

  “Not behind your back—I laugh in your face.” Sasha had started to sweat but remained defiant. “Only an idiot or a little child could not tell what she—it—is.”

  “I might be an idiot,” Rey said bitterly, fearing it true, “but what does that make you? What kind of bastard prods at a man twice his size?”

  “I am not afraid of you.”

  “You should be.”

  “You do not have what it takes to beat me up. You do not have the balls.”

  “You sure?”

  “Da. You are like a child.”

  “Sasha.” Reynold didn’t know what Pete saw in his eyes but the younger man leaped forward and insinuated himself between them. “Sasha, just shut up, will you? Rey,” Pete pleaded, “no trouble. Don’t make me fetch Liam down here.”

  Reynold stepped away, though still flaming with anger. “Keep away from me, Belsky, unless you’re giving me that money.”

  Sasha spat and straightened the front of his jacket. “You ever manhandle me again, you will wake up dead.”

  “Leave it,” Pete begged. “We have work to do. Three new orders and, Rey, there’s a body for you to pick up on Bidwell Parkway.”

  “Go get your cart,” Sasha jabbed. “It is all you are fit for. Big as a cart horse and twice as dumb.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Hold still. I will not tell you again.” Dr. Landry snapped the words as she leaned over Lily with her instruments. They were in the basement of the Crystal Palace where Dr. Landry kept what she referred to as her auxiliary workshop.

  Dr. Landry had held Lily here rather than permitting her to go home to the dormitory—for repairs, she said. Repairs, not treatment or care. Workshop, though anyone else would have gone to the hospital.

  As if Lily were a thing, not a person. Which she was—a thing. She must keep that always in mind.

  Dr. Landry had already put compresses on her bruises and repaired her breast. That had hurt—or rather had not hurt, as Dr. Landry insisted. Now Lily, still naked, lay on the steel table face up with each leg suspended from a separate winch—to give Mrs. Landry better access to her damaged vagina, she supposed.

  Whatever Dr. Landry did to repair the tear there did not hurt most of all.

  “I said stop squirming.” The woman paused with grisly instruments in her hands and glared. “Every time you move, it makes the procedure more difficult.”

  “But it stings.”

  “I have told you—you are incapable of feeling pain as such. I need to clean the damaged material away before laying in the graft.” Dr. Landry fixed Lily with a fierce eye. “Would you prefer I shut you off?”

  “No, Dr. Landry. Please.”

  “Perhaps I should.”

  “I will be still. And silent.” No matter how much it hurt.

  She wondered just where her shutoff switch was located—amazingly, she did not know. It could not be anywhere it might be triggered accidentally by a client, and that ruled out most everywhere. Lilly remembered Dr. Landry shutting Constance off—she had reached through the back of her dress and fumbled inside. It must be somewhere in back.

  Where?

  Constance had not yet made a reappearance, still under disciplinary shutdown. Lily wondered what happened to her intelligence—her beingness—when she was shut off.

  Dr. Landry applied her instruments and pain flared between Lily’s legs. She fell back on what had become her mainstay distraction and wondered about Rey. Where was he now, what might he be doing? Collecting a body? It seemed a noble profession.

  He seemed a noble man, withal.

  “There. The graft is laid in. I need only let it take hold to effect the repair.”

  “How long before I may work?”

  “Ready to get back to it, are you? About time you showed a proper sense of industry. I should say two or three days before you are suitably presentable.”

  “And healed?”

  “The units of your line heal very quickly. Make sure you use the enzyme wash every morning and evening. It is that which nourishes your organic parts.”

  Lily understood that. She neither ate nor drank, and her tissues had to be kept alive on the steel frame. Twice a day she put drops in her eyes, which had been harvested from a cadaver, and flushed her skin, mouth, and vagina with nourishing enzymes formulated by Dr. Landry herself.

  “In three days I will be back to work?” Maybe then Rey would come.

  “Yes. Until then you will remain here at the Crystal Palace. Now go to your room.”

  Dr. Landry released Lily’s heels from the clamps. She righted herself with difficulty and slid from the table.

  Obedient, she crept away.

  ****

  “She will be safe with me, sir. I assure you.”

  Reynold spoke to the top of the man’s head—all he could see. The man knelt in the street over the body of his dead wife, who’d been knocked down by a cart horse. The ensuing melee had lasted more than an hour. In all that time, the woman had lain sprawled in the street till a police officer ran and fetched Reynold.

  “You pick up dead bodies, right? Well, come and get the one blocking the street.”

  By the time Reynold got there, the cart horse—trapped in the heat by traffic—had also gone down. Reynold couldn’t immediately tell if it was dead or alive. It made a gruesome scene.

  “Fellow won’t let anybody pick up his wife,” the police officer said. “Immigrant. I’m not sure he understands she’s dead.”

  Reynold went and knelt on the bricks at the man’s side. Not only was the woman dead, most of her blood had leaked into the street through her cracked skull.

  “Sir, sir, you don’t want to let your wife lie here. It’s not right—not respectful.
”

  That snagged the man’s attention. He looked up, and Reynold saw he was young—not above Reynold’s age—and quite obviously in shock, eyes red from weeping and face wet with tears.

  “Let’s get her out of the street,” Reynold urged. “I’ll help you.”

  “Na, na!” The fellow’s accent sounded a little like Sasha’s, if much thicker. Sasha, as Reynold knew, had lived here in the city since quite young. “You will not take her from me.”

  The man stooped protectively over his wife’s body. Reynold didn’t know what to do, beyond attempting to pull him off.

  He looked around desperately. People—including the police—eyed them but didn’t approach. Loud rattling heralded the arrival of a large wagon that had “City of Buffalo Anti-Cruelty League” painted on its side. It couldn’t get very close either, but a man emerged from it, moving purposefully.

  Reynold couldn’t help but stare. Tall and powerfully built, he wore rough trousers and a white shirt open at the neck. His face, though, might as well be a mask—half of it ordinary, topped by a fall of auburn hair, the other half of his head hairless, the face marred by scar tissue that disfigured the cheek, jaw, and neck.

  The man took in the scene, his gaze connecting with Reynold’s for an instant, and went directly to the downed horse.

  “Well, now, old fellow,” Reynold heard him say, “let’s get you up.”

  Reynold found a sweating police officer at his elbow. “Will he let us move her?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s that?” He indicated the scarred man.

  “Him? Don’t you know Jamie Kilter?”

  So that was Jamie Kilter—Liam had mentioned him. Or had it been Clara? Reynold watched as the big man ran infinitely gentle hands over the horse, murmuring to it persuasively all the while.

  Touch—perhaps that was the answer. Reynold turned back to his own charge, laid a hand on the fellow’s shoulder. “Here, now. What’s her name?”

  “Anya. She is my Anya.”

  “And your name, friend?”

  “Tomas Bylacek.”

  “Have you been married long?”

  Tomas blinked rapidly, seeking coherence from the depth of his misery. “A year. Just a year.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “In old country. Her family come here, and mine. We move near each other, marry. Today she—she tell me…she will have our first child.”

  Oh, hell. Reynold’s heart overflowed with sympathy. He said, “Then you definitely don’t want her lying here in the street, right? I promise I’ll lift her ever so gently. You can come along.”

  Tomas visibly struggled with it. To their left, the scarred man had got the cart horse up with efficiency and embarked on an argument with its owner.

  “No one’s going to take her away from you,” Reynold went on softly, and the cart driver charged up to their side.

  The man, flushed with anger and the heat, already belligerent from his conversation with Jamie Kilter, glared down at Tomas. “I’ll have you know I accept no blame in this. The two of you stepped out directly in front of my horse. It’s not my fault your wife is dead.”

  Tomas tipped his face up. “Dead? My Anya?”

  “Jesus,” Jamie Kilter said. He asked Reynold, “Will he let you move her? I’m taking the horse into care for the time being. They’re going to want to clear the street.”

  Reynold nodded, touched Tomas’s arm again, and looked into the man’s shattered face. “Will you trust me to pick your wife up?”

  “You will not hurt her?”

  “I promise.”

  Tomas nodded brokenly. Reynold leaned down and, with tender care, gathered the corpse into his arms. She weighed almost nothing, and he lifted her with ease.

  Almost nothing, to make up someone’s world.

  Jamie Kilter gave him a smile and clasped his arm briefly. The sweaty police officer nodded in relief. With Tomas at his side, Reynold walked to his cart.

  “We’ll just put her in here, all right? Very carefully. You can walk along with her if you like.”

  “Where you take?”

  A good question. “Back to our shop. It’s cool and quiet there, and we can send a message to your people, tell them what’s happened. All right?”

  Tomas looked at him blankly. “You are kind. I hold her hand.”

  They must have made a strange sight trundling through the streets—Reynold perspiring as he pushed the cart, Tomas walking gravely, his clothing splashed with blood, and the dead woman staring at the sky. Fortunately, the crowd thinned rapidly as they moved away from the accident site. Reynold found himself wondering: Jamie Kilter would take care of the cart horse; who would take care of poor Tomas?

  At the coffin shop, they paused outside the front door. Tomas eyed the building in confusion.

  “Why we come here?”

  Before Reynold could answer, Pete poked his head out the door. He swept the trio with a look of horror.

  “Bring ’em in, then, before the whole street sees.”

  The street should be used to corpses by now. But Reynold lifted the dead woman from the cart, and Tomas followed him inside.

  Where to put her? He didn’t think the rough room out back, where he washed the dead clients, would be appropriate, and the workshop was full of dust. After a moment’s hesitation, he carried her into the showroom.

  A small space—an afterthought, really—it made the most of the large front window by displaying their top model, all gleaming mahogany and a work of art. Four other coffins stood at intervals alongside a short bench.

  Reynold laid Tomas’s wife there on the bench. Pete opened his mouth to protest and shut it again.

  He had no chance to speak anyway; Sasha came barreling in from the workshop.

  “What is all this?”

  “She was knocked down in the street,” said Pete. “The police sent for us.”

  Sasha stepped closer and peered. “She’s dead.”

  “No,” Tomas said.

  Sasha eyed him up and down, a scathing look. “Ignorant peasant—don’t you recognize dead when you see it?”

  Tomas said something in his own tongue. There ensued a spate of words back and forth, none of which Reynold understood.

  When things grew heated, he stepped between them, facing Sasha. “Leave him alone.”

  “Do not tell me what to do. You are not in charge here.”

  “You’re a bully. But I’ll not let you bully him. He’s just lost his wife. And child.”

  “Back off, you big, dumb zadrota.”

  “Hey, hey!” Pete cried. “Sasha, leave it alone. Go back and finish what you’re working on.”

  Sasha narrowed his eyes at Pete.

  Swiftly, Pete said, “Liam did leave me in charge.”

  “Well, then, great and powerful czar, what you going to do about that?” Sasha gestured at the corpse.

  “I do believe Liam would want us to provide her with a coffin.”

  Chapter Nine

  “I’m going now. Will you close up?” Pete shrugged into his jacket and moved to the door. The shop lay empty and silent. A group of people—none of whom spoke English—had come and collected Tomas, who had embraced Reynold at parting. One of the party had given him an address where the body could be delivered tomorrow and had even promised payment.

  One problem solved.

  Sasha had left hours ago, also collected by a couple of friends or companions. Reynold found it hard to believe Sasha possessed any true friends as such. He also couldn’t help wishing Sasha lay dead instead of Tomas’s little wife.

  He’d tended her carefully after Tomas’s departure. He and Pete together had fitted her for a decent, reasonably-priced coffin, their most popular model, in fact, and one Liam often donated.

  Reynold, more than ready to go home, nodded at Pete, who went out.

  Silence settled around Reynold, and his thoughts rushed in. All this day, Lily had been in the back of his mind; now his worry for her returned with
a vengeance.

  Why hadn’t she been on the tram? He needed to get in to see her and make sure she was all right.

  But he didn’t have the price.

  His mind examined and discarded ways he might earn it. All of them would take too long. Perhaps someone might lend him the money. Liam would, he felt, if he were here.

  His eyes crept to the till, which sat on the counter. He wondered if thirty dollars lay inside. Probably not—it was an awfully large sum for Liam to keep around. Still, he didn’t suppose it would hurt to look and see.

  He moved through the dim room, not bothering with the lamp, and worked the mechanism that opened the drawer.

  The amount of money inside made him dizzy. He riffled through it with clumsy fingers, and his mouth went dry. Why so much? Liam must have hurried off when he learned the baby was set to come and then forgotten about it.

  Reynold stood there fighting a war in his head. He’d never in his life stolen from Liam; he couldn’t imagine doing so. As a boy—and hungry—he’d sometimes nicked food from carts or stalls. Everybody did. But that made up the extent of his career in larceny.

  And to steal from Liam, of all people, who’d been good to him, who trusted him…

  Yet taking the money he needed, in this case, wouldn’t be stealing. It would be borrowing. He had every intention of earning it and putting it back. Only…earning that great sum would take a long time.

  He needed to see Lily now.

  But what if he borrowed the money and in the morning Pete noticed it missing? Hard not to notice that much money gone. What if Liam came in? He had to come back eventually.

  Well then. Reynold drew a breath. He’d just explain to Liam or to Pete that he’d needed to borrow the money to cover an emergency and would pay it back.

  Borrowing, sure.

  His heart rather than his brain reached that conclusion; his fingers counted and sorted with uncharacteristic skill. He’d have to go home and get the rest of Sasha’s stash and his own savings before he could go to the Crystal Palace. He would need to stop home anyway and change into his best clothes.

  He shut the till with shaking hands.

  ****

  The same steam unit as before opened the door to him. Reynold didn’t know if it remembered him, but it ushered him into the side chamber where he’d been before, and the woman he’d met last time rose from her desk.