The Night Mayor

by Kim Newman

  The mark was looking around, gasping. ‘…Phil? You…’ The balloon went up.

  She took out his left kneecap. He staggered sideways, tripping into an abandoned urn but not falling. She upped the r.p.s. and sprayed Dearborn’s flailing right arm. His hand came off at the wrist. Most of the guests had to laugh. She closed in, and fired a final, freeranging burst into his torso. She had a glimpse of churning innards. He did an awkward pirouette and, with a satisfying splash, fell into the pool. The purple skum rippled. There were cheers. Patricia took a bow.

  By the time she had retrieved her coat, the resurrection men were there. The kildare was passing a vivicorder over the corpse. A nurse Patricia knew ticked off the necessary repairs. Most of the vatbred organs and ossiplex bones would be in the Firm’s ambulance. The front man was assuring Gillian Dearborn that her husband would be on his feet by morning, and preparing the legal and medical waivers for her palm.

  ‘Good job, lassie.’ Wragge hugged and kissed her. Even for a regular customer, he was overdoing it. ‘When Jay sees himself on the playback, he’ll die all over again.’

  He stuffed a thousand note down her cleavage. Not a bad gratuity. He also gave her a hundred in Sainsbury’s Redeemable for Chord. She was invited to the resurrection party, but cried off.

  Tired, she gave Chord authority to get back to town by the quickest route. As she drove through Shit City, she cleaned the roscoe. She remembered her own deaths, and wondered whether the DHSS still had a budegtary allocation for resurrecting the underemployed.

  She hadn’t had the kind of luxury treatment Dearborn was getting. There had been problems with her anglepoise vertebrae throughout her middle teens. She had not had the funds for a proper rebuild until she started working for Killergrams.

  That first time, the other children had dragged her out of the house and hanged her from a swan-neck lamp-post. Her party dress was torn, and her legs were badly bitten by midges. Dangling in the late afternoon, the last thing that had crossed her mind was that this was supposed to be funny.

  TWITCH TECHNICOLOR

  Playing the buttons was all well and good, but Monte thought sometimes you had to get your hands in the colour. He had Bela Lugosi frame-frozen in mid-snarl, stretched black and white over the video easel, wooden stake jutting. Patiently, he combined film overlays in his plastette. Red was the key here. People like red best of all, and there would have to be a lot of it in the Dracula remix. It was integral to the property; perhaps a major factor in its lingering appeal. Finally satisfied, he inserted the plastette into the assessor, and sat back while the machine digitally encoded the precise shade that had struck him as proper. When it was done, the assessor pinged like an antique oven, and Monte plucked the now-primed squirtstylo from its lightwell.

  He squeezed a blob of red onto the tip of his forefinger and examined it. It was fine. Then he dabbed the electronic image/analog with the stylo, dribbling red between the reproduction lines. The monochrome filled in, and gore gushed from the dead actor’s starched shirtfront. The film looked better already. It was the personal touch that distinguished the Monte Video product from the competition’s all-machine ‘enhanced’ remix jobs. He plugged the stylo, and noticed phantom rinds of red under his nails. His hand looked as though it belonged to a murderer. He shook his fingers, and the red vanished in a static crackle. He adjusted his handiwork. He keyed ADVANCE and the film slow-forwarded a few frames. Lugosi completed his snarl, his hand clawed at the stake, blood flowed freely. The red grew, a blob in the centre of the image. It was fine. Monte keyed SAVE, and the colour took. The vampire’s glowing eyes and skull-head cufflinks lit up, the exact red of the blood on his chest and about his mouth.

  Michaelis Monte could remember the beginnings of the remix business, the ineffectually ‘colourised’ films of the eighties. He had been among the first to test the potential of image/analog encoding, the process that enabled a skilled remix man to have an original moving picture reduced by the assessor to a particle chain of information bits and then rebuilt again in accordance with his own vision. With his own technologies, he had stolen the march on the majors, resisted many an attempted corporate rape, won all the Dickie awards going, and marked out an Ayatollah’s share of the marketplace. Monte Video’s Dracula was already a q-seller on advance orders. Securing the rights from the schizoid legal descendants of Bram Stoker, Universal Studios, Hammer Films, the BBC and about twenty others who had dipped their claws into the property had been a lengthy and costly battle. With such an important acquisition, Monte might in any case have taken the time to handle the remix himself. Thanks to the Troubles, he was being forced to do the hands-on work personally. He was still the primo uno in the business.

  Trebor, Ruby Gee, Consodine, and now Tarnaverro. All remaindered. Someone had it in for his remix men, or was trying for a stranglehold on Monte Video.

  He keyed PROCEED, and the assessor took over, absorbing Monte’s decisions, replacing the drab grey of the original with dayglo colours. He liked to think that Monte Video’s Dracula was the movie Tod Browning would have turned out in 1930 if he had been free from the censorship requirements of the day and had access to unlimited technical resources. Browning had been forced to have Van Helsing stake Dracula offscreen, with only a tame groan to mark the villain’s death, but now the anti-climax could be fixed. Lugosi floundered through the vaulted crypt, eyes aflame like an electric Antichrist, pushing aside curtains of butterfly-winged/stained glass cobweb, recoiling from a succession of violently violet neon crucifixes. Then the vampire was down, and Peter Cushing was on top of him, hammering furiously, driving in deeper the killing stake.

  Actually, Edward Van Sloan had played Van Helsing to Lugosi’s Count Dracula, but since nobody remembered him any more, Monte had decided to mix in Cushing’s definitive performance from the 1958 version. In fact, aside from Lugosi, and Dwight Frye as the fly-eating Renfield, he had recast the whole film: James Dean as Jonathan Harker, Marilyn Monroe as the victim-cum-vampirette Lucy, and Meryl Streep as the heroine, Mina. He’d even stirred in Humphrey Bogart as the comic cockney asylum attendant. There weren’t enough David Manners or Helen Chandler fans to make a dent in the marketplace, and Monte was always in favour of anything that added to the commercial afterlife of a property. His instincts had made him a rich man; rich enough to afford an unparalleled art collection: 3-D religious postcards, popster necrophiliabilia, Woolworth’s clown prints. Michaelis Monte was well-known as a man of influential tastes.

  Onscreen, Dracula putrefied spectacularly, maggots bursting from his eyesockets. An entirely apt Jimi Hendrix guitar burst accompanied his deathscreams. Monte upped the zynth. More noise, more music, more scream. He infilled with more red. The last of Dracula should be a bloody pool on the lining of his opera cape, red on red. ‘Fuck you, Count,’ said Peter Cushing, ‘and the bat you rode in on.’ It was well said, and Monte’s vocals people had taken a lot of care to perfect the actor’s clipped voice pattern. Hendrix segued into Tchaikovsky, winding up the film with the snatch of Swan Lake that had been heard in the Transylvanian prologue, and the end titles strobe-flashed as Cushing led Dean and Streep out of the crypt into the rainbow-bright sunrise that lettered out ‘THE END’ in the sky, and subliminally flashed an expensive ad for Coca-Drugs.

  The message pore in the top right of the easel spiralled open. Monte saw an inset of his own doorstep, from the p.o.v. of the monitor-eyed stone eagle perched atop the lintel. Sally Rhodes stood on his WELCOME mat, drenchcoat belted tight, hat-brim pulled low over her domino breather. She looked the eagle in the eye and gave a tight smile. Monte pulled over the nearest slab, and ran the routine checks. The image in the pore proved true; a first-generation, unscrambled (he supposed that he only had himself to blame for the fact that you couldn’t routinely trust anything you saw on television any more). The Household recognised her heat pattern, cross-checked the clearance of the Sally Rhodes Agency with the latest listings, and gave him a manual control over the door. He palm-p
rinted an okay, and the pore closed as Sally Rhodes was admitted into his hallway.

  Monte had scheduled this meeting for late evening in an attempt to avoid embarrassment. He had, of course, been keeping the state police updated on his Troubles, as he was obliged by Law to do, but it was no secret that Monte Video was financially able to afford access to private sector policing. The Sally Rhodes Agency was known for its discretion, and Monte found that quality worth a hefty annual premium. He was even willing to overlook Sally Rhodes’ tactless jibes about his business and taste in objets d’art. In a market rife with piracy, Monte Video rarely suffered from bootlegging, and the last large-scale operation to try infringing its copyrights had been permanently retired to Sally Rhodes.

  Monte met her in the gallery. The paintings were asleep, but the room was a whisper with their steady breathing. Sally Rhodes was admiring his shagpile Rothko. ‘There is some interesting work being done with sub-sentient jellies and acrylics at the moment, don’t you think?’ he ventured. The poised young woman turned and held up a hand in mock horror, waving it as if to ward off Dracula with a crucifix. He missed the point.

  ‘That shirt,’ she gasped. ‘It’s… it’s…’

  ‘It’s called a paisley pattern,’ he told her. ‘The lemon yellow and eggshell blue combination is my own idea.’

  ‘You didn’t have to tell me, Miki. My grandmother told me about the 1960s. They must have been hell to live through.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I was very small at the time.’

  ‘And now you’re very big?’

  ‘Quite.’ He adjusted his chrome and lucite love beads. ‘Are you in a position to make a report?’

  ‘Only a preliminary. I note that you’ve lodged provisional declarations of war against Agfa-Daiei and Disney-McDonald’s. You know what kind of commitment that will entail.’

  ‘What choice have I got? Someone’s been singeing my remix men. With Tarnaverro gone, there’s a severe crimp in my output. It has to be an alliance among the competition. They want me scuppered before Frankfurt.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Sally Rhodes. She peeled off her domino, and sniffed with distaste the herbal-scented air. ‘Do you have a roomscreen handy? I’ve got a tape to run for you.’

  He accessed the downstairs suite, which came complete with a full editing slab, and a glasswall display of Monte Video’s topselling remix jobs: Citizen Kane, Battleship Potemkin, Psycho, Faster Pussycat! Kill! KILL!, King Kong, High Noon, Double Indemnity, The Best of Sergeant Bilko, The Elvis Autopsy Video, The Seventh Seal, The Breakdancin’ Nun. Monte thumbsigned the slab, and a framed poster for the Bob Dylan/Sylvester Stallone/Glenda Jackson/Madonna Women in Love remix rose into its ceiling slot, revealing a milkwhite wallscreen. It was the only colourless thing in the house.

  Sally Rhodes unscrambled the sequence lock on her briefcase, and produced a video cassette. It was a Monte Video Own Brand product. ‘This is from Tarnaverro’s office,’ she said. ‘I’ve established that it was what he was working on when he was killed.’

  ‘Then it should be Captain Blood?’

  ‘1935, Michael Curtiz, with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Warner Brothers. Right?’

  ‘Your pardon?’ he double-taked. ‘Oh, forgive me, I always forget you’re a – what are they called? Film buff.’ He spat the word with distaste, recalling the petitions that used to flood into his slab.

  ‘Let’s pass over that, shall we?’ she said, shuffling fiche notes. ‘You’ve kept up on your autopsies, I trust?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But let me remind you. Tarnaverro was attacked by someone with a long, sharp, heavy blade. A carving knife, a machete, or a sword. He was almost entirely hacked to pieces.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I suspect those Agfa-Daiei bastards. The multi-nats like to throw in a scare when they open hostilities.’ In his struggle to swallow Thorn-Futura-McAlpine before the combine swallowed him, Monte had authorised as bad or far worse. ‘And you know what the axis are like.’

  Being market leader was a precarious position. Since the Troubles started, with Trebor, Monte Video had lost over 20% of its employees to the marketplace. Even disemployment was better than being an unmourned casualty in a corporate skirmish.

  ‘It may not be that simple, Miki. Have you ever thought to match the methods of assassination used against your people with the properties they were working on?’

  Monte was startled. ‘No. Why should I?’

  Sally Rhodes held up her fiche. ‘Trebor was the first. Two months ago. He was blown to bits by some kind of frag charge. He was remixing Battleground. Ruby Gee was expertly kicked and trampled to death. Her current assignment, The Gold Diggers of 1933. Consodine had his throat ripped out by some kind of animal. Remember the werewolf jokes in the newsies? His last property was Lassie Come Home. Do you see it?’

  He wanted it keyed out for him.

  Sally Rhodes slid Captain Blood into the VCR maw, and began to play the buttons. As always when you slot a cassette at random, the sex scene faded on. ‘This is the sequence Tarnaverro was remixing when they got him. We had to clean the blood and guts off the tape. The assessor was clogged.’

  Onscreen, Errol Flynn was extensively sodomising the cabin boy. It had seemed wasteful not to feature the star’s most legendary endowment in the film, and all the historical research proved that buggery would have been a way of life on the all-male pirate ships of the 17th Century. Besides, they had wanted to work up a role for the teenage David Bowie. There was a little ghosting, and Tarnaverro’s green notation blips came and went in the corner of the image, but otherwise it was fine. It was an effective addition. Sally Rhodes was distracted, not looking at the action, but waiting for something else to appear. ‘Look, here it is, here’s where it happens –’ she framefroze ‘– look at this line.’ There was a thick band of different quality colour, crossing the screen like a ripple. She advanced frame by frame, demonstrating the glitch’s progression. It was a diagonal wipe from left to right. Inside the band, the colours were different: a little like the pastel shades of three-strip Technicolor, not very realistic and far too thin for Monte’s taste. When the band had passed, all colour had gone. Bowie’s face faded into Olivia de Havilland’s, and, a cut later, Errol Flynn had his clothes on. There was a ruckus outside the cabin, and Flynn was bounding, cutlass in hand, to the door.

  ‘So this is where Tarnaverro broke off? This is the original version?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Sally Rhodes, tapping a finger to the screen, initiating PAUSE. A horde of pirate extras cowered in tableau as Captain Blood laid into them. They were typical Warner Bros. seadogs with earrings, three or four knives apiece, striped headscarves, leather boots, stupid expressions. But in the middle was a balding pirate with Coke-doke bottle glasses, and a two-piece whaleskin suit. It was Tarnaverro. The woman took her finger from the screen, and action resumed. In a long shot, Flynn threw off two huge attackers. Tarnaverro was in the melee, turning to run. His glasses fell off, and were kicked over the side by a sneering Basil Rathbone. The remix man made a dash for safety, and tripped over De Havilland’s skirts. Flynn smiled, impossibly beautiful in the smoke of battle, and ran the interloper cleanly through. He heaved the body off his cutlass, and Tarnaverro fell into the sword-waving throng. The pirates hacked at him mercilessly. He even got his own close-up, still twitching, eyeballs free-floating, a coil of rope grey under his head. Then, he was out of the film – another dead extra – and Flynn was facing up to Rathbone, jeering at the villain’s frenchified ringlets.

  Monte was appalled.

  ‘Elaborate, isn’t it?’

  He had to agree. ‘It would take expert remixing to… do that. But it’s pointless…’

  The film went on. Monte waved down the sound, but the black and white figures still danced on the wall. He had to think.

  ‘Mr Monte, do you know a Caspasian Kleinzack?’

  ‘Of course. He’s a remix man. With Agfa-Daiei. I’ve been trying to get to him. With t
he Troubles, we’ll need to net a few top defectors to keep up our output. He’s not up to my standards, or Tarnaverro’s, but he’s a professional jobber. Is A-D involved in this?’

  ‘Unlikely. I mention Kleinzack because he’s dead too. The newsies haven’t got it yet, but he’s definitely a casualty. I think A-D have had others, and there’s been a total security clampdown at McDisneyworld. Someone doesn’t like remix men; Kleinzack was shot. He was working on My Darling Clementine. Do you know the property?’

  ‘1946, John Ford, with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. 20th Century Fox. You’re not the only one who can remember things. A-D screwed me out of the rights in a nasty negotiation last year.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s the one. A-D buy their policing from the Salvation Army. That’s fundamentalism for you. I’ve got a few friends in The Sal, and I was leaked some fiche. According to them, Kleinzack was deleted with something exotic, a Buntline special. Ever heard of it? No reason you should. It was a white elephant showpiece of the Wild West, with an eleven-inch barrel. Wyatt Earp had one. Do you see the pattern? The Sal aren’t saying any more, but it’s my guess that if you were to screen Kleinzack’s Clementine, you’d see a Technicolor twitch, and it would wind up with a lab-coated Kraut remix man blundering into the crossfire at the OK Corral and getting his globes shot out.’

  Later, after Sally Rhodes had gone, Michaelis Monte had a few stiff drugs. He was rattled, no doubt about it. In previous corporation wars, the higher echelons had been off-limits. You can’t negotiate a peace with a frazzled corpse. But this new thing, this campaign of terror, didn’t appear to be a particular respecter of the ethics of monetarist diplomacy. He found Sally Rhodes’ conclusion unutterably creepy: ‘Someone, something, doesn’t like what you do Miki, and is taking extreme measures to shut you, and everyone else in your line, down.’