‘The Firstborn bless you, Mr Tibbs!’ Charlie yelled at our backs. ‘Bless you and keep you safe!’
Tibbs’s quarters were modest, given his tendency towards the rococo and the fact that he probably cleared ten thousand ochres per annum. Small bordering on cramped – a crumbling desk, a coat rack and a bar. A heavy safe was sunk into the corner, cash on hand to defray his operating costs, a fortune for the average citizen.
‘That boy’ll come to a bad end,’ Tibbs said, pouring two glasses of whiskey and taking a seat behind the desk.
I followed him to roost. ‘At least you’ll know you tried,’ I said, not sure if I was kidding.
Tibbs nodded thoughtfully, then focused his attention on the matter at hand. ‘If it was up to me, I’d settle into my high-back and we could toss words around all night. But I know you, Warden, and much as it bleeds my soul, you are not the sort for aimless jabbering. So,’ he set the whiskey into my hand, and clinked my glass, ‘let’s get to it.’
A sharp crack interrupted us, a scream following immediately on its heels. Again the same. I took a sip of the liquor. It tasted like the sunset, and I told Tibbs so.
‘A luxury I allow myself. Imported from Kinterre – you people can’t distill a decent batch to save your life, if you don’t mind me saying.’
I didn’t. ‘I need to know the time and location of the next shipment of Giroie choke,’ I said.
‘I don’t move wyrm.’
‘And I don’t have a seat on the royal council, but I know where the palace is.’ I could hear Charlus whimpering through the walls. You don’t need your pinky fingers, strictly speaking, to pick a pocket, but their absence certainly wouldn’t help.
‘What are you getting involved with the Giroies for? You know the son is running it these days, and he doesn’t have enough wit to fill a sock.’
‘He should be about at my speed then.’
‘It’s not like the old days. The Islanders run the docks now, them and the heretics. Been a long time since the Tarasaighns held monopoly on contraband.’
‘Come on, Tibbs, the senior Giroie wouldn’t so much as shake a Kiren’s hand – no way in hell Junior started cashing his chips with the foreign born. The Giroies still work through you swamp dwellers. You aren’t really gonna look me in the eyes and tell me that you don’t have a few friends amongst your countrymen?’
‘A few, I suppose,’ Tibbs said, with no great enthusiasm. ‘Of course, it’s a substantial favor you’re asking.’
‘It’d have to be, to make a dent in what you owe.’
‘You did me a solid, back in the day.’ He sucked at his teeth and reached out with a hard gaze. ‘Back in the day.’
‘Years and years ago – so I suppose it’s been accruing interest.’
He smirked. ‘I could put someone on it. Not like the Giroies run a tight ship.’
It’d be a foundering one soon enough, but there wasn’t any need to spread that around. The Swell Man topped me off from his decanter, then took the same liberty with his own glass. ‘What are you up to, Warden?’
‘Treading water. You know how it goes.’
‘Sounds to me like you’re making a play. It’s been a long time since the Giroies have been top-shelf, and their head’s a fool – but he’s got a fair share of men beneath him.’
‘How many is a share?’
‘More than zero, which means they dwarf your own reserves.’
‘I never had much in the way of a formal education,’ I said. ‘Arithmetic makes my head fuzzy.’
‘You know your business, Warden, I won’t say otherwise. Been running that little kingdom of yours for a while now – though having been there, I’m not at all sure it’s worth the effort.’
‘A man gets accustomed to his surroundings.’
He took off his top hat and set it on the table. Without it he seemed distinctly diminished. His hair had turned silver since I’d seen it last, and in the bad light he didn’t look like a man who’d live forever. ‘You know, I can remember when you still wore the gray. I bet there aren’t so many men who can say that.’
‘My acquaintances tend not to live so long. Read into that what you will.’
‘I’m still alive, Warden.’
‘You are indeed.’
‘Thirty years I’ve held my territory.’
‘Long time.’
‘Seen a lot of people end up sleeping in the harbor.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘After you left Black House, I remember thinking you’d be one of those unfortunates.’
‘Never too late to dream.’
‘All that trouble with Mad Edward’s mob—’
‘Poor Edward. Put his faith in the wrong people.’
‘You seemed like a fellow sprinting towards a bad end.’
‘More of a marathon – same destination, though.’
‘But eventually things settled down, and I figured I’d been wrong.’
‘Don’t take it to heart – I was wrong once, too.’
‘You’ve played it smart. Kept your grip tight, never made yourself a nuisance to anyone big enough to scratch you.’
‘You’re gonna make me blush, you don’t cut this short.’
‘Now I’m thinking I was right after all. You’re tough, Warden, damn tough, and too contrary to go smooth. I think maybe you just haven’t found anybody to put you down yet – but I think maybe you’re still looking.’
‘That was a hell of a sermon. Too late for you to join the priesthood? I think you missed your calling.’
He snickered. ‘Not enough the hypocrite.’
I thought it polite not to argue.
‘This information, whatever you want it for – it won’t be good, not for you, not for anybody.’ He rolled the brim of his cup up to his lip, then rolled it back down to his desk, empty. ‘If I was your friend, I wouldn’t give this to you.’
‘But we aren’t friends, Tibbs. You’re just a guy I do business with.’
After a moment he nodded sadly and flipped the hat back on his head with one smooth motion. ‘How could we be otherwise, since you never come to visit? I’ll send a man around tomorrow with what you need to know.’
23
I walked into the Hen and Harpy early the next morning. It took up the first floor of a red-brick building in a quiet corner of the Old City. It was not a particularly nice restaurant – the décor and menu had remained unchanged since the plague. But then it didn’t need to recoup its costs. It needed to advertise that the Giroie family had money and age, and it did that effectively. The kitchen was closed, but a man sat at the bar, pouring coffee into a porcelain mug. He was dressed like a maître d’, but beneath his coat could be seen the outline of a knife.
‘I’d like to speak with Artur.’
He took a long look at my frayed shirt. ‘And who would you be?’
‘I’d be the Warden.’
He took another look at my frayed shirt. He was having trouble squaring it with my name, though what exactly he expected from the attire of a slum kingpin, I wasn’t sure. ‘Is Mr Giroie expecting you?’
‘Not unless he can see the future.’
‘So then you’re hoping he has a break in his schedule?’
‘Praying for it.’
Humor confused him, and it was a while before he answered. ‘I’ll have to send up and see if he’s available.’
I nodded and set down to wait. The concierge detailed a serving boy, then returned to his seat and his coffee, sipping slowly, pinky extended. When Senior had run the joint the bottom floor of the Hen was guarded night and day by thugs in bad suits, big guts and bigger arms, split even between friendly and threatening. I hadn’t liked them, but I’d liked them more than their replacement, a silk-clad twit who’d simper while slitting your throat. After a couple of minutes a firm set Rouender with no pretensions of belonging in the service industry took me up to the top floor.
If you followed the Giroie line back far enough, you’d fi
nd a man. A real fierce motherfucker, two-fisted and vicious, the kind you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, or a lit one, or anywhere else for that matter. Savvy enough to catch the angles others missed, with the balls to take advantage of them. A man who’d carved an empire at the edge of a blade, who’d locked onto it with both hands and held it against all comers. Who’d inscribed his name deeply enough into his territory that it had become an inheritance. You could have seen traces of this man in Artur’s father – not the full allotment, but something of his progenitor’s savagery and cunning, rough patches beneath the polish.
Not so Junior – in him the blood had finally gone false, watered away to nothing. As far as he was concerned the family business was just that – he’d have been as comfortable running a merchant consortium or a winery. Had he been cognizant of his own weakness, he might have been OK, content to hold on to what his ancestors had earned, hopefully pass it down to a son who was hewn a little closer to his forebears. But Artur was a snake who thought himself a lion, and the Giroie family wouldn’t last him. It had genteeled itself out of existence.
He was still high on his recent success, having swallowed up some unaffiliated street gangs a few weeks back. I doubted he’d have long to enjoy it. There were plenty of players out there larger than the Giroies, and it didn’t do to draw their attention just to add a few blocks of territory. But then, Junior had a hard time seeing past his next meal. I’d known him for years – he used to hang around the restaurant, his father’s lieutenants bringing him candy and paying him compliments, a spoiled child who’d become a callow youth.
His office was altogether too elegantly outfitted for a man who, bottom line, made his living off choke and leashed whores. He was sitting at a table about the length of a coffin, and didn’t bother to get up as I came in. The top of it was one smooth sheet of translucent crystal, because who doesn’t want to be staring at another man’s thighs while conducting business?
‘Warden,’ he began happily. ‘A pleasant surprise.’ Artur was the wrong sort of pretty for his industry. Muscled but soft, with blond hair trailing to his shoulders and an outfit that seemed cut from a courtesan’s bed sheet.
‘Appreciate you making the time.’
‘A pleasure, a pleasure. How’s business going?’
‘A glorious string of uninterrupted successes. Yourself?’
‘It goes very well,’ he said. The sunlight came in through the windows and off his teeth. ‘Very well indeed.’
‘Good to hear.’
‘Can I get you something? Whiskey? Cigar?’
It was nine-thirty in the morning, but offering gifts reminded Artur that he was rich, so every meeting was my birthday. I shook my head just the same. ‘I’m solid.’ I took a deliberate look at the surrounding opulence. ‘Been some changes since I sat here last.’
‘Change comes for all of us, Warden – either we embrace it, or we let it swallow us.’
I’d make sure to polish up that pearl of wisdom and set it somewhere safe. ‘That’s what happened to the James Street Boys? They got eaten up by the future?’
He smiled, coy as a ten-ochre whore. ‘You heard about that?’
‘Word spreads.’
‘An ugly sort of business, really. If it were up to me, these sorts of things wouldn’t be necessary. Business could be conducted honestly, with all sharing in the profit. But,’ he sighed dramatically, ‘we do not live in such a world.’
‘Your world, maybe – mine’s nothing but spun sugar and sunsets.’
‘You’ll have to invite me over sometime.’ He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. ‘I’m sure you didn’t make the walk up here just to listen to me ruminate.’ Though that wouldn’t stop him. ‘What is it that brings you to the Hen before noon?’
‘Call it a sense of neighborliness.’
That crossed his eyes. ‘I was unaware our homes abutted.’
‘All the world is my home, Artur, and every man my neighbor.’
His laugh was too close to a giggle for my tastes. ‘Speak on, citizen of the world.’
‘I hear you’ve been having trouble with the Association.’
He looked faintly quizzical. ‘No, not really.’
‘You won’t be able to say that much longer.’
His desk was covered with a wide variety of bric-a-brac, paperweights and gilded timepieces, useless but expensive gadgetry from the Free Cities that chimed when you tapped them. He picked one of the assemblage, a miniature pikeman, and began to wind its key. ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘The kind of trouble an organization subsisting of narcotics distribution would have with an organization once sworn to eradicate it.’
Artur grimaced, unhappy to be reminded he didn’t operate a cotton concern. He set the toy back onto the desk. It marched forward a few inches in awkward lockstep, then tumbled over. ‘The family has many and varied interests, most strictly legal. I wouldn’t at all describe us in the terms you used.’
‘I’d assumed both of us were too busy for hair splitting, but if I’m the only one who’s got things to do today . . .’
‘We haven’t been in conflict with the veterans for over ten years, since Roland Montgomery was killed.’
‘I hope you enjoyed the break.’
‘You’re saying they’re going to move on us?’
‘Haven’t they already? You think Pretories doesn’t know who pulls the Savages’ strings?’
‘The Savages are not affiliated with the Giroie family,’ Artur said. ‘Like any other wholesale operator, we have a wide variety of customers. Whatever activities they engage in after our transactions are finalized is no concern of ours, I can assure you.’
‘A neat distinction, one I doubt the other syndicates will make. The street respects winners, Giroie – and not yesterday’s winners, either.’
‘You don’t need to tell me my business,’ he said with a pinched-lemon face. ‘Where’s your information coming from? Is it reliable?’
‘You don’t need to tell me my business either, Artur. I wouldn’t have wasted the walk if I didn’t think what I had to say was on the level.’
He tapped nervously at the glass shelf. ‘No offense, Warden – I know your sources are well placed. But the Association has kept themselves out of our business for over a decade, and we’ve done the same. Pretories has never shown any willingness to renew our conflict, and I don’t see why that would change now.’
‘You hear about this march they’ve got planned?’
‘Of course.’
‘Next week he’ll have fifty thousand men underneath his banner. Numbers like that, might be he gets to thinking about settling old scores.’
‘Might be,’ he responded, unconvinced but nervous.
I boosted myself to my feet. ‘Do whatever you want, Artur – this was a courtesy.’
Artur stood as well. ‘Don’t misunderstand – I appreciate the information. You’ve always been a loyal friend of the family.’
I’d never been anything of the sort, but there was no reason to point that out. ‘I’m near enough to Association territory to warrant keeping an ear out. They finish with you, might be they set sights on me next.’
‘I doubt it will come to anything,’ Junior said, back straight, doing his best to seem like a person of importance. ‘But if they make a play, we’ll answer it.’
Downstairs the maître d’ and Artur’s guard sat together at a table, drinking coffee and playing chess. They played ugly, trading pieces at random and without any sense of deeper strategy. The guard had mate in three, but he didn’t see it. I watched their game for a moment, wondering if either would be alive at the end of mine. But it was too hot for speculation, let alone sympathy, and I headed on out.
24
Twelve hours later I stood in front of a beaten-down mansion, ancient and decaying, a monument to the time a half-century past when the docks were prime real estate and not the city’s dumping ground. The late summer sun had dipped below the
skyline but its residue offered some succor against the coming night. On the ramparts above me the usual line of stone gargoyles gave silent warning, half-animal figures with broken appendages and fractured leers, the population within slow to scare and quick to vandalize. The rest of the abode had gone in the same direction, product of the passive indifference and bored maliciousness of a generation of squatters. You wouldn’t have thought anything to look at it, unless you spent a few minutes watching the stream of passers-by cross the street rather than walk past.
The Bruised Fruit Mob owned a stretch of territory along the boundary between the Isthmus and Kirentown, an area so impoverished as to blur racial animosity, skin color rubbed away by the abject misery of circumstance. They bore close resemblance to a lot of other Islander gangs, smuggling goods through their section of the docks and hiring out as muscle to anyone foolish enough to take them. They had no real ties to anyone who mattered, and their activities were of the kind that tended to make a lot of noise, which in the long run is poor strategy for a criminal organization. For the moment, though, they punched above their weight, making up in sheer savagery what they lacked in resources and sanity.
A bravo lounged outside the entrance, charcoal-skinned, a curved short sword swinging from each hip. Though my visits were frequent and nothing but beneficial to his clan, still he bared back his teeth when he saw me, unable to conceive of any other greeting. I paid it little mind, shouldering him aside and descending through the door into hell.
The founder of the Bruised Fruit Mob had fancied himself an artist, as well as a thug and killer, and he’d compulsively tattooed his dreams throughout the interior in vibrant and garish colors. His initial creations were distinctly light-hearted, smiling clouds blowing gusts of wind across dancing children, an anthropomorphic sun smoking a joint and winking. As his craving for wyrm had festered, he’d painted over his visions with things far darker – horned figures engaged in ill-defined blasphemies, abortions mouthing their hatred at the world. He’d died a year or so back – choke will do that to you – and his masterpiece had begun to degrade, the results of his different periods blurring together into an infernal overlap of pigment.
Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2) Page 14