Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2)

by Polansky, Daniel

  The building itself had been unsafe for habitation since before its current crop of occupants had turned their teeth from the nipple. Rotting walls leaned against each other, standing solely from force of habit. The smell of decay was heavy and omnipresent, pulped wood and mildew, rainwater seeping through ceilings and into the foundations. Given the size of the structure, one would have supposed it reasonably simple to confine refuse, and for that matter bodily waste, to a specific wing or floor. One would be disappointed. Trash of all kinds lay strewn about, and the stink of urine emanated from stains on the walls.

  There were five or six thugs hanging out in the hallway, passing thick spliffs of dreamvine back and forth, and laughing in a not altogether friendly fashion. They cut the chatter short when they saw me. Despite the extravagant, labyrinthine layout of their headquarters, large enough to accommodate every member of the gang and his extended family besides, the antechamber was always packed. A close-knit crew of lunatics were the Bruised Fruit Mob. This batch managed a slightly more genial greeting than their confederate outside, mumbling my name and nodding me through a wooden door painted to resemble the back of a throat.

  Inside the main room was the man and his heavy, strung over a collection of furniture that had been the subject of frequent outbursts of aggression. The muscle perched precariously on a stool too small for him, sharpening a knife that would have been a sword in a normal man’s hands. It didn’t need sharpening, but he was sharpening it anyway. I could never remember his name; it was enough to know his purpose.

  Adisu the Damned was stretched out on a couch, scraping his grin with a toothpick. He was young, a few years over twenty – they seemed always to be getting younger, these vice-lords and corner kingpins, though maybe that was just me getting older. Truth told he didn’t look like much – a runt of a man with bad skin and a shaved head, and eyes that were too big for their frame.

  But looks can deceive. Adisu was, in fact, as hard a man as you’d ever meet, greedy and fierce, and apt to forget you were the same. He needed constant watching, else he’d try and make a play on you – it wasn’t enough that he got his end, he wanted yours as well. You needed to make sure he kept firm in his head that you were not a fellow with whom to fuck, but politely, without any outright challenge.

  Because the other thing about Adisu was that he was shithouse crazy – you could see it in the way his eyes never quite settled on anything, and in the nervous movement of his hands. It wasn’t a put-on, he wasn’t mad-dogging to keep an edge on his people – there was something wrong with him, something broke. So even if you played everything perfect you still weren’t home free, ’cause at some point whatever was inside his skull would tell him to jump, it was only a question of time. I’d seen him do it once, beat a runner to death with a frying pan he’d pulled up off the fire – one minute we’re laughing and passing around a blunt, the next Adisu’s smashing bits of brain out of the poor kid’s nose. Afterward he’d said it was because the boy was stealing, but that was nonsense. There wasn’t a reason, not a real one.

  The whole mob was mad for ouroboros root, they kept a simmer pot of it going on the table day and night, and it filled the air with a thin soup of hallucinogens. ‘Hello, Warden,’ Adisu said, leaning over the table and fanning back the fumes. ‘What can I do for you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Close, but no ring.’

  ‘All right then. What can you do for me?’

  ‘Depends. How you feel about money?’

  The half of his grin that was pure gold gleamed in the candlelight. ‘I’m for its acquisition.’

  ‘And the Giroies? Where do you stand on them?’

  He laughed. The muscle laughed too. The muscle was well trained. ‘We love all them yellow-haired white boys. Sticky as honey, the batch of us.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘Is it?’

  I nodded. ‘’Cause I happen to know where their next shipment of wyrm is getting dropped, and if you weren’t sweethearts, you might be able to lay your hands on a quarter-stone of uncut choke.’

  The muscle stopped sharpening his knife. Adisu stretched back against the couch, stroking a tuft of padding that stuck out through the torn leather. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘I fucking hate the Giroies.’

  ‘Tomorrow night, around one, a skiff will dock at the tip of the Sugarland Pier. Some men will get off it. Other men will meet them.’ Or at least that was what had been written on the sealed note Tibbs’s man had brought by the Earl that afternoon, brought it and waited while I read it, then watched as I held it over a candle.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That’s the plan at least. Of course, sometimes plans have a way of not working out.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘I doubt it’s being escorted by nuns, but last I checked you don’t run a monastery.’ I’d been doing my best not to take in any of the frying root, but a fellow can only go so long without breathing. I could feel it buzzing at the base of my brain stem, and my tongue felt slow and swollen. A pair of fornicating demons on the back wall stopped their lovemaking to turn and leer at me. Above them an intricately detailed portrait of the Lost One wept tears of blood that trickled down the walls.

  ‘Where’s your end in this?’ Adisu asked.

  ‘Say a third of what you get from selling off the stash.’

  ‘Say a fourth.’

  I nodded ascent. I didn’t so much care about the money – for my purposes the only thing that mattered was that there wouldn’t be any Giroies left to talk up who’d hit them. But then the Bruised Fruit Mob had a well settled ‘no survivors’ policy, and I didn’t think I needed to voice my concern.

  ‘The Giroies . . .’ Adisu began. ‘They probably wouldn’t be happy if they found out a crew of inks made off with their stash.’

  ‘Why, you thinking of telling them?’

  Adisu rested his chin against his hands, weighing his options silently. A silhouette of my mother on the back wall reached out her hands to me, sympathetic and disappointed. I blinked her away. ‘What you think, Zaga?’ Adisu asked.

  The muscle let the sword fall from his hand, its weight wedging the tip into the floorboards. ‘Set up,’ he said, beady eyes snarling in a skull the size of a coconut.

  ‘But on whom?’ Adisu reached over and pulled his man’s weapon out of the wood. ‘You know Warden here used to be an agent? High up in it too, from what I hear. Made sure the Dren didn’t swoop over the bay and pillage the city. Protect the country and shit.’ He made a mocking little salute. ‘He still thinks like that, like we was pieces on a board. He wants us to play the hammer on some poor set of motherfuckers.’

  ‘We gonna do it?’ the muscle asked.

  ‘Hell yeah, we gonna do it. ’Cause the Warden, he makes sure the angles meet. We just little fish, ain’t nothing he wants to concern himself with. If the take ain’t square or if the Giroies are waiting for us . . .’ He gestured with the blade. ‘There’s gonna be trouble, trouble our man don’t need. And he’s too smart to make trouble for himself.’

  Adisu the Damned would be dead in six months – no one could hold to his narcotic regimen indefinitely, and he ran his boys too hard, and he was too fond of close-in work. But none of that changed the fact that he was half a genius, sharp as the steel he was holding.

  ‘One o’clock, Sugarland Pier,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I’ll make a note of it,’ Adisu said, bright-eyed and smiling.

  I pushed myself up from the chair, unsteady from the smoke but trying to hide it. False, horrifying things swarmed the walls like crabs overflowing a barrel. The first man I’d ever killed waved hello to me, a boy really, grinning at me beneath a caved-in skull, pink oozing out the hole I’d made. Soon he was joined by a host of others, slit throats and burned bodies, corpses barely remembered, all standing abreast, laughing silently and gesturing for me to join them.

  ‘What you got against the Giroies?’ Adisu asked, breaking me out of hallucination.

 
‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said honestly, then fell on out.

  25

  I was finishing off a pot of coffee the next morning when they came for me, a pair of them, the collars of their gray-blue dusters upturned despite the heat. Not big men, but big enough, short blades at their sides, hard in the right places. I was the only person in the joint but they took a few seconds before coming over. First thing an agent learns is you never hustle, not unless it’s time to snap the trap shut.

  I’d been wondering how long it would take before the ice decided to pay me a call. I would have figured I’d have time for a few more moves before they made theirs, but this was fine. Actually this was good – it meant they were keeping an eye on Pretories.

  I didn’t know either of them, but then I’d been out of the Crown’s service eight years, and recruitment continued apace. They seemed to know me, however, and while one smiled and took a seat, the other stayed standing, eyes hard, hands ready to make sure I went easy.

  ‘You busy?’ the friendly one asked. His face was fat and freckled, like a jolly uncle. The rest of him told you this impression was a lie.

  ‘Never too busy for the Crown.’

  ‘That’s good to hear. You’d be shocked to discover how many of your neighbors feel otherwise.’

  ‘Spare the details, please. I’ve got a weak heart.’

  ‘I don’t suppose your sense of duty would extend to a trip to Black House?’

  ‘What kind of patriot would I be otherwise?’ I asked, standing. They walked me to the small carriage waiting outside, opened the door for me even. Then they took seats across from me, smiling and unsmiling, respectively. I wondered if they ever switched roles. It gets boring being yourself all the time.

  Black House is the center point of the Empire, where the decisions get made – we just keep the palace around so tourists have something to look at. From inside its soot-colored walls a few hundred uniformed men work diligently to fetter the hands and bind the eyes of some millions of their fellows. I don’t like going there, and not just because the last few times I’d arrived in cuffs. A life like mine, most lives really, you’re better off not looking back – my years in Black House belonged to a different epoch, a distant and best-forgotten age.

  Still, if I had to pay a visit, it was nice not to have a sentence of death hanging over my head. We stopped in front of the entrance, a footman arriving swiftly to help us alight. Then the gray-clad pair escorted me down the front hallway and into the back, up a flight of stairs and through the door of a corner office where I had the first legitimate shock of the day.

  ‘Hello, Warden,’ Guiscard said. ‘Grab yourself a seat. There are some things I’d like to run past you.’

  It had been three years since I’d seen him, but time is a malleable thing and well more than that had passed on his end. He’d been a pretty little peacock when I’d known him, eye candy for the heiresses and perfumed fairies at court, but he wasn’t any longer. There was a gauntness to his face that accentuated the beak-like turn of his nose. His hair was still a striking shade of white-blond, but it had receded over his temples and he’d trimmed what remained to stubble, a far cry from the curls he’d once sported. His uniform was spotless but faded – it seemed his coxcombry had gone the way of his hair.

  Or maybe he just didn’t have the time to keep up a fashionable exterior. The fact that he had men to order about had tipped me, but the five-pointed star on his lapel confirmed it – Guiscard was a member of Special Operations. The last I’d seen him, when he’d treasoned me out to the Old Man, he was still slumming it with the rest of the freeze, chasing down murderers and rapists. Now he was a member of the elite, and stopping crime beneath him. His new duties tended towards spy craft, counter-intelligence, preemptive assassination – that wide variety of unsavory activities that ensure those in power remain so.

  I guess selling my secrets had earned him the seat. I didn’t blame him. The Firstborn knew I’d done worse to get there.

  ‘Nice digs,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Normally when I get called down here, it’s to see the chief. I’m feeling a little unloved.’

  ‘Don’t take it too hard. The Old Man’s delegated me to look in on you. He’s not as young as he used to be.’

  ‘He was never young.’

  ‘No, I suppose he wasn’t.’ Guiscard waved again at the chair. ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘I’ll stand.’

  The agents stirred behind me. ‘You really gonna buck at the offer of a chair?’

  ‘You really gonna muscle me into one?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I sat. I’d been expecting to be doing this with the Old Man, but the fact that Guiscard was point would make the whole thing easier. I wondered how much he knew of Black House’s past history with the Association, and about Roland’s murder in particular. Less than he supposed, I was sure. The Old Man didn’t like anyone to know anything. Better to have a subordinate ruin an operation through ignorance than weaken his own position internally.

  Guiscard nodded at the two agents. They closed the door on their way out, and the rumble of the building dulled away.

  ‘Word is you and Joachim Pretories have been having a lot of meetings.’

  ‘That the word?’

  ‘That you’ve thrown your hand in with the Association.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You never struck me as a man inclined toward nostalgia.’

  ‘You’d be wrong there. I still have the rocking horsey I got for my fifth name day.’

  ‘Nor someone apt to end up on the losing side of things.’

  ‘You’re definitely wrong there.’

  ‘So that’s it then? You and the commander, arm-in-arm?’

  ‘I dunno about any of that. Maybe I just felt like paying a call on a fellow veteran. Talk about old times, relive our youths.’

  ‘Whatever you may think, Joachim Pretories isn’t a man to be trusted.’

  I laughed.

  ‘You disagree?’

  ‘No, not at all – it’s just funny to be on the other side of this conversation.’

  ‘Then why would you set yourself up as his pawn?’

  I had to play this tight. Black House needed to think they were running me, and not the other way around. ‘I’m a small-timer these days, Agent – I job with whoever offers it.’

  ‘And you aren’t overly concerned with who your patron is?’

  ‘I used to work here, didn’t I?’

  ‘Fair point,’ he admitted.

  The Guiscard I knew had been brash, youth and high status inclining him towards playing the bull. But he’d picked up a trick or two since then. Best to let a man come to you, not to force it. You don’t need to force it if you’ve got the leverage, and Black House always had the leverage.

  ‘So you called me in here because you were worried I was hanging with a rough crowd. I’m touched. I’ll make a point to mend my ways in the future.’

  ‘That wasn’t exactly what we were hoping.’

  ‘Subtlety makes my head hurt.’

  ‘You say you’ve got the commander’s ear. Maybe you could stick around, let us know what falls into yours.’

  ‘I don’t know – I really took that warning you gave me about Pretories to heart.’

  ‘It would be in the interests of the Crown.’

  ‘I’m not that interested in your interests.’

  He shrugged, then threaded his fingers through one another. ‘How’s the Earl?’

  ‘It runs. Come by sometime – I’ll spit in a glass of ale for you.’

  ‘How’s Adolphus? And the boy?’

  I smiled unpleasantly. ‘Let me give you a lesson in making threats, Guiscard – start small, ’cause you can’t go backwards. It don’t mean anything to tell a man with a slit throat that you’re gonna break his kneecaps. Threatening my people . . . that’s as heavy as it gets. So now, when I tell you to go fuck yourself, you got no cards left to play. You’
ll just have to sit there like an impotent faggot, moaning at my impertinence.’

  ‘There’s no reason this needs to turn sour. Believe it or not, I didn’t call you in to muscle you. I’m hoping the two of us can help each other out.’

  ‘You offered me help on something once before, I remember – what was it again?’ I snapped my fingers theatrically. ‘Yes, of course – you promised to help find the man who murdered our ex-partner, then you turned around and sold me to the Old Man.’

  ‘Look, Warden. You sat where I’m sitting once, and you had the same conversation we’re about to have. This is Black House. We own the city. We own the country. We own the sea and the skies. If there’s a place you go to when you die, we own that too. We spin the shuttlecock of your fate – the woof can go easy, or it can go hard.’

  I fished out my tobacco pouch from my pocket. The heat had dried it out, and the tab I rolled was awkward because of it. ‘I used to give that speech better.’

  ‘How did people respond?’

  ‘Depended on who I gave it to.’

  ‘How are you going to respond?’

  ‘Say it goes easy.’ I lit my cigarette. ‘What would that look like?’

  Guiscard opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an ashtray, then set it in front of me. ‘We aren’t entirely without resources, nor are we unwilling to compensate associates for their assistance.’

  ‘What kind of assistance?’

  ‘Let’s begin with what you know.’

  ‘I know lots of things, Guiscard. We start in that direction and we’ll be here all day.’

  ‘Confine yourself to the recent goings-on of the Veterans’ Association.’

  ‘They’ve got a march coming up.’

  ‘So far I’m not blown out of my seat.’

  ‘And before fifty thousand men charge the palace, Pretories is gonna detail a few of them to burn out a syndicate.’

  That didn’t quite blow him out of his seat either, but he leaned back in it at least, mulling things over before responding. ‘To what end?’

  ‘I’m not privy to his innermost thoughts. I suspect this thing with the Private’s Silver has him unsettled. Makes him look weak, like he can’t take care of his people. So while he’s got the numbers he figures he’ll use them, remind everybody that the Association isn’t to be taken lightly, and neither is their leader.’