Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  I did.

  “Hold the door,” he said. “I’ll open.”

  He went to the desk and dug his personal effects out of the mess I’d made. He stuffed them all into his pockets except for the pince-nez, which he clipped to the wide bridge of his nose. He angled the standing lamp’s articulated neck until the element poured bright light over the safe’s face.

  I drew my gun and took up station, back to the wall, on the opening side of the door. My ears were in the stairwell, my eyes on Thor as he squatted at the safe.

  Thor’s massive back obscured his hands, so that I couldn’t see what he was doing. Lucky for me he kept up a commentary in his German English.

  “Light and touch,” he said. “All you need to crack these. And time.”

  He had the first in abundance. I guessed he had the second. The third would be a problem. The clatter of shoes on stairs switched to the pounding beat of men in a hallway. I’d been wrong about it being three men. There were four closing on our position.

  I flicked the Lady’s safety off.

  Drowning now beneath the noise of approaching bodies was the faint clicking of the safe’s dial. It wound up and down, a rattler’s tail.

  Thor was still speaking. “Last to first. Combination number. No tumblers like a door lock. Each number notched in a metal disc. Just need to line them up.”

  I made a shushing noise. The storm of footfalls had reached the other side of the door and died.

  The door knob rattled. Gentle then violent.

  “Freiter?” said a voice. Sounded like a name. I glanced at the inert accountant. His name?

  “Freiter. Open up.” A different voice.

  The knob rattled again, twisting a little off its axis. Pretty soon someone was going to pull out the thug’s lock pick―a shoulder.

  I relaxed my grip on the .38. It felt hot in my hand.

  Hoarse whispers filtered through. I couldn’t make out words. Conferring. Planning.

  I glanced at Thor again. If he felt tense it didn’t show. The only movement he made was the slightest twitching of his right shoulder.

  A juddering blow beat on the door, and the lock jumped but held. There was a pause of four seconds, then another blow. The lock assembly twisted and stayed that way.

  The door was flimsy plywood. It was going to tear off the lock in any case. One, maybe two more hits tops.

  A timer in my head wound down. Three seconds... Two...

  I skipped to the other side of the door, flicked the lock off, and yanked the door open.

  A man dashed through in a blur of motion. He tripped over the accountant’s still body and sprawled.

  I rammed the door closed again. From the pained cry, I guessed I’d smashed #2 in the nose. I flicked the lock on, and turned in time to see Thor hammering the first intruder on the top of his skull with his fist, like a pile-driver.

  Beside Thor, the safe’s door hung open.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’m good.”

  “The desk,” I said.

  Thor plucked the desk off its feet as though it were a saltcellar, and butted it against the door.

  I poked into the safe, and found it mostly empty. A shelf separated its insides into a large partition and a small one. The large space was bare. The top held seven vials of clear liquid, all unlabeled.

  I took two, put one in each inner coat pocket, shut the safe and spun the lock.

  I stooped to collect the pistol, which had fallen to the floor. I offered it to Thor, but he said, “Nein.”

  So, gun in each hand I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  We went through the door into the loft, and ran along under the dangling feet. They swung gently with our passage like listless wind chimes.

  At the far end of the loft was another door. There was a landing on the other side of it, and a service staircase that switched back on itself down into darkness.

  Shouts ricocheted to us, sounding close. I had no feel for how the joint was laid out―the men could have been yards away, around an elbow in a hallway.

  Thor squeezed down the stairs. I followed.

  Light flared in the gloom. A bullet tore the faded wallpaper at the stair’s head. Where I had just been.

  We dropped quickly, taking the stairs two and three at a time, our feet pounding dust off the steps. Adrenaline suppressed my sneeze reflex. I guessed the stairs weren’t much used.

  Another flash and peal of gunfire smote the darkness, and footfalls followed fast, tumbling down the stairs above.

  I raised the pistol into the darkness and returned fire, a single round straight up the stairwell. My elbow and shoulder soaked up the recoil. The spent cartridge ejected, chimed on the stair, and flew into open space. It tinkled somewhere below.

  Silence poured in. Our pursuers had something to think about now.

  A mental count put us nearly on the ground floor.

  I reached it and ran smack into Thor’s back. He was standing stock still.

  He swayed once then plunged down the next flight.

  “Know what you’re doing?” I said, keeping an ear open for our pursuers. The sound of their tread reached me, more measured now.

  “Maybe down here,” Thor said.

  Maybe? Maybe he was picking his grave plot. Didn’t matter. I followed. I wanted to know how this monster Teutonic skein was snarled up with Alltron and hitmen.

  Hitman.

  I figured that out on the drop to the ground floor too. It had been an itch that struck up when I saw the accountant trussed and bowed on the floor at Thor’s feet. He hadn’t been panicking. He had been calculating. I’d seen it before. Some would say I’d been it before.

  People think you need to be big and strong to do professional kills. You don’t. A gun, yes. A knife. Poison. Speed helps. But the vital ingredient―the lack of which keeps so many wannabes at home―is the will. The will to snuff a life and call it a paycheck.

  The man we’d left passed out on the top floor had it in spades.

  But I’d been in too much of a hurry to scratch that itch.

  The stairs landed in a basement. It was the neatest basement I’d ever seen. It was lit by a single night-light cupped in an elegant steel fixture, and beneath the light was a door.

  Thor grunted once and went through the door. I followed and soon was huffing along behind him in some kind of tunnel in near darkness. The air smelt of concrete, alkaline. Caged.

  My mental compass finally caught up to events, and told me we were heading away from the street where the taxi had dropped me, away from the back of the townhouse and underground.

  Sparse lamps made pools of light on the swept concrete, and barring the flap of our shoes on the concrete, there was not a sound. Nothing from our pursuers. My back prickled.

  We passed a retaining wall through which a hole had been hewn. Curtains were draped over its raw edges, and steel struts supported a cross bar overhead. We passed beneath it, and I knew we’d entered whatever building backed onto the townhouse, facing the street north and parallel.

  We reached a door and Thor opened it without stopping. A breeze feathered my hair. A reflex threw me forward, and I tackled Thor to the ground―just. A bullet from behind tore the door’s hardwood lintel.

  I pushed through the doorway, keeping low, and hauled the door shut. We were in a basement the mirror image of the one we’d just left. No lock on the door and nothing to wedge it shut. We legged it up the stairs.

  And straight into High Society.

  The stairs gave onto a small foyer serving restrooms. The smell of the toilets was the first hint it was a classy joint―there wasn’t any. That, and the demure tinkling of glassware and murmur conversation.

  I walked down a hallway that seemed to head somewhere. Doorways slid by on either side, windows on rooms hosting private dinner parties. A lady with sculpted red lips shot me a haute-couture-and-escargot glance. Between my purple cheeks and sweat-slicked hair, and the Germanic Col
ossus striding behind me, we were about as welcome as a slice of salami in the Vegan Special.

  The corridor terminated and we emerged into a large space, a restaurant and bar. The murmur and clink of cutlery rose, and the air here was thick with the mingled odor of perfume and spice. Couples sat at tables in the blush of faint, warm lamplight, each a little world.

  Pairs of eyes darted behind me to Thor.

  The bar patrons were hemmed in by a thigh-level partition, with the bar itself running the length of one wall. Behind it, a vast mirror doubled ranks of bottles into a forest of glass and liquor, and gave the room a subterranean feel.

  I strode toward the street door, parallel to the bar. Halfway along it I halted in front of a barman. He was pouring a drink, one hand gripping a draught handle, the other tilting a glass beneath the tap. A frothing liquid rode up the side of the glass then began sluicing into the drain. He’d not moved since I’d noticed him, except for his eyes. They had tracked us, like marbles swiveling on gimbals.

  I stared at him. He stared back.

  This was bad.

  I got the hell out of there. Thor at my heels, no idiot.

  Outside the street was dark and, but for a loner or two skulking between streetlamps, deserted. I spoke some French and strafed the darkness for an exit.

  “There,” said Thor, his arm stuck out like a tree limb, pointing to a cross street a hundred yards north. That made it Allen Street. A cluster of cars were banking up at the intersection against the signal, while an officer in the signal station was holding up the traffic for a road train that had pulled off the expressway ten exits early.

  We just needed warm bodies. The more the better.

  We ran toward the clot of honking metal, and the signalman’s booth―he was technically a cop and licensed to carry. We passed the mouth of a serviceway running between the restaurant we had just exited and the flanking building. From the corner of my eye I saw men tumble from a doorway.

  I pushed to a sprint, tallying the odds of survival from that brief mental snapshot. Five men. A handful. Packing more than double our arsenal. Not great odds.

  But before I had a chance to digest that information, the next piece of mental calculation rammed home; we weren’t going to make it.

  Thor must have seen it too. He dived down the next serviceway. I turned, slipping on wet-slick litter. Scattershot blitted the bricks in a tight pattern only feet away and chased me after him. The shot came from a shotgun. A clean kill was not an operational parameter for these guys.

  Thor was already halfway along the alley. It was short, didn’t run the length of the building, but split off into an open parking complex and a million exits. Make that and we were home.

  I heard more gunfire, but it was no shotgun. It was the deep, compressed cough of a heavy-caliber pistol. Two shots.

  I stuck my head back around the corner.

  And caught a three-inch wedge of mortar above my ear.

  But in the half-second between the bullet tearing a chunk from the wall and lights out, time expanded. I slipped down the rabbit hole and the world turned hyper-real and absurd.

  Absurd was how the chunk of mortar lifted away from the wall and spun lazily toward me. It was absurd because my brain told me it was a wedge of ice―grey, dirty ice. I guess when time slows the brain’ll grab any old association just to fill a need.

  Hyper-real was the scene playing out behind that gyrating mortar-ice: on the ground, perhaps twenty feet away, was a man with a hole the size of an ashtray cored through his trunk. A big ashtray. The heavy-caliber pistol was packing soft-nosed slugs.

  A shotgun lay at an angle inches from his dead eyes. His shirt was a mess, and his pants were grimed kitchen-hands’ whites. He was one of our pursuers. Had been.

  Farther up the street, two men crouched. One, facing me, had just loosed the slug that smashed the wall near my head. The other was straining to shrink behind a post box, looking for the missing part of his right arm.

  Two of our pursuers were missing. Maybe they’d circled back. Maybe I should tell Thor.

  Too late. I was about to get brained.

  But there was one more detail of the scene that got seared on my optic nerve before I passed out. I caught a glimpse of the shooter helping us, in silhouette only, and already ducking for cover down the alley by the restaurant.

  It was the accountant.

  — 9 —

  I felt fingers press on my skull.

  I kept my eyes hooded and tracked the fingers by their touch. Right hand? Thumb and three digits splayed over the mortar impact site.

  Two more fingertips above my ear. Left hand.

  Those two digits pushed.

  Someone moaned. It might have been me.

  I felt warm breath flow over my cheek, and decided I knew enough. Step on a bear trap and you can’t complain if it snaps shut.

  I forced my eyes open and saw a blurry half-darkness. My left arm gripped the guy’s right, ripped it away from my head, and pulled the forearm vertical. At the same time, my right hooked his elbow and locked it in place.

  Holding that elbow as pivot, I forced the hand back, counter-clockwise, like turning the handle on a butter churn. Only the stuff that was going to churn was shoulder ligaments and cartilage.

  Before the shoulder joint popped from its socket, two things happened. One, I realized the arm belonged to a girl not a guy. And, Two, a loud voice filled the small space. It said, “Nein! Halt,” which, although I understood well enough, was not what froze me. It was Thor’s voice.

  I let go, and blinked to clear my vision. The woman, her eyes wide with fright and glistening in the poor light, stepped away, hugging her arm to herself.

  Thor loomed. “Nurse,” he said, but I’d already got it.

  I said sorry to the woman. She nodded but her eyes remained wary.

  I looked around. Shadows and stone and hobo interior design. The rusted hulks of drums. A boarded up window. The place was poorly ventilated, and smelt of burnt gas. There was something familiar about it all.

  Voices drifted down, from the floor above I guessed. A deep rumbling reached my ears, travelling through the stone walls.

  “Where am I? What happened?”

  I was lying on a table. Thor sat on one end. It creaked under the load. I sat up and swiveled my legs over its lip. A noise like a collapsing bridge swelled in my head and I rode a wave of nausea.

  When it passed I asked again.

  Thor said, “I took you. You passed out. Took a car and came here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Safe place.”

  Safe like the underside of a chesterfield.

  I said, “Can I get a drink?”

  The nurse disappeared and returned with a mug of brackish water. I thanked her, and she gave me a little dip of the chin.

  I glanced at Thor and pictured him carrying my ragdoll deadweight over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Then I looked at the mug in my hands and realized where I was. I burst into laughter.

  When I caught my breath, I said, “Which side of Germany you from―east of Berlin?”

  He shook his head. “Augsburg.”

  Pity. I’m a guy that likes symmetry. And irony. Didn’t McCartney and Jackson sing about that?

  I caught Thor’s eye, and waved my cup at the tomb-like room. “What do you think this place is?”

  “Safe place.”

  I smiled. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  I held my cup up, and said, “Can you read that?” referring to the words enameled on the side of the utilitarian mug.

  He squinted then shook his head.

  I hadn’t thought he would be able to. The light was poor. The enamel had chipped and worn, obliterating some letters and marring others. And English wasn’t Thor’s first language.

  “It says: Civil Defence All Purpose Cup.”

  He just looked at me. It meant nothing to him.

&n
bsp; I said, “When you moved in here you probably found blankets, cracker tins, IV lines and bandages, maybe even some broken vials labeled Dextran. Am I right?”

  “Some of those things,” he said, with a look on his face like he’d bitten a sour olive.

  I told him and his nurse friend that the place they’d chosen to squat had once―long, long ago―been a Cold War bunker. The reason it was familiar to me was because I’d read about it in the Times or National Geographic a couple of years ago. Bunker building was a national hobby during the 50s and 60s―after the Ruskies put Sputnik into orbit, and nukes into Cuba. Nobody told people that bunkers weren’t much protection from a ten-megaton explosion. Two on Lower Manhattan would have snuffed an estimated 6.1 million souls.

  Nukes. Couldn’t build those either after the Event. Regression had its upside.

  The far-off rumbling spoke through the walls again, and loosed a purl of silt that threaded through a crack in the ceiling, and dispersed in the air.

  I knew what was making that noise now too: one of those pistons ramming people into and out of Manhattan. A train. Riding the Brooklyn Bridge―the new Brooklyn Bridge that was a retrofit over the original stonework, towers and ramps. They’d laid the new structure over the original like a great cloak in winter.

  This bunker had been stumbled upon way back in 2006 during routine maintenance in an alcove beneath the arch of the Manhattan-side ramp. And here it still sat, even snugger than before, over two centuries later.

  A new voice spoke, surprising me. It sounded German but I couldn’t make it out. Maybe a dialect.

  The voice’s owner stepped into the room. He was tall like Thor, but wiry. His face had been worked into lines and greys by tension or grief. His hair was long and thick, but matted like a cared-for animal gone feral.

  He spoke again in gibberish.

  Thor responded in English. “He is good. Not police. He saved my life.”

  The man switched to good English. “And you saved his, so you’re square. Doesn’t effect this.”

  I ignored them, and spoke to the nurse, “You got the time?”

  She shook her head, not understanding. I jabbed a finger at my wrist, but she still didn’t get it. Her eyes were darting between the other men, who were spitting rapid-fire dialect at each other.