Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

He listened quietly until I got to where I’d landed on his doorstep not half an hour earlier. The first thing he said was, “You need another drink.”

  He poured me one, and while I was draining it, said: “So you like this Nicole?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling the liquid reinforcements make their mark. “I like a lot of things. I like an ocean breeze. I like pretzels.”

  “Why don’t you ask the lady out then?”

  I ran my tongue over the inside of my cheek where it had been cut by my teeth in the fall. It stung from the drink.

  “How long since you had a convert?” I said.

  “I just plant the seed brother,” he said. “God makes it grow.” He laid a thick finger against his face and gazed at me with twinkling eyes. “So why not take her to dinner?”

  “Is that the best you’ve got?” I said. “I give you the inside story on the biggest murders this decade, and you ask me why I’m not dating the stiffs’ sister?”

  He sat like a statue. Waited me out.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” I said. My voice had risen without my meaning it.

  He said, “You’re the one that dragged me into this fight―but, okay, you want a reason?” He prodded a callused finger at my left hand. “That ring on your finger.”

  I raised my hand to look at it shining in the lamplight with dull luster. Eighteen carat gold. Nine pennyweights. Almost half a troy ounce. I twisted it, feeling it tug on my skin, slip friction, and slide around my finger.

  “The ring around your heart,” he added. “You want an answer, cut and dried,” he continued. “But this kind doesn’t come in a package.

  “Why do you come here?” he said.

  At first I mistook his meaning. “Cheap drink and cheap advice.”

  Then I understood. He didn’t mean the church. He meant Newer York. He meant the flipside of the mirror.

  Nate alone new my secret, one man in a city of thirty million. I’d tried it with none, but that was a path to madness.

  “Because,” I said, and found my cheeks were wet, “if I don’t, she doesn’t visit my dreams.”

  Most nights I dreamed of my wife. Vivid dreams. But the one time I’d sworn off mirror travel, six years ago, following a brutal case that ended with a dead client, my wife had faded from my dreams. It was as if she existed in the air of Newer York, and if I didn’t continue to breathe her in, my flesh forgot her.

  But I didn’t need dreams to tell me my wife and the mirror-travel were linked. It was the morning she disappeared that I first leaned on a mirror and stumbled through burning chaos into Newer York. And I’d be damned if I’d let go that last link to her.

  Nate was silent, but I heard his thoughts all the same, and answered him. “No, it would not be for the best.”

  I plucked the ring from my finger, and angled it so the light caught its inside edge. Engraved within was her name: Grace.

  I returned Nate’s gaze. “Forget the ring. It’s the promise: till death do us part. We’re parted, sure. But death...?” I slipped the ring back onto my finger. “What am I without my word? I am my word.”

  At last he lowered his eyes and chuckled. “Not a word, Janus. An argument.”

  Again I’d used the man as a punching bag, and he’d soaked it up with barely a murmur. So I handed him a free kick: “An argument? That the best you’ve got?”

  “Janus McIlwraith, in the vast and intricate cloth of Time, you”―he smiled as his eyes found me―“are a dropped stitch.”

  I laughed. Everything was starting to seem funny.

  “So God’s clumsy?” I said.

  “Can’t a man drop a stitch on purpose?”

  “If you ask me that’s a messy way to get things done,” I said, and tried to lick the bottom of my glass.

  His features drew into that mixture of sobriety and joy I’m yet to see on another face.

  “Very messy,” he said. “Spilled his own blood on that cloth.”

  I didn’t want to go there. Not now.

  I said, “Do you want to hear what happened? The night she left?”

  That was my question. The first of the ritual I shared with Nate. The first of the liturgy. I wanted it that night like a glimpse of beacon-light over a storm-tossed sea.

  “Tell me,” he said. The response.

  “It was the Sixth of January,” I said. “Snow blanketed the sidewalk and clung to the window. We didn’t make love. She was still angry―no. Not angry. Sad. She thought I... But she lay naked in my arms. Curled just so. I woke while it was still dark, 5:23. The clock readout is seared in my memory. I woke in pain, as if someone were screwing his boot heel into the bowl of my skull. Only, there was no one there. Not a soul. I was alone.”

  “Maybe she woke,” Nate said, “and slipped away?” Second response.

  “No. The bedroom door was still locked from the inside. She never liked that. But she understood. My past made enemies.”

  “So, she vanished into thin air?” Third response.

  “Thin air,” I said.

  “Does that sound rational?” Fourth response.

  “As rational as walking through mirrors.”

  “And you think she still lives?” Fifth.

  “I don’t know. But I mean to find out.”

  Nate paused, searching my face. Then, with his gravel tones: “You will.” A benediction.

  Later I slunk as near as I dared to my office building, and went, instead, down the nearest subway station with a restroom. It was empty, so I plunged straight through the only intact mirror in the joint.

  I rode a different groove home. Greater friction. Slide like fire. But my body was done with registering more that night. The new pain joined the old and lost its voice.

  As I moved away from the exit mirror, down the hall, my eye caught on her things. It always did after I talked with Nate.

  Her handbag propped against the wall in the apartment’s vestibule. The shoes, burgundy leather, bought the day before she disappeared and pristine but for a warehouse film of dust. Hanging above them the threadbare woolen overcoat that had once been her mother’s, and matched neither the bag nor the shoes.

  But these were not the most potent mementos. All of them had been prepped for the day she’d envisaged. They were clinical. It was the items that were precipitated throughout the apartment that gouged me. The chance-fallen tank-top, lying twisted in a rope on the dresser by the ensuite. Her camera wedged into the bookcase, lens cap dangling free on its tether.

  One day I’d clear them all away, clean the apartment top to bottom. The day I gave off visiting the other side of the mirror.

  When I sat at the Royal 10 and sought an explanation for the day’s events, I was conscious instead of the cool kiss of the typewriter’s keys beneath each fingertip. They were her keys. Her fingers.

  I sat and simply stared into the middle distance.

  For the first time since I’d taken the Speigh case, I had nothing. Nothing wanted out of my aching skull and onto paper so bad it could shift my fingers.

  I sat silent for the time it took a cab to crawl a peak-hour city block.

  Then I pushed my chair back.

  In the hallway I passed the coat and the shoes and the bag. I took my apartment keys from the hook behind the door and let myself out.

  For hours I walked the streets and visited the bars of electrified New York. Times Square was ablaze, and the air was full of the sound of ringtones and intercontinental chatter. I shared a drink with a man whose name I couldn’t remember. For hours I haunted my own life.

  — 16 —

  Next day I broke the pattern.

  I woke with a todo list emblazoned on my mind, and the first item had me ride the mirror on return trips to three separate locations in under ten minutes. I was a blip on the radar at Grand Central Station, Columbus Circle, and a message post on Times Square. I didn’t want to take chances with the cops. For all I knew I was now shoot on sight. Each trip required a return to my apartment, and each time I steppe
d back into its hall and paused to draw breath, my head ached that bit more. By the end of it my body felt sapped, and my head was humming like I’d spent the morning perched on a hundred-watt Marshall Stack.

  But I was happy with my work. I had three gangs of street kids hungry for the same commission. Each coterie worked separate. From past experience, I knew competition squared their output.

  While I waited for news, I ticked off a couple other items on my list.

  Number One was Carl Inker, the oracle of Meatside. I gave his office building the twice-over, but seeing no signs of trouble, I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. I rapped on the glass of Prometheus Investment Brokerage, same as I had three days before, and let myself in. The same smell of carbon assaulted me but the office’s expensive fiber link was splashing light onto the wall at an empty transcoder’s station. The lady with the gnarled hands whose job it had been to decode the ticker into holy financial writ was absent. Maybe she had a good union.

  When I found Inker in the inner office, he was out of sorts. As usual he seemed in a hurry to go no place at all, but even his good eye didn’t want to stay on me. I put it down to the money his link was silently pissing against the wall in the outer office.

  Jerking a thumb over my shoulder I said, “Your lady quit?”

  “Lunch,” he said, and poured me a drink unasked.

  “At half ten?”

  “She starts at five.”

  Wall Street didn’t open till nine-thirty, but maybe there was more than stock market ticker in Inker’s fiber bundle.

  Inker told me he’d mined Alltron’s finances to a privately owned syndicate called Phlogiston Capital, but there the trail not so much grew cold as ran into a brick wall.

  The name, Phlogiston, set up an itch that I didn’t scratch till later. (You could say it was the scratch and I was the itch.)

  What I really wanted to know from Inker was if the frame-up had shown any sign of cooling off. He told me he had nothing more.

  I said, “That’s positive.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, and then told me I was a fool to have come. Told me to get out of the city.

  I didn’t take his advice. Next on my list was Alltron and Project Hydra, the work on exotic neurotoxins implicated in the murder of Euripides Speigh. As I suspected, the project was defunct. Someone was mopping up. It had been removed from Alltron’s directory, and Doctor Arnold was on leave.

  No one I spoke to at Alltron had heard of any Phlogiston.

  It was nearing noon when I finally got word back from the street network. The word was the address of a street corner in NoLIta―Prince and Mott―and a time, 12:30PM.

  The time and place became my next appointment. I waited near the curb behind a copy of the morning Times, one eye on the comics page, and the other on the street.

  I didn’t have long to wait before a grey Patriot sedan with police plates hove into view. It pulled up behind a car waiting at the stop sign guarding Mott Street. It was stationary maybe ten seconds, but that was enough time for me to drop the paper, yank open the passenger door, and slide onto the front seat.

  The man behind the wheel reached for his gun without a sound.

  I had a second to forestall a bullet. I raised my hands till the tips of my fingers brushed the velour of the car’s ceiling.

  “Arrest me,” I said. “Janus McIlwraith.”

  Finlay MacLure, chief of the Organized Crime Bureau, froze, lips parted.

  A car behind honked.

  Then he decided. He put his free hand back on the wheel, let the clutch out, and rode up to the line.

  “I know who you are,” he said without missing a beat, then took his other hand from the wheel and took a bite out of the burger pinned in its grip. The burger was big, but he still had a job finding it in his over-sized mitt.

  This was one cool cat. I was impressed.

  He chewed, swallowed, and said, “Why didn’t you come down to the station? Hijack a cop like that and you’re likely to get blown away.”

  “Just as likely to get blown away on the steps of One Police Plaza,” I said.

  MacLure’s broad forehead crumpled into a frown. “How’s that?”

  “Yesterday I shot one of your cops,” I said, keeping an eye on his free hand.

  He was silent a moment. His brow became smooth.

  “You’re right,” he said. “If I’d known, I’d have smeared your carcass across the steps myself.”

  His eyes darted at me, calculating.

  “What do you want?”

  “Space to finish the Speigh case. I can’t do that with this frame-up over my head.”

  MacLure took another bite of his burger.

  “Done,” he said.

  His answer took me by surprise. I’d been mentally marshaling my side of the deal.

  “Done?”

  “As of this morning. Your friend Tunney convinced me you’re not that much of an idiot. We’re following another lead.” He paused. “So which of my boys did you peg?”

  “Gallant,” I said, “But you’ll want to know why.”

  He went rigid, and I tensed, waiting, but all he did was take another bite.

  “Why?”

  “It has a price tag,” I said. “It was going to be time, but now I want an amnesty.”

  “Amnesty?” he said. “I just told you you’re in the clear.”

  “Not for me,” I said. Then I explained about my German friends holed up in the guts of Brooklyn Bridge―without mentioning the bridge, of course. I told MacLure I could give him enough leads on the illegal immigration racket to crack it wide open. As I spoke, I watched his eyes for that glitter of avarice that would tell me his head had filled with visions of himself as Chief of Department, but either he concealed his emotions well, or else he is that rare bird with eyes only for his own rung of the ladder.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want me to take down this network but grant the current crop of illegals visas?”

  “Not visas. Citizenship.”

  His cheeks billowed. “Besides the fact that’s the weirdest deal I ever heard, I can’t do it. I don’t carry the weight.”

  “You won’t think it weird when I tell you the rest―the part that involves Detective Gallant. As for weight,” I smiled, “if I lean on you, that makes plenty.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance.

  “Hardball, McIlwraith?”

  “Sure,” I said, and gave him that showroom smile again, “but we’re on the same team.”

  “Are we?” he said, his gaze strangely abstracted for a man of his force.

  He didn’t speak again for minutes. He swung the sedan off Mott and onto Grand, heading away from One Police Plaza. The traffic crept past us on either side as we flowed around the curve of Jackson Park and got a peek at the bay.

  Beneath the forest of dock cranes below Manhattan Bridge, he took the entry ramp onto the lower level of the FDR, and we became one little grey beetle among a mass exodus of beetles.

  “Say I can swing it,” he said at last. “Nothing guaranteed, but I have a few favors to call in. It’ll cost me. What are you putting on the table?”

  “Information,” I said.

  He grimaced and said out the side of his mouth, “You’ll need to stop dancing, McIlwraith. What are you, a ballet dancer?”

  A ballet dancer. I smiled, then said, “Your department is compromised. Probably fatally. Has been for years.”

  “What the hell?” He swore. When he mustered the spit again, he said, “You’re wasting my time, shamus. Do you know how many guys I’ve stuck in the Tombs?” He swore again. Seemed to have forgotten his appetite. The burger hung out of his fist like last week’s laundry.

  “Small fry,” I said. “When what you want is the daddy fish. You want the Strawman.”

  Now it was his turn to smile. But his pale blue eyes stayed flinty.

  “The Strawman? Don’t tell me you’re a believer, hard case like you, McIlwraith?”

/>   “But that’s the beauty of it, Chief,” I said, and admired the trees on the river’s edge with their tops bursting with quickening’s green. “What better place to hide than underneath a myth? Every cop I talk to thinks the Strawman is a handle, or at best a card played by whomever, whenever it’s convenient. And for years you’ve had people messing over the tracks right under your nose.”

  MacLure took a bite of the laundry, and ate with renewed gusto. It was a good sign.

  “Gallant,” he said, not a question.

  “He’ll show up some day soon with a busted leg and some mugging story, but, yeah, he’s one,” I said. “He’d have others.”

  “And you’re telling me this immigration racket is the Strawman’s?”

  “Not immigration racket: trafficking in human meat.” I gave him the address of the death cult and explained how the human contraband were being used to test exotic poisons.

  MacLure’s mind seemed to be turning on these revelations like a millstone.

  He said, “Making money three ways. The meat, the deed, and—when it gets to market—the poison.”

  He stuffed what was left of the burger into his mouth and chewed it under bulging cheeks until he could speak again.

  “Okay. I’ll bite. If the cult checks out, you’ve got a deal.”

  “One more thing,” I said.

  MacLure was silent. I took it as an invitation.

  “When you clean house, keep me in the loop. I want the real dossier on the Strawman. I’ve seen the one Gallant covered with crap.”

  “If you’re right,” he said, “you can date my daughter.”

  “If I’m right―and I am―the first thing you should do is get your daughter the hell away from New York and to a city that does happy endings.”

  — 17 —

  When I entered the lunchtime buzz of the Whipped Elephant, more than one set of eyes lit with what I call the scoop-light.

  I picked the nearest pair, and to make the point carry, the pair furthest from the ground.

  “You wanna pull those stalks back in before someone trips on them.”

  The owner, a reporter for the Herald by the press card clipped to his sports jacket, gave me the once over, then turned away from me toward the bar. I probably looked like a pickled baseball mitt, but I couldn’t say whether he feared trouble or an infection.