Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  Her eyelids flickered and she took her finger from my hand. She seemed to want to avoid my eyes, but I heard the air vibrate with an unspoken word: stay.

  I stacked my fingers together and looked at how my wedding band partnered the red band of tortured flesh, was shadowed by it in scar-tissue. Another image burned in the gloom before me like an apparition. Trinity Church’s arches framing Eveylne and Dorrita Speigh joined.

  I repossessed my hand.

  At the door I made the mistake of meeting her gaze. Behind it a single question burned: “Am I not fit for you?”

  Lubricated by drink I might have said: “You are. But you were not the first. I am my word.”

  Lubricated by drink I would have been dead.

  I said, instead, “Your grandfather died of a stroke didn’t he?”

  “Who told you that?” she said. “He went missing from a Long Island beach.”

  — 18 —

  My body was calling it a day in every language it knew plus a few I’d never heard before. But I took the subway and detoured via Rector Street and the restaurant my confidence man staying at the Tombs, Mr. Tritt, had mentioned.

  The restaurant was sandwiched between an upmarket haberdasher and a tax accountancy. The name of the restaurant, The Illustrated Man, was rendered as an acronym in huge gothic capitals, T.I.M. (acronyms were the new black). From the sign above the sidewalk dangled two metal appendages like spider legs. On closer examination I saw they were part of a mocked-up moon lander, complete with feet like shovels and painted-on solar panels.

  Inside was more of the same retro-futuristic junk. It was dark and I had to order a coffee for an excuse to stay long enough to eyeball all the staff.

  The way Tritt had told it, I was expecting the tattooed hulk to be working here. There was no sign of any slope-shouldered giant with a spiral tattoo on his neck, so either I’d read Tritt wrong, or it wasn’t the man’s shift.

  I left with the intention to try again in daylight.

  Back at my office building on the ground floor, I found the elevator again temporarily defunct. I briefly considered a career-change to diesel fitter―I mean, how hard can it be?―while I trudged up the stairs to my office floor on legs that felt sand-bagged. Each step was a promise in triplicate, a down payment in ambulatory pounds of flesh, on those I’d have to climb between my office and my exit on the twenty-seventh.

  I looked in on the office only to check that Ailsa had taken my advice and visited with Aunt Ethelred. She wasn’t there, and her desk was squared away, her typewriter hooded.

  I had my hand on the pilot light dimmer when I saw the corner of a piece of paper poking from beneath her desk. It looked yellow, but then everything looked yellow in that light.

  I couldn’t remember it being there when I last left the office. Then again, I couldn’t remember it not being there either.

  Ailsa was the epitome of anal retentiveness when it came to her space. It must have slipped off her desk and escaped her notice.

  I stooped to retrieve it, and saw it was another hand-delivered cable. I smoothed an oblique crease out of it and read it.

  It was surprising.

  Surprising not the least because the sender was me. The message was new to me too, but I suppose that’s because I hadn’t sent it.

  Whoever it was who’d pretended to be me had told Ailsa to get down to some boutique bar and cafe just off Broadway in Gramercy Park, and wait till I showed up.

  So my secretary, instead of being safe a hundred miles away in Scranton, playing pinochle with Aunt Eritrea, was cooling her heels in a pocket bar waiting for Yours Truly.

  I hoped she’d have the good sense to wait five minutes and blow me off.

  All the same, it made me mad. It also turned my stomach a little.

  I locked up again and took the stairs two at a time to the ground floor. I searched the street for a cab, but found a car idling by the curb. The car looked a lot like Nicole’s.

  Turned out it was Nicole’s car. And out of it got Nicole’s chauffer. And in his hand was Nicole’s chauffeur’s Glock.

  He jammed it in my face and told me to get in the back of the car, while I rummaged in my brain for comparative stats on the Glock and the Lady.

  In the back of the car was Nicole’s chauffeur’s friend, and he showed me his gun too, a Meisner 45 automatic. Then he frisked me and took the Lady.

  I don’t do three-way comparisons, so I gave that away and asked if anybody had a toothpick when what I really wanted was a cigarette. Nothing doing.

  I said to the driver, “Is this payback for opening my own door? ‘Cause I can let you do that. We could pull over and I’ll let you catch up, maybe even put a few on credit. Whaddayasay?”

  He said nothing.

  Turned out they wanted me in the same place I’d wanted to be, the boutique bar and cafe off Broadway in Gramercy Park. The sign over the shopfront said: Witt’s End B & C.

  We got out of the car, but instead of marching me into the bar, we entered the slim apartment building adjacent. We went along a dark corridor and took a right turn into an almost-as-dark room. From the quality of the air there were at least two other bodies breathing into it. Someone pushed me into a chair. In front of the chair was a window into another room, and in that other room were a few chairs and tables and the shortest bar you’ve ever seen.

  The pieces were starting to fit together before I even saw Ailsa propped into the corner of a booth on the left of the window. I was looking into the Witt’s End through what was undoubtedly a one-way window.

  I watched Ailsa. She had one hand cupped around a slender glass. A straw stuck out of it but she hadn’t touched the drink. Only someone who knew her well could’ve spotted her anxiety. Her legs were crossed tightly under her table, and her neck was too straight.

  My stomach flipped like a landed fish.

  I felt more than heard a door open and a figure loomed before me. I recognized the silhouette of Eustace Speigh, the last remaining male heir to the Speigh Empire, before his features resolved from the gloom. He wore the same suit he’d worn the day we met, thousands of feet above Manhattan in Evelyne Speigh’s drawing room, and still looked like an animated block of granite. But today his shirt was pulled open at the neck.

  He ran his eyes over me for a long moment, then said, “I thought so.”

  He slapped me in the face, hard enough that stars streaked across my vision, then left.

  A moment later he appeared on the other side of the window. He sat at a table on the far side of Ailsa, but in clear view. A waiter took his order and a moment later returned with a drink.

  Eustace Speigh then looked directly at me through that window, raised his glass to his lips, and drank. He looked past me, and nodded.

  Two hands like T-bone steaks clapped down on my shoulders, pressed me into the seat. The shape of another man loomed in my peripheral vision.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Broke loose like a stallion in harness. Broke loose like water through inch-perfect canals.

  I knew from the first stroke of the man’s fist on the side of my neck that it was to be death by a thousand cuts. A thousand cuts from a hammer.

  The guy worked one side of my neck till I tasted bile in my throat, and then shifted to the opposite side. Each blow was precisely placed, and held plenty in reserve. His fist was a chunk of gravelstone sheathed in a rubber glove. It beat me where the pain went deep but didn’t leave surface bruising. They meant to hollow me out but leave me looking like I’d just come home from the shop. And I had no idea why.

  Time stopped going in a straight line and started stretching and shrinking like a slinky spring. Then someone dropped the Time-slinky down a Liberty Borough elevator shaft. Halfway down that shaft, Time turned into a cat with six legs. Then into a Rorschach blot that looked like a cat with six legs. The Time got bored and walked out of the cinema for a cheeseburger.

  They were working on my right kidney when the effort started to te
ll. Quality control on the punches slipped. He went too hard, and I knew I’d have at least one nice, big purple rainbow on my lower back as a souvenir of my time in a dark room behind the Witt’s End.

  Ligaments are great. On a good day they get only a trickle of blood. Which is the reason they take so long to heal. It also means they don’t bruise as such. You’d have to go looking for traumatized ligament and neighboring cartilage.

  The guy with the meatsteak hands was pulling on my left arm, pulling on it with precise, choreographed motions―a kind of tug and scoop―that reminded me of sheep crutching. When I was conscious, which seemed to be less and less. There was a monkey in the fuse box of my head hunting for bananas.

  And all the time Ailsa sat taut as the space needle on the other side of that glass with a drink she no longer pretended even interested her.

  Next thing I knew Eustace was standing in front of me. One of this grunts pulled a chair over for him. The grunt was out of breath, I noticed with a quantum of pleasure.

  Eustace sat. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my face.

  “Thanks,” I said, meaning it. I had trouble getting the word past the congested flesh of my throat.

  “Not long now, dick,” he said. “Just answer me one question, and then you have one more job.”

  The grunts were working behind me. Sounded like they were tugging more furniture around. Scratching on the floor.

  “I didn’t bother asking before,” Eustace said. “You don’t look like the kind to offer anything without some persuasion.”

  I didn’t think that was quite fair. Janus McIlwraith has some esprit de corps.

  “So tell me,” he said, and leaned forward, drawing on his cigarette so I could see his eyes clearly in its light. “Did you murder my brothers?”

  If you’re going to get that window into a man’s soul where the truth is sitting there in plain view for all to see, you only get it for half a second, tops.

  “Did you?” I said. “You lied about not being with him that night in the warehouse,” and watched for the window.

  We locked gazes. The window opened. He shook his head with a grimace. And I thought I saw through it a confused, angry, and grieving man.

  Trouble is, was it a window or a mirror?―because they can be one and the same.

  Eustace wasn’t wasting any time. He stood, drew on his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the surface of the table.

  He called to one of the grunts. “Give it here.” And I heard the clink of glass.

  Eustace took a glass tumbler and a bottle of vodka from the man. He placed the tumbler on the table, twisted the top from the bottle, and filled the glass almost to the brim with the clear, fiery liquid.

  “Drink that and we’re done here,” he said.

  My eyes made laps between the glass and Eustace’s face. He didn’t blink. They made a few more laps.

  Then I looked through the one-way window at Ailsa. She hadn’t moved. She looked pale and alone.

  Eustace saw me look at her.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Drink up or she’ll get into a tangle with a mugger at closing time.”

  “Seems a waste,” I said. “Of vodka.”

  “A bullet ain’t a waste of lead,” he said. The polish had rubbed off his accent. He sounded more like a toffed-up rat than a business major.

  I looked at the drink again, then at Ailsa.

  “Why not just put a bullet in me?” I said. “I don’t really like vodka.”

  “Almost closing time, dick,” he said, and flicked a thumb at the window. “Better hurry up if you want her face to stay in one piece.”

  A light went out on the other side of the glass. A man in a barman’s uniform stacked chairs on a table and moved to clear away another.

  Behind me, Eustace’s men were still moving the furniture around. I twisted my head around to see what they were doing. The motion sent a bolt of pain lancing down my spine. But I did see they’d rigged a rope from a bracket on the wall up and over an exposed beam. Hanging down from the rope’s end, was an object moving back and forth in the gloom, like a fish in muddy water.

  I lowered my eyes to the floor and saw what had made the scratching noise I’d heard earlier. Inch thick bars of chalk had been used to etch a figure on the floor. I couldn’t decipher the figure, and maybe it didn’t mean anything, but its significance was clear to me. It lay directly below the thing swinging back and forth from the end of the rope. I glanced up again and confirmed what was attached to the rope. It was an iron hook.

  The last time I’d seen a hook like that there were twenty of them, and a dead man hanging from each. This room had been mocked up as a satellite of Eutarch’s death cult, and I was to be the first and only hoisted. The lone sacrifice.

  I couldn’t see the sense in that and said so.

  Eustace told me to shut up and drink.

  “Do I get a cigarette?” I said, as my mind tried to wrestle out from beneath a blanket of pain.

  I guessed they were tying off a loose end. Eutarch was dead and his baby had to die too. I was the fire sale.

  “Sure,” said Eustace. He slipped me a cigarette from a pack and snapped a lighter open. I lit up and was watching the naked flame’s reflection on the window’s surface when through it I saw another light die. The barman was still clearing away tables. Ailsa’s eyes were tracking him. Pretty soon he’d be asking her to pack up.

  For the last time I looked at the drink sitting on the table in front of me. And with a sigh, stretched out my hand for the tumbler.

  Someone screamed.

  That someone was my arm. The one the grunt had used as a sculling oar. I overrode its reflex to jerk back, and grasped the glass.

  I raised it to my lips, gave Ailsa a nod she’d never see, and said, “Bottom’s up.”

  It went down my tortured throat like lava. But I decided my prejudice against vodka was unfair. It wasn’t a bad drop. The bad drop was what was already flowing in my veins.

  “I’d say see you round and nice knowing you, dick,” said Eustace, stowing his lighter. “But I won’t, and it wasn’t.”

  Then just like that they left. I guessed the grunts would be back when my ticker gave out to string me up and complete the picture.

  My body knew straight away the drink was wrong. It had landed in my guts with the usual spreading warmth. But no sooner had it begun to bloom within me than it became cold, like I’d dropped a block of ice into my stomach.

  Movement tugged my gaze to the window. A boy appeared and went quickly to Ailsa. He handed her a slip of paper. I watched her read it, and as she read, the tension left her frame. She smiled. She rose, and left, and on her heels the last lights were put out.

  And there I sat in the near-complete dark, alone.

  Not for the first time my mind harked back to the cold slab of the X-ray machine. I felt again the coarse thread of the twine I’d used to fire the exposure. Doubted again the wisdom of pulling it.

  The cold was steeling through me fast.

  ―When the fingers of my right hand found the warm metal encircling the ring-finger of my left.

  Its touch quickened my mind.

  Maybe Grace lay somewhere out there, in the dark. Lost and alone. Wondering if she were the last human alive.

  I couldn’t bear that thought.

  Over the clamor of the pain thrilling in my body, I retrieved and pocketed the Lady. I poked my cigarette between my lips and drew in a gust of smoke. Its tip flared.

  For a half-second I saw an image rise in the window-become-mirror before me―a ghost that wore my features. That ghost looked pissed, and I pitied the man who incurred its wrath.

  And I dove for the mirror.

  On the far side, in the In-Between, was chaos.

  I had already known it would be a rough ride home to good ol’ New York. The distance from Gramercy Park to the Upper East Side was longer than I was used to, and made it a recipe for a trip hangover.

  But the path home thro
ugh the mirror, the solidus, was a log bobbing on a river in tumult. I’d no sooner stepped onto this end than it rolled under me and I plunged into a moiling fluid. Fire was replaced with frost. It pressed close on me, probing in a sensory assault of a new kind. I was a man with only a childhood memory of how to swim.

  Exits yawned up at me from out of nowhere like the mouths of sea grottos. Voices seeped in through the pores of Reality, garbled and indistinct. I was tempted to dive for any old exit and take my chances.

  Currents tugged at me, and I scented on them the exit I wanted. But I was blind, and just as the scent grew strong, and I sensed my exit was near, a cross-current struck and dragged me away.

  It grew even colder, as though I had swum out over an underwater precipice and into trans-continental currents. My stomach prickled at the feeling of exposure.

  It’s possible my mind juddered into brown-out, for I thought I glimpsed deep down in the In-Between other shapes swimming.

  True or not, the vision gripped me with a deep dread.

  Then just like that I was free.

  I tumbled from the mirror and rolled off the same washstand I’d met just four days before, in the women’s restroom on the third floor of Lennox Hill Hospital. Happily no one had left a glass on it this time, so I nose-dived onto the tiles with only their bleach-tasting kiss to endure.

  I had no idea what time it was. The part of my brain that rattles when I walk was cackling that it was time to die.

  My skin didn’t prickle. It was bone-cold and numb. It was no easier to breathe here either.

  When I got my hands under me and pushed I found they didn’t want to play ball. I rolled onto my back. Felt you could call me Sir Edmund Hillary for that alone. I stared up at the door handle to the hall and may as well have been gazing at the moon. It wasn’t even part of my world.

  For all the good they were doing me, my lungs sounded like bellows. Only when they paused, empty or full, could I hear the lone misfiring fluorescent tube, and drip of a leaking cistern.

  That gave me an idea.

  But I had to move fast if my future was to be more than a collection of neat ideas in congealing meat.