by Brett Adams
Time to scratch.
On the other side of that mirror a murderer walked free on my streets. Free on the streets of New York. Pacman on the grid of Manhattan.
Manhattan. Even the name worked mental contortion. A name that meant “hilly island” (really) or “place of general inebriation.”
Or, my favorite, “place of the whirlpool.”
Gotham. The gateway city. Hell’s gate.
The Big Apple, home of Big Sin.
Capital of the U.S. of A. for five whole years before the fools realized capitals need respectability.
Provoker. Agent of change. Equilibrium in tension.
My city.
The city said to pose the most exciting and alarming riddles about present and future.
Damn right, that man.
And here I am.
Dawn light was spreading through the graveyard. It made the mist covering the ground glow. From my vantage point it looked low and level like a lake. The dark bulk of headstones and crypts poked above the ground fog like the figureheads and forecastles of shipwrecks.
An orange-yellow bauble of light wobbled too and fro beneath the tide. It paused a moment, disappeared, then reappeared and moved on. Nightwatchman. It was that sort of cemetery.
New York’s history is a series of riots. The Doctor’s Riot of 1788 came of over-zealous medical students plundering graves for cadavers. (At least they waited for their subjects to die, unlike Doctor Robert Knox of Edinburgh.)
I wasn’t after a body. Information would do.
And the only reason I was squatting in the leaf litter on a knoll overlooking the cemetery was to be sure it contained no dogs. I was developing a thing for dogs.
A minute later I scrambled over the fence and dropped onto the damp soil the other side.
My ears strained for sounds above the murmur of the waking city. The cemetery was ringed by a scenic fringe of elm and ash, but it didn’t screen out the wail of horns from seaward tugs, nor the dawn-rumble of rapidly clogging parkways.
Nothing. I moved off along a row of stumpy headstones. The further in I went the more elaborate they got, until I reached my first tomb, a short, compact box of concrete. Eternal home of one Bartholemew Rosencratz.
It could have been an oversized postbox. Better hope he had the required stampage.
I said good morning to Bart and continued along the row, which was rapidly turning into a stunted canyon. I only had about ten feet of vision. Far from helping, the rising sun was charging the fog, suffusing it with an obscuring glow. I guessed I had a quarter of an hour before the sun began to burn it away, and with it, my cover.
The tombs got more and more expensive. Concrete was replaced by finished stone and marble. The angels grew taller, their wings wider. These angels saw clear to the end times.
Crushed rose petals were the first sign of a recent funeral. I followed them like Hansel, and was rewarded when a stone edifice loomed out of the mist. It presented a flat-faced vestibule and gate to a belowground crypt. Across the top of it ran some Roman-looking script.
Victoria Patientia Crescit.
Victory through endurance.
Beneath that was the name Liselle.
Entry to the crypt was blocked by a stout wooden door. A padlock and chain were the only items out of step with the aesthetic of forbidding majesty. They had the dull shine of the kind of setup you see guarding a well-provisioned garden shed.
I knelt, studied the lock, and slipped pick and rod from the inside pocket of my coat. A squint at the sky told me the sun was just powdering its nose. I had minutes.
The lock was slippery with storage oil, but it still sprang open with a prodigious chunk. The noise had to have carried past the fence and into the shrubbery. I untangled the chain, opened the door, and slipped inside.
With the door shut it was pitch black. I didn’t have time to wait for my eyes to adjust. I felt in a pocket for a book of matches. I tore a number out and lit the first one on the back of the matchbook.
The flame flared and settled, and revealed a flight of steps leading to the crypt, which was about an office-floor and a half below ground. I took them, holding the flame aloft to get my bearings.
My first impression on stepping into the crypt proper was of a room that had been flooded for centuries then drained. Damp had seeped through the walls and left yellow-green smears of mineral residue. Must’ve been some copper in the ground, made it look like algae. The air smelt of lacquer.
Above me the ceiling was vaulted and crisscrossed by groins. The crypt was probably thirty feet long by fifteen wide, and I was looking down its length. The first coffins stored on my left were parallel to the wall, and thereafter were end-on. On the right were only empty, coffin-shaped slots. Somebody had paid for a job lot. My light didn’t reach to the other end.
I gave the flame another match to feed on, and began walking down the left side of the crypt. Each coffin had an inscription carved into the stone shelf on which it sat. On another day I might have taken my time over those inscriptions, conducted a little comparative genealogical survey.
But today I was only interested in the latest arrival.
Well before I reached the far end of the crypt, eyes began peering back at me. All shapes, all sizes. Dark stones, polished onyx, pocked the wall. A cast of hundreds inscribed on the face of a block of granite. Jesus, Buddha, a pantheon of Roman gods and Judeo-Greek and neo-revanchist synchronisms, and the Latter Day Cognomon. This pack of luminaries struck poses upon a stage of anonymous masses that intertwined in an eye-cheating mess that made me think of Rubens’ Fall of the Damned. Above this tableau the Three Fates wove, measured, and snipped the mortal thread, and managed to effect both somber witness and righteous chickhood.
The whole scene amounted to the religious equivalent of a stockbroker’s derivatives hedge on a futures steal on a bond coup backed by gold. It was a thousand-way bet.
This mythic potpourri wasn’t that oddball for Newer York. After all, we’re talking about religion after the apocalypse. But the extravagance spoke of a deep superstition.
Pain stole through my central nervous system as the flame burnt down to my fingers. I flung it down on reflex, where it guttered and died on the damp floor.
I lit the remaining match. It was past time to be leaving.
I turned to examine the coffin slotted into the next-to-last slot on the left side of the crypt. Its black bulk glowed dully in the feeble light. The inscription below it was fresh carved. It read: Euripides l’Framboise Eschaton Speigh, Loved. It wasn’t clear whether he was the object or subject of that verb, but right then I didn’t care.
I manhandled the coffin out and pivoted it on its end until it rested on the ledge running along the shelf. It was heavy.
Securing the lid of the coffin was a small silver clasp, more decorative than functional. I snapped it back, took a breath and a glance over my shoulder at the tableau, then lifted the lid.
Inside was a blaze of red satin, quilted in white thread. Plush. As comfortable a resting place as one could ask for.
Pity it was empty.
Well, not empty. There was a sack of sand laid along the bottom.
And a finger. Pinky, at a guess.
I whistled. The walls of the crypt whistled back.
The coffin of Euripides l’Framboise Eschaton Speigh was empty as a pocket, save for a single digit.
Then I burnt my fingers for the second time in under a minute. I dropped the match and the room plunged into darkness.
I began feeling my way back toward the stairs. If the coffin had held a body, I would’ve bothered re-shelving it, but I had better things to do than pay respects to a bag of sand.
Outside the vast hum of the fully-woken city hit me like a downpour. The sun had all but burned the mist away. I drew the chain through the bracket by the door and snapped the lock shut.
I turned to find a man staring at me.
It was the nightwatchman, to judge by the cold lamp hanging f
rom his left hand and the ironic look in his eye. That and the crumpled grey uniform. The break of his pants was a third the way down his boots, their hems stained by dirt. Maybe his sixty-something frame had shrunk. His right arm was akimbo, fist planted on his hip, above a bundle of the gear of his trade. The biggest bulge was the handgrip of a Desert Eagle .50, still the world’s largest-caliber magazine-fed production handgun.
Two antiques. One of which could smear me across the grass.
“Get watcha came for?” he said.
He stood only a foot in from the edge of the adjacent tomb. It was a close thing whether he’d rounded that corner before I had the lock shut.
What the hell.
“Yeah, I did,” I said, raised both hands, and flicked my fingers out. I smiled what must have been my winning best, because when I turned my back and headed for the exit, the only sound I heard behind me was the clank of metal chain.
— 20 —
The second time I jumped into the car driven by the chief of the Organized Crime Bureau his hands didn’t even leave the wheel. The guy is a stone.
“McIlwraith,” said Finlay MacLure around a mouthful of burger, “why don’t you just make an appointment like everyone else?”
“I’d have to wait in line, like everyone else,” I said. “And besides, I’m a dead man. I’d like to stay dead for another day.”
MacLure kept chewing. You don’t get to be a stone by airing every stray thought.
“What did you find?” I said.
“It’s been one week. What the hell do you think I’ve found?”
“I’ll take whatever you’ve got. My near-death experience put a fire under me.”
He made a dogleg and headed for Bowery.
“Could you drop me at Rector Street?” I said.
He shook his head, then hauled the Patriot around in front of traffic, and gunned it downtown on a crest of horn blasts.
“You know your girl thinks you’re dead,” he said.
“Which―what?”
“Your secretary. She went to Tunney with a story about you being abducted. It got bounced to OC when she gave the address to which she was baited. A bar in Gramercy Park called Witt’s End. The place is owned by a hotelier with a foot-long record of nearly-did-time’s, goes by the name of Cross. It’s on our books as a some-time drug-hole.”
“Huh,” I said. “It might be owned by Cross, but it was Eustace Speigh’s gorillas that worked me over.”
He shot me a glance. “Speigh? How do you know?”
“‘Cause he was there,” I said. “He’d dressed up the hidey hole behind the bar as a franchise of the death cult I told you about. He meant to drop me in the swill and hope I didn’t get too much attention when I got sucked down with all the other floaters. Maybe it was some kind of twisted tribute to his brother, too. The cult was Eutarch’s idea.”
“And you got out?” he said. It was the first time I’d seen his eyebrows come away from his orbits.
“They forgot to lock all the doors,” I said. “And speaking of death cults. Did you get what I wanted?”
“Cost me a pound of flesh, but yeah. Your illegals are safe.”
My thoughts went to Thor and his missing son.
“All of them?”
“The investigation’s continuing, but we’ve run down most of the New York side of the operation. The cult was only a part of it. Some of these poor saps got sold out to private citizens. We’re still working through the books, but if you ask me.” MacLure pinned me with a morose stare. “By the time we get to the end of it, you’ll think the dead ones got a better deal than some others.”
That train of thought didn’t stop him ripping another mouthful off his burger.
“Except the women,” he said.
“The women?”
“Yeah. Far as we can tell, most got parceled out to sweat shops south of the Tristate border. But not that kind of sweat shop. None got sold to a feral like Goiĕ. Ain’t that funny?”
He was amazed the women hadn’t been sold as sex slaves. Prostitution was probably the largest return on investment for human trafficking. That or organ harvesting. And Goiĕ, the mega-scraper that could be seen as a faint smudge to the south of Manhattan, was the biggest client. Three-quarters built when the Event forever stopped work on her, Goiĕ was a ghetto that killed cops. So they didn’t bother with it.
“Crook with a heart,” I said. “You meet one every so often.”
He shot me a disdainful glance, and said, “Yeah, and I’ve got a factory bottling unicorn farts you could invest in.”
We crested an on-ramp and merged with the traffic on the mid-level of the FDR heading downtown. The East River sat heavy on my left, and brown like it had been turned upside down.
“So what can you tell me about your errant detective, Gallant? How grubby did he get his fingers?”
MacLure tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and dropped the last piece of burger down his throat as if it was a pickled herring.
“Like I said, early days. They’re being very careful.”
“They?” I said. “You brought Internal Affairs into this?” There was no reason to think whatever cancer Gallant represented hadn’t spread across bureaus to Internal Affairs.
“My detectives, Mac,” he said. “You think I’m an idiot?” He didn’t wait for an answer. I’d have reminded him Gallant was one of his detectives. “We’re starting from the present and tracing him back. And,” he looked at me, “you were right. His big pawprint’s right there on the murder of the Speigh boy, the second one.”
“Eutarch,” I said.
“That’s right. Well, on that case, one of the officers dispatched to the Landmark canvassed the floors above and below. He was debriefed by Gallant, and Gallant did a do-over on the report and put his signature to it.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “The original paper work got lost.”
“Yeah, so we went over it with the officer. Most of it struck him as fine. The devil was in the detail. During the first interviews there was a bus boy who said his trolley disappeared and re-appeared on the 50th floor.”
“A trolley?”
“I know. Who’s to say it wasn’t a lazy staffer from another floor. But why would Gallant be rubbing out that little number? If it had been a laundry trolley, I could understand. Those things would fit a body.”
I imagined Eutarch’s body wrapped in its limbs, minus a single digit, being trundled through the corridors of the Landmark Hotel. Gave new meaning to the phrase ‘taken to the cleaners’.
“Suppose you had tracked the luggage trolley down,” I said, “gotten trace, or at least confirmed how the body was removed. Then what? You still had no suspect. Trail would have just died a step further on.”
“Gallant couldn’t have known that he wasn’t the only one raking over the coals. He wasn’t the primary officer on the case. Nobody was reporting to him.”
Darkness fell as we slipped into the shadow of Liberty. Far above, the citadel’s peak was clawing the guts out of a dirty cloud. MacLure angled in front of a ten-seater van with blacked-out windows spewing out a streamer of dirty exhaust, and then sank down the off-ramp to Whitehall and skirted Battery Park.
“Which is how it turned out,” he said, swinging his head from left to right, seeing which street had a clear run.
“What turned out?”
“There was a suspect. A detective from Homicide coaxed the memory from a busboy whose immigration status is somewhat fluid. Anyway, this guy saw someone the day of the murder leaving the 50th floor via the stairs. That’s it. Might’ve been someone’s mother bringing them a soup lunch. And he only remembered that because whoever it was wore a hat and a cloak with the collar turned up. But it wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t wet.”
“Man or woman?” I said.
“Didn’t catch the face, couldn’t tell. Could’ve been a smallish man or a largish woman,” he said and grunted.
“Or a Doberman on its hind legs,” I said.<
br />
“You said it. So in the end that came to three fifths of squat anyway.”
“Except that the murderer might have carted the body, part way at least, on a luggage trolley.”
A car-sized hole opened in the right lane. MacLure speared his car into it, raising a squeal of tires from the car behind.
“Here’s another thing,” he said. “I sent a man to the Tombs to check Gallant’s last three interviews. He recorded one with a Harold―”
“Duffy,” I said. A mental snapshot of an interview record signed with the initials P.G. flashed through my brain.
He gave me a queer look.
“I read the Strawman dossier,” I said. “Harold’s information pushed the Strawman’s debut back a few years.”
MacLure nodded. “But his cell mate said Duffy told him he was on the west coast at the time he claimed to be running a drug deal for the Strawman in Florida―so one of the them was bullshitting.”
“And Duffy died a week later,” I said. “Convenient.”
“Convenient,” MacLure agreed.
So, minus Gallant’s false information, the Strawman’s beginnings were back at the police estimate of eleven years. That was in the ballpark of Dorrita Speigh’s disappearance from the scene.
MacLure nosed the Patriot onto Rector St. and ground to a halt behind a clot of traffic.
“Well, thanks,” I said.
“Serve and protect,” he said, with only a hint of irony.
“Drop me here,” I said.
The car had begun to move and he had to step on the brake as I opened the door.
“This isn’t―” he began.
“Bookshop,” I said, and jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the storefront.
I glimpsed MacLure’s face as he squeezed the throttle and propelled the Patriot’s bulk back into traffic. Placid as ever. Stone driving a stone.
The streets and sidewalks were alive with lunch-hour traffic. Second-hand sunlight was bouncing off the mirrored face of a neo-Modern across the street. It felt almost as good as the real thing.