by Brett Adams
MacLure didn’t know it but he’d cleared the decks. He’d confirmed I had one case instead of two, and the common denominator was the Strawman.
— 21 —
At the fourth coffee, I had to give in and vent my bladder.
I also had to wonder what kind of bean they served in The Illustrated Man. My system is well and truly inured to Arabica, but I had some kind of buzz going. My hands were fretting for a cigarette.
Plumbing attended to, I sat again at my table, which was tucked into a streetside corner on the inside of the T.I.M. A massive sheet of plate-glass window came just shy of my table and afforded a view of the sidewalk. I could see everybody coming or going, whereas I’d be a dark smear to anyone entering until their eyes adjusted to the T.I.M.’s by-design retro-futuristic aesthetic. The collection of up-scaled astronomical devices―some real, some fantastic―looked no more authentic than it had done the first visit. Steel armatures hung over tables in places like the boughs of a metal forest. It was the sort of place you could do a quiet deal.
I retrieved the novel I’d bought from where it sat wedged into a cluster of cups that no one had bothered to clear away. The title was rendered in gothic script: The Red Web. It was a piece of speculative fiction set in an alternate history where wireless technology had beaten wired and the Russians owned the Internet. The premise was a stretch, and it was littered with anachronisms that had nothing to do with the historical twist. (The Higgs Boson didn’t come out of the Los Alamos labs that built the bomb. Way too early.) But I was wearing my polka-dot belief suspenders today and went along for the ride, if for no other reason than the weird sensation of reading technology imbued with the aura of fantasy. In Newer York, that’s what the electron was: pure magic. I thumbed my book open to the page I’d dog-eared and became a fly on the wall in Voldemort Putin’s Kremlin.
Later, the rising chatter of conversation alerted me to the approaching lunch-hour rush. Tables were filling with middle management and lawyers’ wives.
I had to put the book down. I didn’t want to miss the tattooed hulk if he chose today to hook-up with the next link in the chain that led to the Strawman.
Movement in the corner of my eye arrested my attention, and I spotted a waiter making a beeline for my table. It was so odd. Who can get a waiter?
He looked sharp in midnight pleated slacks and blood-red shirt. He had a sharp tongue too.
“You’ll need to order.”
“I did,” I said with a smile, and tapped the lip of one of my cups with a fingernail.
“Lunch,” he said. “You’ll have to order something off the menu.” He kept his tone level, but his gaze swept the filling tables of all those paying customers and he may as well have added ‘asshole’. He probably sent sympathy cards for weddings.
“Fine,” I said. “Get me a menu.”
He whipped one from some place at the back of his pants and his face was transformed into wide-lipped smarm.
I took the menu and he left to harass another coffee drinker.
The menu was an arty foldout done all over in techno-fantastic designs. I unfolded it and as soon as I ran my eye over it the breath froze in my lungs.
Above me a neon sign lit up. It flashed Idiot in reds and blues.
The chain of thought that led to this neon-lit revelation went something like this:
The Illustrated Man (T.I.M. to the hip), the restaurant, was named after The Illustrated Man, the book, written in the 20th Century by Ray Bradbury. It is a collection of short stories about a future that is now the past. The stories are tied together by a central conceit, the eponymous illustrated man. This man is a vagrant whose every inch of skin is covered by tattoos. (See where this is going?) The tattoos were inked by a witch, and cast a spell on anyone who looks at them too long. Each tattoo comes to life to share its story with the enthralled victim.
The tattoo I was looking at didn’t move but for a brief moment it did hold me in thrall.
There on the inside of the lunch menu was the figure of a man. He was covered in tattoos, and inked on his neck was the tattoo of a spiral.
Then I remembered Ryan Tritt’s face on the other side of the glass in the Tombs’ visiting room when he told me the story of how he’d tailed a man here. I remembered the hitch in his voice before he’d told me of seeing the next link in the message chain he was tracking, a large, slope-shouldered man with a tattoo of a spiral on his neck.
It wasn’t hard to see he’d realized mid-confession that he was about to put me way too deep on the trail of the Strawman. So the conman had reached, lamely, feebly, for something, anything, other than the complete truth.
Which was fine. But I’d been an idiot to buy it, for the simple reason that anyone who bothered protecting their chain of communications with cut-outs wouldn’t put a link in the middle of it that stood out a mile―a person, say, with a distinctive tattoo.
See? Idiot.
The revelation left me feeling conflicted. On the upside, I had a good book and the prospect of a nice lunch. On the down side, my conscience would probably complain if I charged the lunch to a Speigh. Plus, any minute now, another Speigh might be pushed off the perch.
I scanned the rapidly filling room and tried to drink from an empty coffee cup.
For a moment, the dark spaces between the restaurant props were filled with Nicole Speigh’s haunted eyes.
That’s when something tickled my brain. A little itch in my eye.
I focused, and hunted the room for the source of the itch. When I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d felt it, I forgot about lunch.
Three tables away from me I saw a waiter, not my waiter, taking an order from a table stuffed with suits. Nothing abnormal about that.
The abnormality I found etched into my memory of ten minutes prior.
I’d watched the same waiter return the receipt and change to a table of two men in hackneyed grey suits. Then he’d made a racket clearing the table.
Problem was, no one at the table had paid.
They’d drunk coffee that, by their faces, was of the Irish persuasion, devoured a plate of pie, and then taken change for a non-existent payment.
The other word for that kind of change is retainer.
The waiter was the next link.
I named him Link, and stuck my eyeballs to his back.
I had a hunch whoever had grown this message tree liked his dispatches with low latency. I waited and watched for a hand-off.
I waited a long time.
The lunch-hour buzz rose till it filled the room to its ceiling and poured out the doors. I finished my veal cutlets with a side of mashed potato and greens, and chased it with a sour, all the while keeping an eye on Link.
He was all over the room, an efficient operator. He didn’t make a move without carrying something―bowls of steaming soup, empty plates smeared with sauce.
But not once did I detect the flicker of a promiscuous transaction.
The lunch hour was nearing its frenzied denouement when my bladder cried foul. I hazarded a visit to the restroom. It was off the end of a short corridor behind a screen. A slight effort had been made to carry the T.I.M.’s décor down here in a lick of matte black paint star-speckled in white like somebody had sneezed. In fact the back of the joint was a shared wet-area with the adjacent businesses. A doorway framed a piece of access alley out the back. A couple of crates were tucked up by the stair, resting in a midden of cigarette butts. Beyond them was the peeling paint and rust of a dumpster. A high-pitched screech and a curse rang through the doorway and two small figures raced past in the alley outside followed by another. Kids.
A man brushed past me and entered the restroom.
Two minutes later I wended my way back through the restaurant to my table. I emptied the dregs of three coffee cups down my shirt, dumped cash with a fat tip on the table, and exited via the front door.
Four minutes later I was hunting through the dumpster at the back door of the T.I.M. From the trash I
fished a wine bottle. I splashed its dregs onto the palm of my right hand and ran it through my hair. I wiped the remainder next to the brown stains on my shirt, then sat by the side of the dumpster, out of sight of the doorway, and mentally probed my appearance.
I’d shaved that morning so the best I could manage was Wall-Street-Car-Crash. Common enough. Not as good as an indentured hobo (they were transparent), but the Car-Crash was a clichéd punchline that I hoped nobody wanted to hear. Or see.
In ten minutes there I listened to two smokers’ conversations and was sniffed by a dog.
Later, when the bell at New Trinity had tolled its third quarter, and I was starting to think I’d wrecked a shirt for no good reason, I heard footsteps converge on the far side of the dumpster. They were light and swift.
There was some talk I didn’t catch and then I heard the steps recede.
I counted to ten then poked my head over the lip of the dumpster. I had time to register the sight of a kid disappearing round the corner onto Rector St. heading west.
I followed.
Turned out to be one of the hardest tails I’ve ever done. In no time the kid took me off the streets of New York’s stalled and rising and into the New York they’d stepped on to get there. And when I say stepped on, I don’t mean figuratively.
The kid wove through foot-traffic on Greenwich St. and took a ramp down to the Pedestrian Concourse running beneath. The rent was cheaper down here and the shopfronts were a slightly dirty reflection of those above.
Flo-lamps hung in a pendulous line from the apex of the arched roof, each lamp’s flame captured by a mantle, intensified by its alloy, re-focused by mirrors, and shot out in beams. With the caged acoustics, it gave the place a carnival atmosphere. I strained to keep sight of the kid darting in and out of the crowd.
The concourse terminated in a plaza whose eastern side was formed by the West Broadway subway line. A rumble told of an approaching train, and when it came the kid camped by a pillar until the last minute then ducked onto a carriage.
I got on one carriage farther up. Felt the doors whisper past my ear.
We got off two stops down the line, and when the kid chose not to head back to the surface but turned instead for Holland Mall, I knew this was the last link in the chain.
The kid was a rat and had just run down a drainpipe. What was a poor bloodhound like McIlwraith to do?
Suck in his gut and spare an eye for the shadows is what.
The mall serves as unofficial gateway to The Foundry, a vaulted space that was carved out of the ground when Liberty was made, as a marshaling yard for the freight of raw materials, and the furnaces that smelted the megascraper’s substance.
And here we hit a kind of jurisdictional confusion. New York’s old arrangement of precincts and divisions was laid down in two dimensions, and hadn’t adapted well when the first ecologies were built, much less the filling up of the city’s old bones beneath the water line. Cops didn’t come down here in job lots less than a baker’s dozen.
The Foundry was like a place on the beach now and then hit by waves from two directions at once. But most of the time it was clear of water. And full of rotting things.
I could smell them as I joined the flow, still keeping an eye on my link.
I preferred Pedestrian Concourse’s carnival atmosphere to the Foundry’s bordello. Half of New York’s stolen property was fenced down here. As the mall opened out into the attached tenements and shopping district I realized my clothes were in a no-man’s land between pimp-flare and half-way-to-hell. Every man wore his piece on his hip, and not a few women wore knife scars for make-up. One man passed me making a clicking sound that turned out to be his three-inch fingernails.
I saw now why a kid was the perfect choice. Able to slip from the rich streets of the financial district to here and blend. The conman, Tritt, had managed to follow the first two links, which had taken him from Eastside to Wall St., and the Illustrated Man. But there weren’t many who could run the whole gambit.
I’d walked these streets twice before. The first time is not worth recounting. It was a disappointment. The second I was hunting for a man’s daughter. The case was pro-bono, but it cost me a bullet in the shoulder. Gave me something in common with Orwell. That and the knowledge that when a bullet hits, you don’t feel pain. Just a violent shock.
I didn’t find the girl down here. Her father counted it a blessing.
The kid wove in right angles through malls and along concourses on a rough heading for the subterranean face of Liberty. I glimpsed its wall through the smog captured against the arcade’s roof. It loomed like a block of granite sunk into an ant nest. Cut into it were great arches for vehicular and foot traffic and smaller access ways for utilities―holes in the plascrete that would be there long after all the ants died. All designed when the place blazed with a galaxy of electric light, and every public place was saturated by the camera’s eye.
Twice I detected a figure shadowing me. Just a random attracted by my dress, hoping to prey on my freshness. But they thought better of it. The .38 I’d unholstered might have had something to do with it.
We neared the face of Liberty. I could make out the winking blue lights of a precinct station. It was hard by a tunnel into Liberty proper, nestled between a forest of cylindrical sheaths sprouting out of the Number 5 Deep Tunnel pumping station feeding the borough above. Cops topside called the station The Crotch, on account of how Liberty’s junction with Manhattan Island made the set look like a man sitting up with his legs pointed northeast. The station mainly existed to traffic-check the flow into the ecology. Its cops didn’t venture far.
But the kid turned off the way and made instead for a cluster of co-op habitats stuck onto the outer side of Liberty like wasp nests. The apartment blocks had their backs to the plascrete and existed in the shadow of the Crotch. Close to Liberty’s amenities but without the killer rent.
We were close now. I smiled a morgue-smile―all I could manage in that atmosphere―and drew a touch closer to my rat.
The rat passed the facades of buildings with grand names like Hamilton Towers and Franklin Heights and Monteray Gardens. The only gardens down here were the wrought-iron trees running down the center of the boulevard where once grass might have been made to grow.
The rat turned into the lobby of an apartment block called the Empyrean Prospect. As I watched from behind a pedestal that supported a pointless awning, the kid cast a furtive glance at the street.
It was then that I noticed that, beneath neat-cut bangs, the kid wore a girl’s delicate features. Something went thud in my stomach. Perhaps it was the smile that let go of my face. It went the way of the last lingering thought of going easy on the occupant of apartment 8b.
It was apartment 8b’s mail slot into which the girl slipped a slim package. She then took out a key, unlocked the slot for 8a, and reached into it. But her hand came out empty, and closed and relocked it.
I stepped into her path as she came back through the door. She was five foot nothing, with a grace that ill-matched her tomboy jeans and hooded windcheater.
The face beneath the hood went white as a sheet.
Before she could bolt I holstered the .38 and locked a hand around her upper-arm.
“Easy,” I said.
She beat the fist of her free hand on my arm like a wild thing. I marvelled at the strength contained in her tiny frame, and held on.
I grabbed her flailing arm and pinned it to the other.
And all at once she burst into wracking sobs. She cried until tears dripped off the point of her chin.
“He’ll kill her,” she said. It took her an eternity to get the words right.
“Who?” I said.
“My mother.”
“Where is your mother?” I said.
I felt another fight come and go in her arms. She deflated again.
“A hospital in Queens.”
That fit. Nice thing to hold over a kid. Made a strong link in the chain.
I pulled her near and squatted down till I caught her gaze in mine.
“Listen to me. You’re gunna go straight back into Liberty, via the police station back there.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Take an elevator to the day. You never have to step foot in this shit hole again.”
“But she―”
“Doesn’t have to worry about that man any more.”
Her lips worked a moment under the force of an objection. Then, as she stared into my eyes, the lines of panic evaporated from her face. Her little chest, which had been hitching uncontrollably, began to rise and fall.
She stared a moment longer, and a different emotion dawned in her face.
It was strong enough to sear my innards. Would have, if someone hadn’t got their first.
It was hope I saw in her face. A thing she’d forgotten existed.
I gave her a wink and let go her arms.
She stepped onto the street, paused to turn and look at me, then raced back along the boulevard toward the blinking blue lights.
I straightened up and tugged the Steel Lady from her holster. I put a hand on the iron-grille and glass door, pushed, and entered the lobby of the Empyrean.
Inside, the lobby was little more than a stunted corridor. It was carpeted in a royal blue with a thick nap worn down to the rubber in a groove by foot traffic. Half of the brass lamps fixed to the walls were unlit. The place smelt faintly of cigarette smoke and perfume.
I crossed to the mail slots and ran my index finger across the lips of a half-dozen. Most held a film of dust. I guessed the place was at half occupancy, max. I couldn’t understand why anybody would choose to live down here either.
I squeezed the Lady’s hammer back until it caught and moved down the corridor. I passed the grille guarding the dark shaft of the building’s only elevator and stepped into the stairwell.
There were even fewer lamps burning here. Stairs wound down into what I guessed was a basement. It brought a wry smile to my lips. A basement. The whole place was a basement. The bonds of convention.
I paused to listen, but nothing stirred down there.
I took the stairs to the first floor and found the doors to apartment 1a on the right, and 1b across from it. On my way back to the stairs I called the elevator. I felt a faint tremor below as it sprang to life.