I didn’t answer. A droplet of sweat had crawled down from his forehead, languishing on the tip of his nose. He brushed at it and looked away.
A quarter inch had burnt off my smoke before I started again. ‘If my presence here is a nuisance, I’ll shuffle off directly.’
He mumbled something that wasn’t quite an apology. ‘I suppose there are any number of players that would be interested in acquiring my merchandise.’
The toy pikeman lay on its side. I picked it up and wound it, then left it to pace across the desk. ‘Any number,’ I agreed.
‘Perhaps . . .’ He seemed almost to be searching for permission. ‘Perhaps it would be wise to make further inquiry, before committing my forces.’
‘Makes sense. And anyway, even if it was the vets – maybe you’re better off letting it go. They’re well supplied with muscle, and they won’t be slow to press the advantage.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What did you say to me last time I was here? That the family is a business, like any other? No profit in blood. Write it off and move on. So your rep takes a hit, so what? Nobody ever comes out of a war in the black.’
‘Is that what you think?’ His glance would have withered a daisy. ‘Is that what they think? That I’m weak? That my name is dust? That the Giroies can’t even look after their own interests?’
‘Nobody’s saying nothing, Artur. Even your father didn’t go up against the Association lightly.’
He cocked his head, as if catching something. ‘Even my father?’
‘I just meant—’
‘I know what you meant,’ he snapped. ‘You presume too far, Warden.’
I studiously avoided smiling. ‘My apologies, of course. No offense was intended.’
‘Accepted,’ he said after a moment, nodding slowly, his thoughts of blood. ‘Too many think as you do – that the Junior is not the Senior, that the Giroies have slipped, that we aren’t to be reckoned with. I assure you,’ he said, snapping his attention back to me, hands folded on the table, back straight, a portrait of composure surrounded by the possessions he’d destroyed. ‘These delusions will swiftly be proven false.’
I picked an ashtray up from off the carpet, set it on the desk, then stumped my cigarette into it. ‘No doubt.’
29
Adisu was a long time coming. Another man would have intended the delay an insult, meant to indicate how little water I drew in their eyes. As it was, I figured he’d probably just forgotten – punctuality was not a strong point of the Bruised Fruit Mob. It can be hard to keep track of the minute hand when you spend most of the day wrapped up in a blanket of high-grade hallucinogens.
Dizzie’s was an ugly restaurant with an odd layout, no bathroom and a very noticeable stable of vermin. But it was located in a section of Offbend that no one ever went to, and the servers knew when to leave you alone. I sat on the small verandah and watched my coffee cool. It was slow going. I wasn’t sure that the kettle had been any hotter than the porch.
Between the weather and the exertions of the last few days, I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings and didn’t notice Adisu till he dropped down on the bench across from me. He’d come accompanied by his bodyguard and a thick layer of body odor.
‘Adisu,’ I said.
‘Warden,’ he returned, but he didn’t look at me while he said it. His eyes were blood red circles around little black dots. An angry sheen of cankers had erupted across his forehead and beneath the patchy growth of his beard. Below the table his foot tapped an uneven rhythm. He hadn’t slept the night before, probably hadn’t slept since last I’d seen him, spending the intervening hours binging on breath and savoring the violence I’d set him to. He was coming down now, feeling antsy and jagged, and easy to provoke. It did not bode well for the remainder of our conversation.
The waitress was dowdy, middle-aged, and frightened. She approached our table in tiny steps, like a rabbit crossing an open field, wary of predators.
Her arrival sparked Adisu to life. ‘How you doing, darling?’ he said, turning his gaze on her full bore. He was making an attempt at being friendly, but between the outsized leer and the clear madness in his eyes, his attention seemed to have the opposite effect.
‘I’m fine,’ she managed.
‘Just fine, huh? Nothing better than that?’
She shrugged.
‘You know, any day you wake up, that could be your last day, you hear? You got this little flame, but all it takes is a stiff wind, you know? A stiff wind and . . .’ He brought his hand up in front of the Muscle’s face and snapped his fingers. The Muscle didn’t react. Part of being the Muscle was not getting rattled when Adisu started acting a little crazy. ‘And you gone, you know? Just like that. You gotta take every minute like it’s on loan, you dig?’
‘I’ll . . . I’ll try and do that,’ she said. I had no doubt that at this moment the poor woman was very conscious of the fragility of her existence.
Adisu smiled and nodded his head up and down for an uninterrupted five seconds, like he’d gotten lost midway through the motion and couldn’t stop. ‘You got steak and eggs?’ he asked finally.
‘Sure.’
‘I’d like an order of steak and eggs.’
‘You want those eggs scrambled, or fried?’
‘Bring me both,’ he said. ‘And some grits. And potatoes. And a cup of coffee. And some milk. Is your milk fresh?’ He didn’t wait for her to respond. ‘And some cornbread. Plus some bacon – burnt to hell, you understand me? Not the steak, though – I like my steak just this side of raw.’ He snapped his attention over to the Muscle. ‘What you want, Zaga?’
‘Coffee,’ he said.
‘That’s it?’ Adisu asked, incredulous and with an odd sense of concern. ‘That’s all you gonna eat? Breakfast is important, man, you gotta fill yourself up, we got shit to do. Have some eggs or something at least.’
It was past noon, but amongst the social conventions ignored by Adisu the Damned was the notion that breakfast ought to be consumed at a specific hour of the day.
Zaga shook his head. ‘Coffee,’ he said again.
Adisu shrugged and turned back to the waitress. ‘You gotta leave people to make their own decisions, at the end of the day, you know what I mean?’
She nodded in frantic agreement. I imagined there was very little she wouldn’t have agreed with at that point, if it meant a speedier end to the conversation.
‘You’re a smart woman,’ Adisu said. ‘But you ought to chop off those bangs, sweetness. They ain’t doing you no favors.’
The waitress put her hand to her forehead, opened her eyes wide as an ochre. I found myself agreeing with Adisu. He had a keen aesthetic, for a man whose pit-stains ran from underarm to crotch. Now more humiliated than frightened, our server took off back to the kitchen at high speed.
I had never seen Adisu by daylight before, it occurred to me then. His madness had been less apparent, or at least less objectionable, in his natural habitat, amidst his decaying mansion and a gang of almost equally cracked confederates. Out in public, contrasted against the civilian world of working stiffs and passing pedestrians, it stood in stark relief. It began to occur to me that perhaps I’d picked the wrong root-breathing lunatic to do my dirty work.
‘Everything go all right?’
In the ten-second interval between speaking to the waitress and my spitting a question, Adisu had delved pretty deeply into the confines of his skull. His lips moved up and down in noticeable but silent conversation. He managed to stall his inner monologue long enough to answer me. ‘What did you say?’
‘Did everything go all right,’ I repeated, ‘with that thing I asked you to do.’
‘Oh. Yeah, it went fine. Everything like you said. Dominoes falling into place and whatnot.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed, though he didn’t seem particularly excited by it.
‘So then you’ve got my cut.’ It was a sta
tement, though in truth by that point I was far from certain about anything regarding Adisu the Damned.
‘Your cut,’ he repeated, as if unfamiliar with the term. ‘Actually, there’s something I need to tell you about your cut.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m not going to give it to you.’
The Muscle puffed up his shoulders till they were about level with the top of his skull. I sipped at my coffee in the least threatening fashion possible.
‘I want you to understand, Warden, it’s not like I just decided to con you out of the deal.’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s not the way I do business – ruin a good connect just to pick up something on the short end. What kind of sense does that make?’
‘No kind at all.’
‘I’m not the sort to quibble over a couple of copper.’
‘Wouldn’t have thought it of you.’
‘Thank you,’ Adisu said. He seemed genuinely touched. ‘Like I said, I was planning on bringing you your cut. I even had a little package for you, didn’t I, Zaga?’
The Muscle spat out onto the street, which I guess could have been taken as confirmation.
Adisu nodded vigorously. ‘Twenty-five ochre, one-fourth of what I figure we’ll clear off the wyrm. And that’s a generous estimate! The way prices have bottomed out lately, that might even be north of what I owed you. But then, I’m not the sort to quibble over a couple of copper.’
‘You said that already.’
‘When did I say that?’
‘About thirty seconds ago.’
Adisu spent something like that length of time trying to recollect it. ‘Right, yeah – what I meant was, it’s not about me turning coat on you, just so I could have your ends. I had every intention of paying you, honest I did. But then I got to thinking.’
‘A dangerous recreation.’
‘I figured the Warden, what’s he doing stirring up the Giroies? He got a nice little operation, he ain’t the sort to bring trouble back his way just to make a few ochre. Wouldn’t be . . .’ He turned abruptly to his second. ‘What’s that word I’m looking for, means you don’t do nothing gonna come back and bite your ass?’
The Muscle shook his head. The Muscle did not know the word Adisu was looking for. As far as I could tell, the Muscle had about a hundred-word vocabulary, consisting exclusively of monosyllables.
Adisu snapped his fingers and started to grin. ‘Prudent – that’s what I was trying to say. You a prudent motherfucker.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Too prudent to be stirring up trouble – unless . . .’ Adisu leaned his face into mine, teeth yellow as beaten gold, breath like he’d been scavenging road kill. ‘He wants the trouble! He don’t care about the money at all.’
‘Tell you what – if it’ll break this conversation short, you can keep my part of the deal. That settle you down?’
‘I just told you man – it ain’t about your cut. I don’t give a shit about twenty-five ochre. Twenty-five ochre don’t mean nothing to me. I’d scatter twenty-five ochre in the mud outside my house, just to see the bums pick around for it. So don’t fucking bring up your cut again, all right? I find that shit insulting.’ And indeed, he seemed genuinely wounded.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
He weighed over my apology for a moment. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘So anyway, I started doing some digging, made a point of keeping my ears open. Word comes out that the Giroie are awful riled up about the bodies we made. Ain’t no surprise there, I mean who likes having their men made into corpses?’
His pause extended onward. Eventually it occurred to me that the question had not been intended rhetorically. ‘No one.’
Adisu nodded happily, like he was pleased with my progress. ‘Exactly, don’t no one like it, not one bit. But here’s the interesting thing – the Giroies, they’re not looking in our direction, says the scuttlebutt. They looking at the vets. Don’t that seem strange to you?’
‘I’m too old to be surprised.’
‘Not me, man! It’s a crazy world we’re living on. You got to take the time to recognize what’s in front of your face, dig? Otherwise what’s the point?’
It’s an odd fact about lunatics and junkies, but every one I’d ever met is just dying to share their life wisdom. I started rolling up a cigarette while I waited for Adisu to continue.
‘You shouldn’t smoke, man,’ he said. ‘Bad for your health.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you, Warden, figuring out your puzzle, it made me feel awful good about myself. Awful smart, you dig? Made me want to start crowing, let the whole world see how slick I am, that I can follow along with a real heavyweight like yourself.’
‘I hope you restrained yourself.’
‘I have,’ Adisu nodded emphatically. ‘So far. But you know me, Warden, I get bored easily. If something don’t come by to hold my attention, I might have to start making the rounds, bragging about my genius.’
‘And what exactly would it take to keep you occupied?’
‘We can start with what I was gonna give you. Twenty-five ochre – when you’ve got it, I mean I know you aren’t carrying it on you, don’t worry. I’m a reasonable man. And if I was you, I wouldn’t be thinking of this as no one-time thing – ’cause I’ve got to be honest, my attention span, it’s not exactly limitless.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
He shrugged apologetically. ‘Nobody’s perfect. Point being, if I don’t see a regular supply of coin coming my way, say once a month till forever, well – I can’t make no guarantee as to whom I might take it into my mind to chat with.’
‘I imagine the Giroies might take offense to finding out you murdered some of their men.’
‘The Giroies don’t scare me so much. I figure they won’t be so quick to come into the Isthmus looking for us, not when they’ve got you as an easy scapegoat.’
I finished up my cigarette, sparked it and put it to my lips. ‘You’ve come out of this pretty well,’ I said, doing my best to affect a reasonable tone. ‘Seventy-five ochre worth of wyrm, should catch you a couple hundred if you move it smart. Now that’s found money, and you didn’t have to work much for it. You said I was a prudent man – why don’t you take a lesson from me. Walk away with what you’ve got.’
He’d been staring at the wall behind me during my speech. He continued a while afterward, then blinked twice and turned back to me. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘I said that you’d be better off without making an enemy of a friend.’
‘We aren’t friends.’
A bit of my own medicine. I drank it down with the dregs of my coffee. ‘We’re friends in the sense that I’m not actively seeking your demise, Adisu. By my standards, that makes us damn near bosom brothers.’
‘Bosom brothers,’ he repeated, enunciating each syllable with peculiar intensity. ‘Bosom brothers.’ He seemed quite taken with the term, and it took a moment to free himself from its grip on his mind. ‘Were you breastfed?’ he asked.
‘One more time?’
‘Were you breastfed? Did you suckle your mother’s titties?’
‘You know, Adisu,’ I said, making a show of thinking about it, ‘I can’t rightly remember.’
‘Right, course,’ he laughed. ‘Me neither. But Moms, I mean back when she was around, she told me I wasn’t. You got any siblings, Warden?’
I found I wasn’t particularly interested in sharing the specifics of my upbringing with Adisu. ‘We’re getting off topic.’
‘I’m the youngest of eleven. Nine brothers, two sisters. Moms said that by the time she got to me there just wasn’t nothing left. Said she used to mix up some goat’s milk with water, soak a rag in it and put it in my mouth.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Ain’t right, you know? A little child, having to live on that. Sometimes I think: maybe, if I’d had what the rest got, I’d have turned out different than I did. Been taller, maybe. Used to
make me angry, back when I was a kid, thinking what I could have been. On the other hand, though, it learned me something early on that most people don’t figure out till later.’
‘And what was that?’
‘There ain’t but so much milk to go around.’
As I’d mentioned, being cracked as an outhouse rodent didn’t stop Adisu from being right about most things. I’m not sure what exactly that says about the world. Nothing good, I don’t imagine.
‘All right,’ Adisu said, standing abruptly. The Muscle seemed caught off guard as well, because it took him a moment to do the same. ‘I said what I got to say. Twenty-five ochre by the day after tomorrow, or my gums start flapping with the wind. Whatever cakes you got baking, you sure as hell don’t need my crazy ass sticking a finger in the dough.’ He was back in good humor, smiling at me affectionately. ‘You be well. I’ll see you soon.’
The Muscle waited a second, then gave a sort of half-shrug and disappeared after him.
I finished off my cigarette and started on another, running over the last ten minutes. They didn’t look any better through the smoke. I had too much to worry about to add Adisu’s madness to the mix. And while the Bruised Fruit Mob were hardly considered reliable, there was enough truth in his story to get me killed by any number of people.
Of course, there were other ways to fix the situation than the one he’d presented.
The waitress came back to our table. On her shoulder was a tray. On the tray was enough food to feed a family of eight. ‘Where’d your friends go?’ she asked.
‘Weren’t never here,’ I said.
She dropped her burden onto the table, rattling the plates and sending coffee spilling. ‘Well, who the hell is gonna pay for all this?’
‘He is,’ I said, pulling an argent out of my pocket. ‘He just doesn’t know it yet.’
30
The man at the front desk of Black House was not inclined towards letting me wander the halls unaccompanied.
A day had passed since my meeting with Adisu, a day spent avoiding the sun and Adeline, holed up in my room burning through a half-ochre worth of dreamvine. In the city outside the seeds of my plot were beginning to sprout, soon to flower into chaos and violence. They’d require cultivation, but at that exact moment all they needed was a little bit of time. I went to bed early, and woke up the same, heading out to visit Guiscard before breakfast. I’d thought a lot about what I was going to say to him, but I’ll admit I hadn’t foreseen the possibility that said dialogue would never take place.
Tomorrow, the Killing lt-2 Page 17