by Warren Ellis
“Because my firearm wasn’t secured, because the asshole has no face now, and because I’ve been put on the Pearl Street case to fail. I’m being set up so they can take me off the force for PTSD.” He was suddenly cold, and his heart rate was up like a runner’s, and he was saying too much. It wasn’t good enough. Tallow held a breath and closed everything down, looking at his unconscious assailant. That was a Jim Rosato move right here, he thought.
Scarly was already looking up and down the street. “No CCTV coverage. But the longer we stay here chatting like morons, the better the chance of someone else coming out of the bar or just wandering by.”
“Give me your lighter,” said Bat. There was a sharp snap of professional appraisal in his voice that made Tallow hand it over without question.
“It’s just a disposable,” Tallow commented.
“Good,” said Bat, prying the top off with surprisingly strong fingers. “You only touched him at the back of the neck, right?”
Tallow nodded. Bat emptied the lighter fluid over the back of the man’s neck. He then kicked the shank back into the man’s potential reach.
“You’re going to set fire to his neck?” Tallow asked, not completely certain that he wanted to ask that of a CSU or get an answer.
Bat tossed both parts of the lighter as far down the alley as he could. “No. The butane will fuck up any epithelial cells you might have transferred to the back of his neck. Just in case anyone gives enough of a shit to check him over.”
“Go home, John,” said Scarly. “Now.”
And Tallow would have, were he less fascinated by the abrupt transformation of his companions.
“What do you think?” asked Bat, stepping back to survey the picture.
Scarly leaned to one side, squinted. “Kick his head around so it’s facing away from the street. It’ll look more like he’s sleeping rough.”
Bat used his toe to shift the man’s head. The man gurgled. “Fuck it,” said Bat, and kicked him in the temple. The man’s head turned; now he was facing the alley.
“Good enough. Go home, John. And if you take your gun off again for any reason I will shoot you myself and then we’ll make it look like you committed suicide. Am I making myself completely clear here?”
“Yeah,” said Tallow.
She gave him a shove in the shoulder to start him across the street. “We’ll see you in the morning. C’mon, Bat, let’s find that cab.”
Tallow stopped, turned to them, and, with nothing more useful to contribute, simply said “Thank you.”
Bat gave his weird grin. “Hey. We’re partners now.”
Tallow went back to his car and started for home, having decided once and for all that CSUs really were completely insane.
Seventeen
TALLOW PARKED, pulled a few books out of the back of his unit, and went inside.
His apartment, on his return, smelled oddly musty. As if there had been no living man occupying it for years. He spent minutes walking around his place, looking at the megaliths and barrows of CDs and books like a confused archaeologist happening upon some ancient settlement unseen by human eyes since before God was a boy. He wasn’t sure if he didn’t spend enough time here or if he just didn’t spend enough time fully present here.
He started his laptop, launched his usual music service, and bought a 320k MP3 of “Heart of Glass.” He set it to repeat and let it loop through the room as he found a big atlas that would serve as a desk, rested it atop a thick stack of books, and unpacked the contents of his jacket onto it. The books from the car and the tablet from the bag went next to his notebook and cigarettes. He pulled his chair over and sat in front of it all. And then got up, scowling, to look for a drink and an ashtray. He found a can of iced coffee moldering in the back of his small fridge, and an empty foil food container, still crusted with discolored rice, in the trash. Tallow sat down again, ready to think, and then realized he’d given his lighter to Bat.
He sat back, absently patting the insides of his thighs, debating the problem. He had decided, he told himself, that he didn’t want a cigarette. It would stink up his apartment. He would exert control and ignore that his feet were now tapping, heel to ball and back again.
He then went to the kitchen, precariously got his cigarette lit off the stove, forced the small kitchen window open, and leaned out of it like an indecisive suicide contemplating the drop, puffing away disgustedly. He was going to toss the pack in the morning. After all, he reasoned, he didn’t even have a lighter anymore, so there was no use in keeping the cigarettes. He would toss them now, but they’d go stale in the pack as they lay in the trash and, again, stink the place up. Tallow was pleased with his reasoning, and smoked.
Sitting back down, he tore open the iced coffee, took a swallow, and decided that if Mother Teresa had ever served iced coffee in the depths of Calcutta, it probably wouldn’t have tasted quite as bad as this. He took a second swallow anyway and turned to the reviewing of his notebook. He woke his tablet and copied some drawings of tobacco prayer ties into the notebook, scratching a reminder to himself to ask Scarly and Bat about the composition of the paints found on some of the guns.
He also copied down what he hoped were the salient details on that historical Rochester slaying. Hands flicking across the tablet, he pulled up a couple of generic summaries of the Son of Sam killings and did the same for those. Right now, both events were part of the same flight of fancy. Tallow knew he was nowhere with the case, but even the consideration of these other cases made him feel like he was still thinking, and if his mind was in motion, then he would be in a condition to trap the real details when they presented themselves.
Tallow went back to the laptop bag. The paperwork the lieutenant had given him this morning was still in there. He hadn’t properly reviewed it yet.
The first processed weapon. A Bryco Model 38, .32-caliber. Basically a Saturday night special, small, cheap, and distributed in bulk. Nothing special about it at all. Except that the report said the inside of the barrel had been interfered with. Tallow made two notes: he wanted to see pictures of the bullet, and he wanted to see inside the barrel. Maybe Bat could cut it open at the same time as he fulfilled his little wish of splitting the barrel of the flintlock.
The dead man associated with the gun: Matteo Nardini, Lower East Side, 2002. Nothing immediately jumped off the paper. Tallow put that sheet to one side.
Next was the Lorcin .380 semiautomatic. Tallow had encountered Lorcins on the street. They were thirty-dollar guns, more for posing with than for using because of their incredible unreliability. For a few years, they’d been known in the department as broke-pimp guns. They were made out of a zinc alloy that would snap like a cracker if you looked at it funny. He remembered one such poverty-stricken pimp who was carried into the precinct house because he’d had the idiocy to open fire on police with a Lorcin, only to have the slide mechanism shunt right off the back of the gun and into his forehead, smacking him unconscious.
The report noted that the weapon had been extensively modified. Again, his guy had taken a gun that no sane person would use for a killing and rebuilt and restored it until it would guarantee a result. Which indicated that, again, the use of this particular gun had meant something to his guy. But a Lorcin? What was he missing about a Lorcin?
“No sane person,” Tallow said to himself, and gave a little joyless half-laugh.
Chewing his lip, he put the make of the gun into the search on his tablet and skimmed the results. One sentence leaped out at him. A common street handgun, due to legendarily poor security at the manufacturing plant over a number of years. Tallow knew that—Rosato had once told him that, in fact—but seeing it there put it into a new context for him.
Tallow read down and discovered that Daniel Garvie, found on Avenue A with a bullet in the back of his head in 1999, was a previous customer of the New York Police Department. Convictions for petty theft.
Tallow sat back and told himself a little story.
A stolen gun to kill a thief.
Tenuous.
But it sort of fit the fiction he’d started assembling around the case today.
Gun three: Ruger nine-millimeter, scarred firing pin, Marc Arias, Williamsburg, 2007, unsolved. Tallow wished he knew more about guns. He wished he knew whom the flintlock had killed.
Gun four: a Beretta M9. Didn’t mean a thing to Tallow.
He put the tablet to sleep, and then put the laptop to sleep, and then dropped his clothes like a trail of dead and put himself to sleep.
Eighteen
[show direct message conversation]
D MACHENV: CALL ME ON A CLEAN PHONE RIGHT NOW
D WESTO911: clean phone? what am i stringer fucking bell?
D MACHENV: DO IT. I JUST HAD A VISIT FROM AN OLD FRIEND
D WESTO911: oh shit.
BBMessage [timestamp]
[JW] Call me now
[AT] Am at dinner w commish and wacko wanda among others. May have to talk about her!
[JW] We have an issue with that
[AT] wtf
[JW] I’m heading downtown. Get out of there now
Blog entry [user: emilyw] [locked]
ANY INTEREST in finance becomes an interest in power, and an interest in place, I think. When I started working on Wall Street, I was interested first and foremost in doing a good job in a high-pressure environment. But it became apparent to me, quite quickly, that I would do my job better if I took notice of the real flows of currency, and the actors and locations they gravitated to and spun around. And I think—it might even be too obvious to state!—that that leads you to a study of history.
There I was, routing around financial meltdowns the world over, not realizing that I was standing on the site of the original American financial meltdown. Wall Street itself, named for the wall the Dutch put up to fortify the New Amsterdam settlement against the natives, a wall that eventually extended out to what is now Pearl Street, the old shoreline. It was here on Wall Street that the smart operators of the 1600s looked to do business with the locals, the people of Werpoes and the other Lenape villages of what they called Mannahatta.
The Europeans had noticed that the Native Americans seemed to place great value on something called wampum, or “white strings.” These were lengths of beading made from shells and woven together into strips or belts. They had many uses. The relative complexity afforded by shape and color meant that wampum could be used as a communications medium and as a record of events, not unlike a simple tapestry. There are surviving photos of wampum belts constructed to seal and commemorate treaties. They were used as devices to preserve and tell stories from one generation to the next, a crucial cultural aid in otherwise oral societies. Wampum had myriad other social functions. In short, there was perceptible value to wampum in Native American society.
When the Europeans arrived, they immediately looked for ways to open commerce with the natives, and when they saw the traffic of wampum, they felt sure that they’d found it. Therefore, they began to produce their own wampum. It must have been difficult at first, essentially trying to forge a currency without really understanding it, but the Europeans had one important advantage. The natives of Mannahatta were a preserved Stone Age culture. These seventeenth-century Europeans had metal tools and all the advantages of coming from a world poised less than a century from the top of the Industrial Revolution.
The natives, at first, must have found it to be some weird way of reaching out. The Europeans making wampum, rich with cultural memory and meaning, and wanting to hand it over in exchange for furs and food. I wonder if the natives felt beholden; if they felt they had to take this strange, useless wampum and exchange it for the goods the Europeans needed to survive.
Soon, of course, the inevitable happened. The Dutch flooded this tiny primitive market with fake wampum. They massively overproduced it, at great speed, and the villages of Mannahatta couldn’t absorb more than a fraction of it. Wall Street caused and presided over America’s first financial collapse. But the furs and the food and the other goods obtained from the Lenape with fake currency allowed the wall of Wall Street to grow until it enclosed and swallowed villages like Werpoes. It’s still there now, buried under downtown, a hidden place of power. I don’t think of it as subsumed into the new power of Wall Street.
I think of it as lying in wait, glowing with the half-life of its lessons learned and its vengeance pending.
I’m not supposed to go near Werpoes. If you can see this friends-locked entry, then you know there are issues in my life that I can discuss only in the most allusive of ways. But I invent new reasons, weekly, to get a little closer. Purchasing cut flowers from a certain store. Getting food from a certain café. I edge nearer, incrementally, despite the risks, because my first interest was in power. And Werpoes was the first community I know of that was crushed by the sort of financial wrongdoing that I did for a living. The living that, in fact, gave me, completely, the life I have now.
I’ve had to learn a lot about Native American culture since those days. I’m drawn to it, fascinated by it, and hope that what I’ve learned will protect me in the years to come. But I’m drawn to power, too, and there is power there.
Don’t go to Werpoes. It’s not safe.
Nineteen
TALLOW WOKE up about six a.m., feeling like boulders had been rolled over him in the night.
The shower didn’t help. He endured a short but explosive session on the toilet, and when he turned to flush there was blood in the bowl. He got dressed, stuffed some things back in the laptop bag, and left.
At seven a.m., he was outside a large florist’s store that he knew, on Maiden Lane. They were just opening, bringing in leafy goods from trucks temporarily double-parked on the tree-lined street. Tallow slid in the front door, past two unpleasantly healthy men in wife-beaters and jogging pants carrying pallets of heavy pots like they were cafeteria trays. A slender woman spotted him in the gap between two large and odious monoliths of vegetation that might have been triffids and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not really open yet.”
With a smear of regret, Tallow badged her. “I know. I just have a quick question about something.”
The woman walked around to him, wiping her palms on a pair of jeans that hadn’t been blue in five years. She was white like lilies, and willowy, her hair the pale glow of blondes who have worked in the sun for a long time. “What did you need, Detective? Is this quick question for a wife, a girlfriend, or your mother?”
“I didn’t badge you to get special treatment, I promise. I need to see a tobacco plant, if you have one.”
Her eyes said she was in her forties, but only two lines were drawn on her forehead as she made a small pensive frown. “Hm. You know, I think I do. Come with me.”
She led him past four or five stages of plant life, along an aisle, and into a small jungle of shrubs. Tallow watched her eyes tick down and across three levels of shelving. She settled on a small pot containing a sickly-looking collection of sticks topped with wispy white heads. “Woman’s tobacco,” she told him. “The Native Americans used the leaves to alleviate heavy periods, postnatal sickness, and stomach problems.”
There were so few leaves on the object that Tallow didn’t want to touch them for fear of killing the thing.
“Or there’s this,” she said, lifting a heavier pot filled with a vivid, vigorous green foliage that sprayed white trumpets of flowers whose mouths were a warm pink. “Your basic Nicotiana tabacum, cultivated tobacco, a distant relative to the tobacco seeds the Taino Amerindians gave to Christopher Columbus, which became the plants that Jean Nicot gave to the French court, where people were so goddamn delighted by the effect the ground-up leaves had on their heads that they named the plant after him.”
Tallow rubbed one of the leaves between thumb and forefinger. He got a, yes, a distant relative of that slightly sharp scent, just barely suggestive of cigarette tobacco, that he’d detected in apartment 3A.
“That’s it,” he
said. “I think. Maybe if I crushed it up and burned it.”
“You crush and burn it, you buy it,” the florist said with a smile.
“Sorry,” Tallow said. “It’s for something I’m working on, believe it or not. You seem to know about this stuff.”
She rolled her eyes around the room. “I kind of should, don’t you think?”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m not really awake yet. Would you know if this is the sort of tobacco plant that would have grown naturally around here, way back when?”
She bit her cheek, turning the pot around in her soil-streaked hands. Her nails were longer and stronger than he would have expected for someone in her job. “Well. It’s a cultivar, like I said, and some people think it has a couple of other tobacco plants mixed up in it. But sure, something pretty much like it would have grown around here. The woman’s tobacco would have been local too. You would have found it on the slopes headed down toward where Pearl Street and Water Street are now, back in the days before the natives sold the place to the Dutch.”
Tallow made a decision. “I’d like to buy this, um, this one with the flowers here.”
“Nicotiana tabacum.”
“Yeah.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t do cop discounts. And women really do prefer roses.”
“I’m sure they do. But I think the person I’m looking for prefers Nicotiana tabacum. And I don’t take cop discounts.”
Which was a damned lie, because in the past couple of years he’d done it a lot, and he knew it, and she knew it just from the look in his eye, but Tallow paid full price for the pot and a bag of plant-food sachets, and was happy to do it. He thanked her and left, dodging another weight-lifting display as he went.
Tallow’s next stop was the coffee shop, where he purchased a cardboard tray of six of the morning specialty, an iced coffee, in the grotesque venti-plus, that was made with nothing but too many shots of espresso and seriously chilled cream. The half a dozen drinks came in milkily translucent corn-plastic containers stamped with a cartoon of a naked man plugging himself into main electricity through his genitals and leaping into the air with the joy of voltage. Tallow made a pit in the backseat of the car and placed the tray in it. The tobacco plant sat in the foot well of the passenger seat. It wasn’t yet eight a.m. So far, Tallow had remembered everything except food. He figured he could survive until lunch and pointed the car at One PP.