Gun Machine

by Warren Ellis

  Tallow had a sudden sour memory of the lieutenant suggesting that Tallow had been deluded about that.

  He crouched down next to the woman. “It’s okay, ma’am. I’m a police officer. He’s gone. Can you tell me what happened?”

  She folded her arms over her head and rocked, choking out the words “I thought it was him” over and over again.

  Tallow said, “It’s okay, ma’am,” and experimentally put his hand on her shoulder. She shrieked and jerked away with terrified revulsion, almost fell over, and started coughing as well as crying. Being strangled by her own throat muscles and fluids seemed to pull her out of the fugue. She wobbled on her haunches, those strange golden heels pushing around on the sidewalk for purchase. He touched her again, under her forearm this time, softly. She turned her gold-framed black shades to him, and she allowed him to gently guide and support her to a standing position. She started sobbing again, and fell into him. He put an alien arm around her somehow, and looked at the ground. Her cylindrical purse was on the sidewalk, unopened, next to her wrapped sandwich. He strained a bit and put out a foot to the purse, rolled it closer to him.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said to his chest, sounding a million miles away.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “It’s not,” she said, scrabbling for an unconstricted breath. “He just asked me for a light. But I saw the, the feathers, and his clothes, and…” She broke into tears again, but the crying was cleaner now, more flowing, more purging. She was crying herself out, coming back to herself.

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Emily.” Her hands were shaking epileptically, and his arm was providing less emotional support than physical—he realized he was doing most of the work of holding her up.

  “Let me get you sat down,” he said, and shuffled her with difficulty toward his car. His spine popped as he reached down to unlock the driver-side door. He swung it open and lowered her sideways onto the seat.

  “One second,” he said, and swept up her purse and sandwich, reclaimed his own purchases, opened the rear door, and put his (and he had to ask himself, What was wrong with him that he was treating three sandwiches like fragile treasure?) precious food on top of the laptop bag. When he turned back to her, she’d fumbled her shades off and managed to stuff them in one pocket of her jacket. Emily did not have the eyes of someone who slept peacefully or often.

  “Oh God,” Emily croaked, “look at my hands.” The veins on the backs were standing up like cables, and her hands were shaking so hard they almost blurred.

  Tallow gave her her purse. She took it with difficulty, but held on to it. Tallow watched. The shaking diminished, but it didn’t go away. He hunkered down by her side, leaning on the car. “Can you take another shot at telling me what happened, Emily?”

  He was oddly saddened to see deception crawl across her eyes like rainclouds.

  “I, I don’t really know,” Emily said. “I haven’t been, I guess, I haven’t been well for a while. A, um, I’m not sure what you’d call it, an emotional problem, mental issues, I don’t know, anything I say makes me sound crazy, right? Things just get on top of me sometimes. I get frightened easily, maybe? And that man. He just. Wrong moment.”

  She looked down at her brooch and plucked at it with hate, giving a laugh and a sob all in one horrible heartbroken sound. “And this stupid thing, it doesn’t…”

  She looked at him, and caught herself. “…doesn’t matter.”

  Tallow indicated her purse. “You have your phone in there?”

  She nodded, unzipped, and produced it. The phone was very new, a model he’d only read about: just a thin slice of flexible, scratchproof plastic with an artful streamer of antenna wire baked into the back.

  “We get given prototypes by phone companies,” Emily said, by way of explanation or apology.

  “What’s your husband’s name?” he asked, taking the phone.

  “Jason. Jason Westover,” she mumbled.

  He opened the phone’s contacts, found the name Jason, and pressed Call. The warmth of his hand activated something in the phone’s structure, and it curled in his grip, taking on the curve of an old-style handset.

  “Yes, Em, what is it,” said a tired man’s voice. Not a question; more a resigned statement.

  “This is Detective Tallow, NYPD. Is this Mr. Westover?”

  “Oh. Oh Christ.”

  “It’s all right. Everything’s okay. Am I speaking with Jason Westover?”

  “Yes. Yes. I didn’t—”

  “It’s all right, sir. I’m with your wife. She’s had a bad scare, and I don’t judge her fit to drive home safely. She’s very shaken up. If you can let me know where you live and arrange to meet me there, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” Westover said. “Yes. Of course. Thank you. We live at the Aer Keep. I’ll head home as soon as I can and meet you in the main foyer. What about the car?”

  “It’s locked and I have the keys. I realize it’s inconvenient—”

  “No, no, don’t worry. I’ll have someone come home with me, and I’ll give them the keys and have them pick the car up. Where is it?”

  Tallow gave him the address and listened to the scratching of Westover writing it down with a very sharp pencil on paper with a rich tooth.

  “Thank you,” Westover said. “Thank you for doing this. I’ll start out for home now.”

  “We’re heading to you. Thank you, sir,” said Tallow, and ended the call.

  Emily seemed more miserable. “Was he angry?”

  “He was just glad you’re safe. Now, can I get you to move over to the passenger seat? I’m not allowed to let you drive.”

  She almost smiled at that. But then, thought Tallow, it was only almost a joke. He helped her up, walked her around to the passenger seat, and installed her in it. Getting in the driver’s seat and strapping in, he had a thought.

  “I have to ask,” Tallow said. “If you live in the Aer Keep, what were you doing all the way down here?”

  She gestured at the storefront. “They have the best sandwiches,” she said.

  Tallow aimed the car uptown.

  “It’s really very kind of you to do this,” Emily said.

  “I couldn’t leave you stranded down in the 1st, and I really didn’t think driving was a good idea for you.”

  “The 1st?”

  “1st Precinct. The NYPD breaks the city up into zones, precincts, and we’re in the 1st Precinct right now.”

  “How funny,” Emily said, without smiling. “Invisible walls for Wall Street.”

  “I suppose,” Tallow said.

  “Wall Street. Named for the wall the Dutch put up to keep the Native Americans out.”

  “You like history?” Tallow asked.

  Emily went inside herself a little. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the past year or so. I don’t really like coming down here. It’s not far enough from Werpoes.”

  “Werpoes?”

  “It was a major Native American village. Just by the Collect Pond. You can look at the little park there and almost imagine that you can see a bit of it. But I only went there once.”

  She was rubbing the brooch again, chin down on her collarbone and looking at it as if expecting a genie to rise out of it. No, sadder than that: as if knowing that, despite a story she’d been told, nothing was going to emanate from the device.

  As they crossed Broadway, Emily asked, “Are we still in the 1st Precinct?”

  “Just left it.”

  “This was an old Lenape walking trail. So one border of your 1st Precinct is the oldest road in Manhattan.”

  “Ghost maps,” said Tallow to himself.

  “What? Ghosts?” She sounded genuinely worried, eyes widening.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud. What made you interested in Native American history? Or is it just Native Americans in New York?”

  Tallow couldn’t tell if she was relaxing or coming apart again. She wasn
’t staring out of the windows as if expecting an attack on the car anymore, but her hands were trembling harder and her eyes were wet.

  “Just something someone said to me once,” she eventually said. “Did Jason sound very angry?”

  “More like shocked.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. He doesn’t beat me or anything.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Jason has a lot to deal with. More than anyone should. I don’t like to make things worse for him.”

  “I see.”

  “No. No, you don’t.” Her eyes glittered at him like well water. “But you want to, don’t you?”

  Tallow had nothing to say to that. He kept his eyes on the road and continued to speed uptown. He could feel her look at him, and then look away, and then look back, as if keeping her eyes on him was safer than looking outside. Tallow started to feel like he should say something.

  “Ghost maps,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s what I said to myself five minutes ago. You thought I said ghosts. Ghost maps. I had a meeting yesterday with a man who runs one of those big financial companies on Wall Street. You know, the kind you describe as a financial company but don’t really have a clue what it is it actually does?”

  Emily’s smile was a ghost of its own. “I suppose it must seem like that,” she said.

  “Does to me. Anyhow. He was talking to me about how there’s an invisible map of connections all over the financial district that do transactions at light speed, and how the map doesn’t quite fit the territory? Something that’s physically closer to the Exchange isn’t necessarily…informationally closer?”

  “You’re talking about low latency,” Emily said with a shade of surprise in her voice.

  “I think so?”

  “This was the sort of thing that was really taking hold as I was leaving the field,” she said. “Ultra-low latency and algorithmic trading. Ultra-low latency means sending the trading information really, really fast. Algo trading is using specialized computer code to sort of break up every transaction into hundreds of little ones. You can almost think of it like rain, really hard rain hitting the windows of the Exchange. The rain’s eventually going to form one big puddle, but you’re not looking at that. You’re looking at the rain. The big transaction’s hidden in plain sight.”

  “You worked on Wall Street?”

  “I worked for one of those mysterious financial companies. Vivicy.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Tallow. “Why did you leave?”

  “I met my husband there. Well, kind of. I met him through my boss. They were old friends. And after we were married, Jason said to me: Andy’s kind of an asshole to work for, and the business is doing pretty good now, so why don’t you work for yourself, like me? So now I’m an independent financial consultant, which means I can work from home with my dog and drive downtown for the good sandwiches instead of being one of Andy’s wizards. I don’t have to do the magic for him. But I can’t learn the magic I need to know. Fuck—”

  Emily started beating the dash with her fists, screaming Fuck over and over again. Tallow cast around with his eyes, twisted the wheel of the unit, and managed to pull over without causing a pile-up. He reached across the seat and grabbed her wrists. She was still trying to punch the dash even in his grip. He yanked her arms toward himself and yelled, “Look at me!”

  She jerked, and her eyes seemed to roll up into her head for a moment before they came back to his. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “Please don’t tell Jason. He worries so much.”

  “I’ve already told him all he needs to know. Anything else is between you and him.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, but Tallow had the feeling that she meant something else. She sat back, and sat still, dread on her face.

  Tallow pulled the car back out into traffic.

  “Did Native Americans fish? Here in Manhattan, I mean,” Tallow said.

  Emily’s eyes were closed now. “Yes, of course. They caught oysters too. When the Dutch came, they found huge mounds of discarded oyster shells and crushed them to pave—”

  “—Pearl Street,” Tallow said. “Right.” He had the sudden strident sense of vast nets around him, so fine that they were invisible until the light caught them. He took out his phone.

  “Scarly?”

  “Lunch delivery is fail, Tallow.”

  “I know. I got into something, I’m going to be a little late. Listen. The paints. Every one of those guns was cleaned before it went up, but he must’ve put the paints on with his fingers. Before you do whatever it is to identify the paints, you’ve got to check them for DNA and anything else you can think of. Okay?”

  “On it. Bring food.”

  “On it.” Tallow killed the call with his thumb and checked Emily out of the corner of his eye to calculate her alertness. “Emily,” he said, “do you know what Native Americans used for paints?”

  She kept her eyes closed. “Ocher. Red ocher, around here, I think. It’s mostly what you find on the East Coast. It’s a clay-based pigment. They used it for all kinds of things, including body painting and staining their hair. Some people say that some of the first Native Americans to meet Europeans were wearing it, and that that’s where Red Indian comes from.”

  Tallow knew his history. Not deep history, but certainly city history. He knew there had been mines all over the area. Staten Island, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t built on landfill garbage. The Dutch had mines there early on. His mind was jumping around, looking for fingerholds.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “Blue clay. Crushed clamshells for white. They’d sun-dry things, or burn them, to get the colors they wanted. Charcoal, obviously. Tree sap, berries. Why?” She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “Just keeping you talking,” said Tallow. “You had a shock, after all. Where’s your dog?”

  “I have a dog walker for during the day. She took the dog out, I went for lunch. My husband walks the dog at night.”

  Emily seemed to be sliding into a state of…he wouldn’t say emotionlessness, but certainly distance and apathy. Her voice came from somewhere deep inside her, somewhere dusty that was a long drive away from being present in the world. The same remote point that he had sometimes, in rare self-aware moments, heard his own voice coming from over the past few years.

  The past two days had put Tallow back in the world. Two days ago, he would have pretended he wasn’t police in order to safely walk past shrieking Emily and get in the car with his lunch. In the time before two days ago, he did everything differently. Which was to say, he did as little as possible. Cases got taken care of because nothing was hard.

  He was back in the world, thinking energetically, engaged with people, and, he realized with a cold empty feeling in his gut, it was this that was making the scattered fragments of this awful, career-ending case slowly push together. His gut got icier and sicker as he kept thinking.

  “So who was the man,” Tallow said, quietly.

  “What?” She was far away, and fear was suddenly spoiling the scenery out there.

  “The homeless guy who scared you. Who did you think he was?”

  “Nobody,” Emily whispered, and turned her face from him.

  Tallow steered into the Aer Keep. The front gate was a concrete checkpoint that wasn’t shy about its Cold War look. Tallow showed his badge to the security guard there, noting that the woman was wearing the same Spearpoint insignia as the drones at Vivicy. The guard bent over and peered into his car. “Mrs. Westover,” she said, “is everything okay?”

  “Yes, Hannah, I’m fine. I felt ill, and this kind police officer said he’d drive me home. Is my husband here yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do you need anything? Should I send the building doctor up to your apartment?”

  “I’m fine, Hannah, honestly. I probably just forgot to eat or something. But thank you.”

  The guard gave a smile that said she hoped she’d done enough
because someone who controlled her employment would certainly be asking her that later, and the gate rose to accept the car into the Keep.

  “You go down into the garage,” said Emily. Tallow drove to the mouth of it, where it descended into the bowels of the Keep, and stopped. He wriggled his wallet out and took one of his cards from it. He slipped his notebook pen from of his inside pocket and wrote his cell phone number on the card.

  “Take this,” he said, pressing it into her hand. “The number I just wrote down gets my cell phone, day or night. And I don’t sleep much. If there’s anything you ever want to tell me, anything that’s ever worrying you, anything happening that you need help with, call that number. That number’s your new 911, okay? Even if you just want to talk about history. That number.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She zipped the card into one of the peculiar vestibules of her jacket.

  Tallow drove down into the island. It was lit down there, and Tallow thought of mines again. The roadway forked; he went right, which took them along a curve to the shining doors of the main foyer. There were more guards there, and one stepped to the car as Tallow got out.

  “You can’t park here, sir.”

  Tallow showed the man his badge. “Yeah, I can.”

  “Actually, sir…” he began, but Tallow was already walking around the car to let Emily out. The guard saw her; his features creased with frustration, and he was compliant in voice only. Tallow knew when someone was memorizing his face in order to do something medieval to him later, and the guard was taking a good long hostile look. Tallow gave Emily her purse and, with a smile, her sandwich. He took her elbow, gently, and guided her past the guard. Tallow took a good look at the guard too, and gave him a shark’s dead-eyed smile, just for the hell of it.

  The shimmering glass of the foyer frontage slid open to accept Tallow and Emily. Just inside, a solid man a few inches shorter and a mile fitter than Tallow stood talking to an athletically slim younger man in a sleek black suit and a Bluetooth earpiece. Two steps into the foyer, Tallow saw the Spearpoint insignia on a discreet pin on the younger man’s lapel.