by Leo Champion
There were occasionally arkies in this crowd, although rarely; it was easy to spot the slumming arkies because of all the personal security they had. They surrounded themselves with platoons of the bodyguards who hung out in the Independent’s lobbies and charged extortionately by street standards for muscle, although to a US-15 or -18 it would be pocket change. Across from the Hotel were bars and clubs, lines in front of some of them.
Vehicle traffic passed slowly through the mobs of people, although some of the tenement bosses had footmen with batons to beat a path. Others rode sedan chairs, surrounded by guards that elbowed a way forwards. There were streetgangers with their blades peace-bonded, pushing their supermarket carts of sorted trash toward one of the Exchanges Midtown encompassed. There were ragged raff workers from across the city, pulling carts or given time off; there were bucket-shop scrip exchangers and a hundred kinds of hustler. It was eight pm but aside from a neon tint to the light it might have been eight am; this place was always in shadow anyway, but the lights made up for that.
Don’t mind me, Diana Angela thought as she made her way past a group of boisterously drunk tenement high-ups in expensive suits with meaningless – the highest tastes in street fashion had always struck her reserved, upper-class self as being tacky, although saying that aloud could get you killed down here – gold bling on their shoulders, aping the insignia of a world that had abandoned their ancestors more than a century ago. Just another raff chick in a hood, hiding some injury you probably don’t want to look too closely at.
* * *
She remembered her first venture up to the streets, driven by curiosity after years of observing from below as she killed vermin after vermin, developing her skills with every success and avenging Ian that much more. She’d found her way during the daytime into tenement bars and coffee houses in Times Square and then Greenwich Village, started to learn the ways of the city’s politics.
They read Charles Dickens on the streets, and a hundred other authors banned or lost to obscurity upstairs. They read Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair and Jack London and HG Wells and Karl Marx, and the Marx was enlightening certain young members of the streets’ upper class to the fact that the raff were in chains and it was their duty, as the intellectual vanguard, to break those chains.
It had been an invigorating time, Greenwich Village in the late 2170s. The tenements’ rulers were at comfortable peace, which had made them prosperous and lax. Ideas had flowed with the coffee and wine, with texts unknown in the arkscrapers and books forbidden by the authorities on the streets. Because etexts and printings of John Kiska were to be found, a brilliant writer who had emerged from the streets themselves.
The man himself was in hiding, two million dollars on his head but still always producing new stories, which came out through underground channels of people who knew people. There were printouts and the young tenement aristocrats, younger children mostly of underbosses and senior associates whose elder siblings were soldiers, shared them with the raff. A lot of the raff had basic literacy; they could read Kiska’s plain, clear, tenement language – his descriptions of squalor that every tenement worker knew in his own life, but had imagined better elsewhere. Kiska’s subject matter had been tenement life, but his message had been: It’s this bad everywhere, but it will get better if you make it better. The people responsible for your misery can be killed.
It had been all over the city, the spirit of the late ‘70s when a better world had seemed possible despite, upstairs, the purging of her visionary mentor Lucius Theron for daring to suggest radical change from above. If it would not happen from above then it could happen from below, she has believed at the time. She had fallen in love with Alex Thomson, son of an underboss but an intellectual with a fiery charisma that had convinced her of it – the world that she lived in was broken. Hundreds of millions lived in squalor on the streets, but the boot holding them down could be thrown off!
She missed the blind optimism of those days, half a decade past now. John Kiska had been killed on the steps of Midtown’s Library Terrace, dragged out of a hidden basement by bounty hunters and executed by Roman Kalashov’s personal soldiers. His death had been the spark that had led to the Greenwich Village Commune, which would be four years ago this May First…
She turned her mind firmly away. She was not going to think about the fucking Commune.
* * *
Roman Kalashov owned Times Square, but his troops with their fancy automatic weapons controlled some areas more thoroughly than others. Or, put another way as Diana Angela turned down an alley where the neon’s glare was only a reflection on glass and steel in the darkness: some areas paid more vig, and got left alone.
She recognized some of the faces in doorways, whores and madams watching the street pass by. One or two of them called out to her; she made noises of recognition, as alert here as she’d been in the sewers because these alleys could be almost as dangerous.
Down a flight of stairs to a heavy steel door manned by a bouncer with a mouthpiece. She pulled the hood off and looked Nestor in the eye. The burly man gave a slight nod and murmured something into his mouthpiece. The door slid open. The Last Stand paid Kalashov’s enforcers extra vig to stay well away; it was one of the less regulated places in Midtown, and it had become her home more than home.
There were traveling mercenaries and bikers; there were hitmen and soldiers and the girls who serviced them, the girls who didn’t operate in their own right. There were enough of those to make grabby hands think twice about her, and she made her way through the crowded tavern floor without much cause for concern, although she felt eyes on her.
People knew to feel her up with only their eyes for the most part, although every once in a while you got some idiot stranger who thought it would be fun to pat the ass or the tits of the hot blonde. Much of the time they backed off when they noticed her weapons, far more than the usual holdout pistol or blade that a lot of the call-girls had. Sometimes she had to kick the shit out of someone.
Or just dick, she thought with a smile, as a particularly handsome rider type crossed her vision, from his jacket a patched nomad biker of the Bandit Brothers. She’d come to really appreciate bikers; their code of honor was immensely appealing to a woman from as corrupt a society as the Intendancy had created. Upstairs it was impossible to be honorable, but the bikers accepted nothing less from the men, and the chicks some clubs allowed to full-patch, they rode with.
Yes. There was more than one way to scratch an itch, and killing always made her a little horny anyway. Perhaps she’d see if that biker was with anyone… or if he had friends. A wicked smile started to cross her face as she fell in behind him, a tall man with a beer in each hand.
“Lady D,” came a soft voice behind her.
She didn’t have to turn to know it was Rex, the go-to man and bodyguard for a fixer named Charles van Zanden. Not that fixers needed bodyguards in a place like here, where just about any of the place’s well-armed, often-augmented patrons would be happy to do a favor for one of the guys with the information, one of the guys with the work, one of the guys who could connect you to the money.
“Not now, Rex,” she said.
“Charlie wants you, Lady D.”
“Charlie can wait, Rex.” I have my sights on one of those bikers.
“Got a job for you,” Rex persisted and she turned toward him. He was a big man, shaven-headed and somewhere in his forties. He wore a plain tieless suit and little pince-nez that were actually SmartContacts. The Last Stand was of course an implant-disabled zone, so like a lot of higher-level people on the streets he carried a cellphone with an earpiece and a digital wand.
“Can it wait a couple of hours?” Just a quick fuck to get the day out of her system…
Rex muttered something into a subvocal mouthpiece, waited a moment, and gave her back the response: “Your call, but he’s been on your list over a year.”
Over a year, huh?
Yeah, picking up a guy could wait
. The night was young anyway.
* * *
van Zanden sat in his corner table, a pair of private detectives on one side and the other empty. One of the detectives was big and powerfully-built in a sharp suit, the other was grossly fat, but they were familiar faces. So was van Zanden, a handsome fortyish man so clean-cut he looked out of place in a ruffians’ bar like this. He was tolerated – welcomed, in fact, with his own table – in the Last Stand because of his connections, which meant work. He was a thinning-haired blond white man in a plain tieless suit, with an electronic tablet in his hands.
“Charlie,” she said.
van Zanden motioned, with a slight tip of his head, for her to sit down. She did. The detectives didn’t move from across the table, but they seemed more interested in their drinks than the woman who’d just joined them. She knew that was an act – Archie and Nero were professionals, and they were paying as close attention to her as they were everything else in the place.
“You spotted one on the list, huh?” she asked without preamble.
“They did.” van Zanden gestured at the two detectives.
“Which one?”
“Johnny Caustus,” said van Zanden. “Need a reminder?”
The name didn’t ring a bell and Diana Angela knew van Zanden had the files ready on that tablet anyway, so she grunted. “All I remember is that he’s a pedo.”
“Tenement underboss from Hackensack,” said the fixer. “Likes young girls. Buys and sells young girls. There’s a ten grand contract on his head in his capacity as a tenement underboss, we’ve got proof of young girls going into his apartment and… never coming out, and he’s come out of his shell to party tonight right here in Times Square.”
Diana Angela smiled thinly.
“And he’s been on my list since… how long?”
The fixer checked his tablet. “He first came to your attention June ’83. But he was too far away, too well-protected, too hard. Until he comes waltzing in with his boss and some others, less than an hour ago. They’re presently getting shitfaced at the Hux.”
“I’d like to see the evidence,” she said softly. Because this was too good to be true, a prime target right here! She noticed her tongue flickering between her lips; this would be a good kill indeed.
“Showing you would give its source away. It satisfies me and some of it has been independently verified,” said van Zanden. “I give my word that it satisfies me.”
Everyone in power in the tenements had done something to warrant killing, she had decided a long time ago. But it would be physically impossible to kill every tenement boss, so she focused her attentions on the particularly egregious ones. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the big picture, but someone had to avenge those children.
Diana slowly nodded.
“Fill me in.”
* * *
There were different ways to get into places, but tonight’s easy prey – easy but so deserving – would be out clubbing, which made it both easier and harder. Places like the Hux didn’t exactly allow you to stroll in with knives; she’d have to take the other approach.
Who’d taken out this contract, put down their ten grand to van Zanden, she had no idea about; that was the point of the fixer. Maybe it was some external tenement seeking to weaken this guy’s; maybe it was an internal enemy, because tenement bosses and their leading families spent all the time scheming against each other in a constant game for status and survival.
She really didn’t care; what mattered was that this fucker had killed, van Zanden swore to the best of his knowledge, and when she’d independently verified these things he had never been wrong, at least four young children. It probably hadn’t been a relative of those children who’d placed the bounty – although you never knew – but she was going to be killing for Jamie, Nareendra, and Glennis; van Zanden hadn’t had the name of the fourth.
“What’d this one do?” Cleopatra asked as Diana Angela came into her office. She was a tall ebony woman in a shimmering gold dress, some said the illegitimate daughter of a major Harlem OG. You could tell from the darkness of her shaved head that she was of an old gangsta family, those who had been organized crime since before the streets had been abandoned.
Diana Angela closed the door that led onto the parlor, where seven of Cleopatra’s girls were waiting to be dispatched. They didn’t need to hear any more than they’d already figured out.
“Pedo killer. At least four known kids, probably more,” she said.
“You need an escort, a lineup, what?”
“He’s in Times Square. Just a shower and then a dress, tonight. Then a cab.”
* * *
Eyes turned to watch the stunning blonde woman step out of an armored yellow taxicab, alone, in front of a Times Square club named the Hux where a line of waiting hopefuls snaked thirty feet up past the doors along Seventh Avenue. Some of the eyes belonged to the place’s bouncers, serious security although their guns were mostly out of sight.
The patrons, and aspiring patrons, of a club like this were likely to be the sons and daughters of powerful tenement people, to be handled lightly. But the armed force was available; clubs like the Hux drew attention from envious streetgangers too, and it wasn’t unknown in places like this for fights to erupt between people from rival or warring tenements. Their soldiers settled it on the ground with their lives, the rulers got bloody noses and two-week bans from the club.
Diana Angela got to her feet under the eye of the Hux’s bouncers, straightening herself up and reaching into her handbag for the clip of bills she’d need to start giving them. She was in a frilly pink slip of a party dress and white stiletto heels, bereft of anything security might conceivably interpret as a weapon.
She would have to be the weapon, but that was the fun part when it came to pedophiles. And there would soon – she kept the carnivorous grin just off her face – be one fewer of those.
The next few minutes involved a lot of bribes, simpering, and being felt up. The Hux security knew perfectly well that beautiful women did not just saunter into nightclubs unaccompanied with no angle. If she were a tenement high-up she’d be with an entourage; alone meant she was probably looking to fuck a tenement high-up. For the night, for a lifetime… it happened. It was how a girl with looks could make her way on the streets, and not something it was Diana Angela’s place to judge. It was probably the course she’d have taken, if she’d been born raff, and she had nothing but sympathy, friendship, and protection for the girls in that trade.
She passed through layers of security that didn’t take chances, as good as the most paranoid tenement boss because they were guarding some of those very same people. One inner-circle security team leader recognized her but said nothing, and got a crisp five-hundred discreetly slipped into his palm in appreciation. The shaven-headed ex-mercenary smiled:
“Good hunting,” Logan murmured under his breath.
Not everyone on the streets was a shit. Of course, he wouldn’t expedite her getaway if things turned really sour – that was up to her to work out. She was really putting her head into the lion’s den here, but that was part of the thrill. Sending Johnny Caustus to hell was delicious icing, but icing on that cake. She was never going to hurt innocent people, but God was it fun to kill guilty ones!
The last security man on the third floor mistook the smile on her face as anticipation for a different kind of fun – that, she would have later tonight – and leered at her as he signaled to the camera to let her through. The innermost door opened.
Music, ambient house beats from an artist who’d been popular in the arkscrapers a decade ago, played at a volume low enough to allow talking without much effort. Drinks and service girls circulated; DA winked at her friend Rosa as they passed, Rosa arm in arm with a handsome black man from probably one of the Bronx or Harlem OG families, who wore a tailored purple suit and a lot of jewelry. She felt eyes on herself as she circulated, scanning the private, roped-off areas where inner-circle tenement bodyg
uards mixed with more of the Hux’s people. It would look bad for the club for anyone to get killed on its premises, but the real high-ups insisted on at least a little of their own security while they held court.
A shame, that. There were at least six tenement bosses holding court in this room, and one of them she knew for a fact had a hundred thousand dollars on his head. The big beefy man with the cigar was also a happy peeler, known to enjoy flaying people alive, and she…
On target, DA. You can get Donald Larson another time.
That was the problem with this city. There were too many throats for one girl to cut no matter how hard she hustled!
Chapter Five
Johnny Caustus was a small man of about forty-five, with olive skin and slicked-back black hair. He wore a black suit with three gold diamonds on each shoulder; meaningless Intendancy-aping bling so far as she was concerned, although it would mean something in his tenement – others in the group of about a dozen had only one or two of the diamonds, while one woman had four. They were crammed into a pair of corner tables behind ropes, drinking and smoking; there was both weed and thick cigar smoke and a few girls were already with them. Caustus didn’t seem taken, though.
She sidled up along the ropes, and it didn’t take long until a beckoning finger drew a pair of security, one Hux bouncer and one in colourful tenement livery, over to her. There was a careful search, professionally from the Hux man but the tenement goon was clearly enjoying himself, before she was allowed in, walking past the man who’d gestured to her as she went over to Caustus.
“Sorry babe,” she simpered to that man. “I’m paid already, for him.”
“Ah, a bribe!” came raucous laughter from others in the group.
“Someone wants to bribe my head of production, what a surprise!” the boss in the centre laughed. “Hey, who paid for you?”