Strawman Made Steel (14 page)

“Thanks,” I said.

Then I looked at the mug in my hands and
realized where I was. I burst into laughter.

When I caught my breath, I said, “Which
side of Germany you from―east of Berlin?”

He shook his head. “Augsburg.”

Pity. I’m a guy that likes symmetry. And
irony. Didn’t McCartney and Jackson sing about that?

I caught Thor’s eye, and waved my cup at
the tomb-like room. “What do you think this place is?”

“Safe place.”

I smiled. “You don’t know the half of it.”

I held my cup up, and said, “Can you read
that?” referring to the words enameled on the side of the utilitarian mug.

He squinted then shook his head.

I hadn’t thought he would be able to. The
light was poor. The enamel had chipped and worn, obliterating some letters and
marring others. And English wasn’t Thor’s first language.

“It says: Civil Defence All Purpose Cup.”

He just looked at me. It meant nothing to
him.

I said, “When you moved in here you
probably found blankets, cracker tins, IV lines and bandages, maybe even some
broken vials labeled Dextran. Am I right?”

“Some of those things,” he said, with a
look on his face like he’d bitten a sour olive.

I told him and his nurse friend that the
place they’d chosen to squat had once―long, long ago―been a Cold War bunker.
The reason it was familiar to me was because I’d read about it in the Times or
National Geographic a couple of years ago. Bunker building was a national hobby
during the 50s and 60s―after the Ruskies put Sputnik into orbit, and nukes into
Cuba. Nobody told people that bunkers weren’t much protection from a
ten-megaton explosion. Two on Lower Manhattan would have snuffed an estimated
6.1 million souls.

Nukes. Couldn’t build those either after
the Event. Regression had its upside.

The far-off rumbling spoke through the
walls again, and loosed a purl of silt that threaded through a crack in the
ceiling, and dispersed in the air.

I knew what was making that noise now too:
one of those pistons ramming people into and out of Manhattan. A train. Riding
the Brooklyn Bridge―the
new
Brooklyn Bridge that was a retrofit over the
original stonework, towers and ramps. They’d laid the new structure over the
original like a great cloak in winter.

This bunker had been stumbled upon way back
in 2006 during routine maintenance in an alcove beneath the arch of the
Manhattan-side ramp. And here it still sat, even snugger than before, over two
centuries later.

A new voice spoke, surprising me. It
sounded German but I couldn’t make it out. Maybe a dialect.

The voice’s owner stepped into the room. He
was tall like Thor, but wiry. His face had been worked into lines and greys by
tension or grief. His hair was long and thick, but matted like a cared-for
animal gone feral.

He spoke again in gibberish.

Thor responded in English. “He is good. Not
police. He saved my life.”

The man switched to good English. “And you
saved his, so you’re square. Doesn’t effect this.”

I ignored them, and spoke to the nurse,
“You got the time?”

She shook her head, not understanding. I
jabbed a finger at my wrist, but she still didn’t get it. Her eyes were darting
between the other men, who were spitting rapid-fire dialect at each other.

I caught Thor’s eye. “What time you make
it?”

His brow wrinkled like he was looking at an
idiot.

My vision swam. I needed to lie down again
but I wasn’t going to do it here.

I pressed my case: “‘Cause I have a date.”

They ignored me.

I laid the flats of my palms on the table
and pushed. I got my legs under me and they seemed to hold.

Until the man with the unkempt hair took my
shoulders in his hands and thrust me back down.

“Sit,” he said.

He thought I was a good dog. His mistake.

I hocked and spat on his shoes. Universal
gesture. Diplomacy etc.

Both men turned to look at me.

“Can we wrap up the good-host-bad-host
thing? It’s past my bedtime.”

The wiry guy weighed me and Thor both with
his gaze. Then he pulled a flick knife, and snapped it open. The metallic snick
reverberated in the walled-in space. “You’ll go to the police.”

“No. I’ll go to bed.”

“You joke!” He shook his head, angry. “What
guarantee do we have you won’t?”

“I don’t joke. My word is your guarantee.”

He made a gesture with his fingers, like
flicking dust.

“What did Alltron do to you?” I said.

He spat something in dialect, then in
English: “What the hell are you talking about?”

I reached a hand into my coat and retrieved
one of the vials I’d taken from the safe. I held it up.

“Okay. What did
this
do to you?”

The room was frozen a second, maybe two.
Then the guy melted like an ice sculpture in time-lapse. Tears wet his eyes and
leaked over his cheeks. He sat and hid his face.

Still no one spoke.

I filled up the void: “So you’re illegals.
Who cares? I don’t. The city’s full of them.” I watched their eyes, fishing for
reactions. “You’ve been here a week, two at most.” I flicked a hand at Thor. He’d
doffed his hat and too-short coat, but his shirt, pants, and boots still
jarred. “Any longer and you’d camouflage better.”

The wiry man raised his head. His face was
covered in tear-slicked grime, but his bleary eyes were sharp as he listened to
me.

“There are maybe twenty of you.” I jabbed a
finger at the ceiling. Feet shuffled somewhere above as if in confirmation. “So
you’re organized. But illegals don’t camp in Manhattan. The heat is too heavy
here. And this bunker is no long term squat―not for you at least. So the plan
has come apart. I know all that. And you have my word your secret is safe with
me.” I had a soft spot for immigrants. After all, I was one. Part-time.

I swept a hand hard over my forehead and
eyes, and tried to settle my floating vision.

“What I don’t know, is how you lot got
tangled with this,” I said, and tipped the vial, watching the harmless-looking
clear liquid slosh sideways. A slightly raised viscosity was the only telltale
it was not water. “And how it got tangled with a corpse I’m investigating.”

I fixed my gaze on the wiry man and
directed my words to him. “Your friend is right. I’m not police. I’m a
provenor.
Private
investigations. I
don’t get paid for solving someone else’s cases. Your secret is safe with me.”

He was silent for what seemed a long time,
but I waited. He’d decided to talk. I saw that in the subtle shift of his
posture. Just had to wait.

“He said it would be easy,” he said in
English with only the slightest alien inflection. “Underground railway, he
called it. Been operating for years. Thousands of people. Never a hitch.
Contacts high and low in all the right places.”

His talk came pocked with silence at first,
but gathered momentum like a locomotive. The guy lived with a head of steam.
Which explained the drain on his vitality.

I held my tongue and let him talk it out.
His spiel summed up to organized human trafficking, emphasis on the organized.
I guessed the traffickers had feeders dangling in all the cities of turbulent
Europe. (I said the whole world went to hell in a handbasket after the Event.
Some of it still hadn’t returned.) Thor & Co had been dribbled straight
through bought-and-paid-for border checkpoints in Bavaria and Tirol via rail,
and then queued in the Italian Port of Genoa, before boarding a freighter for
New York. Right up until their first glimpse through a rusted porthole on the
waterline of the Statue of Liberty, the plan had seemed to hold. The freighter
had moored, and they’d collectively held their breath in the dank and stinking
hold waiting for nightfall, according to plan.

“I waited for dark,” said the wiry man,
“charged with hope and fear, like a father to be. Night meant new life.”

But night had not brought a clean birth.

“When they opened the hatch to the hold,”
he said, “there was a group of them. Like they expected trouble. Men with eyes
you can’t see into. I know that kind of man. They are the same in Germany. The
same everywhere.”

He paused. Drew his fingernails across a
cheek. Blood welled and beaded in a broken line.

“Women,” he continued. “They asked for
women first. They split us into groups and took us out one group at a time.
Then in mixed groups, but they fed us lies about police raids that meant we
couldn’t stick to our families. Once ashore, we were to filter out from those
groups a few at a time over the next week to re-join our families and be
placed. Placement was part of the deal, what we paid for. Work, housing,
identities.”

So they’d split, and that was how it had
stayed.

Until one of those who’d ‘filtered out’
returned.

“A man, one of our group, returned. Blood
was leaking from his eyes.”

Never a good sign.

“I don’t know how he found us again, in
that condition. He broke into the basement where we were kept, not far from
here. He killed the man guarding us. Told us he’d been taken, a sheep to the
slaughter.” He paused, pressed his lips together and pulled them apart with a
wet noise, and said, “Then before we could get him to make sense, he died right
there in that stinking cell.”

“Poison?” I said.

He nodded.

Thor pointed at the vial resting in my hand
and said, “That poison.”

Seemed like a brutal time for a
cross-examination, but better to yank the band-aid all in one go. I tapped the
vial with a fingernail and said, “This doesn’t make a man bleed out his eyes.”

At that the wiry man stiffened. Fifty-fifty
he was going to slug me.

Thor’s bulk loomed between us, his brow
creased by a deep frown. Seventy-thirty
he
was going to slug me.

“We got out,” Thor said. “
I
found
our people―those that left. That poison was there.” He jabbed a finger at me.
“You saw it.”

“I saw rows of corpses hanging in thin air.
None wore red mascara.”

I felt like dirt, goading a grieving guy
like that. But facts aren’t cheap. My head was wearing the cost.

Thor took a step back. I thought he was the
ocean receding before the tsunami. I battened down the hatches to meet the
liquid tons.

But he turned and walked to the room’s far
end. Over his shoulder he said something in dialect.

The wiry man pinned me in the beam of his
gaze and picked up the story again.

“Thorsten found where some of our people
were taken. The building you saw tonight.”

I said, “The Brownstone in intimate
relations with its neighbor?”

“Yes. They bring small groups of people from
the restaurant through the tunnel by which you escaped.”

My gut began to tense like it had detected
the spike in the punch. My mind flashed with recall of two nights prior, of
twiddling my thumbs while waiting for a diagnosis by X-ray.

But there was nothing wrong with my gut. It
was my
mind
that was pulling together the fragments of tonight into a
whole.

“The rich people gather,” he said. “And
when they go...” He spread his arms as though the ending were too obvious for
words.

It was, but I said it anyway. “They leave
dead bodies, empty glasses, and one less vial.”

“Empty glasses?” said the nurse. The first
words she’d spoken in my presence.

I nodded.

It was beautiful. Elegant. It had the
hallmarks of a man like the accountant. Maybe he wasn’t the principal, but he’d
helped streamline it.

“Death cult,” I said. When I got no
response, I said, “Germany has death cults?”

“Of course,” said the wiry man. “But―”

“You’re in America now. You don’t have to
die to be in a death cult―God forbid. Convenience is king. And let’s face it,
dying is about
the
worst inconvenience.”

There was a smile hanging on my face
whenever I paused, and even I didn’t know if it had grimace in it.

“So what do you do if you’re some cashed-up
kook with a penchant for the mysterion, for astral planes, and life beyond the
veil? You get someone else to do the dying for you, and see if you can’t at
least catch a whiff of the wind off those Elysium fields as they croak it.”

A touch of hysteria was making me babble. I
took a breath.

“New York has more cults on the boil than a
40s Californian summer. And this racket that snagged you has at least one
bubbling. My guess is they dose up the unwitting victims before the party
arrives. Everything seems fine. They probably get paired up. The paying partner
shares a drink with the victim, a libation that triggers the poison, then sits
back and watches the show. Maybe they have more voodoo―pentagrams and music and
juju―I don’t know. The hoisting up is probably part of the show. More addictive
than crack to that set.”