Strawman Made Steel (16 page)

I felt a gross enthrallment to her words. I’d
never wanted to be in two places so much―there and any other place in all the
world.

“He drew my hair back. But before he
whispered in my ear, smothered me with his heat, drowned me in the smell of
drink, I knew his intent. It sat fully formed and clear in that first thieving
grasp. From the moment of that first touch I knew what he planned to take.”

She described how he moved her like a
manikin. How she did not think to cry out because she had forgotten speech.

From the corner of my eye I saw Coffey
place his cigarette stub on the bar, missing the ashtray. It must’ve burnt his
fingers but he was silent.

Nicole’s narration reached the point where
he had hold of the hem of her dress. But her next words broke on me like a
clear dawn.

“Then Eury burst in upon us―”

I heard a noise like scraping ceramic and
felt more than saw motion.

“Janus,” said Nicole. “Are you hurt?”

I looked and saw that I was standing. In my
hand were the remains of my glass. Shards of it were collapsed inward, and the
moisture of the dregs seeped among them onto the skin of my palm. The motion I’d
felt was a shard that had sprung from my hand. Blood mingled with the wreck.

“Bloody Mary,” I said. “On the rocks.” I
dumped the glass fragments into the ashtray, retrieved a kerchief from my
pants, and wrapped it around my hand. “What did your brother do, Nicole?”

She was silent a moment. I couldn’t read
her thoughts.

“Brothers. Eutarch followed Eury. My
attacker, Prentice―that was his name―didn’t react at first. Eury hit him. But
his hands were still on me.”

Nicole shuddered. She seemed to have lost
her detachment. Perhaps I had shaken her back into the moment. She regained her
composure with visible effort.

“That was when he put a knife to my
throat.”

She rested a delicate fingertip on the thin
pink flaw at her throat.

“Then Eury and Eutarch disarmed him and
beat him badly.” She glanced at Coffey. “There were no witnesses, Mr. Coffey.
At least, no one saw us. I trust you will not print any of this.” It wasn’t a
question. Coffey, to his credit, nodded soberly.

Now that Nicole wasn’t speaking, I heard
the silence that had descended on the smoky air of the Elephant.

I said to Nicole, “I want to talk to your
brother, Eutarch. Where would I find him?”

“Today? He’ll be watching the high stakes
tables at the Diogenes.”

“Perfect,” I said, and rose.

Nicole placed a hand on my chest. “Let me
take you.”

I paused a beat, had another argument with
myself, and said, “Okay. But this isn’t a social outing.”

We left Coffey alone at the bar. All the
rush seemed to have gone out of him.

Outside Nicole directed me to the dark bulk
of a Chrysler Pacific-class Limousine. Beside it stood a chauffeur, stiff as a
flagpole. He held the door open for Nicole. I made my own way to the other
door, and slipped onto the leathern bench seat facing backward across from her.

“Quite a story,” I said, wondering if I’d
ever get a chance to chat to this Mr. Prentice.

“I think of it as a joke,” she said absurdly.
“But I left out the punch line.”

I waited for it.

She leaned toward me conspiratorially, and
said: “I think Eutarch meant for the assault to happen.”

We floated in silence, stop start,
through the Midtown congestion. I watched Nicole watch the passing sights. Her
expression made her seem a schoolgirl on an excursion somewhere new.

It wasn’t until we drifted down the
Blockade Bridge off-ramp and into Queens that she spoke again.

“God, I miss Eury.”

“What did he make of Prentice?” I said.
“Did Eury think Eutarch involved?”

“You should have those bruises seen to.”
She reached a hand part way across the space between us then withdrew it. “I
never talked to Eury about it, but he had to have suspected. Prentice seemed so
surprised when Eury found us. I think Eury fought with Eutarch about it
afterwards.”

“Why?”

“He was bruised.”

“Black eye?” I said.

She nodded, then looked at me. I saw the
sky and trees sliding by in her eyes. “And it changed him. Eury I mean. He wasn’t
the same after.”

I fiddled with the kerchief still wrapped
around my hand and let her spill it.

“We were always close. He’s the brother I
climbed trees with, got scraped knees with―as much as a nee Liselle was
permitted. It sounds clichéd. But after the Ball... I don’t know how to
describe it.” The skin around her eyes crinkled in concentration. “He forgot
about himself. Not that he was selfish before―I wouldn’t say that. But he began
to
hover
. The friends he introduced to me were from out of town. If I
didn’t know better, I’d say he was trying to push me away from New York.”

She fixed me with a stare. “Why would he do
that?”

I thought,
Other than to get you away
from a pimping brother?
but didn’t say it.

She guessed my mind in any case: “You think
because of Eutarch? But how could I be right about that? My own brother.
Ridiculous. The idea was born in the moment, but it isn’t rational. I’m sorry I
repeated it.”

I rested my head against the window glass.
My head juddered against it, vibrations strangely soothing to the three pounds
of ache encased by my skull. I watched the sidewalk race past to be gathered
into the distance.

The tail of the industrial sprawl on the
East River passed, giving way to new ghettos of cashed-up renewal. But above
the peaks of shiny new townhouses and commercial complexes, there reared the
heads of three knolls, each a hundred feet high. Stone and rusted steel stuck
from their flanks like the bones of rotting animals. They rose above the street
frontage and lay their ponderous beams of somber wisdom upon the brow of
McIlwraith.

Each hill was only a pimple on a city the
size of NYC, but held the accumulated pus of the city’s infected conscience.
Each a barrow filled with the wreckage―stone, beast, and man―of the dirtiest
kind of war: the so-called civil. Between East and West.

Civil war. More fruit of the Event.

The war broke over North American barely
thirty years into the recovery period. But it wasn’t fought over slaves. Wasn’t
fought over any moral but the will to power. New York and Los Angeles sat on
opposite sides of the continent and sent scrabbling hands out to recover and
rebuild, and everything was fine until those hands grabbed for the same
trinket: a gazillion gallons of shale oil beneath the old prairie.

But the Event didn’t just create the
imbalance between Los Angeles and New York that squeezed the temperature to
boiling point. It also made the big bombs blind. Without electric sensors, and
guidance by invisible beam, they fell where the wind took them. The kids who
died flying kites in that wind agree: it was a good thing the war had no moral.

Perhaps a nuke would have been better after
all. History needs a keen edge if it’s to help. But it makes no difference if a
man doesn’t feel its blade. Sin of Adam and all that.

When the memorial knolls finally slipped
out of sight, I felt like I’d woken from a nap.

“Did your brothers take after their
father?” I said.

Nicole seemed to take a moment to retract
her attention from a distance.

“Do you?” she said.

“My father was three quarters Scotch. And I’m
not talking about his ancestry. So, yes.”

“You’re not a drunk,” she protested. The
concern in her voice for my self-respect was equal parts touching and amusing.

“You’re a poor judge of character,” I said.
“Answer the question.”

She considered. “Each brother took a part
of him―which was the part of each he admired most.” She gave a wry smile. “I
think they mistook it for love.”

I sat there trying to see Nicole Speigh
again as if for the first time. I wondered if I was the one misjudging
character.

She spoke to the scenery flying past. “I
suppose next you’ll ask if he loved me.”

It was my turn to talk to the fleeting
lampposts. “If he didn’t, he was an ass.”

The Diogenes Casino was the
architectural return to Ancient Greece writ large. Even by the standards of
electrified New York―for that matter, Las Vegas―the Diogenes was a temple
ablaze. It promised, if not bounty, a sweet ecstatic burn into oblivion. And
from the size of the parking lot, it drew moths from every corner of Tri-State.
This, more than Evelyne Speigh’s mansion in the clouds, gave me a visceral
sense of the glory of the Speigh Empire. Mental hat-tip to Carl Inker.

The chauffeur maneuvered the Chrysler
through a tangle of traffic off the throughway and onto a circular drive that
kissed a sweeping flight of stairs to the entrance. In less time than I’d have
thought possible he had Nicole’s door open and got into his flagpole routine as
she eased out of the car.

I clambered out the other side and tugged
my coat into shape. The advantage of owning two sets of identical clothes―you’re
always wearing your Sunday best.

I saw a doorman, resplendent in red
uniform, hurry inside. My guess, he’d spotted Nicole. Well trained.

Inside we joined the crowd, a flowing mass
of humanity, clustering and fragmenting, and re-clotting around game tables.
Roulette, Craps, Blackjack, and 7-stud, plus a few recent innovations. Light
spilled and shot from a myriad of lamps suspended by chains in chandeliers, and
secreted in alcoves. Their glow lit glistening teeth and eyes, and gilded
watches worn by heavy men with premature hangovers. Voices swelled and ebbed
around the vaulted dome of the main floor as fortunes rolled about it and
clashed like waves, and from somewhere came the woody strains of a quartet.

But absent from it all was the voice of the
harnessed electron. All that spoke were sounds human or mechanical. No pokies.
No laser display or piped music.

After nine years riding the mirror, it
still struck me.

The only electrons pulling their weight
were firing down nerve pathways. Electric charge born in the brain. Biological
systems managed the trick somehow, and the first to untie
that
knot
―
Alltron
or whomever―would overnight make the Speigh Empire seem a spittoon deposit. As
it was, all those clever little nerve pathways were doing was forking over cash
and imbibing alcohol.

“Miss Speigh,” came a voice.

We turned to find another lackey in red,
head tilted deferentially. “Mr. Speigh asked that you be informed he is
currently in the Pearl Room, and suggested you join him if it would please
you.”

She turned to me and raised her eyebrows.
For a moment she looked like that girl on excursion.

Without a word she led me to the foot of a
curling stairway. At the foot of the stairs stood two guys in black looking
like seven-foot gloved fists. They parted without a word and we ascended.

The stairs reached up maybe two stories,
but already the hubbub was diminished. A wide balcony curved with the dome of
the main floor, overlooking it. Into the wall was cut a series of anterooms,
leading to high-stakes rooms.

Nicole paid no attention to the crowd
below. (I guess secretaries eventually get bored of the fish in the waiting
room tank.) She strode toward the room marked by a replica pearl. The pearl
hung impossibly large over the anteroom, pendulous with a dull luster. I
followed, eyes roaming the drama below. I speculated about how much money a man
with a pair of binoculars and a partner able to read sign language could make
before being squashed by one of the fists.

The Pearl Room was no closet. Even so, I
spotted the middle Speigh brother the moment we entered.

And he spotted us.

He grinned, slapped a high roller on the
shoulder with familiarity, and strode around the table toward us. He pulled up
short by a couple of yards, took one sub-conscious drag on the cigarette
pinched in his fingers, and looked me over. He took his time with my purpled
face. Then burst into laughter.

I did my own stocktake of the middle
Speigh. Compared to the elder brother, there wasn’t nearly so much to do.

His spare, knuckly body was swathed in a
pinstriped suit. A wide band of white shirt cuff poked over the hand that held
the cigarette. A green pocket square sprouted too far from his suit pocket, the
only splash of color. The collar of a black turtleneck sweater clung to his
neck, rolling under his chin like pedestal fluting. His head sat atop it, a
living bust.

Here was the genuine little Caesar. A kind
of charisma. More instinct than brains. Able to work a table. Ply the man. Rock
of Eye.

He stood there, giving his humor free
reign.

I noticed the threads of silver shot
through his black hair. The red marbling of his eyes. Eutarch might have the
Speigh gen-lines, but he was making them work uphill. He’d be dead before his
mother.