Strawman Made Steel (21 page)

The broadsheet archive was an egg that got
left out of the big basket: the digital basket. The basket that overnight
effectively disappeared from the panoply of human accomplishments, taking with
it everything from the collected mind-farts of overwrought teenagers to the
substance of entire multi-national corporations.

The Event only removed one card from the
House of Cards called Reality, and somehow left it standing. Pity it happened
to be the one we bet the farm on.

Digital data: prior to the Event, man’s
number one industry. If you could eat it, we could have fed a billion Earths—money,
health, news, entertainment, marriage, and even simulated weather systems
accurate to a blade of grass. Oceans of data recorded on DVDs, hard disks,
silicon, and, later, in the loopy traits of sub-atomic particles.

But the Event had rendered all of it
inaccessible in the blink of an eye. Much of it was still
there
, hidden
in relics from before the Event—but as useless as printed text to a blind man.

I ran a hand over the wooden bulk of the
broadsheet archive. This archive housed microfilm. Plain, old-fashioned
photographic exposures of broadsheets, shrunk to fit 800 to a reel of 35mm
film. It stretched back in unbroken sequence, barring a few hiccups, to life on
the other side of the mirror and earlier. Somewhere in the archive, printed in
miniature, was the cover of today’s yet-electrified New York Times. Hell, one
day, just for a laugh, I’d catch up on the classifieds from centuries in the
future.

But not today.

I ran a finger along the wooden cabinet’s
grain hunting for the dates straddling the murder of Dorrita Speigh. I found
them, trundled the drawer open, and removed two boxes of film, a chunk of the
archive three weeks long.

I found a microfilm machine in a crook of
the shelves that afforded me a view of the approaches. The machine was a mix of
wood, metal, and faux-Bakelite that interior designer’s probably call H.G.
Wells Chic.

I slipped the first reel from its box,
skewered it on the machine’s pin, slipped the head of the film under the glass
and onto the receiving reel, and wound it on. At the side of the machine was a
crank for tensioning a spring that drove the reel. I wound it, fired up the
unit’s lamp, and played with the lens until the Time’s banner stood out crisp.

The headline was criticizing the President’s
pro-Anglo concessions on Atlantic trade under the epithet “Sellout Shaw” and a
cartoon of her in lingerie sewn from swatches of the English flag. Must’ve been
a slow news day. I wondered what the hell you’d find in the editorials.

The date was too early by a week. With a
twist of the seek knob the pages blurred into a stream.

I halted the flow and read the date. Still
three days early. I twitched the knob and jogged the reel forward until I
reached D-day.

I couldn’t have missed it.

Emblazoned across the Times was the
headline: Grim Message Proves Magnate Kidnapping.

I read the article. A lot of hot air,
sensation without specifics. So I spun the reel forward a few more days and
looked for something substantive. I found it on a page four rehash, and
garnered the facts.

On the Fifth of April, a Thursday, Dorrita
Speigh simply failed to return to his Liberty Borough estate.

I paused. Today was Friday. Which, in the
normal flow of things, meant yesterday had been Thursday. Dorrita and his
second son, Eutarch, had both ‘disappeared’ on a Thursday—the day the Speigh
hired help were free to chase their dreams. Evelyne had told me so. Would her
eunuch be wearing a black rose for Eutarch, as he had for Eury?

I read on.

Dorrita had recently finished a term of
convalescence following surgery for a temperamental appendix, and was beginning
to ease back into the day-to-day direction of his empire, when he vanished from
the byways of the Borough.

His usual routes were combed and re-combed
but no trace of him could be found. His wife, Evelyne Speigh, told police he’d
walked different routes to regain his strength. These were combed too. Then the
Borough was turned upside down, as much as something weighing a gazillion tons
can be turned upside down. Nothing.

Then came
the finger
that had the
press salivating.

It was hand-delivered in a cigar box. The
hapless delivery boy was hunted down and grilled but no leads came of it. The
boy had taken the job on the street from a “man” wearing a “hat” and that was
that.

The Times had the gall to pun that the
finger pointed nowhere. It was immaculately severed and well preserved, but
held no trace evidence. The cops assumed the ring finger had been severed to
obtain the gold wedding band.

The cigar box had also carried a
typewritten note demanding a ransom, and specifying an amount to make the eyes
water, and a drop point upstate. The note threatened that the clock was
ticking. If the instructions were not followed to the letter, the next delivery
would need a bigger box.

Perhaps they meant to return Dorrita’s hat
next?

“Unlikely,” I said to myself just to break
the silence. My voice echoed, playing with itself in and out of idle shelves.

I jogged the reel further forward. The
Speigh kidnapping faded further into the paper as it fell out of the news
cycle. The next headline I found declared: Speigh Ransom Paid But Kidnappers
Missing. The ransom delivery was made, but no one bothered to pick it up. No
head-sized boxes showed up either.

Evelyne had mentioned they paid a ransom.
She hadn’t said nobody took it.

In a rare show of restraint, the Times didn’t
connect the dots for the reader. The kidnappers had probably gotten cold feet,
murdered Dorrita (if he still lived), and flown.

I reached the end of the reel. Its free end
flapped against the machine’s head. I rewound it, loaded up the next reel, but
didn’t find much. De-fingered Squillionaires could only hold the public’s
interest for so long. The paper dropped it like a flyblown peach.

So I returned the Times reels to the
archive and instead tried the Star. It only took three pages for me to find the
first article about aliens, and I don’t mean Mexicans. The Star’s that kind of
paper. Even my ass wouldn’t read the Star.

But in its pages, a couple days after the
Speigh story broke, I found exactly what I was looking for. The Star had put
its muckrake through the Speigh family tree, branch and twig.

One gnarly remnant caught my attention.
Dorrita Speigh had one brother, Jahan, alive as of eleven years ago. From the
amount of copy the Star got from Jahan, he hadn’t much liked his brother or
else the Star was paying well. Maybe both.

Jahan lived in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a
four-hour trip from Manhattan.

It would make Tunney happy, and God knows
the man needed some happy.

Maybe I was sick of high society. Maybe the
heat really was getting to me. Maybe I’d been beating in the branches for too
long. Lebanon, and Mr. J. Speigh, was the closest I was going to get to the
root.

I returned the Star reels to the archive,
and left the library already smelling country air.

Two hours later I was sitting with the
other human cattle being freighted east on the Raritan Valley Line, bound for
Lebanon via Allentown, deciding that the country air smelt a lot like the city
air.

Once out of NYC sprawl, the train had
threaded east and south down the Appalachian valley. We passed Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, where there was no star. The city brooded under a perpetual haze
of foundry smog that would have blotted it from the sky in any case. Refineries
flocked the railway, standing like clusters of vast, dirty bottles with necks
of warped glass, all bent and tangled.

Neither did Allentown own any Billy Joel.
What it did own was a million wells sunk to suck the shale gas buried in the
vast Appalachian Basin. They pocked the landscape wherever the gaze fell, and
marched into the horizon like the Armada at World’s End. Probably why the air
smelt no better than that wafting over Manhattan’s concrete and tarmac.

The train idled at Allentown, waiting for a
connection. I got out onto the platform to stretch my legs and pine over the
cigarette stand. I bought a bag of peanuts and a copy of the Times, the same
edition Ailsa had brought up that morning to wreck my day.

When I got back on the train my seat was
still warm. I opened the paper, ignoring the cover, and folded it over on the
crossword page. 1 Across ― Six-letter word beginning with S. Leading family of
America’s second Gilded Age.

No. That’s not what it said. Not on the
paper, anyway.

With a diesel grunting the train hauled
itself out of the station, swaying over one junction after another, and through
the tangle of lines knit into the city.

We skirted a ridge marking the northern
wall of the great valley, a barrier of land like crinkled paper that forms what
geologists call a physiognomic province. Railway men call it a pain in the ass.

The rhythmic motion of the train gradually
beat out the crossword. I tugged my hat down over my face and dozed.

When I woke, night was stealing through the
sky, and the lights of Lebanon were flaring to life.

I waited for the train to leave, and the
platform to empty, before making my own way to the concourse. It meant I had to
wait, but I’d wanted to eyeball everyone who’d come on that train. Like every
paranoid knows―it probably
is
you they’re looking at.

Opposite the station were taxi ranks and a
bus depot. Between them was a plaza filled with day-weary commuters. The
acoustics were awful. I passed a hire car counter and a kebab joint before
finding what I wanted: a message post. Boys were clumped out front of it in
various postures―Holmes’ Street Arabs―each waiting for a commission.

I raised my voice over the din: “Jahan
Speigh. Who knows where he lives?” I got two to give me the same address and
left them to split the cash.

Happy to find Jahan hadn’t dropped off the
perch, I didn’t notice another boy take off.

Wars turn on moments.

The moon was poking its brow over Lebanon’s
light haze when my cab drew up at the address. I figured if I got my business
done in under an hour I could catch the late train and be home, snug in bed,
well before the witching hour.

I told the cabbie to wait. Without a word
he wound his seat back and closed his eyes. Not the nervous type.

Jahan Speigh lived in a mansion. That’s how
it looked at first sight. But it didn’t take much to penetrate the illusion.
The building was like the husk a lobster casts off before it leaves to be a
happy lobster someplace else. It reeked of neglect. Eleven years of neglect
maybe.

The grounds were walled in. Cast-iron gates
were thrown back on their limits, and rusted in place. Fruit trees that might
have once been nipped and tucked into espalier perfection were bursting over
the walls and hanging low over lawns grown high. Come autumn the place would
stink of rotten fruit.

I opened my coat and loosened the Steel
Lady beneath my arm. Trespassers were shot first and challenged later.

The gravel drive crunched under my feet as
I trod my way to the door. A path of desire―a line of dirt hard-packed by
foot-traffic―led off around the back. I mounted the steps to the stoop and the
formal entrance.

I reached the door to be met by the dull
gaze of an iron knocker. Some kind of mountain cat. I gripped the improbable
ring threaded through its nose and rapped loud. An animal scurried beneath the
curling planks of the stoop.

I heard floorboards creak. The door handle
turned, and then the door, sticky with disuse, opened an inch.

“Who is it?” a whisper, southern. Might
have been warm air escaping the building.

I prodded my card into the gap. Thin
fingers took the card, and the door closed.

A moment later it re-opened, but only an
inch.

“What do you want?”

I considered feeding the door another card.
The house seemed to respond to treats.

I said, “To talk to Mr. Speigh.”

The door closed a fraction, paused. Then
came a rattle of chain on wood and the door swung wide to reveal a woman no
bigger than a girl. She wore a loose slip of pale blue that fell in a straight
line from her thin shoulders to the floor. Straight grey hair fell half that
distance down her back. The only thing about her that looked younger than sixty
was the scope mounted on the rifle she had leveled at my crotch.

She wasn’t bothering to sight through it.
All she had to do was to wave the gun in my general direction, pull the
trigger, and I’d shed a hundred pounds.

“I’m Mrs. Speigh,” she said in that same
lilting whisper. “You can talk to me.”

Mrs. Speigh
.

God, the kaleidoscope. I couldn’t help it;
I laughed.

She watched me like a Jersey milker, then
untucked the rifle from beneath her arm and rested its butt on the floor.