Strawman Made Steel (30 page)

But the original runs another twelve
seconds to five minutes. Those seconds contain silence after the fade out, and
are followed by a fade-
in
and a cold close.

I like the original better.

— 19 —

Next morning I beat the sun out of
bed, dressed, gargled coffee, and paused in front of the mirror to check the
score.

The bruise over my kidney felt wadded like
a poultice. My neck was braced each side by a rod of iron.

I could’ve taken the parts that didn’t hurt
to Disneyland, paid full fare, and had change left for a bender at Vegas. The
rest were just a constant buzz of pain.

I reached inside myself and reset the
thermostat. The pain receded into the background. My brain filed it in the
everyday, along with a – for air; and g – for gravity. I dug in. Found a new
level. The only spike in the signal was the job, the case―that was the only
itch that needed scratching.

Time to scratch.

On the other side of that mirror a murderer
walked free on my streets. Free on the streets of New York. Pacman on the grid
of Manhattan.

Manhattan. Even the name worked mental
contortion. A name that meant “hilly island” (really) or “place of general
inebriation.”

Or, my favorite, “place of the whirlpool.”

Gotham. The gateway city. Hell’s gate.

The Big Apple, home of Big Sin.

Capital of the U.S. of A. for five whole
years before the fools realized capitals need respectability.

Provoker. Agent of change. Equilibrium in
tension.

My city.

The city said to pose the most exciting and
alarming riddles about present and future.

Damn right, that man.

And here I am.

Dawn light was spreading through the
graveyard. It made the mist covering the ground glow. From my vantage point it
looked low and level like a lake. The dark bulk of headstones and crypts poked
above the ground fog like the figureheads and forecastles of shipwrecks.

An orange-yellow bauble of light wobbled
too and fro beneath the tide. It paused a moment, disappeared, then reappeared
and moved on. Nightwatchman. It was that sort of cemetery.

New York’s history is a series of riots.
The Doctor’s Riot of 1788 came of over-zealous medical students plundering
graves for cadavers. (At least they waited for their subjects to die, unlike
Doctor Robert Knox of Edinburgh.)

I wasn’t after a body. Information would
do.

And the only reason I was squatting in the
leaf litter on a knoll overlooking the cemetery was to be sure it contained no
dogs. I was developing a thing for dogs.

A minute later I scrambled over the fence
and dropped onto the damp soil the other side.

My ears strained for sounds above the
murmur of the waking city. The cemetery was ringed by a scenic fringe of elm
and ash, but it didn’t screen out the wail of horns from seaward tugs, nor the
dawn-rumble of rapidly clogging parkways.

Nothing. I moved off along a row of stumpy
headstones. The further in I went the more elaborate they got, until I reached
my first tomb, a short, compact box of concrete. Eternal home of one
Bartholemew Rosencratz.

It could have been an oversized postbox.
Better hope he had the required stampage.

I said good morning to Bart and continued
along the row, which was rapidly turning into a stunted canyon. I only had
about ten feet of vision. Far from helping, the rising sun was charging the
fog, suffusing it with an obscuring glow. I guessed I had a quarter of an hour
before the sun began to burn it away, and with it, my cover.

The tombs got more and more expensive.
Concrete was replaced by finished stone and marble. The angels grew taller,
their wings wider. These angels saw clear to the end times.

Crushed rose petals were the first sign of
a recent funeral. I followed them like Hansel, and was rewarded when a stone
edifice loomed out of the mist. It presented a flat-faced vestibule and gate to
a belowground crypt. Across the top of it ran some Roman-looking script.

Victoria Patientia Crescit.

Victory through endurance.

Beneath that was the name Liselle.

Entry to the crypt was blocked by a stout
wooden door. A padlock and chain were the only items out of step with the
aesthetic of forbidding majesty. They had the dull shine of the kind of setup
you see guarding a well-provisioned garden shed.

I knelt, studied the lock, and slipped pick
and rod from the inside pocket of my coat. A squint at the sky told me the sun
was just powdering its nose. I had minutes.

The lock was slippery with storage oil, but
it still sprang open with a prodigious
chunk
. The noise had to have
carried past the fence and into the shrubbery. I untangled the chain, opened
the door, and slipped inside.

With the door shut it was pitch black. I
didn’t have time to wait for my eyes to adjust. I felt in a pocket for a book
of matches. I tore a number out and lit the first one on the back of the
matchbook.

The flame flared and settled, and revealed
a flight of steps leading to the crypt, which was about an office-floor and a
half below ground. I took them, holding the flame aloft to get my bearings.

My first impression on stepping into the
crypt proper was of a room that had been flooded for centuries then drained.
Damp had seeped through the walls and left yellow-green smears of mineral
residue. Must’ve been some copper in the ground, made it look like algae. The
air smelt of lacquer.

Above me the ceiling was vaulted and
crisscrossed by groins. The crypt was probably thirty feet long by fifteen
wide, and I was looking down its length. The first coffins stored on my left
were parallel to the wall, and thereafter were end-on. On the right were only
empty, coffin-shaped slots. Somebody had paid for a job lot. My light didn’t
reach to the other end.

I gave the flame another match to feed on,
and began walking down the left side of the crypt. Each coffin had an
inscription carved into the stone shelf on which it sat. On another day I might
have taken my time over those inscriptions, conducted a little comparative
genealogical survey.

But today I was only interested in the
latest arrival.

Well before I reached the far end of the
crypt, eyes began peering back at me. All shapes, all sizes. Dark stones,
polished onyx, pocked the wall. A cast of hundreds inscribed on the face of a
block of granite. Jesus, Buddha, a pantheon of Roman gods and Judeo-Greek and
neo-revanchist synchronisms, and the Latter Day Cognomon. This pack of
luminaries struck poses upon a stage of anonymous masses that intertwined in an
eye-cheating mess that made me think of Rubens’ Fall of the Damned. Above this
tableau the Three Fates wove, measured, and snipped the mortal thread, and
managed to effect both somber witness and righteous chickhood.

The whole scene amounted to the religious
equivalent of a stockbroker’s derivatives hedge on a futures steal on a bond
coup backed by gold. It was a thousand-way bet.

This mythic potpourri wasn’t that oddball
for Newer York. After all, we’re talking about religion
after
the
apocalypse. But the extravagance spoke of a deep superstition.

Pain stole through my central nervous
system as the flame burnt down to my fingers. I flung it down on reflex, where
it guttered and died on the damp floor.

I lit the remaining match. It was past time
to be leaving.

I turned to examine the coffin slotted into
the next-to-last slot on the left side of the crypt. Its black bulk glowed
dully in the feeble light. The inscription below it was fresh carved. It read:
Euripides l’Framboise Eschaton Speigh, Loved. It wasn’t clear whether he was
the object or subject of that verb, but right then I didn’t care.

I manhandled the coffin out and pivoted it
on its end until it rested on the ledge running along the shelf. It was heavy.

Securing the lid of the coffin was a small
silver clasp, more decorative than functional. I snapped it back, took a breath
and a glance over my shoulder at the tableau, then lifted the lid.

Inside was a blaze of red satin, quilted in
white thread. Plush. As comfortable a resting place as one could ask for.

Pity it was empty.

Well, not empty. There was a sack of sand
laid along the bottom.

And a finger. Pinky, at a guess.

I whistled. The walls of the crypt whistled
back.

The coffin of Euripides l’Framboise
Eschaton Speigh was empty as a pocket, save for a single digit.

Then I burnt my fingers for the second time
in under a minute. I dropped the match and the room plunged into darkness.

I began feeling my way back toward the
stairs. If the coffin had held a body, I would’ve bothered re-shelving it, but
I had better things to do than pay respects to a bag of sand.

Outside the vast hum of the fully-woken
city hit me like a downpour. The sun had all but burned the mist away. I drew
the chain through the bracket by the door and snapped the lock shut.

I turned to find a man staring at me.

It was the nightwatchman, to judge by the
cold lamp hanging from his left hand and the ironic look in his eye. That and
the crumpled grey uniform. The break of his pants was a third the way down his
boots, their hems stained by dirt. Maybe his sixty-something frame had shrunk.
His right arm was akimbo, fist planted on his hip, above a bundle of the gear
of his trade. The biggest bulge was the handgrip of a Desert Eagle .50, still
the world’s largest-caliber magazine-fed production handgun.

Two antiques. One of which could smear me
across the grass.

“Get watcha came for?” he said.

He stood only a foot in from the edge of
the adjacent tomb. It was a close thing whether he’d rounded that corner before
I had the lock shut.

What the hell.

“Yeah, I did,” I said, raised both hands,
and flicked my fingers out. I smiled what must have been my winning best,
because when I turned my back and headed for the exit, the only sound I heard
behind me was the clank of metal chain.

— 20 —

The second time I jumped into the car
driven by the chief of the Organized Crime Bureau his hands didn’t even leave
the wheel. The guy is a stone.

“McIlwraith,” said Finlay MacLure around a
mouthful of burger, “why don’t you just make an appointment like everyone
else?”

“I’d have to wait in line, like everyone
else,” I said. “And besides, I’m a dead man. I’d like to stay dead for another
day.”

MacLure kept chewing. You don’t get to be a
stone by airing every stray thought.

“What did you find?” I said.

“It’s been one week. What the hell do you
think I’ve found?”

“I’ll take whatever you’ve got. My
near-death experience put a fire under me.”

He made a dogleg and headed for Bowery.

“Could you drop me at Rector Street?” I
said.

He shook his head, then hauled the Patriot
around in front of traffic, and gunned it downtown on a crest of horn blasts.

“You know your girl thinks you’re dead,” he
said.

“Which―what?”

“Your secretary. She went to Tunney with a
story about you being abducted. It got bounced to OC when she gave the address
to which she was baited. A bar in Gramercy Park called Witt’s End. The place is
owned by a hotelier with a foot-long record of nearly-did-time’s, goes by the
name of Cross. It’s on our books as a some-time drug-hole.”

“Huh,” I said. “It might be owned by Cross,
but it was Eustace Speigh’s gorillas that worked me over.”

He shot me a glance. “Speigh? How do you
know?”

“‘Cause he was there,” I said. “He’d
dressed up the hidey hole behind the bar as a franchise of the death cult I
told you about. He meant to drop me in the swill and hope I didn’t get too much
attention when I got sucked down with all the other floaters. Maybe it was some
kind of twisted tribute to his brother, too. The cult was Eutarch’s idea.”

“And you got out?” he said. It was the
first time I’d seen his eyebrows come away from his orbits.

“They forgot to lock all the doors,” I
said. “And speaking of death cults. Did you get what I wanted?”

“Cost me a pound of flesh, but yeah. Your
illegals are safe.”

My thoughts went to Thor and his missing
son.

“All of them?”

“The investigation’s continuing, but we’ve
run down most of the New York side of the operation. The cult was only a part
of it. Some of these poor saps got sold out to private citizens. We’re still
working through the books, but if you ask me.” MacLure pinned me with a morose
stare. “By the time we get to the end of it, you’ll think the dead ones got a
better deal than some others.”