Strawman Made Steel Read online

  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 le
ss 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.”

  The room was poorly lit, but I saw the nurse’s already pale skin blanch. Her breath was coming in shallow pants.

  “You paid for a ticket to hell; the rich kids paid for a ticket to the show.” And someone was paying to hone the performance of an expensive poison. Blood out the eyeballs? Bad for business, if your business is hard-to-trace death elixirs. Good to spot that kink and work it out before going to market.

  I pushed myself up. I felt okay. Didn’t need to vomit right away.

  “Point me at the door and I’ll bid you fine folks a goodnight.”

  “What’s the hurry,” said wiry man. “At least sleep the night. You might’ve been followed.”

  “I don’t sleep here,” I said, meaning Newer York. Call it a superstition.

  Glances were exchanged. Then Thor lumbered out the door and called me to follow.

  I brushed past the wiry man. He shot out a hand and clasped my wrist. “Give us away and I’ll kill you.”

  I let him hold on. “Give you away and I’ll kill myself.”

  He searched my eyes then let go.

  I followed Thor through another door, down a flight of stairs, and along an access way with a curved wall. He dropped me in a place that looked like a dead end. It was strewn with cardboard and rags, evidence of infrequent habitation.

  “I hope you find your brother,” I said.

  “My son,” he said. “Hans is my son.”

  I clapped a hand on one of his huge shoulders, offered a silent prayer to whatever god ruled Newer York, and dragged myself off to find a cab before I turned into a pumpkin.

  I was barely conscious when I slumped in front of the Royal 10. I could skip cleaning my teeth, but I knew from experience of beatings like the one I’d had that day, if I didn’t dump the day’s take onto paper it wouldn’t be sitting in the grey matter come morning.

  It took me three goes to feed paper into the machine. I wound it, cupped my head in my hands, and tried to dredge from the day’s slurry the gold. My mind was like a stray dog looking for a kind hand.

  I typed.

  Day 2:

  * Visited Speigh mansions and eyeballed the hired help. Eunuch has the muscle for the job, but he’d have to fit through the door first; Butler is a waif, but poison doesn’t need muscle.

  * The poison that killed Euripides was manufactured with Alltron Corp technology―Speighs a controlling interest; Eustace Speigh, the oldest brother, has the executive; Eutarch project manages.

  * Dorrita Speigh abducted for ransom, but the only part of him to be seen again was his ring finger—more than money involved?

  * Poison activated at the Eastside warehouse owned by Euripides’ father, Dorrita (also murdered?)

  * Yours truly nearly put on ice by an accountant, and subsequently saved by same.

  * Why me?

  The Sandman came with a club that night.

  — 10 —

  In and out in ten seconds. It could be done.

  I pried open the door to my outer office. Through the gap, my eyes hunted for Ailsa, gathering intel for Operation Escape with Manhood Intact.

  “I know you’re there,” came her voice. “Just assume you’re in trouble and stop being childish.”

  So much for The Operation. I switched to the contingency plan: evasive maneuvers.

  I pushed the door open and made a beeline for the inner office. Ailsa appeared from the blind side of the door, hooked my arm, and swung in front of me.

  “You’ve―” she began, then sucked in a deep breath, and almost shrieked, “My God, Janus! What happened?”

  Her next request would be a one-sentence synopsis of War and Peace.

  “A lot of Frenchies died,” I said.

  Her eyes turned pleading. “You’ve got to drop this case before it kills you.”

  I shrugged out of her clutch, angry at well-intentioned ignorance. “Only if it drops me first.”

  She just stared. I couldn’t tell if I’d hurt her.

  I said, “Any mail?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good. I’m late already.”

  “For what?” Drained of emotion, she drew herself back behind her defenses. I’d seen it many times. It’s how you survive in the immortal New York.

  “For the first day of the rest of my life,” I said, and tried to stir a smile onto my face. I managed something like a facial tick.

  Ailsa rounded her desk and sat, and said without looking up, “I’d tell you to be careful, but...”

  A minute later I emerged from the elevator wondering how many conversations ended with that word.

  Outside the air had a rare foretaste of summer in it. A metrobus thundered past and the dust it raised hung over the road like brown ground fog.

  I wound and checked my watch. Already past nine-thirty. The day was stealing away.

  I hailed a cab, and felt a dip of disappointment to find the driver wasn’t the boy from yesterday. A ridiculous hope in a city with more cabbies than parking meters.

  “Whipped Elephant,” I said to the driver. “You know it?”

  “Know it? I own it,” said the driver. A joker. He and I weren’t going to get on well this morning. Some cabbies think a dense commentary gets a fat tip. But the best cabbies have an eye for a fare and know when to shut up.

  I saw him glance at my face in the mirror. “Looks like you bought it too.” He laughed and shared a joke with himself.

  While he gassed about the mayoral election and a mongrel he’d squashed on the road the previous day, I watched Harlem slip by. I was having a time pulling my thoughts out from under Brooklyn Bridge and into today.

  The Whipped Elephant was buzzing with newshounds on morning break. It was Wednesday. In the ebb and flow of the weekend newscycle, Wednesday is rumor day. Get out, stir the pot, scent the scoop. The unlucky weekend hacks would be pawing through the slush pile come Thursday.

  I spotted Coffey straightaway. One elbow propped on the bar, fingers pinching the last quarter-inch of a cigarette, burning it down to the filter.

  The guy he was talking to, who was leaning on the bar, facing him in mirror image, was a reporter for the Star. He thought he was pumping Coffey for a story, but if I knew better, it was Coffey doing the pumping, hulling the guy down to the fibers like that cigarette.

  I ordered a sour and planted it on the bar between the men.

  I spoke to the Star reporter. “Flock of flying pigs circling Trademark Tow
er. Better get on it before it becomes a frenzy.”

  He stood up straight, digging in.

  “I’m working here,” he said.

  “Do you want to be the story?” I said.

  He left to eavesdrop on a group of beat cops that had just settled around a bowl of pretzels.

  Coffey hoisted his glass and openly appraised my face. “Do I want to know what happened?” he said.

  “You don’t like your face the color it is?”

  He let it drop.

  I said, “Tell me―” but stopped when I saw Coffey’s gaze dart sideways. The smell of a park in spring twined around me, and I didn’t need to turn to know who it was.

  “Miss Speigh,” I said, sculled the whiskey, and angled myself to include her. “Fancy.”

  “Mr. McIlwraith,” she said.

  Coffey introduced himself with a smile in his eyes. She lifted a hand from the handbag she held primly at her midriff and shook his hand. “Mr. Coffey.”

  She was the picture of elegant simplicity, swathed in a white dress that appeared sewn from a single cloth, open at the neck. A delicate silver charm hung from a chain at her neck, a counterwoven Celtic design. She wore no make-up that I could tell, and the only sign of grief was the lingering darkness beneath her eyes.

  Chatter in the bar dropped.

  She turned back to me, saying, “Sorry to follow you, but I arrived at your building just as you left. I hope I’m not intruding―” and choked to a stop.

  “Your face! Were you―”

  “Yes,” I said, cutting her off. “All itemized on my expenses. You’ll get a copy when I’m done.”

  “Now,” I said, and yanked a barstool into the space between myself and Coffey. “Take a seat.” She did. “I was just about to ask my friend here to tell me what he knows about your scar.”

  Coffey’s lips twisted in a half-smile. It was all he could ever manage. The nerves down low on one side of his face had been damaged digging dirt on a previous administration. When it slurred his speech he called it his Pulitzer.

  “Awkward,” he said looking not at all abashed.

  Miss Speigh sat, tight-lipped.

  “I haven’t got all day,” I said to Coffey. “Don’t you want to get busted back out of the social pages?”