Strawman Made Steel Read online

  “I may have heard something.”

  “Well hurry it up. I may have heard something about a coup in City Hall.”

  His eyes flashed. Fully awake now. “When?”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a toss up.”

  He drank, grimaced as whatever he was drinking drained down his throat.

  “Stirrer,” he said.

  He checked his watch, ran an eye over the Elephant’s dusky interior, then dragged another stool over and sat.

  I pulled a stool up to make us a cozy threesome.

  He picked a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it with a precise flick of his thumb on a silver lighter. Coffey is one of those guys who don’t think well with empty hands.

  He stowed the lighter, dragged on the cigarette, and, not looking at Miss Speigh, said, “Denied of course, but a couple months back the Speighs were touched by a little scandal.”

  “Uh-huh” I said, one eye on Miss Speigh. She displayed no reaction.

  “The lady’s choice of partner at the Mayor’s Winter Ball was questioned.”

  “By who?”

  Miss Speigh, appearing at ease, turned and ordered a highball.

  “Members of her family.”

  “Which members?”

  Coffey drew hard on the cigarette. “Calm down, McIlwraith. I already have my ass in the wind. This is the social pages we’re talking about. Sheer rumor. The lady could set you straight.”

  Miss Speigh received her drink, sipped at it, and said, “I wouldn’t want to interrupt. You tell it so well.”

  Coffey’s eyebrows popped up and he gave her a there’s-no-pleasing-some-folk look.

  “The talk, from those who claimed to witness anyway, put the youngest Speighs―Nicole, Eutarch and the sti―” He stopped and glanced at Miss Speigh. “―Euripides, at the scene.”

  “Scene?” I said.

  “Yeah. An ‘altercation’.” The undamaged side of his face twisted. He was mocking the society he depended on for scoops. The veneer of civility that covered relish for scandal and schadenfreude.

  “The Messrs. Speigh confronted the young turk, a Mr. ...” Coffey glanced at Miss Speigh, but she didn’t supply his faulty memory, just let her gaze rest on his irritation, deadpan, hands cupping the part-drunk highball.

  Coffey went on. “I forget. Big guy. Sewer contractor.”

  “Your brothers didn’t like his portfolio?” I said to Miss Speigh.

  Coffey answered. “Word was, it was his hands they didn’t like. They were travelling hands.”

  I watched Miss Speigh. Still nothing.

  Coffey finished. “The brothers caught up with the happy couple away from the crowd, and spoke to Mr. Sewers. In the wash up, he got a warning the color of two black eyes and some busted ribs, and Miss Nicole Speigh got the wound that became that scar.” He jabbed his cigarette at Miss Speigh’s slender neck, and the pink flaw that ran in a crescent under her jaw.

  “This Mr. Sewers still breathing?” I said to Miss Speigh.

  Coffey grunted a laugh thinking I was joking.

  Miss Speigh, though, had got me: “Yes,” she said, “but his New York contracts have been terminated.”

  I glanced at Coffey and in his scleral eyes saw the birth of the scandal’s sequel.

  It took me a moment to realize she was still speaking. It was the chill that crept over my shoulders and up my neck that woke me and wrenched my attention back to her.

  “My left breast,” she said, and placed her right hand on the smooth white cloth over her heart, where it strained a little over the swelling of her flesh. It sat there a moment, cupping her bra as though it were the most natural thing in the world before returning to the glass.

  “He clutched my left breast first. Slipped his arm around my trunk from behind.” Again she acted out her narrative with an efficient detachment.

  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 afterward
s.”

  “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 ov
er 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.

  By his side, clutched in his hand, was a small black folder. Its purpose wasn’t obvious. But I didn’t need to know what it held. It had already told me this guy, for all his self-assurance, felt the need to appear to be working.

  It made me smile.

  The smile seemed to stop the laugh in his throat. His gaze switched to Nicole.

  “Nicki,” he said and crimped her in a hug. “Shit, girl. Which creek you drag this guy from?”

  She glanced at me. I saved her the trouble of an introduction. Dug a hand in my pocket and produced a card. I offered it to Eutarch. He paused a moment, with a wry grin, and clamped his fingers over it.

  But I didn’t let go.

  “My mistake,” I said. “This one looks like a dog chewed it. Let me get a fresh one.”

  He let go. I pocketed the card, and fished for another―spanking white with simple black lettering.

  He took it and read.

  I watched him digest the information on the card, then reappraise my throbbing skull. He chuckled.

  “I know who you are, shamus.” He nodded at my head. “You always plough the ground with your head?”

  “It’s all I have that breaks rocks,” I said.

  Nicole told us both that her brother wasn’t always this rude and managed to say the exact opposite.

  Eutarch pivoted to face a craps game. “Care to wager?”

  “I’m fresh out of cash,” I said, and mimed patting my pockets.

  “Breaking rocks with your head,” he said. “What you expect?”