Strawman Made Steel Read online

  When I gave my name to the girl at reception, her eyes lit with purpose. It seemed I was persona grata, access all areas.

  I had a job convincing her I wanted neither the CTO nor a flunky tour. That troubled her, like I was a potential customer that had wandered out of her sales-pitch matrix into no-man’s land. (“You want free money?” “No.” Crickets.)

  “I don’t want a manager, and I don’t want the janitor. I want someone in charge who gets their hands dirty.”

  Eventually, with the aid of an organizational chart, we settled on a “sub-divisional adjunct”. I spotted the sub-division I wanted: therapeutic bio-tech, endogenous. In my head that translated loosely to something like ‘squeeze a squid for what ails you.’ Antidotes and the like.

  And antidotes were just the flip side of the coin to poison.

  I walked a mile to find the office of Dr Lucius Arnold. The good doctor was in.

  He was an old-looking fifty-something. The feet poking beneath his desk were sheathed in argyle socks and shod in oxford wingtips. But somewhere above his ankles and below his breastbone, he’d lost the formal urge. His restless hands poked from the sleeves of a threadbare tweed jacket. Bright purple suspenders peeked from beneath his suit lapels as he swung off his chair.

  His large head was made to look pointy by a fringe of black hair laced with silver that circled his bald dome like the arboreal zone of a mountain. Wrinkles gathered over the entire surface of his face as though he’d been slowly tapped of vital juices by daily labor, a prune drying in the sun.

  But when he rounded his desk, which held a maze of paper columns, his eyes were quick, and his movements lithe.

  He smiled and said, “You’re the man from Dupont?”

  I smiled and said, “And you’re the Thanksgiving turkey.”

  His smile got the quivers, threw its legs in the air, and died. “You’re not the man from Dupont.”

  I said nothing about a turkey. I hadn’t made my mind up yet.

  Then he fell back on territorial rights. “I have an important meeting. With whom do you wish to speak?”

  “Someone who splits his infinitives and burns his interrogatives.”

  His pruney eyes blinked once before he replied, “Grammar is not my forte.”

  “What is your forte?”

  He decided then that I might be yanking his chain. “I’m a biologist.”

  “What do you biologer?”

  “I run many projects. Most target antivenins.”

  “Toxicology?”

  He spread his hands. “Of course. Target practice is more fun with live birds.”

  “Would you show me some of these birds?”

  “Our poisons?” He got all patrician and shook his head. “I’m afraid―”

  “Mr. Speigh would appreciate your showing me.”

  That name had a visible impact on the good doctor. His stance lost its bullocking cant. Doubt filled his eyes.

  He said, “Which Mr. Speigh?”

  Now it was my turn to be confused. “How many do you keep around here?”

  “Mr. Eustace Speigh holds the executive office, but his younger brother, Mr. Eutarch Speigh, manages a number of programs.”

  “Yours one of them?”

  He nodded.

  “Good boss?”

  He gazed at the wall and tugged at his chin with thumb and forefinger.

  “I wouldn’t say he has the managerial touch.”

  “What’s that in English?”

  He let go his chin and returned my gaze.

  “He often mistakes his employees for something stuck to the bottom of his shoe, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  I hunted my pockets for a cigarette before remembering I was on the wagon. I settled for plucking a card from the pack in my pants pocket. I handed it over.

  “You’ve a nice place, Doc, but I don’t fancy growing old and dying in it. Here’s the beef: I’m a private investigator, here with the blessings of your boss, hunting a murderer who looks like he made hay with one of your fancy poisons.”

  The good doctor paled. The wrinkles made his face look like an arty line drawing by Giacometti, Portrait de l’Academic Spooked or something.

  Anger flushed his face red again in no time. “If you’re suggesting―”

  “No suggestions, Doc. Straight up: you guys cook up death elixirs for the almighty dollar, then get worked up when someone points out the bleeding obvious: put a loaded gun in a room and sooner or later it’ll go off.”

  “Come,” he said, and strode from the room.

  I followed him along a corridor, then another, then up a flight of stairs. At the head of the stairs was a pair of heavy white doors inset with a pair of small, square viewports. The doctor pushed the doors open and went through.

  I followed, and a smell like ether tickled my nose. The doors closed noisily behind me and cut-off the sunlight from the corridor. From the gloom emerged a lab, a dimness pocked by gaslights. At benches spread through the lab, half a dozen men and women were hunched in different postures of concentration.

  “Hydra,” said the doctor. “One of my projects.”

  I patted my pocket again for a cigarette before giving it away.

  “Why’s it so dark in here?” I said.

  “Sunlight kills things,” the doc said.

  “I thought that was the point.”

  He gave me a look that said ‘get an education.’

  “Do you know how much legacy military biotechnology leaked into native fauna after the Event?”

  “No idea,” I said. “A little of it leaked into me a couple days back.”

  His brow worried at that before he said, “Too much.”

  He walked me over to a bench where a man was staring down a microscope. He was pale, and his white lab coat was stained brown where the sleeves swept the bench.

  The doctor spoke to the man. “Are these the Macaque biopsies?” The man lifted his eyes far enough away from the microscope to nod.

  The doc gestured for me to look. The man backed away from the microscope, looking at me like I was a medic about to palpate an organ he cared about.

  I had a time seeing down both lenses. I was bigger than the guy, and had to squint down one. What I saw looked like a jar of red and green jellybeans.

  “Thanks, but I had lunch already,” I said.

  “You’re looking at a piece of monkey. It has been stained to mark poisoned tissue green.”

  “Okay. Not a happy monkey―not even before you carved a hole in it.”

  “The poison in question came originally from a rare octopus that lives off the western coast of Australia.”

  “The monkey got around.”

  The doc smiled tightly. “Were that were so.”

  I withdrew and let the pale man look at his jellybeans again.

  “Why don’t you connect the dots for me,” I said.

  “This toxin was co-opted for military use a long time ago. Now, by the same means with which it was transcoded and smuggled into new species, it has spread to five native species in the North American continent. Five at last count, that is.”

  “Are you telling me the next bunny I meet could turn killer?”

  The doc tucked his thumbs under those purple braces. “I’m telling you we do good work here.”

  “Good work that requires plenty of poison and plenty of monkeys.”

  He shrugged―yes and proud of it.

  In a corner of the room, one of the labcoats plugged a machine into the pressure line driven by a boiler. A valve opened with a hiss, and the innards of the machine began to spin noisily.

  I said, “So where do you link this stuff to a fuse? Have the bunnies got that working too?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Police forensics said the poison was most likely inert until the victim was given a catalyst to wake it up.”

  I watched the doc. Cogs were winding way back behind his eyes. I could hear them.


  I said, “You’re familiar with that kind of kit?”

  “I’m familiar with the delivery mechanisms, yes.”

  “Something you guys could knock up?”

  He shook his head. He still looked like he’d fallen off this conversation, and was a few miles back down the road, dusting himself off.

  He said, “Not Hydra. Not in any of my projects.”

  “Another project then?”

  “It wouldn’t be illegal,” he hedged.

  I waited for him to answer the question. His gaze touched various objects in the room as if cataloguing them for the first time.

  “I’m not privy to the goals and materials of every project conducted at Alltron.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  His pruney forehead puckered in a frown. “Mr. McIlwraith, I think I’ve been very patient and accommodating, but I have work to do.”

  He held the door open for me. On the walk back to his office I made conversation for the both of us.

  “I guess breaking work into chunks, keeping groups blind to each other, encourages innovation and removes distraction. During World War II the same policy did a great job of quashing niggling doubts about the moral dilemma of building a nuclear bomb. Maybe you had a great-great-great grandfather working on a harmless little timer circuit.”

  The doc entered his office and sat. His gaze got lost in a photo of a lady I assumed was his wife.

  He said drily, “So you’re a student of history too, Mr. McIlwraith?”

  “It’s the only topic.”

  I’d almost had enough of riding the good doctor. Maybe he’d indulge me one more question.

  “What’s your opinion of the Event?”

  A twinkle returned to his eye, even as it stayed fixed on his wife.

  “I’m a biologist. Why would I have one?”

  “Everyone does. What’s the water cooler gossip? You’ve got physicists and mathematicians here. I noticed them moping about the joint, guys with rugged, dented foreheads and noisy demons.”

  He smiled, looked at me, and ran a hand over his smooth, pointed head. “Have you ever heard of the god particle, Mr. McIlwraith?”

  I shrugged. “No, but I get the idea. Deities are a dime a dozen these days.”

  “Well, I believe on the day of the Event we found the god particle. We woke it. And, Mr. McIlwraith―” He lifted his palms and read a message in their too-wrinkled skin. “―It was an angry god.”

  — 8 —

  On the north boundary of Alltron’s campus lay a branch line, and on the south a taxicab rank. I flipped a coin and headed north, stopped, thought about it some more, then went south.

  It was getting near home time and already there was a queue swelling for the taxicabs. I bought a coffee and a puzzle book from a streetside vendor, and sat on a stained wooden bench twenty feet back from the curb.

  The cabs were a wall of yellow metal, constantly flowing to the right and splintering into the rush of general traffic. The motion helped to keep the queue queue-like and the expletives to a minimum. Diesel fumes hung heavy in the air.

  I drank coffee and did magic squares. In my peripheral vision, Alltron employees spurted past in homogenized blobs of middle management or grousers, oil and water.

  I was joining the dots in my puzzle book on what could’ve turned out to be a Speigh, when I heard Dr Lucius Arnold’s voice. His overly enunciated syllables were woven with a higher-pitched Bostonian chatter. I searched the crowd and caught a glimpse of him hand in hand with his wife.

  I decided I liked Dr Arnold.

  They embarked near the head of the queue. I got another coffee. The guy who sold it gave me a toothy smile, and I considered telling him his teeth were wasted on a captive market.

  An hour later and the queue was beginning to show breaks. A chill was starting to rise up my legs, but any more of the dirty water the guy was calling coffee and murder might look good.

  That’s when I saw him. One of Dr Arnold’s staff. One of the anonymous few assigned to Hydra. He’d doffed his lab coat and was getting about in a brown single-breasted suit that looked like velvet in the failing light. He toted a briefcase, and the way he held it made it seem naked without a set of handcuffs.

  I pocketed my puzzle book and joined the queue.

  When he got into the back seat of a cab, which lurched into the traffic, I slipped past a cluster of men and women standing at the open back door of a cab deciding how to split across cabs. I slid onto the back seat, and shut the door. The smallest guy in the group swore at me with his arms.

  I thrust cash through the grill to the driver. “Tail job. That cab,” I said, pointing at the back of the cab the Alltron man had taken, which was already shrinking with distance.

  The engine kept humming. We went nowhere.

  The driver, a kid of no more than eighteen, sucked his teeth and gazed sleepily at me in the rear-view mirror.

  I poked more cash through the hole. He counted it, and stowed it in a shirt pocket. Then he planted his foot, and the cab leapt forward, pushing me against the abraded leather seat.

  “Your lucky day, mister,” the kid said. “I chase tail like no one.”

  “Save the bragging. Stick to that cab and you’ll get a bonus.”

  My cab was the typical New York Sherman Tank but the kid rode it like a go-cart. The engine growled up and down as the traffic locked up and came loose like an avalanche of shale. The kid worked with a margin of inches. We moved in a cocoon of deep-throated horn blast.

  Time and again I thought he’d given the prey too much lead, but we’d turn a corner and I’d see it easing along, four or five cars ahead.

  “You a dick?” he said, then, before I could reply, “Private dick. Provenor.”

  “Sharp,” I said. “What’s the tell?”

  “The .38, or somethin’ smaller, under your armpit. I saw it when you queue-jumped. And your shoes need a polish. You steal from a hobo?”

  “You’d make a good dick.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, which made his neck bend like a sapling in the breeze. “Nah. Too much self-respect.”

  Our quarry cut over to Flatbush Ave and crossed Manhattan Bridge onto the island. We were going against peak hour, but the sun had dropped from the sky by the time we entered the concrete thicket that remained of the Lower East Side.

  Changes to the rent law were fast pushing out the lower middle class. The pastiche of inhabitants was mirrored by mismatched buildings. Seemed none of the architects were interested in the future. Everyone wanted to re-capture. Reprise. Borrow.

  Fine by me, but they could have picked a period.

  Many of the town houses were dark, looking like they were prepped for demolition. It was across from one such building that the cab carrying the Alltron man pulled up. He got out, bent to pay the driver, and crossed the street.

  The kid pulled our cab over half a block away, into a dark stretch of curb where the spill of lamplight from either side didn’t reach.

  I handed the kid a bonus. He took it without obvious avarice.

  I said, “Be good to your mother.”

  “She’d dead,” he said, and turned the cab. I heard the thrum of its engine wane and get lost beneath the whine of a distant patrol car.

  I slipped into the deep shadow behind stairs of an old Brownstone, and watched my man mount the steps to the dead-looking townhouse. He paused at the door, swapped the briefcase to his left hand, and fiddled a key into the lock. The door opened without a sound. He melded with a wedge of shadow and the door shut. Its lock clattered, a loud noise in the quiet street.

  I jammed my hands in my coat pockets against the dropping temperature and leaned against the stairs. I watched and waited, but no light appeared anywhere in the grid of windows facing the street.

  Maybe the guy lived here. Maybe he gave to charity, and didn’t have the money to pay the gas bill.

  From my vantage point, I examined the building for another access point. Short of rapping on
the door and doing the travelling salesman bit, I wasn’t going in through the guest entrance.

  I was speculating on the fire escape when I saw movement on the sidewalk. A guy no taller than an oil derrick, no wider than a meat truck hove into view. He wore a hat three decades out of date. A coat wrapped his trunk like butter spread too thin, and its hem dangled three feet above work boots. His head was sunk into shoulders solid as the faith-moved mountain.

  He walked in a straight line, but his head swiveled toward the stairs of my townhouse. He stepped past it, then, like a piece of bad choreography, turned on his heel and came back. He glanced up and down the sidewalk, and then took the stairs two at a time to the door.

  In the fading light, I could just make out his hand digging like a pit bull in his coat pocket. When the hand appeared again, it grasped an object. But it wasn’t a key. With it, he laid one blow on the door lock.

  One was enough.

  There was the partially muffled noise of splintering wood, and the door hung open like the slack mouth of an idiot.

  He went in. The shadow had a time swallowing him.

  I counted to ten, and then ducked across the street and into the throughway at the building’s side. Jutting into the air two feet above my head were the bottom rungs of the fire escape―and me without my track pants.

  I touched my piece once to make sure it was snug. I squared my feet, sunk a little onto my haunches, and leapt for the bottom rung.

  I caught it first go, but the ladder didn’t hinge down. It was rusted in place. I hauled myself up hand over hand until I reached the first landing.

  From there I covered the building’s scant six floors quickly, then scaled one last vertical. It ended in a short balcony of grey stone crusted with lichen. I pitched over that and landed on the roof.

  The roof was a ten-foot band of flat, tarred space surrounding a long section of slanting, tiled roof.

  The building had been a well-to-do townhouse, was now a soon-to-be-ex-townhouse. But before that, it had been a factory with a live-in floor. There are plenty of them in lower Manhattan, relics of the recovery period, when industry adapted, was reborn.