Strawman Made Steel Read online

  I found what I was after on the far side of the roof, after crunching my shins on half a dozen capped vents hiding in the dark under my knees―a steam overflow vent like an upside-down hockey stick. Thick enough for a McIlwraith. The boiler it had served would be long gone.

  I squeezed myself in under its head, sat on its lip, and eased my feet into its shaft. I hitched my shoulders to get my coat sleeves under the heels of my palms, planted them on the vent’s shaft, and, trying not to pop any of its plates, slid down its dark throat.

  Half-way down I realized that if the bottom of the shaft was guarded by a grille, I would soon be a very bad smell for the tenants.

  No grille. No smell. No valley full of weeping virgins.

  I squeaked to a stop with my feet dangling into thin air, and let go before my imagination woke up. I dropped onto a wooden floor, rolled and froze. A sprain-like pain washed through my ankles like a gun report. Then all was well. False alarm.

  I stood and dusted my shoes with my hat. The only light was a sliver of moon slipping through a shard of broken window. The rest of the window was blacked out.

  I waited for my eyes to adjust.

  Motion in the roof cavity tickled my eye. There must have been a draught. I peered up at a series of rafters making A-frames off into the dark.

  I’m not an emotional guy, but what I saw put a lump in my throat and a tingle down my neck.

  Rank upon rank of shoes dangled down into the moon-sheen. In the shoes were feet. Dead men’s feet.

  I heard a voice. But it didn’t come from above. My lump went. The tingle left off.

  I concentrated and strained to hear what the voice was saying. It spoke a language I didn’t understand, but I got the gist: there was about to be another pair of shoes hung up to air.

  I thought there were plenty up there already. I investigated.

  The voice was rumbling through the thin timber of a door at the far end of the loft. I crept to the near side of the door on fairy steps and put my ear to it.

  The voice was getting excited.

  A spray of light gleamed around door, and from a flicker of shadow I sensed someone moving on the far side. I squatted, quiet as a mouse, and put an eye to the keyhole. Through it I got a bead on the owner of the voice. It was the guy from the street with the pleasant sales technique, and from the way his shoulders were bunching he was about to make mischief on a thin guy trussed at his feet. I couldn’t see the man I’d tailed here from Alltron or his suitcase.

  I flexed my arm. My shoulder still hurt and I was giving away a thousand pounds on Mr. Manners, but if I didn’t move he was going to make kindling of his prisoner.

  I hoped the door wasn’t locked.

  I waited till that big back moved between me and the light, twisted the knob, and threw my shoulder into it.

  The door slammed into the big man’s back and stopped like it had hit the opposite wall.

  He turned and in the same motion cast the door fully open with one hand. The other hand was balled into a fist, which he threw at me like a wrecking ball. The only thing that saved me was how slow he was. If he’d connected it would have been lights out and play the organ.

  I dropped under his punch and slugged him on the jaw. A lucky shot. He dropped like a redwood―slow but done―shook the floor and lay still.

  While I sucked on a split knuckle, I finally got a good look at the man trussed on the floor. A lamp cast yellow light over his stubbled head, which hung pendulous from a too-thin neck. Leather suspenders made little knolls of his shoulders, and he peered up at me from behind glasses as big as bus windows. He looked like the reflection of an accountant in a sideshow funny mirror.

  “Untie me,” he said. His enunciation was crisp.

  I did.

  He stood, rubbing one wrist.

  I turned and toed the body on the floor.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  When he didn’t reply, I looked his way.

  From somewhere he had pulled an automatic pistol, and was pointing it in my direction. I sidled left to see if I was the target, and was tracked by the hollow eye of the gun. Lucky me.

  “You will sit,” he said, and flicked his free hand at a plain pine dining chair.

  “True,” I said, standing still. “I’ll probably shout, spit, and shit too sometime in the near future. What’s your next prediction, Nostradamus?”

  He whipped the gun at me with an arm like a cobra. It lashed my cheek, and connected with the bone. The impact washed through my skull looking for someone who cared. The side of my face went numb immediately, except for a fiery spot under the skin at the focal point of the blow. Numb was fine. I could handle numb. It was when that side of my face woke up that the fun would start.

  “If you had prophesied, ‘I will hit you with a gun,’ I might have moved sooner.”

  His face was a blank.

  He said, “Would you like me to hit you again?”

  I sat in the chair.

  I felt like it was missing a table and a plate heaped with meatloaf. I think I was surly from being pistol-whipped by a bean counter.

  “Put your arms behind you,” he said.

  He kept the gun trained on me as he moved out of sight. Then I felt the chill metal of handcuffs clasp my wrists.

  When he appeared again, he weighed the gun in his hand in front of my face, and then hit me on the other cheek. I tasted salt in my saliva, and this pain ran round my skull till it found its mate. They got together and gossiped.

  I grimaced and licked my lips. “You balance tires too?”

  He ignored that. With one hand he frisked me, found my .38, pulled it from its holster and put it on a desk.

  Then he went over to the big guy I’d laid out and squatted by him. He went through his coat pockets, then dug under the coat and checked his pants and shirt. His search yielded an ancient looking chain watch, a tangle of rubber bands, a handful of peanut shells, a pince-nez, and a wallet. He rifled through the wallet, then laid all of the items on a small desk amid a mess of papers.

  Then, stooping over the prone man, he frisked him from shoes to hat. Apparently satisfied, he gripped his gun by the barrel, and, holding it like a hammer, clubbed him on the temple. The skin there rose in an angry red welt.

  From a drawer beneath the desk he produced another set of hand cuffs. The place was a regular police station. Then he returned to the man and knelt, and I heard the cuffs grind tight.

  I mused, “In my business I meet a lot of assholes.”

  He ignored me, tugged a chair over to the desk, and sat. He put his gun down and his hands began to play over the mess of paper like harvestmen brooding over eggs, collecting, straightening, positioning. Returning them, I guessed, to the order they’d had before the big guy showed up.

  I judged no insults were going to penetrate the accountant’s OCD haze, so I took the opportunity to run an eye over the room.

  It looked like a typical clerk’s office, if you subtracted the comatose giant and the wiseguy handcuffed to the chair. It had two doors, one I’d come through, and the other for the big guy. Three triple-decker filing cabinets of green metal, listing a little under load. One lampstand, unlit, and one desk lamp, burning bright, and casting a huge shadow of the accountant’s head onto the opposite wall. As he worked, his glasses would now and then catch the light and throw it across the wall in bright arcs.

  The room had probably served as a foreman’s office for the workfloor in a previous life.

  One fixture stood out as clearly post-hoc. Bolted to the wall, low down on the far side of the desk was a safe. A cube of heaving-looking, low-gloss metal. Masonry powder and curls of sawdust were still collected around the heavy-duty bolts driven through the safe’s brackets into the wall and floor.

  The sound of paper being butted into a stack drew my attention back to the accountant. He had made a neat job of the desk. Everything stood in its own pile, separated by clear margins. Paper, stationary, the giant’s personal effects, the
pistol, and my revolver.

  He swiveled on his chair till he faced me. His face was still a bland oval, as though it cost him too much to employ its muscles.

  “What am I going to do with you?” He wasn’t asking me.

  “You’d better kill me,” I said.

  “But how?” he said, as if he was choosing from a mental list of precise length.

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “But if you don’t, I can’t be held responsible for what my friend does.”

  Finally I got some play from his face. A single eyebrow crooked. He glanced at the prone giant and back at me.

  “Your friend isn’t going to be helping anyone.”

  “Him?” I said. “Don’t know the guy. I’m not talking about him.”

  He shook his head a little, wanting me to make sense. “Then you came alone?”

  “I never go anywhere alone. I can’t. There are two of me.”

  He smiled, and said, “My arm needs calibrating. I must have hit you harder than I intended.”

  “You did fine,” I said. “It’s just someone beat you to it, years ago. Cracked my skull and sheared my brain in two. I live in one half. My friend lives in the other.”

  He licked his lips, and said in the voice of one playing a game, “Who hit you?”

  “Fate.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and his face lost its animation. “Fine. Today I am Fate’s hand, and I have decided what to do with you both.”

  I glanced at the giant. His chest was still rising and falling. His left leg was splayed farther than it had been. I thought I could see his profile better. The skin at his temple was ripening into a deep maroon.

  The accountant turned and retrieved my revolver.

  “Don’t you want to know who I am?” I said.

  He trained the gun on me.

  “If I put you down first,” he said, “I can investigate without your talk. It grates.”

  “Frisking a corpse isn’t the same as hearing it first hand. I’m good at stories. Don’t you want to hear one?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Not if I have to listen to you tell it.”

  “Killing me will upset Mrs. Speigh.” Shot in the dark.

  But it landed.

  I saw it land in the way his eyelids parted minutely. On that bland face that movement was a volcanic eruption.

  He bent over me, and sent his cobra-quick hand darting in and out of my pockets until he found my card. He read it silently, and then weighed me in his gaze.

  I nodded at the card. “Get out of jail free?”

  He replaced the revolver on the desk, precisely where it had lain, then fetched a cigarette and lighter from his pocket. He lit up and drew on the cigarette. Smoke seeped from his mouth and nose while he continued to stare at me.

  “You’re investigating the murder of Mr. Speigh,” he said.

  He laughed. “Clever.”

  I had no idea who or what he was talking about.

  He leaned over me again, and a familiar odor enveloped me―one that tickled at my memory―but I couldn’t place it. Not aftershave. Maybe toilet cleaner.

  “Whodunnit?” he said with a mock twang.

  “Dunno,” I said in a passable imitation of his twang.

  “But you have ideas.”

  “I’m full of ideas.”

  He drew on his cigarette. “Speculate with me.”

  “You’ll have to hire me first.”

  With the hand holding his cigarette he reached past my ear and stubbed it into the tender fold between lobe and scalp.

  The pain was so sharp I felt as if it were coming from every square inch of skin on my body. I couldn’t help sucking air through my teeth.

  “I don’t want to hire you. I just want an answer.”

  “A dickhead. There’s your answer,” I said. “You get the question for free: What do you see every morning in the mirror.”

  He turned to look at the big lump on the floor. Then he drew heavily on the cigarette. He squatted by the man’s head and hung the cigarette over his face. He shut his eyes and moved its burning tip around like he was playing pin-the-tail, until it stopped just above the man’s left eyelid. It dropped―

  “Wait,” I said.

  The cigarette halted a quarter-inch above skin, and the accountant’s eyes popped open, expectant.

  “Eutarch,” I said. “Middle brother murdered the younger.”

  He seemed to ponder my answer, before turning toward the giant’s slack face, saying, “Would have been a pity to tarnish a beautiful face.” He seemed to mean it.

  When he returned to stand over me again, I caught movement in the corner of my eye. The sole of the big guy’s boot edged an inch across the floor.

  “Bend down,” I said to the accountant, “and I’ll whisper how he did it.”

  He bent until I felt his breath in my ear.

  Fast as a spasm, I twitched my head sideways and back―and delivered the most brutal head-butt my neck would give.

  Only it missed.

  The accountant’s head whipped upward and out of the way.

  Momentum took me over. I crashed onto my skull, and lay on the floor still shackled to the chair.

  Which is where I’d wanted to finish.

  The accountant was too quick, too smart to have fallen for a head-butt. I’m familiar with his type. Always cool calculation.

  If you wanted to upset the calculation, you had to heat the machine.

  So that’s what I did. Lying on my side, head ringing from the blow it took on the floorboards, I stretched forward, opened my jaws, bared my teeth, and sunk them deep into his leg above the left ankle.

  (It’s a strange sensation, to feel a man’s blood run in your mouth―at least, it seemed strange later.)

  Nothing heats like outrage. The machine got hot.

  He made a noise deep in his throat and wrenched his leg free, nearly taking my incisors with him. He stumbled backwards and fell over the big guy, landing flat on his back with his legs angled over the body.

  And the big guy came to life.

  With his hands still manacled behind him, he raised his legs into the air, twisted to change their angle, and brought them down around the accountant’s torso, a huge pair of pincers. He shimmied until he got his knees to meet beneath the accountant’s spine, locking his arms.

  The room was still except for the giant’s shoulders, which heaved with his breathing. His hands were flexed into fists the size of pineapples, white with strain. I couldn’t see his face or the accountant’s.

  My backside had just enough play over the seat of the chair to let me get my feet where I could lever myself upright. I stood and waddled to the desk, wearing the chair behind me like a Victorian bustle. The desk drawers had handles of tubular metal thin enough to get my teeth around. When I’d pulled the top drawer open all the way, I found the keys sitting there slotted onto a ring. I ducked my head into the drawer, like I was bobbing for apples in a barrel, and managed to snag them on the second go.

  I swung around to face the giant, mumbled “keys” around a mouthful of metal, then dropped them into his hands, which sprung open to receive them.

  I glanced at the accountant. He lay pinned, and still as a spinal cord patient. I turned and sat the chair over his legs and waited while the giant attempted to unlock my handcuffs. His hands were surprisingly nimble. Two minutes and I heard a click, and the weight of one cuff fell dead away. I stood and undid the other, then stooped to free the giant.

  He said, “Danke.”

  Without pausing to rub his wrists, he wrapped his hands around the accountant’s throat and began to throttle him.

  I watched as the accountant’s face colored. It got to purple―the same purple as the welt on the giant’s temple―before I retrieved my .38, stepped round in front, and said, “Don’t do that.”

  He kept his hands there, but must have relaxed his hold. Color drained from the accountant’s face, and he heaved air into his lungs.
r />   I holstered my gun. The giant removed his hands from the accountant’s throat―and hauled off and punched him in the face with a hundred-car freight train. Blood flowed from both nostrils, and the sight of it seemed to calm the giant down. The accountant was out cold.

  The giant got up, shook my hand, and said that word again.

  “McIlwraith,” I said.

  “Thorsten,” he said. He said it Torsten.

  “I’ll call you Thor.” He didn’t object.

  At the desk, I put my hands on the accountant’s neat stacks of paper and made a mess of them looking for I didn’t know what.

  “This door,” said Thor in a thick accent. “Where does it go?” He was pointing at the door to the loft.

  To hell, I thought, and said, “Loft.” He grasped the door handle, and I said, “Careful. There’s a whole team of dead guys hanging from the rafters.”

  He went out in a rush that sucked air from the room.

  I pawed over the paper on the desk. No sign of Alltron letterhead anywhere. There were some accounts with cryptic entries, and notes in a shorthand I couldn’t interpret. And lists. Many lists of names. Nothing odd about the names―if I was in Europe. Czechs, Poles, French, a few Russians, and Germans.

  I heard a cry come from the loft. My .38 was in my hand before Thor came back through the door, but I holstered it again when I saw the smile splitting his melon-head from ear to ear.

  He had a nice smile, but it soon collapsed, leaving the hardened face I’d seen watch while he brained a guy with a single devastating blow. A glitter in his eyes was the only trace of the smile.

  “Hans is not there,” he said.

  Hans. There were no Hans’s on the lists I’d read. I passed a sheaf of them to Thor. He snatched them from my hand, held them close, and ran a finger down the top sheet like he was doing times tables.

  My gaze fell on the safe. I wanted it open.

  That’s when I heard footsteps clattering up a staircase. More than one pair, and coming fast.

  Thor stiffened, then stuffed the lists into his coat and went to the door I guessed led to the stairwell.

  “Locked,” he said. “But dünn. Thin.”

  He caught me looking at the safe, and said, “You want to open this?”