Strawman Made Steel (32 page)

The waiter was the next link.

I named him Link, and stuck my eyeballs to
his back.

I had a hunch whoever had grown this
message tree liked his dispatches with low latency. I waited and watched for a
hand-off.

I waited a long time.

The lunch-hour buzz rose till it filled the
room to its ceiling and poured out the doors. I finished my veal cutlets with a
side of mashed potato and greens, and chased it with a sour, all the while
keeping an eye on Link.

He was all over the room, an efficient
operator. He didn’t make a move without carrying something―bowls of steaming
soup, empty plates smeared with sauce.

But not once did I detect the flicker of a
promiscuous transaction.

The lunch hour was nearing its frenzied
denouement when my bladder cried foul. I hazarded a visit to the restroom. It
was off the end of a short corridor behind a screen. A slight effort had been
made to carry the T.I.M.’s décor down here in a lick of matte black paint
star-speckled in white like somebody had sneezed. In fact the back of the joint
was a shared wet-area with the adjacent businesses. A doorway framed a piece of
access alley out the back. A couple of crates were tucked up by the stair,
resting in a midden of cigarette butts. Beyond them was the peeling paint and
rust of a dumpster. A high-pitched screech and a curse rang through the doorway
and two small figures raced past in the alley outside followed by another.
Kids.

A man brushed past me and entered the
restroom.

Two minutes later I wended my way back
through the restaurant to my table. I emptied the dregs of three coffee cups
down my shirt, dumped cash with a fat tip on the table, and exited via the
front door.

Four minutes later I was hunting through
the dumpster at the back door of the T.I.M. From the trash I fished a wine bottle.
I splashed its dregs onto the palm of my right hand and ran it through my hair.
I wiped the remainder next to the brown stains on my shirt, then sat by the
side of the dumpster, out of sight of the doorway, and mentally probed my
appearance.

I’d shaved that morning so the best I could
manage was Wall-Street-Car-Crash. Common enough. Not as good as an indentured
hobo (they were transparent), but the Car-Crash was a clichéd punchline that I
hoped nobody wanted to hear. Or see.

In ten minutes there I listened to two
smokers’ conversations and was sniffed by a dog.

Later, when the bell at New Trinity had
tolled its third quarter, and I was starting to think I’d wrecked a shirt for
no good reason, I heard footsteps converge on the far side of the dumpster. They
were light and swift.

There was some talk I didn’t catch and then
I heard the steps recede.

I counted to ten then poked my head over
the lip of the dumpster. I had time to register the sight of a kid disappearing
round the corner onto Rector St. heading west.

I followed.

Turned out to be one of the hardest tails I’ve
ever done. In no time the kid took me off the streets of New York’s stalled and
rising and into the New York they’d stepped on to get there. And when I say
stepped on, I don’t mean figuratively.

The kid wove through foot-traffic on
Greenwich St. and took a ramp down to the Pedestrian Concourse running beneath.
The rent was cheaper down here and the shopfronts were a slightly dirty
reflection of those above.

Flo-lamps hung in a pendulous line from the
apex of the arched roof, each lamp’s flame captured by a mantle, intensified by
its alloy, re-focused by mirrors, and shot out in beams. With the caged
acoustics, it gave the place a carnival atmosphere. I strained to keep sight of
the kid darting in and out of the crowd.

The concourse terminated in a plaza whose
eastern side was formed by the West Broadway subway line. A rumble told of an
approaching train, and when it came the kid camped by a pillar until the last
minute then ducked onto a carriage.

I got on one carriage farther up. Felt the
doors whisper past my ear.

We got off two stops down the line, and
when the kid chose not to head back to the surface but turned instead for
Holland Mall, I knew this was the last link in the chain.

The kid was a rat and had just run down a
drainpipe. What was a poor bloodhound like McIlwraith to do?

Suck in his gut and spare an eye for the
shadows is what.

The mall serves as unofficial gateway to
The Foundry, a vaulted space that was carved out of the ground when Liberty was
made, as a marshaling yard for the freight of raw materials, and the furnaces
that smelted the megascraper’s substance.

And here we hit a kind of jurisdictional
confusion. New York’s old arrangement of precincts and divisions was laid down
in two dimensions, and hadn’t adapted well when the first ecologies were built,
much less the filling up of the city’s old bones beneath the water line. Cops
didn’t come down here in job lots less than a baker’s dozen.

The Foundry was like a place on the beach
now and then hit by waves from two directions at once. But most of the time it
was clear of water. And full of rotting things.

I could smell them as I joined the flow,
still keeping an eye on my link.

I preferred Pedestrian Concourse’s carnival
atmosphere to the Foundry’s bordello. Half of New York’s stolen property was
fenced down here. As the mall opened out into the attached tenements and
shopping district I realized my clothes were in a no-man’s land between
pimp-flare and half-way-to-hell. Every man wore his piece on his hip, and not a
few women wore knife scars for make-up. One man passed me making a clicking
sound that turned out to be his three-inch fingernails.

I saw now why a kid was the perfect choice.
Able to slip from the rich streets of the financial district to here and blend.
The conman, Tritt, had managed to follow the first two links, which had taken
him from Eastside to Wall St., and the Illustrated Man. But there weren’t many
who could run the whole gambit.

I’d walked these streets twice before. The
first time is not worth recounting. It was a disappointment. The second I was
hunting for a man’s daughter. The case was pro-bono, but it cost me a bullet in
the shoulder. Gave me something in common with Orwell. That and the knowledge
that when a bullet hits, you don’t feel pain. Just a violent shock.

I didn’t find the girl down here. Her
father counted it a blessing.

The kid wove in right angles through malls
and along concourses on a rough heading for the subterranean face of Liberty. I
glimpsed its wall through the smog captured against the arcade’s roof. It
loomed like a block of granite sunk into an ant nest. Cut into it were great
arches for vehicular and foot traffic and smaller access ways for
utilities―holes in the plascrete that would be there long after all the ants
died. All designed when the place blazed with a galaxy of electric light, and
every public place was saturated by the camera’s eye.

Twice I detected a figure shadowing me.
Just a random attracted by my dress, hoping to prey on my freshness. But they
thought better of it. The .38 I’d unholstered might have had something to do
with it.

We neared the face of Liberty. I could make
out the winking blue lights of a precinct station. It was hard by a tunnel into
Liberty proper, nestled between a forest of cylindrical sheaths sprouting out
of the Number 5 Deep Tunnel pumping station feeding the borough above. Cops
topside called the station The Crotch, on account of how Liberty’s junction
with Manhattan Island made the set look like a man sitting up with his legs
pointed northeast. The station mainly existed to traffic-check the flow into
the ecology. Its cops didn’t venture far.

But the kid turned off the way and made
instead for a cluster of co-op habitats stuck onto the outer side of Liberty
like wasp nests. The apartment blocks had their backs to the plascrete and
existed in the shadow of the Crotch. Close to Liberty’s amenities but without
the killer rent.

We were close now. I smiled a
morgue-smile―all I could manage in that atmosphere―and drew a touch closer to
my rat.

The rat passed the facades of buildings
with grand names like Hamilton Towers and Franklin Heights and Monteray
Gardens. The only gardens down here were the wrought-iron trees running down
the center of the boulevard where once grass might have been made to grow.

The rat turned into the lobby of an
apartment block called the Empyrean Prospect. As I watched from behind a
pedestal that supported a pointless awning, the kid cast a furtive glance at
the street.

It was then that I noticed that, beneath
neat-cut bangs, the kid wore a girl’s delicate features. Something went thud in
my stomach. Perhaps it was the smile that let go of my face. It went the way of
the last lingering thought of going easy on the occupant of apartment 8b.

It was apartment 8b’s mail slot into which
the girl slipped a slim package. She then took out a key, unlocked the slot for
8a, and reached into it. But her hand came out empty, and closed and relocked
it.

I stepped into her path as she came back
through the door. She was five foot nothing, with a grace that ill-matched her
tomboy jeans and hooded windcheater.

The face beneath the hood went white as a
sheet.

Before she could bolt I holstered the .38
and locked a hand around her upper-arm.

“Easy,” I said.

She beat the fist of her free hand on my
arm like a wild thing. I marvelled at the strength contained in her tiny frame,
and held on.

I grabbed her flailing arm and pinned it to
the other.

And all at once she burst into wracking
sobs. She cried until tears dripped off the point of her chin.

“He’ll kill her,” she said. It took her an
eternity to get the words right.

“Who?” I said.

“My mother.”

“Where is your mother?” I said.

I felt another fight come and go in her
arms. She deflated again.

“A hospital in Queens.”

That fit. Nice thing to hold over a kid.
Made a
strong
link in the chain.

I pulled her near and squatted down till I
caught her gaze in mine.

“Listen to me. You’re gunna go straight
back into Liberty, via the police station back there.” I jerked a thumb over my
shoulder. “Take an elevator to the day. You never have to step foot in this
shit hole again.”

“But she―”

“Doesn’t have to worry about that man any
more.”

Her lips worked a moment under the force of
an objection. Then, as she stared into my eyes, the lines of panic evaporated
from her face. Her little chest, which had been hitching uncontrollably, began
to rise and fall.

She stared a moment longer, and a different
emotion dawned in her face.

It was strong enough to sear my innards.
Would have, if someone hadn’t got their first.

It was hope I saw in her face. A thing she’d
forgotten existed.

I gave her a wink and let go her arms.

She stepped onto the street, paused to turn
and look at me, then raced back along the boulevard toward the blinking blue
lights.

I straightened up and tugged the Steel Lady
from her holster. I put a hand on the iron-grille and glass door, pushed, and
entered the lobby of the Empyrean.

Inside, the lobby was little more than a
stunted corridor. It was carpeted in a royal blue with a thick nap worn down to
the rubber in a groove by foot traffic. Half of the brass lamps fixed to the
walls were unlit. The place smelt faintly of cigarette smoke and perfume.

I crossed to the mail slots and ran my
index finger across the lips of a half-dozen. Most held a film of dust. I
guessed the place was at half occupancy, max. I couldn’t understand why anybody
would choose to live down here either.

I squeezed the Lady’s hammer back until it
caught and moved down the corridor. I passed the grille guarding the dark shaft
of the building’s only elevator and stepped into the stairwell.

There were even fewer lamps burning here.
Stairs wound down into what I guessed was a basement. It brought a wry smile to
my lips. A basement. The whole place was a basement. The bonds of convention.

I paused to listen, but nothing stirred
down there.

I took the stairs to the first floor and
found the doors to apartment 1a on the right, and 1b across from it. On my way
back to the stairs I called the elevator. I felt a faint tremor below as it
sprang to life.

It rose up behind the grille like a vehicle
from hell. I drew the grille back, stepped into the elevator, pressed the
actuator for the eighth floor, and stepped back out before it moved. I hurried
back to the stairs and strained to match its speed without blowing a gale.

It beat me by a handful of seconds. I
squatted in the dark by the end of the corridor and waited.

Nothing but the same blue carpet and
tight-ass lighting regime. This carpet was in better nick than that of the
lobby.