Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

He nodded once. “I’m the chief of staff to the office of the President of the United States. And you are Michael McGill. Can I call you Mike?” “No, I’m…” Reflex. Swallowed, changed tracks. “Mike is fine.” I slumped in my chair. “I really need to be more awake than this.” The square inch of my brain that was working properly blitzed through possibilities. It’s a gag. No, that’s the guy. Why is the chief of staff alone in a room with a man whom they must know has a gun in the drawer? No, no, that’s the cart before the horse: why is he here looking at me like that? With those eyes, so pale they’re almost white-on-white? Jesus, he’s a creepy old fart in real life…

“You’re looking at me strangely, son.”

I smiled, shook my head. “It’s just what TV does to us. You say ‘chief of staff ’ and I expect John Spencer from The West Wing, you know? I don’t suppose you’re a genial man of Chicago with a drink problem, right?”

“Hell, no. I take heroin, son.”

“Okay.”

“I have a stressful job. This is how I like to relax. I like to go to a small hotel and take heroin. Just lay on the bed and feel my bowels slowly unclench.”

He leaned back and sighed with relish, as if he were sinking into a warm bath.

“I like to lay on the bed, naked, with my guts oozing onto the sheets, nodding out and watching the Fashion Channel. All those skeletal smacked-out girls. The faces of angels and the bodies of Ethiopians. I find that sexy, son. It’s not like I have an easy job, and I feel I should be cut some slack in this area. Heroin angels, strutting around for me. With Enya playing. They play a lot of Enya on the Fashion Channel. Great regiments of heroin angels lined up in endless long dressing rooms elegantly banging smack between their delicate toes to the sound track of British TV shows about Celtic people. You should try it. It’s a poetic thing, you know?”

His eyes closed, a beatific grin spreading across his weathered face like an old wound opening.

“In that moment, son, I am as beautiful as they, and you are to ignore the rabbit droppings steaming on my bed: interior chocolates placed on the pillow by the solicitous maids of my bowel. Sometimes I get up and dance, scattering the gifts of my intestines across the Edwardian carpet, ignoring the shrieking of the housekeepers and the priests they call in. ‘Phone the White House,’ I sing to them. ‘I control the nuclear bombs.’ All of which is to say: I am a functioning heroin addict and also the most powerful man in the world, and you should pay attention now.”

He hadn’t opened his eyes. The gun was in the desk drawer. Five, six inches away from my hand. It was tempting. I hadn’t decided which of us to use it on, though.

“Oh, I am. Insofar as I’m wondering what the hell you’re doing here.” “I’m here because you’re a shit magnet, son.”

It was one of those unusual moments where I couldn’t think of a swearword bad enough.

“The world just kind of happens to you, son. The worst things we could possibly imagine just up out of nowhere and piss on your shoes, don’t they? It’s a special talent. It gets you work as an investigator, and in certain circles you are renowned for plucking diamonds from that skyscraper of blood-flecked turds that is the American cultural underworld.”

“Don’t you have a divorce case for me? A lost dog? Missing doorkeys?” I don’t think there was a sob in that last bit.

“Those are for ordinary people, son. You are special.”

“What I am is unlucky,” I snarled. “You know I got an adultery case last year? You know what the husband turned out to be doing at night? He had formed a sex cult that broke into an ostrich farm at midnight three times a week. You know what it’s like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”

The chief of staff made a sympathetic noise he’d probably learned off a talk show. “I’m not sure I can even imagine how to do that.”

“I had that image in my head for two months. I couldn’t have sex. My girlfriend came to bed one night in a feather boa and I started crying. She left me for a woman named Bob who designs strap-ons shaped like dolphin penises.”

“That’s very sad, son.”

“Bob had a hair transplant procedure on her nipples. They email me photographs.”

“I’m sorry for your pain. But this only illustrates how you are the right man for this job.”

“I’m not the right man for any job. You want to call me a shit magnet, fine, I’m a shit magnet. But what I am is the unluckiest bastard you ever met. I have to take this work because it’s all I can do, but please, I don’t look for this stuff.”

“No. It finds you. Which is why you are perfect for this job. We have something we need you to find, and we have exhausted all our orthodox operations. Somewhere out there is a book we need.”

“Lost and found?” I said, hopeful.

And right there is where I needed a time machine, so I could go back and shoot myself.

“Lost and found. Lost in the 1950s, in fact. Nixon traded it for the favors of a Chinese woman living on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay. It’s moved from person to person ever since. Now we need it back in the White House.”

A cold fifty-year-old trail. That was some real detective work right there. This had a weird appeal to me. It seemed like what the job should be about. As opposed to waving a flashlight over a fat bank manager hunched over an ostrich full of Rohypnol.

“I’ll need to know what the book is.”

“Yeah. This is the tricky part. Technically, this is high codeword stuff. I’ve had your name signed to a document that allows you to know the following, on pain of death if the information exits your train of investigation.”

“Excuse me?”

“You talk about this, the Office of Homeland Security turns you into pink mist. There will be Shock and Awe, do you understand?”

That took me a minute. Getting my head around their having apparently forged my signature on a White House document. In my experience, people in positions of overwhelming power don’t lie. They don’t have to. I shifted in my chair, sketched a small smile, and tried to speak, but all that came out was a choking sound. The chief of staff seemed to take this as a yes. Or simply decided that I was scared enough.

“We need you to find the other Constitution of the United States.”

I carefully kept my face neutral and composed. You know, professional.

“This is a secret document privately authored by several of the Founders. It details the real intent of their design of American society, and twenty-three Invisible Amendments to be read and adhered to only by the presidents, vice-presidents, and chiefs of staff.

“It is a small, handwritten volume reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t some nancy-boy novelist who wrote sensitive books about aliens sticking things up his rectum, you know. On the seventh night he got right up and killed the little bastard with one punch.”

I didn’t want to move. It felt like I was trapped in a room opposite a mad weasel with paintstripper daubed on its nipples. One false motion and it’d stop ripping itself to shreds right in front of you and go straight to chewing your head into a stump.

He just wouldn’t stop talking. It was horrible.

“The book binding is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”