Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

“What one thing? You said you hadn’t learned that one thing yet. What’s that?”

“Like I said, asking too many questions gets in the way of doing business. You got to learn not to ask questions all the time. That one thing is learning the right question to ask at the right time.”

“Is that right.”

“You’d know that, Detective. Right?” Carman sat proud in his back-room throne, having found a little epigram he’d probably heard on a TV show and offered it to his guest like an old subway token.

“Who are you selling the building to, Mr. Carman?”

“Some banking company. Vivicy. They’re, like, financial services, all that weird money stuff that no one understands and that never sounds completely fucking real.”

Tallow wrote Vivicy down and paused a moment. Made a small spiral movement with his pen, like he was stirring the fog.

“Mr. Carman. Why are you selling the building? Why is Vivicy buying it? And were you going to tell them about the man in three A who has secured his apartment door so that no one can enter it?”

Carman sucked his teeth. Tallow just gave him the dead stare.

“I’m selling it because they offered me enough money to retire on,” Carman said eventually. “And I don’t mean retire down to Florida, get loaded, and drown while trying to dynamite a children’s ride and get blown at the same time. I mean a fucking yacht someplace, and slaves and shit.”

“And.”

“And the guy in three A ain’t my problem. They’re going to knock that place down, and if the crazy guy’s still in there when it happens, then it still ain’t my problem, serve him right, and I got mine. That about cover it, Detective?”

“When do you get paid?”

“When the building’s empty.”

“I also asked why are they buying it.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the right question at the right time. The first day my old dad figured I was bright enough to jerk off and chew gum at the same time, he told me this. He said, The thing about land, son, is that they don’t make it no more. So if you want a big shiny building in the financial district to keep your internets and your gadgets and your fucking gold treasure in, well, the financial district ain’t going to grow more land for you to put it on. So you need to find an old building and knock it the fuck down and build over the hole.”

“Give me the names of the people you’ve been dealing with at Vivicy.”

Carman tensed up quickly. “Why?”

“Because nothing’s getting knocked down until I say it is. Your building’s a major crime scene, and not one damn thing is going to happen to it before I want it to. Give me the names.”

IT WAS getting harder and harder to find pay phones in Manhattan, and it was getting harder and harder for the hunter to see them.

The hunter did not yet wish to resort to prepaid cell phones. If cornered on the subject, he’d be forced to admit that he was not yet completely conversant with the finer points of their operating parameters. Was it easier to pick a cell phone conversation out of the air than to hurriedly put a tap on a random pay phone line?

Some days, obviously, it all bothered him less. The hunter didn’t realize it, but his opinion of those days changed like the wind. Some days, when he could hear only traffic and machines and the sound of synthetic soles on sidewalk, he wanted nothing more than the condition of living on Lenape Manhattan Island.

The change for the phone flickered in his upturned palm. One moment coins, the next moment seashells. The hunter set his jaw, clamped down on his perception, and the coins stayed coins long enough for him to force them into the thin mouth of the machine. He summoned from a recess in his memory the telephone number of the first man, and dialed it. The phone made a noise that he supposed meant that the number didn’t work. He went to the next alcove in his mind and pulled the number of the second man.

The hunter listened to ringing, and then clicking, and then a woman’s voice telling him his call was being transferred. A recording, he decided. The twenty-first century seemed very far from him today. The line rang again, a different sound.

On the fourth ring, the second man said, “Andrew Machen.”

“Do you recognize my voice?”

An ice-pick pause. Then, through a hard swallow, “Yes, I recognize your voice. How did you—I mean, how can I help you?”

The hunter smiled. They were still afraid of him.

“Mr. Machen, I have been keeping things at a building on Pearl Street.” The hunter gave Machen the building number and the apartment number. “My things have been found by the police. I have watched them begin the process of carrying them out of the building. These things are mine. And in a way, they are yours too. They are the tools of my trade. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Machen’s breathing had been speeding up as the hunter spoke. Now he was fighting to fill his lungs enough to get through a full sentence. “That building. I’m buying it. My company’s buying it. The police killed someone there. Yesterday. Some shut-in lost his shit when the current owner gave the residents their eviction notices. What have you been keeping there?”

“Think about it. What have I been keeping there? I told you a moment ago.”

“Oh no. Oh no. You can’t have.”

“And now you are telling me that this is your fault. That you have bought the building that contained my things. That you have precipitated their capture.”

“I didn’t know! How could I know? You weren’t supposed to tell us! Hell, you weren’t supposed to keep the fucking guns—”

“You had no rights over them. They were mine. They were sacred. They had done powerful things and were not to be tossed away like used toys the day after Christmas.”

The hunter smiled when he said that to Machen because he had a strong feeling that he had not remembered the existence of Christmas for some weeks.

“Well… what am I supposed to do?”

“Fix it,” said the hunter quietly. “You must understand, Mr. Machen. If the other two men decide that you have become an impediment to their success, you must understand what I will be asked to do.”

The hunter hung up the phone. He went to cross the road but saw a CCTV camera hung from the entrance to a bank on the far corner. So instead, he turned left, down an alley, and melted into an imaginary forest.

VIVICY WAS housed in the top ten floors of a 1980s skyscraper that looked like a spaceship standing on its launch gantry. A spaceship that had been staging, melancholy, since that decade’s recession, waiting for someone to come along who could afford to fuel it up for its leap to the sky. It was oddly sad, seeing the city soot barnacled to the clamps and pylons affixed at the building’s edges as an architect’s smiling decorations.

Its launch date was as long past as the days of the three-martini lunch in the financial district. Midafternoon, and the people still on the street were darting toward buildings with panic in their steps, chewing the last woody lump of a power bar or quickly stamping out a half-smoked cigarette.

Tallow, back in the 1st Precinct, had smoked a cigarette for lunch as he considered the building. He’d placed the phone calls to Vivicy he’d needed to on the long drive back downtown but had decided to reinforce a few points in person.

Inside the building, the spaceship metaphor held. A mother ship’s cathedral, with huge aluminum pipes for pillars and a burnished metal floor. Magnesium or something, Tallow thought, as he walked on it; it was sprung, or suspended on joists somehow, so that his feet lifted a little as he moved. A floor for Masters of the Universe that put a spring in their steps on the way to the elevators in the mornings. Inside, the building didn’t feel like an unfueled article on an abandoned launchpad. It felt like it was just waiting to fill up with all the world’s money before it took off for new maps.