Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Recessed golden spots attempted to throw Constable-like shafts of God’s light into the hall. The near-ambient background music was clever. Waiting in line at the security station, he realized the music swelled to a little climax every couple of minutes. Some Muzak-laboratory mutation of the theme to The Big Country, where the orchestral strike was muted and the motorik beat of German Krautrock from the seventies flowed under and past it. When the metal buttresses of this church were first flown, the music had probably still sounded like the future, he thought.

Tallow badged through the security station. The guards, bearing on their black shirts the embroidered brand of a firm called Spearpoint, nodded at Tallow in the conspiratorial and collegiate manner of those security employees who consider themselves brothers and sisters of police. Tallow nodded back, just to make life easier. He took the elevator with a man who was compulsively raking the base of his thumb with bitten fingernails. Hard enough to raise tiny red blooms from between the flecks of old scarring.

Tallow got off at Vivicy’s first floor and, along with a grim-looking courier, quickly took the second-stage elevator that serviced it and the top nine. The courier ground his teeth. It sounded like paving slabs being rubbed together. At the building’s top floor, Tallow stepped off and found a helpful map screwed to the wall by the elevator that laid out the office territory for him. Tallow waited until the courier was deep in hot negotiation with the harried receptionist and glided through the main doors into the main part of the floor.

People looked up as he moved down the middle of the space toward the corner office he wanted. They didn’t look at him so much as sniff the air, decide that they didn’t detect the kind of predator they feared most, and return to work.

The corner office was crewed by a personal assistant at a brushed-steel desk. Behind her, the big doors to the office she guarded. Tallow broke his stride—his Rosato-stride, the stride he’d learned to keep up with and then emulate, relentless Rosato like a ton of boulders rolling down a slope toward you. It’d been too easy to roll along with it.

Tallow took twenty seconds to observe the personal assistant. Japanese American woman in her twenties. Beautiful eyes, bitten lips, short black hair. She touched it. Pushed at it with her nails. False nails, but small and neat. Touched her hair again, caught herself doing it, made herself put her hand flat on her desk as she wrote with the other. Tallow had seen the hint of a tattoo under the hair. Her head used to be shaved. The hair was growing back, and she was managing it, but it still bothered her. The clothes bothered her. The clothes were good, business wear chosen with some taste, but cheap. A warm day, even under the air-con, but she had long sleeves. He watched her stop at the document she was annotating, turn to a battered little notebook, and refer to something. Her own notebook. She wanted to hold on to the job so badly that she was preparing for everything it could throw at her.

Tallow put his police face back on, walked to the desk, and badged her.

“Detective Tallow, 1st Precinct. I need to talk to Andrew Machen.”

She looked at his badge like it was his gun.

“Mr. Machen is, uh, he’s not available right now, Detective. If I can, can, take a number from you, I can arrange a meeting just as soon as he’s, you know, he has an emergency right now, and—”

Tallow dropped his voice. “He’s in there, isn’t he?”

She raised her voice, clearly hoping it was loud enough to be heard through the doors. “No, sir, Mr. Machen is not in his office right now.”

Tallow made a move to the doors. She came out of her seat, fear and tears pearling her eyes.

Tallow touched a finger to his lips. Smiled. Put out his hand to calm her. Said in a loud voice, “This is a homicide investigation, ma’am, and I’ll go wherever I like, and if you don’t get out of my way and stop blocking these doors, I will arrest you and then I will arrest him. Is that clear?”

She sat back down, a little smile timid on her face. Tallow smiled at her again as he opened the doors.

Andrew Machen said, “Did she really block the doors?”

A big man rose from an Xten Pininfarina chair that looked stolen from a starship’s bridge and very deliberately put a cell phone in an African blackwood case down on a Parnian desk before walking around its curve to meet him. His charcoal shadow-check suit was cut to accentuate his wide shoulders. He was a product of that Hollywood-gym regime that gave a man a wide chest, a long abdomen, and snake hips.

“Yes.”

Why are your fingers shaking? Tallow thought as Machen reached for a handshake.

“Detective Tallow, 1st Precinct. May I have five minutes of your time?”

“Seems like you already took it. Apologies for”—Machen waved that oddly trembling hand at the doors—“all that. Very busy time. Obviously I want to put myself at your service, but what we want, limitations on our resources, you know…”

Nothing in the office matched, Tallow noticed after a moment. There was no unifying approach, no theme at work. No taste, Tallow supposed. Just a collection of very expensive things that didn’t go together. Except, presumably, by the scale of their price tags.

“I know all about limitations on resources, yes. I have a few questions.”

The visitor’s chair—singular—was of the same make as Machen’s chair but cheaper, with two long curved runners instead of wheels and with a different color trim. Machen gestured to it, walking back around his protective curl of a desk.

“Whatever I can do, Detective.”

Machen’s hand seemed to shake less once he was in his space throne behind his absurd zebrawood desk.

Tallow gave him the address on Pearl Street. “You’re buying this building, yes?”

“Yes, I believe so. I mean, I don’t have direct day-to-day oversight of that purchase, but yes, I remember something about it. Possibly it’s not me you should be speaking to.”

“You do own Vivicy, yes? You did found this company and continue to own and control it.”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s you I should be speaking to, Mr. Machen. What are your plans for that building?”

“I don’t have—”

Tallow let a little steel into his voice. “I think you can help me, sir.”

Machen simulated relaxing back into his chair. The thing seemed almost to close chrome arms around him. “Let’s say I can.” He smiled.

“Your plans for the building, sir?”

“Knocking it down.”

“Why? To build offices? Seems to me you have plenty of space here.”

“Ah, well, Detective, here we enter the dark arts of financial wizardry. And this is something I do actually employ a wizard for. Pingback.”

Tallow decided to take out his notebook. “I don’t really know what you’re referring to there.”

“It’s what my wizard calls it. The time it takes a bit of information to go from my computer to the New York Stock Exchange and back again. Any kind of financial trading has to take into account the speed at which an opportunity can be observed and a deal can be executed. The Pearl Street location has particularly good pingback.”

Tallow scratched down some notes, and then paused. “Wait. Aren’t we closer to the Stock Exchange here than we would be if we were sitting in that building on Pearl?”

Machen clapped his hands. Tallow had the sudden feeling that Machen practiced this routine for dinner parties. “Aha. And that’s why I keep a wizard. Because the pingback on the Pearl location is actually better than it is here. Even though we are physically much further away. Working this out is almost like feng shui.” Machen mispronounced it. Tallow let it go.