Giles Blunt - No Such Creature

“Max, you old mofo,” the man said. “You have room at your table for a respectable working stiff?”

“Yes, and even for you,” Max said, patting the seat beside him. “Owen, allow me to introduce Charlie Zigler, known to all and sundry as Zig. Old acquaintance from Oxford.” Oxford was Max’s word for prison, in this case a certain locked institution in Ossining, New York.

Zig put down his beer glass to shake hands. He was a compact, nervy man who blinked a lot. It gave him a look that was both curious and startled, a raccoon rudely awakened.

“Who’s the kid?”

“I don’t even know this boy,” Max said. “Never seen him before in my life. He just came up and asked me for money.”

Owen introduced himself. “I’m his nephew.”

“Uh-oh,” Zig said with a wink. “You must have bruised your old uncle’s ego somehow. How you keeping, Max?”

“Couldn’t be better. And you? Last time I saw you, you had grandiose plans to usurp William H. Gates, third of that name, in the pantheon of computer gods.”

“Exactly right,” Zig said, blinking. “Took a ‘puter repair course at a community college. Paid for itself after two weeks. Ask me anything.”

“How do I replace the PRAM battery in my PowerBook?” Owen said.

“No idea,” Zig said, and let fly with a laugh that sent pressure waves slamming into Owen’s eardrums.

“Don’t even talk to him,” Max said to Zig. “You’ll give him the illusion he’s human.”

“Poor old Max. Say, you still pulling those lame-ass dinnertime gigs, or did you finally retire?”

“Suddenly the whole world is breathless for my resignation. I suppose you want me to carve my own coffin and lie down in it too, you hideous dwarf.”

“Maybe you should move into an honest trade like myself.”

“I’m a travelling salesman-a friend to the bald, the gay, the theatrical. What could be more honest? Anyway, what do you care what I do, where I live, or whether I retire?”

“There’s some badass dudes out there, my friend. I wouldn’t want to see the Subtractors get hold of you.”

“The Subtractors,” Owen said. “I always thought they were a myth.”

“They exist,” Zig said. “And believe me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of those guys.”

“Urban legend,” Max said. “No such creature.”

“Legend, huh?” Zig drank down half his beer. With each gulp his Adam’s apple bounced higher and higher up his gullet as if it might ring a bell and win a prize. “Lemme tell you about this urban legend, kid.” His face loomed forward across the table, blinking and foam-flecked. “The Subtractors is a group of individuals, a secret organization, call them. No one knows who they are, only what they do. And what they do is not pleasant. They prey upon thieves, see? They hear about a tasty job going down, they get their hands on one of the likely crew, and they, I don’t know how else to put it, they subtract parts of his body until he reveals where the score is tucked away. Bolt cutters are their tool of choice, although they have been known to use straight razors, exacto knives, whatever’s handy.”

“That’s sick,” Owen said.

“Scares hell out of me.” Zig jerked his head toward Max. “Gramps never mentioned them to you?”

“Naturally not. I keep rumour, superstition and falsehood off the curriculum.”

“The Subtractors exist, kid. And if Pa Clampett here was a decent father figure, he would have warned you about them.”

“Sounds like something out of a Tarantino movie,” Owen said.

“Doesn’t it?” Max said. “The distinct tang of fiction.”

“You don’t believe me?” Zig said to Owen.

Owen shrugged.

Blinking ferociously, Zig opened the buttons of his shirt, top to bottom, eyes fixed on Owen, a smirk on his face. He pulled open his shirt.

“Whoa,” Owen said, and looked away.

Zig turned to Max, displaying his chest like a stripper.

“Hmm,” Max said. “And they didn’t return them when they were finished?”

“That’s all you got to say?” Zig said. “Urban legend? No such animal? If that’s the case, where the fuck are my nipples?”

“Do I need to remind you,” Max said, gesturing at Sir Slots-a-Lot’s shining armour, the maces and lances, “that we are in a restaurant?”

“Just don’t tell me the Subtractors don’t exist,” Zig said, buttoning up. “Happened three years ago. Me and a couple of colleagues got into the customs house in San Francisco. Had a tip on some icons that were being held there. Next thing I know …”

“Your tits were in the wringer.”

“Razor, actually.”

Owen was still having trouble catching his breath. “Did you tell them where the stuff was?”

“Course I did. What do you think I am? Superman?”

“I would have told them after the first one,” Max said. “In fact, I would have told them before the first one. I would have handed them a map and a key.”

“Unfortunately, the Subtractors don’t work that way. They had ’em off and in a jar before I could say jack shit. They hadda show they were serious, see? I had five more seconds to tell ’em or I’d be sitting here singing soprano.”

“I don’t imagine your colleagues were too pleased.”

“No, I imagine not. Lucky for me, in the process of helping themselves to our score the Subtractors killed both of ’em. Paper put the number of bullet holes at thirty each.”

“That was lucky,” Max said. “Have you thought about cosmetic surgery?”

“I don’t know,” Zig said with a shrug. “Kind of a conversation piece.”

Later, on their way back to the Rocket, Max told Owen to be sure and keep away from Zig if he should bump into him anywhere else in town. Despite his surface friendliness, the man was a violent pig, a rapist, and possessed of nothing resembling a conscience.

“If he’s so awful, why were you so friendly to him?”

“That, my boy, is one of the cruelties of incarceration. One must choose one’s friends from a very murky pool.”

It started over a disagreement concerning a pack of cigarettes-a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights-but it quickly escalated to the point where Zig was banging the guy’s head on the floor.

Being a berserker, an unknown quantity capable of exploding over the smallest of provocations, had worked well for Zig up to that point. It had worked for him in the juvenile detention facilities where he spent most of his teenage years; it had worked for him in his time at Rikers; and it had even worked reasonably well for most of his ten years (sexual assault, aggravated assault, attempted murder) at Sing Sing.

He was a decent talker, and he had sunny periods during which he was able to nurture relationships that almost approximated friendships, but always, sooner or later, he would explode and someone would end up in hospital, and it was never Zig, despite his deficiencies in height, weight and reach.

Until the cigarette thing. Unfortunately, the head he was banging on the cement floor of the TV room-a privilege he had earned during one of his sunny periods-belonged to one Teddy Kern, favourite punk of no other than Khalid Mossbacher. Khalid Mossbacher, until his incarceration for murder and conspiracy, had been a hip-hop star famous for his abs and biceps.

It was only a matter of time. The messages started arriving well before Kern was out of hospital: messages yelled down the wing after lights out, messages that arrived with Zig’s food. He even began to hear messages in the clanking of the prison’s old radiators, though he hadn’t the first clue about Morse code.

Khalid going to pop you -that was the mildest note he received. Others were more exuberant: Khalid going to dismantle you. Khalid is going to torch your ass .