Giles Blunt - No Such Creature

He thought about faking cardiac pain. At best, that would get him into hospital for a few days. But when it was over, he would still have to return to the wing to face the righteous wrath of Khalid Mossbacher. The only way Zig was going to survive was to get transferred to another wing, and the only way you got transferred was if there was a credible risk of grievous injury or murder. His predicament certainly met that standard. But the catch was, if you snitched about your problem, the risk of getting murdered increased tenfold.

So Zig didn’t say a word to anyone. Within a week he had scored cocaine from one source, a razor blade from another. One night, when the whole prison seemed to be asleep, he made the cocaine into a paste and rubbed it into himself at the crucial points. He sat himself on the floor and, with his back to the door, tied himself to the bars. He cut off first one nipple, then the other, slipped his free arm back into his bindings, and let loose some hellish shrieking.

Worst part of it was, the cocaine paste didn’t work all that well.

Guards came running, the wing was locked down, and Zig was wheeled off to the prison hospital. In the circumstances, his claim that his life was under imminent threat was deemed credible, and he was transferred to another wing where he was not known. Max’s wing.

It was while recuperating in hospital that Zig came up with his money-making idea. He’d had lots of money-making ideas over the years, but incarceration tended to dampen entrepreneurship, and somehow they had never come to anything. The Subtractors had long been the stuff of criminal legend; Zig had been hearing about them since he was twelve. Since their victims were thieves, they could hardly report matters to the police.

You’d expect there would be lots of thieves hobbling around missing toes and fingers and what have you, but somehow, despite his long association with the profession, Zig had never run into any of these victims. And yet everyone claimed to know someone who had been kidnapped, maimed, and let go, and most criminals believed the gang existed.

Now, as Zig contemplated the missing nipples under his bandages, he began to see possibilities in the Subtractors’ business model. He knew hundreds of thieves and robbers; he even knew their MOs. All he had to do was keep up on the crime news-dead easy in this Internet age-and do a little guesswork. The rest was simple.

So, shortly after his release from Sing Sing four years previously, he had set about bringing the Subtractors into actual existence. The fear factor was definitely in his favour, and he was in an excellent position to amp it up, given his own peculiar mutilation. He told himself he had no intention of turning into a sadist. You don’t want to lose your humanity, after all. It was simply a business model. He formed a loose association of assistants to put his scheme into action, and the Subtractors myth became his biggest asset.

From the outside, the Desert Moon funeral parlour looked like a drive-through bank. In fact, that wasn’t a half-bad idea, Zig thought as he went inside. You could have the coffin low in a window, loved one on display, and people could just drive by, stop for a second, and take off.

The interior offered the usual collection of hushed rooms and pastel fabrics. Melvin Togg was laid out in viewing room three. Besides Melvin himself there was only one lone occupant, a woman sitting on a long, low couch beneath a soothing abstract.

Zig went and stood over the casket, head bowed. Melvin looked peaceful, and quite a bit healthier than he had in life, the mortician’s art tastefully applied. A tiny guitar with Graceland scrolled around it was pinned to Melvin’s lapel, a rosary entwined in his fingers. The cuffs of his burial suit covered his wrists and any microscopic evidence of duct tape that might have remained, not that any would.

It hadn’t taken Melvin long to lose consciousness, but Zig had to be sure, and he and Clem had waited quite a while after the bag stopped puffing in and out before venturing over. They had untaped his wrists and ankles from the chair, putting the tape into their pockets. Then they had carried Melvin over to his bed and laid him down on it, still with the bag over his face. Zig washed his wrists with rubbing alcohol to remove any trace of the tape.

Melvin’s Elvis clock had startled them as they were leaving.

“ Man, am I beat ,” the King said. “ It’s six o’clock .”

Zig went over to the woman. “Charlie Zigler,” he said. “Would you be Melvin’s wife?”

“No, no. Melvin wasn’t married,” the woman said. “I’m his sister. Monica Davies.”

“Very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“Melvin was a good guy. I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him, same as most people.”

The woman smiled faintly.

“I was shocked when I heard he’d, you know …”

“Committed suicide? How would you even hear such a thing? It wasn’t in the paper.”

“No, I know. But people talk. And they’re all saying the same thing: no one saw it coming. Melvin seemed pretty chipper, pretty gung-ho, right up to the end. You know the way he was.”

The woman nodded, dipping her head once.

“I probably should have seen it, though. I’m kicking myself about that.”

It took a moment for this to register. When Ms. Davies looked up at him, it was with a frown of puzzlement. “But you said you hardly knew him.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so weird. In retrospect, I mean.”

Zig reached into his satchel and handed her a parcel loosely wrapped in brown paper. She slipped off the rubber bands and unfolded the paper, contemplating the framed rectangle in her hands.

“It’s from Elvis,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Isn’t that amazing? Melvin come over to my place one afternoon last week and give it to me. I was kinda surprised at the time, because I knew he was a real Elvis fan. And I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to give it to me.”

Monica Davies seemed frozen in that hunched-over position. Not a muscle moved. A tear detached itself from her eyelash and splashed onto the picture. She rubbed it away with a neatly painted index finger.

“Like I say,” Zig said, “Melvin hardly knew me, but he give me this thing. I was surprised, but I didn’t think too much about it until I heard the news. Then it kinda made sense. They say people give away things that are precious to them, you know. Anyway, I thought I’d come here and give it to his wife or family or whatever.”

“You’re very kind,” she said, and wept a little into a Kleenex.

“I’m just sorry I didn’t realize what it meant at the time. I coulda done something maybe.”

“How could you know?” she said softly. “What does anybody know about anybody?”

For the entire next day Max was sullen as only Max could be. Here they were strolling the brightest, gaudiest blocks in the world-neon cowboys, a Manhattan skyline, the temple of Luxor-and Max was ignoring it, muttering to himself like a gargantuan baby. Owen kept trying to interest him in the criminal history of Las Vegas, the colourful, murderous life of Bugsy Siegel, but Max would not snap out of it.

That night in his bunk, Owen could hear Max talking to himself in the Rocket’s master bedroom. He reached for a paperback in an effort to ignore him: The Magus , a novel with which he was flat-out in love. Owen was soon absorbed in the story.

“I have of late, and wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth …”

Max was reciting loudly enough to make sure Owen could hear.

“… forgone all custom of exercise. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory.”