George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

“Let him go,” said Okking. He was breathing hard, too.

“Lieutenant,” objected one of the men, “if—”

“Let him go. Now.”

They let me go. I got to my feet and watched the uniforms holster their weapons and leave the room. They were all muttering. Okking waited for the last one to cross the threshold, then he slowly closed the door, ran a hand through his hair, and returned to his desk. He was spending a lot of time and effort calming himself. I suppose he didn’t want to talk to me until he got himself under control. Finally he sat down in his swivel chair and looked at me. “What is it?” he asked. No bantering, no sarcasm, no cop’s veiled threats or wheedling. Just as my time for fear and uncertainty had passed, so had Okking’s time for professional disdain and condescension.

I laid the note on his blotter and let him read it. I sat down in a hard, angular plastic chair beside Okking’s desk and waited. I saw him finish reading. He closed his eyes and rubbed them wearily. “Jesus,” he murmured.

“Whoever that James Bond was, he traded in that moddy for another one. He said I’d know which one if I thought about it. Nothing rings any bells with me.”

Okking stared at the wall behind me, calling up the scene of Selima’s murder in his mind. First his eyes got a little wider, then his mouth fell open a bit, and then he groaned. “Oh my God,” he said.

“What?”

“How does Xarghis Moghadhil Khan sound?”

I’d heard the name before, but I wasn’t sure who Khan was. I knew that I wasn’t going to like him, though. “Tell me about him,” I said.

“It was about fifteen years ago. This psychopath proclaimed himself the new prophet of God in Assam or Sikkim or one of those places to the east. He said a gleaming blue angel presented him with revelations and divine proclamations, the most urgent being that Khan go out and jam every white woman he could find and murder anybody who got in his way. He bragged about settling two or three hundred men, women, and children before he was stopped. Killed four more in prison before they executed him. He liked to hack organs out of his victims as sacrifices to his blue metal angel. Different organs for different days of the week or phases of the moon or some goddamn thing.”

There was anxious silence for a few seconds. “He’s going to be a lot worse as Khan than he was as Bond,” I said.

Okking nodded grimly. “Xarghis Moghadhil Khan by himself makes the whole of the Budayeen’s collection of thugs look like cartoon cats and mice.”

I closed my eyes, feeling helpless. “We’ve got to find out if he’s just some lunatic hatchet man or if he’s working for somebody.”

The lieutenant stared past me at the far wall for a moment, turning some idea over in his mind. His right hand toyed nervously with a cheap bronze figure of a mermaid on his desk. Finally he looked at me. “I can help you there,” he said softly.

“I was sure you knew more than you were telling. You know who this Bond-Khan guy is working for. You know I was right about the murders being assassinations, don’t you?”

“We don’t have time for back-patting and medal-pinning. That can come later.”

“You’d better come across with the whole story now. If Friedlander Bey hears that you’re holding back this information, he’ll have you out of your job before you have time to say you’re sorry.”

“I don’t know that for sure, Audran,” said Okking. “But I don’t want to test it.”

“So spell it out: Who was James Bond working for?”

The cop turned away again. When he glanced back at me, there was anguish in his expression. “He was working for me, Audran.”

The plain truth is, that wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. I didn’t know how to react. “ Wallat il-’azim ,” I murmured. I just let Okking take care of explaining it however he wanted.

“You’re stumbling around in something bigger than a few serial murders,” he said. “I guess you know that, but you don’t have any idea how much bigger. All right. I was getting money from a European government to locate somebody who had fled to the city. This person was in line to rule another country. A political faction in the fugitive’s homeland wanted to assassinate him. The government I work for wanted to find him and bring him back unharmed. You don’t need to know all the details of the intrigue, but that’s the basic idea. I hired ‘James Bond’ to find the man, and also to disrupt the other party’s attempt to assassinate him.”

I took a few seconds to take that all in. It was a pretty good sized chunk to swallow. “Bond killed Bogatyrev. And Devi. And Selima, after he became Xarghis Khan. So I was on the right track from the beginning — Bogatyrev was iced on purpose. It wasn’t an unfortunate accident, as you and Papa and everybody else kept insisting. And that’s why you haven’t been digging deeper into these murders. You know exactly who killed them all.”

“I wish I did, Audran.” Okking looked tired, and a little sick. “I don’t have the slightest idea who’s working for the other side. I have enough clues — the same awful M.O., the bruises and handprints on the tortured bodies, a pretty good description of the killer’s size and weight, a lot of little forensic details like that. But I don’t know who it is, and it scares me.”

“ You’re scared? You got a hell of a lot of nerve. Everybody in the Budayeen has been hiding under their covers for weeks, wondering if these two psychos would tap them next, and you’re scared. What the hell are you scared of, Okking?”

“The other side won, the prince was assassinated; but the murders didn’t stop. I don’t know why. The assassination should have ended the matter. The killers are probably eliminating anyone who might identify them.”

I chewed my lip and thought. “I need to back up a little,” I said. “Bogatyrev worked for the legation of one of the Russian kingdoms. How does he tie up with Devi and Selima?”

“I told you I didn’t want to give out all the details. This gets dirty, Audran. Can’t you be satisfied with what I’ve already told you?”

I felt myself getting furious again. “Okking, your fucking hit man is coming after me next. I’ve got a goddamn right to know the whole story. Why can’t you tell your killer to lay off now?”

“Because he’s disappeared. After the prince was killed by the other side, Bond dropped out of sight. I don’t know where he is or how to get in contact with him. He’s working on his own, now.”

“Or else someone else has given him a new set of instructions.” I couldn’t suppress a shudder when the first name that crossed my mind was not Seipolt’s — the logical choice — but Friedlander Bey’s. I knew then that I’d been kidding myself about Papa’s motives: fear for his own life, and a laudable interest in protecting the other citizens of the city. No, Papa was never so straightforward. But could he somehow be behind these terrible events? It was a possibility I could neglect no longer.

Okking was lost in thought, too, a glint of fear in his eyes. He played with his little mermaid some more. “Bogatyrev wasn’t just a minor clerk with that Russian legation. He was the Grand Duke Vasili Petrovich Bogatyrev, the younger brother of King Vyacheslav of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. His nephew, the crown prince, had gotten to be too much of an embarrassment at court and had to be sent away. Neofascist parties in Germany wanted to find the prince and bring him back to Byelorussia, thinking that they could use him to topple his father from the throne and replace the monarchy with a German-controlled ‘protectorate.’ Remnants of the Soviet Communists supported them; they wanted the monarchy destroyed, too, but they planned to replace it with their own sort of government.”