Daniel Polansky - Tomorrow, the Killing

His office was altogether too elegantly outfitted for a man who, bottom line, made his living off choke and leashed whores. He was sitting at a table about the length of a coffin, and didn’t bother to get up as I came in. The top of it was one smooth sheet of translucent crystal, because who doesn’t want to be staring at another man’s thighs while conducting business?

‘Warden,’ he began happily. ‘A pleasant surprise.’ Artur was the wrong sort of pretty for his industry. Muscled but soft, with blond hair trailing to his shoulders and an outfit that seemed cut from a courtesan’s bed sheet.

‘Appreciate you making the time.’

‘A pleasure, a pleasure. How’s business going?’

‘A glorious string of uninterrupted successes. Yourself?’

‘It goes very well,’ he said. The sunlight came in through the windows and off his teeth. ‘Very well indeed.’

‘Good to hear.’

‘Can I get you something? Whiskey? Cigar?’

It was nine-thirty in the morning, but offering gifts reminded Artur that he was rich, so every meeting was my birthday. I shook my head just the same. ‘I’m solid.’ I took a deliberate look at the surrounding opulence. ‘Been some changes since I sat here last.’

‘Change comes for all of us, Warden – either we embrace it, or we let it swallow us.’

I’d make sure to polish up that pearl of wisdom and set it somewhere safe. ‘That’s what happened to the James Street Boys? They got eaten up by the future?’

He smiled, coy as a ten-ochre whore. ‘You heard about that?’

‘Word spreads.’

‘An ugly sort of business, really. If it were up to me, these sorts of things wouldn’t be necessary. Business could be conducted honestly, with all sharing in the profit. But,’ he sighed dramatically, ‘we do not live in such a world.’

‘Your world, maybe – mine’s nothing but spun sugar and sunsets.’

‘You’ll have to invite me over sometime.’ He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. ‘I’m sure you didn’t make the walk up here just to listen to me ruminate.’ Though that wouldn’t stop him. ‘What is it that brings you to the Hen before noon?’

‘Call it a sense of neighborliness.’

That crossed his eyes. ‘I was unaware our homes abutted.’

‘All the world is my home, Artur, and every man my neighbor.’

His laugh was too close to a giggle for my tastes. ‘Speak on, citizen of the world.’

‘I hear you’ve been having trouble with the Association.’

He looked faintly quizzical. ‘No, not really.’

‘You won’t be able to say that much longer.’

His desk was covered with a wide variety of bric-a-brac, paperweights and gilded timepieces, useless but expensive gadgetry from the Free Cities that chimed when you tapped them. He picked one of the assemblage, a miniature pikeman, and began to wind its key. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘The kind of trouble an organization subsisting of narcotics distribution would have with an organization once sworn to eradicate it.’

Artur grimaced, unhappy to be reminded he didn’t operate a cotton concern. He set the toy back onto the desk. It marched forward a few inches in awkward lockstep, then tumbled over. ‘The family has many and varied interests, most strictly legal. I wouldn’t at all describe us in the terms you used.’

‘I’d assumed both of us were too busy for hair splitting, but if I’m the only one who’s got things to do today . . .’

‘We haven’t been in conflict with the veterans for over ten years, since Roland Montgomery was killed.’

‘I hope you enjoyed the break.’

‘You’re saying they’re going to move on us?’

‘Haven’t they already? You think Pretories doesn’t know who pulls the Savages’ strings?’

‘The Savages are not affiliated with the Giroie family,’ Artur said. ‘Like any other wholesale operator, we have a wide variety of customers. Whatever activities they engage in after our transactions are finalized is no concern of ours, I can assure you.’

‘A neat distinction, one I doubt the other syndicates will make. The street respects winners, Giroie – and not yesterday’s winners, either.’

‘You don’t need to tell me my business,’ he said with a pinched-lemon face. ‘Where’s your information coming from? Is it reliable?’

‘You don’t need to tell me my business either, Artur. I wouldn’t have wasted the walk if I didn’t think what I had to say was on the level.’

He tapped nervously at the glass shelf. ‘No offense, Warden – I know your sources are well placed. But the Association has kept themselves out of our business for over a decade, and we’ve done the same. Pretories has never shown any willingness to renew our conflict, and I don’t see why that would change now.’

‘You hear about this march they’ve got planned?’

‘Of course.’

‘Next week he’ll have fifty thousand men underneath his banner. Numbers like that, might be he gets to thinking about settling old scores.’

‘Might be,’ he responded, unconvinced but nervous.

I boosted myself to my feet. ‘Do whatever you want, Artur – this was a courtesy.’

Artur stood as well. ‘Don’t misunderstand – I appreciate the information. You’ve always been a loyal friend of the family.’

I’d never been anything of the sort, but there was no reason to point that out. ‘I’m near enough to Association territory to warrant keeping an ear out. They finish with you, might be they set sights on me next.’

‘I doubt it will come to anything,’ Junior said, back straight, doing his best to seem like a person of importance. ‘But if they make a play, we’ll answer it.’

Downstairs the maître d’ and Artur’s guard sat together at a table, drinking coffee and playing chess. They played ugly, trading pieces at random and without any sense of deeper strategy. The guard had mate in three, but he didn’t see it. I watched their game for a moment, wondering if either would be alive at the end of mine. But it was too hot for speculation, let alone sympathy, and I headed on out.

24

Twelve hours later I stood in front of a beaten-down mansion, ancient and decaying, a monument to the time a half-century past when the docks were prime real estate and not the city’s dumping ground. The late summer sun had dipped below the skyline but its residue offered some succor against the coming night. On the ramparts above me the usual line of stone gargoyles gave silent warning, half-animal figures with broken appendages and fractured leers, the population within slow to scare and quick to vandalize. The rest of the abode had gone in the same direction, product of the passive indifference and bored maliciousness of a generation of squatters. You wouldn’t have thought anything to look at it, unless you spent a few minutes watching the stream of passers-by cross the street rather than walk past.

The Bruised Fruit Mob owned a stretch of territory along the boundary between the Isthmus and Kirentown, an area so impoverished as to blur racial animosity, skin color rubbed away by the abject misery of circumstance. They bore close resemblance to a lot of other Islander gangs, smuggling goods through their section of the docks and hiring out as muscle to anyone foolish enough to take them. They had no real ties to anyone who mattered, and their activities were of the kind that tended to make a lot of noise, which in the long run is poor strategy for a criminal organization. For the moment, though, they punched above their weight, making up in sheer savagery what they lacked in resources and sanity.

A bravo lounged outside the entrance, charcoal-skinned, a curved short sword swinging from each hip. Though my visits were frequent and nothing but beneficial to his clan, still he bared back his teeth when he saw me, unable to conceive of any other greeting. I paid it little mind, shouldering him aside and descending through the door into hell.