Gods of Manhattan (2 page)

"I'm an exterminator, amigo."

He grinned - a madman's smile - and flipped Willis a quick salute. Then he jumped over the side.

Willis ran to the edge of the boat, looking into the water, but there was no sign the masked man had ever existed.

Willis sat down, trembling, trying to remember if he'd even heard a splash, and he wondered just what he'd let loose on New York City.

Here's another story.

In Japantown, under the pink light of a shaded lamp, an otaku-kid took a steel flick-comb from his pocket and dragged it slowly through his Jesse Presley quiff, idly transferring a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Hisoka looked at his reflection in the mirrored window of one of the idol stores, and it was acceptable. The weight of the nunchuks on his back felt good, felt right. It was a mark of status in his zoku to have hand-made nunchuks. He'd carved these himself from hardwood, and they were weighted perfectly, so that he could draw them from his back in one smooth motion, spinning and whirling them through the air in a dazzling display, never making the new-kid mistake of banging himself in the head or thigh with them. They were the only thing he'd ever been proud of in his life. With these - he knew with a cold and terrible certainly - he could kill a man.

Maybe he'd have to kill a man tonight.

There was trouble in the zoku between him and Orochi. It couldn't be helped. They were in love with the same girl, the neko-catgirl Akemi. Hisoka didn't have much time for catgirls - they were twee, silly, overdone - but that just made Akemi more remarkable to him. She carried the look in a way that was utterly unlike any of the others, that made the velvet ears and tail seem strangely exotic instead of an affectation so drastically out of fashion as to be simply absurd. The moment Hisoka had seen her, he'd known that this was the woman he would live and die for.

Probably die. But there were worse ways to die than for love.

Hisoka turned his head, hearing the soft whirr of metal and rubber. An ORB - the off-road bicycles the bosozoku ran with, with their thick-treaded rubber tyres. Just one, though. He knew what that meant. A visit from the Inspector.

He turned, looking contemptuously at the slowing bike, lip curled in an imitation of the King's sneer. "Inspector West."

The inspector bunny-hopped and skidded the ORB to a halt, the glass beads on the wheels rattling like the tail of a deadly snake as the sudden lack of centrifugal force left them clattering down the spokes. His eyes were hidden, as usual, behind black sunglasses, and his expression was as unreadable as ever. West was ex-bosozoku himself, the Americanised name hiding his Japanese heritage. The rumour ran that he'd been raised from birth by an outlaw vigilante who lived in a graveyard, and on reaching adolescence he'd formed his own outlaw bike gang to keep the peace in Japantown in the face of a corrupt police force, only joining the pigs himself once he'd burnt the corruption out at the root, and even then only to catch his mentor's killer. It was a good story, and it bought him a lot of respect in the Japantown gang culture, more than for the other cops. But it didn't make him a friend.

"Big night, Hisoka."

Hisoka shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and shrugged, a studied display of indifference.

The Inspector spoke the language. He knew that too much talk was a weakness. He'd already said everything he needed to say - that he knew what was likely to happen, that he knew where, that he'd be watching. Whoever won in the coming clash between Hisoka and Orochi, the winner would walk away in cuffs and spend the rest of his life locked up in Rackham, and Akemi would find another boy, some handsome neko like herself, perhaps.

So be it. To be otaku was to live a manga, and the best mangas were the noirs. Hisoka shrugged again, enjoying the thrill of fatalism that shot through him, and turned his back, showing the Inspector his nunchuks as he walked away.

On Inspector West's face, there was the faintest trace of disappointment. He could pull the kid in, check if he had a permit for those things, but it would only postpone what was coming. He stood off the saddle, driving his feet down hard on the pedals to bring the ORB up to speed, and raced off into the night, leaving Hisoka to his destiny.

Hisoka never made it to the meeting. They found him the next morning, with six bullet holes in his chest. On the body, someone had left a white business card. On one side, there was a spider design, in red. On the other, a haiku:

Where all inhuman

Devils revel in their sins -

The Blood-Spider spins!

His nunchuks were never found.

Here's another story.

Just off Broadway, the man in the tweed coat sniffed, sipping the pint of bitter he'd ordered, and grimaced. O'Malley hated that - the little grimace. Sons of bitches came all the way from Magna Britannia and the first thing they ordered when they came into O'Malley's was English bitter. And then they grimaced, because it was made in New Jersey and they hadn't got it just the way they served it in Assrapeshire or wherever the hell they came from.

Screw it. It was O'Malley's own fault for opening an English bar in the first place.

The man frowned. "It's not quite the way it is back home, is it?"

His wife pursed her lips, her mouth becoming reminiscent of a dog's wrinkled asshole. "Well, they don't know any better. They're all socialists here. No education to speak of. Dreadful little country."

So what the hell are you even doing here,
O'Malley didn't say. Instead, he just kept on cleaning the glasses and counting his blessings that there weren't any other New Yorkers nearby to make the kind of scene he couldn't get away with making. Tourists were his lifeblood, especially the rich limeys from across the pond who flocked in their thousands to get a first hand look at the City Of Tomorrow. A few even stuck around. These two wouldn't.

One look told the story. They just didn't get it.

The man snorted, not bothering to lower his voice. "Well, obviously. Have you noticed they don't have any flags here?"

"We've got a flag. We don't use it much." O'Malley scowled despite himself. It'd been a sore point since 1954.

"Well, there you are. And they go on and on about all the culture here, and then you go to the gallery and it's all just nonsense, just a lot of silly colours and shapes. My five-year-old nephew could do better. And the music..." He turned to O'Malley, as if he was responsible for everything he'd seen and heard. "I've never heard anything like it in my life! The
noise!
There was one fellow playing some sort of - well, I'm not sure what-"

"Guitar." muttered O'Malley.

The man flushed; his wife tutted and sniffed, her mouth shrinking even tighter. "He wasn't even wearing a suit. When I go to a concert back home, we expect the performers to be dressed properly and to play proper instruments. And proper music. Not three-minute bursts of jingles and shouting."

O'Malley shrugged and picked up another glass. "Who was it?"

The man in the tweed shook his head angrily; his wife's mouth had almost disappeared. "Oh, I don't know. They were singing something about 'taking Berlin'. Probably your socialist friends. Well, that sort of propaganda doesn't wash with me. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have a thousand like Herr Hitler than one Bolshevik like Bartlet or Rickard. If you ask me, a strong leader like that is what this country needs."

O'Malley scowled. Typical Brits - half of them probably mailed checks to Untergang from their cosy little armchairs back home. "Yeah, well, he's not exactly a good friend of ours, so you might want to watch that kind of talk while you're here."

The man drew himself up to his full height - roughly a foot and a half shorter than O'Malley. "And you should watch your tone, Sir. I'm a guest in your country, and a customer, and the customer is always right."

O'Malley breathed in, then out.
Don't get mad at the customers.
All it took was one bad report spreading through Assrapeshire and he could end up losing a hundred customers. Keep the Brits happy, that was the rule. That was the price for running an English bar.

He could've taken his brother's advice and started a futurehead club, but no, he wanted to serve a 'better class of person'. What a schmuck.

"Sorry, Sir," he muttered, concentrating on cleaning the pint glasses.

There was a long silence. The Brits didn't say anything else for a while, and O'Malley was glad of that.

After about a minute of strained silence, the bell over the door rang and a skinny guy with long, dirty blonde hair and a ratty beard walked in, sniffing the air like a dog. He looked as though he hadn't bathed in weeks. The Brits shrank back, looking daggers. The long-haired man just smiled, good-natured.

"Hey, Larson." O'Malley smiled.

"Uh, hey, O'Malley." Larson grinned, nervous, fumbling in his pocket. "Listen, can I borrow your phone?"

O'Malley nodded. "Just remember to pay for the call. How's the fight against the Man? The cops still hassling you?" He took a perverse pleasure in needling Larson about his police phobia, especially with those damned supercilious Brits hanging on every word he said. Larson couldn't have come in at a better time.

The man with the dirty blonde hair laid twenty bucks down on the counter. Larson was notorious for being broke - chasing the dragon would do that to you. This was more money than O'Malley had ever seen him with. "Damn, Larson, what have you been getting into?"

Larson chuckled nervously. "Oh, uh, this and that." He wandered back behind the bar, heading into the back room, and O'Malley found himself surreptitiously listening in, trying to hear what was said over the loud tuts of the British heifer and her grim husband.

"Disgusting," the British guy kept saying, over and over. "Disgusting country. Disgusting people."

O'Malley ignored him.

"Uh, never mind how I found you," Larson whispered into the phone. "I've got something you want..."

Jesus, he'd better not be dealing drugs on my phone,
O'Malley thought. Twenty bucks wasn't worth that.

"Who was that
awful man?"
The woman hissed, her eyes wide with indignation.

"College professor." O'Malley murmured, still trying to keep an ear on Larson. He didn't even seem to be speaking English any more. What was that, Spanish?

The British man took another sip of his bitter, shaking his head. "I suppose that's the sort of person who enjoys your American 'concerts'. It's disgusting. Disgusting. They didn't even play your national anthem at the end. Shocking behaviour."

O'Malley frowned, turning his attention back to the tourists. "Yeah, we don't use that much either. Mind if we drop the subject?"

The man sniffed, as if something smelled bad. "Not very patriotic, are you? Not proud of your flag, not proud of your anthem. If some chap was like that back home, we'd say he was rather un-British, what? I suppose that would make you un-American or something!"

The glass in O'Malley's hand cracked.

His knuckles were white, and so was his face. He was sixty-three years old, old enough to remember the last time he'd heard that word, the word nobody ever said anymore. Old enough to remember where it had led. Old enough not to be able to hear the name McCarthy without flinching. Old enough to remember The Second Civil War, the six days of hell when you didn't know who was your neighbour and who was Hidden Empire. Six days when people you'd lived next door to for years took a knife to you, calling you a monster, a
liberal,
like it was a curse word, a fake American. An
un-American.

And the un-Americans didn't get to live.

Sure, it was all mind control, or that's what most had told themselves so as not to tear the country apart for good when it was all over. Still, after that week, there wasn't a USA anymore. There couldn't be. So the big boys had made it official - sent the message that there'd never be another McCarthy, another Hidden Empire. This was the USSA, and that's how it was staying.

There was a sign behind the bar:
Doc Thunder drinks free.
Pretty much every bar in New York had a sign like it, and everybody knew what it meant.

Everybody except the tourists.

Rudi O'Malley - who'd seen his parents hung in front of his eyes on his sixteenth birthday, who'd seen a man's entrails torn from his belly and wrapped around a flagpole while people laughed and cheered, who'd killed twenty-eight people in the battle for the White House and dreamed of twenty-eight screaming faces every single night of his life - excused himself, dropped the broken glass into the sink, and went into the back room to bandage his hand.

Larson popped his head around the door. "Listen, O'Malley, thanks for the, uh... the... O'Malley?" He gingerly reached out a hand, as if to touch O'Malley's shoulder, then withdrew it awkwardly. "Are, uh... are you okay?"

O'Malley looked at himself in the mirror, at the fat, lazy tears running down his old, worn face. At his lousy, horrible bar and his lousy, horrible clientele and his whole lousy, horrible life.

"Yeah." He said. "Yeah, Larson, I'm fine. Go watch the bar for me, will you? I'll be out in a sec."