Strawman Made Steel (25 page)

When I found Inker in the inner office, he
was out of sorts. As usual he seemed in a hurry to go no place at all, but even
his good eye didn’t want to stay on me. I put it down to the money his link was
silently pissing against the wall in the outer office.

Jerking a thumb over my shoulder I said,
“Your lady quit?”

“Lunch,” he said, and poured me a drink
unasked.

“At half ten?”

“She starts at five.”

Wall Street didn’t open till nine-thirty,
but maybe there was more than stock market ticker in Inker’s fiber bundle.

Inker told me he’d mined Alltron’s finances
to a privately owned syndicate called Phlogiston Capital, but there the trail
not so much grew cold as ran into a brick wall.

The name, Phlogiston, set up an itch that I
didn’t scratch till later. (You could say
it
was the scratch and I was the itch.)

What I really wanted to know from Inker was
if the frame-up had shown any sign of cooling off. He told me he had nothing
more.

I said, “That’s positive.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and then told me I
was a fool to have come. Told me to get out of the city.

I didn’t take his advice. Next on my list
was Alltron and Project Hydra, the work on exotic neurotoxins implicated in the
murder of Euripides Speigh. As I suspected, the project was defunct. Someone
was mopping up. It had been removed from Alltron’s directory, and Doctor Arnold
was on leave.

No one I spoke to at Alltron had heard of
any Phlogiston.

It was nearing noon when I finally got word
back from the street network. The word was the address of a street corner in NoLIta―Prince
and Mott―and a time, 12:30PM.

The time and place became my next
appointment. I waited near the curb behind a copy of the morning Times, one eye
on the comics page, and the other on the street.

I didn’t have long to wait before a grey
Patriot sedan with police plates hove into view. It pulled up behind a car
waiting at the stop sign guarding Mott Street. It was stationary maybe ten
seconds, but that was enough time for me to drop the paper, yank open the
passenger door, and slide onto the front seat.

The man behind the wheel reached for his
gun without a sound.

I had a second to forestall a bullet. I
raised my hands till the tips of my fingers brushed the velour of the car’s
ceiling.

“Arrest me,” I said. “Janus McIlwraith.”

Finlay MacLure, chief of the Organized
Crime Bureau, froze, lips parted.

A car behind honked.

Then he decided. He put his free hand back
on the wheel, let the clutch out, and rode up to the line.

“I know who you are,” he said without
missing a beat, then took his other hand from the wheel and took a bite out of
the burger pinned in its grip. The burger was big, but he still had a job
finding it in his over-sized mitt.

This was one cool cat. I was impressed.

He chewed, swallowed, and said, “Why didn’t
you come down to the station? Hijack a cop like that and you’re likely to get
blown away.”

“Just as likely to get blown away on the
steps of One Police Plaza,” I said.

MacLure’s broad forehead crumpled into a
frown. “How’s that?”

“Yesterday I shot one of your cops,” I
said, keeping an eye on his free hand.

He was silent a moment. His brow became
smooth.

“You’re right,” he said. “If I’d known, I’d
have smeared your carcass across the steps myself.”
 

His eyes darted at me, calculating.

“What do you want?”

“Space to finish the Speigh case. I can’t
do that with this frame-up over my head.”

MacLure took another bite of his burger.

“Done,” he said.

His answer took me by surprise. I’d been
mentally marshaling my side of the deal.

“Done?”

“As of this morning. Your friend Tunney
convinced me you’re not that much of an idiot. We’re following another lead.”
He paused. “So which of my boys did you peg?”

“Gallant,” I said, “But you’ll want to know
why.”

He went rigid, and I tensed, waiting, but
all he did was take another bite.

“Why?”

“It has a price tag,” I said. “It was going
to be time, but now I want an amnesty.”

“Amnesty?” he said. “I just told you you’re
in the clear.”

“Not for me,” I said. Then I explained
about my German friends holed up in the guts of Brooklyn Bridge―without
mentioning the bridge, of course. I told MacLure I could give him enough leads
on the illegal immigration racket to crack it wide open. As I spoke, I watched
his eyes for that glitter of avarice that would tell me his head had filled
with visions of himself as Chief of Department, but either he concealed his
emotions well, or else he is that rare bird with eyes only for his own rung of
the ladder.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You
want me to take down this network but grant the current crop of illegals
visas?”

“Not visas. Citizenship.”

His cheeks billowed. “Besides the fact that’s
the weirdest deal I ever heard, I can’t do it. I don’t carry the weight.”

“You won’t think it weird when I tell you
the rest―the part that involves Detective Gallant. As for weight,” I smiled,
“if I lean on you, that makes plenty.”

He gave me a sidelong glance.

“Hardball, McIlwraith?”

“Sure,” I said, and gave him that showroom
smile again, “but we’re on the same team.”

“Are we?” he said, his gaze strangely
abstracted for a man of his force.

He didn’t speak again for minutes. He swung
the sedan off Mott and onto Grand, heading away from One Police Plaza. The
traffic crept past us on either side as we flowed around the curve of Jackson
Park and got a peek at the bay.

Beneath the forest of dock cranes below
Manhattan Bridge, he took the entry ramp onto the lower level of the FDR, and
we became one little grey beetle among a mass exodus of beetles.

“Say I can swing it,” he said at last.
“Nothing guaranteed, but I have a few favors to call in. It’ll cost me. What
are you putting on the table?”

“Information,” I said.

He grimaced and said out the side of his
mouth, “You’ll need to stop dancing, McIlwraith. What are you, a ballet
dancer?”

A ballet dancer
. I smiled, then said, “Your department is compromised. Probably
fatally. Has been for years.”

“What the hell?” He swore. When he mustered
the spit again, he said, “You’re wasting my time, shamus. Do you know how many
guys I’ve stuck in the Tombs?” He swore again. Seemed to have forgotten his
appetite. The burger hung out of his fist like last week’s laundry.

“Small fry,” I said. “When what you want is
the daddy fish. You want the Strawman.”

Now it was his turn to smile. But his pale
blue eyes stayed flinty.

“The Strawman? Don’t tell me you’re a
believer, hard case like you, McIlwraith?”

“But that’s the beauty of it, Chief,” I
said, and admired the trees on the river’s edge with their tops bursting with
quickening’s green. “What better place to hide than underneath a myth? Every
cop I talk to thinks the Strawman is a handle, or at best a card played by
whomever, whenever it’s convenient. And for years you’ve had people messing
over the tracks right under your nose.”

MacLure took a bite of the laundry, and ate
with renewed gusto. It was a good sign.

“Gallant,” he said, not a question.

“He’ll show up some day soon with a busted
leg and some mugging story, but, yeah, he’s one,” I said. “He’d have others.”

“And you’re telling me this immigration
racket is the Strawman’s?”

“Not immigration racket: trafficking in human
meat.” I gave him the address of the death cult and explained how the human
contraband were being used to test exotic poisons.

MacLure’s mind seemed to be turning on
these revelations like a millstone.

He said, “Making money three ways. The
meat, the deed, and—when it gets to market—the poison.”

He stuffed what was left of the burger into
his mouth and chewed it under bulging cheeks until he could speak again.

“Okay. I’ll bite. If the cult checks out,
you’ve got a deal.”

“One more thing,” I said.

MacLure was silent. I took it as an
invitation.

“When you clean house, keep me in the loop.
I want the real dossier on the Strawman. I’ve seen the one Gallant covered with
crap.”

“If you’re right,” he said, “you can date
my daughter.”

“If I’m right―and I am―the first thing you
should do is get your daughter the hell away from New York and to a city that
does happy endings.”

— 17 —

When I entered the lunchtime buzz of
the Whipped Elephant, more than one set of eyes lit with what I call the
scoop-light.

I picked the nearest pair, and to make the
point carry, the pair furthest from the ground.

“You wanna pull those stalks back in before
someone trips on them.”

The owner, a reporter for the Herald by the
press card clipped to his sports jacket, gave me the once over, then turned
away from me toward the bar. I probably looked like a pickled baseball mitt,
but I couldn’t say whether he feared trouble or an infection.

“That time of the month, McIlwraith?”

“Every day of the month, Coffey” I said,
and took the stool next to the sub-editor of the Blaze’s social pages. He was
leaning on the bar, and from the pile of ash in the tray at his elbow, looked
like he’d chain smoked the morning away on that stool.

“Not dead yet?” he said, and coughed a puff
of ash out of the tray.

“Disappointed?” I said. “You should talk.”

“None as sanctimonious as a reformer,” he
said, and drew heavily on the cigarette pinched between his thumb and
forefinger. His lips tugged around it unevenly, warped by the dead nerves on
one side of his face.

“I’m no reformer,” I said. “I just don’t
want that morning to come where I’m contemplating my own lung for breakfast.”

“Charmed,” he said, and called for a drink.
“Bet you fart middle-C too.”

I added my own order and scanned the room
again to see if anyone was still taking too much of an interest in me.

“You didn’t get my cable, then?” he said,
and a tightness came into his face.

“I got it. Took a cure in the country. Did
wonders for my aura. Got a little purple into it.”

Coffey’s eyes travelled over my face and
marked the divots the bluestone had taken.

“So I see. But what I had in mind was more
of a sabbatical. See the sights, breath the air”―the bartender put our drinks
on the bar with a rap of wood. Coffey brought his to his lips, paused―“avoid
death,” he finished, and sculled.

Coffey excused himself and headed for the
john. I sat with a hand curled around the cool glass and tried not to feel the
weight of stolen glances.

A sensation flitted through my mind like a
long-forgotten memory half-seen. Its substance was the deliciousness of doing
nothing, of an idle afternoon. I felt weary with a mind too long harnessed. I
wanted to dump my head at the city limits and slap its rump.

It was in that frame of mind, straining not
to be there, not to be anywhere, that I saw a runner appear at the entrance to
the bar. The boy’s body was framed a moment in the doorway, before it entered
swift as a thrush into the smoke and press of the room.

I tried to imagine the boy to be a force of
nature. He was a wave curling on a beach, a cloud in the shape of a boy. But my
ears caught his voice and the illusion fell apart. He was asking after Coffey.

“Kid,” I said, loud enough to carry, and
when he looked my way, flicked a thumb toward the john.

I watched him make a bee-line for the men’s
and tried to imagine he was a tumbleweed driven on the wind.

No good. The boy was a runner, and in his
hand was a message for Mr. Grover St-Claire Coffey, Esquire, whom he would find
pissing four-hundred proof into one of the Whipped Elephant’s shallow urinals.

I gripped my glass and raised it to my
lips, and said, “To work life balance.”

That was when a hurricane tore out of the
john. A Cat-Five, at a guess, and much more believable than my tumbleweed.

The hurricane wore Coffey’s grey flannel
suit and bore down on me with inhuman speed. It slapped the glass from my lips
before a drop had crossed them. The glass sailed through the air, slewing liquid,
to bounce once on a table and smash into the wall.

The hurricane had an eye, and it engulfed
the room in astonished silence.