Strawman Made Steel (27 page)

“Did your mother get along with him?”

“Hated him,” said Nicole with certainty.
“Like her mother.”

“Why?”

Nicole stretched her head upon her neck,
arched her back, and laughed for the first time that afternoon.

“Same answer.”

“You don’t know,” I said. “Yet you all
guess. What a family, a regular Cluedo game.”

“A what?”

“Foreign term. Never mind.”

She turned more pages. I silently absorbed.

Dorrita Speigh, the Dorrita Speigh of
turned up sleeves and frank gaze, had impressed me. But as time wore on, that
afternoon’s and the years accreted in geological layers of image, I saw with a
pang of loss the same flaccidity creep in around the eyes of Dorrita Speigh,
the same milkiness cloud his piercing gaze.

When she reached the end of the photoalbum,
she rose and retrieved another without a word. The sun dropped from the sky
while we waded deep into the collective memory of Liselle-become-Speigh.

Nicole paused often over photos of Eury,
occasionally touching one with a finger as if it were a talisman. In time, too,
she paused to gather in the memory of Eutarch. I pretended not to notice the
tear that crested her cheekbone to leave a glimmering trail on her skin.

The sun had disappeared altogether when
Nicole poured herself wine from a decanter. Blood-red it looked in the poor
light of the angle-poise lamp at the arm of the couch.

I unfolded the corner of a photo that had
dog-eared, and was surprised by the touch of her finger on mine.

“How did you get this scar?” she said. Her
finger slipped along mine to reveal a band of red flesh a quarter-inch wide.
Her touch came to rest on my knuckle. It felt like I’d shorted the mains.

“Cable-strippers,” I said.

“Good God,” she said. “Who did that to
you?”

“A madman,” I said.

I didn’t tell her the madman had been me.

Having opened the lid on her own memories,
she respected the privacy of mine. I liked that about her.

Her eyelids flickered and she took her
finger from my hand. She seemed to want to avoid my eyes, but I heard the air
vibrate with an unspoken word: stay.

I stacked my fingers together and looked at
how my wedding band partnered the red band of tortured flesh, was shadowed by
it in scar-tissue. Another image burned in the gloom before me like an
apparition. Trinity Church’s arches framing Eveylne and Dorrita Speigh joined.

I repossessed my hand.

At the door I made the mistake of meeting
her gaze. Behind it a single question burned: “Am I not fit for you?”

Lubricated by drink I might have said: “You
are. But you were not the first. I am my word.”

Lubricated by drink I would have been dead.

I said, instead, “Your grandfather died of
a stroke didn’t he?”

“Who told you that?” she said. “He went
missing from a Long Island beach.”

— 18 —

My body was calling it a day in every
language it knew plus a few I’d never heard before. But I took the subway and
detoured via Rector Street and the restaurant my confidence man staying at the
Tombs, Mr. Tritt, had mentioned.

The restaurant was sandwiched between an
upmarket haberdasher and a tax accountancy. The name of the restaurant, The Illustrated
Man, was rendered as an acronym in huge gothic capitals, T.I.M. (acronyms were
the new black). From the sign above the sidewalk dangled two metal appendages
like spider legs. On closer examination I saw they were part of a mocked-up
moon lander, complete with feet like shovels and painted-on solar panels.

Inside was more of the same
retro-futuristic junk. It was dark and I had to order a coffee for an excuse to
stay long enough to eyeball all the staff.

The way Tritt had told it, I was expecting
the tattooed hulk to be working here. There was no sign of any slope-shouldered
giant with a spiral tattoo on his neck, so either I’d read Tritt wrong, or it
wasn’t the man’s shift.

I left with the intention to try again in
daylight.

Back at my office building on the ground
floor, I found the elevator again temporarily defunct. I briefly considered a
career-change to diesel fitter―I mean, how hard can it be?―while I trudged up
the stairs to my office floor on legs that felt sand-bagged. Each step was a
promise in triplicate, a down payment in ambulatory pounds of flesh, on those I’d
have to climb between my office and my exit on the twenty-seventh.

I looked in on the office only to check
that Ailsa had taken my advice and visited with Aunt Ethelred. She wasn’t
there, and her desk was squared away, her typewriter hooded.

I had my hand on the pilot light dimmer
when I saw the corner of a piece of paper poking from beneath her desk. It
looked yellow, but then everything looked yellow in that light.

I couldn’t remember it being there when I
last left the office. Then again, I couldn’t remember it not being there
either.

Ailsa was the epitome of anal retentiveness
when it came to her space. It must have slipped off her desk and escaped her
notice.

I stooped to retrieve it, and saw it was
another hand-delivered cable. I smoothed an oblique crease out of it and read
it.

It was surprising.

Surprising not the least because the sender
was me. The message was new to me too, but I suppose that’s because I hadn’t
sent it.

Whoever it was who’d pretended to be me had
told Ailsa to get down to some boutique bar and cafe just off Broadway in
Gramercy Park, and wait till I showed up.

So my secretary, instead of being safe a
hundred miles away in Scranton, playing pinochle with Aunt Eritrea, was cooling
her heels in a pocket bar waiting for Yours Truly.

I hoped she’d have the good sense to wait
five minutes and blow me off.

All the same, it made me mad. It also
turned my stomach a little.

I locked up again and took the stairs two
at a time to the ground floor. I searched the street for a cab, but found a car
idling by the curb. The car looked a lot like Nicole’s.

Turned out it was Nicole’s car. And out of
it got Nicole’s chauffer. And in his hand was Nicole’s chauffeur’s Glock.

He jammed it in my face and told me to get
in the back of the car, while I rummaged in my brain for comparative stats on
the Glock and the Lady.

In the back of the car was Nicole’s
chauffeur’s friend, and he showed me his gun too, a Meisner 45 automatic. Then
he frisked me and took the Lady.

I don’t do three-way comparisons, so I gave
that away and asked if anybody had a toothpick when what I really wanted was a
cigarette. Nothing doing.

I said to the driver, “Is this payback for
opening my own door? ‘Cause I can let you do that. We could pull over and I’ll
let you catch up, maybe even put a few on credit. Whaddayasay?”

He said nothing.

Turned out they wanted me in the same place
I’d wanted to be, the boutique bar and cafe off Broadway in Gramercy Park. The
sign over the shopfront said: Witt’s End B & C.

We got out of the car, but instead of
marching me into the bar, we entered the slim apartment building adjacent. We
went along a dark corridor and took a right turn into an almost-as-dark room.
From the quality of the air there were at least two other bodies breathing into
it. Someone pushed me into a chair. In front of the chair was a window into
another room, and in that other room were a few chairs and tables and the
shortest bar you’ve ever seen.

The pieces were starting to fit together before
I even saw Ailsa propped into the corner of a booth on the left of the window.
I was looking into the Witt’s End through what was undoubtedly a one-way
window.

I watched Ailsa. She had one hand cupped
around a slender glass. A straw stuck out of it but she hadn’t touched the
drink. Only someone who knew her well could’ve spotted her anxiety. Her legs
were crossed tightly under her table, and her neck was too straight.

My stomach flipped like a landed fish.

I felt more than heard a door open and a
figure loomed before me. I recognized the silhouette of Eustace Speigh, the
last remaining male heir to the Speigh Empire, before his features resolved
from the gloom. He wore the same suit he’d worn the day we met, thousands of feet
above Manhattan in Evelyne Speigh’s drawing room, and still looked like an
animated block of granite. But today his shirt was pulled open at the neck.

He ran his eyes over me for a long moment,
then said, “I thought so.”

He slapped me in the face, hard enough that
stars streaked across my vision, then left.

A moment later he appeared on the other
side of the window. He sat at a table on the far side of Ailsa, but in clear
view. A waiter took his order and a moment later returned with a drink.

Eustace Speigh then looked directly at me
through that window, raised his glass to his lips, and drank. He looked past
me, and nodded.

Two hands like T-bone steaks clapped down
on my shoulders, pressed me into the seat. The shape of another man loomed in
my peripheral vision.

Then all hell broke loose.

Broke loose like a stallion in harness.
Broke loose like water through inch-perfect canals.

I knew from the first stroke of the man’s
fist on the side of my neck that it was to be death by a thousand cuts. A
thousand cuts from a hammer.

The guy worked one side of my neck till I
tasted bile in my throat, and then shifted to the opposite side. Each blow was
precisely placed, and held plenty in reserve. His fist was a chunk of
gravelstone sheathed in a rubber glove. It beat me where the pain went deep but
didn’t leave surface bruising. They meant to hollow me out but leave me looking
like I’d just come home from the shop. And I had no idea why.

Time stopped going in a straight line and
started stretching and shrinking like a slinky spring. Then someone dropped the
Time-slinky down a Liberty Borough elevator shaft. Halfway down that shaft,
Time turned into a cat with six legs. Then into a Rorschach blot that looked
like a cat with six legs. The Time got bored and walked out of the cinema for a
cheeseburger.

They were working on my right kidney when
the effort started to tell. Quality control on the punches slipped. He went too
hard, and I knew I’d have at least one nice, big purple rainbow on my lower
back as a souvenir of my time in a dark room behind the Witt’s End.

Ligaments are great. On a good day they get
only a trickle of blood. Which is the reason they take so long to heal. It also
means they don’t bruise as such. You’d have to go looking for traumatized
ligament and neighboring cartilage.

The guy with the meatsteak hands was
pulling on my left arm, pulling on it with precise, choreographed motions―a
kind of tug and scoop―that reminded me of sheep crutching. When I was
conscious, which seemed to be less and less. There was a monkey in the fuse box
of my head hunting for bananas.

And all the time Ailsa sat taut as the
space needle on the other side of that glass with a drink she no longer
pretended even interested her.

Next thing I knew Eustace was standing in
front of me. One of this grunts pulled a chair over for him. The grunt was out
of breath, I noticed with a quantum of pleasure.

Eustace sat. He lit a cigarette and blew
the smoke in my face.

“Thanks,” I said, meaning it. I had trouble
getting the word past the congested flesh of my throat.

“Not long now, dick,” he said. “Just answer
me one question, and then you have one more job.”

The grunts were working behind me. Sounded
like they were tugging more furniture around. Scratching on the floor.

“I didn’t bother asking before,” Eustace
said. “You don’t look like the kind to offer anything without some persuasion.”

I didn’t think that was quite fair. Janus
McIlwraith has some esprit de corps.

“So tell me,” he said, and leaned forward,
drawing on his cigarette so I could see his eyes clearly in its light. “Did you
murder my brothers?”

If you’re going to get that window into a
man’s soul where the truth is sitting there in plain view for all to see, you
only get it for half a second, tops.

“Did you?” I said. “You lied about not
being with him that night in the warehouse,” and watched for the window.

We locked gazes. The window opened. He
shook his head with a grimace. And I thought I saw through it a confused,
angry, and grieving man.

Trouble is, was it a window or a
mirror?―because they can be one and the same.

Eustace wasn’t wasting any time. He stood,
drew on his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the surface of the table.

He called to one of the grunts. “Give it
here.” And I heard the clink of glass.