Strawman Made Steel (33 page)

I stood and moved down the corridor. About
a foot in from the stairwell, something beneath the carpet went
snick
.
Could have been an access panel to the heating lines.

I crouched at the door of 8a, below its
black peephole like an eye, and rested my ear against the grain of its timber.
Nothing.

I did the same for 8b and got the same
result.

I returned to 8a and examined the lock. It
was a Michigan. Solid but not impregnable. I slipped a high-tensile pick from
my coat and went to work on it. When I sprung the lock, I leaned on the door
hard to soak up its reverb.

I gripped the doorknob and teased it round
until the tongue popped free.

I knelt at the wall, reached, and gave the
door a push.

I counted to five, and stole a glance into
the room. I saw a clutter of shapes defined by light spilling from the
corridor. I stood and reached a hand around the door jamb and hunted up and
down the wall for a switch. My hand brushed a chain and I gave it a tug. There
was a click and a hiss of flame feeding on backed-up gas before it settled and
cast a yellow glow over the room.

When I looked again it was over my gun sight.
I saw a living room. A couple of leather couches faced off across an
expensive-looking Indian rug. I strafed the barrel across the couch tops, and
hunted among the lamps standing guard over the couches and clusters of
ornamental wooden furniture.

I entered and pulled the door shut behind
me.

A book lay open on an end table. I picked
it up with one hand and tipped its cover closed. It was a history of
Renaissance art. I put it back down, and it flopped open to the same page. I
ran a hand over the bulbous brass fixture of a lamp behind a couch. It was cold
as the crypt waiting for Euripides Speigh.

It was a small apartment. I poked my nose
into kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. The furniture and fixtures were all of a
theme. Dark, burled wood, real leather, brass fittings with the first stain of
patina. Solid, subdued, and expensive without screaming it. And taken all
together, somehow sterile. The apartment was a made oasis hidden in humble
surrounds. Pity no one bothered to live in it. Its rooms felt like they were
waiting for a real-estate agent.

I let myself out, re-locking the door, and
turned my attention to the door across the way, 8b.

It had the identical lock, and I took a
nick out of my record getting it open.

What greeted me when I opened that door
took some interpreting, but lack of light had nothing to do with that. The room
burned with a cozy glow.

I was looking at the mirror-image living
room to the apartment across the hall, but the resemblance didn’t get past the
floorplan.

The room was stuffed with the ordered chaos
of a museum. A place for everything and everything in its place. A ship’s cabin
lashed down for the sea of life. A tinker’s wagon.

I entered, again pulling the door shut
behind me.

I stared over the .38’s sight, tracing a
zigzagging course over the room’s contents because it gave me no natural line.
A series of waist-high bookshelves and cabinets enforced a subsidiary,
maze-like floorplan on the fixed dimensions. I stepped forward to open out the
space. My eyes scanned past a utility trunk supporting a CCP semi-automatic
rifle, part broken down, its scope balanced on its fat end like a miniature
lighthouse. Abutting that was a glass-paned cabinet, and in that was a human
skull. The wells of the skull’s eye sockets stared up at me. What at first
appeared to be a discoloration of its bone turned out to be many tiny crosses
inked on, like capital cities on a world globe. The cabinet rested against an
easy chair with worn fabric on the arms and a deep depression in its seat
cushion. On a blondewood end table next to the chair perched stacks of neatly
folded socks, handkerchiefs, and underwear. The silver line of a pair of
tweezers glinted from the lip of the table.

My inventory of the contents of the room
was compressed into less than three seconds.

When my search returned to its origin I got
a crawling feeling over the skin of my neck, like someone had traced my spine
with a feather tip.

I’d been so focused on covering the room, I
hadn’t looked at the walls. They’d been a blur in my peripheral vision until
that crawling feeling invited me to take a look.

The wall was full of eyes.

Familiar eyes.

Every square inch of wall, except what was
occluded by a tall bookshelf and a fake hearth, was covered by photos. Some
were seated in gilt frames and mounted. Others were naked paper stuck to the
plaster with adhesive.

All of them were portraits, or pieces
cropped from larger photos, blown up, and made into portraits.

The subject of every portrait was a man.
The same man.

I sighted them over the gun barrel and
returned each gaze. Something in me wanted to put them in order, to rehearse
again that mysterious sense of loss I’d felt the last time I’d looked at the
progress of these eyes.

It was Dorrita Speigh’s eyes that filled
the room.

I checked the rest of the apartment to make
sure there weren’t any nasty surprises.

There weren’t any nasty surprises.

There was no one home.

Coming back into the living room and under
the glare of those eyes, I cut across to the bookshelf. It’s a bad habit of
mine. I poked through a few volumes, German philosophy from the look of them,
but my interest soon died.

The room made me feel sad. I pitied its
owner. Pitied him like one pities the fox lying on the road with half its
insides smeared by tire tracks, as behind its eyes frantic, animal thoughts run
in circles while life’s light fades.

I exited and locked the door behind me.
That grim pity got locked away too.

In the dim light of the corridor I was
struck by a memory strong as hallucination of feet dangling from a ceiling. I
remembered Eury Speigh’s body, thrown like a ragdoll into a dumpster. I
remembered the blood-slick on the 51st floor of the Landmark Hotel. I
remembered the finger like a cockroach on the mantelpiece of the Speigh mansion
in the clouds. I remembered Nicole Speigh’s voice...

I quit remembering.

Standing there across from 8a, I re-holstered
the Steel Lady.

I took five strides down the corridor,
pulled her out again, and sank onto one knee by the wall, facing back the way I’d
come.

I didn’t have long to wait.

He’d slipped the lock off while I’d been in
8b, so the door to 8a swung inward without so much as a whisper.

The doorway vomited a figure into the
gloom.

“Drop it or I blow you a new hole,” I said,
and re-cocked the .38 for punctuation.

The man froze.

I heard something heavy thud on the carpet.

“And the other one,” I said.

He hesitated, then drew a gun from the
small of his back. He dropped it. It hit the carpet with a lighter thud and sat
next to the other gun.

I rose from my crouch and closed the gap
between us, keeping that impassive face just over the .38’s sight.

Up close, I could see how I’d mistaken him
for an accountant. Neat, small, pale, bespectacled. The skin over his brow and
about his eyes creased in lines deep enough to indicate habitual concentration,
but not deep enough to indicate an object of concentration he much cared about.
My only mistake had been thinking he counted beans rather than beings. Surgeons’
shop talk, if it’s honest, sooner or later touches on the fear of seeing patients
as lumps of meat. A fear that can begin to feel like a joy. Full blown it
creates a god-complex. The stink of it was on him.

But there was one lump of flesh this
surgeon
had
cared about. I’d just seen his shrine to it. To the flesh of
Dorrita Speigh.

The surgeon’s eyes watched me. They were
the only part of him moving.

“Put your hands behind your back and turn
around,” I said. “Easy.”

He turned.

I kept my revolver trained on his back
while I dug hand-cuffs out of my coat.

I’d just pulled them free, when I saw a
tendon in his right wrist grow taut. I was expecting it, but give the man
credit. He was fast.

He became a blur as he spun on the spot.
His arms flung out like a whirly gig. His left caught my hand where it was
closed over the butt of the .38 and rammed it high, and his right fist smashed
into my shoulder. My deltoid soaked up the knuckle blow, but there was a sting
in the fist that I couldn’t do much about―six inches of cold steel. It was a
surgical lancet, and with it he’d pinned my shoulder to the wall.

We were frozen in a posture that would have
made a lovely cover for Ballroom Dancing Quarterly. It was a deadlock. I had
the gun and he had the pain.

He leaned his face in closer till I could
smell his breath and see the yellow stain of pterygiums on his sclera through
the lenses of his glasses big as bus windows.

“How’s it feel?” he said, and levered the
lancet. I tried bracing his arm with mine but he still managed to pull it down.
The movement caused a chrysanthemum of pain to explode in my shoulder. The
sparks bounced and skittered through my nervous system so much I nearly let go
his arm. Beads of sweat sprang out on my forehead.

“Prickly,” I said, and found my lungs at
the bottom of a long drop.

“That’s the brachial plexus,” he said, and
waggled the lancet. “There’s a network of nerve ganglia tucked up under that
flesh in your shoulder. A big one. Can you feel the strength weeping from your
body?”

He pushed his head further forward to say,
“You should’ve pulled the trigger when you had the chance.”

“I will if I need to,” I said.

I thought about it.

“I don’t need to,” I said, and smiled.

The smile seemed to upset him. I don’t
think the surgeon believed a man with a blade of steel through his brachial
plexus should be smiling. But there were a few facts that had failed to settle
in his grey matter. Unfortunate for him.

“You’re a smart guy,” I said, “but a slow
learner.”

Inside, I took the Medusa-head of pain in
my shoulder and compressed it until it became a ball-bearing, smooth and small
and cold.

Then slow and steady, I began to lower that
ball-bearing toward the floor. The point of the lancet scraped behind me
against the plaster and jumped as it nibbled at it. But it was just noise to
the ball-bearing.

“I warned you last time that Fate sliced me
in two. The other guy that lives in here with me got all the fight and none of
the flight. He’s not as smart as me. Tends to be a bit literal. It can be
annoying. But he remembers what he hears. He once heard a coach say ‘steel don’t
feel’. He likes that sort of thing.”

I unhooked my right hand from his forearm
and let it dangle like the big hand of a clock at half-hour. My knees bent with
my downward slide till my free hand was only inches above the carpet.

Panic flashed in his eyes when he saw my
fingers descending on the small automatic he had dropped.

He had a moment to choose whether to dig in
and keep me pinned, hoping I would run out of gas, or let go and dive for the
gun himself.

He chose “all of the above.”

He let go of the lancet and simultaneously
dipped and drove his shoulder into mine and reached for the gun.

But the muscles in my legs were coiled like
springs, cocked against the wall. I drove a knee into his groin.

He made a coughing noise and froze for a
moment as if suspended by a wire.

Then he slapped onto the carpet and
deflated like a spent airbag.

I yanked the lancet from my shoulder and
knelt to cuff him.

When I rolled him right way up, I saw his
fall had smashed the right lens of his glasses.

— 22 —

I gave in and splurged. I paid for an
external elevator up Liberty.

Maybe it came from a sense of the dramatic.
Or perhaps it was the complaints rising again from my shoulder. I was about to
invoice my clients and realized my expenses had run to more than the usual
pound of flesh.

During the day, the elevator tracks made
dark lines easy to see up the outer surface of the borough, and the cabins
slipped along them like impossible dewdrops. At night you marked the dewdrops
by the single lamp burning in each. The locals called the elevators and cable
cars that freighted the vertical borough’s imports and exports of human flesh ‘totes.’

They always made me think of tsetse flies
bothering a buffalo.

We had the cabin to ourselves, me and my
surgeon friend. He sat across from me, his back to the cityscape slowly
spreading away behind him. His cuffed wrists were wedged behind him. His right
eye appeared smaller than his left on account of the smashed lens. Its lower
lid was framed with blood that had run from a cut like red mascara. His thin
lips were pressed together, but otherwise he appeared relaxed, and had been
that way since we passed the precinct station and kept going. On my thigh
rested the Steel Lady, pointing his direction, on the off chance he wanted to
start a conversation with her.