The Crime Studio (6 page)

Leon Wardial was cheerfully ahead of his time - but it was a close call. As a student
Leon
had almost become English through bad illumination and lack of exercise. Noting that the precedent system in Western law bore an identical structure to that of mental neurosis, he had written a thesis on
Crime as a Creative Medium
and been kicked out bodily by a principal of such frail health Leon himself had had to support him during the procedure. He entered the world with an almost senatorial lack of practical knowledge, naively invigorated by the dismissive rage with which he was greeted at every turn. Like everyone in
America
he wanted to make a living by writing trash. Academe had taught him that if you leave the dishes for long enough they’ll get done by evolution. But
Leon
soon found that money had to be earned or stolen. Nobody wanted his thesis, which he had retitled
Damn the Police
. People told him the army built character, but fortunately he already had one. So he sought the traditional wisdom of Uncle Savage, respected thief and dagger artist.

Savage was stripping a chainsaw when
Leon
entered the basement seeking what he termed a ‘burglar’s wage’.

‘A burglar’s wage he says,’ muttered Savage, a vein in his temple throbbing audibly in the small room.

‘If you’ll teach me sir,’ said
Leon
brightly, tripping over coils of rope.

Savage looked as though he’d as soon shatter
Leon
’s ribs as grace his ear with a verb.

‘Can you handle a grapple, boy?’

‘If you mean a grappling hook Uncle, no. Though I did on one occasion throw a net over a prairie dog. In
New Brunswick
.’

‘A net over a prairie dog he says - god almighty. On one occasion he says. I bet it’s an occasion you remember well eh boy? While I can barely sleep nights for all the wildlife I’ve wrestled into submission with these two hands.’

‘Pardon me Uncle but your bestial peccadilloes are hardly the issue here.’

‘What, you bastard? I’ll slash your throat from sternum to navel.’

Bounding over moonlit rooftops, arguing red-faced over the plunder and bickering at the foot of their victims’ beds, Leon and his uncle formed an uneasy alliance. Whistling loudly as he dropped silverware into the sack which Savage, glaring furiously, held open,
Leon
would reel off quotations from Voltaire in a Scottish accent and pause only to have a good laugh. He repeatedly alarmed his uncle by pretending to pass out on the premises and would wait until Savage, flushed and gasping from the exertion, had dragged him through the window to safety before sitting up and asking why Savage’s belly was heaving. He became adept at snagging his uncle’s pants with a grappling hook and hurling them at the eaves in a flap of rags. Pointing with a guffaw whenever Savage tripped on a slate,
Leon
was a constant source of umbrage and the two would inevitably scuffle and shove on the starlit ledges, hurling diamonds and slugging each other with nuggets of masonry.

Leon
had quickly discovered that the best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief. This adroit principle entered him like a sickness. It suggested that the tedium of the getaway could be relieved by pretending that Kermit was trying to get out of the sack. It caused him to sit at gang meetings mimicking a cop siren without moving his lips. He made unneeded extra cash at K-Mart demonstrating flame-retardant dungarees. He frightened little kids by murmuring poetry. The cops hated him - he was forever telling the truth and throwing a spanner into their inquiries. Savage felt as though he’d knitted a monster.

But he had to concede that
Leon
had contracted a personality since the days when he had had to stamp on snails in an attempt to entertain the gloomy child. Most youngsters these days could not entirely believe in a thing unless it was printed on a T-shirt, but Leon seemed to have a genuine interest. Savage talked about his life as a re-offender. How could someone be offended by the same thing twice? Was nothing learnt?

Leon
theorised that a thief creates something out of nothing, like an artist or god. These lisped absurdities made
Leon
unpopular with other criminals, and Savage suffered a loss of esteem by association. They wanted to know why Savage stood for it, and he felt the pressure. He began to think
Leon
was being resentful for the time Savage had tried to teach him about real life by dragging him behind a Chevy.
Leon
had been eight years old at the time and had made no comment except to thank his uncle for demonstrating the behaviour of a typical bastard. In truth the incident was one of
Leon
’s fondest memories and in the autobiographical novel
Burgling In Beerlight With Uncle Savage
attributed the whole thing to Savage having taken buoyant leave of his senses. Savage was a laughing stock before the book’s publication but on hearing of its existence he lunged across the table at
Leon
’s throat. Pulling away with his uncle’s hands about his neck
Leon
dragged him through shattering breakfast plates and into a struggling, screaming heap, kicking over chairs and straining for weapons just out of reach. This scuffle formed the opening scene in the stage adaptation, which was notorious for the ending in which a cop appeared on stage and arrested the audience. The acclaim which greeted Uncle Savage came as a total surprise to
Leon
and a shock to his uncle, whose hair went black overnight. Disguised as an Arab and approaching
Leon
at a dinner party, he had barely begun to express his feelings when
Leon
tugged down his false beard, at which Savage retreated in alarm. They say a little embarrassment’s good for you - I wonder what they say about this much?

Leon
wallowed in the newfound popularity which was aided by his readers’ fascination with the perils of his work. The lady host of a literary soiree once found her absent guest-speaker burgling her bedroom and brought him downstairs in a din of delighted applause.
Leon
, flattered and bashful, removed his mask and accepted their toast, presenting the host with a crowbar and searing his admirers with a volcano of modesty.

Leon
’s idea of a perfect crime was one during which he enjoyed himself. How could he be so selfish? Crime was supposed to be a necessity - the cops didn’t want people to think crooks were enjoying it, and crooks didn’t want the cops to think so either.
Leon
was blowing the gaff like there was no tomorrow. He’d never been popular on the west coast, where bigtime hoods have the souls of accountants. But now even the Beerlight mob was brooding and Dino Korova the hoodboss hauled Savage in by the legs. Savage was not unconnected with the mob and so by association
Leon
was not unconnected any the more. Dino Korova did not like to hear
Leon
saying he was having the time of his life as a burglar in Beerlight. Night and day
Leon
was on chat shows stating the benefits of not having to pay, and it was placing mob rule in a bad glare. As the keeper of the Beerlight mob it pleased Dino to pretend it was fragile, and alluding to
Leon
’s cool calculated cheek he stated with a yell that he’d oblong the bastard with an ammo-guzzler.

Savage found himself arguing on
Leon
’s behalf with an almost forensic intensity. What with the hazards of drugs, sex and spiritual quest, crime was one of the few activities a young man could undertake without fear of the consequences.
Leon
’s lack of unconnectedness with the mob was as slender as a bug’s fetlock. The boy could walk down
Chain Street
picking both nostrils simultaneously with a tuning fork and no one would give a thought to the mob or anything else. And as a burglar, nobody was more punctual.

‘Never was a truer word spoken,’ said Dino Korova. ‘At least not around here. I’ll have you know what I intend to do with this skulking paragon, Savage - you two will enter a premises on my behalf, and if Leon begins chanting, impersonating a crash dummy in slow motion or braying with laughter during the job, I assure you he’ll depart the world like a greyhound out of a trap. This joker of a nephew of yours grows more floridly conspicuous every time I look away. I cannot allow the national media to perceive the moral angularities of my enterprise.’

Savage tracked
Leon
down at a squash club and tried to impress upon him this opportunity to redeem himself or face the boneshattering music.
Leon
distractedly agreed during a slamserve and turned up cheerily on the night with only the dimmest notion of what was riding on it. Gasping with hilarity, he shuffled into the dark alley and began to mime an encounter with an invisible wall. Bristling with common sense, Savage watched as the evening developed into a fiesta of song and balloon animal mayhem.
Leon
proceeded as though there were no such thing as a burglary. The premises was quickly filled with semi-inflated dogs and volleys of abuse. Savage stood slack-featured and regarded the fading afterimage of his integrity. And then, as
Leon
began playing a trumpet, years of sedentary, strolled burglaries exploded like a fumbled egg. Savage saw with a pellucid clarity the notion that would transform his previously dreary career.
Leon
was bringing him on.
Leon
wasn’t into misery because it lacked the element of surprise.

Neighbours were banging on the walls and cop sirens began to wail. Leon and Savage were on the roof, releasing balloon creatures and bellowing quotations from Poe at operatic volume. The cops arrived gung-ho for justice and hauled them yanking and flapping to the state pen at such speed their yells underwent a Doppler shift. The arrest produced baffling headlines which had to be qualified and explained at length, and then the issue sank like a U-boat. Savage was so happy his teeth hurt. His smug mediocrity lay cooling on a slab.
Leon
was out of the public eye and wouldn’t have to be abstracted by Dino. The book continued to circulate, and would later enthral Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire. Leon and Savage were celebrities inside. And when the pen priest told them the walls of hell were four thousand miles thick, they began at once to formulate a plan for breaking in.

More murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature. How crisply I recall the summer when the barometers hit the 92 mark and the denizens of Beerlight burst hollering onto the streets and began arbitrarily shooting the life out of each other. For the first time there was a real sense of community. Everyone woke up to the fact that they were living in a barnacle-encrusted city run by a donut-crazed cerebral-retentive and a strange, gill-bearing mayor. It was difficult to tell where one bastard ended and another began, and the town was immediately swept by lucrative rioting and lush panic. Shrapnel flew through the air as if by enchantment. All minorities were catered for by the hail of lead and aluminium. Freddy Bitmap was assaulted with a rivet gun. Lester Mirsky was smacked by a truck on
Crane Street
. Dino Korova the hoodboss shot three of his best men with a Colt Python then turned it around and blew off his own unredeeming features. Brute Parker entered the Delayed Reaction with a street-sweeper and knocked ten people onto the back wall - it was like an explosion in a melon shed. My good friend Billy Panacea dropped by for a visit and stabbed me six times in the chest with a bowie knife - I’d never seen him so happy. He leapt screaming onto the bandwagon and in the following days took every risk available to him, burgling premises for all he was worth. Those cops not instantly dead and buried were stringently demoralised, and one escaped through the skylight of the beleaguered cop den wearing a vertical take-off jet. The mayhem had all the diversified and collaborative qualities of good improvised theatre and it wasn’t surprising that the papers claimed not to understand it.

All that summer everyone had been critical of my death-defying attachment to Bleach Pastiche and the supposed idea that it ripped the balls off polite society - I couldn’t even visit the Delayed Reaction Bar without Don Toto the owner yelling his view that she was poison. ‘It’d be cruel to test her on animals, you clown. She walks around with a Parabellum automatic in her jacket - she’s more scary than a cretin with a vote.’

But these observations ricocheted off me so fast Toto caught the fragments in his leg. Me and Bleach were burning like Shelley’s cadaver and any ill-feeling I had ever harboured languished like a drying starfish. It takes alot to change what people laughingly refer to as my mind, though in the first weeks even I was baffled by the draw - she wasn’t a beautiful mess, she was just beautiful. Her mouth was so red I had to regard it through a welding mask. She had a registered trademark symbol tattooed on her forehead and every accessory she wore was capable of exploding harmfully. She had dyed her hair luminous in honour of her twin sister who, starved of colour in the eighties, had finally blown her head off with a flare gun. Bleach taught me so much about the world - like how the atom bomb was the result of Einstein mistaking a roving flea for a decimal point in his calculus, that America produces better physical comedy because there’s more room and that for a two-dimensional being 10 and 90 miles per hour are the same on a 100 mph speedometer. She once rubbed a sleep crumb out of her eye and when I studied it under a microscope I found it was a perfect miniature replica of an Alpine village.

Bleach existed in a colourful corner - her TV didn’t get snow, it got sunburn. She moved through the Beerlight streets in a cloud of army surplus and drove a surgical-pink convertible. The back of the car had caught light in a bomb accident and everyone had joined in with wrenches and hammers to make shapes before the metal cooled - the rear wings were now rippled and stretched like a discarded rubber.

The cops wanted an audience with Bleach because she was responsible for seven important murders but in the four days that the atmosphere remained at 92 they were fully occupied supervising the violence. So what with Bleach’s munitions knowledge and the feeling of invulnerability common to kids newly on the shaft we felt safe and inclined to go for a leisurely cruise in the exaggerated sun. My borrowed AK-47 sub lay in the back and I drove with one arm about Bleach and her S&W 9mm ACP, her Armalite AR-180 semiauto, her SPAS-12 autofeed, her M-79 grenade launcher and her cut-down Remington skeet. She kissed me like a frog and passed a pill that numbed my body and stopped the pain in my chest. We laughed in the knowledge that in the trunk were stowed a Panzerfaust-3, an adjustable dagger set, a Japanese bolus and a three-sectioned staff. Life was strong and durable as the wind whistled through the pin of Bleach’s body-grenade. Parking turbulently on the waterfront, we felt like the perfect antidude couple as we strolled down the boardwalk with a golfbag containing the best of our home-defence artillery. We thought our passion would last forever, like styrofoam. Bleach elaborated on her theory about how Lee Oswald survived and changed his name to Bob Newhart, and we idled at a fish stall for a snack - but we had reckoned without the pathological climate. Instantly belligerent, the fish-seller formed his hand into a claw and expressed indignation at our breathtaking arrogance in requesting food from a guy like him. Rolling up his sleeves, he shrieked about how things were done when he was a boy.

A disturbance developed during which everyone on the pier pulled out an automatic weapon. Even picturesque passersby walking small chirpy dogs became gun-toting, bellowing maniacs. A silver-haired gran rolled down the hood of a baby carriage revealing a SMAW launcher with a dual function HEDP projectile and nightsighter. Taffy Moodswing, who ran the boat-hire service, ran screaming up the steps with an H&K, rapid-firing before a target had so much as graced his eye. Any sign of mannered deportment went out the window. Even as he was firing a Winchester the fishman yelled that he couldn’t hear himself think. Taffy was slobbering like a primitive, strafing the pier buildings with a fierce and Freudian inaccuracy. Granny launched the SMAW and blew the north end of the boardwalk to matchwood - Bleach and I were behind a lifeboat and dwarfed by the wall of splintering debris.

The shooting resumed before the smoke had cleared. And when I looked around Bleach had selected the Norinco submachine. She took aim with soulful eyes and wasn’t at all cruel. She’d been shot in the arm once and said it was like having her picture taken by god. Tightening on the squeeze like a Grafenberg manoeuvre - the cords in her arm and shoulder moved like a river and the recoil erased any question from her mind. Linda Hamilton with a touch of Spinoza, a ballistic angel, her beauty at that instant was intravenous.

Bleach swapped the AK for the Armalite and, aiming, narrowed her eyes. Her nipples were hardened like acorns.

‘This’ll hurt.’

Taffy prancing across the fireline - Bleach let it go. The scene was like a Scorsese movie but without the pretence at moral justification - and the gore looked fake. The fishman yelled from behind rubble. ‘You and the clown better throw down your weapons or any moment now you’ll be zinc-eyed and deceased.’ I couldn’t believe he was acting so superior when all he ever sold were manually-strangled lobsters whose bleak features told a tale of unrelieved despair. I began shooting at him tentatively.

But I was no good and kept hitting gulls and surfacing anchovies. Bleach was appalled and we began arguing without restraint. We got onto communism as usual, and Bleach repeated her view that Russia was never a communist country seeing as communism is the abolition of class and all they ever did in Russia was abolish the middle one. Finally she said she was ashamed to be seen with me and stormed off down the boardwalk, her white tanktop an easy sight-target as she took casual pot-shots left and right with the 9mm. She scudded away in the car so I had to walk back.

In town the firing had become more sparse and emphatic. Chief of the Cops Henry Blince declaimed from a balcony but the combined effort of his mouth, nose, arms and legs could not produce the level of authority required to quell the masses. Brute Parker fired at him boisterously with the same Corbray he’d used in the Delayed Reaction.

But within twenty-four hours the only work for the cops was in cutting down the hanged and wading through blood so thick it pulled their boots off. The temperature dropped dramatically - at 92 degrees there are murders galore but at minus 92 they’re unnecessary. Even the mosquitoes were frozen. Parker tried to make soup in a cauldron of water, boiling his Corbray and spent shells. Everyone was ashamed at having shot people without arranging an alibi. As Bleach and I argued in the Reaction we were shivering so much our features were a blur. I compromised by agreeing to use BBs, which take people’s eyes out no matter where you point them. But the whole mess had lowered my bridge in regard to Beerlight, its alleys and apartments full of brooding garbage, stoved-in TVs and shipwrecked cars, the air polluted by flying ammunition. Even the squalor was nuclear-powered. What was it doing to me? Pretty soon I’d be regarding the world through an infra-red grid.

And for the first time I found myself dreaming of a land far away, where I would be awoken by the clang of opening flowers and walk through apple-green fields full of small, inexpensive cows.