The Crime Studio (7 page)

Ben Stalkeye had a fierce effect upon chance - he had only to walk into a room and the probability figures would go haywire. The unlikeliest things would happen, but on the sole condition that he didn’t want them to. This was detrimental to his work - every heist he performed failed through the most bizarre chance events. He could never make anyone understand or believe how there’d be another robbery in progress when he arrived, or the teller would be struck acutely blind at the moment he passed over the note, or the gun he held would simply and impossibly turn into a sweetcorn. It happened. By tradition those who make pacts with the devil have some success in life, so Stalkeye assumed he’d made a pact with god.

A benign illustration of his effect on chance was his ability to throw a dice a couple of hundred times and always have it come up the same number, so long as he didn’t want it to. If he tried to demonstrate this to someone it wouldn’t happen, because he wanted it to. Stalkeye was fascinated and appalled by the immaculate simplicity of his private hell.

But despite absolutely everything Stalkeye was not one to kick back and let the blistering inferno of circumstance reduce him to bleached bone. The logical thing was to find someone else who had the same problem, but who didn’t want to accomplish any form of crime. If brought along on the robbery this party would influence the probability ratings in favour of a successful heist and thus neutralise the effects of Stalkeye’s bad luck. Stalkeye would have at least a fighting chance of performing a hold-up with the standard odds.

After eight farcical years he ran slambang into a woman who was running away from Deal Street in a flurry of smackers and sobbing like a struck deacon. Stalkeye took her aside and she explained her plight in finely-crafted detail. She had been all fired up to make a small deposit at a Deal Street bank when she saw a gun sat in one of the bank’s litterbaskets. She took this to a teller and was instantly given vast quantities of cash. Then the teller began screaming and the woman bolted as though checking out of a hotel. She had inadvertently robbed two hundred and fifty thousand smackers from the stockpile. ‘This town is full of recidivists,’ she sobbed. ‘Recidivists and people of imagination. I just want to be good like a lamb or perhaps a turtle.’ Her name was Gerty Hundred Ram, regrettably. But Stalkeye perceived in her an innocence which, if channelled correctly, would make more money than war.

He told her he’d by all means help her to make her deposit - what could be more simple? At the strategic hour he’d just pull the Ingram M11 out of his coat and rob the life out of the establishment. They went straight across town to a bank on Cardiac Avenue and stood in line. When they reached the front and it was time to start the robbery, Stalkeye found that he simply couldn’t be bothered. He was mildly startled by this new complacency. Gerty, in her turn, was no longer concerned about making a deposit, but couldn’t understand why. The two were crippled by a rictus of lethargy and finally had to excuse themselves and leave the bank, mystified.

Back at Stalkeye’s fragile apartment he calculated the distortions of the day on a blackboard as Gerty sifted desultorily through her two hundred and fifty thousand smackers. It was crystal clear that in neutralising each other’s bad luck at the bank, they had temporarily neutralised each other’s desire to do anything there. Stalkeye recalled how he had been idly fascinated by the patterns on the floor. The sudden absence of annihilating fortune had left he and Gerty in a shock which resembled heaven. They lined up each other’s chakras like a snake swallowing a pole. And when they got used to each other, Stalkeye reasoned, they’d be able to rob a bank like any other couple.

Meanwhile they were growing accustomed to doing what they wanted without all the forces of nature strategically mustering against them. They could move about the apartment without harmful incident. They could go see a movie together without getting mugged any more often than the national statistics suggested. They watched street-mimes without laughing. Everything was as it should be.

When acting independently, however, it was back to the old days. Whenever Gerty went alone to make a deposit at the bank she’d return with at least a hundred smackers. And if Stalkeye tried to rob a bank, as he felt he should as the man of the house, he’d end up buying shares. Once he opened a gilt-edged account which would yield impressive dividends, and left the bank boiling with frustration. Gerty once laughed hysterically at the antics of a street performer and was too ashamed to tell Stalkeye about it when she went home.

Only together did they add up to two normal people. And it was with this certainty that Stalkeye proposed his gas-attack on the bank on Belly Street. Gerty protested that they had enough money from her visits to the bank and attempts to give to charity. Stalkeye let her disagree, all too aware that if they both wanted the robbery it wouldn’t stand a chance. In most things they held opposing views, and their well-being depended on this balance.

But as the robbery approached, a new anti-crime campaign started up in Beerlight. Henry Blince pledged to halve crime in ignorance of the old Zeno principle that if you keep halving something indefinitely you’ll never get rid of it. The alternative was to halve crime and allocate the more lucrative half to the government, but this had already been done with the result that public sector crime expanded to fill the gap. It was imperative to the average bank artist to steal as much money as possible to spend after s/he finished the prison term s/he’d be given for stealing it. The cod sentence held no fear for those providing for a family. So the new campaign consisted of relentless, guilt-spiked appeals to do something redemptive for someone other than oneself or one’s family and loved ones. But disregard the crime families in Beerlight and all you’re left with is the Beerlight cop department - the campaign was like Henry Blince throwing open a window and yelling ‘Lemme alone, bastards!’

Fazed by the lack of logic or conviction in the campaign, Gerty began to have a rip-roaring change of heart. She found she wanted the hold-up to be an exorbitant success. And it was as she and Stalkeye stood outside the Belly Street bank priming the M-79 gas-grenade launchers that Gerty realised this. She immediately tried to tell him but he waved her off. Stalkeye knew she viewed his heist dreams as an obsession, and thought this was a last-ditch attempt at discouragement. The plan was airtight and all that remained was to keep the odds at a standard level. Gerty yelled that the odds were screwed - they both wanted the heist to work, so it was dead in the water. But the hour was nigh – Stalkeye pulled on his gas mask and kicked into the bank. Gerty knew they were doomed - that the odds were piled so high against them it was a wonder they could open the bank door. She pulled on her mask and went in after him.

But the odds were standard - Stalkeye, too, had had a change of heart. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself but the new campaign had driven a gas truck through the gibbon-house of his sensibilities and he felt as sorry as hell for the cops. The heist went like a dream. Stalkeye and Gerty were wading through smackers and lived together with a happiness which would have seared the skin off a less robust couple.

Louie the Garb was the most disconcerting man alive. He was like a grapefruit - you never knew what was going on inside. A couple of times he called me ‘Sonny Jim’. Another time he slit his arm, pulled out a long and purple vein and said ‘What’s this?’

Billy told me he’d seen Louie coming out of a manhole on Deal with a tub of ice cream. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Louie missed whole weeks by walking behind them like they were the facade of a movie set. He claimed he could detect tiny pastoral scenes in his saliva. He robbed a drugstore disguised as a giant wren. He walked down the street while manifestly asleep. He spent every evening projecting
The
Magnificent Ambersons
onto his own face. Confronted with the most serious news or sternest caution, Louie would crease with a hilarity that knew no earthly bounds. Without provocation he’d admire you through tears of mirth, shake your hand, and slap your back while you were facing the other way. When people saw him approaching they were filled with a strange, unwarranted guilt and a dread of the unexpected. Everyone hated Louie the Garb and wished him dead. I myself once pushed him down the stairs to stop him laughing. One time he got Sammy Vale to deliver a violin case to Brute Parker at the all-night gun shop. When Brute opened the case a weird lizard skittered out, knocking ammo off the counter and scaring the customers. Parker punched Vale, strangled the lizard and called Louie on the phone, shouting at him to keep his monsters to himself. Louie stood on a soapbox on the corner of Chain and went into convulsions, juddering to beat the band until Brute remarked it was time he was discredited with an assassin’s bullet.

Cool as a cucumber and half as intelligent, Parker called a meeting at the Delayed Reaction. ‘I’ve had it up to -’ and he punched Billy Panacea in the throat, ‘-
here
with Louie.’ Parker set up a committee to give Louie the cod-eye or injure him in a way that would make him know. I myself, being known to the denizens of Beerlight as a man of no fixed personality, was charged with the post of treasurer. Now since no money was ever invested in the assassination project I had nothing to do but sit back and admire the mayhem and that suited me fine.

‘Murder in this town,’ muttered Brute, jaded at the sheer bureaucracy involved in concealing a killing. ‘You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.’ The two factors involved were setting and transport. Because Brute wanted the whole thing to look like a random strafe he couldn’t bean Louie during the nightly projection of
Ambersons
. And the only other thing that could be predicted about Louie was his attendance of the Muse Street movie house when they were showing an Overbite double feature - so Brute threatened the manager and gave him a few boisterous prods in the eye, telling him to show a season of Arquette movies. Then he acquired an old beat-up vehicle because he knew the best place to put a body is in overalls under a car with its legs sticking out. Nobody bothers it for days and when it is discovered the swiftness of the murder inquiry depends on the social standing of the murderee, this being indicated by the make and expense of the vehicle.

At the appointed hour Brute stood at the third-floor window of a tenement block across from the Muse Street movie house. He’d selected a GE Mini-gun with a fire-rate of 6000 rounds per minute, reasoning that if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing disproportionately. He had on a pair of mirror shades so big they afforded protection to his upper arms. He hadn’t seen Louie enter the house but swore he was in there as he felt it in his bones - Parker always felt things in his bones because, he said, it saved space. Billy was going to keep the street clear by knifing anyone who came near it and Bleach Pastiche was going to feed the belt.

At four transfixing minutes past two Louie pranced out of the movies wearing herbal dungarees and a shirt that broke the sound barrier. Brute opened fire as though there were no tomorrow. The street exploded around Louie, who was pulling on an obviously rented balaclava. Shop windows erupted and waterfalls of glass splashed onto the sidewalk. Louie was walking expertly on his hands amid the destruction. ‘Die, you Situationist bastard!’ bellowed Brute. ‘Die, die, die!’ The antipersonnel gun thundered in his hands, spattering 7.62mm shells across Muse Street as he peered gleefully down the sight. Grey clouds billowed aside allowing us fleeting glimpses of Louie as he mimed walking against the wind. A water hydrant exploded and started to geyser. Bleach was laughing painfully, holding her side as she knelt feeding the ammo with the other hand - Brute was still firing amid a hail of scorching profanity and deafening invective.

When he finally stopped he lowered the gun and peered down, indignant - Louie was sat in the lotus position in the middle of the street, consulting an improving volume. Bleach and I were crying with laughter. ‘He aint even sincere enough to get struck,’ exclaimed Brute, gaping down. He opened up again, but Louie was nowhere in sight - Brute stopped briefly, then resumed fire when Louie drove past, from right to left, in the corpse car Brute had selected earlier. Again a pause, then Louie walked down the empty street, from left to right, convincingly disguised as Brute Parker. Throwing the GE impatiently aside, Brute drew a Dan Wesson and started taking pot-shots at the figure. Louie glided back and forth like a ducktarget at a fairground. Then he stopped, looked up at us with a childlike, preliminary face and inflated his cheeks like a rheumy-eyed blowfish. The whole affair was beyond explanation, like a beard made of concrete. Brute was foaming with fury, and lobbed a cylinder grenade with wild abandon - Louie was at his shoulder, urging him on.

Brute stood quickly, backing against the wall - Bleach and I were in a corner, incapacitated by mirth. ‘Don’t come any closer you goddamn surrealist from hell, or I’ll splatter your brains all over the wall!’ There was an edge of desperation in Brute’s voice which even Brute had never heard. Grandly stationary, Louie stood awaiting the shot. The air was so charged with static we had bits of paper stuck to our faces. Brute clicked on empty. He frowned, lowered the gun and tore off his shades. With every second that passed he was losing weeks of discipline forged while breaking bricks with his eyelashes in the Shaolin Temple. Finally he burst into sobs, and Louie looked upon him with the empathy of a saint. It was like a Jimmy Stewart movie, but without the vomiting. Two days later, Brute’s mother sent a telegram to congratulate Brute on the mature reunion with his kid brother. ‘To understand is to forgive.’

John Stoop amazed everyone by his lack of appearance. Without his voice this man could not be identified. He possessed the anonymity of those who are in such a state of health and standard opinion as to be almost undetectable to the human eye. At the start of any social encounter Stoop would have to state in no uncertain terms exactly who and what he was. His own mother didn’t recognise him - one time he went to see her and she only let him in when he told her he was Robert de Niro. Finally he had to sing a nursery rhyme from his youth to prove he was John Stoop her beloved son.

Now after this incident an idea kissed Stoop’s brain - perhaps the first and best he ever had - and he decided to experiment. He hovered through the fog and filthy air to the all-night gun shop on the corner of Dive and Ride and said hello to Brute Parker, who was gutting a rodent. Of course Brute couldn’t place him despite their twenty hazardous years of friendship, but instead of saying right off who he was, Stoop introduced a dud moniker. ‘Damage is the name,’ said John Stoop. ‘Harry Damage. Five foot eight. Blue eyes, brown hair and a chin straight out of a graphic novel.’

‘What can I do for you Mr Damage,’ said Brute Parker without blinking. Stoop put a down-payment on a 40mm grenade-pistol, left a laughable address and breezed out, heart beating like a steamhammer. Suggestion and projection - John Stoop was a blank screen on which the denizens of Beerlight would be happy to shine whatever he demanded.

Stoop took the snail by the horns and stationed himself at the bar of the Delayed Reaction. ‘Remember me?’ he said to Don Toto, ‘I am Tony Endless, who goes around stealing dogs for a living. Gimme a scotch with everything in it or I’ll die right here.’

‘Now now Tony you stay calm and collected,’ said Toto, ‘while I build a drink which in no time at all will have us hooking you off the ceiling with a broom.’

‘Put it on the tab or I won’t be responsible for anything.’

‘Right Tony.’

And now Stoop turned to his neighbour at the bar and executed a mighty plan which he would repeat on a dozen occasions over the ensuing weeks. Reminding them of who he was, he would give his victims an icy smile and state it all in a mild manner. Posing as Tony Endless, for instance, his remarks to Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, went something like this:

♦ ♦ ♦

STOOP: Your sanity’s on the ropes, Billy. All I see you doing these days is punching dogs in the nose and re-breaking leg fractures in a drunken stupor. A bad telephone manner while speaking in person and a head unembellished by a brain. You must have a hole in your pocket - there’s a rat on the floor. Ha, just joking you poor sick son of a bitch. Extraordinaire eh? Bloodless, baleful and tentacular more like. You’re a seacow in its larval state. These poor infants might be mesmerised by your ragged credentials but not this joker. Going full-steam for the criminal nut-house eh Billy? Who’d have thought it. It’ll end in tears Billy. Tears and vomit in a rubber room. Pupils fixed and dilated, if you want the facts - and for what. For the purposes of pert insolence and carefree havoc - the most juvenile of hobbies. If I were in your state of mind I’d shoot myself to a standstill. Don’t spare us - even now everyone here is making elaborate arrangements to deal with your death fumes. Billy’s wan corpse on a blistering bonfire in
McKenna Square
. They’ll be grateful at having been provided with a joy to feel. God knows they’ve moved heaven and earth to be rid of the unholy bedlam of your imagination. I wouldn’t like to be a hen within lusting distance of your beady eye. My god the lard you must get through. Your father would turn in his grave and spike his own nose if he so much as guessed at your evil. And your hairstyle is clearly the result of a misunderstanding.

BILLY: I beg your pardon.

STOOP: Oh that’s good. That’s very, very good, I suppose you’re just some harmless patron mewing and puking at the bar. Well you’ve never pulled the rug over my eyes Sonny Jim. It’s time for you and me to kill kill kill at the appointed hour.
Midnight
at the Waits Warehouse.

♦ ♦ ♦

Then he would storm out of the bar and leave his victim in a state of aggrieved bewilderment. Such an unprovoked litany of the obvious was known to the denizens of Beerlight as a ‘Pinter’. It was such a common form of address that no one batted an eyelid but a mortal challenge out of the blue was a cause for concern and anticipation. Of course neither Stoop nor the figure he had impersonated would ever show up at the appointed hour and victims such as Billy Panacea would grow angry and primal, calling upon the home of the erstwhile adversary and firing suavely through the open door. In fact Billy brought an antique Russian mace out of storage and accosted the innocent Tony Endless while at prayer, breaking his arm in seven important places. Sam Transam, whose business it was to sell insulation in the form of codeine, performed a sprightly shooting in Suede Street and ventilated El Henry after John Stoop posed as El Henry and called him an affront to bigots everywhere. Stoop posed as Billy Panacea and told John ‘Kickstart’ Kelly he knew damn well what he got up to, after which Billy Panacea found himself trying to outrun a Harley ridden by John ‘Kickstart’ Kelly. Babyface Terrier punched Chief of the Cops Henry Blince out of all recognition after Stoop posed as Blince and gave Terrier a stern warning. The Beretta Triangle was up to its face in a vortex of mistaken identity.

After a few weeks of this Stoop was sick and aching from constant abdominal laughter. It was such a change from the meek odyssey of his former life. With an ego small enough to pass easily through a monofilament gill net, he had relied so much on others’ perception of him that his own life was semi-autobiographical. It was a blameless existence - yet now he was to blame for almost everything. He was overcome with a kind of mythical pride as it occurred to him that he had invented an entirely new crime. Supersaturated with the wired, life-affirming urge to rumble and cheat, he became bold.

The heistmaster Jerry Diesel was demonstrating to the riveted Delayed Reaction regulars his fluency in
Behlta
, a Beerlight dialect which consists entirely of the vocal imitation of automatic gunfire. In the middle of it Stoop burst in and said that he, Brute Parker, would have the whole bar know just as well as he did that Jerry Diesel was a deviant turbo-monkey who deserved to be sublimated with a knife. Then he clasped both hands about the throat of his mystified adversary. Diesel rolled his eyes like a deepfrozen sheep as John Stoop shook him, braying with laughter. When a few meek voices questioned these fashionable events, Stoop told them he could do anything he wanted seeing as he was Brute Parker, fascist bastard extraordinaire.

‘Like hell you are,’ rumbled Brute Parker, and Stoop halted as though preserved in a lava flow. Parker was standing at the door and exhibiting all the warmth of a burst blowfish. He’d dropped by to scope for the Damage guy who’d failed to hold up on the grenade-gun deal. Stoop let Jerry Diesel subside as the whole bar advanced toward him.

It was Anxiety Hall for John Stoop amid the whirling and expensive disturbance that followed. Bundling their nemesis into the basement and strapping him to a barrel, fifty denizens sat and waited for the scales to fall from their eyes. Nothing happened. Among the onlookers was Stoop, his silent sniggers making him tremble like a roosting bat. The man they had captured was Brute Parker, and he would never let them forget it.