The Night Mayor (2 page)

Mazurki prodded me from behind, and I wound up in the back seat, wedged between the two hoodlums. The gun was still talking, holding a close-up, intimate conversation with my ribcage. I could get to dislike that.

Marc Lawrence was driving. We took the scenic route. Thunder Road, 711 Ocean Drive, 99 River Street, Nightmare Alley, Scarlet Street, the Street of Chance, the House on Telegraph Hill, Flamingo Road…

When we went under streetlamps, Duryea’s slicked-back hair shone. He fancied himself as a sharpie, and wore a thin-striped suit. He was pleased with himself, but everyone in the car knew he had made a wrong decision buying cologne.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘Will we be long? I promised to take my kid sister to the Philharmonic.’

‘You ask a lot of questions, shamus,’ said Duryea.

I don’t like being called ‘shamus’. It sounds stupid. I also don’t like being called ‘gumshoe’, ‘flatfoot’, ‘dick’, ‘tec’, ‘snooper’, ‘peeper’, ‘cheapie’, ‘the perpetrator’, ‘dead meat’ or ‘Elihu J. Stemwaller’ for related reasons.

‘I have an enquiring mind. A handy thing in my line of work.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Mr Daine don’t like questions so much.’

I refrained from commenting on his grammar. ‘Why not? Doesn’t he have any answers?’

Mazurki held my shoulder. ‘You a wise guy?’

My shoulder hurt. ‘I wasn’t always a detective. I started as a gag writer for Bob Hope. Now I can’t kick the habit.’

‘Funny, huh?’

‘No, not particularly. That’s why I got into this business. The pay’s lousy, the hours stink, you get beaten up every day of the week with an “a” in it, but at least there’s no pressure on you to make jokes all the time.’

‘Wise guy.’

Mazurki disgustedly took his hand away, and my shoulder hurt some more. Duryea giggled, like ice cubes cracking in blood. Maybe Daine had him mixed up with the young Richard Widmark. It’s an easy mistake.

I was tired. That’s the way I tend to feel at half past two in the morning if I’ve been out in the rain for hours and get abducted.

And in the City it was two thirty a.m. for ever. That was late, no matter how I looked at it. I felt like a hungover zombie.

The situation demanded Bogart, but the best I could manage was Boris Karloff. Stretched out on a slab. A few bolts of lightning and I’d be okay, but right now the torch-carrying villagers would have nothing to worry about. I practiced curling my upper lip back in a Bogartian sneer, but couldn’t carry it off.

I looked out the window. Cagney was dying in a gutter, holding his insides in. Glenda Farrell was kneeling by him, explaining to a caped cop with a smoking tommy gun. I couldn’t hear the words, but I recited her dialogue along with her. ‘He used to be a big shot.’ Kiss tomorrow goodbye, Jimmy.

Shit, I thought. But I couldn’t say anything stronger than ‘hell’. The City was getting to me. The Hays Code was invading my mind. I shut my eyes. Sleep was tempting, but I had the feeling the Body Snatchers were in the neighbourhood. My guess was that if 1 were to sleep, I’d wake up changed.

Of course, unless I got to Daine soon, I’d be changed anyway. I had figured that out for myself, without any help from the governor of Princetown. After a few more spins with this crazy croupier, I’d bet away my independence. I’d be a permanent resident. It didn’t appeal as an afterlife: a possible eternity as a private eye in the City. Slugged with blackjacks, kicking in doors, finding icepick-stuck corpses, betrayed by black-lipped blondes. Being beat up, locked up, busted, mistrusted, got at, shot at, framed, maimed, frayed, mislaid and underpaid.

An important lesson: just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.

Or worse.

‘You been taking an undue interest in Mr Daine’s affairs, shamus,’ said Duryea. ‘He will be most displeased.’

‘Shamus, shamus, what’s with this “shamus”?’ I snapped back. ‘How would you feel if I kept calling you “torpedo”, “mobster”, “thug”, “gnat-brains”, “gunsel” or “chiseller”?’

‘I wouldn’t like it.’

‘Well, just imagine how I feel.’

‘Ah, but there’s a difference between us.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m not sitting next to a 200-pound professional wrestler with an automatic held to my kidneys.’

‘You know, Danny, that makes a lot of sense.’

The limousine faded out along Main Street. A fade-out is like hyperspace. It’s supposed to cut out the journey, but really it just rips off a few hours of your life and gives you a skull-cracker of a headache. Me, I’d rather ride the streetcar, but I don’t make the rules.

During the fade, it wasn’t just night outside the car, it was the total darkness of the blind, an endless absence of anything. The sound cut out, but I still had vision. Duryea and Mazurki grinned at each other. Their mouths opened too wide, and their faces distorted like scary clowns. I told myself it wasn’t real. But even if it wasn’t, it felt as if it was. The city demanded you take it seriously, play by the house rules. Otherwise, you could be due for an extended vacation in the Snake Pit. I concentrated on the back of Lawrence’s head, and tried to ignore the deep space beyond the still-waving wipers. The dandruff on the driver’s collar wasn’t very interesting, but at least it wasn’t a threat.

Lawrence took his hands off the wheel and reached behind him, to scratch the back of his head with both hands. His thinning hair parted under his fingers, and a diseased eye winked at me from his scalp.

Cheap trick, I tried to say. But there was no sound.

The limo faded in. The engine and the rain were momentarily deafening.

‘…ick!’ came out of me. Lawrence looked round, sad-eyed, a waxed failure of a moustache clinging to his upper lip, hands back on the wheel. A cigarette dripped from the corner of his mouth.

‘Keep ya eyes on the road, weasel,’ snarled Duryea, and Lawrence turned back. He didn’t have an eye in the back of his head. Not now.

We had faded in on Poverty Row. I had been in town long enough to know the place. It was the worst slum in the City, far from the swish Metro and Paramount districts. Jerry-built tenements cramped together, as convincing as cardboard flats. Every hotel room had an irritating sign flashing outside the window. Every alley had a mangy black cat set to cringe in a flashlight beam. When a door got slammed, the walls shook. There weren’t many people on the streets at any time of the day. Extras cost money. This was the world of peeling paint, tap-dancing cockroaches and the constant shadow of the boom mike. On Poverty Row, life had a low budget and a short running time.

‘Get out of the car,’ said Duryea. I thought of two or three wisecrack answers, but kept them to myself. I even got out of the car.

Back in the rain, I found my shoulder still hurt. Plus my ribs hurt, my calves hurt, my head hurt. I could go on, but you’ve got the general idea.

Duryea and Mazurki joined me on the sidewalk. The car crept away. I noticed a human hand protruding from the trunk.

‘Lawrence has another delivery to make, shamus,’ said Duryea, overdoing it. ‘To the East River.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘No, but I hope you get a chance to get acquainted real soon.’

We were in front of a cheesy office block, the Monogram. Duryea kicked the aged front door in. The sky shook unconvincingly. The lobby was empty, except for a derelict curled up in a spill of garbage between an overstuffed chair and the reception desk.

‘Lookit the bum!’ Duryea prodded him with the toe of his black-and-white shoe. The old man turned over. His throat was a mess of black blood. Outside, something bayed at the painted moon. Mazurki crossed himself, and muttered darkly in Ukrainian.

This wasn’t part of my plot. Poverty Row was a catch-all place, an open sewer of clichés feeding into the elephants’ graveyard of ideas. Mazurki reached into his pants pocket and produced two silver coins stamped with Walter Huston’s head. He put them on the corpse’s eyes and stood back.

‘That’ll keep him down.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ crowed Duryea, impatient with this time out. ‘But where’s the night man? He’s supposed to keep this stuff out of the foyer.’

Duryea hitched his shoulders, a hand-me-down Cagneyism that looked bad on him, and jammed his palm down on a bell on the desk. A door behind opened, and a stooped figure shuffled on stage. The night man had large, watery eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses, quivering lips and a sparse moustache. It was a familiar face, but I couldn’t have put a name to it without the Scrabble prop on the desk that spelled it out. Byron Foulger.

Duryea reached out and grabbed Foulger’s striped tie.

‘Where wuz ya, worm? Scared of the big bad wolf?’

Foulger whined and dithered, and Duryea dropped him.

‘Mr Daine is gonna be displeased, Byron. Ya better start combing the situations vacant in the
Inquirer.
I’m sure someone somewhere wants a squealing rat. Now, call up the boss and tell him his guest is here.’

The night man rattled an antique telephone and talked quietly into it. I was close enough to him to hear the nothing at the other end. It wasn’t even connected to the wall socket.

‘He’s expecting you,’ said Foulger, spitefully.

Mazurki jerked me towards the elevator. We did a minor fade instead of riding up.

The penthouse was surprisingly plush. A panoramic window laid the rain-distorted city out like a corpse. The place was decorated in Early Modern Uncomfortable, with coffee tables shaped like swimming pools and chairs like big black marshmallows. Monochrome etchings hung conspicuously, looking more like sketches than finished work. Daine was a collector.

Duryea poured bourbon. Thick liquid gurgled. An unseen gramophone oozed over-orchestration. ‘Charmaine’. Strings sawed at the brass, the melody drowned.

I took the glass offered me, and drank it down. The hell of it – is that in the City you don’t taste anything. You get drunk, but it might as well be sugared water. Then, I didn’t even want to get drunk.

I handed the glass back to Duryea, and felt the whisky grab my brain. Mazurki hit me in the stomach.

‘Chew on that, wise guy!’

I doubled up, and collapsed onto a grey bombazine couch. It felt like fabric stretched over a concrete lump. I’d have vomited, but no one throws up in the City.

The pain got worse. While I was trying to rearrange my insides into their original configuration, someone came in. A smooth, tall, slightly plump man in a quilted smoking jacket. I didn’t need to match him to the description.

It was Truro Daine.

S
usan Bishopric entered the White Room. A violent black-red shape marred the glaspex sheen of the walls. It was her own reflection. She couldn’t Dream with a distract like that. She twisted her chameleon cameo, and the kimono dragons pinked and passed. Susan scanned the tanned backs of her hands. Ideally she would have had a skinpale too, but now she couldn’t spare the time or expense. Besides, she only had an update scheduled, not a full Dream.

She couched and swung the slab over her lap. She intapped a polite ID and inslotted the
Vanessa Vail
master. A dreamflower bloomed in the bowl; she plucked it. Hooking a stray tress behind her ear, she pressed the flower to her temple. The subcutaneous terminal pricked in with a slight tickle. She blinked, and melshed with the machine.

Susan did not intend a complete surrender to
Vanessa Vail.
Just a mnemonic skim to check the externals. Volume up, vision up, sens up. She was inside:

Vanessa Vail
: deadly, glamorous, capable, highly-sexed international adventuress.

For a moment, she was overwhelmed, feeling the unfamiliar strength of the similie’s limbs, the ease of her pleasures. Was it only five years since she had Dreamed
Vanessa Vail
? Had her body really changed that much? Or had she idealised her former self more than she had thought? In realising the fantasy of lithe Vanessa, Susan had built a heroine out of herself. Vanessa Vail had a mind like a stiletto. For a moment Susan was uncomfortable inside it.

Here’s to you, Dr Frankenstein. Just you wait, Henry Higgins. Susan knew what it was like to be outstripped by her creation. Children always turn out to be bastards.

But Vanessa Vail was comfortably doomed by the concept. No need to waste good envy on her. Susan pulled out and dipped into:

Vanessa’s three lovers: Ray Chance, taciturn CIA agent. Nikolai Kropotkin, fiery Soviet commissar. Lord Roger Marshaller, suave English aristocrat.

And sometimes into:

The air, as a detached, invisible presence in the
Vanessa Vail
sub-universe. Swooping over a firesabre duel in the Finnish wastes. Peeping at troilist romance on a blazing Cuban beach. Observing intrigue in a Jesuit opium den within the walls of Vatican City. Vanessa demolishing a troop of Liechtensteinian police andrews with balletic
baritsu
kicks.

The D-9000 had concepted
Vanessa Vail
, tailoring it precisely to audience requirements. But Susan Bishopric had Dreamed it, depthing out the internals, filling in the externals. As a professional, she knew she had to take the commissions that came up on the slab. At the time, she had been pathetically grateful to Tony for chancing on her for such a solid product. She had even got a few good crix on it. And the sales had been good. Not in the John Yeovil slot, but enough to establish her name. Even she was prepared to admit that her solo stuff hadn’t then been up to much. Typical juvie nonsense, most of it.
Vanessa Vail
was far less embarrassing to her now than, say,
The Light of the Bright World Dies
, with its fuzzy emotional politics, or
Deaf and Blind
, which must surely count as the archest Dream of its season.

But that was then. Now she was at a different career stage. Since
Vanessa Vail
, the nature of the collaboration had changed. With each Dream, Susan had wrestled more control and with
The Parking Lottery
– due, Yggdrasil willing, to scoop the Rodneys this autumn – she had almost edged the cranky computer out. Soon she would be popular enough to declare her independence. Then she could concept her own Dreams. And now, she hoped, she was strong enough to think on her own, to create something of lasting merit.