Tomorrow, the Killing (37 page)

‘You’ve no regrets?’ he asked finally.

‘A few here and there. But regret’s not enough – you have to pay for it.’

This seemed to spark something in him, some dying ember. His mutter became a shout, or the closest he could muster. ‘Have you paid for it, Lieutenant? Have you paid? You couldn’t save Rhaine, so you set the city awash in blood. I see the smoke from outside my window! How many did you kill for a girl you barely knew? You stand here and lecture me on morality, as if your hands weren’t red to the elbow! As if you had no role in leading Roland to the slaughter!’

‘I wasn’t his father.’ I pulled the locket he had given me that first day from my back pocket and sent it spinning across the desk. ‘Nor hers.’

That was enough. He opened the necklace with trembling hands, spent a while staring at Rhaine’s face.

I took a knife from my belt and flicked it into the wood. ‘Do it.’

He raised his eyes up to mine. ‘They’ll cover it up, won’t they?’

I nodded. ‘They’ll cover it up.’

They did. General Edward Montgomery died of a heart attack, unable to stand the loss of his second child. A few days later they laid him in the family crypt, there to spend eternity beside the bodies of his murdered kin.

I
t’s a sure thing, Warden. You know I wouldn’t steer you wrong.’

It was late afternoon, a week or so after the march. I was sitting at a table outside our front door, trying to move as little as possible, which demands more effort than you’d think. The rain had been coming down more or less constantly since it had started. Walking soaked a man to the skin in half a minute, and the streets had turned from dust to quagmire. It almost made one miss the heat – almost. The storm was finally showing signs of easing, but it hadn’t yet, and I was happy for the overhang that kept me from its reach. I’d been mixing whiskey with water since noon, and started doing away with the water not long after.

‘Ten ochres will get you a hundred in a month, month and a half at the outset. How’s that for a return?’

Tully the Hook was a choke head. If he had other characteristics I don’t remember them. He’d swung by a few minutes earlier, the storm nothing against the chance to fill his lungs with wyrm on my copper.

‘Now sure, I could take care of it myself, but then I figured, why not bring the Warden in on this one? There’s a man, I said, there’s a man what knows his business. There’s a man what knows an opportunity when he sees it, and if this ain’t an opportunity, I’ll eat my hat!’

He’d have eaten a turd wrapped in broken glass if he thought it would get him a pipeful of stem. On principle alone, I ought to have injured him – clearly my reputation was weak beer if a mutt like Tully thought he could waste my time and not risk violence. But every part of me still hurt – walking downstairs left me winded and bitter. I had a vial of breath in my pocket, the same one that had been there for four days, but for some damn fool reason I wouldn’t let myself use it.

‘The whole city’s off-balance – now’s the time to make a move. These Islander folks, all they need is a little push. They’ll do the lifting, dig?’

I took another swig of the whiskey, then set my head on the table. It was not soft. ‘Tully, you say one more word I’m going to kill you and leave your body in an alley. You know I’ll do it.’

There was a sputtering sound of disagreement, but it didn’t harden into speech. Maybe my name still hung together after all. Time passed. Half drunk with my eyes closed I wasn’t sure how much.

The muffled fall of steps alerted me to Tully’s return. Dumb motherfucker couldn’t figure when to make an exit. I pulled a knife out from my boot and slammed it in the table, brought my face up after it, trying to think of something threatening to say.

Wren stared back at me, little impressed. ‘That’s a nice knife.’

‘I . . . thought you were . . .’

‘Tully flitted out the back.’

I nodded uncomfortably, then waved at the opposite bench. Wren set himself into it but didn’t speak. The blade went back in my boot.

We stared at each other for a while. It wasn’t exactly riveting entertainment. The sky was a patchwork fabric of sunlight streaming through the clouds. My whiskey was almost gone. A long pull from the bottle and I lost my last reason for sticking around.

‘Rain’s letting up,’ I said.

‘Looks that way.’

‘I gotta run a thing over to a guy. Fancy a stroll?’

After a moment he nodded, and I pulled myself wearily to my feet, and we started off.

Walking pulled at the spot of stomach that I didn’t have anymore, and reminded me of the dozen other injuries I’d sustained the past week. I was too old to survive many more of these. I was surprised I’d survived this one, truth be told. Wren eased himself down to my pace. It was a while before I mustered the courage to say anything.

‘How’re the lessons going?’

‘All right.’

‘Mazzie doing right by you?’

‘She hasn’t cut me up and made me into a stew, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Yet,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t cut you up and made you into a stew, yet.’

He didn’t laugh. The welt on his face was faded but noticeable. I didn’t like looking at it, but wouldn’t let myself look away.

‘You learn to do anything beside spin colors?’

‘Learning to move things without touching them.’

‘I imagine that might be useful.’

The mud pulled at my boots – I had to tug them loose with every step. Despite the break in the weather, we were the only ones on the streets, hobbling down boulevards a dozen stout men could pass abreast. As we edged toward Offbend we started to pass the first signs of the riot, burned-out shells of houses, charred staircases ascending into nothingness, stone cellar skeletons of quaint A-frames. It had taken fifteen years, but the war had come to Rigus. I hoped this was its parting shot, and not the introductory rampage of a successor.

‘I needed you gone,’ I said finally. ‘Things were set to get bad – there wasn’t any time to do it soft. You stuck around any longer, you wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘As for the rest . . . It could have been handled better.’

We stopped in front of a bar. I walked in, then I walked out. My bag was light a few things that had been in it, my purse correspondingly heavier. We started back towards the docks.

‘Adolphus says Pretories was a traitor, says he was working for Black House,’ Wren began.

‘Yeah?’

‘Says he had Roland killed so he could take over the veterans.’

‘He went along with it, at least.’

‘Why’d he do it?’

I’d been mulling that question over for a while now, ever since I’d watched him die, in fact. I wish we’d had the chance to talk it over, foolish as that sounded. The usual lust for power and money? Was he tired of running the master’s water? Or had he an inkling that Roland was cracked, that someone needed to step in? No sin in refusing to follow a man off a cliff, though there is one in tripping him. ‘We don’t always know why we do things,’ I said.

‘What happens to the Association now?’

‘Same as always. Things don’t really change.’ Though I wasn’t quite sure I believed that. The riots had been a rare black eye for the Old Man. Blame the violence on some renegade offshoot of the Association all you want – at the end of the day, a fair portion of the city was in ashes, and that’s not something that the head of national security is supposed to let happen. I doubted he’d intended it to go quite as it had. Maybe he was losing his touch. It was a disturbing thought, the Old Man growing old. Like the weakening of the tides, the stilling of the wind.

‘How about you and Adolphus?’

We’d yet to speak more than pleasantries, muttered greetings when we passed in the stairwell. I was having trouble meeting his eyes, or he was mine. ‘I don’t have an answer to everything.’

The sun took advantage of its short window to glare off every bit of scrap metal and glass, but it did nothing to ease our passage through six inches of sludge. Outside the front door of a one-room shack a child played naked in a puddle, burbling happily, youth and grime obscuring the sex. Its mother appeared from the egress and shrieked incomprehensibly, dragged her seed out of the muck and started on a beating. I averted my eyes – I’d learned my lesson on family quarrels.

‘How much of it did you set up?’ Wren asked.

‘Less than I thought at the time.’

‘Was it worth it?’

I considered that for a while before answering. ‘Probably not.’

We hooked a right off Light Street and down a narrow alley, cobblestone, thank the Firstborn. It curved its way through a row of tenements, taking us away from the main streets.

‘This isn’t the way back to the Earl,’ Wren said.

‘You got something to do?’

After a hundred yards the road narrowed till we had to walk in file, Wren sprinting on ahead, me pulling myself after as best I could. The defile ended at a little plateau that hovered above a corner of the harbor, a few dozen square feet of dirt and sand cropped into a low hill that rose out of the bay. The water was dark and choppy, blurring at the horizon with the clouds above it. In the jetty below the remains of a handful of skiffs lay dashed against the rocks, casualties of the storm.

‘Did they at least get what was coming to them?’ Wren asked.

‘Who?’

‘The guilty.’

He looked so small at that moment, so damn young. There was a scrub tree growing up out of the rocks, and I leaned against it and rolled up a cigarette. It was burnt down to a nub before I answered. ‘Not all of them.’

That didn’t seem to satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me either, but it was all I had to offer. Another few minutes watching the roiling ocean, and I led us back home.

For the first book I had a lot of time to muck about with compliments and in-jokes, but the hour is growing very late, so no one gets anything more than a shout out. Sorry, I’m pushing a deadline as it is.

Business-wise: Chris and Oliver.

As for family: Mom and Dad. Teddy and Jeanette, Ben, Rachel and Jason. My Grandmother. The Mottolas, with particular attention to Uncle John and his set. All of them, really, and apologies I keep missing Thanksgiving. Next one for sure!

And the friends: Bobby, Mike, Pete, Elliot, Sam. Rusty for military advice. Lisa. Will and John. Alex, with apologies that he didn’t get repped better the first time around. You’re twelve foot tall and piss like a fire hose, all right? Tommy/Bosley. The Eleftherious, and the Roots. The strangers, now friends, that let me sleep on their couches/floors/beds.

I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody, and my apologies to that person/people.

About the Author

Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He can be found in Brooklyn, when he isn’t somewhere else. His debut novel,
The Straight Razor Cure
, received great acclaim.
Tomorrow, The Killing
is the second novel in the ‘Low Town’ series.

You can follow Daniel on Twitter @DanielPolansky, or visit his website to find out more:
www.danielpolansky.com
.

Also by Daniel Polansky

The Straight Razor Cure

Discover Daniel Polansky’s masterful debut

THE

STRAIGHT

RAZOR CURE

I
n the opening days of the Great War, on the battlefields of Apres and Ives, I acquired the ability to abandon slumber with the flutter of an eyelid. It was a necessary adaptation, as heavy sleepers were likely to come to greeted by a Dren commando with a trench blade. It’s a vestige of my past I’d rather lose, all things considered. Rare is the situation that requires the full range of one’s perceptions, and in general the world is improved by being only dimly visible.

Case in point – my room was the sort of place best viewed half asleep or in a drunken stupor. Late autumn light filtered through my dusty window and made the interior, already only a few small steps from squalor, look still less prepossessing. Even by my standards the place was a dump, and my standards are low. A worn dresser and a chipped table set were the only furnishings that accompanied the bed, and a veneer of grime covered the floor and walls. I passed water in the bedpan and threw the waste into the alley below.

Low Town was in full stream, the streets echoing with the screech of fish hags advertising the day’s catch to porters carrying crates north into the Old City. At the market a few blocks east merchants sold underweight goods to middlemen for clipped copper, while down Light Street guttersnipes kept drawn-dagger eyes out for an unwary vendor or a blue-blood too far from home. In the corners and the alleys the working boys kept up the same cries as the fish hags, though they spoke lower and charged more. Worn streetwalkers pulling the early shift waved tepid come-ons at passersby, hoping to pad their faded charms into one more day’s worth of liquor or choke. The dangerous men were mostly still asleep, their blades sheathed next to the bed. The really dangerous men had been up for hours, and their quills and ledgers were getting hard use.

I grabbed a hand mirror off the floor and held it at arm’s length. Under the best of circumstances, perfumed and manicured, I am an ugly man. A lumpen nose dripped below overlarge eyes, a mouth like a knife wound set off-center. Enhancing my natural charms are an accumulation of scars that would shame a masochist, an off-color line running up my cheek from where an artillery shard had come a few inches from laying me out, the torn flesh of my left ear testifying to a street brawl where I’d taken second place.

A vial of pixie’s breath winked good morning from the worn wood of my table. I uncorked it and took a whiff. Cloyingly sweet vapors filled my nostrils, followed closely by a familiar buzzing in my ears. I shook the bottle – half empty, it had gone quick. I pulled on my shirt and boots, then grabbed my satchel from beneath the bed and walked downstairs to greet the late morn.

The Staggering Earl was quiet this time of day, and absent a crowd the main room was dominated by the mammoth figure behind the bar, Adolphus the Grand, co-owner and publican. Despite his height – he was a full head taller than my own six feet – his cask-like torso was so wide as to give the impression of corpulence, though a closer examination would reveal the balance of his bulk as muscle. Adolphus had been an ugly man before a Dren bolt claimed his left eye, but the black cloth he wore across the socket and the scar that tore down his pockmarked cheek hadn’t improved things. Between that and his slow stare he seemed a thug and a dullard, and though he was neither of those things this impression tended to keep folk civil in his presence.