The Night Mayor Read online

  Susan over-and-outed on Tony. Conscription to the Public Service was one of the Yggdrasil nets. The concept was to match individual talents to specific problems. Strictly functional. But as an artist – all right, entertainer (Susan Bishopric: four-dimensional tap-dancer) – Susan supposed she was useless. That was certainly the way her parents had looked at it when she tested Talent-positive.

  She knew Tom Tunney slightly. He Dreamed historical detective stories. Get Richie Quick, Richie Quick – Private Dick, The Quick and the Dead. Very derivative of twentieth-century flatties. She had enjoyed the first in a minor key and not bothered with the sequels. His sales were up and his crix were down. Wherever he was, she was going. Offhand, Susan couldn’t think of anything important in the West Country aside from sheep processing and Cellophane City.

  An idea struck. She tapped into her NatBank account. The figures whirred like an odometer on FASTER-THAN-UGHT. A large sum was being credited to her. Payment in advance. Conclusion: she was not being seconded to the Volunteer Police or the Rural Reclamation Corps. Further, although more debatable, conclusion: whatever it was she was being asked (ordered) to do was unusual. Final deep-down gut feeling: it was likely to be at best nasty and at worst suicidal. She knew enough about the Gunmint to figure that.

  Uh-huh. If you want a kidnapped royal rescued from a renegade superscientist’s island enclave, get Vanessa Vail. Ink Susan Bishopric out. Was it worth dodging? She could be Transconcorde-exing the country within the hour. Before they came for her. And come they would – armoured andrews, polite voices behind opaque visors, spidercopters. She had Dreamed enough policiers to know the system.

  No, exing was out. There was extradition from everywhere, anyway. She told herself she was overreacting. Whatever it was couldn’t be that terrible, and would just have to be put up with.

  She changed her clothe, flakjakked, and waited for them.

  3

  I was in Daine’s penthouse, trying to figure a way of taking the hand. I was clutching a pair of dubious deuces, and he had the whole deck fanned in his manicured fingers.

  How had I got into this? That was a dumb thing to think, since I flashbacked:

  Spinning newspaper headlines: FIRST NATIONAL BANK KNOCKED OVER!; SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH, FIFTH AND SIXTH NATIONAL BANKS KNOCKED OVER!; THE KHALIFIA KIDNAPPED – DAINE WANTS 70 MILL!; REIGN OF TERROR CONTINUES!; SHIP SINKS – ONLY ONE SURVIVOR!; INTERNATIONAL COURT WITNESSES SUCCUMB TO BUBONIC PLAGUE!; ‘NO PRISON WILL HOLD ME!’ VOWS SUPERCROOK!; GUILTY! GUILTY!! GUILTY!!!; THE INQUIRER SAYS ‘FRY THE RAT!’; TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS IN SING SING!

  News on the March clips: stock footage explosions, skimmer chases, baffled cops reading official statements, Daine blankfaced in mindcuffs, the scales of justice, Princetown.

  Then I came into it: Tom Tunney, Dreamer. One broken marriage and two inferior sequels away from the peak of my career. There I was, quietly stealing the plot for my next Dream from a 1947 flatty (Ride the Pink Horse, since you asked) and hoping the crix would miss it. Then 1 got conscripted to the Public Service, and dumped on the Midnight Special for the City…

  Someone kindly kicked me in the head. That brought me back to the present. Whenever that was. Hell, I had to kill Daine before this started making sense.

  Hey, Lissa, look at me. Your ex-husband, the private eye. About to be beaten to a pulp in someone else’s nightmare. Proud of me yet?

  ‘Here’s your shamus. Mr Daine,’ said Duryea. ‘He got sick.’

  ‘Well done, Daniel.’ Truro Daine had a cultivated accent. The kind you cultivated on agar jelly in a petri dish.

  I tried to do something difficult, like stand up. I half made it. Mazurki made sure I went the distance by grabbing me under the armpits and lifting me as easily as I might lift a coat.

  ‘Hey, Mighty Joe Young, give me a break. I get airsick.’

  Mazurki let my feet touch carpet. ‘We didn’t damage him none,’ he said.

  ‘Very good. Mr Detective, do you have a name?’

  ‘Quick. Richie Quick.’

  Daine laughed, walked over to the drinks table and mixed himself a frozen strawberry daiquiri. It looked like grey gruel. ‘Drink?’

  ‘I’ve had one.’

  I had my hand inside my coat, clutching my stomach. I felt for my gun. The Bobbsey Twins hadn’t lifted it. Typical thugs, dumber than Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda. One quick shot before Daine could catch on, that was all I wanted. It wouldn’t make the kind of mess you’d get in waking life; just a black spot on his starched shirtfront.

  But he’d be dead. And I’d be back on the sleeper for Momingtown.

  Daine had made up the rules and fixed them against himself. I hoped. In the flatties, the good guys always win. I was a private eye, a solid 100 per cent good guy. I was friends with crippled newspaper vendors, small Negro orphans and garrulous bartenders up and down the strip. Daine was a murderer, arsonist, dope peddler, pornographer, blackmailer, flamboyant thief and escaped convict. He was also a scandalous sexual degenerate, even if in the City that just meant an inordinate fondness for modern art, black cats and correct grammar. I couldn’t lose.

  I pulled my gun and squeezed off a shot.

  A jet of water squirted across the room, arcing down ineffectually. A black line stained the grey carpet. Daine laughed. Duryea and Mazurki didn’t believe it. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  ‘Very clever, Mr… Quick, wasn’t it?’ Daine bit down on the name. ‘But here, I call the shots. In this case, literally.’

  I was holding a goddamned five-and-dime plastic water pistol. I threw it away. It dribbled on the floor.

  ‘The City is mine, Mr Quick. I’m like the Mayor. The Night Mayor. Watch.’

  A brief flash of concentration passed over Daine’s smooth features.

  He was wearing a top hat, white tie and tails, and standing in front of a white wall.

  Then:

  The wall was black. The hat and tailcoat were white. The tie was black.

  With a bored smile, he changed back to his smoking jacket. Behind him was a huge, ornamental fishtank. The hat stayed around. He took it off.

  ‘Neat, now reach in and grab yourself a big fat rabbit, Mandrake.’

  I tried to Dream a tarantula into the hat. No dice. I was off form.

  ‘Cheap, isn’t it? And tedious after a while. Real people are so rare in these parts. I may keep you around to have someone to talk to.’

  ‘I’ll forget how.’

  Daine opened a cabinet, humming along with ‘Charmaine’. A black disc circled under the needle. He lifted the arm off the record, then slipped in some new music. After some hiss, a proper orchestra came in. Wagner, of course. It’s always Wagner. Tannhäuser. Daine turned, flexing his fingers, showing off his rings.

  ‘You strike me as a connoisseur, Mr Quick. Are you familiar with the scene where the suave mastermind talks about art and high culture while his brainless goons beat six or seven kinds of tar out of the stubborn detective?’

  ‘No. Remind me.’

  ‘This is a Degas.’

  Mazurki hit me. Again. The novelty was wearing off.

  ‘Why me, big boy?’ I gasped. ‘Didn’t you hear someone call you a brainless goon a while back?’

  Mazurki picked me up by the lapels and dropped me. My knees gave out, my elbows landed hard and my hat fell off. When I was down, Duryea kicked me. I kissed carpet and didn’t get up.

  ‘This is a Mondrian. An interesting use of geometric forms, don’t you think? We’re all confined by line and space, you know. And here is one of my prizes, an M. C. Escher.’

  The real Richie Quick would have at least hit back a couple of times. Me, I got those seven kinds of tar kicked out of me. I swore to remember this the next time the crix accused me of Dreaming heroes who were extensions of myself. I kept telling myself it would come out right in the final scene. By the end of the picture I wouldn’t have a mark on me. No injury heals faster than a bruise on a private eye. But Daine’s rules weren’
t mine.

  When Duryea and Mazurki gave up taking out their latent hatred of their fathers on me, I lay on the carpet trying to ignore the pain signals various parts of my body were sending to my head. I had been coasting along in this Dream, not exercising my Talent. I concentrated, reaching out to do some conjuring tricks of my own.

  In my pocket was a needle gun. One of those miniature jobs. It was in my trench-coat pocket. It was. I remembered all the component parts, saw them knitting together. The plates locked, the screws tightened, the clip rammed into the butt. Twenty shiny three-inch flathead nails lined up ready for use. It slipped off the assembly line. It was the gun I usually keep in my bedroom chest of drawers. The barrel was scuffed from the time Lissa used it as a can-opener and got mango splatter all over the desktop hob.

  Slowly, my hand crawled into my coat, inching forwards like the Beast with Five Fingers.

  I felt the needle gun with my fingertips. The metal was cold, the grip slightly warm.

  Up close. I’d have to get up, and get close. To be certain of a fatal shot, I’d have to be near Daine. Preferably, I’d get the barrel against his throat, and squeeze one off into his jugular. I’d like a Peckinpah fountain to redecorate the room.

  A four-inch barrel. Homepride symbol on the contoured grip. Gunmetal and plastek.

  I lifted my chest off the floor, and took a deep breath. Get ready to eat nails, Daine.

  Gunmetal and blue plastek. Blue! What in the hell did blue look like?

  I lost it. I wasn’t holding anything in my pocket except a fold of Burberry cloth. I collapsed again.

  ‘As a rule, Mr Quick, I abhor violence.’ Daine sat on the couch, leaning forwards to talk, hands on his knees. I knew what was coming next. ‘But in your case I shall have to make an exception. You cannot know how such uncivilised behaviour pains me.’

  ‘I’ll try to imagine it while I’m being shot to death. I expect I’ll be really upset.’

  ‘A sense of humour. That’s a rare commodity. What a pity it will be to lose you, Mr Quick. You are a man after my own heart. I like a man who jokes in the face of death. It suggests a certain flair, a certain style. Perhaps… but no, I mustn’t let myself be tempted. C’est la vie, is it not? C’est la vie. Daniel, Michael…’

  Twinkletoes and the Gorilla Man picked me up. I didn’t feel too happy being vertical. I was far gone. If they had dropped me into bed with Rita Hayworth, I’d have fallen asleep.

  Someone opened the picture window. I heard the rain. Wagner was getting lyrical, and Daine was making little conducting movements with his fingers. A cold wind swept the room, riffling magazines; my hat drifted towards a wall.

  Duryea pushed me onto the balcony. I leaned over the rail and looked down. Duryea held the back of my neck. The cars passing on the street below went in and out of focus.

  ‘Say hello to the ground, Shamus.’

  Damn, so I was a bit part after all. A first-reel casualty. I prayed to God and Jack L. Warner that Richie Quick had a partner. A Bogart or an Alan Ladd. Hell, I’d even put up with Warner Oland as Charlie Chan or Edna May Oliver as Miss Withers. Richie Quick might be on a slab in the morgue, and his partner might have hated his worthless guts, but murdering detectives is bad for business. Richie’s partner would have the case cleared up by morning. Daine and his goons would be brought to book, or picturesquely killed in such a way that the Hays Code couldn’t accuse the partner of having committed a revenge murder. The old stories always come out best. Of course, none of that would matter to me: dead on the sidewalk in the City, a vegetable in my tank back in the world.

  The lights went out. A lot of glass got broken. A familiar staccato assaulted my ears, and a burst of flashes strobe-lit the night.

  Duryea got pitched off the balcony and fell like a twitching dummy. A small crowd gathered around his broken doll of a corpse. Another cheap hood dead in the gutter. Nothing new around here. They fall out of the skies all the time, like safes in the cartoons.

  The penthouse lights came up again. I turned and staggered back into the room. The place was wrecked. The walls were delicately embroidered with bullet scars. Priceless art objects were smashed. Mazurki lay under the fishtank, which solemnly pissed on him out of a tracery of holes. A cat curled around his huge feet, meowing lazily, waiting for the fish.

  Daine was on the couch. Thick black stuff seeped from his mouth. He had been going for his roscoe but hadn’t made it. He was as dead as Benedict Arnold and twice as guilty.

  In the theory, it was over. I massaged the back of my neck, and waited to be woken up.

  Nothing changed. The record finished and the needle clicked in a groove. The cat left for some business elsewhere. The tank emptied to the level of the lowest hole. The remaining three inches of water were thick with expensive specimens, dragging filament fins in the gravel.

  The City should be decaying around me. I looked out of the window. It was all there. Buildings, slums, ships in the harbour, moving cars, everything. Joseph Cotten looked up at me, hands on hips, coat draped cloak-fashion on his shoulders. He was standing over Duryea, the last of the crowd. He walked across the street to a pay phone and made a call. Even from five storeys up, I could read the PRESS card in his hat. Another late-breaking story for the Inquirer.

  Hold the front page. The City was still alive.

  I checked Daine. He was still dead. The Princetown psychs had been wrong.

  Bastards! Lousy, lying, know-nothing bastards!

  I kicked Daine off the couch. He didn’t come back to life. I kicked him some more, for my own personal pleasure. That doesn’t sound very pleasant, I know, but sometimes these small things help. If the governor of Princetown had been there, I would have kicked him too. And Lissa. Let’s not forget Lissa.

  I kicked Daine around the room. All he did was get deader. I kicked him into a dark corner and tried to bounce a bust of Napoleon off his dead forehead. It exploded, whiting his face like a clown and spreading fragments around him. A black pearl blinked in the plaster mess.

  I scooped up my hat, straightened it on my head and kicked Daine again.

  That’s when I heard the sirens.

  4

  The andrew marshal on the doorstop was a pleasant-faced young woman with JULIET stencilled on her uniform breast. Susan angled the viewer down the official’s body and tagged the sidearm web-holstered to her thigh. From her Vanessa Vail research, she recognised a directional taser. That was enough to confirm the importance of her Public Service.

  Susan ran a check to verify the image. The Household reported that its doorstop view was a first-generation transmission, not a simulation. Thanks to the latest home-defence technologies, ransacking was out of fashion, but feeding a false vision of someone reassuring into the doorstop view had always been a favoured method of entry. Susan had the Household admit Juliet, and met the woman in the hallway.

  The andrew stayed outside.

  ‘I am obliged by law to inform you that the Gunmint requests you volunteer your services.’ Juliet was reading off the inside of a contact lens. ‘Should you refuse, no penalties or proscriptions will be enforced. However, you will be required to pay back the fee that has already been awarded you… plus bank charges, plus inflation increment, plus tax.’

  Susan smiled at the rote speech. Offhand, she couldn’t think of anyone who had refused their Conscription. Who knows, maybe the Gunmint were telling the truth in their official disclaimer. Maybe all you stood to lose was some money. Somehow, though, she didn’t relish the opportunity to become a test case. After all, the lower-case v for volunteer in the standard speech didn’t entirely cancel out the capitalised C for Conscription.

  Juliet held out a formslab. Susan didn’t bother to read the blurb.

  ‘Thumb here, please,’ the marshal said. Susan pressed a square recess, and felt the flickerflash as the slab scanned her print and psycho-chemical balance. It agreed that she was indeed Susan Bishopric, and beeped encouragingly. Juliet allowed herself a tight smile.<
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  After running a cross-check on Susan’s retinal pattern, she gave her ten minutes to pack an overnight hold-all. Annoyingly, the marshal wasn’t authorised to tell her anything that might help her choose what to take. She picked a minimal toilet set (toothbrite, cleanses, pills) and a change of clothe, ummed and ahhed over make-up before making a snap decision she would regret before she was even out of the house, picked out a handful of musics from the pile (Debbie Reynolds, Peggy Lee, Connie Francis, Dick Powell) and threw the book she was reading (Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock) on top of everything. When it was presented to her, Juliet perfunctorily searched the bag, and raised a plucked eyebrow at the book.

  ‘You read?’

  ‘Yes, I’m interested in aesthetic archaeology.’

  Juliet flashed an enigmatic expression, and handed the bag to the black-and-silver andrew. Its face was a cheerful tridvid photograph. They were supposed to be all the same, taken from some square-jawed male model. However, their keepers couldn’t resist giving them individual externals. This one had a black-inked gap in its open smile, and heavily scribbled eyebrows.

  The marshal looked around while Susan programmed the Household not to admit anyone until it received her countersign and palmprint. She fed in the standing orders for dusting, message receipt and feeding the fish. Juliet was plainly taken with the luxury. Susan could imagine the kind of flat the Gunmint would provide its minor functionaries: a GP couch and a foodhole in the wall. Although, tagging the coiled-spring tautness of the younger woman’s body and her confidence with the tools of her trade, Susan wondered whether Juliet might not rate more preferential treatment. In a humourless sort of way, Juliet reminded her of Vanessa Vail. She wore no rank insignia, and Susan intuited that the marshal felt she was on very important business indeed.