The Night Mayor Read online

  ‘But if you get killed in the Dream, it won’t hurt,’ Trefusis chipped in, ‘you’ll just wake up.’

  ‘That’s only a theory, Governor. No one knows yet. You’ve already lost Tunney in there. Besides, what if I get the Maltese Falcon plot? I noticed Daine had Caged and Brute Force on his recommended-viewing list. I don’t think the prisons in his Dream are quite as civilised as the one you run.’

  In the view, Barbara Stanwyck was dying beautifully, rain on her face, ‘Tangerine’ on the soundtrack.

  ‘Here’s another recurrent characterisation…’

  Dr Groome tapped up the images of Ida Lupino in High Sierra, Shelley Winters in A Double Life and Gloria Grahame in Crossfire. They all looked blowsy, lipsticky and desperate, locked in a fight with a life set to trample them into the barroom floor, a series of no-account boyfriends too free with their fists and guns, and an incipient obesity that would limit their later careers to shrill mother roles. Susan noted the still-silent official take an interest. Obviously, she could get a tridsnap of his fantasies of femininity.

  ‘…The tart with a heart. You might be able to avoid notice as a supporting character.’

  Susan shook her head. ‘Oh no, doctor. Those women were disposable. I did a social autopsy on these conventions. It was all tied up with the rigid censorship restrictions of the 1940s. Because it was implied that these girls had been sexually available to a wide number of men, the hero couldn’t live with them after the fade-out. They were regarded as tainted. Typically, they would be shot in the back, throwing themselves in front of the hero, and get to die pathetically in his arms. Then he lap dissolved into a happy ending with some drip like Anne Shirley.’

  Trefusis threw up his hands theatrically. ‘I don’t understand this at all. Why should it be so complicated?’

  ‘Sexism,’ Susan said. ‘That’s not a word that gets much use now. In the twentieth century, it meant that women got a zilch hand-out in life and the arts. These flatties were made by men and mainly for men, and trade on male fantasies. They’re fixated on their male heroes. Women were supposed to be incidentals. And the stronger they were, the worse it was for them at the end of the picture. Barbara Stanwyck spent her whole career suffering and dying just because the dreamership couldn’t stand to see a woman come first.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Juliet, who had been sitting quietly.

  ‘Not long enough,’ snorted the governor.

  Susan looked up at the view, where Gloria Grahame was taking a pot of hot coffee full in the face in The Big Heat. Later in the picture, she would die, pressing a mink to the scarred half of her face. Exploited, mutilated and murdered. Maybe Vanessa Vail wasn’t such a bad fantasy after all: she might die, but at least she was her own woman.

  ‘Did any of you ever bother to dream Tunney’s Dreams?’

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘He might have been here if you had. His involvement with this period and its fantasies was obvious. He used to take whole concepts, characters and moods from the flatties. I’m sure his morbid attachment to these old conventions is unhealthy. My guess is that he wished women back in their twentieth-century slot. He certainly Dreamed them that way. In Get Richie Quick!, the hero’s ex-wife Lola asks him to find some missing family documents and turns out to be setting him up to take the blame for a series of axe murders she’s been committing since she was six years old. At the end, you get to be inside Richie’s head as he righteously kicks the poor woman to death after she’s come for him with a hatchet in each hand. And the crix said the sequels were worse. He garbage-dispersed the whodunit concepts because it was always this monster woman behind the scheme to remainder the hero. No wonder Tunney was so susceptible to Daine’s Dream. He’s probably gone happily native in there.’

  The head gave the impression it was about to say something, but didn’t. In the view, Ronald Colman strangled Shelley Winters, quoting from Othello as he did so, killing with a kiss. He spouted art, and she wound up on ice.

  ‘We’d only got as far as having a preliminary psyche dissection on Daine,’ said Trefusis, ‘but the Yggdrasil probes suggest he had a similar – although far more pronounced – set of personality deformities. And Daine’s neural dysfunctions have shaped his Dream as much as the externals he took from his old vids.’

  ‘Very clever. Daine and Tunney are probably soul mates. I’m likely to have to remainder Richie Quick before I get to your missing prisoner.’

  ‘So,’ said Juliet, ‘if Tunney or Richie Quick or whoever he is can be fooled by a designing woman in each of his adventures, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get the dividend on his blind spot.’

  ‘Good point. I just have to get outdream before the kicking scene comes along.’

  Juliet looked hurt. Susan wished she hadn’t wisebacked at her. In this room, the marshal was the only one who gave any indication that she valued Susan above the worth of her Public Service. Susan flashed a mental apology that seemed to sink in.

  ‘Well, Ms Bishopric,’ said Dr Groome, ‘if you don’t want to fit into any of the roles we’ve assessed, just what do you want to be in the Dream?’

  ‘It’s not much of a choice. Especially since Tunney’s already struck out as a private eye. In the genre terms, that ought to have made him unassailable. Private eyes always win through in the end.’

  In the view, a random assemblage of snips presented a series of betrayals and murders. The films were identified by a floating tridvid legend in the bottom left corner. Ralph Meeker snapped an old man’s priceless Caruso record in half in Kiss Me Deadly, Richard Conte tortured Cornel Wilde by turning up a hearing aid and shouting into it in The Big Combo, Ingrid Bergman drank the poisoned Brazilian coffee in Notorious, Charles Laughton plunged down a lift shaft in The Big Clock, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth shot it out in a hall of mirrors in Lady from Shanghai, Edmond O’Brien lurched into a police station to report his own murder in D.O.A., Tony Curtis was brutally beaten by a corrupt cop in Sweet Smell of Success, Laurence Harvey jumped in the lake in The Manchurian Candidate. It had been a sick period, Susan decided, as monomaniacal in its obsession with violence as the D-9000’s blood-and-buggery concepts. No wonder Daine was drawn so powerfully to it. For a master criminal, it must seem like the Golden Age. The people back then had been so absurdly vulnerable, prey to disease and deception. In among the monochrome massacre, someone had made a mistake; there were brightly coloured Doris Day and James Gamer in Move Over Darling.

  ‘It’s not much to go on, but how about a construct? Something between Gene Tierney in Laura and Ella Raines in Phantom Lady?’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Dr Groome said. ‘I hadn’t seen any of these vids before the crisis came up.’

  ‘Well, we could make the censorship work for us. If I were playing an indisputably virtuous character, then cliché dictates that I would at least be spared death, imprisonment or degradation. I could be a hard-working career girl mixed up in a murder case, doing some solo sleuthing to get her fiancé off a murder charge. That sort of thing was always happening. Fiancés in these flatties were always zomboids with thin moustaches, always being arrested for murders they didn’t commit. That was just about the only way a girl could get any equal action time, if her boyfriend was behind bars.’

  Dr Groome fiddled with the slab and Ella Raines came up, walking alone at night along a deserted railroad platform. Then Gene Tierney, emerging out of the night in a ridiculous hat, surprised Dana Andrews, the cop who thought he was investigating her murder. The doctor looked at Trefusis for approval, and the Governor made a fine-by-me gesture. Nobody asked the Public Service official anything, and Yggdrasil would have spoken up if it had any strong objections.

  ‘Susan,’ said Juliet, ‘could you shoot anyone?’

  ‘In a Dream, of course. As I said, I’ve done almost everything imaginable in Dreams. And this is, after all, only a Dream.’

  ‘That’s what Tunney said, and it swallowed him, bones and all.’

/>   For the first time, Susan intuited that if she really made a point of it, she could get out of her Public Service. Juliet, who represented the Gunmint, could almost certainly out-rule Trefusis and his penal staff in a show-of-force debate. And the professional enforcer visibly disapproved of endangering the minds of civilians in what she considered a problem for her department.

  It was a fine point, and it could keep Yggdrasil arguing with itself for ever: physically, Daine was still in Trefusis’s jurisdiction, but if fleeing into his Dream counted as escaping from Princetown then Enforcement should take over. It occurred to Susan that this could lead to legislation she wouldn’t approve of. If the Gunmint declared a citizen’s dreams within its rule, then a vast but subtle freedom would be lost.

  Trefusis wouldn’t like it, but if Susan refused to go indream, she was sure Juliet would support her. The marshal’s favoured plan – Susan gathered – was that she should go into Daine’s Dream, as herself but with a few improvements, and then rip the sub-universe apart until she found the fugitive and could tase him awake. Susan knew that wouldn’t work, but also that she would never be able to explain to Juliet why an amateur enforcer would have a better chance indream than a skilled public servant.

  Everybody thought they knew what it was like to be a Dreamer, but everybody too readily confused passive dreaming with creative Dreaming. This went beyond a legal technicality, Susan realised. Really, there were only three people in it: Daine, Tunney and herself. They were all Dreamers, and if Daine wasn’t brought back to Princetown, things would go badly for all Dreamers everywhere. She didn’t have to like it, any more than she had to like being Vanessa Vail, but there was no way she could evade the responsibility without racking up a seed of guilt that would sprout and eat at her Dreams. If she didn’t remainder the dragon, she could forget her chance of freeing herself of the D-9000.

  ‘Susan, we can stop all this here,’ said Juliet, leaning forward. The Yggdrasil andrew’s eyes slowly opened. ‘You can say no.’

  ‘Fantasies can be dangerous. I’m used to that. I can’t explain yet, but I have to dream Daine’s Dream. It’s… a professional point.’

  Juliet understood that. Of course, Susan thought, the marshal had probably been inspired to get into Enforcement by dreaming Vanessa Vail – by being Vanessa Vail – at an impressionable age. Dreamers were for ever the vanguard, or maybe for ever the forlorn hope.

  ‘Okay, let’s do it. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.’

  ‘Discussion over?’ asked Trefusis. ‘Good. We’ve a tank prepared.’

  Dr Groome wiped the view and started projecting mental images into it. ‘You’ll need some externals to tap you properly into the Dream. A clothe, a hairstyle, some props.’

  Dr Groome projected a mannequin and roughed out a tailored suit. The psych was surprisingly inventive. Susan particularly liked the hat, which was perhaps a touch mannish for her chosen persona but passed thanks to its raffish qualities.

  The psych smiled. ‘I don’t know much about flatties, but historical fashions are my pash. I’ve a collection of antique accessories. Yggdrasil can encode them into your indream simulacrum. The least we can do is dress you for effect. Tunney went in looking like a Redevelopment reject.’

  ‘And I’ve been thinking about guns,’ said Juliet. ‘You’ll need to think up something.’

  The mannequin faded, and the snips came back. In the view, more actors died.

  11

  ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream…’

  Who said that? Edgar Allan Poe? Or Vincent Price?

  In the dark, I dreamed the unpopulated dreams of the amnesiac. I dreamed I was on a case. I was looking for a man named Tom Tunney, a washed-out writer and a deep-dyed drunk. Lissa, his ex-wife, wanted him found and substantial alimony coughed up. She also wanted to know if he was dead or alive, just out of general interest. Nice lady. Body by Bacall, hair like Hedy’s, face from Frances Farmer and penny-bright eyes like a week-old corpse. I had traced Tunney out of the City to a big house with high broken-glass-topped walls where the rich and inebriated pay to have their vices purged. He had been there and gone. The doctors told me he was unimproved by his stay with them. I could believe it. When the informants ran out, I kept on the man’s trail by following the empties. I always keep a bottle in my desk drawer, but this character was putting it away on an industrial scale. With Lissa’s money I picked up his tabs. Bartenders, hoteliers and B-girls kept asking me if I was Tunney’s brother. The resemblance, they said, was amazing. Lissa hadn’t had a photograph for me to flash, but had described him as looking ‘a lot like you, Mr Quick, a lot like you’. She had made a pass at me, of course, but I had left her and her dead eyes in her big, empty house. I make a policy of never fooling around with my clients. It’s kept me alive so far.

  From the dry-out farm, Tunney had moved down to the border, mooched around in cantinas for a while, then left the country two steps ahead of the sheriff of some Rio Grande jerkwater. I followed by car and burro, tracking him from town to town. The bottles marked his way through the desert, like cat’s-eyes down a street. I made some deposit money back on as many as I could carry. The rest I left out there with the bones of prehistoric animals, as a sign for future generations that there had been civilisation in the Americas.

  Tunney had made a lot of friends along the way, until his travelling money ran out. After that, he made a lot of enemies. I interviewed some of them. Three beer-befuddled construction workers played softball with my head in a backstreet on the mistaken assumption that I was Tom Tunney. With the bruises and a three-day beard, I was told I looked even more like him than I had done. Lissa’s money gave out, and she told me over an international phone hook-up that she wasn’t interested any more. She was remarrying – to a war hero, of course, just like all the girls that year – and didn’t want to know either way about her former husband. ‘He was just a no-account,’ she told me, ‘a Dreamer.’ But I was too far along to drop it that easily. I’m a detective, so I feel obliged to detect.

  I was finding out more and more about my quarry’s life. From the witnesses, I picked up details about his work, his friends, his childhood, his Dreams. And, with each scrap of information I unearthed about Tom Tunney, I seemed to forget something about myself. I found myself using his name on hotel registers, in barroom conversations. I realised, with a shock, that I was drinking almost constantly. One evening, I sat in a cantina with a row of bottles on the bar, and tried to remember absurdly small things about my own life. I couldn’t remember the make of car I drove, how my girlfriend looked naked, what I had done before I got my PI licence, what shape my bathroom was, my parents’ names. I knew more about Tom Tunney than about Richie Quick. The man I had not found yet was real to me, but I was a phantom, as flat and one-sided as Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon.

  I was staring at a wall-sized mirror when he walked into the bar. Over my own shoulder, I saw his face come out of the shadows. For the briefest of instants, I was standing up looking in the mirror at the face of a man at the bar…

  Then the curtains parted, and I was back in the City. Back in the night. Back in the pain.

  ‘Heavens be praised, my boy,’ said Carradine. ‘I thought you were dead for sure!’

  I opened my eyes, was assaulted by the light, and shut them again.

  ‘Easy now,’ said the deep, resonant voice. ‘Step by step.’

  I opened my eyes again, less painfully. I was still on the floor of Kelly’s, surrounded by smashed tables and bulletholes. I was sitting in a congealed pool of stickiness. I felt myself for wounds, and couldn’t find any. The mess was just spilled ketchup. Maybe my luck was changing.

  ‘Not a mark on him,’ said Thelma, ‘saints be praised!’ She had a rosary out, and was knotting it around one hand like a beaded bandage.

  Carradine helped me up. I was unsteady on my feet, and my head felt like a leftover battlefield, but everything seemed to be in more or less working order. There was
ketchup on my trench coat, but it would wash off in time.

  ‘Looks like you’re right about there being a new man at the top,’ said Carradine, ‘and he’s just paid you his friendly compliments.’

  Kelly grunted, seemingly no more upset by the destruction of his diner than he would have been by a broken plate. He was in a grimy apron, sweeping up. There were fresh bullet scars on the walls, like the ones in Daine’s penthouse. Exactly like, I could see the same patterns – faces, almost – in the damage.

  ‘Marvin and the others must have set you up. They’ll all be with the new man by now.’

  Things had changed while I was out, but I couldn’t tell how yet. I had the memory of a headache now, but my head was clear. That felt like a first.

  ‘We’d best be out of here, Richie,’ Carradine said. ‘They might come back.’

  It took me a moment to realise he was talking to me. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about the mess, Kelly…’

  ‘That’s okay,’ the chef said dully, ‘it’s been worse before. When the Muni Mob and Jimmy Cagney had a gang war, they tossed in hand grenades every twenty minutes.’

  Carradine helped me get out of the diner, but I didn’t feel so bad. Some of the earlier aches had faded, and the new ones hadn’t had time to get settled in. It was still raining, but it was a hard, fast, clean downpour now, washing garbage off the sidewalks.

  ‘We better get you off the main streets, you’re a target…’

  It hit me. ‘John, what happened to the pidgin Shakespeare? You sound almost Hemingway. Well, maybe Steinbeck.’

  His long face was quizzical. ‘I guess it wore off. It’s been a funny kind of an evening. I feel like I’ve just woken up after a long dream.’

  ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘It’s as if only the last few hours of my life were real. I could tell you my story up until then, but it happened to someone else, an imaginary character.’