Codename Prague (6 page)

Rabelais leaned forward and tapped the paper on his desk again. “As I was saying, your assignment.” He clenched the cigar with his teeth. “You are to leave City City this instant and fly to the city of Prague in the Former Czech Republik. FYI I’m aware of the irony that your questionable self-designated codename happens to coincide with the name of your destination. I assure you, it’s purely coincidental, although you’ll discover that this irony will be exacerbated by the fact that you are to go to the Hotel Prague on Prague Street and contact a bellhop named Henrí Prague who will usher you up to your room, the Galactic Pot-Healer Suite, and introduce you to his sister, Mädchen “The Prague” Prague. She will serve you breakfast and run you a hot bath. Then she will escort you to a discotheque called The Delova Prague beneath which is a casino called Pragensia St Cagney. At this point you are to play Yahtzee and wait for further instructions.” A mechanical arm reached out of the desktop, took the Commodore’s cigar, tapped it over an ash tray, and returned it to his mouth. “Oh yes,” he added. “One last thing. Here.” He removed something from a drawer and threw it at Prague…a T-shirt. Prague took it by the shoulders and let it fall open. Inscribed onto the front was a CGI version of Vincent Prague in a Boy Scout uniform—yellow scarf, sash with merit badges, short shorts, knee-high socks—administering the three-finger salute. Beneath the image were four words:
My Name Is Prague
. Prague regarded Rabelais acidly. Rabelais laughed. “Just kidding. Let’s have it back, then. We need it for a belated Halloween party they’re throwing this evening in Slaughterhouse-Nine.” The mechanical arm reached across the desk and snatched away the T-shirt. Prague made a face. Rabelais said, “When you introduced me to your codename, I was less than pleased, admittedly. Less than pleased, mind you. But the codename has grown on me in the last few hours, so much that presently I don’t think a more awe-inspiring codename has ever bore its shining meathead in the history of MAP affairs. I’m not sure if you were joking or being serious when you conceived of it. Whatever the case, you know the rules—spies can pick their own codenames. Doesn’t make much sense to me. Then again, neither does my wife’s cooking. Neither does day and night, for that matter. Any questions? Concerns? You’re the Anvil-in-Chief now. Don’t let us down.”

Prague did his best to keep his cool and breathe evenly. A difficult task. The MAP had fucked him over more than once. They’d fuck him over again. Not to mention his boss’s eccentricities and terrific longwindedness. But being in the cut was all he knew. And it was all he ever wanted to do.

He had been to Prague before, once, as a child. His parents were Kafka fetishists
and took him there to visit the author’s house-cum-museum/bookstore/café. He remembered the address: No. 22 Golden Lane. He remembered what color the house had been painted on the outside: tropical sky blue. He remembered the smell on the inside of the house: a rank crossbreed of overcooked sauerkraut and dusty, weathered hardbacks. He remembered the figure in the corner of the main room: a genetic reincarnation of a moribund
44-year-old Kafka, petrified, naked but for a bowler hat, his skin injected with a clearcoat plasma that allowed tourists to view the horror of his tubercular innards. And he remembered flying into the city itself, a heaving and dynamic clot of towers and cathedrals and basilicas, their pointed rooftops defined by great swords that pierced an emphatic, hissing blanket of overlying fog and mist…

As for being Anvil-in-Chief, Prague could care less. Like all titles, this one was as empty as an overturned fedora. He said, “What sort of funding can I expect for this gig?” He knew the answer to the question before he asked it. But he asked it.

“Funding?” Rabelais cackled. He stopped cackling, then resumed with greater intensity. “That’s funny, Vinnie!” He choked on his tongue. In a deadpan voice, he said, “But of course funding is your concern. As always, you may or may not be reimbursed, compensated and promoted depending on the degree of the mission’s success or failure.”

“Blah fucking blah.”

“Indeed. Excuse me.”

This time a nine foot sasquatch and a Dolph Lundgren clone squared off. The Lundgren had on Masters of the Universe regalia and boasted an anabolic physique and Sword of Power. The sasquatch immediately slapped the sword from its grip, however, and they engaged full-throttle in hand-to-hand combat. The Lundgren went straight for the balls. The sasquatch balked but the blow didn’t faze it and it retaliated with a clumsy judo throw—
hiza garuma
, Prague calculated—that swept its opponent off its feet and flipped it a full 360 degrees. The Lundgren landed on its feet. Both fighters cocked their heads in disbelief. The Lundgren kicked the sasquatch in the knee. Cdre Rabelais narrowed his
eyes and groaned at the sound of the knee shattering like a light bulb. As the sasquatch doubled over, it caught the Lundgren’s head and twisted it, cracking the neck and hacking off its aquiline nose with a claw. The Lundgren continued to fight with its head facing the opposite direction. They punched each other for two minutes. Then the sasquatch disemboweled the Lundgren, tearing open the android’s six pack and yanking out intestines hand over fist. There was no blood. Only viscera. And the viscera scarcely glistened in the dull orange light of the office.

Rabelais clutched his chest. “Cunt on a stick! These models are supposed to be fully loaded. The government isn’t paying for me to get off on empty shells.” The sasquatch looked at him with wet, apologetic eyes. Rabelais retrieved an instruction manual from a drawer and began to rifle through it.

A SAMSA entered the office through a trap door and brained the sasquatch with a two-by-four. As the cleaning crew busied themselves, Prague rose from his chair. The chair tried to keep him seated, but he eluded it.

“This has been fun, CR. Go fuck yourself.”

“Relax, Vinnie,” he said, setting the manual aside. “No need to get pissy now.”

“I’m not pissy. I’m cool. I’m calm. I’m Jack and the beanstalk.”

Rabelais nodded. “OK. Not sure what beanstalks have to do with the price of beans. Solid fairy tale, though. Same thing goes for fairy tales as for Shakespeare, by the way. All literature, really.”

“Thanks for the tip. Ibid, fuck you.“

“More pissiness. Where does it end?”

The chair’s arm reached up and gripped Prague by the elbow. He ripped off the arm, then turned and destroyed the chair with a fusillade of stomps.

“You’re paying for that,” said Rabelais.

Prague replied, “If you say so. I’ll be in touch. Maybe I’ll oblige the MAP after all—killing that chair brings back memories.”

As he left, the wall birthed a mob of xenophobic, sadistic Karen Carpenters and one occupant of interplanetary flesh…

04

The Scorsese Boys

After receiving his assignment, Anvil-in-Chief Vincent Prague went straight to the zoo and stole a crocodile. “People usually try to stay clear of crocs,” said the zookeeper when he watched the tape of the theft. “They don’t befriend them.”

Prague put a leash on the crocodile and took it on a walk through the park. It devoured two dogs. It attacked a toddler in a stroller.

Prague apologized to the toddler’s mother. He apologized to the crocodile before putting it down with a gyrostabilized submachine gun. “You’re riding high in April,” he told a reporter, “shot down in May.” He signed a few autographs, then went home to pack. He wouldn’t tell Rabelais that he planned on taking the job until later. Maybe he wouldn’t tell him at all.

On the gondola ride, he put on a halo and skimmed the editorials that spiraled around his head. The other passengers did likewise, sitting at attention in hoverchairs, backs straight, hands on knees, with lips granulated like scar tissue…Beyond the gondola, the lights of City City slashed the night into long strips of chemical darkness…

Prague ran into trouble outside the entranceway to his building. It set in motion a sequence of troubling events that encompassed nearly two decades of his life.

The Scorsese Boys.

They included the meanest, craziest and most vicious of director Martin Scorsese’s anti-heros:
Casino
’s Nicky Santoro,
Gangs of New York
’s Bill the Butcher,
Cape Fear
’s Max Cady,
GoodFella
s Tommy DeVito,
The Departed
’s Francis Costello, and
Taxi Driver
’s Travis Bickle. All of the androids were easily recognizable by their roles and the actors who played them. Prague was well-versed in Scorsese cinema and had scrapped with the gangsters before. The MAP unleashed them whenever they suspected an agent of insubordination, even if the act of insubordination had not yet occurred, and even if the probability of it occurring was a shot in the dark.

The Scorsese Boys annoyed Prague on multiple levels. The shithawking terrorism they wreaked annoyed him, of course, but so did the fact that DeVito and Santoro, both of which had originally been portrayed by Joe Pesci, looked almost exactly alike except for discrepancies in fashion. Prague liked to be able to tell the difference between things. Additionally, the Scorsese Boys all wanted to be Travis Bickle and resented the fact that they weren’t. Every non-Bickle android tried to talk and act like the taxi driver, despite being inhibited by its own pre-programmed accent and mannerisms. Prague had a low tolerance for that sort of flâneury. Even from a robot.

“Who let this rat motherfucker in my town?” said the Costello. “Somebody says you gotta Jones wit da Man.”

“Jones?” said Prague. “You mean I wanna smoke the Man?”

“You talkin’ to me?” the Bickle responded, glancing over its shoulders. The rest of the Scorsese Boys mimicked the dialogue and gesture.

“That’s original,” Prague huffed. “Look, can we just pretend you robosapiens got the shit kicked outta you and get on with our lives? You know that’s how it’s gonna go down.”

The Butcher said, “You ain’t got the dash, you goddamned monkey.”

The Cady said something in Pentecostal tongues.

The DeVito said, “You only exist in this city becuza ME!”

The Santoro said, “That’s my line,” and kicked dirt on the DeVito’s pants.

Prague saw that his shoelace had come loose and told his shoe to tie it. The laces threaded together into a perfect bow. He gave the Scorsese Boys a once over and hung his head. “Fine. Bring it.”

The Butcher’s hands metamorphosed into two giant hams. “When I close my hands,” it seethed, “they become fists.”

The Bickle ran its fingers along the ridge of a Mohawk and threw out its arm. A glinting .25 caliber sprung into its grip from inside the sleeve of its army jacket. The Santoro, DeVito and Costello followed suit. The Cady, in contrast, pulled a .44 magnum from the crotch of its chino deck pants and said, “I’m gonna make you learn about loss,” in an overclocked southern drawl.

They fired.

Prague lunged into the street and somersaulted behind a parked Model T+. He clicked together the titanium rings on his thumbs and middle fingers and two Videodrome flesh-cannons burrowed out of his palms and engulfed his hands. Pushing himself off the car, he darted forward across the sidewalk, ran two steps up a brick wall, and flipped backwards…In mid-air he dodged bullets and returned the Scorsese Boys’ fire, shooting them full of holes in a dizzying fit of hyperstylized Gun Kata maneuvers.

He landed on one knee with a loud boom, cracking the asphalt beneath him.

He stood.

He flexed his wrists and the Videodrome guns disappeared into his skin. Smoke hissed and oozed into the gutters.

The Scorsese Boys were badly damaged. The Costello’s head had been blown in half. It lay prostrate on the hood of a Model T+, blood erupting from the wound in a seemingly endless cascade. Like all android blood, it was real…

The Bickle’s coat was on fire. It tried to put it out, but the flames got larger the more it slapped them. It staggered down the street moaning and signaling taxis that weren’t there. The Cady, DeVito and Santoro were veritable archery targets, their aerated bodies spurting blood. None of them expired, though, and they sized up the Anvil-in-Chief with renewed determination. So did the Butcher, who went unscathed. Prague saw to it. You don’t gotta gun, you don’t get the gun.

Small teams of wannabe indie filmmakers clambered out of the shadows and started jostling for footage.

Prague checked his watch. Nightly reruns of
The A-Team
began in fifteen minutes and he needed to have a shit first. Best wrap this shindig up.

The Butcher’s ham-fists glistened with toxic juices that dripped onto the street in corrosive, smoking pools. Its stovepipe hat was a Leaning Tower of Pisa that seemed on the edge of collapse. The handles of its mustache quivered. “End a the line for you, you unholy sack a shit. No sprat fucks with the Butchah. I’m an Amerikan.”

“Them’s fightin’ words, Bill,” yawned Prague. Still, the taunt worked. Prague despised the Butcher’s arrogance, even if it was coded into its system. This codedness, in fact, reinforced his enmity. He had dished out Hard Goodbyes to more than ten Bill the Butcher androids in the past few years. Didn’t matter how effektively. The moment its clockwork stopped ticking, a flatline signal transmitted to one of the MAP’s many Culture Factories and a new Butcher was taken off a warehouse shelf like a toy in a department store.

Prague let the android get real close. He even let it give him a whack in the chops with its acidic mitts.

He grinned like a lizard as ham juice singed his cheek and mixed with martini blood. “It burns,” he said…and executed one of his many token moves, the Horrorshow Splirt, a simple but devastating sleight of hand in which a Jungian psychogenetic implant allowed him to harness all of the repressed desire in his unconscious and unleash it in one mystical act of hatchetry. Contingent upon the success of the move were the retractable vibroblades implanted into the blades of his hands…