She Who Waits (Low Town 3)
Read She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Online
Authors: Daniel Polansky
Table of Contents
Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He can be found in Brooklyn, when he isn’t somewhere else. The
AV Club
called
The Straight Razor Cure
, Daniel’s debut and the first novel in his Low Town series, ‘an assured, roaring, and rollicking hybrid, a cross-genre free-for-all that relishes its tropes while spitting out their bones.’
She Who Waits
is Daniel’s third novel.
You can follow Daniel on Twitter
@DanielPolansky
, or visit his website to find out more:
www.danielpolansky.com
.
The Low Town Novels
The Straight Razor Cure
Tomorrow, the Killing
She Who Waits
Daniel Polansky
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Daniel Polansky 2013
The right of Daniel Polansky to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4447 2143 0
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To my family and friends; I am grateful there are enough of you to make enumeration impractical.
T
hat autumn the bottom fell out.
You could tell it was coming if you were paying attention, though most weren’t. A low background hum, the faint smell of brimstone. They’ll deceive you, those stutter steps into the abyss. You get to thinking the descent goes on indefinitely.
Everything ends. Looking back, it’s not surprising that things came apart – it’s surprising how long they stayed together.
‘Warden, you around?’ asked a voice from behind me.
‘No,’ I said, my first lie of the day.
It was nearly noon, late for breakfast but awfully early to be boozing, though I suppose the handful of drunks sharing the bar with me disagreed. I’ve often suggested to Adolphus that we keep to stricter hours, keep out the clientele until after nightfall. At other times I’ve suggested maybe going one further and just not letting anyone in at all. I really didn’t have any business owning a half-stake in the Staggering Earl, in so far as I find people unpleasant as individuals and altogether loathsome when amassed into a crowd.
The voice walked over to my table, revealed itself as belonging to Fat Karl Widdershins. Karl lived two doors down, though he spent the majority of his waking hours inside the confines of the Earl. A drunkard living off his pension, Karl’s recreational activities centered around inebriated stumbling interspersed with the occasional bout of spousal abuse. Which is to say he was all but indistinguishable from the better half of our patrons. He didn’t bother to sit down, just buzzed around my shoulder. ‘There’s something you ought to come take a look at,’ he continued.
The only thing I felt like looking at right then was the plate of runny eggs and fried ham in front of me. After that I was thinking I might spend some time looking at a full glass of beer, and then at some point probably at an empty one. ‘I’m busy.’ It was my second lie of the day.
‘The guards have Reinhardt cornered inside his house. They’re getting ready to make a move on him.’
‘That’s unfortunate for Reinhardt.’
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
I didn’t, in fact, though Karl was thrilled to his socks to tell me. I don’t know what it is about the species that makes us enjoy passing along bad news – if Reinhardt had hit today’s racket numbers, I didn’t imagine Karl would have ran himself breathless coming to tell me. ‘Why?’
‘His kid came sprinting out of his building a half-hour back, screaming that Daddy had chopped up Mommy with a butcher knife.’
The ham and the eggs would wait. I slid off my chair and out the front door.
Reinhardt was a Valaan from the far north, one of those rocky islands so barren and brutal that it made the slums of the capital pleasant by comparison. He’d served his stint in the war, settled into Low Town, spawned children and taken a wife. Not quite in that order. He was a foreman down at the docks, made decent money, nothing to a noble or a banker but good enough for a man that labored for a living. We weren’t friends, or anything close to it, but maybe I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t keep an eye on those veterans that lived in the neighborhood and hadn’t turned their skills over to a syndicate. He used to nibble away at my stock of breath, a vial or two on the weekend, a handful at Midwinter and High Summer. At some point he’d started to show up more often, and we’d had a long conversation at the back of the Earl, come to an arrangement. I’d spot him a vial a month for recreation, two on the holidays, and apart from that I wouldn’t find him knocking at my back door, wouldn’t need to think about him taking money away from his rapidly expanding brood. That had been a year back, maybe a year and a half. Since then I hadn’t seen much of him, and was glad of that fact.
It was the kind of autumn afternoon where you can smell winter in the air, that scent that’s part wood smoke and part the cold that makes the first necessary. Karl walked a few steps ahead of me, playing the guide, though there wasn’t a corner of Low Town that I didn’t know better than a toddler does his mother’s teat. Reinhardt’s apartment was down near the docks, one of a hundred crammed into a tenement that had been intended for a quarter of that. I didn’t sprint down there, but that was only because I was still pretty hung over.
The war had done mad things to everyone, broken most of those it hadn’t killed, turned stout men into drunks and quiet boys into murderers. But the war had been gone fifteen years, and while you never forgot it – while you might wake up in a sweat and breathing heavy, your wife or the whore you’d bought bug-eyed at your madness – at some point most of us had brokered an uneasy truce with memory. It was like anything, you put it behind you or you let it put you in the ground, and most of us had made our decision one way or the other long years back.
‘This is as far as I go,’ Karl said as we got in sight of our destination. ‘I just thought I’d let you in on the gossip. The rest isn’t any of my business.’
‘You’ve an admirable sense of community,’ I said, tossing over a copper coin. Karl bit it, then disappeared back the way we’d come.
There were a handful of guards standing outside of Reinhardt’s building, looking useless and maybe a bit frightened. One of them, so innocent as to be unaware that I effectively paid his salary, made to brush me off. But his captain shut him down, even opened the door for me. They give good service, the hoax.
I didn’t know exactly which hundred square-feet were Reinhardt’s, but another coterie of law enforcement was waiting on the second stairwell, and I figured they weren’t doing so for their health. The men upstairs were the very cream of Low Town’s finest, hardened veterans of a thousand back-alley shakedowns, clean as a latrine and bent as a penny-nail.
I knew the lieutenant, as I knew all of the officers in the neighborhood and most of the patrolmen. He was about fifty, an aging Tarasaighn with muscle all but warped away to fat. You could see he was a drunkard by his nose, which was the color and rough shape of a radish, though several times the size. I couldn’t remember his name right at that moment, but then it didn’t really matter. ‘By the Firstborn,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
This statement shouldn’t have bothered me, but the truth is at bottom there’s some part of me that never quite got over the world being upside down. ‘What’s the situation?’
‘Got word a half-hour back that Reinhardt’s daughter was running through the streets, screaming about blood. Came up here to see what’s what, but he’s not answering and neither is his wife. We were getting ready to kick in the door.’
Getting ready, getting ready, getting ready but not doing it. The hoax were tough as all hell when jumping on a manacled prisoner, but going toe-to-toe against a veteran with death in his immediate history was enough to unglue them. ‘Where’s the kid?’
‘Back at the station. She’s pretty shaken up.’
‘Wouldn’t you be?’ I muttered, then said, ‘I know the man. We go back a ways.’
‘Yeah?’ the lieutenant said, eyes brightening, thrilled at this sudden opportunity not to do his job. ‘Any chance you could talk him down?’
‘We’re about to find out.’ I knocked three times, loud enough to get the attention of anyone inside but not so hard as to bust the door down. A narrow middle, as these tenement houses were about as flimsy as wet paper. ‘Reinhardt, you in there? It’s the Warden – I’m coming in, I’m by myself, and I’d as soon not have any surprises, dig?’
No response. It was moments like this – a lot of moments, if we’re being honest – that I found myself aching for a hit of breath. Steady your mind, settle your hands, get you so the idea of seeing blood or making it doesn’t seem any particular trouble. But I’d sworn that off a few years back, and the fact that I still missed it was a pretty good argument that I’d been wise in doing so.
The door was unlocked. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. It swung open easy and I came in quick after it, like I’d done a thousand times back when I was an agent. And like every other time, the muscles in my neck tensed up, anticipating the shiv.
A fate delayed. She Who Waits Behind had left the building – though she’d been in residence not long before.
Reinhardt’s daughter had not been lying, I could tell that before I saw the body, tell it from the smell of blood in the air, hanging like washing over a line. I could taste egg yolk in the back of my throat, managed to swallow it before it came out on the floor.
I’d only met Gertrude once or twice, and she hadn’t occupied any particularly distinct spot in my memory. All the same I was pretty sure that when we’d seen each other last, she’d had both her arms attached to her body. I’d say she was cut up like a hog but that would be a lie, because you slaughter a hog for food, and you do it careful. It’s not pretty and it’s not clean but it wasn’t anything like the specimen of madness on the floor in front of me. I’ll spare the specifics, though sadly it isn’t because I’ve forgotten them.