The Night Mayor (12 page)

My best bets were still Rains and Kruger. One, or both, of them could easily have opted to give Daine a hot lead push and taken the operation over. Or maybe it was more complicated than that. Maybe Daine had somehow cooperated in his own extermination, but transferred something of himself to his heir. In Otto Kruger’s file, there were a bunch of crackpot pieces on various psychic phenomena – hypnotism, mental telepathy, oneiromancy, possession. Maybe Daine had gone
dybbuk
and passed into another body. Metempsychosis, that was called. It was screwy, but so was everything else in this case. I had the feeling I had been given most of the pieces, but not the boxfront picture to tell me how to put them together.

I looked at some pictures of Rhonda Fleming. She favoured very tight gowns with large pieces cut out of them. There had to be a woman in the picture. With me, there invariably was. I took my automatic out and rested its cold metal on Rhonda’s paper torso. She was some kind of a woman all right. Cute as lace pants, sharp as a stiletto and hungry as a Bengal tiger. I hoped we’d get to meet some time soon.

‘We interrupt this broadcast,’ said an announcer, fading out José Iturbi, ‘to bring you an important newsflash…’

The urgent tones startled Carradine awake, and with a cry, he fell off his chairs. The furniture tangled in his long legs.

‘…Captain of Detectives Barton MacLane has called out the National Guard to assist in the search for private detective Richard Quick, who is still at liberty. Quick is wanted in connection with the brutal murder earlier this evening of millionaire philanthropist Truro…’

I turned off the radio, wrenching the knob off the set. It was the same old guff. I had heard it all before.

‘Perhaps you’d better get out of the City,’ suggested Carradine.

‘Perhaps there isn’t an outside to go to.’

‘Sure there is.’ He smiled. ‘I remember the prairies. Why, I remember being in a stagecoach, with the Apaches attacking, and out on the road with Henry Fonda and the Okies and shooting Tyrone Power while he was hanging up a picture…’

‘Are you sure, John?’ I knew how memories like that worked. Right now, in the familiar clutter of my office, I had this feeling in my water that I had never been in the room before. Someone’s hand had torn away three-quarters of the days of the desktop calendar and filled a wastebasket with them, and someone had written girls’ names and telephone numbers on the blotters. I recognised my own handwriting and the way I would scrunch up a calendar date before throwing it away. But I couldn’t see myself actually scribbling or tearing. That had been someone else. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was the ghost. ‘Are you sure?’

Carradine’s eyes saw faraway sights, and he ran a hand through his shoulder-length hair. ‘No, now you come to mention it, I’m not. Those things happened, I know that, and I could swear they happened to me. But maybe in other lives, or in…’

I lit a cigarette. ‘…In Dreams, John, Dreams. There are too many maybes in the City, too many dreams within Dreams. You were asleep just now; were you dreaming?’

‘Yes, I…’

He looked scared for a moment; then almost scary, stroking his moustache with long, thin fingers, thoughtfully tonguing sharp teeth.

I exhaled a cloud of smoke. The neon striped it in the air. ‘What were you dreaming?’

‘I’m not certain. I was dead, but alive. I was wearing evening clothes like a dress extra, and I had flour in my hair. It was somewhere in Eastern Europe, I think. The men wore lederhosen and the women gypsy blouses. It was modern times, but there was no war. And I was thirsty… it’s difficult to say, I wanted… to… drink…
blood
.’

The tall man was racked with self-disgust. I couldn’t help but feel for him. ‘Don’t worry, John, it’s just a dream. Just another role seeping through.’

‘Ugh. It was repulsive. Were there any clues in your files?’

I riffled the papers on the desk. ‘Just names. Claude Rains, Otto Kruger, George Macready. They were tied in with Daine, maybe still are…’

Under the files, the telephone rang. Carradine and I looked at each other. The ringing was startlingly loud. I knew that if there was anyone else at all in the building, they’d be alerted to it. It grated on my eardrums, set my teeth on edge, shook loose all the pains I thought I had lost.

‘They’ll give up,’ I said. We stood hunched over the desk, frozen like waxworks. The telephone rang twenty, forty, a hundred times, and kept on ringing. It got louder, more painful. I saw a bead of sweat drip from Carradine’s forehead, trickle down his cheek, perch on the end of his moustache and fall with a small splash onto a picture of Rhonda Fleming posing in a backless, strapless, practically frontless dress. ‘They can’t possibly expect an answer.’

Carradine was shaking, holding onto my desk with both hands to keep steady. I followed the telephone cord and found where it went into the wall. One tug and the noise would go away. But whoever was calling would know someone was here. Perhaps the cops had a man calling up every half hour, and a squad car ready to be here in seconds. They had let me slip through the net earlier; they wouldn’t exactly be fans of mine. And the National Guard were on the case now. They’d have much bigger guns than me, and be authorised to use them. I put my hands over my ears and prayed that the ringing would stop. Everything in the office was vibrating. I knew how the Hunchback of Notre Dame had gone deaf, with the tinnitus for ever in his head.

With a strangled, gargling shriek, Carradine fell over, frothing at the mouth, arms waving. A pile of documents, clippings and photographs fell with him and drifted around him as he writhed on the floor. The ringing stopped, and I gave a silent thanks to St Bernadette of Lourdes for the miracle. Then I realised Carradine had knocked the phone off the hook when he fell, and that the receiver was dangling under the desk…

‘Tunney,’ said a female voice, tiny but shouting, ‘Tunney, pick up the damned phone if you’re there. We need to talk. Tunney…’

Almost laughing, I took the receiver. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Tunney. Yggdrasil be praised. Listen, I’m at the bus station. You need help. My name is Susan. Susan Bishopric. We’ve met. We lobbied the British Board of Dream Classification over the blasphemy rulings. I Dreamed
The Parking Lottery
.’

‘I’m sorry, lady,’ I said, ‘but you must have the wrong number. My name isn’t Tunney.’

I hung up, and went to help Carradine. He had stopped twitching violently, but he wasn’t out of his
petit mal
yet. His limbs were working independently of each other.

‘Snap out of it,’ I said, flicking him lightly about the cheeks with my fingers, ‘we’ve got to get out of here. That might not have been a wrong number. Somebody could have put the finger on us.’

He wiped the froth from his lips with a huge handkerchief, and apologised for his behaviour. ‘I don’t know what got into me. It was the telephone. It didn’t sound… natural.’

‘I know what you mean. But I’m not sure there’s any nature at all in this case.’

* * *

Outside my office window, the irritating neon sign flashed on and off, casting rigid bars of light into the room. Prison bars.

‘
W
here to, lady?’ asked the cab driver. Susan recognised the desperate whine in his voice, but read the name off his licence anyway. Elisha Cook Jr, professional loser, fall guy and victim. Cook had the face of a shrunken Peter Pan, lost in adulthood.

‘Cruise,’ said Susan. ‘I just want to get out of the rain.’

‘It’s your dough, sister.’ Cook manhandled the meter flag. It ran like
a click-click-clack off the beaten track as the Brownsville Train comes through
,
like the tick-tack-toe of Old Black Joe…

Susan snapped, ‘I ain’t your sister, bud!’ Was that correct? Ain’t? Bud?

‘Pardon me for livin’, lady.’

‘One of these days, if you work at it real hard.’

‘Say –’ Cook’s worn veneer of toughness dissolved – ‘quit ridin’ me. I ain’t hostile.’

‘Sorry. It’s late.’ She had miscalculated: she thought everyone in the City insulted each other. ‘I’ve had a rough evening.’

‘Me too. I been beaten up by hoods, framed on a murder rap, beaten up by cops, sent up the river, beaten up by prison bulls, got a last-minute reprieve from the governor, and been beaten up by my girl.’

‘Sounds tough.’

‘In spades, lady.’

Yeah: in spades, on ice, eight ways to sundown, from here to eternity. It was a different language. An idiot Dream if ever there was. She knew she mustn’t give in to it. There was a risk of ending up like Tunney. On the phone, he had sounded in a bad way. She had called him up from the bus station as soon as she got into the City. It had been ridiculously easy to track him down. Richard Quick, Private Enquiry Agent, was in the Yellow Pages under Detectives. Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell and Alan Ladd had big display adverts with prominent slogans: ‘No Divorce Work’, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, ‘This Gun for Hire’. Quick was buried in a column of single-line ads for grade-B bloodhounds, between Dick Purcell and Ron Randell. His irresistible come-on was ‘Investigations – Cheap!’

For now, she’d have to leave Tunney to his own problems and go after Daine.

Over the smart street clothes Dr Groome had come up with, she wore a transparent raincoat. She must look like a cellophane-wrapped sweet. A hard-boiled sweet. She checked her lipstick in the cab’s mirror. Her face had come out more like Ella Raines than Gene Tierney. Too thin-lipped for high-gloss romance, but pretty in a hard-edged, sparkly fashion. She would have to get used to the way she looked in black and white.

In the short time she had been in the City, she had been propositioned by a well-dressed lush, witnessed a gangland execution and been pursued through a deserted subway station by a bulky killer. This would take some getting used to.

The Princetown psychs had simply lost track of Tunney. They had monitored him as far as Poverty Row, then the Dream had upside-downed. A major shadow reality shift. This place looked solid enough from the inside, but it could change as quickly as your mind.

Susan Bishopric, assassin. That was a new paragraph for her curriculum vitae. Kill Truro Daine. In this Dream, that was tantamount to putting out a contract on God. But God makes mistakes. Ask Job. Daine had been caught and convicted back in the real world. That would put a dent in his omnipotence. Even here.

Dreaming herself into the City had been easy. Dr Groome had hooked Susan up to Yggdrasil and floated her in the third tank. Trefusis had wished her luck, Juliet had told her to shoot straight, and the psych techs had tried not to look her in the eyes. Then she had descended through the familiar outer layers of Dreamspace, and faded in on the bus.

She found to her surprise that she didn’t mind the clothes. Whenever she Dreamed historical, she always assumed multiple garments would be uncomfortable and cumbersome, like a non-protective flakjak. Actually, she quite liked nylons, padded shoulders and her hat. And pockets were a revelation. Her gun hung heavy in her suit coat, resting cool against her hip. She put a hand in her pocket and felt the grip of the weapon. Juliet had given her a few pointers, but indream Susan found her experience as Vanessa Vail somehow more confidence-building. Vanessa could shoot the eye out of a gnat at fifty paces. Susan hoped the skill would come back to her if it came to guns.

Cook drove clumsily, keeping up a constant stream of chatter. Susan volumed him down. Poor little chump. Tired eyes flashing in the rearview mirror, childish enthusiasm bubbling over. He was marked for a fade-out long before the finish. Susan couldn’t think of a film where he had made it alive to the end credits.

The cab paused at an intersection to give right of way to a car chase. Edward G. Robinson careened down Elm Street and screech-turned onto Sunset Boulevard. The only things holding his stolen sedan together were bulletholes. Lieutenant Ward Bond was at the wheel of the police convertible hot on his tail. Detective Van Heflin stood up in the car, hat clamped to his head, firing his tommy gun from the hip.

‘He killed a dame,’ explained Cook, ‘strangled her with a string of pearls. The cops will get him. Nobody gets away with murder in this City.’

‘There’s always a first time.’

Experimentally, she flicked the cold steel safety catch on and off in her pocket. She was wearing a groove in her thumb.

What to do next? Hole up, hide out, get the measure of the Dream. Then start feeding in a few amendments. That would offbalance Daine. She was certain she could make some substantial changes. Perhaps Daine wouldn’t like what she was planning for his self-designed afterlife. She concentrated on the interior doorhandles of the cab and changed their design several times, just for practice, then smoothed them out entirely. No problem.

Should she try to get in touch with Tunney again? He was stuck in the City somewhere. The tentative diagnosis was that he had been too close to Daine’s fantasies and been subsumed into the structure of the Dream. Deep down, he had felt too much at home in the City to want to see it deleted from the Yggdrasil file.

All this might have the makings of a Prix Italia memoir. There were very few Dreams about Dreams and Dreaming. But first, she would have to come through it alive (relatively easy: keep repeating, none of this is real, it’s only a Dream) and sane (a horse of a different colour: like in
The Wizard of Oz
)…

She looked down at her feet, and ruby slippers briefly superimposed on her patent-leather pumps.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road! Follow the Yellow Brick Road…
Stop!

That had been bothering her since she hit the City. Was her own brain kinking her around, or was Daine trying to tie her mental patterns in knots? They hadn’t been able to tell her whether he would automatically sense any new presences in his Dream, and lateral thinking was the Dreamer’s occupational disease. Irrelevant associations dredged out of the mind’s mire of trace memories, subconscious detritus and stamped-on feelings. There was only one cure: reality. Of which there was precisely none about. She would have to put up with occasional Sinatra-outs until she was out of the tank.