The Night Mayor (15 page)

Also, she would have to find Daine. Best to start at the top.

‘City Hall,’ she said. ‘I have to see a mayor.’

S
teelface knew how to get to City Hall. Susan suspected Daine was making it easy. He thought he could mindblast her as simply as he had put Tunney out of the picture. And, he was probably curious about her. She mightn’t be much, but in the self-awareness and independence stakes she was the only girl in town. This might be his idea of an escape, but in Daine’s position she thought she’d go zooidal. She imagined a lifetime among her own Dreamed creations, knowing exactly what they would say next, exactly what was around every corner. No matter how vast a universe he made, Daine would still be trapped by the limits of his own imagination. He was probably far gone enough not to realise yet that he had jumped from one box into a smaller one.

All roads probably led to City Hall. Her chauffeur got her there with the minimum of distraction. There weren’t any incidents to get in the way. No car chases or police roadblocks.

Insofar as the City had a business and commercial district, this was it. There were election posters up for the mayoral race. James Stewart was running against the incumbent, Brian Donlevy. Neither of them appeared to represent any particular party, and the election was being fought entirely on personalities. Stewart’s slogan was ‘War on Graft’, Donlevy’s ‘Doing Things the Way They’ve Always Been Done’. Susan knew Stewart would win the election but never take office. That was how the story always goes: the young reformer wins in the end, but by the next picture the corrupt machine politicians are still in power. She wondered if Jimmy ever got tired of the cycle. She kept seeing copperplate graffiti on Stewart’s posters, ‘You can’t fight City Hall.’ Things weren’t all that different back in the real world, she thought.

The City’s administrative centre was like a giant-scaled village green, with three imposing municipal erections boxing it in. City Hall, Police Headquarters and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Building. City Square was a cheerless park, with arrangements of black, white and grey flowers in beds, grey stretches of grass, and a monumental, black, floodlit statue of Truro Daine dressed as a Roman emperor, fiddle tucked under his chin, bow poised to saw down.

Susan had her chauffeur draw into a space beside City Hall marked RESERVED, and got out of the car. The square was empty, except for a pair of winos sleeping it off under the statue. She looked up at the statue and laughed. The black brows knit, and solid silver laurels bobbed. Like many great villains, Daine must have no conception of how ludicrous he appeared much of the time.

‘Are you really in there, Daine?’ she shouted.

Gigantic arms moved, and music was shaken from the stone violin. ‘The Devil’s Trill’ by Tartini. More delusions of grandeur. Although the music was animated, only the arms moved. The face was frozen now, and the rest of the body was stone dead.

Over the shriek of the tune, Susan asked a question. ‘Daine, do you know anything about Japanese monster flatties?’

She sat cross-legged on the grass and reached out to the bay. Casting her mind deep into the black waters, she created a whirlpool. It started as a funnelling current the size of a sea horse, then lengthened, sucking in a core of air. She made that air solid, and drew in stuff from the water and clouds of spinning gravel. Daine had made the bottom of his sea loose, like a big fishtank. She imagined a musculature, a skeleton, a hide, pumping organs, glowing eyes. As her creation grew in strength, so she felt her own on the rise. Her upper arms began to swell, stretching tight the fabric of her suit. She caught it in time, and had them dwindle a little. She couldn’t afford a Hulk-out now.

The two winos had been shocked awake by the infernal music, and scurried away from the statue.

‘Hey, lady,’ said one rummy, Walter Brennan, ‘wuz you ever stung by a dead bee?’

They kept running, and were gone before Susan had a chance to figure out what that meant and whether she should answer it. The statue kept playing. The ground of the park rippled as if disturbed by colossal, underground moles. Gophers, rather: moles would be gophers here. Susan felt the power in the earth shaking up through her body.

Out on the bay, something enormous broke the surface. Miniature tidal waves swept up against the waterfront, tearing piers and jetties away, spilling over into the maze of streets, driving a human exodus before them. Susan dipped into her new toy, seeing the City spread out like a model in front of its water-washed eyes. She roared her delight, and clapped house-sized hands in the air above her scaled head. She lashed out with her tail, overturning ships, smashing down a lighthouse. Waves surged around her gargantuan thighs as she waded towards the shore.

Back as Susan, she heard her own voice, distorted by its passage through the cavernous reptile throat, shouting out in defiance. The ground still shook in time with the footsteps of the great beast. Whole sections of the City were trampled flat, buildings going down like balsa wood. Streets buckled, cars flew through the air like nursery toys, and matchstick model pylons flew apart.

Susan held her hands up in the air, and felt those other, claw-tipped hands tearing down Daine’s Dream. Cuts and weals appeared where her surrogate hurt itself in its destructive frenzy, but she smoothed them away with a flick of her mind. People ran through the square, screaming in Japanese. A rag-tag convoy in half-tracks and armoured cars passed by City Hall, their outriders churning up the flower beds. No one bothered Susan. She saw Charlton Heston standing up in a jeep, dressed as a desert general, his shirt open to the waist, binoculars hanging against his hairy chest. He signed his troops to move out. Artillery batteries opened up.

The army couldn’t stop it. A tank hurled across the square, just missing the still-fiddling statue, and crunched into the side of the MGM Building. It lodged in the shattered brickwork as a million windows fell in tinkling shards to the sidewalk. The truck-sized stone Ars Gratia Artis lion on the roof mewled and leaped for a safer perch. Gunfire sounded like Chinese fireworks, and the great beast shrugged off the hurt as if it had been inconvenienced by gnats.

A squadron of biplanes flew low over the City, machine guns chattering. The Dawn Patrol was early. Susan heard them being knocked out of the skies. A bipedal beagle tall as a child, with a flying helmet and goggles, climbed out of a wrecked Sopwith Camel and brushed himself off, barking in pain. So much for Biggles and the Red Baron. The air force couldn’t stop it either.

Then Susan’s monster was in the square, towering above Daine’s statue. She had seen a lot of Japanese
kaiju eiga
flatties as a child thanks to a quirk of her father’s, and had now been able to draw on her memories of them. For her creation she had combined Godzilla the King of Monsters, Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, Gappa the Triphibian Monster, Guilala the X from Outer Space, Gamera the Giant Flying Turtle and Hedorah the Smog Monster. The enormous hybrid flexed its non-functional wings, breathed atomic fire down on the City, and thumped the ground with its 500-foot tail. Daine’s statue shook but didn’t miss a note.

Susan shut her eyes and saw through her monster’s. The tiny black fiddler irritated her with his scratchy, wasplike buzzing. She raised a flipper-clawed foot, and a shadow the size of a meltdown scar fell over the busy-armed figure. Susan felt something pull her tail, and was rudely dislodged from the creature. As if slapped across the face, she opened her eyes and looked up as her monster was tugged off its feet by invisible forces. She saw it struggling against a mighty wind, but unable to smite anything tangible within its reach. Its tail dangled useless, like the broken arm of a bendy rubber doll. The monster was sucked upwards. Increasing distance made it shrink as it rose, until at an unimaginable height it was not larger to her eye than a small bird. Then, tiny in the sky, it burst into a black cloud and was gone.

Susan rubbed her smarting eyes. All was quiet now, except for the gentle rain and Daine’s music. The square was undisturbed. The MGM windows were smoothly unbroken, the lion still vigilant on the roof. The grass was level, the flower beds in order. She could see no wrecked cars, planes, military vehicles. The trill sawed to a finish, and even the echo of the notes faded. The statue was unmoving again.

‘What do you want to call that, Daine? A draw? Too easy. This is Susan Bishopric here. I’ve won one Rodney, and I’ll have a shitload more this autumn. 1 can Dream rings around you, and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’

One of the statue’s black marble eyes winked at her.

I
felt as if an earthquake had just hit the City. They had me in the holding cells at headquarters. Edward G. Robinson was blubbing a confession in the next cage, and George Raft was hollering for his lawyer in the one beyond that. I sat on my cot, playing cat’s cradle with handcuffs, and kept quiet. The whole building shook, and someone was running the sound-effects tracks from
All Quiet on the Western Front
and
Hell’s Angels
very loud out in the street. I asked a passing cop what was going on, but he just double-took on me and snarled, ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ Some drunk downstairs was yelling about monsters, and I figured Orson Welles had pulled another Men from Mars gag. Only this time, he had put a lot more into the production values. A lump of the ceiling fell down. Then, suddenly, everything was quiet again and you could hear the dust settling. Only then did the cops bother to send anyone up to check to see if we were okay. Sergeant Allen Jenkins was disappointed that none of us had been pancaked under rubble, but quickly learned to live with it.

‘You,’ he said to me, ‘Quick. They want you in Interrogation.’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll come quietly.’

He rattled a huge ring of keys and let me out of the cell.

‘So long, fellas,’ I said to Eddie and George. ‘See you in the movies.’

Jenkins took my arms and helped me up several flights of stairs, like a Boy Scout assisting an old lady. Headquarters was a mess. Nurses were going around putting white bandages on bruised heads, and painting iodine on open wounds. We passed the press room. The door had been knocked off its hinges. Inside I saw Joseph Cotten on the phone, rattling off some scare story about the Monster that Ate the City. He tucked the phone between chin and shoulder and gave me a friendly salute, but didn’t pause in his recitation of copy. I’d have waved back, but I still had the manacles on.

‘Quiet night, huh?’ I remarked. Jenkins didn’t say anything.

Interrogation was a quiet room at the top of the building. A room with no windows and thick walls. Once the door was shut, they could have had a dance band going full blast and you’d never know it in the next room. I suppose cops get squeamish whenever they hear screams and thumps.

‘Hold out your hands,’ said the sergeant. Obligingly, I did, and he fiddled with the lock. The bracelets came off, and I massaged my wrists.

‘No funny business now, you hear.’

‘As if I would…’

He prodded me through the door. The room was dark.

‘Sit down.’

Jenkins shoved me into a chair, then twisted a desklamp until it shone in my face. That much was traditional. I took off my jacket and rolled up my shirtsleeves. I’d have loosened my tie, but they had taken it away along with my wallet, gun, belt and shoelaces. I wondered how easy it would be to hang yourself with your shoelaces.

Jenkins stepped out, and two shadows moved behind the light. I remembered Captain of Detectives Barton MacLane from the Noir et Blanc. According to the papers, he hadn’t been very complimentary about me recently. The other man was Detective Ralph Bellamy, who had a reputation as a straight cop. I hoped he had earned it. MacLane hadn’t shaved in a week and listed ‘sweating’ as his hobby in
Who’s Who
; Bellamy radiated open-faced friendliness and ever so slightly dumb honesty. Nasty cop, nice cop: they were following procedure to the letter.

MacLane lit up a cigarette and breathed smoke into the funnel of light. He offered the pack to Bellamy, who accepted one, and conspicuously failed to give me the chance to take the easy way out by tarring the inside of my lungs until I choked. That would have been quicker than shoelaces, I was sure. I drummed my fingers on the desktop. I wasn’t Gene Krupa, but I got a fair beat going before MacLane rapped my knuckles.

‘Can it, gumshoe.’

‘Gumshoe’. That comes a close second after ‘shamus’ as my least favourite euphemism. What’s so difficult to say about ‘private investigator’ or ‘Mr Quick’ or even ‘pal’, ‘buddy’ or ‘sir’?

My hand hurt. MacLane slapped his open palm lightly with a leaded length of rubber hosepipe. Bellamy gave him a disapproving look, but he ignored it.

‘Okay, gumshoe, let’s get this straight…’

‘If you’re straight, we’ll treat you straight,’ said Bellamy.

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘You mugs wouldn’t know how to treat me straight if I were a twelve-inch ruler.’

‘A comedian!’ MacLane did something else with his toy. ‘I love comedians.’

Then they brought in a couple of supporting interrogators and gave me the third degree. They were good. I sweated in the spotlight and tried not to tell them anything. They prowled beyond the light like caged beasts, filling the tiny room with cop stink, barking out a bunch of unconnected questions. I think they brought in some ex-Gestapo ‘ve haff vays of makink you talk’ thug to substitute on some of the pitches. The rubber hose didn’t actually get used, but it was waved around a lot. The cops worked shifts, but I was booked in for the run. The cops got coffee and cigarettes and sandwiches, but I had to make do with inhaling their used smoke. Ashtrays got full, and paper cups got drafted. There’s no smell quite like burning butts in coffee dregs. It was two thirty in the morning, and I hadn’t slept in days. I could barely remember what a bed looked like.

This team could have persuaded the Pope to confess that Judas Iscariot had been framed by George Washington, and that Jesus H. Christ had let Huey, Dewey and Louie take the rap for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. If they had worked on me enough, I’d have blown the whistle on myself for the Lindbergh kidnapping, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Cleveland Torso slayings, betraying West Point to the British, fixing the 1919 World Series and souring all the milk in Salem, Massachusetts. But I had decided that I wasn’t going to wear the arrow suit for Truro Daine.