The Night Mayor (6 page)

I pushed through crowds and staggered down deserted alleyways. I knocked over newsstands and bounced off delivery trucks. Crouching against a wall, I saw my own face staring guiltily down at me from a WANTED poster. There was a reward out for me, posted by something called the Cicero Club. Police cars prowled past, searchlights stabbing the darkness for me. Knots of people saw me coming and whispered among themselves, turning up their collars to shut me out of the game. Every cop in the city was after me, and I knew Daine’s underworld connections would have spread the word to have me pencilled out of this draft by now. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out and wanted for murder.

In the French quarter, I saw a Gestapo staff car draw up outside an
estaminet
and heard Raymond Massey describe me in gutturally accented English to a group of swarthy collaborators. I dodged seemingly random shots from the snipers on the roofs. There were Vs painted on all the posters of the Führer Anton Diffring, and bulletholes at chest height on most of the walls.

Staggering down one well-lit main street, going from bar to bar, I tripped over Sterling Hayden. He was bleeding to death in the gutter, one hand trying to hold his stomach in, the other clutching a battered suitcase held together by travel stickers and string. He groaned as I stumbled, and my foot caught the catch of the case. It sprang open and a wind from nowhere whipped out the loose hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside. A cloud of mimeograph-grey money enveloped me for an instant, bills whipping my face, and scattered away. Pedestrians snatched bills from the air, scooped soggy currency from the sidewalk, watched as the valuable cloud took off like a hot-air balloon, twisting in a faintly manlike shape, ascending to the skies. It was the Genie of the Bank, willing to bestow three wishes on anyone who would set him free of the vaults, but skilled in the arts of irony and deception. All his promised were razor-edged with hidden dangers, loopholes and lessons. Those wise enough to save the last wish usually begged for death. Sterling turned over and laughed painfully, a treacle trickle snaking from his mouth. He died with eyes open, leaving a million dollars to the four winds. That was The End of his plot, and I thought I could see a touch of relief, of transcendence, in his dead smile.

But I was still strapped into my life, bound by a plot I could no longer predict, condemned to ride the streetcar until the last stop. A police car turned into the street, searchlight sweeping the asphalt like a Martian heat ray. I wiped wet money off my face, and ran again.

Hiding briefly between the garbage cans by a diner, gasping for breath, I overheard an announcer cut into a programme of dance music from the Starlight Lounge of the RKO-Radio Hotel and broadcast my description.

‘This man is armed and dangerous, and should be shot down on sight or turned over to the police. In addition to the contract killing of Truro Daine, he is believed to be not only the mastermind behind the string of so-called “Pajama Suicides” that have so baffled Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, but also the ape trainer responsible for the infamous Murders in the Rue Morgue, the mechanic who serviced Amelia Earhart’s plane before she took off on her last flight, and the man who shot Liberty Valance.’ As an afterthought the announcer added, ‘This interruption is
not
part of the scheduled Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air presentation,
The Black Path of Fear
by Cornell Woolrich. This is a genuine interruption and should not be misconstrued as a bizarre prank.’

His voice changed pitch from urgency to solemnity and he trailed a later programme. ‘In two hours’ time, we will broadcast a tribute to Truro Daine, the great humanitarian who has so suddenly and tragically been taken from our City by this senseless crime. Among those who have hurriedly assembled in our studios to air their heartfelt feelings in this hour of mourning are Mayor Brian Donlevy, famed criminologist and broadcaster Qaude Rains, philanthropic businessman and pillar of the community Edward Arnold and noted psychic consultant Otto –’

A customer yelped, and the drudge behind the bar spun the radio dial until music sounded out again. The young, high-voiced Frank Sinatra did what he did with ‘Night and Day’.

I pushed away from the diner, and propelled myself across the street. For no reason I could tell you, I appealed for help to a corpse-thin, bald man in his shirtsleeves who sat on an empty beer keg in a doorway, playing solitaire on a fold-out table, chewing an unlit cigar. I went down on my knees and begged him to take me in, to give me shelter, food, a place to sleep, a new face, a forged passport, a ticket to Peru, a hot drink. He continued to turn over the cards, never lifting his eyes from the configurations on the baize, saying nothing. Finally, I ran out of words and just sobbed. Then I ran out of sobs and slumped on my knees in front of the man’s doorway.

He was losing, but hadn’t seen it yet. He kept going through the pack, three cards at a time, and nothing came up. Nothing changed. He played faster. The same five or six cards showed their useless faces. He bit through his cigar, but sucked it in, keeping it in his mouth, spitting the plug out into the gutter. The cards kept coming up the same. Disgusted, he shuffled the cards in his hand, cheating, and went through the pack again. There were still no cards he could use. I knew he should give up, but he kept playing, hands moving faster than a magician’s.

‘Please,’ I said.

The solitaire player dealt me a single card, and continued to play. It was the Queen of Spades. She had Veronica Lake’s face, sliced diagonally in half by bobbed hair. Veronica’s exposed eye winked at me, and I dropped the card onto the sidewalk. It fell face down on the wet, black slab.

I left the man playing and walked away, alone in the City. I angled my face up and shut my eyes. Pain throbbed in the dark of my head. Water ran down my face.

It was two thirty in the morning, and raining.

V
aclav Trefusis received Susan in his spacious office. He evidently took seriously his position as governor. Behind his antique, formica-topped deskslab, he sat in a swivel throne, kitted up like the stereotypical New Carolian: mutton-chop whiskers, starched collar, frock coat, mirror shades and medal ribbons. One wall was decorated entirely with pics of Princetown jail from the 1800s to the present day, an evolving monolith, and portraits of past governors. Another was hung with the black-framed trids of the various notable felons who had been incarcerated here. Of course, the governors looked far less trustworthy than the felons. Life doesn’t believe in typecasting. Through a huge, one-way view, Governor Trefusis could overlook his charges. Currently the scene was a hydroponics plant.

‘Food for the refugees in Kansas, Ms Bishopric.’ Trefusis pulled a cigar out of a recess, chopped it in a miniature guillotine and sparked it with a tiny zapgun. ‘We find that forgers and stranglers make the best viviculturalists. Assassins and rapists get the reclamation duties. Black economists process DHSS forms, meatleggers work the kitchens, and ransackers still break up rocks with picks and sledgehammers. This institution is a machine. Its function is to punish trespassers, but I have streamlined its workings. There are side effects profitable for all society.’

Trefusis exhaled a cloud of scented smoke. Susan sipped her green tea and nodded. She still had no idea what was going on. Trefusis tapped his slab, and the toilers among vats disappeared. A tridvid mugsnap appeared in the view, full face, revolving to left profile, back of head, right profile and full face again. And the face was indeed full. Not flabby, but full. The face of a general regarded as a homicidal maniac in his time but reassessed as a national hero after he was safely dead for centuries; the face of a great technician hailed as an artist of genius by his peers and contemporaries, but contemptuously forgotten by posterity once he was no longer around to fuel the vogue with his personality; the face of an emperor – a Nero, an Alexander, a Napoleon, a Heseltine, a Dweezil.

Susan whistled. ‘Truro Daine.’

‘You’re familiar with the man?’ asked Trefusis, holding the dopesmoke in the back of his throat.

‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘The world has heard of Truro Daine. In an era when criminals are largely imbecile sociopaths, politico-religious fanatics, disadvantaged simpletons or overenthusiastic executives, he is unique.’

‘Fu Manchu.’

‘I beg pardon?’

‘Fu Manchu, the Great Enchanter, Professor Moriarty, Captain Nemo, Zenith the Albino, Dr Mabuse, Lex Luthor, Ernst Stavros Blofeld, Dr Doom, Eugene Smedley, Cardinal Synn. A master criminal.’

‘Quite. Popular culture is, of course, your field. I was misremembering. That’s why you’re with us. Truro Daine is indeed a master criminal. Even in this place, his fluence remains. He remainders more people annually than motorways. When he commenced his career, some of your colleagues in the mediocracy chose to project him as a romantic figure, a swashbuckling throwback to an earlier, somehow more exciting, age. Naturally, I cannot be expected to share that opinion.’

Trefusis’s fingers did a little dance on his slab, and a montage of tridvid clips passed through the view. Ruined banks, sundered museums, devastated cities, blasted heaths. Trefusis gave her a series of corpse close-ups, one dead face after another. Men, women, children, animals. ‘For Truro Daine, human life is a poor commodity. Like many great men – and I do not begrudge him that epithet – he has a deep-seated belief that other people aren’t real. In his solipsism, he has experimented with murder on an unprecedented scale, convincing himself with each zilched life that he alone is truly sapient. That is a crucial insight. Tag it well.

‘Of course, his basic problem is common or garden homicidal mania. It’s been treatable for fifty years. It would lead another man to become a mercenary or a serial killer, but Truro Daine is not another man, he is perhaps the third or fourth loftiest intelligence in the world. Had he chosen to live within the fold, he would undoubtedly be richer through the income on his patents than he was through theft, extortion, terror-for-hire, blackmail and the black economy. He could have been very high in the Gunmint. But that would have bored him zoidal.’

‘B-b-bad to the B-b-bone.’

‘I beg pardon?’

‘A song, Governor. Pardon me. It’s a pash of mine. Old songs.’

‘Harrumph.’

Daine’s face came back, frozen. His serial numbers hung solid in front of his chest. Being under arrest hadn’t fazed him. Perhaps he had tried everything else and thought punishment might be less boring than trespass. Yggdrasil knows, Truro Daine was brainier than the Gunmint.

‘Do you know,’ said Trefusis, clearly enthused on his favourite subject, ‘when he finally came to trial, he was found guilty on 8,921 counts of first-degree murder alone, excluding his various thermonuclear adventures. Before they gave up, the international courts found him culpable in enough instances to entail a mandatory sentence without remission that would take a significant chunk out of the lifespan of a continent. If he were to live out his stretch, it is likely on the current evidence that the human race would have evolved beyond all recognition by the time he was eligible for parole. When it came to the vote, lamas who refuse vaccines on the grounds that even microorganisms have a right to life endorsed a revival of the death penalty just this once.’

Susan remembered the controversy. It had got as far as Yggdrasil, and the machine had taken longer to debate the issue than any other she could remember. When, after a full two hours, it had decreed that, even in the case of Truro Daine, capital punishment was not an option, there had been riots from Peiping to Valparaiso. A few more decisions like that and the Gunmint would have to find itself another A1 demagogue. Behind Trefusis, Daine was still at ease in his tridvid clip, smug as Prime Minister Dies, calm as Chillmeister Freaze.

‘You’d think that the one place Truro Daine would be accepted was right here, wouldn’t you? All trespassers together. But child molesters, corpse violators and religion pushers refuse to share a field with him. He has a phantom zone of his own to keep the other prisoners away from him. He remaindered too many of his associates to retain the loyalty of the trespassing classes.’

‘This is all very interesting, but…’

‘Where do you come in, Ms Bishopric? You must forgive me for being prolix. You see, Truro Daine has escaped.’

The view blanked. Susan saw that Trefusis was crying. He reached for a face-dab and touched his cheeks. She looked around, nervous, and was embarrassed by the nerve-twitch reaction. Did she think Truro Daine was hiding behind the Yggdrasil banks in the corner, clutching his straight razor?

‘That’s not supposed to be possible, Governor.’

Trefusis blew his nose, and ordered himself. The pomp came back and he inflated again. ‘It isn’t. Do you understand our system?’

‘Only what I scan in the newsbreaks.’

‘It’s perfect. Humane, but escape-proof. There are no bars and locks. Structurally, this building could be a school or a hospital. Our only security comes down through the Yggdrasil terminal. It broadcasts a variable energy field. At night, it shrinks to encompass just the main building. During the work periods, it bubbles significantly to allow the prisoners to their assigned toil areas. Upon conviction, each trespasser is implanted with a pacemaker. If he or she should wander beyond the field, the pacemaker gives out and their heart stops. If we find them within five minutes, they can be resurrected. If not… well, they knew what they were doing. Aside from clear-cut cases of suicide, no one has even tried to escape since we introduced the system.’

‘So, what did Daine use? A deal with the Devil? Do-it-yourself open-heart surgery?’

‘He found a loophole. A loophole which can be noosed only by someone with your qualifications.’

Susan had that deep-down doom feeling again. She precogged all her Dreams being reissued in black-trimmed boxjackets as a memorial set. ‘Governor, please don’t confuse me with one of my characters. I’m not especially qualified for anything apart from Dreaming. I’ve never done anything heroic awake. Most of the time I need a nerve enhance and an armoured andrew guard to cross the road.’