Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Brandy’s up early,” Joe said.

  Berlin nodded. “Too early. I got a bad feeling, Joe….”

  They held off playing as Brandy Jack came walking around the side of the house. He walked with a shuffling limp, an old skinny hobo in battered hand-me-downs, hair as white as Joe’s, but looking washed-out against his pale skin. Beside him a big mongrel pulled a small wagon that held all of Brandy’s worldly possessions. Tin cans and found things; magazines, a couple of old Reader’s Digest books and a lot of paperbacks with the front covers torn off; rags and mismatched clothing, a lot of it too big or too small for him; a broken harmonium and a ukulele that still worked; a bit of everything to reflect the varying aspects of his fifty-five some years.

  The dog was called Noz and he had a small beanie on his head with a propeller that still turned. Berlin hoped that Brandy had just heard their music and come to play a few of his old Music Hall songs.

  “Hey, Jack,” Joe called. “Glad you’re back.”

  Brandy shook his head mournfully. Even on the sunniest day he wore a hang-dog expression.

  “Dig out your old uke there, Brandy,” Berlin said, “and sing us a couple.”

  Brandy shuffled to a halt when he was at the foot of the steps going up to the porch. Noz sat down in his harness, his short tail thumping the dirt.

  “Seen the sky?” Brandy asked.

  Berlin and Joe looked up. It was growing steadily lighter, but the dismal grey was here for the day.

  “Over there,” Brandy said, pointing west. “Something’s burning in Tintown. Something big.”

  “Burning…?” Joe began.

  Berlin hopped over the rail and landed lightly on the ground, backing up until the house no longer hid her view of the western skies.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “What’s up, Berlin?” Joe asked.

  “Shit!”

  She ran up the stairs, disappearing inside the house. Moments later she was outside once more, a jean jacket thrown on over her faded T-shirt, her jeans tucked into a pair of black leather boots. A knife hung sheathed under each armpit, under the jacket.

  “That’s one of our places that’s burning,” she told Joe as she wheeled a small battered scooter out of the shed that leaned up against the side of the house like a drunken companion too unsteady to stand.

  Tugging a small spell-box free from one of the jean jacket’s many inner pockets, she inserted it into the scooter and turned the engine over. The starting motor ground a couple of times, then the machine coughed into life.

  “What do you want us to do, Berlin?” Joe asked, joining Brandy at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Wake Hooter. Keep a watch on the place.”

  “What about the rounds?”

  Berlin frowned. In another hour or so it’d be time to take out the big wagon and make the rounds of the restaurants to collect what freebie food they could get for the free supper the Diggers provided every night. It was Berlin’s week to take the wagon out.

  “If I’m not back in time, get Casey to take it out.”

  “Casey’s not going to like that,” Joe said. “She’s always complaining that—”

  Berlin just shook her head. Gunning the engine, she took off, the scooter’s rear wheel spraying dirt behind it until she hit the pavement.

  Joe looked at Brandy, then shrugged. “Guess Casey’ll just have to complain some more,” he said as he went back up the stairs.

  There was a big vintage Harley parked in front of the burnt rubble of the Diggers’ free flophouse in Tintown when Berlin arrived. She parked her scooter beside it, putting the little machine on its kickstand. A large ferret sat on the Harley’s saddle, it’s weasel-like body stretched out on the leather as it watched Berlin pocket her spell-box.

  “How ya doing, Lubin?” she said and gave the ferret a pat before joining the tall black man who knelt by something at the front of the building.

  The area was eerily quiet. There were usually a lot of hobos up and about by now, cooking coffee and what breakfast makings they had. Runaways hanging around—Soho Rats looking for a handout from those who weren’t much better off than they were themselves, but still always seemed to make do. But Tintown was empty. The only smoke going up to the sky coming from the big ruined building.

  “Christ,” Berlin muttered. “What the…?”

  Her voice trailed off as she reached the owner of the Harley and saw what he was kneeling beside.

  “Oh, Jesus—Nicky!” She dropped to her knees in the dirt beside the limp broken body, tears welling up behind her eyes. She touched his cold cheek with a trembling hand, then turned away.

  “Stick?” she asked softly, her gravelly voice huskier than ever.

  “Easy, Berlin,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  He took her in his arms as she began to shake. Tears erupted, and Stick just held her close, letting them soak into his shirt. He stroked her hair until she finally pulled away, sitting back on her heels, violet eyes dark with pain.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice firmer now.

  Stick sighed. He stood up and turned away, looking out over Tintown and beyond. His dreadlocks hung like fat fuzzy snakes down his back. When he turned back to look at her, his coffee-coloured skin was pulled tight across his face.

  “I think Nicky took a jump,” he said at last.

  Berlin shook her head. “No way, Stick. He had everything going for him now. All that shit was so far behind him that—”

  Stick silently handed over a small metal container.

  “What’s that?”

  “I found it on him.”

  Berlin opened it up and shook some of the pink and mauve flakes into the palm of her hand. She licked a finger and went to touch it to the flakes, but Stick caught her hand.

  “Bad idea.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Looks like a kind of pearl, but there’s something about it makes me nervous.”

  Berlin looked at the dope, then slowly funneled it back into the container.

  “There’s no way Nicky’d go back,” she said.

  Stick nodded. “That’s what I thought. Found this lying on his chest.”

  He passed over a lacquered marker chip with a Dragontown chop on it—what some of the old folks used to use as a calling card. Berlin studied the black dragon against the red background and shook her head.

  “I don’t recognize the chop,” she said.

  “Neither do I—but it’s definitely a calling card.”

  “One of the tongs?”

  “Doubtful,” Stick said. “It might be someone else trying to set it up to look like the tongs’re involved.”

  “Bloods?”

  “Hard to say at this point, Berlin.”

  Berlin stuck the marker in her back pocket. “Then I guess we’d better go about finding out.”

  “What about Nicky?”

  “Nicky? I….”

  When she looked back at that small broken body the tears wanted to come all over again.

  Berlin swallowed hard. “Can you bring him to the House on your chopper?”

  Stick nodded. “We can’t go off half-cocked on this, Berlin.”

  Berlin looked from the smoldering rubble to Nicky.

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Somebody just declared war, Stick.”

  “Diggers don’t go to war,” Stick reminded her.

  “But Berlin does,” she said softly. “And maybe somebody forgot that.”

  Stick sighed. “And maybe that’s just what they want you to do.”

  Berlin lifted her gaze from Nicky’s body. “Thanks for being here, Stick.”

  Stick looked as though he had something more to add, then he just shook his head.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Gently he cradled Nicky’s body in his arms and carried it back to his Harley. Balancing it on his gas tank, he followed Berlin’s scooter back to the Diggers’ House.

  THREE

  The Digg
ers go back a long way.

  Most people who remember them think of 1967—Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, Yorkville in Toronto. The Summer of Love. Be-ins and Love-ins. Free music in the parks. The Diggers ran houses that provided free shelter, food, medical advice and counseling for the kids who had dropped out, but had nowhere to go, no one else to turn to.

  The original Diggers date back to 1649, in England. They were a radical offshoot of the Levellers—the extreme left wing of Oliver Cromwell’s army. Christian communists, they didn’t believe in private property and were contemptuously called “the Diggers” when they tried to communally farm some poor unused land in St. George’s Hill, Surrey. Forcibly removed, it took over three hundred years for their name and hopes to be revived in the sixties.

  Since then they have resurfaced from time to time—most notably during the food riots in New York City at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More recently they appeared in Bordertown, answering an unspoken need as the city’s population continued to swell with a constant influx of runaways and down-and-outers escaping the World and its ever-increasing capitalistic concerns.

  Berlin thought of all that as they buried Nicky in the graveyard behind the Diggers’ House. A different kind of digging. Instead of scruffing about, looking for handouts to feed their charges, and buildings to bed them in, they were planting one of their own. Digging in the dirt. The world’s common treasury that was more abused every year. But that was what happened when people thought they could own land. The world’s most successful cultures, at least in an ethical sense, had always been those that understood that the land was only theirs on loan.

  She was the last to leave when the short non-denominational service was over. Stick gave her some time on her own by the graveside, then returned from the House where he’d been talking with a couple of the other Diggers.

  “I didn’t know him too well,” he said after awhile.

  “I did.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “I was the one that brought him in—talked him down, saw him through the first rough weeks when he was dropping the pearl. I never thought he’d….” Stick touched her shoulder, but she shook her head. “I’m okay. I’m all cried out, Stick. Now I just want to find the fucker who did this to him.”

  Hooter was the Diggers’ current medic. When they brought Nicky’s body back to the House, it had only taken him a few moments to find the tell-tale flaring in the dead boy’s pupils. Nicky hadn’t ODed, but he’d definitely been pearl diving when he died.

  “Sometimes they just go back to it,” Stick said quietly. “It’s not nice and it’s not pretty, Berlin, but it happens.”

  “I know. And I know the kind it happens to. Nicky wasn’t like that. By the time he was finally clean, Stick, all he could feel was relief. He was the best we had to handle anyone who was making the break for themselves. He hated dope—any kind of it. Believe me.”

  Stick looked down at the raw earth of the grave and sighed. “Okay. I’m going to do some poking around—see what I can come up with. Can you be cool till then?”

  Berlin shook her head. “I’m tracking them down, Stick.”

  “Bad move.”

  She turned to face him, eyes dark with anger. “You’re treating me like a kid and I don’t like it.”

  “Think of what you’re about to do. The Diggers are tolerated at best, but only because they don’t get political. They don’t get involved. They’re not aggressive. You start shoving your weight around, Berlin, you’re just going to make things worse. You want your food sources cut off in Dragontown? You want some Blood gangs or Packers to come down on you and trash your Houses? Who’s going to defend them? You? All by yourself?”

  “If I have to.”

  “But you don’t have to. I can do this thing for you. Christ, it’s what I do.”

  “You don’t understand,” Berlin said.

  “Hey, all of a sudden I’m—”

  “Will you listen to me? You’re out on the streets, sure, and you help a lot of people—my people, street people, whoever’s in trouble. I can appreciate that. But then you go back to your fancy museum with all its conveniences and shut the door on the world. It’s not the same out here. We’re living right on the front lines with the people we’re trying to help.”

  “Now don’t—”

  Berlin cut him off again. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing, Stick. I know what’d happen if you opened your place to the streets—the museum’d get trashed. And you’re doing more for those who need help than just about anybody else, but it’s still not the same as being a part of it. Can you understand that? It’s not just revenge I want. I’ve got to know why this is suddenly happening. Who’s got it in for us and why.”

  Stick nodded. “Okay. I get the picture. You want to come with me or go it on your own?”

  “No offense, but I think I’ll go it on my own.”

  She looked up to meet his gaze. Stick laid the palm of his hand against her cheek.

  “There’s not many of us left,” he said. “You be careful. Let me know if you need anything.”

  Berlin nodded.

  “Be seeing you then.”

  He turned and strode off, leaving her by the grave feeling very much alone. Not until she heard the deep-throated roar of his Harley starting up and then taking off, did she walk slowly from the grave herself.

  FOUR

  There was music on the roof.

  Stick heard it when he shut off his Harley, a jaunty version of “Tamberwine’s Jig” on tin whistle and electric guitar that came drifting down from the museum’s roof-top garden. Locking up his bike and pocketing its spell-box, he went up the six flights of stairs to find Amanda Woodsdatter and Jenny Jingle in the garden amusing Lubin with their music. The ferret danced on her hind legs, keeping perfect time to the 6/8 rhythm of the jig.

  The girls brought the tune to an end when they saw Stick.

  “You don’t look so good,” Manda said.

  “It’s not been a good day,” Stick agreed.

  Silver-eyed and mauve-haired, Manda leaned against the balustrade in a polka-dotted mini-dress that matched the canary yellow of her Les Paul. She played lead guitar for the Horn Dance, but spent a good deal of her spare time hanging around the museum acting the part of Stick’s surrogate daughter, much to Stick’s amusement. Leaning her guitar against its small portable amp, she picked up a thermos to pour Stick a mug of tea.

  “Did you find out where the fire was?” she asked.

  Stick nodded. “Someone torched the Diggers’ place in Tintown.”

  “Are you serious? Was anybody hurt?”

  “A guy named Nicky who ran the place.”

  “I’ve met him,” Jenny said.

  She pushed Lubin away from her knee which the ferret kept nudging in an attempt to get her to continue the music.

  Unlike Manda who was a halfling, the whistle player was a full-blooded elf who worked part-time at Farrel Din’s place down in Soho. She wore her hair in a half-dozen silver braids from which hung tiny bells that jingled whenever she moved her head and a pair of shades with pink plastic frames. Her T-shirt was one that Stick had given to Manda advertising a long-gone rock band called the Divinyls.

  Stick took his tea from Manda with a nod of thanks. Slouching down in old wicker rocker, he put his feet up on Manda’s guitar case and sighed.

  “Well, Nicky’s dead now,” he said heavily.

  “Dead?”

  “I just got back from burying him.”

  The girls exchanged horrified looks.

  “God,” Manda said. “What a horrible way to go.”

  Stick shook his head. “He didn’t get caught in the fire. He was on the pearl and took a drop from one of the windows.”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Jenny said. “I know he used to be a junkie but he dropped the pearl a long time ago. There’s no way he’d go back.”

  “That’s what Berlin said, too. She
’s taking it pretty hard. But we found some shit on him—weird shit. Some new kind of pearl, looks like.”

  He filled in the rest of the details with a few terse sentences. When he was done, they all sat around without speaking for a long while. Lubin gave up on Jenny and came to collapse on the arm of Stick’s chair. He ruffled the thick fur at the nape of the ferret’s neck and looked out across the roof-top garden to Fare-you-well Park and beyond.

  “Well,” he said finally. “Time’s wasting. I’ve got to head over to Dragontown to check up on that marker.”

  “I know someone who might be able to help you with that,” Jenny said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “My teacher—Koga Sensei.”

  Something flickered in Stick’s eyes.

  “Shoki,” he said quietly. “I hadn’t thought of him.”

  Jenny looked puzzled. “Who or what’s Shoki?” she asked, but Stick was already turning away.

  “Not this time,” he told Lubin as the ferret rose to follow him. “Manda?”

  Manda called Lubin back. Stick nodded to them from the door.

  “Don’t hold supper for me,” he said.

  Then he was gone. Jenny and Manda looked at each other.

  “Sometimes,” Jenny said after a few subdued moments, “he really spooks me.”

  “He just gets a little intense, that’s all,” Manda said.

  Jenny nodded. “Poor Nicky. I wonder how it happened. He was the last guy I’d expect to get hooked again.”

  The grey skies above them seemed drearier than ever. The air held a sudden chill. Manda shivered.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  Together they packed up their things and brought them down to the living quarters on the Museum’s fifth floor.

  Koga Sensei lived behind his dojo which was on the second floor of a building that also housed a Trader’s shop. The store was run by an old Japanese couple and took up most of the main floor. Stick glanced at the goods for sale in the window—everything from Japanese noodles and gaudily-wrapped imported candies to elvin herb-pouches—then went up the stairs.