The New Hero: Volume 1

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  To his credit, when Don Vicente arrived at Cazador’s table, taking advantage of the sudden departure of two local businessmen who had been winning slow and steady until just then, he was all gracious manners and suave introductions. He clapped the shoulder of the West Side real-estate developer. He murmured interestedly to the East Side furrier, and was positively courtly to the wife of the regional sales manager from Philadelphia who couldn’t believe he was still holding his own in the game. He nodded remotely to the Texican oil baron, aristocrat to nouveau riche aristocrat. Only after taking his seat did he allow himself a flash of anger at Cazador across the table. His men ringed the table, almost but not quite blocking a quick retreat. Now the game could begin for real.

  ‘So what brings you to New York, Mr. Hunter?’ The question came from the real-estate man, who had been subtly encouraged in such curiosity for the past hour or so.

  ‘I’m here to meet a friend of mine, an engineer. We’re hoping to work on a project together. I saw him here yesterday, but I just missed him.’ Cazador swept the eyes of all four Imperials, gratified to see the recognition bloom. ‘But I’m not worried. I’ll figure out where he got off to, and then we’ll be back in business.’ Four sets of eyes shifted or stared or squinted, and Cazador’s eyes marked them.

  Then the cards came around, and conversation ebbed for a bit aside from ‘Draw two’ and ‘Forty to you, Mr. Welch’ and ‘Call’. Cazador had long since figured out the tells for his table mates, some of which could have been seen from a lighted stage. Now he looked for those little tics and gestures from Don Vicente, and from his watching men. The Cuban lieutenant tightened his lips at near-run plays by anyone at the table. One of the guards sneered whenever the Texican or the Jew played badly. The other seemed a little slow, but his eyes lit up when he saw something he recognized or there was a big win. And Don Vicente, as it happened, tilted his chin slightly to the left when he had good cards, and lowered one eyelid a millimeter at bad ones. Cazador kept the game hot enough, playing just a little wild and outside, feeding enough plays to unlikely winners, to get a whole range of reactions from the four of them. Every stimulus he played out drew four signals in return. For Cazador, it was like calibrating a four-way, card-driven polygraph.

  ‘So is your ranch north of Houston, Mr. Marland?’ Cazador asked it innocuously, but leaned a bit on Hew-ston. And the big guard sneered as only a New Yorker can when someone mispronounces Houston Street―pronounced How-ston, and named for Congressman William Houstoun in 1786 on both Earths.

  For his part, Marland threw back his head and laughed: ‘Nossir, I can’t say as there’s much north of Houston. My place is south of there, a good bit south.’

  That was a gamble that paid off twice. First: young Sam Houston had thrown in his lot with Burr and eventually got something in Texas named after him on this Earth, too. Second: Don Vicente’s chin tilted slightly to the left. A bluff?

  ‘So pardon my ignorance, Mr. Marland, what exactly is north of Hew-ston?’ Now the Cuban’s lips tightened―he’d heard someone recently mispronounce the street, at a guess Don Vicente. And something was north of Houston Street.

  ‘Just the river, Mr. Hunter. And a whole passel of Pawnee Indians.’ The slow guard’s eyes lit up―it couldn’t have been Pawnee Indians―was it the river? A quick flurry of bets and some table talk on the last card of the next hand ―‘the river’ in Mississippi gamblers’ slang, also on both Earths―nailed it. But it couldn’t be the Hudson to ping a native New Yorker… of course, River Street.

  Now, it was the real-estate developer’s turn to earn his place at Cazador’s table. It took barely any time for him to start exalting various locations around the city, quite a few of them on the Lower West Side. And every so often, a street or a church or a park would get a hit on one or more of the four Imperials, and Cazador could narrow his aim even further. Cazador played the Philadelphia tourists on the furrier, since he’d already eliminated the East Side. Like all New Yorkers, ‘the clever Mr. Dreyfus’ was happy to explain how to get anywhere in the city on a streetcar or subway, and even happier to argue about his route with the other New Yorkers at the table. More streets, more locations, fed into the polygraph.

  Cazador had to keep the cards fairly quiet to avoid washing out the signal. He started winning slow and early, calling bluffs before pots got too rich, and folding only when he was sure someone else had the hand under control. Don Vicente, meanwhile, began playing more and more aggressively, betting big and bluffing hard. And sometimes, Lady Luck likes the hard sell: Don Vicente’s chin lifted on a very good turn. He and Marland were suddenly in play for a very big pot, with Cazador holding nothing. ‘Hell, looks like someone found the key to the bank!’ Marland said, throwing down another thousand New Dollars. That would eat up most of Cazador’s remaining stake. It was worth it, however: a tic from the Cuban and lighted eyes from a guard put the Imperial safe house on Bank Street, north of Houston, near River. Cazador would bet everything on it.

  He threw down his cards. ‘I fold.’

  Nothing wakes up a table like a steady winner who just lost big. Marland was too surprised to raise again, and Don Vicente cleaned up with Kings over Tens.

  Now another gamble. Cazador stood, gathered up his diminished chips, bowed to Don Vicente, and turned slightly away. Don Vicente stood up in a rush: ‘Señor Hunter. We have not yet finished our game.’ A toss of the head; the guards began to move toward the casino entrance, blocking his retreat.

  ‘You will excuse me, Don Vicente. It is after midnight’―the eyelid lowered more than one millimeter at this―‘and I have an early day of looking for my friend tomorrow.’ Cazador stepped around the table, on the opposite side from the Cuban.

  ‘Stay here, play out the game, and I shall make sure you find him.’ Don Vicente countered, blocking Cazador and coming closer.

  ‘I cannot.’ Cazador moved up, crowding into even Don Vicente’s narrower Latin personal space.

  ‘I insist.’ Don Vicente’s eyelid was really going now. Cazador judged he was all in, consumed with anger and frustration, with the spy’s nightmare of Not Knowing.

  Cazador lowered his voice. ‘If you wish your subordinates and this arriviste blanco to know that I have your credentials, by all means keep me from leaving, Don Vicente.’

  Before the other could react, Cazador pivoted. ‘Or allow me to slip them to you as we walk outside, and word never needs to reach your enemies in Mexico City.’ Louder: ‘Perhaps a cigar, then, Don Vicente. If you insist.’

  For a long second, the other man did nothing. Cazador waited―this had to be Don Vicente’s move, or the fencer would riposte instinctively.

  ‘A cigar. Excellent.’

  Now was the time to weaken, to let Don Vicente think he’d won something. Cazador let his shoulders slouch, loosened his arms, lowered his chin. He did not slacken his stride toward the doors, but the Imperial kept up easily.

  As the guards fell in behind them, Cazador turned to Don Vicente. Now was the time to damp that frustration, to give him what he wanted: an explanation. In a conversational tone, Cazador said ‘Moscow’. France and Britain too easy to check, Japan too outré. The Russians seemed like the right touch.

  A light of comprehension dawned. ‘Your masters need to learn that this is our hemisphere.’

  Cazador relaxed into his slouch, and raised his chin: beaten, but proud. ‘They need to pay more, and provide better backup if they want to prove you wrong, Don Vicente.’ Now, they were two professionals, exchanging shop talk.

  Don Vicente’s chin lifted in response. With an exaggerated roll of his eyes and a subtle roll of his head, he indicated the guards behind them. Cazador spread his hands: What could they do? They were both professionals, hampered by fools.

  By the time they reached the door, Don Vicente actually gave Cazador a cigar and produced one for himself. Magnanimous in victory, he allowed Cazador to slip him his credentials under cover of clipping and lighting.

  As he climbe
d aboard the water taxi, Cazador could still see the glow of Don Vicente’s ash.

  ***

  It had to be large enough for four or five men. It had to have sight lines down the street, and a rear entrance or yard. It was probably being watched―Don Vicente’s shrug aside, Cazador was not about to underestimate Imperial Mexico’s local talent. Not too many places on Bank Street fit that pattern, and Cazador found the safe house within half an hour. Then he settled in to wait.

  It was almost two hours before the Cuban and his men returned―with Don Vicente. Apparently his generous mood had lasted, and he wanted to have one last moment of hands-on leadership before flying out the next day in triumph. The unexpected presence of His Excellency was more than enough distraction for Cazador. He slipped the lock on the back entrance while the guards were out front making sure Don Vicente hadn’t been tailed.

  Up or down? Cazador picked randomly and went upstairs. More arrogant to stash Troutman here, in sight of the street. The guard sitting in the hall didn’t even get all the way out of his chair before Cazador’s fingers speared into his throat. He went down, wheezing, and Cazador clipped him again.

  A peek through the eyepiece in the door: Troutman, hunched up and lying on a bed. He would keep. Cazador rifled the guard’s pockets, coming away with a thick key ring and a sap. It was better than nothing, but not much.

  Voices on the stairs, coming up. Cazador jumped down the stairs, feet forward, slamming the guards and the Cuban backward, kept going at a run, using gravity and momentum and surprise until everyone was back on the ground floor. One more guard was down, and another nursed his wrist. The Cuban and one olive-jacketed thug were still up, though, as was Don Vicente.

  ‘Take him.’ The guard started forward, and Cazador backed up. The sap snapped forward, another wrist went numb and lifeless. Everyone stopped for a second. Cazador locked eyes with the Cuban, with Imperial Mexico’s long-suffering, underpaid, unappreciated man in New York. ‘If Don Vicente’s mission ends in a fiasco,’ he said in Havana-accented Spanish, ‘you won’t be seeing him back here again.’

  With a wordless cry of outraged aristocratic pride, Don Vicente charged, blocking his men’s approach for a crucial two seconds. This time, Cazador ducked and let the charge slam home, smashing both of them against the wall. He popped a leg lock around the fencer’s calf and felt corded steel. Letting Don Vicente get out of this clinch would be very stupid, and very dangerous. But this Earth didn’t have Krav Maga, dedicated close fighting invented by a Jewish wrestler who also believed letting enemies get away was stupid and dangerous. At the cost of another slam into the wall, Cazador got his arms around the other’s neck in a head lock. A half twist and a squeeze, and Don Vicente was bent nearly double.

  Cazador twisted again, and pulled them both down on the stairs. Don Vicente almost spun out of it―his reflexes were amazing―but the stairs came just a fraction of a second too soon, slamming his arm underneath two bodies. One last risk. Cazador released the head lock, reared back and the fencer came up straight, snapping his leg out of the other’s hold. It was the obvious move for a man justly proud of his strength and angered beyond reason at having to wrestle like a peasant. The obvious move; Cazador knew just where to aim his elbow. Don Vicente’s nose broke with a noisome crunch, and blood fountained. Now, Cazador whipped the sap around, breaking the fencer’s collarbone. A stomp kick, and the Imperial’s knee gave way. Again the sap; Don Vicente sagged to the stairs.

  The Cuban and the two remaining Imperials looked up at Cazador. He looked down at them steadily. His arms hurt like hell, and his knee felt like it was going numb. He kept staring, evenly, unemotionally. The Cuban was the only one uninjured, and he probably had a gun. He had two ambulatory, if not precisely functional, guards. Cazador kept his gaze level, feeling Don Vicente’s blood drying on his shirt.

  ‘I’m taking Troutman. And I’m leaving. You’ll never see him again, and you’ll never have to face his turbines on an enemy sub.’

  The Cuban’s lips tightened. ‘And why, Señor Hunter, do I not take him to Mexico City myself?’

  ‘Because you’re not authorized to leave this station. And truth be told, you don’t really want to. Back in Mexico, you’d have to deal with him’―a gesture to the beaten aristocrat on the floor―‘and his friends, and people like him. Here, you run the show. And you’ve run it well, until he’―another gesture―‘showed up and ruined things.’

  Cazador went all in. ‘You can’t commandeer a flight like he could. Like he still can. You’d have to spend a week or more getting clearance, then getting back. Don Vicente Teodoro Garcia Estancia y Jackson’―Cazador hit the names slow and hard, his Havana accent thick on the harsh J―‘would spend that week taking credit for extracting Troutman. And he would spend that week trying to destroy you. Trying to destroy any man’―a quick flick of the eyes took in the other guards, trying not to look like they were listening―‘who saw him beaten.’

  ‘Dump him somewhere without his credentials. Clean this place out and go to another safe house―we both know you have one―and in the morning, report him missing to your normal channels in Mexico City. Tell them you were ambushed, tell them he got drunk, tell them he got involved with a whore, tell them whatever you think his enemies will believe. Stay here and serve your Emperor on your home ground, not back in the Palacio on his.’

  The guards shuffled their feet uncertainly; one’s eyes lit up. The Cuban’s mouth relaxed. Just a bit, but enough. ‘I will never see you again, either, Señor Hunter.’

  Always leave them something on the table. Never make them understand how bad the beat was. ‘Not me. I’m collecting my pay for Troutman and I’m going to France to see what the girls are like on the Riviera.’ Now Cazador could relax, could open out his hands a bit, push his head forward. Now he was the mercenary, and the Cuban was the noble follower of a higher cause. It was even true, when you put it that way. The bounty on Troutman back across the Bridge on Earth wouldn’t quite run to a four-star hotel on the Riviera, but there were plenty of other places Cazador could spend it.

  He turned his back on the loyal servants of Emperor Aaron IV Burr and walked upstairs to get Troutman.

  Charcuterie

  Chuck Wendig

  Mookie’s hands are rusty with dry blood. Under his fingernails is a rime of blue dust. He gently sets the plate down in front of Werth—Werth the old goat, Werth with those wiry chin-hairs, Werth with the one dead tooth and the one dead eye.

  ‘What’s this?’ Werth asks. The gaze from that one good eye roams over the plate.

  ‘I fixed you a plate,’ Mookie says, still standing. ‘While we talk shop.’

  ‘Fuck is it, though?’

  ‘It’s meat.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like meat.’ Werth holds up the plate, smells it. Licks at his gray incisor. He glances around the bar to see if anybody else is watching; they aren’t, because nobody else is here. ‘Are they sausages? They almost look like sausages, if, say, you first took those sausages and ran them through the bowels of a dead guy.’

  Mookie stabs the plate with a finger as thick as a bull’s nose. ‘This here is bresaola. That’s a culatello over melon and next to it, a cocoa nib salami. This is duck galantine at the edge, here.’

  ‘It got flies in it?’ Werth picks up the neat circular slice of duckmeat, waves it around, flap flap flap.

  ‘Currants. Dried blackcurrants.’

  ‘And this?’ Werth looks at a strip of white fat.

  ‘Lardo.’

  ‘I used to call my brother Lardo. Or Lard-ass. Or fuckface. Mostly fuckface.’

  Mookie doesn’t say anything. He just growls and grinds his teeth.

  Werth finally rolls his one eye, eases the duck galantine into his mouth with all the excitement and technique of someone forced to eat a dead butterfly. He closes his mouth around it and chews slowly, gently, methodically, as Mookie watches.

  ‘It’s good,’ Werth lies.

  ‘You don’t like it.
’

  ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this thing, can’t you just make me a goddamn sandwich instead of these fucking fantasy meats? Fry me an egg or something instead of pegasus paté?’

  This doesn’t sit well with Mookie. He worked hard on these. Hanging the meat. Cutting off the mold. Curing the flesh. Emulsifying the forcemeats. All that chopping and cutting and tasting. Werth doesn’t know what a pain in the ass it is to get saltpeter. Harder to get than meth by a country mile—almost as hard to get as the Blue Blazes. Werth doesn’t like this side of him. The old goat likes Mookie as a single-serving tool: a hammer. A skull-crushing, ball-smashing, drive-a-fence-post-through-some-mean-fucker’s-heart hammer. Besides, weren’t old goats supposed to eat everything? Rusty cans, rubber tires?

  ‘No sandwich,’ he growls, then finally takes a sit. He tugs the plate to his chest and begins to eat. The flavor—the fat—explodes in his mouth and for a moment he feels centered.

  Werth leans in. ‘You did good down at the docks today.’

  ‘Mmn.’

  ‘Those gobbos didn’t know what hit ’em.’

  Mookie pauses, looks at the dry blood on his hands before popping a strip of Lardo—cured pork fatback—into his mouth. It melts.

  Werth watches him eat, disgusted. Look on his face like he’s watching a snake eat a baby. He shakes his head, slides across an envelope fat with twenties. A small metal tin—like one that might hold lip balm or some strange unguent—joins it.

  ‘There you go. A bit extra in the envelope since, ahh, the situation was worse than we figured. And the tin, well. You know what you need. A little Smurf Blood, make it all better.’

  Mookie twisted the cap off the tin. Inside, a cerulean powder, blue as a peacock.

  ‘You know,’ Werth says, picking up a paper-thin cut of bresaola with his spidery fingers before smelling it, ‘you should really quit this out-of-the-way shit. Close this place up. I mean, Christ, Mook, you’re in the exact epicenter of nowhere. No customers. No traffic.’