Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets

by Alessio Lanterna

  The elf has a name at last: Inla Lovl’Atheron. Incredibly for an ass, Inla was arrested and put on file (even though she was released straightaway) eight years previously, during one of the many violent disturbances on the streets during the Year of Revolt. Thinking about the old times always make me stroke my gun fondly.

  “You were wrong, Lieutenant,” says Cohl, in a tone of voice that makes me want to smash his face in, “she was just over three hundred years-old.”

  “Impossible…by elf standards that would make her only little more than a girl, that doesn’t explain the grey hair.”

  “Maybe she went prematurely grey, I don’t know. In any case, the prints match, there’s a photo, too,” he says, showing me on the patrol car computer. “It looks just like her. In fact, there’s no trace of grey hair.”

  “Or winkles,” I add, pointing at the screen. “Impossible for them to appear on an elf in such a short space of time.”

  “Maybe due to illness…I must admit it’s weird, though.”

  I go back for a closer look at the body. Just before I turn away, I catch sight of a slight tear in Inla’s sophisticated dress, over her heart. There’s a cut underneath, somewhat insignificant to the naked eye, just above her nipple.

  “What’s this?”

  “Looks like a cut.

  I stare at it for a moment without saying a word and sigh. Despite the fact that rigor mortis is already setting in and stiffening the body, the flesh around the breast is still soft. By applying light pressure on the wound, the cut reveals itself to be unexpectedly deep and thin, blood trickles out of the wound that was trapped within the damaged tissues.

  “Incredible!”

  “It’s like she’s been sliced by a sheet of paper. Two to one, this is the cause of death.”

  “Have you ever seen anything similar, Lieutenant?”

  “No...but I know who to ask.”

  I take a few shots of the wound and the dress with my mobile, which suddenly starts ringing.

  “Lieutenant Arkham? This is Divination.” It isn’t Dorisa, it must be the telephone operator. “Gremlicide’s got six vans, they’re all heading back to HQ bar one, who isn’t answering the call. I’ll send you the GPS coordinates.”

  “Thanks, the van’s only a few blocks away.” I turn to the kid. “Come on, Inspector, let’s see if we can catch our suspect. With your car.”

  A Fiamma 1600, it still smells showroom-fresh. He lives it up, this kid. For a brief second I’m tempted to ask him who feathers his nest, but certain things are best left unsaid. Or maybe he’s simply rich. The ashtray is spotless and I grind my cigarette into it.

  “I don’t smoke, Lieutenant, and I would prefer it if you didn’t smoke in my car.”

  Nodding, I light up another. He stares at me for a moment, stunned, then shakes his head in disbelief and turns the engine on. Driving only a few blocks at five in the afternoon in rain like an impenetrable smokescreen is like being stuck in the summer exodus. The siren is completely useless at getting through traffic when there’s a bottleneck in the guts of the lower levels. So I find myself boxed in with Inspector Cohl. The first cigarette goes by in peaceful silence, broken only by the occasional cough of complaint and the sound of the window periodically going up and down to let the smoke out. Then the kid feels obliged to make small talk.

  “So…how come you came to my crime scene?”

  “A tip-off.” What else could I say? Not the truth, that’s for sure.

  “Ah. So there’s a link with organised crime, I suppose. Ogres, perhaps.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe if you could tell me more, we could try and crack this case together.”

  He’s a pain in the arse with this ‘my case’ business, the wanker.

  “Nohl Cohl,” I say, changing the subject, “doesn’t sound like a name from ‘round here.”

  “No, in fact, I’m from Frosgaarde.”

  Way out East of Nectropis. This kid really doesn’t like the sun. There’s no shutting him up now.

  “…Then, when I finished my training, I was posted to customs for couple of years, until I discovered a shipment of Onirò hidden inside watermelons; inside watermelons, can you believe it? They cut them open, emptied them, filled them with drugs and then they closed them up again using magic. Do you want to know how I knew something wasn’t right?”

  “To be perfectly honest, no.”

  But Cohl’s not listening anymore, he’s all wrapped up in his story.

  “…So I stuck a knife in and poof! A cloud of white powder flew out, unbelievable, I nearly ate a stick of Onirò, ahahah! Course, that time was just a stroke of luck, obviously I didn’t get a promotion just for that, I’d carried out a few raids. Like, once…”

  The queue is on the move. I sit and watch it for a few seconds, imagining the sheer bliss of taking the Altra and blowing his skull off, right here in the cab of his Fiamma 1600. Then, with a sigh, I light up another cigarette and think about something else while the Inspector dries his mouth out with all the bullshit he’s spewing. Thinking about it, I don’t mind the idea of meeting up with Dorisa at all. I’ve been screwing no one besides the Brunette for at least two weeks now. Fancy goods, don’t get me wrong, but you need to vary your diet once in a while to stay healthy. Sergeant Xevez, that’s what I call her when we’re fucking, is the type of woman who appears to be designed to release stress. “Shit, Arkham, what’s with you? All you do is fuck everything. Money, colleagues, women, cases belonging to poor old Nohl ‘dick head’ Cohl…”

  “Okay, here we are.”

  A squalid lateral opening where the cement is literally crumbling away in some places, patched up with something that vaguely resembles dark soil. Considering, though, that the nearest soil is six levels away (a quick mental calculation: nearly two hundred metres below), that stuff could be anything except soil. The green Gremlicide van is stoically still in the pouring rain, a big lifeless gremlin face is painted on the side. The windscreen wipers are motionless, and the rivulets of water on the windscreen barely reveal a shape at the wheel. Pulling out our regulation Sebans, we get out of the van.

  A high-pitched scream of terror from some creature greets us. This wouldn’t be very good publicity for a pest control company if it came out that one of their vans was nearly ransacked by a tribe of tiny parasites.

  We approach with our weapons aimed, in the filthy rain.

  “Metropolitan Police! Come out with your hands up!” Cohl yells at the cab.

  Nothing.

  “I’ll open it and you look inside, Inspector.”

  He nods. We move towards the door. I open it. Nohl lowers his weapon to look inside. The ogre is stock-still, his glassy eyes are locked on the rain washing down the windscreen. A needle sticks out of his right arm, which helped to wipe away another useless piece of shit a tourniquet completes the pretty picture.

  “Call the station…”

  “I’m on it,” answers the kid, mobile already in his hand.

  “I’ll look in the back.”

  The double doors are locked, so I go back to the cab to get the keys from the dashboard. While I’m trying to get them out, I inadvertently lean on the corpse’s arm. Something’s not right. The pig’s body is still warm, but it’s as stiff as a board.

  “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s like a piece of wood.”

  “Maybe he simply didn’t like dancing.” Nohl can hardly keep a straight face, all pleased with himself with the jokey comeback. He had it all ready or he heard someone else say it and thought it was so damn hilarious it deserved another airing.

  Too soon for rigor mortis, considering the temperature and the fact that according to the Godur ‘cook’, our pest control worker here was still alive enough to dump the body and leave no more than two hours ago. Judging by the traffic, the ogre can’t have died more than an hour ago, an hour and a half if he somehow managed to fly over the other vehicles.

  I try
and move the eyelids, definite proof. They’re not stiff yet.

  “Shit, he’s been murdered.”

  “How can you say that? Maybe he stiffened up quicker because of the drugs.”

  “A, it’s too soon. B, eyelids are the first part to go stiff on a dead body. You know that scene in all the films where they close the corpse’s eyes? Complete bollocks. C, this piece of shit hasn’t got one single hole in his arm, apart from the one that sent him to his maker. What the fuck do they teach the rookies in Frosgaarde, how to hunt penguins?” I toss him the keys. “Go get the weapon out of the back of the van, kid.”

  “What weapon?”

  Oh Sweet Mary.

  “The blunt instrument this moron used to smash the ass’s skull when she was already dead, idiot.”

  Father, if I hadn’t been here, I would have filed this as a suicide case. Or, ‘accidental death caused by solid excrement falling from a great height’. Instead it’s looking more and more like a fucking conspiracy. Evidently, the God of Intrigue, the Slitherer.

  “The back is utterly revolting, pieces of skull everywhere. There’s a bat, too, all smeared with blood and other matter.” Nohl is pale, he looks like he’s about to puke. “You were right, Lieutenant Arkham.”

  “Of course I was right. Wait in the car for your pals to get here, then let’s go. This is a red herring.”

  Getting into my car right after getting out of Cohl’s Fiamma is a bit like having to leave the honeymoon suite of a young, selfless model to go back to your fat old wife who doesn’t believe in hair-removal. You love her (I suppose), but, I mean, for fuck’s sake…

  Well. At least I’m alone at last. I take out the envelope from the inside pocket of my raincoat and turn it over in my hands for a second or two, and think. Five thousand crowns in cash, and a note, handwritten in gold ink, stating the address of the alley where we found Inla and a promise “TEN TIMES AS MUCH IF YOU TURN THE REAL CULPRIT OVER TO THE AUTHORITIES”. Oh yes, it’s a very tempting offer, but what with the gold ink and the fact that nobody actually delivered the envelope, it simply appeared on the desk in my office, these two signs clearly point to one thing. A magical contract; a more inexperienced person who took the money after reading the note would have been literally obsessed by the task until its completion. Therefore, whoever sent it is ignoring my five and a half years at the Nectropis Magic Academy, or else they think I’m some kind or retard. Magical contracts constitute one of the main subjects of the Legal Magic course.

  In any case, this does not detract from my interest in those 550,000 crowns; it’s better to keep your free will, including the possibility of pulling out from the match, especially in view of the direction the investigation has been going in, right from the start. After all, the contract’s supernatural binding works both ways, it forces the instigator to come up with the payment once the job has been done.

  I light a cigarette and wipe some ash off the digital clock set in the dashboard. I’ve booked a table at Fierno for nine, so I’ve got plenty of time for a quick trip to Sublevel One. Before I switch the ignition on, I snatch another look at the photos on my mobile, without coming to any mind-blowing conclusions.

  Sublevel One is a lively commercial neighbourhood, practically mono-racial, a pleasant environment for dwarves and humanoids suffering from acute agoraphobia or acrophobia. Dwarves who are in touch with their roots prefer a house underground to the higher neighbourhoods, therefore Nectropis’s golden rule: higher means better, is not applied here. Barely interested in daylight, the dwarves have always been the most enthusiastic supporters of the city right from the very beginning, they capitalize on its heritage without dwelling on its biggest defect: night lasts over twenty-two hours.

  Nectropis really does owe its blossoming to the Failed Apocalypse. According to the unanimous opinion of these self-appointed experts, the last colossal battle between the Sulphurous Throne and the planet’s sentient races was fought where the cyclopic city walls stand today. A great coalition launched a desperate attack here on the portentous demonic citadel, the brutal fighting lasted nearly a week. Once the war was over, only a few thousand dwarves survived and there were only a few dozen elves left in the whole world; but it was the vampires who paid the highest price, they were completely wiped out and disappeared from history. The vampires, who for centuries had governed most of today’s Western Federation, possessed the extraordinary gift of being able to establish a sort of mystical bond between themselves and the areas they reigned over, immersing them in dense darkness for most of the day. Curiously, the longer this bond persisted, the more fertile the soil became, the mines richer and the weather more temperate. Therefore, the people ruled over by the un-dead happily accepted this nomination by the eternal lords of darkness.

  A few decades after the vampires were exterminated, the day-night cycle went back to normal everywhere, except in Nectropis. The most valid theory explaining this phenomenon claims that the vast amount of immortal bloodshed by the vampires on the battle field left a permanent mark on the landscape, which is apparently confirmed by the City’s surprising growth in the subsequent millennium.

  I take ringroad 45, one of the level’s main roads which links the ramps to the centre. Traffic is dense but it’s moving, the dwarves are leaving work in an orderly fashion, some are heading home while others are off to the pub.

  Funny folk, these bearded shorties, obsessive when it comes to work or traffic regulations, completely mental when playtime comes around. The same amount of traffic on the roads in human neighbourhoods would cause an endless traffic jam, hundreds of honking horns and numerous nervous breakdowns. Maybe even death. Instead, under less than an hour, the drunks will start the first bar fights of the evening. Dwarves are exempt from common law concerning bar fights, they are considered as being part of their multi-millennial culture. It’s no mere protest, confirmed by the fact that often important businessmen are involved in these fights as well as prominent political figures, just as if the brawl were a national sport. The police only intervene on the rare occasions weapons are involved, that really is a bad business. Anyway, punch ups in the dwarf district always attract crowds of tourists and onlookers who, apart from serious cases of congenital stupidity, do not normally join in the action. Simply speaking, a dwarf would never “stoop” to fighting with people from other races, with the natural exception of ogres, who are inevitably at the origin of sporadic battles involving real combat or improvised knives, axes and hammers.

  Leaving the ring road I turn into a narrow one-way street lined with various shops, but no pubs, thank God. I park crosswise between two squared vehicles perfectly aligned along the pavement. The buildings rise from the ground as far as the ceiling which is punctuated with powerful street lamps. The old neon sign—TUBGORNE’S—is already switched off, but there’s still a light on inside. I scan the goods in the window with bored indifference while I finish my cigarette. Beron Tubgorne, in my expert opinion, is the best rune engraver in the whole city. I met the hairy son of a little bitch at the Academy of Magic, when he still held the Chair of Engraving. One hundred years previously he had received an award from the institution for his creation of an original prototype of a hybrid elemental combustion engine, one of the crucial inventions for modern magitechnics. A stab of nostalgia hits me right in the gut as I think back to my time at the Academy. Master Tubgorne was expelled when his affair with one of the students, a female dwarf, came out. Beron decided to marry her all the same, but his early retirement and subsequent excess of free time (which translated, fatally, into excessive brawling and gambling accompanied by his wife) ruined him completely, despite his wealth generated by numerous patents belonging to the dwarf. Poor bugger. The day I saved him from a loan shark, I became a kind of uncle in his eyes. Opening the shop was a way of getting back on track.

  Without thinking, I flick the cigarette butt onto the pavement and instantly regret it. An elderly dwarf couple, solemnly plodding along arm-in-arm, flinch in horror.
>
  “How dare you, you lout?”

  “Can’t you see there’s a bin?!” This is the wife, with a tone of voice you would use with a backward child. She’s wearing a brown scarf wrapped round her head, covering her hair. Someone ought to explain to her that it went out of fashion a good few decades ago. She’s five hundred years old if she’s a day.

  “That’s what street cleaners are for,” I reply, shrugging. They are momentarily stunned by my indifference, I take advantage of this brief awkward interlude to dive into the shop and leave them to their resentful muttering. The bell above the door heralds my arrival.

  Inside is rather bare compared to human standards. I linger to have a look at the goods. On the right, some shelves have a tidy display of various items for sale, particularly utensils, strengthened by runic inscriptions. A torch with no batteries with a hundred-year guarantee here, a pan which heats up without the aid of fire there, a mobile phone with constant reception in pride of position on the middle shelf, all with price labels, obviously more expensive than your common-or-garden torches, pans or mobiles. Then, on the wall to the left, there is an impressive poster of all the runes people could choose from for Beron to engrave and the prices of each. This kind of work was always the main source of business for the shop. At the back, the counter stands between the clientele and the entrance to the workshop and the basement. I’m about to head towards it when a cavernous voice from the other room stops me in my tracks.

  “We’re closed.”

  I fold my arms with a smirk.

  “We’re closed,” repeats Beron, showing his face. “Oh, hello there, sonny, it’s you” He greets me with a smile.

  “For the love of Owl, Professor, I’m thirty-seven, stop calling me sonny.”

  “Hey! No swearing in my shop, cheeky. I’ve told you before…”—waving his stubby index finger in my direction—“…Muraddin will have you.”