Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets

by Alessio Lanterna

  “I… I… shot… him,” stammers the police officer in shock.

  “Yeah, I can see that. I mean, how did it happen?”

  “I just wanted to… to frighten him a bit, that’s all. I thought the safety was on… the safety should’ve been on, you see? I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to!”

  “Shh, shh. Relax, we’ll sort it out now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  I delicately rest my hand on his shoulder and notice that he’s still holding his weapon. Unfortunately it looks lke it’s a nine-millimetre Seban C, a regulation police gun. The idiot has killed a poor random fuck with his own gun, which happens to be registered and on record. Off the top of my head I’d say we’re talking dishonourable discharge, no pension and at least fifteen years of assorted brutality in some cheery federal prison filled with horny lifers with nothing to lose and a burning desire to wreak revenge on the world. For a minute I’m not sure if I’m dealing with the world’s biggest fuckwit, but Reinart knows I’m looking for people for the team, and I don’t think she would be so stupid as to compromise her career with an out-of-control moron just to make me look bad. I come to the conclusion that he’s a decent policeman who just ran into some bad luck. At least that’s what I hope.

  “Is that your gun? Registered in your name I mean?”

  “Fuck, yeah,” he answers, on the verge of tears. “I’m screwed, screwed. I’ll end up in the Well forever, do you understand?! Do you know what they do to police officers down there? Do you?!”

  The Well, Nectropis’s prisons. Reinforced concrete coffins measuring six by three metres in theory designed for four inmates each, but in actual fact they’re inhumanely packed up to double their capacity, and dug out of the ground over twenty metres underneath the last sub-level. Sunlight, even that faint glimmer of light in the City at midday is a mere faded memory for these guests of the state.

  “Nothing like that is going to happen my friend. Ezy Pharrol, is that right?”

  I stick my hand out, he looks at it in confusion.

  “Lieutenant Arkham, from the Guard.”

  He shakes it uncertainly.

  “Contrary to how things may seem at the moment, you’ll look back at this day as a turning point in your life. And I mean for the better.”

  “I don’t see how…”

  “I don’t know who this dead guy on the ground is, and I couldn’t care less. Because neither I nor the Sergeant here, and you especially, weren’t here this evening.”

  “Er, no?” he asks hesitantly, looking backwards and forwards at me and her, uncertainly.

  “Of course not!” I clap him on the back and summon up one of my best salesman smiles. “That would be impossible, seeing as all three of us were at the bar talking about your transfer to my team, isn’t that right, partner?” I pass the ball to the carpet-muncher, who nods from within a cloud of burnt cigar.

  “Er, what… but it’s my bullet… he’s the suspect from a case I’m investigating…”

  “I’ll take care of the corpse. Your suspect vanished into thin air? Well, that means that your hunch was spot on, am I right? He split because you were onto him. God knows where he’s got to now.”

  “But, what do you mean…?”

  “Leave it with me, okay? You and the Sergeant go and get yourselves a stiff drink now, and I’ll meet you later.”

  “Hmmm… all right then,” he comments disbelievingly, relaxing ever so slightly.

  “Go on then, off you go.”

  I take out my mobile while they start up the car and drive off. A woman carrying bags of shopping peers over at the scene from the end of a side street, she winces when she catches sight of the mangled corpse.

  “Move along, madam. Federal Guard, everything’s under control.”

  She doesn’t react fast enough for my liking. The plebs must jump to it when I order them to get lost. I move closer and behave more menacingly.

  “Go home, before your frozen peas thaw. Go and put your vegetables in the fridge. Now. Your stuff will go off if you end up in jail for obstructing the course of justice. You have no idea how many times that happens to nosy parkers. It happens all the time.” I enunciate my words clearly and deliberately, finally persuading her to leg it.

  I press my phone against me ear a couple of rings before they answer at the other end.

  “Ugube? It’s me. I need a blast furnace, and quick… all right, fuck, put it on my tab… yeah… listen, shut it now. Send someone with some saws and some plastic bags.”

  Fuck’s sake. Fat old pain in the arse. I couldn’t care less about eight thousand crowns more or less, it’s not like I have the slightest intention of paying. Sooner or later I’ll pin something on him and get him out of the way for good. At least that’s what I thought six years ago.

  While I was waiting for Khan’s henchmen to arrive, Reinart took Pharrol to a typical bar for cops, the owner of which owed his survival to both the discretion and politeness of the clientele in uniform. They are sitting at a table in the corner in the shadows, and are drinking a gutwringer of a drink that hovers somewhere between fear and hope. To be perfectly frank, it’s guesswork with the Sergeant, she spies on the world through cerulean glasses with her usual suspicious, scornful demeanour.

  I order a whiskey and sit down on the empty stool, calm personified.

  “Everything… okay?”

  “Of course,” I answer simply, in the tone of voice of someone who is reciting a geometric axiom, they are dumbstruck.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, sir, I owe you—“

  “Stop right there, don’t even start, Pharrol. Welcome aboard.”

  “I don’t get it, why me? I mean, I don’t even know you…”

  “You see,” I’m ready with my script, “the team is like a family to me. There has to be absolute trust, you know? Each one of us has to be prepared to put their trust in their colleagues. And I can’t rely on someone who has never made a mistake. I’ve read your file and I know you’re an excellent agent. But it’s only when you come up against life’s pitfalls that you get the true measure of a man…” Then I add, remembering Reinart’s there too, “… or a woman. I want us all to be bound to each other by a permanent pact. I know that you wanted my position, Sergeant, and I think you deserved it. But it’s out of my hands. They sent me here. What would you have done, if you had been in my shoes, refused it?

  “No. No, I think I’d’ve accepted it,” she admits after thinking about it for a second.

  “Listen, we did this thing together. From now on, if one of us goes down, we all go down. But I swear,” I lay on all the emphasis I can muster, “I swear that together, we’ll go far. We wouldn’t be here now if we didn’t know that you can’t do this job by following the absurd rules created by those thieving politicians. Everyone knows they’re the most corrupt of anyone else, and they make the laws so that they can carry on with their own rackets and get away with it. And us, my friends, we do good things for society, as far as it is humanly possible, and at the first hitch or slip up, how are we treated? No pity whatsoever. They unload all the responsibility onto our shoulders as though we were the dregs of society!”

  “You’re abso-fucking-lutely right!” exclaims Pharrol, galvanised by my closing speech that I carefully rehearsed in front of the mirror. Reinart is more restrained, but I think that deep down she readily accepts the alibi I’m offering her. After all, what other options does she have? She was the one who asked me to bury the incident, which she’s up to her neck in. This is exactly the type of person I need, people who understand that there are shades of grey in life.

  “I’m not having it. And neither are you two, I’m sure of it. We’re good agents. I swear to you both, when we’ve finished we’ll get everything we fucking deserve, no one will get left behind.”

  I wait a moment to let my proposal take root inside their heads, especially the woman, because Ezy keeps on nodding his head like a donkey at every word I say. At the end I lay my
hand, palm up, on the table.

  “So, are you with me?”

  “Fuck, yes!”

  Pharrol gives me some skin, and leaves his right hand against mine. We both stare at the Sergeant with big smiles on our faces. It’s a tense moment when she hesitates. Evidently she’s sharper than Ezy, and she obviously has a clearer idea about what this pact will lead to. When she gives in with a sigh and a conspiratorial smile (the first one I’ve seen from her), she puts her hand on top of ours and says scornfully, “Fuck it. The pay is crap anyway, and the pension is laughable.”

  We raise our glasses make a toast, then we drink a mouthful together. Reinart elbows me.

  “You know, Chief, I’ve heard that you can get cancer from smoking with chewing gum in your mouth.”

  We have a good laugh and I promise to give up my chewing gum habit. I probably don’t need to underline the fact that that didn’t happen.

  That day I laid the foundations for my subsequent triumphs. Over the years not only did we make a living, going from one success to another, regularly using the complete range of legitimate as well as unlawful investigative methods, but we all got our slice of bonus profits and extra benefits. A favour here and a reward there, and everything went smoothly. I’ve created a close-knit, friendly group: basically, I say this without a trace of false modesty, I’m the best boss in the world, and if anyone disagrees with this blinding truth I will take action, occasionally I will also employ even more persuasive methods.

  I had almost reached the relative safety of my desk, separated from the rest of the room by reassuring green metal Venetian blinds, when Mequire bursts into the room. When it comes to sniffing me out to get on my back, the Captain is like a fucking bloodhound, so much, in fact, that I suspect he has planted bugs all over the station just to catch me out.

  “Arkham! My office, immediately,” he barks from the doorway, disappearing before I can even turn round.

  “Mother fuck, I’ll shoot him one of these days,” I mutter as I go past Pharrol’s desk.

  The tiny kingdom belonging to Fingeruphisarse always reminds me of a dusty cupboard, despite the obsessive cleaning carried out by his room mate each day. Over the years I have come to realise that this feeling is mainly caused by the collection of black and white photographs on the walls, dominated by an ancient photo of his father, an army Major who died a glorious imbecille at the head of his armour-clad unit during the Great War. Mequire, an insignificant biped obsessed by the desire to imitate the deeds of his illustrious parent but unfortunately without any heroic battles to lose, had to settle for a mediocre career as a superior officer in the Federal Guard. In a bid to assure himself as well as the entire world of being a faded copy of a great soldier from the past, the Captain sports two long greying sideburns and a thick moustache which have supposedly escaped from the last century.

  He is sitting with his back to me, staring out of the window as though he’s waiting for a messenger on horseback to arrive with the order to get ready for an imminent, devastating conflict. Or, a more realistic hypothesis would be that he’s carefully listening to the vortex of air swirling around inside his fur-clad head.

  “Right, here I am. What is it you want to tell me?” I ask impatiently, as soon as the door closes behind me.

  “How many times have I told you, you have to call me ‘sir’? We’re not friends or family.”

  He doesn’t even look at me.

  “Clearly not enough. I just can’t get it into my head…”

  I smile, in my amusement I stick my hands in my pockets and rock backwards and forwards on my heels.

  “Your report on the clandestine Oda settlement was somewhat lacking.”

  “I know, I know. I really ought to change my telephone company.”

  “What?” The Captain jumps to his feet, and treats me to face-to-face contact.

  “They make me pay for every letter in a text, it’s a disgrace…” I’m smirking.

  “Do you think you’re funny?” He bangs his fists on the table, but he doesn’t scare me.

  “I do!”

  Here we are in the “I’m warning you and wagging my index finger in front of your face” stage of the proceedings.

  “You, damn son-of-a-bitch. I will employ every single fibre of my being, every minute of the time I have left here to stop you from becoming captain. I know you’re rotten, Arkham. You’ll trip up sooner or later, and I’ll be there, ready to throw you into an isolation cell until the second Apocalypse.

  “Oh, I hope you do, with all my heart, my dear old man. After all, how many years have you waited for this moment? Seven, right? It would be so humiliating if you retired before you managed it, wouldn’t it?”

  There’s a blood vessel on his forehead and I reckon it’s throbbing well beyond exploding point.

  “What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn’t you be holed up in some fetid den for animals like yourself, getting drunk or getting high?”

  “Yeah, but then I thought: the Captain must miss me so much. I know, I know that when I’m not here you spend your time wondering where I am. So I said to myself: I could pop into work, and while I’m there, start up some operation or other. Can you imagine how that would look on my CV? ‘Despite being on leave for the injuries he suffered on the job, the Lieutenant continues to carry out his work with a level of dedication which goes above and beyond the call of duty.’ With the addition of the odd ‘admirable’ here and there, it should be the perfect prelude to my promotion, don’t you agree?”

  “You haven’t got so much as a scratch, you incorrigible piece of shit.”

  “Really? Odd. I seem to have a lovely doctor’s certificate here.”

  “Puke up your daily bullshit and stop fouling the air in my office.”

  “It was you who called me!”

  Fingeruphisarse settles for a low growl but which is heavy with scorn.

  “A raid. Don’t you worry about calling the judge, Mequire, I’ll see to it, you’ve got high blood pressure.”

  “I won’t leave you alone, you bastard.”

  Why does this man dislike me so intensely? Maybe he is prejudiced against young successful officers, I honestly don’t understand it.

  “I shall live in terror during these last moments of freedom I have left.”

  “Fuck yourself sideways.”

  “Hooray. Remember to take your tablets, Grandad.”

  Thank the Lord I won’t have to put up with him for much longer.

  While the prehistoric computer bursts into life with the usual series of electronic farts, I cast my eye over the pile of paperwork which inevitably accumulated in my absence. I carefully pick up a couple of folders, trying not to disturb the inert bureaucracy. I suppose it’s perfectly inevitable, when you spend years in the same environment, you start to treat inanimate elements you live with day after day like sentient beings, capable of movement, moods and aims. It’s not a matter of imagining binders with paper clips like paws, or the legendary “elementals or rubber stamps”. It’s more about an ancestral reverence, an innate, primitive response to everything which you are unable to understand. And I’ll challenge anyone to explain to me the point of all this paperwork I have to fill in on a regular basis. Sometimes I have the fleeting impression that I’ve grasped the meaning of Form C, only to find out that it doesn’t end where I think it’s going to, but that it leads to more administrative offal and ultimately to a long-forgotten archive, where it will rot into eternity. I mean, sooner or later everyone has to give in and accept the mystery of this paperwork, out of faith. But there is a tacit compromise, you learn to make an offering every once in a while, when you haven’t got anything better to do. This is not the case here, I conclude, and stop upsetting the column which is greedy for dates and signatures.

  Inla’s father, the new dark horse. The computer is able to tell me much more than I expected: Nylmeris Lovl’Atheron, son of wanker Valan, walking around causing damage for the past eight hundred and seventy-seven years
and counting. Finding out what he got up to before the Federation was created is beyond the capabilities of information technology, but something of interest does come up. It turns out that Daddy did his bit during the Great War. Special service, honours, medals, praise and all that goes with it. Obviously it doesn’t say why exactly, but I can get a rough idea by studying his post-war assignments. A couple of years in eastern Qari, followed by Stanghanyf during the tulip revolution. Honourably discharged at the fall of Khanato. Of course, by this time the world had changed too much for our spy. No more cold war with the ogres, now they’re practically our friends, right? Today we fight wars by buying debentures and raising custom duties on the importation of harpsichords.

  I light a cigarette before realising that the cleaning staff have removed my ashtray while I was away and they haven’t brought it back: I will repay them by dropping my cigarette butt on the floor. Nylmeris was a secret agent for the service, great. I wonder how many ended up like his daughter when he was a state employee? Why on earth did he kill her? Then, a badass like him would certainly know how to make a corpse disappear, he wouldn’t leave it in an alley where anyone could find it. Unless that was exactly what he wanted…

  What if it were a message, the kind of message where you hit one to teach a lesson to a hundred? I flick my ash onto the floor. Maybe he just lost his mind. Judging from her behaviour, Inla clearly had problems with not just paternal but family authority in general. Maybe Nylmeris had good reasons for going off the rails and killing her, and I imagine that Inla’s spectre would have been reluctant to tell me, if that were the case. Getting murdered doesn’t necessarily make you a victim around these parts. What I mean is, if a bastard shoots me, I won’t say thank you, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t say I was a victim either.

  The truth is that I have to arrest one of Valan’s children and make sure they are sentenced, a fucking hero of not one, but numerous numerous fucking wars, Bastard Father. He’d come to court bent over with the weight of all the medals pinned on his uniformed chest, with pots of money and a major dynasty barking behind him via television, radio, newspapers and any other form of communication. If I go up against such a man, the least that will happen is they’ll send me to the north pole to direct traffic. Like I’ve got a fucking choice. On the contrary there’s a redwood pressing against my diaphragm, and it came in the back way, that’s what I’ve got.