Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  “And that means you’re not even going to try? Instead you’re going to actively see to it she has no hope of ever being saved?”

  The accusation hit him hard.

  “You said she can’t be saved.”

  “I’ve been wrong before, lad. I’m not ineffable. I’m just an old man who once upon a time made a bad decision.”

  “And that’s why I’m offering you a chance of redemption,” Josh said. “To put right what you did.”

  “You’re not. You aren’t proposing we make a time machine and somehow go back to that night and change the outcome. I can’t put right the mistakes I made.”

  “Then think of it as a chance to make amends.”

  “And if I have no interest in that?”

  “Then perhaps you’ll find peace in the death you so obviously want.” It sounded more like a threat than he intended it to be.

  “This life is not such a bad place to be,” the old man said, turning his back on Josh. He walked slowly through the cemetery gates, forcing Josh to follow him.

  Despite having decades on the old man, Josh struggled to keep up and was breathing heavily by the time he reached the rusted iron gates of his tomb. “Can you do it?”

  “Stop asking can and ask will,” the old magician snapped, stepping into the darkness beyond the threshold.

  “Will you?”

  “God help me, and God help that poor woman, but I will do what you need me to do. Now leave me alone, lad, there are things to be done if this isn’t going to end in the deaths of us all.”

  Josh lingered on the threshold for a minute or two, expecting the old man to emerge again, but he didn’t. He thought about going in there after him, but to what purpose? He’d gained all he could hope to here. There were other pieces he needed to align if they were going to have a prayer of luring Seth into their trap, not least getting Seth to the abandoned cemetery.

  But he had an idea how that might be done, but it would mean relying on someone who had betrayed him once already. Betrayed then rescued, Josh amended, hoping the second act outweighed the first in terms of where Julius Gennaro’s loyalties lay.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket as he walked back toward the cemetery gates.

  “If I’m going to keep my promise to Gideon, I’m going to need your help,” Josh said even before Julie had managed his single word of greeting.

  “Yes.”

  “I know how he got to you. I know about your partner.” That was greeted by silence. “I know where the bodies are buried.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “The right thing. Make sure the old man knows that Damiola is still alive.”

  “And that’s important because?”

  “He’s the man who made Glass Town. All of this begins and ends with him.”

  “Okay, so I tell him the guy’s still alive, then what?”

  “Then you tell him where to find the magician. The old Ravenshill Cemetery. That’s where he’s buried.”

  “You said he was alive.”

  “He is.”

  “And that’s all you need from me?”

  “Bolt cutters.”

  “What?”

  “Bring a pair of bolt cutters and a blowtorch along,” Josh said.

  44

  THIS OLD MAN’S WAR

  The one benefit of old age is knowing that you are dying a little more every day and not caring. It brought a kind of uncaring invulnerability with it. What’s the worst you can do to me, it said, kill me? What’s the difference between dying today and dying tomorrow? Brutal fatalism had its charms. There was no getting around the fact that his days were numbered, Gideon Lockwood had known that ever since his father walked back into his life. This town, as the old cliché went, wasn’t big enough for the both of them.

  There was no heroism or nobility in the old man’s bones. He was and had always been a hard bastard. Frailty didn’t change that. It didn’t change his mind-set or just how far he’d go to win. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. The tree in this case might look younger and prettier, more vital and vibrant, but it was still rotten through to the core. He was old, not stupid. He was well read, not ignorant. Events as they were unfolding around him were tragic in the Shakespearean definition of tragedy, the protagonist brought down by his own flaws: Othello by his passions, Hamlet by his indecisiveness, Seth Lockwood by his obsessions. Empires fell for less: some raised up from sand and silk, others from bloody knuckles and sawn-off shotguns. People are always and have always been their own worst enemies, and his father was no exception. Seth was driven by his obsessions. Once upon a time they’d been about a girl, before that they’d been about bringing the estates around the East End under control, before that they’d been about playground power. Gideon had never known his father. He’d disappeared into Glass Town when he was born. Isaiah was the legitimate heir to the brother’s empire, but had no interest in it so others came along and claimed the spoils while Seth was gone, capitalizing on his absence, leaving Gideon to be raised by East End nuns.

  He’d been gone so long he ceased to matter. As Gideon grew up, he grew tired of hearing what a man his old man was, a proper criminal’s criminal, someone who commanded the respect of a room full of proper hard bastards without having to say a word. Always it was Seth this, back in Seth’s day that, it never would have happened if Seth was still here, and on and on with a level of reverence that bordered on the pathological. Gideon got sick of hearing about it before he grew out of short trousers. But not sick enough to think about his old man as anything short of a god when it came to these streets. Seth Lockwood gave, and Seth Lockwood took away. With that in mind, he had slowly and systematically gone about taking back his father’s empire one street corner at a time. By the time he was nineteen, he’d put his father’s specter where it belonged, in the ground far, far behind him. When people said the Lockwood name now it was Gideon they were terrified of. He was their bogeyman. He was the one who made their lives a living nightmare. He surpassed any evil his old man had ever considered, but still the legend of Seth Lockwood lived on.

  There was a delicate ecology in place around the estates, a balance between the criminal fraternity and those paid to keep it in check.

  So when he’d come back after all these years, unchanged, acting like it was all still his by the divine right of bastards, Gideon watched that delicate balance come undone. Seth still acted like it was 1924; the lawmen ill-equipped, underpaid, and absolutely corrupt. He threw his weight about, making a lot of noise, putting the frighteners on local businesses and ordinary decent criminals alike. He didn’t like the way Gideon ran things and made no attempt to hide his contempt. This was all his; that’s what he’d said that first night back. This was all his, and he was taking it back for as long as he needed it. Not a word about why he needed it, or how he had resisted the ravages of age and those deep cuts of time’s knife; just that he was taking it all back. No pleases, no thank you for all that he had done to keep the family business together after he’d disappeared down the rabbit hole. None of that.

  Why couldn’t he just stay gone?

  Wishes and fishes, right there. He couldn’t because he didn’t. And now Gideon was going to have to deal with him, even if doing so killed him.

  He didn’t mind.

  Everyone died.

  So he waited for Seth in the taproom of The Hunter’s Horns. Marcus, the bartender, had left a glass of Rastignac XO on the table for Gideon before he’d folded up his towel and left him alone in there.

  There was no music. The only sounds were down to life passing by outside.

  His conversation with Gennaro had been most enlightening.

  He would play his part, and he would enjoy it.

  Gideon savored a sip of the old brandy, rolling it around his tongue before swallowing. It was beautifully smooth going down. He put the glass back down and took a thick hand-rolled Cuban cigar from the tin in his inside pocket, snipped off the end, then lit it,
puffing several times on the tightly packed leaf to get it smoking. To hell with smoking regulations, this was his pub. He remembered the man he’d bought the cigars from, a big Swede who hadn’t quite grasped English, introducing himself as sixty-five and retarded. That put a smile on the old man’s face. “Hello, I’m Sven Ingvar, I’m sixty-five and retarded.” But not as brilliantly memorable as the next thing he’d said. “I lost my virginity to a hooker in Havana. I don’t know if I have any children.” Lucky man, that Sven Ingvar, Gideon thought, as he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, enjoying the smoke while he waited for his father. All families were fucked up in his experience.

  It didn’t take long for Seth to arrive.

  He didn’t appreciate having been summoned.

  “What was so important that we couldn’t do this over the phone?” he said, without preamble. The door slammed behind him as he stalked into the snug and sat himself down across the table from his boy.

  “Here we are, finally. Father and son,” Gideon said.

  “Spare me the whole we-should-do-this-more-often guilt trip. I know, I know; I’m a rotten father, never took you to a football match, wasn’t there to teach you how to ride a bike, none of that bonding stuff. I get it. I doomed you to a lifetime of angst and self-loathing. The whole Oedipal thing and not being able to form functional relationships? Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa and all that crap. We’ve already done this, I freely accept it’s all my fault.”

  “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?”

  “‘Don’t you, Dad.’ Or ‘Father.’ Or, if you prefer, ‘sir.’”

  “You walked out on us. On all of this.”

  “Ah, the empire. Yes, I admit it, I didn’t want it anymore.”

  “No. You wanted her.”

  “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Seth said, obviously growing bored with the whole touchy-feely moment he thought was happening here.

  “Didn’t you used to be someone? I mean a real man? That’s the bit I don’t get. How you could walk away from who you were—and then come back?”

  “Who I am, son. Who I am. Remember, it’s only last year for me, barely time to scratch my arse. You’ve grown old, my hometown’s gone to the dogs, but me, I’m still the same old cunt I’ve always been. And I came back out of necessity. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. This place reeks of mortality.”

  I’m not the only person dying here, Gideon thought, but kept his own counsel. He raised the brandy glass to his nose and breathed in the heady fumes. It was the simple pleasures he was going to miss most, he thought, like a good piece of battered fish and chips with a side of mushy peas. Even the thought that this might be the last conversation he’d ever have didn’t bother him half as much as the thought that he might never smoke another one of these most excellent cigars again. He inhaled slowly, savoring the smoke, then let it corkscrew up in front of his face. He tapped the ash off into the small silver ashtray beside the brandy glass. He refused to be rushed.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Seth said, finally.

  “Answer me one question, then you can go.”

  “Fine. Ask.”

  “What do you see when you look at me?”

  Seth leaned back in his chair. He thought about lying, but shrugged and told the truth. “Nothing,” he said. “I don’t feel anything, either. No great regret. No sadness that I never saw you grow up. No remorse at abandoning you to the nuns. No dreams that it might have been different. There’s no parental pride. I see a stranger.”

  “Look again,” Gideon said. “I’m what you could have become if you fulfilled your promise. I’m you, perfected.”

  That put a smile on Seth’s face. “I don’t think so, son. You’re just a shadow of the man I used to be.”

  Gideon shook his head. “The world’s moved on since you were here. I don’t know whether you’ve really had a chance to take it all in, you’ve been so obsessed with your demons, and trying to grasp what’s become of the world you left behind. It’s subtler for one thing; the racketeers and gangsters are all dead. Protection is a mug’s game. When you left this place it was all about extortion and opportunity—”

  “And no matter what year it is, that doesn’t change.”

  “Maybe not, but the how of it does. Back then there was honor to it. Ordinary decent criminals they used to call us. There was honor among thieves. There was a code. You knew where you were with your own kind. Now it’s all happening in the shadows. It’s online. Hackers are a bigger threat than heavies. You want to frighten someone you go for their information, their client base, you isolate them, you breach their security, and blow their relationships. You do stuff that’s frankly beyond me; I’m a dinosaur in this new landscape, but you? You’re clueless. You have no idea what it’s really like out there. Kids hold all the knowledge of the world in their pockets. They can talk to each other, and I don’t just mean a telephone conversation, they can reach out to hundreds of thousands of people all at once. A picture can go around the world before you’ve walked down the street. It’s so much harder to be what we were, Dad. You’ve actually got to be clever, not just mean. What you don’t realize is you kick-started that change with your twisted need for possession beyond all normal reason.”

  “I hardly changed the fucking world, son, you’re exaggerating my importance. That’s just time. Time’s change. It’s the nature of the world.”

  “You didn’t change the world. You changed me. I changed the world.”

  Seth smiled at that. “You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

  “Because I’ve lived the life you walked away from. You name it, I’ve done it, and worse than you could ever imagine. Everyone you knew, your entire world, they’re all gone. Every last one of them. No one remembers you. Do you know how they’d treat you if they were here now? They’d spit in your face. You broke the code. Now you’re an irrelevance. I’m not. People are frightened of me, Dad. Me. Not you. They respect me. Not you. The name Lockwood still means something around here. That’s down to me. Not you.”

  “So you called me here so you could show off a bit before you shuffled off this mortal coil? Isn’t that a bit, oh, I don’t know, needy? What do you want me to say? Well done? I’m proud of you? Fucking hell, son, did no one ever tell you that you talk too much?”

  Gideon leaned forward, planting both his hands on the table and started to rise. Slight tremors ran the length of his arm as it took his weight. He stared into his father’s eyes.

  “I fantasized about killing you,” he said.

  That brought a smile to Seth’s face. “And then thought better of it, I assume? I’d snap you in two, son.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do it myself. It’s been decades since I’ve got my hands dirty. But I’ve got an army of people who’d happily do it for me.”

  “Ah, right, you’re the Big Man. Sorry, I forgot for a moment.”

  “Do you want to know a secret?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about now?”

  “It’s a secret that will damn you, Dad. I know it will. So, I’m asking you if you want to know it, not simply telling you it. Think of it as a courtesy.”

  “Have you lost your fucking mind? Is that it? You’ve gone gaga in your old age? Good to know senility runs in the genes. I’ll do my best to stay away from old age.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “I’m not interested in playing games with you.”

  “It’s not a game. I don’t play games. It’s a fact. I think you want to know it, so I’ll make the decision for you. Cadmus Damiola is still alive.”

  Seth didn’t flinch. His lip curled. He shook his head. “You really have lost it, haven’t you? He’s dead and gone.”

  “I don’t particularly care if you believe me or not. That doesn’t change the fact he’s alive.”

  “And what if he is?”

  Gideon’s smile was sly. “Then Glass Town can be saved, can’t it? You said yourself, that’s
why you returned. All you need to do is find the magician. And I know where he is.”

  “Do you now?” Gideon nodded. “So what’s it going to cost me? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Money, power, something? What do you want? You called me here to negotiate, so let’s negotiate.”

  “You don’t have anything I want.”

  “Oh, that can’t be true. Use your imagination a bit. Be creative. How about the carousel so you can torment your enemies with the Rushes? Or the projector? The Reels are nastier, more fully formed, but they’re both quite effective terrors. You haven’t even seen the Negative in glorious action.”

  “You don’t have anything I want,” Gideon repeated.

  “I don’t believe you, boy.”

  “What I want is you out of my life. The magician’s hiding out in the old Ravenshill Cemetery. Do with that information what you will.”

  “You’ve just made an old man very happy, son,” Seth said, pushing himself up until he was face-to-face with his boy. “For that reason I won’t kill you. Because, and now it’s my turn to let you in on a secret, I’ve been thinking about doing just that for a long time now. You sicken me. You’re a poor excuse of a man. But if you’re wrong, if this is a lie or a trick, I’ll come back here and I’ll burn this place to the ground with you inside it.”

  The threat wasn’t so far removed from what Gideon had in mind himself.

  He said nothing.

  He didn’t sit down again until he was alone.

  It was done. It was down to young Joshua now.

  He breathed deeply, and then took another slow draw on the cigar.

  He’d miss these simple pleasures.

  He left the cigar smoldering in the silver ashtray, walking unsteadily upstairs. He needed the banister to stop himself from falling. In so many ways he wasn’t half the man he used to be, but in others he was twice the man he’d ever been. He thought about calling Julius Gennaro, but he needed to do this alone.

  The hallway reeked of stale cigarettes and beer soaked into the threadbare carpet. There was a dark stain beside the wall that he remembered being blood. The unlucky bleeder had been on his knees when Gideon had grabbed a handful of his hair and slammed it into the William Morris wallpaper. It had made quite a mess. These walls contained so many memories, most of them brutal. He opened the door to the office. He’d run the family business from this room for the best part of sixty years. It had been his sanctuary. His one place where he could get away from the world.