Dredd pulls out another pic. "This him?"
I don't have to hesitate. Conrad's self-important, smooth visage glares back at me. "Hell, yeah, that's him. He got form?"
Dredd shakes his head. "This is his citizen ID. He hasn't got a record. His real name's Vandris DuNoye. He's Catalyst's legal eagle and the right-hand man to the creep behind the company."
"Drokk me," I say, genuinely shocked. "He mentioned something about his employer'."
"Erik Rejin. He's the meathead at the top I want to nail, but the rich creep's surrounded himself with a layer of protection I can't get close to. That's where you come in."
"Get inside the organisation," Hendry says to me. "See what you can find. We gotta blow it wide open from the inside." He pauses, glances at Dredd, then adds: "Rejin's got a daughter, Ramona. Must be in her early twenties. Get close to her. We, uh, know you got a rep with the ladies, so see if you can use that to your advantage. Get what info you can out of her."
"Keep me updated," Dredd adds sternly. "And don't go so deep you can't get out. Remember who you're working for."
I nod slowly. "Nothing I can't handle."
Dredd pulls himself up to full height, a lawbreaker's nightmare. "Don't be too sure. If these creeps are guilty of what I suspect they are, you're gonna have to keep your wits about you. From what I've seen of them, they are dangerous and they are remorseless."
I look down at the photo of DuNoye, his cold, dark eyes betraying nothing. I can still taste blood in my mouth.
PART TWO:
THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION
NINE
"You Trager?"
I glance up at the guy looming over me and it doesn't strain my brain to guess that this is the gimp I've been waiting for. Built like a Manta prowl tank, he's squeezed into a two thousand-cred suit that looks like it's about to burst. His massive arms are barely contained within a jacket stretched to the seams, and his thick-necked bullethead emerges from the shirt collar like pink sausagemeat squeezed out of a tube.
The creep's outfit makes him immediately incongruous amongst the rest of the clientele in Tommy's, and if it wasn't for the shaved head, pinched features and cold, cruel eyes set deep in his waxy skull, then no doubt one of the bad-asses here would question his right to walk amongst them. Also, the drokker's a good six and a half feet tall; he towers over the stumpy little bikers as if they're his pixie followers. Looking like a serial killer on his way to his grandmother's funeral, he exudes an attitude that would keep anyone at a safe distance, allowing him an impressive exclusion zone. Right now, his bowel-loosening stare is fixed on me, his nostrils flaring like he's itching to spill some blood.
Take a deep breath, I tell myself. Don't sound hesitant, don't let him intimidate you. "That's me. You're Alphonse, right?" The name sounds ludicrous, applied to King Krong here. His parents must've been seriously drokking optimistic - you might meet a MCU History lecturer called Alphonse, or it's what you'd christen your robo-servant if you had lots of money and pretensions but little taste, but no way does it suit a bruiser of the magnitude that is standing before me. It's like naming one of Satanus's brood Fluffy or something; just ain't gonna work. Then again, the tag could be bullshit, just another bogus ID.
He nods. "Come on. Got the speedster parked outside."
He turns, not waiting for me to join him, and surges his way through the Friday evening drinkers, the barflies parting almost as one to let him pass. I trail behind in his wake, singularly less threatening, relieved as I step out into the cool night air to be away from the crush, though apprehensive about where tonight's events are going to lead. I won't have much of a chance against this gorilla if things turn nasty, and there won't be time for back-up to mobilise. I just gotta stay on his good side, prove that I will be a worthwhile addition to the organisation.
Alphonse is standing beside his vehicle waiting for me to catch up. It's a sleek, dark, two-man hatchback job and I'm surprised he manages to fit behind the steering wheel. He's eyeing me as I approach, cocking his head to one side as if weighing up in his mind what size coffin I would take, or how much ballast he'd need to sink my body in a rad-pit. What he's actually thinking about surprises even me.
"You got any smarter clothes than that?"
I stop and look down at myself. To blend into the citizenry means a fairly understated wardrobe that isn't going to draw attention to yourself. My outfit consists of lime-green kneepads, Emphatically Yess pantaloons with the third trouserleg tucked stylishly into the waistband, a pair of hightops and a shirt/jacket combo by the Guerre family from Cal-Hab. If you don't want to attract unwelcome comments from passers-by and risk provoking trouble, it pays not to look like a simp.
I shrug at Alphonse. "S'all I got."
He sighs like an exasperated fashion consultant, then climbs into his car, indicating that I should do likewise. "We gotta get you a suit. None of mine are gonna fit a pee-wee like you."
"What's the diff?"
"Difference is," he says, starting the vehicle up and easing it into the flow of traffic, "that it creates an impression. It puts forward an image. Most people make a decision about somebody within the first few seconds of meeting. If you meet someone and they're suited and booted, chances are your impression's gonna be that they're respectable, businesslike, and take pride over their appearance. No reason to fear someone in a shirt and tie."
The casual way he says "fear" gives me goosebumps, as if everybody had a very real reason to fear him and the clothes were just a costume, a distraction, to hide the psycho concealed inside them.
"People look at you," he continues, glancing at me, "an' they're gonna think - no offence - that you're an asshole. No reason why they should give you the time of day."
"Charming."
"Nothing personal. Ninety per cent of the population looks like you and they're assholes as well. If the average Joe on the slab turns up at your door asking questions or needing help, do you let him in? Do you say, 'Hey, whatever you need, use my vid-phone, anything.'? Like drokk you do. You tell him to get lost. You don't owe any drokker anything, right?"
I nod, conceding the point. Most Big Meg citizens barely saw their neighbours, let alone spoke to them. There was too much suspicion, too much nervousness about the consequences of helping - or even getting to know - a stranger. One minute you're helping out some little old lady to cross the road, the next you wake up and find yourself being sold in an alien slave market on a far away rimworld.
The Judges had fostered a society built on dread, in which they constantly reiterated the fact that crime was an ever-present disease and that each second of every day someone was a victim of it. It left cits paralysed, scared to leave their apartments; which, of course, suited Justice Department very well. It was a lot easier to control a city if the population felt besieged by an enemy within. The cits were so busy barricading themselves into their homes that they failed to notice that their supposed protectors were removing their civil rights one by one.
"Now put a man in a suit," Alphonse says, "and watch their reaction change. Automatically, they think you're someone in authority, 'cause you don't look like them. They're deferent, courteous, eager to please - a world away from how they treat others normally, even their own family." He takes one hand off the wheel and briefly adjusts his tie in the rear-view mirror. "Here, watch this."
A Judge suddenly slides up parallel to the car on his Lawmaster and glances in. Sweat prickles in the small of my back, but the helmet simply gives Alphonse the once-over then glares at me for a second before taking an off-ramp.
"Y'see?" Alphonse asks me, waggling his eyebrows. "Model citizen, me."
"Sounds to me like you've made a study of this."
He smiles unpleasantly. "I've seen plenty of meatheads' reactions close-up. I know when I've been taken into their confidence, when they sense there's nothing suspicious about me. You get enough experience at this sort of thing, it's as easy as flicking a switch. You go from Mr Nice Guy to... someone el
se."
"What, exactly?" I enquire, pushing him slightly.
"You'll see," he says quietly, watching me from the corner of his eye. "Mr DuNoye, he doesn't trust you, you know that, don't you? He's pretty wary of anyone he doesn't know well. Some say he's paranoid, but me, I just think he's careful."
Mr DuNoye, eh? The need for cover names seems to have gone. "You mean Conrad?" I ask innocently.
Alphonse lets out a barking laugh. "Ha! His idea of a sick joke - just one more actor playing a role. Everything I learnt about playing up to people's perceptions I got from him. You've met him, right?"
I instinctively touch my face where the bruises were slowly fading. "Yeah, we've met."
"And you're first impression of him was?"
"He looked like a businessman, like a gruddamn captain of industry. But it didn't take me long to realise that inside he was-"
"Something different," he finishes. "That's how it works, that's how we all work. The image we put forward every day ain't necessarily the same as what we're like in private. Do you know what we'd be like if we were one hundred per cent honest with ourselves? The city would be full of naked, gibbering loons, man."
"So, DuNoye may look like Mr Respectable, but he's buying antique torture equipment from South-Am. He got a taste for the rough stuff?"
Alphonse is silent for a moment, then he says: "Mr DuNoye is a respected lawyer and the public face of Catalyst Productions with many influential friends, including some within Justice Department. He also happens to have a certain... predilection, which he shares with a select client base in a profitable enterprise."
Predilection? Profitable enterprise? Suddenly, the penny drops. "Vi-zines. He's making Vi-zines."
"A rather crude term for what we're actually achieving, but needless to say you can understand Mr DuNoye's reticence to allow outsiders into his private life. You'll see soon enough how our work is so much more than some backstreet criminal organisation, and we shall see if you have the stomach to be a part of it."
I swallow, feeling I could do with a zizz hit. "He said he had an errand for me. A test. So where are we going?"
"Why, Mr Trager," Alphonse replies, that nauseating smile returning to his lips, "we're going to pick up our next star."
We park in the shadow of Dick Miller and take the el up to the one hundred and fourteenth floor, my mentor explaining to me the set-up along the way.
"See, we can't just kidnap people when they turn up to auditions. Their agencies are gonna want to know where they are, and once they start getting suspicious then the talent's going to avoid us like the plague."
"You're talking about Catalyst here?" I ask, acting stupid. I have to be careful and make sure that I don't let it slip that I have more than my fair share of information at my disposal. "I thought it made regular movies..."
"It does. Anti-Sov prejudice sells all over the world. But it's our legitimate front and what you might call our grooming method. Mr DuNoye and Mr Rejin, they monitor the actors and see who they think has potential. Those that they like the look of often get called back."
"Rejin... I've heard of that guy. Never seen in public, right?"
Alphonse doesn't reply straight away. "He's the man at the top," he mutters. "He... tends to keep himself to himself."
"But why don't you just snatch the victims off the street, if they're gonna be murdered anyway?"
"It's all about quality, that's why," he snaps. "Yeah, any two-bit Vi-zine publisher gets its meat by snatching a couple of bums out of an alley, but what do you get? You get shit, is what." He reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls out a small, rolled-up periodical, handing it to me. "Stuff like this is pretty much the standard that you can buy off the black market; a shoddy, cheap hack job."
I open it out and catch the title - Drilling Miss Daisy - before my eyes are pulled to the explicit cover pic of an eldster getting a frontal lobotomy while clearly fully conscious. The image is grainy and badly composed, the photographer having got so close to the subject that it isn't easy to make out the details. Judging by the lighting too, it had been shot in a gloomy basement with only a bare bulb providing any illumination. I steel myself to flip through the pages and do so quickly and with the minimum of attention, trying hard not to rest my gaze on any one atrocity. The reproduction values are poor, the paper rough. Hard to believe, but a mag like this sells at about fifty creds each on the underground. A sicko and their money are soon parted, that's for gruddamn sure.
"Pretty grim," I say, giving it back to him, relieved to have it out of my sight. I notice ink has rubbed off onto my fingers and I try to wipe them down the back of my trousers, keen to be rid of its taint.
"Yeah," he says distractedly, slipping it back into his pocket as if it were the morning's Mega-News. "It's this sort of rubbish that we're trying to avoid. We're going for the high end of the scale - classy pics, quality production and, of course, top-of-the-range screamers."
The el' pings as it reaches our floor and we step out into the block corridor. Alphonse pauses for a moment to check the address. "Three-nine-nine-eight/B, that's what we're looking for," he says to himself. "One Bartram Stump."
"What's to stop this guy having a spouse and six bawling brats?" I ask as we head off in search of the apartment. "I mean, you ain't just gonna be able to walk out with him in front of his whole drokking family."
"Research. The bosses are not only looking for photogenic bods that are gonna look good carved up for the camera, they get us to investigate their personal backgrounds: find out if they've got next of kin or many friends, see if it's gonna be noticed if they disappear. Actors have a habit of going where the work is, so it's not unknown for them to just up and leave one day, 'specially if we leave enough evidence to point the authorities in that direction. We target the ones that are living alone, preferably new to the city, that ain't gonna be missed in a hurry."
"Have any of them ever been investigated?"
"Occasionally a name crops up on the Tri-D as having vanished, but cits go missing all the time. Judges got bigger problems than chasing round after errant actors." He stops. "Wait here." He flattens himself against the corridor wall and slides along to a junction, where up on the corner of the ceiling a CCTri-D camera is operating. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves a small canister, spraying the contents in front of the camera's lens, then he looks back at me and motions for me to follow. When I join him, he murmurs, "Freezed the circuitry. It'll drokk with its time delay. Don't want PSU seeing who Stump's visitors were."
We continue down another corridor until we halt in front of a door. "Here we are," Alphonse says. "Let me do the talking at first, OK? I wanna make sure we don't spook him too early."
I nod. I can feel myself clenching and unclenching my fists, my palms damp with perspiration.
Alphonse knocks briskly. Moments later we hear movement behind the door before it slowly opens, a head peering round the frame cautiously. For a second, the citizen looks bemused, then recognition lights up in his eyes, and he pulls the door wide. All he's wearing is his dressing gown.
"Alphonse! How're you doing?" He reaches out and shakes my partner's hand vigorously. "Long time no see."
"It's been a while, Bart," Alphonse acknowledges, that slick smile spreading across his face. "We were in the neighbourhood, thought we'd drop by."
Stump's attention turns to me and he curiously gives me the once-over. The guy's got matinee idol looks written all over him: tanned complexion, square jaw, thick, dark hair that might or might not be a wig, a smooth forehead showing evidence of several rejuve jobs, pearly white teeth and bright blue eyes. He seems vaguely familiar in a way that suggests I might've seen him in a vidvert recently or staring down from some advertising hoarding; a commercial for toothpaste, maybe, or aftershave. Something in which a gimp grins at himself in the mirror a lot.
Alphonse makes the introductions. "Bart, this is Pete Trager. He's the new casting manager over at the studio. We were discussing
a shortlist of names for the next feature, and yours cropped up. I reckon it's been too long since the Stumpster has been wowing the ladies in the aisles."
"Really? A new production?" he says eagerly, turning from me to Alphonse and back again, his naked ambition embarrassingly plain to see.
"No one nails that gruff Mega-City Judge charm the way you do. Ain't that right, Pete?"
I nod, trying to generate enthusiasm. "That's the truth."
"Well," Stump says conspiratorially, modesty evidently a fairly alien concept, "to be honest, I feel playing a Judge slightly beneath me. Not much personality or motivation to work on, you understand. And I always feel a bit unclean conveying fascism so convincingly. But I do so love a challenge." Before I can piledrive my fist into his arrogant face, he adds excitedly: "You better come in and tell me all about it." He ushers us across the threshold and shuts the door behind him.
His apartment gives off more than a whiff of pretty poster-boy fallen on desperate times: the furniture looks ratty, the remains of take-out food is lying on the floor, and the walls are smothered in stills from movies, faded publicity pics and yellowing cuttings. In nearly all of them, Bartram Stump is flashing those dazzling teeth, either at paparazzi as he's snapped with a succession of beautiful women attending some premiere, or in character as he's pouring on the charm to his co-star. The general effect is headache-inducing, as if I'm standing in a hall of mirrors with reflections on every side.
Stump is babbling away to Alphonse. "Grud, when was the last time you required my thespian services? Must've been Strat-Bat Out of Hell... That was, what, a couple of years ago? I must say, it would be very interesting working with you guys again. What made you think of me?"
"Let's just say you got the perfect face for our next leading role," Alphonse replies, reaching into his jacket. "Now can you do me a favour?"
"Anything-"
Alphonse levels a gun at the actor. "Shut the drokk up and do what you're told." He beckons me over with a gesture of his head. "Trager, grab him."
The Final Cut Page 14
