Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2)

by Polansky, Daniel

  Well, that was pretty fucking easy, I thought, and pushed aside my plate.

  My tobacco pouch sat on the counter. I thumbed out a sheaf of paper and a few tufts, playing for time. The portrait painter had taken liberties, but then I guess that’s what they’re paid for. The woman in front of me was a far cry from the vision in miniature I had been given. Her face lacked any trace of softness, of the plump vitality that draws the male gaze. She was too sharp, too angular, her body a reflection of the belligerence her reputation spoke of and our short acquaintance confirmed. A crueler man than I might have called her boyish, and I imagined her childhood had contained no shortage of pimpled wits happy to plague her with similar epithets. Still, her scarlet hair was as striking in person as in oil, a vivid contrast with the blue of her eyes.

  The longer the pause lasted the narrower these got, till they were little more than slits in a sea of freckled pink. ‘Well? I asked you a question.’

  ‘You look like your brother,’ I opened.

  Excitement spilled across her face, but she killed it quick, tightening her mouth into a sneer. ‘You knew my brother?’

  ‘I served under him during the war. I saw him around a little after that.’

  She cocked her head as if to spear me. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘All right then. You look like your mother.’

  Now she was thoroughly confused, so much so that for a moment she forgot even to be angry. Her face was more pleasant when it wasn’t radiating antipathy. ‘You knew my mother?’

  ‘No, never met her,’ I said, flagging down Adolphus. He sidled over from the other side of the bar and refilled my glass.

  ‘Who’s this?’ His smile would have been charming if it hadn’t been attached to the rest of him.

  ‘She’s our new bar keep. I’m sick of watching you drag your ass over here every time I need a beer.’

  Adolphus looked her up and down. ‘Not sure she’s big enough,’ he said. Then, to her, ‘You think you could carry a half-cask up from the basement?’

  ‘I’m not a bar back!’

  ‘No need to get huffy about it.’ Adolphus winked his one good eye and drew off, chuckling.

  I took a shallow drag off my cigarette while she composed her fraying nerves. ‘Why are you looking for me?’ she said again.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘It’s Father, isn’t it?’ She shook her head angrily. Petulantly, if you were inclined to be judgmental about it. ‘Tell him he can stop worrying. Tell him I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve made it this far.’

  ‘So did he,’ I pointed at a drunk passed out in the corner, his snoring interrupted by the occasional involuntary belch. ‘But if we were kin I’d be concerned to hell.’

  She had primed herself for a screaming match, and my refusal to offer a fight left her unsorted. Her shoulders slumped, pinned down by the day’s length. ‘What does he want from me?’

  ‘The general? I think he’d like you to outlive him. It’s a common hope of parents, I’m told.’

  ‘And what of Roland?’

  ‘I imagine your father would have liked him to do the same.’ The longer the conversation lasted the more it was becoming clear I was not the ideal candidate to reconcile the Montgomery family, never having had a family myself, nor entirely understanding their purpose.

  ‘You say you knew my brother.’

  ‘I said that.’

  ‘How well?’

  ‘How well does anyone know anyone?’

  ‘Did you think him the sort of man to end his life face down in the gutter, outside of a Low Town whorehouse?’

  ‘I’ve known better men who died worse.’

  That was close enough to an attack to allow her temper free reign. ‘You can tell Father I’m not some child to get fetched by the help. You tell him I’ll stay in Low Town till Roland gets justice, since he’s not man enough to see it done himself.’

  As she turned to walk away I closed the tips of my fingers around her wrist. ‘Let me tell you something about the dead, as someone who’s seen a few of them. They don’t care what we do. They don’t yearn for vengeance, and they don’t hope for redemption. They rot.’ I tightened my grip slightly. ‘Stick around Low Town and you’ll find out I’m right.’

  She ripped her arm away with enough force that I worried she might have injured herself. Then she shot me a look that could have curled paint, and stalked off into the night.

  I finished the rest of my drink and told myself to stay out of it, knowing I’d be too stupid to listen.

  7

  Roland Montgomery’s birthday party was not my kind of scene.

  This was a year or two after the armistice. I was a low-ranking agent, investigating crimes and punishing the guilty, or at least the unlucky. Roland was amongst the most beloved heroes of the Great War, and the Association rapidly becoming a political power. That ought to have been enough to mitigate against our continued interaction, even without the differences in our upbringing and social status. I suppose Roland’s willingness to try and forge a friendship despite them was to his credit. But virtue and vice often walk hand in hand, and I sometimes wondered if his sense of egalitarianism wasn’t an offshoot of his consuming love of being liked.

  In later years, in my professional capacity as a purveyor of phantasms and herb-induced bliss, I would find myself in any number of upper-class debaucheries, half-orgies populated by the degenerated scions of the aristocracy. This was about as far from those as you could get. General Montgomery was old school, and though Roland’s politics now ran to the radical, personally he was as little taken with revelry as his father. I suspected that this celebration was not of his making, that if his wishes had been taken into account the day would have come and gone unmarked.

  A white canvas tent had been erected in the backyard, a term that hardly does justice to the virtual nature preserve that was the Montgomerys’ grounds. The late spring evening was illuminated by white lanterns hung amidst foliage. The weather had been kind enough to go along with the proceedings, the night warm, the sky clear. A pleasantly bucolic scene, though the chattering of the insects was largely drowned out by the chattering of the guests. Waiters shoved trays of over-elaborate pastries into my face, diced quail spleens with candied almonds, goose liver dabbed atop thin-cut white bread, things that looked like food but somehow weren’t quite. I got the sense that no one else was having a particularly good time, but then they’d all had more practice in faking it.

  The young Rouender woman with whom I was nominally conversing had spent a good deal of money to look very cheap. She wore little in the way of clothing but a great deal of make-up, along with a selection of jewelry that weighed enough to drown a man in a gutter. Her name was Buffy or Minnie or some other jarring diminutive more appropriate for a child’s doll than an adult. I’d long since stopped paying attention to her words, but their gradual increase in volume suggested her anecdote had reached its climax. I shook free of my thoughts long enough to catch the last sentence. ‘It’s just so hard to find a decent servant these days.’

  ‘A constant struggle,’ I agreed.

  ‘You have no idea. And if you are lucky enough to find someone who knows what they’re doing, good luck keeping her! I had the sweetest little girl, a half-Islander who could do the most amazing things with my hair. Five years I had her, and then one day she just disappeared, shipped out to the Free Cities with some . . . man she’d married.’

  ‘After everything you’d done for her.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Foremost what is hateful about the aristocracy is their fundamental meaninglessness – they do nothing and thus are nothing. On some dim level they seem to be aware of it, hence their refuge in petty intrigues and expensive narcotics, in nightly soirées and the occasional bloody duel. There’s a frantic quality to their play, more distraction than recreation. If things ever stopped spinning long enough for t
hem to take a look at themselves, half would end up taking a midnight dip in the bay.

  ‘How exactly do you know Roland?’

  ‘I served beneath him.’

  She set one hand on my chest. ‘We all so appreciate your sacrifice,’ she said, blinking her eyelashes as if shooing away a fly.

  I would never be categorized as handsome – a lifetime of scraps had been effective in defacing a physiognomy that would not originally have been mistaken for attractive. But there was a certain type of woman that seemed to find my alley-mutt face alluring, at least as a curiosity. And the uniform helped – the rich had no greater love of Black House than any other cohort of the population, but it was at least evidence that I had a real job, which I supposed made me something of a novelty.

  ‘Is it true what they say about him, our Roland?’

  I thought about that for a while. ‘Yeah, it pretty much is.’

  ‘What an honor it must have been for you, to be a part of his command.’

  ‘Every moment a joy.’

  ‘Tell me, what was it like? The war, I mean?’

  I finished off what was in my cup. ‘It was like something that you never feel like talking about.’

  Her face turned from pink to bright red. The pink had been make-up, but the red seemed authentic.

  ‘Where is the guest of honor, anyway?’ I asked. I’d seen Roland briefly on the way in, he’d pumped my hand and told me we’d talk soon. That had been two hours prior, and so far his promise had been unfulfilled.

  ‘I’m . . . not sure,’ she said, eyes fluttering about the party for someone else to speak with.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll see if I can’t run him down,’ I said, disengaging.

  Buffy or Minnie made no particular effort to dissuade me.

  Somewhere in the vast estate surrounding me there was a fully stocked bar, but it was not in view, nor did the various waitstaff seem inclined to provide directions. This left me trying to get drunk on the house punch, a syrupy concoction ill-suited to my mood, which was bored trending towards bitter. It filled my bladder long before offering any sort of a decent buzz. As watering the greenery seemed likely to betray my upbringing, I found my way towards the powder room.

  Business concluded, I detoured away from the party, bright lights and dull people. This was my second visit to the Montgomery Manse. The first had been several months earlier, a dinner party to which I’d been invited. I’d sat at the far end of the table from Roland and his father, said little and enjoyed myself less. But it had given me a passing familiarity with the layout, one I put to good use in avoiding the gathering outside.

  I wasn’t exactly trying to snoop, but then I wasn’t exactly trying not to either. As a member of the secret police I figured I had at least the license, if not the obligation, to figure out what everyone else was doing. And given the sensitive nature of the conversation, General Montgomery and his seed had done little to inure themselves from eavesdroppers. The door to the office was half open, and if they weren’t yet yelling outright, it was clear the conversation was moving in that direction.

  ‘They can’t very well name me High Chancellor with my eldest child calling for the abolition of the damned monarchy!’

  ‘There are more important things in the world than your political career, Father,’ Roland said. His voice was calm but not quiet, and I thought I detected in it a hint of mockery.

  ‘Like yours, for instance?’

  ‘Like the interests of the men who served beneath my command.’

  ‘And how are their interests served by you making trouble in the streets? By threatening the Crown and the government?’

  ‘I’m simply asking that the Queen appropriately reward the men who died keeping her aloft. If she chooses to take offense, I can hardly be blamed.’

  ‘Should she take offense at your marching armed through Low Town? Of instigating feuds with drug dealers and criminals?’

  ‘I can hardly imagine the Throne would object to concerned citizens defending their families.’

  ‘The Throne would object to your building a private army, regardless of who you choose to aim it at.’

  ‘The Throne built the army, Father. I’m just borrowing it while it’s not in use.’

  There was a choking sound, then a long silence. When next the general spoke, it was with that studied composure that lies a short step from open rage. ‘Flippancy ill-suits you, or the gravity of the situation. Pensions, almshouses, jobs – as High Chancellor I’ll be in a position to provide these things. If you cared as much about them as you did your own grandstanding, you’d cease your provocation and fall in line!’

  A movement in the shadows betrayed that I wasn’t the only one interested in the goings-on of the Montgomery clan. Botha stood silently outside the study door, an impressive degree of stealth for a man of his size. I wondered what it meant that he hadn’t bothered to chase me off. His smirk had worn a groove into his face – a bitter thing, devoid of levity.

  I followed the hallway back toward the party, taking a seat on a small sofa near the exit. It was getting late, and unlike the rest of the attendees, I had things to do in the morning. I could hear Roland and his father continue with their dispute, the distance I’d added made up for by the increase in volume. It was too garbled to make out specifics, and I didn’t strain myself trying.

  After a moment I noticed someone peering out from around the corner. A young girl, ten or twelve, I’m bad at that sort of thing. She had her brother’s red hair and her father’s fierce gaze.

  I crooked one finger in hello. She scowled and approached me.

  ‘It’s my brother’s birthday,’ she said.

  ‘Is that why all these people are here?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, clearly thinking me very foolish. As a line, the Montgomerys had many virtues, but not one of them possessed anything resembling a sense of humor.

  ‘Are you supposed to be up so late?’

  ‘No one cares what I do,’ she said.

  At her age I had been five years on the streets, orphaned by the Red Fever, scraping by on theft and low cunning. It had been quite literally the case that no one cared what I did. ‘Don’t you have a nanny or something?’

  ‘She thinks I’m in the privy.’

  ‘A budding criminal genius.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a criminal,’ she said.

  ‘Most don’t.’ I very much had the urge to smoke a cigarette, but decided it was better not to offer the pubescent an opportunity to feel morally superior to me. We stared at each other for a while.

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’ I asked.

  ‘Will you tell Father that I’m out of bed?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  She rolled over the worth of my word. ‘I shouldn’t believe you,’ she said. ‘But I will.’ She plopped herself next to me on the sofa.

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  We sat quietly while the familial dispute worsened.

  ‘My brother’s a hero,’ she said suddenly, as if expecting me to contradict her.

  ‘I’ve heard that.’

  ‘My father too.’

  ‘That’s the word.’

  There was the sound of something breaking. One of the participants had thrown something against a wall. I assumed it was Edwin. He’d something of a reputation as a firebrand, despite his age.

  ‘They fight a lot,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to know that.’

  ‘I don’t think either of us are.’

  ‘If they’re both heroes,’ she asked, ‘then why do they fight so much?’

  ‘Heroes can’t disagree with each other?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘Being a hero means you always know what the right thing to do is.’

  ‘What if there’s more than one?’

  ‘There’s only ever one right thing to do,’ she said, the final moral authority on the subject.

  ‘Of
ten not even that.’

  What little enthusiasm I’d managed to inspire in the girl dissipated quickly. She all but leapt up from her seat. ‘I don’t think I like you,’ she said.

  ‘A popular sentiment.’

  She lifted her chin till it pointed at the ceiling, turned imperiously and marched back the way she’d come.

  Free of the possible censure of a child, I smoked a cigarette and said a silent prayer for those poor fools who’d chosen to personally ensure the continuation of the species. It must be exhausting, having to pretend you had the answers. My position within Black House required a rather casual relationship with the truth, but even I wasn’t forced to uphold such an absurd fiction every moment of the day.

  I never ended up seeing Roland. A few minutes after Rhaine went to her bed I decided to head to my own. It had been a long trek to Kor’s Heights, with little enough to show for it.

  When the general had asked me if I’d met his daughter, I’d lied and said I hadn’t. At the time I hadn’t seen any point in mentioning our initial conversation, brief and meaningless as it was. Having had a follow up, I wasn’t so sure. There seemed to be a great deal of the child I’d met in the woman whose life I was trying to save.

  8

  I awoke the next morning stewed in my own sweat, and well past breakfast.

  I didn’t mind. It was too hot to eat, too hot to do anything but lie in bed and be too hot. Sadly I didn’t have that luxury, so I stretched myself into yesterday’s shirt and dropped down the stairs.

  Wren was hung over a table, naked from the waist up.

  ‘I’ve got a message I need run.’

  ‘Can it wait till the afternoon?’ he asked. ‘It’s hot as hell out.’

  ‘It’ll only get hotter,’ I said, and he pulled himself up off the wood sulkily. ‘I need you to find Yancey. Ask him what he’s got going on this evening. Tell him I’d like to pay him a visit.’

  He smiled. He liked the Rhymer. Everybody liked the Rhymer. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I gotta make my tithe.’

  He nodded sympathetically and went back to not moving. I watched him enviously, then slipped out the back.