Jerry seemed genuinely glad to see Wodan, and greeted him with a new set of black-and-greens. Jerry rambled on at length about reestablishing clientele connections and Wodan used his extensive notes and stolen files sitting at Floyd Street to find phone numbers and the like. Jerry was flabbergasted at Wodan’s superior “memory” but was so intent on getting the new office up and running that he did not question his secretary on any of the details. Jerry never asked what happened to him in Precinct Zero. Since the Law backed away from Jerry and those he was linked to, he must have assumed that Wodan had refused to sell any information to them.
The new office was similar to the old, except that it was on the second floor of a busy commercial district. The lounge was filled with a new batch of Coil Soldiers and Lieutenants. The young men looked remarkably similar to their forebears who were gunned down only a week ago, as if Pontius was an assembly line filled with interchangeable parts.
One day Jerry called Wodan into his office. His hands shook as he wiped his forehead, and he announced, “Wodan, the Cognati will arrive within the next few days!”
“The cog in the who?” Wodan searched his memory and wondered if he was in trouble over something.
“The Cognati!”
“Oh? Huh… you don’t say...”
“Come on, Wodan, where’s that big memory of yours? They’re the elite killers in our employ! And it’s our duty to greet them and make them feel at home.”
Wodan paused for a long time, then said, “Is it those religious nutballs that I got in trouble for not paying fast enough?”
“Yes! I mean, no, Wodan, they’re not religious nuts. They come from the holy land, but believe me, they’re killers. Thankfully we’re the only ones who can afford their services.”
“What are we going to use them for, sir?”
“That’s not for us to know, Wodan! Let’s just say we need their presence during these… trying times.”
“Because the Ugly killed one of our Captains,” said Wodan, nodding. “I guess if the Ugly are superstitious, then maybe the best defense would be another group of superstitious nuts.”
Jerry shook his head and sighed. “Wodan, as your boss, I’m begging you not to show that kind of attitude to our guests. The Cognati have a power that people like us can’t even imagine. I’ve heard they can even read your thoughts and, if they don’t like what they see, they can snap their fingers and pop your skull! Even the Hands fear them, Wodan. ”
Wodan assured Jerry that he would show nothing but politeness toward their guests. As he returned to his desk, he wondered at the fact that a gang like the Coil, who cared only about tangible rewards, inexplicably reserved some religious sense of devotion for these Cognati. Were the Coil really any different from the primitives that they looked down on from their high city walls?
* * *
The next day, Jerry shrieked something about the arrival of the Cognati, then passed Wodan a wad of bills soaked with sweat. “G-go and buy some food for them! S-s-something classy, mind you. And be quick about it!”
Wodan changed out of his uniform, then took his time walking about the area before buying a fruit try full of rare, out-of-season fruits preserved through Smith refrigeration. When he returned he set out the tray in the lounge, where all of the Soldiers and Lieutenants were pale-faced and chain smoking with rapid, jerky movements. Wodan noticed that they had hidden their pornographic books and replaced them with a spread of religious tracts. Jerry paced about and wrung his hands and continually made a strange chirping sound. Wodan changed back into his uniform, then prepared a pot of coffee.
The door to the office opened in a gust of wind and everyone jumped to their feet and quickly stamped their cigarettes out. Jerry ran into the lounge as if chased by a ghost, then stood rigid before the entrance. Wodan joined the others and saw a lanky man with a stubbly-shaved head enter. He wore billowing orange robes with holes cut out for his arms. His tanned face was grave, with small unmoving features. Behind him came a group of six young men in black robes, with dark sleeves tied tight with leather cords and rough-looking green sashes stretching from their left shoulders and around their waists. They all wore stern scowls.
“Honorable Cognati!” Jerry stammered. “This humble Captain of the Coil welcomes you to his meager office.” The Coilmen bowed low and Wodan joined them a moment too late.
“Please, rise,” said the orange robe, “for you are bowing to Nobody.” His voice was flat and featureless. “The great wasteland philosopher Globulus, wisest man in all the world, sends his regards.”
Globulus? Wodan thought. Was that the name of the philosopher that Zach’s father kicked out of his kingdom?
Jerry bowed again, quicker this time, and said, “It is an honor to do business with such an uh-uh-honorable personage... may I offer you a seat, please?”
“The students and I will not sit,” said Nobody, “until our current contract with you is ended, and not a moment sooner.”
“Y-yes... very good, sir... you do us honor with such nobility of character... uh, I trust your trip to Pontius was... um...”
“If you think that we met with no devils,” said Nobody, “then I must disappoint you. We were beset upon by them. But even the devils of this world have learned to fear the might of the Cognati.”
Yeah, right, thought Wodan. They’d be praying like crazy if they saw one slimy tentacle.
“If I may, I present to you the most promising student of Globulus,” said Nobody, pointing to the youngest looking boy. He had pale skin, slitted blue eyes, and wild black hair. He was only a little taller than Wodan. “This is Jared, and he will be acting as commander for all combat-oriented functions. Please send your requests through him; I am merely the chaperone and guard of the contract itself.” Jerry bowed to the young man, who flicked his eyes to the Captain but made no move otherwise.
“We should like some coffee,” said Nobody.
After a moment of silence, Wodan said, “I already have some made up, sir. I’ll go and bring it in.” He bowed slightly and started to turn.
“Make it fresh,” said a high-pitched voice. Wodan turned and saw the boy Jared looking straight at him.
“It is fresh, I assure you,” said Wodan. “And you’ll find that no office has better coffee than mine!”
“I can smell it from here,” said Jared, curling his lip, “and it already reeks as if the stench of Pontius has gotten into it.”
An uncomfortable silence settled into the room and Wodan saw Coil heads bobbing awkwardly. The entire entourage of outlanders turned to stare at him.
“Very well, sir,” said Wodan, feeling more ridiculous than embarrassed. He’d been somewhat excited to meet the Cognati and figure out a way to use them in his plot against the Ugly, but now that they were here, he doubted that an old man and a group of boys would be of much use. At best, word would reach the Ugly that these so-called wizards were backing up the Coil, and the Ugly would back down, thus ruining Wodan’s plan to set the gangs against one another. Wodan resented their haughty demeanor, so he said, “If my lords are experts in the sampling of fine coffee, then I shall indeed make another pot. You have my promise that I will not go into the back room and putter around and then try to pass off the other pot of coffee as a fresh one.”
“This is what happens when you don’t beat a wild dog,” said Jared. “Friendly licks turn into ungrateful bites and, before you know it-” With that, Jared raised a hand up to Wodan, opened his palm, and Wodan felt something like a truck slam into him. His feet left the ground, the room passed by in a blur, then he crashed into the wall. Though he saw nothing, he felt something like hundreds of powerful arms pushing him against the wall, driving the air from him.
Suddenly the strange struggle ended and Wodan crashed into the ground. He saw Jared standing over him, smiling.
“How about that coffee?” said Jared.
Finally able to draw in air, Wodan said, “I’ll get on that.” He rose, legs shaking, too shocked even
to be embarrassed. He turned as he left and saw Jerry bowing low, vomiting out a steady stream of apologies.
In the file room, Wodan’s hands would not stop shaking as he fumbled with the Smith coffee maker. He shook his head, sat down, stood up again, then realized hot water was running through the machine without coffee. He heard Jerry caterwauling with hysterical laughter. Wodan had no doubt the outlanders were making fun of him – the fool who had dared insult the Cognati. Wodan’s mind raced as he tried to understand how the trick had been done. When Jared raised his hand, had he shot rubber bullets at Wodan? The idea seemed implausible, but nothing else presented itself.
Wodan tried to listen in and heard the man called Nobody say, “... and did you read his mind, Jared, before you chastised him?”
“I did indeed read his mind,” said Jared. “What he’s done is very terrible, and I know that his sins will catch up with him.”
Completely unsure of himself, Wodan’s heart raced out of control. Was it possible that they could see into his mind and know that he murdered a Coil Captain?
“You see,” said Jared, “when I looked into his mind, I saw that he is quite obsessed with the other young men in this office. I saw a great many fantasies of these young men, disrobed and locked in passionate embraces.”
Wodan shook his head in rage as laughter echoed from the other room. He was relieved that the Cognati could not read minds, but they were as insufferable as they were mysterious. Once the coffee finished, Wodan played the only card he had by spitting in the fresh pot. The previous pot, made with love, he poured down the sink.
* * *
The next day, the Soldiers in the lounge treated Wodan with frigid contempt. Wodan heard no stories about the Cognati attacking the Ugly, so his fears seemed to be confirmed: Despite their amazing power, the expensive mercenaries were nothing more than a feint. The Coil had paid an exorbitant sum only to check the Ugly, but not push them.
Around midday a plain-clothed Coil Lieutenant burst into the office, beaming and laughing.
“We caught him!” he yelled. “We caught Barkus!”
Wodan and Jerry rushed into the lounge as the others gathered around the newcomer while he told his tale.
Apparently Barkus was paranoid that his brother might kill him, even though it was not entirely Barkus’s idea to betray the Smiths during their Crusade. Barkus moved from place to place, using only Ugly that he trusted; no Coil spy was able to track him down. Due to increased Coil attacks on new recruits, Boris was able to get a message to his brother about being concerned for his safety. Barkus was moved to a safehouse under the care of Utrecht Sera, leader of the Right Leg of the Ugly. The reasoning behind the move was that even if Barkus was found out by the Coil or the Smiths, Sera’s berserkers would be more than enough to slow down an attack while Barkus was moved again. However, by some strange twist of fate, nearly half of the small troop of berserkers who guarded Barkus were, in fact, Coil spies. They stabbed Barkus’s true Ugly guards in the night and made off with Barkus.
“How did the spies even know if the other guys were spies?” asked a Soldier. “If one of them got found out, he could easily betray the others.”
“It’s crazy,” laughed the plain-clothed Coilman. “The guy I heard it from, he said our boys in the Ugly do this thing where they hum some notes or, like, tap out a beat. It’s supposed to look like some little nervous gesture... it’s not like you’d even notice if your buddy started makin’ up a song if he’s bored, right? So, man, I guess these guys were sittin’ around, doin’ nothin’ and bein’ bored. A few of them tapped out some notes, some others hummed a few bars, and before you know it, probably every one of our undercover guys knew what the deal was. And they didn’t care that their cover was blown, of course - they got Barkus, man, the Barkus Right-Arm, and that’s a prize-and-a-half. Not to mention Sera was humiliated!”
The Coil laughed and slapped each other on the shoulders and a Lieutenant cracked open a fresh jug of booze. The newcomer paced around, laughed, and said, “They caught his accountant, too. I bet we’re gonna waste him if Boris thinks we don’t mean business. His name’s Fash... Fasher...”
“Fachimundi,” said Wodan. “They caught Fachimundi, too?”
“Yeah, him! You know him?”
“I’ve heard of him,” said Wodan. Of course he knew the man. Fachimundi was the giggling, sadistic toady who had knocked Wodan out in the wasteland when he and Marlon were first captured. He was the last of Barkus’s inner circle. “What do you think’s going to happen to Barkus?”
“Who knows?” said the newcomer. “But we’ve really got the Ugly by the balls now, is what matters.”
* * *
Wodan thought about the capture of Barkus during the long walk home. He was not sure how he felt about it. On the one hand, he was glad that Barkus was a prisoner. He knew that the Coil’s retaliation killings for Wodan’s “false flag” murder were the reason for Barkus’s movement and subsequent capture, so he took some comfort in that. On the other hand, Wodan knew how things were with these gangs. Being cowards, the Coil might very well negotiate with the Ugly for a peaceful trade of some sort. What if the Coil only wanted to embarrass the Ugly, but beyond that, did not care if the Ugly placed Barkus directly back into a position of leadership? Wodan knew that he could not rest on what he had already done. One dead Coil Captain was not going to lead to the destruction of the Ugly. More action would have to be taken.
A car slowed down beside Wodan, then pulled ahead and stopped. Wodan realized he had not been paying attention to his surroundings - the street ahead was completely empty. He was too far from Floyd to make it if he ran, but too close to even try for fear of giving its location away. He froze and threw his eyes from side to side.
The door opened and Detective Virgil stood before him. “Get in,” he said, smiling.
“Am I under arrest?” said Wodan.
“Naw, man,” said Virgil. “I was hoping you’d come and have dinner with me.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Risk of Saying Something
“Dinner?” said Wodan, stepping into the car. “Are you going to throw me in a cell with some Ugly and be like, ‘You’re the main course’?”
Virgil laughed, then said, “Relax.”
“This isn’t some kind of date, is it?” said Wodan.
“Relax. Not everyone’s a predator here.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well... okay, no.”
“Not sure about this being a date or not sure about being a predator?”
Virgil shook his head and said, “You’ve been in the car for ten seconds and you’re already annoying me.” He drove in silence to a neighborhood where small houses were lined up near one another. Wodan noted the man’s strong-looking hands, the large revolver at his side, and his ridiculous mustache. He parked in front of a simple-looking house. His was the only car in the area.
Inside, the place was neat, if a little plain. Wodan saw a few simple paper-prints of flowers and said, “You buy this stuff?”
“My third wife put that there.”
“How many wives you had?”
“Three so far. I’ve got stuff from the others, but I had to hide it all and never really thought about bringing it back out. I couldn’t throw it out, you know, but having all that stuff around at one time would be like being in a fight with all of them at once.”
Virgil set to cooking some eggs on a gas oven and Wodan sat in the kitchen with him. Wodan adjusted his position and hit something with his knee. He looked under the table and saw a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun taped to the underside. He adjusted his chair so that he was no longer directly in the gun’s line of fire. Virgil removed his light jacket and threw it across a chair, revealing a small handgun holstered to his chest.
That’s the third gun I’ve seen so far, Wodan thought. He’s incredibly paranoid.
“You never checked me for guns,” said Wodan. “Aren’t you worried about that?”
/>
“No,” said Virgil. “You’re not going to kill me.”
“You trust me?”
“Not really. I’m a fast draw.”
Wodan laughed and caught Virgil smiling as he plopped the eggs onto plates and put them on the table. He cracked open two bottles of beer and set one in front of Wodan. They wolfed the food down, then smoked and watched one another.
“I’ve got to get something off my chest,” said Wodan. “You didn’t bring me here to lecture me about the evils of being in a gang, did you?”
Virgil shook his head slowly, then said, “A good Lawman might do something like that.”
“But not a great one.”
Virgil cast his eyes away suddenly, then forced them back onto Wodan. “Did you kill that Coil Captain?”
Wodan thought for a moment, then said, “I... don’t feel comfortable answering something like that.”
Virgil looked away again, but in a more controlled manner. The detective nodded, and Wodan wondered if he had just passed some kind of test. Trusting in his intuition, Wodan said, “You wouldn’t want to work with a braggart, would you?”
“Work with?”
The first one to be completely honest, thought Wodan, runs the risk of being sold out. Wodan wondered if the man could possibly be a spy for the Coil. Of all the gangs, they undoubtedly employed the most.
Wodan studied Virgil’s face intently. He obviously lacked charm; the man was calm and strong, not the type to be able to lie with his body. Still, whether he was a Coil spy or not, he was definitely a Lawman, and had been for years. He was a good enough Lawman to smell the blood on Wodan’s hands. In either case, he was dangerous.
“Listen,” said Wodan, “I know neither one of us can be honest. You’re a Lawman and I’m a Coil and we get paid to make each other’s lives hell. But you’ve got me outgunned. You’re in a less vulnerable position. You could give me some idea of what you’ve got in mind.”
Demonworld Book 3: The Floyd Street Massacre Page 14
