Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  I’ve known men like this, who think they’re tough because they can throw a scare into a frail. And I’ve known women who’ve been cut up, and worse, because some dirty crook was enjoying his own power too much to know when to quit. I gripped my Colt like I already had them by the neck, and eased my way into the room.

  The smaller of the two men was speaking, his voice raspy and vicious. ‘Box, why don’t you tell her what we came for?’ he said. Then the other one—you—started to speak. Only I swung the door shut and the noise made the two of you turn to the barrel of my Colt. To make sure you noticed it, I cocked the hammer. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you came here for,’ I said, ‘while the lady gets busy calling the police.’

  Swagger tells me what happened at Evelyn’s, the words pressing against my memory of the scene as I thought it went, overwhelming it.

  He has grown until his back is bent against the ceiling.

  His hands by the typewriter are as big as kitbags.

  ‘Oh Mike!’ Evelyn Heydt ran to me, keeping as much furniture between herself and her two intruders as she could. I could feel the squeeze of her body against mine, full of gratitude, and promise. ‘Thank God, Mike! You made it here just in time,’ she said.

  ‘Always, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Go and raise a couple of buzzers, while I ask these two who sent them crawling out their holes.’

  When she was out of the apartment I used the long barrel of the Colt to invite you both to sit. Your friend with the knife sneered at me. ‘You can stand or you can sit,’ I said. ‘However you like it. But I mean to get some answers out of you. We don’t have a lot of time before the cops get here so I might not be able to ask nice. You two don’t look like you’ve got a lot of smart ideas sparking in your heads, so I’m going to assume someone told you to come here. Who was that?’

  Your friend with the knife swung his arm up, the knife disappearing into itself before he dropped it into his pocket. Then he spat at my feet.

  I almost pulled the trigger then. ‘You’re quite the tough little _____, aren’t you?’ I said.

  I wanted to put a hole in this little loogan’s side. Even Cromarty wouldn’t have given me a hard time about it, some vicious little torpedo who’d broken in to rasp threats, a scar across the side of his chin: no one would mind if they had to patch up a bullet hole before they put the cuffs on him. ‘The only reason I haven’t dropped you with a bullet,’ I told him, ‘is because she seems like a nice girl, and I don’t want her to have to clear your blood out of her carpet.’

  Then you took a half-step at me, remember, Box?

  I try to remember visiting Evvie’s that first time, seeing her at her window, pressing our way into her space, pursuit in slow steps, her eyes big as spotlights, distress coiling in her throat, a liquorice taste of new words forming in mine.

  I remember it, but not as he tells it, nothing squares, not even close. And the ceiling bends across Swagger’s back with each breath he takes.

  He licks at his lips with a tongue like a wet towel.

  And from the door came Evelyn’s voice, and it was timid and fragile. ‘Mike,’ she said.

  I stepped back as I turned so I could keep the gun on you, and there she was in the doorway, a snub-nosed automatic pressed against her temple. ‘I trust it won’t be nes-sess-ary to shoot Ms Heydt,’ said the ghoul, Cansel, from behind the doorjamb, his long fingers tight around her upper arm.

  He must have found her on the stairs. ‘You killed Holcomb,’ I said, ‘and you’re going to die for it.’

  ‘I am not a murderer, Mr Swagger, and I hope you do not mean to turn me into one,’ said Cansel.

  That’s how he got you out of there, you and your vicious little friend, by taking an innocent girl and pressing the barrel of a gun against her pretty head.

  Cansel is a tall corpse we find under a bloody sheet in a hotel room, but somehow he is in Evvie’s apartment with a gun pressed to her temple, somehow we work with him.

  Swagger is a private eye, he is wearing his vest, his holster, his gun—all of it is vast, he’s an alleyway I’m trapped in, he’s the buildings pressing all around.

  At Cansel’s instruction, I put my gun on the ground and let the two of you leave. I traded your sorry lives for hers, and you scurried off into the night, like vermin. Cansel followed you down the stairs, muscling Evelyn with him. I watched from the top of the landing, which was as far as he would tolerate me to come, as he shouted from the outer door, ‘Goodbye, Mr Swagger. I hope very much never to see you again,’ and went, leaving the girl. With Evelyn safe, I gave chase, but the ghoul had vanished.

  I tell Swagger that my head hurts and he laughs a colossal laugh.

  I think of the cacophony of giants in Holcomb’s story.

  I’ll skip some, then. Cansel went to Holcomb’s girl maybe because there was something he needed to know or just to throw a scare into her and keep her quiet: either way, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t jumped town, and he wasn’t safe, not from me.

  You don’t need to hear about Lowden—a fumbler in antiques, a rich amateur. We found him because Campbell had mentioned the name once to Evelyn Heydt. And you don’t need to hear about Dickie, Lowden’s sometime fence. Though it was Dickie who finally told us what the ghoul was chasing …

  *

  In a previous life, half a continent from here, Campbell had run up a lot of debt, and fled. He came to town, put on a new name like it was a change of clothes and maybe he thought he was safe. But our ghoul, Cansel, drew a bead on him, bought up the debt and chased him down.

  Swagger has grown so big there is no space in the room to stand, I’m pressed up against the wall. His tooth swings open like a door and I go inside the hot cavern of his mouth and his voice surrounds me.

  Except the trail went cold on Cansel. To find his mark he had to come to my office.

  We led him, along with some stray muscle he hired, straight to Campbell, and I don’t plan on forgiving myself for it.

  Cansel, or you and your friend, or all of you together, put Campbell through the wringer. You wanted to get as much of the debt out of him as you could.

  Except Campbell had spent all his money on leg shows and drink. He couldn’t pay. What he could do was tell stories. That was his line of work.

  He told you a story about a mask. A Colombian funerary mask, that’s what Dickie called it. Solid gold. It had a lot of history, this mask. It had been through the hands of the royal families of Europe and caused at least one revolution. For hundreds of years, people had been stealing and killing for it. Gold, and beautiful. Nothing else like it anywhere in the world. And behind it a trail of bodies, centuries long.

  Campbell told you about this mask, told you he had a line on it, he got you interested. He told you about it so you wouldn’t kill him, but he must have told too much. He didn’t keep himself vital. You thought you didn’t need him, so he got a twist in his neck, one more hole in the side of his head.

  Swagger lay outside Holcomb’s. He waited half in, half out the phone booth. He meant to shoot _____ and me, he meant to hang the corpse on us.

  But as Swagger’s voice fills everything I can feel my hands round Holcomb’s neck, I can see _____ bouncing him off the walls, and Cansel putting the final hole in his cheek.

  Soon Lowden the amateur in antiques, and in crime, was overtaken by the curse, his overstuffed body left to dream of an inheritance it would never get. And then the trail of death caught up to your little gang, didn’t it? Even the ghoul, Cansel, couldn’t escape. By the time I got to him your little friend had already shot and stabbed him, and set fire to the hotel room he was lying in. He was a ghoul from hell right up to the end: he died in flames, burned up, until the skin slid from his bones.

  That was to be my pleasure, killing Cansel, but your friend took it from me.

  Which left Dickie, a last loose end. Childs and I were there, in Dickie’s dingy little office home, when your friend shot him. The shot came from the dark of the fire escape, and Dick
ie was down, the red muck and broken china of his head spread across thin carpet. We shot back, and when your friend ran for it, we went after him, Childs down the front steps, me down the fire escape. In the street I almost ran through Cromarty as he climbed from a prowl car. For a moment I thought I would have to take a swing at him to stay on my man, but he shouted, ‘Well? Come on!’ and we chased after our man together. In the middle of a crossing he stopped, Box. He raised his head like he was sniffing at the air. And I took my shot.

  There’s so much Swagger, he is everywhere and there’s no me, not a dot, not a drop of sweat.

  I ask, What happened to the mask?

  The package, like a baby wrapped up so tight it might have just come in the mail. Who got the mask?

  I’ll tell you, Box.

  A gold Colombian death mask, and plenty are dead for it now. Only there’s no mask. Campbell made it up. He realised he needed to give you something to save his life and he had nothing to give, so he told a story. He made it good enough to stick, too. Cansel bought it, and everywhere he went looking for the mask he convinced someone else, until Lowden bought it, and Dickie. Your friend bought it. All for a story, he said. All for nothing.

  *

  Polly realises she’s holding a half-eaten apple. She can’t remember taking a bite. She thinks about when she found out she was pregnant with the child who would be Evvie. The shock of it: for her and for Chester. ‘Our concern, Box,’ she says, ‘was that we’d both raised some heck in our time, and we thought we might end up raising another little piece of it in the form of this child.’

  Everything was more complicated than that, of course. Evvie was an angel for a normal duration of blessedness, and then a squalling demon for a period almost too short to be remembered once it was past, which at the time felt longer than a prison sentence, and louder, with fewer moments of rest. Then, gradually, over not so many years, what appeared in her was the intelligent, headstrong, caring person she would be for the rest of her days. Polly’s favourite moments in life, particularly after Chester’s death, came during those evenings—they came once or twice a year—when Evvie would sit and talk with her in intense, one-sided conversations on large questions: on living and how it should be done, or the obstacles she’d found to being principled or kind or forgiving. These talks felt like examinations that Evvie gave to herself on the condition of her soul, and it was clear Polly contributed best by being silent.

  ‘I learned to keep my counsel,’ Polly says. ‘You know how it is.’

  One day, Evvie read half a dozen lines in the newspaper—about a girl who had walked into the hospital after a mangled abortion and died three days later. ‘This little girl walked in there holding her blood and pieces of her own uterus in her hands, that was how wrong the operation had gone. It made Evvie so angry,’ says Polly. ‘Who wouldn’t be angry? There were decisions that led to that young girl in that state, and they weren’t the girl’s decisions. They were the decisions of men who thought it was better to send her to a butcher than give her medical care and some control over herself. I would have read that in the newspaper and been angry for days and done nothing.’

  Evvie read it and started planning. She had Dr Boken, and Dr Boken would have done anything for her. She had drugs, and books, and clean equipment, and she meant to make things better for any girls in that same sorry situation. ‘And it was no use telling her that the same men who made the laws which killed that girl would work to find her and punish her for it,’ says Polly.

  ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘you found her instead, didn’t you, Box?’

  *

  Polly is writing a letter, she has it on top of a book on her lap, leans on the book to write it. It takes time. When she finishes, she folds it and puts it into an envelope, puts the envelope into her bag. It’s early still but she doesn’t want to be in this room any more. She’s been here long enough.

  She pulls her chair around, between Box and the window, so that as she sits her knees touch his right leg. He is big but he doesn’t look strong any more: he looks punctured, drained, spent. He looks like he is weeks dead and lying in the undergrowth of that hair and beard, the frame of that device just so much broken fencing. She waves a hand in front of his eyes and says, ‘Box.’ She taps at the device with a finger as if she is knocking on a door.

  Does he see her? Does she swim up to the windshield of whatever there is left of him? If she does there’s no sign of it.

  ‘Well, Box,’ she says. ‘I’ve sat here thinking with you and it’s taken me a long time, but not all my time. I’m not going to let this be the rest of my life. I’ve done my thinking,’ she says. ‘And I still aim to forgive you some day, Box, because this hate I have for you is no good to sit in. But I don’t need to be here to do it, and you don’t need to be there.’

  She stands, folds her chair and puts it against the wall, and leaves him.

  *

  Somehow I press my way out of Swagger, I fight my way clear and run from Holcomb’s building, and look back and it has the great and golden face of the detective, and I run and climb into cracks through drifting, leaking, poisoned thought, and go back to Evvie. The device can fix everything if it can just fix this.

  I crawl back up this branch I’m on where I wasn’t good enough for her and she didn’t care to be with me. But I rush. And I make a mistake. I make worse than mistakes.

  *

  I lower the device around my head and fit the straps. I am one of Holcomb’s scientists climbing into his machine. I leak thought and begin to flicker, a card in a shuffling deck. I go to Evvie and go to her and go to her. Not because I’m going to exhaust her, but because in some part of some inclination in her exists a desire to care for me and be with me. As real as anything I have ever felt it’s there and it only needs to be found, that amenable fraction of a possibility. If I can’t find it alone I send emissaries, I split the work, I play the odds.

  We each of us crawl back through time and go to her and the same thing every time—she says these kindnesses were a mistake and not to be repeated, and we keep crawling back but we can’t find a way to hold her, to keep her caring for us.

  We get impatient. We parade in front of her together, and it scares her, but each of us is so keen to be cared for, to make it all work. We tell her that we know that there is some part of her that loves us, some part that can entertain being with us, so what are our odds? 1 in 1000? A thousand of us stand in front of her, which of the thousand is it, we just need you to find the right one and he’ll care for you as you care for him. Except she is scared—there’s so many of us.

  In the great part of me, what I want for her is only comfort and care, and her happiness before anything else. I am good and selfless in my love for her. But there is, in some small part, something less good. So in all the thousands of us, there are those that are angry, who can even hate her, who think that if she can seem to despise us now then she was false and cheap when she seemed to love us, when she kissed us or took our hand. Fights break out between us, and the worst are subdued or killed, but there’s always more—vicious, selfish.

  *

  We rush and everything is confused and a lot is bloody, and still we don’t know how to hold it all and keep it. Some of us lose our minds—we’ll make her understand, we’ll make her.

  Some of us despair. A sour mood can sweep through us: the most soured give in to it, they put their necks into ropes and step onto tracks, and their bodies pile up like sandbags. Terrible impulses turn to pitched battles, the piles grow bigger.

  Some of all these probabilities tear each other apart and the number of us reduces, there are fewer and fewer. We crawl up the branch, we keep at it, but slowly, with care, there’s not so many of us, already we have some sense, seen that things should not be rushed, not in the way they have been.

  Only there are still some terrible impulses. One of them goes to see Evvie alone.

  *

  There is a phone call and it wakes me, and at fir
st I take the confusion to be mine.

  *

  But even this can be fixed and undone. Work carefully and slowly. If I sit and think then that is enough, that is plenty. One of them can scrabble up the branch as many times as it takes, to make it all right and fix these mistakes, can find the single thread that has to be pulled to noose all this disaster and blood. Evvie alive again, and _____, and Holcomb too. However long it takes.

  However long it takes, it will have been cheaply earned.

  Epilogue

  Hector and Charles wake early. At breakfast, Hector rereads his letter. ‘Read it aloud if you are going to read it,’ says Charles.

  ‘You know what it says,’ says Hector.

  ‘As do you,’ says Charles, ‘but you are electing to read it instead of engaging in conversation, in which case you can read it aloud.’

  Hector looks at Charles wearily, but returns to the first page of the letter, gives a small cough intended to be obnoxious, and reads.

  To Hector,

  I don’t suppose you would know me, but years ago you knew my husband and maybe this address for you is still good. My husband had some unsavoury friends once, and I hope you don’t mind me saying I count you among them. I am now too old a lady for that to mean much, and also people indulge ladies of my age when they come out with rudeness and I hope you will too.

  The first thing I should tell you is that Chester, my husband, has died. I am sorry not to have written to you with regards to the funeral but there was a long time where my husband felt sure he was dying, long enough that we spoke about his wishes for when he was gone, and he wished principally to keep the funeral small and cheap. I am sure you don’t care about this and I realise I am trying to be polite because I am writing to a stranger with a request and I should make myself get to the reason of this letter, which is that I am hoping that you will be able to kill the man who is responsible for the death of my daughter.