Gun Machine

by Warren Ellis

  Scarly turned her stare on the evidence. “Shit. We have two shots. Bat, get people the fuck out of the clean room and make sure the plasticware’s been UV’d.”

  Bat was at the laptop, scribbling on the back of an old, unstuck coffee sleeve. He passed the thin cardboard to Tallow, walking around. “What have we got?”

  Scarly was pulling latex gloves out of a pants pocket. “We’ve got cigarette paper to smoke for prints, and I want to trim the mouth end and try the fast EA1 proteinase method on it.”

  “The fast one?” Bat said. Tallow watched them click into professional mode.

  “Yeah. I don’t think we’ve got time for anything else.”

  “The trim’s going to be problematic. We need a centimeter square of paper for the fast one, and that’s going to cut into print space.”

  “No, we cut the end all the way around, gives us a total of a centimeter. We’ll reserve the tobacco in case we somehow get more time.”

  “Slow up,” Tallow said. “More time? Fast method?”

  Scarly sighed. “My boss has been told by her boss that too many resources are being eaten up by the case. We’re going to get pulled off this, sooner rather than later.”

  “And who do I get instead?”

  “Nobody, John. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re not living in the same world we were two days ago. All our sins are forgiven, and the case is going to be sunk just as soon as some asshole finds a big enough anchor to hang on it. Possibly one just your size.”

  Tallow leaned against the bench.

  Scarly’s face hardened. “So. Yeah. We’re waiting for the word. But in the meantime, we are still doing this. So we’re going to use the fast method, and clear people the fuck out of the clean room, and get as much done as we can as soon as we can. All right?”

  “All right. Go.”

  “I was.”

  Bat spread his wings and hustled her out of the room. “The man’s just trying to do his job, Scarly. Don’t snap at him.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were.”

  “It’s not my fault, I’m fucking autistic—”

  Tallow read off the information Bat gave him and dialed the number. Ninety seconds of fairly sharp conversation with secretarial interceptors brought him the voice of an executive named Benson.

  “Ms. Benson, thank you for speaking to me. Let me make this very fast: I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation, and it just now looked like it had ties to the death of your former employee Bae Ga. The question is simple. I need to know what the nature of his employment was.”

  “Bae? Bae was so brilliant. Bae wrote algorithms for us.” She had, Tallow thought, a voice like Lauren Bacall’s, all cigarettes and brandy, enough age to know the way of the world and enough youth to still be capable of disappointment in it. “He was the new generation. He spoke excellent English—he came from a port city, you know, very international in outlook—and he was so brilliant, so gifted. And such a relief to work with. Before him, we had to use Russian physicists for algo work. Lunatics, for the most part. Bae was going to bring us to the next level.”

  “Are you talking about algorithmic trading?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone ever try to hire him away?”

  “Everybody did.” She laughed. “Goldman Sachs, Vivicy, Blackrock, you name it. But he wouldn’t go. He was young enough to believe in loyalty, bless him.”

  “You liked him.”

  That laugh again. “I looked after him. I sometimes wondered what might have happened if I hadn’t opened the closet door for him, as it were. He was going to a party in one of those awful new buildings in Clinton that night, you know, to meet his new boyfriend. He was a lovely young man too, an architecture student. I encouraged Bae to get out of his wizard’s cave from time to time. I said, You found a lovely young man who wants to show off his brilliant boyfriend at parties, so go, go.”

  She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was lower and harder. “And then. Shot like a dog.”

  “One last thing. And this is just curiosity, but I’d like an answer. How did the loss of Mr. Ga affect your business?”

  Ms. Benson laughed. “Andy Machen would be polishing my shoes if I still had Bae today, Detective. He was, and is, irreplaceable. You only luck into one mind like that in a generation.”

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Benson.”

  “If you find anything—”

  “If anything new comes up, I will of course call you.”

  “Thank you. The business doesn’t matter, you see. We soldier on, you know. But I miss him. And he didn’t deserve what happened to him, not even a little bit.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Benson.”

  Tallow hung up and put the piece of cardboard into his bag before heading for the elevators and down to the map of a murderer’s room in the basement.

  Assistant chief Allen Turkel was standing in the emulation.

  Tallow ensured that he didn’t break step on seeing the man. “Sir,” he said with a nod, and proceeded to the table outside the emulation.

  “Detective John Tallow. This is an impressive piece of work.”

  “Thank you, sir. How can I help you?”

  “I’m really not sure yet, Detective. I just wanted to see what you’d done down here, with this space you stole from my building.”

  Turkel was smiling, creating the suggestion that he was just ribbing Tallow. Tallow was still geared up. He saw the wear on Turkel’s wedding ring. He was a man who took it off a lot. Not just to shower. It got slipped off and into pockets a lot. Turkel regularly paid someone quite a slice of money to cut his hair, and his teeth were fixed in preparation for a job in which he was in front of cameras and audiences often. His shoes were thrown from supple leather with a cultivated grain, a silver chain linked across the throat of each.

  “Borrowed, sir. And I couldn’t live in the actual crime scene. It would’ve slowed down retrieval of the evidence even more.”

  “Well, that’s evidence of you at least giving half a shit about department resources, Detective. Tell me: Do you ever think about promotion?”

  Tallow just looked at the man.

  “It’s just a question, Detective. Did you plan on staying a detective all your life?”

  “In all honesty, sir, I don’t plan for a lot. But if you’re asking: No, I don’t really think about promotion.”

  “I know cops like you,” said Turkel, lifting his chin and smiling with the warmth of a man who thinks he knows where the power in a room is. “I always thought there were three kinds of cops. Police like you, who think they’re born to the job they’ve got, and they’ll do it until it kills them or they walk away from it. And cops like your lieutenant, who want to be promoted because promotion is there, and they figure getting promoted is the job. Police like that, I have no real use for. Oh, your lieutenant’s a good manager, and I’ll make good use of her, but strictly speaking, she’s not here to be a good police officer. She’s here to be a good candidate for promotion.”

  Turkel paused, and Tallow accepted the cue with false graciousness. “And the third kind? Sir?”

  “The third kind are police like me. Police who need to be promoted because they see what the real job is. A street cop sometimes finds it hard to see it this way, Detective, but police like me are the real idealists in this job. We’re the people who actually have a vision of how the department can adapt and change and serve the city better. That’s why I wanted promotion. Want it still. Because I want to change and improve your life.”

  “My life.”

  “The lives of the police under my command. Which is you. But I also have a responsibility to the people of this city. They are, after all, paying us, in a roundabout way. And one day they may be paying us directly. So I have to manage resources. Like this one. What purpose is it serving?”

  “It’s what the case is all about, sir,” Tallow said.

  “I thought it was about a lot of unsolved homici
des you reopened.”

  “You really want to talk about this, sir? I mean, really talk about it?”

  Turkel put a level gaze on Tallow. “Yes,” he said, after a moment.

  “All right, then. It’s about the unsolved homicides, of course it is. To us. But to him, it’s about this room. The killings were the means to this end.”

  “I don’t understand,” Turkel said. “The killings were the end. He just had to store the weapons afterward, so they weren’t found.”

  “No, sir. This room is the point, for him. Let me…”

  Tallow stepped into the emulation and looked at where Turkel was standing. “No. Stand over here. Face this wall. And then sit down.”

  Turkel frowned at him. “I’ll stand.”

  “All right.” Tallow stepped outside the whiteboard perimeter. “Focus on the middle of that wall.”

  “…It’s a shape.”

  “Yes, sir. Now pan across the room, heading left.” Tallow walked around the emulation, feeling like an animal pacing just outside the reach of campfire light.

  “All the way around?”

  “Yeah. You’ll see where to stop.”

  “Christ. It’s patterned, somehow. It’s like the guns all flow together, almost. There are gaps, but…”

  “That’s right, sir. There are gaps. Each of those gaps is a future kill.”

  “Oh. Oh Christ. Oh Christ. It wraps onto the floor.”

  “And there are more gaps, sir. And the great machinery of it all goes into all the other rooms, and around and back again.”

  Turkel’s voice was very quiet. “What is it, Tallow?”

  “It’s information, sir. It’s the work of a very methodical, very functional madman who is writing a book out of machines that kill people. It’s an information flow, it’s code, it’s pictograms, mathematics that mean nothing to anyone but him. The work of a serial killer in permanent totem phase, permanently energized, permanently in the moment and permanently laboring to complete his message to history. That’s what’s been set loose in Manhattan over these past twenty years, sir.”

  Turkel looked like he was going to throw up.

  “How long have you known Andrew Machen, sir?” Tallow said.

  “More than twenty years now,” Turkel muttered abstractedly, eyes still tangled in the gunmetal belt of the room. “Why? What?”

  “Would you say you’ve known Jason Westover for the same amount of time?”

  “What?” Turkel came back to himself a little, and looked around for Tallow. Tallow was circling the emulation. Turkel could glimpse the detective only between gaps in the whiteboards.

  “Why do you think Andrew Machen bought the building, sir?”

  “What? Where are you? Why would he buy the building?”

  “For his little wizards, sir. For his algorithmic traders to continue making invisible maps all over the 1st District and make their money from hiding.”

  “You’re talking nonsense. Stand still, damn it. Why would Machen buy—”

  “See, that’s what’s been bothering me, sir. But it occurred to me, just five minutes ago, that you’re all so busy making your invisible new maps of the city that…well, none of you can see the others’ maps.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Tallow?” Turkel was, Tallow thought, starting to sound a little unglued. The sound helped Tallow cancel out the internal susurrus of his own fear.

  “Andrew Machen didn’t see the maps the killer draws on the city. He bought the building on Pearl according to the needs of his own maps, without a clue that his own hired murderer used that building to store all the guns he ever used. I like to think that it came as quite a shock.”

  Tallow stepped into the emulation, behind Turkel. “It’s all maps, sir. This is a map. A map of a room.”

  Turkel turned on Tallow, eyes juddering in their sockets, thinking as quickly as he could. “Are you saying Andy Machen hired this man to kill all those people? Are you really saying that? Where’s your evidence? Where’s anything to support that?”

  “Are we still speaking honestly, sir?”

  Turkel took a breath, straightened, and visibly found his courage. “Yes.”

  “And no one can hear us.”

  “That’s right, Tallow.”

  “So you’d like to hear my sense of the case.”

  “Fuck you, Tallow. You won’t be on the case long enough for it to make any difference.”

  “All right, then,” Tallow said, walking around the assistant chief in a slow circle. “Twenty years ago, you were probably a patrolman, Jason Westover was probably fresh out of the army, and Andrew Machen was, I don’t know, selling old ladies’ gold fillings on the street. And you all knew each other. Maybe coincidental drinking buddies. Maybe childhood friends. Who knows? I’ll find out. And you were all young, and reasonably arrogant, and ambitious, and hungry, and a little bit greedy, and a little bit sick of how slowly things can happen even in the big city. And one night, one of you said, What if we could just kill all the assholes that are between us and the things we want? And each of you laughed, and had another beer. But the idea stuck, didn’t it? You couldn’t shake it off. And you—a policeman, a soldier, and a banker—couldn’t help but start talking about how such a thing could possibly be done. What happened next? Did one of you know a guy? Did you go looking for a guy? Someone you could somehow place total faith in. Someone you could pay to be so dedicated to the job that he would remain, here’s that word again, invisible in the city for as long as it took. And it always seemed to take longer than you’d thought, didn’t it? There was always someone else who needed to be helped out of the way of your constant advancement. And you knew the stats, didn’t you, sir? You knew how many unsolved homicides could be hidden inside the annual numbers. But what’s brought us to this place here today, sir, are the things you didn’t know. You didn’t know your man was keeping all the guns and hiding them in an apartment on Pearl Street. Jason Westover certainly didn’t know that the security devices whose disappearances he was turning a blind eye to were going to secure the door of that apartment. And Andrew Machen didn’t know he was actually buying the complete revelation of the entire scheme.”

  Turkel convulsed and threw up.

  As the man was down on his hands and knees emptying his guts, Tallow had to restrain a very strong urge to kick him in his heaving stomach. Instead, he stepped away from the stink.

  Tallow had dropped at least three outright, extemporaneous inventions into his narrative, including the bit about Westover knowing about the security door on 3A. His instinct had told him that these three men were talking, regularly, and a little disinformation could work to his advantage in the long run. If he had a long run.

  “What the fuck is going on in here?”

  Turkel’s energetic puking had managed to blanket the sound of the elevator doors opening. Tallow knew the voice, and he knew the face he’d see. A woman’s face that had the constant appearance of having just taken a strong shot of Scotch whisky.

  “First Deputy Commissioner,” Tallow said.

  She was flanked by two plainclotheswomen, and she moved in quick little stamps of steps across the room and past Tallow.

  “Not talking to you. Al, get the fuck up off the floor.”

  “Food poisoning,” rasped Turkel, coming up on his haunches, rummaging for a tissue.

  “Good. Maybe it’ll kill you so I won’t have to. What the fuck are you doing, Al?”

  “Wanda—”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re trying to fuck me out of my job. Don’t think I don’t know you, Al Turkel. I should grab the back of your head and fuck your eyes out right there on your knees. You want my four stars, you be a man and take them by fucking gunpoint.”

  “Oh my God,” said the assistant chief, “what is happening.”

  “What’s happening is you trying to bury the Pearl Street case in the same fucking week it opened, that’s what. Trying to bury it and get away with it, k
nowing full well that if the commissioner got hauled up by the mayor or God knows who over it, he wouldn’t shit down your neck, he’d shit down mine, because that’s what a first deputy is for. Queen Shitrag.”

  “You’re insane, Wanda.”

  “You want to know what’s insane? The captain of the 1st, a man with maybe one ounce of juice left, which he’s been saving to buy himself retirement with full benefits a couple years early, spending it today on this kid”—pointing at Tallow without looking at him and yet pinning him unerringly—“after he got the memo from your desk telling him to bury the fucking case.”

  Tallow rocked a little on his heels.

  “I don’t have to go to you to manage my borough, Wanda,” Turkel said, clambering shakily to his feet.

  “Your borough. My city. What the fuck are you doing?”

  “It’s insoluble. It’s just a waste of resources. I’m having all the evidence gathered, and CSU will continue to process it in a nonprioritized work stream until a solid background is developed.”

  “Al, you fucking moron. Someone killed a cop with a gun stolen out of evidence that belonged to Son of fucking Sam. What do you think happens when that inevitably fucking leaks? Is it you that’s going to be asked questions? No. Some happy shithead is going to be training a camera on the commissioner just after he’s spent an hour fisting the mayor with handfuls of thousand-dollar bills—or whatever the hell it is the commissioner has to do to keep his job from week to week—training a camera on him and saying, Hey, I hear your department deep-sixed the case of the mass serial killer who stole another serial killer’s gun out of your storage depot and used it to kill a cop, which was just one among the two hundred or so homicides you managed not to notice were connected. Any comment?”

  “Wanda,” Turkel said wearily, “aren’t you supposed to be on medication for days like this?”

  “Fuck you. Your order’s been dissolved.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Can and did. I know you want my job, Al. I know you want the commissioner’s job one day too. And you’re very good. Your mistakes are few, and you’ve risen up through the ranks pretty quickly. But I’ll tell you this for free: You’re thinking like a manager. You think that at your level it’s still all about clearances and hiding the stats you can’t clear. That’s fine for CompStat and promotional reviews. But when you get to my level, Al Turkel, you need to see a bigger map. You’ll take the hit on your stats, or else you’ll be shot dead by the media and the politicians. And in this case, by every other cop in the department, who’ll ask what happens if they get inconveniently shot by a gun you don’t want to admit is out in the wild.”