Hammer and Tongs and a Rusty Nail

by Ian Tregillis

  Quietly, watching Wally converse with a person who had the head and neck of a giant earthworm and what appeared to be a humanoid body covered in mackerel heads, Mordecai said, sotto voce, “An endorsement from your fraternity would be a boon for his campaign.”

  “I saw this request coming from a mile away.”

  “Well, what are the chances? He seems to know lots of people. Does that include your colleagues?”

  “Oh, everybody at the precinct knows Wally. Maybe not in the way you’d prefer, though.”

  Mordecai started. “You’re not telling me he has a criminal record? I can’t believe that.”

  “No, but you should know that for a period of time his list of parking citations was the stuff of legend. Relax, they’re all paid now. I made sure of that. But you know how after he got magnetized you were reticent to bring him inside your shop? Well, let’s just say our budget for paperclips andhard drives went through the roof the last time he visited the precinct.”

  “Oh.”

  “People still talk about it.”

  “In a funny reminiscence kind of way?”

  “No. More of a ‘I had to let my perp walk when we lost all the witness statements’ kind of way.”

  “So—”

  “They’re endorsing Chang. At least until somebody less batso comes along.”

  He’d been running the campaign for less than two days, but that stung. “And you?”

  “I can’t campaign for Wally inside the precinct any more than I can anywhere else. But we have a few weeks. I’ll work on them. I can change some minds between now and then.”

  “Okay. You’re our woman on the inside.”

  She shushed him. “Don’t say stuff like that. It’s like catnip to IA.”

  Wally’s interactions with passersby dwindled a little as they neared Jan’s place. Halfway down the block, he waved at a familiar figure descending the stairs to the basement of a brownstone. “Howdy, Jube!”

  The walrus-joker paused in the act of unlocking the door. He spun, hiding something behind his back. “Oh, well, hey, look at that, it’s Wally Gunderson.” His gaze flitted between Wally and the doorstep of the neighboring building. Under his breath, he added, “On this street.”

  “What are you doing here, buddy?”

  “I, uh, live here,” said Jube, eyes scanning the windows of the neighboring building. The drapes twitched. He reached for his door. “Well, good to see you, I’d better—”

  Darcy stepped forward. “Jube, one moment, please,” she said in what was clearly her cop voice.

  The walrus turned again, tipping his hat to her. “Afternoon, Officer Ackerman. Didn’t see you there. Well I’m sure you’ve got places to be—”

  She spoke over him. “I believe that on Monday of this past week, you and Mr. Gunderson together encountered a person who expressed enthusiasm for city council politics. Is that correct?”

  “Yes—”

  “I don’t suppose you recall his name.”

  Mordecai had to admire her technique. Everybody knew Jube never forgot a face or a name or the tiniest crumb of gossip. By indirectly challenging this, she hooked him by the pride. He stopped inching toward the door. “Of course I do: Randall McNath. From the Joker Anti-Defamation League.”

  She frowned. “Are you absolutely certain?”

  Jube looked pained. “Come on.”

  “Thank you for your help, citizen.”

  He glanced at the neighboring house again. “Well, if that’s everything—”

  “Enjoy your day.”

  Jube spun for his door, unlocking and opening it at the same moment his neighbor’s door swung open. A woman wearing extremely thick dark glasses stormed onto the stoop of the adjoining brownstone. Jube’s shoulders sagged.

  “A-ha,” she declared, pointing at him over the railing. “I knew it. I knew it. I caught you red-handed.”

  Wally looked at the number on the mail slot, then compared it to the number written on his arm in puffy glitter paint. “Oh my gosh. Are you Miss Chang?” There was a brief grinding of metal when he scratched his temple, as if trying to remember something. “Oh, hey, I know you! You were in Texas with all them band kids. Me, too!”

  The newcomer ignored him, anger focused on the walrus. “I knew you were spying on me for the enemy camp.”

  Mordecai raised his hands in what he thought would be a supplicating gesture. “Whoa, hey, we’re not—”

  “I won’t be threatened.” Little arcs of electricity leapt the gap between her teeth when she raised her voice, exhorting random passersby to take out their phones and record her assassination. “They can’t get all of us!”

  “—enemies,” he finished quietly, backing away.

  (Darcy said, sotto voce, “I warned you guys.”)

  Jan saw Darcy and, finally, Wally. “Oh, I get it. I get it. I see what’s happening here. The NYPD cites me for some made-up offense, the paper injects me with their subcutaneous tracking technology, and then he watches me through the holes in the walls, reporting every move until the time is right to take me out. Then they install their robotic minion—”

  (“Hey,” said Wally.)

  “—and before you can say ‘Annunaki overlords’ the rest of the city council has been mesmerized. Then, boom! Rents spike up to a thousand dollars per square foot while economy-destroying tycoons chew up our neighborhoods and turn us into hyper-abstracted financial instruments in a gigantic spreadsheet somewhere.”

  Jube asked, “Why would I have to watch you if they’re already tracking you?”

  Good question, thought Mordecai. But, having read the room, so to speak, he kept this to himself.

  “Well, the joke’s on you, Jube. I’m installing steel plating over the drywall. Every inch.” She tapped her temple. “Try drilling through that! Ha.”

  Wally stepped forward. “Gosh. I think we got off on the wrong foot. I just wanted to introduce myself and say—”

  Though he was twenty feet away, she shrank from his outstretched hand. “I won’t fall for that. You think I don’t know that they know that awalking Faraday cage would be the perfect assassin for me? Ha.” She leaned forward, sniffed the air, then retreated against the wrought-iron bannister, where the snap and crackle of corona discharge filled the street with the metallic stink ofozone. “What’s in that microsyringe, Mr. ‘Wally Gunderson’?” She raised her gloved hands and waggled her index fingers in the air when she said Wally’s name. “Polonium? Weaponized anthrax? Xenovirus Takis-H? Yeah, that’s right, I know all about strain ‘H.’ Or maybe it’s something special cooked up by your reptoid shadowmasters in Majestic-12.”

  “I don’t know what any of those words mean, ma’am.”

  “Stooges never do.” Jan stepped inside. “I’m sweeping for bugs after you leave, so don’t bother dispersing your aerosolized drones.” Then she slammed the door. A fading glow of St. Elmo’s Fire limned the door.

  Silence, like the fading echoes of a thunderclap, enveloped the street.

  “Cripes,” Wally sighed, effectively summarizing the encounter.

  Darcy nodded. “Yeah. Definitely recording the forum.”

  Wally noticed the package behind Jube’s back. “Hey, whatcha got there, fella?”

  “What, this? Nothing.”

  “It looks like a sign. Hey, you know, I’m gonna have some signs printed up real soon. Maybe you could…”

  Wally trailed off when Darcy laid a hand on his arm. She pointed at the windows of Jube’s brownstone. All but one held a sign reading

  JAN CHANG FOR CITY COUNCIL

  Wally’s shoulders slumped.

  “Don’t take it personally. And she’s really okay most of the time. It’s just, since the city council thing…” Jube shrugged. “I can’t keep replacing my appliances.”

  * * *

  Wally lay in bed, reading the city council minutes that Mordecai had acquired.

  It was slow going. He didn’t read real fast, for one. And for another, everything th
e councilors said involved quorums and motions and seconds and points of order and yeas and nays, so he had to keep Robert’s Rules of Order in one hand and the minutes in the other, practically reading both at the same time. It was like a different language. But he kept at it. He had to know this stuff.

  He soon noticed that Jan Chang appeared frequently in the public comment sections. She used a lot of terms like “amortization,” “Bohemian Grove,” “credit default swap,” and “Illuminati.” He’d found he needed a dictionary on the nightstand, too, to piece through the meeting minutes, but even this didn’t help with a lot of what Jan said.

  He paid particular attention to the places where the councilors for Jokertown spoke up a lot. In addition to Morlock-and-Eloi on the council, there was Mark Benson, whose dentist’s office was just down the street. When it came to Jokertown issues, he and M&E usually agreed, though they’d been on opposite sides of a debate over something called the Annex Nine Phase Two Redevelopment. Whatever it was, M&E had been dead-set against it. Vocally so.

  Overall, she seemed to have taken seriously her responsibility forJokertown and its residents. Too bad she’d gotten sick.

  * * *

  “It’s as if he doesn’t exist.”

  Mordecai bent steel pipes around a frame, listening to Darcy. One advantage his repair shop had over many others was that he could bend all the metal by hand, thus faster and cheaper than shops that had to use torches and hammers. It was also the only motorcycle shop in the city—and the only establishment in Harlem, period—with a WALLY GUNDERSON FOR JOKERTOWN sign in the window (“THE METAL MAN WITH THE METTLE TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS!”).

  “Maybe the JADL fired him,” he said. “That would explain why he’s not in their phone book.”

  “No.” Darcy shook her head. “I went down there. They’d never heard of him. And you don’t think that’s weird?”

  “If he really did claim to work there…” Mordecai conceded the point. “Yeah, it’s weird.”

  “At first I thought Wally had misremembered—”

  “I can understand how you might have thought that.”

  “—but then Jube confirmed what Wally had told us.” She was pacing now.

  “It’s not as if this Randall person, or whatever his name is, actually committed a crime. Just to play devil’s advocate, all he did was convince Wally to run.”

  “First of all, are we really sure that’s not a crime? And second, he did so under a false name, claiming false credentials. Honest people don’t do that.”

  “Well, sure. I’m not saying it isn’t hinky. But I don’t see the play here. Wally is honest to a fault. It’s not like they’re installing somebody who can be bribed.”

  “I don’t have an answer for that yet,” said Darcy, “but here’s the really worrisome thing. Not only did he give Wally and Jube a false name, he up and disappeared after Wally joined the race. Wally said he kept running into this person. But in the past week? Vanished.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t live in J-town, either. Like me.”

  “Then why does he give a toss about who represents it? And why claim to work for the JADL? Because it opens doors in Jokertown. Even people with compound eyes can read the papers and watch the news. Many places in the world, jokers don’t have it very good.” She stopped pacing. “I am telling you, as a cop, something doesn’t smell right about this.”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of it. Or you will, anyway.” Mordecai paused in bending another pipe so he didn’t have to speak over the groan of distressed steel. “Wally’s lucky to have you looking out for him.”

  “It’s why we make the big bucks, you and me. Speaking of which, dare I ask how fares the debate preparation?”

  Mordecai winced.

  * * *

  The candidates’ round-table forum was heldin a community room of the local library and sponsored by the Jokertown Cry. The paper had wanted to use the auditorium of the Jerusha Carter School, which was larger and had better facilities, but Jan had refused on the grounds that Wally’s relationship with the school offered his agentsample opportunity to install psychotropic agents in the HVAC.

  Tables had been angled at the front of the room so that Wally and Jan could face both each other and the audience at the same time. At Jan’s insistence, she and Wally were seated as far apart as the width of the New York Public Library Jokertown Branch’s Xavier Desmond Community Room would allow. Something about Wally’s body acting like a “subharmonic refractor for ionospheric HAARP beams.”

  Ghost and the others sat just behind the moderators’ table. Wally waved at them. A stand mike had been situated in each aisle, for the public Q&A portion of the forum. The moderators’ table didn’t have a microphone, owing to its proximity to Jan and the pretty lights under her skin.

  Near the back of the room, a technician fiddled with a digital video camera on a tripod. Wally tugged at his hat’s chin strap. Looking at the camera made it tighten, like it was trying to choke him.

  He recognized a few parents from the Carter School. Mrs. Trelawny gave him an encouraging smile. Leaning against the rear wall, maybe so that his bulk wouldn’t block the camera, was an out-of-uniform Officer Bester, one of Darcy’s coworkers. A cryptic look passed between the two police officers; Bester shrugged at her. If she had convinced others to attend, Wally didn’t recognize them.

  Mr. McNathhadn’t come. That was a bummer. He’d been such a fan of the campaign, even before it started.

  Jan’s supporters had turned out, too. Wally didn’t see Jube anywhere, but three of her fans sat in the same row as Ghost, wearing JAN CHANG FOR CITY COUNCIL t-shirts. He knew the slightly rubbery guy on the end; Mr. Ruttiger had been one of his fellow chaperones during the band trip to Texas. Wally tried not to look disappointed. It woulda been nice to have more people on his side of the aisle. He’d called Bubbles but she was down in Brazil, doing a fashion shoot in Rio de Janeiro and fighting forest fires in the Amazon. It felt crummy wishing she was here instead.

  Maybe he should’ve worn something other than his John Deere overalls. Wally tugged on his top hat again, glancing at the camera. Gee whiz, he didn’t like being on TV.

  “Relax,” Mordecai said. Ghost gave him a thumbs-up.

  The room was approximately a third full at ten minutes after the official starting time of the event, so the fella from the Cry stood up and addressed the crowd. He introduced the candidates and explained the format of the discussion. He had what looked like spider legs for arms. Wally couldn’t remember if he’d seen him around the neighborhood, but then, he didn’t subscribe to the Cry. Or any other paper.

  Maybe he shouldn’t mention that.

  The moderator took his seat and opened a binder. “We’ll begin by asking the candidates to describe briefly their motivation for seeking a seat on the council, and why they feel they are better suited to serving the people of Jokertown. Mr. Gunderson?”

  Mordecai had anticipated the forum would begin this way, so he’d spent hours over the past few days helping Wally practice what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. His campaign manager had insisted that Wally’s motivations were “above reproach” (a good thing, Wally learned, after consulting the dictionary on his nightstand), so all he had to do was practice the delivery.

  Don’t be intimidated by the audience, Mordecai had said. Just pretend everybody in the audience is naked.

  Wally remembered that now, and blushed. The chin strap pulled tighter still. And had they turned up the lights, too? It sure seemed warm.

  A camera shutter clicked. The moderator cleared her throat. “Mr. Gunderson?”

  “Yep. I mean, ‘Yes.’” He took a deep breath. “I, uh, figure lots of you know me, but maybe some don’t. I wasn’t born here, but this is where I’ve made my home. I have a family and I pay taxes and all my parking tickets, all of ‘em, even though, gosh, it sure was a lot of money—”

  A frantic motion in the front row caught his eye: Darcy drawing the edge of her hand across he
r neck while Mordecai rolled his index fingers around each other in the little gesture they decided would mean “move on.”

  “Anyway, when I’m not here in Jokertown I’ve traveled all over the world with the United Nations trying to help folks who need it. Like the jokers in Egyptsome years back, and some folks in East Timor, and those poor kids in the place that used to be the People’s Paradise of Africa” (Ghost betrayed no reaction) “and a buncha other places, too. But sometimes the help people need isn’t facing down tanks and bullets and bad guys. Sometimes it’s fixing potholes or making parking meters that don’t break so dang easily.” (Darcy rolled her eyes at this digression.) “That makes people’s lives better, too. On the Committee, we come and go and sometimes I don’t get to see how what we’ve done made things better for the folks living there. But this is where I live. And I’m not going anywhere.” (Mordecai wrote that part.) “I like making a difference in people’s lives. I’ve done it around the world, and I will do it here, too. If I can survive getting machine gunned in a war zone, I can survive city council meetings.” (Hold for laughter. Mordecai wrote that part, too.)

  After polite applause, it was Jan’s turn.

  “Okay. We don’t have all evening, so I’ll give you the executive summary. Guys, my visual aid, please?” The trio with JAN CHANG t-shirts slid a long cardboard tube out from under their seats. Mr. Ruttigerstretched like a rubber band, bobbingover the moderator’s table to hand it to Jan.

  She said, “I’ve been tracing the secret currents of power in this country, and in this city, for years. At tremendous personal peril and cost, I might add. So, why am I running for city council?” Jan asked, sliding something from the tube. “I think my research speaks for itself.”

  With a flourish she unfurled a large sheet of butcher paper. It was full of little pictures, handwritten phrases, and newspaper clippings, all connected with different colored pieces of yarn, like a tie-dyed spider web. The diagram-collage thingy had a few large labels written in capital letters and circled in black magic marker: FEDERAL RESERVE, MK-ULTRA, BILDERBERG GROUP, REPTOIDS, PAUL MCCARTNEY/WALRUS. A tangle of yarn connected these to each other and to dozens of smaller labels on the poster: mortgage-backed financial instruments, water fluoridation, Jokertown city council, chemtrails, 2008 recession. Wally didn’t get most of it, but the tangle was real pretty, like the cat’s cradles that Ghost sometimes did on her fingers.