Cruel Zinc Melodies

by Glen Cook

  Gilbey lugged over three big tankards. He settled. We three made up points of a lopsided triangle.

  The professional fire tender left without being invited. Probably part of his job to know when.

  I said, “There was talk about ghosts. And bugs.”

  “At the World, you mean.” Gilbey. With foam on his upper lip.

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  “Partly,” Max admitted.

  “Mostly,” Gilbey said.

  “Mainly.” Old Man Weider drained off half a pint.

  “There’s something going on over there that ain’t right. I don’t believe it’s ghosts. I think it’s somebody working stunts. With extortion in mind.”

  “There are bugs, though,” Gilbey said.

  “In the winter?”

  “In the winter. And the World won’t work if the customers have to deal with bugs.”

  I didn’t say so but bugs are a fact of life. In my world, anyway. You have to come to a natural understanding with them, so to speak.

  “You’ll see,” Gilbey promised.

  My skepticism was too obvious.

  Gilbey clambered to his feet. I thought he was going for refills. I was wrong. He collected a drawing board, two feet by three. A sheet of fine handmade paper was affixed. Someone had used writing sticks to create excellent drawings of a building.

  I have a small financial interest in the manufactory that produces the writing sticks and a dozen other miraculous gimmicks.

  Max has a bigger chunk of the same operation. As does Tinnie’s family. They provided the capital. I delivered the inventor.

  Max said, “They call those? elevations,? Garrett. That’s what the World will look like when it’s done.”

  “All right. I'll take your word. But these two here look more like maps than pictures.”

  Gilbey said, “They are maps. This is the ground-level layout. The band pits. The stages. The passageways to the center. We thought we could do the vendor work out of there. A carpenter who knows theater told us that was dumb. So that’s where the actors will wait and change and where the ready props will be stored. The vendors will operate from under the second-and first-class seating.”

  “All right.” I followed his finger but didn’t really picture it. “It looks like a pie.”

  “Our clever innovation,” Max said. “There are a lot of theaters these days. Not many get a full house after the first week of a play’s run. So we'll run three at once. With limited audiences. That will make it harder to get into one of our shows. So, if you do, you’ve got something to brag about. People want to be part of the elite. We manage it right, we'll have them trying to outdo each other in how many times they’ve been to one of our plays. We'll use special paper tickets that they can keep and show off.”

  Max has a knack for creating artificial shortages that spark snob appeal.

  Gilbey added, “We’re still a ways from a final plan. We’d like to come up with movable walls so we can change the size of the pie slices.”

  “All right,” I said. “I see the layout. What’s this?”

  “That’s the cellar. Under the floor and stage. So people and stuff can come up from there. And for storage. Prop storage is a big problem for theaters.”

  Max chimed in. “This will be only the second theater in TunFaire built to be a theater.”

  “And all this is going up now? In the weather we’re having?”

  “Yep. But it isn’t going as fast as it should.”

  I was amazed. TunFaire’s construction people don’t like to work in bad weather. On the other hand, they’re not fond of not eating.

  Gilbey said, “We want to open in time for the spring season.”

  Thatwas ambitious. But Max Weider generally accomplishes what Max Weider sets out to do.

  “All right. I know the general plan. What do you want from me?”

  Gilbey told me, “What you do across the street. Show up unexpectedly. See what’s going on.”

  “Find out who’s sabotaging things,” Max said. “It’s trivial stuff now. Pranks. Petty theft. Vandalism. Nobody’s asked for protection money yet, but it feels like it could turn serious.”

  “Ghosts and bugs aren’t serious?”

  “Nuisances add up.”

  “Finances? In case I need to bring in other people? Assuming you want quick results.”

  “I haven’t caught you robbing me yet. Manvil, give him what he needs. Keep records, Garrett.” Not one of my strengths, he knew. “I’m interested in results.”

  Max is a bottom-line guy. And proof that good things happen when you keep an eye on that end of life’s math.

  Gilbey prepared papers. I asked, “The Old Man really has a new reason to live?”

  “When he forgets Hannah and the kids. The theater excites him.”

  “And you?”

  He lied, “I’m pretty much past the worst.”

  “And Alyx?”

  “Alyx worries us. Alyx hasn’t faced it yet.”

  “All you can do is watch her and be ready when she needs you.”

  “How are you going to start?”

  “Go look around the construction site.”

  “Use the papers. I'll have your advance against expenses messengered to your place.”

  “Good. It won’t be my fault if the money evaporates somewhere out there.”

  “No. But Max would take a long, hard look if anything did happen.”

  People don’t have much faith in other people’s honesty anymore.

  6

  I didn’t recognize the World first time past. I thought they’d just be getting started, not almost finished.

  I expected lots of guards, too. Thieves inevitably appear wherever there’s something burnable. Even in this brave new postwar world, where law and order threatens to become a universal disease.

  I was a hundred yards into the Tenderloin before I realized I’d missed. I turned. There it was. Looking just like one of the elevations Gilbey had shown me, not quite complete. How do you walk right on by a round building without noticing?

  Max had used the sheer weight of his own fortune, supported by selective gratuities, to gain possession of a grand tract on the edge of the anything-goes part of town. He’d cleared the tenements and whorehouses, the taverns and feeble storefront-branch churches.

  I headed back, wondering if there was something about Max that I’d been missing. The World looked like a monument to an aging man’s ego. Gilbey’s elevations had done little to betray the scale of the project. Maybe that’s how you miss a round building. It’s too big to see.

  “Where you goin’there, slick?” a bony old man with a peg leg, a ragged white beard, a truncheon, and a wild walleye wanted to know. His other eye was glass and brown instead of a washed-out blue.

  “Do you read?”

  “Some.”

  “Here’s word from the owner.” I produced the paperwork Gilbey had given me. “I’m a security specialist. The Old Man isn’t happy with the way things are going.”

  “Who?”

  “Max Weider. Of the brewery Weiders. The man who pays your salary.”

  “Lego Bunk pays my salary, ace. And he’s one cheap-ass mortar forker.”

  Watching a semiliterate, one-eyed, walleyed man try to read Gilbey’s fancy hand was an adventure. My patience got strained before the old boy nodded. “All right, chief. Guess you’re real. Mind me asking what you’re supposed to do?”

  “You have a name?”

  “They call me Handsome. I don’t know why.”

  Made no sense to me, either. “Handsome, the boss is worried about delays. Says people are blaming ghosts and bugs. Says he don’t believe it. He wants some heads busted. In order to encourage the others.”

  Handsome understood. I’d referenced a bad habit of Venageta’s rulers during the recent conflict. If they thought their troops weren’t trying hard enough, they executed a few. In order to encourage the others.

  Handso
me was a veteran.

  The peg leg was a clue.

  The war for control of the Cantard and its mines had gone on forever. It defined generations. It bound men together where they had nothing else in common.

  “You Corps?” I asked.

  Handsome grunted an affirmative.

  “Me too.” He was way older so we had little else in common. But that was enough.

  Two minutes after you start boot training they convince you that Marines are a separate and dramatically superior species. And once a Marine, always a Marine. Rah!

  Marines are more family than most brothers and sisters. And so forth.

  You never get over it, either.

  We didn’t swap stories. You don’t do that, except maybe with the guys who were there with you.

  Me bringing it up was as good as a secret handshake, though. Handsome became confidential. “I don’t believe they’s really no ghosts. That’s crap. I never heard no music, neither. An’ I been here since the start. Somebody’s pulling some shit, maybe, trying to fuck up the program. Maybe kids. They’s kids around all the time. One day gang-type kids, the next day kids that look like they run away from the Hill. But they’s plenty a? fucking bugs, I guaroontee you that. Bugs you ain’t gonna believe till they climb your fucking leg.”

  “Tell me about the bugs.”

  “They’re big. And bold as cats. You go on in there, cap. Prowl around. Won’t be that long afore you see.” He stepped aside.

  No one else challenged my right to visit the site.

  Actually, no one seemed to give a rat’s whisker, one way or another. Everybody but Handsome was trying to get some construction done.

  I went inside. It was warm in there. I saw no obvious reason why.

  My familiarity with the theater phenomena was limited. I went to a passion play once with a lost girlfriend, way back. Twice recently I’d gone with Tinnie, to a comedy and a tragedy, both historicals based on rulers from Imperial times. Neither play impressed me.

  Interior work on the World was just getting started. Most of the planking meant to become ground-level flooring remained to be pegged into place. No seating or stages or walls had gone up yet. A couple of carpenters pegged away. I strolled over. One worked an augur. The other sanded the head of a peg just driven into place. I peered into the lower-level gloom. “What’s the plan for ventilation down there?”

  The carpenters looked like brothers separated by five years. The elder said, “I’m a carpenter, chief. You want to know something like that, ask the friggin’ architect.”

  The other said, “Don’t mind this asshole. He married my sister. She sucked the nice out of him years ago.”

  Not brothers, then. The sister must be a walking disaster zone, she had a brother who talked like that.

  The younger continued. “They'll be louvered iron windows that can be adjusted from inside. And a stack in the center that’s supposed to draw hot, stale air.”

  “Thank you.”

  Something brown scooted through the lower murk.

  Carpenter the Elder failed to object to his companion’s remarks. I assumed the crab-and-grin was a regular act.

  Another something moved downstairs. Followed by a bunch of somethings. Rats? “You guys seen any ghosts?”

  “Say what?”

  “Ghosts. Old Man Weider said you construction guys can’t stay on schedule on account of ghosts and bugs.”

  The crabby carpenter whacked a peg into place with a wooden mallet. “I heard the same shit, slick. ButI ain’t never seen no spooks. Bugs, though? Shit. Yeah. We got them fuckers out the wazoo. Some a’them big enough to rape a dog.”

  “Not mosquitoes, I hope.” In the islands we’d joked about the skeeters being so big they’d hang you in the trees so they could snack on you later.

  “Nah. They’s cock-a-roaches, mainly. I seen some ugly beetles, too. Shit! Lookit! There’s one right over there.” He threw his mallet. He missed. The mallet bounced all the way to the wall. Which I noted only in passing. Because I was looking at the biggest goddamned roach that ever lived. And the fastest thing on six feet that I ever saw.

  It wasn’t big enough to rape a dog. Not even one of those little yappy fur balls favored by old women on the Hill. “Holy shit!” That son of a bitching bug had to be eight inches long. There wasn’t anything like that native to TunFaire.

  I begged, “Tell me that wasn’t a baby.”

  “Nope.” That was the carpenter who wasn’t busy retrieving his mallet. “That was the biggest one I ever seen. But they keep getting bigger. We kill as many as we can. Old Man Weider needs to get somebody in here that knows what they’re doing.”

  “He got me instead.”

  “Kind of takes the optimism out, don’t it?”

  What the hell? This guy didn’t even know me and he was piling on. “I'll be back.”

  “That a threat or a promise, chief?”

  “Pick your poison.”

  7

  I took a meandering route home. A little south of the direct route. I stopped by Playmate’s smithy and stable. Before he could start carping I told him, “I need to rent a coach. Tomorrow. Big enough for four people and fifty rats. I'll need a driver, too.”

  “Rent?” He sounded skeptical.

  “You always get paid.”

  “Thanks to Pular Singe.”

  Playmate skeptical is a vision. Because he’s a big black human house. Three hundred pounds, every ounce muscle. A slow-talking, fierce-looking sweetheart of a guy. So soft he’s squishy on the inside. A religious sort fully stuffed up with homilies about turning cheeks. He oozes unwarranted faith in the innate goodness of mankind.

  My experience suggests the opposite. The species is naturally wicked. People just fake it till opportunity crosses their bows. Only rare, twisted souls and random mutations, like Playmate, rise above the muck.

  And Playmate is no fanatic. He'll turn the other one only once. Then he'll bring the hammer down. If you’re obviously a bad guy, you won’t get the once.

  He stared and went right on not understanding. “You’re volunteering to pay for use of a coach? Up front?”

  “This is unbecoming. How long have we been friends?”

  “I don’t remember. Five minutes, back when we were kids?”

  “Wiseass. That’s the attitude that... Like I said, when did I ever not pay you?”

  “Not once,” he admitted. “Since you’ve had Dean Creech and the Dead Man to keep you honest. And Singe to keep your books.”

  “And before that, one time, you had to wait a couple days till I tracked down a client who tried to stiff me.”

  “Let’s forget it. We’re all even now.”

  One thing about Play, lately. His sense of humor is severely diminished. And he isn’t very patient.

  I worry that he may be suffering chronic pain, or something.

  “I’ve just gotten a major commission from Max Weider. He gave me a free hand. The job should be calm, cool, peaceful, and profitable. I almost feel guilty about getting paid for doing it.”

  Playmate slapped both hands onto his butt. “Where did I leave my chain-mail underwear?”

  “Come on, man! It’s a walk. There aren’t even any damsels in distress. Just Tinnie Tate, Alyx Weider, and a couple of their friends who’re scared their theater won’t open on time.”

  “That actually makes sense,” Play said when I told him what I meant to do. “It’s not the usual Garrett leap into the middle of things, flailing around till you’re the last one standing.”

  My methods are more sophisticated than that. Sometimes.

  “You going over to The Palms now?”

  “Say what?”

  “Your standard routine would be, go sucker Morley next.”

  He was speaking of my good friend, the half dark elf vegetarian restaurateur Morley Dotes. The semiretired bad guy. “Not this time. John Stretch, Singe, Melondie Kadare, maybe, and a lot of rats. Plus a coach to haul them in. I won’t even bother th
e Dead Man. It'll be heroics on a budget.”

  “I don’t believe you for a second. Even if you believe you.”

  “You need to root around in your junk room. See if you can’t find where you left your positive attitude.”

  “You could be right, old buddy. The trouble is, you really are my old buddy. I’ve known you way too long.”

  My friends. My pals. They never let up.

  8

  I had planned to visit The Palms. I hadn’t seen Morley in weeks. But Playmate’s attitude made me think it might be more useful to let Dotes lie fallow. I shouldn’t need any high-skill bonebreakers this time.

  Whatever else he pretends, running his upscale club, Morley is a serious thug.

  I gave The Palms a wide berth. Morley could find some excuse to come see me.

  It was a nice day. I was humming as I turned into Macunado Street, betraying the fact that I have less musical talent than a wounded water buffalo.

  I headed up the slight slope toward home. I wasn’t alone in suffering the happy. My neighbors were out, enjoying air that lacked the usual heavy flavor.

  The long, cold winter had frozen the ugly out.

  People who normally ignore me, or watch me like they expect me to turn berserk, nodded, smiled, lifted a hand in feeble greeting. I do provide local entertainment. And safety. And stability.

  Some minion of the law is always hanging around, keeping an eye on me.

  I spied a Relway Runner. Not bothering to be discreet. I should be grateful, or flattered, that they watch me when all I’m doing is swilling beer and feuding with Tinnie.

  Deal Relway, secret police honcho, is determined to catch me doing something. Anything. Now or a hundred years from now.

  Singe opened the front door. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “You just did a contraction, sweetheart. You know that?” Ratpeople voice boxes aren’t built for human speech. They have trouble speaking Karentine at all. The man on the street won’t understand one word in ten from your average ratperson. Singe, though, has mastered the vulgate. Almost. Now including contractions.