Warlord of New York City

by Leo Champion

  There’d been looting, but… where was the blood? These mobs, or activists in these mobs, in Greenwich Village had proudly waved heads on pikes that first night, and others had been swinging by their necks from street signs and light posts everywhere. There was none of that that she could see, as she slowly made her way down Elizabeth Street with the hood firmly drawn over her face. Just a raff crone, never mind me…

  Someone did mind her. A middle-aged woman pressed a glass of some plum liquid into her hand.

  “From Mr. Moncreve’s personal cellar, ma’am! Have a bit, it’s the best brandy you’ll ever taste!”

  “Not the best ever,” said a round-faced man a few years younger than the woman. He was raff in old pants and boots but a fine green shirt a bit too large for him, and he was brandishing a clearly-unfamiliar pipe musket. “There’ll be more like it to come!”

  Learn to turn that fucking safety catch on, Diana Angela thought with irritation as she noted the percussion cap uncovered in its tray, unless you want to kill me!

  “Gonna be pure Candyland Mountain from here on if we can keep the Reverend out,” the man with the musket continued as he waved the thing around. She flinched as the muzzle covered her for a moment.

  “Don’t believe we’ve seen each other, ma’am,” said the motherly woman. She squinted at Diana Angela, looking past the dark hood. Shit. She eyed the round-faced man’s musket carefully; she wouldn’t hurt the man, but if she did have to make a rapid escape she’d want to neutralize that gun…

  “They’ve gone, missy,” the woman said carefully. “The high-ups are all gone and the streeters ain’t gonna rape you.”

  “Yet,” Diana Angela muttered, looking down, ready to grab that musket and yank its cap loose, then run… but the conversation had taken a relatively safe turn. There was a reason young raff women, especially attractive ones, concealed their looks on the street.

  “You still ain’t from here,” said the woman carefully. “Where you from, missy?”

  “South Bowery,” she replied. This was why you did your research before going in!

  A grin spread across the woman’s face – and the man’s.

  “It’s already spreading, eh?” the man asked.

  I so hope not.

  “They say President Hammer’s gonna,” the woman said, “redistribute the means of production. Just like they did in Greenwich Village back then!”

  The man with the musket pumped it in the air with a “Yah!”

  Around them, people cheered in response to him.

  “Have that drink, missy,” the woman said. “Mind if we know your name?”

  “Sally Smith, ma’am. From Grand Street.” Diana Angela sipped the brandy, tasting it, then threw it burning down her throat. She’d anticipated this happening, so she had popped an antihol capsule on the way here.

  “Well, I’m Nellie Brasci,” said the woman, “and this here’s me husband John. We used to live just up there” – she gestured north – “but we’re moving into First Company’s old headquarters! You wouldn’t believe how the helmets’ families live, Missy Smith, but their places and their stuff’s ours now, isn’t it!”

  “I hear he’s an airborne?” Diana Angela ventured. She waved off Nellie Brasci’s offer of a refill from the brandy bottle. “How’d some pigeon take over?”

  John grunted, and laughed. “Hey, Vinnie! Vinnie!”

  A drunken man who looked to be in his late twenties staggered over. His head was shaved, common on the streets as a measure against lice, but he wore a shined handlebar moustache.

  “Johnny! What’s up?”

  “This here’s Sally,” said Nellie to the man. “Sally, this one’s our roommate Vinnie diCarlo. Our families shared a room until today. Tell him how the sewergangers got Arnie and President Hammer saved his ass!”

  Vinnie diCarlo was drunk enough that he slurred his words and repeated things, but the story he told her was a horrible and familiar one on the streets: a sewergang had come out of their holes and raided the tenement, dragging people away to die horribly – she herself knew how horribly – underground. One of those people had been Vinnie’s young son Arnie.

  Only this time the story had had a happy ending: a tenement guard named Jeff Hammer, who had formerly been an airborne, had taken charge of a squad that had not been his to command. They’d circled around, cut off the raiders’ retreat, saved the prisoners and wiped out the tribe. The tenement boss, Reverend Carl Garson the Second, had responded to Hammer’s taking charge of the squad by flogging him for insubordination.

  “They lashed his ass for saving Arnie,” diCarlo scowled. “But then he says something. That he’s gonna take over. And he did!”

  He and Brasci cheered, a call that was echoed by a few more of the happy, drunken people on the street. A street that, Diana Angela had noticed, did not have a single hanged-by-their-neck person dangling anywhere.

  “Swept the bodies up already?” she ventured. Because the Commune at this point had been a bloodbath…

  Vinnie diCarlo shook his head.

  “Let ‘em go. They surrendered and he kept his word.”

  “Shouldn’t have,” John Brasci grumbled. “Should’ve strung every last one of those fuckers up so they don’t come back.”

  “But he didn’t?” Diana Angela asked, mildly surprised.

  “Keeping their word’s some big thing with airbornes,” Nellie explained. “And some of the high-ups joined him.”

  “Some joined him?”

  “Oh yeah. The Beppe family, the Karsteins – that’s Captain Don Karstein, commands one of the companies, and his little sister Bitch Kimmy, and we can call her that aloud now!” Mrs. Brasci said with a grin. “The Haskins family too, and most of the Kwans, and a few others.”

  “Bitch Kimmy, huh?” Diana Angela asked.

  “She was the Reverend’s chief snitch,” said diCarlo. “You wouldn’t say that aloud, but she changed sides. Still call her that, Bitch Kim. Bitch Kim, Bitch Kimmy!” diCarlo shouted at a happy passer-by.

  “Bitch Kim!” the passing woman shouted. “Bitch fucking Kimmy!”

  Ah – Diana Angela smiled – the joys of being able to shout aloud what you’d been afraid to even whisper before now. But… Captain. In a precinct this small, probably didn’t have more than a couple of hundred full-time guards, that would mean something unless it was an honorary title.

  “So some of the old bosses are still around,” she said. So this had been more of a coup on the part of some of the upper-class people against the main management… but behind an ex-pigeon grunt rather than one of their own?

  This puzzle still had pieces missing…

  * * *

  There were more of the city’s feral streetgangers around than she’d ever seen inside a tenement at night, their weapons out and naked, long live steel showing without a trace of any wax-and-wire peace bonds. Most of them looked extremely satisfied with themselves, many of them were drunk, high, or both, and at one point she saw two facing off in an alley with blades, a chanting circle of their mates around them… and the local soldiers were watching them warily.

  She circled through the small precinct, reluctantly accepting a couple more drinks that particularly insistent people pressed into her hands. The antihol could only absorb so much, and she did not need alcohol affecting her reactions in a place like this.

  She didn’t want it affecting her emotions, either. The happy optimism, hope in people’s faces as they drank and celebrated… she had seen that before. There were even a few Commune-style rosettes, carefully-hoarded or newly made because in most tenements since the Commune, those had been as illegal to possess as Kiska’s books. Don’t they remember? Don’t they remember what happened just west of here not so long ago – and how it went?

  Some did, she could tell. There were basement lights on in some places and a glance through one window showed people bunched up, very pointedly not being involved in any of the festivities. Other buildings’ doors were securely fa
stened and she could sense wary eyes on the happy crowds. Those people remembered how the Commune had gone and the brutal reprisals that had followed in the wakes of the joint task forces.

  But for every one person with common sense and memory, there were four on the streets right now celebrating this quixotic mistake. The yoke had been thrown off, ownership of the means of production had been thrown into the hands of the proletariat, and life would get better for everyone now! It would be Candyland Mountain just as Karl Marx had predicted and John Kiska had urged, and it would go in one of two ways. Don’t they realize?

  Either this night’s euphoria would end in starvation, torture chambers and war. She wondered if John Brasci would last as a commissar – Rosa’s ones had come from the same source, raff given guns. He seemed the nice type, but that wouldn’t last. In three months that nice, slightly older wife of his would not recognize him, because torture and battlefield executions were bad for their conductors as well as their victims.

  Or… the upper-class people who’d taken over would break their word, and the euphoria would end in crackdowns, executions and bitter, miserable disappointment for the survivors. It was not an encouraging thing that this tenement’s chief snitch, this Bitch Kimmy, had taken the side of the revolution. With some of the snitches active and taking notes, and names to be remembered for later… Diana Angela hoped Vinnie diCarlo would not find himself hanging by his thumbs in two months. The revolutionary calling herself Rosa Luxembourg had been from the same cloth, a secret policewoman whose first act in the uprising had been to gun down her former colleagues.

  Slowly she shook her head. How could people have forgotten ’81 so quickly?

  * * *

  “What’re all these streetgangers and pigeons doing here?” she asked the old raff woman she’d been talking to for the last few minutes. The woman, who sat on a milk crate in a doorway about halfway up Prince Street, was the real thing for what Diana Angela was trying to pretend to be, a crone in a shawl hood. She was hunched and grey and her voice cracked as she replied:

  “They helped him, girl. In his battle to take over.”

  Jeff Hammer had apparently launched his coup with an airstrike, but that had failed to do much. The Reverend and his inner circle had ended up holed up in the Chapel, that fortified headquarters building, with some of the military and a telephone connection.

  “How do you know this, ma’am?”

  The woman coughed.

  “Who moves the squad counters in the war room of the Chapel, eh?” She cackled. “Reverend and the captains don’t, eh? Officer’s wife, I used to be. They killed my husband in the fighting when the Rev’s dad was first splitting off and taking over, he was Captain Thurston. Mrs. John Thurston to you, girl.”

  “The boss didn’t give you a pension?” Diana Angela asked in horror.

  “Job’s meant to be. But I was there, girl. Nobody pays attention to what the maids think, but we listen.”

  Diana Angela produced a couple of wrinkled hundreds, quietly slipped Mrs. Thurston one but pulled the other back. Anything bigger would be hard for her to change; it’d draw notice from thieves. The hundreds she could probably handle more discreetly.

  “I’m paying attention to what you’ve heard,” she said carefully.

  It turned out that most of today’s coup had been a long siege, with the Reverend and most of his top people holding the Chapel, which had been defended by the helmet-wearing, picked-for-loyalty enforcers of First Company. Fourth Company had been actively in mutiny, Third had been loyal, the other two sitting on the fence to see what would happen.

  Until the Reverend had gotten an agreement of assistance from the Chang tenement, the one to their immediate south and west. She’d observed those guys on her prowling earlier: the ones in red and grey, with axe bayonets on their muskets that turned the combined weapons into ungainly halberds rather than spears. They’d sent a force east along Prince Street, right down here, to relieve the Chapel and get the high-ups out. Where the ground was cracked and pitted – in fact, you could tell from the tar that had been shovelled across the tops of refilled holes, this area had taken significant ordnance.

  Someone more familiar with the streets would have noticed that immediately, but she was only a visitor, not someone who lived down here. A true native would have been able to tell immediately that this woman hadn’t been born raff, either – Captain’s wife meant she must have started life with good blood indeed.

  “Third Company led the relief force, but there were a hundred Changs behind them and only streetgangers in their way,” said the woman. “The streetgangers were expected to fire a few shots from what guns they had, but melt away from contact against a force that outnumbered them.”

  For good reason. Streetgangers fighting on even terms against a formation of tenement soldiers would have an extremely bad time against the far better-equipped, better-trained and -organized troops. Outnumbered, there would have been only one outcome…

  “And then Hammer’s airbornes, this gang he’d been training on physics and coordinating with the streetgangers, came in. It was like a wall of flame, my neighbours tell it,” Mrs. Thurston said, with a gesture of her wizened hand across the street. “Straight into centre of mass, perfect spreads, bombs absolutely on target – it wasn’t supposed to be possible. Then the streetgangers counterattacked – it wasn’t the Changs’ tenement to die for, they were shocked and fled and Roger Moncreve ran with ‘em, and that was the end of Third Company.”

  That had apparently tipped the balance; Second Company, under one Don Karstein, had made a deal with Hammer: promotions for his family in exchange for support. The Reverend and his people had filed out of the Chapel shortly after, heading north to Times Square and the Independent Hotel while there was still light to safely travel by. The survivors of First Company had gone with them for now, while those from Third were mostly bedded down in the Changs.

  A commotion on the street to their right drew her attention. People were mobbing around someone, and it wasn’t hard to guess who it was from their shouting.

  “Ham-mer! Ham-mer!”

  “Thank you for the precinct!” came a male voice from the centre. Diana Angela gave Mrs. Thurston the other hundred with a nod of thanks and moved toward the commotion, a hand going to the main fighting knife at her waist. Calculating escape vectors… there were people everywhere, although this Hammer did not appear to have any security – he was completely on his own in the crowd, something Spartacus had done too. Trusting his people.

  But Spartacus had had the threat of Rosa Luxembourg’s commissars; any assassin would face a horrible death and they knew it. There was a chance that if she… prevented the emergence of commissars, right now, then she would be able to escape in the confusion.

  What confusion? The mob would rip her apart. There were enough people behind her now, it was a dense enough crowd, that she would not get more than a few feet before they dogpiled her, if that far…

  She had always accepted that one day her luck would run out and she’d never go back upstairs. Someday the dice would fall wrong… but she owed it to herself, and to a family who would never know where or why she had vanished, to postpone that date as long as possible by acting as sensibly as she could.

  What can be done now with a knife can be done later with a crossbow.

  The man was making his way through the crush of outstretched hands, shaking people’s hands. “I thank you all for the precinct!” he was shouting. “Thank you!”

  Boss Jeff Hammer was lean and wiry, like most airbornes, with tanned brown skin and high cheekbones above a windscarred face with a high forehead. Younger than she’d thought – he looked to be in his early thirties, although that was old in the gangs. There were substantially younger people who’d inherited tenement bossdoms, though. People of the finest blood, which the vaguely-brown Hammer didn’t look like he had a drop of.

  He wore a green shirt with shoulderboards but no rank insignia, black trousers and
combat boots, with his dark hair cut short and slicked back. He was taller than average, a wiry six foot two, and as – shaking hands, exchanging fist-bumps and high-fives, thanking his people – he drew closer to where she stood in the crowd, she saw a purpose and intensity to his eyes and his motions that Spartacus had also had.

  She twitched for the knife, wanting to end this thing before it rose high enough to crash catastrophically. If she killed this man right now, she would avert…

  She would avert her own life, that was what. The mob would tear her apart, a horrible thought. She was not going to commit suicide by impulsively doing what could be done later, with time and planning.

  She shrank back into the crowd, letting another man push past her, as Hammer passed by.

  She could get him later.

  “I thank you for the precinct,” Hammer was saying, “and I will tell you more of our plans at Sunday’s Assembly. For tomorrow, please go to your jobs!”

  “When will the workers’ committees start?” someone with a Commune rosette demanded.

  “I will tell you more of our plans at Sunday’s Assembly,” Jeff Hammer repeated. “For tomorrow, I ask you to work your shifts tomorrow.”

  That seemed to satisfy the crowd.

  A few more minutes with Olivia Thurston, when the newly successful tenement warlord had passed… told her what she needed to know: the Assembly would be held at nine Sunday morning, probably on the Chapel balcony since the raised stage the Reverend had preferred to set up on the street, had been damaged in the fighting of the coup. Lines of sight to the balcony… accessible rooftops… retreat paths…

  Sunday morning. She would come back with a crossbow and she would kill Spartacus 2.0 then, during his speech. He had thirty-three hours to live.

  And now she was going to find the cutest available officer in this tenement, because the fire between her legs was coming back now there was time for it. With a smile she gave in to temptation and redirected herself toward what looked like a busy officers’ club.

  Celebrate your victory with me, tonight, she purred to herself, and tell me what you know.