A Drink Before We Die: A Low Town Short (3 page)
Read A Drink Before We Die: A Low Town Short Online
Authors: Daniel Polansky
6
The agreement had been to meet at a warehouse near the docks at eight in the evening, me and Armadal and one other man a piece. I'd hand-written the message a few days after my meeting with Cosgrave, the script even, the words polite. Armadal took it as an offered throat, and had brought along six thugs equipped for battle, hatchets and knives and crossbows, one of them even dressed in the boiled leather armor we'd worn during the war, which I thought was overkill but fair enough. I did not like Armadal, I did not particularly respect Armadal, I sure as hell did not trust Armadal, but credit where due he understood the foremost rule of our business: a downed man exists to be kicked.
I was sitting at a small table, and I'd been waiting a while. “Why, Armadal,” I said, sparking a match and bringing it to a cigarette liberally laced with dreamvine. “This hardly seems in keeping with our agreement.”
“You know, Warden,” Armadal said, smirking as his men shook themselves out around me, “I admit, I'm a little disappointed.”
“Oh?”
“Everything they say about you, I'd never have imagined you'd roll so easy. Two months I've been stripping you of your territory, eating off your table, every day expecting some riposte.”
“That's what makes this part so much fun,” I said, smiling as Cosgrave and his squad of men slipped out from the darkness behind me.
To his credit, this reversal of circumstances did not unman Armadal, quite the opposite. Though his boss had brought ten in to deal with his six, he neither quivered nor begged. And you have to respect that in a man, in any man, if he can stare at She Who Waits Behind All Things without flinching. “What is this supposed to mean?” Armadal said.
“I told you to expand our interests towards the docks,” Cosgrave said, “not settle Low Town as your own personal fiefdom.”
“I been kicking up your end.”
“You'll bite the hand that feeds you before long.”
“Warden been telling you that?”
Cosgrave laughed. “I don't need him to tell me you're a treacherous little snake who never knew his place.”
“You're a spoon-fed fuckwit,” Armadal spat. “And my place is where you're sitting.”
My job really isn't so difficult. Convincing violent people to do violent things? Like getting a cobbler to resole a shoe.
Armadal was swift on the draw, his little fencing sword out with your first blink, and with your second he had tossed himself at Cosgrave—there was real hate there, this wasn't just business. Cosgrave's bodyguard intercepted Armadal's attack, which was an impressive bit of loyalty for a hired blade, though not one for which he'd ever be rewarded. Armadal skewered him through what looked like the spleen, though I couldn't tell for sure. Regardless, he didn't seem to enjoy it, even fell to the ground and wept a little bit.
Things continued apace. I smoked away the rest of my joint, watching the grim arithmetic by which eighteen thugs became fourteen became ten became four. It was your standard melee, evil men in a darkened room sticking metal into each other, as ugly and brutal and pointless an activity as might be imagined. I did not actually see Armadal go down, my attention must have been elsewhere. At one point he was in a corner defending himself rambunctiously from a pair of Cosgrave's stouts, and then he wasn't, and the world continued on much the same as it had before. You will find that is generally the way of it.
“A fine job, boys, a fine job,” I said, tossing away my smoke. One of Cosgrave's remaining soldiers, merciful or cruel, was ministering to those of Armadal's side that had only been wounded. “I couldn't have done it better myself.”
Cosgrave had blood on his hair and light in his eyes. These middle-management types, they get so excited about wetting their weapons, like a priest with his first whore. “I must admit, Warden, you worked it out neatly.”
“No thanks necessary,” I said, raising my hands and waving them, as if to forestall praise. That wasn't actually what I was doing, but Cosgrave could be forgiven for thinking so. “The beginning of a prosperous relationship for both of us, no doubt.”
“Yes, about that,” Cosgrave smiled at me, catching his breath and letting his killers catch theirs. “I'm afraid there's been a change of plans.”
“Really? How so?”
“As much as we appreciate your assistance in the matter, looking forward, it's hard to see how your continued existence would benefit the Consortium. You're too clever by half, and besides—I have people within my organization to reward.”
“But Cosgrave!” I said, rubbing one hand against the bristle on my scalp. “We had an agreement! Promises were exchanged! We shook hands!”
Cosgrave laughed, cleaned his weapon with a bit of rag. “It's a cold world.”
Coincidence mandated that it was at this exact moment that the door flew open. Outside was the cold, and the dark, and a handful of large, armed, unfriendly looking Valaan.
“Fucking frigid,” I said. “These are the Five Brothers, and they'd like to introduce you to the rest of the family.”
7
“I was always pulling for you, Warden, you know that,” the Wind Cock said.
I drank whiskey and nodded absently.
“But what could I do, a small-timer like myself? I'm as quick to wield a blade as any man,” emphasizing the point by searching for the hilt of his weapon beneath the table, though his swell of gut meant it took a while before he found it. “But I can't be expected to go up against the entire might of the Ballafleur Consortium, not all by my lonesome!”
There was no longer any such thing as the Ballafleur Consortium, with their leaders and most of their toughs in the ground. Well, dead at least, I didn't bother to dig any holes. There would be blood on the snow this winter, as the rest of the city fought over their operations, syndicate heavies dropping like flies. By the time the spring buds bloomed we'd be back to the usual uneasy peace
,
the victors having assumed the choicest cuts of Cosgrave's old empire.
And Low Town? Low Town would remain mine.
“Point being,” the Wind Cock said, “I was hoping things would work out this way. I mean, I always figured they would—the Warden, I tell myself, he's just as sharp as a razor, and it's darkest before the dawn, and you've always got a card up your sleeve, after all.”
I spent a few seconds trying to untangle the knotted strands of metaphor. “Your good opinion means the world to me,” I said.
He at least had the good manners to look chagrined. “Here's everything that I owed you these last eight weeks.” He let the purse fall loud on the table, metal ringing against wood.
I let it sit a while.
“It's all there,” he said, licking his lips. “Every copper. You can count it.”
I watched the last few droplets of whiskey run down the edge of my glass. “Thirty ochre,” I said finally.
“What?”
“There's a thirty ochre penalty for tardiness.”
Even the Wind Cock couldn't have been so foolish as to think he was going to walk out of the Earl that morning without paying some sort of indemnity. It seemed thirty ochres was still within what he had expected to lose, and he nodded, if not happily, at least vigorously. “Fair enough, Warden, fair enough.”
“And thirty for disloyalty.”
His shoulders shifted down another notch.
“And thirty on top of that, because I dislike you, and because I can do whatever I want.”
We had finally reached the point where avarice began to compete with self-preservation. “Warden, please—”
“Or I can tell the Brothers it was you that pointed them out to Armadal.” Of course I had been the one to get that pot stirring, but who was going to know that? So far as the Five Brothers were concerned the noontime sun shone bright out of my asshole, I'd be able to count on them for muscle for the remainder of my life. Or their lives, at least.
“No,” the Wind Cock said, looking like more like a corpse than usual. “No. Ninety ochres is...fine. Ninety ochres is reasonable.”
He'd spend the rest of his life paying me back those ninety ochres, plus the accruing interest, die with the balance in my favor. “Of course it is,” I said, smiling again. “I'm a reasonable man.”
Henri didn't stick around long after, nodding and bowing on his way out, leaving a trail of unctuousness like a slug does slime.
“Everything all right?” Adolphus asked, coming by to refill my whiskey.
“Same as ever,” I said unsmiling. “Same as ever.”
About the Author
Daniel Polansky is the author of the Low Town trilogy and the forthcoming Empty Throne duology, among other things. He can be found in Brooklyn, when he isn’t somewhere else.
facebook.com/DanielPolanskyAuthor
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