Hang Wire (11 page)

Nobody says anything. Then John nods and Jan smiles. “We’ll meet at eight, OK?” she says, gesturing at the Big Top. Highwire nods, and they seem happy and turn away, muttering a good night as they go.

Then comes the smell of cigars and aftershave, and the sound of hard-soled boots on the ground.

“Mister, a word, please,” says the Magical Zanaar, waving his cigar in the air, the glowing red end drawing a figure eight in the semi-darkness behind the tent.

The ringmaster and the acrobat walk around the Big Top until they reach one of the trucks parked behind it. The truck is just a large black outline, tarpaulin flapping against the grass in the evening breeze.

Jack stops and removes the cigar from his mouth and smiles. He points at Highwire’s chest with the cigar.

“Highwire,” he says. He peers at the mask. Highwire wonders why the ringmaster doesn’t ask him to take it off, doesn’t know his real name, doesn’t think that this is all strange and peculiar and not the way to run a circus. But perhaps he isn’t running the circus. If the circus gave birth to the acrobat then perhaps
it
is running the ringmaster.

“Everything OK?” he asks. “With Jan and John. No problems?”

Highwire bows his head. “None, Mr Newhaven.”

“Good, good,” says the ringmaster. He puts the cigar in his mouth but then he takes it out almost immediately. “We don’t see you around much. Not during the day. Sleeping, right? In your trailer. Must be a tiring act, up there on the wires.”

Newhaven’s forehead creases. He’s concentrating. He looks distracted. Like he’s trying to remember something.

“Are you OK, Mr Newhaven?”

“I’m too old for this shit,” says the ringmaster, apparently to himself. He jams the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “Did you take the cable or not?”

Highwire folds his arms.

“Cable?”

“Cable. The tightrope that you dance around on. A reel is missing.” He sighs and then he comes to life, his internal battle either forgotten or won. He pokes Highwire in the chest with a fat finger with a big ring on it. “That shit costs a fucking fortune, and if a cable fails now then we haven’t got a replacement. Know anything about it? Short of money maybe? Thought you could make a quick buck?”

The cable. Of course. Without knowing it, Newhaven has given him a vital piece of information.

Cable. The Hang Wire killer – Highwire’s quarry, out there in San Francisco – strings his victims up with wire. Not just any wire. Cable. Woven steel, thin but strong. The killings are strange, the process clearly requiring strength just to bend the cable into a working noose.

Tightrope wire. A reel of which has been stolen from the circus.

Highwire doesn’t think he took it, but then he doesn’t remember.

He looks at Newhaven, unsure whether the ringmaster has put the cable theft and the murders in the city together.

Highwire shakes his head. “It wasn’t me. I wouldn’t steal from the circus, Mr Newhaven, and I certainly wouldn’t put myself and my partners at risk.”

Newhaven doesn’t look happy.

“Mr Newhaven, if I hear or see anything, I’ll let you know. You have my word,” says Highwire. “That cable is my livelihood. Is anything else missing?”

“No,” Newhaven says. “Not yet.” He puffs his cigar slowly. “But keep your eyes open. I am.” Then he turns and walks into the night.

Highwire heads in the opposite direction, keeping close to the shadows cast by the tent and the trucks. There are a few circus folk around, doing odd jobs. Over the other side of Sharon Meadow, a light flares, big and orange, and what follows is music on the air. Drums, a pipe, a wheezing drone. Stonefire, the Celtic dancers, settling in for the night in their own way.

Highwire waits in the darkness a little longer. Then, satisfied that nobody is watching, he slips out, into the night, into the city.

— VIII —

She’d walked this route a hundred times. Down Cleeft, onto Fourth. Along Fourth, past the titty bar, past the bums playing chess and asking for four dollars for a grande latte. Past the big streetcar stop with its long seat, slightly too low and too angled to be comfortable for sitting on – or for sleeping on, which was probably the intention. To the main intersection at First and Maple, with the Apple store on her left and the towering frontage of Macy’s on her right. Ahead the road was wide and straight, and filled with streetcars and other traffic. A pause at the lights until they turned red and the cross signal shone. Then up the hill, toward Union Square and Chinatown, to her apartment.

She walked it on automatic, her mind elsewhere as her brain piloted her home. Dangerous in any big city, perhaps; maybe even more so on this particular route through downtown San Francisco when there was a killer on the loose. Her friends had told her several times – even her boss. If you want to walk, Lotta, he said, for God’s sake don’t go behind Grestch Street. Stick to the open. Be safe.

But the Gretsch Street shortcut knocked five minutes off the journey home, maybe more. And the narrow street was always deserted. Lotta worked nights and when it came time to head home the empty backstreet seemed preferable to running the gauntlet of leering, drinking men outside the strip clubs. They stared and said things, and sometimes they even followed her for half a block, calling out and clutching at their crotches before laughing and sloping back to their habitual loiter spot. Maybe they didn’t actually ever go into the joint. They probably couldn’t afford the cover.

Lotta turned into Gretsch at 2.30am. Today’s shift had been nothing out of the ordinary. Like her walk home, she was so used to the routine that she switched off at work, her mind wandering in one giant daydream. Sometimes, the dream never quite went away, and sometimes she blinked and found herself pushing the key into her front door and she couldn’t remember the walk home at all.

She followed the curve of Gretsch as it veered to the left, past a shuttered newsstand. A fire escape platform jutted out here as the buildings on either side crowded in, so close that, Lotta thought, you could almost step from one fire escape to the other, traveling between buildings without ever touching the ground.

Lotta sniffed. The sky was clear and there was no mist, but it was chilly. She passed under the fire escape and adjusted her coat, and as she did so the figure on the fire escape peeled out of the shadow, swung over the rail, and dropped heavily to the street.

Lotta stopped and turned around.

The bonfire had long passed its peak, when it had towered over even the Big Top like a giant pyramid of ever-changing orange and yellow. But despite the size of the blaze, it had been strangely cool. Malcolm and the members of Stonefire sat around the fire while the rest of the circus slept in their trailers.

Malcolm let his eyes un-focus as he watched the dying fire, turning it into an abstract swarm of red and black shapes, like the roiling surface of a dying sun. The heat was there all right, it was just going somewhere else.

And now it was hot enough to begin.

Malcolm stood up, ignoring the cracks of his knees and his protesting muscles as he rose from the cross-legged position. Around him, the rest of his company jerked into life, uncurling themselves from their fireside positions, brushing the dust from their leather and bare skin.

They were silent, all of them, and all of them watched Malcolm, because Malcolm was not just their leader, he was one with the spirits, chosen. Malcolm knew how it all worked because the fire spoke to him. Something else spoke, too: their true master, their creator, the thing asleep. Close, so very close.

The embers of the bonfire glowed scarlet. Malcolm moved closer, until he was standing in the ashes and charcoal that marked the edge of the fire itself. He stopped, and stared into the fire, listening to the magic in the cracks and crackles.

The glow of the embers began to brighten. Dull red became white, so bright that in Malcolm’s vision there was just the fire and nothing else, his troupe – his
clan
– vanishing into abyssal darkness.

Malcolm was alone with the fire. Alone with his god.

The fire spat a shower of yellow sparks like a solar flare, cracking like electricity. Malcolm smiled, and somewhere out in the darkness someone began to clap. Soon others joined, followed by voices. The rhythm was slow, steady, primal: clapping, feet slapping the ground, moving around. Stonefire began their dance.

Malcolm stepped closer, his bare feet disappearing to the ankle in the glowing ashes. The fire cracked again and Malcolm bent down, sifting the brilliant embers with his hands. There was no heat, but a tingle, pins and needles, and his mouth was filled with the taste of rotting lemons.

Malcolm stood and turned with his back to the fire, facing the darkness. His eyes adjusted, resolving the moving figures of Stonefire as they danced and stamped and chanted. He held his arms out, and as one the dance troupe fell silent and still.

“Here,” Malcolm said, and when he spoke the fire cracked again. He lowered his arms, and turned and pointed to where he had cleared a small patch in the ashes.

“We dig. Belenus commands it,” he said, and he dropped to his knees. He began scratching at the blackened Earth.

The members of his clan ran forward, converging on Malcolm, almost smothering him, as twenty pairs of hands scrambled in the embers, digging below the fire.

Lotta took a step backwards and regretted everything. She regretted not taking the advice of her friends and of her boss. She regretted the shortcut; she regretted not paying attention. What she would do now for the sight of the strip club boys and their loose jeans, grinding their crotches as they tailed her down the street, calling obscenities and wolf whistles. On the other side of the street there would be people, cars, even at such a late hour.

On Gretsch Street there was just Lotta and the man in front of her. He was a black silhouette, nothing more than an oblong shadow with arms, standing under the fire escape. His shape was strange, elongated, like he was wearing a tall hat.

Lotta turned. She knew it might be a mistake, but she couldn’t run backward. Fifth Avenue was just ahead. Lotta tensed herself to run and drew a breath to scream for her life.

There was a sharp sound, like someone retracting the extendable flex of a vacuum cleaner, and Lotta was pushed forward onto the pavement as something very heavy hit the back of her neck. She instinctively reached out to break her fall and exhaled heavily as the wind was knocked from her lungs, but as she tried to whoop a fresh breath in she found her airway closed tight. A second later the weight on her neck shifted and she was jerked backward a few feet. Her hands flew to her throat as something tightened around it with mechanical strength, crushing her windpipe, pushing her larynx against her spine. Exquisite agony exploded beneath her jaw, and her fingertips scrambled over and around thick, hard metal. She could feel the weave of individual cable fibers and the cold of the metal against her skin. At the back of her neck her fingers found the cable was looped through an eye, a metal ring, smooth in comparison with the wire itself, with a thick rivet or bolt fixing it in place.

The cable was tugged again, sliding tighter on the loop. The index finger of Lotta’s right hand, somehow inside the noose, was caught and cut through to the bone as the metal loop was tightened and tightened. She tried to scream, but there was no air and her throat was nothing but hellish fire. She could feel her eyes bulge like water balloons, and the night disintegrated into purple spots in front of her.

Another jerk, and Lotta’s last thought was that she was flying, her feet leaving the ground as she was carried into the air by her neck, her trapped right arm strung uselessly behind her head.

She swung from the fire escape on the steel cable. She was dead already but her legs kicked violently for a few seconds, throwing her left shoe off. Then the kicking stopped, and the alley was quiet and she was alone once more.

The night is cold and damp, the fog rolling in from the bay in a great opaque cloud, obscuring everything in its path and coating the city in a thin sheen of water slick with grease and oil.

Dangerous conditions for an acrobat, but even as Highwire slips for the third time as he leaps from one building to the next, he understands the problem and corrects for it, and when he lands on the next roof it is with silent, mathematical precision. He rises into a crouch and pauses, balanced forward on fingertips, and when he closes his eyes, he can sense it all: the fine fizz of the fog against this face, the sandpaper texture of the tar paper under his fingertips, the slight changes in the gentle breeze four stories from the street.

Two other things as well. Something large, nearby, breathing slowly like a sleeping dragon. It comes from all around, but seems to emanate from the ground, the streets, like there’s a slow-moving river deep beneath the city. Highwire isn’t sure whether he can hear it or feel it, but he can sense something is there.

The other: a vibration ahead, rhythmic, a slowly changing, slowing pattern. One object in contact with another, the two touching, separating, touching; a weight, swinging, pulling on something metal that creaks and shakes in microscopic ways. The first sound – the
sensation
– seems to be pulsing in time with the swinging too, like whatever it is beneath the city can feel it, is drawn to it.

Like Highwire. It’s not just sounds and sensations that brought him here. He knows he is close. The killer is near. So very near. And perhaps, if he is quick…

Highwire skips forward on all fours, toward the edge of the building, and jumps.

The embers were heaped into two great piles on either side of the hole, like a parting of the seas frozen in blazing white and red. Now the digging had slowed, become more organized, the fire – through Malcolm – having selected the youngest, the strongest, for the last stage. As the others watched, a handful of men covered in black ash continued to dig with their bare hands as they knelt in the embers. A couple of younger dancers, a teenage girl and her older brother, spun around, kicking up ash and chanting, as a third member pounded a gentle rhythm on a leather-skinned drum.