Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets (22 page)

He is sitting with his back to me, staring out of the window as though he’s waiting for a messenger on horseback to arrive with the order to get ready for an imminent, devastating conflict. Or, a more realistic hypothesis would be that he’s carefully listening to the vortex of air swirling around inside his fur-clad head.

“Right, here I am. What is it you want to tell me?” I ask impatiently, as soon as the door closes behind me.

“How many times have I told you, you have to call me ‘sir’? We’re not friends or family.”

He doesn’t even look at me.

“Clearly not enough. I just can’t get it into my head…”

I smile, in my amusement I stick my hands in my pockets and rock backwards and forwards on my heels.

“Your report on the clandestine Oda settlement was somewhat
lacking
.”

“I know, I know. I really ought to change my telephone company.”

“What?” The Captain jumps to his feet, and treats me to face-to-face contact.

“They make me pay for every letter in a text, it’s a disgrace…” I’m smirking.

“Do you think you’re funny?” He bangs his fists on the table, but he doesn’t scare me.

“I do!”

Here we are in the “I’m warning you and wagging my index finger in front of your face” stage of the proceedings.

“You, damn son-of-a-bitch. I will employ every single fibre of my being, every minute of the time I have left here to stop you from becoming captain. I know you’re rotten, Arkham. You’ll trip up sooner or later, and I’ll be there, ready to throw you into an isolation cell until the second Apocalypse.

“Oh, I hope you do, with all my heart, my dear old man. After all, how many years have you waited for this moment? Seven, right? It would be
so humiliating
if you retired before you managed it, wouldn’t it?”

There’s a blood vessel on his forehead and I reckon it’s throbbing well beyond exploding point.

“What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn’t you be holed up in some fetid den for animals like yourself, getting drunk or getting high?”

“Yeah, but then I thought: the Captain must miss me so much. I know, I know that when I’m not here you spend your time wondering where I am. So I said to myself: I could pop into work, and while I’m there, start up some operation or other. Can you imagine how that would look on my CV? ‘Despite being on leave for the injuries he suffered on the job, the Lieutenant continues to carry out his work with a level of dedication which goes above and beyond the call of duty.’ With the addition of the odd ‘admirable’ here and there, it should be the perfect prelude to my promotion, don’t you agree?”

“You haven’t got so much as a scratch, you incorrigible piece of shit.”

“Really? Odd. I seem to have a lovely doctor’s certificate here.”

“Puke up your daily bullshit and stop fouling the air in my office.”

“It was you who called me!”

Fingeruphisarse settles for a low growl but which is heavy with scorn.

“A raid. Don’t you worry about calling the judge, Mequire, I’ll see to it, you’ve got high blood pressure.”

“I won’t leave you alone, you bastard.”

Why does this man dislike me so intensely? Maybe he is prejudiced against young successful officers, I honestly don’t understand it.

“I shall live in terror during these last moments of freedom I have left.”

“Fuck yourself sideways.”

“Hooray. Remember to take your tablets, Grandad.”

Thank the Lord I won’t have to put up with him for much longer.

While the prehistoric computer bursts into life with the usual series of electronic farts, I cast my eye over the pile of paperwork which inevitably accumulated in my absence. I carefully pick up a couple of folders, trying not to disturb the inert bureaucracy. I suppose it’s perfectly inevitable, when you spend years in the same environment, you start to treat inanimate elements you live with day after day like sentient beings, capable of movement, moods and aims. It’s not a matter of imagining binders with paper clips like paws, or the legendary “elementals or rubber stamps”. It’s more about an ancestral reverence, an innate, primitive response to everything which you are unable to understand. And I’ll challenge anyone to explain to me the point of all this paperwork I have to fill in on a regular basis. Sometimes I have the fleeting impression that I’ve grasped the meaning of Form C, only to find out that it doesn’t end where I think it’s going to, but that it leads to more administrative offal and ultimately to a long-forgotten archive, where it will rot into eternity. I mean, sooner or later everyone has to give in and accept the mystery of this paperwork, out of faith. But there is a tacit compromise, you learn to make an offering every once in a while, when you haven’t got anything better to do. This is not the case here, I conclude, and stop upsetting the column which is greedy for dates and signatures.

Inla’s father, the new dark horse. The computer is able to tell me much more than I expected: Nylmeris Lovl’Atheron, son of wanker Valan, walking around causing damage for the past eight hundred and seventy-seven years and counting. Finding out what he got up to before the Federation was created is beyond the capabilities of information technology, but something of interest does come up. It turns out that Daddy did his bit during the Great War. Special service, honours, medals, praise and all that goes with it. Obviously it doesn’t say why exactly, but I can get a rough idea by studying his post-war assignments. A couple of years in eastern Qari, followed by Stanghanyf during the tulip revolution. Honourably discharged at the fall of Khanato. Of course, by this time the world had changed too much for our spy. No more cold war with the ogres, now they’re practically our friends, right? Today we fight wars by buying debentures and raising custom duties on the importation of harpsichords.

I light a cigarette before realising that the cleaning staff have removed my ashtray while I was away and they haven’t brought it back: I will repay them by dropping my cigarette butt on the floor. Nylmeris was a secret agent for the service, great. I wonder how many ended up like his daughter when he was a state employee? Why on earth did he kill her? Then, a badass like him would certainly know how to make a corpse disappear, he wouldn’t leave it in an alley where anyone could find it. Unless that was exactly what he wanted…

What if it were a message, the kind of message where you hit one to teach a lesson to a hundred? I flick my ash onto the floor. Maybe he just lost his mind. Judging from her behaviour, Inla clearly had problems with not just paternal but family authority in general. Maybe Nylmeris had good reasons for going off the rails and killing her, and I imagine that Inla’s spectre would have been reluctant to tell me, if that were the case. Getting murdered doesn’t necessarily make you a victim around these parts. What I mean is, if a bastard shoots me, I won’t say thank you, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t say I was a victim either.

The truth is that I have to
arrest
one of Valan’s children and make sure they are
sentenced
, a fucking hero of not
one
, but numerous
numerous
fucking wars, Bastard Father. He’d come to court bent over with the weight of all the medals pinned on his uniformed chest, with pots of money and a major dynasty barking behind him via television, radio, newspapers and any other form of communication. If I go up against such a man, the least that will happen is they’ll send me to the north pole to direct traffic. Like I’ve got a fucking choice. On the contrary there’s a redwood pressing against my diaphragm, and it came in the back way, that’s what I’ve got.

I prepare a nice snowy motorway to cheer myself up, seeing as for once I’ve got a handy work surface. Halfway down the road, Pharrol knocks on the glass door.

“Just a minute.” I finish snorting and rub my nose, mindful of the episode involving a driver recently maimed by a mysterious hooligan.

“Come in.”

“Here we are. I looked up that Kurt Nofym—“

“Kart.”

“Eh?”

“
Kart
Nofym, not Kurt, shit! With a fucking A.”

“Oops…”

“Oops my arse, mother bitch. For fuck’s sake, Ezy, I’ve got enough problems without you fucking me over with your stupidity, is that clear?”

“Sorry, I misunderstood—”

“God forbid that you understood correctly but you made a cack-handed job of it on purpose just to annoy me. Look, don’t you get on my fucking nerves as well, do me a fucking favour.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll check again. You don’t need to get so angry about it.“

“I’ll decide when I need to get angry, fucking hell! I’ve already got the Slitherer who’s waiting to screw me, Mequire wants to screw me, the paperwork wants to screw me, so do me a favour and don’t add your little dick to the crowd around my arse, all right?”

“I’m going, I’m going!”

I go back to the computer screen and a charming photograph of Daddy. Those ears that stick up higher than his beret are grotesquely ridiculous. You know what he looks like. A porn star in uniform from a gay film. I must tell that wanker Pharrol, so he can release some of that anger away from me. He hasn’t got any other children. Well, he has got the rest of eternity to make a new life for himself, although he did kill his only descendant. She must have done something seriously bad. Using the mouse, I randomly scroll the page up and down, with no particular destination in mind. I’m tormented by the polar nightmare. Boundless expanses of white nothing surrounding the only settlement for miles and miles, my solitary post at the edge of the world. So I start clicking all over the place, until I chance upon a list of the members of his unit during the Qari period. And who do I see?

Gilder Feltu’Atheron.

Trained by Nylmeris Lovl’Atheron and posted under his command for three years, he left immediately after the local dictator was assassinated and promptly replaced by a surprisingly pro-federal banana republic. Evidently that is how the blonde and the redhead met, at some ceremony or other or even during the military preparation. Who can say, maybe at the beginning the father was happy his daughter was having it away with one of his underlings. And maybe placing a young Feltu under the great Lovl was part of a ‘technical attempt at dialogue’ between the two dynasties, officially divided by a feud which had certainly had its day. Then something happened, and Gilder doesn’t want a part of it anymore. He went back to civilian life after only thirty-nine months, while his superior stayed on for sixteen more years. I calculate that Nylmeris left the military around the same time Inla was exiled. Her father retired and finds out that while he was away, the blonde guy was screwing his only daughter. Cuckolded and screwed over, insult was definitely added to injury here. The relationship between father and daughter, in a family where incest is perfectly normal, must be pretty damn morbid. She would even rather endure exile than have to suck off the old man again, and Gilder is the last straw.

T
he shadow of the dark slayer doth fall upon him
, the ghost said. Of course, because now Nylmeris is on the hunt for his ex-pupil, the one who took his beloved offspring away. Turns out we’re on a crime of passion path again; perhaps Cohl isn’t as stupid as he tries to look. Nevertheless, there’s still something which doesn’t quite add up. What’s the secret the elf referred to? What’s more, someone who loses it because someone else is banging his daughter shouldn’t be lucid enough to organise a scam with a pest-exterminator ogre. Considering the type of job he did, Nylmeris would certainly have had all the right skills to carry out a coverup, but I can’t imagine reconfirming his virility and then covering it up. In short, as a hypothesis it stands up but it’s got one leg missing.

Knock knock.

“Come in.”

Pharrol, holding a print out which has been laboriously produced by the only, venerable needle printer available to my agents.

“After a long search, the only thing I could find is this company in Uxama…”

“A city in the southern continent, could it be where the two lovebirds were headed?”

“What do they do?”

“Install boilers, repairs, that kind of thing.”

“Is there an email address?”

“Yeah, hang on…” Ezy scans the printed sheet and wrinkles his brow. “Here we are, nofymboilers@-“

“Perfect, great. Forget it, there isn’t the slightest fucking connection.” I’m more depressed than angry this time. “In fact, listen, just to be sure, ask them if by any chance they have had any contact with anyone from Nectropis, recently. They’ll say no in any case, but at least then I can forget about it.”

“Chief, if you tell me what it is you’re looking for exactly, maybe I could do more. Just doing stuff randomly like this makes it harder.”

Drag my men into this matter? Better not, if it isn’t strictly necessary. They’d almost certainly ask questions, they’d want a slice of the cake and I really have to buy a new car. That’s not even counting the fact that, leaving romance aside, I don’t think any of them would be willing to get involved in business against the elves, team or no team. The chances of getting out are slim, and we are all here to live a better life, not to stop living completely.

“It’s nothing important, never mind. It’s just a lead I’m following up, but there’s nothing definite. It’s just an unfounded hunch, that’s what. Instead, have you heard from the others?”

“Yeah. For a minute I was afraid the sergeant was going to punch me through the telephone receiver. The only one missing is Lisande, he’s got the ‘flu’.”

“Okay, there’re enough of us anyway.”

“Enough for what? You can at least tell me this?”

“Stolen cars. Fringe activity by some organisation or other, I don’t know who yet. I got a tip off…”

“Isn’t that work for the blue shirts?”

“Yeah, but the idea of just handing a raid over to the cousins pisses me off. We’ll do it, that way we can say we’re working our arses off, I think that’d be much better. Don’t you?” l gratify him by asking his opinion. That’s all that’s needed to reassure pets after you’ve scolded them. A pat, a scratch behind the ear.