Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets (7 page)

“Does your cousin know how to use a silk blade?”

His nostrils flare and he writes some notes.

“He is no longer my cousin.”

“I suspect I won’t get any more out of the Feltu’Atherons. But this is important confirmation.”

I press the green button with a sigh, sit on the bonnet and inhale a lungful of smoke. The sky is beginning to clear, like its slipping off its lingerie in a striptease of cosmic length. The mobile tells me that one of its kin, inside Inspector Cohl’s pocket, has started to annoy my potential interlocutor, who will predictably already be well-pissed off for reasons of his own.

“Arkham, where the fuck have you been?!”

“Cohl—”

“I’ve been trying to call you all morning on that fucking—“

“—Cohl—”

“Bloody hell, I’m not at your beck and call …”

I hold the phone away from my ear. Another drag. I wait until the phone stops transmitting a stream of abuse in my direction and replaces it with a rhythmic series of calls for attention.

“Arkham? Arkham! Are you there…? Hello? Lieutenant?”

There you go. We can start from scratch.

“Hello, Inspector. What did you get up to this morning?”

On the other end of the line I can hear smothered cursing. I smile.

“I worked—plus, I’ve got an address.”

Nohl waits a few seconds before answering, during which time there’s no noise at all. I bet he covered the microphone with his hand so he could freely damn me to hell.

“Shall we meet somewhere?”

“Of course we’re going to meet somewhere.” I don’t need to look at my watch to know that it’s lunch time. “Do you know Pantalassa?”

“No. It’s not one of those places that does coastal food, is it? I don’t like spicy food.”

“You can have bread and salad, okay? Good for your health.”

“Lieutenant, you are the only person who
really
makes me want to swear.” In the meantime, he’s back to showing me respect.

“Great. Ringroad 180 on Ninth. Big red sign with a volcano on it.” I snigger. “Half an hour. Bring me Inla’s file, and see if there’s anything on a Gilder Feltu’Atheron.”

“It’ll take a while, I don’t know if I can get there in half an hour—“

“Thunder farts, use that magic box with all the pretty lights and buttons… you know, on your desk, next to your vibrator, in your office.”

“The filing system is still
paper-based
.” He grunts threateningly.

“Okay, listen, I’ll be there in half an hour. As soon as I arrive, I’ll order you a coffee, that way if you’re late, you’ll have to drink it cold. That’s a good incentive, don’t you think? Half an hour.”

I hang up and hop in the car.

I like Pantalassa because the spicy food is spicy. A load of places write “coastal food” on the sign and business cards, then they bring you a flabby, insignificant steak, half a stunted chili pepper shivering from coldness and loneliness. Here, on the other hand, you’ve got to move them out of the way to get to your piece of dead cow. Another reason why I like it is because the sun shines down at exactly lunch time. The owner, whom I’ve known by sight for years, corrupted five separate officials from some dynasty or other so he could open his restaurant in a particularly advantageous square paved with white cobblestones which, when the sun shines, dazzles like the teeth of a troll who’s rich enough to afford a dental hygienist.

I find my customary illegal parking spot, grab my sunglasses off the dashboard and push them onto my face while I get out of the car. Everybody in Nectropis owns at least one pair of sunglasses, because the world outside is ruthless. Numerous
nouveau riche
dicks, who could suddenly afford to go on a beach holiday to some third rate hole, every year ended up as part of the statistics measuring stupidity because they burned their retinas off as soon as they woke up, along with the rest of the fucking family. The progressives who take part in those ludicrous summer talk shows always say that it’s not their fault if they’re ignorant, and the ministry should provide more information. Yeah right, like a pamphlet saying: ‘You’ve lived in the dark your whole life, you wanker, put on a pair of fucking sunglasses when you leave the City’. If the ministry ever does anything like that with my taxes, I swear I’ll hunt them down with a rusty crowbar.

You never really need dark glasses in the City, but I like them. They make me look tough, hide my bloodshot eyes together with the bags languishing beneath them, along with any black eyes I may have acquired, this happens more often than I’d like. I sit down at a lovely table bathed in light, and bask in the warmth of the sunshine. The waiter comes and I order two special steaks, two beers and a coffee. I did promise him, after all.

Cohl arrives fifteen minutes late. He says ‘hello’ but stops halfway through my name, staring in confusion at the steak smothered in chili pepper, the beer and the coffee. The steak is cold and spicy, the coffee stone cold. The beer is lukewarm and on duty. The expression on his face is my dessert, seeing as I’ve already finished my meal.

Defeated, he plonks himself down. He doesn’t know what to say, so I break the ice.

“Thanks for lunch, Nohl. Eat something, though, otherwise I feel guilty.”

Cohl breathes in to answer, but it’s a false start. He tries again, same story. By the third attempt, his tone is more curious than angry, in that he’s damned curious and only fucking angry.

“Why do you do this?”

Yeah, why? Probably because I’m a complete bastard. Or because this Nohl Cohl gets on my nerves. No, wait, it’s his Fiamma 1600 that gets on my tits.

“When I was a child, a fella from Frosgaarde bit me.”

“That doesn’t explain all the blaspheming.”

“Jesus fucking Christ—“

“There, you see? Why do you have to—“

“May Muraddin take you, what are you, a priest?”

“Insulting the Gods of the dwarves, too, well done. A world-class blasphemer.”

“So what faith do you follow then, the Cult of Morons?”

“I’m Dualist.” Then he adds, solemnly, “Reformed.”

Oh for fuck’s sake, please excuse me for dragging Mummy and Daddy into it, but, you know how it is, the whore spewed you out of her arse into a world where Daddy had just taken a shit.

Dualists. There’s the mother: i.e. feelings, nature, no rules and a big fucking mess. A whore, in fact. Then there’s the father: the architect, tradition, order and other assorted bollocks. You light a candle to him if you want a promotion. One can’t exist without the other and vice versa, but they’re in constant conflict. On the other hand, according to the reformed—the worst kind, with their smartypants attitude—they are in constant harmony, a divergence which, four hundred years ago, stirred up a real hornet’s nest, including a few dozen deaths. That’s some universal harmony. If I had to pick a religion which is less nasty than the others, then I’d go for Pantheon. The elders are nearly all much more reasonable and human, kind of. There’s Ao, the big chief, the Owl of wisdom, the Slitherer for intrigue, the Pale for death, Thunder for strength and so on, and they all argue together all the time. The sacred Pantheon texts are a sort of adventure novel featuring characters with egos as huge as their superpowers. It’s no coincidence that they do comic strips as well. The best thing is that the followers take sides, too, and blaspheme their heads off at their darlings’ rivals. It’s not like I believe a single word of their religion, but it’s pretty funny. The religious programs on Sunday afternoon hosted by Pantheon priests get really high ratings, because everyone likes watching them squabble over whose representative gets the most attention, trying to explain the week’s news from a mystical angle.

“Oh, forget it,” answers Cohl, trying to avoid confrontation. But I don’t want his pity.

“But aren’t you reformists duty-bound to ‘save confused souls’? Promote harmony?”

“I said, forget it. Here’s the file. We’ve got nothing on that Gilder.”

He tosses the report onto the table and makes a face when he drinks the icy-cold coffee, before calling the waiter over. I start leafing through the papers.

“Can you please take all this away, and bring me… what do you have that isn’t spicy?”

“Erm… salad… and bread. I mean, bread that isn’t spicy, sir,” he answers, taken aback. “Shall I bring you a mixed salad?”

“And a bottle of still mineral water, thank you.”

“Leave the beer,” I add, grabbing the glass without looking away.

Inla Inla Inla. You are deep in my heart, at least until I find the ass you were riding. Arrested during the “protest” on 3 June in Cross Square. Eight years ago. I was there, too. I remember it like it was only yesterday.

“Close ranks! Steady!” barks the sergeant from the second row.

A hundred or so agents in riot gear guard the entrance to the main tower on the Fourteenth Level. Plastic shields, truncheons, helmets with plastic visors, gas masks hanging from their chests. I’m at the front. There are uprisings everywhere. It’s the Year of Uprisings, even though the horoscope says it should be the year of the gentle Elephant, the lesser God of Memory. In actual fact, it’s not gentle at all. All the security forces had been called to defend the institutions, so I, from the vice squad, ended up in the Abyss. And the Abyss roars. During the briefing, the colonel of the MP talked about ‘potential coup d’etat’, ‘subversive plans’, ‘risk to democracy’, ‘sacred duty to protect the Federation’. Many colleagues shouted at the language that was being used, to give themselves courage. We were all shitting bricks. Twenty-two agents died in the first two hours of the day, and more than four times that number were seriously injured. The army was just outside the City, but they were up against strong resistance on the ramps on the Third and Fourth Levels. The Special Forces, on the other hand, had been teletransported to the Sixteenth Level. The higher floors and Nexus had been secured a couple of days previously.

There was an ocean of rabid street cleaners, hysterical shop assistants, furious electricians, blood-thirsty butchers before us. No Colonel, sir, there are no subversive plans. And the democracy is right here, in front of us. The population wants heads to roll.

“Stones!”

We raise our shields to protect ourselves from the improvised bullets raining down on us. They’re not exactly stones—at least, not
only
stones. My shield deflects, in the following order, a dead rodent, a toaster, the right-hand wing mirror of some mutilated car and another dead rodent. A shower of bricks hurled by a gigantic ogre sends four cops a few metres away on my left flying into the air. Three pick themselves up and resume their position, but the one who got the full force of the bricks drags himself behind us, yelling and clutching his shattered arm, his ulna bone sticking out of his flesh and uniform.

“Sergeant, they’ll
murder us
if we stay here!” shouts a voice from the front.

“Oh Father! Father protect me… aargh!” wails a fellow cop, crying.

“We’ve got to break them up!” adds another at the top of his lungs.

“Get ready for a lighter charge!”

Is he completely mad?

“Masks! Two canisters … Stones!

The shields go up. A pair of shoes, half a brick. More stuff thrown at us. A gremlin arrived from somewhere, he gets battered with truncheons until he stops struggling. A wheel rim rolls in the few metres, separating us from the frenzied mob. It falls short and doesn’t do any damage, thank God.

“Masks!” repeats the sergeant. “Two canisters of tear-gas and then charge! Ready!”

We’ve got some tear-gas left, I thought we’d used it all. Perhaps we have a chance of surviving our own attack. Maybe not all of us.

The dull
thuds
of the tear-gas canisters spread smoke all over the square where the four main ringroads of the Fourteenth meet. It’s supposed to be a chic area, instead it’s a battlefield. We’re wearing gas masks, and the religious among us pray to their Gods. I pray to a random God, it’s not like he’s going to answer anyway.

As soon as the shapeless mass starts to die down, we surge forward, with a blood-curdling cry, and cosh them. We cosh everywhere. I cosh a psycho with a scarf over his mouth and a plank of wood that is bigger than him. Despite the tear-gas he’s still standing. I cosh a woman kneeling who suddenly raises her arms. I prefer not to wait and find out whether she’s pulling out a weapon or simply surrendering. I cosh one of those bastard gremlins who infiltrate armour with shards of glass to slice officer’s tendons. I cosh a half-ogre, his face is a mask of blood. I cosh a bearded fella who’s taken a truncheon from an officer, but he’s too intent on coughing and crying to defend himself.

Inside the smoke, all we do is cosh.

…

“Are you listening?” Cohl’s got this annoying habit of talking when I don’t feel like listening to him.

“What do you want now?”

“Know what you found out, seeing as I
worked
this morning.”

I give him a quick summary, suitable for the whole family, leaving out personal details, ogres and suchlike. In the meantime, the waiter brings a mixed salad to the Inspector, who enthusiastically plunges his fork into it and extracts a rich mouthful of vegetables. He sticks it in his mouth and his face immediately flares up, his eyes wide with shock. Then he gulps down half a bottle of water, draining three glasses in quick succession. The waiter clearly forgot to say “not spicy” to the chef, who prepared a classic bowl of molten steel. Once he’s collected himself, Cohl feels ready to deliver some prime bullshit.

“Well, I think we can trust a person like Mr Valan.”

“This is why I’m a Lieutenant of the Guard and you’re an Inspector of the MetroPo, kid. You understand fuck all.”

“But you said yourself that it was probably all about these lovebirds, so to speak. Come on, what could an elf know of such importance if she’d been disowned for nearly ten years?”

“Who knows. Something exciting perhaps.”

“No. I think the passion lead is more promising.”

“That’s what worries me.” The fact that Cohl is a dick, I mean.