Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets (8 page)

I go back to the report. Just before an army of lawyers—possibly literally called up from hell—arrived at the police station to get her released, Inla stated that she’s been attending a protest “in favour of equal rights for all races, against corruption and bad government”. It’s easy to play the big defender when your
grandfather
summons half the Sulphurous Throne to save your arse. This might be why she left shortly afterwards. Maybe she was able to work out in that brain of hers, strangled by hair and ears, that two and two makes four, and she realised that the people pulling the strings inside that corrupt government were none other than the
noble
elf dynasties. Not that they’d gone to any great lengths to hide it. I finish up Colh’s flat beer.

“Drinking on duty isn’t allowed,” Nohl reminds me, strictly.

“Indeed. You drink like a fish, you ought to stop. Anyway, we’ve got an address that needs checking out.” I look around but can’t see the car. “Where the hell did you park?”

“There’s a carpark two blocks up the road.“

“You
paid for a carpark
?
Two
blocks away?”

“I’m on my lunch break, so…”

“See you there then. I’m not walking two blocks because you’re too dumb to park close to where you have to go.”

I indicate the square, where, naturally, there are no other cars, apart from mine, right in the middle. Parked all wonky.

I stand up and remind the Inspector to pay the bill.

We drive around most of the city before we get to where we need to be. I have to get petrol at one point during our pilgrimage. It’s like watching the lives of the two lovebirds condensed in an afternoon. And it stinks.

It’s still light when we find a nice apartment block at the address Lonny gave me. Seventeenth Level, it’s bound to be nice. The streets are incredibly clean, and the houses have a garden. I wonder how much it costs to get soil all the way up here to create these gardens. The sparkling aviomobile in the driveway is practically ubiquitous, looking all the world as if it’s been washed just after the rain, ready to be shown off. A preposterously gorgeous sexpot, the masterpiece of some talented plastic surgeon smiles at me slyly while taking her cat for a walk, on a lead. I bet Miss Balcony’s husband is a wizened old bird with pots of money and a wizened old cock to match.

As far as I can see, as soon as they fell out of favour with their respective families, our centuries-old young things lived the high life on their liquidation. After a year of this, the bank balance can’t have been very healthy, according to what an old trout with aristocratic airs living across the road told us. She insisted on offering ‘two good police officers’ a cup of tea.

The inside of the house would make anyone want to take up thieving. I reckon even Cohl got a hard-on when he saw the gold and crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the entrance hall. What’s really incredible amongst all this splendour is the gremlin. There’s a fashion amongst the rich to breed gremlins and keep them as pets, to show the skeptical sentients of Saros that, with the right upbringing, the little beasts can be a part of society. So that little green turd is standing in the corner dressed like a pageboy from some long-forgotten era. The old bag—or most likely some unfortunate slave—had put white make-up on its face, and rouged its cheeks. I would laugh at the contrast between the creature’s lost expression, but the thought that the hag spends much more money on food to feed it than I spend on food for myself, kills all the comedy. Normally, the well-to-do get rid of the gremlins after a few months, when they start to show all the characteristics of their personalities. They’re demons at the end of the day, many seem to forget that. Noticing my interest in the creature dressed up to the nines, the woman says smugly, “Our
Jaja
i
th
th
o elegant,
th
o polite. Right,
Jaja
?

“Yeees… Ma-dam…” it answers, before performing a little bow. In order to be so docile, it’s probably drugged up to the eyeballs from morning ’til night. The queen of crow’s feet here is probably prepared to do anything so as not to admit defeat. All things considered, Jaja is probably better off than most who have to choose between their daily bread sor a dose, a dozen levels or so further down.

Following a stream of bullshit about her late husband, prominent businessman and philanthropist, photograph and hagiography, the embalmed mummy finally spills the beans. It turns out that, like any good pensioner, she just adores sticking her beak in other people’s business and talking about it during her weekly bridge game with her cronies. She clearly remembers those two elves, despite it being such a long time ago, because it’s
‘th
o
’
unusual for elves to live outside of their spires. When they moved, the urge to find out where they went was irresistible, and she made a note of their new address. She got it from the removal company and wrote it down in an enormous book containing all the contact details of all the people, most of them dead, she had met during her life. Never mind the filing system at MetroPo. This rich relic’s hypothesis, brimming with artificial optimism, is that the pair needed to live in a neighbourhood which was more…
suited
to them. When she let slip about some trouble with their families, it’s clear that the old lady had sussed the pair out, pigeon-holed and discarded them. Who knows how many bitchy comments were tossed around the bridge circle about the two destitute, disowned elves. They’re probably still making fun of them today.

Four levels further down, life is still worth living. It’s the heart of the city, full of offices, restaurants, theatres, classy shops. The buildings have several floors which keep the ceiling at a safe distance, lighting is a public good. Nectropis is undoubtedly a mess, but it’s still the political and financial capital of the richest and most influential state in this ball of mud floating in the cosmos.

Nefertiti’s directions lead us to the entrance of a luxury apartment building south-east of the cross. I think the facade is illuminated during daylight hours, both because it looks as though it’s been built in relation to an aperture towards the south, and because, if it were always in the decent but timid street lights, the mirrored windows would look pretty ludicrous. At the reception desk there is an economics and business student, he’s found an easy job which pays the rent of some hole several levels further down. When we go in and I flash my badge, he comes over all diligent, puts down his gigantic tome about private law and calls the manager; the latter, who for the past twenty years has kept an extremely organised digital file on all his clients, promises to send us a fax with all the details in ten minutes. Ten mortal minutes Cohl has to fill with conversation.

“So…”

I look at him impatiently.

“Are you from here? Born in Nectropis, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And…”

Oh for the love of God.

“… your father, police officer too?”

“Yep.”

“Still in the force?”

“No. He found a new job.”

“Ah!” He thinks he’s finally found something he can continue the conversation with. “And what does he do?”

“He fertilizes the grass in the graveyard.”

“Oh.” His face clouds with sadness. “I’m sorry…”

“Yep.” I kill the conversation once and for all. The next nine and a half minutes are spent in rigorous silence. I smoke three cigarettes underneath the NO SMOKING sign, just to pass the time.

The fax turns out to be exhaustive, as promised. The unmarried newly-weds lived on the thirteenth floor for two years, during which time nothing much happened. According to the tenant’s contract, Gilder was a dancer with the Hulyen Xen’Atheron company, while Inla described herself as a “painter”, without leaving any additional information. So Gilder went to work for one of the minor dynasties, who presumably hired him to get back at the Lovls. Obviously the manager couldn’t have cared less what these two did for a living, as long as they paid their rent regularly. At a certain point though, they started skipping payments. Six months later they were evicted, but for some reason they weren’t reported to the police. I suppose it was the manager who wanted to avoid any trouble with the elves, even though they had no money. You never know, once they got back in with their families they could have come back and wreak revenge. Unfortunately there was no indication as to their next address.

We have more luck at Hulyen. Nohl is in and out in under twenty minutes, after he begged me to let him do something to break the boredom. He comes back with an address and a leaflet of the opera season. There’s a telephone number written in one corner.

“Your shirt is buttoned-up all wrong. Loverboy.”

Embarrassed, he fixes his buttons.

“Aren’t you Reformed supposed to get married before you screw?”

“Oh, no. Sex is a tribute to Mother, not to Father. Marriage is one of the last goals of illumination, because it combines—“

“Okay, whatever, who cares. What did she tell you this…” I stretch my neck to read the name above the telephone number. “…Marena?”

“Well, Gilder worked here for a couple of years. After that, he only did the odd off-season performance, up until three years ago. Marena told me that the last time he was here, he had an almighty row with the manager, and he was never seen since.”

“What did he want?”

“A new two-year contract.”

“The Xen’Atherons mustn’t have wanted to piss the Feltus off anymore. Address?”

“An apartment on the Ninth.”

“Ah, crap. We’ve been driving around all day and we’re going back there.”

“Well, not exactly. It’s quite a way from Mezzodì. At the other end of the Level.”

“At the Bazaar?” I ask, incredulously. Then I add, sarcastically, “From hero to zero. There’s no blueberry shampoo round those parts.”

We go back to the cars and go down. The Bazaar is a rough area even by the Ninth’s already embarrassing standards. The only thing that stops it from being a complete sewer is that the hundred and eighty is quite nice. The nickname comes from the fact that you can buy almost anything here: drugs, light weapons, sex, black market goods. Let’s say it bridges the gap between the dregs of the lower levels and the growing glitz of the upper levels.

The view from the street is discouraging, even though the building is a fair way from the centre of all the illicit activity. Groups of decrepit sentients swarm backwards and forwards, along with clumos of gremlins and stray animals. The few windows of shops open in the late afternoon are inevitably lit with various shades of red, whether they be fast-food joints, porn video stores or clubs showing off their ‘dancers’ to passersby—commonly referred to as “whore houses” by patrons, rarely classy enough to use the more polite “bordellos”.

A tramp slumped in a corner asks for a few coins by tugging at my trousers and breathing his putrid breath towards my face. Shrugging him off I light a cigarette to get rid of the revolting stench, praying to God that Cohl isn’t looking for a place to park, while the beggar goes back to talking gibberish to a bag of rubbish, his new best friend. Instead the Fiamma pulls up right behind my double-parked car, thank God.

The entrance to the apartment block is an obscene graffiti-covered door, squeezed between a hardware shop with its shutters down and a minimarket that went bankrupt. In the poky waiting room, there’s a bloke staring at a quiz show on a black and white TV that’s more or less my age. The age of the viewer, on the other hand, is a complete mystery. I’m pretty sure he
ought
to be dead. His yellowish skin looks like it’s been stretched over his bones with difficulty, speckled with brown patches of various sizes. Grey hairs emerge disgustingly from his body, seemingly at random, some out of his head, some out of his face, some out of his shoulders and some out of his arms. He’s wearing shorts and a greasy cream-coloured vest, which was probably white once. In one hand he’s clutching the remote control, in the other a pack of filterless Federals, the cigarettes universally recognised as an incentive to stop smoking. It’s so fucking warm.

“Two crowns an hour. I’ve got a clean room too, I know that…” He coughs. “…
your type
likes cleanliness.”

He finishes with an abortion of a laugh, a lascivious ‘eh’, without even looking at us. I’d punch him in the face if he weren’t so repulsive. Cohl takes the lead.

“We aren’t interested in a room. Metropolitan Police.” He shows him his badge.

At last that snot ball looks at us and gets up from the sofa in the ‘reception’.

“Hey. Cops. Hey. Sorry.” He gurgles for a moment and then spits in a basin next to the TV, hitting it spot on with precision that only comes with years and years of practice. I force myself not to look at the contents of the basin.

“What can I do for you? Whores? Eh.”

“No.”

“I’ve already paid my dues, already paid them, eh,” he exclaims, worried, before coughing and hitting another bull’s-eye in the spittoon.

“I’ll pretend I never heard that. We need information.”

“Ah, information. Eh. About what?”

“Elves, a male and a female. They lived here a few years ago,” I interrupt, to stop myself from succumbing to the temptation of looking inside the spittoon. It’s as if he’s offended, the human bogey spits again.

“Eh. Yeah, right, the two asses. Eh. They’re not here anymore, they left. Didn’t have any money, eh.”

“Do you know where they went?”

Coughing fit, spit in the basin.

“I made an offer to the chick, eh. So they could stay. But they were like, ‘no’, eh. Madame Arsey must have preferred the streets, eh.”

“Where. Did. They. Go?”

“I. Don’t. Know.
Eh.
” He smiles like I imagine a slug would smile if it had a humanoid mouth. He’s even got a trace of saliva on his lower lip. At least, I hope it’s saliva. Either way, he’s totally fucked me off. I take my regulation gun out of its holster and disengage the safety.

“Hey. You can’t shoot me. Eh.”

I shoot the TV, and make both Cohl and the slimeball jump out of their skins. The ancient cathode ray tube dies during its first and last explosion of colour.