The Gordon Mamon Casebook (17 page)

Riding the escaladder up to ground level—the rampway would be ‘off limits’ until the tower was fastened to the elevator cable—he became glad of the brief scare of seeing the suit of armour … unforewarned, the diorama of vampires, werewolves, and zombies that met him in the building’s foyer could have seriously perturbed him. Now that he knew they were just waxworks, they were robbed of (most of) their shock value. Moving awkwardly between them, he took the rampway to the next level.

* * *

He got another shock when, after two-hundred and seventy-five successive waxworks, he encountered Claudia Iyzowt on the seventeenth-floor landing.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking a step back from her, thereby knocking a sherriff against a bandit and almost tumbling a gunslinger. “I thought you—”

“Would be taller?” Claudia Iyzowt suggested, peering up at him over her lorgnette.

“No, that wasn’t what I—uh, welcome aboard. Is everything to your satisfaction?”

“Near enough. But where do I go to get a cup of coffee?”

Iyzowt’s smile seemed genuine enough, moreso than Col’s; yet Col had sought to make out that the heiress had some form of character defect.
Pots, kettles, low albedo
, Gordon thought to himself, wondering if Col might possibly consider ‘humanity’ as a character defect. Aloud he said, “There’s usually a cafeteria on the second floor. But that’s—let me see, fourteen floors down. Fifteen. If you don’t mind a vending machine, there should be one on this level.”

“Would you recommend the vending machine’s coffee?”

I wouldn’t even recommend the cafeteria’s
, thought Gordon. “Yes, it’s … fairly pleasant.”

“Good. Then perhaps you’d join me for a coffee?”

“That sounds—” The building shook, and a subsonic growl reverberated throughout its structure.
Damn
, thought Gordon, recognising the transformation that signalled fastening of the tower to the cable. Over Iyzowt’s shoulder, he watched as a wall receded, thudding shut against another surface, and then folding itself away, accompanied by other noises of architectural reshaping as the building sealed itself around the now-central elevator cable. It wouldn’t be too many minutes now until the ascent started. He’d better put through that call to Freight, to get the items in the basement properly stowed. He pulled out his handheld, activated the call. Dead.

How could there be no signal? The freight depot was just a few hundred metres away …

“Is something wrong, Mr Milkman?” Mrs Iyzowt asked, noticing Gordon’s consternation.

“
Mamon
,” he replied automatically. “No, it’s—why don’t we go track down that coffee?”

* * *

They were sitting on a plastiwood bench near the vending machine, each drinking a disposable mug of alleged coffee.

“I’m curious,” said Gordon, trying his best not to grimace as he tested, again, whether, like a wine or a cheese, the coffee improved with age. (It didn’t.) “Why the Moon?”

“I’m afraid I’m not really up with current theories of solar system origin, Mr Mailman.”

“
Mamon
. Though please call me Gordon. No, what I meant was: why are you looking to relocate a large waxworks museum to the moon?”

“Oh, I won’t deny I’m expecting the move to be financially advantageous, from a tourism perspective,” replied Iyzowt. “Though I’d like to think of myself, of the museum in fact, as a kind of cultural ambassador. We’ve had settlements on the Moon for forty or fifty years now, but don’t you think the place is still lacking in atmosphere?”

“Well, I—”

“Oh, there’s Lunar Park, in Copernicus, but not much else for tourists anywhere, really. We’ll be setting the museum up in Tycho. Make a change from all those monolithic black office blocks.”

“I hope it works out for you.”

“And it’ll provide a sense of legacy. Which is a bit of a sore point for me, seeing as I was never able to have children.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Gordon, trying to decide if he wasn’t in fact sorrier at having ordered this coffee.

“Oh, it probably would have worked, if we hadn’t had Jeffrey’s tubes tied …”

“Jeffrey?”

“My late husband,” she explained. “He had a rare medical condition. And he was wanting so much to be here, on this trip, but … he didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gordon said again, taking a sip and wincing. “How did it happen?”

“He was in the following aircar, and they ran into turbulence. But I’ll see him again, I suppose, up there.” She cast her eyes heavenward.

Gordon, mentally picking his way back through her words, was about to ask something.

But the building—the lift-module—shook, in a ‘Right, let’s get this party started’ kind of way. Claudia Iyzowt flinched, almost dropping her purported coffee, and Gordon swore.

“Is something wrong, Mr Merkin?”

“
Mamon
,” replied Gordon. “Uh—no, this is how the ascent always commences.” And indeed, there was a slight augmentation of weight, as the freight tower started to haul itself ponderously up thirty-five-thousand-odd kilometres of a heavily reinforced cable that had never broken yet. “It’s just that I’d been meaning to contact Freight, to get them to secure the load in the basement.”

“Basement?”

“Yes. The waxworks on the main floors all looked secure, and there’s a job sheet on each floor confirming the work’s been done to standard, but the items in the basement were loose, and could well be damaged in transit. Plus the load’s supposed to be balanced, to minimise wear on the cable. I’d better go tend to the job myself.”

“Well, that sounds sensible. But what are these items in the basement?”

“Just a couple of crates, and your suit of armour.”

“I don’t have a suit of armour.”

“Yes, you do,” protested Gordon. “It’s down in the basement.”

“Mr Marlin, if I had a suit of armour, I’d know it.”

“You’re sure?”

“
Yes.
Do I look like the sort of person who wouldn’t know if I had a suit of armour?”

“Well … uh, what does that sor—”

Claudia was warming to her topic. “I can assure you, there’s no suit of armour in the collection. Waxworks is all about the challenge of presenting the inanimate as living. Where’d be the challenge in a suit of armour?”

“Oh. But if it’s not
your
 …” Gordon felt a sinking sensation, completely overriding the rising sensation of the lift-module as a whole, as the gravity of the situation struck home.
That ‘you-will-meet-certain-death’ voice message on the handheld
. “Listen, Mrs Iyzowt,” he said, trying not to sound alarmed. “I’d better go and check on this. And I’d suggest you please wait in your quarters, and not open the door until I get back.”

“Is there something wrong, Mr Ma—?”

“Please. Call me Gordon. And I hope it’s nothing. But I really
do
need to check this.” He excused himself, and moved rapidly to the downward rampway.

* * *

When he reached the basement, he found only the two crates. The suit of armour was missing.

And when he returned to the vending machine, then checked in Mrs Iyzowt’s quarters, she was missing, too. As was most of her door.

* * *

Gordon wasn’t sure what kind of damage would be inflicted on a plastimahogany door by a rampaging villain in a suit of armour, but he was fairly certain that the damage before him was exactly that damage. And of the heiress to the Iyzowt fortune herself, there was no sign. She’d been in the room, though. The cooling mug of vending-machine coffee stood undisturbed on an occasional table near the room’s viewing window.

He pulled out his handheld, switched it to ‘Forensic’ mode, and waved it around the room in an attempt to find clues, DNA, fingerprints. The handheld took a minute to announce the detection of traces of five humans: Gordon himself, Iyzowt, and three long-time members of Skyward’s cleaning detail. Which, regrettably, made a certain kind of sense: suits of armour didn’t have fingerprints.

No extraneous blood, nor skin cells. Not even a length of hair.

A sudden sway in the freight tower’s motion momentarily unnerved Gordon, and he turned to check the doorway behind him: nothing. Probably just turbulence: they weren’t yet clear of Earth’s atmosphere, and the space elevator’s braided filament was not immune to a little atmospheric push-and-shove. But the scene of the crime was never a good place to loiter.

And, obviously, there was the small matter of Claudia Iyzowt herself. As the only staff member in the 20-storey freight tower, he plainly had a duty-of-care towards her. It wouldn’t do to cower meekly in some hidey-hole, while she was in the hands of … who?

He took the escaladder down two flights, and let himself into a dimly-lit storage room with three connecting doorways and a disconcerting conclave of waxwork pirates in sundry menacing poses. After sweeping the room, and those adjoining, for signs of life and detecting only himself, he applied his mind to the tasks at hand, which were, as he saw it: (1) to not get killed, (2) to locate and rescue Claudia Iyzowt in some manner commensurate with task (1), and (3) to apprehend or otherwise immobilise whoever might be the occupant of the suit of armour, provided that this could be effected without breach of (1) and, if possible also, (2). Viewed in this way, the problem constituted a puzzle, and Gordon
liked
puzzles. (Though he generally preferred them when they didn’t involve all this pain-of-death-or-serious-injury stuff.)

So: how to approach it?

The voice messages he’d received, foreshadowing his appointment with certain death—quite aside from however paradoxically, unfairly vague was the concept of ‘certain death’ itself—had sounded not merely sinister, but
angry
. Which took a lot of doing, considering the messages had featured a mechanical voice. Anger obviously made it personal, very personal. Gordon wondered who might hate him with sufficient intensity to not only wish him dead, but to go to substantial lengths to give effect to said wish.

Discounting for the moment certain ugly incidents involving lost luggage, Gordon could only imagine one class of people who might hold such an aspiration towards him. Murderers. And in particular, one small subset of the set of murderers.

He turned his mind to reviewing—in a totally non-spoilerish fashion—the outcomes of his previous cases.

Formey’s killer was clearly out of the equation. Kurtz’s attacker was, so far as Gordon knew, out of the system, safe in Alpha Centauri’s maximum-security facility, Alphatraz. And Havmurthy’s assailant, Gordon was sure, was still being questioned by the Saturnian police force. It might, in principle, be possible that an accomplice could be acting on behalf of one of these, but Gordon’s intuition said otherwise …

Well, it fitted. The apparent
modus operandi
, the professional’s keen desire to stay in the game, the ruthless drive to settle any scores. When the other killers were eliminated from consideration, it left just the hit-man.

“Haier,” Gordon murmured to himself, only conscious in retrospect of the noises from the hallway.

“Correct,” said a voice that was unrecognisable as Gunther Haier’s. The suit of armour now advanced slowly through the room’s doorway. “Though there’s been a name change, along with everything else.”

Gordon retreated through the thicket of pirate figures, backing towards one of the room’s connecting doors, trying to remember if the door opened inwards, or outwards. “Is that so?” he asked. “Why?”

Then Gordon pushed through, and started running.

Behind him, Haier—the suit of armour—was lumbering in pursuit, explaining. “Business reasons. Marketing. Image, if you will. To a hit-man, image is
everything
. So you can call me—”

“Didn’t think you hit-men cared about image,” Gordon called back, reaching the hallway and trying to choose between the rampway and the escaladder.
Upwards
, he decided quickly. Although he wasn’t good with heights, he was even less good with impending violent death. And if Gordon was as shrewd a judge of homicidal character as he fancied himself to be, then Gunther Haier in a suit of armour was all about impending violent death.

At the foot of the escaladder, Gordon turned. That last thing Haier had said had piqued his curiosity. Despite himself he asked, “Call you what?”

“My new name,” Haier bellowed, with evident pride and not a little menace, “is Sir Tin Death.”

* * *

Gordon willed his heart to quiet its thudding: the unaccustomed combination of exercise and adrenaline was taking its toll. And clinging to the rungs of the relentlessly-ascending escaladder, above a dozen or more storeys of clear drop to a plasticrete floor, wasn’t helping any, either.

No sound of pursuit. And Haier (Gordon couldn’t persuade himself to think of his old adversary in terms of the other’s new sobriquet of Sir Tin Death), with the fifteen kilograms or so of metal cladding he now sported, was not equipped to move silently. Gordon had switched from rampway to staircase to escaladder as he sought to put some distance between himself and his armoured foe. Still, he found it difficult to believe that he had so easily thrown the hit-man off his trail.

Gordon was powerfully conflicted. He should be doing everything within his power to find, and to rescue, Claudia Iyzowt, whom Haier had abducted. But it was hard to see how he could match it against Gunther Haier. The hit-man probably had decades of practice in the arts of brutality; the nearest Gordon had ever come to any kind of combat training was when, as a child, he’d signed up for lessons in what he’d believed to be karate. (He’d given it up after four classes, wondering when they were going to quit with all that singing and move on to the good stuff.) No, if he was going to beat Old Ironsides, he’d have to outwit him.

Yet Haier was shrewd, as Gordon knew to his cost. A man who could make a bloodless getaway look like a murder was someone whose cunning was not to be underestimated.