Armwrestling the Dead

the absurd.

  ‘No,’ replied Harry. ‘I don’t think she knew.’

  ‘What about Courtney?’

  He sipped his drink. ‘Oh, he knows. Whatever it is, he knows. He was expecting us.’

  ‘Correction: he was expecting somebody. But it doesn’t take much to deduce that. For all we know the suitcase might be a red herring.’

  Harry didn’t agree. He said as much.

  Ivan waved at the waitress. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Sure...’ He was getting somewhere with the alcohol.

  ‘Two beers, two rums, and a cigar for my friend here.’

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ confessed Harry. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is - you’re creepy.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That’s okay. Where did you get the money?’

  Ivan smiled out of his new face. ‘Found it in my pocket.’ He wafted a note. Ten bells, one hundred chimes to the bell.

  ‘Blood money,’ said Harry, woozy.

  ‘Right. Who cares? It’s necessary.’

  Their drinks arrived. Harry couldn’t be certain whether he meant the cash or the killing.

  ‘A toast,’ he proposed.

  ‘A toast to what?’

  ‘Who cares...’

  Ivan shook his head. ‘To death,’ he said. ‘To death and...’

  ‘No guilt problem.’

  The bar was full, people loud and close. Smoke drifted through a sense of occasion. An evening paper had passed between them earlier.

  Six dead, forty seriously injured.

  They spent the night in a deserted office block, its floorspace until recently under conversion.

  ‘There is always something bigger,’ stated Harry the next morning over breakfast, deep in bacon, eggs and steam. ‘First rule of any conspiracy; as far as I know universal. Are you going to eat that toast?’

  ‘It must be your ambition to die on a full stomach,’ Ivan noted.

  ‘Yeah, well, I won’t die of starvation. That narrows it down a bit.’

  Ivan shifted irritably in his chair.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Harry queried, glancing round at the other tables.

  ‘This body,’ said the snatcher, ‘has an uncomfortable rectal condition.’

  The fat man nearly choked, taking a moment to compose himself. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Can’t you, er, change it for another?’

  ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m stuck,’ Ivan said. ‘The people here, they’re not compatible. I can’t invade them the way I did this man.’ He tapped his chest.

  The words amounted to a confession, the truth of Ivan’s unpleasant proclivity Harry had found ways not to hear, not to believe. He faced it now, a repugnant evil. And yet an evil, a man toward whom he was sympathetic.

  He wondered about that; about what it made him.

  They sat in silence a while, Harry stirring spoon through coffee.

  ‘They’re different somehow.’ It was not a question. ‘The masked man, who you are now, he was company. Offworld.’

  ‘I have no empathy with the locals...’

  ‘Precisely. Or maybe you have too much.’

  Ivan’s head lifted.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Harry, picking his teeth. ‘What brings you here in the first place? Why my suitcase?’

  ‘Courtney.’

  ‘Yeah. He was first-foot. Vanished on an island to the west, on a world that couldn’t be more different to this one.’

  Ivan brooded, said, ‘I killed his father, the governor of Saturn. The company set me up.’

  ‘And the company’s here. Mother’s here. You know Mother, the chief execs?’

  ‘Of course! We’ve been over that.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Second rule of any conspiracy: the facts are always available, the truth right in front of you, provided you know where to look.’

  Standing, Ivan unrolled a bill and dropped it on the table. ‘Have a doughnut,’ he suggested.

  Harry was nonplussed. ‘Wait a minute. Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s right in front of you,’ Ivan chided, straightening his borrowed collar and grabbing his borrowed coat.

  ‘Wait!’

  Five past eight in the morning and the traffic nose to tail. A cold drizzle darkened sky and pavement, making piebald kerbs and windows. No sign of Ivan. Company assassin? Every thumping wiper blade registered, along with countless AM odours, fresh bread, fresh ink, fresh shirts, ordinary people about their everyday business in a city that to Harry was a throwback, an urban landscape from the early 21st Century.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He gazed down at a man’s ruddy complexion. ‘Yes?’ Bespectacled, tiny, florid. Not much over a metre tall.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ he said, hands in greatcoat pockets, ‘but you look like a man of rare sensibilities, someone I would take pleasure in introducing to my wife. That is, if you’ve no prior engagement. We have an apartment a short drive from here. Pendler Avenue.’

  He spoke the address with pride.

  ‘Your wife?’ Harry was less suspicious than intrigued, and he was very suspicious. So far Moss City had held only unpleasant surprises. This could be another, he thought. Such an approach, however, deserved a result and there was the possibility he might learn something.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, grinning happily. ‘Pamela is sadly housebound these days, but always keen to entertain strangers; especially those of a supernatural nature.’

  That clinched it. He returned the smile, offered his hand and revealed his name, adding, when the formalities were ended, the smaller man introduced as Martin Mortmain, ‘I’d be delighted to meet your wife.’

  Pendler Avenue was exclusive and residential. The Mortmains occupied a penthouse suite with a view of the river, barges idly traversing an elegantly fronted waterway. Martin waved Harry through a second door with a flourish, removing and cleaning his spectacles having separated his guest from his jacket, hung with the greatcoat in a spacious hall cupboard.

  ‘This is the living-room,’ said Martin, the wave taking in an array of baroque furniture, heavy drapes and two ornately framed portraits of a young woman. ‘Please, have a seat. Pamela will be out in a minute.’ Hands clasped, he disappeared through a panelled screen disguising, perhaps, a dining area. The open plan was broken into a number of lesser territories by silk and paper walls, vivid reds, blues, umber, gold, veneers and reliefs rising two thirds of the way to the generous ceiling.

  Harry leaned back into cushions, the chair large and well upholstered.

  There was a parrot in a cage.

  The screens rustled and Martin reappeared, carrying a silver tray laden with teapot, cups and saucers, cakes, biscuits and preserves in small glass jars. He placed this centrally on an oval table one of whose brass legs wobbled from the floor, then positioned himself, comically short on an embroidered chaise longue. A hum of electrics heralded the arrival of Pamela. At the sight of wheels and flowing skirts Harry found he’d stood along with her diminutive husband, who seemed barely able to contain his excitement. Pamela beamed approval, asked them to sit, parked her archaic-looking conveyance, took a silver spoon from the tray and rapped the china pot with its bold design of flowers. She nodded to Martin, who poured.

  Harry accepted his brew and sipped, waiting for this latest interview to be initiated.

  The wasted lady, face crumpled like old parchment, scrutinized him as she helped herself to a generous slice of orange-cake.

  ‘Pamela has so many questions,’ assured Martin, filling his small mouth.

  ‘I’d be pleased to answer them,’ Harry offered politely, feeling his intestines wriggle.

  Would he?

  Pamela adjusted herself. ‘Mr Schroeder,’ she began, dabbing her frail lips with a doily. ‘I don’t
know what Martin has told you of my researches, but I imagine an explanation is in order.’ She quietened her husband with a raised finger. ‘There are many unknowns,’ she said. ‘Many worldly secrets. Information is a privilege, even in this enlightened age. As an example, did you know that recently it has been suggested - and wildly believed, also - that life on our planet was seeded from outer space? Ridiculous, as I’m sure you’ll agree; but such outlandish theories have popular appeal among the less well educated.’ She paused. ‘Life has only one source, Mr Schroeder.’ She straightened. ‘The interior.’

  Harry lowered cup to saucer, saucer to knee. ‘You mean?’

  ‘Precisely! The underworld, the netherworld, those regions below us all, where the souls of our dear departed toil unflaggingly on behalf of their mortal brothers in a constant effort of salvage and replication, gathering materials for the next generation and patiently tending those living forms we grace for however brief a tenure. A veritable army, Mr Schroeder, in which you have the honour of serving. But a forgotten army on a forgotten campaign, for few among the living are either knowledgeable or grateful. Their fate is sealed, I fear, as in disbelief lies dissolution. Thus do our numbers decline over the generations. Why, I remember my home town, a bustling hive of nearly twenty thousand when I was a girl. And now? A ghostly relic! A deserted conurbation whose populace is more accurately guessed than counted, for it is ever in decline. And all through a lack of faith in your own good services.’

  Martin was the colour of radishes, feet swinging clear of the thickly carpeted floor.

  Harry wondered what quality the man had detected in him, dreading there was none and he’d been picked at random, a likely candidate for an unlikely conversation. The chewing in his stomach filled him with an increasing disquiet.