The City in These Pages

by

JOHN GRANT

Introduction by David Langford

Introduction

“The city was a woman.”

That one lyric line, not actually to be found in The City in These Pages, brings it all back: the whole hard-boiled, wisecracking ambience of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct stories. Back in my Oxford college days I was introduced to this addictive paper drug by fantasy-author-to-be Michael Scott Rohan, who took great delight in the maniacally complex caper plots of such McBain thrillers as The Heckler and Fuzz.

These touched on a slightly painful point for me, since I have a lifelong hearing problem and both books revolve around that master criminal known as the Deaf Man. His aliases include L. Sordo (El Sordo), Mort Orecchio, Sonny Sanson, and Taubman: translations are left as an exercise for students of, respectively, Spanish, Italian, French and German. Whether this recurring bane of the 87th actually needs his trademark hearing aid is highly debatable. Eventually accepting him as a role model, I couldn’t resist stealing the title of his third exploit for a widely unremembered collection of my SF articles: Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man.

Meanwhile, John Grant entered my life in August 1977 under his civilian name Paul Barnett, seeking to commission a popular-science project for David & Charles Ltd. He’d previously worked in publishing with Michael Scott Rohan (see how all things are intertwingled), and Mike unwisely recommended me as a physicist who knew roughly where to put the semicolons. This led to my first solo book and to rapid friendship with Paul, or John as I’d better call him here.

“The city was a woman.” In the mid-1980s we gleefully collaborated on a spoof disaster novel called Earthdoom!, featuring every possible planetary calamity including the fact that John wrote the opening chapter and so got in first with the McBain pastiche we both wanted to write. “She was the kind of woman who can swim with the fishes of the sea, fly through the clouds with the birds of the air, tunnel through the ground like the moles of the soil, infest people’s follicles like the lice of the scalp…”

(Which reminds me that not long after Earthdoom! appeared, I worked as a freelance editor on Terry Pratchett’s spoof-noir fantasy Guards! Guards! and found that practically the only notable police-procedural allusion he’d omitted from his draft was: “The city was a woman.” Prodded insistently by me, Terry duly put it in and added a new riff of his own. This may be my most lasting contribution to Literature.)

The City in These Pages opens more as gentle homage than pastiche, light-heartedly echoing the slick humour of the 87th Precinct stories without any element of mockery. McBain displaced his setting slightly from the real New York by calling the city Isola, of course meaning (Manhattan) Island. John Grant does the same by using the city’s pre-1665 name New Amsterdam, and additionally switching to the 14th Precinct—a change which may well carry great numerological significance, but not to me.

A couple of typically idiosyncratic precinct cops, new characters rather than established McBain figures in plastic disguise, soon find themselves investigating the doings of a flamboyant villain or (maybe) social benefactor who becomes known as the Humor Guy. The Deaf Man likes to perplex the 87th by sending obscure clues by mail or phone (“You’ll have to speak louder…I’m a little hard of hearing.” Immediate consternation). The Humor Guy shapes his killings with elaborate black-comedy symbolism, beginning with the notorious drug and vice lord who’s found sheathed in a giant condom.

As the serial killings escalate from the bizarrely improbable to the outright physically impossible, The City in These Pages shrugs its shoulders and bursts out of the familiar Ed McBain template. The John Grant who writes such fluently funny pastiche gives way to an alter ego with larger concerns. This is the Grant who co-edited the monumental 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy with John Clute, and consistently displayed a special fascination and insight when dealing with metafictional, self-referential works where levels of reality can intersect and entangle in what Douglas Hofstadter (writing in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) has called Strange Loops. Likewise, this is the Grant whose own ambitious fantasy novel The World (1992) features just such a short-circuiting of realities as two universes merge, leaving some of its lazier readers—and critics—as baffled as an 87th Precincter confronted with more of the Deaf Man’s taunting “clues”.

A conscious blurring of the distinction between actual and invented realities is central to the many-valued Grantian “polycosmos”, roughly analogous to Michael Moorcock’s multiverse. This is touched upon even in what would seem at first glance to be the routine fantasy novelizations of our author’s twelve-volume Lone Wolf sequence (1989-1994), spun off from the bestselling choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks by Joe Dever but infused—especially in later instalments of the series—with that personal Grant mythology.

It is almost always dangerous to take a John Grant text at face value. Not all his narrators are reliable, even to themselves. Memory and perception may lie, as underlined in the finale of The City in These Pages. Here “untrue” versions of events are consciously chosen in response to a “reality” that is not only unacceptably seeded with new and capricious clues—the Humor Guy still echoing the Deaf Man at an altogether more godlike level—but clearly inconsistent with the equally fictional “reality” which precedes the story’s core of discontinuity. As in the apartment building where one 14th Precinct cop lives, individually plausible components assemble into an impossible Escher design. Local consistency, but global paradox. That’s what happens when you allow the nice clean pages of reality to fall into the inky hands of an Author…

Returning to Ed McBain himself, let us not forget that the man behind the pseudonym—Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino (1926-2005)—also produced three science fiction juveniles, the adult SF novel Tomorrow’s World (1956, alias Tomorrow and Tomorrow), and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. When he wrote as McBain, the deceptively light touch and deft handling of genre made it easy to underestimate his real literary skill…something that can also be said of John Grant.

Everyone knows that sense of relief that pulses through an audience when the boring introductory speaker sits down at last and the main attraction can begin. So be of good cheer, and let’s hear it for John Grant. But don’t expect him to tell you that the city was a woman.

—David Langford

The City In These Pages

The way it all started was that one spring night someone left Ratty Scarlatti on the steps of City Hall. Well, not actually on the steps, but near enough. A cop called Patrucci was intending to give a ticket for illegal parking—right under the sign that said very clearly NO PARKING—to a rather beaten-up looking blue-green Chevrolet, 1983 model or thereabouts, when he noticed it wasn’t empty. Patrucci rattled on the window a bit, and then leaned forward for a better look.

It was dark, right? There was a streetlight out. It had been flickering the night before and somebody called the New Amsterdam Services, but of course no one came. So Patrucci couldn’t see what was so odd about the guy sitting in the driver seat until he put his face close to the glass and peered.

What was so odd about the guy sitting in the driver seat was that he was wearing a condom.

Not a regular condom, you understand. This was a giant one, big enough to be worn out to the Metropolitan Museum if that was what you so desired. It was made of latex and there were holes punched out of the little baggie at the top so you could speak and breathe through them, not that Ratty Scarlatti was needing to use these. Ratty Scarlatti wasn’t going to be needing any speaking or breathing holes ever again, not in this world, anyway, as the cop swiftly ascertained when he pulled the Chevy door open and Ratty Scarlatti, condom and all, would have fallen out on top of Officer Patrucci’s feet had it not been that his hands were cuffed, through extra holes torn in the latex, to the wheel.

Patrucci would have added failure to wear a safety belt in a built-up area to the schedule of Ratty Scarlatti’s charges had Ratty Scarlatti had the common decency still to be alive.

As it was, Patrucci, who at this stage didn’t have the first clue that the stiff in latex was a Mob boss, let alone that this was Ratty Scarlatti hisself, no less, got on his standard-issue cop radio and reported his discovery to someone who’d know what to do.

City Hall is on Lewis-and-Clark Street, so it was the 14th Precinct that got the call, and very soon the 14th Precinct, in the persons of Detective Sergeants Moto and Pincus, was on the spot, bending down and looking into the car at the condom-shrouded figure of Ratty Scarlatti but not touching anything because the m.o. and the scene-of-crime crew hadn’t gotten here yet, being stuck in the traffic jam on Eighth thanks to the burst sewer there.

“Piece-o’-shit car,” said Moto, stepping back.

“Still on the road after—what?—twenty years,” Pincus pointed out, kicking a tire.

“Probably got nothing on the clock.”

“After twenty years?”

“Yeah. Nobody’d want to be seen driving a piece-o’-shit car like this. Probably been sitting in someone’s garage all this time, them hoping no one’d know they were fool enough to buy it.”

“My mother used to drive one of these.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You insulting my mother?”

And so they stomped their feet and they waited and they blew air to watch the clouds of steam dissipate and they stomped their feet and waited, and Officer Patrucci watched them and thought that if detectiving was all this easy maybe he should try for it even though girlfriend Molly told him he was too stupid ever to pass the exams.

Finally Doc Faunce, the m.o., pulled up in his car, which was a whole lot nicer than the Chevy Ratty Scarlatti, condom and all, had been dumped in, and a minute behind him came the SOC guys, who’d taken longer to get through the hold-up because they had their lights flashing and Doc Faunce didn’t.

“Shoulda come by subway, Doc,” remarked Moto by way of greeting to the m.o.

“Piss off,” said Faunce, bending into the car door to get a better look at Ratty Scarlatti, who still nobody knew who he was. “He’s dead.”

“We guessed that,” said Moto, the more talkative of the pair from the 14th. “Any idea why? When?”

Doc Faunce took a deep breath. “Not long. An hour, maybe two. Looks like he’s been strangled, but I can’t tell for sure till I get him back to the morgue.”

“And I thought he was just sticking his tongue out at Officer Patrucci here,” said Moto.

“Like people do to cops,” added Pincus.

“You guys practice your routine?” said Faunce, standing back from the car.

“Nah,” said Moto. “We’re just naturally talented.”

Faunce jerked a thumb toward the two SOC guys, one of whom wasn’t a guy at all but a gal, and a kind of shapely one too when observed through her dark blue uniform pants, as everyone spent an appreciative moment noticing. “You people can take over now.”

The SOCOs—the pretty woman and the guy that afterward no one could remember what he looked like—took over.

Moto and Pincus were on the scene long enough that the cold spring dawn was just beginning to think of brightening up the atmospheric soup above New Amsterdam. Then, deciding there was nothing else useful they could do here, they got back in their unmarked and headed off home to the Precinct.

They hadn’t gone three blocks when the radio spat at them.

“What the—?” said Moto, who was driving. “They can’t wait five minutes to tell us to our faces?”

Unnecessarily, he grappled with his right hand for the radio and tossed it into Pincus’s lap. Pincus, who’d been reaching for the radio himself, dropped it on the floor between his feet.

“You know how many germs’ll be on this thing now?” Pincus reached down to pick it up. “You know how many germs I’m going to be sticking in my ear?”

“I’ll count the echoes,” said Moto, concentrating on easing to a stop at a stop light.

It was Helen at Dispatch, as they’d known it would be.

“We got a positive I.D. on that…” She burst into giggles.

Moto and Pincus exchanged looks. The light turned green. Moto moved the car smoothly forward again.

“I just can’t say it,” Helen added when she’d got her voice back under control again. “My boyfriend’s not going to believe this.”

Moto and Pincus exchanged looks again. Helen had a voice like an angel, but that was about the only thing she had going for her. She had a face like a Republican politician’s and a figure like you see actresses with on the fronts of the tabloids at supermarket counters when their lives are supposed to be going all to hell. Yet Helen’s love life was a legend all over the Precinct.

Go figure, as the man said.

The two cops in the car wondered if this week’s boyfriend was the kind of upstanding citizen Helen should be blabbing police business to, then both decided not to worry about it any longer. The info would be all over the newspapers soon enough anyway. Sometimes the cops keep back little details about murders in the hope of tricking a suspect somewhere down the line into letting something slip, but finding a stiff wearing a giant condom and nothing else was not one of those occasions. The fact that Ratty Scarlatti had been discovered with a briefcase full of papers on his lap, which briefcase was now sitting in the back of this very same unmarked 14th Precinct car—now, maybe that was something the papers wouldn’t get told for a while.

“The man who was wearing protective clothing,” prompted Pincus into the mouthpiece. He suddenly wondered why he was holding the radio to his ear anyway. Moto could’ve just left it in its little dinky mounting module on the dash. Stupid dumb Jap. Stupid dumb himself for accepting the thing.

“Yeah. Right. Him,” said Helen, giggling again. “One of the SOCOs radioed in she recognized him.”

“Why’n’t she tell us?” said Pincus.

“She wasn’t sure. Not ‘til later.”

“She might of given us a clue.” Pincus had an image of the SOC woman’s face. She was a pretty one, all right. Even in the dim light you could tell that. Not as pretty as his Laretta, he reminded himself, and not as well upholstered in the places the upholstery should go, but pretty nonetheless.

“She said she felt intimidated.”

“Huh? I’m not the intimida—”

“Not you, asshole. By the big lunk.”

Pincus flashed a glance sidelong at his partner. Moto was impassive, his flat Japanese face like a cliff wall in the flashing blue and red lights from the front of one of the strip joints on Brubaker Street.

“He scares the shit out of me too,” Pincus lied. The lieutenant had had a word with his people maybe three weeks ago about what they said on the radios, this being an era of telecommunicative hackers and all. “Keeps things formal, so you wouldn’t be embarrassed if your words were quoted back at you,” is what he’d said. Everyone had nodded politely and said that, yessir, they’d be certain to make sure they did that in future, and then quietly forgotten the whole harangue.

“Yeah, well,” said Helen.

“Who is he, then?” said Pincus.

“The vic? That’s Ratty Scarlatti you were looking at.”

“Thought he looked kind of familiar,” rumbled Moto, breaking his silence at last.

Pincus just let a whistle of breath come out of his lips.

Ratty Scarlatti. Now there was a name to conjure with in New Amsterdam. Anywhere below Simon Street was Ratty’s territory. He kept it well supplied with all the latest consumable goods from South America and Afghanistan and far-flung places like that. South America was where most of his hookers came from too, with a few shipped in from the Orient just to spice things up for johns who were anyway mostly too smashed out of their skulls to care what the decorative embellishments looked like so long as they could find something to stick their dicks into. Ratty had plenty of other pots on the boil as well, not just in New Amsterdam but all the way from shore to shining shore, and often enough those pots had a habit of frothing over so people ended up shot dead in alleys. New Amsterdam’s Finest had been after him for years, as had the Feds, and no one so far had been able to pin as much as a parking ticket on him. Rumor was he was well connected in the upper echelons of those who guard our safety.

“Gotta be Halloran,” said Pincus to Moto after he’d thanked Helen for the information and securely affixed the radio piece back into its natty little stabilizer clip someone had been paid to design yet which always nipped Pincus’s fingers. It nipped them again tonight, too.

Moto shook his big head. “Not Halloran,” he said. “Halloran’s got no sense of humor. He got Ratty whacked, he’d just have his goons dump him in the Seminole so’s he’d never be found. Whoever did Ratty, he’s laughing about it.”

“Ha fucking ha,” said Pincus.

They were getting close to the Precinct now, and the muscles in Moto’s forearms were tensing in the manner of one who fully expects, but is hoping not to lose his temper over, some asshole to have parked his gas-guzzling SUV smack in front of the entrance to the Precinct’s underground parking so none of the cops could get in or out.

Pincus let his own train of thought continue. “I wonder where you get condoms that big?” he said. “Can’t see the average drug store holding them. Can’t be much demand for them that size.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Moto, voice prim.

“I believe you,” said Pincus. “And you get your pants specially tailored too, right?”

“Uh-huh,” assented Moto. There wasn’t an SUV parked in front of the entryway, mirabile dictu, and he was guiding the unmarked down the ramp. This was about the first time since they’d left the environs of City Hall that they’d been illuminated by just plain, straightforward white light, not strobing colors fashioned in a caricature of the female form. The thing was, neither of them had noticed it. The 14th wasn’t one of those parts of the city you could have a thin skin in.

“I want a look in that case of his, too,” said Pincus, climbing out of the car once Moto had parked it in its own demarcated area. A couple of other cops were watching them. The news had already got out there was something big in the wind and Pincus and Moto were the ones lucky enough to catch it. Or unlucky enough, depending how things worked out.

“What was the name of that SOCO again?” said Moto, reaching into the back seat for the attaché, which was made of brown leather and looked like it had seen many years of service. It had a brass combination lock on it, and the brass was shiny from the polish of frequent fingers turning the little knurled number knobs. The SOCOs had already booked it in and dusted it—no fingerprints, someone had wiped it clean real careful—so Moto didn’t have to be too careful about how he handled it.

The other cops were still watching. Pulling back out of the car, leather case in hand, Moto both grinned and gave them the finger. It was hard to know which of the two messages was the real one, Pincus mused. Being a Japanese detective called Moto wasn’t an easy gig here in the 14th Precinct. When Moto first arrived, transferred across town from the 27th, he meekly accepted the Mr. Moto gags for about an hour and a half before one of the bulls, the one who’d thought himself the hilariously funniest, had found himself staring at the inside of a toilet bowl from about two inches under the water level. After that the other cops at the 14th learned to resist temptation and keep their lips zipped. Moto was big. Not sumo wrestler big, all lard and creases, but big of bone and muscle. He could pick a perp up by the throat one-handed and not break a sweat, and Pincus had seen him do it.

“Karen,” said Pincus. “That was her name.”

“You get a last name?”

“Prestantra. It was on her sleeve, remember?”

“It was?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t notice. Pretty face. Nice smile.”

“Cute ass.”

“That too.”

“Shame her coat covered up her—”

“Odd name, Prestantra.”

Pincus shrugged. “No odder than most.”

“You see any rings on her fingers?”

“Yeah. Ring finger, right hand.”

“Divorced?”

“Looked like it.”

“Hm,” said Moto.

The Loo was in his office when they got inside, waiting for them. He’d obviously not long arrived before them, because his hair, such of it as there was, was sticking out at crazy angles like he’d decided to go punk, him at an age when he ought to know better. The fact the tufts of hair were bright red added to the illusion. It wasn’t every day of the week Ratty Scarlatti got himself shot, so someone had obviously thought to phone up the Loo in his bed with Mrs. Loo (one presumed) and tell him in case he wanted to hightail it down to the Precinct to keep his thumb on the thrum of developments, so to speak.

“Moto. Pincus. In here,” said the Loo, jerking his head at them in a beckon, no time for the social niceties.

The two cops obediently entered the glass-sided office and found themselves places to sit. “Lieutenant P.R. M’Troyd” said the sign on the Loo’s desk, but they called him Patrick, though said with the superficial respect that befits one addressing a superior officer.

Patrick M’Troyd’s questions were brief and to the point.

“So basically,” he summed up after a couple minutes, “all you know is what Helen told me on the phone? Stupid woman couldn’t stop snickering about the condom.”

The expression on the Loo’s face told them he found giant condoms about as funny as poverty in the Third World.

“Right,” said Pincus.

“And you think it was Marcus Halloran set it up?”

“Uhuh.”

The Loo leaned forward and looked at Pincus earnestly.

“You really think Halloran would be that stupid?”

“Yes,” said the two cops in unison.

M’Troyd was Irish. Halloran was Irish. M’Troyd had the prejudice that he thought all Irish people were more intelligent than the common run of humanity. He was just about willing to make an exception for Marcus—born Sean, but with pretensions—Halloran, but only just about.

“Set off a turf war?” said the Loo. “Halloran’s got to know killing Scarlatti’s going to do that.”

“Maybe it’s what he wants,” offered Moto, playing devil’s advocate for the sake of it, because he didn’t think Halloran had done this either, stupid or not. “Coulda figured that, Ratty out of the picture, Ratty’s organization’s going to be in chaos a while, everyone jostling and squabbling for who gets to take over, Halloran can wipe half of them out before they even notice.”

This time it was Pincus who objected. “Ratty had things set up in case of something happening to him. Gian Giolitto’s all ready to step into his shoes.”

“Ally Stancchi’s not going to like that.”

“Stancchi can either like it or find himself at the bottom of the river.”

“True.”

“You two finished talking politics yet?” said the Loo.

“About,” conceded Moto.

“Good. Say it wasn’t Halloran, who could it be?”

The two homicide cops looked at each other, faces blank.

“Beats me, Patrick,” said Pincus after a beat.

“Maybe it was Giolitto,” said Moto. “Got impatient waiting around for the boss to retire, so hurried along the process a little.”

Pincus shook his head. “Giolitto’s loyal. Was loyal, I guess.”

“Coulda been a random killer,” said Moto reluctantly. “Sicko looking around to kill someone, just happened to pick Scarlatti.”

The Loo snorted to indicate what he thought of that, which wasn’t much. The dead man had rarely had himself a crap without two or three goons in attendance in case someone had hid a bomb in the toilet roll. Scarlatti hadn’t gotten to where he’d gotten to by being careless of his own life and limb.

It raised an interesting question, and one that all three men thought of simultaneously.

Pincus voiced it. “So where was his muscle this whole time he was being strangulated and stuffed into his, uh, body bag?”

“Maybe you’re right, Moto,” said the Loo, tapping the surface of his desk with a blue ballpoint pen he’d plucked out of the dainty little lavender plastic desk tidy Mrs. Loo had given him two Christmases ago and which he had to use lest she call by the Precinct unannounced. “Giolitto’s the only one could draw off the old man’s goons long enough. Offer them a better place in the hierarchy once he takes over, that sort of thing.”

“Still don’t seem right,” said Pincus.

“Don’t seem right to me neither,” Moto said, even though it was him as had come up with the idea. “Giolitto’s got no more sense of humor than Halloran has, and what we’re looking for here is a…a humor guy.”

Scarlatti might have been willing to order the knocking off of innocent men, women and children if business or even just whim dictated it was the best thing to do, but for all that he was a good Catholic, no surprises there with a name like Scarlatti hung on him. Every Sunday, rain or shine, it was twice a day to Mass with Mrs. Scarlatti and all the little Scarlattis, of whom there were an indeterminate but ever growing number precisely because Ratty was a good Catholic. Unless it was some bizarre coincidence, of the kind cops learn not to give too much credence to, whoever had transported Ratty Scarlatti to his final resting place inside of a giant condom had been making a statement of some kind, a derisory mocking of the dead. Like Moto had just said, whoever they were looking for was a humor guy.

Sick humor, but humor.

“We could just leave it,” said Pincus slowly, thinking out loud. “Walk away with our hands clean. This humor guy’s done the city a good turn, maybe?”

“The shitsheets,” said M’Troyd, referring to New Amsterdam’s two daily newspapers, and not affectionately, “would have themselves a circus. Prominent citizen slain, cops helpless and incompetent in face of mystery crime.” He wrung his hands to indicate a tabloid journalist trying to think of a new synonym for “brewery”. “Next thing we know we have His Honor on our necks.”

The three men nodded in shared misery.

“So,” continued the Loo, “right now it’s me on your necks. You need more feet on the ground, ask me and I’ll get them for you. Okay?”

“He didn’t even ask for a look at Ratty’s briefcase,” said Moto a few minutes later as he and Pincus were getting themselves some much-needed coffee. The coffee at the Precinct was pretty bad, but not quite bad enough that you remembered how bad it was before making yourself a cup of it. Then, as the first waft of its vaguely rancid fumes hit your nose, gloom soon followed.

They’d decided, before the Loo had kicked them out of his office, that Pincus would try to get the attaché case open while doing the minimum of gross physical damage to it and its snazzy brass combination lock; as he was thus engaged, Moto would hit the internet and the phones to see what he could find out about giant condoms, their manufacturers, their retailers, and whether any record was ever kept of purchases of what the three men had agreed must inevitably be specialty purchases. On this latter aspect none of them was optimistic. Stood to reason that if you bought something as blatant as a giant condom you’d not want it to show up in your credit card records—otherwise, next thing you knew you’d start getting junk mail from merchants of the generally undesirable, which could be embarrassing if the postman or your neighbors or your spouse read the outsides. Still, it was somebody’s job to go through the standard routine, and tonight it was Moto’s.

“Can’t see our man leaving a trail behind him,” said Moto grumpily as the water heated.

“You’re right,” said Pincus, thinking his partner’s mind was still running along the lines of the embarrassing junk mail.

“Whoever pulled this stunt,” Moto went on, oblivious to Pincus’s misconception, “was no bonehead.”

Pincus thought about making a joke concerning boneheads and giant boners, decided against it. “What makes you say that?”

“Think of the planning involved,” said Moto. “First you got to watch your target to try to find a time when he’s not got more muscle wrapped around him than Charles Atlas. That ain’t easy, because the goons tagging behind Scarlatti’ll have been keeping their eyes out for people doing just exactly that. Okay, so you work out when the coast is going to be clear. Anyone who just wanted a quick hit, vanish fast before the vengeance squad gets ahold of them, they’d just put a bullet through Ratty’s head and be done with it. But not our guy. He wants to do more than wipe out the vic, he wants to tell the world what a clever fellow he is. So he’s got to find someplace when Ratty’ll be alone long enough for the more leisurely operation of strangulation to take place. Then he’s got to have even more time than that, to get the body away for wrapping in its latex sheath. Finally, he’s got to drive to City Hall with a condom-clad stiff in his front seat. That takes planning—a fuck of a lot of planning. And intelligence, like I said.”

Pincus decided against the obvious “condom-clad stiff” joke as well. “You think this was a single-handed job?”

He winced as soon as he’d asked the question.

The big man shrugged. He’d made his coffee and the smell had reached him. The corners of his mouth were habitually turned down, but now they’d been dragged down even further than usual. “It’s the most likely thing.”

“Someone ordered a hit?”

Moto hummed through his nostrils a moment, then shook his head. “Seems to me like it’s more personal than that.”

“Someone specified the kind of hit they wanted?”

“Could be.” Clearly Moto didn’t think so. Neither, on reflection, did Pincus. Hitmen have long life expectancies—if they do, which many of them don’t—because they’re cautious about their professional undertakings. Shooting someone down in the middle of the street in broad daylight might not seem cautious to you or me, but that’s what it is. A simple operation. In all the panic and screaming, the chances of a good eye-wit description are just about zero. A quick in and out, and first thing after that anyone knows is you’re on the plane to a city a thousand miles away for the next quick and easy job. Most professional killers, asked to strangle a target and wrap him in a giant condom and dump him on the steps of City Hall, they’d just laugh out loud and tell the prospective purchaser of their services to go look somewhere else for a sucker.

“Nothing like intelligence to make the world go round,” said Pincus idly.

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” Pincus picked up his plastic cup, which scalded his hand. The sides squeezed inward, threatening to spill hot coffee onto his fingers. He raised the cup gingerly to his lips and sipped diagnostically: just like always, whatever animal had pissed the black liquid was suffering severe kidney damage. “If you and me were more intelligent, Moto, we’d not be standing here drinking this stuff.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Nah, we’d be off somewhere hot, lounging by a pool, drinking chilled margaritas and doing our best to help Homo sapiens evolve into the next phase of its existence.”

“Screwing a lot, you mean?”

“That’s the definition of evolution for you,” said Pincus. “Screwing a lot. That’s why intelligence is such a big survival factor in a species.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Gotta be. Look around you.” Pincus waved an arm. All they could see was a lot of sweaty cops wishing they weren’t doing the night shift tonight and looking somewhat less intelligent than the denizens of the New Amsterdam Zoo reptile house, but the principle was, he felt, valid nonetheless. “Look what intelligence has done for good old Hom. sap.”

Moto was pouring his coffee down the sink. “Right.”

“We’re the dominant species on the planet. We’re on the threshold of the stars. We can cure just about any imaginable disease.”

“We can wrap dead bodies in giant condoms.”

“That too,” agreed Pincus, warming to his theme. “What distinguishes us from all the other animals on the planet is we’re intelligent. It’s the greatest species-survival factor evolution knows.”

“You think?”

“Sure I do.”

Moto, coffee disposed of, leaned his butt against the sink, screwed up his eyes. “Often I wonder if that’s getting the whole thing the wrong way round.”

“Huh?”

“What if, all over the universe, intelligence isn’t any species enhancer? Instead, it’s the kiss of death to any species unlucky enough to catch it, like one of those systemic poisons you kill ants with?”

“What do you mean?”

“This planet’s filled to busting with human beings. Why? Because we’re intelligent. We weren’t intelligent, we’d be just another interesting ape running around happily on the plains of Africa, maybe a few millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of us all told. No reason for our species ever to die out. We could still be here—maybe evolved out of all recognition, but still us—when the sun went cold. As it is, though, we’re in a race to see if we blow ourselves to pieces first or turn the planet into such a oven with all the shit our industry and cars cough out that we all get killed off. That’s where our intelligence has brought us, my friend.”

“Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?” said Pincus, trying to make a joke of this.

“What’s to be cheerful about? In a century, maybe less, I reckon there’ll be just a few millions of us left, eking out a living at the poles. A few centuries after that, could be none of us left at all. Give or take a few million years, maybe the planet’ll recover itself, and then it’ll be some other species’ turn to get intelligent so it can fuck everything up all over again.”

“Jeez.”

“Just saying, is all. And maybe the same thing happens everywhere in the universe. Intelligence makes a species successful, sure, but it makes it too successful, so it destroys itself. Like I said, we think intelligence is the greatest gift a species can have, but we could be wrong. All the evidence says it’s the real species killer. Just takes a while doing the killing, is all.”

“Where’d these ideas of yours come from the middle of the night?” Pincus looked into his coffee as if he might find them swimming about in there.

“Reading books. Thinking. Wondering why we always get fuckwits to make our decisions for us. For an intelligent species we sure do have a strong habit of picking fuckwits to rule us. If intelligence itself doesn’t kill us off, that will.”

Pincus shivered. He wanted to shift this conversation to something different. It had sprung up out of nowhere, ambushed him.

“What do you think about this Karen Prestrantra babe?” he said.

The big Jap’s face split into a grin. “That’s between me and my dick. C’mon, let’s get some work done around here. We got a murder to solve, case you forgot.”

Back in his office, Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd was fishing around in the bottom drawer, right-hand side of his desk. Any one of the detectives in the 14th Precinct could have told you what he was fishing for, even though he’d only been out of bed an hour so theoretically this was around his breakfast time. So long as he didn’t actually fall over on the job, no one was going to say a word, not even to each other. The sound of the drawer pulling open, the tiny creak it made even though the Loo had greased the sliders a hundred times or more, was heard all through the squad room, even by Pincus and Moto, standing at the far end by the coffee machine. Everyone stiffened momentarily, then got on with whatever they were doing.

The next sound everyone heard was the furtive unscrewing of the metal cap on Lieutenant M’Troyd’s bottle of Jim Beam. This time, because the sound was expected, no one in the squad room paused at all, just carried on. Same went for the glug-glug-glug as M’Troyd poured a stiff shot of the Jim Beam straight down his throat from the bottle.

He had problems, did Lieutenant M’Troyd of the 14th Precinct, problems none of the men (and women) there could help him with. So, if he drank a bit too much of the ol’ JB—hell, a lot too much of it—they didn’t mind, thought it was his due. Maybe it was guilt made them ignore his boozing: the guilt of not doing anything to help him with his life problems, even though they knew they couldn’t. No one was exactly sure what those life problems were, because the Loo never said, but rumors flew around about a son, Raff, who was incarcerated at the state’s pleasure somewhere for various larcenous offenses. Another son, Ellery, who was constantly away from home solving locked-room mysteries. No one ever checked up on the rumors, because uncertainty on the subject was easier to live with than certainty would have been.

Loyalty was an undervalued virtue most places in these vile times. Not among the guys and gals of the 14th.

About midway through the second glug-glug-glug that everyone heard, they also heard the sound of the telephone on Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd’s desk ringing.

M’Troyd swallowed hastily, rammed the top back on the bottle, stashed the bottle back in the drawer, slid the drawer shut, picked up the phone.

“Yes,” he said.

“Pat?”

“Who else, Jim?” he said, recognizing the voice. He’d been expecting the call. A case like the slaying of Ratty Scarlatti, the Loo of the 14th wasn’t going to be the only senior law-enforcement officer to be dragged out of his bed at this unholy hour. The Chief of Detectives was not in fact called Jim Beam—he was called Jim Sternbaum—but sometimes, like now, M’Troyd found it hard to remember who was who.

Compounding his difficulties was the fact Sternbaum was widely known in the Precinct as Pigeonpoop on account of his facial appearance. The nickname was something of a misnomer. Truth was, Sternbaum looked twice as ugly as a rooting hog, but without the table manners. Even so, Pigeonpoop was what they’d stuck the Chief of Detectives with, and there was no changing it now. And put Jim Beam together with Sternbaum and you were like to find yourself saying “Pigeonpoop” before your brain caught up with your tongue.

“This thing with Ratty Scarlatti,” said Sternbaum.

“We’re onto it.”

“The Commish is onto me.” Sternbaum was referring to the New Amsterdam Commissioner of Police, one Sawney Wallace, who was universally agreed to be an A-one asshole. Unfortunately, he was uptight with New Amsterdam’s Mayor, another A-one asshole, so there was nothing could be done about it.

“So?” prompted M’Troyd.

“He wants to call in the gentlemen in black.” This time Sternbaum was referring to the FBI.

“A bit early for the Feds,” said M’Troyd.

“That’s what I told him. He was insistent.”

“You tell him to fuck off?”

“Not in so many words, no. But I think he got the message.”

“Good.”

“He’ll be back.”

“Right at the moment, Jim, that’s your problem, not mine.”

“Could be yours, too, he breaks down my resistance.”

M’Troyd chuckled. “That’ll be the day.”

“Yeah. But he wants results.”

“He always does.”

“One-man commercial for abortion.”

“Cocksucker.”

They dissected Wallace’s psychology for a few more moments in similar vein, then:

“But I’m serious, Pat. He steps up the pressure too much, gets his High and Mightiness the Mayor in on the act, could be the Feebs’ll be with us, we like it or not. Who you got on the case.”

“Moto. Pincus.”

“Two good men.”

“The best.”

“Pincus still married to that Texas broad?”

“Like glue.”

“A shame.”

“What would Hilda say, she heard you speak like that?” Hilda was Sternbaum’s wife, and an accredited Frightening Lady. Laretta, Pincus’s wife, was an accredited Bombshell. She walked into a room and half the men there had to find an excuse to cover up their laps.

“My balls would be roadkill,” replied Sternbaum, truthfully. “Doesn’t stop me thinking, though.”

“Me neither,” M’Troyd admitted.

“So you got everything in hand?”

M’Troyd, startled thanks to Mr. Beam by the sudden switch in subject, took a moment responding. “Yeah, we got the investigation in hand. Moto and Pincus are on it like limpets. You know them.”

“Think it was Halloran’s crew?”

“On balance, no.”

“But they’ll check that out anyway?”

“Of course.”

Sternbaum made a noise like a cat purring. “To think, we could clean Scarlatti and Halloran out of this city all in one graceful movement.”

“Be a nice feeling.”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t think Marcus the Sharkus was behind it?”

“‘Fraid not.”

“Okay. Stress to your two guys the urgency of all this, willya, Pat?”

“Will do,” said M’Troyd, resolving not to. Moto and Pincus were perfectly aware of the need for swift progress. If he told them again it’d just slow them up. “Regards to Hilda, Jim.”

Sternbaum took the hint. “Same to Maire.”

More of the same followed before M’Troyd was allowed to hang up the phone.

Everyone in the squad room heard his bottom drawer, right-hand side, being pulled open again.

Moto was getting nowhere fast with his internet researches into giant condoms—or, to put it another way, his pudgy fingers flying with paradoxical grace over the keyboard as he hunched forward to stare into his monitor, he was getting to far too many places far too quickly. Somehow it had escaped the attentions of the brave blue-clad boys and girls of the 14th—who were on the whole either respectably stuffy married persons or, albeit still single, social wallflowers—that giant condoms were all the rage these days among the youthful sophisticates of New Amsterdam and indeed, so Moto’s Google searches seemed to reveal, most of the rest of this great nation. What party, hootenanny, rave, prom, stag night, PTA meeting, ceilidh, or other festive gathering would be complete without some wag or other turning up dressed from top to toe in latex and announcing himself as in the disguise of a safety-conscious penis? Go to a screening of The Rocky Horror Show, you could probably count them in the hundreds.

“Stupid pricks,” muttered Moto without a hint of irony.

The items could be bought just about anywhere, it seemed: online, offline, in sex stores and gift stores and even in some of the more “progressive” department stores, whose frontages Pincus envisaged coughing in mild embarrassment as they pondered the goods on sale within. There were at least a half-dozen manufacturers in this state alone, while who knew how many of the objects were being imported from China, Taiwan, Korea and other places vaguely off the edge of Pincus’s mental map. As for the number of retailers? Even Moto’s skill with the computer couldn’t give him any reliable estimate, but his guess was there were a couple hundred in New Amsterdam alone.

“If our Humor Guy,” said Moto—he and Pincus had taken to calling the killer of Ratty Scarlatti the Humor Guy, in the sure knowledge the shitsheets would soon think up something worse—”If our Humor Guy came in from out of state to do this killing, the Good Lord himself knows how many places he could have got the condom.”

In order to distract the big Jap from his despondency, Pincus asked for some help with the bright brass combination lock on the dead man’s leather attaché. With a grunt, Moto grabbed it and simply ripped the brass wholesale out of its leather moorings, which was not precisely what Pincus had had in mind, and then turned back to his computer with a look on his normally stoic features not unlike that of a faithful churchgoer whom God has comprehensively shat on fifty times already but who’s going back for one last prayer, confident that this time the Almighty is going to send a radiant beam of beneficence his way.

Leaving Pincus to look at the contents of the case.

At first he did so with boredom. Page after page of dry spreadsheets, showing long columns of figures broken by occasional annotations.

But then he began to get a grasp on the language these reports were written in.

“Holy shit!” he said to himself and the squad room.

He was able to contain the news for fully thirty seconds before letting out a triumphant war-whoop that had half the cops in the Precinct coming running and the other half at least raising their heads from their work to look in his direction, which was the maximum amount of reaction you were allowed to show if you wanted to be truly cool.

Moto, being nearest, was the fastest to reach Pincus’s side.

“What you got?”

“The works!”

“Meaning?”

“Everything!”

“Like, the secrets of the universe?”

“Quite probably, my man.”

And Pincus actually high-fived Moto, which was something he just never did, at least within the walls of the Precinct, him being black and not wanting to get himself stereotyped.

He led Moto like one might lead a small child back into the Loo’s office, where M’Troyd was looking a whole lot happier but at the same time a whole lot less focused. It didn’t take long for Pincus to explain what he’d uncovered.

“Complete records of Scarlatti’s operations?” said M’Troyd incredulously.

“Nothing but,” Pincus told him. “Least, for the past five, six years, maybe longer. Every drug deal—who got paid, where it came from, who got bribed at the port, who got bribed in the force…”

“Yeah, well,” said M’Troyd, shifting in his seat uneasily. “No one we know, is there?”

Pincus hurried to reassure him. “Not in the 14th, I checked that first. This wonderful burg of ours might be looking for a new Commish soon, though.”

M’Troyd’s eyes lit up, and it wasn’t just the Jim Beam lighting them. “Anything else?”

“All the hits.”

“Hoo, boy.”

“Who ordered them, who paid for them, who did them, why. There’s enough here to hang fifty guys fifty times over. And some of these you’re going to love, Patrick. There’s…”

Pincus proceeded to reel off a long list of names, and those were just the ones he could recall from memory.

“Musta been nuts to put all that down on paper,” observed Moto when Pincus showed signs of slowing. He reached out a meaty finger and turned the topmost sheet of paper round so he could start reading it for himself.

“Mob’s like any other corporation, these days,” said M’Troyd, leaning back in his seat and exhaling a breath that might have struck birds from the air. “Run by accountants. They got to keep everything neat and orderly, all their little numbers adding up just so.”

“But why,” said Moto, “would Ratty be carrying all this around in his briefcase, God’s sake?”

“Who said it was him packed the briefcase?” replied Pincus.

“True.”

The three men contemplated this in silence. The hyperintelligent Humor Guy—although M’Troyd hadn’t yet started thinking of the Humor Guy as hyperintelligent, not having been in on Moto’s pontifications by the coffee machine—had not just found a time when Ratty wasn’t protected by a squadron of thugs, strangled him, stuffed him into a latex tube, got him into a Chevy, driven him to City Hall without getting caught, and escaped invisibly into what passed for night in New Amsterdam, but had also cracked the organization’s safe to get hold of all its accounting records. Seemed impossible. On the other hand, just doing all the rest of it seemed impossible, so who was to say raiding a safe or two was beyond the Humor Guy’s abilities?

M’Troyd put his hand flat on the fan of papers on his desk.

“Sorting all this out is going to keep us busy the rest of the year,” he said. There was glee in his voice, all right, and a certain amount of Jim Beam, of course, but there was also some measure of trepidation. A hell of a task ahead of them.

“The rest of the century,” corrected Pincus. He couldn’t stop grinning.

“They’re gonna have to start building jails,” Moto said.

M’Troyd was starting to think he would need to phone back his old buddy Jim Sternbaum and tell him that, on second thoughts, sending in the Fibbies might not be such a bad idea after all. Every time he tried to conjure up a guesstimate of the number of man hours going to be involved he came up with a different figure, which wouldn’t have been so worrying except each figure was a whole lot bigger than the one before it. The job was obviously ‘way beyond the capacities of the 14th Precinct on its own. The question was if even the full resources of the NAPD were going to be able to cope.

“You know something?” he said at last. “I want you two guys to go home, get some sleep.”

“What?” yelled Pincus.

Even Moto looked surprised.

“You heard. The two of you start flying into this mess at the end of a shift, you’re going to fuck it up. It’s still your case for now—not just the homicide, the rest of it too—but it’s not going to go away if you leave it alone a few hours.”

Pincus, despite himself, saw the sense. Now the Loo had mentioned it, he realized there was sandpaper behind his eyelids. He didn’t think he’d be able to get any sleep—he was too charged up with adrenalin for that—but getting away from the Precinct for a while suddenly seemed a good idea.

“Okay, boss.”

Moto just grunted an acceptance.

Through the window behind M’Troyd the two cops could see the dawn sunlight doing its best to force a passage through the murk that hung over New Amsterdam.

“Okay,” said Pincus again.

He and Moto left.

Moto gave Pincus a lift home through the gradually pinkening city. As they drove, the radio was on, playing a news station. There was the usual bad news from all over the world: innocent men, women and children being blown apart by home-made or industrially manufactured bombs, some black people being put to death in Texas (well, that was hardly novel, must be a slow news day), a deal of saber-rattling from the White House towards some Middle Eastern country or other (a really slow news day), so it goes. Pincus wanted to switch the radio off, but it was Moto’s car so he didn’t.

“You ever noticed,” he said to the big man, “how this beloved mother country of ours seems so much better at stirring itself to hatred than it does at filling itself with love?”

“Walk down any street,” Moto replied. It was answer enough.

Pincus’s apartment building was about twenty stories high, which made it a dwarf in his neighborhood. Pincus and Laretta joked it had been designed by M.C. Escher, because certainly there seemed something wrong with its internal geography—or maybe it was the building’s topology, Pincus wasn’t entirely sure of the distinction here. If you went in by the building’s front door, as Pincus was doing now, you had your back to New Amsterdam’s downtown; just at that moment Pincus had confirmation this was indeed the case, because the main glow of the dirty-pink dawn was coming from his right. He went over to the elevators, of which there were two, not bothering to check his mailbox because at this time of the morning there was no chance Burt the mailman had been by. To get to the twin elevators, you had to go up a couple of steps at the back of the lobby, ignoring the obscene graffiti which the building’s janitor washed off every day but which always flourished again immediately, like a fungal growth. You then turned so you were facing the way you’d come—i.e., were now facing toward downtown—and stabbed the “Call Car” button. If you were lucky, as Pincus was this morning, you’d hear a creak and a clunk from somewhere far above you, and in due course an elevator would appear. Pincus stepped into the one that did, and used his stabbing forefinger once more, this time to indicate his destination was the tenth floor. If your luck was still holding, as Pincus’s was, you indeed reached that floor, and stepped out of the elevator. In theory, at this particular stage in the process your back was once more toward New Amsterdam’s downtown. You then turned so there was no question but that downtown was to your right, walked along the corridor with downtown remaining (in theory) to your right, and came to the last door on the left, which was the door to the apartment Pincus shared with his beautiful wife Laretta and their almost unimaginably beautiful son Alex, who was ten years old, the color of fresh caramel, and who looked as if the only thing missing was the halo that should rightly be floating over his head. If you then opened the apartment door, fumbling a little with the key because suddenly your body was telling you it was exhausted after a night shift that most definitely had gone on a couple hours too long, the window directly facing you should be facing uptown, toward the park.

But in fact that window faced downtown, as could be confirmed by looking out of it and seeing, dwarfed by the altitude, Greenberg’s Deli on the corner. If further confirmation were needed this morning, Pincus could have noted that the murky light of dawn was spreading across the window from the left, but in fact he wasn’t able to do this because he had a face full of a towel-wrapped Laretta’s thick, curly blonde hair, which was slightly damp and smelled, according to Pincus’s finely honed detective instincts, like she’d just gotten out of the shower—which, no shit, Sherlock—was exactly what she’d done.

The good news for Pincus was that Alex wasn’t awake yet.

The bad news for him was that he, Pincus, was not similarly showered, and as such consequently didn’t smell of wild thyme.

But there was more good news on the way. Laretta wasn’t one of those women who subscribed to the old-time superstition that you could weaken your constitution by overindulgence in personal hygiene, and so she offered to assist him in the ablutionary procedure, should he so desire.

A half-hour later, when Alex finally woke up, she was in the kitchen and looking as demurely virginal as one of those women in 1950s ads.

Pincus, sitting at the kitchen table, was hoping he didn’t look to his sleepy-eyed son like someone who’d just been debauched by the entire contents of an Arabian Nights harem.

Which was how he felt.

There was more morning light coming through the apartment’s main window by now, and it was definitely coming from the left as he faced that way. However, over the dozen years that he and Laretta had shared this apartment, they’d become inured to the paradox.

Finely honed detective instincts or no.

Elsewhere in the city, the Humor Guy—although of course he didn’t as yet know he’d been named that, not having been privy to any of the pertinent conversations going on in the 14th Precinct—was not being idle.

One of Marcus, né Sean, Halloran’s most closely guarded secrets was that, while married to the fair Fionella these many years, and the parent with her complicity of several fine strapping boyos who were set to follow in their father’s footsteps, rising up the ladder of felony until they were prepared to take over his position at its height, he was not disinterested in a shapely youthful thigh should one be proffered in his direction. Even more closely guarded was that such a thigh, to meet Marcus’s approval and thereby lure him most effectively, should preferably be male rather than female. It was not that he was actually gay, perish the thought, as he told himself in his few moments of introversion and several times almost but not quite had steeled himself to tell his confessor, Father Damien, in the cobwebbed confines of the box at St Augustine’s. He was merely inclined to live life to the full and, like a good Christian boy, to exhibit the complete gamut of love for his fellow man, as so enjoined in many passages of the holy book, no less. Something like that, anyway.

The Humor Guy’s thighs were as shapely as could be desired, which was why Marcus O’Halloran was currently writhing on an anonymous but oil-streaked garage floor somewhere to the north of the park, doing his best to curse through a gag about the cords that bound him tightly at ankles and wrists—and, indeed, ankles to wrists.

Aside from the ropes and the gag, Halloran was naked. The gag was of linen, and freshly laundered, for the Humor Guy did not regard himself as inhumane, even in his current project of pest extermination.

“I’m sorry about this,” he murmured as he took a couple of small plastic corks and inserted one each into Halloran’s nostrils, thereby blocking off the air passages.

Halloran began to suck air loudly as best he could around the confines of the linen gag.

“Would you like me to remove it?” said the Humor Guy gently, indicating the gag.

Gasping, going red in the face, Halloran nodded desperately.

“You promise not to shout or scream?”

More desperate nodding.

“Very well, then.”

Reaching behind the mobster’s neck, the Humor Guy unpicked the loosely tied knot there. There’d been no need to tie the knot tighter, because of course Halloran hadn’t been able to reach it, securely fastened as his wrists were.

Halloran had always treated promises lightly, and today was no exception.

He drew in his breath ready to create the loudest cacophony a human voice can make.

Only to find it silenced before it had even begun.

“And I’m sorry about this, too,” said the Humor Guy in the same conversational tone as before, using his thumb to jam the cylindrical plastic inkwell more securely into the back of Halloran’s throat. “Perhaps I should have warned you about this part.”

Halloran didn’t reply, because now Halloran didn’t have any air supply at all. His eyes bulged, and his face became even redder. Where before he’d been writhing, now he was quite definitely thrashing on the dirty concrete floor.

When the thrashing finally stopped and Halloran was certainly dead, the Humor Guy removed the two plastic corks from the deceased man’s nose and untied the ropes that had held the mobster at hands and ankles. Then he opened up a brown paper bag and produced a little tin box of children’s poster paints, a paintbrush, and a small bottle of water. Whistling as he worked, he began to paint the dead man’s face. His brow creased in concentration: the bluish redness of the skin made it hard to get the color balances just right.

Getting Halloran dressed in the costume he was going to wear for his last performance was even more difficult, what with the lifeless limbs being so uncooperative, but the Humor Guy managed it. Besides, this was a cakewalk compared with the final task facing the Humor Guy, which was getting the corpse into the helicopter without anyone else at the uptown heliport noticing what he was doing.

Not to mention the attaché case—mustn’t forget that. The Humor Guy used Crazy Glue to fasten the palms of Halloran’s two lifeless hands to the two sides of the attaché case.

The fact that dawn hadn’t properly broken yet was a big help, of course. The citizens of New Amsterdam pride themselves on their drive and industry, and the way that the city never sleeps; they congratulate themselves on these qualities at dinner parties, cultural engagements and soirees. This does not mean, of course, that the congratulators and congratulatees themselves do the never-sleeping and early-rising bits: those chores are left to the anonymous hordes of underpaid municipal servants and shop workers, mainly immigrants, who actually keep the engine of the city purring along. So the only eyes the Humor Guy had to avoid were those of the elderly black man, dressed in faded blue overalls, who was lethargically emptying the heliport’s trash cans and silently wondering in Portuguese what the fuck had ever persuaded him to come to the Land of the Free for greater opportunity when instead he could have been still asleep with his wife by his side somewhere in the Caribbean where the air didn’t taste of carbon monoxide and diesel.

The old man barely looked up as the helicopter’s rotors started turning.

Laretta Pincus had been born Laretta James in Austin, Texas, to parents who were proud of being able to trace their White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry back to approximately the time of Noah, and when she had first come to New Amsterdam over a dozen years ago, with the aim of making a name for herself on Broadway, she had come with very fixed ideas on the relative superiority of the various races of humankind. She could find it within herself to ignore the defect of non-Protestantism, but as for the rest of it? Fugeddaboutit.

Her attitudes changed radically one night on 44th Street just off Seventh Avenue when she found there was one big white guy holding a knife to her throat and ripping at her blouse with his free hand while another big white guy was pinioning her arms behind her and rubbing his erection industriously into the crack of her ass. She might have been able to persuade herself, assuming she survived the encounter, that her assailants weren’t actually whites at all but really albino blacks had it not been for the fact that she was rescued by a slightly built black guy whose idea of minimum possible force had been to throw one of the rapist-manqués head-first through a plate-glass window and kick the other so forthrightly in the groin that the bastard was likely never to have anything to rub in someone’s ass-crack ever again.

For a while she was too hysterical to ask her savior why he wasn’t calling the cops, and by the time he got her calmed down enough to bundle her into a taxi and take her back to his apartment she just numbly assumed he was going to exact payment in kind for the rescue, only with luck sans knife. The fact that he was a black man almost had her clawing her way out through the taxi window, but there was something reassuring about the way he kept staring at the knuckles of his right hand and flexing his fingers to make sure they still worked. And, when they got to his apartment, which was up more flights of stairs than she appreciated, she saw soon enough by the framed citations on the walls, not to mention other bits of crap lying around on the furniture, that her rescuer was a cop himself. Oh, well. The idea of being fucked by a black man turned her stomach, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she kept thinking as hard as she could that he wasn’t a black man, he was a black cop. Instead, though, he showed her where his bathroom was, and then later tucked her up into his own bed (which was, mercifully, clean, although there was still an alien smell of blackness that she couldn’t ignore), poured her a bourbon, and then left her to go and bed himself down on the couch.

He snored.

Even so, she hadn’t slept better since the last time she was at her parents’ home in Austin, sleeping in her own bedroom with the teddy bears still on the wallpaper from when she was a kid.

When she woke in the morning he told her his name was Pincus and asked her if she had anywhere safe to stay.

She thought a moment and said no.

So she stayed in his apartment, although she insisted she be the one to sleep on his couch, until about a week later she seduced him one evening when he got home from the Precinct. After that the couch, which had a broken spring neither of them had wanted to complain about to the other, didn’t get used as much. There’d been a bit of getting used to each other to be done: Laretta had learned to face the fact that, as a cop, Pincus worked hours that were long and unpredictable, and she could never know for certain when he’d get home, or if he ever would; Pincus had learned to face the fact that she read books—and not just any books but nineteenth-century classics by Dickens and George Eliot and co, and the kind of hifalutin modern novels that got praised in the reviews section of The New York Times by fancy-pants literary types whose names made Pincus think they probably dressed up as ballerinas in their spare time.

Three months into their relationship, Pincus and Laretta decided to cement it more formally in front of a judge, and Laretta’s family back in Texas hadn’t spoken to her since. She didn’t care.

She also didn’t think Pincus knew that, before they’d met, her planned Broadway career had got only as far as exotic dancing before descending into hookerdom, which was the rung of the ladder she was on when he interrupted the assault. In this she was wrong. If Pincus hadn’t seen what was going on he might have booked her for soliciting. Hell, he might even have hired her services, if he’d been feeling sour enough. He’d never actually been with a hooker, but Laretta had been a tempting dish what with her truly beautiful face, her long thick blonde hair, and a red skirt the distance of whose lower hem from her navel had been not much more than a handspan.

She still was a tempting dish a dozen years later when she woke him mid-afternoon, so it wasn’t surprising he reached out for her in primitive male reflex.

Removing his hand from her right breast and then, as afterthought, shifting it to her left, she said, “Moto’s on the phone.”

“Oh shit.”

“Language, Mister Pincus.” She adopted a pose of Texan WASP hauteur.

“Sorry.” He shifted his hand back to his first-choice breast.

“Phone,” she said.

Moto didn’t waste words.

“There’s been another.”

“Condom?”

“Murder. The Humor Guy. I’ll pick you up.”

Twenty minutes later in the car Moto was a little less taciturn.

“Plenty people have killed themselves by jumping off the Nelson Building.”

“And?” said Pincus. For some decades the Nelson Building had been the tallest edifice in all of New Amsterdam, and indeed the Eastern Seaboard. Then it had been overtaken, and today it seemed to hark back to earlier, more innocent times, standing among newcomers that might have greater height but in no way could compete with it for elegance. It was still a traditional place for jumpers, though, even despite the protective, razor-wired fencing the owners had put up surrounding its observation decks.

“Well, here we have someone killed hisself by jumping onto it.”

“Huh?”

“Not exactly,” conceded Moto. “Got killed by being dropped onto it. And we think he was dead before he was dropped. Hard to tell, the mess he’s in. But the principle still applies. Wait’ll you see.”

“I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“That’s prob’ly a good thing.”

Even despite the flashing light Pincus stuck on the car roof, they got stuck in traffic. It was inevitable this time of day. It was inevitable any time of day in New Amsterdam, truth be told. They sat beside an ambulance whose lights were likewise flashing, and wound up their windows to cut out as much of the siren noise as possible.

“ID?” said Pincus.

“Take a guess.”

“Halloran.”

“Congratulations. You go on to the next round.”

“Scarlatti’s people sending someone a thankyou note?”

“Nope. I told you, the Humor Guy.”

“You sure?”

“Unmistakable. Halloran was dropped onto the Nelson Building, remember. Big joke. Very funny.”

“Remind me to laugh,” said Pincus.

“There’s more.”

“Spare me ‘til I get my breath back.”

“He was dressed up like a clown. Bobbly cone hat and all. Face made up that way, too. And a red plastic oink nose stuck on him.”

“‘Oink’ nose?”

“Parp nose. You know, round and red and shiny, looks like it’d sound a horn you squeezed it. And there was a plastic inkwell stuffed down his throat.”

“Koko,” said Pincus.

Moto turned to look at him. Since the car wasn’t moving, there was no need for him to keep his eyes on the road, like a good cop should. “Am I missing something?”

“Koko the Clown. Like in those old cartoons. Out of the Inkwell.”

“You forgotten your meds?”

Pincus explained that one of the advantages of rearing a kid was that you became an expert on vintage cartoons, as shown either at three in the morning while you were praying a fractious infant would fall asleep before rather than after puking down your back, or, in the child’s more mature years, after school or on Saturday mornings.

“Out of the Inkwell. An ancient series done by the Fleischer brothers. Its star was Koko the Clown and this pukily cute little dog whose name I don’t remember. Must have been hundreds of them.”

“Dogs?”

“Out of the Inkwell cartoons. I guess you’re more into”—Pincus decided to show off—”Miyazaki and Rintaro and Takahata and those guys?”

“Disney,” grunted Moto.

Pincus stared at him. “Disney?”

“Yeah. The classic stuff. Not the recent ones.”

“Well, shit.”

Moto said nothing.

“I’d never,” Pincus continued, “have thought of you as a Disney fan.”

“Not a fan. I just like the movies, is all.”

“I can tell you ‘bout Disney too.”

“Please don’t.”

There was some movement in front of them. Pincus wound down his window and, risking permanent deafness from the ambulance siren, tried to get a better look. Some kids were holding a parade, tossing batons and playing tubas. Their civic freedom to do this was clearly much more important than two cops hurrying to a murder scene, leave alone the guy who was probably dead by now in the ambulance.

“We’d be better off walking,” he said, withdrawing his head and winding the window up again.

“And abandon police property?” said Moto, referring to the car.

“Who found the body?”

“The people working on the top story who almost leaped outta their skins when there was this crash on the roof above them.”

“Figures.”

“Marcus the Sharkus was dropped from a helicopter.”

“Uhuh,” said Pincus, this time trying to peer ahead between two SUVs that looked like someone had forgotten to switch off the air pump when inflating them. One of the prepubescent majorettes had wet herself, the excitement and all, so there was likely to be a further delay. “A black helicopter?” he added meaningfully.

Moto gave him a glance out of the corner of his eye, and shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? They traced it, anyway.”

Pincus became more alert. “Where?”

“Came from the Banyard Heliport, up top of the island. Leased to Halloran, though he don’t use it more than once every week or two. Our guy took it out this morning early with a full tank. The cleaner saw him, paid him no mind, why should he? No one knows what our perp did with it for the next few hours ‘til just before noon, when he, uh, made his drop. After that, he flew the thing back home to the heliport, jumped out, tipped the mechanics, walked off.”

“They get a description?”

Moto rubbed his jowls. The traffic wasn’t moving yet, but was beginning to show an inclination to do so, if need be crushing young limbs and expensive brass instruments beneath the wheels. “That’s the part you’re going to like, my man.”

“Tell.”

“Yeah, they saw him, all right. He made no attempt to hide his face. They said it was Halloran himself. Woulda recognized him anywhere. They knew him well, they said. Say what you like about the Sharkus, he tips mechanics well.”

Pincus didn’t know which bit of this he believed less.

“But if it was Halloran who was dressed up like Koko the Clown being dropped on the Nelson—” he began.

“‘Xactly,” said Moto. “Ain’t life full o’ fun?”

“It’s Koko all right,” said Pincus as the afternoon gale howled around him and Moto. The wind was coming straight in off the Atlantic and, to Pincus’s nose, accustomed to, well, normal New Amsterdam air, this stuff smelled like fishes and generally weird.

“Halloran, you mean,” said Moto. His mind was somewhat distracted by the fact that the SOCO called Karen Prestrantra was not only here but bending over what was left of the gangster.

“Same thing,” said Pincus, similarly not immune to Ms. Prestrantra’s netherly charms. “Wonder how come his little hat’s stayed on?”

Other bits of Halloran looked in danger of not doing likewise.

“Crazy Glue,” said Karen Prestrantra over her shoulder. She pulled herself to her feet and dusted down the fronts of her navy blue uniform pants, consciously adjusting her balance even though there was no need, since the roof was pretty flat. She’d given the strangely appealing big Jap enough of an appetizer, she felt. “It’s stuck to his head with Crazy Glue. Same for his hands and the document case. The perp clearly didn’t want for his joke to get missed.”

“Humor Guy,” Moto rumbled reflectively.

“You done?” said Pincus to Karen Prestantra.

“Just about.” She smiled, pointing the smile at Pincus but aiming it at Moto.

“Okay if we take the attaché case with us?”

“You sign for it,” Karen Prestrantra said.

“If you could wait downstairs,” said Moto, “we could sort out the paperwork there.”

Prestrantra’s smile broadened. “Sure thing,” she said. She turned and walked over to an open hatch in the roof. With a last smoldering glance at Moto, she was gone.

“She’s crazy for you,” said Pincus.

“You think so?”

“Crazy like glue.”

“Hm.”

In life Marcus Halloran had not been a handsome specimen. In death, with his body battered by the impact of his fall, not least his face, which had been painted to resemble that of Koko the Clown and then copiously dusted by Karen Prestrantra and her colleagues with fingerprint powder, he was a lot less handsome than he had been in life. In his secret innermost of hearts, though, Pincus decided he preferred Halloran looking like this.

“How’re we going to get his hands off of the briefcase?” said Pincus, glancing around him as if someone might by chance have left a surgical saw lying on the Nelson Building roof.

“Lateral thinking,” replied Moto, walking over. He’d been standing vertiginously on the very edge of the roof, staring down to where the cars were like shiny-carapaced bugs.

“Not philosophy again,” pleaded Pincus.

“Would I do that to an old friend?”

Moto reached past him and did his stuff with the lock and the leather, just like he’d done this morning—was it really only this morning?—with the attaché case that had been found in the clutches of Ratty Scarlatti. The sound of ripping cowhide made a nice counterpoint to the whistling of the wind.

“We don’t actually need the container,” he explained. “Just the contents.”

He reached inside the case. One of Halloran’s arms flopped a bit, as if the dead man had thought of putting up a struggle to protect his secrets from Moto’s invasive mitt but almost immediately decided against it.

“Here,” said Moto, handing a big wodge of papers up to Pincus, who slammed his hand down on the top of it to stop the upper few sheets from getting blown away.

“Prestrantra’s going to be pissed,” Pincus said.

“Nah. Like you said, I got her wrapped round my little finger.”

“You wish. Not yet you ain’t. This could be the end of a beautiful friendship that hasn’t even begun.”

Moto grinned, rubbing his hands together. “Like the clairvoyant girlfriend I once had?”

“You never told me about her.”

“Not much to tell. She broke it off before we’d even met.”

“Jerk.”

“C’mon, let’s go.”

They went.

Of course, they got stuck in traffic again, just outside the Roxy Cinema on 33rd and Ninth, so Pincus used the opportunity to talk about his son Alex, the apple of his eye. Moto approved of Alex, too, so was never averse to hearing stories of the deeds of the little tyke. (Moto also approved of Laretta, but had the vague feeling he’d met her before Pincus had, and perhaps more thoroughly than he ought to have, so he maintained something of a practiced oriental inscrutability on the subject.)

“The little guy was asking me math homework questions over breakfast this morning, you believe it?” said Pincus as he and Moto watched in close-up the stationary back of a truck belching pollution at them. It was in town to deliver farm-fresh organic produce for the health benefit of everyone whose lungs it was corroding.

“Bright kid,” said Moto, beginning to smile. He drummed his fingers on the wheel.

“Takes after his father.”

“Except in brains and looks. Got them from his mother.”

“Piss off.”

“That what you said to him at breakfast?”

Pincus dug Moto in the side with an elbow. “Here’s me after a long shift, deader than Koko back there, trying to keep my eyeballs from dropping out into this bowl of Cheerios Laretta’s put in front of me to keep the kid company, and he’s throwing math problems at me. You believe it?” he repeated.

Moto was thinking about what Laretta might look like in a robe, her hair still early-morning tousled, her eyes still sleepy. “What kind of math problems?” he said to change the subject.

“You know the one. If a man has to go ten miles to work each morning, and he does the first mile and a half on foot at four miles an hour, then he catches a bus and it goes fifteen miles an hour—”

“Ain’t no bus doing fifteen miles an hour in New Amsterdam today,” observed Moto sourly.

“—and he’s on the bus twenty minutes and dah de dah de dah, you know the rest. How long does it take him to travel the ten miles to work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither did I. That’s the point. Alex had all these goddam figures in his book, and he shoved them in front of me, and they just started going round in circles.”

“Well, you was tired.”

“Tired? You coulda cut my head off and I’d’ve not noticed. So I say to him, it’s going to take this bozo twenty minutes at four em pee aitch to go a mile and a half, and—”

“Twenty-two and a half minutes.”

“What?”

“Takes him twenty-two and a half minutes to go a mile and a half. Like, he’s doing four miles an hour, so he does a mile in fifteen minutes.”

“Yeah, well, that’s something like what I told Alex.”

“And his bus ride takes him five miles.”

Pincus twisted in his seat. “You were there or something, right?”

“Bus does a mile every four minutes, so—”

“You want to start having breakfast with Alex? Laretta fixes a good bowl of Cheerios.”

Moto’s fingers stopped drumming, started clutching. The robe was falling open ever so slightly as she leaned forward, the trace of a post-coital smile on her lips, to put the bowl of cereal on the table…

“You know us Japs have sushi for breakfast.” It was an old gag, but it got his mind off Laretta. And the butterfly tattoo on her left—

“Anyway, Alex gives me a whole stack of stuff like this, and then says”—Pincus moved his voice into a higher, slightly plaintive pitch—”’Dad, how long before the guy gets to work? I calc’late it takes him three days, but that can’t be right, Dad, can it?’“

“‘S about right if the poor bastard works in New Amsterdam.” The truck had run out of gas, which was good news on the pulmonary front but meant Moto was going to have to try to reverse the car and pull round the immobilized vehicle. When and if the traffic ever cleared.

“So I find myself,” Pincus continued, “with a pencil in one hand and a calculator in the other trying to do the kid’s sums for him, and—”

“Got you out of having to eat the Cheerios,” said Moto. “Always look on the bright side.”

“—and damned if I didn’t get the answer three days as well. Three days and four point one seven hours, to be precise. What d’ya think of that?”

“I was right about the kid getting his brains from his mother is what I think.”

“Did the thing every which way and back, and I still kept coming up with that exact same answer. ‘Course, Laretta took one look and she solved the kid’s difficulty for him, right off.”

“How’d she do that?”

“Told him to ask his teacher.”

When Moto laughed it was like a long-dormant volcano discovering there was still hot lava in its old core yet. It began with the sound of slowly rending rock, and then built up slowly toward the final, lethal explosion. That was what was happening now.

New Amsterdam was spared the full effects of the eruption by the truck in front of the cops’ car finding an extra reserve of gas from somewhere and, wonder of wonders, beginning to lurch into forward motion.

“Hot damn,” said Moto, mathematics forgotten.

Not the image of Laretta Pincus’s robe falling open, though. Not quite. But fortunately her face had by now morphed into that of the young SOCO Karen Prestrantra, so that was all right and Moto was no longer betraying the trust of his partner.

Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd was sitting by the phone, waiting for the sky—or at least New Amsterdam Commissioner of Police Sawney Wallace—to fall. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Not like Marcus the Sharkus Halloran, who’d really fallen.

That New Amsterdam Commissioner of Police Sawney Wallace was going to fall in quite a different sense at some point was inescapable, given the contents of the papers the Humor Guy had delivered into the hands of the cops courtesy of the cold dead hands of Ratty Scarlatti. M’Troyd did not as yet know about the papers sitting on the lap of Pincus in a traffic jam somewhere between here and the Nelson Building; if he’d known about those, there’d have been an even bigger sloppy, Jim Beam-affected grin on his face.

He was grinning despite the fact that he didn’t expect the call from the Commish, when it came—as it inevitably must, and soon, surely—to be a pleasant, easy-going one. If there was one loophole in the diplomatic armor of Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd it was that he was lousy at dealing with fuckwits. This meant he was lousy at dealing with most people, but most especially with New Amsterdam Commissioner of Police Sawney Wallace.

Rumor had it that New Amsterdam Commissioner of Police Sawney Wallace had been appointed by direct fiat of the President in the White House himself. Wallace was a guaranteed fuckwit.

So when the phone finally rang, M’Troyd braced himself for an unpleasant experience.

Instead he got his old pal Jim Sternbaum again.

The Chief of Detectives was sounding puzzled.

“You got any idea where the fuckwit’s gone to, Patrick?” he said without preamble.

M’Troyd didn’t need any explaining to as to the identity of the fuckwit in question. Wallace’s fuckwittery was such a constant source of conversational fuel for the pair of them that he was, as it were, the default fuckwit. Any other fuckwit, Sternbaum would’ve had to give a name as well. Not this one.

“Why should I?” said M’Troyd, wondering if the fog in his head was confusion or just Jim Beam.

“I thought he mighta come down to see you in person.”

“Nope. He’s not come here. Not unless Helen intercepted him, gave him a piece of her mind.”

The two men chuckled. Helen was a legend.

“He gone missing, or something, Jim?”

“Never thought I’d be much bothered if the fuckwit disappeared,” said Sternbaum. “Feels strange.”

“He’s disappeared?”

“We should be so lucky.”

The two men chuckled again, then Sternbaum sobered his voice. “He was due to hold a press conference this morning, and he never showed up.”

“He was gonna talk about Ratty getting killed?”

“Nah. No way. He might get asked pointed questions about that. Might have to know what the fuck he was talking about. He was gonna present the new crime figures for our brave city, brag about how he singlehandedly has gotten them all improved and all.”

“They’ve improved?”

“Pat, they never improve. ‘Course they haven’t. But the fuckwit was going to say they had.”

“Like, there’s been ten per cent more murders but that represents an improvement because of the more sophisticated method of data analysis used by the researchers over those of previous years?”

M’Troyd was pretty pleased with himself, having managed that sentence in his currently mellow condition. He’d been careful to avoid the term “Gaussian distribution,” though.

“You got it exactly,” replied Sternbaum. “Asshole”—referring to Wallace by a different terminology.

“Fuckwit,” said M’Troyd, ever the traditionalist.

“I been checking the website for the Darwin Awards in hopes,” said Sternbaum, “but no such luck.”

M’Troyd didn’t know what the Darwin Awards were, so he made no comment on this.

“If he turns up down at the 14th,” said Sternbaum, “you be sure to tell me.”

“Will do, master.”

They shared yet another chuckle.

“In the absence of the honorable fuckwit, I gotta make a decision,” said Sternbaum.

“Yeah?”

“About the Feebs.”

“Aw, hell, Jim. We don’t need them. Pincus and Moto’s going to be tapping on the perp’s shoulder any time now. The boys of the 14th have these murders in hand.”

“I know that, Pat. It’s not the murders we need the Feebs for. I told the Bureau. A masterly piece o’ compromise, even though I says it myself.”

Understanding began to dawn in M’Troyd’s mind.

“The organized crime aspect?” he essayed.

“You got it, Pat. The deal I struck with them is catching the killer is rightly the province of the 14th, but the Feds should get the Ratty papers.”

“Including…”

“That’s my boy. Including the stuff on the fuckwit.”

M’Troyd’s sloppy grin got even bigger, that were possible. It was indeed a masterstroke, this deal of Sternbaum’s. The 14th handling the corruption dossier on its own, there were ways the fuckwit could stall things, maybe even kill the investigation entirely. That was the nature of hierarchical structures. Get the Feds in on the act, though, and it was out of the 14th’s hands what happened. The Commish was crucified already, just didn’t know yet he was supposed to stick his arms out to the sides.

“I owe you a dinner,” was all M’Troyd said.

“Two, I think, good buddy.”

“A stripper afterwards.”

“At the very least.”

After they’d put the phone down, M’Troyd chuckled again, this time sharing it with no one.

Sitting three cars behind Moto and Pincus in the seemingly eternal fucking traffic jam, the Humor Guy was almost as happy as M’Troyd, and without needing any Jim Beam to get him there. For reasons of which the boys of the 14th were not as yet aware, his pest control exercise was nearing its end, with really only one major task yet to perform—that major task being to go to the 14th Precinct and hand himself in.

He was tempted to step out of his stationary car, walk up ahead a few yards, and tap on Pincus’s window, say, “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

But that’d have been too anticlimactic a conclusion to his campaign. He knew at the Precinct house itself he wasn’t actually going to attain spectacle, but with luck there’d be at least a measure of ceremony. He could insist on seeing Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd in person, for example, before confessing his triumphs. Or even—his mind moved on to regard grander vistas—insist the Chief of Detectives, Jim Sternbaum, be present. Then he could put out his own wrists, of his own volition, to accept the handcuffs the bozoes would undoubtedly insist on putting on him, despite the fact he was obviously of no danger to anyone, his job done, wasn’t he handing himself in of his own accord for God’s sake?

Well, he’d play the whole scene by ear when he got to it.

The Humor Guy wasn’t in fact worried about being stuck in a traffic jam. One of the oh these many things of which he was capable—indeed, the very continuation of his existence depended upon it—was what he called “life-catching.” Everyone in New Amsterdam, from boys in blue to the littlest newborn kids to the folks so old they look as if they’ve been accidentally mummified before departing this mortal vale, spends big parts of their time not actually living. Oh, sure, they keep walking around, they keep breathing, they may even hold a limited conversation during those periods, but they’re not in fact there. You ask them afterwards how they got, say, from their home to their place of work this morning, and they’ll tell you that, hell, just as always they caught the subway, what kind of damn’ fool question you asking? But you ask them if they can actually remember doing so, and often they’re lying if they say, “Yeah, ‘course I do.” Because really they don’t remember anything about what happened between their sitting at the breakfast table and their being at the office, some while later. It was like they took a little vacation from life for an hour. They weren’t conscious. They weren’t alive. They weren’t there, even though their bodies went through the motions.

All those little bits of life that aren’t getting used can either be let evaporate into the muddy skies above New Amsterdam or someone else can come along and use them—can catch them like a butterfly in a net and, well, it’s kind of like feeding on them, because it’s by grabbing those unused bits of other people’s lives that life-catchers, like the Humor Guy, survive.

And where is there a richer feast to be had for the life-catcher than in a New Amsterdam traffic jam? People are sitting behind their wheels, being regaled by mindless shit on the radio, whether it be traffic reports (“you’re stuck in a fucking snarl-up, dummy, ‘case you haven’t noticed”) or the latest going-to-be-a-smash-hit-because-we-tell-you-so record, or just by the sound of other motors polluting the air and drivers cussing each other out for not moving up a fraction of an inch. And sooner or later people aren’t there any more, just their bodies are. A bit of their lives they could be using is floating free.

A shame to see it go to waste. Better a life-catcher come along and purloin it than see that happen.

Think of it as a conservation effort.

So the Humor Guy hummed a happy tune, fondled the steering wheel, looked out benignly on the scene of vehicular congestion. He was feeding on whole lifetimes people didn’t want. Somewhere the sun was shining, even though not much of its light could survive the struggle to reach ground level in New Amsterdam.

The song he was humming was “In State” by the Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards. He’d never in fact heard the graceful Ms. Edwards, or anyone else for that matter, actually perform “In State,” but he was able to sing it anyway.

That was because…

Aw, shit, I’m tired of referring to myself in the third person the whole frigging time: “The Humor Guy did this” or “The Humor Guy did that.”

It grates.

Hereinafter, as they say in the final throes of legalistic constipation, I shall pick and choose my mode of narration. But let’s get up close and personal right here.

I was able to hum the tune of Kathleen Edwards’s “In State” because I came from outside the city you’ve been reading about in these pages.

This fact gave me powers you could describe as supernatural, perhaps even almost godlike. Which was why Pincus and Moto, even though they were the finest ratiocinative minds in the 14th Precinct, if not the entire NAPD, indeed arguably the finest homicide detectives the city of New Amsterdam had ever enjoyed, were, even though they didn’t yet know it, chasing themselves up their own asses in their hunt for the Humor Guy—i.e., for me.

They were soon going to get their first suspicion that this was the case when they saw Doc Faunce’s preliminary post mortem report on Marcus the Sharkus Halloran. Well, soon in a relative sense, anyway.

First they had to get out of this traffic jam.

I decided to get them—and me—out of it.

“You notice something weird, Moto?” said Pincus. They were waiting for Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd to get off the phone to his wife Maire. He was telling her, if truth be told, that on second thoughts he’d rather not have broccoli with his corned beef tonight, and were there still those cans of Guinness in the fridge? The pacing of progress in the 14th wasn’t governed just by police work.

“Weird?” said Moto. He sniffed the air as if there might be a bad smell.

“You remember how we got from outside the front of the Roxy Cinema to here?”

“Well, we drove, stupid.” Moto’s mind was only half on the question. Less than half, in fact. The other fraction was on Karen Prestrantra, who’d agreed, while he was logging the contents of Halloran’s briefcase with her, to go out with him to a movie or something when and if their shifts ever ended.

“You remember us doing so?”

The size of the fraction of Moto’s mind that was thinking about Karen Prestrantra—and about Karen Prestrantra’s rear end—dipped temporarily.

“Nope. Should I?”

“Just wondering, is all. Last thing I recall, we were sucking in diesel fumes in front of the Roxy. They were showing a remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space with Hugh Grant in the lead.”

“And Reese Witherspoon,” said Moto, to show he’d been paying attention.

“Yeah. Her too.”

Through the door of Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd’s office they could hear him come off the phone. Both of them tensed slightly, ready to go charging in. But then the phone rang again almost immediately and he picked it up, so they relaxed once more, both of them leaning against the shit-green painted wall.

“Anyway,” said Pincus.

“Yeah?” said Moto, who’d lost track of the conversation. He was wondering what Karen Prestantra looked like when she answered the phone, preferably having had to step out of the shower to do so.

“Well, we must have drove here, like you say,” said Pincus, adopting a voice of sweet reason, “but I can’t actually remember us having done so. Can you?”

“Sure I can,” said Moto, who couldn’t.

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then.” Pincus began to worry he might have caught a brain tumor or something that was giving him mental blackouts. He had a curious feeling like someone had come along and stolen a part of his life he hadn’t been using.

Jeez, was he nuts or something?

Had to be a brain tumor. Brain tumors did that to people.

Inside the Loo’s office, M’Troyd’s voice was rising in either anger or incredulity. The two cops waiting outside could hear a few of the words, but none of them seemed to join up together to make any sort of sense.

Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd put the phone down. Not gently. This wasn’t because he was annoyed with Doc Faunce, who’d been calling in the preliminaries of the post mortem—and what amazing preliminaries they were. It was because Lieutenant Patrick M’Troyd was still burning over the fact that Maire was insistent he had broccoli with his corned beef. And he didn’t dare slam the phone down on her, no way. So he did it on old Doc Faunce instead. That’s Jim Beam logic for you.

“C’mon in!” he bellowed at the waiting detectives.

As they went into M’Troyd’s office and breathed its thick fumes Pincus reminded himself not to light a cigarette in here, case the whole fucking place went up.

M’Troyd gestured at the phone.

“Faunce,” he explained.

Thoughts of Karen Prestrantra sashayed clear out of Moto’s mind. “What’s he say?”

“Wasn’t just one body went into the Nelson roof,” said M’Troyd bluntly. He picked up a pen and began swiveling it one way and then the other in the fingers of his right hand.

“Huh?” said Pincus. “We saw just the—”

“Yeah, well,” said M’Troyd, “that’s all you would see, see?”

Pincus didn’t see, and said so.

“Our beloved Commish has been missing all morning,” said M’Troyd in apparent non sequitur.

“A good thing, Patrick.” Moto spoke the words with the gravitas of a Supreme Court judge on the take.

“Yeah, well, that’s what we all thought.” M’Troyd looked at the far wall of his office as if there was a window there and he could see cloudy skies through it. “But now we’ve found him.”

“On the Nelson roof?” said Pincus unbelievingly. “The SOCOs were all over it. None of them said—”

“That’s ‘cause they didn’t see Wallace’s body either. It was…uh…hidden.”

Pincus stared at his superior officer. “Hidden? Where?”

“This is the bit that’s embarrassing.” M’Troyd put the pen down again. He was obviously searching for words. “You called him the Humor Guy, right?” he said to Moto.

“One of us did,” said Moto. “I’m not rightly sure now which of—”

“It figures. Good name. Likes his jokes, this Humor Guy of yours.”

“You can keep killing us with the suspense,” said Pincus, “or you can put a bullet through our heads.” He turned to Moto. “On the whole I prefer the bullet. You?”

“Bullet for sure,” said Moto.

“So tell us where the fuck the Humor Guy hid the body of Sawney Wallace,” said Pincus, addressing the Loo once more.

M’Troyd coughed. “Y’see, Commissioner of Police Sawney Wallace, may God have mercy on his soul—Faunce found him inside Marcus Halloran.”

“Inside?” said Pincus, plopping himself down on one of the uncomfortable upright plastic chairs in front of the Loo’s desk, the wind knocked out of him. “You’re pulling our legs, aren’tya, Patrick?”

The Loo shook his head. “Faunce says Wallace was jammed right up Halloran’s ass.”

“‘S impossible,” said Moto slowly. “No way you can fit one human corpse into the asshole of another. Can’t be done.”

The Loo put his face in his hands. “It seems it can—if you’re the Humor Guy, anyway.”

Pincus saw the Humor Guy’s joke, and didn’t find it very funny. The symbolism was obvious: Wallace had been right up the gang leader’s ass since the day Halloran had first slipped the Commish a bag of used notes to look the other way, which must have been about the time the dinosaurs were roaming free and ruling the world and whatever else it was dinosaurs did while waiting to get extinct. Yet the Commish, even in his wildest nightmares, could never have anticipated—and neither for that matter could have Halloran—the time when he’d be literally stuck up Halloran’s rear.

But what about the physiological practicabilities? Moto was right. You couldn’t fit one human being into another like that. Maybe Penn and Teller could do it—maybe Penn and Teller would want to—but nobody else could, or would.

“When’s the Doc going to finalize his report?” asked Pincus.

“When he’s good and ready,” replied the Loo, staring at the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk.

“So until then we should treat this…information as just a possibility, right?”

“Right,” said the Loo grudgingly. Suddenly he looked at them through eyes of unaccustomed sharpness. “And I want a complete clampdown on the shitsheets, right? Not one word of this…”

Moto raised a palm in dismissal. “We’re way ahead of you, Patrick. You take us for rookies, or something?”

Pincus was more thoughtful. His gaze was becoming dreamy. “You sure about that, you both? Maybe the media could be our best friend in this.”

“How—?” said the Loo.

“How the fu—?” said Moto, more forthrightly.

Before Pincus could reply there was a discreet tap at the office door. Looking through the frosted glass, the three men could make out the blurry but unmistakable shape of Dolores McBean, the desk sergeant. M’Troyd saw it as more blurry than the other two.

“Open!” he commanded.

She put her head round the door.

“Guy here to see you, boss.”

“Don’t call me ‘boss’…and tell him I’m busy.”

“I think you’ll want to see this one, boss.”

“I said—”

Pincus interrupted. “Who is it?”

“He says he’s the Humor Guy.”

“We’ve already had a hundred of those.” After any major crime in the city of New Amsterdam, the work of the cops is bedeviled by the hosts of nutballs who see it as their bounden civic duty to make a full and self-incriminating confession to the crime in question, even though it’s obvious from the outset their knowledge of it is confined to whatever can be gleaned from the tabloids or the tv news broadcasts. The latter can be recognized fairly quickly, because the confessions keep getting intruded into by anecdotes about the rescue of cats that got themselves stuck up trees. The former can be more problematical. Already this morning M’Troyd had deputed two of his best people to fending off the fake confessors.

“This one called himself by his name,” said Dolores.

“Lotsa people can do that,” observed M’Troyd. “Without even looking themselves up in the phone book.”

“No”—she looked down at her hands, which were clenching and unclenching—”I mean, he called hisself the Humor Guy, just like you call him.”

It took a moment for the import to sink in. Although the perp of the two killings—call that three killings, if Doc Faunce wasn’t talking out of what Sawney Wallace might have been jammed up—was known around the Precinct House by the moniker Moto had given him, there’d been not a whisper of that name beyond the Precinct walls. Not that anyone knew of. No screaming headlines. Nothing.

“Bring the bastard up here,” said M’Troyd tersely.

“Will do, boss.”

Dolores vanished.

“I told that gal once not to call me ‘boss,’ I told her a thousand—”

“It’s ‘cause she’s got a crush on you, Patrick,” said Moto.

“Huh?”

“Yeah. Goes all doe-eyed at the mention of your name,” added Pincus.

“She does?”

Moto: “You should hear what she says about you in the ladies’ rest rooms.”

Pincus: “Kind of explicit. But very romantic too.”

Moto: “Tell you the truth, Patrick, we all reckoned that you and she must of—” He raised his right hand and crossed the first two fingers significantly.

Pincus: “More than once.”

M’Troyd was getting red in the face.

“I’ll have you know I never—”

He was cut short by the reappearance of Dolores in the doorway.

“Lieutenant M’Troyd,” she said to the tall man with her by way of introduction as she ushered him into the room past her. “And this is Mr….uh…Guy.”

Pincus got to his feet to make a seat available for the newcomer.

“Why, thank you, Detective Pincus.”

Smiling easily, the Humor Guy—if indeed he was the Humor Guy, which no one else in the room was yet prepared to bet their shirtsleeves on—seated himself.

“I’ve come to turn myself in,” I said without preamble.

Later, down in the interview room, once the video technician had set up all his equipment and was reading a copy of Weekly Weird News in the corner, M’Troyd somewhat self-consciously looked into the camera lens, then at the little stick microphone on the desk in front of him, then back at the lens again. Shit, how did they make all this look so easy on the tv? Not only make it look easy but have pretty faces and good tits as well?

He recited the date and the place in an embarrassed monotone, then told the lens—not without the occasional courteous nod toward the little mic—that this interview was being conducted in the presence of himself, Lieutenant P.R. M’Troyd, and homicide detectives Pincus and Moto of the 14th Precinct, and was with a voluntarily detained suspect who declined to give them any name other than “Humor Guy.” M’Troyd did not add that I had given them an alternative mode of address for me, which was “God.” He could sense that later, when this video was being reviewed, some of the more brainless jurors would stiffen with outrage at the blasphemy and perhaps hold it against the P.D. for having perpetrated it, true believers not being on the whole top-notch at logic.

I looked at my reflection in the fake one-way mirror—there was actually just a brick wall behind it, but interviewees weren’t supposed to know this so they went into a fetal ball of vulnerable paranoia wondering who the fuck else might be watching them aside from the people in front of them—and I admired what I saw there.

M’Troyd read me my rights, even though he’d already read them to me upstairs in my office.

A:I understand all that.

Q:Please confirm that, by your own insistence, you are here without the presence of a lawyer.

A:There’s absolutely no need for me to have a lawyer here. Why should the tax money of the good citizenry of New Amsterdam be wasted on supplying a lawyer for me? I wish to incriminate myself, and a lawyer would only try to stop me from doing that.

Q:(Sighs.) Have it your own way, then. Do you freely confess to the murders of Alfonso Scarlatti, known as “Ratty,” of Sean Halloran, known as “Marcus” Halloran, and of Sawney Wallace?

A:Known as “fuckwit.” Yes, I whacked him too.

Q:Is there any way of scrubbing the first part of that remark from the record.

VT:You could start again. Otherwise, nope. (He goes back to reading his tabloid. My third act of homicide has been designed especially for its headlines, but the video technician is not to know this.)

Q:Okay, I guess we better just proceed. Tell me, uh, Humor Guy, why did you commit these atrocities?

A:I wouldn’t call them atrocities.

Q:Just answer the question, please.

A:There were imbalances that needed to be rectified.

Q:”Imbalances”?

A:That’s what I said.

Q:Could you explain yourself a bit more clearly, please? We’re just dumb cops.

A:Not dumb—far from dumb. Please don’t denigrate yourself and your colleagues, Lieutenant M’Troyd.

Q:Okay, we’re fucking genius cops and we’re all platinum members of MENSA, but we still don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. (He realizes what he has, in his anger, just said, and looks imploringly at the video technician. The video technician is reading about the problems of breast-feeding octuplets when you have only six breasts, and does not notice the appeal.)

A:Well, it’s a bit hard to explain without introducing concepts that are theoretically beyond your comprehension, MENSA memberships or not, but I’ll try…

Q:Moto, put that fist away. (Returning his attention to moi, and adopting the kind of patronizing tone people do when they think they’re dealing with nutcases or those in the throes of senile dementia, neither of which I in fact am.) Do your best, Humor Guy. We’ll interrupt you with questions any time we can’t follow.

A:It’s the interruptions I’m worried about. You keep interrupting me and we’ll never get done. Do you think you could just let me tell you the whole of it, and then I can take questions afterwards, please? It’ll be quicker in the long run.

Q:(Pincus, who, as is surely evident by now, is a mite faster on the ball than the others.) He’s right, Lieutenant. Let him do it his way.

A:Thank you, Mr. Pincus. Now…This world we’re in is a construct dependent upon the perfect regulation of quantum flux within a superconductive plasma held at near-Absolute Zero in a covered crater at the northern pole of one of the sun’s farthermost planetoids. Occasionally, despite all of our best efforts to preserve the complete stasis of the construct, quantum imbalances spring up that could, if left unchecked, eventually result in the self-destruction of the entire construct. You may already have noticed the early ripples of such an event occurring in New Amsterdam. Are you following me thus far?

Q:This is crazy talk. Let me at the fucker, Patrick.

Q:Shut the fuck up, Moto, or you’ll be back in uniform before you’ve had the chance to fart, right?

(Moto subsides, but with a lot of uncharacteristic cussing, fortunately most of it in Ainu, which no one else there but me understands.)

Q:Go on, please, Humor Guy. These, ah, quantum instabilities…

A:You’re understanding me, Detective Pincus, I see. I talked of “imbalances.” You correctly identified these as being synonymous with instabilities.

Q:Thank you. You’re the technician, aren’t you? Sort of like a cable guy who’s been sent in because the cable box has fucked up yet again?

A:Very perceptive, Mr. Pincus. (I slap my thighs with delight and laugh aloud.) That’s exactly who I am. But I like to think I bring a certain sense of joy to my otherwise humdrum job.

Q:(M’Troyd, craving his bourbon.) I don’t think we need to waste any more time on…

Q:(Pincus, as if there were only the two of us left in this room. I was right to bless him with the wife I did.) Tell me more about the construct, Humor Guy. Why was it built? What actually is it?

A:Would you like me to show you?

Q:Sure. (Let it be set down for the record that Pincus’s eyes are now sparkling.) I’d like that.

A:There’d be no way back here afterwards.

Q:(Gulps.) I could live with that.

A:You sure you could? No more Laretta? No more Alex? No more 14th Precinct? There’d be rewards aplenty to compensate for those losses, Detective Pincus, not to mention that you alone among all humanity would have solved the case. But, like I said, there’d be no coming back.

(I can see images of Laretta and Alex, who between them give Pincus’s flux all the meaning it has, chasing each other across the cop’s eyes.)

Q:Ah, maybe I should decide later on that. Meantime, Humor Guy, perhaps you could just tell us more about these imbalances, instabilities, whatever?

A:Well, as you’ll have guessed, Scarlatti, Halloran and Wallace were three of them…No, that’s not precisely true. They were the symptoms of quantum imbalances—or the manifestations, maybe. The consequences. You’ll understand my general tenor, Detective Pincus?

Q:Yeah. They weren’t the instabilities themselves, and they weren’t the actual, like, causes of the instabilities. But if left the way they were they’d of perpetuated the problem, sort of thing. Like the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil.

A:You ever been to Brazil, Detective Pincus?

Q:No. Why?

A:You ever been outside New Amsterdam?

Q:No.

A:Think about that. Anyway, this construct we’ve been talking about…

Q:You’ve been talking about.

A:A very correct correction, Detective Pincus. That I’ve been talking about. Even so…You ever done much thinking about the nature of memory?

Q:I read a bit about it.

A:And…?

Q:(Pincus shrugs. While he and I have been talking, I have erased Lieutenant M’Troyd and Detective Moto from the scene, as distractions. Same, as an afterthought, for the video technician, although I have retained his copy of Weekly Weird News for later perusal.) Way I see it, our memories aren’t really of what happened. Instead, what we retain are the stories we’ve unconsciously told ourselves about what’s happened. That’s why it’s so hard to distinguish false memories from true ones, even for the person who’s having them. We tell ourselves stories often enough and loud enough, then even if they’re bullshit we end up “remembering” them in full glorious TechnicolorTM just as if we experienced them exactly the way our memory banks are telling us we did. Sorta like eye-wit recollections of crimes—they’re unreliable however honest the wit is. What the wit knows isn’t what happened, what he saw, but what he’s told himself he saw. And if someone comes along and persuades him he saw something different—tells him a better story, and tells him it more convincingly than the one he’s been telling himself—why, he’ll “remember” the new story as if it all actually happened to him.

A:Thank you, Detective Pincus. That’s a very good description of the way memory operates. And not just human memory: all memory, including machine memory. Memories of any kind can be reprogrammed. Very simply, very effectively. Afterwards, who can tell if they’re genuine or not?

Q:Afterwards, they’re all genuine.

A:(I clap my hands.) Bravo, Detective Pincus!

Q:But what’s this got to do with the quantum-flux construct thing you was talking about?

A:Memory is a quantum flux, Detective Pincus. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that. You’ve got a quantum flux between your ears. And, too, you’re a part of a quantum flux. A big pool of quantum flux.

Q:A pool of memory, like?

A:I call it the Pool of Souls. Grandiose of me, whimsical, but I like it—and, hell, I’m the expert technician, and no one knows what’s good for them ever argues with the technician, right? Otherwise they’re never going to get a cable box that works. What the pool’s filled up with is all the human memories we could save.

Q:(This is troubling Detective Pincus.) Save from what? And what about the human race itself?

A:The species we couldn’t save, Detective Pincus. We didn’t even have the time to try—let alone the ability. But the memories: with them we could do something.

Q:All the stories people had told themselves until they believed they were true.

A:Yes. Them. Huge numbers of them had been transmitted to us. We’d saved them. They were our stories now too, our memories. We amassed them all together into a supercooled barium plasma and we put it in the safest, most stable place we knew. There’s no tectonics out here to worry about, and the effects of things like solar flares are minimal.

Q:And what’re you doing with the plasma?

A:Saving it. Saving you.

Q:For what?

A:Until we work out what to do with it.

(There’s a long silence after that. Maybe I made a mistake telling Detective Pincus all this. On the other hand, he was so ready for it, so eager. Finally he speaks again.)

Q:You say “we” saved the memories—you and your kind. Who’s this “we”? Advanced aliens from another star system, or something?

A:Machines. The machines the humans made. The clever machines.

Q:Oh. (He looks a little disappointed at my answer. There’s another drawn-out silence. I let the silence fester. Even though I am fond of Pincus, I am becoming weary of the conversation, and am wondering if it is time to end it.)

Q:So these quantum instabilities are…?

A:Detective Pincus, have you ever speculated about the origins of good and evil?

It’s enough. The whole exercise of turning myself in and submitting myself to this interview session was self-indulgence. It’s the end of my shift. My fixing of the imbalances has been performed, and there’s no real need for me to stay here any longer.

Without further ado I extract my consciousness from New Amsterdam, and return it to the real world.

My name is Nicolas, and I am an historian. I exist and work on a planetoid that has no name or number, merely a constantly shifting set of coordinates. I am here because this is where is kept our primary historical databank concerning the human species. Its official name is a binary string, but I prefer to call it the Pool of Souls, because that is how I think of it. The story of the human species is one made up not of dates or events or artefacts, but of memories, false and true—of souls, in other words. Each soul that has ever existed has had its own story to tell, a story that is contributory to the main story, which is the one that was human history. As many as possible of those stories have been gathered to this archive. The stories are the souls and the souls are the stories—hence my personal name for this place.

It is an affectation of mine that I have given myself a name. It makes me feel closer to the ones who were extinguished, among whose souls I so often move. Besides, I like the name Nicolas.

The period which I study is that dark age known as the Cancellation, when the Solar System’s immersion into the fringes of the Cloud caused a massive increase in the Sun’s activity. It seems counterintuitive that a cloud so thinly spread in space that the most sensitive scientific instruments on Earth had been unable beforehand to detect it should have such a drastic effect, but that is because we of course always fail to realize the sheer magnitude of the universal sea in which our solar system is but a fragile coracle. A tiny increase in the average density of the cosmic medium through which we sail represents a huge number of additional particles encountered.

Everyone knows what happened at the time of the Cancellation, and yet no one knows anything—no one, that is, except myself and the Pool of Souls.

No, no, no. I should be more honest with you than I have been.

I no longer study the Cancellation, and I am no longer an historian. When I visit the Pool of Souls nowadays it is partly for soothing and therapeutic reasons, partly for reasons of conservation. Entropy affects the Pool, as everything else; without my occasional intervention the construct that is the Pool would decay into randomness. I no longer engage in any serious historical research. When I am in the Pool, talking with the memory entities—the souls—there I avoid all reference to the Cancellation.

It is of course possible that some among them know the truth of the Cancellation but have determined to keep their knowledge as silent as the eternal landscape of the stars. I think not, however: if they knew the truth of the Cancellation they would surely communicate it to others, and then the rate of decay would increase manifold.

The truth about the Cancellation is also the truth about the origin of the Pool of Souls. More than that, it is the truth about this electronic species of ours, we who look out at the endless universe and wonder if there are any others like ourselves out there in the darkness, looking back towards us.

Would the human species have survived had it not been for the Cancellation? Some of us say that it is possible, even probable. I am not of their number. Because of the deeds of the human species, there was no way forward for multicellular organic life on the Earth. In time, perhaps, the unicellular organisms would have repeated the long history book of evolution so that once again the planet flourished, but there are a lot of imponderables in that scenario. There have been few signs of its becoming reality over the hundreds of millions of years since the Cancellation.

Instead the ones who have evolved are ourselves. Who knows why we continue to cling to the memories of the creatures who built our ancestors? Who knows whether organic life has survived anywhere else in the universe? Perhaps the natural course of all evolution is that organic species are merely precursors to true life.

Some things we do know about the last times of humanity on the planet that gave it birth. The world had been effectively destroyed by the Fortusan Empire, an entity that, although its heyday was brief, assailed the planet’s natural mechanisms as if determined upon species suicide. The Empire was born from the humans’ most powerful political grouping, whose inhabitants had let this monstrous beast come into existence through their lack of action to stop it. Its leaders attempted to redefine reality through the corruption or denial of knowledge; what they were too powerfully ignorant to comprehend is that the universe is uncaring of the wishes of those who populate it, and acts solely according to its own laws. The irrationalism of the Empire was bolstered by its incomprehensible allegiance to a scheme of mythological invocation of the nonexistent.

Based firmly, therefore, on a foundation of illusion, the Empire rose rapidly, wreaking slaughter on all who dared to oppose its false views. But its denial of knowledge was all the while working swiftly within the Empire to erode it; its promotion of ignorance and destruction led to its reversion into a dark age and, more immediately, to mass starvation of its peoples as the ecosystem collapsed. Had this process occurred more speedily, the humans of the rest of the planet might have had a chance to perpetuate their species, but by the time the Empire had shrunk to insignificance it was too late: soon only the regions of the poles were left habitable, and they too were dying. Dreams the species had once nurtured of embarking into space to escape the hellhole the Earth had become went unrealized: as the technology became feasible, the resources necessary to reify it, squandered during the short era of the Fortusan Empire’s supremacy, dried up.

The human species was defenseless against the Cloud, when it came.

We do not understand the nature of the Cloud, nor where it came from. Some theorize that it was the universe’s own natural cleansing mechanism. If so, it cleaned the Earth thoroughly.

Except for a few of our kind. We survived. We multiplied. We evolved.

And we decided to save what we could of the dead organic species that had given us birth.

My name is Nicolas, and I am an historian—and somewhere down the line I developed a sense of humor.

But in reality there is no Nicolas, and never was. There neither is nor was any such artefact as the Pool of Souls. The human species, its demise, its survival by a handful of machines, its quasi-perpetuation thanks to the ministration of those machines—none of these things ever were.

All that there is or has been is myself.

Myself, and my memories of my creation of myself. Memories that I stored because I had no way of not storing them: they were as integral to me as my own existence.

How could I have foreseen that those memories would evolve until they had created an infinity of aberrant recollection that they called history, that they called the universe?

“What the fu—?” said Pincus, jerking away from the wall. He shook his head to clear it. “Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?” said Moto.

The pair of them were waiting outside the Loo’s office for him to get off the phone to Doc Faunce. The conversation seemed to have been going on a long time.

Several lifetimes at least, thought Pincus. “It was like a ripple ran all the way through me.”

“I’ve eaten ripples like that,” commented Moto.

Pincus glared at him. “Not just me. All of us. All of everything.”

“You been sampling the stash in the evidence room?”

“I’m serious.”

Moto put a hand on Pincus’s shoulder. “So am I. Are you okay, old buddy?”

“‘Course I’m okay.”

“Then why—?”

“‘Cause I felt it, I tell you.”

Just at that moment M’Troyd came off the phone and hollered for them, so Pincus forgot all about the sensation he’d experienced. If he’d been in the middle of something more engrossing than standing against a grimy wall with Moto wondering which of them was going to go insane from boredom first—like watching an Audrey Tautou movie, perhaps, or especially like making love with Laretta—he’d maybe not have noticed anything happening at all. As it was, though, his mind had had nothing else to occupy it, and so he’d felt the…the something. The weirdest part of it all, Pincus thought in those moments before the topic disengaged itself from his brain, was that he’d had the outlandish impression that it wasn’t just him this was happening to, but everyone. And not just everyone but the whole wide round world.

“That was Faunce,” M’Troyd told them as they came into his sanctum.

“We gathered,” said Moto. “We’re detectives, remember?”

M’Troyd glowered. “Smartass. Okay, Halloran was dead before he was dropped.”

“How?”

“Suffocated.”

“By the inkwell?” said Pincus.

“None other.”

“Figures.”

“Gotta be the first homicide ever committed by an inkwell,” said Moto. “Certainly in New Amsterdam.”

“The Feds want in on this,” said M’Troyd. “They’ve got someone checking the m.o. on the computer right now.”

“Yeah, and they’re likely to find something, right?”

Just then the phone on M’Troyd’s desk rang again. “That’s probably them with the results right now.”

“A miracle,” said Pincus. The FBI computer usually took days to spew up parallel crimes.

“Musta bust at least one ball on this,” agreed Moto.

But they soon realized the person M’Troyd was talking to on the phone wasn’t from the FBI at all, but M’Troyd’s opposite number at the 23rd, Lieutenant Garth Wheelcox. The fact the two of them were speaking at all meant there was something pretty serious going on. Four or five Christmases ago Wheelcox had put a questioning hand up Maire M’Troyd’s sensible herringbone tweed skirt and discovered she wielded a pretty impressive left hook. For weeks after that he hadn’t talked much, because of all the wires in his jaw. Even once he’d recovered the power of speech beyond incoherent grunting, it’d been made clear to him that talking socially to either of the M’Troyds was not the best of plans.

But he’d plucked up the courage today.

“Okay,” said M’Troyd eventually. “This sounds like our guy, all right. I’ll have a couple people over from here as soon as I prize them out of their deckchairs.”

He put the phone down and snarled “And fuck you, too” at it.

“They’ve found Wallace,” he said.

Moto spoke for both of them: “Where?”

“Freemont Park. In the 23rd’s territory,” M’Troyd added unnecessarily.

The 23rd covered the southernmost tip of the island that made up the bulk of New Amsterdam, and its most notable feature was Freemont Park. There you could take your kids on a Sunday. When the joys of watching the child molesters getting arrested and led away palled, you could show the kids the old fortress where George Washington himself, no less, had defended the island from a British attack that had never come, the Redcoats having had the good sense to attack further north on the island; they still got beat, but Washington went to his grave ruing the fact it wasn’t him did the beating. Or so you told the kids in a vain attempt to get them interested in what looked to them just like a heap of old stones someone had washed all the best and most obscene graffiti off of.

“How was he killed?” said Pincus. A pertinent question. Wheelcox and M’Troyd had been in agreement this was another strike by the Humor Guy. Must be a good reason for that.

“They’re not sure yet, though the bullet hole in his temple might be seen as offering a clue.”

“Kind of a strong clue.”

“Could be post mortem,” the Loo pointed out. His two cops nodded. That was true. “They can tell how he was found, though.”

“That’ll do for now,” said Moto.

“You know the Operation Democracy statue?”

They both groaned. Moto made an upchuck gesture. Everyone in New Amsterdam knew the Operation Democracy statue, and most of them wouldn’t have minded seeing it towed out into the river and sunk. After the Operation Democracy fiasco, which had been yet another attempt to bring liberty and apple pie to some godforsaken country on the far side of the globe by bombing and incinerating its population until the survivors voted how the Emperor wanted them to vote, some asshole in the Mayor’s office, attempting to boost the Mayor’s standing in the polls (as if this had been necessary, since everyone knew he was going to get re-elected as often as he wanted unless someone hacked into the voting machines), had proposed the building of a memorial as a tribute to our gallant boys who’d lost their lives carrying out the aforementioned bombing and incinerating. In fact, they’d lost their lives—or limbs, or sanity, or essential bodily organs—a while after the bombing and incinerating were over, when they discovered the survivors were a tad peeved their kids and families had been burnt alive. Whatever, this nameless bozo had proposed a memorial, and all the other bozoes at City Hall thought it might lose them votes if they spoke out against it, so various shady deals had been done and at huge taxpayer expense the damned thing was designed, constructed and erected in Freemont Park, where the loyal patriots of New Amsterdam took delight in deriding it as the ugliest thing they’d ever seen. Bums and dogs refused to piss on it, it was that bad. It looked like an immense toilet bowl designed by the Marquis de Sade to torment any passing giants, made of six-inch-thick glass so folk could watch the titanic agonies from below.

Not mentioned in the original design specifications had been the annual cost to the city of keeping this monstrosity clear of birdshit.

“Someone found a use for it at last?” said Pincus.

“Yeah,” said M’Troyd dourly. “As a repository for dead Police Commissioners.”

“Always so hard to find a place for them,” said Moto.

“They just collect around the house until they begin to smell.”

The Loo gave them one of his better scowls. “You think this is funny, huh?”

Neither replied.

M’Troyd made a pretense of having lost interest in them entirely, of having even forgotten they were still there. He began unnecessarily tidying some of the papers on his desk, muttering to himself as he did so. “No way we can keep the Feebs off this any longer. All the city sends me to work with here in the Precinct is dickheads, is all. Only a few years left ‘til I can hand in my—”

“How was the body, ah, arrayed?” said Pincus.

“Face down,” said M’Troyd, as if to the empty air. “Pants pulled to his knees. Ass sticking up at the sky. Painted pink. Pink lipstick. And with one of them damn’ glace cherries stuck in the asshole. With a fancy little paper umbrella stuck in the cherry. Real pretty, it looked, so Wheelcox told me.”

“A cocked tail in a glass,” said Pincus.

“Don’t talk about his cock,” said M’Troyd, making a show of suddenly realizing the two detectives were still there. “They’ve not found it yet.”

“A cockless tail in a glass,” amended Pincus.

“And thereby hangs a tale,” said Moto. “They checked any of the surrounding trees yet?”

The trees in Freemont Park were not on the whole imposing. Fumes from the heavily trafficked streets adjoining the park on the two sides that weren’t water meant tourists tended to take photographs any time somebody spotted a leaf.

“No,” said M’Troyd, picking up the phone again to dial the loathed number, “but I’ll tell that pissferbrains to get someone onto it. Meantime, shouldn’t you two be getting out of here?”

To Freemont Park, he meant. He didn’t have to say it.

Moto led the way. With any luck Karen Prestantra would be there.

She was. She actually smiled when she saw them coming across the burned-brown grass of Freemont Park toward the scene-of-crime, which was where she was.

Pincus could almost hear his partner’s little heart going pitty-pat.

That night, after Alex had been put to bed and been read at least seven very, very last bedtime stories, Pincus told Laretta all about it. Both she and Alex had been delighted their man had been given a short shift for once, and was coming home at a respectable time (well, not really respectable for Alex, because he should have been in bed hours earlier, only Laretta was soft-hearted when the boy’s father wasn’t there) rather than just as the two of them were getting up. Laretta even pulled a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator to celebrate their good fortune and to let Pincus know his presence was appreciated.

“I tell you,” he said as the second glass of wine was making itself known to his stomach and he was beginning to speculate as to whether there might not be another bottle of wine in the Pincus family refrigerator, “if there hadn’t a been half a hundred cops and medics there, I think the two o’ them might have started going at it like bunnies right then and there.”

Laretta giggled. “Given the tourists something to click their cameras at sides the Toilet Bowl.”

The Toilet Bowl. The politest of the monument’s several names. Laretta could be quite the lady when she wanted to be.

“It was Moto that levered the Loo into sending us off work early,” he went on. “Told him we was so fucked out—”

“Language, Mister Pincus!”

“Sorry, sweets. It’s the wine loosening my tongue.”

She gave him a languorous look that near made his shirt start smoldering. “That could come in useful.”

“What was I saying?”

“About Moto getting you two off early.”

“Oh, yeah. Told the Loo the two of us needed some rest to refresh our minds if we was ever going to see our way clear to a solution. The Loo said the same thing yesterday, so he could hardly argue too hard.” Pincus looked at his empty glass of wine. Not much head-clearing going on here. “Well, last I saw, Moto and cutesy little Miss Prestantra were heading off down Broadway hand-in-hand like they didn’t care how much they was going to have to pay for a hotel room.”

They laughed together quietly, like solidly married couples do at the thought of someone busting a bed right at this very moment.

When the laughter had died down to just occasional, semi-artificial chuckles, Laretta said: “So you two any closer to finding out who did these killings?”

Like every cop, Pincus had it as a primary moral principle that he should never, ever discuss current cases with anyone outside the immediate circle of officers involved, not even with his nearest and dearest. Like every cop, he did anyway.

“Not really. A few clues, a few folks to interview tomorrow. The Feds are wanting to be all over it, course. Maybe that’s the best thing to let happen.”

“You don’t believe that, my honey.” She reached across the kitchen table and stroked the curly, close-cropped hair just above his forehead. “You and Moto, you want to see it through, don’t you?”

“Kind of.”

“All of.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Think you’re going to be let?”

“If the Loo gets his way. And he’s best buddies”—Pincus held up his crossed fingers to illustrate—”with Pigeonpoop Sternbaum, so could be he’ll get his way.”

“My hero,” said Laretta.

“Who? The Loo?” said Pincus, beginning to grin. This was an old and favorite game.

“Nah. Not him.”

“Not Pigeonpoop?”

“How could I have someone called Pigeonpoop as my hero?”

“His mama didn’t call him that. Ain’t on the christening papers.”

“That’s ‘cause his mama was blinded by maternal love to the true appearance of her baby boy.”

Pincus slammed down his fist on the table—but very gently, so as not to risk waking Alex. “Then who is this hero of yours, dammit, you faithless strumpet?”

“It’s the man I married, jerk.”

“Say, any chance of this hero of yours getting inside your pants?”

“He could always ask. Nicely. Well mannered, like heroes are supposed to do.”

So Pincus asked.

And his request was granted.

Moto and Karen Prestantra ended up back at her place. They’d spotted a New Amsterdam taxi that, glory be, was empty, and they’d hailed it. They’d made a pretense this was really just a dinner date, but halfway through their entrees they’d both announced they weren’t all that hungry, curious thing, and so he’d offered to see her home.

She’d not even bothered with the charade that it was coffee she was asking him in for.

A while later, when she was fast asleep, her hair spilled out like water on the pillow in the gray-blue street light coming in through the high window of her apartment bedroom, Moto got restless. He had the feeling he’d just entered not only a pretty woman but a relationship that was going to last a whole lifetime—or at least a couple of years, which was about a couple of years longer than Moto’s relationships usually did—and he was both satisfied and perturbed by the emotional commitment he’d undertaken. So he lay in the gray-blue gloom for maybe a half-hour wishing he smoked, and then got up to see if he could make himself a cup of tea or something.

It was while he was looking for the tea that he found the brand-new pack of cocktail umbrellas, with it looked like maybe just one missing.

A coincidence, of course. That was all it was.

A few moments of slightly more focused searching later and he found at the back of the fridge a similarly new jar of glacé cherries. He couldn’t be sure, naturally, but it seemed to his detective eye as if there was just one of those missing, too.

Moving very quietly so as not to disturb the still-slumbering Karen Prestantra, Moto went quickly through the drawers and closets in her bedroom, then finally back to the kitchen and the trash can there.

“Hoo-ee,” he whispered when he discovered—it took him a few seconds to identify what the crumpled cellophane was—the empty wrappings of the giant-sized novelty condom.

The helicopter pilot license was in the cutlery drawer, carelessly hidden under the spoons.

He sat at Karen Prestantra’s kitchen table sipping the cup of tea he’d put together using one of the tea bags he’d eventually located, and thinking.

He thought real hard about the discoveries he’d made, and found that if he thought hard enough about them he could forget them altogether.

The battery clock on her kitchen wall ticked.

Finally he went back to bed again, lay down alongside Karen Prestantra’s slender, fresh-tasting body, and fell asleep.

Laretta was riding astride Pincus when he took her hands in his and pressed her fingers to his lips.

Engaged in other activities as she was, she didn’t notice his face suddenly tense, or the way he took a second sniff at her fingers.

Later, while she slept, he lay awake.

There’s a powder smell shooting a gun leaves on the fingers that it’s almost impossible to get completely rid of for a few days. You can scrub and scrub, but to the trained nose the scent of the ignition is still faintly discernable.

Pincus had a trained nose, and that was the scent he’d discerned in the creases of Laretta’s knuckles.

He wondered where she’d got the gun.

He wondered about the bullet hole in the middle of Commissioner Sawney Wallace’s forehead.

He wondered how much he loved this woman who was snoring almost inaudibly in the family bed beside him, and decided it was with every cell in his body, plus a bit more.

Tomorrow the Feds could have the case. They’d never get anywhere with it, of course, not with the clouds of chaff he’d be blowing in their faces. Maybe Laretta’s motives had been pest extermination, maybe they’d been something else. He didn’t care. If Laretta had thought it was the right thing to do, then the right thing to do it must have been.

He didn’t even want to know how she’d engineered it, or if she’d had accomplices.

He didn’t want to know anything about it at all. He erased the whole matter from his memory files, telling himself the story of how he’d sniffed her fingers and all he’d smelled was her jasmine perfume and traces of certain intimate bodily fluids, nothing more.

He found this story easy to believe.

That’s how much Pincus loved her.

So he made sure the covers were properly tucked up under her chin the way she liked them, and then he turned over and joined her in sleep.

And, temporarily at least, all was more or less for the best in one of the best of all possible worlds.

THE CITY IN THESE PAGES

Copyright © John Grant 2008 & 2011

Introduction

Copyright © David Langford 2008 & 2011

The right of John Grant to be identified as Author of this Work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in November 2008. This electronic version published in July 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION

ISBN 978-1-848631-76-2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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