Gun Machine

Twenty-Two

THE HUNTER needed to obtain a weapon.

There were an unpleasant number of conditions placed on his forthcoming work. He needed the weapon by tomorrow. He was well aware of having a limited sum of money at his hideaway here in the south of the island. He could not bear to take the subway. And he knew that the response to his next hunt would be immediate and difficult.

The hunter kept walking west. The modern man in him understood that he was entering the part of New Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen by most, and Clinton by real estate agents’ store-window ads, but he allowed Old Manhattan to wash up in his vision for a little while, and he contentedly followed the stream that the first Dutch on the island called the Great Kill.

His hand went into his bag, locating and producing first a pair of thin leather gloves, and then a ring. The ring was not the most beautiful piece of handcrafting he’d ever seen, or even that he’d ever made. It was wrapped wire, wide enough to accommodate the gloved index finger of his right hand, and in the crude but tight setting was a piece of quartz he’d found by the mouth of the Harlem River Ship Canal. The hunter had worked it carefully. It stood out just enough from the wire claws of the ring setting and was cut to such a sharp point that it made a functional punch weapon of last resort. The hunter had on one occasion used it to strike open a jugular vein, and on another to destroy a larynx.

The hunter slipped the gloves on, and then the ring.

Draining Mannahatta from his sight with reluctance, he began to pick his way through warehouses, gray-mud parking lots, and auto repair shops. It was, he felt, as desolate as this end of the island got.

He found the location he wanted: a five-story building whose frontage was a boarded-up pizzeria. The side door, which opened onto the stairs going up to the higher floors of the building, was, as ever, slightly ajar. One presented oneself in front of it, at which event the door would creak open to reveal a large man with a badly concealed gun standing in its lee.

And so it was that the door swung to show, in the gloom, a grotesque in a grubby orange tracksuit, dark hair growing patchily out of a head that appeared to have at some point fallen in, or been held in, farming machinery. It was as if his face were once a soft thing that someone had swirled with a finger before it had set.

“I want to see Mr. Kutkha,” the hunter said.

“Ain’t no Kutkha here,” the grotesque said, predictably.

“Tell him a previous customer and distant old tribesman has come to visit.”

“Got a name?”

“Tell him you asked for a name and that I told you I’m a human being.”

The grotesque shrugged and walked up the short flight of stairs backward, keeping his hand on the gun shoved in the back of his waistband. At the landing, still keeping his deep-set eyes on the hunter, he relayed the information.

The hunter presently heard a laugh like bones being rattled in a tin, and then a harsh, snapping voice shouting “Let him in, let him in!” The grotesque summoned the hunter up with a paw whose shape was lost to flab. On the landing, the hunter saw a second man, shorter than the grotesque, with a military haircut. His body was overtrained in the manner of the modern physical narcissists, speaking of a man who knew the names of most of his muscles. This one held out a hand for the hunter’s bag, which he passed over easily. The hunter was silently directed to the door of the largest room on this floor, a room that hummed with the sound of machines. It did not quite smother a sudden composition of sounds from the next floor up: screams like a cat being dismembered, a deep thump that shook the ceiling, the noise of someone trying to cry while unable to draw breath.

The hunter showed no outward sign of having heard it. He allowed the man with the military haircut to pat him down.

The first thing the hunter noticed upon entering the room was a boy of sixteen, low-browed and broad-nosed, standing beside the door with the expression of a soundly beaten puppy. The hunter could not see the boy’s hands, and so he moved to kill the boy.

Kutkha’s voice stopped him. “Boy! You do not stand there when a true man enters a room! Do you want to die?”

Kutkha was thin like a switch, with a face flaked from flint. He sat with kingly aplomb upon a small, richly buttery sofa, flanked by two tall fans attendant on either side of his seat, with two floor-standing air-conditioning units on the floor before him like kneeling slaves. The hunter knew Kutkha of old: the man complained of being permanently hot, yet he loved clothes, and so he sat there in peculiar long shorts of fine cotton and white silk and an elaborately patterned waistcoat and nothing else, being delightedly hammered by the tundra gales of very new air-conditioning machines.

Kutkha was still cackling at the boy’s frozen horror as he rose to shake the hunter’s hand. “The human being himself! My distant relation!”

And then, to the boy: “A human being, see? He is of the Lenni-Lenape tribe. Do you know what those words mean? The ‘Human Beings!’ He and I, we are of the same blood. Your family?” He spit on the floor. “Your family are shit.”

Kutkha turned back to the hunter. “My brother fucked a Muscovite. What can you do. Some people will fuck livestock if the animals stand still long enough. That family, they continue to send these little sperms up the B to beg me to make nice, come to Brighton Beach, eat kielbasa they made out of fucking dogs, and listen to them talk about how I can give them all my fucking money. Those people have been fucking my people for so long that you could look right into my very fucking DNA with a microscope and see someone from Moscow pissing on my genes and calling it summer rain.”

Kutkha rounded again on the hapless boy. “Do you see? I am Itelmen! My people walked to Alaska and down into America and became his people! He is more my blood than you. You are like the things that fall out of my ass when I eat Italian foods.”

Kutkha returned to his seat. There wasn’t another chair in the room, but the hunter was expecting this. He knew Kutkha. He stood between the air-con units, a supplicant position before the throne. The hunter had harbored some small stone of regret about what would have to happen. It turned to dust in his heart as he stood there like a peasant between the rumbling little machines.

The Russian waved an airy hand at the boy. “You can speak in front of him. I am not even convinced he knows the language.”

The hunter studied the boy briefly, and then decided to speak. “I need a gun. I would very much like a police gun.”

“How so?”

“A gun associated with the police. With use by the police.”

Kutkha addressed the sullen boy. “He’s a collector, see. Knows what he wants, knows what he likes. A man with an interest in history. You could cultivate that shit. Know where you’ve been and you’ll see where you’re going. You might be of some use to me if you could prove you could think. Or count. You do not have to go back to Brighton Beach and get jerked off by old men in piss-stinking banyas. I’ll say that I can teach you things here in Manhattan that have been long forgotten in Brighton Beach.”

The hunter said, “It doesn’t have to be new. I’d prefer something in working condition.”

“You know.” Kutkha ruminated. “I’m almost positive I have a Colt Official Police. From the 1950s.”

“What does the grip look like?”

“Checkered wood.”

“And the barrel?”

“Six inches, I would say. I remember this because my specialist, he likes history like we do, and he saw this gun and made the little rocking motion that means he is happy, and told me many things about the gun until I had to say to him that I would shoot him to make him quiet again.”

“I’ll take that,” said the hunter.

“A fine purchase. A weapon like that, it’s like a good watch, from the days when they still had mechanical parts that people cared about. I could have maybe found you a SIG, but it’s simply not the same, is it? The Colt comes with the original NYPD holster, but I’ll not sell you that. If you want it, it’s free, but I’ll not take your money for it.”

“Why?”

“It hasn’t been used. It’s a spare holster. And I will tell you a thing that I was told by my specialist, because it amused me. Policemen had to break in those holsters. They looked like leather but were just treated cardboard. So they had to force a Coke bottle into the holster for a week to loosen it enough to get the gun in. If you put the gun in there without breaking it in, you had to cut the gun out again. Or get shot. But breaking it in did so much damage that the holster would fall apart after six months. I am told this: in the 1970s, men of our kind could rip the Colts right out of the holsters. Just tear the holsters, pull the gun, and shoot the policeman. Those were sweeter times, if you ignored the clothes.”

The hunter clamped down on the thoughts and actions boiling in his gut. “How much?”

“I will not accept more than one hundred dollars for this gun,” said Kutkha, chest swelling with pride in his own magnanimity. “It will come with twenty-four rounds of ammunition.”

“That’s very kind,” said the hunter. “Thank you.”

“The gun will have to come in from New Jersey. I’ll make a call. Be here tonight around seven. It will arrive with my evening shipment. I will take it from the vehicle myself and ensure everything is correct.”

“That is very professional and very timely. Thank you,” said the hunter. “I’ll be here with the money.”

Which he most certainly could have been.

Kutkha did not stand again to shake the hunter’s hand but instead picked up his cell phone and speed-dialed a number, looking at the hunter with the expectation that he was observant enough to know that his audience had concluded. The hunter nodded and left the Russian’s little court. In the hallway, he took his bag from the military man, who watched him walk downstairs to the grotesque, who opened the front door for him and saw him out.

What the hunter knew was that there was the grotesque, the military man, Kutkha, the boy, and at least one additional man upstairs. All but the additional man or men upstairs had seen him. When he returned, there would be at least one other, whichever employee from New Jersey had driven in with his gun and with whatever else Kutkha had previously arranged for his “evening shipment.” Humans, the hunter presumed. In his bag there was the knife and some small tools for living in the forest. A pouch of tinder, a strike, some twine, a few other things. He had the ring on his finger.

He walked to the end of the block, ensured he was out of sight, and began to look for access to the rear of Kutkha’s building.

On the east–west side of the block, five or six doors before a little food store, he found an abandoned hardware store, windows imperfectly whitewashed, the frames in the floors above mostly missing their glass. An official-looking sign had been pasted on the door, but weather had washed many of its words away. There was no one to see him put his knife to the lock and pry the door open. Inside, he closed the door with care and found a standing particleboard display unit to prop against it. The owner had apparently been forced to abandon the place in a hurry. There was still stock here, and many fittings. The hunter crouched in the gloom for a moment, listened, and inhaled. He could faintly detect human feces, but they were old. No one was currently squatting here. He searched what remained of the missing owner’s attempt to live by the cheating laws of exchange in Manhattan. Whatever he took was fair. Mannahatta had been stolen from the Lenape in fraudulent barter. The hunter was no criminal. The spoils of the city on this island were his by right.

The hunter found, among other things, more twine and sliding trays of nuts and bolts that hadn’t been worth the owner’s time to pack and carry. A thought came to him, and he cut himself six feet of twine, gathered a handful of nuts and a few bolts, and looked for the stairway access to the upper floors and ultimately the roof.

Up here, he had an angled view on the rear of Kutkha’s building and clear sight of its weed-choked loading yard and the access alley where cars could reach it. The windows on the upper three floors of the building had makeshift curtains tacked across them inside.

The hunter crouched behind the ventilation unit on the roof, out of direct sight of Kutkha’s building, and began to tie nuts into the length of twine. He knotted the heavy bolts on either end of the string. Experimentally, he spun a foot’s worth of string in his fist, the bolt at the end whipping the twine around in a tight arc. Good enough.

The hunter stood, faced Kutkha’s building, spun the weighted twine until it buzzed, and flung it toward the top floor of that building. He watched it fly and then ducked behind the roof unit and watched from the best stealthy angle he could find.

The bolted twine hit the top window. Not hard enough to break it. With just enough force for it to make a sharp report and clatter down onto the window below on the fourth floor, and again onto the third, before falling away, landing in a thick patch of weeds in the yard.

One curtain was pulled away on the fifth floor. One on the fourth. Two on the third. Little bobbing heads trying to see what had made the noise.

Four more people. Also, whoever they were keeping up there. At least one woman being held. The hunter sighed, rolling back out of sight. This had gotten more complicated than it needed to be.

He wondered if the grotesque ever left his position for lunch. The grotesque did not have the shape of a person who was likely to forget about his lunches.

The shipment from New Jersey was obviously going to come through the access road to the yard, in dying evening light. It was a well-secluded space. Unless you were on an adjacent roof, of course, the hunter thought with a quiet chuckle.

His original plan had been to pay for the weapon, leave, return a few moments later, and kill everybody. There were now too many players, all too scattered, for that to work. The hunter needed to make the thing small again. He needed to isolate Kutkha. He did not want everything to balance on Kutkha having made a point of saying he’d take the gun from the car himself to check it over.

That said, the hunter had to admit to himself, that was the sort of thing Kutkha would do, and he’d done similar things in the past. The man did take steps, if not exactly pains, to act and present himself as a courtly criminal, operating in accordance with some mannered tradition that existed for the most part only in Kutkha’s own head.

The hunter looked at the sun and calculated the phase of the day. He looked along the row of roofs, paused to count off his pulse, and matched his internal drums to a beat in his mind. The hunter then, staying as low as he dared, ran and leaped and ran over the roofs until he reached the corner he’d turned earlier. He committed the time elapsed to hard memory and crawled to the edge of this new roof. He had an oblique sliver of a view to the front door of Kutkha’s building; enough that he’d notice someone leaving.

The hunter was very good at waiting. The roof became the gently curved crown of a foothill, and he was looking down into a gladed trail, the patchy blacktop so easily turning into shade-dappled ground that he smiled, broadly and genuinely, at its simple beauty. There were deer mice popping across the grass here and there, and the shadow of a sharp-shinned hawk orbited his head for a short and exquisite minute. There were patches of bladderpod, as lovely a pale violet as a summer evening sky, whose seeds were sacred. All was sacred, in this waiting time. Life was perfect.

The sun had just stepped to its noon summit when the hunter flinched from the wrenching uchronic sight of a twenty-first-century grotesque in a food-spattered orange running suit walking through a pre-seventeenth-century Mannahatta woodland trail. He almost threw up from the perceptual shock.

The grotesque followed the path the hunter himself had taken. He turned the corner of the block. His only possible destination was the food store. The hunter, blinking back history, watched the man’s walking speed, and as he turned the corner, the hunter ran for the roof he had come from, beating out the time in his head.

The hunter was on the ground floor and prepared within four minutes. He prayed it was enough. He moved the display stand and opened the front door. The street was still entirely clear. It wasn’t, after all, a part of town you went to unless you had to. He stood behind the door, put it ajar, and waited again. This time, he was tensed. The grotesque couldn’t possibly have bought food and made it back around the corner in four minutes. The creature just didn’t move that fast. The street had to stay clear. Performing this hunt was risk enough.

The grotesque dawdled past the hunter’s door.

The hunter counted off two more steps, to give himself more space to work in, and opened the door and moved.

A double loop of twine went around the grotesque’s neck, and a vicious wrench pulled a complex knot swiftly tight. The hunter wound the twine into his left hand and yanked the creature backward. The hunter gave him credit for trying to reach for his gun with his right hand even as he tried to get his left hand under the loop. The hunter pulled him in close and drove his own right hand into the grotesque’s temple. The hunter felt the bone give like struck eggshell under the quartz spike.

The prey’s legs turned to mush. The hunter summoned all his strength and dragged the prey backward into the dark of the store. He pressed the prey into the wall face-first long enough for him to close the door as silently as he could.

The prey kicked.

The hunter was off balance and had not yet reached out for his knife, which he’d placed on the display stand. He fell backward with the prey on top of him, bucking like a wounded bull. In past years, the hunter could have throttled his prey by main force. But he had no ego about his age and was fine with jabbing his knee into the prey’s back to increase the power he could put into the strangulation. In this position, the more the prey struggled, the quicker he choked himself against the twine.

The prey’s heels skittered on the floor, and dug in. He paid for it. But the hunter realized the prey was making the space for what could be a successful grab at the gun in the back of his waistband. The gun the hunter had not yet had the opportunity to take.

The hunter heaved and threw the prey onto his belly. Still on his back, the hunter punched him four or five more times in the side of the head. Blood began to pump weakly from a jagged hole in the prey’s temple, and he began to moan and flop. The hunter took the gun. He resisted the temptation to beat the prey to death with it. He had plans for the weapon and didn’t want to damage it.

Instead, he stood and placed the gun on the display stand. He took his knife and turned to the prey on the floor.

The prey was up and going for him. One of its eyes had filled with blood. It couldn’t speak beyond moans and croaks, and the foam in its mouth was red. It had urinated in its clothes. One of its giant hands, trembling spastically, went for the hunter’s face and found purchase.

The hunter drove his knife in and up under its ribs. It made a sound between a choked scream and a whistle. The hunter drove the blade in again. The prey suffered a violent bowel movement. The hunter drove his blade in a third time, higher and harder, and felt down the length of it the resistance of meeting and splitting thick, dense meat.

The hunter twisted the blade.

The prey’s open mouth became a still pool of blood.

It died, and dropped, and leaked, and was no longer interesting.