redRobe

Chapter Five Right Here, Right Now

Colonel Emilio smoothed his already-neat moustache and then pinched the broad bridge of his nose, hard…

He had a headache. It wasn’t the Saturday morning warmth that bled in from the great square of the Zocalo outside or the familiar stink of the cellar. Or the sight of the bloody wreck of a suspect sitting in front of him. A man apparently given to talking to himself as he committed murder.

No, what was giving the neatly-dressed, thickset cavalry officer problems was that he had one dead ex-Guerrilla leader-plus boyfriend-murdered on the Paeso and the man tied to the chair was refusing to take the situation seriously. And unfortunately no amount of expensive tailor-made nanetic artery-widening in the Colonel’s brain could do a thing about it.

Colonel Emilio got headaches, always had done ever since he was a child. He just wished he hadn’t got one today. But then what could you expect with a suspect who gave his name as Black Jack d’Essiarto.

‘Who ordered the hit on Isabella Rosa?’

‘I’ve already told you,’ Axl said as lightly as anyone could with three teeth missing. ‘I’ve never heard of Isabella Rosa. And I killed Kachowsky for Don Alonzo d’Estevez.’

There was no significance in the fact that Axl was being questioned in a small cell off a cellar that had once, centuries before, been used as a prison by the Inquisition in Mexico. It was just that upstairs at La Medicina the cells were all in use and this was where the police dumped the overspill, which is what he was.

Just another late arrival in the hell that was the morning after the night before at DFPD headquarters.

The Colonel walked slowly around the chair to which the man was tied with self-knotting ropes. The slow click of his heels on the granite floor wasn’t meant to intimidate the prisoner or make him fear that he was about to be attacked by the Colonel from behind-the Colonel had a sergeant to do that for him if he wanted, but he didn’t.

No, the Colonel was walking in circles because he was bored, like a dog trapped in a too-small courtyard, and he was beginning to think the piece of human wreckage in front of him was telling the truth.

Everyone at La Medicina always did in the end. Tell the truth, that was. Though it was usually DSP or sodium pentathol that brought them to it. Violence was as inefficient as it was unnecessary, though from the state of the man’s face the Colonel could tell that his troopers still hadn’t quite grasped that.

‘Alonzo d’Estevez died six weeks ago,’ said the Colonel slowly, not for the first time. His heels continued to click on the stone flags as he kept circling the small cell, thinking about what the man had said. What kind of idiot would kill someone on the instructions of a man already in his grave?

But what else was there? You only had to look at the prisoner to know that he didn’t move in the same world as Leon Kachowsky. And what about all that talking to himself while the murder was happening… Spirit voices?

Was it Voudun?

The prisoner didn’t look like a candidate for hardcore/Vou. Colonel Emilio stopped pacing and checked the edge of the man’s shirt, rubbing it between his fingers. Old but soft and finely woven, not smartcloth but some kind of lightweight silk all the same, Italian possibly or Spanish.

The boots were scuffed from where the man had been dragged face-down across the floor, and both the heels and soles were badly worn but the stitching was hand done.

Colonel Emilio began to be more interested. This man wasn’t Voudun. Vou was for the poor, for the dispossessed, for barrio-dwellers seeking emotional release within Vou’s soulCore synthesis of Catholicism and Animism…a release fuelled by cheap psychotropics and cheaper hardcore.

‘So,’ the Colonel said with a sigh, ‘a dead man told you to murder Kachowsky… ?’

‘He wasn’t dead when he gave the instructions and it wasn’t murder,’ Axl said it firmly enough for the Colonel to stop dead and stare into his violet eyes. They were as hooded and impassive as those of any slum Indian but Axl met the Colonel’s gaze without faltering. Not bad for someone half unconscious from loss of blood.

‘It was a hit,’ Axl repeated. ‘Ordered by Don Alonzo d’Estevez.’

‘Who is dead…’ The Colonel’s words trailed away into silence. This wasn’t the first time they’d been round that particular loop.

‘You had the money in advance?’

The man nodded.

‘Then where is it?’

‘Debts,’ Axl said shortly as if that explained everything, head shaking abruptly to say the conversation was closed.

Little. . . The Colonel stepped forward and then stopped himself, eyes widening. The fool shouldn’t have jerked his head like that, it was too much of a give-away. Grow back that hair, take twenty years off the face and scrape away the city grime…

Staring down at the man tied to the chair, Colonel Emilio smiled for the first time that morning. He already knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway.

‘Your real name?’

For a second, Axl considered lying. Then, just as quickly he rejected the idea. Surprising the Colonel, but not himself. Honesty was something he majored in. Honesty and stupidity, and few things were more stupid than ending up in the cellar of La Medicina.

‘Borja,’ he said. ‘Axl O’Higgins Borja… And I’d like to see the Cardinal.’

If Axl noticed the look that crossed the Colonel’s face, he didn’t let it show. He’d seen that look before, just not for a long time. Part fear at the Cardinal’s name, part contempt as if to say, ‘Have you heard what they say about you and the Cardinal?’

Yeah. He had. But that was years ago and it wasn’t even true back then.

‘You know what the Cardinal liked about me?’ Axl asked.

The Colonel didn’t and wasn’t at all sure he wanted to. Which was fine because Axl wasn’t about to tell him, not for real, not all of it.

‘I know how to die,’ Axl said flatly.

‘Any one of my soldiers knows that,’ the Colonel said abruptly.

‘No,’ Axl said as he shook his head. ‘They know how to kill, anyone can be taught that. Learning how to be killed takes a special kind of teacher. Ask the Cardinal…’

The Colonel was back inside the hour. In that time, Colonel Emilio’s fat sergeant had found Axl a very young police surgeon who stapled shut his ruptured lip, fitted new tooth buds and put a handful of cheap silver spiders to work sucking dead blood from the swelling round his right eye.

Six ribs were cracked, according to the doctor, one of his retinas was almost detached and a chip of bone had freed itself in the second vertebra of his neck.

‘You know,’ said the boy, ‘in the long term he should get something done about that vertebra ... if there is a long term.’ He glanced from Axl to where the sergeant stood doing fist clenches to build up her already-vast biceps and padded silently out of the cell door.

After the doctor came a shower, in a marble-tiled room one floor up. The room was filled with stucco mouldings to the ceiling and a vast marble fireplace in the middle of one wall. Shower stalls stood at one end, a bank of cheap Sony tri-Ds filled the other. And naked to the waist at the screens were two cops blasting Chinese mercenaries off the red-tiled roof of a warehouse. Relaxing after a hard morning’s work.

The cops shot double handed, racking up four baby Uzis between them that unleashed a steady stream of flame. And the cheap synth soundtrack didn’t even keep time with their movements.

Axl snorted.

In RL the mags would have blipped out themselves inside five seconds and the cops would have been overrun before they had time to reload, but DeathGuardIV wasn’t RL, it was that month’s best-selling battle sim.

Neither cop looked round, not when Axl came in and not when he stripped off to step into a shower, letting waves of tepid water soak the blood from his body and face. Most of the spiders were already dead, their job done. The others died as they were washed off his skin, metal legs waving.

The only person who watched was the sergeant and for all the interest she showed he could have been dead meat already.

‘Borja.’

Without turning round, without even seeing Colonel Emilio’s face, Axl knew just from the voice that he might want to see the Cardinal but the Cardinal didn’t want to see him. So be it ...

So be what? Part of Axl wanted to outraged but it was a very small part and most of him couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.

‘Justice must be upheld?’

Behind Axl, the Colonel grunted. They both knew what JMBU meant. JMBU wasn’t merely the slogan that ticker-taped lazily along the bottom of every newsfeed during televised trials. It was the foundation on which the Cardinal had ruled Mexico for nearly fifty years.

It was legitimisation for judicial murder, for abrogation of civil rights. JMBU justified manipulating difficult judges, nationalising some industries and privatising others, the usual detritus of centuries of Central American realekonomik.

‘But not before my day in court?’ Axl could already imagine it. A week of having his life raked over on newsfeed. Maybe as much as three weeks if CySat’s liaison officer at the Ministry of Justice could work out how to throw in a couple of twists.

‘No public trial.’

Axl turned round at that.

The Colonel’s voice was flat, uninflected. He was wearing a pair of wrapround Spiros that hadn’t been there when he went out an hour before. And he stood well back from the prisoner, hands behind his back, as if fate could be contagious. Or maybe it was the fact that Axl was naked.

‘Military trial?’ Without thinking about it, Axl climbed back into his trousers. Even freed clones got their five minutes in front of a civil magistrate. Which didn’t usually make a difference to the result, but that wasn’t the point.

Colonel Emilio didn’t answer.

Fuck it, thought Axl. Maybe he should have paid out for a misery-bypass in Santa Fe after all, that time he’d had his conscience removed. Though removal was the wrong word, ‘amygdala block’ was more accurate. It would have made sense to get his capacity for misery chopped back at tie same time, but then that particular threshold had always been set too low. Red meanies, black dog, insomnia, the blues-Axl got them all.

Amygdala amendment was cheaper than seeing a therapist and infinitely more secure. The only therapist Axl had visited had been a Jungian with an unnaturally developed sense of right and wrong. And after a single session and three days of the man’s increasingly frantic calls to Axl’s house AI, Axl had been reduced to threatening to kill the man if he didn’t turn over his case notes and leave town.

So, thought Axl as he perched himself on the edge of a window sill and watched the two cops still knocking gooks off the roof, justice must be upheld, must it? Inside he didn’t feel nearly as sick as he’d expected.

But then hell, death and he had been like… Axl wasn’t too sure how to define their past relationship. Suffocatingly close was probably an accurate enough description.

Just next to him was the fireplace, neo-classical, flanked by two marble dryads, one male and one female, blank eyed, both naked from the waist up. It was difficult to see them properly because an old-fashioned lecture screen had been nail-gunned in front, the bolts driven into the marble at chest height.

That would have been done years back, obviously enough, but no one had bothered to remove the useless screen. There were also books lined up on the over mantle, all of them flaking and crumbling with age and no one had bothered to remove those either. Time’s debris-there was a lot of it about.

‘You got the job of trying me?’

The Colonel nodded. No apologies, no excuses. Axl was grateful for that.

‘Today?

Colonel Emilio spread his hands. From his short brushed-back hair to his green eyes, he might have been Austrian somewhere back in the gene pool, but he had the hand gestures of someone born in Mexico.

‘The Cardinal decided this?’

Of course he did. Stupid question.

Outside in the central courtyard police recruits paraded in full uniform. They carried Browning pulse/Rs with flip-out bayonets, sawtoothed ceramic blades neatly folded back under each barrel. Grey polymer helmets protected their heads while smoke-grey visors hid their faces.

It was the battle armour of an army devoted to crowd control not the solving of crime. Everyone from the meanest peon to the Cardinal, from the visiting delegation from WorldBank to the crowd being controlled knew that.

Fear was the key, thought Axl, but then when wasn’t it? My fear, your fear, the Cardinal’s fear...

Particularly the Cardinal’s fear.

When Axl spoke again, his words were calm and reasoned. Without knowing it, he fell into the speech patterns of his old captain. Understated, ironic. The things Axl usually tried to be and mostly failed.

‘When you try me, do you get to take my saving the old bastard into account?’

Colonel Emilio shivered. Criticising the Cardinal lost people more than just promotion… Starting with their heads, if they got lucky. Everything else, and then their heads if they didn’t.

What Colonel Emilio should have done was slap the prisoner into submission, just in case the two cops at the screen had overheard. But it was too late for that and besides Axl could tell the Colonel was interested.

‘I saved his life,’ said Axl, ‘but you already know that

Colonel Emilio didn’t know, he didn’t know at all. And the Colonel suspected he was learning something it was better not to have been told.

‘The republicans almost shot the old bastard,’ said Axl flatly. ‘But I was there, so it didn’t happen. Maybe I was wrong…

‘Maybe I should have…’

‘Out,’ Colonel Emilio barked and the two cops looked round in surprise. Neither one had been listening but that wasn’t the point. A door slammed and then Axl’s comment hung in the air like a taunt, along with a thin strand of spider’s web and dust motes that danced like slow-turning flakes in a bottle of chilled goldwasser. The expensive kind sold in Austrian cafés ringing the Plaza de Armas.

Prisoners in La Medicina didn’t question the rights of the Cardinal, not coldly anyway. They cursed and spat defiance or pleaded for their lives or a quick death, or both. Axl wasn’t going to plead. He hadn’t pleaded for the impossible, not for a long time. And he didn’t curse, he left that to his gun. All the same…

‘You go back and tell him I saved his life once. Ask the old bastard if he wants it saved again.’

Power and paranoia, vanity and fear; flip sides born out of the cowardice most people called survival. Me too, thought Axl, surprising himself. The Colonel might not quite believe him. He might decide that Axl’s words were as empty as Axl’s future but all the same…

Axl would get his meeting with the Cardinal, he was sure of it. Whether he’d get out of the meeting alive was something else again. But just being able to stare the old bastard in the face once more would even the odds.