Fruit Mob. This batch managed a slightly more genial greeting than their confederate outside, mumbling my name and nodding me through a wooden door painted to resemble the back of a throat.
Inside the main room was the man and his heavy, strung over a collection of furniture that had been the subject of frequent outbursts of aggression. The muscle perched precariously on a stool too small for him, sharpening a knife that would have been a sword in a normal man’s hands. It didn’t need sharpening, but he was sharpening it anyway. I could never remember his name; it was enough to know his purpose.
Adisu the Damned was stretched out on a couch, scraping his grin with a toothpick. He was young, a few years over twenty – they seemed always to be getting younger, these vice-lords and corner kingpins, though maybe that was just me getting older. Truth told he didn’t look like much – a runt of a man with bad skin and a shaved head, and eyes that were too big for their frame.
But looks can deceive. Adisu was, in fact, as hard a man as you’d ever meet, greedy and fierce, and apt to forget you were the same. He needed constant watching, else he’d try and make a play on you – it wasn’t enough that he got his end, he wanted yours as well. You needed to make sure he kept firm in his head that you were not a fellow with whom to fuck, but politely, without any outright challenge.
Because the other thing about Adisu was that he was shithouse crazy – you could see it in the way his eyes never quite settled on anything, and in the nervous movement of his hands. It wasn’t a put-on, he wasn’t mad- dogging to keep an edge on his people – there was something wrong with him, something broke. So even if you played everything perfect you still weren’t home free, ’cause at some point whatever was inside his skull would tell him to jump, it was only a question of time. I’d seen him do it once, beat a runner to death with a frying pan he’d pulled up off the fire – one minute we’re laughing and passing around a blunt, the next Adisu’s smashing bits of brain out of the poor kid’s nose. Afterward he’d said it was because the boy was stealing, but that was nonsense. There wasn’t a reason, not a real one.
The whole mob was mad for ouroboros root, they kept a simmer pot of it going on the table day and night, and it filled the air with a thin soup of hallucinogens. ‘Hello, Warden,’ Adisu said, leaning over the table and fanning back the fumes. ‘What can I do for you?’
I shook my head. ‘Close, but no ring.’
‘All right then. What can you do for me?’
‘Depends. How you feel about money?’
The half of his grin that was pure gold gleamed in the candlelight. ‘I’m for its acquisition.’
‘And the Giroies? Where do you stand on them?’
He laughed. The muscle laughed too. The muscle was well trained. ‘We love all them yellow-haired white boys. Sticky as honey, the batch of us.’
‘That’s a pity.’
‘Is it?’
I nodded. ‘’Cause I happen to know where their next shipment of wyrm is getting dropped, and if you weren’t sweethearts, you might be able to lay your hands on a quarter-stone of uncut choke.’
The muscle stopped sharpening his knife. Adisu stretched back against the couch, stroking a tuft of padding that stuck out through the torn leather. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘I fucking hate the Giroies.’
‘Tomorrow night, around one, a skiff will dock at the tip of the Sugarland Pier. Some men will get off it. Other men will meet them.’ Or at least that was what had been written on the sealed note Tibbs’s man had brought by the Earl that afternoon, brought it and waited while I read it, then watched as I held it over a candle.
‘Yeah?’
‘That’s the plan at least. Of course, sometimes plans have a way of not working out.’
‘Security?’
‘I doubt it’s being escorted by nuns, but last I checked you don’t run a monastery.’ I’d been doing my best not to take in any of the frying root, but a fellow can only go so long without breathing. I could feel it buzzing at the base of my brain stem, and my tongue felt slow and swollen. A pair of fornicating demons on the back wall stopped their lovemaking to turn and leer at me. Above them an intricately detailed portrait of the Lost One wept tears of blood that trickled down the walls.
‘Where’s your end in this?’ Adisu asked.
‘Say a third of what you get from selling off the stash.’
‘Say a fourth.’
I nodded ascent. I didn’t so much care about the money – for my purposes the only thing that mattered was that there wouldn’t be any Giroies left to talk up who’d hit them. But then the Bruised Fruit Mob had a well settled ‘no survivors’ policy, and I didn’t think I needed to voice my concern.
‘The Giroies . . .’ Adisu began. ‘They probably wouldn’t be happy if they found out a crew of inks made off with their stash.’
‘Why, you thinking of telling them?’
Adisu rested his chin against his hands, weighing his options silently. A silhouette of my mother on the back wall reached out her hands to me, sympathetic and disappointed. I blinked her away. ‘What you think, Zaga?’ Adisu asked.
The muscle let the sword fall from his hand, its weight wedging the tip into the floorboards. ‘Set up,’ he said, beady eyes snarling in a skull the size of a coconut.
‘But on whom?’ Adisu reached over and pulled his man’s weapon out of the wood. ‘You know Warden here used to be an agent? High up in it too, from what I hear. Made sure the Dren didn’t swoop over the bay and pillage the city. Protect the country and shit.’ He made a mocking little salute. ‘He still thinks like that, like we was pieces on a board. He wants us to play the hammer on some poor set of motherfuckers.’
‘We gonna do it?’ the muscle asked.
‘Hell yeah, we gonna do it. ’Cause the Warden, he makes sure the angles meet. We just little fish, ain’t nothing he wants to concern himself with. If the take ain’t square or if the Giroies are waiting for us . . .’ He gestured with the blade. ‘There’s gonna be trouble, trouble our man don’t need. And he’s too smart to make trouble for himself.’
Adisu the Damned would be dead in six months – no one could hold to his narcotic regimen indefinitely, and he ran his boys too hard, and he was too fond of close-in work. But none of that changed the fact that he was half a genius, sharp as the steel he was holding.
‘One o’clock, Sugarland Pier,’ I reminded him.
‘I’ll make a note of it,’ Adisu said, bright-eyed and smiling.
I pushed myself up from the chair, unsteady from the smoke but trying to hide it. False, horrifying things swarmed the walls like crabs overflowing a barrel. The first man I’d ever killed waved hello to me, a boy really, grinning at me beneath a caved-in skull, pink oozing out the hole I’d made. Soon he was joined by a host of others, slit throats and burned bodies, corpses barely remembered, all standing abreast, laughing silently and gesturing for me to join them.
‘What you got against the Giroies?’ Adisu asked, breaking me out of hallucination.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said honestly, then fell on out.
25
I was finishing off a pot of coffee the next morning when they came for me, a pair of them, the collars of their gray-blue dusters upturned despite the heat. Not big men, but big enough, short blades at their sides, hard in the right places. I was the only person in the joint but they took a few seconds before coming over. First thing an agent learns is you never hustle, not unless it’s time to snap the trap shut.
I’d been wondering how long it would take before the ice decided to pay me a call. I would have figured I’d have time for a few more moves before they made theirs, but this was fine. Actually this was good – it meant they were keeping an eye on Pretories.
I didn’t know either of them, but then I’d been out of the Crown’s service eight years, and recruitment continued apace. They seemed to know me, however, and while one smiled and took a seat, the other stayed standing, eyes hard, hands ready to make sure I went easy.
‘You busy?’ the friendly one asked. His face was fat and freckled, like a jolly uncle. The rest of him told you
