The Clarity of Cold Steel

I SLOUCH INTO my office with all the verve of a laudanum addict pulling an overnight on the docks. Kashmira’s plying her secretary’s desk, giving me the evil eye over her bifocals and shaking her head slowly from side to side. Tsk. Tsk. Like she does. I’m late apparently. Again. I set a coffee down on her desk, between two plateaus of cheap novels, because maybe that’ll distract her enough to not bite my head off, and because I’m a prime example of human decency. But you probably already knew that.

“Look like a damn thug,” Kashmira mutters, snatching the drooping cig from my mouth, stubbing it out. But she takes the coffee, too.

“What, uh, time is it?” I glance at my watch which I forgot to wind. It’s not forthcoming with a riot of accurate information. Not sure I could read it if it was.

“You sleep in a gutter?” She draws in a long whiff of the steaming coffee. Licks her wizened lips. Precoital bliss.

I shudder, shake my head. “In the comfort of my own home.”

She takes another whiff of me, scrunches her nose. “Been punishing your liver?”

“How’s it ever gonna learn?”

“Just get in there,” Kashmira grunts, nodding her cottontop toward my office door which is opened a crack. A man’s sitting inside at my desk. He looks well-dressed from what little I can eyeball.

“Suit?” I check my breath against my hand. It ain’t good. But I most likely ain’t kissing this bloke, either. I doff my tricorne hat and greatcoat and smooth out the lapels of my suit.

“Suit and tie.” Then she mouths, “Expensive,” and shoos me in with both hands.

“Really?” I mouth back as I hand her my great coat. “Huzzah.” While her back’s turned and she’s hanging up my coat, I snatch back her coffee and pound past. Before I close my office door, I turn back for an instant and give her my most winningest smile. “Thanks, darlin’.”

“Oh, you’re welcome, sunshine,” she calls out in her ginger-peachiest secretary voice, all butter and honey and grandmotherly goodness, all the while dead-eye dicking me through one large caliber eye and chucking me one lone monotone middle finger with that arthritic claw she sports.

I waggle my eyebrows and disappear within the confines of my claustrophobic office, mule kicking the door creaking shut behind me. The man in the seat turns, appraising me from beneath one raised eyebrow. He’s Hindu, like me, a lot shorter and a lot plumper, and far less debonair. To be fair, though, I set the bar high in that department. And he is well-dressed, a fine suit, as Kashmira said. Kashmira knows her business. Why I keep her around. Suit’s tailor made. Charcoal-dark. Sheen of sharkskin. Not the best, perhaps, but far and away better than I’m used to with regards to my typical clientele. I can smell the aroma of money on him, and I try not to drool. And he looks familiar, but I can’t place him.

“Coffee?” I offer out Kashmira’s steaming cup.

“No, thank you.” He waves a delicate hand.

I set it on the desk. “You’ll have to pardon my tardiness.” A glance at my watch for effect. Busy busy. “Was working a case last night. Late last night.” I hold out a hand. “Avinash Shakteel. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

The bloke glances at my outstretched hand as though it’s some exotic animal that he’s not sure is poisonous or not. I’ve wondered the same from time to time. After an uncomfortable pause, he finally rises and takes it, sits back down, all prim and proper. “Ahem.” He wipes his hand surreptitiously on a lavender-scented handkerchief as I round my desk. “We’re already acquainted, Mister Shakteel.”

“Eh?” I take a sheaf of papers, mostly scribbles of naked women and dragons and impossible inventions, and tidy them up, tapping them on edge lightly on the desk, then set them aside. Face down. I clear my throat. “Ahem.” That familiarity again. Like something from a dream. I know this bloke, but I can’t place him, and I already don’t like him, so I toe the party-line with a congenial rictus.

“You were in quite a state at the time, though, as I recall. My name is Chirag Khanna,” he announces, and then he lets it set in, a shitty smirk lengthening his lip line, stretching that dead caterpillar glued above his pallid lips.

“Shit,” I blurt out as realization gongs me like a hammer, my smile wilting flaccid. This bonny bloke’s a giblet slinger, a snakehead, an illegal dok dealing in the graft trade. Hell, he’s the graft trade in the borough of Malabar. And I owe him. Big. “Well, this is truly a pleasure,” I lie. He specializes in black market organ donation and transplantation. Chirag’s connected, and I don’t mean to the telegraph system. He grafted me a liver on loan. So technically, the liver’s still his. He also supplies — or his office, I should say — supplies me with my daily dose of immunosuppressives that make sure my body doesn’t attack and kill my grafted liver. I rip through some quick math in my head, which’s never been my strong suit; I’m still trying to find my strong suit. “I’m paid up through the month, ain’t I?”

“What?” Chirag stiffens in his seat. “Oh, no — I mean, yes, Mister Shakteel, your account is paid up in full.” A look of consternation scrunches his mug as he waves a hand as though erasing the draconian rates he charges. “And in any case, I employ professionals to … settle indigent accounts.” What he means is he employs repo men, probably from one of the Kalighat Syndicates that owns his ass, who specialize in hunting down men and cutting out their transplanted organs. Excision with precision, they call it on the street. Or settle indigent accounts as Chirag more pleasantly puts it. “I’m here because I want to hire you.”

I deflate and let out a near-audible groan, clutch my precious liver, or his precious liver, if you want to get technical. I’ve some history with the Kalighat Syndicates of Malabar. And not the good kind.

“I’ve heard tell you’re adept at finding, ah, missing persons.” He smooths out his dead caterpillar, licks his lips like some tepid reptile.

“I am that.” I nod, dig in, a bloodhound on the trail already. “Who is it gone missing?”

“My nephew.”

I reach for my auto-stenographer, pause with my finger poised above its switch. “Do you mind?”

“Ah, no, certainly not.” He resettles in his seat, giving the auto-stenographer a wounded look.

I flick the switch and the auto-stenographer whirrs into life, the mech-arm scribbling a test strip before settling into silence. “What’s your nephew’s name?” The auto-stenographer whirrs, transcribing my question.

“Gortham Khanna.”

“And how old?” I steeple my fingers on my desk, lean forward, try to look professional despite five o’clock shadow creeping on premature.

“Four — no, fifteen-years-old.”

The auto-sten screeches to a halt, starts scribbling a mess of jagged mountains that probably mirror my heart rate.

“Sorry. Piece of junk.” I flip it off, pull out a notepad, jot down the key notes old school, trying to salvage my shattered aura of professionalism. “Where was he last seen?”

“His home.” He points over his shoulder in the direction of Brahma knows where. “It’s a sod-hulk moored out in Boneyard Bay. The Iphigenia.”

“Tough part of town.” Pen poised, I glance up through one eye. What I mean to say is Boneyard Bay’s an armpit. At best. And in Mortise Locke, the Machine City, last bastion of humanity on earth, that’s saying something fierce.

“It is that.”

We’re in agreement. “Where in the Boneyard?”

“On the, ah, east side. Far out. Armada.”

Even better. What he means to say is Gortham’s home’s a boil on the armpit.

“He and his family are share-croppers,” Chirag continues. “They grow and harvest,” he scratches his neck as he considers, “something.”

I scribble down ’something’ in quotes and underline it. Twice.

“I would appreciate it if you would put out, ah, some feelers and perhaps get a lay of the land,” he says in the lingo. He’s talked to someone about me. Gotten a lay of the land. Put out some feelers.

“How long’s he been gone?” I ask.

“Two days.”

“The eighth then?” I nod. Scribble-scribble. “Any chance he just ran away?”

“He is a cropper in Boneyard Bay.”

“Right.” More than reason enough, though to be fair, an equal chance of him having had his throat slit and been dropped in the drink. But I don’t say that. Cause I’m inimitably professional. “Fifteen-years-old. Hindu boy. Gortham Khanna.” I look up. “You his guardian?”

“What?” He straightens. Deer on train tracks, wheels rolling, whistle blowing. “No.”

“Who is then?”

“His parents. My brother Parth and his wife Catia.”

“Can I talk to them?”

“Yes. Of course. They work on the Iphigenia as well.”

“Sort of a family business?”

“Certainly.”

“Anything distinguishing about Gortham?” I ask. “What’s he look like?”

“Ah,” he screws his eyes shut like he’s trying to remember the date of his anniversary, “he is missing his right arm, below the shoulder, and most of the fingers on his left hand.”

“By Shiva’s sword.” I shake my head sympathetically. Or empathetically. One of those. Maybe both. “The slough or a farming accident?” You never know. Sodbusters and sharecroppers? All that machinery they run, you find one with half his marbles and all his fingers and you might as well call him a bloody unicorn.

“I … I don’t know, Mister Shakteel.” He dabs his forehead with that handkerchief. “Forgive me. You see, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve been estranged from my family for quite some time. A falling out with my brother, you see?”

“It happens.” I snap my notepad shut with one hand. Smartly. “I’ll head out to the Iphigenia post haste.” We hash out a mutually acceptable agreement, and then he’s out the door. “I’ll get a lay of the land,” I call after. “Put out some feelers. Won’t rest until it’s…”

Kashmira’s at her post, working her way through some penny dreadful spooker.

“Coffee?” I ask, offering the tepid cup.

She licks a finger, turns a page, pointedly ignores me, so I close my office door gently, dose myself with some whiskey of the dog and stare at a cold cup of coffee until I pass out dead in my chair. Post haste.