At night, the only light in Empire Island comes from the fires. Once upon a time, neon spelled out in bursts of illumination the names that man has given to this world. But now, the shimmering billboards and flashing signs have all gone dark. In their place is another language, a raging hell-fueled scrawl. The dragons glide above it, silent in the pitchy nothing that separates Earth from the cold void of space. The green one makes a black splotch upon the moon as he cruises past.
The brightest part of the city tonight, as usual, is down in Torchtown, between the brackets of those gun-turreted walls, where three separate fires roar in the tangle of the streets. But darkness lurks there too. And in the darkest corner of Torchtown, the one crooked lane entirely unlit by the orange tongues of flame, Eisenhower Sharkey serves the Baroness Swan Lenore Ripple another cup of tea. Then he turns back to preparing their dinner on the stove. Tonight they’re eating hoofer chops on the bone, a fine cut of strangebeef from the deep freeze of a recent Wonland raid. Swanny likes her meat rare, and so does Sharkey. He transfers the chops from sizzling pan to plate as soon as they’re seared. Juicy. Like a ritual sacrifice, their meals always end in a smear of blood.
“Excuse me, I forgot what I was saying.” Swanny’s eyes are already half-mast, her red silk kimono open at the throat. On the nights she takes a break from her investigation, she dresses like a leading lady out of costume, a diva coming uncinched. Sharkey likes it when she gets a little loose. It means she feels at home.
“You were telling me about the burglary. What you remember.”
She sucks her forefinger absentmindedly, massages her gum. She’s got a smile like a predator’s, but it always seems to need coddling. The plight of an aristocratic mouth, he guesses. “Haven’t I related this in some detail previously?”
“Refresh me.”
“It’s my mother’s death, Howie. It’s not an anecdote.”
He didn’t tell her she could call him Howie, but once she started it, he didn’t tell her to stop either. It amuses him. It’s been a while since he met anybody so unafraid.
“C’mon. It’s like the police always say. Anything you recall might prove helpful.”
“Have you ever actually met the enforcement personnel? I’m beginning to wonder if they dispatch anyone at all, honestly. It’s quite lawless around here. For a prison.”
“I think of it more like a zoo.” He hands her a plate. She looks at it, aghast.
“Are we going to eat in here?”
“You’re already sitting at a table. What more do you want?”
“But it’s ever so much more civilized to dine in the dining room.”
“Fine. You carry the tea set.”
Sharkey loads a tray with the dinner plates, soup bowls, and the tureen of mushroom bisque, then follows Swanny as she totters to the conference table in the parlor. He never thought to eat in here before she came. He’s dragged enough corpses out these doors that supper isn’t the first thing he thinks of when he walks into the room. But she’s got class, and this is where she takes her chow. It’s interesting to him, how the other half lives. Outside.
“Happy now?” he asks, taking his seat, pouring her another cup of tea. He spits the chaw from his mouth into a second cup, then fills it, only half-full, for himself.
“Such a regrettable vice,” she opines. “So uncouth.”
“What? I like to mix ’em.”
“Spitting at the table and then drinking one’s own spit—must I explain it all again?”
“My chaw put that primesteak on your fuckin’ plate.”
“I don’t object to chaw as a business, it’s just as a habit”—she tops off her tea once again with icily flirtatious aplomb—“it’s rather common.”
Sharkey smirks. Swanny seems to prize her abstinence—she’s yet to taste the chaw, hasn’t so much as snuck a mouthful on the job, far as he can tell—but what she doesn’t realize is that chaw and his “tea” are mostly composed of the same active ingredients. Tea isn’t even that much weaker, not in the quantity she drinks it. It’s just different in its effects. Tea blurs the lines between past and present emotions. Current hurts and longings, no matter how taboo, get recollected in tranquility; old passions flare afresh. And new acquaintances take on the trustworthy patina of old friends. As a result, tea’s a disinhibitor. It eases up the tongue, if you know the right questions to ask, and only bosses can afford to speak their minds.
“So, you were saying?” He watches her carve her meat with some interest. The dame sure knows how to handle a knife. “About the burglary?”
“It wasn’t simply a burglary, Howie, it was an invasion.” She takes a bloody bite; her eyelids flutter with involuntary bliss. “They were all over the house.”
He suppresses a smile. There were four on that raid, and not even his best guys.
“What about the one that you saw up close? The one your ma shot, before you went upstairs?”
“He was half-naked with a chain saw. There haven’t been many gentlemen in my acquaintance fitting that description.”
“Shirt off, huh?” Sharkey takes a second to consider this. Why wouldn’t someone want cloth touching his skin? Answer: an open wound. He asks his next question extra-casual. “You get a look at his back?”
Swanny chews pensively. He can’t tell if it’s derision or suspicion tingeing her reply: “What possible information could a dead man’s back contain?”
Sharkey shrugs. “Maybe there was a message written there, just for you.”
Swanny snorts and tucks into her dinner.
Her revenge scheme, which he mostly found cute at first, is getting on his nerves. It’s the one off note in their evenings together. There’s only so many times you can hear a woman describe how she’ll sneak into your room and sink a nine-inch shard of broken glass into your jugular the moment she puts two and two together, before you start to believe her. Of course, he could always just kill her if she finds out. But he’d rather not have to.
He’d rather her not find out.
“You’re a real girl detective,” he says now. “I’m sure you can remember a clue.”
“A girl detective?” Swanny shakes her head, frowning as though she’s discovered a sliver of gristle in the marbled flesh of her meal.
“Yeah. Like from the storybooks.”
“Oh no, no, no. The girl detective is a cipher of lesser culture. If a book were written about a character like me, it would be an intense psychodrama about grief that stirs violence in a woman’s heart. About mothers and daughters, inheritance and torment. A love affair with death.”
“Down here in Torchtown, we don’t know so much about culture.” He waxes poetical: “We just take whatever scraps flutter down from your heaven above.”
“I suppose that many poor creatures are just trying to survive.” Tea’s a soporific; heavy eating wears you out. Swanny now has the posture of a fallen soufflé. She stirs a finger in her teacup languidly. “But not you. You’re different. You’re…rich.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘powerful.’?”
“It’s all the same. A simple question of hierarchy. If you’re lord of the sea, you’re still a lord.” She pours herself another splash of tea, then tips the spout farther. “Oh no, I’ve finished it off.”
He still hasn’t touched his. “It’s all right. You want soup?”