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Home ¦ Fiction ¦ Tales from Mega City 1: Roman Noir

11th December 04

Roman Noir
by Ed Berridge

“The Streets were dark with something more than night”
Raymond Chandler - The Simple Art of Murder

Rollo looked down to examine himself. He was wearing a crumpled cream suit that had seemed old long before he had even set eyes on it, now faintly brown and with an added, eye catching slash of red across the middle. On his feet he wore black and white spats with metal tips. Completing he picture was a cream trilby with a blue band, which was perched at a slightly odd angle on his head. In his left hand was the television remote control. Rollo looked to his right, and caught himself reflected in the window, like some disheveled tramp in a badly fitted suit. The thought made him laugh out loud, although it quickly developed into a painfully hard cough. Rollo tried to block his cough with his arm, and when he stopped and pulled back, he could see blood red on the cream sleeve, the colours in contrast almost highlighting its presence. No matter how many times he had seen it, the sight of blood still unsettled him, especially when it was his.

He started to look down towards the mess underneath his shirt, and then stopped short. He leaned forward, both the chair and Rollo groaning in unison. He picked his glass from off the desk; the brown liquid contained within sparkling as it caught the neon lights from the sex show opposite. Rollo downed the remains of the first glass, then immediately poured himself another, larger glass, which he finished just as quickly. As he swallowed the liquid, he felt his collar tight, like a noose round his neck. Rollo undid his tie: he didn’t know why he hadn’t taken it off earlier, except that he hadn’t thought of it before. He finished the rest of the bottle in another two glasses, after which it fell uselessly to the floor. He now felt drunk and confident enough to look at himself. He looked down to his stomach, but all he could make out was a mess of blood, intestines and shirt. He felt sick, but he already instinctively knew that he was too far gone. The drink numbed the pain, and he figured that he was probably going into shock. The light in the room seemed to have got darker. At first Rollo thought that it was his own eyes until he realised that the coin operated meter had run out. He sat forward, to try and lever himself out of the chair when he noticed someone standing outside the door.

Strictly speaking, Rollo didn’t notice the person standing outside the door, but his attention was caught by the way that the black shape highlighted the name, "Miller, Dante & Partners Private Investigations", that was written in white on the front of the frosted glass. The door blasted open, the plasti-glass in the bottom corner smashing under the force of the kick.

“Obviously Block security has not been improved since the last time.” Rollo mused to himself.

Rollo felt the breeze caused by the forceful entry blow through the blonde hair that peeked out from underneath his hat, and looked up to see the massive bulk that now filled the entire doorway.

Mouse. Now Rollo really wished that Block security had been tightened up.

Mouse was of Polish descent, six foot seven tall, and almost as wide, and reputed to have been the progeny of a former Sov-Block Judge, according to the whispering voices of Sector 305, though Rollo had always found the idea that Mouse had parents to be somewhat hard to contemplate. Mouse wasn’t much of a Polish name, Rollo had thought to himself before, although he sensibly never mentioned anything to Mouse, since he was known to fly into violent psychopathic rages for almost any perceived sleight. Mouse first landed himself in a juve cube at the age of fifteen, having beaten a local shop clerk half to death after he discovered Mouse with his fingers in the cash register. Even at fifteen Mouse had already developed the appearance of twelve rhinos trapped in an ill-fitting phone box, and was possessed of about the same temperament.

Since that time, Mouse had spent nearly twenty years in and out of the cubes. However, a walking psychopathic outhouse has its uses, as various forms of low life had discovered over the years. Whenever he was out of his Iso-Cube (and he was in so often that the Judges probably had his name printed over the door, Rollo thought), Mouse had no problem finding work as a simple strong-arm man, and was able to make quite a reasonable living for himself. He was also looking for blood since he found his younger brother Ivan sliced in half after attempting to jump between two zooms, like in some badly plotted action vid.

Rollo was well aware of why Mouse was so pissed, since it was Rollo who was the cause. He had been investigating a case for a Mrs. Emma Kirkdale, a fierce lady in her early forties who, up until recently, had been the girl of the now late mob boss Benny ‘The King’ Azenaeur, and who still seemed to command a certain measure of glamour and importance that she used to hold back when she was a vid star in her own right. She wanted to know where certain incriminating documents that Benny had kept to keep her sweet had disappeared to after his messy and untimely death.

Benny had all kinds of information on all kinds of different people, even senior Judges, so it was rumored. Once Benny had popped his cork, all the goods were taken by the various scavengers in his organization who were still in a position to take advantage of it - as in those who were still breathing. Suddenly every bum and low life with an eye to advancement was out looking for the list and what was worse – so were the Judges.

The goons were relatively simple to track down: it wasn’t that hard to figure out a list of likely suspects, which Rollo was able to whittle down by a process of bar crawls, back-handers and slapped faces. Eventually he found a name, Walt Slacko. Finding Slacko hadn’t been as easy - he’d eventually found him hiding in an abandoned building, down by the edge of the sector Rad-Pits, surrounded by the sight of desiccated architecture, like rotting meat highlighted against the night sky, and with a smell to match. Unfortunately Rollo didn’t turn up alone. Ivan and his friends had followed him there. Walt bought himself a new orifice in his face before he knew what was happening. Fortunately, Rollo had come prepared with an unlicensed and, he hoped, untraceable Magnon Pulser, managing to take out two by himself. Ivan had the photos, and tried to pull his roadrunner act on Rollo, resulting in his brief encounter with the zoom and the tracks. It wasn’t until he retrieved the photos from Ivan that Rollo realised that, at some point during the spastic chain of events that night, he’d been shot in the stomach. He didn’t even know who’d done it.

Of course he knew that Mouse would come looking for him, so went straight back to the office, to make a couple of phone calls and check out his prize, the one that he’d clawed out of the dead hands of what was left of the upper torso of Ivan. Perplexingly, he couldn’t find any shots of Mrs. Kirkdale amongst those of prominent local politicians and judiciary.

The split second gap after Mouse kicked open the door ended when a burst of fire erupted out of his raised right hand, and made a neat hole out of the leather backed chair that Rollo was sitting in as it passed through and impacted against the wall. Mouse wasn’t the type to consider asking for explanations, and Rollo never even felt a thing. However, Rollo didn’t let him get off a second shot. The Magnon Pulser still in his right hand answered Mouse back, and took off his lower jaw with it. Mouse looked surprised, or as surprised as you can look with only half a face. He stood there for a few seconds more, swaying almost imperceptibly. Then he fell backwards, and hit the ground with an apocalyptic crash. Rollo looked down to see where Mouse’s bullet had hit him, but could make out nothing against the mess of the previous wound. He turned round to look at the path of the bullet. He saw where it had hit the wall, and saw the hole where it had passed through the chair that he was still sitting in. Rollo laughed out loud when he realised that the only reason that he was still breathing was because Mouse had shot him in the exact spot where he had already been shot.

Although he felt more than a little sick, he carried on laughing at the ridiculousness of his escape. Rollo lowered his right hand, and turned his head back to the flickering television set by the door.

“Well, here I am”.

Mrs. Emma Kirkdale stood in the open doorway, her face flashing red and blue as it was caught in the crossfire between the neon lights of the street and the flickering images from the muted television. Rollo turned to look at her. She was done up to the nines, face made up, hair freshly cut and styled, her simple red dress that pulled in at all the right places, and yet left enough to the imagination to retain some sense of respectability. The Stookie pelt-effect coat and red stiletto heels completed the look.
“She must have been going out somewhere nice” thought Rollo. He tried to think of the last time someone had dressed up fancily for his benefit, but decided that there hadn’t been any. Rollo left Mrs. Kirkdale’s question hanging in the air like a bad smell, and turned his attention to the TV set.

“You called me? Asked me to ‘get my ass down to your office straightaway’?”
Again there was no answer.

“Look, what the drokk do you want?” she finally let out exasperatedly.
Rollo turned back to look at her.

“Tell you what darlin’, I’ll answer all your questions if you spark me up one of those highly-illegal cigarettes that you’ve got stashed in your purse”.

At first she looked annoyed, then reluctantly removed them from her purse, and pulled one from the packet. Rollo smiled at his apparent newfound telepathic skills. Of course he knew that he’d merely rifled through her purse last time she’d been in the office and seen the cigarettes lying invitingly inside. But it never hurt to give people the old Sherlock routine. She passed the cigarette to Rollo, who placed it in his mouth. She leant forward to light it for him, which would have provided Rollo a great view down the front of her dress, except that at that point she noticed the fleshy mess where his stomach used to be. She recoiled in shock.

“Grud! What’ve you done to yourself, you silly bastard?”

“Mouse’s boys you had tailing me decided to get a bit proactive with me. By the way, you might need to hire a few new boys. I think Benny’s goons are nearly all used up”. Rollo sat back and took a deep pull on the cigarette. It was a ‘Lucky’. Rollo didn’t really care what it was as long as it wasn’t ‘Lights’. At the moment, only the powerful caustic fumes were enough to keep him conscious.

“What are you talking about? I’ve never met anyone called ‘Mouse’”. Mrs. Kirkdale was angry now, on the defensive. Her lips were pouting, highlighting the ruby colour of her lip-gloss. Rollo blew out a thick plume of blue smoke, and immediately began coughing uncontrollably. He thought it a pity, as, like all smokers, he had been hoping to quit at some unspecified point in the far future. Of course none of it really mattered now.
“Of course you know Mouse; after all he told me so himself.”

Rollo lifted his arm and gestured towards the corner of the room. Mrs. Kirkdale looked, and saw the large, shadowy body of Mouse sitting on a wicker chair with half a face. She opened her mouth wide, so wide that Rollo was sure that he could see her back-teeth, but no sound came out. She turned to look at him, her eyes wide and burning with fury.

“Why the hell did you call me out here if you knew it all already?”

“Look lady, if I’m going to drop out here, I want to know the precise reason why. Help confirm a few of the facts and theories for me. A parting favour, you might say.” Rollo was surprised how much this type of conversation still turned him on. He thought that this was probably the last type of situation when he should feel aroused, seeing as how he was slowly bleeding to death. Still, his hormones didn’t seem to know that. Or if they did, they didn’t care. Rollo couldn’t really blame them.

“It’s like painting by numbers. I just need you to fill me in on a couple of blank spaces, okay?”

Mrs. Kirkdale just scowled at him. “See, I know that you were behind stealing Benny’s blackmail photos. I knew you’d have the means and the motive after your sugar daddy got popped. You also knew all his boys, who were then all out of work. I figure you’re a smart girl, you see your angle and you make your play. What I want to know is why it all went so wrong that you had to call me in to try and find your own gruddamn blackmail dope!” Impatience and annoyance mixed into the rising anger in his voice.

Mrs. Kirkdale continued to scowl at Rollo for a moment, and then gave in with a sigh.
“Most of what you said is right. I cottoned on as soon as Benny’s brains hit his marble coffee table. It worked well for Benny for years, fleecing corrupt Judges or politicians who didn’t want pictures of them wearing diapers turning up in the News. Did you know that the Sector Councilman for 304 likes to be spanked whilst wearing lederhosen and to be called Hermann whilst doing it?

“Anyhow,” she continued “after Benny died, some of the boys decided that they wanted a bigger cut of the take. More in the region of a hundred percent.
“I had to get that list!”

“Sure you did, honey.” Rollo answered back, almost sarcastically, jibing her.
Then she reached down into her purse and pulled out something Rollo hadn’t seen in there last time; something that gleamed and glinted dully in the flickering half-light of the destroyed office. A Judge’s badge.

“So you’re Wally Squad?” Rollo said, looking at the woman who until a moment ago had been Emma Kirkbride with a genuine look of surprise which had, for once, escaped onto the outside of his face.

“I’m Undercover Judge Irene Valli, and I need you to hand over that list right now!” her voice firm, full of righteously intended threat.

“You’ll humour a dying man” Rollo slurred, his sarcastic front hanging by a thread.
“But let me play Devil’s Advocate here. Let’s say that you are Wally Squad, and that you’d been placed with Benny to build a case against him. So once you find out about Benny’s ‘little black book’, your boss-Judges tell you to get your hands on it. But Benny takes the midnight dirt nap unexpectedly, and catches you on the hop. Some of his boys waltz off with the list, and you’re left with nothing but the grease stains from where Benny’d had his paws all over you.”

Valli shot him a look, like she wasn’t going to sit still and keep listening too much longer.

“But if all the helmets in the sector are on the lookout for the list, then why exactly were you using a motley crew made up of the waifs and strays of the criminal world to do the Judge’s job?”

“I…” The question had hit home, and Rollo saw the hard-bitten Judge persona quickly fading like the art prints that had been on his office wall since before the day he began working there.

“Wouldn’t it be more likely that you were making your own move on Benny’s information, and you didn’t want the Judges to know?”

Judge Valli fixed Rollo with a stern but sincere look.

“It’s not just greed you know. Certain of my superiors had been placed in a compromising position by Azenaur’s blackmail demands, so we launched a honey trap of our own. After Benny died, getting the list back became top priority, and it was made clear to me that I had to find it before the street Judges. In exchange for successful completion, they offered me Benny’s old patch, and all his little toy politicians to play with.”

“And of course you didn’t have a problem with that?”

“I’d been under deep cover for years. You don’t know what it’s like having to constantly pretend, always telling some lie to someone to cover your back. Eventually it became second nature, and I lost track of the line between the two sides, everything became a single gray blur. All I wanted was to be able to commit myself to one life, one way or the other. Suddenly I was being given this opportunity: all I had to do was recover the missing information, and I’d have my own business, with a ready-made power base. I knew that I could make a success of it, and use his few remaining goons to do all the work for me.

“Anyway, I had a lifestyle to maintain”.

She lit herself a cigarette, the yellow light of the flame illuminating her, casting dark shadows as she perched on the edge of the desk.

Rollo inhaled another lungful. “Where did Mouse and his brother fit into it all?”

“Well Mouse was really my ace in the hole. He kept most of the others in line, but he was too dumb to ever strike out on his own. All it took was the promise of ’undying love’, the occasional kiss and he was mine. So as soon as this revolution began, I had him out looking for the missing boys. He managed to find them all too, except for Slacko. I figured that he must have been on the lookout for Mouse and his boys, so I thought I’d hire an independent contractor, someone Slacko wouldn’t know. That’s how you came into the picture. I had every intention of paying you after you found the stuff, but then Ivan got a bit over eager. I figured that once Mouse had found out that his brother had been bisected, he’d come and find you for some payback, and I’d make the best of a bad deal, and at least I’d have the whole thing cleared with the minimum of fuss and expenditure”.

She looked back again at the inert form of Mouse. “You know it’s a pity that you had to kill him. I mean the others I can replace easily enough, but someone like him only comes along once in a lifetime”. She sighed.

“Anyhow, getting back to the matter at hand” She removed a Mark II Lawgiver from wherever it was she had managed to conceal it about her person – not an easy job in that dress, Rollo thought – and aimed it at Rollo’s head. “I’d really like to know where my documents are now please”.

“You’re threatening to kill a dying man? That’s really going to give me an incentive, isn’t it?” Rollo laughed out a plume of blue-gray smoke. His eyelids felt heavy, and it was getting increasingly hard to keep them open.

“You know, there are worse things you can do to people than kill them” Her lips had curled into a satisfied smile, but her cold green eyes assured Rollo of her deadly earnestness”.

“They’re over there”. Rollo pointed to the waste paper basket. Mrs. Kirkdale moved towards it to pick them out. Things happened quickly from there. Rollo flicked the almost finished cigarette into the bin, to join the, until recently, missing documents, a third of a bottle of whiskey and an entire can of lighter fluid. The rubbish bin burst into a ball of flame, immediately wreathing the entire room in its sickly orange glow. Rollo could see Valli desperately trying to claw out one of the photographs from the inferno, but all she got for her trouble was singed hands as her scarlet coloured plastic nails melted in the heat, the evidence little more than shriveled cinders. Rollo caught the sight of her face illuminated behind the flames, and the fire of anger burning in her eyes seemed stronger than the fire itself. A few seconds later and she was gone. Rollo could already hear the throb of Lawmasters, and the sound of sirens. Obviously the second call he had made, to the Judges, had worked. Now it was time for someone else to put the all the pieces of the jigsaw together.

Despite the fire burning in the room, it still seemed to be getting darker to Rollo. He laughed when he thought of Mrs. Emma Kirkdale, nee Judge Irene Valli. Although it didn’t make him feel any better about dying, he felt extremely pleased that his last act had been to get one over on her. She hadn’t had the time to consider that he might have had the foresight to make a copy, a data slug nestling comfortably in his left pocket. Of course, all those corrupt Judges and politicians would still get away with it. Still, when had the world ever been any different?

Chauvinist, vindictive bastard right to the end, he mused to himself. He might have been a drokking asshole, but at least he knew that was what he was.

“If I can piss all over someone else’s life before I die, then I die fulfilled.”

Almost fulfilled. All he needed now was to get laid, and he could die contented. Still, Rollo contemplated, as he began to close his eyes, life very rarely works out exactly the way you would want it. Besides he felt far too tired now for any physical exertion. All he wanted now was to sleep. Eyes weighted, unwilling and unable to open, as peaceful oblivion quietly washed over him like a soft summer breeze.

Shortly afterwards, somewhere between nowhere and eternity, Rollo lost himself someplace very quiet and very dark.