Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

Islip’s office looked like an old English drawing room, with silky wallpaper, ornate gilt-framed oil paintings of military men on horseback, and antique high-backed armchairs. On the wall behind the desk was a big oil portrait of a pirate with a beard you could lose a dog in pouring boiling oil on what I presumed were seagoing taxmen. I lifted it off the wall to reveal the safe.

And, of course, it was the picture that was alarmed.

I invented five new swearwords in six seconds.

Dashing to the door, I jabbed the jimmy into the lock, immobilizing it. A chair went under the door handle. I ran back to the safe. It was electronic. Brom had told me it was an old-style dial-tumbler design. I went down and peered at the numeric keypad at an angle. The most-used keys pick up more dirt than the others. But this damn thing was new. In my pocket, I had some talc lifted from Brom’s kitchen that I’d wrapped in a square of kitchen paper. I unwrapped it and blew a little over the keypad, and then blew lightly at the keypad itself. One, five, six, and eight looked like they’d attracted more powder than the others, which meant they were slightly stickier, which meant they’d been used more. I hoped.

Someone banged on the door.

I started tapping in variations on 1568. It took me five or six goes before I noticed the little LED display on the face of the safe.

ALARM-LOCK.

The damn thing immobilized when the alarm went off.

With the alarm still beeping away, the element of surprise had kind of faded away a while back.

So I took out the Ruger and shot the safe.

The pow was deafening in the enclosed space. The windows wobbled in their frames. The safe spat out a shower of sparks, the LED going dead. I’d put the big bullet right where I assumed the locking mechanism to be, and the door resentfully eased open by about an inch. I put Brom’s kitchen knife in the gap and started levering with all the strength I had left.

There was a crunching, the blade snapped off, and the door came away. I pulled the door back as far as I could, and looked inside, heart in my mouth.

The book was in there.

It had to be the book. It was ancient. Big, with gray leather covers, mold greening the corners.

The banging on the door turned to thumping. Someone was throwing their body against it.

I took the book out gingerly, and laid it on the desk. The second it touched the surface, my head started swimming, like I’d taken a heavy toke off a strong joint. I shook it off and opened the book. The front cover touched the desk surface and it happened again. I felt my eyes widen and my head kind of lurch to attention, going light.

I took out my phone, found the number I wanted, and hit redial.

“It’s McGill,” I said. “I’m sure you know where I am. I have what you want. Send in the cavalry. And that’s now, not in five minutes’ time.”

“We’re outside,” rasped the voice I’d learned to hate. “Three minutes, Mr. McGill.”

Three minutes. Probably not enough time. But I had to try it.

I took out the handheld computer.

Mr. McGill,” came the voice. From the door.

I walked to it, gun in hand. “Are we all clear?”

“Of course. Open the door.”

“Hold on,” I said. I pulled the makeshift lockpicker out of the door, very quietly slid the chair away, and walked back to the desk. “Come on in.”

The chief of staff entered with two men in black. He took two steps and stopped.

I had the Ruger pressed to the closed book.

“What exactly is transpiring here, Mr. McGill?”

“Insurance,” I said, much more calmly than I expected. “Pick up the handheld device on the desk there.”

“You can’t possibly expect to shoot me before these people unload into your body, Mr. McGill.” The two Secret Service men had both drawn on me, rock steady and aimed at my eyes.

“I’m not aiming at you, sir. Look at me. I’m aimed at the book.”

“What is this?”

“The book’s not going to be a whole hell of a lot of use to you with five large holes in it. Pick up the handheld. I want to see my money transferred into my account before I hand the book over.”

“This is stupid. I’m the White House chief of staff. I don’t lie.”

“There’s no way your boys can take me out before I fire into the book. I’ve already taken first pressure. If I cough, bullets go through this book. Destroying words. Destroying whatever crap is really in the covers. It’ll be useless to you. And after the week I’ve had, I really, really couldn’t give a shit what happens next.”

“We have your friend Trix, you know. Her lawyer friend bolted the second the alarm went off.”

“She’s not my friend. She’s someone I was sleeping with until she slept with someone else.”

He smiled his awful smile. “Yes, I’m aware of that. I did try to warn you.”

I smiled back at him. “Yes, you did. Pick up the handheld.”

“Yes,” he said. “I will. A job well done, Mr. McGill, against astonishing odds.”

He took the device, and his long fingers began playing its keyboard.

“Mike?” came a voice from outside.

“Bring her through,” the chief of staff absently muttered, working the device. Trix, with a foul look on her face, emerged from the outer offce.

“So you’re doing it,” she said to me.

“You’re damn right I am. And I don’t care if you’re disappointed.”

“Meh. It’s been a day of disappointments. It’s not like you’re surprising me with your spinelessness, Mike.”

“Yeah, well. The one thing my life has taught me is that there’s always space for surprise.”

“An excellent lesson to end the day with, Mr. McGill.” The chief smiled. He put the device on the desk and swiveled it around to show me the screen. “A completed, irrevocable transfer of funds, available immediately for your use. You have lived up to your peculiar reputation and my faith in you, Mr. McGill. Now, the book, if you please.”

Watching the Secret Service men, I slowly laid the Ruger on the book and backed away.

“You can keep the gun, too.” I smiled. “I’m done with it.”

I walked around the table and picked up the handheld. The chief walked around the other side and laid his hands on the book, reverently.

“I’m done,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, waving his hand. “You’ll never see me again, Mr. McGill. Unless you attend one of our readings, of course. It may do you good. Return you to moral balance.”

“I’m doing okay,” I said, taking Trix’s wrist. “Have fun.”

I walked her out of the office, through the outer office, and into the bullpen. The Secret Service was everywhere, encircling the great and the good of the party. In the middle of the room were three very scared Latino adolescents in white smocks. The men in black nodded us through, and I pulled Trix toward the elevators.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, as I punched the call button.

“Please, Trix. A couple more minutes and you can do what you like. Just work with me here.”

Both elevators pinged, within a few seconds of each other.

“Please,” I said to no one. “One more time. Just for us.”

The first elevator to open was empty. I shoved Trix into it. A second later, the other elevator opened. And LAPD poured out of it. An absolute flood of ugly men in blue. I leapt in next to Trix and hit the button for the underground carport.

“What the hell was that?” Trix yelped.

“I called the cops.”

“Mike!”

What did you tell the cops to get them there so fast?”

“I told them someone armed was robbing Frank Islip’s safe.”

“Oh my God. And they’re walking into—”

“Into a distinctly criminal sex party apparently attended by the White House chief of staff.”

Trix just looked at me, mouth open and eyes wide. I knew I was grinning. I couldn’t help it. I knew that if I could get through the last ten minutes, her reaction alone would make it all worth it. And, my God, it did. And I wasn’t done yet.

“It’s going to be interesting when the press arrive, don’t you think?”

“You didn’t. You couldn’t. There’s no way you could arrange that.”

“See, I met a very interesting guy this morning. You’d like him, actually. Zack Pickles. He works in porno, but he does it to raise money for what he’s really interested in. Which is moving a certain kind of information around. He called the press for me. But what gave me the really good idea was you.”

“What did I do?”

“You uploaded photos from the handheld to your hosting site, didn’t you? I poked around the handheld a bit, and saw how it worked. Email attachments. Like the photos my ex and her partner send to me. Just stick ’em to an email and off they go. That’s what made me think of it.”

“What did you do?”

The elevator pinged, and we got out. Of course, Brom was long gone, so we just walked up the exit ramp to the street outside.

“Well, I had to give the bastard the book. There was no way around that. But his big idea of doing the Freedom Train thing, getting people inside town halls and exposing them to the damn thing—and I tell you, that book is weird—it was only ever going to work if people didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. It’s right there in the book, on the first page. Someone wrote instructions for use of the book. And the chief of staff obviously wasn’t going to have people warned beforehand. That wasn’t the plan.”

We got to the street. I stopped, looked up at the night, and drew a long breath.

“Mike, if you don’t tell me what you did and I mean stat I’m going to rip off your junk and—”

“I photographed the book with the handheld, Trix. The whole thing is only ten pages. I photographed every page and uploaded the photos to Zack Pickles’s secure hosting site. Those photos are going to be all over the Internet in the next ten minutes. Because everyone’s been telling me that the Internet and everything on it is the mainstream now.”

Oh, yes, it was time for a cigarette. And this one was most definitely the Cigarette of Victory. I lit it and threw the rest of the pack down a drain.

“It’s no good to the White House when everyone knows exactly what it is and exactly what it does. No one’s going to go near it. Hell, the White House won’t even bother taking it out. It becomes a curio, a weird antique, a discussion point for constitutional scholars and poli-sci majors. It’s… defused. And I still got paid, and they can’t pull the money back. We win. We beyond win. We are made of win. My God, it’s full of win. And so on.”

Trix threw her arms around me and kissed me, and I felt stress unpin the muscles in my back for the first time in a day.

“My God, it’s full of win?”

“There’s no way in hell you haven’t seen 2001, Trix, so don’t even—”

“Yes.” She smiled. “I’ve seen it. I just… I really didn’t think you were going to do anything but hand the thing over and take the money.”

“Yeah, I know. You know why you thought that? Because I decided to make it hard for you to trust me. Now, here’s how it’s going to be.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Dear God. Is this your special Patriarchy voice?”

“Yes, it is, and you are just a girl, so you will be quiet and listen while I tell you how it’s going to be. You know how hard it was for you to trust me today? That’s how hard it is for me to trust you with the whole sex-fiend thing. But I am a man, and therefore capable of change and compromise. So here’s the deal. You can sleep with any woman you want—”

Trix thumped me in the chest, laughing in disbelief. “You total pig bastard!”

“—let me finish. You can sleep with any woman you want. You can sleep with hairy-nippled women, you can sleep with skinhead women in combat boots who smoke unfiltered French cigarettes, you can sleep with women who inject their nether regions with warm salty water. And as for everything else…”

I stopped. I stroked her cheek.

“…as for everything else. Just come home at night, would you? Do what you like, do what you have to. Just come home to me at night. Because I love you.”

Of course, the first apartment we took together turned out to have been vacated due to the owner, a dog breeder, having been beaten to death with the corpse of a chihuahua. And after the third break-in we realized that our repeat burglars were a team of necrophiles trying to retrieve some dead bodies they’d stored in the walls.

But we did okay.

I know I’m going to forget someone, because I’m writing this in the pub and the deadline for this page was four days ago. So, in the order they occur to me as I work through my third Red Bull:

Miss Wurzel Tod, the inimitable Suzanne Gerber of Basel, who was the first person to put the words Godzilla and bukkake together in the same sentence. Susannah Breslin, late of New Orleans, and the late Leticia Blake of Los Angeles, whose (the former) writings on and (the latter) experience of the sex trade informed many scenes. Dr. Joshua Ellis (no relation) of Las Vegas, who put one of the settings in my head.

Margo Eve of Virginia, the original Pervert Academic. Lydia Wills of Manhattan, my literary agent, who basically bugged the shit out of me until I wrote the first ten thousand words of this book to make her go away, and then pulled on me the worst trick of my life by selling it in two weeks. Any factual errors in this book should be blamed on her: not because they’re her fault, but because it pleases me to do so. My media agent, Angela Cheng Caplan of Hollywood, for nagging me whenever Lydia paused for breath. Xeni Jardin of Los Angeles and William Gibson of Vancouver, for generally being help and inspiration.

And to my various hosts during my American tour of 2000, which gave me the framework for the book—New York, Columbus, San Antonio, Vegas, and L.A. (There was also a stop in San Francisco, but fiction will never top the Bay Area for outright surrealism.)

If there’s anyone I’ve forgotten, please accept my apologies and thanks, and blame encroaching senility. Or Lydia.

WARREN ELLIS is one of the most prolific, read, and admired graphic novelists in the world and the creator of such popular series as Transmetropolitan and The Authority. He has won many awards and been nominated for many more. Ellis has also written over fifty graphic novels, television and video game scripts, and a constant outpouring of text messages from the pub. He lives in southern England with his partner, Niki, and their daughter, Lilith. He never sleeps.