Читать книгу Toxicology - Steve Aylett - Страница 6

After a pert little heist one day Easy Fortezza felt unaccountably reluctant to remove his mask. It was the amiably layered face of an elephant. He wasn’t even meant to participate in such heists, let alone become transmogrified into a tusken behemoth during the procedure. Because he was a favorite nephew of Eddie Thermidor the gang boss, everyone indulged him. But when after a whole week he was still wearing the bonce, some of the house hoods had a sit-down about it. “So he’s got a attitude problem,” shrugged Larry Crocus, cracking his knuckles.

“Attitude,” grunted Moray.

“Maybe it’s a phase,” said Sam “Sam” Bleaker.

“Phase,” grunted Moray.

“You guys’ll be the death o’ me,” laughed Barry Nosedive.

“Death,” grunted Moray.

“I mean it’s not like he’s done any harm,” Nosedive continued. “Maybe he’s evolving under the pressure.”

“He poses the threat of a good example,” hissed Shiv, examining his knife.

“Sure. We’ll get a reputation.”

“Death,” grunted Moray.

“We can’t waste Fortezza,” stated Nosedive. “He’s good—irreplaceable.”

“He appears to have been effortlessly replaced by an elephant,” muttered Mr. Flak without inflection. He was a man who did not have to raise his voice as he cared little whether anyone heard him—and no-one ever did.

“This droopy mammal,” hissed Shiv, “cow-eyed and inscrutable, will kill us all.”

“The boss don’t even know Easy goes out on them installation pieces,” added Bleaker. “He finds out about this the lot of us’ll be found on an empty lot with our future round our ankles.”

“And our ears stuffed with mini veggies,” hissed Shiv.

“Let me talk to the boy,” muttered Mr. Flak. “He trusts me.”

No-one heard the older guy.

“Death,” grunted Moray.

Mr. Flak visited Easy’s apartment for a friendly chat on the matter of the boys’ decision to send him to the ivory yard. As he waited for Easy to show, the boys planted a bomb on each corner of the building in a deliberate deviation from mob intervention method. Only one went off, obliterating Mr. Flak and the apartment, and the feds suppressed knowledge of the others thinking it was another covert job gone sloppy. Thermidor clocked the mob style but concluded it was a rival gang—maybe Betty getting above her strata. Considering Easy and Mr. Flak were both dead of dispersion, he declared gang war.

Easy meanwhile went on the skitter deep underground in Beerlight City, too tired and tangled to retaliate. Had he offended, or been offended against? At what point had he diverged into this dumb fugitive routine? He knew that among those who suspected his survival he was banished. He wept tears thick as glue.

But he finally found he wasn’t alone regarding the masks. There was even a support group for crooks in just his situation. One night he was listening to one of his brother sufferers address the group. “My name’s Josh,” the brother was saying. “And I’ve been wearing Newt Gingrich’s face for ... three years now. Unlike many of you, I can never feel pride. But I’m resolved to live with the abuse, the scorn, the hatred—and live life as best I can. That’s all I have to say.” There was applause as Josh sat down. Easy later heard that a plastic surgeon had altered the mask to Boris Karloff by shortening the forehead.

But that evening as Josh sat down, Easy beheld a pale horse sitting to his right—the sleekest creature he’d ever seen. After the meeting she approached him. “You don’t need this any more than I do, tusker.”

“So why you here?”

“Ill will hunting. I’m Lady Miss V. Short for Voltaire—I run the Fist of Irony under Valentine Street. The meek are welcome to the earth, Easy.” The pony girl led him across town and down a stairwell to a basement entrance. She pointed out a light meter over the door to measure PVC gleam intensity and took him in.

The Fist of Irony illuminated all the ghostly bones of the heart. Rather than just biting the bullet, these people strapped on a feedbag. Among the laser-sprayed crowd were Chewy Endeavor, a skeleton glossed with wetlook leather, Annie Drawback, who’d disconnected her headskin to make it a draw-off woman hood, Ted Gloot, a man trapped in a cop’s body, and hundreds more who, sick of being stared at in drab America, had resolved to legitimize the stares. Someone had grown a beard consisting entirely of facial muscle. Others had directly stained their skulls with a likeness of their own face so as to retain personality in the grave. A black guy had had himself tattooed all over with the US flag so that police assault might result in prosecution. Couples into acting out alien abductions found common cause with the enema crowd. Buddha Gore had replaced his eyes with wadded-up memos and stuffy apologia. Ariel Hi-Blow was such an invert he stuck himself to the ceiling and put a mirror on the floor. “Molecular solvent,” he laughed, and Easy looked up, startled. “I can see up your pants.” FMJ the gunhead wore a bullet suit and had had Lady Miss construct a giant Charter Arms .44 Special to his precise specifications. “Tonight’s the night,” he said.

“Go girl,” yelled Ariel from the ceiling.

The Caere Twins were in the corner with a guy in a void coat—one pushed an arm in up to the elbow and brought it out dripping with ectoplasm. The man extruded an etheric valve and slathered them in blown ghost—the entire corner bulbed into a pullulating chrysalis, sickly with spinelight. Peering at the indistinct forms which wrestled within the calyx, Easy was hustled on past a series of doors. “Tug of War Room—don’t go in there. Hillary Room—private party. Mattel R Toom—slaves. Firing range—need a licence. And here’s my chamber.” Lady led him into a stable. “America kisses with its mouth closed, Easy. Want to try something?” She placed a bit between her teeth, separating her jaws, and buckled the strap behind her head.

“We can’t do this, Lady,” stammered Easy. “It’s unnatural—we’re different species.”

Lady shrugged off her clothes and knelt over, gleaming white. Easy felt like an airbag was being deployed in his skull. An explosion sounded over the building as FMJ reached for the sky.

Two whole years passed. Easy became part-owner of the club. Moving in a different world, he kept clear of the mob. For a crook to become attached to his disguise was an offence without duplicity. It was rejection—growth, even. Like others at the Fist, he’d given up trying to deny the worth of worship.

Holdup masks never went out of fashion—one afternoon Larry Crocus, Moray, Shiv, Bleaker and Barry Nosedive were due to perform a heist behind the faces of a regular menagerie. The job had reached the vault when Shiv, who had selected the face of a walrus, raised a gun at the others. “Cut it out, Shiv,” they laughed nervously.

With a rubbery flourish, he drew off the walrus mask to reveal that of an elephant.

“Fortezza!” gasped Larry Crocus.

“That’s right,” said Easy. “Don’t let anyone persuade you character takes orders.”

Nosedive pushed forward, the ears of his dog mask flapping. “Hey, we gave you the cod eye!”

“I have different information.”

Crocus, who wore the face of a pig, gestured to Easy with his snubgun. “Where’s the face we shut.”

“This is who I am.” He drew a bead on Crocus. “And these beans want planting.”

“Four guns to one, Dumbo,” honked Moray from behind a cat face. At that moment, Sam “Sam” Bleaker tore off his horse mask to reveal that of a horse.

“Who the hell are you?” shouted Crocus as the pale horse aimed her gun. “What you do with Bleaker and Shiv?”

“You bore me,” said Lady.

“Tied up in a closet at the gang fort,” said Easy. “They didn’t come along on the bomb run, after all.”

“So it’s about the old man. We don’t got any gripe with you Easy but I’ll put you on a keyboard if I have to.”

“I don’t bluff empty armor, guys. Lemme ask you, is crime what happens when you miss the target, or hit it? I put glue in your masks.”

The three mobsters dropped their guns and began scrabbling at their heads as Easy and Lady Miss backed out of the vault. It was Ariel Hi-Blow’s molecular glue. A scream tore out as a face came away with a fake. An elephant never forgets.