The Big Steam

As the thug’s cold, steel fist slams into my jaw and sends me spiralling to the ground in a dribble of blood and teeth, I wonder where it all went wrong. The bastard has another three friends with him, all with that hungry look every soon-to-be-murderer gets, so I don’t exactly have time for the whole life-flashing-before-my-eyes shtick. Just the crib notes, please… I’ve got an appointment to get the shit kicked out of me.

It started like all tragedies: with a dame. One of those real stunners, like that Fay Wray that had been getting all the blokes flocking to the hollie-theatres. You know the sort: hair down to her shoulders, legs up to her ears. A come hither look that smouldered like a crashed zeppelin. The sort of dame men would die to be with. Maybe not the best turn of phrase, given the situation…

She was dressed up in an emerald cocktail dress. Told me she’d seen my office on the way to a shindig, liked the look of it – discreet, she seemed to think. I didn’t know if I liked being called discreet. Rent boys were discreet, backstreet surgi-tecs were discreet. Private eyes? Well, I guess maybe my pride just wanted to hear something more along the lines of ‘talented’… Hell, even ‘competent’. I bristled, and asked her what self-respecting gent holds a shindig in Dagenham. She told me she was on her way to the Ford aeroworks, friend of the wife of the manager’s son or some such thing. Said the company needed someone discreet for a little look-see at the competition. I took my time to light up before telling her to sling it; private eyes deal with unfaithful husbands, not corporate espionage.

She flashed me the puppy-dog eyes, and then a cheque with a whole bunch of zeroes on it. I asked when she wanted me to start. Don’t go judging me… Professional integrity, what little there is in private dickery, had never put food on the table before.

She told me the job. Funny goings-on at the areoworks, parts missing, machines fried and whatnot. In a word: sabotage. The manager seemed to have gotten the idea into his head that Briggs Motor Bodies were still raw at Ford for muscling in on their turf (not to mention setting up the largest aeroworks in Europa right under their noses). I filled in the rest of the job for myself: hit the pubs, ask around and drop a few not-so-subtle, not-so-empty threats here and there until I got myself a name. As she left, she nodded at the cheque I’d stuffed in my breast pocket and told me there was another one of those waiting if I got the right man. I’d grabbed my coat and hat and was hot-footing it to the nearest pub before you could say ‘corporate whore’.

The place wasn’t much to look at. Literally. The bombed-out remains of an old tenement building patched up with corrugated iron and bric-a-brac from the nearby junkyard, the oily glimmer of kerosene lanterns flickering through the dirt-caked, crack-webbed windows. Five years since the Great War and they still hadn’t got around to fixing the electricity around here? Sometimes I wondered why the rest of the world looked to London as the capital of capitals…

Inside it wasn’t much better: a haphazard collection of workers just finished their factory shifts cluttered around a haphazard collection of broken tables pilfered from the neighbouring, less fortunate, tenements. In the corner, a rusty old ‘Bard clunked and whirred as his thick metal digits crashed down on a bruised piano, completely drowning out the music. Thank God for small mercies. A thick, stinking blanket of smoke hung from the roof, trying its best to hide the reek of alcohol that smelt more like motor spirit dregs and the whiff of the unwashed masses. It was a foulness you never got used to: I’d spent years putting up with the same reek in a ditch somewhere in the arse-end of France, and it still burnt in my nostrils as I crossed over to the bar.

I recognised a few of the blokes through the cigarette miasma and soon after my second pint homed in on reliable old Donny. A few years back I’d tracked down a surgi-tec who’d given him a dodgy prosthetic and put the shyster in need of a few fake limbs himself. Donny had told me he could never repay me, and I’d been holding him to that ever since.

Turns out Donny had a friend who’s brother’s father-in-law worked at the Ford plant and might know something about the spanner-in-the-works. I got an address off the poor half-man and headed up to the next floor to check if there was anyone else I could squeeze gossip and half-heard rumours out of.

It was well past midnight when I finally slipped from the pub and started back for the office. It was too late to bother getting the Mono back to Covent Garden; my desk chair was more than sufficient.

As I passed by a wall covered in posters of Marshall Kitchener pointing accusingly at me and demanding I enlist, the uncomfortable sound of a second set of footsteps echoed through the alley. I barely had the time to tell myself it was just another Joe on his way back home when another set of heels clicked against the cobblestones. Not the moth-eaten, dog-eared loafers of the local workmen, no… These shoes sounded well-heeled. Corporate shoes.

‘The bosses don’t appreciate dicks sticking their noses where it don’t belong.’

I groaned. My trademark unsubtlety was fine for runaway husbands, but it looked like the corporations were a lot more on-the-ball. Proved the dame right, though…

There were four of them in the mouth of the alleyway, two abreast. The speaker was a short bastard – looked broader than he was tall. Beneath his coat I could hear the steady whirring of a prosthetic. Not the clumsy clunking of Donny’s; this was the proper deal. Military-grade.

Well fuck…

I look up from the dirt and blood and find myself staring down the infinite blackness of a gun barrel. The alleyway echoes as he thumbs back the hammer. I close my eyes as a shot rings out across the city. Never could say no to a pretty dress, or a hefty paycheque.

Goddamn dame…

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