A Perfect Machine(42)

Krebosche pushed himself off the ground, got his knees under him, stood, arms away from his sides. His heart thumped slower now, his breathing becoming steadier.

Calm down, just calm down.

“I’m going to assume,” Palermo said, “that you’ll’ve come armed with something to harm me. What did you bring? Oh, and don’t show me, just tell me first.”

Krebosche thought about what to say. Should he tell him about the gun and the knife, or just one of them, leave himself a last-ditch option?

“Gun,” he said.

“That’s all?”

Krebosche nodded.

“Now, show me where, but don’t move your arms.”

Krebosche turned around slowly, feet crunching snow. The gun was visible in his waistband.

“Lovely. Stand very, very still as I remove it. OK?”

Krebosche nodded. Palermo moved forward, gun trained on the back of Krebosche’s head. He snatched the gun out of the waistband and stepped back quickly, popped it into his own waistband.

“One more chance: any more weapons? Be honest now.”

Krebosche decided to stick to his deceit. The way Palermo was talking to him – the condescending snideness – could work for him. He thinks I’m a fool, a retard. He thinks he can fuck with me. If I can just get one moment where he’s unguarded…

“Nothing,” he said. “That’s it.”

“Grand. Now tell me what you’re doing here. You were with the other man, Duncan, yes? In it together, were you? Come to expose our secret society?”

Krebosche said nothing.

“Do you think you’re the first to try?”

Krebosche wanted to tell him he’d been tracking him for nearly a year, that he wasn’t just some shitty reporter or something, sniffing around for a lead, that his little society was responsible for his sister’s death, and also that – in a crazy twist of fate he still found hard to believe whenever his mind would turn to the fact – Krebosche had been dating his fucking daughter. And that he knew Palermo had killed her. But he held it in. Tipping his hand now would be stupid. He needed to take advantage of his anonymity.

“I don’t know much at all,” Krebosche said. “Duncan just said if I hadn’t heard from him by a certain time, I was to come after him. Get him out.”

Palermo squinted, cocked his head a little. Said nothing.

Sell it. Come on, sell it, Krebosche thought. Then, eyes down, his voice dropping an octave in what he hoped sounded like shame, he added: “He said we’d be famous.”

Palermo smirked. “Famous.”

Krebosche raised his eyes again, met Palermo’s. He knew the key to selling a line was to not overplay it. No hangdog expressions when shame has been offered up. Definitely no tears. And don’t talk too much. The less you say, the more believable the lie is. Easier to keep track of what you’ve said that way, too.

“So what do you suppose I’m to do with you, Mr Famous? I can’t just let you go, can I.”

“Why not? Won’t I just forget everything in a couple of hours? And who would believe me, anyway? Whatever weird mind scrub effect protects you works on me, too.” He wanted to keep Palermo talking. “How does it work, anyway? Some kinda force field? Some Rasputin-esque shit? Divine intervention?” He dropped his arms a little during the last sentence to test Palermo’s attention. Palermo immediately caught on, motioned to him with the gun to get his arms back up.

“No force field. No Rasputin shit. No God. As far as we know.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing that would make the slightest bit of sense to you.”

Nothing that makes the slightest bit of sense to me, either, Palermo thought, but would never say.

Krebosche blinked. “Try me.”

“Enough of this,” Palermo said, a darkness crossing his features. Krebosche knew he’d lost him – and probably his last chance of survival. “Enough of this Bond-villain explaining-all-my-motives drivel. Hands on your head. Start walking.”

Palermo motioned again with his gun, this time to turn around and walk in the direction of the caboose and the warehouse.

Or wherever he’s decided to shoot me in the face, Krebosche thought, but did as he was instructed. As he turned, his peripheral vision caught something on the roof of the warehouse: a quick gleam of light from a pair of binoculars. So there you are, you fucker. One of you, anyway.

The moon hung low in the sky. It looked like a true blue moon. A rarity. One more shot at random distraction, Krebosche thought. If this doesn’t work, I’ll have to tell him who I am. What I really know. Hope it’s enough to throw him off, give me a shot at the boot knife.

“When I was a kid,” he said, as he marched through the thickening snow, “I used to live for nights like this. Full moon, big and fat, just hanging up there in the sky like–”

“Shut your mouth, or I’ll kill you right here, Mr Famous. Mr Idiot.” Something was boiling up inside Palermo. Some nameless anger that he was finding hard to control. It had started creeping up his back the moment Krebosche had brought up the “mind scrub” thing. Palermo himself had no idea what caused it, nor did anyone else, as far as he knew. It was certainly something he and his kind welcomed, but his failure to understand why it happened was something that gnawed away at him. To him, something about it felt off. Like there were reasons beyond his fathoming for the Inferne Cutis’s existence – some purpose beyond his capability to understand. But that wasn’t entirely it; he felt, too, that there was a kind of manipulation at work. Some sort of–