The Clarity of Cold Steel
Chapter 43

“A LETHAL PURPOSE.” That’s what I tell the bartender when he asks me what I’m drinking to. Then I tell him to fuck off or keep pouring. I’ve still got some coin, the lifeblood, so he darkens, grumbles, glances over my shoulder, shakes his head, begging off some character or characters unknown, no doubt poised to descend upon me, but don’t the fucker pour.

I toss the Sepoy Times aside, the garish title splashed across the front page: Four Dead in House Fire.

And so I’m two-fisting jefes and sour shots in a three-handed juggler’s act, perched on a wobbly stool in some dive on the east side of the Seep. By the water. The Blue Marlin, I think. The name engenders views of clean blue-green seas on sunshining mornings. The name lies. Egregiously.

A sorry bloke asks me if I’ve any pills left. Turning to him, I heft a glass, drinking to life, to love, to muffled oblivion. He shuffles off.

It’s four days post conflagration. All the papers say they’re dead: Aashirya. Kalavati, the boys. My family. The family I lost once. Now twice. Being estranged I could deal with. I always carried that hope, even though I was too much a shit to admit it, that we’d be reunited somehow. Somewhere. Some when. But that ain’t gonna happen now. Now I can only pray it’s in the next life or the one after that. And I’m shit at praying.

So I drink.

And I still haven’t found Nikunj, or rather, he hasn’t found me. Course, the searching I’ve been doing’s been limited to dives and back alleyways and the bottoms of bottles. Due diligence there. I suppose I don’t care, but it does make me wonder. He should have found me by now. If he’s still alive. Never thought it’d be possible someone could manage to ace the fucker, but there’s a first for everything. And Brooklyn? I told him to check the drop in five days, tomorrow, but he’s probably dead, too. And if he’s not, I will be.

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I order another shot, take in the joint.

To call the Blue Marlin a shithole would be unkind to the many other shitholes this side of town that greedily claim that moniker. The ceiling’s a patchwork of corrugated iron dripping both here and there. Bowlered toughs saunter about, their hands black with machine grease and toil.

Should I be here? Wallowing in the dregs of a destitute white borough? Me, a darkie wog with my name and face plastered across the wanted board of every post office wall and cop joint this side of the Dead River? Heh. Good thing most of these shitheels can’t read. Not that they’d need a wanted poster to drum up dark ideas concerning my fine health.

I slap another steel coin down onto the bar. I hocked the last of my pills. Got paid right handsomely, too. The barkeep scans the bar, eyeing the dregs, looking to cop some more coin. He waits, a frown on his face as he glares me down, stuck in limbo between hate of my skin color and love of my coin. Greed overpowers hatred, though, and he covers the coin with a gnarly three-fingered hand, slides it back and away, pours me another shot.

I knock it back, feeling the sweet vestigial burn halfway through my mind but not my throat. My throat went numb an hour ago. Along with the rest of me. For the most part. Just my scattered thoughts’re left. If I could only drown them. Been doing my damnest, though, no lie. But my mind’s still racing like a cocaine-steeped, three-legged thoroughbred. Still going over every detail I don’t know and can only imagine of how Aashirya and the kids all bought it.

Did the explosion kill them instantly? A quick snuff out and then oblivion? I wipe my nose. Or was it worse? Was it longer? Protracted? Was Aashirya outside hanging linen and the house goes up? She tears back in, mad with fear, and the kids are all dead and toxic black spume sears her lungs and she burns to death from the inside out? Or did the floor collapse and pin Kalavati beneath a joist as she was playing with her dolls? Did the fires creep over her, toes to head like a blanket, like the tide rising, inch by searing inch? Did it slowly consume her flailing body as she screamed for mommy? And the boys…

I raise a blurry finger, sway, swallow. “Another one, barkeep.” I’m sure I’m slurring, but he seems fluent in drunk. Has to be. Tools of the trade.

The barkeep hesitates.

I huff like a bitch. Slap another steel coin down. Push it toward him. So gauche.

So he pours. And he pours. And he pours.

“It’s almost over,” I confide in him, and I imbibe. Hold out the glass. Wait. He pours again. Symbiosis personified. The circle of life and I’m rounding that final curve. I’m getting fleeced, getting charged double, triple, but it makes no matter. Can’t take it with you, savvy? And I don’t aim to. Not tonight. Not ever.

We dance the dance until I run out of coin. Till my head’s wobbling cocked and bothered and my soul’s a tattered grey thing devoid of shape or texture or purpose. Half lying across the bar, I’ve a worm’s eye view of my glass as I push it, inching it forward with nudges of my forefinger, one last plea for annihilation. I’m so close I can taste its vacuous allure. “Please sir, may I have another…?” I’m ripping off Dickens, but ain’t it a hoot?

The bartender crosses his arms, shakes his head, says something all garbled and doppler shifted, indicates with a trio of thumbs over his four shoulders where I can go to. “Piss. Off.” I suss that it ain’t somewhere pleasant, but it’s where I was planning on going nonetheless, so I scrabble up near eye to eye with the fucker and insinuate in the bluntest of terms that his relations with his mother are somewhat less than what would normally be deemed socially acceptable. His lips press together so much they disappear. He nods past me. His eyes are glossy pools of liquid midnight.

I turn, nearly fall over but catch the bar with an outstretched hand. A couple of bouncers are trudging across the room, mauling through the morass, business in their collective eye. The barroom’s a sea of bowler hats and dark, over-the-shoulder glares. Packed now. Humming. The bloke next to me can barely stand, and I call him a cunt. Point. Then I laugh.

The fucker can’t barely stand. His friend can, though. Shit… He looks born to stand, and when he does it’s a while in the coming, him unfolding upwards like a crane boom rising. Looming. I call them all cunts, and I laugh — “Ha!” — then I tell them all to fuck off. All of them.

The tall fella breaks a bottle on the bar, and I let out a sigh of relief. What’s a couple stabs? Better than being hand-mangled. He shoves past his comrades, spilling them across the floor, furor rising round us like a dropped bomb as he latches his mitt clutching round my throat, driving me through another bloke and into a crowd of toughs, scattering them like pins, taking down a table.

People are shouting. Glass shatters as a chair flies through the air; then comes the hammering of scarred fists. Falling like a hard rain. Dimly, I wonder what happened to the broken bottle?

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