‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Fucking bastards, all of them. I’ll lay you anything it’s a cover-up.’
‘Of what?’
‘They got the evidence: they’re just keeping us in the fucking dark. There’s something out there that’s not human.’
Kaufman understood. It was a conspiracy theory the oaf was trotting out. He’d heard them so often; a panacea.
‘See, they do all this cloning stuff and it gets out of hand.
They could be growing fucking monsters for all we know.
There’s something down there they won’t tell us about.
Cover-up, like I say. Lay you anything.’ Kaufman found the man’s certainty attractive. Monsters, on the prowl. Six heads: a dozen eyes. Why not?
He knew why not. Because that excused his city: that let her off the hook. And Kaufman believed in his heart that the monsters to be found in the tunnels were perfectly human.
The bearded man threw his money on the counter and got up, sliding his fat bottom off the stained plastic stool.
‘Probably a fucking cop,’ he said, as his parting shot. ‘Tried to make a fucking hero, made a fucking monster instead.’ He grinned grotesquely. ‘Lay you anything,’ he continued and lumbered out without another word.
Kaufman slowly exhaled through his nose, feeling the tension in his body abate.
He hated that sort of confrontation: it made him feel tongue-tied and ineffectual. Come to think of it, he hated that kind of man: the opinionated brute that New York bred so well.
It was coming up to six when Mahogany woke. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle by twilight. The air was about as clear-smelling as it ever got in Manhattan. He stretched on his bed, threw off the dirty blanket and got up for work.
In the bathroom the rain was dripping on the box of the air-conditioner, filling the apartment with a rhythmi-cal slapping sound. Mahogany turned on the television to cover the noise, uninterested in anything it had to offer.
He went to the window. The street six floors below was thick with traffic and people.
After a hard day’s work New York was on its way home: to play, to make love. People were streaming out of their offices and into their automobiles. Some would be testy after a day’s sweaty labour in a badly-aired office; others, benign as sheep, would be wandering home down the Avenues, ushered along by a ceaseless current of bodies. Still others would even now be cramming on to the subway, blind to the graffiti on every wall, deaf to the babble of their own voices, and to the cold thunder of the tunnels.
It pleased Mahogany to think of that. He was, after all, not one of the common herd. He could stand at his window and look down on a thousand heads below him, and know he was a chosen man. He had deadlines to meet, of course, like the people in the street. But his work was not their senseless labour, it was more like a sacred duty.
He needed to live, and sleep, and shit like them, too. But it was not financial necessity that drove him, but the demands of history.
He was in a great tradition, that stretched further back than America. He was a night-stalker: like Jack the Ripper, like Gilles de Rais, a living embodiment of death, a wraith with a human face. He was a haunter of sleep, and an awakener of terrors.
The people below him could not know his face; nor would care to look twice at him. But his stare caught them, and weighed them up, selecting only the ripest from the passing parade, choosing only the healthy and the young to fall under his sanctified knife. Sometimes Mahogany longed to announce his identity to the world, but he had responsibilities and they bore on him heavily. He couldn’t expect fame. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for recognition.
After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to its knees?
All in all, he was content. To be part of that great tradition was enough, would always have to remain enough.
Recently, however, there had been discoveries. They weren’t his fault of course. Nobody could possibly blame him. But it was a bad time. Life was not as easy as it had been ten years ago. He was that much older, of course, and that made the job more exhausting; and more and more the obligations weighed on his shoulders. He was a chosen man, and that was a difficult privilege to live with.
He wondered, now and then, if it wasn’t time to think about training a younger man for his duties. There would need to be consultations with the Fathers, but sooner or later a replacement would have to be found, and it would be, he felt, a criminal waste of his experience not to take on an apprentice.
There were so many felicities he could pass on. The tricks of his extraordinary trade. The best way to stalk, to cut, to strip, to bleed. The best meat for the purpose. The simplest way to dispose of the remains. So much detail, so much accumulated expertise.
Mahogany wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he stepped in he looked down at his body. The small paunch, the greying hairs on his sagging chest, the scars, and pimples that littered his pale skin. He was getting old. Still, tonight, like every other night, he had a job to do.
Kaufman hurried back into the lobby with his sandwich, turning down his collar and brushing rain off his hair. The clock above the elevator read seven-sixteen. He would work through until ten, no later.
The elevator took him up to the twelfth floor and to the Pappas offices. He traipsed unhappily through the maze of empty desks and hooded machines to his little territory, which was still illuminated. The women who cleaned the offices were chatting down the corridor: otherwise the place was lifeless. He took off his coat, shook the rain off it as best he could, and hung it up.
Then he sat down in front of the piles of orders he had been tussling with for the best part of three days, and began work. It would only take one more night’s labour, he felt sure, to break the back of the job, and he found it easier to concentrate without the incessant clatter of typists and typewriters on every side.
He unwrapped his ham on whole-wheat with extra mayonnaise and settled in for the evening. It was nine now. Mahogany was dressed for the nightshift. He had his usual sober suit on, with his brown tie neatly knotted, his silver cufflinks (a gift from his first wife) placed in the sleeves of his immaculately pressed shirt, his thinning hair gleaming with oil, his nails snipped and polished, his face flushed with cologne. His bag was packed. The towels, the instruments, his chain-mail apron.
He checked his appearance in the mirror. He could, he thought, still be taken for a man of forty-five, fifty at the outside. As he surveyed his face he reminded himself of his duty. Above all, he must be careful. There would be eyes on him every step of the way, watching his performance tonight, and judging it. He must walk out like an innocent, arousing no suspicion.
If they only knew, he thought. The people who walked, ran and skipped past him on the streets: who collided with him without apology: who met his gaze with contempt:
who smiled at his bulk, looking uneasy in his ill-fitting suit. If only they knew what he did, what he was and what he carried.
Caution, he said to himself, and turned off the light. The apartment was dark. He went to the door and opened it, used to walking in blackness. Happy in it.
The rain clouds had cleared entirely. Mahogany made his way down Amsterdam towards the Subway at 145th Street. Tonight he’d take the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS again, his favourite line, and often the most productive.
Down the Subway steps, token in hand. Through the automatic gates. The smell of the tunnels was in his nostrils now. Not the smell of the deep tunnels of course. They had a scent all of their own. But there was reassurance even in the stale electric air of this shallow line. The regurgitated breath of a million travellers circulated in this warren, mingling with the breath of creatures far older; things with voices soft like clay, whose appetites were abominable. How he loved it. The scent, the dark, the thunder.
He stood on the platform and scanned his fellow-travellers critically. There were one or two bodies he contemplated following, but there was so much dross amongst them: so few worth the chase. The physically wasted, the obese, the ill, the weary. Bodies destroyed by excess and by indifference. As a professional it sickened him, though he understood the weakness that spoiled the best of men.