"Come on, God damn it! You look fine. Shit!" Willieboy puffed heartily on his cigarette. "I can't believe you! You're worse than a woman with that goddamn shit!" He stood up and began pacing again; his heavy boots tore at the floor. His leather, steel and rubber jumpsuit creaked. "Oh come on!"
"Go plant a garden…" I mumbled around my dead cigarette. Finished, I put the mirror and makeup away, clicked the case shut, and set it on the floor. I gestured to Elmo, pointed at my cigarette, he lit it and I leaned back taking a long hard drag. Willieboy walked back and forth, his cigarette a cancerous will o'the wisp.
"Any whiskey?" I asked, smiling around my smoke.
"Fuck you're just coming out of it…Ah!" Willieboy restrained himself, then went over and rummaged in a faded veneer cupboard. He turned around with a dusty bottle of Canadian Club and three glasses. I looked at the dust on the bottle, ran a finger over it, and peered at the gray on my fingertip as he poured.
"I'd say you haven't been treating this whiskey right, Mr. Willieboy." I smiled again, and drank the glass offered me.
Willieboy sat down, drank his own, and then topped mine up. Elmo sipped at his. The whiskey sprinted into my veins. I took the initiative.
"I suppose it would be awfully insensitive of me not to mention the faded prison fatigues you were wearing that night at the Morocco Hotel. Nice touch."
"Good eye, Wildclown. Glad you appreciated it." Willieboy folded his hands over his knee.
"Let me see," I said, making a steeple of my fingers the way Sherlock Holmes would. "You are not an outlaw; but, you do work outside the law. Robin Hood, shall we say?"
"No, not Robin Hood. I ain't giving no money to no one that didn't earn it. I just work outside their law." Willieboy's grin was unconvincing.
"Whose law?" I could feel my senses perking up.
"There are powerful groups inside Authority that follow their own programs." He let me have it with the eye sockets; they darkened as he squinted around the serious statement.
I dropped my hands and gazed at my boots through cigarette smoke. They were miles away. "I'll take a stab. You're Inspector Borden."
"Yes I am." Willieboy smiled in an unfriendly way and my mind went to work tying that into the web.
Chapter 44
"Willieboy's just a cover name," I grumbled, glowering at him over a fresh drink. He hadn't moved. "I should have known. It's just stupid enough to be believed."
"I wanted to use a name that would inspire compassion." He grinned angrily.
"Your face would have done that," I snarled.
"But you should know," Willieboy said sourly. "There's more than one Inspector Borden."
"More than one." I was interested, but tried to be coy. "Nepotism?"
"It's a nickname we have for a posting in Authority. It's reserved for injured workers and bad inspector's go there for punishment. We collect shit on the phantom baby, stuff like that." He smirked. "It's a play on Inspector Boredom."
"What else do you collect?" I leveled my gaze. My head still thumped alarmingly.
"Records, man! Things about the baby, UFO's, ghosts, you know, the odd missing person. But mostly weird stuff-anything that might be connected to the Change." He shook his head. "Authority doesn't know what it is-why there's dead people walking around and that-so we collect and record every bit of unusual information that we hear."
"So there are other Inspector Bordens?"
"Lots, maybe a hundred, I don't know. I just found it a convenient dodge."
I barely heard his last sentence. I was imagining a hundred Inspector Bordens, and myself trying to find out how many of them were involved.
"Let's not waste time with your real name, Inspector Willieboy. I'll just fire away like we're old friends. Why were you working undercover at the Morocco?" I paused watching him. "Say you're a rogue inspector fighting a corrupt system, and I'll vomit."
Willieboy frowned. "A maverick inspector, then." He climbed from his chair to pace again. "There's a lot of things going on that run against the original mandate of Authority. What you and I call Authority started to form five years after the Change from existing government and privately run agencies. Its original name was Social Authority. Anyway, we were kind of a police force designed to handle it all. No one knew what the Change was, or how long it would last. 'To maintain a social direction,' it says that right in our handbook or charter or whatever. You got to remember, everyone was scared back then. Nobody knew what was happening. I think the first steps to creating Authority were taken by the FBI and the CIA, although Interpol and the U.N. got involved because Authority is present in some form or other in every country in the world now. Anyway, it was decided that the social direction would be one with an open-ended policy of discovery. Since no one knew what the hell had happened we couldn't wisely take any specific direction. And there were a whole lot of powerful Christians in government going bugaboo about the Second Coming. They didn't know whether to shit or go blind. So, discovery was a safe bet.
"With law enforcement agencies privatizing at the start of the new Millennium we conscripted our first people there. Then for a while Authority competed with the government-run coppers. Remember the dead riots? Human rights conscious civil servants couldn't cut the mustard anymore. A heavier hand was needed if civilization was going to survive the panic. So Authority started absorbing government police forces too.
"As time past, control of Authority was shifted to the civilly elected directorate boards that were created not long after the country fragmented-say fifteen years after the Change, when the dead took over the countryside and forced us all into city states. The Federal government had to change with the times and the politicians and lawmakers saw that to keep a hook in the action, they had to streamline the process of Social Authority being adopted by all political and legislative branches of government. The directorate boards were created using representatives from the old system to administer government on federal, regional and local levels."
"Same shit. Different pile," I said, pleased with the history lesson.
"Government in the Old World was simple: get elected, cover your ass and go for your pension. Same thing applied to the new directors only now, with the populace spooked they only had to offer protection and reassurance. Nobody blinked an eye when Martial Law was unofficially declared. Thirty-five years into it, democratic elections were taken over by Authority's public relations wing, and the rest is history-the higher-ups just started making appointments from the ranks. We're in the process of soaking in the air force, army and navy on the Federal level. There's a movement on to re-unite the surviving cities under a single flag-a single Authority. Same thing's going on all over the world: maintain a social direction. If Authority exists then people have something to rally around and something to fear. The result: order."
"Good for business," I mumbled in my most cynical tone.
"That's what it's all about." Willieboy crushed his cigarette, sat down, poured himself another drink and then topped mine up again. He lit another cigarette, gestured for me to take one from the pack where he threw it. His level of literacy improved as he talked.
"As time goes on, society's getting crazier and Authority's growing more powerful. Since the men and women that make up the directorate board come from the old system, lobby groups, congressmen, senators and hangers-on, they just adapt their routines to the Change-and with the appointments from Authority ranks-well, people are getting really entrenched. And since everyone is suddenly immortal-you can imagine! There's plenty of opportunity for old wounds to fester, and for special interest groups to grow within Authority-who am I kidding, they were there already. Now we got pressure tactics, protection rackets-that kind of thing springing up-nothing new."