Deadeyes #7: The Undeadables
Previously, in Boss Deadeyes #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6:
Antony "Deadeyes" Ventredi, a 1930s gang racketeer raised from the dead, has reclaimed his place as "boss" of Gothametropolis York's criminal underworld. He possesses the supernatural ability to kill with touch, but can delay the effect for as long as he likes. With his reanimated comrades-in-crime, dapper hit man Emilio Cacciatore, accountant Ishmael Levi, and nightclub singer Myra Mason, the Boss is seeking to reunite the fragmented GMY mobs.
This has not made him popular with corrupt city Mayor Velma Klein and her allies who have recruited specialist help to "resolve" the situation. Amongst this help is Vlastimock Bogoff, the Necromancer General, who has begun to find ways of transferring Ventredi's death touch from its intended victims to others. Few yet suspect that Klein is still being backed by returning crimelord Harry Flask, the Lynchpin.
Other visitors to GMY include kaos-suffused maverick Tom Black and his demonic temptress PA Regret Kiskilla, international jewel thief Champagne, and acting sorcerer supreme and general occult busybody Vinnie de Soth, all of whom have found themselves embroiled in Deadeyes' schemes.
***
Big Jack Mulroon hit Tony Ventredi hard across the face. "What did you say, you little punk?"
Blood trickled from the young man's mouth but he didn't wipe it away. "I said it's wrong, boss," the gunsel repeated. "Look, we popped Danny Valetti. We put his brother in a box too. That's enough. We don't need to kill the dame and her kid."
Behind them a river boat horn sounded through the foggy Gothametropolis night. The cold water of the Sound lapped against the pylons of the disused waterfront warehouse.
Mulroon glared at the young enforcer he'd begun to rely on. "Oh, so you're givin' the orders in Sixways now, are ye, Tony? You're the guy what decides whether folks that cross me live or die?"
Ventredi shook his head. "That's not it at all, boss. Look, you say Valetti has to die, he's dead. I pulled the trigger myself. But his Mrs hasn't done nothing and neither has the girl. Nothin' to kill 'em for. And nothing to deserve what you're wanting to do to 'em before they die. There's no kind of honour in that."
It was a tense scene in the waterfront warehouse. Lottie Valetti cringed between a couple of Mulroon's hoods, clutching her twelve year old daughter. Tony Ventredi stood alone against his employer.
"They told me never to take on a dago from Eesee Street," Mulroon spat. "I thought you had something, Tony, so I did. I though you was loyal to me."
"I am, boss. I just... you won't win no more respect doing anything to these skirts. That's not right. I'm asking you to let 'em go."
"Right..." said Mulroon. "Right."
This time when he hit Ventredi he used the butt of his pistol, flooring the younger man and leaving him stunned.
The beating was bad but what they made him watch as the women died was worse.
"Get rid of this garbage," Mulroon told his boys at last. "Dump him in the river with the other corpses."
They wrapped Ventredi with barbed wire and looped an anvil round his neck.
"You shouldn't have crossed me, Tony," Mulroon warned him.
"Yeah I should," spat blood at the battered man. "You got no class."
Mulroon kicked him into the water.
Ventredi tried to hold his breath. He tried to pull his arms free from the barbed wire they'd twisted him in.
He sank.
And then someone kissed him.
***
"Nickel for your thoughts," Myrna said to Boss Deadeyes as the ganglord stared out of his Turpin Hill Brewery office over the city towards the estuary. "I can never read your face."
"I'm missing something," Antony Ventredi worried, scowling slightly.
"What's that, Tony?"
"I dunno. What's happening right now, that attack on Emilio, the ambush at the airfield, those guys falling dead and me getting fingered for it, there's more happening than I can see."
"Velma Klein? You knew she'd be getting antsy now election times coming round."
"That's exactly not the time for her to start messing with me and mine," Deadeyes judged. "Not unless someone else was pushing her."
"She's not as strong as she thinks she is," judged Deadeyes' mistress.
"She's a vicious vindictive bitch is what she is. But she's smart too. She knows something I don't. I gotta find out what."
"You want me to take care of it, Tony?"
Deadeyes considered. "Okay, kiddo. Talk to a few guys. Turn on the charm. See what you can find. But be careful. That Necromancer General's out there trying to take us down. Watch your behind."
"Gotcha! Leave this to Myrna."
"Send in Ishmael on your way out," Deadeyes instructed. "I need him to set up a couple things too. Then I gotto go deal with this thing."
Myrna Mason nodded. She blew her lover a kiss and whirled out of his old oak-panelled office. Champagne was waiting in the outer room, absently riffling through a magazine rack.
"He took the leash off?" the international jewel thief checked.
"I'm on the loose," Myrna agreed.
Champagne grinned. "Then let's go."
***
The snows hadn't stopped falling for nine weeks and the harbour was frozen. Average daytime temperatures were two degrees Fahrenheit. This close to the arctic circle daytime lasted less than three hours.
The girl climbed out of the second story inn window and dropped five feet onto the bank of snow that had piled up the rear wall. She slid and rolled down to the stable yard and looked about for Sergei.
There was no sign of the young man. The wind whipped the snow and visibility was less than ten feet, hiding even the gates that led to the forest beyond the guesthouse. The girl wondered if she dared call for the boy she intended to elope with.
She shuddered with the chill. She was already weak from the blood-letting earlier, and though she wore everything she owned (and had hidden her mother's silver locket round her neck to sell later in the journey) the gale seemed to cut right through her.
"Sergei?" she called at last, although it was more of an urgent whisper. "My love?"
Tonight was the time they'd chosen to run away. The girl's uncle had made it clear that Sergei wasn't a suitable husband for his ward. The old man wouldn't have approved of the blacksmith's apprentice even if he and his niece hadn't been fleeing for their lives.
It was fear that had pushed the maiden and her uncle right across the Russian steppes, far from the regular trade paths to lonely frozen Archangel. An enemy called Malvolio Frost had nearly cornered them twice, and each time it they had only escaped by the barest margins. Frost was an agent of the Church of Conformity and he had the resources of a secret empire to command for his hunt.
The girl wasn't sure that her uncle's magics could hide them much longer. She knew that another sacrificial bloodletting would leave her too weak to even rise from her bed. If she was to flee with Sergei, it had to be now.
"Sergei!" she called, louder, worried that he had changed his mind. She was relieved when she heard the gate latch open and glimpsed her suitor's familiar silhouette entering the yard.
She began to run to him, heedless of the sleet, but something was wrong. Sergei moved slowly, his feet shuffling, his shoulders slouched.
"Sergei, what is it?"
Sergei's head lolled at an impossible angle and flopped as he walked. His neck was broken. His unseeing eyes were already frozen. Snow was clinging to his warmthless frame. Still he shuffled forward.
The girl screamed.
Sergei grabbed her wrist and wouldn't let go. Despite his would-be bride's struggles she was dragged out of the yard to the edge of the woods.
The men in dark cloaks waited by the shadows; at least they had shapes similar to men. Uncle was there too, waiting for her.
"Calm yourself, Little Bear," he told her. The pet name seemed cruelly out of place.
"What is this?" the girl screamed. "Sergei! What have you done?"
"What have you done?" Uncle hissed. "You were going to betray me, to waste yourself on that nobody smith's son, to abandon me to Frost and his damned crusade. But I am your guardian. Your body is not yours to bestow, it is mine." He gestured to the black-garbed strangers. "And I have sold you to them," he concluded.
Sergei's corpse-hand still gripped the girl. She struggled but couldn't get away.
"No! Please, uncle! I'm begging you...!"
Uncle shook his head as if disappointed at her fin al terror. He turned away. The strangers turned back into the woods and Sergei shambled after them, dragging his true love behind him. The screaming girl vanished into the darkness.
Uncle weighed the antique box in his hands and considered the bargain a fair one. He headed back down to the crossroads, unbothered by the cold. It had been a long time since cold had mattered to him.
A coffee-hued woman with raven hair waited where the paths intersected. Her hair whipped in the gale like tormented souls pleasing for solace.
"You have it?" she asked.
"I told you I could get it. Here it is."
"I didn't think anything would get the Deep Crawlers to give up their treasure."
"I had a little something I'd been saving for a rainy day."
Regret Kiskilla looked hard at the cadaverous man. "You sacrificed your own niece."
"Yes," answered Vlastimock Bogoff without remorse. "I've run out of other family to use."
"Sacrificed her to that. To them."
"But I got the prize. And if your master wants it then he'll need to get me far away from Frost and his hunting dogs. And I want power and glory."
The bargain was struck. The casket changed hands. The wicked man escaped to continue his studies and experiments in the necromantic arts.
The demon temptress never told him the value of what he'd traded, neither his niece nor the Judas Box her life and soul had bought.
***
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Urthula Underess asked Regret of the Damned, 290 years later. "I'm not signing anything."
The fugitive demoness looked away guiltily. "Nothing. I don't want you to sign any... I don't do that anymore."
"Fine. Just so we're clear. And nothing I happen to say should in any way be construed as a wish, a verbal contract, a deal, or any kind of transaction, okay?"
Regret nodded. "Look, I don't want anything from you, except to help my boss like you agreed."
Urthula glanced ahead down the tunnel to where Tom Black was moving cautiously forward, illuminated by the eerie green glow of his will-o-th'-wisps. "I didn't agree to help your boss either," the party ghoul insisted. "I'm just doing a favour for an ex."
Vinnie de Soth pushed along the tunnel beside Black, pausing occasionally with a stick of chalk to amend blood-stained runes on the sewer walls. He looked back and gave the girls a nervous wave.
"Turn left, Vinnie," Urthula called forwards. "The Necromancer General likes widdershins turnings."
Vinnie paused at a screen of cobweb blocking the whole tunnel. "Er, could you...?" he asked Tom, making wiggling motions with his fingers to indicate that here was another defensive spell nexus that needed to be subverted by Black's quasi-sentient kaos energies.
The sardonic Englishman peeled a couple of glowing orbs from his palm and set them to do their work. "This isn't a team up," he warned de Soth.
"Absolutely not," agreed the young occultist. "For starters, I don't trust you an inch and I like you less."
"Same here," replied Tom. "Except I also despise you."
"I didn't trust you in Egypt and nothing you've done since has made me change my mind."
"And I thought you were a waste of space then and a worse one now. Can we get on, De Soth?"
"What do you see in him?" Urthula asked Regret as they followed on behind. "Is it just that he's seething with so much evil that you can hide from your old master by masking your aura inside his? Or does he actually have a redeeming quality hidden somewhere in there?"
Regret shrugged. "Oh, you know us demon temptresses. We're all about latching on to powerful mortals and turning them to their destruction. Why else would I possibly care about a man?"
If Urthula caught a catch in Regret's voice she didn't show it. "And you're really helping him hunt down the Judas Box? A second time?"
"Can you think of a better way of destroying him?"
Tom's corpse lights finished their work and the webs flared into nothingness. The men pushed on.
"There's dead bodies up ahead," Urthula warned. "I can smell them. They bled to death slowly."
"Did they?" growled Vinnie dangerously.
Black willed a pair of will-o-th'-wisps forward to act as his remote eyes. "Big nexus of sewer pipes ahead," he reported. "Around forty or fifty homeless people all carved up in there in ritual fashion."
"Ready to rise as zombies to trap us?" Vinnie speculated.
"No," sensed Regret. "Whatever happened to them used up any animus they might have retained. Every scrap of lifeforce, even the last ember used for reanimation. There's nothing left in them at all."
The explorers moved tentatively into the slaughterhouse.
"This is definitely my uncle's work," Urthula reported. "His necromantic signature is very distinctive."
"But he's not here," Vinnie frowned.
"Fair to say he was, though," Black noted. He bent over and examined one of the corpses.
"What's that mark on its wrist?" Regret asked him.
"Green ink," Urthula puzzled. "I don't recognise the rune."
Regret knew what it was. "It's an admission marker to the GMY Mobile Soup Kitchen." She didn't say how she knew that. It was literally lifetimes ago. "You get a stamp so you can't con a second helping."
"All of these people went to the mobile soup kitchen then," Vinnie realised. His expression darkened. "And that 's got to be where Bogoff is operating from."
"This is just a dumping ground," Urthula realised. "These folks didn't die here. They just..."
Tom Black interrupted her. "This isn't a dumping ground," he warned. "This is a trap!"
"There's no magic on these bodies now..." Vinnie began.
Then the mundane explosives strapped to the support columns detonated and the roof came down.
***
Tony Ventredi sank.
Then someone kissed him.
The images blurred then; there was a beautiful woman, and she was nude, and she swam beneath the water like a fish. She had a key around her neck that shone even in the darkest waters. When she kissed him he could breathe.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Someone who saw what you tried to do came the answer.
The barbed wire was gone. Tony could move.
"What are you?"
A secret. A miracle. Another chance.
Another kiss. His wounds closed up.
Tony wondered if he was already dead. If so, he found he didn't mind.
"What do you want?"
A favour for a favour.
That seemed fair to the drowning man. "Tell me."
So he had dived with her, deep to the bottom of the Paradopolis sound, down into the silt where ancient hulks of ships lay rotting and forgotten. It was impossible, a dream.
The third kiss was the best of all.
Take that away, the mermaid asked him at last, pointing into the wreckage where a dark shape lay under a greasy smear of polluted water and dead fish.
His hands grasped an antique box. It was cold and slimy to the touch, and it seemed very heavy. Then suddenly it was buoyant and Ventredi struggled to the surface and scrabbled onto the offshore mudflats.
Tony Ventredi took the Judas Box away from the sea. Inside the old carved chest was the scroll that led to the bargain with the ancient dead man. Later came the last conversation with Big Jack Mulroon.
He never saw the ocean woman again.
***
Nobody was expecting Boss Deadeyes to walk into Gino's bar on a Saturday night and order a whiskey. The crowded underworld bar went dead quiet as the crimelord of Gothametropolis sipped his drink.
Gino Toricini hurried to refill the Boss' glass.
"You move this place around," Ventredi said to the barman.
"Yeah. Every time they try to bust us we set up somewhere else. The Zooters find us places. It saves trouble."
Deadeyes touched the old leather-topped barstool next to him. "Same old furnishings though," he observed. "I like the old stuff. Reminds me of my heyday."
The whole bar listened, sullen, untrusting. Word had got round about the deaths.
"Big Jack Mulroon was sat on a stool like that back in '24 when I killed him," Ventredi reminisced. "He'd had the crap beaten outta me and dumped me in the Sound, but somehow I got loose and made it ashore alive."
Gino was an aficionado of the great age of gangsters. "Mulroon ran the rackets in Sixways."
"Yeah. I started out in his mob. So did Danny Valetti, 'cept Danny was dumb and he skimmed a little off the top of his takings. Mulroon put out the word and Danny got a hot lead retirement." Deadeyes sipped his whiskey. "So did his brother. And then Mulroon went after his wife an' kid daughter. And he didn't kill 'em clean."
There wasn't a sound in the entire bar.
"I didn't think it was right, and I said so. That's how I ended in the Sound. But like I said, I survived. A miracle, maybe? An angel? I don't know to this day. But I do know that I came back for Mulroon, and we met each other in a bar just like this one and we pulled our guns on each other."
Deadeyes rose from his stool. "See, I'll kill a guy if I have to. If he goes after me, if he cheats me, if he betrays me. If I think he's doing wrong. I went after Jack Mulroon that night, and I took a bullet in the arm, but he took one too and his went through his skull. I killed Mulroon for what he'd done to me and to Lottie Valetti and little Tamzie. He deserved it and damn him to hell."
Ventredi walked up to the nearest table. "After that I got me a death touch and a sweet deal to come back from the grave an' all, and here I am now. But the thing is this... I'll still kill if I have to. Touch or gun or whatever I need to use, makes no matter. Cross me and you'll die. But..." He pointed at the crowd. "But I'll only kill you when I have to. Not for kicks. Not for fear. Not for nothing. That's not the Gothametropolis way. Not in my Gothametropolis."
Deadeyes looked at the black wreaths behind the bar. "I guess you all heard about Gentleman Nash and Mara Keyes and the rest all dropping down dead. Some good people turned their toes up yesterday. I guess you're wondering what they did to make me kill 'em. So here's the answer: they didn't do nothing. And I didn't kill 'em."
A murmur of surprise ran round the bar.
"You hear me. You got my word."
The bar went silent again.
"And if I didn't kill 'em, then someone else did. Someone else killed my people. Killed 'em to try and make me look bad. I don't like that. That's bad business and it's got no class. So now I'm making it my business to find out who. And then he's going to die. An' that one will be me. Count on it."
Ventredi dropped a fold of bills on the bar. "Drinks on the house and keep 'em coming, Gino. Drink to Gentleman Nash and the others. Drink well." He turned to go. "As for me, I'm going to avenge 'em."
They were cheering him as he left.
***
"But Footnotes, that's a dirty business."
This episode features a trio of flashbacks to earlier times. Of these the Ventredi scenes both come from February 1924 and show us more of the makings of the man who would become Boss Deadeyes. Those curious as to the mysterious underwater lady who saves a drowning man so he can remove the Judas Box from her domain may wish to reflect upon possible similarities with the Aella stories by Rhiannon, albeit the scenes here are set almost a century earlier.
The other flashback concerns the fate of "Little Bear" - Ursula in the Russian - and her wicked uncle. Bogdan Vlastimock, the Necromancer General, is a familiar and regular villain in the Parodyverse since his first appearance in UT#217: The Lighthouse (Part III). His niece, now the free-spirited party ghoul Urthula Underess, was first mentioned in Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny - Part One then debuted in Heart of Darkness #7. She dated jobbing occultist Vinnie de Soth at some point before his first appearance in The Compound - Part One: Gathered. Regret of the Damned first appeared in UT#226: Nats Must Die!, wherein she offered what she claimed was her origin. It's clear that although the person who became Regret died in the modern age she has appeared throughout history on the bidding of her master Sage Grimpenghast.
All the rest was covered in previous footnotes or else is in the Who's Who in the Parodyverse or the Where's Where in the Parodyverse. Many many back-issues are available via The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2011 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2011 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
|
