Crooked Little Vein - By Warren Ellis Page 0,2
“It’s just what TV does to us. You say ‘chief of staff ’ and I expect John Spencer from The West Wing, you know? I don’t suppose you’re a genial man of Chicago with a drink problem, right?”
“Hell, no. I take heroin, son.”
“Okay.”
“I have a stressful job. This is how I like to relax. I like to go to a small hotel and take heroin. Just lay on the bed and feel my bowels slowly unclench.”
He leaned back and sighed with relish, as if he were sinking into a warm bath.
“I like to lay on the bed, naked, with my guts oozing onto the sheets, nodding out and watching the Fashion Channel. All those skeletal smacked-out girls. The faces of angels and the bodies of Ethiopians. I find that sexy, son. It’s not like I have an easy job, and I feel I should be cut some slack in this area. Heroin angels, strutting around for me. With Enya playing. They play a lot of Enya on the Fashion Channel. Great regiments of heroin angels lined up in endless long dressing rooms elegantly banging smack between their delicate toes to the sound track of British TV shows about Celtic people. You should try it. It’s a poetic thing, you know?”
His eyes closed, a beatific grin spreading across his weathered face like an old wound opening.
“In that moment, son, I am as beautiful as they, and you are to ignore the rabbit droppings steaming on my bed: interior chocolates placed on the pillow by the solicitous maids of my bowel. Sometimes I get up and dance, scattering the gifts of my intestines across the Edwardian carpet, ignoring the shrieking of the housekeepers and the priests they call in. ‘Phone the White House,’ I sing to them. ‘I control the nuclear bombs.’ All of which is to say: I am a functioning heroin addict and also the most powerful man in the world, and you should pay attention now.”
He hadn’t opened his eyes. The gun was in the desk drawer. Five, six inches away from my hand. It was tempting. I hadn’t decided which of us to use it on, though.
“Oh, I am. Insofar as I’m wondering what the hell you’re doing here.” “I’m here because you’re a shit magnet, son.”
It was one of those unusual moments where I couldn’t think of a swearword bad enough.
“The world just kind of happens to you, son. The worst things we could possibly imagine just up out of nowhere and piss on your shoes, don’t they? It’s a special talent. It gets you work as an investigator, and in certain circles you are renowned for plucking diamonds from that skyscraper of blood-flecked turds that is the American cultural underworld.”
“Don’t you have a divorce case for me? A lost dog? Missing doorkeys?” I don’t think there was a sob in that last bit.
“Those are for ordinary people, son. You are special.”
“What I am is unlucky,” I snarled. “You know I got an adultery case last year? You know what the husband turned out to be doing at night? He had formed a sex cult that broke into an ostrich farm at midnight three times a week. You know what it’s like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”
The chief of staff made a sympathetic noise he’d probably learned off a talk show. “I’m not sure I can even imagine how to do that.”
“I had that image in my head for two months. I couldn’t have sex. My girlfriend came to bed one night in a feather boa and I started crying. She left me for a woman named Bob who designs strap-ons shaped like dolphin penises.”
“That’s very sad, son.”
“Bob had a hair transplant procedure on her nipples. They email me photographs.”
“I’m sorry for your pain. But this only illustrates how you are the right man for this job.”
“I’m not the right man for any job. You want to call me a shit magnet, fine, I’m a shit magnet. But what I am is the unluckiest bastard you ever met. I have to take this work because it’s all I can do, but please, I don’t look for this stuff.”
“No. It finds you. Which is why you are perfect for this job. We have something we need you to find, and we have exhausted all our orthodox operations. Somewhere out there is a book we need.”
“Lost and found?” I said, hopeful.
And right there is where I needed a time machine, so I could go back