Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets by Alessio Lanterna

graffiti-covered door, squeezed between a hardware shop with its shutters down and a minimarket that went bankrupt. In the poky waiting room, there’s a bloke staring at a quiz show on a black and white TV that’s more or less my age. The age of the viewer, on the other hand, is a complete mystery. I’m pretty sure he
ought
to be dead. His yellowish skin looks like it’s been stretched over his bones with difficulty, speckled with brown patches of various sizes. Grey hairs emerge disgustingly from his body, seemingly at random, some out of his head, some out of his face, some out of his shoulders and some out of his arms. He’s wearing shorts and a greasy cream-coloured vest, which was probably white once. In one hand he’s clutching the remote control, in the other a pack of filterless Federals, the cigarettes universally recognised as an incentive to stop smoking. It’s so fucking warm.
    “Two crowns an hour. I’ve got a clean room too, I know that…” He coughs. “…
your type
likes cleanliness.”
    He finishes with an abortion of a laugh, a lascivious ‘eh’, without even looking at us. I’d punch him in the face if he weren’t so repulsive. Cohl takes the lead.
    “We aren’t interested in a room. Metropolitan Police.” He shows him his badge.
    At last that snot ball looks at us and gets up from the sofa in the ‘reception’.
    “Hey. Cops. Hey. Sorry.” He gurgles for a moment and then spits in a basin next to the TV, hitting it spot on with precision that only comes with years and years of practice. I force myself not to look at the contents of the basin.
    “What can I do for you? Whores? Eh.”
    “No.”
    “I’ve already paid my dues, already paid them, eh,” he exclaims, worried, before coughing and hitting another bull’s-eye in the spittoon.
    “I’ll pretend I never heard that. We need information.”
    “Ah, information. Eh. About what?”
    “Elves, a male and a female. They lived here a few years ago,” I interrupt, to stop myself from succumbing to the temptation of looking inside the spittoon. It’s as if he’s offended, the human bogey spits again.
    “Eh. Yeah, right, the two asses. Eh. They’re not here anymore, they left. Didn’t have any money, eh.”
    “Do you know where they went?”
    Coughing fit, spit in the basin.
    “I made an offer to the chick, eh. So they could stay. But they were like, ‘no’, eh. Madame Arsey must have preferred the streets, eh.”
    “Where. Did. They. Go?”
    “I. Don’t. Know.
Eh.
” He smiles like I imagine a slug would smile if it had a humanoid mouth. He’s even got a trace of saliva on his lower lip. At least, I hope it’s saliva. Either way, he’s totally fucked me off. I take my regulation gun out of its holster and disengage the safety.
    “Hey. You can’t shoot me. Eh.”
    I shoot the TV, and make both Cohl and the slimeball jump out of their skins. The ancient cathode ray tube dies during its first and last explosion of colour.
    “Okay, okay!” He raises his hands, imploring me to calm down with his open jaundiced palms. “I don’t know where they went, but I know where he works, eh. Happy now? Bastard cop. Eh.”
    “Where?”
    “At the Cicisbeo, down on the Eighth. Eh.”
    “The strip club?”
    “Eh. For queers, yeah. Eh.”
    “Let’s go.” – I nod to my faithful cop companion who walks outside before me. I’m just leaving when I hear the hairy piece of snot murmur: “Poofs, eh.”
    I turn and fire at the spittoon from a safe distance, sending fragments of cheap china and balls of catarrh flying all over the room. Then I go out again, leaving him in stunned silence. Bet it’ll only take him a couple of minutes to clean up, even though there’s enough there for weeks and weeks.
    As soon as we’re outside, Nohl anxiously grabs my arm.
    “Tell me you didn’t kill him, Lieutenant.”
    A yell comes from inside: “QUEERS!”
    “Why, do you want to?”
    We leave and go even further down.
     
    It’s chaos