Kyiv, Podil District: A quickly dimming winter light from the first-floor street-facing window directly behind him fades across Jack Step’s gray desk, as the artificial lighting inside the agency’s offices grows automatically brighter in response.
That hadn’t been the case a decade or more ago, when a man had to get up and flick on the switches himself.
But now… the thought had penetrated Step’s seated reverie for just a flash, but is as soon gone, tumbling out of his oft-beaten skull into the Forgotten Dumpster. Never mind all the damage he’d done to himself from his decades of stubborn drinking. Not any more, though – the doctor said…
This time, some years ago, actually, Step had finally taken the warnings seriously, probably because he knew himself he’d die, soon enough, soon enough, if he didn’t stop; and so he stopped; yes, just like that, and it was very, very hard and painful to do, taking him more than a year to come down, and in his mind he’d only needed that one last doctor’s visit to hear the obvious and predictable to adumbrate for himself the life-or-death climacteric of falling back into sobriety – an excruciating place of cleanliness and light; a place he hadn’t been in since before his early 20s.
Oh, there had been a few surprising drink-free periods between then and today, but they had been brief, and, as they say, few and far between. Otherwise, the regular pattern, year-on-year, and decade-on-decade, had been relatively lower inebriation fluctuating with relatively greater drunkenness, grandly topped off about once or twice a month by a ghastly, highly rebarbative, and utterly abhorrent fall-down, on-the-town drunk.
“I could be dead soon, the doctor said, so I –”
“You knew that yourself, Step,” Dickerson would answer him; answer him in a way he had that would get Step to just shut the fuck up about it. “You always knew…”
Eventually, Step dropped the line. He realized it was annoying – to Dickerson, to Mack – and he didn’t want to be that way. Being not drunk a lot of the time, in fact never, anymore, an odd and frightening feeling, has taken some getting used to. And as you read this, with no notion of what the feeling’s supposed to be at the end of it all, which would maybe reassure him that at least this he’s gotten right, Step has not completely gotten there yet; has not completely made it to wherever he’s not sure he’s supposed to be, at the end of all this trying – in mind, body, and spirit. Only, perhaps, in heart.
Protecting itself, Step’s mind surreptitiously, but determinedly, withdraws from the heartbreak of contemplating the history of its own mindless destruction – a process, a thing, not so easily dumped in the Forgotten Dumpster and forgotten, billions of dead brain cells, notwithstanding.
And now Step is in his reverie again.
He looks down, left leg crossed over right at the knees, the way he likes to sit most of the time, for work and comfort: chair leftwards askew of the desk, crossed legs just outside the desk’s front edge, his body positioned that he may view his computer screen at an angle from his left.
He smiles faintly, as he can’t help but admire, yet again, the sharp, crisp crease that had been magically tailored down the centers of the pants legs of his new, high-quality, charcoal-gray wool suit.
Step’s eyes slowly trace the impressive raised line of the fabric of his left pants leg, starting mid-thigh, as it plummets down over the curve of his knee toward its end and peak at the cuff, which billows elegantly above and around a black poly-wool-blend sock; the sock smoothly segueing into a handsome black wingtip shoe.
With his right hand, Step lifts the sleeve on the same side of his new suit’s jacket, which is draped and holding form over the back of Step’s chair. He examines the weave, feels the fabric’s texture between two-three fingers and thumb, reaches into the sleeve and rummages around the lining, as if he actually understands anything about it.
He drops the sleeve and turns his head to the hat resting at the back-left corner of his desk – a more Western, or cowboy-like Stetson Step has recently taken to sporting from time to time instead of the agency’s traditional, signature fedora. Dickerson doesn’t like it, and won’t walk with Step down the street unless he puts his old hat back on.
“I don’t see the sense in it,” of the hat Dickerson will say to Step.
Spurred by the memory of this oft-repeated quote, of late, from his partner of many years, reverie broken, Step calmly turns his head to the right, toward all the metallic banging and under-the-breath profanations.
Dickerson is at it again – “I don’t see the sense in it,” Step repeats to Dickerson, but to no avail – bolting through files in the filing cabinet, laying them out on a table aggressively, though not frantically.
Dickerson’s trying to find anything that even remotely hints at the possibility of the existence of The Black Ferret, let alone this purported Black Ferret’s involvement, direct or otherwise, in Kyiv’s Trukhaniv Island and Podil-district murders of yesteryear.
After establishing the many murders’ obvious seriality, and then linking the depraved boutade of slaughter back to the all but impenetrable, though always highly suspect, Cimmerian basement dealings of the Hassidic Strip Bar, located not that far from the agency itself, Mack inexplicably ordered the agency to close its books on the grisly spree quite the long time ago. Or, did he?
The Ferret – that is, the original, white, or should I rather say, pasty-faced, sickly, green-tinted one, of which those files Dickerson is so determinedly rifling through are overfull – had at the time come to be fingered by the agency as a principal character behind the murders, and even as the prime suspect in their commission.
What’s worse – and this, Step sensed, had been the main reason Mack ordered all investigations dropped; although why, he cannot to this day say – the theory had emerged at the agency that The Ferret was more than just a soulless killer (the unfortunate creation of a maniacal Josh Davies kidnapping the real Ferret boy back-when and changing him under the aegis of a USAID grant and project gone awry into a small and vile multilayered creature of supreme degeneracy and guile) with perhaps a few accomplices, who used the strip bar’s deep-down cellar as a headquarters for their nefarious dealings, but was actually the kingpin behind a literal and growing criminal underground network involved in everything from…
But I am getting well ahead of myself. It is wartime, after all…
For the issue has suddenly become some supposed Black Ferret, with whom the crippled Dickerson has grown absolutely obsessed since his return to the agency, and this is the thing Step can’t fold his brain around; the reason for it; why… why?
As he watches Dickerson, Step again takes in his partner’s still-bandaged hands.
The fire, back in October of ’22, which reduced to crumpled skeletal structure, cinder, and ash the hospital for the criminally insane, in which Dickerson had been voluntarily institutionalized, again, at the time, was set, according to Dickerson – “right in front of me!” – by none other than The Half Guinea; the incendiary calamity that Dickerson obviously escaped, though barely.
Even now, more than two years later, his hands, with oozing, half-dollar sized holes burnt into the palms, remain Dickerson’s horrendous and foul souvenir from that delightful, albeit infernal, visit paid him at the hospital by the Guinea. Tragic? Dickerson doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to hear it.
A nurse, Ira, whom Mack has retained for Dickerson, freshly dresses and rebandages the man’s wounds every day.
Almost as bad as his hands, and, therefore, a little more sufferable: daily, Dickerson, screaming, forces in and out of its shoe his left foot, which hadn’t been shod in its wingtip (while the other one had been) at the moment the Guinea had sparked the blaze.
Half-shoeless and burning, Dickerson’d made a frenzied dash for the large window he knew well, wrenching the inside heavy grate of welded security bars free of the wall and crashing himself through the glass, having methodically and patiently loosened those bars at night, when the ward was asleep, on previous voluntary visits to that bin.
Now, Dickerson stops what he’s doing and looks up at Step. He can tell Step is in mental anguish again; Dickerson sees him suffer.
No, actually, he sees Step with his eyes presently off his work on his computer screen and in a damn magazine, and it’s an erection he’s suffering, if anything, the magazine being that fucking, stupid “Delhi Delights”, a soft-porn Indian Subcontinent caste-system sexual abuse magazine especially created for old-fashioned-type White men, precisely of the Step kind.
The only interesting detail about it, for Dickerson, is that an actual Indian can, at most, sell it, but is prohibited from owning, much less looking through a copy, regardless of his station in life or present incarnation, on pain of dismemberment and death by beating and burning, according to the Law of Common Understanding, which is never spoken of, but referred to in hushed tones in one’s mind, if that one is any kind of Indian. Otherwise, Dickerson grows nauseated by that specific porn mag print and paper smell he can smell from all the way over where he is that the makers of the smut specially put into their “publications” to get a pervert-voyeur horny, like a Pavlov Dog.
Now Dickerson also sees Step running that damned Zapruder film in slow motion across his computer screen, yet again! Slowly, slowly… frame by frame. What does Step think he’ll find there? What more does he think he will see? And what does it have to do with the work he needs to do, should be doing, here, at the agency? War, or no war…
Step senses Dickerson looking at him, but does not turn to meet his gaze. Instead of closing the Zapruder video on his screen, or at least ditching the jag rag, probably out of a sudden embarrassed nervousness, he suddenly takes his western Stetson and flops it down on yet another unauthorized magazine on his desk – as if that childish attempt at concealment could somehow fool Dickerson into thinking that Step had nothing whatsoever to hide.
And that other magazine: an underground plagiarized counterfeit copy of the California-based Pilfer Sty Magazine “For Highly Writerly Satirists, and those who hide their faces in mountains – for free…”; sub-Tagline: “Leading Readers to Wonder, ‘Is it actually “funny”, or simply laughable?’” With its evil cartoons, and shit…
Not that long ago, Dickerson had torn Step another asshole over that one, when the operators behind that operation had somehow managed to convince Step (reaching him through what channels, Dickerson still does not know) to send them a significant cache of Dickerson’s and Step’s classified detective agency reports, and then proceeded to make of them a kind of brazen, grimy, low-level satire fiction comic strip, turning the two agents into bumbling, clown-like, bozo buffoons in the drawings – which didn’t even look like them! Somehow, they had managed to get the Ferret right; Dickerson was willing to grant them that.
“What the fuck, Dickerson?” Step does not look over. He just wants to be left alone – about it all.
“That’s what I want to ask you, Step?”
“Mind your own busi – eh… shit…”
Step pulls open a desk drawer and throws both mags in, one on top the other; he stops the Zapruder clip repeating on screen and makes the mouse arrow hit its top right corner X.
But now, the episode and exchange with Dickerson has oddly put Step in a better mood; his mind waxes mildly amused. He thinks back, grows whimsical. He looks over to his left.
There – another room; its bottom half done in cheap, brown, standard-issue police station wood paneling. The top half, meanwhile, is mounted with glass proofed against bullets and sound.
This is the agency’s workout room. Step smiles, perhaps wryly, as he looks at the by-now shapeless and ruined Welsh Losser Punching Bag still hanging, as a joke, a comfortable distance from the real punching bag that Dickerson, even with his hands, Step, and Mack use to let off steam, when the notion hits them, so to speak.
The Welsh Losser bag is made of blue canvas filled with straw, with a now discolored and faded drawing of the front of the infamous, one-time Kyiv-based PR executive and writer, Welsh Losser, on one side of the bag, with the corresponding drawing of his dorsal side on the other.
The bag, which came with a pair of child-sized boxing gloves that hang high on a wall in the room, is not a full-sized bag, but something like half-sized, meant for small children to have fun with, dancing and jumping around it as it hung low from wherever a responsible parent would have hung it (some assembly required), punching it, poking it, jabbing it, kicking it – yelping and screaming and laughing…
Step’s eyes now move to a related item, immediately outside the workout room, hanging on the wall, in the corner, and a few yards to the right of the window across the room and directly behind Step: It is the Flying Ferret Dartboard, the Black Moon Riders version, if Step remembers correctly. Warped and misshapen, still hanging there, though its cork board had been splintered from continual, aggressive dart-throwing long-long ago; the Ferret’s snout, painted as the bullseye, blasted beyond recognition to pulp.
Why had they gotten these things?
Today, neither of the men understand why a Kyiv Unedited-affiliated outlet would actually have been offering these cheap, tacky, and tasteless, borderline evil, marketing items. But putting in the orders for them, and then actually receiving them at the agency’s offices, back then, so many years ago, had afforded Step and Dickerson a modicum of guilty pleasure. And they’d used every special-offer discount, as advertised on the Kyiv Unedited website itself, which they managed (and still manage), at their puerile disposal, including canceling someone else’s subscription to the Kyiv Poster, which had been one of the principal conditions for the outlet honoring the deal.
It being a Friday, Step, as he has done for a number of years, now, since quitting drinking, has set out on his desk a single shot glass filled to the brim with Johnny Walker Red, a 750 ml. bottle of which he continues to keep in his desk. And when one bottle is done – for someone always does him the courtesy of drinking the glass’s contents, leaving it empty for him to find come Monday, and without pouring themselves any more from the bottle – he promptly goes out and buys another, and starts the ritual all over again.
But now, as his eyes fall on this misfortune of his past, his entire past, he breaks a sweat just looking at the little glass filled with the tremulous, deadly amber fluid. The mere sight of the tiny, poison-containing receptacle throws him into a sudden waking nightmare, and he struggles to break the stare.
Neck bent forward, looking down, Step closes his eyes tight and shakes his head, partly in dismay, partly, for some reason, in relief, as a cold wave shudders through him.
He thinks he hears a kind of very light scraping of the window, but he is not sufficiently in the present moment to make anything of it, and his mind dismisses it as just a winter wind creaking against the pane.
“Hey, Step!”
Before raising his head, Step hears that Dickerson’s startled voice, though calling out to him, is actually directed at the window. Dickerson is genuinely frightened.
Now, it is completely dark out. But snow and an unexpected streetlight illumine the presence of a small, moving creature in the snow, on the window’s ledge. For some reason, the artificial light inside the office seems to have dimmed, perhaps in response to the light outside, and the effect appears to fill the thing out into its third dimension, growing from flat to curved, rounded, and pointy in all directions – as though it were stepping toward them, freeing itself out of a mostly black, 15th century Flemish oil painting. Thank God it’s out there, behind the glass, the window separating it from the men!
Step sees Dickerson frozen in place, aghast. He is actually afraid to get up. For some reason, the bandages on both hands have begun to unravel.
For it’s that horrible… rook!… again, and after all this time!!!
Well, Dickerson can’t be absolutely certain whether it is the very rook of his earlier torments, but it is, unmistakably, a rook all the same. ‘I mean,’ Dickerson rapidly and nervously thinks to himself, ‘why can’t it at least be a crow, for a change?!’
“Okay, Dirk – now I believe you,” Step says.
Mouth open, like a frightened child’s, Dickerson remains motionless and silent.
“And I’m gonna punch its ticket…”
Dickerson manages to understand the import of Step’s statement; and he also understands that Step is not to come anywhere near the damned thing.
“No… no, Jack,” he begins to sputter, “don’t… go near it… don’t fucking touch it!”
“I’m punching its ticket; I’m throwing the lid on top this bird…”
Step opens a drawer and pulls out his old revolver. He checks it – five out of six; that ought to be enough to do the job… He uncrosses his legs and gets up; the stretching of his back is just a little painful.
Dickerson cannot believe he sees, is horrified to see, Step stepping toward the bird. This motion, and not the bird, is what suddenly spurs Dickerson, bandages unraveling, to also rise from the table, awkwardly but swiftly move around it and step toward Step – to what? Stop him? Other than perambulating weakly, and without conviction, on rubbery legs, Dickerson knows he doesn’t have the energy, the drive, the oomph to do anything. Miraculously, he stops short of the window, with Step on its other side, finding the courage to stare back at the bird, which is inexplicably able to stare at the both of them at the same time. In fact, the bird is very calm.
“I’m punching its fucking ticket, Dirk… I’m punching its ticket…”
Straight away, Dickerson sees the revolver pointed up and wobbling in Step’s right hand, much as though he were a baby lifting an object too heavy for it and will soon be forced to let it drop, because Step is lefthanded, and all but incapable of using his right for anything – anything useful and practical, that is, like shooting, for example.
Because, Dickerson now sees, Step intends to use his left to open the window – but after that, what? Disaster! Disaster, either way! By the time Step changes position and switches the gun to his left, to shoot, who knows what that rook will do. The latter, meanwhile, remains poised and calm, behind the glass, studying Dickerson and Step, tilting its head this way, and now that way, beak slightly ajar, as if truly wondering what they are up to.
With his left, Step turns the handle and throws open the window; the bird does not move. And it is suddenly clear to Dickerson that Step actually intends to try to shoot it with his right, apparently calculating that there’s no time for dawdling, for who knows what that bird could do?!
His right hand shaking, the revolver an unfamiliar and foreign object in it, Step nevertheless manages to push its muzzle against the plucky bird’s arrogant head, as the rook has refused to budge even a fraction from its chosen spot, except its mouth has opened wider, as though shocked by Step’s action.
Dickerson looks at Step and then the bird; the bird and then Step; Step, at his uncertain revolver at the end of his right hand up against the bird; the bird, at both Step and Dickerson at the same time.
“Hey, aaahh…”
Startled, Dickerson and Step turn to look at the man suddenly in the door, of whom the rook already has a bird’s-eye view, and so doesn’t have to turn. Nor is it startled.
Briefly taking in the three as though nothing is strange or amiss, the still-well-built older man looks back down at his pad.
“… you blockheads ever hear of an Ed… let me see… yes, that’s right… Tomorrow? So that’s: Ed Tomorrow…”
The three stare back, mouths open, blinking.
“Ed Tomorrow – can you believe that?” Mack asks. “Know anything? Ever come across it?”
Filed by Saint Stephan, Jan. 15, 2025 – two days ahead of schedule