“Ah. I see. Well, right-ho then. Cheerio, Cutie old boy. Busy tonight, but tomorrow I’m off to buy a bomb.”
I pull the headset off my ear. I gaze down the escalators into the maw of my Metro stop, a cement gullet with two rows of grinding metal teeth, waiting to swallow me. Sorry about that – I tend to get a bit poetical when I’m on the verge of losing my rag.
I stand. I ponder. Something grabs the back of my left thigh, and I jump a bloody mile. “Great fucking Scott!” I scream at the little girl with the undead cat, who has apparently followed me all the way from Little Oblivion. “What the deuce are you doing here? Go home, before the House of Voices decides I’ve kidnapped you!”
She narrows her big Valrhona-chocolate eyes at me. She scratches Kittystein’s rump with one hand while she waggles a finger at me with the other. “That is not a word you say to a culandera,” she scolds.
Not much to say to that, of course. In any case, she doesn’t give me the chance. She sets dearly departed Mr. Tom down on the sidewalk, reaches up to grab my shirt, and pulls my face down to her level. “I am not a real culandera yet,” she whispers, “but I can do the cards, and the knotty strings, and the eyes in the smoke. I can do the spider that laughs, and I can do the holes in the sky. Thank you for making Rosa bring back Guapo for me. Mamacita says I may not play with souls until I am ten.”
She looks petulant at this last bit. I feel for her – Pater never let me drive the Rolls until I was eighteen.
The little girl gives my shirt an extra tug. She presses her lips to my cheek, and suddenly my bally face is on fire. “Fuck!” I shriek, leaping up and backward and nearly going arse-over-teakettle down the Metro escalator.
She shakes her head sadly, and makes a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you sound. “I cannot make you not be dead if you become dead,” she says. “But I have given you a kissing-ghost. He will love you. Goodbye.”
With that she giggles, scoops up the yawning feline Lazarus, and skips off back down the street. I shrug. I shake my head and jog down the escalator.
My cheek is still tingling as I wait for my train. Shouldering my way onto the car, the little witch’s lip-prints flicker through a range of temperatures as I race an old lady for the last empty seat. Leaning back, I look up at the ceiling of the tin can that’s dragging me homewards.
I am in a little, brightly-lit, nicely air-conditioned bubble hurtling through darkness. As usual. What worries me is what will happen when it stops hurtling. I’m very concerned about what may be waiting to get on at the next stop.
I sigh, and stand to get off at Dupont Circle. No sense in giving up on a metaphor that’s still got some use in it: what old Spex needs to do is talk to the driver, or one of the drivers. Even if he is a smug, insufferable bastard.
I head back to the flat and change into the suit I got from Rosa. It just goes to show the state this whole affair has put me in – I barely even notice the luscious weave of the fabric, the effortlessly superb way in which the jacket hangs, the understated elegance of the waistcoat buttons. The lip-prints are still chilly on my cheek.
I pull Rosa’s blood-black rose from my discarded shirt and slide it into my buttonhole. I have to go meet somebody who is somebody.
Picardie is usually jam-packed of an evening, but the place is empty when I arrive. Empty, that is, except for one waiter and a chap in a pearl-gray morning coat and ivory cravat. This chap’s hair is black and careless – not careless the way mine is, but careless in a way that takes forty-five minutes and a trained specialist to pull off. Those aren’t rubies in the chap’s cufflinks. You can tell scarlet diamonds by the refractive index of the gleam, or if you know the prick who’s wearing them.
Fucking Adrian. Should have known he wouldn’t meet me in a place he didn’t own.
17.7.09
7.7.09
I-I-XII
“I’ve got twenty dollars and a dead cat that’s not dead anymore. Who’s interested?”
My little mob of bodyguards is dancing as I cross the street. I’m careful not to glance back; inside Rosa’s little emporium of delights and horrors it’s easy to forget that the real horror is right next door. A patter of hammers and a buzz of power tools mingles with the creaking groan of the House of Voices as the natives of Little Oblivion work to build the vast, mad, rambling mansion that shrinks ever in upon itself.
The whispers are distant in my mind. I’m leaving now, I did no harm. The House sees no need to talk about me. Nevertheless, I don’t look back.
“Thanks for waiting, you lot, but your services won’t be needed.” I hand a twenty dollar bill to the oldest boy. “Go buy yourselves something dangerous. And here you go, little one.”
I hold out the feline Lazarus to the dark-eyed girl who’d been mourning it when I arrived. It yawns, hooks its claws into her dress, and clambers into her arms. Being thanked makes me blush, so I turn and head off down the street that will lead me out of Little Oblivion and eventually to my Metro stop. While I walk, I want to talk. I pull my headset out of my messenger bag.
“Hullo, Cutie?” I say. “I need advice. Give me advice.”
The translation takes a few moments in both directions.
“Do not become dead at the wrong time,” Cutie replies at length. “It will make you unhappy.”
This is, indeed, good advice. “Alright then, ta for that. Now-”
“Tell me a story, please.”
I sigh, but it’s fair enough. I’ve been leaning on old Cutie quite a bit lately, and even eternal beings deserve a break once in a while. He likes it when I tell him stories. His particular race of transplanars are unable to perceive the passage of time, and this has resulted in a body of literature that tends to be poorly paced and lack dramatic tension.
“Right-ho, Cutie old boy. As you say.” I try to think of a story I haven’t told him yet. “What sort?”
“A scary story.” Cutie is terribly excited. Scary stories are his favorites – the important thing to understand being that to him, stories with a lot of mayhem and slaughter are funny. People who go out of their way to make their infinitesimally short lives even shorter make him giggle, while love stories – stories about people who want to be together forever, and clearly won’t be allowed to - make him sad. What Cutie really likes, though, is comedy. Jokes send shivers up what would be his spine if he had what we normally think of as a body. Because as we all know, the essence of comedy is…
…
…wait for it…
…
…
…
…timing.
I try hard to think of a funny story to scare Cutie. He likes the classics, but I’ve already gone through most of what I know. “Right. This is a story about King Arthur, what? He’s our hero. And he’s out adventuring with his squire, don’t you know, but he’s not got a horse. So his squire’s got two halves of a coconut, and he’s banging them together…”
The hellish-hot afternoon is shaping up into rather a nice evening. “…and they all say ‘Ni!’ again. Yes. No, I told you, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke. Don’t cry now, Cutie old boy, it’s just a story...” I stroll past the petunia-infested Cadillacs and leave Little Oblivion behind me.
“…and so that’s it. The police show up, and everybody goes to prison. Now, Cutie, I need you to answer my questions. Are you ready?”
He is silent for a long time. Finally: “That story frightened me very much. Can you tell me a funny one now? Perhaps the one about the man who stabs the lady in the shower?”
“Another time,” I say. “Focus now, Cutie. I’m in trouble, I think, and I want to not be.”
I bring him up to speed on current events, starting with Rosa and my reading. “Be a good fellow and give me your thoughts. I know you don’t set much store by the Tarot, but three Major Arcana – that can’t be a good thing, what? There’s something big stirring in the waters, and I don’t understand what it’s got to do with me and this dinner date with dear brother Adrian. What really beats me is why Goo cared so much about it.”
I tell him about my kidnapping by old squid-face. He says something that my headset translates as an indignant sniff. Cutie and Goo don’t much approve of each other.
“I am apologetic that you were put into a van. We…” the headset clicks in perplexity for a few moments. “…Spectators are encouraged not to involve themselves in the lower realities.”
My headset always has difficulty with that descriptor by which Cutie just referred to himself. ‘Spectator’ is probably the most common translation, but ‘Juggler’ and ‘Choreographer’ pop up from time to time. I’ve also heard ‘Landscape Gardener’ and ‘Jigsaw Enthusiast’ – for the sake of my headset’s sanity I’ve never enquired further, but I’ve often wondered what exactly it implies. I used to think it was the equivalent of ‘human being’, and then for a while I thought it was the name of a religion. Now I’m inclined to think that it’s more like some sort of fraternity or trade organization. Evidently Goo’s gangster ways are violating the charter.
“Oh, no harm done,” I say graciously. “I rather like Goo – he’s an interesting chap. He even seems to have found a Novi Dei somewhere; if I can find out where, I may be able to turn a tidy…”
I realize that my headset is clicking up a storm. Cutie’s talking a mile a minute, about something that’s apparently very difficult to say in human terms. I wait for the clicking to find its way into speech.
“One of the New Gods?” Cutie says at last.
“What? Oh, yes.” I hadn’t mentioned my little encounter with the transplanar tourist whom I’d found myself obliged to kill this morning. “Dashed peculiar – I’d heard of them, of course, but never met one before. What do you think it was doing here?”
Cutie says nothing for a long time. I’ve taught him about suspenseful pauses. At last, he says: “I do not know what the ones you call New Gods are doing. I find them very difficult to understand. They are not Spectators.”
“Ah,” I say. “Not in the club, then.”
“No,” Cutie replies. “They are…” My headset clicks and clicks. And clicks. Eventually, it beeps – the sad little beep of a universal translator giving up.
“Sorry, Cutie, didn’t catch that,”
Cutie tries again. “It is complicated. They care very much about people and places, in a certain way. They are…” Click, click, click, clickitty-click … beep.
“Sorry Cutie. Once more?”
He says something that comes through my headset as a grave humming sound. “It is like the story,” he says at last.
It’s my turn to hum gravely. “Is it? Like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’?” I ask. “How so?”
“Not that story,” Cutie says. “The funny sad one, where the people are in love, but they can not be together, and then the man kills the other man. And it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“What’s that? You mean ‘Casablanca?’” How odd. Can it be that I’m really that lucky? My worst-case fate card was The Lovers, and it seemed impossible that this absurd situation was really only as bad as a broken heart. Is fate setting me up to fall in love with some bally Novi Dei, who will then bugger off back to dimensions unknown and leave me to join la Resistance? If that’s my doom, I’ll take it. At least it will keep me breathing. “That’s not so bad,” I say. “’Tis better to have loved and lost, what?”
“You are not understanding.” Cutie throws in another suspenseful pause. “The New Gods are not the Rick and the Ilsa and the Sam. They are the Nazis.”
My little mob of bodyguards is dancing as I cross the street. I’m careful not to glance back; inside Rosa’s little emporium of delights and horrors it’s easy to forget that the real horror is right next door. A patter of hammers and a buzz of power tools mingles with the creaking groan of the House of Voices as the natives of Little Oblivion work to build the vast, mad, rambling mansion that shrinks ever in upon itself.
The whispers are distant in my mind. I’m leaving now, I did no harm. The House sees no need to talk about me. Nevertheless, I don’t look back.
“Thanks for waiting, you lot, but your services won’t be needed.” I hand a twenty dollar bill to the oldest boy. “Go buy yourselves something dangerous. And here you go, little one.”
I hold out the feline Lazarus to the dark-eyed girl who’d been mourning it when I arrived. It yawns, hooks its claws into her dress, and clambers into her arms. Being thanked makes me blush, so I turn and head off down the street that will lead me out of Little Oblivion and eventually to my Metro stop. While I walk, I want to talk. I pull my headset out of my messenger bag.
“Hullo, Cutie?” I say. “I need advice. Give me advice.”
The translation takes a few moments in both directions.
“Do not become dead at the wrong time,” Cutie replies at length. “It will make you unhappy.”
This is, indeed, good advice. “Alright then, ta for that. Now-”
“Tell me a story, please.”
I sigh, but it’s fair enough. I’ve been leaning on old Cutie quite a bit lately, and even eternal beings deserve a break once in a while. He likes it when I tell him stories. His particular race of transplanars are unable to perceive the passage of time, and this has resulted in a body of literature that tends to be poorly paced and lack dramatic tension.
“Right-ho, Cutie old boy. As you say.” I try to think of a story I haven’t told him yet. “What sort?”
“A scary story.” Cutie is terribly excited. Scary stories are his favorites – the important thing to understand being that to him, stories with a lot of mayhem and slaughter are funny. People who go out of their way to make their infinitesimally short lives even shorter make him giggle, while love stories – stories about people who want to be together forever, and clearly won’t be allowed to - make him sad. What Cutie really likes, though, is comedy. Jokes send shivers up what would be his spine if he had what we normally think of as a body. Because as we all know, the essence of comedy is…
…
…wait for it…
…
…
…
…timing.
I try hard to think of a funny story to scare Cutie. He likes the classics, but I’ve already gone through most of what I know. “Right. This is a story about King Arthur, what? He’s our hero. And he’s out adventuring with his squire, don’t you know, but he’s not got a horse. So his squire’s got two halves of a coconut, and he’s banging them together…”
The hellish-hot afternoon is shaping up into rather a nice evening. “…and they all say ‘Ni!’ again. Yes. No, I told you, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke. Don’t cry now, Cutie old boy, it’s just a story...” I stroll past the petunia-infested Cadillacs and leave Little Oblivion behind me.
“…and so that’s it. The police show up, and everybody goes to prison. Now, Cutie, I need you to answer my questions. Are you ready?”
He is silent for a long time. Finally: “That story frightened me very much. Can you tell me a funny one now? Perhaps the one about the man who stabs the lady in the shower?”
“Another time,” I say. “Focus now, Cutie. I’m in trouble, I think, and I want to not be.”
I bring him up to speed on current events, starting with Rosa and my reading. “Be a good fellow and give me your thoughts. I know you don’t set much store by the Tarot, but three Major Arcana – that can’t be a good thing, what? There’s something big stirring in the waters, and I don’t understand what it’s got to do with me and this dinner date with dear brother Adrian. What really beats me is why Goo cared so much about it.”
I tell him about my kidnapping by old squid-face. He says something that my headset translates as an indignant sniff. Cutie and Goo don’t much approve of each other.
“I am apologetic that you were put into a van. We…” the headset clicks in perplexity for a few moments. “…Spectators are encouraged not to involve themselves in the lower realities.”
My headset always has difficulty with that descriptor by which Cutie just referred to himself. ‘Spectator’ is probably the most common translation, but ‘Juggler’ and ‘Choreographer’ pop up from time to time. I’ve also heard ‘Landscape Gardener’ and ‘Jigsaw Enthusiast’ – for the sake of my headset’s sanity I’ve never enquired further, but I’ve often wondered what exactly it implies. I used to think it was the equivalent of ‘human being’, and then for a while I thought it was the name of a religion. Now I’m inclined to think that it’s more like some sort of fraternity or trade organization. Evidently Goo’s gangster ways are violating the charter.
“Oh, no harm done,” I say graciously. “I rather like Goo – he’s an interesting chap. He even seems to have found a Novi Dei somewhere; if I can find out where, I may be able to turn a tidy…”
I realize that my headset is clicking up a storm. Cutie’s talking a mile a minute, about something that’s apparently very difficult to say in human terms. I wait for the clicking to find its way into speech.
“One of the New Gods?” Cutie says at last.
“What? Oh, yes.” I hadn’t mentioned my little encounter with the transplanar tourist whom I’d found myself obliged to kill this morning. “Dashed peculiar – I’d heard of them, of course, but never met one before. What do you think it was doing here?”
Cutie says nothing for a long time. I’ve taught him about suspenseful pauses. At last, he says: “I do not know what the ones you call New Gods are doing. I find them very difficult to understand. They are not Spectators.”
“Ah,” I say. “Not in the club, then.”
“No,” Cutie replies. “They are…” My headset clicks and clicks. And clicks. Eventually, it beeps – the sad little beep of a universal translator giving up.
“Sorry, Cutie, didn’t catch that,”
Cutie tries again. “It is complicated. They care very much about people and places, in a certain way. They are…” Click, click, click, clickitty-click … beep.
“Sorry Cutie. Once more?”
He says something that comes through my headset as a grave humming sound. “It is like the story,” he says at last.
It’s my turn to hum gravely. “Is it? Like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’?” I ask. “How so?”
“Not that story,” Cutie says. “The funny sad one, where the people are in love, but they can not be together, and then the man kills the other man. And it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“What’s that? You mean ‘Casablanca?’” How odd. Can it be that I’m really that lucky? My worst-case fate card was The Lovers, and it seemed impossible that this absurd situation was really only as bad as a broken heart. Is fate setting me up to fall in love with some bally Novi Dei, who will then bugger off back to dimensions unknown and leave me to join la Resistance? If that’s my doom, I’ll take it. At least it will keep me breathing. “That’s not so bad,” I say. “’Tis better to have loved and lost, what?”
“You are not understanding.” Cutie throws in another suspenseful pause. “The New Gods are not the Rick and the Ilsa and the Sam. They are the Nazis.”
26.6.09
I-I-XI
I need to get a life. Doesn’t matter whose. I’ve had heroin in my blood, cocaine in my sinuses, and a Greek gymnast in the back of an armored personnel carrier – but for the ultimate pick-me-up, you can’t beat soul power.
There’s a door behind the racks at the back of Rosa’s office. I’ve never gone through it, never even been tempted. Rosa’s business interests extend far deeper than prophecy and the garment trade, and I know enough to know that I don’t want to know just how deep. Rosa, after squinting at me for a few moments with those slitty cat-eyes of hers, bounds off the desk and slinks into that other room. She returns a few seconds later with a plastic baggie in her mouth.
I take the baggie from her. My hands feel numb; I give up on the twist-tie and just tear the plastic. I shake a single shiny dime into my palm. I squeeze.
Yesyesyesfuckittyyes!
A good butcher can sell every part of a pig but the squeal. Rosa’s better than any butcher. Departing souls tend to leave a bit of themselves behind, and she has perfected a process for skimming off the residue from the bodies she buys. Judging by that tiny taste, I’d say she’s got about three percent of a human life stashed inside my pretty new dime. Just the thing for a fellow who may, if things don’t go perfectly hotsy-totsy tonight, find himself needing all the life he can get.
“Ta, Rosa old girl.” I scruff the back of her head. She mrawrs and heads for the exit – politeness and old friendships are one thing, but I wouldn’t want a doomed chap loitering in my parlor either. I grab my suit and follow her up the stairs. I slam the trap door behind me. “Suppose I’d best be going, what? Oh, but I must take old Tom there with me. I’m only renting him, don’t you know.”
Rosa waggles her tail in the air, gathers herself, and leaps up onto the altar. From there she springs to the shapely shoulder of the body she was wearing when she answered the door. Instantly the dark-eyed girl’s corpse, which had been standing quietly with a blank look on its face, is once more alive and luscious. The empty eyes become the eyes that ten generations of fearful villagers sewed closed before giving ten successive martyr’s pyres to Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patroness of the Wicked Truth. I shiver.
The cat, suddenly un-possessed, loses its footing and tumbles towards the tile. It rights itself in time, lands on all fours, and sets to licking itself. Cool little bastard, it wants me to believe that dying in a dusty street and being resurrected in a candlelit temple are about what it expected from a Tuesday. I stoop and gather it up under my arm.
“I’ll owe you for the Old Black,” I tell Rosa. “Put it on my tab, what?” We both know that she may not have to wait long to collect - in the event of my death, she gets whatever’s left of my body afterwards. I’ve got a tattoo that says so. Treat me right, you may get to see it.
Rosa nods and escorts me to the door. She plucks a night rose, red as a whore’s kiss, from one of the sticky black vines that coat the inside of her home. She hangs it on my undershirt by the thorns. “Come back in one piece, my little Spex,” she says. “And don’t develop any new bad habits, si? Junkies are so uninteresting.”
“I promise,” I say. She’s worried about me getting strung out on the life she slipped me. She’s right to be concerned; once your body decides that it’s used to being 100.5% alive, every waking moment that you spend at baseline normal stretches into a weak-tea eternity that makes you wish you could be bothered to kill yourself. Once, and only once, I allowed myself to get hooked. My buzz ran out just as I was about to knock on her door to beg another hit; she found me looking up at the sky, trying to work up the energy to open my mouth so that if it rained I might manage to drown. “Cross my heart. Hope not to die.”
I have some fond recollections of staring up at Rosa's ceiling, but my brush with life-addiction is not one of them. There’s only one way to kick that nasty little habit: cold turkey. I remember lying on her altar, jumper-cabled to some vagrant she'd hastily procured, as she pulled the dagger from my chest.
I pat my pocket, where I fancy I can feel the dime throbbing against my leg. “Cheeri-o, then.”
There’s a door behind the racks at the back of Rosa’s office. I’ve never gone through it, never even been tempted. Rosa’s business interests extend far deeper than prophecy and the garment trade, and I know enough to know that I don’t want to know just how deep. Rosa, after squinting at me for a few moments with those slitty cat-eyes of hers, bounds off the desk and slinks into that other room. She returns a few seconds later with a plastic baggie in her mouth.
I take the baggie from her. My hands feel numb; I give up on the twist-tie and just tear the plastic. I shake a single shiny dime into my palm. I squeeze.
Yesyesyesfuckittyyes!
A good butcher can sell every part of a pig but the squeal. Rosa’s better than any butcher. Departing souls tend to leave a bit of themselves behind, and she has perfected a process for skimming off the residue from the bodies she buys. Judging by that tiny taste, I’d say she’s got about three percent of a human life stashed inside my pretty new dime. Just the thing for a fellow who may, if things don’t go perfectly hotsy-totsy tonight, find himself needing all the life he can get.
“Ta, Rosa old girl.” I scruff the back of her head. She mrawrs and heads for the exit – politeness and old friendships are one thing, but I wouldn’t want a doomed chap loitering in my parlor either. I grab my suit and follow her up the stairs. I slam the trap door behind me. “Suppose I’d best be going, what? Oh, but I must take old Tom there with me. I’m only renting him, don’t you know.”
Rosa waggles her tail in the air, gathers herself, and leaps up onto the altar. From there she springs to the shapely shoulder of the body she was wearing when she answered the door. Instantly the dark-eyed girl’s corpse, which had been standing quietly with a blank look on its face, is once more alive and luscious. The empty eyes become the eyes that ten generations of fearful villagers sewed closed before giving ten successive martyr’s pyres to Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patroness of the Wicked Truth. I shiver.
The cat, suddenly un-possessed, loses its footing and tumbles towards the tile. It rights itself in time, lands on all fours, and sets to licking itself. Cool little bastard, it wants me to believe that dying in a dusty street and being resurrected in a candlelit temple are about what it expected from a Tuesday. I stoop and gather it up under my arm.
“I’ll owe you for the Old Black,” I tell Rosa. “Put it on my tab, what?” We both know that she may not have to wait long to collect - in the event of my death, she gets whatever’s left of my body afterwards. I’ve got a tattoo that says so. Treat me right, you may get to see it.
Rosa nods and escorts me to the door. She plucks a night rose, red as a whore’s kiss, from one of the sticky black vines that coat the inside of her home. She hangs it on my undershirt by the thorns. “Come back in one piece, my little Spex,” she says. “And don’t develop any new bad habits, si? Junkies are so uninteresting.”
“I promise,” I say. She’s worried about me getting strung out on the life she slipped me. She’s right to be concerned; once your body decides that it’s used to being 100.5% alive, every waking moment that you spend at baseline normal stretches into a weak-tea eternity that makes you wish you could be bothered to kill yourself. Once, and only once, I allowed myself to get hooked. My buzz ran out just as I was about to knock on her door to beg another hit; she found me looking up at the sky, trying to work up the energy to open my mouth so that if it rained I might manage to drown. “Cross my heart. Hope not to die.”
I have some fond recollections of staring up at Rosa's ceiling, but my brush with life-addiction is not one of them. There’s only one way to kick that nasty little habit: cold turkey. I remember lying on her altar, jumper-cabled to some vagrant she'd hastily procured, as she pulled the dagger from my chest.
I pat my pocket, where I fancy I can feel the dime throbbing against my leg. “Cheeri-o, then.”
19.6.09
I-I-X
First card is the Devil, pulling on your heels.
Second card is an angel, who holds you by a rope.
Third card is the rope.
Rosa spears my first card on her foreclaw. This is my worst-case scenario, the fate to most be feared. She turns it over. A naked man, a naked woman, entwined in inseparable embrace. The Lovers.
Rosa seems to shrug. Hard to tell with a cat, of course, but I’m as nonplussed as she is. The Lovers is one of the Major Arcana, heavy-duty juju but one of the most benign cards in the deck. Only amateurs and movie producers think that the Tarot is some sort of inscrutable oracle, speaking mysteries and riddles – The Lovers means just what you’d think it would. Which is why I’m a bit disturbed to see it representing my worst-possible fate in a situation that involves transdimensional gangsters, lost gods, and dear brother Adrian. If things go bad, I can expect a jolly sight worse than a broken heart or a dose of clap. The appearance of The Lovers can mean only one thing: play this right, Spex old boy, or you’re fucked.
Well then. On to Mister Card Number Two. What’s the best I can look forward to? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for something dull, a five of staves or a three of cups. At this point I’d accept a six or seven of pentacles – I don’t need to take any profit or pleasure from this evening’s festivities, just let me get out in one piece.
Rosa’s claw comes down. Flip.
Cats can’t smile. Neither, at this moment, can I. The only grin in Rosa’s office belongs to a gentleman with a pale horse and a scythe, and he’s grinning straight at Yours Truly. A second Major Arcanum has crept into my fate. My best-case scenario is no more complicated than its worrisome predecessor: Death means death. If I’m lucky – really, really lucky – someone is going to die tonight.
It’s rare for me to be sweating at this point in the reading. The third card is just advice – it’s the difference between the first two fates, what I can do to avoid the first in favor of the second, and it’s generally pretty obvious. Many horrifying fates can be avoided simply by not being a fathead. On this occasion, however, I want specifics. I want to … what’s it that the poet says? Tum-te-tum, although the best is bad, sod off and do the best you can under the circumstances. The best is looking pretty sticky right now, so I’ve got precious little room for error.
“Alright, Rosa old girl,” I say. “Let me have it.”
The hackles are standing up on Rosa's back. Not a good sign, when a woman who’s survived more deaths than I’ve had hot dinners is looking edgy. Nevertheless, she’s a professional. She hooks a claw under my last card and pops it into the air. It lands face-up, but turned in the wrong direction. The text is upside-down with respect to where I’m standing, which makes the chap on the card look right-side-up. He’s smiling at me – not a friendly grin, like Mr. Death’s, but the inscrutable pleasantness of a fellow who’s either bought you a pony or poisoned your tea.
The Hanged Man.
The martyr, the traitor. Sacrifice, surrender. Victory through defeat, success through failure, strength through helplessness. A smug little bastard dangling by his ankle, mocking me. My third Major Arcanum in a three card spread – and the big secret, the big clue to help me avoid big trouble, is telling me that I can only win by losing.
I am doomed. I am confused. And I am going to be eating dinner with my brother tonight.
“Rosa?” I say. “Do you remember when you tried to string me out on that Old Black Magic? When you gave me that sweet first taste, and I had to shoot heroin for a month to come down? When I swore I’d hunt you down and kill you properly if you ever gave it to me again?” I sigh. “Gimme.”
Second card is an angel, who holds you by a rope.
Third card is the rope.
Rosa spears my first card on her foreclaw. This is my worst-case scenario, the fate to most be feared. She turns it over. A naked man, a naked woman, entwined in inseparable embrace. The Lovers.
Rosa seems to shrug. Hard to tell with a cat, of course, but I’m as nonplussed as she is. The Lovers is one of the Major Arcana, heavy-duty juju but one of the most benign cards in the deck. Only amateurs and movie producers think that the Tarot is some sort of inscrutable oracle, speaking mysteries and riddles – The Lovers means just what you’d think it would. Which is why I’m a bit disturbed to see it representing my worst-possible fate in a situation that involves transdimensional gangsters, lost gods, and dear brother Adrian. If things go bad, I can expect a jolly sight worse than a broken heart or a dose of clap. The appearance of The Lovers can mean only one thing: play this right, Spex old boy, or you’re fucked.
Well then. On to Mister Card Number Two. What’s the best I can look forward to? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for something dull, a five of staves or a three of cups. At this point I’d accept a six or seven of pentacles – I don’t need to take any profit or pleasure from this evening’s festivities, just let me get out in one piece.
Rosa’s claw comes down. Flip.
Cats can’t smile. Neither, at this moment, can I. The only grin in Rosa’s office belongs to a gentleman with a pale horse and a scythe, and he’s grinning straight at Yours Truly. A second Major Arcanum has crept into my fate. My best-case scenario is no more complicated than its worrisome predecessor: Death means death. If I’m lucky – really, really lucky – someone is going to die tonight.
It’s rare for me to be sweating at this point in the reading. The third card is just advice – it’s the difference between the first two fates, what I can do to avoid the first in favor of the second, and it’s generally pretty obvious. Many horrifying fates can be avoided simply by not being a fathead. On this occasion, however, I want specifics. I want to … what’s it that the poet says? Tum-te-tum, although the best is bad, sod off and do the best you can under the circumstances. The best is looking pretty sticky right now, so I’ve got precious little room for error.
“Alright, Rosa old girl,” I say. “Let me have it.”
The hackles are standing up on Rosa's back. Not a good sign, when a woman who’s survived more deaths than I’ve had hot dinners is looking edgy. Nevertheless, she’s a professional. She hooks a claw under my last card and pops it into the air. It lands face-up, but turned in the wrong direction. The text is upside-down with respect to where I’m standing, which makes the chap on the card look right-side-up. He’s smiling at me – not a friendly grin, like Mr. Death’s, but the inscrutable pleasantness of a fellow who’s either bought you a pony or poisoned your tea.
The Hanged Man.
The martyr, the traitor. Sacrifice, surrender. Victory through defeat, success through failure, strength through helplessness. A smug little bastard dangling by his ankle, mocking me. My third Major Arcanum in a three card spread – and the big secret, the big clue to help me avoid big trouble, is telling me that I can only win by losing.
I am doomed. I am confused. And I am going to be eating dinner with my brother tonight.
“Rosa?” I say. “Do you remember when you tried to string me out on that Old Black Magic? When you gave me that sweet first taste, and I had to shoot heroin for a month to come down? When I swore I’d hunt you down and kill you properly if you ever gave it to me again?” I sigh. “Gimme.”
12.6.09
I-I-IX
I stroke the top of Santa Rosa de Izquierda’s head and scratch behind her ear. She purrs, then jumps onto my shoulder and digs in her claws. This ought to tell you everything you need to know about Rosa.
“Steady on there, old girl,” I say. “I can’t very well pull up the door with you fastened to my bally arm, now, can I? Fuck off.”
She gives me a needly squeeze and leaps off onto the altar. I, because I was fool enough to let Rosa play kitty-cat before I got her to help me, must now heave up a bloody great stone slab all by myself. I stoop to grab the little fingerholds in the floor. I strain.
“Ha-bloody-ha.” I glare up at Rosa from my undignified spot on the ground. She’s sitting on the altar, doing the feline equivalent of laughing her arse off. Now I recall that her last body was a former luchadora – the new meat must have called for an adjustment of the counterweights. The trapdoor yawns, and from the staircase below a greenish fluorescence belches into the candlelit room. The little minx bounces from her perch to my crotch, and thence down the stairs. I rise, dust myself off, and follow.
Above ground, Rosa is la curandera, the witch-woman, patroness of the Wicked Truth. Downstairs, however, she’s really quite interesting. I first met her while I was practicing Voudoun, and even though I’ve mastered it now we still keep in touch. A chap in my position can’t have too many friends, or too many good suits. Rosa is the former, and churns the latter out by the dozens, thanks to this little subterranean sweat-shop of hers. As I jaunt down the stairs I hear a whining, buzzing chorus, like a room full of sewing machines. Rosa waits expectantly for me to open the door at the bottom for her. I turn the knob - on the other side waits a room full of sewing machines.
Perhaps I do Rosa an injustice in calling this place a sweatshop. The air is hellish-hot, but the dead don’t sweat, and the ranked rows of corpses don’t seem to mind. Their eyelids are sewn shut over gold coins, their lips are stapled around mouthfuls of snake flesh and saltpeter. Right now they’re getting ahead of the game, churning out knockoffs of a dress that Rosa’s made for the dewy blonde from ‘Gossip Girl’.
The original is hanging from a beam in Rosa’s little office. I offer it the tribute it deserves. “Smashing, Rosa,” I say. “It’ll hit the tabloids before it hits the floor of her producer’s limo. Where’s my suit?”
She goes nosing in among the racks that are triple-parked in the corner of her subterranean factory that she’s walled off against the noise of the sewing machines. “Mawr,” she says, and I reach for the hanger. I’m careful not to look to closely at the simple lines and understated sheen of what lurks beneath the plastic. If I look, I’ll gush, and that will just embarrass both of us.
Rosa’s suits don’t violate the $100 rule. Not because I don’t pay for them – although I don’t, except occasionally in blood, sweat and tears – but because they are priceless. When I see dear brother Adrian this evening, he will be wearing something designed in Milan and born on Saville Row, with a price tag that more usually applies to real estate. In the presence of this suit, sewn by a zombie in a DC basement, Adrian’s will unravel with shame.
“Ta, old girl.” I hang the evening’s costume next to the cover of the next ‘Us Weekly’. “One more bit of business. I need a reading, and you’re the only one in town I trust besides me.”
She accepts the compliment with feline grace. That is to say, she ignores it utterly and sets to clawing the hell out of a bolt of linen. When she’s finished, she noses open a supply cupboard and scrambles up onto one of the shelves. She roots around at the back and comes out with a rubber-banded tarot deck between her teeth. Nothing fancy here. No frills, no candles, no smoke and mirrors. Just a sneak peek at whatever fresh hell awaits yours truly in the coming hours.
Out of respect for Rosa’s condition, I remove the rubber band and set the deck in a spot on her green industrial metal desk that isn’t covered with drawings and snippings. She hops up and muddles it about with a forepaw, slopping the deck into a puddle of loose cards before reforming it. I prefer a riffle to a wash shuffle for the tarot, but then I’ve got people-hands.
Rosa flicks her tail. She closes her slitty green eyes and extends a single claw. She slides one card from the top of the deck onto the desk, face down. A second card. A third. This is fate. Rosa uses a modified three-card spread -- not the half-assed past-present-future tripe that tourists get on the boardwalk, but a potent short-range illuminator. Card number one is the worst-case scenario. Card number two is the best possible outcome. Card number three represents what’s going to decide between the two.
Flip, flip, flip. Fuck.
“Steady on there, old girl,” I say. “I can’t very well pull up the door with you fastened to my bally arm, now, can I? Fuck off.”
She gives me a needly squeeze and leaps off onto the altar. I, because I was fool enough to let Rosa play kitty-cat before I got her to help me, must now heave up a bloody great stone slab all by myself. I stoop to grab the little fingerholds in the floor. I strain.
“Ha-bloody-ha.” I glare up at Rosa from my undignified spot on the ground. She’s sitting on the altar, doing the feline equivalent of laughing her arse off. Now I recall that her last body was a former luchadora – the new meat must have called for an adjustment of the counterweights. The trapdoor yawns, and from the staircase below a greenish fluorescence belches into the candlelit room. The little minx bounces from her perch to my crotch, and thence down the stairs. I rise, dust myself off, and follow.
Above ground, Rosa is la curandera, the witch-woman, patroness of the Wicked Truth. Downstairs, however, she’s really quite interesting. I first met her while I was practicing Voudoun, and even though I’ve mastered it now we still keep in touch. A chap in my position can’t have too many friends, or too many good suits. Rosa is the former, and churns the latter out by the dozens, thanks to this little subterranean sweat-shop of hers. As I jaunt down the stairs I hear a whining, buzzing chorus, like a room full of sewing machines. Rosa waits expectantly for me to open the door at the bottom for her. I turn the knob - on the other side waits a room full of sewing machines.
Perhaps I do Rosa an injustice in calling this place a sweatshop. The air is hellish-hot, but the dead don’t sweat, and the ranked rows of corpses don’t seem to mind. Their eyelids are sewn shut over gold coins, their lips are stapled around mouthfuls of snake flesh and saltpeter. Right now they’re getting ahead of the game, churning out knockoffs of a dress that Rosa’s made for the dewy blonde from ‘Gossip Girl’.
The original is hanging from a beam in Rosa’s little office. I offer it the tribute it deserves. “Smashing, Rosa,” I say. “It’ll hit the tabloids before it hits the floor of her producer’s limo. Where’s my suit?”
She goes nosing in among the racks that are triple-parked in the corner of her subterranean factory that she’s walled off against the noise of the sewing machines. “Mawr,” she says, and I reach for the hanger. I’m careful not to look to closely at the simple lines and understated sheen of what lurks beneath the plastic. If I look, I’ll gush, and that will just embarrass both of us.
Rosa’s suits don’t violate the $100 rule. Not because I don’t pay for them – although I don’t, except occasionally in blood, sweat and tears – but because they are priceless. When I see dear brother Adrian this evening, he will be wearing something designed in Milan and born on Saville Row, with a price tag that more usually applies to real estate. In the presence of this suit, sewn by a zombie in a DC basement, Adrian’s will unravel with shame.
“Ta, old girl.” I hang the evening’s costume next to the cover of the next ‘Us Weekly’. “One more bit of business. I need a reading, and you’re the only one in town I trust besides me.”
She accepts the compliment with feline grace. That is to say, she ignores it utterly and sets to clawing the hell out of a bolt of linen. When she’s finished, she noses open a supply cupboard and scrambles up onto one of the shelves. She roots around at the back and comes out with a rubber-banded tarot deck between her teeth. Nothing fancy here. No frills, no candles, no smoke and mirrors. Just a sneak peek at whatever fresh hell awaits yours truly in the coming hours.
Out of respect for Rosa’s condition, I remove the rubber band and set the deck in a spot on her green industrial metal desk that isn’t covered with drawings and snippings. She hops up and muddles it about with a forepaw, slopping the deck into a puddle of loose cards before reforming it. I prefer a riffle to a wash shuffle for the tarot, but then I’ve got people-hands.
Rosa flicks her tail. She closes her slitty green eyes and extends a single claw. She slides one card from the top of the deck onto the desk, face down. A second card. A third. This is fate. Rosa uses a modified three-card spread -- not the half-assed past-present-future tripe that tourists get on the boardwalk, but a potent short-range illuminator. Card number one is the worst-case scenario. Card number two is the best possible outcome. Card number three represents what’s going to decide between the two.
Flip, flip, flip. Fuck.
22.5.09
I-I-VIII
“Hullo, Rosa,” I say. “Love the fresh meat.”
The black-haired beauty gives me a look that has been handed down through mankind’s generations ever since the first sailor took the first shore leave. I wouldn’t call Rosa a whore, but not because she isn’t one. She drops her chin and looks up at me through inch-long lashes. She beckons me to come inside. I do, dangling my dead cat. Scar-chin follows.
Rosa’s little white house is one big windowless room, four walls protecting the outside world from a woman it could never understand. Climbing roses, born and raised in the light of a thousand candles, coat three of the four walls with black-green leaves and blooms the color of a streetwalker’s lipstick.
“You be a good boy and wait your turn,” Rosa breathes at me. She rests a hand on Scar-chin’s shoulder and steers him towards the long rectangular block of basalt that sits at the center of her little domain. “Come along, Miguel, let’s have a look at you.”
Scar-chin -- Miguel, I suppose -- boosts himself up onto the altar and lies down so that he is perfectly framed by the drainage gutters. Rosa begins her inspection. She’ll buy any meat that can walk through her door, but what she’ll pay depends on how fresh it is and how long she has to wait for it. She strokes the dying man’s palm, looks into his eyes, runs her hand up under his shirt and over his belly. I take the time to reacquaint myself with the household saints.
I mentioned that three of Rosa’s walls are dripping with those niffy roses. The other is a mosaic of retablos, painted wooden icons. Ordinarily you’d want a to diversify your sacred portfolio for maximum effect -- have a shrine for the chap who looks after your money, and the one who’s in charge of your health, and the one who does your enemies a bit of no-good when they’re not looking, what? Not Rosa. The hundreds of painted figures, each of which enjoys its own row of votive candles, are all consecrated to the same woman.
Like every martyr’s retablo, these tell the story of both life and death. Where another saint might hold the executioner’s sword, this female stands amid licking flames. Her eyes and mouth are cross-hatched over, painter’s shorthand for a bit of pre-pyre needlepoint. The real artistry, however -- the bit that identifies her as Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patron of the Wicked Truth -- is in her sacred stigmata. The wounds in her hands and feet are great, toothy red mouths with lolling tongues. Her garment is slashed over her ribs. A single great and lidless eye stares from her belly.
Ah, Rosa. An egoist and a sentimentalist. It’s been a hundred lifetimes for her since the Catholic church gave up on killing her and just adopted her instead.
“Six hundred dollars,” Rosa declares. She helps Miguel to his feet and pulls out a self-inking rubber stamp. She grasps his lower jaw with one hand, and pops her mark onto his forehead. Long-timers who want a payday get her brand burnt into their hands; if Miguel’s getting ink, she plans on collecting in less than a week. That must be why she hasn’t tried to sell him any of her other services. He’s too ill to enjoy the body she’s currently wearing, and he doesn’t need a suit to be buried in because he isn’t getting buried. Rosa tucks the bills into the pocket of his jacket. “Take care of it now, yes?” she says. “Bring it back in one piece, or I find your soul and put it in a rat. Now, Spexy -- may I have my present?”
I wince a bit when she slinks up and slides a hand around the back of my neck. “What’s that? Sorry old girl, no time just now.” Rosa’s always gorgeous, but I’ve never taken her up on her various -- and believe me, they are extremely various -- offers of sensual delight. Bit of masculine chauvinism, I suppose; I don’t care to get too intimate with a body that’s had more than one owner. “Perhaps later, what?”
She stands on tiptoe and purrs in my ear. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”
“Oh, cripes, yes. Forgot.” Leave it to me -- only chap on the bally planet who could forget he’s carrying a former feline. “Here you are.”
I toss the stiff little thing in the air, aiming for the altar. Rosa springs for it, and grazes the tail with one red-lacquered fingernail. Instantly she stumbles and stops. Her eyes dull. She stands perfectly still, blinking occasionally.
The kitty, in the meantime, has righted itself in midair and landed lightly on all fours on the basalt surface. It licks its chops, and stretches with an enjoyment that’s almost pornographic.
“Well then,” I say, once Rosa’s done scratching away fleas that had almost given up hope. “Let’s do a little business, shall we? I’ve got to see dear brother Adrian tonight, which means I need threads and chemicals. If I’m not looking and feeling abso-fucking-lutely incredible at eight o’clock tonight, I’ll be dead by 8:45.”
The black-haired beauty gives me a look that has been handed down through mankind’s generations ever since the first sailor took the first shore leave. I wouldn’t call Rosa a whore, but not because she isn’t one. She drops her chin and looks up at me through inch-long lashes. She beckons me to come inside. I do, dangling my dead cat. Scar-chin follows.
Rosa’s little white house is one big windowless room, four walls protecting the outside world from a woman it could never understand. Climbing roses, born and raised in the light of a thousand candles, coat three of the four walls with black-green leaves and blooms the color of a streetwalker’s lipstick.
“You be a good boy and wait your turn,” Rosa breathes at me. She rests a hand on Scar-chin’s shoulder and steers him towards the long rectangular block of basalt that sits at the center of her little domain. “Come along, Miguel, let’s have a look at you.”
Scar-chin -- Miguel, I suppose -- boosts himself up onto the altar and lies down so that he is perfectly framed by the drainage gutters. Rosa begins her inspection. She’ll buy any meat that can walk through her door, but what she’ll pay depends on how fresh it is and how long she has to wait for it. She strokes the dying man’s palm, looks into his eyes, runs her hand up under his shirt and over his belly. I take the time to reacquaint myself with the household saints.
I mentioned that three of Rosa’s walls are dripping with those niffy roses. The other is a mosaic of retablos, painted wooden icons. Ordinarily you’d want a to diversify your sacred portfolio for maximum effect -- have a shrine for the chap who looks after your money, and the one who’s in charge of your health, and the one who does your enemies a bit of no-good when they’re not looking, what? Not Rosa. The hundreds of painted figures, each of which enjoys its own row of votive candles, are all consecrated to the same woman.
Like every martyr’s retablo, these tell the story of both life and death. Where another saint might hold the executioner’s sword, this female stands amid licking flames. Her eyes and mouth are cross-hatched over, painter’s shorthand for a bit of pre-pyre needlepoint. The real artistry, however -- the bit that identifies her as Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patron of the Wicked Truth -- is in her sacred stigmata. The wounds in her hands and feet are great, toothy red mouths with lolling tongues. Her garment is slashed over her ribs. A single great and lidless eye stares from her belly.
Ah, Rosa. An egoist and a sentimentalist. It’s been a hundred lifetimes for her since the Catholic church gave up on killing her and just adopted her instead.
“Six hundred dollars,” Rosa declares. She helps Miguel to his feet and pulls out a self-inking rubber stamp. She grasps his lower jaw with one hand, and pops her mark onto his forehead. Long-timers who want a payday get her brand burnt into their hands; if Miguel’s getting ink, she plans on collecting in less than a week. That must be why she hasn’t tried to sell him any of her other services. He’s too ill to enjoy the body she’s currently wearing, and he doesn’t need a suit to be buried in because he isn’t getting buried. Rosa tucks the bills into the pocket of his jacket. “Take care of it now, yes?” she says. “Bring it back in one piece, or I find your soul and put it in a rat. Now, Spexy -- may I have my present?”
I wince a bit when she slinks up and slides a hand around the back of my neck. “What’s that? Sorry old girl, no time just now.” Rosa’s always gorgeous, but I’ve never taken her up on her various -- and believe me, they are extremely various -- offers of sensual delight. Bit of masculine chauvinism, I suppose; I don’t care to get too intimate with a body that’s had more than one owner. “Perhaps later, what?”
She stands on tiptoe and purrs in my ear. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”
“Oh, cripes, yes. Forgot.” Leave it to me -- only chap on the bally planet who could forget he’s carrying a former feline. “Here you are.”
I toss the stiff little thing in the air, aiming for the altar. Rosa springs for it, and grazes the tail with one red-lacquered fingernail. Instantly she stumbles and stops. Her eyes dull. She stands perfectly still, blinking occasionally.
The kitty, in the meantime, has righted itself in midair and landed lightly on all fours on the basalt surface. It licks its chops, and stretches with an enjoyment that’s almost pornographic.
“Well then,” I say, once Rosa’s done scratching away fleas that had almost given up hope. “Let’s do a little business, shall we? I’ve got to see dear brother Adrian tonight, which means I need threads and chemicals. If I’m not looking and feeling abso-fucking-lutely incredible at eight o’clock tonight, I’ll be dead by 8:45.”
18.5.09
I-I-VII
If I’m going to spend the evening with dear brother Adrian, I’ll have to run some errands first. I need to visit a bloody good tailor, a fucking fantastic drug dealer, a bookie, a masseuse, a fortune-teller, and a prostitute.
Her name’s Rosa. She also makes a mean caipirinha.
I let myself out of the crumbling row house that serves as headquarters to the District’s most dangerous sushi roll. A handful of Goo’s half-witted half-breed henchspawn are sitting on the front steps. They laugh at me as I pass, and I take a moment to hand out report cards.
“Not good … not good … put a little more air behind it … come now, show a bit of energy, what? Ah, now that’s not half bad.” I pat the greasy black curls that are sticking up around one chap’s Kermit the Frog mask. I shake his webby hand. “Jolly good. Everyone else pay close attention, this fellow’s almost got it.”
With that I bid the bully-boys a cheery farewell and head off down the street. Rosa’s place is in the opposite direction, but I’m going to have to circle around. Goo’s turf borders Little Oblivia, and I wouldn’t want the Neighborhood Watch to get the impression that I’m friendly with the fish. They might disapprove.
If you only look at Little Oblivia from the outside, which is what a sane person would do, you’d think it was a pleasant little neighborhood. The scary thing is, you’d be absolutely right. It’s an enclave of mostly South American immigrants, quietly prosperous, quietly impenetrable. The streets that cut the three-by-three square of city blocks are closed to outside traffic by the brightly painted corpses of Cadillac convertibles -- converted, now, into petunia planters. Kids can chase dogs and soccer balls from gutter to gutter without fear of getting squished. Old people dance to radios on summer evenings here, and the teenagers on the benches aren’t carrying anything stronger than cigarettes. Not that they’ll share, anyway. Little Oblivia has restaurants with chalkboard menus, bars with live music, and a little white church with a manicured lawn. It’s a good place to live.
It’s not such a good place to visit.
I take a scenic stroll west and north, then make my approach. As I pass a flower-infested Eldorado I wave to a group of three middle-aged men sitting around a pitcher of chicha at Aucapomo’s Sidewalk Café. Bugger. I don’t know any of them, and they’ve been watching me for a block and a half.
I’ve got my spare Bicycle deck in the pocket of my orange hunting trousers. I pull it out and start up a fidgety one-handed slide shuffle as I approach the café. Perhaps I could bluff my way past them, but never-being-seen-again is one of those things that I’d rather have happen to other chaps. Sometimes you’ve just got to lay your cards on the table.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” I say, dragging over an empty chair. The three men, dark-skinned Bolivians with eyes like flint, regard me without comment. One is perhaps forty, in a straw hat and linen shirt; one forty-five-ish, bald and shirtless in the heat; the last pushing fifty, lean and mustached, wool suit and string tie and a shiny white scar on his chin. “In a bit of a rush,” I continue, “but I’ve got an angel for each of you.”
The Angelus is one of the easiest group-divinations you can perform. It won’t satisfy a paying customer, and it won’t impress a pro, but I fancy it may help to convince these chaps that I’m Rosa’s problem, not theirs.
“First we deal the paternoster.” I start the chant, drop-cutting on each syllable until the deck is in three neat piles. “...sed libera nos a malo. Now break your mothers’ hearts.”
The three men sit in silence for a moment. Then the scarred one reaches out and pulls off the top half of his pile. The others do the same. They’re not armed; these men are not Little Oblivion’s guards, nor her soldiers. They are merely her eyes. I could have walked straight past them, if I didn’t care about walking out again.
“This is a skeleton, buried in the ground,” I say, sliding the top card from each of their piles to the bottom. “And this is a devil, come for his soul.” The next card comes off each pile; these I vanish with a Marsden Push, although that’s not really necessary. “This is your angel,” I say at last, “holding a secret. Cross and kiss.”
Nobody moves. The scarred one is smiling down at his card, and the other two are looking at him. At last the bald one grunts and crosses himself. He picks up his Angel card and raises it to his lips.
Three of clubs. “It will only cause trouble,” I say, shaking my head. “Stay home, there’s nowhere you need to go.”
Baldy looks grumpy, but his friends nod their heads. Now the behatted one kisses his own card. “She loves you. Always has, always will,” I say to the ten of hearts. It’s good when they’re this easy. I knuckle Scar-chin on the shoulder. “Come along old egg, pucker up.”
Scar-chin is still smiling. At last he drains his glass and pushes back his chair. “You wanting to see La Rosa, yes? Come on, I take you. I gotta visit her anyway.”
Well, I’m not going to force the chap to take his fortune. I’m a bit curious, however, so as I collect my deck I drunkard-shuffle his Angel card to the bottom where I can check it later. “Tally-ho, then,” I say. “Do lead on.”
I don’t need a tour guide to find Rosa’s place. What I need is a bodyguard. A visitor could probably muck about on the outskirts of Little Oblivia without much bother, if he spent and drank and loved freely enough -- and if he didn’t mind being watched. I don’t mind being watched. What I mind is being talked about. If I stay close to Scar-chin, the voices will let me alone.
“You been to see La Rosa before, yes?” Scar-chin asks. “You know where she lives?”
“Oh, quite,” I nod affably. “Right next to nowhere at all.”
Scar-chin smiles. “Yes, yes. Next to nowhere at all.”
Don’t call it superstition. Think of it as tactful discretion. Nobody talks about the House of Voices -- though you can see it from anywhere in the neighborhood, a ponderous hulk that towers over Little Oblivia, its surface a dollhouse cutaway of unfinished rooms and corridors waiting to disappear beneath the next day’s round of construction. Nobody talks about it, because it might decide to join in the conversation. Even the men who spend their lives building it, adding to it, expanding the vast mansion that shrinks always into itself will not tell you what they do all day. They do nothing, and they do it nowhere. Let the voices talk to themselves. Let them look through the dark eyes of the people who brought them here centuries ago. Let them watch over the safety and the happiness of those whose souls still speak the language of immigrant spirits. Little Oblivia is a coral reef surrounding a sunken warhead, the House, where voices chatter like a Geiger counter.
“Thanks awfully,” I say to Scar-chin as we stroll deeper into the neighborhood. A mob of children has clustered on the corner across from my destination. They are poking at something with a stick. “Hope I’m not putting you out.”
Scar-chin chuckles. “Have to go see la curandera anyway. If not today, another day, and a little extra dinero never hurt anybody.”
“No, I suppose … ah.” There is only one thing I’ve ever known Rosa to pay for. I pull the Bicycle deck out of my pocket and look at the bottom card. Hola, Señor Ace of Spades.
Scar-chin chuckles again. “It’s in my liver now,” he says. “Started in my lungs. I do not mind. Soon I will have a beautiful house to live in.”
Not polite to contradict, of course. “Right ho,” I say. I suppose that somewhere among the millions of rooms that have been built by the locals and swallowed by the House of Voices over the years, there may be one to suit Scar-chin’s fancy. “And enough scratch to stand the boys a few rounds while you wait, what?”
Nobody dies penniless in Little Oblivia. Even when you’ve got nothing left to sell, Rosa is always happy to buy. She’s an investor in the most certain of futures markets: the proposition that living people will eventually become dead people. I can generally find a taker for bits of the used machinery once it’s out of commission, but she’ll buy the whole package while it’s still breathing.
We come abreast of the knot of children. The star attraction, as it turns out, is a dead cat -- a stripy gray that’s so stiff it spins when they poke it. There are about ten of these juveniles taking turns with the stick. An eleventh, a girl about eight years old with jet-black hair and skin the color of a sugar cookie soaked in coffee, is watching the fun from a short distance. Her fists are balled, her lips pursed tight.
“Hoy, there,” I call. “How much for the late Mister Tom? Cuánto cuesta?” I pull out a twenty dollar bill to make it clear that I’ve already decided on the answer.
The kids pause their game to look at the cold, crumply cash. This is a trick that every magician and politician knows -- while they’re distracted, I bend down and scoop up the former feline by a hind leg. With my newfound bargaining power, I lay out additional demands. “You get twenty now,” I say, “and another twenty later if -- if -- you hang about until I come out of the nice lady’s house.” I don’t know if I can count on Scar-chin to wait for me after he’s finished his business with Rosa, and I want to be certain of safe passage out of Little Oblivia.
A ten-year-old boy in a soccer jersey reaches for the bill. I hold onto it for a moment, so he’ll know I mean business, and then let go. I set off across the street; they remain behind, bound by the one promise their parents were ever really serious about them keeping. My destination is a neat little white-painted corner bungalow, the only other house on a block dominated by the vast, groaning, perpetually-under-construction monstrosity that is nothing and nowhere.
Dangling kitty by his leg, I trot up the steps and onto the porch. The door is white, with painted flowers. Roses. I give the twisty wrought iron knocker a couple of good whams, and turn to wave at my child army. “You lot stay put now. Uncle Spex will only be a moment.”
The door opens. In the doorway stands a lovely young women -- skin like bronze, hair a midnight waterfall, lips painted crimson. Her eyes are perfect gemstones, ivory and lapis lazuli. She must have been a corker when she was alive.
Her name’s Rosa. She also makes a mean caipirinha.
I let myself out of the crumbling row house that serves as headquarters to the District’s most dangerous sushi roll. A handful of Goo’s half-witted half-breed henchspawn are sitting on the front steps. They laugh at me as I pass, and I take a moment to hand out report cards.
“Not good … not good … put a little more air behind it … come now, show a bit of energy, what? Ah, now that’s not half bad.” I pat the greasy black curls that are sticking up around one chap’s Kermit the Frog mask. I shake his webby hand. “Jolly good. Everyone else pay close attention, this fellow’s almost got it.”
With that I bid the bully-boys a cheery farewell and head off down the street. Rosa’s place is in the opposite direction, but I’m going to have to circle around. Goo’s turf borders Little Oblivia, and I wouldn’t want the Neighborhood Watch to get the impression that I’m friendly with the fish. They might disapprove.
If you only look at Little Oblivia from the outside, which is what a sane person would do, you’d think it was a pleasant little neighborhood. The scary thing is, you’d be absolutely right. It’s an enclave of mostly South American immigrants, quietly prosperous, quietly impenetrable. The streets that cut the three-by-three square of city blocks are closed to outside traffic by the brightly painted corpses of Cadillac convertibles -- converted, now, into petunia planters. Kids can chase dogs and soccer balls from gutter to gutter without fear of getting squished. Old people dance to radios on summer evenings here, and the teenagers on the benches aren’t carrying anything stronger than cigarettes. Not that they’ll share, anyway. Little Oblivia has restaurants with chalkboard menus, bars with live music, and a little white church with a manicured lawn. It’s a good place to live.
It’s not such a good place to visit.
I take a scenic stroll west and north, then make my approach. As I pass a flower-infested Eldorado I wave to a group of three middle-aged men sitting around a pitcher of chicha at Aucapomo’s Sidewalk Café. Bugger. I don’t know any of them, and they’ve been watching me for a block and a half.
I’ve got my spare Bicycle deck in the pocket of my orange hunting trousers. I pull it out and start up a fidgety one-handed slide shuffle as I approach the café. Perhaps I could bluff my way past them, but never-being-seen-again is one of those things that I’d rather have happen to other chaps. Sometimes you’ve just got to lay your cards on the table.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” I say, dragging over an empty chair. The three men, dark-skinned Bolivians with eyes like flint, regard me without comment. One is perhaps forty, in a straw hat and linen shirt; one forty-five-ish, bald and shirtless in the heat; the last pushing fifty, lean and mustached, wool suit and string tie and a shiny white scar on his chin. “In a bit of a rush,” I continue, “but I’ve got an angel for each of you.”
The Angelus is one of the easiest group-divinations you can perform. It won’t satisfy a paying customer, and it won’t impress a pro, but I fancy it may help to convince these chaps that I’m Rosa’s problem, not theirs.
“First we deal the paternoster.” I start the chant, drop-cutting on each syllable until the deck is in three neat piles. “...sed libera nos a malo. Now break your mothers’ hearts.”
The three men sit in silence for a moment. Then the scarred one reaches out and pulls off the top half of his pile. The others do the same. They’re not armed; these men are not Little Oblivion’s guards, nor her soldiers. They are merely her eyes. I could have walked straight past them, if I didn’t care about walking out again.
“This is a skeleton, buried in the ground,” I say, sliding the top card from each of their piles to the bottom. “And this is a devil, come for his soul.” The next card comes off each pile; these I vanish with a Marsden Push, although that’s not really necessary. “This is your angel,” I say at last, “holding a secret. Cross and kiss.”
Nobody moves. The scarred one is smiling down at his card, and the other two are looking at him. At last the bald one grunts and crosses himself. He picks up his Angel card and raises it to his lips.
Three of clubs. “It will only cause trouble,” I say, shaking my head. “Stay home, there’s nowhere you need to go.”
Baldy looks grumpy, but his friends nod their heads. Now the behatted one kisses his own card. “She loves you. Always has, always will,” I say to the ten of hearts. It’s good when they’re this easy. I knuckle Scar-chin on the shoulder. “Come along old egg, pucker up.”
Scar-chin is still smiling. At last he drains his glass and pushes back his chair. “You wanting to see La Rosa, yes? Come on, I take you. I gotta visit her anyway.”
Well, I’m not going to force the chap to take his fortune. I’m a bit curious, however, so as I collect my deck I drunkard-shuffle his Angel card to the bottom where I can check it later. “Tally-ho, then,” I say. “Do lead on.”
I don’t need a tour guide to find Rosa’s place. What I need is a bodyguard. A visitor could probably muck about on the outskirts of Little Oblivia without much bother, if he spent and drank and loved freely enough -- and if he didn’t mind being watched. I don’t mind being watched. What I mind is being talked about. If I stay close to Scar-chin, the voices will let me alone.
“You been to see La Rosa before, yes?” Scar-chin asks. “You know where she lives?”
“Oh, quite,” I nod affably. “Right next to nowhere at all.”
Scar-chin smiles. “Yes, yes. Next to nowhere at all.”
Don’t call it superstition. Think of it as tactful discretion. Nobody talks about the House of Voices -- though you can see it from anywhere in the neighborhood, a ponderous hulk that towers over Little Oblivia, its surface a dollhouse cutaway of unfinished rooms and corridors waiting to disappear beneath the next day’s round of construction. Nobody talks about it, because it might decide to join in the conversation. Even the men who spend their lives building it, adding to it, expanding the vast mansion that shrinks always into itself will not tell you what they do all day. They do nothing, and they do it nowhere. Let the voices talk to themselves. Let them look through the dark eyes of the people who brought them here centuries ago. Let them watch over the safety and the happiness of those whose souls still speak the language of immigrant spirits. Little Oblivia is a coral reef surrounding a sunken warhead, the House, where voices chatter like a Geiger counter.
“Thanks awfully,” I say to Scar-chin as we stroll deeper into the neighborhood. A mob of children has clustered on the corner across from my destination. They are poking at something with a stick. “Hope I’m not putting you out.”
Scar-chin chuckles. “Have to go see la curandera anyway. If not today, another day, and a little extra dinero never hurt anybody.”
“No, I suppose … ah.” There is only one thing I’ve ever known Rosa to pay for. I pull the Bicycle deck out of my pocket and look at the bottom card. Hola, Señor Ace of Spades.
Scar-chin chuckles again. “It’s in my liver now,” he says. “Started in my lungs. I do not mind. Soon I will have a beautiful house to live in.”
Not polite to contradict, of course. “Right ho,” I say. I suppose that somewhere among the millions of rooms that have been built by the locals and swallowed by the House of Voices over the years, there may be one to suit Scar-chin’s fancy. “And enough scratch to stand the boys a few rounds while you wait, what?”
Nobody dies penniless in Little Oblivia. Even when you’ve got nothing left to sell, Rosa is always happy to buy. She’s an investor in the most certain of futures markets: the proposition that living people will eventually become dead people. I can generally find a taker for bits of the used machinery once it’s out of commission, but she’ll buy the whole package while it’s still breathing.
We come abreast of the knot of children. The star attraction, as it turns out, is a dead cat -- a stripy gray that’s so stiff it spins when they poke it. There are about ten of these juveniles taking turns with the stick. An eleventh, a girl about eight years old with jet-black hair and skin the color of a sugar cookie soaked in coffee, is watching the fun from a short distance. Her fists are balled, her lips pursed tight.
“Hoy, there,” I call. “How much for the late Mister Tom? Cuánto cuesta?” I pull out a twenty dollar bill to make it clear that I’ve already decided on the answer.
The kids pause their game to look at the cold, crumply cash. This is a trick that every magician and politician knows -- while they’re distracted, I bend down and scoop up the former feline by a hind leg. With my newfound bargaining power, I lay out additional demands. “You get twenty now,” I say, “and another twenty later if -- if -- you hang about until I come out of the nice lady’s house.” I don’t know if I can count on Scar-chin to wait for me after he’s finished his business with Rosa, and I want to be certain of safe passage out of Little Oblivia.
A ten-year-old boy in a soccer jersey reaches for the bill. I hold onto it for a moment, so he’ll know I mean business, and then let go. I set off across the street; they remain behind, bound by the one promise their parents were ever really serious about them keeping. My destination is a neat little white-painted corner bungalow, the only other house on a block dominated by the vast, groaning, perpetually-under-construction monstrosity that is nothing and nowhere.
Dangling kitty by his leg, I trot up the steps and onto the porch. The door is white, with painted flowers. Roses. I give the twisty wrought iron knocker a couple of good whams, and turn to wave at my child army. “You lot stay put now. Uncle Spex will only be a moment.”
The door opens. In the doorway stands a lovely young women -- skin like bronze, hair a midnight waterfall, lips painted crimson. Her eyes are perfect gemstones, ivory and lapis lazuli. She must have been a corker when she was alive.
15.5.09
I-I-VI
“Ouch,” I say. “You bastards.”
My kidnappers look at one another. Their masks are goldfish faces, big round popeyed things. One of them pulls out a dog-eared booklet and flips through it. He points at a page, and the other nods. They turn to me. They laugh.
It is horrible, horrible laughter.
I mean it, I’ve never heard such awful laughter. The silly sods are just saying “ha ha ha” at me over and over again. I sigh. “No, come on now. Make a bit of an effort, what?” And since they abducted me before I could laugh at Bansi Butcher, I start laughing at them instead. We drive and drive, and by the time the van stops I’ve got them doing a pretty fair job of it. “It’s still not good, gentlemen,” I say. “Tell Goo that what you say isn’t half so important as how you say it. Valuable life lesson, that.”
They seem hurt. One of them scratches under his mask. “Laughter indicates friendliness,” he says, “and is an expression of goodwill.”
“Bunging a chap into your rotten van when he’s talking to a friend indicates something else entirely,” I reply. “Anyhow, where’s your boss? I presume he wants to make a deal?”
Goo always wants to make a deal. That’s his way of showing off. DC’s fishiest gangster has worked hard to master the art of contingent logic -- his kind have almost no sense of causality -- and he never passes up a chance to strut his stuff. Goo may have a face like an octopus’s arse, but he’s as vain as the day is long. Just look at the name he picked for himself: it’s an acronym, and a misleading one. He’s not so great, and compared to some planars he’s not old at all.
Still, I suppose there is only one of him.
The bully-boys chuck me into Goo’s basement office. It’s a homey place, none of that new-money chic, but a bit damp and chilly because most of the floor’s missing. Goo had it knocked out so that he can sit in a pool of Potomac river water. He’s sitting there now.
“Hullo, Goo,” I say.
Goo gleeps with joy. He likes it when I come to visit, because I admire him immensely -- he knows this because I told him so once, and he hails from a universe that doesn’t understand sarcasm. “The one that is named I’m called Spex you squiddy bastard!” he burbles. “You were at a location that is not this one, and now you are at a location that is this one!”
“Great to be here,” I say. “Adore the new mask. You look just like Mister Obama.”
The grinning part of Goo’s beach-ball-sized latex mask ripples as, somewhere underneath it, tentacles writhe with smug satisfaction. He’s wearing a smart charcoal suit with a pink silk pocket square, presumably the handiwork of a tailor accustomed to clothing Volkswagens. The jolly red oven mitts protruding from his sleeves might almost make you believe that he’s got hands underneath them.
I plop down in a burgundy La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the mahogany desk that hides the less-easily-disguised bits of Goo’s anatomy. “So, Goo old chum,” I say. “Let’s negotiate.”
Time works differently where Goo’s from. He’s used to a flow of history that skips like a scratched record played with a bent needle. His kind are generally a laid-back lot, not worrying too much about a life that’s lived in scattered bits and pieces. When Goo wandered into my world, however, he soon realized that his own actions could reliably influence other people’s. Took to it like a duck to water. After a brief reign of unintentional terror he learned the house rules regarding the proper sequence for conducting business -- now he threatens people before he kills them -- and at this point he’s as upstanding a citizen as our shadowy little community can boast of. And he loves to negotiate.
Goo makes a pleased wet sound. “A deal is the thing that I would like to make at this moment in time. Your counteroffer is unacceptable.”
I pull the handle of the recliner. It slumps me backwards, kicking my feet off the ground and catching me in a saggy polyester nest. “Haven’t made a counteroffer yet, old boy,” I say. “Haven’t heard the offer yet. Think I can guess what it’s about, though.”
The Obama mask squirms in discomfort. Guessing confuses Goo. “Do not be doing the thing that is projecting analysis of possible events. It is very rude. What will instead happen is the saying of my offer, which precedes your counteroffer, which is unacceptable.”
I nod. I’m genuinely curious to hear what Goo has to say, because he’s the one who dumped that Newgie at the Mortal Coil. He might be willing to tell me where he got her from in the first place. Maybe he wants me to kill her. Maybe he knows that I already did; this wouldn’t be the first time he brokered a deal for something that’s already happened, just to make sure.
“This is the offer that I make at this point in time,” Goo rumbles. He huffs and hunches with excitement. “You will cause the Washington Nationals team of baseball to triumph as winners of the Series of the World at a point in time ten million years before this time. In exchange, I will kill you.”
Goo read a book on negotiation. He is concealing his real goal, as well as offering a price far below what he is actually willing to pay.
“I do not accept your offer,” I say. I pull open my messenger bag, because I never got that breakfast Blind Allie promised and I’m famished. I rip the plastic off a roll of ginger snaps and hold one up for inspection. “Here’s my counter-offer. I will eat this cookie, and in exchange, you will watch me eat this cookie.”
I eat the cookie. Goo quivers in admiration; his book spoke in hushed tones of men who can broker and execute deals with this kind of aplomb. My negotiating prowess only daunts him momentarily, however. “Your counteroffer is unacceptable,” he blurps. “Allow me to suggest a deal that is different from the other deal.”
I wave my permission.
Goo rubs his oven mitts together and leans forward in his puddle. “You will eat the thing that is dinner,” he hisses. “You will eat it with the person who is your brother. You will do this at the time that is tonight. In exchange, I will kill you.”
A crumb of ginger snap makes a jump for my trachea. I erupt into a coughing fit that shakes the La-Z-Boy. Behind his desk, Goo flails frantically; he knows what a sharp horse trader I am, and if I choke to death he’s completely out of bargaining chips to push this deal through. Even after I get the little crumb-bastard out of my lungs, I don’t say anything for a long time. Because, I mean, honestly.
Goo is a big wheel. If he slept, and if he did it in a bed, he wouldn't get out of that bed for anything less than business that means business. Yet, he’s meeting with me personally about my dinner plans? How the bleeding fuck could me chewing steak with a nonentity like dear brother Adrian possibly interest a transplanar crime lord? Goo is hopeless by human standards, but human standards aren’t the only standards. He’s a player on the transplanar stage because, even if he doesn’t quite understand how different bits of time connect up, he’s got a knack for being in the right place when they do. And he wants me to accept a dinner invitation. Why?
It’s a trap. That goes without saying. But for whom? Not me or Adrian. So what the deuce is going on? The worst part is, I’m absolutely fascinated. I have to find out more. I am just clever enough to know how bally stupid this is, but I’m still going to do it. “Not a chance,” I say. “Out of the question. On the other hand, I will have dinner with dear brother Adrian if you give me ten thousand dollars.”
Goo shakes his grotesque Obama-head. He’s no fool -- he knows that you never agree to the other chap’s first offer. “This is unacceptable,” he gurgles. “You must do better.”
“Right-oh,” I say. “In that case, I will have dinner with Adrian, and in exchange you will give me twenty thousand dollars, plus I get to borrow any of your cars whenever I like. It’s not as if you can drive them, anyway.”
I can feel the excitement radiating from Goo. He’s still got one more bargaining tactic up his sleeve.
“You must sweeten the thing that is the pot,” he blorps.
I un-recline, stand up, and pull out another ginger snap. I toss it onto the desk. Goo wuffles. “It is acceptable.”
My kidnappers look at one another. Their masks are goldfish faces, big round popeyed things. One of them pulls out a dog-eared booklet and flips through it. He points at a page, and the other nods. They turn to me. They laugh.
It is horrible, horrible laughter.
I mean it, I’ve never heard such awful laughter. The silly sods are just saying “ha ha ha” at me over and over again. I sigh. “No, come on now. Make a bit of an effort, what?” And since they abducted me before I could laugh at Bansi Butcher, I start laughing at them instead. We drive and drive, and by the time the van stops I’ve got them doing a pretty fair job of it. “It’s still not good, gentlemen,” I say. “Tell Goo that what you say isn’t half so important as how you say it. Valuable life lesson, that.”
They seem hurt. One of them scratches under his mask. “Laughter indicates friendliness,” he says, “and is an expression of goodwill.”
“Bunging a chap into your rotten van when he’s talking to a friend indicates something else entirely,” I reply. “Anyhow, where’s your boss? I presume he wants to make a deal?”
Goo always wants to make a deal. That’s his way of showing off. DC’s fishiest gangster has worked hard to master the art of contingent logic -- his kind have almost no sense of causality -- and he never passes up a chance to strut his stuff. Goo may have a face like an octopus’s arse, but he’s as vain as the day is long. Just look at the name he picked for himself: it’s an acronym, and a misleading one. He’s not so great, and compared to some planars he’s not old at all.
Still, I suppose there is only one of him.
The bully-boys chuck me into Goo’s basement office. It’s a homey place, none of that new-money chic, but a bit damp and chilly because most of the floor’s missing. Goo had it knocked out so that he can sit in a pool of Potomac river water. He’s sitting there now.
“Hullo, Goo,” I say.
Goo gleeps with joy. He likes it when I come to visit, because I admire him immensely -- he knows this because I told him so once, and he hails from a universe that doesn’t understand sarcasm. “The one that is named I’m called Spex you squiddy bastard!” he burbles. “You were at a location that is not this one, and now you are at a location that is this one!”
“Great to be here,” I say. “Adore the new mask. You look just like Mister Obama.”
The grinning part of Goo’s beach-ball-sized latex mask ripples as, somewhere underneath it, tentacles writhe with smug satisfaction. He’s wearing a smart charcoal suit with a pink silk pocket square, presumably the handiwork of a tailor accustomed to clothing Volkswagens. The jolly red oven mitts protruding from his sleeves might almost make you believe that he’s got hands underneath them.
I plop down in a burgundy La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the mahogany desk that hides the less-easily-disguised bits of Goo’s anatomy. “So, Goo old chum,” I say. “Let’s negotiate.”
Time works differently where Goo’s from. He’s used to a flow of history that skips like a scratched record played with a bent needle. His kind are generally a laid-back lot, not worrying too much about a life that’s lived in scattered bits and pieces. When Goo wandered into my world, however, he soon realized that his own actions could reliably influence other people’s. Took to it like a duck to water. After a brief reign of unintentional terror he learned the house rules regarding the proper sequence for conducting business -- now he threatens people before he kills them -- and at this point he’s as upstanding a citizen as our shadowy little community can boast of. And he loves to negotiate.
Goo makes a pleased wet sound. “A deal is the thing that I would like to make at this moment in time. Your counteroffer is unacceptable.”
I pull the handle of the recliner. It slumps me backwards, kicking my feet off the ground and catching me in a saggy polyester nest. “Haven’t made a counteroffer yet, old boy,” I say. “Haven’t heard the offer yet. Think I can guess what it’s about, though.”
The Obama mask squirms in discomfort. Guessing confuses Goo. “Do not be doing the thing that is projecting analysis of possible events. It is very rude. What will instead happen is the saying of my offer, which precedes your counteroffer, which is unacceptable.”
I nod. I’m genuinely curious to hear what Goo has to say, because he’s the one who dumped that Newgie at the Mortal Coil. He might be willing to tell me where he got her from in the first place. Maybe he wants me to kill her. Maybe he knows that I already did; this wouldn’t be the first time he brokered a deal for something that’s already happened, just to make sure.
“This is the offer that I make at this point in time,” Goo rumbles. He huffs and hunches with excitement. “You will cause the Washington Nationals team of baseball to triumph as winners of the Series of the World at a point in time ten million years before this time. In exchange, I will kill you.”
Goo read a book on negotiation. He is concealing his real goal, as well as offering a price far below what he is actually willing to pay.
“I do not accept your offer,” I say. I pull open my messenger bag, because I never got that breakfast Blind Allie promised and I’m famished. I rip the plastic off a roll of ginger snaps and hold one up for inspection. “Here’s my counter-offer. I will eat this cookie, and in exchange, you will watch me eat this cookie.”
I eat the cookie. Goo quivers in admiration; his book spoke in hushed tones of men who can broker and execute deals with this kind of aplomb. My negotiating prowess only daunts him momentarily, however. “Your counteroffer is unacceptable,” he blurps. “Allow me to suggest a deal that is different from the other deal.”
I wave my permission.
Goo rubs his oven mitts together and leans forward in his puddle. “You will eat the thing that is dinner,” he hisses. “You will eat it with the person who is your brother. You will do this at the time that is tonight. In exchange, I will kill you.”
A crumb of ginger snap makes a jump for my trachea. I erupt into a coughing fit that shakes the La-Z-Boy. Behind his desk, Goo flails frantically; he knows what a sharp horse trader I am, and if I choke to death he’s completely out of bargaining chips to push this deal through. Even after I get the little crumb-bastard out of my lungs, I don’t say anything for a long time. Because, I mean, honestly.
Goo is a big wheel. If he slept, and if he did it in a bed, he wouldn't get out of that bed for anything less than business that means business. Yet, he’s meeting with me personally about my dinner plans? How the bleeding fuck could me chewing steak with a nonentity like dear brother Adrian possibly interest a transplanar crime lord? Goo is hopeless by human standards, but human standards aren’t the only standards. He’s a player on the transplanar stage because, even if he doesn’t quite understand how different bits of time connect up, he’s got a knack for being in the right place when they do. And he wants me to accept a dinner invitation. Why?
It’s a trap. That goes without saying. But for whom? Not me or Adrian. So what the deuce is going on? The worst part is, I’m absolutely fascinated. I have to find out more. I am just clever enough to know how bally stupid this is, but I’m still going to do it. “Not a chance,” I say. “Out of the question. On the other hand, I will have dinner with dear brother Adrian if you give me ten thousand dollars.”
Goo shakes his grotesque Obama-head. He’s no fool -- he knows that you never agree to the other chap’s first offer. “This is unacceptable,” he gurgles. “You must do better.”
“Right-oh,” I say. “In that case, I will have dinner with Adrian, and in exchange you will give me twenty thousand dollars, plus I get to borrow any of your cars whenever I like. It’s not as if you can drive them, anyway.”
I can feel the excitement radiating from Goo. He’s still got one more bargaining tactic up his sleeve.
“You must sweeten the thing that is the pot,” he blorps.
I un-recline, stand up, and pull out another ginger snap. I toss it onto the desk. Goo wuffles. “It is acceptable.”
11.5.09
I-I-V
“Pop her into first, Bansi old chap.” I lean on the door of the old hearse-looking ambulance as Bansi Butcher fumbles with the gearshift. “Got to let out the clutch though, what? Here, let me have a go.”
“Cheers, Spex.” Bansi undoes his seatbelt and opens the door. He’s a transatlantic import like myself -- his father’s a diplomat, London by way of Mumbai. “Three, and two, and one.”
He slides out of the driver’s seat like a three-hundred-pound Indian eel. I leap in as the ambulance starts to roll. I clutch, shift, and set the handbrake. “There we are. Sweet as a nut.”
“Hey, Spex!” Blind Allie’s waving in my general direction from the steps of the Mortal Coil. “Your brother’s on the phone! He says he’s got reservations at Picardie for eight o’clock tonight. Wanna talk to him?”
“Not on your bally life!” I shout back. “Not now, and not tonight at eight o’clock. Tell dear brother Adrian to go fuck himself, only not in a nice way.”
Allie shrugs and goes back inside. I toss Bansi his keys. “Why are you driving, anyhow? Where’s your cousin?”
He pockets the keys with a sheepish grin. “Rajiv had to work. Mum got it started, but parking’s tricky. I keep meaning to learn, I do.”
“Don’t you dare,” I say. I slap his mountainous shoulder. “We can’t go wasting your brain cells on trifles, what?”
“That’s what Mum says.” He blushes. Thirty years old, Bansi’s already lost most of his hair. Shy bloke, but when he laughs he has to bend at the waist and gasp until his cheeks stop bouncing. “She says I’m not allowed to do the washing-up either. Useless task memorization she calls it, might stop me learning something else.”
“Listen to your mum.”
Bansi and I look down at the corpse lying between two parked cars in front of the Coil. A few minutes earlier it had looked like a half-naked prostitute with torn restraint bracelets on her wrists, but death has a way of stripping off illusions. The thing that lies on the noon-hot asphalt is a five-foot cylinder of glassy green-blue rubber covered with whiskery tendrils. A dark and throbbing ooze drifts in its core, some persisting biological function that doesn’t realize that the guest is gone and the party’s over. Bansi nods. “Yeah, I’ll ‘ave it. Let me grab me tools.”
“This is why we love you, Bansi,” I say. “Your mum must be pink with pride.”
Bansi pulls a crusty black case out of the back of the ambulance. “She says I’m cleverer than her because I eat more fish. At least, she says that when it’s fish fingers for tea.”
“She ought to know, what?” I adore Bansi’s mum. She was head of psychopathology at the Upshur Institute for Clinical Psychology in Illinois before Georgetown University Hospital threw the bank at her to lecture in DC.
“I guess.” Bansi sets the case down next to the corpse. He pops the catches and pulls out a thing like a bent machete. “I reckon she’s having me on about the fish-thing, though. I’ve never really studied human neurochemistry, but just ‘coz docosahexaenoic acid’s a necessary precursor for eicosanoid synthesis don’t mean me brain will fall out if I don’t eat up.”
An old friend once explained to me that chess isn’t really a game. It’s a math problem, and it has a solution: go black, and don’t go back. Whoever plays the black pieces always takes the second turn, which means they can win every game automatically. There’s a formula for it: no matter what the white pieces get up to, black can always force a win. The problem is, our squishy little brains (and even the terabyte processors that help Wal-Mart sell dog food) are too titchy to contain that formula. The last grandmaster the world will ever need will be the mental equivalent of the chap who gets his picture put up behind the bar for eating the hundred-ounce Impossiburger at one sitting.
I’ve gone a bit off the topic, but what I’m getting at is this: Bansi trying to work a gearshift is the opposite of somebody trying to learn the formula for chess. It’s too small a problem to be managed by a bloke whose mechanical aptitude doesn’t have an upper limit. I’ve watched him stare at a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter for twenty minutes because he wouldn’t let me help him make a sandwich, but pop him in the space shuttle and he’ll parallel-park the thing between Saturn’s rings without a glance at the owner’s manual.
“Bloody brilliant,” Bansi murmurs as he sets to work with his oddly-shaped blade. He peels off one of the cartilaginous rings that encircle the body and slides it into a plastic bag. “I’ll give you two hundred for it.”
“Two hundred thou?” My my, this is old Spex’s lucky day, what? Doing odd jobs for odd people isn’t quite the career Pater had in mind, but it’s certainly paying the bills. “I suppose I can keep body and soul together on that, for the nonce.”
“Nuh-uh.” Bansi runs his thumb over glistening membranes and pulls out a shorter blade with a serrated edge. “Two hundred. It’s what’s in me wallet.”
This tough stuff isn’t like Bansi. “Oh, come now,” I say. “It’s a bally transplanar receptacle, and fresh as a daisy. And dash it all … well, you’re the expert of course, but I’ve never seen one like this in all my puff. I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a warehouse full of the things?”
“Nah, s’not that.” Bansi digs the blade into the fibrous trunk, sawing through the outer tissues to expose the pulsating purplish-black liquid at the core. “This thing’s a semirigid vermiform, and I’ll be buggered if that’s not bioperfect amphichirality around the longitudinal axis. You understand? Bioperfect amphichirality.”
I nod. “You don’t get that sort of amphichirality anymore. Not these days. I blame the schools.”
“No, Spex, mate. Listen.” Bansi scratches his nose on his shoulder and dips a finger into the dark ooze. He makes little stirring-movements. A tiny whirlpool forms -- and remains, vortexing away, after he pulls back his hand. “The projection medium looks about like what you’d expect, but you’ve got loads more of it than what you get in one of your garden-variety maniped or cognoc receptacles. High-traffic carrier, mate, serious egoavailability. But all that’s beside the point -- on superstructure alone, this thing’s ataxonomic.”
Dear brother Adrian and I both had third-period Latin at Eton. I learned quite a bit before I gave up trying to out-study him and just started spiking his Orangina. “Ataxonomic, eh? Bit of a rarity, then. Collector’s item.”
“Not rare, boyo. Unique, far as I know.” Bansi’s got a syringe out, and he’s filling plastic ampoules with the wiggling goop. “This xenostructure hasn’t been articulated, at least not clinically. You see it in books, but only in the last couple centuries, and there’s no artifactual reference.”
This seems a bit of an odd haggling strategy on Bansi’s part. “Well, then. Why the piffling price tag? You got me twelve thou for that bit of macrosquid the Smithsonian bought, but you don’t know one mad old boffin in a castle somewhere who’ll shell out a few beans for this unique xeno-whatsit?”
Bansi wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of one hairy wrist. “Not happening, mate.” He looks up, his big brown cow-eyes goofy with excitement. “This is coming home with me.”
I sigh. “Dash it,” I retort weakly. The blighter goes back to work -- I’d like to punch him on the back of his shiny head for putting his scientific curiosity over my pay packet, but he’s the only fence for biologicals I’ve ever trusted. Since I only trust him because he doesn’t give a fuck about the money, I suppose I must make allowances. “Perhaps a barter, then, what? Your mum’s got run of the morgue, and I know a chap who’ll take all the pineal glands I can get him. Surely a N-bally-G receptacle’s worth more than--”
“Wozzat?” Bansi drops an ampoule of inky glup. It bounces on the pavement and rolls under a car. “What makes you think it’s a Newgie?”
“She spoke the lingo,” I reply. “Still not sure why she was wandering about, but … what, you off?”
Bansi is throwing his knives and things back into the case. He surges to his feet. “Come on, get the door.” He’s sweating more than usual as he wraps his arms around the corpse. I open the back of the ambulance, and he heaves the thing in. “Spex, mate -- couldn’t do me a favor?” He takes out his wallet and presses a crumply wad of bills into my hand. “Don’t go talking about this, eh? I need at least a week with it, and if the Novi find out before I’m done--”
I’m about to laugh right in Bansi’s earnest, dripping face. The chap’s a wizard with machines, especially living ones, but he’s gullible as a babe in arms. Nobody knows much about the so-called New God planars, at least nobody who mixes with the general community of those-in-the-know, and I’ll admit that I’m a trifle worried about having found one in my favorite bar. Still, use a bit of common sense, what? Sometimes extrauniversal tourists develop followings among my fellow naked apes, but the rumors about Novi Dei cultists are the stuff that bad movies are made of. Bansi’s afraid that masked men are going to come along in a black van and make him disappear for intruding on their sacred silliness.
As I say, I am just about to laugh at Bansi when a black van screeches to a stop behind me. Two chaps in masks jump out. They grab my arms, throw me into the back, and speed away.
“Cheers, Spex.” Bansi undoes his seatbelt and opens the door. He’s a transatlantic import like myself -- his father’s a diplomat, London by way of Mumbai. “Three, and two, and one.”
He slides out of the driver’s seat like a three-hundred-pound Indian eel. I leap in as the ambulance starts to roll. I clutch, shift, and set the handbrake. “There we are. Sweet as a nut.”
“Hey, Spex!” Blind Allie’s waving in my general direction from the steps of the Mortal Coil. “Your brother’s on the phone! He says he’s got reservations at Picardie for eight o’clock tonight. Wanna talk to him?”
“Not on your bally life!” I shout back. “Not now, and not tonight at eight o’clock. Tell dear brother Adrian to go fuck himself, only not in a nice way.”
Allie shrugs and goes back inside. I toss Bansi his keys. “Why are you driving, anyhow? Where’s your cousin?”
He pockets the keys with a sheepish grin. “Rajiv had to work. Mum got it started, but parking’s tricky. I keep meaning to learn, I do.”
“Don’t you dare,” I say. I slap his mountainous shoulder. “We can’t go wasting your brain cells on trifles, what?”
“That’s what Mum says.” He blushes. Thirty years old, Bansi’s already lost most of his hair. Shy bloke, but when he laughs he has to bend at the waist and gasp until his cheeks stop bouncing. “She says I’m not allowed to do the washing-up either. Useless task memorization she calls it, might stop me learning something else.”
“Listen to your mum.”
Bansi and I look down at the corpse lying between two parked cars in front of the Coil. A few minutes earlier it had looked like a half-naked prostitute with torn restraint bracelets on her wrists, but death has a way of stripping off illusions. The thing that lies on the noon-hot asphalt is a five-foot cylinder of glassy green-blue rubber covered with whiskery tendrils. A dark and throbbing ooze drifts in its core, some persisting biological function that doesn’t realize that the guest is gone and the party’s over. Bansi nods. “Yeah, I’ll ‘ave it. Let me grab me tools.”
“This is why we love you, Bansi,” I say. “Your mum must be pink with pride.”
Bansi pulls a crusty black case out of the back of the ambulance. “She says I’m cleverer than her because I eat more fish. At least, she says that when it’s fish fingers for tea.”
“She ought to know, what?” I adore Bansi’s mum. She was head of psychopathology at the Upshur Institute for Clinical Psychology in Illinois before Georgetown University Hospital threw the bank at her to lecture in DC.
“I guess.” Bansi sets the case down next to the corpse. He pops the catches and pulls out a thing like a bent machete. “I reckon she’s having me on about the fish-thing, though. I’ve never really studied human neurochemistry, but just ‘coz docosahexaenoic acid’s a necessary precursor for eicosanoid synthesis don’t mean me brain will fall out if I don’t eat up.”
An old friend once explained to me that chess isn’t really a game. It’s a math problem, and it has a solution: go black, and don’t go back. Whoever plays the black pieces always takes the second turn, which means they can win every game automatically. There’s a formula for it: no matter what the white pieces get up to, black can always force a win. The problem is, our squishy little brains (and even the terabyte processors that help Wal-Mart sell dog food) are too titchy to contain that formula. The last grandmaster the world will ever need will be the mental equivalent of the chap who gets his picture put up behind the bar for eating the hundred-ounce Impossiburger at one sitting.
I’ve gone a bit off the topic, but what I’m getting at is this: Bansi trying to work a gearshift is the opposite of somebody trying to learn the formula for chess. It’s too small a problem to be managed by a bloke whose mechanical aptitude doesn’t have an upper limit. I’ve watched him stare at a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter for twenty minutes because he wouldn’t let me help him make a sandwich, but pop him in the space shuttle and he’ll parallel-park the thing between Saturn’s rings without a glance at the owner’s manual.
“Bloody brilliant,” Bansi murmurs as he sets to work with his oddly-shaped blade. He peels off one of the cartilaginous rings that encircle the body and slides it into a plastic bag. “I’ll give you two hundred for it.”
“Two hundred thou?” My my, this is old Spex’s lucky day, what? Doing odd jobs for odd people isn’t quite the career Pater had in mind, but it’s certainly paying the bills. “I suppose I can keep body and soul together on that, for the nonce.”
“Nuh-uh.” Bansi runs his thumb over glistening membranes and pulls out a shorter blade with a serrated edge. “Two hundred. It’s what’s in me wallet.”
This tough stuff isn’t like Bansi. “Oh, come now,” I say. “It’s a bally transplanar receptacle, and fresh as a daisy. And dash it all … well, you’re the expert of course, but I’ve never seen one like this in all my puff. I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a warehouse full of the things?”
“Nah, s’not that.” Bansi digs the blade into the fibrous trunk, sawing through the outer tissues to expose the pulsating purplish-black liquid at the core. “This thing’s a semirigid vermiform, and I’ll be buggered if that’s not bioperfect amphichirality around the longitudinal axis. You understand? Bioperfect amphichirality.”
I nod. “You don’t get that sort of amphichirality anymore. Not these days. I blame the schools.”
“No, Spex, mate. Listen.” Bansi scratches his nose on his shoulder and dips a finger into the dark ooze. He makes little stirring-movements. A tiny whirlpool forms -- and remains, vortexing away, after he pulls back his hand. “The projection medium looks about like what you’d expect, but you’ve got loads more of it than what you get in one of your garden-variety maniped or cognoc receptacles. High-traffic carrier, mate, serious egoavailability. But all that’s beside the point -- on superstructure alone, this thing’s ataxonomic.”
Dear brother Adrian and I both had third-period Latin at Eton. I learned quite a bit before I gave up trying to out-study him and just started spiking his Orangina. “Ataxonomic, eh? Bit of a rarity, then. Collector’s item.”
“Not rare, boyo. Unique, far as I know.” Bansi’s got a syringe out, and he’s filling plastic ampoules with the wiggling goop. “This xenostructure hasn’t been articulated, at least not clinically. You see it in books, but only in the last couple centuries, and there’s no artifactual reference.”
This seems a bit of an odd haggling strategy on Bansi’s part. “Well, then. Why the piffling price tag? You got me twelve thou for that bit of macrosquid the Smithsonian bought, but you don’t know one mad old boffin in a castle somewhere who’ll shell out a few beans for this unique xeno-whatsit?”
Bansi wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of one hairy wrist. “Not happening, mate.” He looks up, his big brown cow-eyes goofy with excitement. “This is coming home with me.”
I sigh. “Dash it,” I retort weakly. The blighter goes back to work -- I’d like to punch him on the back of his shiny head for putting his scientific curiosity over my pay packet, but he’s the only fence for biologicals I’ve ever trusted. Since I only trust him because he doesn’t give a fuck about the money, I suppose I must make allowances. “Perhaps a barter, then, what? Your mum’s got run of the morgue, and I know a chap who’ll take all the pineal glands I can get him. Surely a N-bally-G receptacle’s worth more than--”
“Wozzat?” Bansi drops an ampoule of inky glup. It bounces on the pavement and rolls under a car. “What makes you think it’s a Newgie?”
“She spoke the lingo,” I reply. “Still not sure why she was wandering about, but … what, you off?”
Bansi is throwing his knives and things back into the case. He surges to his feet. “Come on, get the door.” He’s sweating more than usual as he wraps his arms around the corpse. I open the back of the ambulance, and he heaves the thing in. “Spex, mate -- couldn’t do me a favor?” He takes out his wallet and presses a crumply wad of bills into my hand. “Don’t go talking about this, eh? I need at least a week with it, and if the Novi find out before I’m done--”
I’m about to laugh right in Bansi’s earnest, dripping face. The chap’s a wizard with machines, especially living ones, but he’s gullible as a babe in arms. Nobody knows much about the so-called New God planars, at least nobody who mixes with the general community of those-in-the-know, and I’ll admit that I’m a trifle worried about having found one in my favorite bar. Still, use a bit of common sense, what? Sometimes extrauniversal tourists develop followings among my fellow naked apes, but the rumors about Novi Dei cultists are the stuff that bad movies are made of. Bansi’s afraid that masked men are going to come along in a black van and make him disappear for intruding on their sacred silliness.
As I say, I am just about to laugh at Bansi when a black van screeches to a stop behind me. Two chaps in masks jump out. They grab my arms, throw me into the back, and speed away.
6.5.09
I-I-IV
“Listen to me.” I press Blind Allie against the door of the men's loo, my hands around her upper arms. “This is a deadly serious business, old girl. I need you to follow my instructions to the fucking letter. Understand?”
She catches me by the left wrist and does sort of a twist-thing. Now I’m pointed the other way with a brick wall pushing my shades into my face, and my left arm is more or less Blind Allie’s property. “That’s enough touchy-touchy for right now, Spex,” she chides. “And enough drama-queening out of you. What’s it gonna take for you to get Miss No-Pants out of my bar?”
“Ouch. Bottle of whiskey,” I reply. “Best you’ve got in the house. You’ll get it all back, cross my heart.”
She thinks about this for a moment. “Best-best, or the best you ever buy?”
“Best-best,” I reply. “Tippity-top, spare no expense.”
She relaxes her grip. “There’s an open bottle of Dalmore Reserve up front. I don’t know what you’ve got planned,” she says, “but I’m gonna count the drops. I’ll know if one’s missing.”
“And two clean glasses, what?”
“Sure, Spex. Do your thing.”
So, tally ho then. She takes off. I, with stately gait and measured stride, cross the stuffy little back bar of the Mortal Coil towards the half-naked woman who has scared some of the scariest people on the planet away from their drinks. I stop at a respectful distance. I clear my throat. “So, what’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?”
Her eyes don’t move from their streaky reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She exhales another cloud of inexplicable smoke. I clear a pair of unfinished lunches off a table, walk up behind her, and grab a double-handful of hair that has been dyed the color of filth. “Alright, now. Upsie-daisy.”
With one good heave I pull her backwards off the barstool and lug her across the room. She slumps onto the sticky varnished tabletop like a roll of sodden carpet. She lies there, staring up at the ceiling, naked but for a bustier and stockings. And the restraint bracelets, of course -- top of the line Kevlar things, fried threads of strong-as-steel fabric hanging loose where they’ve been torn.
Blind Allie returns with the refreshments. “Where you at, baby? Gimme a shout.”
“Over here, Allie. Ta.” I take the bottle and glasses from her. “Might want to grab a fire extinguisher as well.”
She snorts and departs. I pull out a chair and plop the half-bare stranger into a sitting position. I take a seat across the table from her. Her eyes do not exactly focus as I pop open the bottle -– not the '62, but excellent stuff nonetheless -- but there’s a certain … presence. An awareness.
I pour myself a generous dram, then set an empty glass in front of my silent companion. When Allie returns, dragging a big red compressed-foam extinguisher, I am watching the stranger's glass slowly fill with a rich caramel-colored liquid.
Allie drops the extinguisher at my feet. “So what’s up? Gimme the color commentary. Has she said anything? What’s she doing?”
I look at the stranger, at her ugly dye-job, at the tattered restraints. I look at the brimming glass in front of her. “She hasn’t said a word. And what she's doing is just what anybody who’s alone in a new city would do, what? She’s trying to fit in.”
I reach across, pick up the stranger’s glass, and knock back its contents. Instantly my throat is on fire, and my nose is filled with smoke. The Dalmore burns all the way down. “Thanks be for single malts, married women, and any combination of the two,” I say. “And for generous new friends.” I set the empty glass back on the table. Once again, it slowly fills. “Here’s a riddle for you, Allie old girl. Why did Helen Keller fuck the one-armed rabbi?”
She thinks on that for a moment. In the meantime, I pull a small sheet of plywood and a Zippo lighter out of my green canvas messenger bag. Allie shrugs. “I give up. Why did she?”
“Because he drives a Ferrari.” Once more I shoot the stranger’s whiskey. “Now that we’ve broken the ice, I think it’s time to break the silence. Time for a conversation. We’ve just got to put this charming lady in her element, and I’ve got the awfulest suspicion I know what that is.”
Imagine you’re blind, deaf and dumb. The only way you can communicate with the world is by writing things down. But nobody else can read your language, and anyhow, you haven't got anything to write with. Now imagine trying to pass yourself off as a native in an environment that operates on a completely different set of social standards and physical laws from what you’re used to. A bit frustrating, what? There are a thousand possible explanations for this strange woman, but I have a hunch. Of all the elements that might be hers, one in particular makes me rather nervous.
There is a language. Not a well-known language, at least in these parts. I certainly don’t speak it. But I know enough to find out if she does.
I lean across the table. I bend my head down to her ear. I flick the Zippo and hold the flame close to my lips. “*******,” I say.
The stranger flexes. Every muscle fiber in her body clenches at once, arching her back and pulling her face into a beastly grimace. I've no doubt my accent is atrocious, but I don’t need her to tell me the way to the beach. I just need an answer. “Allie? Have that fire extinguisher ready, there’s a dear.” I hold the sheet of plywood out at arm’s length and raise it to the stranger’s mouth.
Ahh. So that’s how you pronounce it.
I drop the flaming board onto the floor and, relieving Allie of her burden, shoosh foam all over it. Allie jumps back as it splashes her feet.
“Spex? Spex, you asshole, what are you doing to my bar?”
I pick up the sodden plywood and shake off the suds. The symbol that's seared into it is one I’ve seen before. It’s not a Cambrian glyph, or one of the middle-epoch runes that Hentchler loves so dearly. This symbol has only turned up quite recently in human history. Aleister Crowley had it tattooed on his left buttock. Madame Blavatsky had it stamped in silver and strung on a chain that she wore to her grave. Scholars will tell you that it means ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ or ‘a journey to an unknown land’. Scholars are arseholes.
“Allie?” I say. “Ring up Bansi Butcher.”
She’s wiping her feet off with a napkin. She’d been glowering at the air a few feet to my right, but now she orients on my voice and gives me the full force. “Nuh-uh. Not in here, not in my place.”
“Have a heart, old girl,” I wheedle. “You want me to do it in the street? Like a bally dog?”
“Yes.”
“Cold-hearted brute.” I sigh. “Well, right-ho then. But ring Bansi.”
Hentchler and Dickey stare as I stagger through the front bar with the half-naked stranger slung over my shoulder. I pay them no heed. Allie holds the front door for me.
I manage an awkward bow as I pass the old fruit vendor. “Hail to thee, Reggie. Nothing to be alarmed about, the lady’s just ill.”
I look up and down the street. There’s nobody about that I can see. I plop the unresisting stranger down on the asphalt between two parked cars; she sits there, with the eyes that aren’t really hers staring through me. I pull out the VoltMeister v350 and push the metal prongs into the pudgy, blotchy flesh under her chin.
“Bon voyage, what?" I murmur. "Don’t bother to write, and try not to come back. I’ve no idea what pious sod called you here, but you really must screen your prayers more carefully. Cheerio, then.”
Bzzzzzzzt
What falls to the ground looks nothing like the woman with the fake tan and bad dye-job. A thing like a five-foot stalk of asparagus, translucent green-blue and covered with short wiry tendrils, flops onto the pavement. Inside it, a cloud of thick, purplish-black ink throbs slowly and without purpose. The tourist has returned home. What’s left is just the receptacle, an empty paper cup tossed out into the street.
I stand up to find Dickey hovering behind me. He’s staring down at the corpse. “What … the fuck … is that?” he asks at last. “Where did it come from?”
I lay a hand on his shoulder. “Those, Dickey old boy, are the wrong questions entirely. For one thousand dollars, I will tell you what the right question is.”
He scratches that perfect Aryan chin of his. He pulls out his wallet and hands over an embossed traveler's cheque, which I slide into the pocket of my orange hunting trousers.
“The correct question, Dickey old bean, is not what or how, but why. Specifically, why now. Now fuck off.” And with that I boost myself over the corpse and cross the street to the ambulance that has just pulled up. “Hullo, Bansi,” I say through the driver’s window. I jerk my thumb back over my shoulder. “There’s your patient. I’ll take my twenty percent up front, if you don’t mind.”
She catches me by the left wrist and does sort of a twist-thing. Now I’m pointed the other way with a brick wall pushing my shades into my face, and my left arm is more or less Blind Allie’s property. “That’s enough touchy-touchy for right now, Spex,” she chides. “And enough drama-queening out of you. What’s it gonna take for you to get Miss No-Pants out of my bar?”
“Ouch. Bottle of whiskey,” I reply. “Best you’ve got in the house. You’ll get it all back, cross my heart.”
She thinks about this for a moment. “Best-best, or the best you ever buy?”
“Best-best,” I reply. “Tippity-top, spare no expense.”
She relaxes her grip. “There’s an open bottle of Dalmore Reserve up front. I don’t know what you’ve got planned,” she says, “but I’m gonna count the drops. I’ll know if one’s missing.”
“And two clean glasses, what?”
“Sure, Spex. Do your thing.”
So, tally ho then. She takes off. I, with stately gait and measured stride, cross the stuffy little back bar of the Mortal Coil towards the half-naked woman who has scared some of the scariest people on the planet away from their drinks. I stop at a respectful distance. I clear my throat. “So, what’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?”
Her eyes don’t move from their streaky reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She exhales another cloud of inexplicable smoke. I clear a pair of unfinished lunches off a table, walk up behind her, and grab a double-handful of hair that has been dyed the color of filth. “Alright, now. Upsie-daisy.”
With one good heave I pull her backwards off the barstool and lug her across the room. She slumps onto the sticky varnished tabletop like a roll of sodden carpet. She lies there, staring up at the ceiling, naked but for a bustier and stockings. And the restraint bracelets, of course -- top of the line Kevlar things, fried threads of strong-as-steel fabric hanging loose where they’ve been torn.
Blind Allie returns with the refreshments. “Where you at, baby? Gimme a shout.”
“Over here, Allie. Ta.” I take the bottle and glasses from her. “Might want to grab a fire extinguisher as well.”
She snorts and departs. I pull out a chair and plop the half-bare stranger into a sitting position. I take a seat across the table from her. Her eyes do not exactly focus as I pop open the bottle -– not the '62, but excellent stuff nonetheless -- but there’s a certain … presence. An awareness.
I pour myself a generous dram, then set an empty glass in front of my silent companion. When Allie returns, dragging a big red compressed-foam extinguisher, I am watching the stranger's glass slowly fill with a rich caramel-colored liquid.
Allie drops the extinguisher at my feet. “So what’s up? Gimme the color commentary. Has she said anything? What’s she doing?”
I look at the stranger, at her ugly dye-job, at the tattered restraints. I look at the brimming glass in front of her. “She hasn’t said a word. And what she's doing is just what anybody who’s alone in a new city would do, what? She’s trying to fit in.”
I reach across, pick up the stranger’s glass, and knock back its contents. Instantly my throat is on fire, and my nose is filled with smoke. The Dalmore burns all the way down. “Thanks be for single malts, married women, and any combination of the two,” I say. “And for generous new friends.” I set the empty glass back on the table. Once again, it slowly fills. “Here’s a riddle for you, Allie old girl. Why did Helen Keller fuck the one-armed rabbi?”
She thinks on that for a moment. In the meantime, I pull a small sheet of plywood and a Zippo lighter out of my green canvas messenger bag. Allie shrugs. “I give up. Why did she?”
“Because he drives a Ferrari.” Once more I shoot the stranger’s whiskey. “Now that we’ve broken the ice, I think it’s time to break the silence. Time for a conversation. We’ve just got to put this charming lady in her element, and I’ve got the awfulest suspicion I know what that is.”
Imagine you’re blind, deaf and dumb. The only way you can communicate with the world is by writing things down. But nobody else can read your language, and anyhow, you haven't got anything to write with. Now imagine trying to pass yourself off as a native in an environment that operates on a completely different set of social standards and physical laws from what you’re used to. A bit frustrating, what? There are a thousand possible explanations for this strange woman, but I have a hunch. Of all the elements that might be hers, one in particular makes me rather nervous.
There is a language. Not a well-known language, at least in these parts. I certainly don’t speak it. But I know enough to find out if she does.
I lean across the table. I bend my head down to her ear. I flick the Zippo and hold the flame close to my lips. “*******,” I say.
The stranger flexes. Every muscle fiber in her body clenches at once, arching her back and pulling her face into a beastly grimace. I've no doubt my accent is atrocious, but I don’t need her to tell me the way to the beach. I just need an answer. “Allie? Have that fire extinguisher ready, there’s a dear.” I hold the sheet of plywood out at arm’s length and raise it to the stranger’s mouth.
Ahh. So that’s how you pronounce it.
I drop the flaming board onto the floor and, relieving Allie of her burden, shoosh foam all over it. Allie jumps back as it splashes her feet.
“Spex? Spex, you asshole, what are you doing to my bar?”
I pick up the sodden plywood and shake off the suds. The symbol that's seared into it is one I’ve seen before. It’s not a Cambrian glyph, or one of the middle-epoch runes that Hentchler loves so dearly. This symbol has only turned up quite recently in human history. Aleister Crowley had it tattooed on his left buttock. Madame Blavatsky had it stamped in silver and strung on a chain that she wore to her grave. Scholars will tell you that it means ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ or ‘a journey to an unknown land’. Scholars are arseholes.
“Allie?” I say. “Ring up Bansi Butcher.”
She’s wiping her feet off with a napkin. She’d been glowering at the air a few feet to my right, but now she orients on my voice and gives me the full force. “Nuh-uh. Not in here, not in my place.”
“Have a heart, old girl,” I wheedle. “You want me to do it in the street? Like a bally dog?”
“Yes.”
“Cold-hearted brute.” I sigh. “Well, right-ho then. But ring Bansi.”
Hentchler and Dickey stare as I stagger through the front bar with the half-naked stranger slung over my shoulder. I pay them no heed. Allie holds the front door for me.
I manage an awkward bow as I pass the old fruit vendor. “Hail to thee, Reggie. Nothing to be alarmed about, the lady’s just ill.”
I look up and down the street. There’s nobody about that I can see. I plop the unresisting stranger down on the asphalt between two parked cars; she sits there, with the eyes that aren’t really hers staring through me. I pull out the VoltMeister v350 and push the metal prongs into the pudgy, blotchy flesh under her chin.
“Bon voyage, what?" I murmur. "Don’t bother to write, and try not to come back. I’ve no idea what pious sod called you here, but you really must screen your prayers more carefully. Cheerio, then.”
Bzzzzzzzt
What falls to the ground looks nothing like the woman with the fake tan and bad dye-job. A thing like a five-foot stalk of asparagus, translucent green-blue and covered with short wiry tendrils, flops onto the pavement. Inside it, a cloud of thick, purplish-black ink throbs slowly and without purpose. The tourist has returned home. What’s left is just the receptacle, an empty paper cup tossed out into the street.
I stand up to find Dickey hovering behind me. He’s staring down at the corpse. “What … the fuck … is that?” he asks at last. “Where did it come from?”
I lay a hand on his shoulder. “Those, Dickey old boy, are the wrong questions entirely. For one thousand dollars, I will tell you what the right question is.”
He scratches that perfect Aryan chin of his. He pulls out his wallet and hands over an embossed traveler's cheque, which I slide into the pocket of my orange hunting trousers.
“The correct question, Dickey old bean, is not what or how, but why. Specifically, why now. Now fuck off.” And with that I boost myself over the corpse and cross the street to the ambulance that has just pulled up. “Hullo, Bansi,” I say through the driver’s window. I jerk my thumb back over my shoulder. “There’s your patient. I’ll take my twenty percent up front, if you don’t mind.”
4.5.09
I-I-III
"Hail to thee, Reggie." I offer a deep bow to the old fruit seller who's sitting in the doorway of the Mortal Coil fanning herself with her hat. "It is, as always, an honor."
She lurches to her feet to drop a ponderous curtsy. "Howdy Spex," she says, bristly chins bobbing. "Wanna pissa mango? Cool you down, boy. Iss hot assa bitch today."
The Coil sits in rather an iffy bit of the District, on a terrace of three-story buildings that somebody painted twenty years ago and then forgot about. Now the red brick is reappearing, surfacing on the facade of the nail shop and the payday loans place like Atlantis making a comeback. A store that claims to sell vacuum cleaners wears the same peeling bars on its windows as Beale's Gentlemen's Lounge and the 24-hour kebab shop. The doorway where Reggie has taken shelter from the sun is not much different from the others, except that it leads to the greatest influence brokerage on this plane of existence.
Every social playground operates on its own currency. In dear old England, as in Los Angeles, that currency is 'fucking' -- the difference being that, in the case of we Britishers, all the really important fucking happened centuries ago. One of my hoary ancestors had the good sense to lay one of the daughters of some long-usurped royal family, and with the resulting bastard was born the ducal line of Haruspex. And, eventually, me. But I've strayed from the topic; as I say, in England it's who daddy's daddy diddled. Elsewhere it's all about the contents of your bed and your bank account. There is, however, a shadow-currency that pervades every social economy but which finds primacy in only one town. My town. Washington DC.
Say it with me, children: knowledge ... is ... power.
Or rather, secrets are power. Knowledge is like any other commodity: if everybody has it, it's not worth a tinker’s damn. And the Mortal Coil is where people who have secrets -- and people who are secrets -- go to knock back a pint and pick each others' brains and pockets. Or, in Reggie's case, to sell fruit. I am preparing to kiss her hand when I see that the door behind her has opened.
"Spex? That you, baby?"
Blind Allie is the sort of beautiful that doesn't generally happen in real life. She always looks as if she's just been shoved out of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting -- artfully disheveled, flaming hair askew, skin the color of a lily that's been surprised while changing. The color of her eyes is the subject of hot debate at the Coil, because she never opens them. Today she's wearing a sort of white summer gown-thing that will come in handy if she feels a sudden urge to drift down a river in a barge full of flowers. She's holding out a pint of Old Peculier. "Here ya go, Morgana. Stay out of the sun."
Reggie takes the glass with a cackle. I pat the pad of jiggle under her shoulder and work my way around to the door. "Hold on to that mango for me, will you madam? I might want it later, if I survive." I step up to buss Allie on the cheek. "Hullo, pet. Come on, I'm famished."
I slip an arm around Allie's waist and steer her back into the Coil. She knows the geography of the place by heart, but any excuse to touch Allie is a good one, what? I find myself unable to enjoy the experience fully, however. "What the deuce? Allie, where in blazes is everyone?"
Ordinarily a chap can expect a bit of company at the Mortal Coil. Lobbyists with very select patrons, traders in securities not found on the public exchanges, antique dealers and freelance journalists and bike messengers -- people in the business of secrets do not keep regular hours, and so while the old watering hole is rarely crowded it is never empty. Clearly, those who make it their business to know things know something that I do not. Bally disquieting feeling, that.
Noblesse oblige, and all that rot, but a chap’s got to look after his own skin. I slip my unoccupied hand into my bag, and my fingers close around my emergency Bicycle deck. I'm about ready to perform Tatiere's Fifty-Two-Card Oracle right there on the barroom floor, and if I see one face-of-spades I'll break all the laws of chivalry, courtesy, and particle acceleration on my way out the door.
"Mister Haruspex. So good of you to join us."
I jump out of my bloody skin. Wheeling about, I find that not all of the Coil's clientele have, in fact, abandoned ship -- although whether or not I should feel reassured by this is not immediately clear.
"Hentchler! You fucking bastard, you scared the dickens out of me."
In the booth by the front window, Hentchler waggles his jowls with mirth. The fellow across the table from him snickers and waves.
"Fuck you too, Dickey," I tell him. "Just for that, I'm not sending you blighters a wedding present."
I'm just joshing, of course. In all my twenty-eight years I've never seen a romance as perfect or as touching as that of Walter Hentchler and Lindsay Barrington Dickey IV. So often, true love finds itself compromised by a basic human decency that alloys the parties' enthusiasm for one another. Not so for this merry pair.
Seated -- I have never seen him standing -- Hentchler can best be described as a speckled brown egg with bushy white eyebrows. He lost his neck through decades of good food that he didn’t have to work for, and his ears in Machu Picchu when the guerillas whom he was paying to transport certain antiquities received a better offer. If you want to learn where he got his ghastly pink plastic prosthetics from, you can go buy his book. He's that Hentchler. And ever since the disappearance of the notorious Dr. Platt, the much-lesser half of Platt & Hentchler has grown wealthy off the stories and connections he made as the cryptolinguist and bureaucratic grease-monkey for our century's finest and maddest archaeologist.
Dickey is quite a different story altogether, at least on the physical front. His beauty is on a par with Allie’s, except that whereas she tumbled from a romantic’s brush, Dickie goose-stepped from the pen of a Nazi propagandist. With his rakish blonde coif and strong Aryan chin, the chap could have bedded half of DC by now if it were not for his unique and peculiar fetish. Dickie only fucks organizations. He’s an institutional hit-man by trade, with a unique talent for penetrating corporations, governments, even religious sects, and reaming every available orifice until the poor things collapse in a puddle of money. This black-hearted little prodigy is all of twenty-five years old, which means it‘s been two years since his fingertips first brushed against something far larger and more interesting than his usual victims. By his own bent lights -- the light of an uninsured factory burning, the light of police flashers following an anonymous tip to a planted stash of kiddy porn -- Dickie saw more worlds to conquer. Worlds outside the shady little koi pond that most people consider reality. That brought him to the Coil, and to Hentchler.
Between them, these two have attained something almost like significance on the trans-planar stage. Dickey’s ruthlessly efficient social engineering has whipped Hentchler’s network of corrupt customs officials, bribe-taking antiquarians and blackmailable museum curators into a machine for funneling experts and artifacts wherever he wants them. They convert power into knowledge and back again, in hideous mockery of the laws of thermodynamics, turning a profit on each transaction. Scary blokes, Hentchler and Dickey. I’m terribly glad to see them.
“Couple of bally heroes, you two, what? Here to rush to Allie’s aid in case things get rough?”
Dickey just smiles. He hates my guts, because he knows that I can see right through him. Hentchler, however, is a genial soul. “Waiting for you, Mister Haruspex,” he says. “How much do you know?”
“A tremendous amount, old boy,” I reply. “It’s quite astonishing, in fact. But about this? Bugger-all.” This is not quite true. I’ve already inferred from Allie’s summons that this newcomer, who and wherever she is, comes from farther afield than your average DC tourist. The fact that these two have elected to stay put says that they think there’s something to be learned here worth risking their precious skins for. Who, oh who, can this mysterious female be? “I gather she’s having some difficulty with the native lingo. How’d she get here, anyhow?”
“Goo brought her,” Dickey replies. His smile says that he knows what this means, and that he knows I know too. “He came in with an extra pair of bully-boys. They put her in the back bar, and then they left.”
Allie prods me in the ribs. “You want your breakfast before you go talk to her, or after?”
Given the choice between bearding whatever the fuck awaits and trying to eat scrambled eggs with Dickey grinning at me, I flip him the bird and stand to attention. “No time like the present, what? Lead the way to our esteemed guest.”
The scene in the back bar is like bad science fiction. Half-eaten steaks and hamburgers sit on abandoned plates. A dozen pint glasses, some full to the brim, litter the bar on either side of the single occupied stool. That stool’s occupant is leaning on her elbows, her eyes fixed on the mirror behind the liquor bottles.
She looks about thirty. She’s wearing a black leather bustier, a pair of fishnet stockings hooked to a garter belt, and two restraint bracelets with shredded straps around her wrists. And … that’s it. She looks tired and ill-used, scrawny but flabby, her skin the greenish orange of a sunless life mixed with bronzing chemicals. Her hair is an unnatural mud-color with long mousy roots. Her pale, bare arse laps over the green leather of the barstool.
She’s blowing lazy smoke rings at her reflection. I wouldn’t mind, except she hasn’t got a cigarette.
She lurches to her feet to drop a ponderous curtsy. "Howdy Spex," she says, bristly chins bobbing. "Wanna pissa mango? Cool you down, boy. Iss hot assa bitch today."
The Coil sits in rather an iffy bit of the District, on a terrace of three-story buildings that somebody painted twenty years ago and then forgot about. Now the red brick is reappearing, surfacing on the facade of the nail shop and the payday loans place like Atlantis making a comeback. A store that claims to sell vacuum cleaners wears the same peeling bars on its windows as Beale's Gentlemen's Lounge and the 24-hour kebab shop. The doorway where Reggie has taken shelter from the sun is not much different from the others, except that it leads to the greatest influence brokerage on this plane of existence.
Every social playground operates on its own currency. In dear old England, as in Los Angeles, that currency is 'fucking' -- the difference being that, in the case of we Britishers, all the really important fucking happened centuries ago. One of my hoary ancestors had the good sense to lay one of the daughters of some long-usurped royal family, and with the resulting bastard was born the ducal line of Haruspex. And, eventually, me. But I've strayed from the topic; as I say, in England it's who daddy's daddy diddled. Elsewhere it's all about the contents of your bed and your bank account. There is, however, a shadow-currency that pervades every social economy but which finds primacy in only one town. My town. Washington DC.
Say it with me, children: knowledge ... is ... power.
Or rather, secrets are power. Knowledge is like any other commodity: if everybody has it, it's not worth a tinker’s damn. And the Mortal Coil is where people who have secrets -- and people who are secrets -- go to knock back a pint and pick each others' brains and pockets. Or, in Reggie's case, to sell fruit. I am preparing to kiss her hand when I see that the door behind her has opened.
"Spex? That you, baby?"
Blind Allie is the sort of beautiful that doesn't generally happen in real life. She always looks as if she's just been shoved out of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting -- artfully disheveled, flaming hair askew, skin the color of a lily that's been surprised while changing. The color of her eyes is the subject of hot debate at the Coil, because she never opens them. Today she's wearing a sort of white summer gown-thing that will come in handy if she feels a sudden urge to drift down a river in a barge full of flowers. She's holding out a pint of Old Peculier. "Here ya go, Morgana. Stay out of the sun."
Reggie takes the glass with a cackle. I pat the pad of jiggle under her shoulder and work my way around to the door. "Hold on to that mango for me, will you madam? I might want it later, if I survive." I step up to buss Allie on the cheek. "Hullo, pet. Come on, I'm famished."
I slip an arm around Allie's waist and steer her back into the Coil. She knows the geography of the place by heart, but any excuse to touch Allie is a good one, what? I find myself unable to enjoy the experience fully, however. "What the deuce? Allie, where in blazes is everyone?"
Ordinarily a chap can expect a bit of company at the Mortal Coil. Lobbyists with very select patrons, traders in securities not found on the public exchanges, antique dealers and freelance journalists and bike messengers -- people in the business of secrets do not keep regular hours, and so while the old watering hole is rarely crowded it is never empty. Clearly, those who make it their business to know things know something that I do not. Bally disquieting feeling, that.
Noblesse oblige, and all that rot, but a chap’s got to look after his own skin. I slip my unoccupied hand into my bag, and my fingers close around my emergency Bicycle deck. I'm about ready to perform Tatiere's Fifty-Two-Card Oracle right there on the barroom floor, and if I see one face-of-spades I'll break all the laws of chivalry, courtesy, and particle acceleration on my way out the door.
"Mister Haruspex. So good of you to join us."
I jump out of my bloody skin. Wheeling about, I find that not all of the Coil's clientele have, in fact, abandoned ship -- although whether or not I should feel reassured by this is not immediately clear.
"Hentchler! You fucking bastard, you scared the dickens out of me."
In the booth by the front window, Hentchler waggles his jowls with mirth. The fellow across the table from him snickers and waves.
"Fuck you too, Dickey," I tell him. "Just for that, I'm not sending you blighters a wedding present."
I'm just joshing, of course. In all my twenty-eight years I've never seen a romance as perfect or as touching as that of Walter Hentchler and Lindsay Barrington Dickey IV. So often, true love finds itself compromised by a basic human decency that alloys the parties' enthusiasm for one another. Not so for this merry pair.
Seated -- I have never seen him standing -- Hentchler can best be described as a speckled brown egg with bushy white eyebrows. He lost his neck through decades of good food that he didn’t have to work for, and his ears in Machu Picchu when the guerillas whom he was paying to transport certain antiquities received a better offer. If you want to learn where he got his ghastly pink plastic prosthetics from, you can go buy his book. He's that Hentchler. And ever since the disappearance of the notorious Dr. Platt, the much-lesser half of Platt & Hentchler has grown wealthy off the stories and connections he made as the cryptolinguist and bureaucratic grease-monkey for our century's finest and maddest archaeologist.
Dickey is quite a different story altogether, at least on the physical front. His beauty is on a par with Allie’s, except that whereas she tumbled from a romantic’s brush, Dickie goose-stepped from the pen of a Nazi propagandist. With his rakish blonde coif and strong Aryan chin, the chap could have bedded half of DC by now if it were not for his unique and peculiar fetish. Dickie only fucks organizations. He’s an institutional hit-man by trade, with a unique talent for penetrating corporations, governments, even religious sects, and reaming every available orifice until the poor things collapse in a puddle of money. This black-hearted little prodigy is all of twenty-five years old, which means it‘s been two years since his fingertips first brushed against something far larger and more interesting than his usual victims. By his own bent lights -- the light of an uninsured factory burning, the light of police flashers following an anonymous tip to a planted stash of kiddy porn -- Dickie saw more worlds to conquer. Worlds outside the shady little koi pond that most people consider reality. That brought him to the Coil, and to Hentchler.
Between them, these two have attained something almost like significance on the trans-planar stage. Dickey’s ruthlessly efficient social engineering has whipped Hentchler’s network of corrupt customs officials, bribe-taking antiquarians and blackmailable museum curators into a machine for funneling experts and artifacts wherever he wants them. They convert power into knowledge and back again, in hideous mockery of the laws of thermodynamics, turning a profit on each transaction. Scary blokes, Hentchler and Dickey. I’m terribly glad to see them.
“Couple of bally heroes, you two, what? Here to rush to Allie’s aid in case things get rough?”
Dickey just smiles. He hates my guts, because he knows that I can see right through him. Hentchler, however, is a genial soul. “Waiting for you, Mister Haruspex,” he says. “How much do you know?”
“A tremendous amount, old boy,” I reply. “It’s quite astonishing, in fact. But about this? Bugger-all.” This is not quite true. I’ve already inferred from Allie’s summons that this newcomer, who and wherever she is, comes from farther afield than your average DC tourist. The fact that these two have elected to stay put says that they think there’s something to be learned here worth risking their precious skins for. Who, oh who, can this mysterious female be? “I gather she’s having some difficulty with the native lingo. How’d she get here, anyhow?”
“Goo brought her,” Dickey replies. His smile says that he knows what this means, and that he knows I know too. “He came in with an extra pair of bully-boys. They put her in the back bar, and then they left.”
Allie prods me in the ribs. “You want your breakfast before you go talk to her, or after?”
Given the choice between bearding whatever the fuck awaits and trying to eat scrambled eggs with Dickey grinning at me, I flip him the bird and stand to attention. “No time like the present, what? Lead the way to our esteemed guest.”
The scene in the back bar is like bad science fiction. Half-eaten steaks and hamburgers sit on abandoned plates. A dozen pint glasses, some full to the brim, litter the bar on either side of the single occupied stool. That stool’s occupant is leaning on her elbows, her eyes fixed on the mirror behind the liquor bottles.
She looks about thirty. She’s wearing a black leather bustier, a pair of fishnet stockings hooked to a garter belt, and two restraint bracelets with shredded straps around her wrists. And … that’s it. She looks tired and ill-used, scrawny but flabby, her skin the greenish orange of a sunless life mixed with bronzing chemicals. Her hair is an unnatural mud-color with long mousy roots. Her pale, bare arse laps over the green leather of the barstool.
She’s blowing lazy smoke rings at her reflection. I wouldn’t mind, except she hasn’t got a cigarette.
1.5.09
I-I-II
"Hullo, little one. Want a biccy?"
Miss Infant Kansas 2009 looks up at me with deep skepticism. Her sweat-slick and sunscreened family is negotiating with Azif the street vendor for four XXL 'Washington DC: Our Nation's Capital' tee shirts, and she has decided to split while the splitting is good. I reach into my green canvas messenger bag and dither between a tube of ginger snaps and a sheet of blotter acid. I decide to let her choose.
"Pick a hand." I hold out my fists. You can tell a lot about somebody by what kind of luck they have, and my first read of little blondie tells me she'll be spending most of her life getting lucky. "Come along now. Don't dawdle, Uncle Spex has to go get himself killed."
She sucks a finger at me. Then, spreading her arms, she makes a grab for both of my hands at once, seizing my thumbs and looking up at me with blue eyes that hearts and fortunes could be lost in. In that brief moment we understand each other, and I shiver in the noonday heat. I return my humble offerings to my bag. In their stead, I pull out a square bronze medallion on a string -- got it off a Byzantine chap, and this seems like a brilliant opportunity to unload it.
I squat down to whisper in her ear. "This," I say, hanging it around her neck, "is for protection. We'll fucking need it. Paribaadhate, deliver all foolish men from thee."
"Hey! Excuse me? Excuse me, sir?"
The materfamilias has noticed that her offspring has escaped and is talking to strangers. I waggle my fingers at little blondie and continue on my merry way through the Circle. It's summer, so the fountain's splashing away. The park is crammed with dogs and bicycles and pale people trying to turn red -- they clear a path for me, however, because I've got on a pair of bright orange hunting trousers and a white undershirt and look as if I may be stark, raving bonkers. This is important. If you make a habit of talking to people nobody else can see, it's better for everyone if you appear to have an excuse.
I feel a bit of a weight in my tum-tum as I head for the Metro. You see, I may look as if I robbed my costume off a homeless person -- actually, I won it in a game of strip gomoku from a gentleman who lives under the Key Bridge -- but I am, in fact, violating the sacred $100 Limit. The $100 Limit is one of my cardinal rules for business involving planes of reality other than this one, and violating it like a bally catamite makes me most uneasy. The rule is quite simple: the total market value of everything you're carrying and wearing positively must total less than one hundred American dollars. It is a very important rule, for two reasons.
Reason one: If things get fucked up, and you cease to exist in any meaningful sense, at least you've only wasted a hundred dollars.
Reason two: Mindset is everything. If you think that you can buy your way to safety in this line of work, you'll prove yourself wrong jolly quick.
A good bulletproof vest, or a respectable collection of charms, wards, talismans and relics, can cost thousands. Swanning about imagining yourself to be invincible, on the other hand, will cost your heirs whatever it takes to bury whatever's left of you afterwards. The same principle goes double for holy water, wooden stakes, and silver bullets; when you walk into the sort of situation that I seem unable to avoid, you cannot let yourself think in terms of winning a fight. It does ... not ... happen. That's why I obey the $100 Rule religiously. If you can stop yourself from trying not to die, you might just save your life.
Sunglasses, incidentally, are exempt from the $100 Limit. Mine are spiffing black things that I can, and do, wear indoors. They do not cloud my judgment because I only expect them to protect me from two things: bright lights, and not being the dashingest fucker in the room.
I jog down the escalator and hop the station gate. I'm quite fond of the Metro. Can't abide automobiles; depending on where you find yourself there's no telling which side of the road they want you to stay on, and if you guess wrong everyone gets cross. Besides that, you can do all sorts of things on the Metro that would amount to suicide if attempted behind the wheel. I have tied a flawless double Windsor, uncorked a delightful Pol Roger Brut, waltzed with a perfect stranger, made passionate love, and broken an empty bottle over a chap's head, all in the course of a single trip from Farragut North to Union Station. Besides, my flat's in Dupont, and there's simply nowhere to park.
"'Scuse me. Do beg your pardon. Madam, if you do not move that umbrella I shall feel compelled to tip you." The platform has been taken over by clones of little blondie's family, and I'm forced to wedge in as best I can. As dictated by tradition, the tourists have arrived with the cherry blossoms like some sort of biblical plague, gaily bedecked in Washington Nationals baseball caps and bum-bags with the American flag on them. I rather like tourists. They may behave like herd animals, but there is a sort of chaotic order in how they move, patterns within patterns as they lumber across the National Mall and down towards the Tidal Basin. Large groups of uprooted people have their own unique and significant rhythms. This afternoon, if I'm not dead, I'll pay a visit to the observation level of the Washington Monument to see what can't be seen on a Metro platform: a vast flock moving freely, guided by the hand that is visible only through what it touches. I've read broken bones and STDs in the flight of birds. I'm curious to see what I'll learn from the tourists.
I jostle with these hearty pilgrims until the train arrives. When it does, I find myself in rather a pickle. "I say, move along the car, what? Hallo? Plenty of room in the middle, don't you know. Oh, you fucking bastards." The doors stand open, but I can see no geometric solution to the problem of how to get myself through them. A tee shirted band of merry nomads has congregated near the doors of the otherwise empty car, obstructing passage with arses as big as the Kansas sky. So here I am, trapped on the outside looking in, faced with a bally Symplegades of flesh that threatens to crush me if I should dare to enter.
I shall now relate the story of how I came to break the sacred $100 Limit on this fine day. The fact is, I have one of my hunches about the troublesome guest that Blind Allie has summoned me to inspect, and I do not have hunches the way other people have hunches. My hunches are the hunchy equivalent of those chaps who wear dusty robes and sit on mountains and can kill you with a Mars bar. They are not to be trifled with, and that is why I have the VoltMeister v350 in my pocket. It hardly counts as a weapon even by human standards -- postmen and bill collectors carry them in case they have a misunderstanding with Mister Fido -- but the little chappie can deliver three doses of sparky goodness before needing to be plugged back into the mains. That makes it a dashed useful tool under certain circumstances. It puts me squarely on Queer Street with the $100 Limit, because at $99.99 retail I can only technically excuse it if I plan on charging into battle Pict-style wearing only a bit of blue mud, but well ... I'd look a bally hypocrite if I went around breaking everyone's rules except my own, what?
Bzzzzzzzt
Somebody squeals. The obstruction clears, and an oceanic current sweeps yours truly and my fellow platform-dwellers into the train and onward to glory. I feel somewhat vindicated about turning up to the Mortal Coil less empty-handed than usual.
I’ve just started haggling with a high school girls’ lacrosse fieldtrip over weekend plans and a bottle of ketamine when my headset buzzes. "Hullo again, Allie. New developments with your new friend?
"Not yet, sweetie." Allie sounds the way she sounds when she's sounding not-worried -- not what a chap wants to hear when he's about to risk his life for a plate of eggs. "Just checking to make sure you haven't forgotten me. Oh, and your brother left a message for you."
"Dear brother Adrian?" This news always calls for a flip of the coin. I dig a quarter out of my pocket, chip it into the air with my thumbnail, and catch it on the back of my left hand. "Oh, fuck me."
"He says he's gonna be in town," Allie continues. "He wants to take you out to dinner to talk about something he calls 'planching'."
"Fuck me sideways with a bargepole."
She giggles. "He sounded really excited. What is it, anyway?"
"Nothing a nice girl like you should be mixed up in." I slip two fingers under my shades to massage my poor aching eyeballs. "Hang about, I'm almost to my stop -- be at the Coil in ten minutes. If dear brother Adrian calls again, tell him I'm dead. Chances are, by then you won't be lying."
Miss Infant Kansas 2009 looks up at me with deep skepticism. Her sweat-slick and sunscreened family is negotiating with Azif the street vendor for four XXL 'Washington DC: Our Nation's Capital' tee shirts, and she has decided to split while the splitting is good. I reach into my green canvas messenger bag and dither between a tube of ginger snaps and a sheet of blotter acid. I decide to let her choose.
"Pick a hand." I hold out my fists. You can tell a lot about somebody by what kind of luck they have, and my first read of little blondie tells me she'll be spending most of her life getting lucky. "Come along now. Don't dawdle, Uncle Spex has to go get himself killed."
She sucks a finger at me. Then, spreading her arms, she makes a grab for both of my hands at once, seizing my thumbs and looking up at me with blue eyes that hearts and fortunes could be lost in. In that brief moment we understand each other, and I shiver in the noonday heat. I return my humble offerings to my bag. In their stead, I pull out a square bronze medallion on a string -- got it off a Byzantine chap, and this seems like a brilliant opportunity to unload it.
I squat down to whisper in her ear. "This," I say, hanging it around her neck, "is for protection. We'll fucking need it. Paribaadhate, deliver all foolish men from thee."
"Hey! Excuse me? Excuse me, sir?"
The materfamilias has noticed that her offspring has escaped and is talking to strangers. I waggle my fingers at little blondie and continue on my merry way through the Circle. It's summer, so the fountain's splashing away. The park is crammed with dogs and bicycles and pale people trying to turn red -- they clear a path for me, however, because I've got on a pair of bright orange hunting trousers and a white undershirt and look as if I may be stark, raving bonkers. This is important. If you make a habit of talking to people nobody else can see, it's better for everyone if you appear to have an excuse.
I feel a bit of a weight in my tum-tum as I head for the Metro. You see, I may look as if I robbed my costume off a homeless person -- actually, I won it in a game of strip gomoku from a gentleman who lives under the Key Bridge -- but I am, in fact, violating the sacred $100 Limit. The $100 Limit is one of my cardinal rules for business involving planes of reality other than this one, and violating it like a bally catamite makes me most uneasy. The rule is quite simple: the total market value of everything you're carrying and wearing positively must total less than one hundred American dollars. It is a very important rule, for two reasons.
Reason one: If things get fucked up, and you cease to exist in any meaningful sense, at least you've only wasted a hundred dollars.
Reason two: Mindset is everything. If you think that you can buy your way to safety in this line of work, you'll prove yourself wrong jolly quick.
A good bulletproof vest, or a respectable collection of charms, wards, talismans and relics, can cost thousands. Swanning about imagining yourself to be invincible, on the other hand, will cost your heirs whatever it takes to bury whatever's left of you afterwards. The same principle goes double for holy water, wooden stakes, and silver bullets; when you walk into the sort of situation that I seem unable to avoid, you cannot let yourself think in terms of winning a fight. It does ... not ... happen. That's why I obey the $100 Rule religiously. If you can stop yourself from trying not to die, you might just save your life.
Sunglasses, incidentally, are exempt from the $100 Limit. Mine are spiffing black things that I can, and do, wear indoors. They do not cloud my judgment because I only expect them to protect me from two things: bright lights, and not being the dashingest fucker in the room.
I jog down the escalator and hop the station gate. I'm quite fond of the Metro. Can't abide automobiles; depending on where you find yourself there's no telling which side of the road they want you to stay on, and if you guess wrong everyone gets cross. Besides that, you can do all sorts of things on the Metro that would amount to suicide if attempted behind the wheel. I have tied a flawless double Windsor, uncorked a delightful Pol Roger Brut, waltzed with a perfect stranger, made passionate love, and broken an empty bottle over a chap's head, all in the course of a single trip from Farragut North to Union Station. Besides, my flat's in Dupont, and there's simply nowhere to park.
"'Scuse me. Do beg your pardon. Madam, if you do not move that umbrella I shall feel compelled to tip you." The platform has been taken over by clones of little blondie's family, and I'm forced to wedge in as best I can. As dictated by tradition, the tourists have arrived with the cherry blossoms like some sort of biblical plague, gaily bedecked in Washington Nationals baseball caps and bum-bags with the American flag on them. I rather like tourists. They may behave like herd animals, but there is a sort of chaotic order in how they move, patterns within patterns as they lumber across the National Mall and down towards the Tidal Basin. Large groups of uprooted people have their own unique and significant rhythms. This afternoon, if I'm not dead, I'll pay a visit to the observation level of the Washington Monument to see what can't be seen on a Metro platform: a vast flock moving freely, guided by the hand that is visible only through what it touches. I've read broken bones and STDs in the flight of birds. I'm curious to see what I'll learn from the tourists.
I jostle with these hearty pilgrims until the train arrives. When it does, I find myself in rather a pickle. "I say, move along the car, what? Hallo? Plenty of room in the middle, don't you know. Oh, you fucking bastards." The doors stand open, but I can see no geometric solution to the problem of how to get myself through them. A tee shirted band of merry nomads has congregated near the doors of the otherwise empty car, obstructing passage with arses as big as the Kansas sky. So here I am, trapped on the outside looking in, faced with a bally Symplegades of flesh that threatens to crush me if I should dare to enter.
I shall now relate the story of how I came to break the sacred $100 Limit on this fine day. The fact is, I have one of my hunches about the troublesome guest that Blind Allie has summoned me to inspect, and I do not have hunches the way other people have hunches. My hunches are the hunchy equivalent of those chaps who wear dusty robes and sit on mountains and can kill you with a Mars bar. They are not to be trifled with, and that is why I have the VoltMeister v350 in my pocket. It hardly counts as a weapon even by human standards -- postmen and bill collectors carry them in case they have a misunderstanding with Mister Fido -- but the little chappie can deliver three doses of sparky goodness before needing to be plugged back into the mains. That makes it a dashed useful tool under certain circumstances. It puts me squarely on Queer Street with the $100 Limit, because at $99.99 retail I can only technically excuse it if I plan on charging into battle Pict-style wearing only a bit of blue mud, but well ... I'd look a bally hypocrite if I went around breaking everyone's rules except my own, what?
Bzzzzzzzt
Somebody squeals. The obstruction clears, and an oceanic current sweeps yours truly and my fellow platform-dwellers into the train and onward to glory. I feel somewhat vindicated about turning up to the Mortal Coil less empty-handed than usual.
I’ve just started haggling with a high school girls’ lacrosse fieldtrip over weekend plans and a bottle of ketamine when my headset buzzes. "Hullo again, Allie. New developments with your new friend?
"Not yet, sweetie." Allie sounds the way she sounds when she's sounding not-worried -- not what a chap wants to hear when he's about to risk his life for a plate of eggs. "Just checking to make sure you haven't forgotten me. Oh, and your brother left a message for you."
"Dear brother Adrian?" This news always calls for a flip of the coin. I dig a quarter out of my pocket, chip it into the air with my thumbnail, and catch it on the back of my left hand. "Oh, fuck me."
"He says he's gonna be in town," Allie continues. "He wants to take you out to dinner to talk about something he calls 'planching'."
"Fuck me sideways with a bargepole."
She giggles. "He sounded really excited. What is it, anyway?"
"Nothing a nice girl like you should be mixed up in." I slip two fingers under my shades to massage my poor aching eyeballs. "Hang about, I'm almost to my stop -- be at the Coil in ten minutes. If dear brother Adrian calls again, tell him I'm dead. Chances are, by then you won't be lying."
27.4.09
I-I-I
"Fuck. Just a moment, Cutie old boy, got a visitor."
I pull the headset off my ear. The bell on the wall is jangling like billy-o. I give it to the count of ten to pipe down, but it doesn't, so I surrender. I rise, feeling like old Lazarus after a bender. I start undoing locks. I crank open the door of my study -- the thing's a four-inch-thick sandwich of plate steel and asbestos, and my back makes its feelings on the subject quite clear. Still, precautions, what? A chap's home is, after all, his castle.
"Hold on, hold on, I'm coming. No need to pull the bally bell rope off." I trot down the corridor. My flat's front door is a charming old iron-and-wood bastard with a peepslit and a hatch for transacting biz. I flip open the slit. "And what can I do for you, my good man?"
My visitor is wearing a black hoodie with the drawstring pulled tight over his face. "You Spex?" He asks. "I hear you sell red. I want the good stuff."
"Half a mo'." I let the slit flap shut. My instincts are generally spot-on with this sort of thing, and this johnny feels harmless as a lamb, but with unexpected referrals it pays to stay on the safe side. That's why I keep an old deck of Bicycle playing cards on a shelf beside the umbrella stand. I pick it up, give it two quick riffles and a weave, and do an Elmsley pop from the middle of the deck. I catch the popped card in midair, and flip it. Four of diamonds. Harmless.
"Back again." I give my visitor a friendly wave through the slit. "Looking for a bit of the tip-top in the red department, are we? Well, one does one's humble best. So,it's not too inquisitive, what exactly the fuck I can do for you on this fine day?"
He looks up and down the corridor. There are places where the market gets so black that no law enforcement even cares anymore, so this fellow's a dab. "How much for Type-V?" he asks.
Listen to the chap, talking the talk. "Two thousand will get you a pint and a smile."
"I can get it from Archie for seven hundred."
"My Type-V is not the same as Archie's Type-V," I point out. "I can serve you from the rail for four hundred -- guaranteed human, and that's as far as I go. For one thousand I can offer you the top-shelf stuff. Certified low-mileage, some probably V and some probably not. Two thousand gets you the guaranteed V."
He thinks about this. If he's got any sense he'll take the bargain bin option, because there's nothing he could possibly be up to that requires actual virgin. If he's one of Archie's clients looking to trade up, he's either rich and stupid or rich and very clever indeed.
"I'll give you two-five apiece for two pints of the Type-V, if you can guarantee it," he says. He pushes the cash through the hatch. A stack of fifty hundred-dollar bills in a paper band.
"That's dashed generous of you, considering I just fucking said that I guarantee it at two thousand." I pull out ten of the hundreds and push them back through. "Hold on a tick."
My cold room is mostly empty at the moment. Anatomicals and biologicals are moving too fast for me to keep them on the shelves, and that's when I can even get them. Got a couple of hands and hearts in the deep freeze, Mexican cartel up from Juarez. No good unless you're desperate, but people do get desperate, what? At the moment, most of my refrigerated stock is pre-packaged pints of the old human bean juice. I know a chap who knows a chap who runs a bent Bloodmobile service for girls' boarding schools.
I pull two bags off the rack, check the labels, and grab a can of Beast on the way out.
"Here you are, chum." I push the plastic pouches through the hatch and into a waiting duffel bag. "Pleasure doing business with you."
"Are you sure--"
But I'm already back in my study, turning the crank. The door closes, four inches of tank armor between me and the world. Not precisely elegant, but it keeps out anything that gets kept out by doors. "Hoy, Cutie," I say, clipping my headset back on. "Back again. I do apologize, new customer. Dabblers -- more money than sense, what? Bless their curious little hearts."
The translation takes a split-second in both directions. "You kept me waiting."
"Why, Cutie, that's funny!" I laugh, so he'll know that I’m sincere. "Jolly good joke, bravo."
"Thank you," Cutie says. "The statement is absurd, because 'to wait' implies a chronological perception of time, which I do not possess."
"Jokes aren't quite so funny if you go explaining them, Cutie. Spoils the whole effect." I pop open my Beast and pour the whole bally thing down my throat at one go. My head feels all full of needles. I yawn until my jaw aches, and it dawns on me that I haven't been getting just oodles of sleep lately. "Must pop off now, I need a wash."
My bathroom opens right off the study, still inside the skin of metal and chemical protection that sits in the walls and ceiling and floor around my sanctum. It isn't until I've got the water on that I realize I'm still wearing my tuxedo from last night -- no mirrors allowed, you see. With what it cost me to seal this place, I'm not about to go leaving a bloody window open, what? Anyhow, I bung the ghastly stiff things into the laundry basket and slip in under the hot water.
Time for a quick checkup of the corpus. The week has not handled old Spex with kid gloves, but in my book it's not how many lumps you take, it's how many you avoid. A quick count puts fresh bruises at seven, whereas I feel that I've earned twelve at the least. A nasty great slash up my left leg from that beastly rosebush I jumped into merely testifies to the buttock-load of buckshot I'd have received if I hadn't jumped. Scratches on my back from that nice Armenian aristocrat, teeth-marks in my ankle from her Pomeranian, two loose molars from her husband. All in all, not so bad. Bit older, bit wiser, but neither so old nor so wise as to give up the game just yet. Brisk scrub, splash the soap from the eyes, and tally-ho.
I step out onto the mat feeling a good deal more civilized. Toweling off the old torso, I pad back into my study and feel the deep burgundy pile between my toes. When I first settled on this little pad of mine it was with the knowledge that I might one day find myself locked inside it, possibly for the duration of my life. To a bloke who's picking out a couch that he may breathe his last on, attention to detail is of the utmost -- inside my study, which is also my bedroom and my little command center, you'll find only the best. The wallpaper is cream-and-gold antique silk, and fucking expensive. I received the Chippendale wingback armchair as a bequest from a darling old socialite who turned out to have a great deal more life in her than the doctors had promised. To enjoy the contents of the humidor on my desk, a gift from brother Adrian, is an act of simultaneous worship and desecration.
Apart from my brother's gifts, which are generally intended to be imbibed or inhaled, my only souvenir of home is the carved stone mantelpiece. Shipped across the wide Atlantic to the District of Columbia and now set into a wall that boasts no fireplace, it bears the arms and motto of the House of Haruspex. A great eye, sable, upon a field, azure, with stars. Supported by a serpent, dexter, and a great hand, sinister, the shield is crested with a broken coronet. Beneath: spes vincit fatum. My ancestors terrify me.
Back to the headset, and perhaps a bit of work done before breakfast. "Hullo, Cutie?" His name's actually something a bit like Ku'taghot'ka, but that's such a fuss to pronounce that I generally use his nickname except when I'm cross with him. "You still there?"
His voice -- not really his, I suppose, and I suppose he isn't strictly a 'he' -- always reminds me a bit of my geography master back at Eton. "Hello, Spex. You kept me waiting."
"Joke's not funny the second time you tell it, chum," I reply. "Got to let it rest for a century or two, what? Anyhow, enough dilly-dallying. Have you got anything for me, or not?"
"Rumors," Cutie says. "Letters of transit have been stolen, and are expected to end up on the open market. They may find their way into your neighborhood."
Of course, he didn't really say "letters of transit," but some concepts don't translate literally from one plane of reality to another. I knew what he meant, and I knew that it would mean a pot of trouble for whatever poor bugger lost his rag and tried to fence something with that much heat on it. "That's a nasty affair. Sort of thing that turns brother against brother, what? Any reason to think the merchandise will be coming my way?"
"Rumors. Only rumors."
"Right." I begin to contemplate getting dressed. Seems like an awful bore; I'd been to an embassy party the night before, the guest of an old dab I tell fortunes for, and the wine had flowed well past four in the morning. "You'll let me know if it turns into more than that, what? And I'll keep my ear to the ground. Oops, must let you go, got a call on the other line." I switch over. "Hullo, Allie old girl. How's tricks down the Coil?"
"Hello baby." Blind Allie's got a voice like honey on a razor blade. I'd adore her even if she weren't proprietress of the premier watering hole for fellows in my line of business. "'Fraid we might have a teensy-weensy problem with a language barrier over here. There's a new girl in town, and I thought you might want to come around and get acquainted."
"Oh yes? Flattered you'd think of me." Flattered and concerned. My wheelings and dealings have taken me a bit off the beaten path, to be sure, but I'm hardly what dear brother Adrian might call a cunning linguist. Besides, on an average day the regulars at the Mortal Coil can be counted on for fluency in twenty or thirty non-human languages between them. Only one reason Allie would think that I might be better equipped to chat with this Jenny-come-lately. "Troublemaker, what?"
She giggled. Allie doesn't break hearts, she just melts them into unresisting goo. "Nothing a guy with a posh accent and some old-world charm can't handle. Come on by, I'll scramble some eggs for you. Please?"
Dashed difficult to refuse, of course, when a girl like Allie's applying the old oil like that. "I ... well, right ho, I suppose."
"Thank you, baby." And with that, she rings off.
I gaze unhappily at my painted ceiling. With mirrors out of the question, I'd been at a bit of a loss with regard to decorating the old c., but then the Marchese Ercole passed away and brother Adrian pinched a few frescoes from his palazzo in Umbria before the historical chappies could get there. I quite like it -- triton with sea horses, lots of water nymphs cavorting about in the altogether -- and usually it cheers me up. Today, however, even a renaissance rendering of breasts and buttocks can't drive away the sense that I've agreed to trade my life for a plate of eggs. I glare at a laughing naiad. "Fuck you," I tell her. "And the porpoise you rode in on."
I pull the headset off my ear. The bell on the wall is jangling like billy-o. I give it to the count of ten to pipe down, but it doesn't, so I surrender. I rise, feeling like old Lazarus after a bender. I start undoing locks. I crank open the door of my study -- the thing's a four-inch-thick sandwich of plate steel and asbestos, and my back makes its feelings on the subject quite clear. Still, precautions, what? A chap's home is, after all, his castle.
"Hold on, hold on, I'm coming. No need to pull the bally bell rope off." I trot down the corridor. My flat's front door is a charming old iron-and-wood bastard with a peepslit and a hatch for transacting biz. I flip open the slit. "And what can I do for you, my good man?"
My visitor is wearing a black hoodie with the drawstring pulled tight over his face. "You Spex?" He asks. "I hear you sell red. I want the good stuff."
"Half a mo'." I let the slit flap shut. My instincts are generally spot-on with this sort of thing, and this johnny feels harmless as a lamb, but with unexpected referrals it pays to stay on the safe side. That's why I keep an old deck of Bicycle playing cards on a shelf beside the umbrella stand. I pick it up, give it two quick riffles and a weave, and do an Elmsley pop from the middle of the deck. I catch the popped card in midair, and flip it. Four of diamonds. Harmless.
"Back again." I give my visitor a friendly wave through the slit. "Looking for a bit of the tip-top in the red department, are we? Well, one does one's humble best. So,it's not too inquisitive, what exactly the fuck I can do for you on this fine day?"
He looks up and down the corridor. There are places where the market gets so black that no law enforcement even cares anymore, so this fellow's a dab. "How much for Type-V?" he asks.
Listen to the chap, talking the talk. "Two thousand will get you a pint and a smile."
"I can get it from Archie for seven hundred."
"My Type-V is not the same as Archie's Type-V," I point out. "I can serve you from the rail for four hundred -- guaranteed human, and that's as far as I go. For one thousand I can offer you the top-shelf stuff. Certified low-mileage, some probably V and some probably not. Two thousand gets you the guaranteed V."
He thinks about this. If he's got any sense he'll take the bargain bin option, because there's nothing he could possibly be up to that requires actual virgin. If he's one of Archie's clients looking to trade up, he's either rich and stupid or rich and very clever indeed.
"I'll give you two-five apiece for two pints of the Type-V, if you can guarantee it," he says. He pushes the cash through the hatch. A stack of fifty hundred-dollar bills in a paper band.
"That's dashed generous of you, considering I just fucking said that I guarantee it at two thousand." I pull out ten of the hundreds and push them back through. "Hold on a tick."
My cold room is mostly empty at the moment. Anatomicals and biologicals are moving too fast for me to keep them on the shelves, and that's when I can even get them. Got a couple of hands and hearts in the deep freeze, Mexican cartel up from Juarez. No good unless you're desperate, but people do get desperate, what? At the moment, most of my refrigerated stock is pre-packaged pints of the old human bean juice. I know a chap who knows a chap who runs a bent Bloodmobile service for girls' boarding schools.
I pull two bags off the rack, check the labels, and grab a can of Beast on the way out.
"Here you are, chum." I push the plastic pouches through the hatch and into a waiting duffel bag. "Pleasure doing business with you."
"Are you sure--"
But I'm already back in my study, turning the crank. The door closes, four inches of tank armor between me and the world. Not precisely elegant, but it keeps out anything that gets kept out by doors. "Hoy, Cutie," I say, clipping my headset back on. "Back again. I do apologize, new customer. Dabblers -- more money than sense, what? Bless their curious little hearts."
The translation takes a split-second in both directions. "You kept me waiting."
"Why, Cutie, that's funny!" I laugh, so he'll know that I’m sincere. "Jolly good joke, bravo."
"Thank you," Cutie says. "The statement is absurd, because 'to wait' implies a chronological perception of time, which I do not possess."
"Jokes aren't quite so funny if you go explaining them, Cutie. Spoils the whole effect." I pop open my Beast and pour the whole bally thing down my throat at one go. My head feels all full of needles. I yawn until my jaw aches, and it dawns on me that I haven't been getting just oodles of sleep lately. "Must pop off now, I need a wash."
My bathroom opens right off the study, still inside the skin of metal and chemical protection that sits in the walls and ceiling and floor around my sanctum. It isn't until I've got the water on that I realize I'm still wearing my tuxedo from last night -- no mirrors allowed, you see. With what it cost me to seal this place, I'm not about to go leaving a bloody window open, what? Anyhow, I bung the ghastly stiff things into the laundry basket and slip in under the hot water.
Time for a quick checkup of the corpus. The week has not handled old Spex with kid gloves, but in my book it's not how many lumps you take, it's how many you avoid. A quick count puts fresh bruises at seven, whereas I feel that I've earned twelve at the least. A nasty great slash up my left leg from that beastly rosebush I jumped into merely testifies to the buttock-load of buckshot I'd have received if I hadn't jumped. Scratches on my back from that nice Armenian aristocrat, teeth-marks in my ankle from her Pomeranian, two loose molars from her husband. All in all, not so bad. Bit older, bit wiser, but neither so old nor so wise as to give up the game just yet. Brisk scrub, splash the soap from the eyes, and tally-ho.
I step out onto the mat feeling a good deal more civilized. Toweling off the old torso, I pad back into my study and feel the deep burgundy pile between my toes. When I first settled on this little pad of mine it was with the knowledge that I might one day find myself locked inside it, possibly for the duration of my life. To a bloke who's picking out a couch that he may breathe his last on, attention to detail is of the utmost -- inside my study, which is also my bedroom and my little command center, you'll find only the best. The wallpaper is cream-and-gold antique silk, and fucking expensive. I received the Chippendale wingback armchair as a bequest from a darling old socialite who turned out to have a great deal more life in her than the doctors had promised. To enjoy the contents of the humidor on my desk, a gift from brother Adrian, is an act of simultaneous worship and desecration.
Apart from my brother's gifts, which are generally intended to be imbibed or inhaled, my only souvenir of home is the carved stone mantelpiece. Shipped across the wide Atlantic to the District of Columbia and now set into a wall that boasts no fireplace, it bears the arms and motto of the House of Haruspex. A great eye, sable, upon a field, azure, with stars. Supported by a serpent, dexter, and a great hand, sinister, the shield is crested with a broken coronet. Beneath: spes vincit fatum. My ancestors terrify me.
Back to the headset, and perhaps a bit of work done before breakfast. "Hullo, Cutie?" His name's actually something a bit like Ku'taghot'ka, but that's such a fuss to pronounce that I generally use his nickname except when I'm cross with him. "You still there?"
His voice -- not really his, I suppose, and I suppose he isn't strictly a 'he' -- always reminds me a bit of my geography master back at Eton. "Hello, Spex. You kept me waiting."
"Joke's not funny the second time you tell it, chum," I reply. "Got to let it rest for a century or two, what? Anyhow, enough dilly-dallying. Have you got anything for me, or not?"
"Rumors," Cutie says. "Letters of transit have been stolen, and are expected to end up on the open market. They may find their way into your neighborhood."
Of course, he didn't really say "letters of transit," but some concepts don't translate literally from one plane of reality to another. I knew what he meant, and I knew that it would mean a pot of trouble for whatever poor bugger lost his rag and tried to fence something with that much heat on it. "That's a nasty affair. Sort of thing that turns brother against brother, what? Any reason to think the merchandise will be coming my way?"
"Rumors. Only rumors."
"Right." I begin to contemplate getting dressed. Seems like an awful bore; I'd been to an embassy party the night before, the guest of an old dab I tell fortunes for, and the wine had flowed well past four in the morning. "You'll let me know if it turns into more than that, what? And I'll keep my ear to the ground. Oops, must let you go, got a call on the other line." I switch over. "Hullo, Allie old girl. How's tricks down the Coil?"
"Hello baby." Blind Allie's got a voice like honey on a razor blade. I'd adore her even if she weren't proprietress of the premier watering hole for fellows in my line of business. "'Fraid we might have a teensy-weensy problem with a language barrier over here. There's a new girl in town, and I thought you might want to come around and get acquainted."
"Oh yes? Flattered you'd think of me." Flattered and concerned. My wheelings and dealings have taken me a bit off the beaten path, to be sure, but I'm hardly what dear brother Adrian might call a cunning linguist. Besides, on an average day the regulars at the Mortal Coil can be counted on for fluency in twenty or thirty non-human languages between them. Only one reason Allie would think that I might be better equipped to chat with this Jenny-come-lately. "Troublemaker, what?"
She giggled. Allie doesn't break hearts, she just melts them into unresisting goo. "Nothing a guy with a posh accent and some old-world charm can't handle. Come on by, I'll scramble some eggs for you. Please?"
Dashed difficult to refuse, of course, when a girl like Allie's applying the old oil like that. "I ... well, right ho, I suppose."
"Thank you, baby." And with that, she rings off.
I gaze unhappily at my painted ceiling. With mirrors out of the question, I'd been at a bit of a loss with regard to decorating the old c., but then the Marchese Ercole passed away and brother Adrian pinched a few frescoes from his palazzo in Umbria before the historical chappies could get there. I quite like it -- triton with sea horses, lots of water nymphs cavorting about in the altogether -- and usually it cheers me up. Today, however, even a renaissance rendering of breasts and buttocks can't drive away the sense that I've agreed to trade my life for a plate of eggs. I glare at a laughing naiad. "Fuck you," I tell her. "And the porpoise you rode in on."
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