“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.”
22.5.09
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."
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