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.

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