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.