by Ari Marmell
Pinetti never stood a chance. He did manage to hold off for another few breaths—he really didn’t want to hand over one of his customers—and then he sagged. “Okay. This way.”
I could see the hurt in the expressions of the folks eating nearby, the sorrow and, yeah, fear that he’d caved. What I’d done would probably cause Pinetti problems in the future, and I could tell by his resistance that he genuinely cared about these people. It made me feel rotten at forcing his hand in public, at how I’d managed to talk myself out of sympathizing.
Not enough to get me to back down, though.
Franky was hunched over a table toward the back, wearing either the same cut-rate green suit I’d seen him in last, or one just like it. His glasses had been broke and fixed with tape, and I could see even from here that his collar was open, and his neck suspiciously bare of gold. His jaw sagged when he saw me coming, soup actually pouring over his lip and onto the table by his bowl. He stood, tensed to skedaddle, and then about deflated when I shook my head.
Guess he saw something in my expression to suggest it wouldn’t go well for him if he tried.
(Yeah, he was eating, though I know some fellas wouldn’t call soup “food.” Franky ain’t full-blood aes sidhe, remember; not all Fae can get by in your world with milk the way we can.)
“Hey, Mick. How you been?”
“Let’s take a walk, Franky.”
“Uh…” He looked as though he wanted to dive into his soup bowl and swim away. “I’d, um, kinda prefer to talk here.”
“No.” I put a “friendly” arm around his shoulder. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh. Okay…”
I guided him toward the closest door—an emergency exit—leaving Mr. Pinetti behind, horror and anger slowly painting his face as my influence started to fade.
Franky actually jumped when the door slammed behind us, leaving us in a dirty, paper-and-broken-glass-strewn alley not all that different from the one where we’d last jawed.
“Um, Mick…”
“Tell me, Franky.” I moved my arm, reached over—smiling as he flinched—to straighten his collar and dust off his lapel. “You got any shame at all? Coming to this kinda place to grab a bite, when you and I both know you got dough—or some gold you could hock—at home.”
He shrugged, smiling weakly. “C’mon, Mick. I just got beat up and robbed. Yeah, I got more jewelry, but selling it? Right after getting mugged? That’s asking too much, don’t you—”
At which point, his words turned into half-digested soup. Probably because I slugged him in the gut hard enough to lift him off his feet. He fell to all fours, his lunch spattering across the tips of my Oxfords, which I proceeded to clean off on Franky’s ribs. Hard. He left his feet (and hands) again and rolled a couple yards down the alley, finally coming to rest on a heap of newspaper and used napkins that’d fallen from a nearby garbage can.
(I know I told you before that most Fae don’t normally vomit. Obviously, that ain’t entirely the case; if we’ve just eaten and something hits us hard enough in the stomach, the food’s gotta go somewhere, don’t it?)
His glasses had come off halfway. I picked ’em up and stuck ’em in a pocket as I stepped toward him.
“Jesus, Mick… Jesus…” He spit out a tiny length of noodle and struggled upright enough to sit back against the wall. The entire front of his jacket and vest were soaked, and already letting off a tear-jerking stink.
“You lied to me.” I squatted down so I could look him square. “You got any idea how much that bothers me? How grateful I’d been to have gotten away from the Court, so I wouldn’t have other Fae lying to my face?”
“What… What you talking about? When did I…?”
I picked up one of the cleaner napkins—by which I mean it didn’t have any obvious dried soup, dirt, rat piss, or other filth on it—and wiped a few smears of puke off Franky’s jacket. “Changeling. Girl. Sixteen years ago. Ottati family. Any of this ringing any bells?”
“Well, yeah, you asked me last week, but—”
“But nothing, Franky. I know how you keep your ear to the ground. I know you got connections, here and Sideways. And I don’t for one damn minute believe that if someone like Goswythe showed up back here in Chicago, with a teenage girl in tow, that you wouldn’t have heard about it!”
Okay, to be fair, I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure they were here in the Windy City—but the odds were damn good. Ninety-five, maybe better. Not only was it the city Goswythe knew best (in both worlds), but I hadn’t just sat around on my thumbs my last evening in Elphame. Once I had the name “Goswythe,” I’d asked a couple more questions of the few Fae there who didn’t want to see me humbled or dead. Ielveith, for instance. And based on what all of them had heard, yeah, Goswythe had left Elphame not too long ago, but he hadn’t left Chicago.
On the way off chance they were wrong, I was gonna owe Franky more’n an apology.
But they weren’t wrong.
“Hey, c’mon, Mick! How was I supposed to know the girl Goswythe was with was the one you were asking about? It ain’t like he was shouting her real name with the newsies on streetcorners. Hell, she probably don’t even know her real name!”
“But you did know, Franky, that the phouka had just shown up in this Chicago a few months before I started asking around, with a girl who was the right age, didn’t you? And you had to know that she coulda been the one I was looking for. Which means, hey, you know what? You lied to me.”
“Well, now…” Franky was pressing himself tight to the wall, either trying to stand up against it or to vanish through it. His hair was a drunk spider’s web, sticking up and out and all directions across the bricks. “It wouldn’t have been fair to send you after a guy when I wasn’t sure he was—Mick!” I think it was probably me cocking back my fist that got to him. “Okay, all right! Yes, I fucking lied to you! Goswythe’s a lot more well connected than you are! What’d you expect me to do?”
“I expect, Franky, for you to tell me the truth when I ask you something. Even if it means you tell me, ‘Sorry, I’m not willing to get into that.’” I reached into my coat and he recoiled, smacking his head hard against the wall, but I just pulled his glasses outta my pocket. “You dig?”
“I get you. I’m sorry, buddy.”
“I’m sure you are.” I stuck the glasses, crooked, onto his face. “Now, where do I find Goswythe and the girl… What’s her name now, anyway?”
“Celia. I’ve heard he calls her Celia. I don’t know exactly where they are, Mick.”
“Franky…”
“I don’t, I swear! But I can tell you that they work mostly inside the Loop. Fleecing tourists, mostly.”
Huh; okay, then. The Loop was a lotta area to cover, and just ’cause they worked there didn’t mean they necessarily hung their hats anywhere nearby. But it was a start, a lot better one than I’d had—and I believed Franky when he said that was all he knew.
I think I’d been convincing enough to be sure of that.
I dropped him a few bucks to pay for the dry cleaning, and went on my merry way. Given what they were up to, the tricky twosome probably worked after hours, and I had a couple more stops to make before the sun set.
But this time I was picking up a smaller prop, damn it!
* * *
It was, as fate or fortune would have it, the same fella who cracked open the door this time as it’d been on my list visit.
“Good day to you again, sir!” I replied to his wary scowl. “I’m calling on behalf of Credne Household—”
“Household Device Repair,” he interrupted, showing a better memory than I’d have given him credit for. “The heck you doing back, pal?”
“Ah, well…” I lifted the narrow plastic contraption, letting the tube dangle from my hand, a thick and lifeless plastic snake. “The lady of the house, ah, Mrs. Ottati? She wanted a demonstration of Credne’s External Corner and Under-Ledge modifications. You’ve heard our slogan on the radio, right? ‘Inside
or Outside, That Dirt Can’t Hide!’”
I think I hated myself a little bit right about then.
“But I didn’t have it with me at the time,” I continued, not waiting to see if the tensing in his neck meant he was about to shout at me or laugh at me. “So here I am.”
His head tilted as he followed the tube down to the far end, coiled limply on the porch. “Where’s your vacuum?”
I shrugged and tried to twist my grin into something a little more ingratiating. “Well, the lady just wanted to see how the attachment worked, and I know she owns a vacuum, so I thought, hey, why lug the thing all across town, right? Right?”
And then, since I’d been concentrating on him long enough while we’d been booshwashing, “Could you announce me to Mrs. Ottati, please?”
Again, it wasn’t hard to make the request sound a little more reasonable than it was, and again, he was back after just a couple minutes. “C’mon in,” he grunted.
Well, that was a bit of a pickle, wasn’t it? I’d hoped Bianca woulda taken the hint. “Sir,” I tried again gamely, “It’s a head for external cleaning. It’s best if I’m outside to demonstrate—”
“Nuh-uh, pally.”
And yeah, I froze. I wasn’t actually gonna walk out on my deal with Bianca, not after all I’d been through to get this far (and especially not after I’d already put myself in a couple different jams and made myself some fresh and exciting new enemies whether or not I took it any further). But I also was not stepping across that threshold again; never mind the pain of it all, if I backed down on my threat to Orsola now, she’d walk all over me.
I honestly dunno what I’d have done, then, except it wound up not being an issue.
“Mrs. Ottati and Donna Orsola say they wanna see you inside, so you’re coming right on inside.”
Orsola chimed in? Either she was taunting me, pushing to see how far I’d bend, or…
I leaned in as if I was taking a step, just enough to put my shoulders through the doorway, and I felt it. Or more accurately, I didn’t feel it.
The wards were down!
Not completely they weren’t. I felt a faint pressure as I stepped across the threshold, an irritating “phantom poison ivy” itch all over my skin, but it was only a smidge worse than anything I mighta felt after a few minutes in a flivver or a long chat on the phone. And as I walked inside and let the gorilla manhandle me again in his fruitless search for a heater, I could see why. The runes and glyphs were still poking out from under a door here, the corner of a kinda garish rug there. So the sigils remained; she just hadn’t maintained ’em, hadn’t laid any magic on the wards in a few days. Let the power slowly fade, basically.
She musta really wanted my help after all.
Mr. Personality led me back into that same sitting room, where I greeted Mrs. Ottati and offered Donna Orsola a deep and respectful nod. Her head twitched in what looked almost like she might be returning it. I started making up whatever bunk sounded good about the virtues of the External Corner and Under-Ledge cleaning head until the goon wandered from the room, and then I plopped down onto the sofa.
It felt a lot more comfortable, this time around.
“I was starting to get concerned, Mr. Oberon,” Bianca said. “I’ve been trying to reach you since Tuesday.”
“Yeah, sorry. I was, uh, out of town, following up a few leads.”
She and the old woman both leaned in, their faces excited. The clicking of the rosaries they both clutched sounded synchronized. “You know where she is?” Bianca demanded.
“No.” Then, as their expressions began to sag, “I’m a lot closer’n I was when we last talked, though. I ain’t making any promises, but I might be able to find her in a couple days.”
“Oh, Blessed Madonna! Meraviglioso!” Orsola was actually smiling at me! It was, in its own way, about as disturbing as Eudeagh’d been. “But how can you do this?”
“Well, that’s the trick.” I turned back to Bianca. “I need a lock of your hair, Mrs. Ottati.”
“What?” She looked puzzled, perhaps a little disturbed. Orsola had paled.
“I need—”
The strega rose from her chair. “We heard what you need, fata! But if you think I do not know better than to grant you such a powerful tool to use against—”
“It’s not for you, you paranoid dingbat! I need it to find her. Hair or clothes or something of hers would work a lot better, but since that ain’t gonna happen, something tied to her mother’s the next best thing. And yeah, you better suck it up and live with it, or else this ain’t gonna happen!”
“It won’t work,” she said, though she sounded a little calmer. “Do you believe I haven’t tried, over and over through the years? Every divination I could think of, every far-ranging spirit of whom I might demand answers, and none led me to her.”
“My magics don’t work the same as yours, donna. And I ain’t casting around blind, either; I know where to start, now.” Which’d be why I didn’t ask for the damn thing earlier, savvy? You think I didn’t know the old bat’d throw an ing-bing over the whole notion?
The pair of ’em muttered and argued and groused in Italian for a few minutes—I could translate it all for you, but really, why bother?—and then Bianca nodded at me. “I’ll fetch a pair of scissors.”
Which left Orsola and me alone again, trying not to be too obvious about recoiling from each other.
“Surprised you’re jake with this.” Yeah, I was pushing. I do that when I’m hurting and tired and angry.
“I am not ‘jake’ with this, fata. I’m well aware that I’m handing you potential influence over one of my family with which you cannot be trusted. Rest assured that while you are searching for my granddaughter, I will be taking steps to minimize your ability to use that influence. I help you with this because I must, creature, but I can stop you from abusing what trust we’ve offered. And if you attempt to do so, I swear to you, I shall stop at nothing to destroy you utterly.”
I believed she would, too. But as I said before, she musta been desperate for me to find the girl to even think about cooperating as much as she had.
A fact she pretty much confirmed when she finished up with, “But my granddaughter is worth the risk.” Her whole trap wrinkled, like the words had been marinated in lemon juice. “I will be in the next room until Bianca finds the scissors. I feel the need to pray before I do this.”
Yeah, sister. You and me, both.
It all proved about as difficult as you’d imagine. Bianca brought in a pair of kitchen shears, I snipped off a small tuft of her hair, and that was pretty much that.
It was right about then, as I was shoving the lock into my coat pocket, that we all heard the front door slam and a tide of voices start flowing down the hall toward the sitting room. Bianca’s blinkers went wide as the boggarts’ mouths, and I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if she’d fallen into ’em.
“I imagine that’d be the hubby,” I said.
The door opened to reveal a small gaggle of Joes. (Do wiseguys come in “gaggles”?) Most of ’em I knew already, by face if not name. The one in the lead—kinda block-jawed, clean-shaven, wearing a rich brown three-piece with a gold watch fob—I hadn’t met yet, and didn’t look too happy to be meeting me now. He’d never have looked handsome, not even if he wasn’t glowering like a constipated thundercloud, but his eyes were steady, half-lidded, his jaw quirked just a little. Not handsome, but definitely striking, definitely noticeable. This was a fella who, wherever he was and whatever was happening around him, was definitely there, if you dig what I mean.
Right now, he was here, and he didn’t much like that I was here.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Ah, hello, sir! I represent Credne Household Device Repair. I was just showing your gracious wife our new External Corner and—”
“What the fuck is this, Tony?” He’d pivoted toward one of the big lugs next to him, who was, far as I could tell, pretty much indistinguishable from the
other big lugs around him. “You let this scemo just waltz into my house? What the fuck’s the matter with you? When did you mugs turn so stupid, Tony?”
“Fino, please,” Bianca began, “he—”
While I, at the same time, had started with, “Mr. Ottati, I can assure you—”
“You! Close your fucking head! Bianca, what’sa matter with you?”
“I—”
“You know better’n this! You all know better’n this!”
At some point during the diatribe, incidentally they’d all switched to Italian. Made no nevermind to me after a few words, of course.
“What the fuck?” Fino was going on, with a rather disturbing lack of original profanity. “A fucking salesmen you let walk in here? And leave him alone with my wife and my mother? What the fuck?”
“He’s been here before, boss,” one of the palookas protested. “He’s harmless. Just a vacuum repair—”
“Before? He’s been here before? You been this stupid twice?”
I honestly wondered for a minute if someone wasn’t about to start throwing lead.
“It’s not a big deal, Fino,” Orsola said calmly. “We were simply discussing—”
“Please, Momma,” he interrupted—though with a lot more deference than before, I should point out—“lemme deal with this.” Then, to the others again, “Everything going down with Shea’s fucking Uptown Boys, and now Scola’s trying to convince the Outfit that I can’t handle my fucking territory, and you go and let some stranger near the ladies?”
Interesting… And somehow, I figure, a lot more open than he’d have been if he’d known I understood every word. Orsola, who did know, cast a nervous peek my way—right after spitting at the mention of “Scola”—but said nothing.
“—searched him, boss,” the guy who’d let me in was protesting. “He ain’t packing.”
“Yeah? You bother to search the vacuum hose, wise-ass?”
It was actually kinda funny watching a whole cluster of Mob soldiers go pale at once. Three of ’em actually stumbled over themselves getting to me and snatching the hose from the floor next to me. It was clean, of course.