by Tad Williams
Even in a body that wasn’t one hundred percent my own, I couldn’t repress a shiver. It looked like I’d be doing a lot of things I wouldn’t much like in the next few days, including having a conversation with my best friend Sam about why he wasn’t being entirely honest with me. Alice in the office had said when she gave me the case that Edward Walker was supposed to be Sam’s client, and if our situations had been reversed I certainly would have explained to my old buddy by now why I missed taking a client that landed him deep in the shit.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed more information about everything—about dead Mr. Walker, even about Grasswax. But information about Hell’s labor force wasn’t easy to come by through regular channels. I was going to have to pay a visit to Fatback.
five
pig man
ORDINARY WORK kept me busy much of the next day. Alice sent me a downtown client, a hit and run on the 84 over by Shell Mound Road. It was pretty much a slam dunk case—the victim was a twelve-year-old school kid crossing the intersection on the way home for lunch. The prosecutor, a new guy named Weepslug took one look at the scene and rolled his eye in disgust. (He only had one, more or less in the middle.) In fact it would all have been over in a very short time indeed—this wasn’t the kind of kid hiding any ugly secrets—but the rules about children are very, very strict, and we had to go through every formality. By the time the judge ruled, and I could finally leave the pathetic scene behind—the whole time we were arguing the case the kid’s twisted bicycle and one shoe were still lying in the middle of the road—my day was pretty much shot. Even winning the case wasn’t going to wipe away the memories of that child crying when he realized he wasn’t going home to his mom and dad.
Sometimes I hate what I do.
At one point, while the judge was questioning the deceased—they do that when it’s a minor—Weepslug turned to me and said, “You heard about Grasswax?”
I wondered if he really didn’t know. “Oh, yeah, I heard.”
“He was a bastard, but trust me, nobody deserves that.”
“I was under the impression you guys thought being a bastard was good.”
He gave me a strange look. For a demon I kind of liked him—his single, bleary eye had a bemused expression, and although he was almost twice my height he didn’t use that to intimidate. Not that I trusted him an inch, of course. “There’s good bad and then there’s bad bad,” he said. “G-Wax made some enemies on both sides.”
“You think somebody on my side of the scrimmage line might have done this?” This was a new idea. It wasn’t in character for our side, but that could be exactly how someone wanted it to seem. Still, the Bloody Net…!
The prosecutor’s forehead wrinkled in distress; it made his face look like someone had sat on a Christmas ham. “I’m not saying anything,” Weepslug declared, quick and loud. “I don’t know anything.”
“Neither do I,” I assured him. “There’s no greater bliss than ignorance.”
“Oh, look!” yelled Sweetheart when I walked into The Compasses just before six, “It’s Heaven’s Most Wanted!”
“Yeah, cute, very cute.”
Sam was at the bar with a ginger ale and a San Judas Courier spread out across the counter. Newspapers were another way my buddy liked to cultivate his old-school act. “Check it out,” he said as I approached. “His working name was Darko Grazuvac.”
It took me a moment. “Grasswax? He got an obituary?”
“Obituary, hell—he got an above-the-fold story. After all, he did just turn up drowned at the scene of a headline suicide. What did you expect?”
This was making me more and more uneasy. Neither our side nor the Opposition liked publicity, especially not this kind—having reporters digging into the backgrounds of people whose pasts were largely invented is never a good thing for either of us. “So, why would anyone bump him off right there at the Walker guy’s house?”
Sam shrugged and downed his ginger ale. “Sending a message? Dunno. Let’s go eat.”
You could get a meal of sorts at The Compasses but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to do if you were going to keep living in the same body afterward, so we wandered across Beeger Square to Boxer Rebellion, my favorite Chinese place. It’s small and unpretentious, and for a Chinese restaurant (which tend to the businesslike over the sentimental in my experience) also quite friendly.
Normally having a pair of chopsticks in my fist and a plate of their sesame seed mutton in front of me is enough to convince me that the Highest is on His throne and all’s right with the world, but tonight it wasn’t working.
“So what’s going on?” I asked Sam. “Where were you yesterday? Why did I get what should have been your client, and how come you didn’t say anything about it when I saw you?”
He swirled his tea around in his cup before drinking it down. “You mean the Walker thing? Damned if I know, old buddy. Why you got it, I mean. Why I didn’t get it—well, that was the kid’s fault.”
“Clarence? That kid?”
Sam thinks chopsticks are for poseurs. He took a big spoonful of pork and suan cai stew and looked at it like he wasn’t certain what it was, even though he orders the same thing every time. “Yeah. He had me back and forth from Outside to Inside all day, asking me to show him how different things worked. When the call came down we had just stepped through a Zipper because he wanted to watch to see if my appearance changed Outside.”
“Curious little bastard. But you’re supposed to be training him, not letting him dictate your schedule.” I was still pissed off. Not that I wanted all this crap landing on Sam, but I sure as hell hadn’t wanted it on me, either.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. When the call came, I got it, but I couldn’t answer it. And when I tried to step back Inside to see if that helped, I couldn’t make the Zipper work. Lasted what felt like about ten minutes and by then the call had rolled over—I didn’t know it went to you, though.” He shrugged. “Pretty weird, huh?”
“Damn weird. Have you mentioned that to anyone?”
“Anyone? Everyone! You forget, I had to talk to the fixer about everything that happened that day. That’s all I know—it wasn’t like one of the fixers from the House was going to tell me what had been going on with the Zippers. But that’s not what’s really bugging me.” He shook his big head. Sam looks about twenty years older than his body’s supposed to look. Part of it is just the way he moves, that kind of unhurried, good-old-boy thing. He talks the same way, and it can drive you crazy. Now he made me wait while he took two more spoonfuls of soup and all but sent them out to the forensic lab for tests, swirling the cabbage around in his mouth for what seemed like minutes. (Just because we’ve been friends for years doesn’t mean I never think about murdering him.) “It was too convenient, the way it all happened,” he finally said. “If the kid hadn’t wanted me to be there, I wouldn’t have been Outside when it all went down—wouldn’t have been stuck. No, there’s definitely something unusual going on with our young Clarence,” he finally said.
“Well, shit, no kidding. I already knew that.” I told him about the odd conversation I’d had with the Mule, how he’d asked me to keep an eye on the new boy.
Sam nodded slowly. “Haraheliel. That’s his angel name, right? You ever heard of him before?”
“Nope. But someone might have. He claims he was in Records—Filing, he says. Maybe we should see if anyone else remembers him.”
“I could do that,” Sam told me, slurping up a little broth. “But you’d have to do me a favor and take him off my hands for a couple of days. I can’t get anything done with him hanging around.”
“Then maybe I should be the one to do the investigating.”
Sam frowned. “Look, B, the kid likes you. He’s been asking about you, so it’d be a natural, and I got a buddy or two working in the Records Halls that I know from the old days. They should have some ideas how the kid wound up here.”
I thought about i
t. Sam did know a lot of people, but our fellow advocate Walter Sanders knew people in Records, too so I could just as easily ask him. But when a friend asks a favor…“Okay. But I can’t take him off you ’til the day after tomorrow. I’m going to be too busy before that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking into some things of my own. I’ll fill you in if anything interesting comes up.”
Sam considered, then lifted his teacup. It took me a moment, but at last I caught on and raised my beer bottle to clink against the delicate porcelain. “Confusion to our enemies!” he said, our familiar toast.
“Amen to that,” said I.
Once upon a time most of San Judas was agricultural land—numberless small farms, orchards, you name it. Then the city began to grow, and everything that wasn’t city gradually got pushed farther and farther away, until nowadays you can’t find much that resembles real agriculture except backyard wineries and people growing pot in their garages. But there were still a few exceptions, and after I said goodbye to Sam I retrieved my car from the handicapped parking space (yes, angels cheat sometimes, but come on, we’re doing God’s work!) and went back to my apartment to kill some time. A little before eleven I got back behind the wheel and headed up into the hills in search of one particular farm.
It wouldn’t be easy to find Casa de Maldición in the daytime, but since I always go there at night it’s usually damn near impossible. It’s in the hills off the old Alpine Road, past Skyline and down a long winding rural road in a particularly empty section of unincorporated county. In general it’s the kind of place that rich people and hermits live, and neither of those care much about sidewalks—they attract riffraff—or streetlights (which, presumably, draw more of the same). Casa M. itself is on a hill up a little spur road off the winding one. In the deep darkness of the evening, well beyond city lights, it would have been invisible to most people, but I’d been here before and had the windows rolled down. The stench let me know when I was close.
Ever smelled a pig farm, even a small one? Honestly, if you haven’t, don’t bother. There are many things in life not worth experiencing if you don’t need to—amputation, crab lice—and porcine husbandry is one of them. Trust me.
I often wondered whether Fatback surrounded himself with pigs for company or protection. Certainly the presence of several dozen swine on his property meant that only the very determined (or the completely nostril-deaf) ever ventured up the wandering track to the rather nice house at the top. In the darkness I could just make out the smaller (but still good-sized) pig barn off to one side and hear the gentle grunting of its occupants.
The old man named Javier opened the door. He’d pretty much been born working for Fatback’s family—his father and grandfather had served before him. He never seemed to get much older between the times I saw him, but he sure as hell wasn’t getting any younger either. He looked like something you would find lying in the desert and then waste half an hour trying to decide what it used to be.
He blinked, even though I was the one standing in the dark and what little light there was came from his side of the doorway. “Hello, Mr. Dollar,” he said at last. “Long time, good to see you. If you come to talk to Mr. George, he not quite ready yet.”
“That’s okay. I don’t have much time so just take me in to him, and I’ll wait.”
Javier didn’t really like to do it—he still hung onto some vestige of Old-World pride in his employer and didn’t like to display him at less than his best—but he knew me and knew who my bosses were, so he nodded and beckoned me to follow him into the house. As we went past the kitchen I saw a half-eaten plate of rice and beans and realized I’d interrupted the caretaker’s dinner. A small television on the counter was showing some Mexican game show.
We walked through the house and out the back. He pointed to the big barn, which stood by itself about ten yards away down the hill, connected to the main house by a long stairway. I nodded and thanked him. He went back to his meal.
The smell, which was eye-watering everywhere else on the property, rolled out of the barn door like a full scale chemical weapons attack, so that for a moment I couldn’t even go inside, but had to stand there and try to fan a hole in it with my hand. It didn’t work—it never did—but at last I was able to deal with it enough to walk inside.
Most of the barn was taken up with a central pen about twenty by thirty feet or so, with a chest-high rail and a bottom about a foot or so deep in stinking mud—and I mean stinking. At one end of the enclosure, dim and pale in the flickering overhead light, crouched a huge, naked bald man smeared with mud and worse. He looked up at me and his squinting eyes gleamed.
“Hello, George,” I said. Nobody called him Fatback to his face—it wasn’t polite. Not that he understood me at the moment, anyway.
He let out a squeal of rage at the sound of my voice and hurtled across the pen on his hands and knees, splashing mud and shit and pig slops everywhere, but slipped and skidded head first into the barrier with a grunt of pain and frustration. He sank back in the muck and sat looking at me sullenly, blood now trickling from a cut on his forehead. I sighed and checked my watch; 11:52. Still eight minutes to go.
I moved safely out of splashing range and watched him as the time ticked away. He watched me back. It was unpleasant, being stared at by those narrow eyes. There wasn’t anything human in them as far as I could see, but there was an awful lot of murderous anger. I was glad old Javier seemed to keep the pen in good repair.
Casa de Maldición is Spanish for “House of the Curse,” but what had happened to George was worse than that. The child of an old Californio family (the Spanish-speaking folks who owned everything before the gringos showed up) George Noceda had inherited not just a lot of family property in the Pulgas Ridge area but the family’s major obligation as well, which happened to be a debt to the dark powers. (Nowadays we call ‘em by more respectable names, like “the Opposition,” but it’s still the same old firm.) In return for unnatural prosperity for the family, for several hundred years, every oldest male child of the Noceda line had been were-hogs, doomed each night to become a ravening beast between the hours of midnight and sunup. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the family did their best to keep the suffering male heir locked up at night. Mistakes were made (and more than a few local monster legends had been started because of those mistakes) but by and large the family had come to accept the price of the bargain some ancestor had made in return for their good fortune in all other matters.
Then along came George. A creature of the late twentieth century, he had never doubted in the power of dark magic—after all, he had started to smell powerfully of chitterlings when most boys were just growing their first scraggly mustaches, and had changed for the first time soon thereafter. But like most of the people of this modern age, he didn’t think he should have to take the fall for something his great-great-great grandparents had done. So he made a deal with the Opposition: he would sacrifice most of the family fortune, land, wealth, and prestige, and in return Hell’s minions promised they would reverse the curse.
Poor George. Like so many others before him, he underestimated what he was dealing with. He got what he wanted, to the letter of his new contract, and the curse was, in fact, reversed. So from then on, each night at twelve, the same thing happened. In fact, it was happening now.
The fat, naked man suddenly fell face down into the filthy mud, bellowing like he was on fire. He began to thrash, sending gouts of stinking slime everywhere. I stepped back to the front door to protect my coat, which wasn’t all that expensive but was a favorite. The noise went on as the huddled figure in the muddy pen writhed and changed, grew darker and misshapen, until it had taken on an entirely new form, that of an immense, black, bristle-skinned boar hog.
The hog finally stopped squealing. It rolled over and sat up on its haunches, then turned its beady eyes in my direction.
“That hurts like an unholy bitch,” he said. “Every time.�
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“Nice to see you, George.”
He wrinkled his snout. “Oh, I’m sure, Bobby. A treat for all ages.” He saw something floating in the muck before him and sucked it up, then began to chew. “Corn cob,” he explained when he saw my horrified look. “Fiber. And oh my sweet and precious God do I need it…!”
I was getting more information than I wanted, and it would only get worse. George was garrulous in this form—pig’s body, man’s mind—and usually had no one to talk to but Javier or one of the old man’s sons, the only other people who still lived on this shrunken remnant of what had once been a grand seigneurial property. Of course, when he was in his other form, his dawn-to-midnight form of a pig’s mind in a man’s body, he wasn’t much for conversation.
They reversed the curse, you see. Just like they promised. Who do you think invented lawyers in the first place?
“So what brings you up to my neck of the woods, Mr. D?” George asked. “What can I do for you?”
“I need information on a citizen named Edward Lynes Walker and also on Grasswax, infernal prosecutor.” Fatback was the only outsider I could safely approach in the current climate. The Opposition had hosed him in a completely legitimate way, but George had never forgiven them, and he made it his life’s work to keep a close eye on their dealings. That was why a large portion of what remained of his family’s once vast fortune went toward funding a small research agency of which George was the only client. The only other thing in the room beside George’s pen was the projection monitor screen he used to view what they sent him, and to troll the net for what he could find himself.
All voice-controlled, of course. He’s a pig.
“Sure, I’ll see what I can find for you, Mr. D.” He cleared his throat and said, “Radiant.” At the code word the screen flicked on, bathing the room in cool light. “Hey, you want to do me a favor while I’m starting the search? Get that rake and scratch my back.”