by Steven Brust
“All right.”
There was silence, and I badly wished my head would clear, at least a little. I wanted to tell her about finding out that my home was destroyed, but I didn’t dare, because I didn’t want people knowing about Feng’s, and because, well, Souci didn’t seem like the sort of person you dump your troubles on.
We were at the apartment. Climbing the stairs was a lot harder than it should have been, and getting my key in the lock took all the concentration I had to spare. But we were finally inside, and I led the way to my room and collapsed on my futon, noted thankfully that the room wasn’t spinning, and stared up at Souci, who shook her head sadly.
“I’m drunk,” I explained again.
“I know,” she said. She sat down next to me and stroked my forehead. In my drunken stupor, it seemed like an uncharacteristically, I don’t know, tender gesture. I almost said Those Three Words, but retained enough rationality to know that would be a bad idea. Besides, what does it mean, coming from a drunk?
And, as we sat there, the thought came to me, When did you start thinking you knew her so well that you can make all of these deductions about what she’s like? I kept looking at her. The voice inside of my head whispered to me once more, in case I’d forgotten: You’ve got it bad, son.
She kissed me on the cheek, and I almost choked up. I stroked her hair and kissed her clumsily. I was too drunk to make love, but she kissed me back, and then she was lying across me, then I rolled over, and I heard myself make little whimpering sounds. Her skin was so soft.
I’m usually no good for sex when I’m wasted, but I guess there are exceptions to everything. We made love three times that night. At one point she said, “Are you always so horny?”
“No,” I said. In retrospect, I think that was the right answer.
Along toward morning, when the liquor had mostly been worked out of my body, I said, “That was pretty fine, Cupcake.”
“Cupcake?”
“You called me Pumpkin.”
“Cupcake sounds like something you’d name a horse.”
“I like horses.”
“Are there things you haven’t told me? Hmmmm?”
I said, “Anyway, Cupcake—”
“I could kill you in your sleep.”
“Probably. Just don’t wake me up, okay? Ouch.”
Sometime later I said, “Hey, babe?”
“Hmmmm?”
“I don’t think we ought to be serious about it. I mean, I like hanging around you—”
She smiled. “Uh-huh.”
“I just don’t think we should let it get serious.”
“I agree.”
I sighed. “I mean, I don’t know what my plans are for the future.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m not at a point where I can really make commitments.”
“Neither am I.”
“As long as we’re clear that, well—”
“We don’t owe each other anything, honey.”
I said, “Good. And Cuddles—”
“Hmmm?”
“Never leave me.”
“I won’t.”
I woke to Jamie’s blessed face. I say blessed because in his hands were two cups of coffee.
“You,” I told him, “are a saint.”
“Thank you, suh,” he said, doing his English butler. “Will that be all?”
“Yes. Thank you, James.”
I blew on my coffee and tasted it. Sugar, heavy cream, cinnamon, and cocoa. If you’re going to wake up at all after drinking heavily the night before, this is the way to do it.
Souci pulled the covers up around her chin and opened one eye. It was true; I only noticed her freckles in the morning. She sat up when I gave her her coffee, and she sipped at it, very delicately. My heart did a thing. Jamie left and I finished my coffee and crawled to the bathroom, which was mercifully not in use. I spent a good ten minutes brushing my teeth, then I showered and shaved. Souci used the bathroom after me, and when she came back she shut the door and starting kissing me.
At one point she said, “I love how horny you are in the morning.” I was going to make the same comment to her, but I got distracted.
When we finally dressed and walked out into the living room, Tom was sitting there with Rose and Jamie. “Morning,” I said.
Tom said, “Did you know that Chico Marx learned all of those accents so he could go anywhere in New York without getting beat up?”
“Is that true?” I said.
“Yep.”
“Cool. Did you know that you look funny sitting there without Carrie?”
“Already? That’s scary.”
“No, she isn’t here.”
“What?” Then he hit his forehead with his hand. “You’re doing it to me now.”
“I’m becoming infected.”
“What is this about?” asked Souci.
I said, “Tom is always making stupid puns, and—”
“No, about Carrie.”
“Oh. Right. Carrie and Tom have been being cute together.”
“Really?” she said. “Aren’t you a little old for her?”
Tom stared at her like she was a dead fish he’d just found in his bathwater. She didn’t seem to notice. “I have to go talk to my agent,” she said. “Are you going to be around for a while?”
“Yeah,” I said. “At least a few hours.”
“It won’t be more than two.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
She nodded and headed out the door.
When she was gone, Tom didn’t say anything, which I thought was nice of him. I had the impression that he and Souci weren’t going to be best of friends.
Jamie said, “Should we practice?”
“I’m supposed to work today,” said Tom.
“Wait a while,” I said, “I have some news.”
“Oh?”
I licked my lips. “I learned something yesterday.”
They all stared at me, waiting. I took a deep breath and told them.
Jamie just stared straight ahead. Rose cuddled up with him. Tom sat there shaking his head. I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No,” said Jamie. “We’d have found out.”
Then we sat in silence for a while longer. Tom reached for his mandolin and started noodling. Pretty soon Jamie got out his guitar and I borrowed his twelve-string, since this was not a banjo sort of mood. We were all pretty much in tune, and none of us cared about the difference right then. Eventually Rose joined us, and we went into a long, slow version of “I Know You Rider.”
Maybe that was a mistake, but I really don’t think anything we did would have been any different. Irish music (or, as it was called on Old Earth, folk music) is, by its nature, filled with place. Sure, the best songs transcend their time and place of origin—that’s why they keep being rewritten—but I sang the verse about the “sun gonna shine,” and thought about how I wouldn’t see it anymore, and tears started. Singing about “cool Colorado rain” was no better.
Stan Roger’s “Giant” was, if anything, worse, and “Jack Stewart” was maybe worst of all—we were all in tears by the time we were halfway through it. I kept wanting to break into something cheerful like “Darlin’ Corey,” but I couldn’t. We played nonstop for an hour and a half, and were just winding down when I noticed Jamie hammering on a slow finger-picked D minor, which could only mean one thing. I caught Tom’s eye and he nodded. Rose was already making banshee sounds from her fiddle.
We played “Tom O’Bedlam” as we’d never played it before. Every verse was a nail in the coffins of our private memories, a teardrop in our personal wake for a lost world. Where each of us went to find our grief doesn’t matter, it was there in Jamie’s voice and Rose’s fiddle and Tommy’s mandolin. My thoughts will remain my own, as the music remained within those walls on that world, so far in time and space from where we had come, and even further yet from where we were going, together or apart, as may be.
When Souci came back I asked her if she was hungry, and she was, and she didn’t mind eating at Feng’s since they had a pretty good variety, so we walked down there along some tree-lined side street that ran parallel to LeDuc, slow and quiet, and I was glad we were together. We didn’t say a word as we walked; she seemed to sense that I had a lot on my mind. Tell me this, my friend: Was what I was feeling at that moment real? Or was I just working very hard not to think about the Earth, and all the things I might have to do but didn’t want to, and investing all of that emotion into her just because she happened to be there and willing? And, for a chance at the big deal of the day, does it matter?
Rich was in the taproom, and was just finishing drinking something clear and bubbly. I said, “Sissy water?”
“Sissy water.”
“The local stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“How is it?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I laughed. I cried. I fell down. It changed my life. It was good. The end. Yeah, it’s pretty good.”
“Right. Rich, this is Souci. Souci, Rich.”
“How do you do?”
“Hi.”
“So, Rich, you finished the pipes?”
“Yep.”
“Good. Where’s Eve?”
“The library.”
“Oh?”
“Libby was talking to us about what you learned yesterday.”
“Oh.”
Souci glanced at me, but Libby called for Fred from the back room just then.
I yelled back, “He just went into the men’s room. What is it?”
“Delivery.”
“I’ll get it,” I said.
“Want help?” asked Rich.
I shrugged, not knowing how big a delivery it was likely to be. Souci sat down to wait while Rich and I went back to the rear entrance. There was a neat stack of a dozen boxes just inside the door, each box about two feet by one by one. I hefted one and it weighed about fifteen pounds, which wasn’t bad. I looked at the label and smiled. “The local whiskey, I think.”
“We should sample it,” said Rich.
“After we move it in.”
“Like Jamie says, you’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun at all.”
“Right.”
We had about half of them moved, when Rich suddenly said, “That’s funny.”
“What?”
“The seal on this one.”
I looked. “I don’t see any difference.”
“The tape isn’t even.”
I looked again. “It probably came open, so some guy had to do it instead of a machine.”
He nodded, picked it up, stopped, and his brows knitted. He set it down again. “Look at this.”
“What?”
He pointed. There was the tiniest lump at one end of the box, near the seal. I said, “Don’t ask me. Open it up, if you’re that curious.”
“I think I will,” he said. “Have a knife on you?”
“No. Where’s your tool kit?”
“The other room. I’ll get it.”
I moved another box while he went for his tool kit. I saw him poised there for a moment, about to break the seal, then he stopped again. “Billy, does this look funny to you?”
“What now?”
He pointed again to the strip of tape sealing it shut. I looked closely. I said, “Yeah. It’s like there’s a wire or something below the tape.”
He nodded.
I shrugged. “If you stare at anything long enough it’ll look funny,” I said, but there was no conviction in my voice. My mouth felt dry, although, really, I hadn’t consciously thought of anything it could mean by that time. Rich’s movements suddenly became much more fluid, and, simultaneously, sharper, more precise. He kept his eyes on the box while his hand found something in his tool kit, which he switched on and pointed at various parts of the box. It beeped twice in different tones at different places.
He found something else, held it only a bit away from the top of the box, and pressed a stud, studied the display on the top. He did this again, then said, “Billy, get everyone out of the place.”
I said, “Is it—”
“Do it now,” he said.
“Right.”
I spoke to Fred first. “We need to clear the building.”
He didn’t even bat an eyelash; he just said, “You take the dining room, I’ll take the taproom and the kitchen area. What about Rich?”
“He’s staying, for the moment,” I said, and was suddenly very happy that Eve wasn’t around.
I went into the restaurant and found that the only customer in the place was Souci. I said, “Let’s go outside.” Her eyes widened, and she didn’t move or say anything, she just waited. I said, “There’s something going on. I can’t explain right now. We have to wait outside.”
“All right,” she said, and we headed out. Libby was standing on the other side of LaVelle looking at loaves of bread and talking to Fred and Tom, who’d been washing dishes. Libby said, “What is it?”
I shook my head. “I’ll tell you later,” I said, and walked back into the building and back to where Rich was—and if you think that was easy to do, you don’t know me. Rich had his whole tool kit laid out, and the box still wasn’t open. He seemed quite calm, and was making notes in a small notebook from the reading of various instruments. Without looking up, he said, “Is everyone out?”
“Yes. Can I help?”
“Not as much as you’ll distract me because I’ll be worrying about you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Thanks. This thing is set to go off in about ten minutes, as near as I can tell. I’m pretty sure I can disarm it in less than that. Get at least as far as the other side of the street, and make sure everyone else is, too.”
“Pretty sure?” I echoed. “Can’t we just call the police or something?”
“Not before it goes off.”
“Maybe if we just get it out of here—”
“And put it where? Who would you like to blow up? And I can’t even be sure that too much motion won’t set it off.”
“But what if you—”
“And we’re running out of time. Get going, Billy.”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you later.”
“You damn well better.”
And I made a special effort to walk, not run, out of the place and across the street. My legs were shaking. Everyone sort of gathered around me, and I said, “Rich found a bomb. He’s disarming it.” I didn’t say, “He’s trying to disarm it,” which would have been more accurate. “It should only be about ten minutes.”
Souci’s eyes grew very wide. “Are you going to call the police?”
“There isn’t time,” I said. “If we’re going to save the building—”
“That’s crazy. Your friend is going to blow himself up. The police know how—”
“So does Rich,” I said hopefully.
It was right then that Jamie and Rose showed up, and asked why we were standing on the street, so the whole thing had to be explained to them. Rose, I think, was beyond shock. Tom, who finally learned what was going on, screwed his face up, like he only does when he’s really angry, and turned his back on us. His fists were clenched and there was tension in his bony back. I made a note to be careful around him; when he’s mad, he’s just mad, and he’ll sometimes take it out on whoever has the bad luck to cross him first. Jamie was angry as I’d rarely seen him angry. He stared at Feng’s like he could see right through it to whoever had sent the bomb. I could almost hear his teeth grinding. He started across the street.
“Jamie—” I said, knowing I couldn’t stop him, but just then Rich emerged, smiling and holding the box. He met Jamie in the middle of the street. They walked back together, and Rich set the box down. It was mostly packing material and wires, with a few electrical doodads, as well as whiskey bottles so it would weigh the same as the other boxes.
“A good job,” said Rich, holding o
ut a lump of what looked like Silly Putty. “Enough to wreck the place and kill everyone in it, and not do much else, as far as I can tell. If we’d opened it, it would have gone.”
I started shaking again. I’d say I had every excuse. If I’d been the one to pick up that box…no, I did not really want to think about that. Jamie hugged Rich. I said, “Good work.”
“It wasn’t that hard,” he said.
I said, “I want to go in and sit down.”
Jamie said, “I want to find out who sent that thing.”
Souci didn’t say a word, she just walked into Feng’s next to me. We all sat down at the big corner table in the restaurant part. I asked Libby, “Going to close up for the day?”
“Hell no,” she said. “We’ll be getting busy in an hour.”
Fred said to Tom, “You don’t have to stick around.” Tom glared at him, like he’d just been insulted.
Jamie said, “We’ve got to do something about this.”
“For starters,” said Rich, “I’m going to check the rest of the boxes.”
I added, “And anything that ever gets delivered, here or to any of us, as long as we all shall live, amen.”
Fred said, “Should we go to the police?”
“Maybe,” said Rich. “Will it do any good?”
“Who knows?”
Souci said, “What are you talking about? Of course you should call the police. Someone tried to blow you up. Are you foolish?”
“Who the fuck asked you?” said Tom.
She started to flare at him, then stopped and just shrugged. The rest of us didn’t say anything. The silence grew more and more uncomfortable. I said, “Cupcake, can we get out of here?”
“Sure.”
Jamie said, “Wait, I thought we were going to decide—”
“To decide what? Whether to call the police in? Shit, I don’t know. Whatever you do is fine by me. How to find out who put the bomb in the place? Let me know when you have an answer, and I’ll help. But this place is giving me the creeps right now, okay?”
Jamie had nothing to say to that. Souci and I walked out onto the street. We stood in front of Feng’s for a moment, then I said, “Show me the city.”
“All right,” she said. My palm felt sweaty and I was shaking, but she made no comment as she took my hand. It was what I needed just then, and that is a thing I remember.