Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille

by Steven Brust

  “The one on the left,” said Rich.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s very tall.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Tall,” repeated Christian. “Is that what you call it?”

  “Yeah, I—wait a minute.”

  The door opened again, and a short, pinch-faced fellow came out, looked at us, turned, went back inside. I said, “Is that—”

  “Yes,” said Rich. “That was the guy who was following me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’d been about to ask if he was one of the guys in the pictures Fred has. I’ve seen him before, I think with her.”

  “I haven’t seen the pictures,” said Rich.

  “Neither have I. I guess we both ought to look at them, huh?”

  “What pictures?” said Christian.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Asshole,” suggested Christian sweetly.

  When we got to Feng’s, which was just opening and already had a few people waiting for lunch, we left Christian at a table, grabbed Fred, and took him into the pantry.

  “Hurry up, gentlemen,” he said. “There are customers.”

  “Right,” I said. “Pictures.”

  He took a plain number ten envelope from his back pocket, handed it to me, and was gone. We rejoined Christian and opened it. There were two snapshots in it, both taken, I think, from a distance with a good telephoto lens.

  “This guy,” I said, “I’ve met. His name is Justin and he’s a friend of Carrie’s.”

  “He’s the one who was following me,” said Rich.

  “Great. And I’m sure you recognize this guy, right?”

  “Yeah. We just saw him coming out of Le Bureau whatever it was.”

  “His name is Claude,” said Christian. “I don’t know his last name.”

  I said, “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Don’t make me kill you.”

  He shrugged and smiled. I continued to look at him, considering. “What is it?” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “I guess it isn’t surprising that you know all of those people, I mean, if you hang around with S—, with her, you’d know the same people. It’s just that—you know.”

  “What?”

  That this guy who knew so much about us might be on the side of whoever had tried to blow up the place. “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

  After breakfast, which in my case involved scrambled eggs and hash browns, both including green pepper and onions, the eggs also involving participation by mushrooms, sausage, and paprika, Christian said, “So, you guys are, like, aliens from another planet, right?”

  I said, “I’ve never really thought of it that way before. It might be more accurate to say another time, though. Or maybe dimension. I like that: William Kevely, traveler through dimensions.”

  “Can I come along?” asked Christian.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, if we’re about to be nuked…”

  “That’s right, you heard that, too, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We could be lying, you know.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I shrugged. “Always room at Cowboy Feng’s.”

  A few cups of coffee later, Christian took off to get a few extra sets of strings—or so he claimed.

  “Should we follow him?” said Rich.

  “If he’s with them, he’ll expect us to. Do you know how to avoid being spotted? I don’t.”

  “I guess not.”

  Rich and I put our feet up on the seats and drank coffee. I stared out the window. A head of red hair floated past above the far booth and my heart leapt, but it wasn’t her. I thought about having a drink and decided it would be a bad idea just then.

  “Something wrong, Billy?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “What’s important and what isn’t? If it’s important to you—”

  “Yeah. I know. Never mind. I think I’ll go back home and play some banjo.”

  “Suit yourself. Let me know if I can do anything.”

  “I will.”

  Since it was only half an hour out of the way, I walked by Souci’s place and rang the bell, but no one answered.

  That night I went back to Feng’s to catch Pan’s Dream, and I thought they were good; the flute player was especially hot. Between sets, I talked to the skinny guy, whose name was Luc. He suggested that I get together with his band sometime to jam, and I complimented him on his band, and he explained how badly they were doing that night, and later I found myself in a back corner booth drinking soda and listening until the music was over. The guy running the sound board for them was a large, bearded man with long hair, a bald spot, and a potbelly. He was pretty good, too; surprisingly good for how much cheap whiskey he consumed.

  When they were done, I remained in back drinking orange juice and charged water while they packed up and left. Libby saw me, correctly deduced that I didn’t want company, and left me alone. When the place finally closed, she turned the lights out without saying a word. The room became very quiet. The stage creaked occasionally as it recovered from the abuse suffered earlier. The ventilation system softly hummed the D below middle C (we’ve checked). From time to time, my glass thunked on the table. I decided I should probably have been drinking scotch to get the full dramatic effect from the moment, but it was better that I didn’t.

  After about forty-five minutes of feeling good and sorry for myself, I got up, walked outside, and found myself face-to-face with the short guy named Claude whom I had seen earlier that day at Le Bureau. He was dressed in dark clothes and had something in his hand. After a moment, it resolved itself into a large canister. We stared at each other for a moment, then he dropped it and ran. I smelled kerosene.

  I don’t remember deciding to chase him, but I must have because I did. It was a foolish idea. He knew the city, I didn’t, he was probably in better shape than I was, and I had no idea what I was going to do if I caught him, but chase him I did, down the middle of the street, then around a building where he hid hoping I’d pass him, but I didn’t, so around another corner, smack into blinding lights, a car? no, security light, and he’s running that way, toward the door to a bar, I think, past it, a wind catches in my throat and I can’t breathe for just a moment, tears in my eyes, someone opened a door, but no, not that way, around to the left, and was that him going through that window? good thing this place is empty, feet echoing slap slap up a flight of stairs I can hear him glass breaking out the window down to land rollingrollingrolling broken glass on my shoulder makes me happy from an alley looks like fucking New York City he must be out of breath by now, good, I wish I could get more air into my lungs and my legs are so heavy, so heavy, where did he go now, can’t see the runner for the tears, and he’s turned down this—

  He stopped. Why?

  Ah! He thinks he’s lost me.

  “Shit,” I said aloud, and leaned against a building for a while, breathing in gasps. I could practically feel him on the other side of a garbage Dumpster, maybe twenty feet away from me. I pushed away from the wall after a while and started walking, trying very hard to walk quietly so he wouldn’t think it odd when he could no longer hear my footsteps after about thirty paces, when I stopped, listened, and heard his.

  I set out after him once more, carefully this time. I mostly stayed hidden, and once I caught him looking back over his shoulder, but I was pretty well concealed in the shadow of a church of some sort. Appropriate, if you like. I never saw him look back after that, so I assumed he never saw me.

  Eventually he left the city proper, and I fell even further back as we walked along a dirt road. I could just barely see him as he came to a very tall house all done up in Victorian clothes, from which light came streaming out to collect in puddles on the road. The house was very big, and formed a nice silhouette against the sunset. I decided it would have made someone a very fine haunt
ed house, from what I could see of the towers. Perhaps it had gables; I don’t know what a gable is. It had funny things that looked decorative built up around the towers, and if they weren’t gables they should have been, because it was that sort of house.

  There was an iron fence, the fence set into a low wall. It made me wonder, suddenly and perhaps irrelevantly, what this indicated about the economics of the person or the colony. But I had no idea if skilled craftsmen were plentiful, or iron was rare, so it really told me nothing. I hid behind the wall and watched as Claude knocked on the door and was admitted. I got no glimpse of the person on the inside. I made a note of the house number and the name of the road, and I left.

  It took me a long time to find my way home, and I might still be looking if I hadn’t found the river and correctly guessed that we were downstream from my apartment. The walk home helped settle nerves that badly needed settling. I stopped by Feng’s and removed the canister that did, in fact, contain kerosene. I held it for a while, thinking. A killing, a bomb, and this. The killing was successful, the bombing prevented by Rich’s alertness and by luck, the burning by luck alone.

  I opened the place up and stored the kerosene inside Feng’s for lack of anywhere else to bring it, and because one never knows when one might need two or three gallons of kerosene to burn down a Victorian mansion or something.

  When I woke up, it was early afternoon of a beautiful Sunday tra-la tra-la. Out the window of my bedroom, past lacy curtains left by Mr. and Mrs. Previous Occupant, a monster elm, Earth variety, held the ground together and the sky up and neatly bisected the unkempt green terraced and dirty-pine-fenced backside of a New Quebec residential district. The tree had to be damn near the full sixty years old that it could be. Can you imagine that? Land on a planet and start planting elms. Every once in a while I think the human race is worth saving, after all.

  As I lay there that afternoon making deep, melancholy, and philosophical reflections, it came to me that this last bit—the one about saving the human race—wasn’t totally out of the question. That is, whoever had blown up Earth could have had that in mind. A frightening thought, if an unlikely one. It would certainly explain the way the wars followed people around.

  “But who,” I subvocalized, “would want to destroy the human race, anyway?” I considered this carefully, in part because it took my mind off wondering about Souci. The more I thought about it, the odder it seemed. I did not consider myself any sort of expert on the human animal, and I’d never made a study of psychology, or maybe I’d have been able to make some sort of intelligent guess. I tried to build a picture in my mind of the sort of maniac who would be seriously trying to destroy humanity, and what his motives could be. Religious? Maybe. But what religion? I could suggest the idea to Eve, who enjoyed looking things up in libraries, maybe she’d learn something, and then I could—

  —what?

  I sighed and studied a knot in the elm. In wood it’s called a knot; in metal it’s called a flaw, because somewhere we decided that man is fallible and nature is not. This first proposition seems intuitively obvious; the second is dubious. As I studied this knot and made cynical observations about humanity and myself, I faced the fact that I had no idea what to do about any of the dilemmas I found myself amid.

  But I had to know.

  Maybe—probably—because the alternative was to wonder about her, but the reason didn’t matter. There it was, and I was going to act on it, because I needed to act.

  But first, I would deal with those aspects of reality that rudely forced themselves upon my consciousness; that is, I got out of bed and used the bathroom.

  An hour later, showered, shaved, with notes left behind me to who may be concerned, I set out walking toward a large mansion. The notes detailed what I had discovered, gave the location of the mansion, and what I planned to do. I mailed it to Libby care of Cowboy Feng, figuring I could get to them before it was opened and tell them all of this in person if I survived.

  It is certainly the case that I am a coward, but there was an air of unreality about this threat that made it easy to deny it; to just go do what I wanted to without really thinking about it. Whatever happened, I expected it to be interesting.

  The place was more impressive in the daylight. It was big and white with red trim around the windows that should have made it look more garish than it did. All the paint was new. All the edges and corners were sharp. The door was big and wood and had an ornate brass knocker that belonged there. I used it, and waited more than a minute. The door opened with a thoughtful creaking and a slowness that would have been more appropriate in a Mel Brooks parody of a horror movie than in the real thing. When it opened and I was able to get a look at the man who opened it, I knew at once that this was not the butler I’d more than half expected, though I cannot point to precisely how I knew.

  He stood half a head taller than I. His face was heavily jowled, heavily browed, and quite ruddy. His hair was curly and completely grey. He wore black and white, including a very long, black dinner jacket with, apparently, velvet lapels. Jamie would have looked great wearing it on stage. Other than his white shoes, I thought him fairly well dressed. I hate people who wear white shoes. Sorry if I’m stepping on any toes, so to speak, but it’s a prejudice. Don’t let me get started on Trans Ams. He studied me with an expression of mild curiosity; if I were selling encyclopedias, he would ask me to leave politely but without room for argument.

  I tried to forget the white shoes. He said, “Oui, monsieur?” His voice was very rich and full, the sort of voice one enjoys listening to.

  “Parlez-vous English?” I managed, with some work.

  “Indeed,” he said. “How may I help you?” Clipped, yet distinctly more American than, say, British. East Coast, perhaps. Perhaps not.

  “I am looking for the master or mistress of the house. My name is Kevely.”

  As I said my name, his brow went up and my heart dropped approximately the same distance. “William Francis Kevely, is it not?” he said. “Or Billy, as your friends call you?”

  My voice was dry, but fortunately did not crack. “That is correct.”

  “Please come in, Mr. Kevely. This is my home. My name is Harold Peter Rudd. You will understand if I do not offer to shake hands.”

  “A pleasure, Monsieur Rudd.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Mr. Kevely.”

  I crossed the threshold into an L-shaped entryway, with coat closets on either side and a mirror straight ahead. He helped me with my leather jacket, where it found a home between something white and furry and something long and tweedy. I think it was supposed to feel honored.

  Out of the L and into the land of high ceilings and a fireplace in a big sitting room where we were surrounded by books that didn’t look read, a fireplace that did look used, and light-colored wood paneling. I didn’t see any speakers, but they could have been concealed. Two chairs sat in the middle looking lost, facing each other at an oblique angle. They were probably Louis the something or other. When he gestured me into one, I was surprised that it was comfortable.

  “Brandy, Mr. Kevely?” he said. Of course. I wondered how much he was playing a role. Silly question, phrased that way. The room echoed as he spoke. The whole thing was pretty spooky, and rather surreal at the same time.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.” I wasn’t really; I was wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt that said, “The Flying Karamazov Brothers. There’s more to to the theatre than than repetition.” Such things don’t usually bother me, but on that occasion I really wanted to be wearing my nice white-on-white shirt with French cuffs and the jeans with the holes in the knees. Oh, well.

  He sat facing me at that oblique angle I mentioned earlier. My left eye could watch him while my right eye could look at the cold fireplace. He relaxed, his feet stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His eyebrows were as grey as his hair. He noticed me looking at the fireplace and said, “Should I start a fire, Mr.
Kevely?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Monsieur Rudd.”

  “Very well.” He cleared his throat. “I must say, I didn’t expect to run into you.”

  “I came chasing bears,” I said.

  “Ah. Of course.” He smiled. In another context, I would not have taken it for an evil smile. “Any particular bear?”

  “We could start with the one who tried to burn down Cowboy Feng’s last night. Claude, isn’t it?”

  “So it was you, and he didn’t lose you.”

  “It was and he didn’t.”

  “He was afraid of that.”

  “And we can go from there to whoever tried to blow it up earlier. Claude again, I think. And, perhaps, Justin?”

  “You know a great deal.”

  I waited for him to say, “More than is good for you,” or something like that. When he didn’t, I said, “I don’t know as much as you do, or as much as I’d like to.” I decided to make what I thought was a reasonable guess at this point. “For example,” I said, “I don’t know why you had someone shot at the restaurant, or who he was to begin with. Or, in fact, exactly who shot him.”

  Rudd nodded, his mouth twitching. A very expressive mouth, it was, too. “You must understand, Mr. Kevely, that we are far from perfect.”

  We? Sugar Bear? “Well, yes.”

  “We are dedicated people, but we are not killers, save by necessity.”

  “This was necessary?”

  “You misunderstand. I am explaining that we bungled. More particularly, I bungled. I should have had a photograph, but, well—” He spread his hands. “I didn’t. I relied on a verbal description, and there was an unfortunate man who matched the description. I do feel bad, although no doubt he was diseased as well, so there is no real loss.”

  “Oh.” I cleared my throat. This raised more questions than I could handle at one time. I started with, “If it was a stranger who was shot, why did he die saying, ‘Sugar Bear’?”

  This time, Rudd’s whole face twitched. “I told you we are not professionals. The gunman told him. I don’t know exactly how, I suspect he said, ‘Sugar Bear has found you, you scoundrel, prepare to die,’ or words to that effect.”