by Mike Ashley
The toad croaked at me indignantly. I snorted. “Yeah, yeah, so reptiles don’t have bacon. You want to play egghead games or you want to save your brother before they send him back to you in a box?” The toad looked sorry for having brought up the whole subject. I patted her on the head and said, “Never mind, honey. Let’s hit the bricks. Our next step is back to Junior’s place so I can—”
I never got to finish saying what I had in mind. A galaxy of stars exploded inside my head and my next step was sprawled flat on my face on the office floor. That’s life: Sometimes it hands you a gingerbread house, sometimes it shoves you head first into an oven, and sometimes it’s happy to have some gorilla sneak up from behind and bean you with a blackjack.
When I came to, I got a first-hand idea of what Junior’s ravaged apartment must’ve looked like. Someone had torn through my office like a two-headed ogre with a migraine. I pulled myself to my feet using what was left of my desk and surveyed the damage.
There were papers everywhere, not a drawer left in place. My file cabinet was stretched out like a coffin, my chairs were kindling, and something very important was missing from the room:
My client.
I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell me what had happened, though I could’ve used the entrails of a black he-goat to fill in the details. The same goon-or-goons-unknown who had ripped up Junior’s digs had come a-calling at my door. They’d probably been tailing Gretel, looking to put the snatch on her. I guess some whizz-kid figured that if Junior wouldn’t sing to save his own skin, maybe he’d twitter through a scale or two to save his sister’s. When she came to see me, all nice and private, they got their chance.
I touched the egg growing out of the back of my skull and winced. “That’s no way to treat a lady,” I muttered. I crossed to the coat closet, avoiding shards of glass and piles of chocolate-chip crumbs. They’d busted my cookies. Nobody busts my cookies.
Lucky for me my uninvited guests had left my broomstick alone. Probably thought it belonged to the cleaning lady. I appreciate opponents with no imagination; it’s no loss to the world when I put them away for good. My head was still spinning, but I’d flown with hangovers that were a damn’ sight worse. Now I needed just one more thing before I could hit the wild blue yonder . . .
“Here, kitty,” I called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Here, Bogey, come to Mama.”
The first thing they teach you in my line of work, even before you get within spitting distance of a magic wand or a cauldron or that plug-ugly black pointy hat, is that you don’t go up without a co-pilot. You can’t. Cats and witches don’t hang out together just for the conversation: We need the beasts to power our brooms. Witches know that every living thing’s a source of potential energy. You ever spend a whole day watching a cat? Most of the time he’s curled up asleep in the sun, when he’s not feeding his face. All intake, no output; the perfect storage battery. Get enough cats together and you could launch a flock of B-29s.
“Bogey-boy, come on, I need you. Puss, puss, puss. Bogey, I’m calling you, you mangy fleabag! Get over here, Bogey, I mean it!”
Nothing. That wasn’t unusual. You show me the cat who comes when he’s called and I’ll show you an enchanted prince waiting to be kissed. That, or a sick cat. But I was doing more than just beating my gums: I was using his name as the focus for an attraction-spell. If Bogey was anywhere within the sound of my voice, he’d be dragged in and set down at my feet in two minutes. “Bogey, come here!”
Two and a half minutes later, I was worried. Nothing could keep Bogey from responding to my attraction-spell if he were alive. “If anything’s happened to him . . .” I gritted my teeth. He was more than just a cat to me: He was my partner. No one takes out my partner and gets away with it.
Suddenly, I heard a weak sound coming from the corner behind my toppled file cabinet. “Bogey, is that you?” If I was the church-going type, I would’ve wasted time saying a little thanksgiving prayer. Instead, I got right to work, moving the cabinet so he could get out. “Hold on, kitty, Mama’s coming.”
It wasn’t a kitty; it was a toad. I forgot that I’d pulled the old shape-change on him before, when he got on my nerves. I was forgetting a lot of things, mostly thanks to that lump on my head.
“Hold still, kid; this won’t take a second.” I made with the mystic bushwas to restore him to his original shape. There was a hokey puff of smoke as the spell hit him.
“It’s about time!” Gretel snapped at me. Her eyes flashed all around my wrecked office. “Thorough bastards, aren’t they? Serves you right. Now, where’s my purse? I’m getting out of here.” She started pawing through the rubble.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Not so fast, sugar. Aren’t you forgetting a little something?”
“You mean my brother?” she shot back, jerking out of my grasp. “Hardly. He’s all I’m gonna be thinking about the whole way to New York City, which is exactly where I’m headed as soon as I find my purse.” She went back to digging up the ruins, a regular Schliemann in shantung.
I hauled her back to face me a second time. “Cool your heels, sweetie-pie. What’s all this about New York?”
“It’s the farthest away from here I can get, that’s what,” she said. “By bus, anyway. Maybe you didn’t see the pair of thugs that were just in here—”
“They gave me the bum’s rush to Slumberland before they bothered to introduce themselves,” I replied, with a twisty little smile. It hurt. “So there were two of them, you say?”
She nodded. “Big ones. Ugly, too. A couple of reject heavy-weights from palookaville.”
“Names?”
“I heard one call the other Max; that’s all I know. Max was the one who slugged you.”
“Max, huh?” I made a mental note to give Max a tour of the La Brea tar pits from the bottom up when our paths crossed again.
“Anyway, it turned out they’d been spying on us for a while, probably standing out in the hall, eavesdropping, so they knew what you’d done to me. As soon as you were down, Max’s partner said, ‘Okay, grab the toad and let’s blow!’”
“How did you manage to get away?” I asked.
“As soon as I knew they’d come for me, I hid. That’s how come they tore up the place, looking for me. They just happened to find the other toad first.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m a lucky girl.”
“Sure you are.” I pretended like I believed her, but I had a feeling it hadn’t gone exactly the way she told it. More likely she’d done something to draw those two goons’ attention to where Bogey was hiding, then hopped away fast while they bagged the wrong batrachian. “So, they say anything else?”
“Only that Mr LeGras would be real glad to get his hands on me. That’s when I figured it all out: LeGras was going to use me to make Hansel tell where he hid the black bird.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t go along quietly,” I said. “Why pass up a chance to help your darling little brother? You the same girl who was just telling me how close the two of you are?”
She looked away. “Not close enough for me to want to share the same grave. Even if they’d managed to grab me, bring me to LeGras’s place, do . . . things to me, Hansel wouldn’t talk. I know him, and he knows LeGras. He used to say that once LeGras squeezes the last drop of juice from a lemon, he throws the peel away.”
“Can’t say I know a lot of people who save it, sugar,” I said.
“You know what I mean! Once Hansel tells LeGras where the bird is, LeGras’s got no reason left to keep Hansel alive!”
“So he’ll clam up? Even if it means buying a few more hours at the cost of your life?”
“Even if it buys him a few more minutes,” she replied. “Why the hell you think I’m heading for New York?”
“That would not be advisable.”
Both of us turned at the sound of an unfamiliar voice from the doorway.
“Mr LeGras, I presume?” I said.
“The same. May I come in?”
He asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He barged into my office like he owned the place. For all I knew, he did. He was a big man, but he moved silently and gracefully. So had the Hindenberg. Our Mr LeGras would have to watch himself. Offhand, I could name five, six practising fairy godmothers in the downtown area who’d get one eyeful of that pumpkinshaped body and try turning him into a coach-and-four. He was impeccably dressed in a dapper white suit and Panama hat, a fresh red carnation in his buttonhole. He balanced his enormous bulk on a pair of obscenely tiny feet in glittering black Oxfords, real Italian leatherwork. A silver-headed mahogany walking stick in his left hand took some of the load off. A pearl-handled revolver in his right put some of the heat on.
He was alone. That did surprise me. I’d expected him to show up backed by the two apes who’d wrecked my office, at least. He was a confident s.o.b., our Mr LeGras. Maybe he’d make a confident toad. I smiled.
“Pray, put any thoughts of thaumaturgy from your mind at once, gnädige Hexe,” he said. His voice was deep, with a raspy wheeze that made me want to start smoking cigarettes just so I could quit the habit. “Oh yes, I know you for what you are. A man in my position is not without his sources of, aha, reliable information. Knowledge is power. So too are certain, hrrrumph, connections. They permit one to take the appropriate precautions proper to the immediate circumstance.”
He held out his hand. At first I thought that maybe he was cuckoo and wanted me to kiss it, like he was the Pope or something. Then I saw the little jade-and-pearl ring crammed onto his pinky. It gave off a protective aura strong enough to fade the letters in a locked grimoire at fifty paces. Any witch stupid enough to try casting a spell at that boy would have it bounce back in her face and do triple damage.
I forced myself to keep smiling. “I guess you want me to be impressed,” I said.
“Your reactions are of startlingly minuscule importance to me, my dear,” he replied. “I have done you a kindness by allowing you to perceive the ring’s power. In ordinary circumstances, it remains hidden until aroused. You should thank me for sparing you a very nasty – and perhaps fatal – surprise.”
“Thanks,” I said, deadpan. “I’d offer you a seat and ask you to stay to tea, but your boys took care of my chairs.”
He laughed. Everything shook except the gun. “You have a sense of humour. Good, good. I find it much easier to deal with people who see the inherent absurdity of life. They are far less likely to take a foolishly heroic stand on matters that do not, in essence, involve them.”
“Oh, I’m no hero, dumpling,” I replied. “I’m just a poor old lady who wants to get her pussycat back. Your boys picked him up by mistake.”
“So we discovered in short order. The same, hrrm, person who supplied me with this ring perceived our mistake without even bothering to remove the unhappy creature’s toad-form.”
I wondered which of my colleagues was down-and-out enough to take LeGras’s money and be his sorciére de joie. Then I decided that I was happier not knowing anyone that desperate.
“No surprise there,” I said. “Bogey’s more than my cat, he’s my familiar. All us girls in the life can tell another witch’s familiar on sight, no matter what shape it’s wearing. Bring him back to me and you can have the girl. Hell, you can have her now. Take her. She was just telling me how much she misses her little brother. It’d be cruel to keep them apart.”
LeGras laughed again. “Ah! An excellent jape. The Algonquin Round Table is the poorer for your absence. Rest assured, it is my intention to reunite brother and sister with due celerity, to the ultimate benefit of, ahem, all parties concerned.”
“How sweet. Well, don’t let me keep you.”
He didn’t take the hint. “I am afraid, my dear, that I have not made myself clear: I have come for the young lady, but prudence dictates that you accompany us as well.” He made a discreet but unmistakable motion with his gun.
I don’t believe in wasting time on useless arguments, especially when my respected opponent has six hot lead arguments at his disposal. “Mind if I get my hat?” I asked.
LeGras made me a dancing-school bow. “Not at all, dear lady. Fetch your gloves as well, if you so desire. How I deplore the growing disregard for the proprieties of personal appearance in today’s society! The numbers of young women I have seen traipsing about with neither chapeau nor chaperone would break your heart.”
“You’re assuming I’ve got one.” I breezed past him to the closet. I could feel him tracking me with the muzzle of his revolver the whole time, feel his fat little trigger finger itching to punch me a one-way ticket to hell if I tried anything funny.
I’m a witch, not a comedian. I got my hat off the top shelf of the closet and dropped the old butterball a curtsy. “Ready when you are, sweets.”
LeGras herded us out of my office, down the hall, and into the wheezy old rattletrap of an elevator. There were four passengers in it plus Steve the shaft-monkey. None of them seemed to notice that the two lovely ladies accompanying the personable fat man were doing so under pearl-handled protest. LeGras’s pet witch probably slapped a no-see-’um charm on his gun.
His car was waiting for us right outside my office building, a Cadillac the colour of fresh cream. There was a big goon uglying up the space behind the wheel. I wondered if it was my buddy Max, but the circumstances weren’t social so I couldn’t ask. LeGras jerked his head, silently ordering us into the back seat. He climbed in after, shut the door, and gave the order: “Home.”
I wondered where “home” was. I was betting it was somewhere up in the Hollywood hills, a popular nesting spot for the cash, flash, and trash crowd. I had the window seat, with Gretel wedged in between me and LeGras. I guess I could’ve tried something smart, like pulling a Houdini when the car stopped for a traffic light, but I didn’t. I knew that if I skipped, Gretel’d be stuck paying the full bill.
Yeah, tell me I’m a sucker. Then tell me something I don’t already know.
I like riding in cars. You get places faster when you fly a broomstick, but in cars you don’t get bugs in your teeth. I leaned back against the upholstery and closed my eyes. For all I knew this was going to be my last ride; might as well enjoy it. If I was going to die, at least I was wearing a nice hat for the occasion. LeGras didn’t know it, but there was a reason I’d grabbed this little beauty out of the closet instead of rummaging through the office wreckage for the hat I’d been wearing earlier. This hat was special. This hat stood up straight and proud, and not just because I’d asked for extra starch at Ling Po’s Genuine Chinese Hand Laundry.
This hat was packing a rod.
I had it all planned: We’d get to LeGras’s place and he’d bring us face to face with Hansel – unless he handed us over to his goons for some preliminary softening-up first. He’d try to make the little gunsel sing, but he’d come up against the biggest case of laryngitis known to man. Then he’d start putting the screws to Gretel. The most he’d get out of that would be some cheap entertainment for the hired help. I had LeGras and his gang of creeps pegged for the type who got their kicks watching a woman get hurt. He’d keep his gun on me the whole time, but not his eyes. He’d have more . . . amusing things to look at.
That was when I’d ask if I could take off my hat and stay awhile.
Maybe I couldn’t use the wand to hurt him while he wore that stupid ring, but I could use it to create a distraction, like setting the place on fire, or breaking the water mains, or making Max’s head explode like a party balloon full of brains and blood. You know, little things. And in the confusion, I could get Gretel and me the hell out of there, easy as—
“We’re here.” LeGras’s wheezy voice busted up my pretty dreams.
I opened my eyes in time to see the car pull up in front of one of those bijou hideaway hacienda-style mansions. It had a tapestry brick driveway, brutally neat flower beds, and an ornamental pond where a quartet of swans paddled around looking bored. Silent film stars used to buy up places like this by the
bagful, like penny candy, only to toss them back on the market at a dead loss when the talkies showed no signs of going away. It was tucked into the armpit of a mountain with the nearest neighbour located a body-drop below.
A butler answered the door. He looked like a refugee from a Karloff flick. He bowed slightly to Gretel and me and asked if he could take my hat.
“No thanks, Spooky; it’s carrying my personality,” I told him.
“It is also carrying a concealed weapon,” he replied, slick as a lounge lizard’s manicure. “I regret to inform you that all such artefacts are powerless within these walls.”
I goggled at him like a sea bass with goitre. LeGras escorted me over the threshhold, chortling. “Do not be surprised, madam,” he said. “I have long been a collector of esoteric souvenirs. The black bird is merely the, hrrm, most profitable in a series of the same. I am sure you would agree that any malefactors interested in thieving such items must of necessity be versed in the Darker Arts. With that in mind, it would be unwise not to place certain, ah, protective wards upon my property. Just as your ordinary homeowner might have the double security of a high fence to keep housebreakers out and a vicious dog to deal with any who do get in, I too have diversified my defences. Some, like Stanton here, detect the presence of uninvited magic or magical appurtenances. Others, like this ring that you have already noted—” he flashed his pinky at me “—repel outright sorcerous attacks. Now be a good little witch and hand over the hat.”
Nobody ever called me a good little witch. Nobody still in need of oxygen. I glared daggers at Stanton, but I gave the big stiff my hat. What choice did I have? He pulled out the hidden rod and held it out for his boss’s inspection like a cat proudly puking up mouse-guts on the doormat.
“A magic wand,” LeGras said, tapping it aside with the nose of his revolver. “How quaint. Thank you, Stanton, you may dispose of it.”
“Very good, sir.” The butler’s hand closed on my rod. There was a grinding sound and the whole thing broke into a million splinters. This Stanton wasn’t your everyday butler.