She gave me a funny look. I hoped it signaled arousal. Probably not, though.
“You mean somebody put him down?” she asked.
“Yeah, that too,” I said.
“How long have you been one of us?”
“Long enough.” Six days was the real answer to that question. Maybe I don’t talk all the jive lingo, but hey, who makes up jive lingo anyway? We do, that’s who. So maybe my words’ll catch on, and then everybody else will look stupid instead of me.
She started collecting her dead brother’s legs. “This was a mistake. I need someone with more experience. Any experience, really. If he was dead, his legs wouldn’t still be kicking.”
She shook one of her brother’s hairy limbs at me. They were definitely still moving. Oof. I really had a lot to learn. The hookers at Hat Scratch had controlled different parts once they were stacked up. Maybe it was like keying a lock. Once a limb was hooked to their brain, they were still connected to it. At least until somebody else keyed themselves to it.
Her brother was still controlling his legs remotely, kicking to let her know he was still alive. Undead. Whatever. It was a signal, a distress call, an S-O-S by L-E-G.
Damn it. She was halfway out the door before I had worked through all that. I called after her in a desperate attempt to keep her from going, no matter how much I was enjoying watching her leave. “You don’t know what I did before I was turned.”
Ooh, threw out a fancy deadhead word for you there, didn’t I?
That seemed to calm her down. Of course, I didn’t know what I did before I was “turned” either. “Well, that’s true,” she said. “What did you do?”
I shrugged. “What I’m doing now.”
Sitting. Probably technically accurate. Talking to dames. Probably also true at some point.
“Well, will you take the case?” she said.
“Let me look at my schedule.” I picked up this notebook and flipped through it a few pages. “I’ll see if I can squeeze you in, but I need to know a little more. You know anybody who might like your brother…?” I made the choppy-choppy finger across my neck.
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. He was a pussycat.”
Yeah, I’ll bet. “What did he do?”
“Well, he used to work in the textile factory,” she said. “But as he started to, you know, decompose, he had to get work in the fish market.”
“A lot of our kind work there.” Just a guess.
She nodded though, confirming my suspicion. “Lately he wasn’t even getting regular work. You know how it is in the breadlines. When they catch our scent, well, you know.”
“Run us off,” I guessed again. “Or worse.” Funny how on the nose I could be after six days. I guess human nature never changes, only targets do. Or whatever.
“So his name was Tong, too?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Oh, no, he wasn’t my brother in life. He was my, you know, morgue mate.”
Buried at the same time? Woke up at the same time? I’d ask Lazar later to be sure. “I see.” I drew a cartoon owl as a way of pretending to take notes. “And what was his name?”
“Skaron,” she said. “Ivan Skaron.”
“Anywhere else Ivan spent time?”
“No,” she said, then corrected herself. “Actually, he went to the library a lot. Researching our condition.”
I raised my eyebrow. If there were books about our kind, that was something I’d have to look into. “What’d he find out?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know,” she said.
I shrugged. Damn, but that dame played her cards close to the vest. I learned a little something about our physiology after she left. We sleep, we drink. Other things still happen.
I went to the fish market. Having been around our kind for a couple of days, I could finally identify one of us by smell. I could at least tell our kind from theirs, though some of both wore eau de cologne and perfume that complicated the matter. Not to mention all the fish in the air complicated matters, but that was probably the reason our kind liked hanging out down there.
As I had suspected, a lot of our kind were at the wharf. Good place to remember when dead ends start cropping up in future investigations. “Dead” ends. Ha!
I wandered for a bit, smelling at folks and trying not to be too obvious about it. I finally spotted a cat I was 100% sure on; he wasn’t wearing flower water or anything. Black rubber covered him head-to-toe. Massive galoshes poked out under his slicker and a hood more than covered his face. Sure, it was November on the high seas and all, but the sun was burning bright and not another longshoreman was bundled up as tight. I followed him until he turned down an alleyway between row upon row of packing crates.
Instead of a kewpie doll, that lucky contestant earned my hands around his scruff. I threw him against the pine wall the crates made. “You got a bullet hole under there?” I hissed into the empty void of his hood. “Or maybe a Gloucester smile from ear to ear?”
There was abject silence and a distinct dearth of motion for about as long as it takes for the world to end. He wasn’t breathing; that was obvious. He could’ve been eyeballing me, but I wouldn’t have known either way.
A nondescript voice finally wafted out of the blackness where his face should’ve been. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He tried to wriggle out of my grasp, so I took the opportunity to bounce him off the crates again. “Oh, come on,” I said, leaning in a little too close for either of us to be comfortable. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
I let go of him and, with one finger, tugged my blouse open and showed him my mortal wound.
“Whaddaya want?” he asked finally.
“Looking for someone,” I said, “a day laborer.”
“There’s a million of them on the docks,” the shrouded man said, pointing back to the mouth of the alleyway. “No need to turn queer on me in an alleyway. Some’ll work for five bucks a day.”
“I’m looking for a particular one,” I said. “Ivan Skaron.”
That’s when I caught a brick to the gut. I looked around. I had been so focused on accosting the poor longshoreman that I hadn’t noticed his friends had crept up to defend him. Our kind definitely sticks together, on the docks the same as in the Mat.
Some of them were swaddled head to toe, like my good friend the Grim Reaper. Others were a little more passing, but only just. A few definitely had the pale, sickly skin of the recently drowned. Others were bloated and waterlogged as if, whatever their original cause of death, they had been fished out of the bay a few days or maybe weeks later. One had an industrial-sized hook through his chest, sawed off at either end and just barely recognizably curved.
The next blow fell from behind and took the knees out from under me.
“You think I remember one day laborer out of thousands?” the Grim Reaper asked, laughing. “You must be dumber than a Portuguese man-o-war.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said. One of the longshoremen hoisted a crowbar over my head. I remember thinking that that was the end.
The Grim Reaper held up his hand though. “Wait, he’s one of us. Even if he is sticking what’s left of his nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He looked me over. I wasn’t sure beneath all that rubber, but it was either that or he was just standing there. At least he didn’t say, “Don’t thank me yet.”
“You new?”
I nodded. “Pretty new.”
“We stick together.”
He gestured at all of his friends with a back-and-forth motion of his left thumb, but I guess he meant all of our kind, even including a dummy like me.
“That’s why you get to walk away. But you come around asking questions, you don’t act like you’re part of the community, maybe we make an exception for you next time. Capiche?”
I nodded.
“Put the boots to him medium-style,” he concluded.
They proceeded to beat the ever-living fish heads out of me, but I gathered not as badly as they might have.
I went home smelling like fish. Homer didn’t like it. His cat loved it, though.
November 6, 1934
Only one lead left in the case of the fabulously swinging chickadee’s missing brother or whoever.
Welcome to the Mat Public Library. What a steaming garbage pile. I’ve seen more variety of books in piles outside Nuremberg.
Wait. Have I? Or is that just an expression? Seems like an odd turn of phrase.
Librarian was your usual type. Gray as a ghost, hair up in Manchukuo-style chopsticks or some such, glasses as thick as my thumb. I would’ve laid it on a little thicker, but I knew how gray and sallow my skin was getting. I wasn’t much to look at. Still passing, but not much to look at. My gums were black enough to scare breathers, and when I wasn’t paying attention, my neck sometimes twisted at awkward angles. That wasn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things. Some of our kind ended up at the point where they couldn’t even go out anymore, like the Old Man. Though, to be fair, he had never been at a point where he could go out.
“Ma’am,” I said, tipping my hat.
“You might take your hat off when you’re indoors, young man,” she said.
Right, right. I took it off.
I hope my hair isn’t getting too thin and stringy. I might have to get a little Brylcreem. Actually, I might have to get a rug if things keep going the way they seem to be going. How do Kumaree and Lazar look so good when I look so bad after only a week?
I cleared my throat. “Ah, listen, ma’am, a friend of mine used to come here. Ivan Skaron. Maybe you remember him?”
She stared daggers at me.
“Anyway,” I went on, “I was wondering—Ivan is such a bookworm—I was trying to figure out what to buy him for his birthday. Coming up, you see. Any chance I could see what the last few books he checked out were?”
As it turned out, I didn’t really have to turn on the patented Braineater charm. She didn’t give a shit. She handed me his old record. After a few minutes of figuring out that fancy wooden card catalog, I sat down with a stack of books that probably left that little rattrap library looking bare.
Liber Mortis, Malleus Maleficarum, De Vermis Mysteriis, Naturom Demonto. Are any of these in English? Even a play about some guy wearing yellow. Who knows?
Funny how little there is describing our condition. Ivan scoured those books. Notes in the margins and everything. A lot about wampyr. That’s not really us, though. Those guys go back to their graves and drink blood to stay alive. Closest bit was maybe about a revenant, who only has to drink a bit of blood. They say Jesus turned his blood into wine. We have to drink liquor. I might be stretching it there.
Ivan highlighted this passage everywhere it appeared:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Interesting.
There’s a lot of other weird stuff that Ivan seemed really into. Voodoo witch doctors down in the island of Haiti. I guess they create beasties called jumbee. Never heard anyone in our community call it that before, but Ivan kept circling the word and highlighting it. That was where his research was leading him. Crazy bastard.
I wonder if there are any voodoo witch doctors in the city. The sour librarian, of course, refused to help, but luckily a helpful stewbum didn’t mind pointing me toward Little Haiti in exchange for a zozzle of Crow.
Little Haiti smells, if anything, worse than the fish market. Even in my short existence, I had learned there are parts of the Mat people go to and parts that people don’t go to, even one of us who doesn’t care about getting aced. Little Haiti was one of those places people don’t go to no matter what. If you’re on fire running down the street, and no one will douse you, you take pains to avoid that ghetto.
I felt as if I had crossed an invisible line and every eye in the slum was on me. Oh, well, what would they do, kill me? Stay away from the salt and the bread; that’s what Ivan’s books told me. Of course, I suppose they could fill a shotgun shell with rock salt. If that even kills us.
A beggar held out his hands at me. I think he said, “Sergeant?”
“What do you want?” I said.
He rubbed his fingers together. I pulled out a coin. That seemed to excite him quite a bit. “Okay,” I said, “but tell me where I can find a witch doctor. You understand me?”
He did not. I checked my notes.
“Bokor,” I said. “Where’s the bokor?”
“Bokor?”
He seemed to understand that. I waved the coin at him. He shook his head. I pulled out another. He shook his head, waved his arms, and took off running as if he had never run before in his life.
“Shit,” I said.
“Murder,” somebody behind me said.
I turned. “What about murder?”
It was a woman. Pretty bird. Would’ve been more striking if she weren’t so damn skinny. Her ribs damn near poked through her shirt. I wanted to buy her a Polish sausage right then and there, but I don’t suppose the cart guy comes down that way.
“Not murder,” she said. “That’s shit. You don’t speak French?”
“I don’t speak jibber-jabber, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “That sure don’t sound like no damn froggy talk I ever heard.”
“You are an ignorant man,” she said.
“Yeah, I never said otherwise.”
“You come into our neighborhood. You disrespect us. You ask about things you don’t understand.”
“Listen, girlie,” I said, “I don’t care much about any of that stuff. As you can tell. I’m trying to help somebody, save somebody’s life—erm, well, limbs, anyway. If there’s a voodoo priest here who can help me, great. If Lucifer himself will help me, great. I’m just trying to do my job.”
She stared at me. I assumed there was a little bit of a language barrier between us, but she couldn’t possibly have missed my gist.
“I’ll take you to the mambo,” she said.
“That’s the good witch,” I said. I had read it in some of Ivan’s books. The girl nodded. “What about the bokor?”
“You”—she paused—“you would do well not to ask about that.”
She led me up the street, past the newspaper blowing by like tumbleweeds and the derelicts splayed out in the middle of the road where no jalopies went by. There were car parts and former cars set on concrete blocks, but no functional people movers came to that part of the Mat. I didn’t think things could get bleaker than they were in the deadhead section.
She led me into a tenement building with a tar paper roof and garbage piled up against it that the denizens had simply dumped out their windows. Inside, some folks were sleeping in the halls. Others were doing more than sleeping. She pointed me up a stairwell. I went first. That was my first mistake. I stomped through one of the stairs with even my light step.
The door was smeared with–well, I don’t want to know what it was smeared with. But there were symbols, words. Some of the smeared I-hope-it-wasn’t-excrement looked like a chicken skull. Another mark was a snake eating its own tail. Curious. I probably stood there rubbing my chin too long because the girl poked me. So I knocked.
“Entrée,” somebody inside said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Chicken. Or beef. Probably better go with the beef.”
I hadn’t eaten in a week. Literally. I hadn’t even stopped to think about it.
12. Can we eat? Is alcohol enough?
“Come in,” the voice of some old lady inside said. Then she said some words in mashed up pidgin that I couldn’t figure out word for word but didn’t seem any damn good.
I opened the door real slow, partially because it seemed covered with some kind of goopy grease. The inside of the apartment resembled a caveman’s circle, leastways what I figured a caveman’s circle looked like. Gutted animals lay strewn about haphazardly.
They used the corners of the room for jakes, and that wasn’t jake. She had a fire going in the center of the apartment. Wasn’t too cold out either, not even for November.
Shadows danced along the walls in a million funny and scary shapes. I would say “arcane,” but I never was 100% sure what that word meant. It was almost like a shadow puppet show. I wondered if she set up the room special that way.
She tossed something, dice maybe, onto a rabbit pelt. It seemed to have been freshly skinned, although what do I know about stuff like that? The old lady was bundled up in a hundred layers of scarves and pearls.
“Welcome to Port-au-Pauper,” she said.
I didn’t get it. “I don’t get it.”
“You come for answers,” the old lady said. Her voice sounded like a rock dragged across a chalkboard, and her face was covered.
I didn’t much like talking to someone I couldn’t see, and for good reason. “Well, I didn’t come looking for questions.”
“What do you want to know?” she said.
“Looking for a guy,” I said.
The old lady laughed, and it was awful. Like listening to the lost souls on the Lusitania screaming. “You like men. Cities are funny places.”
“I’m not a fairy,” I said, then I stopped to think about it. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I was. Who knows?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, look, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m looking for a particular guy. Business reasons. Name’s Ivan Skaron.”
She shook the dice. I guess they were chicken bones, based on what she said next. Maybe the chicken part was optimistic.
“You want the bones to show you? Five dollars, I answer any question.”
I waved my hand. “No, I’m not here for fortune-telling. This Ivan cat was interested in voodoo. I think he might’ve come here looking for a bokor, and you’re the furthest I’ve gotten so far.”
The old lady seemed really scared. She reared up like a beached whale. “I am a mambo. Clean Vodun. You had best stay away from the dark arts.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody keeps telling me,” I said, jerking a finger behind me to indicate the girl. “But it ain’t getting me any closer to finding my client.”
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