We sat silently for a while. The Mat really is a miserable little place. That was all we could muster for a parade. I had no doubt that somewhere in the Altstadt, the fat generals who had done nothing but send good boys to die were having their own parade. They were rolling down the streets in something nicer than the one Model T our boys could muster.
Of course, I couldn’t see any of our kind. That is, assuming they let our kind march. I could picture the railroad bulls with staves in their hands, making sure not to let the deadheads mingle with the breathers. I couldn’t say I blamed them. Might’ve been a bit appalling to have a dead man march in an Armistice Day parade.
“How old do you think I am? Was, I mean?”
“Who knows?” the head replied. “You’re all corpsed up now.”
“I remember it a bit, but I don’t think I was there. Like, newspapers and such.”
“Maybe you were young,” he said. “Like the Old Man.”
I did some arithmetical calisthenics in my head. “He woulda been in his bottle, what, four years when the war started? I doubt I was that young. I woulda been reading the funny papers still. He’s a weird little shit, isn’t he?”
“Weird, yes,” Alcibé said, “but on my worst day, my shits were bigger than him.”
“When you had an asshole, maybe.”
“It’s all right. I found a new one.”
“I don’t like that guy,” I said, generously ignoring his wisecrack. “I wonder why someone doesn’t just squish him.”
“I used to say the same thing about Hoover.”
“Seriously, though, why doesn’t somebody just…?” I trailed off, just throttling a bit of drumstick with my dickbeaters.
“Well, did you ever see his bodyguard?”
“Yeah, well then, why doesn’t that big mook just…?” I squished a can between my palms as I imagined what that gorilla could’ve done with the Old Man’s Mason jar.
“Would you give up a steady-paying gig like that?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your memory, Jones. I don’t know what’ll kickstart it.”
“Maybe nothing will,” I said. “Then again, maybe that’s for the best.”
We sat there for a moment, watching the men until they trailed away into history. I was too far down in the dumps to do anything else for the rest of the day.
November 12, 1934
It was a good thing Lazar walked into my office. I was down to maybe a third of a bottle of Old Crow. I was reduced to drinking beer and mouthwash to keep up my alcohol content. Alcibé was listening to the radio. As usual, I was tossing cards into my hat.
Lazar walked over and turned off the squawk box. He was carrying a leather suitcase.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I’m about dried up. ”
“I heard about what you did for Ivan Skaron,” Lazar said.
“Yeah,” I said, “well, I’m just glad they could sew his legs back on. Didn’t know they’d still work. We’re funny creatures, you know that?”
He seemed to be trailing his finger along the layer of dust on my wall. What was I going to do? Clean it? Why bother? What difference did hygiene make to our kind? It wasn’t as though I was going to catch typhoid and die from it. The dead do not clean.
He picked up my bottle of Crow and shook it. “No more freebies. Time to earn all this.” Lazar raised his arms to encompass the vast domain of my one-room crap shack in the middle of the Welcome Mat on top of a pawnshop and a backroom dive bar.
“You’ve got one of those nonpaying gigs for me, I take it,” I said. I tossed another ace in the hole.
“You and your partner, yes,” he said, glancing at Alcibé.
I had given up trying to protest the head being my partner. He had his—occasional and limited—uses, and he didn’t cost much money. Besides, if he got out of line, I could always stick him in a fishbowl somewhere.
“Tell us what your game is, Lazar,” Alcibé said. “You don’t smell right to me.”
I had already grilled the head, but he didn’t know any more about my mysterious patron than I did. Went by Lazar, probably a joke on Lazarus. No one knew his real name. He was a prime mover and shaker in the deadhead community. No one knew where he went at night after he moved out of what had become the Braineater Jones Detective Agency. All in all, he was a mysterious and powerful deadhead. But not to be trusted. I had more to find out about Lazar.
Question 10 remains on the list. Who is Lazar? What is his real name?
“No game, my little friend,” Lazar said. “Just a simple task.” He placed the suitcase on my desk. It was one of those fancy jobs with two metal combination locks. “I want you to deliver this.”
“What is it?” Alcibé asked.
“That is none of your concern,” Lazar said.
“Oh, contraire, moan frair,” the head growled. “That is very much my concern.”
“Then let us simply say that it is not within your purview,” Lazar replied.
That seemed to shut the little neck blister up.
“Where to?” I asked.
“To the docks. Here’s the address.” He handed me a crumpled piece of paper. 101 Gateway Lane. Didn’t ring a bell, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
“Don’t do it, Jones,” Alcibé said. “It could be anything. It could be illegal.”
I shrugged. “What difference does that make?”
“Well put,” Lazar said. “And I assure you it is nothing illegal. Incidentally, let’s consider the completion of this task your rent for the month. So long, darlings.”
What a weird cat. He left, but that didn’t stop the head talking. He had a million objections, each stupider than the last.
“What if it’s something dangerous?” he asked.
“What do I care?”
“Wouldn’t you be bothered if you were responsible for people getting hurt or even killed?”
“I’m already dead,” I said. “I don’t care about a whole lot of things. But I’m kind of interested in exactly what you think is in here.” I thumped the suitcase with my hand. It wasn’t very thick. What did he think was inside? A bunker buster? Big Bertha?
“Information can kill the same amount of people,” he said. “If it’s not something dangerous, why do you think he’s asking you to deliver it?”
“Busy man, maybe. Or hell, maybe he just doesn’t want to be seen down by the docks.”
“I don’t trust him,” the head said. “I’m not going.”
“No one asked you to. Not that you could stop me if I wanted to take you.” He bared his teeth and reminded me of nothing so much as a fighting terrier. I waved my hand in dismissal. “You’re more of a hassle than a help anyway. Feed the fish while I’m gone. Oh, wait, you can’t.”
I stomped out. I felt idiotic, like an old woman quarreling with her daddy. I don’t know why I even let that stupid corpse head get to me. He’s nothing to me. Less than nothing. He had a funny point, though. I stopped on my way to the docks and dove into an alley. I think maybe I was partially worried about repeating my run-in with the longshoremen, and I wanted to find any excuse to procrastinate. Still, the contents of the suitcase were calling to me like a shiny red piece of candy.
The locks on the suitcase weren’t exactly like cracking into the First National Bank. I fiddled with them. I grabbed a shard of glass from a broken bottle and tried to jimmy them open. All I got for my trouble was a shredded-up hand.
I sat for a while thinking about what the combination might be. I didn’t know Lazar that well. I didn’t know any of his fancy numbers–birthday, anniversary, kid’s ages, if he even had any. It was pointless fiddling with the dials without even a guess at the numbers.
8000. No. 8674. No.
I probably spent longer guessing than I should have. I stood up. It was simple enough, really. Deliver a package and free rent for a month. What was the issue really?
Stupid fuckin
g head.
The docks stank like seaweed and calamari as usual. I heard a couple of sailors yelling at each other in some funny language. Something was familiar about it. I had a thought. I pulled out this notebook and walked over to them. I was fairly certain—though not 100%—they weren’t of the same crowd that had put the screws to me before.
“Hey, you recognize this?” I said.
They looked at it. The first one shook his head. He pointed at himself. “Portuguese.” Then he pointed at the notebook page. “Italiano.”
“Eye-tie? Thanks.”
That was a start. At least I finally knew what language the graffito tag in the Welcome Mat was written in. It seemed like the least important of my numbered questions, but for some reason, it pressed the most heavily on my mind.
There it was. 101 Gateway Lane. A nondescript sort of loft. I checked my pocket real quick. The gun was loaded, at least. The door had one of those old-fashioned knockers, shaped like a gibbering face. I knocked.
The door opened, but they hung back in the shadows. “What do you want?”
“I got a delivery for you,” I said.
Long pause. “Slide it in.”
I did so. Then I waited. The door didn’t close.
“Am I supposed to pick something up?” I said. “Some kind of receipt, maybe?”
Another long pause. “No.”
The door closed. And that was that. With my head on swivel, I walked home to find a bright, beautiful new bottle of bourbon waiting for me.
November 13, 1934
The head didn’t talk eye-tie. And if he did, he wasn’t helping.
I tried the bar. The gorilla wasn’t a dago, either. Neither were any of the regulars. I didn’t ask any of the nonregulars, but they weren’t looking promising. Hell, I even tried old Homer in the fence. He was no help. I would’ve tried his cat, but it was sleeping.
The library was worse than useless. I found one battered, old English-Italian dictionary. Trying to figure out the tag from that was like trying to decrypt the Rosetta stone with a crystal ball. The old hag gave me a funny look, too.
I’m about exhausted dealing with her.
Little Italy was an option. It was in the nicer part of Ganesh, though. We weren’t talking about going around the corner of the Mat, like Port-au-Pauper. The garlic eaters were a little richer, at least richer than the deadheads and Haitians, and they found a grudging niche in the wider city.
“You want to get some spaghetti?”
The head didn’t even look at me. But then, he was facing the opposite direction.
I tromped down the stairs a little louder than necessary. I had been pondering whether it was worth the hassle to try taking the trolley. Today was my day. According to the transit map, all the trolley stops in the Mat were “temporarily suspended.” According to the locals, “temporary” meant longer than anyone except the Old Man could remember. It was a few blocks out of the Mat to the nearest trolley stop, but I figured that was better than walking the whole way to Little Italy. Even though the day was a little hot—or what I would’ve considered hot when my nerve endings were still at 100%—I wore my hat and my trench coat.
When the trolley came, I turned up my collar to cover as much of my face as I could. I tossed a nickel in the bucket and sat as far in the back as I could. I didn’t look back. I hoped nobody was watching. When I finally stopped to take a look, of course they all were staring at me. With my fist, I wadded up the bullet hole Francoise had put in my coat, but that gesture only seemed to invite more unwanted lookey-loos to see what I was trying to hide.
I waited. And waited. The trolley made its stops. After a few people got off, most of the folks weren’t interested in me anymore. Only one kid still stared at me.
“Hey, kid,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, just sat there chewing gum like a motherless little bastard.
“Wanna see something?” I asked. I opened my coat and showed the kid my bullet hole. Luckily for me, I had laid off the booze a little that morning and a worm had found his way in. The kid turned around. Even though the trolley was moving, he ran up to the front seat.
I vowed that would be the last time I would take public transportation, even if I had to walk the whole length and breadth of the city. It’s not worth it.
Eventually we stopped in Wopville, and I got off. Ritzy. Upscale. Not at all like the Mat. I guess some ghettos can move up in the world. Maybe once me and my kind showed up, we bumped the eye-ties a few rungs up the ladder. Or maybe not. I walked into a butcher’s shop.
The butcher was easily three hundred pounds soaking wet, and he wore a white apron and a tiny white paper hat like teddy bear clothes. He just stuck one big sausage of a finger at the door. “Get out.”
Didn’t need to tell me twice. Damn. I was starting to worry that I wasn’t passing for human anymore. Some folks still talked to me, but others sussed me out right off the bat. Some folks stared at me, like on the trolley. I felt unwelcome, exposed.
I sat down at one of those little outdoor cafes—I guess they call them beast-rows—with the red and white checkered tablecloths. A jug of wine with a candle stuck in it sat on my table, still unlit. A couple of shady characters sat here and there, smoking, looking at me, and eating only the occasional pastry.
Under their glare, I tried to retreat as deep into my clothes as I could, like a turtle hiding from his old lady. I finally understood why the longshoreman on the dock had hidden so deep in all his fishing gear.
A waiter in an apron splotched with yellow stains appeared eventually. He was smiling, and he had such a greasy moustache, I guess he could’ve buttered all the garlic bread in the joint with it. He stood in front of me, pencil poised over a notebook, and his smile didn’t disappear. That was a start, anyway. “What’ll it be, buddy?”
“Hey,” I said, “you speak Italian?”
He gibbered on and on in Italian. I guess he misunderstood.
“No, no,” I said, “I don’t speak it. I wonder if you can tell me what this means.” I threw the notebook down to the right page.
He cocked his eyebrow, but he picked up the book and stared at it. He nodded like a broken sipping bird. “Very nice, very nice. Is Dante. Classic. You probably know this line, actually, in Inglese.”
Alighieri. That usually meant the Inferno. Nobody ever read the other two, anyway.
Maybe I was an English professor. I certainly wasn’t no Italian professor.
“You want I should translate it right here?” he asked.
“Go to the next clean page,” I said. I took the notebook from him when he was done.
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.
I held out a five-dollar bill to him. The waiter waved it off like it was nothing.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s nice to help. So you want anything?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and I ordered.
4. What does the cryptic entrance sign mean? It’s a quote from Dante, apparently, the sign above the entrance to Hell.
I wonder if all the threads in the tapestry were coming together. Not really. I have to get down to some real gumshoeing.
It was a long walk back that night, longer than I had figured when I had hopped on the trolley. I threw a box down in front of the head. He had moved from his position that morning. Not sure how. Maybe Homer came up and moved him, or more likely the bartender.
He eyed it warily. “What’s that?”
“Spaghetti,” I said.
He looked up at me. “Everything tastes like ash, and we don’t need to eat.”
“No, I guess not,” I said, “but sometimes it makes you feel human.”
He had to slurp his like a disgusting child. I ate with a fork and pretended not to notice the pillow of masticated noodle slowly elevating him off the desk. Goo
d thing my gag reflex doesn’t work anymore, I suppose. We talked for a while, like two ordinary eggs having a meal.
12. Can we eat? Is alcohol enough? We don’t have to eat. But it sure feels nice sometimes.
November 14, 1934
I was sitting in Hallowed Grounds watching a fly buzz around one of the light bulbs. A glass of rum sweated in front of me. Normally I only drank Crow, but lately I’d been thinking about spicing up my life. Someone plopped down in the chair next to me. I didn’t turn.
“Nice to see you here,” Lazar said.
“You don’t come around much these days,” I said.
He laughed and gestured at the bartender. There was some unspoken arrangement between them, I suppose, because the big ape immediately poured some kind of frothy orange mixed drink with rum, pineapple, a cherry, and an umbrella. “I just wanted to say good work on the delivery the other day.”
I grunted.
“Your curiosity didn’t get the better of you, did it?”
I let the question hang. He rubbed his hands together like a kid on Christmas and gratefully took his drink from the bartender.
“Where is your annoying little companion anyway?”
“The head?”
He nodded.
“He’s upstairs,” I said. “Sleeping it off from last night.”
“Overdrinking can be dangerous,” Lazar said. “Almost as dangerous as underdrinking.”
“Wasn’t that,” I said. “Son of a bitch ate a whole bowl of linguini. I spent the rest of the night cleaning it up off the desk.”
“Strange,” Lazar said. “I wouldn’t think that would make him lethargic.”
“Jaw muscles,” I said, pointing at my own. Mine were practically poking through the skin of my cheeks. I had to wonder how some of the skirts stayed so good looking, Kumaree Tong and the bunch. Must take a lot of cosmetics and even more booze. Maybe there was some other secret. Lazar, for one, always looked immaculate, and by all accounts, he should’ve been getting pretty long in the tooth. “How do you always keep looking so fresh and minty, Lazar?”
I don’t think he could’ve looked more stunned if I had asked where his mother kept her combat boots. I watched him slowly, carefully swallow the mouthful of fruity drink already in his mug.
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