“I’ll give you the address for my scratcher.” He scribbled down an intersection on a bar napkin.
“Scratcher?”
“He’ll get you fixed up,” he said, stuffing the napkin in with my handkerchief. “Now about last night.”
“Yes?”
He clapped me on the back. “Well, I just wanted to say thanks. We may look forward to a bright future working together.”
“I don’t suppose I’ve earned any answers,” I said.
He snorted. “Hardly. To be honest, I feel like most of the goodwill and effort put forth is on this side of the table. You’re like a baby and I’m like your papa. That doesn’t make us equals.”
“Okay, pops,” I said. “How about you at least tell me what you are.”
He dropped his finger into his drink. Not literally, not like it fell off. I imagine that happens for us sometimes. He just dunked the end of his fingertip in and swished it around a little. “Well, you already know that, Jones. I’m a bootlegger.”
“Do you still call it that when Prohibition’s over?”
He smiled. “I suppose so.”
“A bootlegger, then. That could mean anything. You could be Al Capone or you could be the Great Gatsby.”
“A reader of literature,” he said, luxuriating over every word. “You really are full of surprises. I’d wager there was a little education crammed into that head of yours before it was buried.”
“You’re good at running conversations off the rails. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were a politician.”
He leaned back on his stool. Being as there was no back, he didn’t have very far to go. “Maybe I am. But I assure you, I’m more of the East Egg school than the Chicago outfit.”
“Not a whole lot of booze you can fit into a suitcase,” I said.
“Well that depends on whether it’s airtight or not,” he said.
I nodded. Not much chance I was getting anything out of him. I hoped maybe a little more might come out another day, but it’s impossible to tell things like that.
He picked up his drink and pointed at nothing in particular behind the bar. It was a nervous gesture, I guess, to make him look important. “I’ve heard you’ve been taking on some extracurricular activities. I mean, beyond your paying cases and my little favors. It’s not wise, you know, to get too mixed up in the affairs of your old life.”
“Are you telling me to back off?” I asked.
“It’s not a threat,” he said, “just a warning. I don’t want your heart to get broken, Jones.”
“Don’t worry about my heart,” I said. “It doesn’t even beat anymore.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t get broken,” he said. “There’s a saying in our community.”
I waited for what seemed like a solid minute. “What’s that?”
“Huh?” He looked at me. “Oh, well, just what I just said. Just because your heart doesn’t beat doesn’t mean it can’t get broken. That’s the saying. Really, now, Jones, you must try to keep up.” He stood and littered the counter with bills, no doubt to cover my drink and his own. Goddamned gorilla double charged me anyway.
I stomped back up the steps after the speako closed down for the night. Funny that an illicit gin joint has to stop serving, but I guess everybody’s got to clean up at some point.
The lights were out. Strange. The head should’ve been up. I fiddled to get my keys out. I had taken to locking the shop up when I was gone. There was no point.
The door was already ajar. I pressed it open, hoping it would be silent, but of course it had to creak. It was a creaky, old, piece-of-shit door. I drew my piece.
“Alcibé,” I said, “give me a noise.”
A voice cut through my chest like an icicle. “He’s not here.”
I turned and fired at the figure silhouetted in the moonlight. There was a gargle, and the figure clutched its chest and fell backward. I flicked the light switch on and off. No power. Or else they had gotten to the fusebox.
I stood over the intruder. She was laughing. She.
“Is that any way to greet an old client?”
I squinted. My dark vision wasn’t real great. Couldn’t have helped that my eyes were rotting out of my head. “Kumaree?”
She smiled. At least, I think she smiled. She was wearing something black and lacy, like out of a Tijuana Bible.
“Where’s Alcibé?” I broken-recorded.
“The head took a walk,” she cooed.
I looked around the room. What was going on? Was she setting me up? Somebody sending in a dame to take me off the balls of my feet? “Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“He agreed,” she said. “He’s staying with a friend. I gave him a little scooter to ride.”
“Assuming I believe you”—I waved the gun in her face—“what are you doing here?”
She got to her knees. It must not be as big of a foe pa in the deadhead world to shoot somebody as it is in the thinky breathy world. “I realized that I never thanked you for saving my brother.”
I lowered my gun. Tentative, but I lowered it. Any mook in the shadows would’ve made his move by then. I think. “I got your payment. Matter of fact, I got his, too. Got paid twice for the job. Very lucrative.”
She touched my leg. I guess my nerve endings weren’t completely dead after all. “Paid, yes,” she said, “but I wanted to thank you.”
She stood. I looked around the room. What on earth was she wearing? Like something out of the back of the Sears catalogue or something.
“Did you turn out the lights?” I said.
She took my head in her hands. She nodded.
“Are you hurt?” I said.
She laughed and stuck her finger into the hole I had so recently provided her with. She leaned in close and put her tongue in my ear to speak. “Nothing a little plaster won’t fix.”
Plaster. So that’s how the women did it.
“Meanwhile,” she said, “I have a new hole, if you’re interested.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t much good at pillow talk. Or maybe I was. Who knew? I stuck the gun in my belt. “I might be more interested in one of your older ones.”
Hey, I said I was bad at pillow talk.
I was lying on the mattress, smoking a Lucky. I lit one up for her too while I was at it.
She took it. “I normally smoke Chesterfields.” Just like a twist to complain about a favor.
“Yeah, well, I normally…” I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Sleep alone?” she suggested.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I put out the cigarette on my wrist. I didn’t really think about things like that anymore. Probably disgusting to a bird, though. Damn it.
Probably to make me feel better, she put hers out on her tongue, then swallowed it. I guess there were advantages to feeling next to nothing, because something weird like that seemed dead sexy. I kissed her. She didn’t object. Would’ve been disgusting if I had been alive, like kissing an ashtray. As it was, it was a whole new world. I leaned back again.
“I didn’t know our kind could do that,” I said. “I guess I’d heard rumors…” I trailed off again. I’d been doing that all night. I didn’t think it would be real wise one way or the other to mention my experience at the Hat Scratch. She must’ve thought I was positively medieval in prudishness.
Actually, I didn’t come up with that turn of phrase. She told me as much later on in the night.
“Of course we can,” she said. “Wouldn’t be any fun if we couldn’t. Who would want to unlive like this? Just don’t look at the stain afterward.”
I lifted my eyebrow but refused to take the bait directly. “Wonder how it all works.”
“Wonder all you want,” she said. “The living don’t know how anything works either. They blame it all on God.”
“Don’t you believe in God?” I was trying to be sly since I had my own thoughts on the matter, but it’s hard to tell when a twist might
turn out to be gaga for Jesus. Heavy talk for the sack, I know, but don’t we all get like that sometimes?
“No, I guess not,” she said. “Something about being promised life after death and getting this instead. Sours most of us to God.”
Funny, the same thoughts had occurred to me, too. “So there are no religious deadheads.”
“A few,” she said darkly, “but you want to stay away from those. Fanatics. Worse than the worst living ones.”
I nodded. I’d file that away to find out more about later. Or not. Nothing seemed to matter much that night. I took her into my arms and kissed her a bit around the neck. “So I guess you’ll be a repeat customer,” I said.
She pushed me away. Dames. Who can figure them? “Don’t flatter yourself, Jones. I only do virgins. You’re no good to me anymore.”
I folded my arms. “That’s not what I meant.”
She laughed at me and stood to get dressed. I guess she had some real clothes around the apartment after all. I surreptitiously lifted the covers to look at the stain. It was green and slimy, and a bit like a fungus. She was right. I wished I hadn’t looked.
“You’re terrible with double antennas,” she said. “But sure, if one of my morgue mates goes missing again, I’ll be sure to call.” She ran her hand along my desk. “Oh wait, you don’t have a phone.”
The door closed not with a slam, but with a miserable little creak.
November 15, 1934
I left the “bedroom” feeling as if I’d been plowed over by a steamroller. Alcibé was back, struggling to eat some pancakes. I’d finally gotten him into the habit of sitting in a bedpan when he eats so I don’t have to clean up afterward. There was a stack for me, too, covered with fruit and still steaming. I sat at the desk and popped the cork on a new bottle of Crow.
“How the hell’d you pull all this off?” I asked.
He gave one of his customary nondescript shrug-like gestures.
“I suppose you had help,” I said.
“I do have friends other than you, Jones,” he said between munches.
“Sure you do,” I said.
“Hey, I did have an unlife before I met you in Port-au-Pauper, you know.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said. “The bokor said that, too.”
“It’s just a pun,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I shrugged. No sense worrying about it. I had enough questions on my numbered list already.
“So, ah”—he was as reticent about the subject as I was—“your old client stopped by last night.”
“Yeah,” I said, tinkling my fork on the plate.
He nodded, or he would have if he had more of a neck. “Not much on under that trench coat, I’ll wager.”
I said nothing.
“I had a sex life of sorts, before Delamort got his claws into me,” he said. “I suppose I still could. You know, it would be limited in certain ways.”
I slammed my fist on the table, fork and all. “Enough. I don’t want to hear about a head giving head.”
We ate in silence for a moment.
“Grumpy,” he remarked.
I heard screaming through the window and a few shots rang out. We stared at each other. I grabbed the head and my revolver and ran out onto the street in nothing but my socks, drawers, and bathrobe.
One of our kind was staggering down the street, arms out like a Frankenstein and slobbering. A crowd of breathers had gathered around to form a circle but were giving the deadhead a wide berth. Some of the men were shakily waving torches and knives at him. Within the circle, a young girl sat flat on her behind, petrified with terror. Her fingernails were ragged and bleeding from scrabbling backward along the macadam. None of the brave breathers were doing a damned thing to protect her.
“It’s like he’s rabid,” one of them said.
Somebody else countered, “You ever seen a rabid person?”
“What’s going on?” I whispered to the head as I stuffed him inside my jacket as though I was hiding a stack of schoolbooks from the rain. I recognized this was no situation for us to be mistaken for what we really were. I guess Alcibé realized that too, because he didn’t protest being jammed up against my fetid armpit.
“It’s one of our kind,” he whispered through the terrycloth. “Shoot him in the head.”
“Shoot him?” I said. “That’ll kill him. For real kill him.”
“Yes,” Alcibé hissed. “He’s too far gone now.”
“The hell happened to him?”
“He’s either off the sauce, or he’s reached the end of his time. That’s a real braineater, Jones.”
“Who in the blue blazes are you talking to?” some old guy said, turning to look at me.
I grunted and pointed at the lump under my robe. “Ventriloquist.”
The old guy gave me a look like I had raped his two-year-old. “This hardly seems the time.”
“Out of the way,” I said, practically knocking the old guy over.
I pushed my way through the circle of breathers. I got down on one knee to help my aim and pointed my pistol at the braineater. Unfortunately, I guess the breathers took that as a signal to back off. Without the knives and flames in his face, the braineater lurched forward and grabbed the little girl.
Before she could scream, he took a huge jagged bite out of her skull. I could see the teeth marks in her head, like in a Felix cartoon.
“God damn it,” I whispered as I blew his brains out. I had never seen one of our kind dead before. Incredibly, the crowd of breathers up and disappeared. Nobody claimed the girl. She wouldn’t become one of us. That had been preempted by having an apple-sized chunk of her brain bitten into and splattered on the street.
I dropped the gun to the street, and my hand went instinctively along my jawline. I felt thick, ropey muscle there, thicker than a regular human’s, and a thick knot of it at the joint. Dazed, I released the head from his hidey-hole and held him by the hair. He didn’t protest.
“I didn’t know we could bite through bone like that,” I said. “Did you?”
“Yes,” he said, “but don’t start on me.”
I plucked a thick, brown glass bottle off the street—a piece of debris—and put it between my teeth. Tentatively I bit down and sliced through the glass as though it was butter. Absently, I chewed a bit, then spat out the glass, thinking that the next time I saw Kumaree, she wouldn’t appreciate jagged glass if we went French-style. I didn’t believe that bit about her only shacking up with virgins for even a minute.
Some of our kind wandered onto the street at that point. They had been hanging back, I suppose, waiting for the breathers to leave. I felt betrayed.
Someone clapped me on the back paternally. “It had to be done, Jones.”
I didn’t know him. “Get fucked,” I replied.
They picked up the deadhead and the girl. Cops didn’t come to the Welcome Mat. There’d be no investigation unless I performed it myself. I wondered briefly who the little girl was, with her blue dress and white apron and perfect little blond curls. Didn’t much matter, I suppose. Just another dead human.
“This is why they hate us,” Alcibé said.
“This isn’t us,” I said. “This is…” I was at a loss for words.
“You understand now why you shouldn’t call yourself Braineater?” the head asked.
“Fuck that,” I said.
It’s a badge of honor. After a fashion.
November 16, 1934
I flopped down into my usual seat at the bar. I flipped through my notebook then stuck it back in my pocket. The gorilla came around eventually.
“You’re not here to drink,” he said.
“No,” I said, “but you can hit me anyway.”
He gave me some of that clear Russian stuff, and I threw it back. I kept giving the “come hither” signal with my finger when the glass got empty.
“What do you know about Lazar?” I asked.
The gorilla shoo
k his head.
“Come on, damn it,” I said. “You know who I’m talking about.”
“Sometimes he goes by Lazar, sometimes by Russ, sometimes by—”
“Lazarus.” I already figured that.
“Other things, too,” the gorilla said. “I don’t trust a man—even one of our kind—who can’t settle on a name. Like he’s always hiding something.”
I waited. “That’s it? That’s all you know?”
He shrugged. “Used to live upstairs. Left a little while before you came. Kept to himself. I don’t know his business. I don’t care to know. He and the Old Man talk a lot.”
I stroked my chin. Felt strange not to have any stubble. Or did it? Muscle memory, maybe. Must’ve had a beard when I was alive or didn’t shave much. Contrary to popular belief, our hair and fingernails do not continue to grow.
That wasn’t really my line of thinking at the time, though. At the time, I was putting it together that Lazar—or whoever he was—was the one keeping the speakeasy in business. He had some kind of arrangement with the little abortion. What was the arrangement? Some kind of kickback thing? If not, why didn’t Lazar simply run the speakeasy himself?
“Let me talk to the boss,” I said.
The bartender nervously polished his hands with his dishtowel. I noticed for the first time that he had lost one of his ears. I wondered if he had ever had it since I met him, or if he had lost it at some point and I was just noticing. Didn’t matter much, I guess, but might go a long way toward telling me what kind of detective I am.
“I don’t think he’ll want that,” he said.
“What, do you speak for the Old Man now?” I asked. “I ain’t asking for an audience with the pope. Now bring that little shit up here.”
I wonder if I was a papist before. Kumaree was right, after all. There wasn’t a religious bone in my body after my physical conversion. Only thing that twist was right about it.
The gorilla tried to pull one over on me. He went through all the motions of clomping down into the little basement and then clomping back up. “He’s busy.”
I flung myself over the counter and grabbed the big mook by the lapels. Probably not the best idea, someone as tiny as me taking on a gruesome monument like him. But it seemed like the thing to do at the time. “You get that little jar of crap and you bring it up here.”
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