Wicked City

by Alaya Johnson

She proceeded to demonstrate her utter indifference to my presence by uncapping her pen and scribbling on a clean sheet of paper.

  “What would you do in my situation, Lily?” I asked.

  “Give my reporter friend all the details so she can publish an exposé.”

  “No, really,” I said, my words somewhat garbled by an ice cube in my mouth.

  Lily tossed her pen with enough force to splatter ink and swiveled to face me. “Well, if I knew a nice lady who liked me and happened to work in the mayor’s office, I might just ask her for help instead of bothering the overworked reporter you won’t give the story to anyway.”

  I crunched down the last bit of ice and grinned. “Now that,” I said, “is why I so value our relationship.”

  “Glad to be of service,” Lily said. “Now, leave.”

  * * *

  The secretary guarding City Hall’s inner sanctum took one look at me and shook her head.

  “Mrs. Brandon’s left for the day,” she said.

  Already? It was barely four o’clock on a Friday. Perhaps she was busy running errands for the mayor’s dinner tomorrow night. “Maybe I wanted to see someone else?” I asked.

  The woman tilted her head. “Like who?”

  “The mayor?”

  I had meant this mostly as a joke, but she jolted upright and looked down at something on her desk. “Oh!” she said. “He gave me a note to send you.”

  “He did?”

  “I haven’t sent it yet.”

  “Oh? I had a feeling he might want to hear from me,” I said.

  She looked at the note again and shook her head. “Give me a moment. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Not two minutes later, she ushered me into his office. He was adjusting his tie in the mirror and gave me a suspiciously friendly smile when I sat down.

  “I’m glad to see you, Miss Hollis,” he said. “Darned good luck for you to have come just now. I’ve been booked solid all day. But you had some business of your own, I’m sure?”

  I should have left as soon as I learned Mrs. Brandon wasn’t in. There was a world of difference between asking a sympathetic ally for help and playing political games with the mayor.

  “I’m afraid I was wondering … did you call the commissioner?”

  He nodded gravely. “I see, I see. Well, I can grant how you would appreciate that, Miss Hollis, but I’m afraid it isn’t possible.”

  “It isn’t?” I felt as though he had slapped me.

  He turned from the mirror and walked over to his desk, though he did not sit down. “The trouble, you see, is that you haven’t kept your side of the bargain.”

  “You didn’t talk to Nicholas?” I said. “He promised that he would come!”

  His lip curled in remembered distaste and he dabbed at his mouth with his pocket square. “I spoke to the vampire boy, yes. He’s a piece of work, that one. But not much help to me. And he was curiously emphatic about one thing, Miss Hollis.”

  “What’s that?” I prayed I didn’t already know the answer.

  Mayor Walker leaned against the edge of his desk, close enough for me to get a good look at his gray spats and the white carnation in his buttonhole. He looked like a man about to make the social rounds, and yet he had happily made time for me.

  “Your Nicholas, it seems, is not the original distributor.”

  “Well, Rinaldo’s dead.”

  “That’s the curious thing, Miss Hollis. Your Nicholas said he didn’t have an original bottle, but that you know a genie who might.”

  I laughed, perhaps a little too forcefully. “A genie? Like one who lives in a lamp? How could I have managed that?” I imagined all the responses Amir could make to this statement and had to force back a giggle. In other circumstances, I would have loved to see Amir and the mayor face off.

  “Improbable, I grant you,” he said. “But you strike me as an improbable lady. And Nicholas was sure that a genie was the original distributor.”

  I cursed Nicholas ten different ways in the privacy of my thoughts. I had told him I knew nothing about Amir! Had he known I was lying? I decided to go on the offensive. “Even if a genie was the original distributor, I certainly know nothing about him. I know Nicholas, and that’s who you asked me for. So keep your word.”

  He frowned. “But I doubt you’ve kept yours, Miss Hollis. If you know this genie—”

  “A practically mythical creature—”

  “If you know him,” the mayor continued, unperturbed, “and you sent me Nicholas instead, then you haven’t kept your side of the bargain. I think you knew full well that Nicholas wouldn’t have the original Faust. I think you are hiding the genie from me so as not to hurt your bluenose friends.”

  I glowered. “If genies exist,” I said, “I doubt there’s more than two people in all the world who know one. What you are accusing me of, sir, is absurd. I’m sorry your hopes were disappointed in this manner, but you asked for Nicholas. If you insist on breaking your promise, then tell me so. I will leave you to it.”

  I felt quite proud of this performance, and it seemed to give the mayor pause. He walked back over to the mounted mirror and examined some minute imperfection in the lining of his suit jacket. Finally, he turned around with a rueful smile.

  “My sincerest apologies, Miss Hollis. You are entirely right. I had pinned too many hopes on your Nicholas. But we had a bargain, and I would never let it be said that Gentleman Jimmy goes back on his word. I will call the commissioner within the hour and clear up that pesky business about the child vampire. Will that satisfy you?”

  I wanted to ask him if he could also put in a word about me not murdering anyone. But that would reveal knowledge that I shouldn’t have, and possibly hurt Mrs. Brandon.

  So I stood. “It certainly will,” I said, as though I had no idea I was under suspicion for murder.

  “Brilliant,” the mayor said. “Oh, and here,” he said, reaching for a small envelope resting on his desk. “It would delight me to see you at the banquet tomorrow evening. It’s my big event before the vote on Monday.”

  I took the invitation, inked by hand on thick cream paper. My ticket to the most exclusive social event since Lindbergh’s banquet. I had no doubt the mayor had some political purpose in mind for giving it to me—perhaps he hoped I might still give him the “genie”? But I was thinking about Lily and how much she would owe me if I brought her as my guest.

  “I just might attend,” I said.

  * * *

  There were only a few people loitering in City Hall Park, but to my surprise I thought I recognized one of them. Someone whose presence here was so odd that I had to get very close before I was sure it was her.

  “Ysabel?” I said. She was sitting on a bench, a scarf pulled tight over her silver hair and tapping her foot anxiously. She nearly jumped when she saw me.

  “Oh, bubbala! Why are you here? Are you in trouble?”

  She seemed agitated. I sat beside her. “Of course not,” I said, blithely ignoring the last week of my life. “Why would I be?”

  “You know, this whole mess, the shibboleth with the dead bruxa. Such a shame. It must stop.”

  She looked away from me, her throat working.

  “But didn’t you hear? They caught the killer last night. He won’t be able to hurt anyone again.”

  I had hoped this would comfort her, but she turned to me with such intensity I nearly backed away. “It is not the man that kills,” she said. “It is the blood.”

  Blood from her Bank? But I couldn’t ask. “The police have the blood now. It can’t kill anyone else.”

  “And what if the killer finds more, Zephyr?” she said.

  “Ysabel, there are rumors … I’ve heard the tainted blood came from a Bank. That the blood supply might be compromised. Are you saying…”

  “No! I am saying nothing. How could I? There is too much blood, too many bruxa, too many mensch, how can we tell if blood is good or blood is bad? We cannot. Unless it is too late.”r />
  “Is that why you closed the Bank?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened. “I closed the Bank because of some family trouble, like I said. I will open as soon as I can and I will make sure that the blood is safe.”

  Nearby, someone honked their horn with jarring force. Ysabel sprung upright like a jack-in-the-box and looked around frantically. A sedan with a dented fender idled in front of the giant post office. The driver honked again, loud enough that the only other person in the park—a man leaning against the clock tower with a cigarette—lifted his cap and frowned.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered. I took her elbow and helped her stand. “So late,” she said, straightening her scarf and gripping her bag more tightly. “Always too close to Shabbos.”

  “Will you tell me when you open the Blood Bank again?” I asked.

  Her eyes focused on me again and she smiled, a little sadly. “Of course, bubbala. In the meantime, you keep from trouble.”

  She pecked me on the cheek and then paused.

  “Do you know that man over there?” she said, quietly.

  She was referring to the gentleman smoking by the clock tower, who looked away as soon as I glanced over. “I’ve never seen him before in my life,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I think he is police. I saw him talking to an officer before you came. And he has stared at you ever since you sat here.”

  I held my breath and looked, ever so carefully, over Ysabel’s stooped shoulder. Sure enough, the man was staring at me from under his cap. A coincidence? But I couldn’t discount that the police might have decided upon a more active form of investigation.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  The car honked again, a loud and sustained racket that caused the pigeons to fly away. “Stay safe, Zephyr,” she said and hurried to the car, the owner of which seemed to be in danger of breaking his horn. She started lecturing in Yiddish the moment the door opened and had not stopped by the time the car turned down Park Row and away.

  I stared after her for a moment. Clearly Ysabel suspected the St. Marks Bank might have distributed the tainted blood. I hoped she was wrong, but I was afraid. I took a deep breath and turned back to the possible police officer. He was conspicuously ignoring me now, lighting a second cigarette and admiring the towering post office building.

  I stood up and took a leisurely turn around the park. At first he didn’t move, and I was about to ascribe my and Ysabel’s suspicions to overactive imagination. But once I ambled out of his line of sight, I soon discovered that he kept a distance of no fewer than twenty yards between us. Bloody stakes. I wondered what to do about it. Despite the fact that I grew up with a stake in my hand, Daddy never taught us much about tailing.

  City Hall proper shared building space with the Third Precinct. As I completed my circuit, a uniformed policeman just exiting the precinct hailed my unwanted companion and they began to chat. My man looked around nervously, so I pretended blithe ignorance and sat down on a nearby bench, leaning back in feigned exhaustion. As I suspected, the man relaxed and continued his conversation. As soon as I judged his attention sufficiently diverted, I moved.

  With a swiftness that would make Harry proud, I dashed across the street to the gaudy victorian monstrosity of our main post office, and headed behind a truck loading its final mail delivery. A man in a postal uniform smoked on the loading bay and looked at me curiously.

  “I’ll give you ten cents for your cap and jacket,” I said.

  He laughed. “And I’ll give you twenty for a look under that skirt.”

  I rolled my eyes and dared a glance back in the park. My shadow was looking frantically up and down the street.

  “A dollar,” I said. “And that’s all I have on me, so that’s all you’ll get.”

  “What you want with—”

  “Will you take it or not?”

  “All right. More than I paid for ’em.” I took the coins from my pocket while he removed his clothes. I tried not to notice that the jacket had stains in the armpits and the cap was ripe with hair grease.

  “I wasn’t here,” I said, and grabbed an empty mail bin from the back of the truck.

  I couldn’t help that I wore a skirt instead of trousers—and I didn’t imagine that too many women worked to deliver the mail—but I walked swiftly and with purpose down the east facade of the building. I didn’t want to enter in the public lobby, but the delivery entrance suited me just fine. I didn’t dare look behind me to see if the officer had discovered my ruse. I passed a few postal workers in the basement corridors, but I kept my head down and if I seemed unusual, apparently it didn’t worry them enough to stop me. I made my way down a central hall, hoping that I would find a door leading out the other side.

  I had nearly made it through when I realized that I hadn’t lost my tail.

  Ahead and to my left, a smaller hallway branched off of this main one. For once, I had cause to appreciate the atrocious architectural sensibilities of my Victorian forebears. If not for their dedication to crowding perfectly good spaces with unnecessary passageways, I would have a much harder time leaving the man behind. I turned left, made sure no one was ahead of me, and broke into a dead sprint. This was all over if the hallway dead-ended, but no, there was another turn to the right. I slid on the worn soles of my boots and plopped the empty mail crate bottom-up on the floor behind me. This new corridor led into a wall, but that didn’t matter much. I ducked into the deep shadow of a recessed doorway and waited.

  Footsteps, louder and faster, approached. A male voice cursed under his breath.

  I recognized it, but didn’t have time to shout a warning before he came barreling around the corner, hit the overturned mail crate and fell with a rather sharp smack onto the tiled floor.

  I knelt to assess the damage, but my brother didn’t seem too bad off. “I wish you wouldn’t follow me around like that,” I said.

  Harry rubbed his elbow, aggrieved. “Duly noted. So you knew about the police officer?”

  “Why else would I be down here, wearing this? Speaking of which…” I pulled off the grimy cap and jacket and tossed them to the floor. “I would love to find a bath.”

  He sniffed. “I can see why. Come to my place? We need to talk.”

  I helped him up and we set off down the hall. “Are letters too good for you, now?” I asked.

  “They’re too dangerous for you, Zephyr. You wouldn’t believe the rumors I’ve been hearing! And now the police…”

  “If that’s what you came to talk to me about, I have the situation well in hand.”

  Harry rolled his eyes and opened the door to the west facade. He poked his head out first, then motioned for me to follow. He slipped his arm around my waist, and I automatically leaned into his broad shoulder—a perfect impersonation of a young, loving couple, out for a stroll. Sometimes the best disguises were the simplest.

  “I highly doubt that,” Harry said, his voice carefully pleasant. “But that’s not why I’m here. We need to go back to headquarters. There’s a message from Mama.”

  “You couldn’t have brought it with you?”

  Harry pursed his lips. “Well, I could, but I imagine he would only increase your troubles.”

  I paused. “He? What is going on, Harry?”

  “It’s Judah. He’s in my room.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Harry lived on the top floor of the Defenders’ newly relocated headquarters, though I imagined that he could afford something better and more private. He had been working for Troy for nearly six months, after all. Odious as I found him, the man did know how to find well-paying work. But Harry didn’t seem to have bothered. I suppose it made sense: why worry about finding a nicer place when you could just rotate among the poster beds of your wealthy lovers?

  “You kept him here?” I whispered, while he unlocked the courtyard gate.

  “Where else could I put him? In my pocket?”

  “But Troy—”

  Harry sighed. “Troy is th
e least of your troubles, Zeph. For Christ’s sake, you’re not still sweet on him, are you?”

  “Perish the thought.” Troy had been my first beau back in Montana, and we were well rid of each other.

  Harry grinned impishly and tugged at one of my damp ringlets. “Zephyr has a crush,” he said in the singsong tone of our childhood.

  There were no observers here in the garden courtyard. I stuck my tongue out at him.

  Inside, the headquarters were silent and dark, and we encountered no one until we reached the landing of the third floor. Troy sat in front of Harry’s door, a sword across his knees and a pistol by his side. Several wisps of dirty blond hair had escaped the rigid cage of his pomade, which told me more about his mood than his flat expression.

  “There is an underage vampire in your room,” Troy said, with the sort of calm that presaged violence.

  Harry took a step back. He seemed to consider many responses—thankfully, none of them involved the pistol I knew he kept in his vest pocket. Finally, he settled on, “Yes.”

  “And how did you intend to manage the situation?”

  Harry darted a glance at me. “Have a conversation with him?” he said.

  “A conversation.” Troy didn’t reach for the gun, but his hands tightened on the pommel of the sword.

  Harry flushed, highlighting his freckles and ginger hair. I recalled that I had rescued Judah all those months ago because of his resemblance to my brother at that age.

  “Troy, I know the kid, he’s—”

  “An underage vampire,” Troy repeated, in about the same tones one would use for “plague-ridden corpse” or “Boss Tweed.”

  It was time to attempt to defuse the situation, though I doubted Troy would listen. I stepped forward. “His name is Judah, I rescued him this January and our parents have been caring for him ever since.”

  Troy looked dumbfounded enough to put down the sword. “Your … your parents!”

  “Yes. And by our parents we also mean our daddy.”

  Troy scrambled up, his righteous indignation in full flower. This was a relief—when Troy engaged in theatrics, no one could be in serious danger.

  “How in seven hells did you ever get the great John Hollis to live with an underage vampire? Has he gone mad?”