Supernatural Noir

A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her human clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian—for a fat ten percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelley manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam who, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling—never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long, lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.

Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in It Happened One Night. I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut, and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.

“Hey, be careful,” I said, “unless you intend to pay for those.” I jabbed a thumb at the books she’d spattered. She promptly stopped shaking the umbrella and dropped it into the stand beside the door. That umbrella stand has always been one of my favorite things about the Yellow Dragon. It’s made from the taxidermied foot of a hippopotamus, and accommodates at least a dozen umbrellas, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen even half that many people in the shop at one time.

“Are you Natalie Beaumont?” she asked, looking down at her wet shoes. Her overcoat was dripping, and a small puddle was forming about her feet.

“Usually.”

“Usually,” she repeated. “How about right now?”

“Depends whether or not I owe you money,” I replied, and removed a battered copy of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled from the crate. “Also, depends whether you happen to be employed by someone I owe money.”

“I see,” she said, as if that settled the matter, then proceeded to examine the complete twelve-volume set of The Golden Bough occupying a top shelf not far from the door. “Awful funny sort of neighborhood for a bookstore, if you ask me.”

“You don’t think bums and winos read?”

“You ask me, people down here,” she said, “they panhandle a few cents, I don’t imagine they spend it on books.”

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t. Still, queer sort of a shop to come across in this part of town.”

“If you must know,” I said, “the rent’s cheap,” then reached for my spectacles, which were dangling from their silver chain about my neck. I set them on the bridge of my nose, and watched while she feigned interest in Frazerian anthropology. It would be an understatement to say Ellen Andrews was a pretty girl. She was, in fact, a certified knockout, and I didn’t get too many beautiful women in the Yellow Dragon, even when the weather was good. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in Flo Ziegfeld’s follies; on the Bowery, she stuck out like a sore thumb.

“Looking for anything in particular?” I asked her, and she shrugged.

“Just you,” she said.

“Then I suppose you’re in luck.”

“I suppose I am,” she said, and turned toward me again. Her eyes glinted red, just for an instant, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. I figured it for a trick of the light. “I’m a friend of Auntie H. I run errands for her, now and then. She needs you to pick up a package and see it gets safely where it’s going.”

So, there it was. Madam Harpootlian, or Auntie H. to those few unfortunates she called her friends. And suddenly it made a lot more sense, this choice bit of calico walking into my place, strolling in off the street like maybe she did all her shopping down on Skid Row. I’d have to finish unpacking the crate later. I stood up and dusted my hands off on the seat of my slacks.

“Sorry about the confusion,” I said, even if I wasn’t actually sorry, even if I was actually kind of pissed the girl hadn’t told me who she was right up front. “When Auntie H. wants something done, she doesn’t usually bother sending her orders around in such an attractive envelope.”

The girl laughed, then said, “Yeah, Auntie H. warned me about you, Miss Beaumont.”

“Did she now. How so?”

“You know, your predilections. How you’re not like other women.”

“I’d say that depends on which other women we’re discussing, don’t you think?”

“Most other women,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the rain pelting the shop windows. It sounded like frying meat out there, the sizzle of the rain against asphalt, and concrete, and the roofs of passing automobiles.

“And what about you?” I asked her. “Are you like most other women?”

She looked away from the window, back at me, and she smiled what must have been the faintest smile possible.

“Are you always this charming?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “Then again, I never took a poll.”

“The job, it’s nothing particularly complicated,” she said, changing the subject. “There’s a Chinese apothecary not too far from here.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” I said, and lit a cigarette.

“Sixty-five Mott Street. The joint’s run by an elderly Cantonese fellow name of Fong.”

“Yeah, I know Jimmy Fong.”

“That’s good. Then maybe you won’t get lost. Mr. Fong will be expecting you, and he’ll have the package ready at five thirty this evening. He’s already been paid in full, so all you have to do is be there to receive it, right? And Miss Beaumont, please try to be on time. Auntie H. said you have a problem with punctuality.”

“You believe everything you hear?”

“Only if I’m hearing it from Auntie H.”

“Fair enough,” I told her, then offered her a Pall Mall, but she declined.

“I need to be getting back,” she said, reaching for the umbrella she’d only just deposited in the stuffed hippopotamus foot.

“What’s the rush? What’d you come after, anyway, a ball of fire?”

She rolled her eyes. “I got places to be. You’re not the only stop on my itinerary.”

“Fine. Wouldn’t want you getting in Dutch with Harpootlian on my account. Don’t suppose you’ve got a name?”

“I might,” she said.

“Don’t suppose you’d share?” I asked her, and took a long drag on my cigarette, wondering why in blue blazes Harpootlian had sent this smart-mouthed skirt instead of one of her usual flunkies. Of course, Auntie H. always did have a sadistic streak to put de Sade to shame, and likely as not this was her idea of a joke.

“Ellen,” the girl said. “Ellen Andrews.”

“So, Ellen Andrews, how is it we’ve never met? I mean, I’ve been making deliveries for your boss lady now going on seven years, and if I’d seen you, I’d remember. You’re not the sort I forget.”

“You got the moxie, don’t you?”

“I’m just good with faces is all.”

She chewed at a thumbnail, as if considering carefully what she should or shouldn’t divulge. Then she said, “I’m from out of town, mostly. Just passing through, and thought I’d lend a hand. That’s why you’ve never seen me before, Miss Beaumont. Now, I’ll let you get back to work. And remember, don’t be late.”

“I heard you the first time, sister.”

And then she left, and the brass bell above the door jingled again. I finished my cigarette and went back to unpacking the big crate of books from Connecticut. If I hurried, I could finish the job before heading for Chinatown.

——

She was right, of course. I did have a well-deserved reputation for not being on time. But I knew that Auntie H. was of the opinion that my acumen in antiquarian and occult matters more than compensated for my not-infrequent tardiness. I’ve never much cared for personal mottos, but if I had one it might be, You want it on time, or you want it done right? Still, I honestly tried to be on time for the meeting with Fong. And still, through no fault of my own, I was more than twenty minutes late. I was lucky enough to find a cab, despite the rain, but then got stuck behind some sort of brouhaha after turning onto Canal, so there you go. It’s not like old man Fong had any place more pressing to be, not like he was gonna get pissy and leave me high and dry.

When I got to 65 Mott, the Chinaman’s apothecary was locked up tight, all the lights were off, and the “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign was hung in the front window. No big surprise there. But then I went around back, to the alley, and found a door standing wide open and quite a lot of fresh blood on the cinderblock steps leading into the building. Now, maybe I was the only lady bookseller in Manhattan who carried a gun, and maybe I wasn’t. But times like that, I was glad to have the Colt tucked snugly inside its shoulder holster, and happier still that I knew how to use it. I took a deep breath, drew the pistol, flipped off the safety catch, and stepped inside.

The door opened onto a stockroom, and the tiny nook Jimmy Fong used as his office was a little farther in, over on my left. There was some light from a banker’s lamp, but not much of it. I lingered in the shadows a moment, waiting for my heart to stop pounding, for the adrenaline high to fade. The air was close, and stunk of angelica root and dust, ginger and frankincense and fuck only knows what else. Powdered rhino horn and the pickled gallbladders of panda bears. What the hell ever. I found the old man slumped over at his desk.

Whoever knifed him hadn’t bothered to pull the shiv out of his spine, and I wondered if the poor SOB had even seen it coming. It didn’t exactly add up, not after seeing all that blood drying on the steps, but I figured, hey, maybe the killer was the sort of klutz can’t spread butter without cutting himself. I had a quick look-see around the cluttered office, hoping I might turn up the package Ellen Andrews had sent me there to retrieve. But no dice, and then it occurred to me: maybe whoever had murdered Fong had come looking for the same thing I was looking for. Maybe they’d found it, too, only Fong knew better than to just hand it over, and that had gotten him killed. Anyway, nobody was paying me to play junior shamus; hence the hows, whys, and wherefores of the Chinaman’s death were not my problem. My problem would be showing up at Harpootlian’s cathouse empty handed.

I returned the gun to its holster, then I started rifling through everything in sight—the great disarray of papers heaped upon the desk, Fong’s accounting ledgers, sales invoices, catalogs, letters and postcards written in English, Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, French, Spanish, and Arabic. I still had my gloves on, so it’s not like I had to worry over fingerprints. A few of the desk drawers were unlocked, and I’d just started in on those, when the phone perched atop the filing cabinet rang. I froze, whatever I was looking at clutched forgotten in my hands, and stared at the phone.

Sure, it wasn’t every day I blundered into the immediate aftermath of this sort of foul play, but I was plenty savvy enough; I knew better than to answer that call. It didn’t much matter who was on the other end of the line. If I answered, I could be placed at the scene of a murder only minutes after it had gone down. The phone rang a second time, and a third, and I glanced at the dead man in the chair. The crimson halo surrounding the switchblade’s inlaid mother-of-pearl handle was still spreading, blossoming like some grim rose, and now there was blood dripping to the floor, as well. The phone rang a fourth time. A fifth. And then I was seized by an overwhelming compulsion to answer it, and answer it I did. I wasn’t the least bit thrown that the voice coming through the receiver was Ellen Andrews’s. All at once, the pieces were falling into place. You spend enough years doing the step-and-fetch-it routine for imps like Harpootlian, you find yourself ever more jaded at the inexplicable and the uncanny.

“Beaumont,” she said, “I didn’t think you were going to pick up.”

“I wasn’t. Funny thing how I did anyway.”

“Funny thing,” she said, and I heard her light a cigarette and realized my hands were shaking.

“See, I’m thinking maybe I had a little push,” I said. “That about the size of it?”

“Wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d have just answered the damn phone in the first place.”

“You already know Fong’s dead, don’t you?” And, I swear to fuck, nothing makes me feel like more of a jackass than asking questions I know the answers to.

“Don’t you worry about Fong. I’m sure he had all his ducks in a row and was right as rain with Buddha. I need you to pay attention—”

“Harpootlian had him killed, didn’t she? And you knew he’d be dead when I showed up.”

She didn’t reply straight away, and I thought I could hear a radio playing in the background. “You knew,” I said again, only this time it wasn’t a query.

“Listen,” she said. “You’re a courier. I was told you’re a courier we can trust, elsewise I never would have handed you this job.”

“You didn’t hand me the job. Your boss did.”

“You’re splitting hairs, Miss Beaumont.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a fucking dead celestial in the room with me. It’s giving me the fidgets.”

“So how about you shut up and listen, and I’ll have you out of there in a jiffy.” And that’s what I did—I shut up, either because I knew it was the path of least resistance, or because whatever spell she’d used to persuade me to answer the phone was still working.

“On Fong’s desk, there’s a funny little porcelain statue of a cat.”

“You mean the maneki neko?”

“If that’s what it’s called, that’s what I mean. Now, break it open. There’s a key inside.”

I tried not to, just to see if I was being played as badly as I suspected I was being played. I gritted my teeth, dug in my heels, and tried hard not to break that damned cat.

“You’re wasting time. Auntie H. didn’t mention you were such a crybaby.”

“Auntie H. and I have an agreement when it comes to free will. To my free will.”

“Break the goddamn cat,” Ellen Andrews growled, and that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I slammed it down directly on top of Fong’s head. Bits of brightly painted porcelain flew everywhere, and a rusty barrel key tumbled out and landed at my feet. “Now pick it up,” she said. “The key fits the bottom left-hand drawer of Fong’s desk. Open it.”

This time, I didn’t even try to resist her. I was getting a headache from the last futile attempt. I unlocked the drawer and pulled it open. Inside, there was nothing but the yellowed sheet of newspaper lining the drawer, three golf balls, a couple of old racing forms, and a finely carved wooden box lacquered almost the same shade of red as Jimmy Fong’s blood. I didn’t need to be told I’d been sent to retrieve the box—or, more specifically, whatever was inside the box.

“Yeah, I got it,” I told Ellen Andrews.

“Good girl. Now, you have maybe twelve minutes before the cops show. Go out the same way you came in.” Then she gave me a Riverside Drive address, and said there’d be a car waiting for me at the corner of Canal and Mulberry, a green Chevrolet coupe. “Just give the driver that address. He’ll see you get where you’re going.”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding the desk drawer shut again and locking it. I pocketed the key. “But, sister, you and me are gonna have a talk.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Nat,” she said and hung up. I shut my eyes, wondering if I really had twelve minutes before the bulls arrived, and if they were even on their way, wondering what would happen if I endeavored not to make the rendezvous with the green coupe. I stood there, trying to decide whether Harpootlian would have gone back on her word and given this bitch permission to turn her hoodoo tricks on me, and if aspirin would do anything at all for the dull throb behind my eyes. Then I looked at Fong one last time, at the knife jutting out of his back, his thin gray hair powdered with porcelain dust from the shattered “lucky cat.” And then I stopped asking questions and did as I’d been told.

——

The car was there, just like she’d told me it would be. There was a young colored man behind the wheel, and when I climbed in the back, he asked me where we were headed.

“I’m guessing Hell,” I said, “sooner or later.”

“Got that right,” he laughed and winked at me from the rearview mirror. “But I was thinking more in terms of the immediate here and now.”

So I recited the address I’d been given over the phone, 435 Riverside.

“That’s the Colosseum,” he said.

“It is if you say so,” I replied. “Just get me there.”

The driver nodded and pulled away from the curb. As he navigated the slick, wet streets, I sat listening to the rain against the Chevy’s hardtop and the music coming from the Motorola. In particular, I can remember hearing the Dorsey Brothers, “Chasing Shadows.” I suppose you’d call that a harbinger, if you go in for that sort of thing. Me, I do my best not to. In this business, you start jumping at everything that might be an omen or a portent, you end up doing nothing else. Ironically, rubbing shoulders with the supernatural has made me a great believer in coincidence.

Anyway, the driver drove, the radio played, and I sat staring at the red lacquered box I’d stolen from a dead man’s locked desk drawer. I thought it might be mahogany, but it was impossible to be sure, what with all that cinnabar-tinted varnish. I know enough about Chinese mythology that I recognized the strange creature carved into the top—a qilin, a stout, antlered beast with cloven hooves, the scales of a dragon, and a long leonine tail. Much of its body was wreathed in flame, and its gaping jaws revealed teeth like daggers. For the Chinese, the qilin is a harbinger of good fortune, though it certainly hadn’t worked out that way for Jimmy Fong. The box was heavier than it looked, most likely because of whatever was stashed inside. There was no latch, and as I examined it more closely, I realized there was no sign whatsoever of hinges or even a seam to indicate it actually had a lid.

“Unless I got it backwards,” the driver said, “Miss Andrews didn’t say nothing about trying to open that box, now did she?”

I looked up, startled, feeling like the proverbial kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. He glanced at me in the mirror, then his eyes drifted back to the road.

“She didn’t say one way or the other,” I told him.

“Then how about we err on the side of caution?”

“So you didn’t know where you’re taking me, but you know I shouldn’t open this box? How’s that work?”

“Ain’t the world just full of mysteries,” he said.

For a minute or so, I silently watched the headlights of the oncoming traffic and the metronomic sweep of the windshield wipers. Then I asked the driver how long he’d worked for Ellen Andrews.

“Not very,” he said. “Never laid eyes on the lady before this afternoon. Why you want to know?”

“No particular reason,” I said, looking back down at the box and the qilin etched in the wood. I decided I was better off not asking any more questions, better off getting this over and done with, and never mind what did and didn’t quite add up. “Just trying to make conversation; that’s all.”

Which got him to talking about the Chicago stockyards and Cleveland and how it was he’d eventually wound up in New York City. He never told me his name, and I didn’t ask. The trip uptown seemed to take forever, and the longer I sat with that box in my lap, the heavier it felt. I finally moved it, putting it down on the seat beside me. By the time we reached our destination, the rain had stopped and the setting sun was showing through the clouds, glittering off the dripping trees in Riverside Park and the waters of the wide gray Hudson. He pulled over, and I reached for my wallet.

“No, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head. “Miss Andrews, she’s already seen to your fare.”

“Then I hope you won’t mind if I see to your tip,” I said, and I gave him five dollars. He thanked me, and I took the wooden box and stepped out onto the wet sidewalk.

“She’s up on the eleventh,” he told me, nodding toward the apartments. Then he drove off, and I turned to face the imposing brick-and-limestone faзade of the building the driver had called the Colosseum. I rarely find myself any farther north than the Upper West Side, so this was pretty much terra incognita for me.

The doorman gave me directions, after giving me and Fong’s box the hairy eyeball, and I quickly made my way to the elevators, hurrying through that ritzy marble sepulcher passing itself off as a lobby. When the operator asked which floor I needed, I told him the eleventh, and he shook his head and muttered something under his breath. I almost asked him to speak up, but thought better of it. Didn’t I already have plenty enough on my mind without entertaining the opinions of elevator boys? Sure, I did. I had a murdered Chinaman, a mysterious box, and this pushy little sorceress calling herself Ellen Andrews. I also had an especially disagreeable feeling about this job, and the sooner it was settled, the better. I kept my eyes on the brass needle as it haltingly swung from left to right, counting off the floors, and when the doors parted, she was there waiting for me. She slipped the boy a sawbuck, and he stuffed it into his jacket pocket and left us alone.

“So nice to see you again, Nat,” she said, but she was looking at the lacquered box, not me. “Would you like to come in and have a drink? Auntie H. says you have a weakness for rye whiskey.”

“Well, she’s right about that. But just now, I’d be more fond of an explanation.”

“How odd,” she said, glancing up at me, still smiling. “Auntie said one thing she liked about you was how you didn’t ask a lot of questions. Said you were real good at minding your own business.”

“Sometimes I make exceptions.”

“Let me get you that drink,” she said, and I followed her the short distance from the elevator to the door of her apartment. Turns out, she had the whole floor to herself, each level of the Colosseum being a single apartment. Pretty ritzy accommodations, I thought, for someone who was mostly from out of town. But then, I’ve spent the last few years living in that one-bedroom cracker box above the Yellow Dragon—hot and cold running cockroaches and so forth. She locked the door behind us, then led me through the foyer to a parlor. The whole place was done up gaudy period French, Louis Quinze and the like, all floral brocade and orientalia. The walls were decorated with damask hangings, mostly of ample-bosomed women reclining in pastoral scenes, dogs and sheep and what have you lying at their feet. Ellen told me to have a seat, so I parked myself on a rйcamier near a window.

“Harpootlian spring for this place?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “It belonged to my mother.”

“So, you come from money.”

“Did I mention how you ask an awful lot of questions?”

“You might have,” I said, and she inquired as to whether I liked my whiskey neat or on the rocks. I told her neat, and set the red box down on the sofa next to me.

“If you’re not too thirsty, would you mind if I take a peek at that first,” she said, pointing at the box.

“Be my guest,” I said, and Ellen smiled again. She picked up the red lacquered box, then sat next to me. She cradled it in her lap, and there was this goofy expression on her face, a mix of awe, dread, and eager expectation.

“Must be something extra damn special,” I said, and she laughed. It was a nervous kind of a laugh.

I’ve already mentioned how I couldn’t discern any evidence the box had a lid, and I supposed there was some secret to getting it open, a gentle squeeze or nudge in just the right spot. Turns out, all it needed was someone to say the magic words.

“Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower,” she said, speaking slowly and all but whispering the words. There was a sharp click and the top of the box suddenly slid back with enough force that it tumbled over her knees and fell to the carpet.

“Keats,” I said.

“Keats,” she echoed, but added nothing more. She was too busy gazing at what lay inside the box, nestled in a bed of velvet the color of poppies. She started to touch it, then hesitated, her fingertips hovering an inch or so above the object.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, once I saw what was inside.

“Don’t go jumping to conclusions, Nat.”

“It’s a dildo,” I said, probably sounding as incredulous as I felt. “Exactly which conclusions am I not supposed to jump to? Sure, I enjoy a good rub-off as much as the next girl, but . . . you’re telling me Harpootlian killed Fong over a dildo?”

“I never said Auntie H. killed Fong.”

“Then I suppose he stuck that knife there himself.”

And that’s when she told me to shut the hell up for five minutes, if I knew how. She reached into the box and lifted out the phallus, handling it as gingerly as somebody might handle a stick of dynamite. But whatever made the thing special, it wasn’t anything I could see.

“Le godemichй maudit,” she murmured, her voice so filled with reverence you’d have thought she was holding the devil’s own wang. Near as I could tell, it was cast from some sort of hard black ceramic. It glistened faintly in the light getting in through the drapes. “I’ll tell you about it,” she said, “if you really want to know. I don’t see the harm.”

“Just so long as you get to the part where it makes sense that Harpootlian bumped the Chinaman for this dingus of yours, then sure.”

She took her eyes off the thing long enough to scowl at me. “Auntie H. didn’t kill Fong. One of Szabу’s goons did that, then panicked and ran before he figured out where the box was hidden.”

(Now, as for Madam Magdalena Szabу, the biggest boil on Auntie H.’s fanny, we’ll get back to her by and by.)

“Ellen, how can you possibly fucking know that? Better yet, how could you’ve known Szabу’s man would have given up and cleared out by the time I arrived?”

“Why did you answer that phone, Nat?” she asked, and that shut me up, good and proper. “As for our prize here,” she continued, “it’s a long story, a long story with a lot of missing pieces. The dingus, as you put it, is usually called le godemichй maudit. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually cursed, mind you. Not literally. You do speak French, I assume?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I do speak French.”

“That’s ducky, Nat. Now, here’s about as much as anyone could tell you. Though, frankly, I’d have thought a scholarly type like yourself would know all about it.”

“Never said I was a scholar,” I interrupted.

“But you went to college. Radcliffe, class of 1923, right? Graduated with honors.”

“Lots of people go to college. Doesn’t necessarily make them scholars. I just sell books.”

“My mistake,” she said, carefully returning the black dildo to its velvet case. “It won’t happen again.” Then she told me her tale, and I sat there on the rйcamier and listened to what she had to say. Yeah, it was long. There were certainly a whole lot of missing pieces. And as a wise man once said, this might not be schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but, near as I’ve been able to discover since that evening at her apartment, it’s history, nevertheless. She asked me whether or not I’d ever heard of a fourteenth-century Persian alchemist named al-Jaldaki, Izz al-Din Aydamir al-Jaldaki, and I had, of course.

“He’s sort of a hobby of mine,” she said. “Came across his grimoire a few years back. Anyway, he’s not where it begins, but that’s where the written record starts. While studying in Anatolia, al-Jaldaki heard tales of a fabulous artifact that had been crafted from the horn of a unicorn at the behest of King Solomon.”

“From a unicorn,” I cut in. “So we believe in those now, do we?”

“Why not, Nat? I think it’s safe to assume you’ve seen some peculiar shit in your time, that you’ve pierced the veil, so to speak. Surely a unicorn must be small potatoes for a worldly woman like yourself.”

“So you’d think,” I said.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “the ivory horn was carved into the shape of a penis by the king’s most skilled artisans. Supposedly, the result was so revered it was even placed in Solomon’s temple, alongside the Ark of the Covenant and a slew of other sacred Hebrew relics. Records al-Jaldaki found in a mosque in the Taurus Mountains indicated that the horn had been removed from Solomon’s temple when it was sacked in 587 BC by the Babylonians, and that eventually it had gone to Medina. But it was taken from Medina during or shortly after the siege of 627, when the Meccans invaded. And it’s at this point that the horn is believed to have been given its ebony coating of porcelain enamel, possibly in an attempt to disguise it.”

“Or,” I said, “because someone in Medina preferred swarthy cock. You mind if I smoke?” I asked her, and she shook her head and pointed at an ashtray.

“A Medinan rabbi of the Banu Nadir tribe was entrusted with the horn’s safety. He escaped, making his way west across the desert to Yanbu’ al Bahr, then north along the al-Hejaz all the way to Jerusalem. But two years later, when the Sassanid army lost control of the city to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, the horn was taken to a monastery in Malta, where it remained for centuries.”

“That’s quite a saga for a dildo. But you still haven’t answered my question. What makes it so special? What the hell’s it do?”

“Maybe you’ve heard enough,” she said, and this whole time she hadn’t taken her eyes off the thing in the box.

“Yeah, and maybe I haven’t,” I told her, tapping ash from my Pall Mall into the ashtray. “So, al-Jaldaki goes to Malta and finds the big black dingus.”

She scowled again. No, it was more than a scowl; she glowered, and she looked away from the box just long enough to glower at me. “Yes,” Ellen Andrews said. “At least, that’s what he wrote. Al-Jaldaki found it buried in the ruins of a monastery in Malta, and then carried the horn with him to Cairo. It seems to have been in his possession until his death in 1342. After that it disappeared, and there’s no word of it again until 1891.”

I did the math in my head. “Five hundred and forty-nine years,” I said. “So it must have gone to a good home. Must have lucked out and found itself a long-lived and appreciative keeper.”

“The Freemasons might have had it,” she went on, ignoring or oblivious to my sarcasm. “Maybe the Vatican. Doesn’t make much difference.”

“Okay. So what happened in 1891?”

“A party in Paris, in an old house not far from the Cimetiиre du Montparnasse. Not so much a party, really, as an out-and-out orgy, the way the story goes. This was back before Montparnasse became so fashionable with painters and poets and expatriate Americans. Verlaine was there, though. At the orgy, I mean. It’s not clear what happened precisely, but three women died, and afterward there were rumors of black magic and ritual sacrifice, and tales surfaced of a cult that worshiped some sort of demonic objet d’art that had made its way to France from Egypt. There was an official investigation, naturally, but someone saw to it that la prйfecture de police came up with zilch.”

“Naturally,” I said. I glanced at the window. It was getting dark, and I wondered if my ride back to the Bowery had been arranged. “So, where’s Black Beauty here been for the past forty-four years?”

Ellen leaned forward, reaching for the lid to the red lacquered box. When she set it back in place, covering that brazen scrap of antiquity, I heard the click again as the lid melded seamlessly with the rest of the box. Now there was only the etching of the qilin, and I remembered that the beast had sometimes been referred to as the “Chinese unicorn.” It seemed odd I’d not thought of that before.

“I think we’ve probably had enough of a history lesson for now,” she said, and I didn’t disagree. Truth be told, the whole subject was beginning to bore me. It hardly mattered whether or not I believed in unicorns or enchanted dildos. I’d done my job, so there’d be no complaints from Harpootlian. I admit I felt kind of shitty about poor old Fong, who wasn’t such a bad sort. But when you’re an errand girl for the wicked folk, that shit comes with the territory. People get killed, and worse.

“It’s getting late,” I said, crushing out my cigarette in the ashtray. “I should dangle.”

“Wait. Please. I promised you a drink, Nat. Don’t want you telling Auntie H. I was a bad hostess, now do I?” And Ellen Andrews stood up, the red box tucked snugly beneath her left arm.

“No worries, kiddo,” I assured her. “If she ever asks, which I doubt, I’ll say you were a regular Emily Post.”

“I insist,” she replied. “I really, truly do,” and before I could say another word, she turned and rushed out of the parlor, leaving me alone with all that furniture and the buxom giantesses watching me from the walls. I wondered if there were any servants, or a live-in beau, or if possibly she had the place all to herself, that huge apartment overlooking the river. I pushed the drapes aside and stared out at twilight gathering in the park across the street. Then she was back (minus the red box) with a silver serving tray, two glasses, and a virgin bottle of Sazerac rye.

“Maybe just one,” I said, and she smiled. I went back to watching Riverside Park while she poured the whiskey. No harm in a shot or two. It’s not like I had some place to be, and there were still a couple of unanswered questions bugging me. Such as why Harpootlian had broken her promise, the one that was supposed to prevent her underlings from practicing their hocus-pocus on me. That is, assuming Ellen Andrews had even bothered to ask permission. Regardless, she didn’t need magic or a spell book for her next dirty trick. The Mickey Finn she slipped me did the job just fine.

——

So, I came to, four, perhaps five hours later—sometime before midnight. By then, as I’d soon learn, the shit had already hit the fan. I woke up sick as a dog and my head pounding like there was an ape with a kettledrum loose inside my skull. I opened my eyes, but it wasn’t Ellen Andrews’s Baroque clutter and chintz that greeted me, and I immediately shut them again. I smelled the hookahs and the smoldering bukhoor, the opium smoke and sandarac and, somewhere underneath it all, that pervasive brimstone stink that no amount of incense can mask. Besides, I’d seen the spiny ginger-skinned thing crouching not far from me, the eunuch, and I knew I was somewhere in the rat’s-maze labyrinth of Harpootlian’s bordello. I started to sit up, but then my stomach lurched and I thought better of it. At least there were soft cushions beneath me, and the silk was cool against my feverish skin.

“You know where you are?” the eunuch asked; it had a woman’s voice and a hint of a Russian accent, but I was pretty sure both were only affectations. First rule of demon brothels: Check your preconceptions of male and female at the door. Second rule: Appearances are fucking meant to be deceiving.

“Sure,” I moaned and tried not to think about vomiting. “I might have a notion or three.”

“Good. Then you lie still and take it easy, Miss Beaumont. We’ve got a few questions need answering.” Which made it mutual, but I kept my mouth shut on that account. The voice was beginning to sound not so much feminine as what you might hear if you scraped frozen pork back and forth across a cheese grater. “This afternoon, you were contacted by an associate of Madam Harpootlian’s, yes? She told you her name was Ellen Andrews. That’s not her true name, of course. Just something she heard in a motion picture—”

“Of course,” I replied. “You sort never bother with your real names. Anyway, what of it?”

“She asked you to go see Jimmy Fong and bring her something, yes? Something very precious. Something powerful and rare.”

“The dingus,” I said, rubbing at my aching head. “Right, but . . . hey . . . Fong was already dead when I got there, scout’s honor. Andrews told me one of Szabу’s people did him.”

“The Chinese gentleman’s fate is no concern of ours,” the eunuch said. “But we need to talk about Ellen Andrews. She has caused this house serious inconvenience. She’s troubled us, and troubles us still.”

“You and me both, bub,” I said. It was just starting to dawn on me how there were some sizable holes in my memory. I clearly recalled the taste of rye, and gazing down at the park, but then nothing. Nothing at all. I asked the ginger demon, “Where is she? And how’d I get here, anyway?”

“We seem to have many of the same questions,” it replied, dispassionate as a corpse. “You answer ours, maybe we shall find the answers to yours along the way.”

I knew damn well I didn’t have much say in the matter. After all, I’d been down this road before. When Auntie H. wants answers, she doesn’t usually bother with asking. Why waste your time wondering if someone’s feeding you a load of baloney when all you gotta do is reach inside his brain and help yourself to whatever you need?

“Fine,” I said, trying not to tense up, because tensing up only ever makes it worse. “How about let’s cut the chitchat and get this over with.”

“Very well, but you should know,” it said, “Madam regrets the necessity of this imposition.” And then there were the usual wet, squelching noises as the relevant appendages unfurled and slithered across the floor toward me.

“Sure, no problem. Ain’t no secret Madam’s got a heart of gold,” and maybe I shouldn’t have smarted off like that, because when the stingers hit me, they hit hard. Harder than I knew was necessary to make the connection. I might have screamed. I know I pissed myself. And then it was inside me, prowling about, roughly picking its way through my conscious and unconscious mind—through my soul, if that word suits you better. All the heady sounds and smells of the brothel faded away, along with my physical discomfort. For a while I drifted nowhere and nowhen in particular, and then, then I stopped drifting . . .

——

. . . Ellen asked me, “You ever think you’ve had enough? Of the life, I mean. Don’t you sometimes contemplate just up and blowing town, not even stopping long enough to look back? Doesn’t that ever cross your mind, Nat?”

I sipped my whiskey and watched her, undressing her with my eyes and not especially ashamed of myself for doing so. “Not too often,” I said. “I’ve had it worse. This gig’s not perfect, but I usually get a fair shake.”

“Yeah, usually,” she said, her words hardly more than a sigh. “Just, now and then, I feel like I’m missing out.”

I laughed, and she glared at me.

“You’d cut a swell figure in a breadline,” I said, and took another swallow of the rye.

“I hate when people laugh at me.”

“Then don’t say funny things,” I told her.

And that’s when she turned and took my glass. I thought she was about to tell me to get lost, and don’t let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Instead, she set the drink down on the silver serving tray, and she kissed me. Her mouth tasted like peaches. Peaches and cinnamon. Then she pulled back, and her eyes flashed red, the way they had in the Yellow Dragon, only now I knew it wasn’t an illusion.

“You’re a demon,” I said, not all that surprised.

“Only a quarter. My grandmother . . . Well, I’d rather not get into that, if it’s all the same to you. Is it a problem?”

“No, it’s not a problem,” I replied, and she kissed me again. Right about here, I started to feel the first twinges of whatever she’d put into the Sazerac, but, frankly, I was too horny to heed the warning signs.

“I’ve got a plan,” she said, whispering, as if she were afraid someone was listening in. “I have it all worked out, but I wouldn’t mind some company on the road.”

“I have no . . . no idea . . . what you’re talking about,” and there was something else I wanted to say, but I’d begun slurring my words and decided against it. I put a hand on her left breast, and she didn’t stop me.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, kissing me again, and right about then, that’s when the curtain came crashing down, and the ginger-colored demon in my brain turned a page . . .

——

. . . I opened my eyes, and I was lying in a black room. I mean, a perfectly black room. Every wall had been painted matte black, and the ceiling, and the floor. If there were any windows, they’d also been painted over, or boarded up. I was cold, and a moment later I realized that was because I was naked. I was naked and lying at the center of a wide white pentagram that had been chalked onto that black floor. A white pentagram held within a white circle. There was a single white candle burning at each of the five points. I looked up, and Ellen Andrews was standing above me. Like me, she was naked. Except she was wearing that dingus from the lacquered box, fitted into a leather harness strapped about her hips. The phallus drooped obscenely and glimmered in the candlelight. There were dozens of runic and Enochian symbols painted on her skin in blood and shit and charcoal. Most of them I recognized. At her feet, there was a small iron cauldron, and a black-handled dagger, and something dead. It might have been a rabbit, or a small dog. I couldn’t be sure which, because she’d skinned it.

Ellen looked down, and saw me looking up at her. She frowned, and tilted her head to one side. For just a second, there was something undeniably predatory in that expression, something murderous. All spite and not a jot of mercy. For that second, I was face to face with the one quarter of her bloodline that changed all the rules, the ancestor she hadn’t wanted to talk about. But then that second passed, and she softly whispered, “I have a plan, Natalie Beaumont.”

“What are you doing?” I asked her. But my mouth was so dry and numb, my throat so parched, it felt like I took forever to cajole my tongue into shaping those four simple words.

“No one will know,” she said. “I promise. Not Harpootlian, not Szabу, not anyone. I’ve been over this a thousand times, worked all the angles.” And she went down on one knee then, leaning over me. “But you’re supposed to be asleep, Nat.”

“Ellen, you don’t cross Harpootlian,” I croaked.

“Trust me,” she said.

In that place, the two of us adrift on an island of light in an endless sea of blackness, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was down now, and I reached up, brushing it back from her face. When my fingers moved across her scalp, I found two stubby horns, but it wasn’t anything a girl couldn’t hide with the right hairdo and a hat.

“Ellen, what are you doing?”

“I’m about to give you a gift, Nat. The most exquisite gift in all creation. A gift that even the angels might covet. You wanted to know what the unicorn does. Well, I’m not going to tell you; I’m going to show you.”

She put a hand between my legs and found I was already wet.

I licked at my chapped lips, fumbling for words that wouldn’t come. Maybe I didn’t know what she was getting at, this gift, but I had a feeling I didn’t want any part of it, no matter how exquisite it might be. I knew these things, clear as day, but I was lost in the beauty of her, and whatever protests I might have uttered, they were about as sincere as ol’ Brer Rabbit begging Brer Fox not to throw him into that briar patch. I could say I was bewitched, but it would be a lie.

She mounted me then, and I didn’t argue.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Now I fuck you,” she replied. “Then I’m going to talk to my grandmother.” And, with that, the world fell out from beneath me again. And the ginger-skinned eunuch moved along to the next tableau, that next set of memories I couldn’t recollect on my own . . .

——

. . . Stars were tumbling from the skies. Not a few stray shooting stars here and there. No, all the stars were falling. One by one, at first, and then the sky was raining pitchforks, only it wasn’t rain, see. It was light. The whole sorry world was being born or was dying, and I saw it didn’t much matter which. Go back far enough, or far enough forward, the past and future wind up holding hands, cozy as a couple of lovebirds. Ellen had thrown open a doorway, and she’d dragged me along for the ride. I was so cold. I couldn’t understand how there could be that much fire in the sky, and me still be freezing my tits off like that. I lay there shivering as the brittle vault of heaven collapsed. I could feel her inside me. I could feel it inside me, and same as I’d been lost in Ellen’s beauty, I was being smothered by that ecstasy. And then . . . then the eunuch showed me the gift, which I’d forgotten . . . and which I would immediately forget again.

How do you write about something, when all that remains of it is the faintest of impressions of glory? When all you can bring to mind is the empty place where a memory ought to be and isn’t, and only that conspicuous absence is there to remind you of what cannot ever be recalled? Strain as you might, all that effort hardly adds up to a trip for biscuits. So, how do you write it down? You don’t, that’s how. You do your damnedest to think about what came next, instead, knowing your sanity hangs in the balance.

So, here’s what came after the gift, since le godemichй maudit is a goddamn Indian giver if ever one was born. Here’s the curse that rides shotgun on the gift, as impossible to obliterate from reminiscence as the other is to awaken.

There were falling stars, and that unendurable cold . . . and then the empty, aching socket to mark the countermanded gift . . . and then I saw the unicorn. I don’t mean the dingus. I mean the living creature, standing in a glade of cedars, bathed in clean sunlight and radiating a light all its own. It didn’t look much like what you see in storybooks or those medieval tapestries they got hanging in the Cloisters. It also didn’t look much like the beast carved into the lid of Fong’s wooden box. But I knew what it was, all the same.

A naked girl stood before it, and the unicorn kneeled at her feet. She sat down, and it rested its head on her lap. She whispered reassurances I couldn’t hear, because they were spoken as softly as falling snow. And then she offered the unicorn one of her breasts, and I watched as it suckled. This scene of chastity and absolute peace lasted maybe a minute, maybe two, before the trap was sprung and the hunters stepped out from the shadows of the cedar boughs. They killed the unicorn, with cold iron lances and swords, but first the unicorn killed the virgin who’d betrayed it to its doom . . .

——

. . . And Harpootlian’s ginger eunuch turned another page (a ham-fisted analogy if ever there was one, but it works for me), and we were back in the black room. Ellen and me. Only two of the candles were still burning, two guttering, halfhearted counterpoints to all that darkness. The other three had been snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind that had smelled of rust, sulfur, and slaughterhouse floors. I could hear Ellen crying, weeping somewhere in the darkness beyond the candles and the periphery of her protective circle. I rolled over onto my right side, still shivering, still so cold I couldn’t imagine being warm ever again. I stared into the black, blinking and dimly amazed that my eyelids hadn’t frozen shut. Then something snapped into focus, and there she was, cowering on her hands and knees, a tattered rag of a woman lost in the gloom. I could see her stunted, twitching tail, hardly as long as my middle finger, and the thing from the box was still strapped to her crotch. Only now it had a twin, clutched tightly in her left hand.

I think I must have asked her what the hell she’d done, though I had a pretty good idea. She turned toward me, and her eyes . . . Well, you see that sort of pain, and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget you saw it.

“I didn’t understand,” she said, still sobbing. “I didn’t understand she’d take so much of me away.”

A bitter wave of conflicting, irreconcilable emotion surged and boiled about inside me. Yeah, I knew what she’d done to me, and I knew I’d been used for something unspeakable. I knew violation was too tame a word for it, and that I’d been marked forever by this gold-digging half-breed of a twist. And part of me was determined to drag her kicking and screaming to Harpootlian. Or fuck it, I could kill her myself, and take my own sweet doing so. I could kill her the way the hunters had murdered the unicorn. But—on the other hand—the woman I saw lying there before me was shattered almost beyond recognition. There’d been a steep price for her trespass, and she’d paid it and then some. Besides, I was learning fast that when you’ve been to Hades’s doorstep with someone, and the two of you make it back more or less alive, there’s a bond, whether you want it or not. So, there we were, a cheap, latter-day parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, and all I could think about was holding her, tight as I could, until she stopped crying and I was warm again.

“She took so much,” Ellen whispered. I didn’t ask what her grandmother had taken. Maybe it was a slice of her soul, or maybe a scrap of her humanity. Maybe it was the memory of the happiest day of her life, or the ability to taste her favorite food. It didn’t seem to matter. It was gone, and she’d never get it back. I reached for her, too cold and too sick to speak, but sharing her hurt and needing to offer my hollow consolation, stretching out to touch . . .

——

. . . And the eunuch said, “Madam wishes to speak with you now,” and that’s when I realized the parade down memory lane was over. I was back at Harpootlian’s, and there was a clock somewhere chiming down to three a.m., the dead hour. I could feel the nasty welt the stingers had left at the base of my skull and underneath my jaw, and I still hadn’t shaken off the hangover from that tainted shot of rye whiskey. But above and underneath and all about these mundane discomforts was a far more egregious pang, a portrait of that guileless white beast cut down and its blood spurting from gaping wounds. Still, I did manage to get myself upright without puking. Sure, I gagged once or twice, but I didn’t puke. I pride myself on that. I sat with my head cradled in my hands, waiting for the room to stop tilting and sliding around like I’d gone for a spin on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel.

“Soon, you’ll feel better, Miss Beaumont.”

“Says you,” I replied. “Anyway, give me a half a fucking minute, will you please? Surely your employer isn’t gonna cast a kitten if you let me get my bearings first, not after the work over you just gave me. Not after—”

“I will remind you, her patience is not infinite,” the ginger demon said firmly, and then it clicked its long claws together.

“Yeah?” I asked. “Well, who the hell’s is?” But I’d gotten the message, plain and clear. The gloves were off, and whatever forbearance Auntie H. might have granted me in the past, it was spent, and now I was living on the installment plan. I took a deep breath and struggled to my feet. At least the eunuch didn’t try to lend a hand.

——

I can’t say for certain when Yeksabet Harpootlian set up shop in Manhattan, but I have it on good faith that Magdalena Szabу was here first. And anyone who knows her onions knows the two of them have been at each other’s throats since the day Auntie H. decided to claim a slice of the action for herself. Now, you’d think there’d be plenty enough of the hellion cock-and-tail trade to go around, what with all the netherworlders who call the five boroughs their home away from home. And likely as not, you’d be right. Just don’t try telling that to Szabу or Auntie H. Sure, they’ve each got their elite stable of “girls and boys,” and they both have more customers than they know what to do with. Doesn’t stop them from spending every waking hour looking for a way to banish the other once and for all—or at least find the unholy grail of competitive advantages.

Now, by the time the ginger-skinned eunuch led me through the chaos of Auntie H.’s stately pleasure dome, far below the subways and sewers and tenements of the Lower East Side, I already had a pretty good idea the dingus from Jimmy Fong’s shiny box was meant to be Harpootlian’s trump card. Only, here was Ellen Andrews, this mutt of a courier, gumming up the works, playing fast and loose with the loving cup. And here was me, stuck smack in the middle, the unwilling stooge in her double-cross.

As I followed the eunuch down the winding corridor that ended in Auntie H.’s grand salon, we passed doorway after doorway, all of them opening onto scenes of inhuman passion and madness, the most odious of perversions, and tortures that make short work of merely mortal flesh. It would be disingenuous to say I looked away. After all, this wasn’t my first time. Here were the hinterlands of wanton physical delight and agony, where the two become indistinguishable in a rapturous Totentanzi. Here were spectacles to remind me how Dorй and Hieronymus Bosch never even came close, and all of it laid bare for the eyes of any passing voyeur. You see, there are no locked doors to be found at Madam Harpootlian’s. There are no doors at all.

“It’s a busy night,” the eunuch said, though it looked like business as usual to me.

“Sure,” I muttered. “You’d think the Shriners were in town. You’d think Mayor La Guardia himself had come down off his high horse to raise a little hell.”

And then we reached the end of the hallway, and I was shown into the mirrored chamber where Auntie H. holds court. The eunuch told me to wait, then left me alone. I’d never seen the place so empty. There was no sign of the usual retinue of rogues, ghouls, and archfiends, only all those goddamn mirrors, because no one looks directly at Madam Harpootlian and lives to tell the tale. I chose a particularly fancy-looking glass, maybe ten feet high and held inside an elaborate gilded frame. When Harpootlian spoke up, the mirror rippled like it was only water, and my reflection rippled with it.

“Good evening, Natalie,” she said. “I trust you’ve been treated well?”

“You won’t hear any complaints outta me,” I replied. “I always say, the Waldorf-Astoria’s got nothing on you.”

She laughed then, or something that we’ll call laughter for the sake of convenience.

“A crying shame we’re not meeting under more amicable circumstances. Were it not for this unpleasantness with Miss Andrews, I’d offer you something—on the house, of course.”

“Maybe another time,” I said.

“So, you know why you’re here?”

“Sure,” I said. “The dingus I took off the dead Chinaman. The salami with the fancy French name.”

“It has many names, Natalie. Karkadann’s Brow, el consolador sangriento, the Horn of Malta—”

“Le godemichй maudit,” I said. “Ellen’s cock.”

Harpootlian grunted, and her reflection made an ugly, dismissive gesture. “It is nothing of Miss Andrews. It is mine, bought and paid for. With the sweat of my own brow did I track down the spoils of al-Jaldaki’s long search. It’s my investment, one purchased with so grievous a forfeiture this quadroon mongrel could not begin to appreciate the severity of her crime. But you, Natalie, you know, don’t you? You’ve been privy to the wonders of Solomon’s talisman, so I think, maybe, you are cognizant of my loss.”

“I can’t exactly say what I’m cognizant of,” I told her, doing my best to stand up straight and not flinch or look away. “I saw the murder of a creature I didn’t even believe in yesterday morning. That was sort of an eye opener, I’ll grant you. And then there’s the part I can’t seem to conjure up, even after golden boy did that swell Roto-Rooter number on my head.”

“Yes. Well, that’s the catch,” she said and smiled. There’s no shame in saying I looked away then. Even in a mirror, the smile of Yeksabet Harpootlian isn’t something you want to see straight on.

“Isn’t there always a catch?” I asked, and she chuckled.

“True, it’s a fleeting boon,” she purred. “The gift comes, and then it goes, and no one may ever remember it. But always, always they will long for it again, even hobbled by that ignorance.”

“You’ve lost me, Auntie,” I said, and she grunted again. That’s when I told her I wouldn’t take it as an insult to my intelligence or expertise if she laid her cards on the table and spelled it out plain and simple, like she was talking to a woman who didn’t regularly have tea and crumpets with the damned. She mumbled something to the effect that maybe she gave me too much credit, and I didn’t disagree.

“Consider,” she said, “what it is, a unicorn. It is the incarnation of purity, an avatar of innocence. And here is the power of the talisman, for that state of grace which soon passes from us, each and every one, is forever locked inside the horn—the horn become the phallus. And in the instant that it brought you, Natalie, to orgasm, you knew again that innocence, the bliss of a child before it suffers corruption.”

I didn’t interrupt her, but all at once I got the gist.

“Still, you are only a mortal woman, so what negligible, insignificant sins could you have possibly committed during your short life? Likewise, whatever calamities and wrongs have been visited upon your flesh or your soul, they are trifles. But if you survived the war in Paradise, if you refused the yoke and so are counted among the exiles, then you’ve persisted down all the long eons. You were already broken and despoiled billions of years before the coming of man. And your transgressions outnumber the stars.

“Now,” she asked, “what would you pay, were you so cursed, to know even one fleeting moment of that stainless former existence?”

Starting to feel sick to my stomach all over again, I said, “More to the point, if I always forgot it, immediately, but it left this emptiness I feel—”

“You would come back,” Auntie H. smirked. “You would come back again and again and again, because there would be no satiating that void, and always would you hope that maybe this time it would take and you might keep the memories of that immaculate condition.”

“Which makes it priceless, no matter what you paid.”

“Precisely. And now Miss Andrews has forged a copy—an identical copy, actually—meaning to sell one to me, and one to Magdalena Szabу. That’s where Miss Andrews is now.”

“Did you tell her she could hex me?”

“I would never do such a thing, Natalie. You’re much too valuable to me.”

“But you think I had something to do with Ellen’s mystical little counterfeit scheme.”

“Technically, you did. The ritual of division required a supplicant, someone to receive the gift granted by the unicorn, before the summoning of a succubus mighty enough to effect such a difficult twinning.”

“So maybe, instead of sitting here bumping gums with me, you should send one of your torpedoes after her. And, while we’re on the subject of how you pick your little henchmen, maybe—”

“Natalie,” snarled Auntie H. from someplace not far behind me. “Have I failed to make myself understood? Might it be I need to raise my voice?” The floor rumbled, and tiny hairline cracks began to crisscross the surface of the looking glass. I shut my eyes.

“No,” I told her. “I get it. It’s a grift, and you’re out for blood. But you know she used me. Your lackey, it had a good, long look around my upper story, right, and there’s no way you can think I was trying to con you.”

For a dozen or so heartbeats, she didn’t answer me, and the mirrored room was still and silent, save all the moans and screaming leaking in through the walls. I could smell my own sour sweat, and it was making me sick to my stomach.

“There are some gray areas,” she said finally. “Matters of sentiment and lust, a certain reluctant infatuation, even.”

I opened my eyes and forced myself to gaze directly into that mirror, at the abomination crouched on its writhing throne. And all at once, I’d had enough, enough of Ellen Andrews and her dingus, enough of the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, and definitely enough kowtowing to the monsters.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, “I only just met the woman this afternoon. She drugs and rapes me, and you think that means she’s my sheba?”

“Like I told you, I think there are gray areas,” Auntie H. replied. She grinned, and I looked away again.

“Fine. You tell me what it’s gonna take to make this right with you, and I’ll do it.”

“Always so eager to please,” Auntie H. laughed, and the mirror in front of me rippled. “But, since you’ve asked, and as I do not doubt your present sincerity, I will tell you. I want her dead, Natalie. Kill her, and all will be . . . forgiven.”

“Sure,” I said, because what the hell else was I going to say. “But if she’s with Szabу—”

“I have spoken already with Magdalena Szabу, and we have agreed to set aside our differences long enough to deal with Miss Andrews. After all, she has attempted to cheat us both, in equal measure.”

“How do I find her?”

“You’re a resourceful young lady, Natalie,” she said. “I have faith in you. Now . . . if you will excuse me,” and, before I could get in another word, the mirrored room dissolved around me. There was a flash, not of light, but of the deepest abyssal darkness, and I found myself back at the Yellow Dragon, watching through the bookshop’s grimy windows as the sun rose over the Bowery.

——

There you go, the dope on just how it was I found myself holding a gun on Ellen Andrews, and just how it was she found herself wondering if I was angry enough or scared enough or desperate enough to pull the trigger. And like I said, I chambered a round, but she just stood there. She didn’t even flinch.

“I wanted to give you a gift, Nat,” she said.

“Even if I believed that—and I don’t—all I got to show for this gift of yours is a nagging yen for something I’m never going to get back. We lose our innocence, it stays lost. That’s the way it works. So, all I got from you, Ellen, is a thirst can’t ever be slaked. That and Harpootlian figuring me for a clip artist.”

She looked hard at the gun, then looked harder at me.

“So what? You thought I was gonna plead for my life? You thought maybe I was gonna get down on my knees for you and beg? Is that how you like it? Maybe you’re just steamed cause I was on top—”

“Shut up, Ellen. You don’t get to talk yourself out of this mess. It’s a done deal. You tried to give Auntie H. the high hat.”

“And you honestly think she’s on the level? You think you pop me and she lets you off the hook, like nothing happened?”

“I do,” I said. And maybe it wasn’t as simple as that, but I wasn’t exactly lying, either. I needed to believe Harpootlian, the same way old women need to believe in the infinite compassion of the little baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Same way poor kids need to believe in the inexplicable generosity of Popeye the Sailor and Santa Claus.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.

“I didn’t dig your grave, Ellen. I’m just the sap left holding the shovel.”

And she smiled that smug smile of hers and said, “I get it now, what Auntie H. sees in you. And it’s not your knack for finding shit that doesn’t want to be found. It’s not that at all.”

“Is this a guessing game,” I asked, “or do you have something to say?”

“No, I think I’m finished,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’m done for. So let’s get this over with. By the way, how many women have you killed?”

“You played me,” I said again.

“Takes two to make a sucker, Nat,” she smiled.

Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.

——

Caitlнn R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Threshold and, most recently, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

| DREAMER OF THE DAY |

Nick Mamatas

—

Hallway, just narrow enough for two. Tin ceiling, haze in the air. It’s a railroad apartment, three floors up. A pile of old toys and junk—half a bicycle, plastic playhouse all stained and grimy Day-Glo, empty wrinkled cardboard boxes, coils of cable—blocks the back door. By the front door, a small table littered with envelopes. Bills, looks like. Cellophane windows and a name over and over, in all caps.

So you pick a bill, Paul says.

Any one? Lil asks.

That’s the fee. Pick a bill and pay it. This operator, he doesn’t leave the house, he’s not on anyone’s payroll. He puts his bills out here. You want to hire him, you pick out a bill and pay it. This is how he lives.

Yeah, but . . . She bites her lower lip. Licks it. She’s a real lip licker. So what if I take this one?

She taps a Verizon envelope. Her finger is fat on it, like crushing a bit.

Maybe it’s fifty bucks. Maybe he calls lots of 900 numbers, she says. Is that enough, though? If he’s as good as you say he is—

He’s the best.

It’ll look like an accident?

No.

The finger comes off the envelope. No?

It’ll be an accident, he says.

Eyes roll. Whatever, she says. How can he live like this? I mean, if people can pick any bill they like and pay it, why would anyone bother to pay his rent when they could pay some fifty-dollar phone bill? The West Village, I mean. Jesus.

Rent control. It’s not that bad. He’s been here for a long time, Paul says. Then he puts his hands to his mouth, cupping them. Woom woommm wommm he plays, like a sad trumpet. Then he sings two words. Twi-light time. You know it? Paul asks.

She looks at him.

Glenn Miller, Paul says. Plain as day.

A cheek inches up, dragging her lips into a smirk. Another lick.

“Stardust.” Google it or something. Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel. He and his army band were flying into liberated Paris to play and . . . He lifts his palms in a shrug.

And they crashed and drowned?

No, just vanished. Not a trace of him, or the band, or the plane. That was his first hit, they say, Paul says. That’s how old this guy is.

I thought you said this guy makes his hits look like accidents, not like episodes of The X-Files, she says.

We can leave right now, if you like. If you’re not impressed. If you don’t want to pick up a bill and take it downstairs to the check-cashing place and pay his electricity or his cable or whatever the hell else, Paul says. If you don’t want to give him three hundred bucks for his rent this month. If you want to try somebody else who might cut your husband’s brakes or shoot him in the fucking face for twenty times the money. Yeah, that won’t be traced back to you. Have you even practiced crying in the mirror, Merry Widow?

Tears well up in her eyes. She stands up straight, then her spine wilts. Waterworks. The man makes to reach out for her, not thinking. All autonomic nerves, limbs jerking toward the brunette Lil like she needs saving.

All right, all right, you’re good, Paul says.

Lil reaches for an envelope, flashes that it’s addressed from Marolda Properties, and puts it in her purse. Now what, she says.

We wait.

How about we knock? She raises a tiny fist.

I wouldn’t.

Can we smoke?

No . . . but yes, he says. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a silver-on-bronze case, flicking it open and offering her a cigarette.

From crimped lips: no light?

He produces a lighter, flicks it open too. Matches the case. The cherry blooms, and the door unlocks.

Put those nasty things out, the Dreamer of the Day says. You’ll kill us all. The Dreamer’s not a striking man. He couldn’t get a job standing on the lip of a grave on a soundstage, to stare down at the lens of a video camera. A little pudgy, skin like defrosting chicken. His undershirt is yellowed, his eyes an unremarkable brown. Hair a bundt cake around the back of his head. Lil didn’t have lunch today. She couldn’t eat.

The apartment is all newspapers, at first. Then she sees other things—boxes stuffed with green-and-white-striped printouts, old black-screened TVs, dusty Easter baskets, a pile of shoes. The Dreamer leads them like there’s a choice—the kitchen is piles up to the Dreamer’s eyebrows except for the path carved out from force of habit, and the living room is newspapers and magazines avalanching from sagging couches, and the bedroom is just piles of old-man clothes. Hats and green suit jackets and shirtsleeves sticking out like quake victims who didn’t quite pull themselves from fissures. The man has to stand sideways and sidle after the Dreamer. The woman fits, but barely, her elbows tight.

Lil doesn’t smell a thing except old man: lavender and urine.

The bedroom—magazines she’s never seen before, filing cabinets on their sides across a twin bed, a rain of hanging plants. A patch of mattress ticking, bald and empty—the Dreamer takes a seat there. Paul finds a little bench, sweeps it free of old coffee cans and pipe cleaners, and sits. There’s room for her but she stands. The Dreamer reaches and there’s an audible click. A big cabinet-sized television set, framed in trash. Knobs. Black and white, but a nest of cables snaking up from it to a hole punched through the tin ceiling. Her former show is on. The Cove of Love.

Is this some kind of setup? Lil asks. Is this some kind of joke?

The Dreamer says, I like this show. You were good on it.

I don’t watch it anymore, she says.

Paul pats the bench. She sits.

Sotto voce, Paul says, We really should wait for a commercial.

On the screen there’s a man. Old, with silver hair. In business wear, but he means business too. Sleeves rolled up. Suspenders, thick and brown. A pile of dirt, a shovel. The sky behind him is swirls of paint, normally bursting with red and purple (the woman knows that matte painting well), but on the Dreamer’s television screen it’s a sea of gray. The man picks up the shovel and begins to dig. A voice, tinny and distant, begs him to stop. It’s her voice.

That’s a clip from three years ago, she says. Paul hisses at her. She nudges him with her elbow. The bench wobbles under them.

Yes, the Dreamer says. When Savannah was in that old bomb shelter where the gang had her cornered, and they decided to lock her in. I remember those words, that tone. Tell me something.

Yes?

Do you have a lot of the same outfit?

Excuse me?

When you’re doing something like that. Does wardrobe take back whatever you’re wearing every day and clean it, then dirty it up again so it’ll match, and you wear that suit every day? Or is there a rack full of identical pantsuits, with identical tears and identical smudges and burn marks, and you wear a new one every day? You were in that bomb shelter for three months, ten minutes a day.

They have a few outfits. We have girls who take digital pictures and they try to match the amount of dishevelment, Lil says. I think we had three of that outfit for that story arc.

That’s why I like The Cove of Love. I can tell that the director really cares about the show, the Dreamer of the Day says. The other soaps don’t even try anymore.

A commercial for vegetable oil. A world where people in a room can look out the windows, where women stare off into space and hold up bottles and confide in the universe that some things are tastier than others.

Why’d you bring her here, Ron? the Dreamer asks.

I want my husband—the words stick in her throat.

Ron.

Ron opens his mouth. She is tired of being married to her husband.

The Dreamer turns to look at her, to look at Ron too.

Aren’t you a women’s libber?

Lil laughs at that. Who even says women’s libber anymore?

You can get a divorce.

Maybe he doesn’t deserve a divorce. You want the gory details? Paul told me you’re a no-questions-asked kind of guy.

Ron, the Dreamer says.

She looks at the man next to her.

Here, he says, I’m Ron.

Savannah—

Call me Lil, she says.

Savannah, the Dreamer repeats, I am a no-questions-asked kind of guy. I can’t say I like women’s libbers very much. I don’t care why you want your husband dead, but women like you, Savannah, you want to talk about it.

I’m not a woman like Savannah, she says. That was a character I played on the show.

And the show starts again. There’s a hospital. A man turns on his heel and walks off frame. A close-up of a woman’s face. All redheads and blonds look alike. The Dreamer tells them the character’s name is Trista and that she has something horrible inside her. Then two kids bouncing on a couch, too enthusiastic when the man who meant business walks in after burying Savannah alive. A restaurant scene is next, the rhubarbrhubarb of the crowd scene like the Dreamer’s labored breaths. Then a commercial for people who want to fill a bag with gold and mail it away.

The Dreamer says, Ron, go downstairs and get us some coffees. Ron gets up and squeezes past the rubbish into the next room.

Lil puts her hand in her hair, combing it with her fingers. I want my husband dead because he’s been cheating on me.

Bullshit. Pardon my French. I don’t get many female visitors. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. I know I haven’t kept up my apartment. I’m embarrassed. Ron should have told me you were coming. That you were coming. We could have met in the diner.

I thought you never leave.

Maybe I’d make an exception, the Dreamer says. He looks at Lil. His dentures are heavy like two rows of tombstones.

He is cheating on me. This is his third or fourth little whore.

That’s not why you want him dead. If you wanted him dead, you would have put out a hit two or three whores ago.

I used to have a career, something to occupy my own days. Now I’m home all day, or at the gym. I can feel her sweat on the sheets of my own bed when I lay down at night. It’s humiliating.

Humiliating, the Dreamer echoes.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get another role. I’m forty-one years old. I never crossed over to movies, not even to prime time.

You’re not the bitch-goddess type, the Dreamer says. Not the part for you.

I want to know that there’s something more to the world than what I’ve already lived through.

The Dreamer extends a finger and turns off the television set. A single pixel burns in the middle of the screen.

There’s a lot more. Worlds within worlds. You are having an affair with Ron.

The irony doesn’t escape me, Lil says.

You ain’t escapin’ it either, the Dreamer says.

What?

Ron told me that you were together. I feel for him. His wife, the big C. In her breasts, and now her brain. But it’s not just that—he loves you, more than he ever loved her.

He’s a good man, Lil says.

What’s your husband’s name?

Whatever happened to no questions asked?

The Dreamer smiles. I do have to ask one question. Not a personal one. Well, it’s about preferences, not information.

Answer mine first, Lil says.

Anything for you, Miss Savannah.

Why do they call you the Dreamer of the Day?

All men dream, but not equally, the Dreamer says. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.

That’s beautiful.

That’s T. E. Lawrence.

Who?

The Dreamer of the Day shivers, visibly disgusted. Finally, he lets . . . of Arabia extrude from his mouth like sludge. And you got two questions out of me, Savannah. More than anyone ever has. I have a weakness for you.

I apologize, Lil says. I’ll collect another envelope from the foyer on my way out. She says foyer like a Frenchwoman. What’s your question?

Kill him fast or kill him slow?

Kill him slow.

The Dreamer gets up and leaves the room. Lil hears some clatter in the kitchen and gets up. The Dreamer has cleared off the stove. He has a teakettle out. She almost trips over the junk on the floor.

Pau—uh, Ron. He’s getting coffees from the diner.

Ron’s not getting us any fucking coffee, the Dreamer says, gravel in his teeth. Paul’s not getting coffees. He puts his hands on the stove, a little electric number, squeezes his fingers in the gaps between counter and stovetop on either side, and gives it all a shake. A red light blinks to life.

No apologies for your French this time, monsieur?

This is how it’s gonna go, the Dreamer of the Day says. He looks up and off to the side, at some random piece of paper up atop a teetering pile in the living room. Ron’s down at the diner, see. He knows the one. It used to be Greek; it’s Russian now. Your husband’s fourth little whore is there. Blond, milkmaid type. Her upper lip curls when she smiles. He likes that kind of thing. You can do it too.

She can, yes. She does, Pavlovian. Close-ups, she says. You’ve seen the show.

Well, it just so happens that your husband is in the diner too, see? He likes to watch the girl lean over the Formica for tips. He likes to count the seconds other men keep their hands on her ass while she takes their orders. Then he likes to take her up to your home, up to Valhalla on the Metro North so he doesn’t have to drive, doesn’t have to keep his hands on the wheel.

Valhalla. That’s on my Wikipedia page. You probably have a computer around here somewhere.

The Dreamer starts rummaging through a cabinet for a cup. He finds one, waves it hooked around his finger, and then finds a second. This on your Wikipedia page? he asks. Your boyfriend Paul Osorio is connected. How you think he knows me? He’s packing. He sees your husband and is overcome. He pulls out his gun.

Paul doesn’t carry a gun. He’s a good man.

He knows the Dreamer of the Day. I don’t know any good men. I don’t meet them in my line of work. No good women either. What did he tell you? That he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew someone who could help you? He is a guy. He’d have done it himself, if you’d asked him, but why would you ask him? He’s a good man.

Mister, I think I’m going to meet Paul downstairs. I’ll get you some help—my sister is a social worker. You don’t have to live like this. There are nice places. You won’t be lonely either.

The teakettle screams. You don’t want to go down there, the Dreamer says. Paul’s already put a bullet in your husband. He aimed for the head but missed because the whore’s a sharpie. Paul got a faceful of hot coffee the second she saw the gun. Right in the eyes. He’s not going to see out of his left anymore. That face—second- and third-degree burns. St. Vincent’s isn’t that far away. Both of them will make it to the ER.

My husban—

The chest. Bullet just misses the heart. But you said you wanted it slow, so you get it. He bleeds, but he lives. You can go see him later tonight if you want. Take in a movie. Buy yourself a nice dinner. Nine p.m. Visiting hours will be over, but they’ll let you in. The night shift, they’re all fans. You’ll cry like you did in court when the government took your Chinese baby away.

That wasn’t me. That was a character.

They were your tears, the Dreamer of the Day says. That’ll get you in. Go see him. You’ll think the staph will have come from here. That you’re the carrier, that you infected him.

He pours two cups of tea. He hands one to Lil. She takes it but doesn’t drink.

This is the most disgusting place you’ve ever set foot in, he says matter-of-factly. So when your husband gets the MRSA, you’ll think it’s your fault. It’ll get in his blood nice and slow. It’ll take weeks for him to die. He’ll cry even better than you, demand that you visit him every day. Get a hotel room so you can spend all day by his side. He’ll forget the whore entirely, and she’ll be sent back to Moscow till the heat is off. You’ll sneak down to the burn ward to see Paul twice, three times. Then forget it. It won’t matter though.

Why won’t it? she asks. She passes the cup from hand to hand. There’s no place to put it down.

His face will be ruined, but so will your husband’s. The MRSA will do a number on his skin. Boils worthy of Job. Kill him slow. He’ll lose half his nose. Three weeks of rats in the veins.

Lil throws the content of her teacup at the Dreamer of the Day, but he’s ready. He swipes an old New York Post off the countertop and holds it up. The tea splatters all over another disgraced governor in black and white and red.

The Dreamer drops the paper, steps on it as he walks past Lil. Show’s over, he says. Go home. You’ll see.

She follows him back to the bedroom. You crazy old man, she says. What the hell? Did you put Paul up to this? Did he put you up to this? What kind of freak show are you two lunatics running here? Christ, talk about far fetched. I’ve met some real winners, some deranged fans, but you, you are a fucking fruitcake—

The Dreamer grabs a great handful of old suits and tosses them on the white tongue of the bed on which he’d sat. The back door of the railroad apartment. He opens it and walks out without a word. Where are you going! You can’t leave! she demands. The door slams shut. Lil rushes to the door, tries the knob. It’s unlocked, but she has to push, not pull. All the trash and boxes bar the way. She can’t squeeze her pinky through the crack of the door for the rubbish. Lil grabs her purse from the little bench, runs through the apartment on tiptoes, sideways along the narrow path through the piles of garbage, and hits the hallway through the front entrance.

No Dreamer. Lil looks down the well of the staircase. No Dreamer. He’s an old, slow man. He couldn’t have made it outside in time. She’s on the second floor; there are no first-floor apartments he could have ducked into. Lil stomps down the steps and walks outside to a dusk painted red and blue from the lights of ambulances and a black and white. A radio crackles. A shrieking, thrashing blond held inches over the sidewalk by a pair of cops gets shoved into the back seat of the cop car. Then, gurneys.

——

Lil can’t see her husband. He’s in emergency surgery. Paul she doesn’t dare ask after, not when she sees two men in tank-shaped suits in the waiting area very patiently not reading the newspapers open in their hands. She doesn’t want to go all the way up to Grand Central. She doesn’t want to say to the Metro North ticket clerk behind those bars of bronze, “One-way to Valhalla.” She takes in a movie. Cries through it. It’s about someone with cancer. A real tearjerker. She can taste the hospital onscreen. Lil orders a nice dinner in a little place down on Greenwich Street, where the grid of the city collapses against the shore of the Hudson River. Doesn’t eat it. Tips 50 percent for some privacy. Indigo skies go gray. Nine o’clock, she’s crying in the lobby of St. Vincent’s. Not for her husband. Not for Paul. But her husband, he’s the one she decides to see.

Lil washes her hands at the restaurant. Again in the ladies’ restroom. She takes her husband’s hand now because he’s unconscious, breathing hard as though deep in his still body he’s running from somebody. She pulls her hand back, but it’s too late.

——

Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels—Move Under Ground, Under My Roof, and Sensation—and of over sixty short stories, many of which were collected in You Might Sleep . . . Nick’s fiction has been thrice nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and as coeditor of Clarkesworld, he’s been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

| IN PARIS, IN THE MOUTH OF KRONOS |

John Langan

—

I

“You know how much they want for a Coke?”

“How much?” Vasquez said.

“Five euros. Can you believe that?”

Vasquez shrugged. She knew the gesture would irritate Buchanan, who took an almost pathological delight in complaining about everything in Paris, from the lack of air conditioning on the train ride in from de Gaulle to their narrow hotel rooms, but they had an expense account, after all, and however modest it was, she was sure a five-euro Coke would not deplete it. She didn’t imagine the professionals sat around fretting over the cost of their sodas.

To her left, the broad Avenue de la Bourdonnais was surprisingly quiet; to her right, the interior of the restaurant was a din of languages: English, mainly, with German, Spanish, Italian, and even a little French mixed in. In front of and behind her, the rest of the sidewalk tables were occupied by an almost even balance of old men reading newspapers and youngish couples wearing sunglasses. Late-afternoon sunlight washed over her surroundings like a spill of white paint, lightening everything several shades, reducing the low buildings across the avenue to hazy rectangles. When their snack was done, she would have to return to one of the souvenir shops they had passed on the walk here and buy a pair of sunglasses. Another expense for Buchanan to complain about.

“M’sieu? Madame?” Their waiter, surprisingly middle aged, had returned. “Vous кtes—”

“You speak English,” Buchanan said.

“But of course,” the waiter said. “You are ready with your order?”

“I’ll have a cheeseburger,” Buchanan said. “Medium rare. And a Coke,” he added with a grimace.

“Very good,” the waiter said. “And for madame?”

“Je voudrais un crкpe au chocolat,” Vasquez said, “et un cafй au lait.”

The waiter’s expression did not change. “Trиs bien, madame. Merзi,” he said as Vasquez passed him their menus.

“A cheeseburger?” she said once he had returned inside the restaurant.

“What?” Buchanan said.

“Never mind.”

“I like cheeseburgers. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s fine.”

“Just because I don’t want to eat some kind of French food—ooh, un crкpe, s’il vous plaоt.”

“All this,” Vasquez nodded at their surroundings, “it’s lost on you, isn’t it?”

“We aren’t here for all this,” Buchanan said. “We’re here for Mr. White.”

Despite herself, Vasquez flinched. “Why don’t you speak a little louder? I’m not sure everyone inside the cafй heard.”

“You think they know what we’re talking about?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh? What is?”

“Operational integrity.”

“Wow. You pick that up from the Bourne movies?”

“One person overhears something they don’t like, opens their cell phone, and calls the cops—”

“And it’s all a big misunderstanding, officers, we were talking about movies, ha ha.”

“—and the time we lose smoothing things over with them completely fucks up Plowman’s schedule.”

“Stop worrying,” Buchanan said, but Vasquez was pleased to see his face blanch at the prospect of Plowman’s displeasure.

For a few moments, Vasquez leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, the sun lighting the inside of her lids crimson. I’m here, she thought, the city’s presence a pressure at the base of her skull, not unlike what she’d felt patrolling the streets of Bagram, but less unpleasant. Buchanan said, “So you’ve been here before.”

“What?” Brightness overwhelmed her vision, simplified Buchanan to a dark silhouette in a baseball cap.

“You parlez the franзais pretty well. I figure you must’ve spent some time—what? In college? Some kind of study-abroad deal?”

“Nope,” Vasquez said.

“Nope, what?”

“I’ve never been to Paris. Hell, before I enlisted, the farthest I’d ever been from home was the class trip to Washington senior year.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“Uh-uh. Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to see Paris, London—everything. But the money—the money wasn’t there. The closest I came to all this were the movies in Madame Antosca’s French 4 class. It was one of the reasons I joined up: I figured I’d see the world and let the army pay for it.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Not because of the army.”

“No, precisely because of the army. Well,” she said, “them and the spooks.”

“You still think Mr.—oh, sorry—You-Know-Who was CIA?”

Frowning, Vasquez lowered her voice. “Who knows? I’m not even sure he was one of ours. That accent . . . He could’ve been working for the Brits, or the Aussies. He could’ve been Russian, back in town to settle a few scores. Wherever he picked up his pronunciation, dude was not regular military.”

“Be funny if he was on Stillwater’s payroll.”

“Hysterical,” Vasquez said. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I assume this is your first trip to Paris.”

“And there’s where you would be wrong.”

“Now you’re shittin’ me.”

“Why, because I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke?”

“Among other things, yeah.”

“My senior-class trip was a week in Paris and Amsterdam. In college, the end of my sophomore year, my parents took me to France for a month.” At what she knew must be the look on her face, Buchanan added, “It was an attempt at breaking up the relationship I was in at the time.”

“It’s not that. I’m trying to process the thought of you in college.”

“Wow, anyone ever tell you what a laugh riot you are?”

“Did it work—your parents’ plan?”

Buchanan shook his head. “The second I was back in the US, I knocked her up. We were married by the end of the summer.”

“How romantic.”

“Hey.” Buchanan shrugged.

“That why you enlisted, support your new family?”

“More or less. Heidi’s dad owned a bunch of McDonald’s; for the first six months of our marriage, I tried to assistant manage one of them.”

“With your people skills, that must have been a match made in heaven.”

The retort forming on Buchanan’s lips was cut short by the reappearance of their waiter, encumbered with their drinks and their food. He set their plates before them with a madame and m’sieu, then, as he was distributing their drinks, said, “Everything is okay? Зa va?”

“Oui,” Vasquez said. “C’est bon. Merзi.”

With the slightest of bows, the waiter left them to their food.

While Buchanan worked his hands around his cheeseburger, Vasquez said, “I don’t think I realized you were married.”

“Were,” Buchanan said. “She wasn’t happy about my deploying in the first place, and when the shit hit the fan . . .” He bit into the burger. Through a mouthful of bun and meat, he said, “The court-martial was the excuse she needed. Couldn’t handle the shame, she said. The humiliation of being married to one of the guards who’d tortured an innocent man to death. What kind of role model would I be for our son?

“I tried—I tried to tell her it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that—you know what I’m talking about.”

Vasquez studied her neatly folded crкpe. “Yeah.” Mr. White had favored a flint knife for what he called the delicate work.

“If that’s what she wants, fine, fuck her. But she made it so I can’t see my son. The second she decided we were splitting up, there was her dad with money for a lawyer. I get a call from this asshole—this is right in the middle of the court-martial—and he tells me Heidi’s filing for divorce—no surprise—and they’re going to make it easy for me: no alimony, no child support, nothing. The only catch is, I have to sign away all my rights to Sam. If I don’t, they’re fully prepared to go to court, and how do I like my chances in front of a judge? What choice did I have?”

Vasquez tasted her coffee. She saw her mother, holding open the front door for her, unable to meet her eyes.

“Bad enough about that poor bastard who died—what was his name? If there’s one thing you’d think I’d know . . .”

“Mahbub Ali,” Vasquez said. What kind of a person are you? her father had shouted. What kind of person is part of such things?

“Mahbub Ali,” Buchanan said. “Bad enough what happened to him; I just wish I’d known what was happening to the rest of us, as well.”

They ate the rest of their meal in silence. When the waiter returned to ask if they wanted dessert, they declined.

—

II

Vasquez had compiled a list of reasons for crossing the avenue and walking to the Eiffel Tower, from It’s an open, crowded space—it’s a better place to review the plan’s details, to I want to see the fucking Eiffel Tower once before I die, okay? But Buchanan agreed to her proposal without argument; nor did he complain about the fifteen euros she spent on a pair of sunglasses on the walk there. Did she need to ask to know he was back in the concrete room they’d called the Closet, its air full of the stink of fear and piss?

Herself, she was doing her best not to think about the chamber under the prison’s subbasement Just-Call-Me-Bill had taken her to. This was maybe a week after the tall, portly man she knew for a fact was CIA had started spending every waking moment with Mr. White. Vasquez had followed Bill down poured-concrete stairs that led from the labyrinth of the basement and its handful of high-value captives in their scattered cells (not to mention the Closet, whose precise location she’d been unable to fix) to the subbasement, where he had clicked on the large yellow flashlight he was carrying. Its beam had ranged over brick walls, an assortment of junk (some of it Soviet-era aircraft parts, some of it tools to repair those parts, some of it more recent: stacks of toilet paper, boxes of plastic cutlery, a pair of hospital gurneys). They had made their way through that place to a low doorway that opened on carved stone steps whose curved surfaces testified to the passage of generations of feet. All the time, Just-Call-Me-Bill had been talking, lecturing, detailing the history of the prison, from its time as a repair center for the aircraft the Soviets flew in and out of here, until some KGB officer decided the building was perfect for housing prisoners, a change everyone who subsequently held possession of it had maintained. Vasquez had struggled to pay attention, especially as they had descended the last set of stairs and the air grew warm, moist, the rock to either side of her damp. Before, the CIA operative was saying. Oh, before. Did you know a detachment of Alexander the Great’s army stopped here? One man returned.

The stairs had ended in a wide, circular area. The roof was flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. Just-Call-Me-Bill’s flashlight had roamed the floor, picked out a symbol incised in the rock at their feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock. Its circumference was stained black, its interior a map of dark brown splotches. Hold this, he had said, passing her the flashlight, which had occupied her for the two or three seconds it took him to remove a plastic baggie from one of the pockets of his safari vest. When Vasquez had directed the light at him, he was dumping the bag’s contents in his right hand, tugging at the plastic with his left to pull it away from the dull red wad. The stink of blood and meat on the turn had made her step back. Steady, specialist. The bag’s contents had landed inside the broken circle with a heavy, wet smack. Vasquez had done her best not to study it too closely.

A sound, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone, from behind and to her left, had spun Vasquez around, the flashlight held out to blind, her sidearm freed and following the light’s path. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. For a moment, that space had been full of a great, pale figure. Vasquez had had a confused impression of hands large as tires grasping either side of the arch, a boulder of a head, its mouth gaping amidst a frenzy of beard, its eyes vast, idiot. It was scrambling toward her; she didn’t know where to aim—

And then Mr. White had been standing in the archway, dressed in the white linen suit that somehow always seemed stained, even though no discoloration was visible on any of it. He had not blinked at the flashlight beam stabbing his face; nor had he appeared to judge Vasquez’s gun pointing at him of much concern. Muttering an apology, Vasquez had lowered gun and light immediately. Mr. White had ignored her, strolling across the round chamber to the foot of the stairs, which he had climbed quickly. Just-Call-Me-Bill had hurried after, a look on his bland face that Vasquez took for amusement. She had brought up the rear, sweeping the flashlight over the floor as she reached the lowest step. The broken circle had been empty, except for a red smear that shone in the light.

That she had momentarily hallucinated, Vasquez had not once doubted. Things with Mr. White already had raced past what even Just-Call-Me-Bill had shown them, and however effective his methods, Vasquez was afraid that she—that all of them had finally gone too far, crossed over into truly bad territory. Combined with a mild claustrophobia, it had caused her to fill the dark space with a nightmare. However reasonable that explanation, the shape with which her mind had replaced Mr. White had plagued her. Had she seen the devil stepping forward on his goat’s feet, one red hand using his pitchfork to balance himself, it would have made more sense than that giant form. It was as if her subconscious was telling her more about Mr. White than she understood. Prior to that trip, Vasquez had not been at ease around the man who never seemed to speak so much as to have spoken, so that you knew what he’d said even though you couldn’t remember hearing him saying it. After, she gave him a still-wider berth.

Ahead, the Eiffel Tower swept up into the sky. Vasquez had seen it from a distance, at different points along her and Buchanan’s journey from their hotel toward the Seine, but the closer she drew to it, the less real it seemed. It was as if the very solidity of the beams and girders weaving together were evidence of their falseness. I am seeing the Eiffel Tower, she told herself. I am actually looking at the goddamn Eiffel Tower.

“Here you are,” Buchanan said. “Happy?”

“Something like that.”

The great square under the tower was full of tourists—from the sound of it, the majority of them groups of Americans and Italians. Nervous men wearing untucked shirts over their jeans flitted from group to group—street vendors, Vasquez realized, each one carrying an oversized ring strung with metal replicas of the tower. A pair of gendarmes, their hands draped over the machine guns slung high on their chests, let their eyes roam the crowd while they carried on a conversation. In front of each of the tower’s legs, lines of people waiting for the chance to ascend it doubled and redoubled back on themselves, enormous fans misting water over them. Taking Buchanan’s arm, Vasquez steered them toward the nearest fan. Eyebrows raised, he tilted his head toward her.

“Ambient noise,” she said.

“Whatever.”

Once they were close enough to the fan’s propeller drone, Vasquez leaned into Buchanan. “Go with this,” she said.

“You’re the boss.” Buchanan gazed up, a man debating whether he wanted to climb that high.

“I’ve been thinking,” Vasquez said. “Plowman’s plan is shit.”

“Oh?” He pointed at the tower’s first level, three hundred feet above.

Nodding, Vasquez said, “We approach Mr. White, and he’s just going to agree to come with us to the elevator.”

Buchanan dropped his hand. “Well, we do have our . . . persuaders. How do you like that? Was it cryptic enough? Or should I have said guns?”

Vasquez smiled as if Buchanan had uttered an endearing remark. “You really think Mr. White is going to be impressed by a pair of .22s?”

“A bullet’s a bullet. Besides,” Buchanan returned her smile, “isn’t the plan for us not to have to use the guns? Aren’t we relying on him remembering us?”

“It’s not like we were BFFs. If it were me, and I wanted the guy, and I had access to Stillwater’s resources, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on a couple of convicted criminals. I’d put together a team and go get him. Besides, twenty grand apiece for catching up to someone outside his hotel room, passing a couple of words with him, then escorting him to an elevator: tell me that doesn’t sound too good to be true.”

“You know the way these big companies work: they’re all about throwing money around. Your problem is, you’re still thinking like a soldier.”

“Even so, why spend it on us?”

“Maybe Plowman feels bad about everything. Maybe this is his way of making it up to us.”

“Plowman? Seriously?”

Buchanan shook his head. “This isn’t that complicated.”

Vasquez closed her eyes. “Humor me.” She leaned her head against Buchanan’s chest.

“What have I been doing?”

“We’re a feint. While we’re distracting Mr. White, Plowman’s up to something else.”

“Like?”

“Maybe Mr. White has something in his room; maybe we’re occupying him while Plowman’s retrieving it.”

“You know there are easier ways for Plowman to steal something.”

“Maybe we’re keeping Mr. White in place so Plowman can pull a hit on him.”

“Again, there are simpler ways to do that that would have nothing to do with us. You knock on the guy’s door, he opens it, pow.”

“What if we’re supposed to get caught in the crossfire?”

“You bring us all the way here just to kill us?”

“Didn’t you say big companies like to spend money?”

“But why take us out in the first place?”

Vasquez raised her head and opened her eyes. “How many of the people who knew Mr. White are still in circulation?”

“There’s Just-Call-Me-Bill—”

“You think. He’s CIA. We don’t know what happened to him.”

“Okay. There’s you, me, Plowman—”

“Go on.”

Buchanan paused, reviewing, Vasquez knew, the fates of the three other guards who’d assisted Mr. White with his work in the Closet. Long before news had broken about Mahbub Ali’s death, Lavalle had sat on the edge of his bunk, placed his gun in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger. Then, when the shit storm had started, Maxwell, on patrol, had been stabbed in the neck by an insurgent who’d targeted only him. Finally, in the holding cell awaiting his court-martial, Ruiz had taken advantage of a lapse in his jailers’ attention to strip off his pants, twist them into a rope, and hang himself from the top bunk of his cell’s bunkbed. His guards had cut him down in time to save his life, but Ruiz had deprived his brain of oxygen for sufficient time to leave him a vegetable. When Buchanan spoke, he said, “Coincidence.”

“Or conspiracy.”

“Goddamn it.” Buchanan pulled free of Vasquez, and headed for the long, rectangular park that stretched behind the tower, speed walking. His legs were sufficiently long that she had to jog to catch up to him. Buchanan did not slacken his pace, continuing his straight line up the middle of the park, through the midst of bemused picnickers. “Jesus Christ,” Vasquez called, “will you slow down?”

He would not. Heedless of oncoming traffic, Buchanan led her across a pair of roads that traversed the park. Horns blaring, tires screaming, cars swerved around them. At this rate, Vasquez thought, Plowman’s motives won’t matter. Once they were safely on the grass again, she sped up until she was beside him, then reached high on the underside of Buchanan’s right arm, not far from the armpit, and pinched as hard as she could.

“Ow! Shit!” Yanking his arm up and away, Buchanan stopped. Rubbing his skin, he said, “What the hell, Vasquez?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Walking. What did it look like?”

“Running away.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, you candy-ass pussy.”

Buchanan’s eyes flared.

“I’m trying to work this shit out so we can stay alive. You’re so concerned about seeing your son, maybe you’d want to help me.”

“Why are you doing this?” Buchanan said. “Why are you fucking with my head? Why are you trying to fuck this up?”

“I’m—”

“There’s nothing to work out. We’ve got a job to do; we do it; we get the rest of our money. We do the job well, there’s a chance Stillwater’ll add us to their payroll. That happens—I’m making that kind of money—I hire myself a pit bull of a lawyer and sic him on fucking Heidi. You want to live in goddamn Paris, you can eat a croissant for breakfast every morning.”

“You honestly believe that.”

“Yes, I do.”

Vasquez held his gaze, but who was she kidding? She could count on one finger the number of stare downs she’d won. Her arms, legs, everything felt suddenly, incredibly heavy. She looked at her watch. “Come on,” she said, starting in the direction of the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “We can catch a cab.”

—

III

Plowman had insisted they meet him at an airport cafй before they set foot outside de Gaulle. At the end of those ten minutes, which had consisted of Plowman asking details of their flight and instructing them how to take the RUR to the Metro to the stop nearest their hotel, he had passed Vasquez a card for a restaurant, where, he had said, the three of them would reconvene at 3:00 p.m. local time to review the evening’s plans. Vasquez had been relieved to see Plowman seated at a table outside the cafй. Despite the ten thousand dollars gathering interest in her checking account, the plane ticket that had been FedExed to her apartment, followed by the receipt for four nights’ stay at the Hфtel Resnais, she had been unable to shake the sense that none of this was as it appeared, that it was the setup to an elaborate joke whose punch line would come at her expense. Plowman’s solid form, dressed in a black suit whose tailored lines announced the upward shift in his pay grade, had confirmed that everything he had told her the afternoon he had sought her out at Andersen’s farm had been true.

Or true enough to quiet momentarily the misgivings that had whispered ever louder in her ears the last two weeks, to the point that she had held her cell open in her left hand, the piece of paper with Plowman’s number on it in her right, ready to call him and say she was out, he could have his money back, she hadn’t spent any of it. During the long, hot train ride from the airport to the Metro station, when Buchanan had complained about Plowman not letting them out of his sight, treating them like goddamn kids, Vasquez had found an explanation on her lips. It’s probably the first time he’s run an operation like this, she had said. He wants to be sure he dots all his i’s and crosses all his t’s. Buchanan had harrumphed, but it was true: Plowman obsessed over the minutiae; it was one of the reasons he’d been in charge of their detail at the prison. Until the shit had buried the fan, that attentiveness had seemed to forecast his steady climb up the chain of command. At his court-martial, however, his enthusiasm for exact strikes on prisoner nerve clusters, his precision in placing arm restraints so that a prisoner’s shoulders would not dislocate when he was hoisted off the floor by his bonds, and his speed in obtaining the various surgical and dental instruments Just-Call-Me-Bill requested had been counted liabilities rather than assets, and he had been the only one of their group to serve substantial time at Leavenworth—ten months.

Still, the Walther that Vasquez had requested had been waiting where Plowman had promised it would be, wrapped with an extra clip in a waterproof bag secured inside the tank of her hotel room’s toilet. A thorough inspection had reassured her that all was in order with the gun, its ammunition. If he were setting her up, would Plowman have wanted to arm her? Her proficiency at the target range had been well known, and while she hadn’t touched a gun since her discharge, she had no doubts of her ability. Tucked within the back of her jeans, draped by her blouse, the pistol was easily accessible.

That’s assuming, of course, that Plowman’s even there tonight. But the caution was a formality. Plowman being Plowman, there was no way he was not going to be at Mr. White’s hotel. Was there any need for him to have made the trip to West Virginia, to have tracked her to Andersen’s farm, to have sought her out in the far barns, where she’d been using a high-pressure hose to sluice pig shit into gutters? An e-mail, a phone call would have sufficed. Such methods, however, would have left too much outside Plowman’s immediate control, and since he appeared able to dunk his bucket into a well of cash deeper than any she’d known, he had decided to find Vasquez and speak to her directly. (He’d done the same with Buchanan, she’d learned on the flight over, tracking him to the suburb of Chicago where he’d been shift manager at Hardee’s.) If the man had gone to such lengths to persuade them to take the job, if he had been there to meet them at Charles de Gaulle and was waiting for them even now, as their taxi crossed the Seine and headed toward the Champs Йlysйes, was there any chance he wouldn’t be present later on?

Of course, he wouldn’t be alone. Plowman would have the reassurance of God only knew how many Stillwater employees—which was to say, mercenaries (no doubt, heavily armed and armored)—backing him up. Vasquez hadn’t had much to do with the company’s personnel; they tended to roost closer to the center of Kabul, where the high-value targets they guarded huddled. Iraq: that was where Stillwater’s boot print was the deepest. From what Vasquez had heard, the former soldiers riding the reinforced Lincoln Navigators through Baghdad not only made about five times what they had in the military; they followed rules of engagement that were, to put it mildly, less robust. While Paris was as far east as she was willing to travel, she had to admit, the prospect of that kind of money made Baghdad, if not appealing, at least less unappealing.

And what would Dad have to say to that? No matter that his eyes were failing, the center of his vision consumed by macular degeneration; her father had lost none of his passion for the news, employing a standing magnifier to aid him as he pored over the day’s New York Times and Washington Post, sitting in his favorite chair listening to All Things Considered on WVPN, even venturing online to the BBC using the computer whose monitor settings she had adjusted for him before she’d deployed. Her father would not have missed the reports of Stillwater’s involvement in several incidents in Iraq that were less shootouts than turkey shoots, not to mention the ongoing Congressional inquiry into their policing of certain districts of post–Katrina and Rita New Orleans, as well as an event in upstate New York last summer, when one of their employees had taken a camping trip that had left two of his three companions dead under what could best be described as suspicious circumstances. She could hear his words, heavy with the accent that had accreted as he’d aged: Was this why I suffered in the Villa Grimaldi? So my daughter could join the Caravana de la Muerte? The same question he’d asked her the first night she’d returned home.

All the same, it wasn’t as if his opinion of her was going to drop any further. If I’m damned, she thought, I might as well get paid for it.

That said, she was in no hurry to certify her ultimate destination, which returned her to the problem of Plowman and his plan. You would have expected the press of the .22 against the small of her back to have been reassuring, but instead, it only emphasized her sense of powerlessness, as if Plowman were so confident, so secure, he could allow her whatever firearm she wanted.

The cab turned onto the Champs Йlysйes. Ahead, the Arc de Triomphe squatted in the distance. Another monument to cross off the list.

—

IV

The restaurant whose card Plowman had handed her was located on one of the side streets about halfway to the arch; Vasquez and Buchanan departed their cab at the street’s corner and walked the hundred yards to a door flanked by man-sized plaster Chinese dragons. Buchanan brushed past the black-suited host and his welcome; smiling and murmuring, “Pardonnez, nous avons un rendez-vous iзi,” Vasquez pursued him into the dim interior. Up a short flight of stairs, Buchanan strode across a floor that glowed with pale light—glass, Vasquez saw, thick squares suspended over shimmering aquamarine. A carp the size of her forearm darted underneath her, and she realized that she was standing on top of an enormous, shallow fish tank, brown and white and orange carp racing one another across its bottom, jostling the occasional slower turtle. With one exception, the tables supported by the glass were empty. Too late, Vasquez supposed, for lunch, and too early for dinner. Or maybe the food here wasn’t that good.

His back to the far wall, Plowman was seated at a table directly in front of her. Already, Buchanan was lowering himself into a chair opposite him. Stupid, Vasquez thought at the expanse of his unguarded back. Her boots clacked on the glass. She moved around the table to sit beside Plowman, who had exchanged the dark suit in which he’d greeted them at de Gaulle for a tan jacket over a cream shirt and slacks. His outfit caught the light filtering from below them and held it in as a dull sheen. A metal bowl filled with dumplings was centered on the table mat before him; to its right, a slice of lemon floated at the top of a glass of clear liquid. Plowman’s eyebrow raised as she settled beside him, but he did not comment on her choice; instead, he said, “You’re here.”

Vasquez’s yes was overridden by Buchanan’s “We are, and there are some things we need cleared up.”

Vasquez stared at him. Plowman said, “Oh?”

“That’s right,” Buchanan said. “We’ve been thinking, and this plan of yours doesn’t add up.”

“Really.” The tone of Plowman’s voice did not change.

“Really,” Buchanan nodded.

“Would you care to explain to me exactly how it doesn’t add up?”

“You expect Vasquez and me to believe you spent all this money so the two of us can have a five-minute conversation with Mr. White?”

Vasquez flinched.

“There’s a little bit more to it than that.”

“We’re supposed to persuade him to walk twenty feet with us to an elevator.”

“Actually, it’s seventy-four feet, three inches.”

“Whatever.” Buchanan glanced at Vasquez. She looked away. To the wall to her right, water chuckled down a series of small rock terraces and through an opening in the floor into the fish tank.

“No, not whatever, Buchanan. Seventy-four feet, three inches,” Plowman said. “This is why the biggest responsibility you confront each day is lifting the fry basket out of the hot oil when the buzzer tells you to. You don’t pay attention to the little things.”

The host was standing at Buchanan’s elbow, his hands clasped over a pair of long menus. Plowman nodded at him, and he passed the menus to Vasquez and Buchanan. Inclining toward them, the host said, “May I bring you drinks while you decide your order?”

His eyes on the menu, Buchanan said, “Water.”

“Moi aussi,” Vasquez said. “Merзi.”

“Nice accent,” Plowman said when the host had left.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think I realized you speak French.”

Vasquez shrugged. “Wasn’t any call for it, was there?”

“Anything else?” Plowman said. “Spanish?”

“I understand more than I can speak.”

“Your folks were from—where, again?”

“Chile,” Vasquez said. “My dad. My mom’s American, but her parents were from Argentina.”

“That’s useful to know.”

“For when Stillwater hires her,” Buchanan said.

“Yes,” Plowman answered. “The company has projects underway in a number of places where fluency in French and Spanish would be an asset.”

“Such as?”

“One thing at a time,” Plowman said. “Let’s get through tonight, first, and then you can worry about your next assignment.”

“And what’s that going to be,” Buchanan said, “another twenty K to walk someone to an elevator?”

“I doubt it’ll be anything so mundane,” Plowman said. “I also doubt it’ll pay as little as twenty thousand.”

“Look,” Vasquez started to say, but the host had returned with their water. Once he deposited their glasses on the table, he withdrew a pad and pen from his jacket pocket and took Buchanan’s order of crispy duck and Vasquez’s of steamed dumplings. After he had retrieved the menus and gone, Plowman turned to Vasquez and said, “You were saying?”

“It’s just—what Buchanan’s trying to say is, it’s a lot, you know? If you’d offered us, I don’t know, say five hundred bucks apiece to come here and play escort, that still would’ve been a lot, but it wouldn’t—I mean, twenty thousand dollars, plus the airfare, the hotel, the expense account. It seems too much for what you’re asking us to do. Can you understand that?”

Plowman shook his head yes. “I can. I can understand how strange it might appear to offer this kind of money for this length of service, but . . .” He raised his drink to his lips. When he lowered his arm, the glass was half-drained. “Mr. White is . . . to say he’s high value doesn’t begin to cover it. The guy’s been around—he’s been around. Talk about a font of information: the stuff this guy’s forgotten would be enough for a dozen careers. What he remembers will give whoever can get him to share it with them permanent tactical advantage.”

“No such thing,” Buchanan said. “No matter how much the guy says he knows—”

“Yes, yes,” Plowman held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Trust me. He’s high value.”

“But won’t the spooks—what’s Just-Call-Me-Bill have to say about this?” Vasquez said.

“Bill’s dead.”

Simultaneously, Buchanan said, “Huh,” and Vasquez, “What? How?”

“I don’t know. When my bosses green-lighted me for this, Bill was the first person I thought of. I wasn’t sure if he was still with the agency, so I did some checking around. I couldn’t find out much—goddamn spooks keep their mouths shut—but I was able to determine that Bill was dead. It sounded like it might’ve been that chopper crash in Helmand, but that’s a guess. To answer your question, Vasquez, Bill didn’t have a whole lot to say.”

“Shit,” Buchanan said.

“Okay,” Vasquez exhaled. “Okay. Was he the only one who knew about Mr. White?”

“I find it hard to believe he was,” Plowman said, “but thus far, no one’s nibbled at any of the bait I’ve left out. I’m surprised; I’ll admit it. But it makes our job that much simpler, so I’m not complaining.”

“All right,” Vasquez said, “but the money—”

His eyes alight, Plowman leaned forward. “To get my hands on Mr. White, I would have paid each of you ten times as much. That’s how important this operation is. Whatever we have to shell out now is nothing compared to what we’re going to gain from this guy.”

“Now you tell us,” Buchanan said.

Plowman smiled and relaxed back. “Well, the bean counters do appreciate it when you can control costs.” He turned to Vasquez. “Well? Have your concerns been addressed?”

“Hey,” Buchanan said, “I was the one asking the questions.”

“Please,” Plowman said. “I was in charge of you, remember? Whatever your virtues, Buchanan, original thought is not among them.”

“What about Mr. White?” Vasquez said. “Suppose he doesn’t want to come with you?”

“I don’t imagine he will,” Plowman said. “Nor do I expect him to be terribly interested in assisting us once he is in our custody. That’s okay.” Plowman picked up one of the chopsticks alongside his plate, turned it in his hand, and jabbed it into a dumpling. He lifted the dumpling to his mouth; momentarily, Vasquez pictured a giant bringing its teeth together on a human head. While he chewed, Plowman said, “To be honest, I hope the son of a bitch is feeling especially stubborn. Because of him, I lost everything that was good in my life. Because of that fucker, I did time in prison—fucking prison.” Plowman swallowed, speared another dumpling. “Believe me when I say, Mr. White and I have a lot of quality time coming.”

Beneath them, a half-dozen carp that had been floating lazily scattered.

—

V

Buchanan was all for finding Mr. White’s hotel and parking themselves in its lobby. “What?” Vasquez said. “Behind a couple of newspapers?” Stuck in traffic on what should have been the short way to the Concorde Opйra, where Mr. White had the junior suite, their cab was full of the reek of exhaust, the low rumble of the cars surrounding them.

“Sure, yeah, that’d work.”

“Jesus—and I’m the one who’s seen too many movies?”

“What?” Buchanan said.

“Number one, at this rate, it’ll be at least six before we get there. How many people sit around reading the day’s paper at night? The whole point of the news is, it’s new.”

“Maybe we’re on vacation.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll still stick out. And number two, even if the lobby’s full of tourists holding newspapers up in front of their faces, Plowman’s plan doesn’t kick in until eleven. You telling me no one’s going to notice the same two people sitting there, doing the same thing, for five hours? For all we know, Mr. White’ll see us on his way out and coming back.”

“Once again, Vasquez, you’re overthinking this. People don’t see what they don’t expect to see. Mr. White isn’t expecting us in the lobby of his plush hotel; ergo, he won’t notice us there.”

“Are you kidding? This isn’t people. This is Mr. White.”

“Get a grip. He eats, shits, and sleeps, same as you and me.”

For the briefest of instants, the window over Buchanan’s shoulder was full of the enormous face Vasquez had glimpsed (hallucinated) in the caves under the prison. Not for the first time, she was struck by the crudeness of the features, as if a sculptor had hurriedly struck out the approximation of a human visage on a piece of rock already formed to suggest it.

Taking her silence as further disagreement, Buchanan sighed and said, “All right. Tell you what: a big, tony hotel, there’s gotta be all kinds of stores around it, right? Long as we don’t go too far, we’ll do some shopping.”

“Fine,” Vasquez said. When Buchanan had settled back in his seat, she said, “So. You satisfied with Plowman’s answers?”

“Aw, no, not this again . . .”

“I’m just asking a question.”

“No, what you’re asking is called a leading question, as in, leading me to think that Plowman didn’t really say anything to us, and we don’t know anything more now than we did before our meeting.”

“You learned something from that?”

Buchanan nodded. “You bet I did. I learned that Plowman has a hard-on for Mr. White the size of your fucking Eiffel Tower, from which I deduce that anyone who helps him satisfy himself stands to benefit enormously.” As the cab lurched forward, Buchanan said, “Am I wrong?”

“No,” Vasquez said. “It’s—”

“What? What is it, now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out her window at the cars creeping along beside them.

“Well, that’s helpful.”

“Forget it.”

For once, Buchanan chose not to pursue the argument. Beyond the car to their right, Vasquez watched men and women walking past the windows of ground-level businesses, tech stores and clothing stores and a bookstore and an office whose purpose she could not identify. Over their wrought-iron balconies, the windows of the apartments above showed the late-afternoon sky, its blue deeper, as if hardened by a day of the sun’s baking. Because of him, I lost everything that was good in my life. Because of that fucker, I did time in prison—fucking prison. Plowman’s declaration sounded in her ears. Insofar as the passion on his face authenticated his words, and so the purpose of their mission, his brief monologue should have been reassuring. And yet, and yet . . .

In the moment before he drove his fist into a prisoner’s solar plexus, Plowman’s features, distorted and red from the last hour’s interrogation, would relax. The effect was startling, as if a layer of heavy makeup had melted off his skin. In the subsequent stillness of his face, Vasquez initially had read Plowman’s actual emotion, a clinical detachment from the pain he was preparing to inflict that was based in his utter contempt for the man standing in front of him. While his mouth would stretch with his screams to the prisoner to Get up! Get the fuck up! in the second after his blow had dropped the man to the concrete floor, and while his mouth and eyes would continue to express the violence his fists and boots were concentrating on the prisoner’s back, his balls, his throat, there would be other moments, impossible to predict, when, as he was shuffle-stepping away from a kick to the prisoner’s kidney, Plowman’s face would slip into that nonexpression, and Vasquez would think that she had seen through to the real man.

Then, the week after Plowman had brought Vasquez onboard what he had named the White Detail, she’d found herself sitting through a Steven Seagal double feature—not her first or even tenth choice for a way to pass three hours, but it beat lying on her bunk thinking, Why are you so shocked? You knew what Plowman was up to—everyone knows. An hour into The Patriot, the vague sensation that had been nagging at her from Seagal’s first scene crystallized into recognition: that the blank look with which the actor met every ebb and flow in the drama was the same as the one that Vasquez had caught on Plowman’s face—was, she understood, its original. For the remainder of that film and the duration of the next (Belly of the Beast), Vasquez had stared at the undersized screen in a kind of horrified fascination, unable to decide which was worse: to be serving under a man whose affect suggested a sociopath, or to be serving under a man who was playing the lead role in a private movie.

How many days after that had Just-Call-Me-Bill arrived? No more than two, she was reasonably sure. He had come, he told the White Detail, because their efforts with particularly recalcitrant prisoners had not gone unnoticed, and his superiors judged it would be beneficial for him to share his knowledge of enhanced interrogation techniques with them—and no doubt, they had some things to teach him. His back ramrod straight, his face alight, Plowman had barked his enthusiasm for their collaboration.

After that, it had been learning the restraints that would cause the prisoner maximum discomfort, expose him (or occasionally, her) to optimum harm. It was hoisting the prisoner off the ground first without dislocating his shoulders, then with. Waterboarding, yes, together with the repurposing of all manner of daily objects, from nail files to pliers to dental floss. Each case was different. Of course you couldn’t believe any of the things the prisoners said when they were turned over to you, their protestations of innocence. But even after it appeared you’d broken them, you couldn’t be sure they weren’t engaged in a more subtle deception, acting as if you’d succeeded in order to preserve the truly valuable information. For this reason, it was necessary to keep the interrogation open, to continue to revisit those prisoners who swore they’d told you everything they knew. These people are not like you and me, Just-Call-Me-Bill had said, confirming the impression that had dogged Vasquez when she’d walked patrol, past women draped in white or slate burqas, men whose pokool proclaimed their loyalty to the mujahideen. These are not a reasonable people, Bill went on. You cannot sit down and talk to them, come to an understanding with them. They would rather fly an airplane into a building full of innocent women and men. They would rather strap a bomb to their daughter and send her to give you a hug. They get their hands on a nuke, and there’ll be a mushroom cloud where Manhattan used to be. What they understand is pain. Enough suffering, and their tongues will loosen.

Vasquez could not pin down the exact moment Mr. White had joined their group. When he had shouldered his way past Lavalle and Maxwell, his left hand up to stop Plowman from tilting the prisoner backward, Just-Call-Me-Bill from pouring the water onto the man’s hooded face, she had thought, Who the hell? And, as quickly, Oh—Mr. White. He must have been with them for some time for Plowman to upright the prisoner, Bill to lower the bucket and step back. The flint knife in his right hand, its edge so fine you could feel it pressing against your bare skin, had not been unexpected. Nor had what had followed.

It was Mr. White who had suggested they transfer their operations to the Closet, a recommendation Just-Call-Me-Bill had been happy to embrace. Plowman, at first, had been noncommittal. Mr. White’s . . . call it his taking a more active hand in their interrogations . . . had led to him and Bill spending increased time together. Ruiz had asked the CIA man what he was doing with the man whose suit, while seemingly filthy, was never touched by any of the blood that slicked his knife, his hands. Education, Just-Call-Me-Bill had answered. Our friend is teaching me all manner of things.

As he was instructing the rest of them, albeit in more indirect fashion. Vasquez had learned that her father’s stories of the Villa Grimaldi, which he had withheld from her until she was fifteen, when over the course of the evening after her birthday she had been first incredulous, then horrified, then filled with righteous fury on his behalf, had little bearing on her duties in the Closet. Her father had been an innocent man, a poet, for God’s sake, picked up by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte because they were engaged in a program of terrorizing their own populace. The men (and occasional women) at whose interrogations she assisted were terrorists themselves, spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms, his chest, his back, his thighs, who had scored his mind with nightmares from which he still fled screaming, decades later. They were not like you and me, and that difference authorized and legitimized whatever was required to start them talking.

By the time Mahbub Ali was hauled into the Closet, Vasquez had learned other things, too. She had learned that it was possible to concentrate pain on a single part of the body, to the point that the prisoner grew to hate that part of himself for the agony focused there. She had learned that it was preferable to work slowly, methodically—religiously, was how she thought of it, though this was no religion to which she’d ever been exposed. This was a faith rooted in the most fundamental truth Mr. White taught her, taught all of them—namely, that the flesh yearns for the knife, aches for the cut that will open it, relieve it of its quivering anticipation of harm. As junior member of the detail, she had not yet progressed to being allowed to work on the prisoners directly, but it didn’t matter. While she and Buchanan sliced away a prisoner’s clothes, exposed bare skin, what she saw there, a fragility, a vulnerability whose thick, salty taste filled her mouth, confirmed all of Mr. White’s lessons, every last one.

Nor was she his best student. That had been Plowman, the only one of them to whom Mr. White had entrusted his flint knife. With Just-Call-Me-Bill, Mr. White had maintained the air of a senior colleague; with the rest of them, he acted as if they were mannequins, placeholders. With Plowman, though, Mr. White was the mentor, the last practitioner of an otherwise-dead art passing his knowledge on to his chosen successor. It might have been the plot of a Steven Seagal film. And no Hollywood star could have played the eager apprentice with more enthusiasm than Plowman. While the official cause of Mahbub Ali’s death was sepsis resulting from improperly tended wounds, those missing pieces of the man had been parted from him on the edge of Mr. White’s stone blade, gripped in Plowman’s steady hand.

—

VI

Even with the clotted traffic, the cab drew up in front of the Concorde Opйra’s three sets of polished wooden doors with close to five hours to spare. While Vasquez settled with the driver, Buchanan stepped out of the cab, crossed the sidewalk, strode up three stairs, and passed through the center doors. The act distracted her enough that she forgot to ask for a receipt; by the time she remembered, the cab had accepted a trio of middle-aged women, their arms crowded with shopping bags, and pulled away. She considered chasing after it, before deciding that she could absorb the ten euros. She turned to the hotel to see the center doors open again, Buchanan standing in them next to a young man with a shaved head who was wearing navy pants and a cream tunic on whose upper left side a nametag flashed. The young man pointed across the street in front of the hotel and waved his hand back and forth, all the while talking to Buchanan, who nodded attentively. When the young man lowered his arm, Buchanan clapped him on the back, thanked him, and descended to Vasquez.

She said, “What was that about?”

“Shopping,” Buchanan said. “Come on.”

The next fifteen minutes consisted of them walking a route Vasquez wasn’t sure she could retrace, through clouds of slow-moving tourists stopping to admire some building or piece of public statuary; alongside briskly moving men and women whose ignoring those same sights marked them as locals as much as their chic haircuts, the rapid-fire French they delivered to their cell phones; past upscale boutiques and the gated entrances to equally upscale apartments. Buchanan’s route brought the two of them to a large corner building whose long windows displayed teddy bears, model planes, dollhouses. Vasquez said, “A toy store?”

“Not just a toy store,” Buchanan said. “This is the toy store. Supposed to have all kinds of stuff in it.”

“For your son.”

“Duh.”

Inside, a crowd of weary adults and overexcited children moved up and down the store’s aisles, past a mix of toys Vasquez recognized (Playmobil, groups of army vehicles, a typical assortment of stuffed animals) and others she’d never seen before (animal-headed figures she realized were Egyptian gods, replicas of round-faced cartoon characters she didn’t know, a box of a dozen figurines arranged around a cardboard mountain). Buchanan wandered up to her as she was considering this set, the box propped on her hip. “Cool,” he said, leaning forward. “What is it, like, the Greek gods?”

Vasquez resisted a sarcastic remark about the breadth of his knowledge; instead, she said, “Yeah. That’s Zeus and his crew at the top of the mountain. I’m not sure who those guys are climbing it . . .”

“Titans,” Buchanan said. “They were monsters who came before the gods, these kind of primal forces. Zeus defeated them, imprisoned them in the underworld. I used to know all their names: when I was a kid, I was really into myths and legends, heroes, all that shit.” He studied the toys positioned up the mountain’s sides. They were larger than the figures at its crown, overmuscled, one with an extra pair of arms, another with a snake’s head, a third with a single, glaring eye. Buchanan shook his head. “I can’t remember any of their names, now. Except for this guy,” he pointed at a figurine near the summit. “I’m pretty sure he’s Kronos.”

“Kronos?” The figure was approximately that of a man, although its arms, its legs, were slightly too long, its hands and feet oversized. Its head was surrounded by a corona of gray hair that descended into a jagged beard. The toy’s mouth had been sculpted with its mouth gaping, its eyes round, idiot. Vasquez smelled spoiled meat, felt the cardboard slipping from her grasp.

“Whoa.” Buchanan caught the box, replaced it on the shelf.

“Sorry,” Vasquez said. Mr. White had ignored her, strolling across the round chamber to the foot of the stairs, which he had climbed quickly.

“I don’t think that’s really Sam’s speed, anyway. Come on,” Buchanan said, moving down the aisle.

When they had stopped in front of a stack of remote-controlled cars, Vasquez said, “So who was Kronos?” Her voice was steady.

“What?” Buchanan said. “Oh—Kronos? He was Zeus’s father. Ate all his kids because he’d heard that one of them was going to replace him.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Somehow, Zeus avoided becoming dinner and overthrew the old man.”

“Did he—did Zeus kill him?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure Kronos wound up with the rest of the Titans, underground.”

“Underground? I thought you said they were in the underworld.”

“Same diff,” Buchanan said. “That’s where those guys thought the underworld was, someplace deep underground. You got to it through caves.”

“Oh.”

In the end, Buchanan decided on a large wooden castle that came with a host of knights, some on horseback, some on foot; a trio of princesses; a unicorn; and a dragon. The entire set cost two hundred and sixty euros, which struck Vasquez as wildly overpriced, but which Buchanan paid without a murmur of protest—the extravagance of the present, she understood, being the point. Buchanan refused the cashier’s offer to gift-wrap the box, and they left the store with him carrying it under his arm.

Once on the sidewalk, Vasquez said, “Not to be a bitch, but what are you planning to do with that?”

Buchanan shrugged. “I’ll think of something. Maybe the front desk’ll hold it.”

Vasquez said nothing. Although the sky still glowed blue, the light had begun to drain out of the spaces among the buildings, replaced by a darkness that was almost granular. The air was warm, soupy. As they stopped at the corner, Vasquez said, “You know, we never asked Plowman about Lavalle or Maxwell.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Just—I wish we had. He had an answer for everything else; I wouldn’t have minded hearing him explain that.”

“There’s nothing to explain,” Buchanan said.

“We’re the last ones alive—”

“Plowman’s living. So’s Mr. White.”

“Whatever—you know what I mean. Christ, even Just-Call-Me-Bill is dead. What the fuck’s up with that?”

In front of them, traffic stopped. The walk signal lighted its green man. They joined the surge across the street. “It’s a war, Vasquez,” Buchanan said. “People die in them.”

“Is that what you really believe?”

“It is.”

“What about your freak-out before, at the tower?”

“That’s exactly what it was—me freaking out.”

“Okay,” Vasquez said after a moment, “okay. Maybe Bill’s death was an accident—maybe Maxwell, too. What about Lavalle? What about Ruiz? You telling me it’s normal two guys from the same detail try to off themselves?”

“I don’t know.” Buchanan shook his head. “You know the army isn’t big on mental-health care. And let’s face it; that was some pretty fucked-up shit went on in the Closet. Not much of a surprise if Lavalle and Ruiz couldn’t handle it, is it?”

Vasquez waited another block before asking, “How do you deal with it—the Closet?”

Buchanan took one more block after that to answer: “I don’t think about it.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m not saying the thought of what we did over there never crosses my mind, but as a rule, I focus on the here and now.”

“What about the times the thought does cross your mind?”

“I tell myself it was a different place with different rules. You know what I’m talking about. You had to be there; if you weren’t, then shut the fuck up. Maybe what we did went over the line, but that’s for us to say, not some panel of officers don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and damn sure not some reporter never been closer to war than a goddamn showing of Platoon.” Buchanan glared. “You hear me?”

“Yeah.” How many times had she used the same arguments, or close enough, with her father? He had remained unconvinced. So only the criminals are fit to judge the crime? he had said. What a novel approach to justice. She said, “You know what I hate, though? It isn’t that people look at me funny—Oh, it’s her—it isn’t even the few who run up to me in the supermarket and tell me what a disgrace I am. It’s like you said: they weren’t there, so fuck ’em. What gets me are the ones who come up to you and tell you, ‘Good job, you fixed them Ay-rabs right,’ the crackers who wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like me, otherwise.”

“Even crackers can be right, sometimes,” Buchanan said.

—

VII

Mr. White’s room was on the sixth floor, at the end of a short corridor that lay around a sharp left turn. The door to the junior suite appeared unremarkable, but it was difficult to be sure, since both the bulbs in the wall sconces on either side of the corridor were out. Vasquez searched for a light switch and, when she could not find one, said, “Either they’re blown, or the switch is inside his room.”

Buchanan, who had been unsuccessful in convincing the woman at the front desk to watch his son’s present, was busy fitting it beneath one of the chairs to the right of the elevator door.

“Did you hear me?” Vasquez asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I don’t like it. Our visibility’s fucked. He opens the door, the light’s behind him, in our faces. He turns on the hall lights, and we’re blind.”

“For, like, a second.”

“That’s more than enough time for Mr. White to do something.”

“Will you listen to yourself?”

“You saw what he could do with that knife.”

“All right,” Buchanan said, “how do you propose we deal with this?”

Vasquez paused. “You knock on the door. I’ll stand a couple of feet back with my gun in my pocket. If things go pear shaped, I’ll be in a position to take him out.”

“How come I have to knock on the door?”

“Because he liked you better.”

“Bullshit.”

“He did. He treated me like I wasn’t there.”

“That was the way Mr. White was with everyone.”

“Not you.”

Holding his hands up, Buchanan said, “Fine. Dude creeps you out so much, it’s probably better I’m the one talking to him.” He checked his watch. “Five minutes till showtime. Or should I say, ‘T minus five and counting,’ something like that?”

“Of all the things I’m going to miss about working with you, your sense of humor’s going to be at the top of the list.”

“No sign of Plowman, yet.” Buchanan checked the panel next to the elevator, which showed it on the third floor.

“He’ll be here at precisely eleven ten.”

“No doubt.”

“Well . . .” Vasquez turned away from Buchanan.

“Wait—where are you going? There’s still four minutes on the clock.”

“Good. It’ll give our eyes time to adjust.”

“I am so glad this is almost over,” Buchanan said, but he accompanied Vasquez to the near end of the corridor to Mr. White’s room. She could feel him vibrating with a surplus of smart-ass remarks, but he had enough sense to keep his mouth shut. The air was cool, floral scented with whatever they’d used to clean the carpet. Vasquez expected the minutes to drag by, for there to be ample opportunity for her to fit the various fragments of information in her possession into something like a coherent picture; however, it seemed that practically the next second after her eyes had adapted to the shadows leading up to Mr. White’s door, Buchanan was moving past her. There was time for her to slide the pistol out from under her blouse and slip it into the right front pocket of her slacks, and then Buchanan’s knuckles were rapping the door.

It opened so quickly, Vasquez almost believed Mr. White had been positioned there, waiting for them. The glow that framed him was soft, orange, an adjustable light dialed down to its lowest setting, or a candle. From what she could see of him, Mr. White was the same as ever, from his unruly hair, more gray than white, to his dirty white suit. Vasquez could not tell whether his hands were empty. In her pocket, her palm was slick on the pistol’s grip.

At the sight of Buchanan, Mr. White’s expression did not change. He stood in the doorway regarding the man, and Vasquez three feet behind him, until Buchanan cleared his throat and said, “Evening, Mr. White. Maybe you remember me from Bagram. I’m Buchanan; my associate is Vasquez. We were part of Sergeant Plowman’s crew; we assisted you with your work interrogating prisoners.”

Mr. White continued to stare at Buchanan. Vasquez felt panic gathering in the pit of her stomach. Buchanan went on, “We were hoping you would accompany us on a short walk. There are matters we’d like to discuss with you, and we’ve come a long way.”

Without speaking, Mr. White stepped into the corridor. The fear, the urge to sprint away from here as fast as her legs would take her, that had been churning in Vasquez’s gut, leapt up like a geyser. Buchanan said, “Thank you. This won’t take five minutes—ten, tops.”

Behind her, the floor creaked. She looked back, saw Plowman standing there, and in her confusion, did not register what he was holding in his hand. Someone coughed, and Buchanan collapsed. They coughed again, and it was as if a snowball packed with ice struck Vasquez’s back low and to the left.

All the strength left her legs. She sat down where she was, listing to her right until the wall stopped her. Plowman stepped over her. The gun in his right hand was lowered; in his left, he held a small box. He raised the box, pressed it, and the wall sconces erupted in deep purple-black light, by whose illumination Vasquez saw the walls, the ceiling, the carpet of the short corridor covered in symbols drawn in a medium that shone pale white. She couldn’t identify most of them. She thought she saw a scattering of Greek characters, but the rest were unfamiliar: circles bisected by straight lines traversed by short, wavy lines; a long, gradual curve like a smile; more intersecting lines. The only figure she knew for sure was a circle whose thick circumference was broken at about the eight o’clock point, inside which Mr. White was standing and Buchanan lying. Whatever Plowman had used to draw them made the symbols appear to float in front of the surfaces on which he’d marked them, strange constellations crammed into an undersized sky.

Plowman was speaking, the words he was uttering unlike any Vasquez had heard, thick ropes of sound that started deep in his throat and spilled into the air squirming, writhing over her eardrums. Now Mr. White’s face showed emotion: surprise, mixed with what might have been dismay, even anger. Plowman halted next to the broken circle and used his right foot to roll Buchanan onto his back. Buchanan’s eyes were open, unblinking, his lips parted. The exit wound in his throat shone darkly. His voice rising, Plowman completed what he was saying, gestured with both hands at the body, and retreated to Vasquez.

For an interval of time that lasted much too long, the space where Mr. White and Buchanan were was full of something too big, which had to double over to cram itself into the corridor. Eyes the size of dinner plates stared at Plowman, at Vasquez, with a lunacy that pressed on her like an animal scenting her with its sharp snout. Amidst a beard caked and clotted with offal, a mouth full of teeth cracked and stained black formed sounds Vasquez could not distinguish. Great, pale hands large as tires roamed the floor beneath the figure—Vasquez was reminded of a blind man investigating an unfamiliar surface. When the hands found Buchanan, they scooped him up like a doll and raised him to that enormous mouth.

Groaning, Vasquez tried to roll away from the sight of Buchanan’s head surrounded by teeth like broken flagstones. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, her right hand was still in her pants pocket, its fingers tight around the Walther, her wrist and arm bent in at awkward angles. (She supposed she should be grateful she hadn’t shot herself.) For another thing, the cold that had struck her back was gone, replaced by heat, by a sharp pain that grew sharper still as she twisted away from the snap and crunch of those teeth biting through Buchanan’s skull. God. She managed to move onto her back, exhaling sharply. To her right, the sounds of Buchanan’s consumption continued, bones snapping, flesh tearing, cloth ripping. Mr. White—what had been Mr. White, or what he truly was—that vast figure was grunting with pleasure, smacking its lips together like someone starved for food given a gourmet meal.

“For what it’s worth,” Plowman said, “I wasn’t completely dishonest with you.” One leg to either side of hers, he squatted over her, resting his elbows on his knees. “I do intend to bring Mr. White into my service; it’s just the methods necessary for me to do so are a little extreme.”

Vasquez tried to speak. “What . . . is he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Plowman said. “He’s old—I mean, if I told you how old he is, you’d think . . .” He looked to his left, to the giant sucking the gore from its fingers. “Well, maybe not. He’s been around for a long time, and he knows a lot of things. We—what we were doing at Bagram, the interrogations, they woke him. I guess that’s the best way to put it; although you could say they called him forth. It took me a while to figure out everything, even after he revealed himself to me. But there’s nothing like prison to give you time for reflection. And research.

“That research says the best way to bind someone like Mr. White is—actually, it’s pretty complicated.” Plowman waved his pistol at the symbols shining around them. “The part that will be of most immediate interest to you is the sacrifice of a man and woman who are in my command. I apologize. I intended to put the two of you down before you knew what was happening; I mean, there’s no need to be cruel about this. With you, however, I’m afraid my aim was off. Don’t worry. I’ll finish what I started before I turn you over to Mr. White.”

Vasquez tilted her right hand up and squeezed the trigger of her gun. Four pops rushed one after the other, blowing open her pocket. Plowman leapt back, stumbled against the opposite wall. Blood bloomed across the inner thigh of his trousers, the belly of his shirt. Wiped clean by surprise, his face was blank. He swung his gun toward Vasquez, who angled her right hand down and squeezed the trigger again. The top of Plowman’s shirt puffed out; his right eye burst. His arm relaxed, his pistol thumped on the floor, and, a second later, he joined it.

The burn of suddenly hot metal through her pocket sent Vasquez scrambling up the wall behind her before the pain lodged in her back could catch her. In the process, she yanked out the Walther and pointed it at the door to the junior suite—

—in front of which Mr. White was standing, hands in his jacket pockets. A dark smear in front of him was all that was left of Buchanan. Jesus God . . . The air reeked of black powder and copper. Across from her, Plowman stared at nothing through his remaining eye. Mr. White regarded her with something like interest. If he moves, I’ll shoot, Vasquez thought, but Mr. White did not move, not the length of time it took her to back out of the corridor and retreat to the elevator, the muzzle of the pistol centered on Mr. White, then on where Mr. White would have been if he’d rounded the corner. Her back was a knot of fire. When she reached the elevator, she slapped the call button with her left hand while maintaining her aim with her right. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Buchanan’s gift for his son, all two hundred and sixty euros’ worth, wedged under its chair. She left it where it was. A faint glow shone from the near end of the corridor: Plowman’s black-lighted symbols. Was the glow changing, obscured by an enormous form crawling toward her? When the elevator dinged behind her, she stepped into it, the gun up in front of her until the doors had closed and the elevator had commenced its descent.

The back of her blouse was stuck to her skin; a trickle of blood tickled the small of her back. The interior of the elevator dimmed to the point of disappearing entirely. The Walther weighed a thousand pounds. Her legs wobbled madly. Vasquez lowered the gun, reached her left hand out to steady herself. When it touched not metal, but cool stone, she was not as surprised as she should have been. As her vision returned, she saw that she was in a wide, circular area, the roof flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. The space was lit by a symbol incised on the rock at her feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock, whose perimeter was shining with cold light. Behind and to her left, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone turned her around. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. Deep in the darkness, she could detect movement, but was not yet able to distinguish it.

As she raised the pistol one more time, Vasquez was not amazed to find herself here, under the ground with things whose idiot hunger eclipsed the span of the oldest human civilizations, things she had helped summon. She was astounded to have thought she’d ever left.

—

For Fiona.

——

John Langan is the author of the novel House of Windows and the collection of stories Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. His stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction and Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.

——

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over twenty-five years. She was fiction editor of Omni and Sci Fiction and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the current The Best Horror of the Year, Inferno, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft Unbound, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Tails of Wonder and Imagination, Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People, Teeth: Vampire Tales (the latter two with Terri Windling), and Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas).

Forthcoming is Blood and Other Cravings and After (the last with Windling).

She has won multiple Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and Shirley Jackson Awards for her editing. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

She lives in New York. More information can be found at Datlow.com or at her blog: Ellen-Datlow.LiveJournal.com.