Sandman Slim

Page 16

 

  Off to my left, the bike is pinwheeling down the empty street, kicking up, sparking, and shedding its plastic and chrome skin as it flies apart. It's kind of beautiful, turning from a machine into an ever-expanding shrapnel flower.

  Then I hit the street and start tumbling. Then sliding. Then tumbling again. I vaguely remember that there's a proper way to come down after laying down a bike, but my head is bouncing off asphalt and manhole covers and I'm way beyond technique at this point. I just roll up into a ball and hope that I don't break anything important.

  And I don't. I just come away with some road rash on my hands and legs. Chalk one up to Kevlar scar tissue. My leather jacket is nicely scarred, which is fine by me. There's nothing more embarrassing than new bike leather. However, my jeans look like they were attacked by a pack of wolverines. The bike is a total loss. I drag what's left of it and leave it between a couple of stripped cop cars. I'm only a couple of blocks from Vidocq's, so I walk the rest of the way.

  AT THE DOOR Vidocq hits me with the resigned look of a father who knows that no matter how much he tries, this son probably isn't going to make it to thirty. He shows me mercy by letting me in without saying a word. Allegra is grinning at me like the little sister who's thinking the same thing as the father, but finds it funny and not pathetic.

  "Are there any of my old clothes around?"

  "I think there might be some in one of the cabinets. Wait here and try not to bleed on anything. "

  "I showed Eugene that fire magic you taught me," Allegra says.

  "That was barely magic at all. More of a trick. And I didn't teach you anything. I charmed your hand and gave you about one molecule of what I can do. That's not the same as learning magic. You need to remember that or you'll get hurt. "

  Vidocq comes out of the bedroom with a familiar looking pair of beaten-up jeans.

  "Thanks," I tell him. I take off my shredded pants, toss them in a corner and put on the clean jeans, then remember that while modesty isn't in high demand in Hell, you're not necessarily supposed to do that kind of thing up here. But they're both still looking at me like I stepped off the short bus, which is pretty much what I just did.

  Vidocq leads us into the hall, stops, and looks at me.

  "Allegra is with us now," he says. "She needs to see and understand the things we do. You're too drunk to safely steal another car tonight, though I know that's exactly what you'd like to do. Instead, you need to show this girl your true gift and prove to her that you do things besides hurting yourself and other people. "

  "Where are we going?"

  "Third Street and Broadway. The Bradbury Building. "

  I hold out my hand to Allegra. "You ready to do the next thing?"

  "What is it?"

  "This isn't an asking situation. This is a doing situation. Either you're ready or you're not. "

  A moment of hesitation, then she takes my hand. "Show me. "

  Vidocq takes her other hand, and I pull them both into a shadow and into the room.

  "What is this place?"

  "The center of the universe. "

  "What does that mean?"

  "You can go anywhere you want. Any street. Any room. Anywhere. Across town, the moon or Elvis's romper room. "

  "If you can go anywhere you want anytime you want, why are you always stealing cars?"

  "Because ghosts walk through walls. People drive cars. "

  "Mr. Muninn is waiting," says Vidocq. "We should move along. "

  I take Allegra's hand as Vidocq touches her shoulder and we all step out onto Broadway together. We're right next to the Bradbury Building. It's late enough that the only people who might see us are a couple of winos and some master-of-the-universe business types so in love with their cell phones that a nuke could go off in their pants and they wouldn't notice.

  Allegra looks around and punches me in the arm hard enough that I can tell she means it.

  "You shit! You could have done this last night, but instead you made me stab you. "

  "I didn't think you were ready for it. "

  "Like I said, if you want girls to hurt you, there's plenty of professionals in the phone book. "

  The inside of the Bradbury Building is a giant Victorian diorama. It looks like aliens dipped one of Jules Verne's wet dreams in amber and dropped it in Los Angeles. The place is all open space in the middle, with masonry walls and wrought iron catwalks leading to offices and shops.

  We step into an iron elevator that looks like a cage for an extinct bird the size of a horse. A couple of guys get in behind us. Grim expressions. Dark suits. Shades that look like they've never been taken off and, in fact, have been soldered to their faces. They wear those things in the shower and when they're fucking their best friends' wives. Mostly the guys in the suits bug me because they give off a whiff of bacon-cops earning a little extra money under the table by working as security guards. They might be off duty, but a cop is always a cop and being caged up with them makes me want to chew my way out of this steam-powered rattrap. The funny thing is that while their presence is sending my blood pressure to Mars and back, their heartbeats are rock steady. So is their breathing. Cops make me nervous at the best of times, but when I've been ripping off people and cars every couple of hours for days, and I'm packing a Hellion knife and an incredibly unregistered handgun, it brings out the bad side of my personality. Vidocq hits the button for the fifth floor. One of the men in black presses the button for three. If either of these guys even blinks funny, I'm going to be painting the walls with livers and spinal cords.

  But nothing happens. The elevator hits three; the cops get out and walk away without even looking back. The fucked-up part is that I'm actually a little disappointed. I was so ready for a fight that now that it hasn't happened, I feel like I've been tricked. Teased and let down. I desperately want to break something. It occurs to me that I might still be a little drunk and that the only thing that will cure me is a cigarette or random violence. Or maybe a glimpse of the ugliest furniture in the known universe.

  There's a home-decor shop right across the elevator. Some kind of high-end Pier I nightmare selling faux-exotic crap for dot-com cokeheads with too much money and no shame. There are life-size porcelain cheetahs with gilt eyes. Fake antique Chinese furniture. Plasticine Buddhas. Paint-by-number Tibetan thangkas. The sight of the place is the kind of horror that will kill you or sober you up. Fortunately, I'm hard to kill.

  Vidocq closes the elevator door and we start up to the fifth floor. Before we get there, he pushes the stop button and the car rattles to a halt. Using two fingers, he pushes the one and three buttons on the elevator keypad.

  "What did you just do?"

  Vidocq says, "We're going to the thirteenth floor. "

  "There is no thirteenth floor," says Allegra. "Look at the buttons. This building only has five floors. And if it had more, it wouldn't have a thirteenth floor. It's bad luck. No one would move in. "

  "If you say so," he says, and pulls out the stop button. The car begins to move down. It stops at the third floor.

  "See? We're on three again. " Then something moves by the home-decor shop.

  The window where the porcelain cheetah stood just a minute earlier is dark and lit only by candlelight. The big window is caked with a century's worth of dust and impacted grime. In the cheetah's place is a bell jar at least six feet tall. There's a woman inside. She's transparent and drained of color, nearly black and white. Her hair and dress billow around her, blown by some invisible storm. She screams and claws at the glass walls of her prison. When she sees people getting off the elevator, she goes quiet and stares at us like a lion tracking a herd of zebra. A second later, she's pounding on the bell-jar glass again and showing yellow, sharklike teeth.

  The interior of the shop is dark and crowded and has the musty smell of an attic that hasn't been opened in fifty years. A shadow moves out of the shadows. It's a man. He's s
mall, round, and black. Not the way Allegra is black, but black like a raven or an abyss. He's wearing an expensive-looking silk robe and holding a brass telescope.

  "I see you've met my Fury," he says. "She's a very recent acquisition from Greece. Of course, I've had all three Furies at one time or another, but never all at once. That would be a coup. " I look back at the Fury and out the dirty window. Women in business clothes and men in suits and carrying attache cases pass, completely unaware of the Fury and the strange store.

  "Nice to see you all," says Mr. Muninn. "I was beginning to think that you'd forgotten about me. "

  "Never, my friend," says Vidocq. He introduces Allegra and then me.

  Muninn takes my hand and doesn't let go.

  "I've heard a lot about you, my boy. " He stares up at me like he's trying to see out the back of my head. "Interesting. I thought I might see bit more of the devil in you. Perhaps it's best for us all that I can't. "

  "Vidocq said that you might have work for us. "

  "That I do, my boy. I'm a trader and a businessman. Merchandise comes in and merchandise goes out. I'm busy, busy, constantly busy. There's always work here for those who want to work and to earn a decent wage. "

  "We were hoping for more than decent. "

  "Then we'll have to find something indecent for you to do. "

  "You have so many beautiful things," says Allegra, picking up what looks like a basketball-size pearl with a map of the world caved on it.

  "These are just baubles, shiny things to bring in the curious. Come. Let me show you the real store. "

  He sets down the telescope on a table overflowing with pocket watches, an orrery with the wrong number of planets, and a box of glass eyes, some of which are larger than the palm of my hand.

  Muninn takes us through a steel door marked emergency exit. Beyond the door, the walls are rough, chiseled stone, like we're in a cave cut into a mountain. There's a stone stairway that's so narrow at points that we have to walk down single file. And it's not a short walk.

  The trick getting into and out of a place like this is memorizing landmarks. Anything will do. Anything you can remember. A loose stair. A breeze from a hole in the wall. A crack in the rock face that looks like a sheep blowing the eagle on the presidential seal.

  If it's too dark, like it is on Muninn's stairs, you can always steal a handful of rare and ancient coins from a bowl in a guy's shop and drop them like bread crumbs all the way until you get where you're going.

  The most important thing to know about caverns is to never go in one without having a pretty good idea of how to get out. And never let yourself be led into said cavern by a stranger who owns his own Fury. That last one isn't absolute. It's just a good rule of thumb. It also helps to have a friend vouch for the guy, which is the only reason I'm still stumbling down a set of crumbling stairs dropping doubloons and drachmas behind me.

  Just before we hit the bottom of the stairs, I can see where we're headed. It's huge. Like Texas huge. I can see the cavern's ceiling, but not the far walls. There's a junkyard of old tables, cabinets, and shelves at the bottom of the stairs. About fifty yards beyond that is what looks like a stone labyrinth that twists, turns, and snakes away into the distance. Can't see the end of that, either. It's like standing on the beach at Santa Monica and trying to see to Japan.

  "Where did all this come from?" I ask.

  "Oh, here and there. You know how it is when you stay in one place too long. You tend to accumulate things. "

  Shelves, dressers, and old tables are piled with books, old photos, jewelry, furs, false teeth, pickled hearts, and what might be dinosaur bones. Those are the normal bits. Sticking up over the top of the labyrinth's walls are parts of drive-in movie screens, the masts and deck of an old sailing ship, a lighthouse, and strange carnivorous trees that snap at the flocks of birds circling the ceiling.

  "How long have you been here?"

  "Forever. I think. It's hard to be sure about these things, isn't it? I mean, one ice age looks pretty much like another. But I've been here a long time and that's why everyone comes to me. I have all the best things. For sale or for trade. Buyer's choice. "

  "That's why we're here. I used up some of Vidocq's Spiritus Dei and need to pay him back. "

  Muninn glances over at Vidocq.

  "Eugene, I didn't know that you knew the sultan of Brunei. "

  "What does that mean?" I ask.

  "You're not the sultan? Perhaps you're Bill Gates or the czar of all the Russias?"

  "No. "

  "Then trust me. You can't afford Spiritus Dei. "

  The little man wanders to a nearby table and picks up a wooden doll that looks like it was pulled out of a fire. He winds a key at the doll's back. It stands up and begins to sing. The song might be a hymn or an aria from an opera I've never heard of, which is all of them. The doll's voice bounces off the walls, high, perfect, and heartbreaking. With a soft click, the key in its back stops moving and the doll falls over. Its voice echoes for several minutes, bouncing off the labyrinth's thick walls.

  "Of course, we might be able to do a trade," Muninn says. "There's a certain someone who would like a certain something in the possession of certain other people in our little town. I would like you to help Eugene procure this item for me. If you're successful, I guarantee you a flask of Spiritus Dei and a not inconsiderable amount of cash. Eugene told me that you'd like money to be part of your payment. Is that right?"