"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 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 grey 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 towards the apartments. Then he drove off, and I turned to face the imposing brick and limestone facade 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 both me and Fong"s box the hairy eyeball, and I quickly made my way to the elevators, hurrying through that ritzy marble sepulcher pa.s.sing 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 bra.s.s 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"d spent the last few years living in that one-bedroom cracker box above the Yellow Dragon, hot and cold running c.o.c.kroaches 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 recamier 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 I 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 d.a.m.n 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"d 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 f.u.c.king kidding me," I said, once I saw what was inside.
"Don"t go jumping to conclusions, Nat."
"It"s a d.i.l.d.o," 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 d.i.l.d.o?"
"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 h.e.l.l 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 sweaty stick of dynamite. But whatever made the thing special, it wasn"t anything I could see.
"Le G.o.demichet maudit," she murmured, her voice so filled with reverence you"d have thought she was holding the devil"s own w.a.n.g. 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 b.u.mped 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 Szabo"s goons did that, then panicked and ran before he figured out where the box was hidden."
(Now, as for Madam Magdalena Szabo, the biggest boil on Auntie H"s f.a.n.n.y, we"ll get back to her by and by.) "Ellen, how can you possibly f.u.c.king know that? Better yet, how could you"ve known Szabo"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 G.o.demichet maudit. Which doesn"t necessarily mean it"s actually cursed, mind you. Not literally. You do speak French, I a.s.sume?"
"Yeah," I said. "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, Cla.s.s 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 d.i.l.d.o to its velvet case. "It won"t happen again." Then she told me her tale, and I sat there on the recamier 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" 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, naturally.
"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 a.s.sume you"ve seen some peculiar s.h.i.t 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 c.o.c.k. 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 Sa.s.sanid 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 the saga for a d.i.l.d.o. But you still haven"t answered my question. What makes it so special? What the h.e.l.l"s it do?"
"Maybe you"ve heard enough," she said. The whole time she"d been talking, 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 Cimetiere du Montparna.s.se. Not so much a party, really, as an out and out orgy, the way the story goes. This was back before Montparna.s.se 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 afterwards there were rumors of black magic and ritual sacrifice, and tales surfaced of a cult that worshipped some sort of daemonic 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 prefecture 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 sc.r.a.p 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 has sometimes been referred to as the "Chinese unicorn." Yeah, 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 d.i.l.d.os. I"d done my job, so there"d be no complaints from Harpootlian. I admit I felt kind of s.h.i.tty about poor old Fong, who wasn"t such a bad sort. But when you"re an errand girl for the wicked folk, that s.h.i.t comes with the territory. People get killed, and people get worse.
"Well, that"s that," 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 a.s.sured 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 gla.s.ses, 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, a.s.suming 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 s.h.i.t 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" 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 f.u.c.king 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 sc.r.a.ped frozen pork back and forth across a cheese grater. "This afternoon, you were contacted by an a.s.sociate 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 Szabo"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, dispa.s.sionate as a corpse. "You answer ours, maybe we shall find the answers to yours along the way."
I knew d.a.m.n 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 chit chat 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 towards 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. .h.i.t me, they hit hard. Harder than I knew was necessary to make the connection. I might have screamed. I know I p.i.s.sed 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 gla.s.s. I thought she was about to tell me to get lost, and don"t let the door hit me in the a.s.s 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 two bits. My grandmother...well, I"d rather not get into that, if it"s all the same to you. Does my pedigree make you uncomfortable?"
"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 h.o.r.n.y 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 s.h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Szabo, 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."