A City Dreaming (16 page)

“I hadn't really thought about it one way or the other.”

“Twenty-five years and you still as pretty as the day we first met.” The giant sneered, teeth like broken pieces of concrete. “Not for long, though.”

M cocked his head up at the giant, looked over at Flemel, shrugged, and looked back at the giant. “Friend,” he said, still pleasant, “you've got the wrong guy.”

The giant laughed again. It was not a friendly laugh. It didn't really even sound like a laugh, so much as stones rumbling against one another or a round being chambered. “You aren't going to get out of this that easy.”

M turned back to his novel. “I got no idea who you are. We've never met before.”

The biker put two sausage-link fingers on the cover of M's book and closed it with some force. “Look again.”

M sighed, tightened up his eyes, and sucked at his teeth. “Did you used to do my taxes?”

“Do I look like the sort of person that does other people's taxes?”

“Do I look like the sort of person who pays them?” M asked. “Did you sell me a scooter in SoHo?”

“No.”

“Did you hit on me outside a gay bar in the Village?”

“No!” If the giant had been a rain cloud, he would have been pouring; if he had been a nuclear reactor, he would have been poisoning flora; if he had been a volcano, he would have been destroying the homes of the people foolish enough to have built their homes at his feet. Since he was just a man, albeit a very large one, his face got plum-tomato red, from the broken capillaries in his nose to the cartilage in his cauliflower ears. He ran one hand along his terrible scar. “You did this to me, and I've been waiting twenty-five years to do the same back. The same and worse.”

“That's a nasty scar,” M agreed. “I'm sure I would remember doing something like that to somebody. You got a name?”

“Aloysius.”

“Well, that proves it. It couldn't have been me. How often do you meet a man named Aloysius, let alone burn out his eye? Even my memory can't be that bad.”

“It was you.”

M hemmed and M hawed. M drank the rest of his beer. “What were the circumstances, exactly?”

“Little Italy? 1988? You danced with my girlfriend? She had brown hair?”

“I lived in Little Italy in 1988. And I have on occasion danced with people's girlfriends. The brown hair isn't distinct enough to help us out one way or the other. But the rest . . .” M took another long look at the giant and shifted in his seat right to left to get a fuller picture. “No, I'm sorry. I can't remember any of this at all. Do you know what the bar was?”

“There a problem here?” Dino asked.

“Back away, fat man,” the giant said, “this don't concern you.”

But Dino seemed to disagree. Below the bar he had wrapped his fingers around the Louisville Slugger that he kept for chasing out vagrants and
disposing of the occasional extradimensional entity. “This is my bar, and anything that happens in it concerns me.”

“It's all right, Dino,” M said, gesturing the shillelagh aside. “It's all right. How about you bring me and Aloysius a couple of shots. Let the man know I don't have no bad feelings.”

Dino poured a few fingers of whiskey, but he kept his eyes on Aloysius and his hands near his weapon.

“Look,” M said, handing one of the drinks to the giant. “You say I once did something that destroyed your face and ruined any chance of ever leading a normal life. I say I didn't. This is a subject upon which reasonable men can differ. Let's drown our disagreement in liquor and call it even.”

Aloysius smacked the glass out of M's hands. Dino had his cudgel out from underneath the counter, the end stained with red blood and purple ichor. Flemel tightened up his fists from a few spaces away, though he had no clear idea of doing anything.

M scratched at his ear. “No call to waste good booze.”

“I'm going to kill you before the day is out,” the giant said, backing out of the bar. “I'm going to kill you with my hands. I'm going to make your skull into an ashtray.”

“I guess this is my shot?” M asked, then took it. “Each their own.”

The giant left, but he didn't go far. He hung out on the sidewalk outside and spent a while watching M and making calls on his phone. M went back to his book.

“I can't follow you around everywhere,” Dino said, putting the bat beneath the counter.

“No, I don't suppose you can.”

So far as Flemel was concerned, this was just about the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. Two weeks he had been waiting around for M to do something that would justify Flemel having leeched onto him, something that would confirm his belief that M was a member of the confraternity the existence of which long study of esoterica had suggested and his own fumbling attempts at wizardry had confirmed. “What are you going to do?” Flemel finally asked M.

M licked his finger and flipped the page on his book. “About what?”

Outside the bar, two other men had arrived on Harleys, and if they weren't quite the size of the scarred giant, they were still not the sort of men with whom one would want to Jell-O wrestle. “About the guys trying to kill you.”

“Oh, them,” M said, turning to look at the trio of men standing outside glaring at him angrily. “I dunno. I'm sure they'll forget about me soon enough.”

Flemel didn't think he was right, but then again he figured if having his life threatened by a man like Aloysius was insufficient to spur M into worry, there wasn't much he could do. After a while, Flemel went to the bathroom. While he was gone, M found a couple of paper clips from behind the bar, twisted them into a sort of stick figure. He grimaced while pulling out a few strands of his long, brown hair, then tied them neatly around the waist of his new effigy.

When Flemel came back from the bathroom, M had his coat on and was offering Flemel his own jacket. “Probably best if you were to split out before there's any trouble.”

“You sure you don't need my help?”

“They won't do anything during rush hour on Washington Avenue.” And indeed there seemed to be a few too many pedestrians milling about for the giant to deliver the torment he had promised M. “I'll give them a good shake on my way home and leave them tumbling aimlessly around Prospect Park. Anyway,” M said patting him on the shoulder, “you have a lovely evening.”

Flemel figured he would wait until M got around the block, and then follow the bikers who were going to follow M. He didn't know what he was going to do after that exactly; the few bits of chicanery he had gleaned from grimoires and frequent practice would be of no particular use in the situation. But what Flemel lacked in knowledge, strength, or planning he made up for in courage, or recklessness, which in a young man is virtually the same thing. Nor had it escaped Flemel that this might be just the opportunity he was looking for, a chance to demonstrate his utility, worm his way into M's good graces. But somehow M managed to give him the slip after barely a block: He took a left on Atlantic and Flemel took a left on Atlantic only to discover that M was no longer on Atlantic, at least not anywhere that Flemel
could see. And so after a few minutes of trying to catch M's scent and failing, he gave up and decided to head home. He was halfway back to the windowless room in the house he shared with a half dozen almost-artists in the smellier portion of Gowanus when he felt a tap on his shoulder and then a sudden, savage blow to the back of his head.

When Flemel came to his knees were scraping against concrete, then wood, and then he realized that he was being carried into a vacant house, dragged through a dilapidated corridor and into the nearest room, Aloysius splintering the lock with his size-24 foot, an all-purpose skeleton key. The two bikers spilled Flemel into a corner, though after a few slow seconds he managed to right himself.

“Keep a lookout,” Aloysius said. “Make sure the screams don't draw any bystanders.”

The chubbier of the two bikers reached into the back of his waistband and came out with a .38. “You need to borrow my piece?”

Aloysius had a smile that would have swallowed a goose egg. He pulled the handle of a butterfly knife from his jacket, extracted the blade with a practiced motion. “No way in hell,” he said. “I'm going to take my time.”

The fat one put his gun back into his waistband, then followed the thin one outside the room. The door shut.

“I don't know where he is,” Flemel said. It was the honest truth, but he didn't like giving it and felt disloyal, not that M had ever done anything to deserve his fidelity.

“What?”

“M. I don't know where he is.”

“This is a pathetic fucking attempt at humor.”

“Hey, man, we're barely even friends. It's not like he keeps me abreast of every move he makes. I don't even know where he lives.”

“You think playing crazy is going to make me forget what you done to me? Madmen scream just as loud,” he said, aiming the tip of his butterfly knife at Flemel. “Louder, even.”

“What I done to you? What M done to you, you mean.”

“What?”

“What?”

Two events occurred then simultaneously, or nearly so: Flemel realized he'd been played, and a little hiccup of sound wafted out from the corridor.

Flemel was too focused on the first of these to note the second. “I didn't do anything to you.”

“You sang this tune already—I didn't like it any more the first time.”

“No, I mean, M did something to you, obviously, but I'm not M. Actually at the moment I can sympathize with your feelings of vengeance toward the man.”

“You want to die a lying little punk, you be my guest.” Aloysius started toward Flemel with his knife.

And then the door opened and standing there was, so far as Aloysius was concerned, a duplicate M, and this alternate M had a tattoo of a smiley face below his left hand and the fat biker's revolver in his right. It was a confusing situation for Aloysius, one that this new M used to good effect, taking solid aim and firing off three shots. One went wide, but the rest lodged themselves in the knee and lower thigh of the leader of Moab's Minions, who screamed and dropped the knife and fell down on the ground and then screamed some more.

The M standing in the door lit a cigarette and watched Aloysius bleed. He emptied the rest of the bullets in his revolver onto the floor, then tossed it into a corner. He knelt down beside his enemy.

“So this is zero and two for you,” M said, ashing his cigarette into the man's hair. “If you want to have a go at three, I'm down at The Lady most afternoons.”

Then the one M snapped at the other, and both exited into the evening, leaving Aloysius to find his own way home.

Back outside, M reached into a side pocket of Flemel's coat, took out the fetish he had put there, and crushed it ruthlessly below his boot heel. “The first thing you gotta remember if you're going to be in this business,” he said, offering Flemel a puff of his cigarette, “is don't trust anybody.”

Introspection was not a strong suit of M's, nor of most of the adepts and practitioners he had known. He had faced dangers that would have made the hardiest gunslinger hang up his six-shooters, earned victories to satisfy a new Alexander, and suffered failures that would have driven a stoic mad with grief, though few of these found firm purchase in his mind. He wondered sometimes if a certain paramnesia was part of the payoff for being in good with the Management. But he didn't wonder that long, because, well, introspection was not his strong suit.

Still, there are things one does lose track of not so casually, like the heat of the sun or a pair of blue eyes.

It is an odd truth about New York, a city of millions of people, of five boroughs and hundreds of square miles: but one will inevitably stumble upon one's ex. M passed his coming out of the Strand one Tuesday afternoon, and before he could decide whether or not to pretend he hadn't seen her, she had already come up and given him a hug.

“It's you,” she said.

“Seems to be.”

Splitting with her had been his impetus to leave the city the last time, of course. Or had his leaving the city been the reason they had split? When he had thought of her—walking alone late at night on white sand beaches, and in the middle of the afternoon in busy cafés, and sometimes (and this
had always made him feel deeply ashamed, but he had no control over it) while entangled in the limbs of another woman, breathing shallowly in that moment of almost-catatonia that comes after orgasm—he had hoped that maybe she would have grown less pretty. But she hadn't grown any less pretty. If anything, she'd done the reverse, which M felt to be poor manners altogether.

“When did you get back?”

M told her.

“Why didn't you call me?”

“Because then we would have missed finding ourselves in this uncomfortable situation.”

She laughed.

There was a bar nearby. There usually is, that's one of the things about living in the city. They found it and sat down across from one another at a little table by the window. M ordered a beer, but she made do with seltzer. M tried to remember if he had anything to apologize for. He didn't think so. Or more accurately, there were many things he ought to apologize for—selfishness and pettiness and a lack of hygiene—but these were general failings, not germane to the conversation, not specific to their relationship.

The drinks came. They sat together a while, near enough that he could smell her flesh, but not so close as to touch it.

“How is Boy?” she asked.

“Masculine.”

“And Stockdale?”

“English.”

She smiled. “Give them my best when you see them.”

“I will.”

Of course, M had not missed the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, counting from the thumb, but it was only then that M noticed the slight protuberance in her dress. Seeing the first had been like hearing your name called, turning to look for the source, and having someone strike you swiftly in the solar plexus. But the second washed over him smoothly, a pain so old and familiar that you couldn't even really call it that anymore.