Messi@ (39 page)

Three gold rings glittered on Notz's left hand. One in particular made an impression on Bamajan. He had seen one like it before; a death-dealing Jamaican wore it. It was a snake twined around a cross.

“I never saw this chick before,” Bamajan said and started to get up from the table.

But the major laid a strong hand on his shoulder; he sat back down.

“What kind of man goes around selling people?”

“Slavery's back.” The musician nodded gravely.

“Slavery's back? As in, the sixties are back? Disco is back? What do you mean, it's back?”

“Everybody does it, everybody has it, everybody's got to do it once at least,” he sang. Lowering his voice, he said, “It's the drug of the millennium. I sold this chick—not the one in your picture, another one—to a dude wearing wings in a church on Ramparts Street lit up by nekkid women holding candles. They had a nekkid pope, too, and the bishops were nekkid, and a bunch of nasty nekkid cops. I swear. I've never seen nothin' like it. They give me a bag of gold for the chick, but it turn to shit when the cats return me to the street. I swear.”

“Bamajan, I've seen you selling girls right in the square.”

“Just whores, Captain. I'm talking slaves here. There is great danger in the world now slavery's back. I admit it. Tell you something else …” He had to throw the captain a bone. “You know the SMD over on Bourbon? Church of Messiah or something? They've been buying and they likes 'em young, just like the fuckin' perverts.”

“What do they do with them?”

“That's it, man. Nobody fucks them. They make 'em sing.”

“Who's the boss over there?”

“The devil, I think. But word is that TV preacher Elvis owns it. They say he owns strip joints too. One twisted motherfucker.”

Mullin was becoming careless, and his vices were beginning to get on the major's nerves. He had too many businesses, indulged too many private fantasies. But Mullin certainly wouldn't risk holding Felicity in the heart of the Quarter with a bunch of brainwashed chorus girls. Even he wouldn't be that stupid.

“You got any letters, man?” asked Bamajan.

The major tried not to reveal his confusion. What letters? A new kind of drug? He doubted if Bamajan was asking him about his schooling. Then he remembered that lately he'd seen people with letters tattooed on them. Not just Shades. Men in suits, housewives. They were everywhere. The bartender at Molly's had an
O
on his forehead and an
M
on his chest.

“Not really,” he said cautiously.

“That's good.” Bamajan whispered. “The letter peoples is multiplying. They waitin' for the day when they gonna line up and make up a sentence dictated by the devil. I seen the devil … He's fixin' to speak! The slaves are
food
.”

Notz was growing impatient with the man's raving.

“We're going to take a little trip to your place. I think you need your medication.”

Conflicting impulses tugged at the musician. He needed to get away to do some looking for Felicity on his own. He wanted to know what this soldier knew about him. He also felt the need for a little fix.

The flophouse on Saint Charles had seen better days. Dark molding and the grand staircase remained from its former life as the residence of a rubber baron. The rooms had rickety doors with big black numbers painted on them. On the second floor, No. 17 was unlocked. Inside was a white iron bed, a small desk, and an overstuffed chair piled high with clothes and shoes. The floor and the bed were buried under newspapers, more clothes, parts of musical instruments, and pictures cut out of magazines. A stench of half-eaten cans of cat food was mixed with the odor of rotting oranges.

“I feed the hotel cat His name's Aspirin,” apologized Bamajan. “That's his stuff.” He pointed under the desk, where a scratch post shared space with a kitty tray. On cue, Aspirin came in through the open window. He was a large, ragged, one-eyed striped tomcat with a no-nonsense manner. He leapt up on the desk over his stuff.

“You two talk,” said Bamajan. “I'll be back.”

Leaving the door open, he headed for what the major suspected was the hallway bathroom.

When he tried to pat Aspirin, the cat bristled.

“You sinister demon! How's this grab you?” The major picked up a high-heeled shoe from the floor. Aspirin flew to the windowsill, arched his back, and hissed. Notz inspected the mess on the desk: a dirty black T-shirt, a torn paperback of
The Prophecies of Nostradamus
, a cardboard pizza box with a petrified slice still in it, sheet music, a pile of photographs. Standing in front of Café Istambul with their arms around each other, two musicians grinned at the world. Miles and Bamajan. The major sighed. So that's how it was.

Bamajan came back high. His eyes shone as he headed for the bed. He had taken off his pants, and a pair of skinny legs stuck out of a pair of striped shorts, open in front. There was something white in his hand. “My teeth,” he mumbled.

The major looked at the pathetic figure on the bed. “You killed your best friend, didn't you?”

“No, man,” said Bamajan. “He got greedy. He lost his freedom, Soldier.” He closed his eyes.

The major nodded sadly to the musician's unconscious form. He sighed and removed a small gold-plated automatic from his side pocket and fitted on the silencer. He put the barrel against the musician's temple and squeezed the trigger. A black-edged red rose opened in Bamajan's head. A rose for Miles. Major Notz put the gun back in his pocket and lit a cigar.

Grotten's stank of beer and vomit—two stages of the same stink, really—and the connoisseur might easily discern the brand: Blackened Voodoo Apocalypse beer, the latest in a series. The pings and sighs of the poker machines tended to by hollow-eyed video-crack junkies made the air as holey as the noses, lips, and tongues of the studded clientele. The slashed leather stools had been re-covered many times. Trapped sweat and urine squished between the layers at every lurch.

Under the excrescences of mucus, viscera, blood, and the traces of delirium tremens, there was wood. Grotten's was the terminus for preinternable creatures, a screening room for the Hummingbird Hotel and Charity Hospital. Criminals, cops, retailers of every flavor, and underaged drinkers all used it for headquarters. On any given night, several novels' worth of secondary characters slid or crawled through. For a quarter you could get a video-poker tan. For ten bucks, somebody's mother. It was also the clearinghouse for everything that went down in the street.

The late afternoon sun looked cautiously in and turned the scene, briefly, to gold. The television, always on, was blaring a special news bulletin. Special bulletins were as frequent nowadays as commercials. Earthquakes. Fires. Sieges. Self-immolation. Suicide bombings. Hostage taking. The clientele of Grotten's paid no attention.

Joe sat gingerly on the last stool at the end of the bar. Joe motioned to the bartender, Spike, who greeted the policeman with an ebullient “What the hell's going on, Joe? I never heard anything like it.”

Eight dope dealers had been killed in New Orleans over the holiday. Even in a city as blasé as the Big Easy, this was a bit much. They had each been shot at close range with a small-caliber gun. They had all been high when they were killed.

Joe watched the television for a minute.

Spike ground his half-smoked Optimo into the epidermal floor and explained that Grotten's, in his opinion, would survive the End of the World for the simple reason that nobody inside the place would even know that the End had occurred.

The special bulletin had to do with a young girl en route to the United States from Tel Aviv who had single-handedly defused a bomb carried on board the jetliner by an Iranian terrorist. The plane was expected to land at any moment at the Atlanta airport, where hundreds of reporters milled about waiting to interview the amazing young heroine.

“Welcome to the New World,” said Spike. “They'll freak the poor thing so bad she'll shit. She might join an outfit like SMD just to get away from the fucking media!”

“People.” Joe shook his head. “SMD. Haven't heard of that one.”

Spike explained: “Happiest place on earth. Girls only. They go in tone deaf and nymphomaniacal, start singing and acting modest. After a while they disappear. Word is they get distributed to harems in the Persian Gulf emirates. They get fucked while singing. Anything for oil. SMD is run by Exxon.”

“Whoa!” said Joe. “I know this chain of thought. Give it up. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

But SMD was news to him. It was amazing how much faster than the police the street telegraph was.

“Tell you what, though,” said Spike. “Girl like that, wouldn't mind dating her. Motherfucker comes up, she'd take him just like that. Defuse his bomb, har, har.”

Like Felicity, Joe thought. Where the hell was she? He hadn't come into Grotten's to investigate the murders of drug-dealing slavers, as Spike had assumed. He was still looking for Felicity. Hopefully there was no connection between the killings and the girl. One of the murdered dealers was the musician Bamajan, who had been connected to Felicity through Miles. Joe found himself secretly cheering the vigilantes. After all, the dealers were scum. He only hoped that Felicity wasn't caught in the middle of this underground war.

The gate to the SMD quarters on Bourbon was wide open. Joe unsnapped the holster of his service revolver and climbed the staircase to the second story, where it became evident that the place had been vacated in a hurry. The floors were littered with papers and clothes. One large room stared at him with the empty eyes of computer screens. The cords had been ripped out of the wall and lay coiled all over the place like dead snakes. It looked like a school raided by a gang. Joe had seen a school like that once, in the projects. Scorched maps, broken desks. But this place gave him the creeps. This was no innocent place of learning.

There was an odd smell of burnt leaves in the air, which Joe, a non-smoker, took a second to identify. The wake of an expensive cigar. Whoever the smoker was, he was already gone. He must have been there shortly before Joe and walked through the abandoned school slowly, long enough to leave this bitter smell behind. The smell waned as he followed it down a corridor bearing the inscription,
THE LORD'S HANDS APARTMENTS
. At the end of this hall was an iron staircase. Joe climbed it, opened the door there, and the cigar smell hit him as hard as if someone had blown it directly in his face. The smell was compounded by something sickening, like burning hair and frying grease. Joe took his gun out of the holster.

The room was void of living presence, but lying facedown on the parquet floor in front of a school desk were the nude bodies of two men. One of them was covered with tattooed swastikas. The other was brown and had a round ass. Joe kneeled to examine the corpses and saw that the backs of the men's necks bore fresh burns made with a cigar. But the cause of death in each case was the small-caliber bullet holes in the temple.

“Jeezus Christ!” Joe exclaimed, recognizing the two nude prowlers he had busted at Felicity's behest the night he had met her. “You two just can't keep your clothes on.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Wherein we follow the passage of Andrea from the Old World to the New, while Felicity wanders in the desert of her own city

The middle seat in the middle row was the worst seat on the old airbus. Andrea felt pinned there like a butterfly. On her left sat a huge man, a tower of flesh that spilled into her over the armrest between them. He wore a thick purple turban on his massive head. Andrea guessed that he was a merchant, a human abacus. He smelled like an old crocodile-skin wallet. The flesh of his thigh touched her like the sticky underside of a huge snail. She drew as far away from him as she could.

Happily, Ben sat at her right hand, and he smelled like parsnips and iron. I am a spider, not a butterfly. Andrea put out a long sticky thread and wrapped Ben in her cocoon. Unaware that he'd just been cocooned, Ben got up and strolled forward toward the rest rooms. Andrea was left alone with the merchant, whom she imagined enthroned in a rattan chair, his rolls of fat quivering while veiled concubines massaged his obese toes. She had seen this in the old film
Star Wars
. She resolved to turn into a Gorgon, with a headful of hissing snakes, so that if he looked at her, he'd turn to stone.

“Are you going home, young lady?” The man spoke in English.

“Oh, no, kind sir. I am hoping that a distant relative will care for me in America. I am from Russia, from Saint Petersburg. Since our country broke up, things have gotten worse and worse. I was a member of the Komsomol, you understand.” Andrea invented breathlessly, not looking at the man.

“Where are your parents?”

“They went to Finland to work in an oil refinery. There was an explosion. After that …” Andrea hung her head and felt the fleshy monster's humid orbs alight on her neck like two slugs on a cabbage leaf. The flesh of his thigh burned. Droplets of sweat burst from under his turban. In his pocket his hand clutched a fat roll of banknotes. Andrea saw through him as through a shop window. A chill crept through her. The man was a soul buyer. Souls, she knew, were for sale now by the ton; it was a buyer's market. They were no longer sold by the gram or the ounce with pacts writ in flame as in the time of the hapless Dr. Faust. Today, Fausts by the thousands waited hat in hand for a man like this. When he finally spoke she had already guessed what he was going to say.

“For the first few days, before you are settled, perhaps you would accept my hospitality. In Detroit, I own several buildings …”

The fleshy monster opened his briefcase to extract a roll of mints, and Andrea saw stacks of banknotes from different countries, including Russian rubles.