The Dog Said Bow-Wow (36 page)

“No? You don’t wanna build yourself up, get the girl, and beat the crap out of whoever’s pushing you around?” The ogre squeezed Will’s biceps. “You could use it. Only not here. This is a serious club for serious fighters only.”

“No, sir, I’m with Alderman Toussaint.” By the ogre’s expression, Will could see that he recognized the name and was not impressed.

“I was hoping you could tell me something about Bobby Buggane.”

“The bum. What’s he done now?”

“He was murdered.”

“Well, I ain’t surprised. Buggane was no damn good. Coulda worked his way up to the middle of the card, but he wasn’t willing to put in the effort. Always jerking off somewhere with his spook buddy when he shoulda been working out.”

“Somebody said they got into doing crimes together.” It was a shot in the dark, but Will figured the odds were good

“Yeah, well, like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s a lot of crap a gorilla like Buggane can pull off if he’s got a haint accomplice. You go into a jewelry store and pinch the ward when the guy ain’t lookin’ and replace it with a sprig of plastic fennel. Looks just like the real thing. Then that night the spook slips in and shuts off the alarm. If you’re like Buggane, and can rip a safe door off its hinges, you can walk off with a bundle. Somebody pulled something like that at a warehouse down in the Village about six months ago. Got away with a fortune in slabs of raw jade. I remember it because Buggane quit the gym right after that, and I always wondered.”

“Raw jade’s got to be hard to sell, though,” Will said. “I mean, in bulk.”

“Not if you got connections. Even if you don’t, something big like that could be moved through your regular fence, provided you waited until things had cooled down some. Not that I’d know personally. But you hear things.”

“Huh,” Will said. “This girlfriend of his — you remember her name?”

“Naw. Daiera, Damia, something like that. Maybe Danae. Only reason I recollect at all is that I asked Buggane once was she a pixie or a russalka or what and he said she was a diener. Deianira the Diener, that was it. That’s a new one on me. I thought I knew all the ethnics, but I ain’t never heard of a diener before. Listen, kid, I really have got work to do.”

“I’ll be out of your way, then,” Will said. “Thanks for your help.” He took one last look around the gym. “I guess Buggane should have stayed in the ring.”

“Oh, he wasn’t a ring boxer,” the ogre said. “He was a pit boxer.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Pit boxing’s strictly death-match. Two fighters climb down, only one climbs out. Buggane had a three-and-two record when he quit.”

“How the fuck,” Will said, “can somebody have a three-and-two record when he’s fighting to the death?”

The ogre grinned. Then he explained.

Less than an hour later, Will, Salem Toussaint, and Ghostface stood waiting in the shadows outside the city morgue. “Okay,” Ghostface said. “I thought I knew all the racial types from Litvak night-hags to Thai shit demons, but you say this girl is a
what?
”

“A diener. It’s not a type, it’s a job. A diener is a morgue attendant who’s responsible for moving and cleaning the body. She also assists the coroner in the autopsy. I made a few calls and Deianira’s on night duty this week. Though I’m guessing she might take off a little early tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

“This is where Bobby Buggane’s body wound up.”

“I think, boy,” Toussaint said firmly, “you’d best tell us the whole story.”

“All right,” Will said. “Here’s how I put it together. Buggane and Ice steal a truckload of jewelry-grade jade together and agree to wait six months before trying to fence it. Buggane keeps possession — I’m guessing it’s stashed with his girlfriend, but that’s not really important — and everyone has half a year to reflect on how much bigger Buggane’s share will be if he stiffs Ice. Maybe Ice starts worrying about it out loud. So Buggane goes down to the basement to talk it over with his good buddy. They have a couple of drinks, maybe they smoke a little crack. Then he breaks out the crystal goon. By this time, your brother’s lost whatever good judgment he had in the first place, and says sure.”

Ghostface nodded glumly.

“Ice shoots up first, then Buggane. Only he shoots up pure water. That’s easy to pull — what druggie’s going to suspect another druggie of shortchanging
himself?
Then, when Ice nods off, Buggane goes back to his room, takes down the ward, and flushes it down the toilet.

That way, when he’s found dead, suspicion’s naturally going to fall on the only individual in the building able to walk through a locked door. One who he’s made certain will be easy to find when the police come calling.”

“So who kills Buggane?”

“It’s a set-up job. Buggane opens the window halfway and checks to make sure his girlfriend is waiting in the alley. Everything’s ready. Now he stages a fight. He screams, roars, pounds the wall, smashes a chair. Then, when the neighbors are all yelling at him to shut up, he goes to the window, takes a deep breath, and rips open his rib cage with his bare hands.”

“Can he do that?”

“Boggarts are strong, remember. Plus, if you checked out the syringe on his dresser, I wouldn’t be surprised to find traces not of goon but of morphine. Either way, with or without painkiller, he tears out his own heart. Then he drops it out the window. Deianira catches it in a basket or a sheet, so there’s no blood on the ground. Nothing that will direct the investigators’ attention outside.

“She leaves with his heart.

“Now Buggane’s still got a couple of minutes before he collapses. He’s smart enough not to close the window — there’d be blood on the outside part of the sill and that would draw attention outward again. But his hands are slick with blood and he doesn’t want the detectives to realize he did the deed himself, so he goes to the bathroom sink and washes them. By this time, the concierge is hammering on the door.

“He dies. Everything is going exactly according to plan.”

“Hell of a plan,” Toussaint murmured.

“Yeah. You know the middle part. The cops come, they see, they believe. If it wasn’t for Ghostface kicking up a fuss, we’d never have found all this other stuff.”

“Me? I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, it looked hinky to me, but I wasn’t going to meddle in police business until I learned it mattered to you.”

“You left out the best part,” Toussaint said. “How Buggane manages to turn killing himself to his own advantage.”

“Yeah, that had me baffled too. But when a boxer picks up a nick-name like ‘the Deathless,’ you have to wonder why. Then the ogre at the gym told me that Buggane had a three-two record pit boxing. That’s to the death, you know. It turns out Buggane’s got a glass heart. Big lump of crystal the size of your fist. No matter how badly he’s injured, the heart can repair him. Even if he’s clinically dead.”

“So his girlfriend waits for his body to show up and sticks the heart back in?” Ghostface said. “No, that’s just crazy. That wouldn’t really work, would it?”

“Shhh,” Will said. “I think we’re about to find out. Look.”

A little door opened in the side of the morgue. Two figures came out. The smaller one was helping the larger to stand.

For the first time all evening, Toussaint smiled. Gold teeth gleamed. Then he put a police whistle to his mouth.

After Buggane and his girlfriend had been arrested, Ghostface gave Will a short, fierce hug and then ran off to arrange his brother’s release. Will and the alderman strolled back to the limousine, parked two blocks away. As they walked, Will worried how he was going to explain to his boss that he couldn’t chauffeur because he didn’t have a license.

“You done good, boy,” Salem Toussaint said. “I’m proud of you.”

Something in his voice, or perhaps the amused way he glanced down at Will out of the corner of his eye said more than mere words could have.

“You
knew,
” Will said. “You knew all the time.”

Toussaint chuckled. “Perhaps I did. But I had the advantage of knowing what the city knows. It was still mighty clever of you to figure it out all on your own.”

“But why should I have had to? Why didn’t you just tell the detectives what you knew?”

“Let me answer that question with one of my own: Why did you tell Ghostface he was the one who uncovered the crime?”

They’d reached the limo now. It flickered its lights, glad to see them. But they didn’t climb in just yet. “Because I’ve got to live with the guy. I don’t want him thinking I think I’m superior to him.”

“Exactly so! The police liked hearing the story from a solid boy better than they would from me. I’m not quite a buffoon in their eyes, but I’m something close to it. My power has to be respected, and my office too. It would make folks nervous if they had to take me seriously as well.”

“Alderman, I…”

“Hush up, boy. I know everything you’re about to say.” The alderman opened a door for Will. “Climb in the back. I’ll drive.”

EVERY MORNING
King Nimrod walked to the mountain, climbed its steep sides to the very top, and sang it higher. At noon ravens brought him bread and cheese. At dinner time they brought him manna. At sunset he came down. He had called the granite up from under the ground shortly after Utnapishtim the Navigator landed the boats there. First Inanna had called upon her powers to put the rains to sleep. Then Shaleb the Scribe had picked up a stick and scratched a straight line in the mud, indicating simply:
We are here
. Thus did history begin.

But before history existed, before time began, King Nimrod led the People out of Urdumheim. Across the stunned and empty spaces of the world they fled, through the plains and over the silent snowy mountains, not knowing if these places had existed before then or if their need and desire had pulled them into being. The land was as large as the sky in those days, and as unpopulated. But in no place could they linger, for always their enemies were close on their heels, eager to return them to slavery.

So came they at last to the limitless salt marshes that lay between the land and the distant sea. It was a time of great floods, when the waters poured endlessly from the heavens and the grass-choked streams were become mighty rivers and there was no dry ground anywhere to be seen. They built shallow-drafted reed boats then, well-pitched beneath, and set across the waters, where no demon could follow. Skimming swiftly over the drowned lands, they drove into the white rains, seeking refuge. Until at last they came upon what was then an island barely distinguishable from the waters. Here they settled, and here they prospered.

They were giants, that first generation, and half the things in the world were made by them first. Utnapishtim invented boats and navigation. Shaleb invented writing and record-keeping. Inanna invented weaving and the arts of lovemaking. Nimrod himself was responsible for bridges, houses, coins, and stoneworking, as well as cultivation and animal husbandry and many other things as well. But greatest of all his inventions was language. The People could not speak before he taught them how.

I was a boy when the winged lion came. That morning, Ninsun had set me to work pitting cherries. It was a tedious, fiddling chore, and because Ninsun had gathered four bushels, it lasted for hours, but there was no way out of it. So as I labored, I asked her questions about the way things used to be and why things were as they are now. Of all the First, she was the least closed-mouthed. Which is not to say she was at all talkative.

“Why is there work?” I asked.

“Because we are lucky.”

It didn’t seem lucky to me to have to work, and I said so.

“Work makes sense. You labor, you grow tired. You make something, you’re better off than you were before. Imagine the world if it weren’t that way.”

“What was the world like before the People came here?”

“There are no words to describe it.”

“Why not?”

“Because there was no language. Nimrod invented language as a way for us to escape from Urdumheim.”

“What was Urdumheim like?”

“King Nimrod gave it that name afterwards so we could talk about it. When we lived there, it wasn’t called anything.”

“But what was it
like?
”

She looked at me without answering. Then abruptly she opened her mouth in a great O. The interior of her mouth was blacker than soot, blacker than midnight, black beyond imagining. That horrible hole in reality opened wider and wider, growing until it was larger than her face, larger than the room, until it threatened to swallow me up and along with me the entire village and King Nimrod’s mountain and all the universe beyond. There were flames within the darkness, though they shed no light, and cold mud underfoot. My stomach lurched and I was overcome by a pervasive sense of wrongness. It seemed to me that I had no name and that it was thus impossible to distinguish between myself and everything else, and that therefore I could by definition never, ever escape from this dreadful and malodorous place.

Ninsun closed her mouth. “It was like that.” The clay pot where we dumped the discarded pits was full, so she tossed them out the window. “This is almost done. When we’re finished here, you can run along and play.”

I don’t think that Ninsun was my mother, but who can tell? We had not invented parentage at that time. No one had ever died, and thus no one had foreseen the need to record the passing of generations. Children were simply raised in common, their needs seen to by whoever was closest.

Nor was I the child Ninsun thought me. True, when she released me at last, I did indeed react exactly as a child would in the same circumstances. Which is to say, I was out the door in an instant and hurtling across the fields so fast that a shout to come back would never have reached my ears. My reasons, however, were not those of a boy but of a man, albeit a young one still.

I plunged into the woods and cool green shadows flowed over my body. Only when I could no longer hear the homely village noises of Whitemarsh, the clang of metal in the smithy and the snore of wood at the sawyer’s, did I slow to a walk.