The Last Hot Time (20 page)

"And they had this arsenal —Tommy guns and shotguns and pistols and grenades. And Granddad spent two weeks learning how to use them all. And to fight with a knife; he could scrap okay, any kid could in those days, but this was serious. His dad said, 'Two weeks ain't much, but it's better than you're gonna learn from the Army, 'cause most of them guys never had to do it for real. Unless they were like me.' He even made out a list of guys who'd been in the gangs, who Granddad could trust if he needed help. Granddad said he burned the list after the war, because too many of the men on it were heroes then. You want some more tea?"

"Sure," Doc said. When it came, Norma Jean said, "Could you dump two spoons of sugar into mine, and stir it up? This one-wing stuff is no good."

"Your arm's going to be okay, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah! I didn't mean that—you know I wouldn't have it at all if it weren't for you. The) said it may always be a little weak. but I've got therapy three days a week, and Granddad—well, let me finish that story."

"Please."

"Well," she said, a little more softly, "Granddad says that, when they were up there in the woods, fighting and shooting, it was the first time he really felt like his dad loved him, you know? 'Cause he was teaching him what he knew to stay alive in the war. But then he joined the Marines, and he went off and fought, and after he'd fought for a while ... he understood that his dad'd loved him all the time before—hadn't wanted his son to grow up with guns and knives and wars all the time."

Doc waited. She didn't say any more. He said, "Your Granddad must be quite a guy. ... I mean, is he still alive?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "He saw me every day I was in the hospital, and he helps me with my PT. He says I ought to learn to shoot a bow and arrow—you know, an Amazon." She looked down at herself, where the chest wound was hidden. Then she grinned again. "When I got so I could sit up, he said he was making plans to bust me out of the hospital—you know, go over the wall at midnight, like in the movies. He made me promise that if he was ever in, I'd—" Her voice caught. "—crash him out. Funny thing to say, huh."

Doc flashed on the end of High Sierra, with Bogart shot down in the desert, and the girl trying to understand his last words, asking what it meant when a man crashes out.

That's a funny thing to ask, sister, the cop replied. // means he s free.

He had a sudden terrible certainty of what Norma Jean's grandfather had meant.

"You could meet him," Norma Jean was saying. "I think he'd like to meet you. I'm sure he would. He's never really been to Town, and keeps saying he should. He calls it Old Town—you know the song? 'There'll be a hot time in Old Town tonight' . . . ?"

"In the old town."

"No. That was later, when people weren't singing about this city anymore. When the song was written, it was about Old Town here. Really."

"I didn't know. Sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about. Even people who grew up here

don't know that. Lucius Birdsong, the reporter, told me. Do you know Lucius?"

"Yes."

"Oh, of course you do—someone said he wrote about you. He's such a swell guy, but, you know, so odd—I mean, you wanna carry a torch, okay, but do it for someone who's at least on your side of the street. "

Doc waited, but that seemed to be the end of that discussion. Then she said, quite from nowhere, "You living alone?"

He took her meaning at once, somewhat to his own surprise. "I'm seeing somebody. Pretty regular."

He saw lights fade within her. "I'm glad," she said, earnestly. "Do you ever see Chloe Yadis?"

"Sometimes at the club."

"I heard one of her girls ran away. Jolie-Marie, the little one. I mean, petite, you know."

Doc nodded stupidly.

"My mom would die," Norma Jean said, to no one in particular, and then painfully, "No, she'd die"

Then Doc understood. Norma Jean was stuck in the World now. and she wanted back—back with Mr. Patrise, or somebody close to him, like Doc. Even working for Chloe the madam would be a way back to the bright lights.

But there she was, in that chair. Just like Robin had been.

Floundering, he said, "I'll tell Mr. Patrise that you're better. I know he'll be glad to hear it. And—I really would like to meet your grandfather."

She nodded.

Doc tried to think ahead. "Some night we should . . . spring him. Get him to the Mirada, at least. My car won't hold three, but I could borrow one of the others."

"Oh, wouldn't that be great?" The light returned to her face, briefly. "Unless he—it might not be like he remembers. Wants to remember. I just don't know."

In that moment Doc knew the meeting was over. In the next moment Norma Jean was telling him how much fun she'd had. how great it had been to meet him. She touched the control and rolled

her chair back from the table; Doc stood up hastily.

She was offering him no hand to shake, and even a small kiss on the cheek would have required him to swoop and bend over her in the chair. So he just stood. The man in the dark suit reappeared; he seemed to take no notice at all of Doc.

She stopped, rolled back toward him. "Granddad said I should be good to you," she said unsteadily. "That somebody who does— what you do—was really special. You'll tell everybody I miss them, won't you?"

"Of course."

"And tell your girlfriend you're special," she said then, in a voice full of agony and venom. She turned away and was gone.

As he drove back, a windblown winter rain began to fall, that scattered the ghost fires of the Shade far across the real city.

F

riday afternoon, Doc went upstairs to see Patrise. He was sitting behind his silver desk in a long violet dressing gown, feet up, a large book of art reproductions open in his lap.

"I don't expect we'll need you tonight, Hallow," he said. "Have a pleasant evening."

Doc hesitated.

Patrise said, "Was there something else?"

"I was thinking," Doc said, "you know, with all the stuff I carry in my bag, it's a wonder I haven't been jumped before this."

"Do you think so?" Patrise said, sounding interested.

"It makes sense. I mean, I drive a car everybody can recognize, and they probably know I don't carry a gun."

"You haven't wanted to carry a gun."

"I still don't. I just. . . guess I ought to be more careful, from now on."

Patrise's voice cut right across the nonsense. "Who do you think it was that set us up, Hallow? Are you afraid it was Ginevra?"

"No, it couldn't have—she didn't know anything about what was happening, any more than I did."

"You don't know that," Patrise said, calm. "You don't have any way of knowing that."

"No," Doc said, and stopped while he still had his voice.

Patrise put his book on the desk, sat up in his chair facing Doc. "But / know, Hallow. And she did not."

"Then ... do you know—who?"

"Let me tell you something about people, Hallow. If you give people work that makes them feel strong and useful, then they will become strong and useful. Their strength, through you, is power, and astounding things can be done with that power. Impossible things.

"Keep the same people in fear, and you may still get use from them, but never strength. If they find strength despite you, the first thing they will do with it is bring you down. No matter what it costs. Understand that very well, Hallow: any being with a real soul will prize it above anything—certainly above life."

"A soul."

"I am not excluding the Truebloods. If Cloudhunter has no soul, then souls are surely overrated." He leaned back. "Have you thought about where to take Ginevra tonight?"

"Oh . . . the movies, probably."

"Why don't you take her off the Levee?"

"Is something wrong?"

"Not that I know. You should visit the World now and then. The Art Institute is open late tonight. It's not far. Barely past the Shade. Made dinner plans?"

"No."

"The Berghoff should do. Here." He scribbled a note, signed it, folded it. "Please, take it. Let me have my fun."

"Thank you, sir."

Patrise waved. "And think about the Art Institute."

"I'll ask Ginny."

"Yes. Tell me, Hallow, if you don't mind ... do you make her laugh?"

"Uh . . ." Doc had to turn his thoughts sharply around. "She-laughs at the movies. And other times too."

"Good," Mr. Patrise said. "It is an extraordinary thing, that half the human species should need laughter so much from the other half. It is no small gift, you know. Hallow. Magic and Klrland have no substitute for it. Now, the best of nights to both of you. Hallow."

It was beginning to snow when they left the Shadow. Suddenly the air was on fire, turning the snowflakes blood-red; Ginny gasped, and Doc stopped the Triumph for several minutes while they watched the silent, heatless firestorm.

Ginny took his hand. Under her winter coat she was wearing a ruffled white blouse with a small string of pearls, a long black skirt. "I'd forgotten the fire," she said, sounding astonished.

The plaque NEW ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO was on a gray stone building that must have been a department store before the world shifted. The entrance was flanked by huge bronze lions, one old and green, one looking nearly new. A guard tipped his hat as they came through the door; Ginny scanned a brochure on what to see first, and dragged Doc up a flight of stairs, directly to a huge painting of strolling people: Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Doc had seen pictures of it in books, but.. .

"Look at it close," Ginny said.

He did. It was made up of thousands upon thousands of dots of color. Close up, they exploded into an atomic-structure diagram; a step back, and they coalesced again into the calm people in the sunny park.

In one of the modern halls, there was a painting of a theater usher, a girl in cap and vest standing in a golden slant of light. She looked weary; she looked terrifyingly alone. When he could look away from the girl, he saw that the pattern of the walls was a precise reproduction of a corner of the Biograph's lobby. Or was it the other way around?

He turned, a little dizzy, and there was another image he had seen any number of times before, but never like this: a long horizontal frame, a night scene somewhere in a big city, a streetcorner diner lit against the gloom. A sign on the brick wall sold nickel cigars to a disbelieving world. Inside, small at the big L-shaped counter, were a handful of people huddled over their coffee and pie, a counterman in white. No reproduction Doc had ever seen captured the electric green of the fluorescent light—it was like spellbox neon, though the artist had died long before things changed.

He looked at that picture for a long time, too, until its loneliness was too much to stand.

Near the museum exit was a room bannered The Third Fire.

Third? Doc thought. Just inside the door were two enormous engraved illustrations: the Great Fire of 1871, facing the "White City," the Columbian Exposition of 1892, burning at the turn of the century.

Beyond was an architectural model of the original Art Institute building, and an array of photographs. They showed the old building in flames, and a small army of people moving paintings and sculpture and art objects across littered, flame-lit streets. A glass case held a chunk of verdigris bronze: the distorted face of a lion, like those at the doorway looked out.

"The building burned when Elfland came back, you see?" Ginny said wonderingly, pointing at a map. "They moved it all— in one night, this says."

"Under cover of firehose and spell," a voice said. A uniformed museum guard was standing a little behind them, a plump woman with a small, secret smile. "We lost a few paintings, and a fair amount of sculpture, sad to tell. And one of the lions, of course. But look here." She led them to a side alcove: it was filled with a painting, a surreal, darkly vivid nightscape laced with flame and streaking energy. Across the center, figures—some human, some Ellyll—formed a chain, carrying paintings that, in contrast with the rest of the picture, were rendered with photographic realism.

"Picasso Crossing Adams" the woman said. "The elves knew something, even that first awful night. We hardly ever see one here now, but that night—" She shrugged, and smiled again. "Pleasant evening to you."

The woman left. Ginny said suddenly, directly into Doc's ear, "Shall I ask you now? I want to ask now."

"Ask what?"

"If you're coming home with me tonight. You don't have to. you know that. But there's enough suspense in mv life. And if we're going to have a really special dinner, I don't want to be knotted up all through it. So just tell me now, and it'll be OVCI with."

He stared at the painting, the tire and art and sorccrv and said. "Yes."

She let out a breath and hugged his shoulders.

Berghoff's restaurant was a crowded, bustling, jolly place, with fancy wood and stained glass. The maitre d' looked coldly at the young couple with no reservation until he saw Mr. Patrise's note, and at once they were given a table, and brought soup and steak and amazing platters of sausage, with dark beer to wash them down, until Doc wasn't sure the TR3 would carry their weight. There did not seem to be any question of presenting a bill.