The Night Mayor (22 page)

Evidently, this was the temple part of the Temple of Turhan Bey. The trumpet was not a trumpet but a savage frenzy of drums, throbbing like her worst headache. ‘Love for Sale’ was still in there, but it would never earn Cole Porter any royalties. Robed cultists danced with moderate abandon.

Otto Kruger stood by the altar, a white robe over his elegant suit. ‘Pay careful attention, my dear. You are privileged to be able to witness our ritual. Usually, that is denied to unbelievers.’

‘Where’s your
dybbuk
, Otto? Where’s Daine?’

‘A little on the dead side of things,’ purred Kruger.

‘Heh heh heh,’ heh-heh-hehed Peter Lorre. ‘There’s a lot of that about.’

Kruger stroked her hair out of her face, and let his fingers linger about her chin and throat. He rattled the necklace of shells that had been wound around her neck.

‘You’ll never get away with this,’ she snarled. She would have spat in his face, but that struck her as being unladylike. At least Kruger was a polite villain. His smile hardened at her defiance.

‘Actually, I rather think I will. By the way, I really must correct a false impression that I inadvertently gave just now. I said you would be permitted to observe our sacred and ancient rites. That is not strictly true. Although you will be present throughout the ceremony, I fear the later stages will find you something of a poor audience.’

‘So sorry.’

If he caught the irony, he ignored it. ‘No need to apologise, it won’t be your fault. You see, after the exalted ritual of blood sacrifice to the Great God Turhan Bey you will be far less appreciative of the aesthetic and ethnological delights of our little group. Indeed, you might say that…’

‘Hey, boss,’ interrupted Lorre, eyes glowing like neons. ‘Have you told her how we’re going to kill her yet?’

‘I was coming to that. I really must apologise for the ill manners of my associate. He is a true believer, but sadly lacks finesse. Besides the crudeness of his snickering, he is grossly inaccurate. We do not intend to kill you.’

‘That’s a relief.’ No sense skimping on the act. ‘Now if you could just untie me, I have a dental appointment and…’

‘No, indeed. Although your body will perish…’

‘Heh heh heh.’

‘…it won’t really be dying, because you’ll live on in this plant.’

A man-sized shrub behind Kruger and Lorre waved waxy tendrils in excitement. Clean-picked human skulls nested among its branches. Lorre put his arm around the bush, soothing it as if it were a favourite niece in whose person he took an unhealthy interest.

‘Heh heh heh. There now, poppet. Don’t be impatient. Soon you won’t be hungry any more.’

Susan concentrated, trying to Dream.

A small lump of nothing rolled across the floor, gathering substance, and coalesced into an unnoticed rat. The animal began to gnaw at the ropes binding her to the altar. Attaboy, rat! Keep on chewing. Isn’t hemp delicious? She latched on to the rodent’s peanut-sized brain and filled it with enough extraneous material to qualify him as a genius in rat terms. She named him Albert, and gave him an insatiable appetite for ropes. This rat wanted to eat ropes the way Gene Kelly wanted to sing and dance.

Gotta chew
, Albert thought to himself,
chew-de-chew-chew-chewdy-chew-de-chew-chew.

Weirdly, out of nowhere, a thought came. I wonder how I look in a sarong?

Albert was doing well. Daine must be slipping, wherever he was. He had stopped
dybbukking
Kruger. She could tell. They were the same type – the off-the-peg evil mastermind – but Kruger was too much a part of this screwy Dream to host a real mind. He had just spun the thought expressed in the sentence ‘I’m going to kill you’ into three paragraphs of civilised threat. He was as fake as a nine-pound piece.

Where was Tunney? If this scene was anything to go by, Kruger would have him in a cellar with the waters slowly rising. Vanessa Vail must have polluted Daine’s
film noir
universe. This was all turning into Saturday-morning chapter play.
The Fighting Devil Dogs, Manhunt of Mystery Island
,
Zorro’s Black Whip, Secret Service in Darkest Africa.
The sets were cheaper, the lighting flatter, the plot even more wildly improbable.

Ouch! Albert had bitten her. Ungrateful little beast! She shooed it off, vindictively giving it an urge to become a great landscape painter in place of its rope obsession. Let’s see how you manage to be Constable with those tiny paws, Bertie. The ropes still held, but one good tug would part them like silk.

The cultists continued their tame orgy. A pair of giant black slaves pounded drums. Interpretive dancers rushed about the chamber, waving their arms and trying to keep the fruit piled on their headdresses from coming loose. Extras wailed and rhubarbed in a lukewarm pagan frenzy. The plant was squirming in delighted anticipation. Its mouths drooled creamy sap.

Kruger took up a sword-sharp scimitar and held it aloft for blessing. It shone in Susan’s eyes, white fires dancing along its length.

‘Heh heh heh,’ heh-heh-hehed Lorre.

Susan let her shaping thoughts wander around the Temple. One wall was covered by a black velvet hanging. She concentrated.

The drape billowed and a tiny figure crept stealthily out, a blowpipe raised to its hideous lips. It was an Ecuadorian pygmy assassin, sworn to bring death to all the followers of the false god Turhan Bey.

‘In the name of Isis and Amon-Ra,’ began Kruger, ‘though the way we walk is thorny, and of Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, as the rain enters the soil so the river enters the sea, and of Beelzebub and Asmodeus, so tears surround our predestined end.’

Kruger cut the air with the scimitar, and a neatly bisected feather floated in halves to the ground. With a ringing voice, he continued to declaim his unspeakable Satanic rites. The congregation raggedly joined in as he invoked every dark force in the universe.

‘
Cave canem
,’ he said,
‘cum grano salis in vino veritas reductio ad absurdum est
.’

Puff!

Kruger’s sword shook slightly as the dart struck his arm. Susan twisted away from the falling edge. Kruger tried to brush the dart from his robe. It stuck thomlike into his palm.

He dropped dead, undone by a nonexistent but convincing South American poison.

Susan stood up, the ropes parting. She threw the remnants of her bondage away.

‘A miracle from the gods,’ breathed Abraham Sofaer, an indescribably ancient high priest.

The cultists prostrated themselves at Susan’s feet. She lost concentration, and the pygmy vanished. His blowpipe remained behind, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile.

‘Yiu keelled heem!’ screeched Lorre, his shaking hands reaching for a revolver. Sofaer nodded, and Lorre was seized by many pairs of dusky hands. The gangster struggled, but was overpowered.

Susan turned away from the churning and screaming and slurping and crying.

‘Heh heh heh,’ heh-heh-hehed the plant.

I
woke up in a terrarium, half in and half out of a stagnant pool. My first priority, I knew, was to make friends with the two craggy, grey alligators who shared my basement prison. In this neighbourhood, every building came complete with an alligator pit. They were
de rigueur
, like swimming pools in Suburbia. The luggage lizards were asleep when I came to. They had sawtooth snores, and were dreaming about eating someone. Someone exactly like me. Lazily they began to stir, showing an unpleasant interest in me. I Dreamed up two sides of beef, fresh butchered and dripping pink and red. The colour bled across the grey stone and vegetation of the pit. At first the beeves were indistinct masses, cold and blurry, but I eventually got a satisfactory materialisation. It was my idea of what an alligator might find appealing.

The male got up first, and wrapped his lantern jaws around a hunk of meat. That aroused his better half.

‘There now,’ I said. ‘Nice ’gators.’

I imagined they were old and slow reptiles, too far gone to chase a sprightly private detective around their pit, content just to chew placidly on a hunk of dead cow.

And they were.

It occurred to me that the minions Kruger had entrusted with the task of feeding me to Heckle and Jeckle had been careless. They had forgotten to lock up, ever eager to hurry back to the endless rounds of torturing and giggling that are the happy lot of a sadistic underling.

I was right.

I decided that what with the big human-sacrifice convention in town, the cultists would be too busy to post any of the grade-A guards, and that the job would fall to Sleepy Joe and the Catnap Kid.

That’s exactly how it turned out.

I slipped past the dozing duo, and found myself in a labyrinth of corridors. The next thing was to find Susan. She had made a difference. We were Dreaming now, reshaping Daine’s hideaway. The more it changed, the more it could change.

Susan was real. A solid-silver doll.

But…

Governor Trefusis had told me there would be two real people around this Dream. Me and Daine. The Princetown psychs hadn’t said anything about sending in a back-up. I had a nasty thought. What if Susan were Daine in disguise? Back in the world, I had barely had a nodding acquaintance with the girl. I couldn’t be expected to tell now whether she was live or Memorex. Becoming a woman wouldn’t be beyond Truro Daine. When he was living in his body, he had it made over so many times that there was hardly any of what he had been born with left.

He/She could be looking for a
Double Indemnity
climax. Just when the hero really needs the girl’s help, she stands revealed as a killer with a long history of leading enslaved men to destruction, a siren wrapped in furs and degeneracy, venom in her veins, murder in her mind…

That’s not the way I wanted it to be, but I had had a lot of disappointments lately.

There were plenty of interesting items in the temple basements. A torture chamber where skeletons hung in tatters on disused racks and in iron maidens, a musty crypt where giant armadillos and wasps crawled between the catafalques, an opium den with rows of blank-eyed imbibers mindwiping themselves, and a laboratory full of bubbling retorts and crackling electrical equipment.

I met Susan on the stairs. She was in a Dorothy Lamour island-princess number that showed her shape. I kissed her. It seemed like the thing to do. She didn’t mind. I kissed her again, putting more into it this time.

I hoped to God she wasn’t Truro Daine.

She pulled away, surprised eyes sparkling, and let her hands play with the back of my neck. I tasted sweet lipstick.

Okay, so it’s mushy, but you always have to have some love interest.

‘Kruger and Lorre are out of the picture,’ she said. ‘I’m the reborn high priestess of Turhan Bey.’

‘Great.’

‘…And the bad news is that some treacherous skitch called the police.’

‘Damn! We’ve got to leave!’

‘Sure. Steal me a mink, would you?’

‘I can do better than that.’

I Dreamed her up a street outfit. I hated to exchange the basic wraparound for a tailored suit, but I had priorities. And staying alive was on top of the list.

‘How did you know my size?’

‘Good judgement. Let’s get out of here.’

It was exciting again, and life was a game of hide and go seek.

There were familiar sirens outside. The cops never go anywhere in the City without alerting all the wrongdoers in the neighbourhood.

By the time we made it to the foyer, a panic had started. Well-dressed suckers were pouring out of the upstairs theatre, barrelling down the rickety spiral staircase, skidding on the highly polished floor. There were others mixed in with the crowd, dressed in indeterminate native outfits, somewhere between Polynesian, gypsy, Masai, Ancient Egyptian and Comanche. I was separated from Susan by a flood of flailing humanity.

‘Outta my way!’ said a big man, knocking me over.

‘Pardon me!’ said a big woman, stepping on me.

A tommy gun rat-tat-tatted into the ceiling. Chinese paper ornaments and showers of dust fell. Everyone freeze-framed. I took the welcome opportunity to stand up.

Two impassive cops in shiny black raincoats levelled guns like the Gestapo rehearsing for a massacre.

Barton MacLane and Ralph Bellamy came through the door. MacLane was smiling, and that was a collector’s item. I could already feel the rubber hosepipe. I was sure this was where I came in.

Someone must have done some extensive informing, because MacLane picked Susan and me out of the crowd without even the pretence of looking around for the usual suspects.

‘Hello, gumshoe. You been a busy boy tonight. Don’t think we didn’t see you around when Claude Rains made with the Lindbergh act, by the way. And that goes for your girlfriend and the punctured cab driver too. You both got a nice long rest coming.’

I put my hands in my coat pockets.

‘You know what?’ snarled MacLane, ‘I wish you would. I’d love to save the taxpayers some money and shoot it out with you.’

I eased out of the pockets and showed him my open, empty hands. The smile went away.

‘Okay, outside!’ he barked at us. ‘The rest of you people, get lost! And don’t do it again.’

We were impersonally helped out of the temple. Bellamy was aw-gosh polite to Susan, but I got some unnecessary shoving. A cop grabbed my wrist and handy-helped me into the street. That wasn’t too pleasant, since he had apparently come direct from a City-wide garlic and limburger cheese sandwich-consumption championship.

What do you know, it had stopped raining outside. The City was still wearing the wet look. Drains were overflowing, and globs of water clung to everything, but it had stopped raining. The air tasted cleaner. Next thing you knew, it would be daybreak. I could picture that: a Technicolor sunrise, and three singing sailors swarming through the docks.

Either we were altering the Dream for ever, or Daine was signalling to us that it was time to get out of his head.

MacLane had us stand against a wall, facing the bricks. Bellamy reported to police headquarters over his two-way wrist radio, wrapping up the case.