For a while. Till I was broke again. That’s how things go.

  He didn’t care that I crossed his palm with silver. I have no idea how he knows what coins are, but he does. He took me down to the bottom of the hill, then waited for the next person who wanted to fly up.

  Before I went back to the office, I stopped at Allums Drugs on Central. The cat who does their photo developing lived down the street from me when we were kids. “Hey, Terence,” I said. “I’ve got six or eight on this roll. Can you give me prints by tomorrow morning?”

  “Could be. Afternoon for sure,” he answered.

  “Morning’d be better.” Which meant I’d slip him something when I got ’em. You have to keep the wheels greased.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Which meant he’d take care of it.

  “Nine o’clock?”

  “Half past.”

  “Thanks, man. That’ll work.” I headed out. You know the folks who say it’s not what you know, it’s who you know? They’re so right. I wouldn’t have to shell out as much cumshaw as a stranger who needed rush prints would, either. If a stranger could’ve got Terence to do the job at all.

  When I finally did get back to the office, daylight was leaking out of the sky. Where? Down into the Pacific, probably. Old Man Mose sniffed when I walked in. Literally, I mean: he said, “You smell happier than you did before.”

  “I took care of something that needed doing,” I said. He thought all the complications between men and women were stupid. If a lady cat wasn’t interested, he knew. He knew if she was, too. If some other tomcat also knew, Mose tore him up before he jumped on her. Life’s simple when you’re a cat.

  When you’re my kind of animal, though …. I didn’t have to know why Marianne Smalls was running around on Lamont, not to do my job, but I wanted to. You like it when the puzzle pieces fit together in your head. Did she aim to set sail in the big white world? Was that it? Was that all of it? Or any of it? Was Lamont a stingy bastard? Was he just a Sad Sack in the sack?

  I didn’t know what had happened to Frank Jethroe yet, either. All I did know was that Pat Brannegan had told me some lies. That was interesting, anyway. You don’t lie for the sake of hearing yourself lie. You lie because the truth’s bad. I wondered whether Clarice Jethroe or anybody else would ever see Frank alive again.

  The chair behind my desk creaked and squeaked when I sat down in it. I opened the drawer with the Wild Turkey in it and took a slug. If I got soused, I wouldn’t have to wonder about things. I liked that idea.

  “Why do you drink that stuff?” Old Man Mose said. “It stinks. So do your cigarettes. Your nose must not work right.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, and took another slug. The bourbon punched like Sugar Ray. I didn’t want it to KO me, just to leave me loopy. Not caring whether I wondered or not, that was what I was aiming for.

  I missed. Like most of us, I’ve spent a lot of my life missing. I wondered what had happened to Rudolf Sebestyen, too.

  There was the bottle. One more good glug and I wouldn’t be able to wonder any more for a while. Or walk. A big chunk of me thought that’d be great. But still I persisted in wondering.

  So instead of opening up the bottle, I opened my address book. There was the number I wanted. I spun the chair around and peered through the closed slats on the venetian blinds. Not much light leaked in. What there was, was gray. The sun would be down. I dialed the number.

  It rang three or four times. Then somebody picked it up. “Hallo?”

  A woman’s voice. “That you, Miss Urban?” I said.

  “It is, yes, Mister Mitchell,” she answered, so I didn’t have to tell her who I was. “You have learned something of importance?”

  “No. I wish I had. I just wanted to ask more questions, that’s all.”

  “This is not a bad thing. You are at your office?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I will see you soon.” She hung up. So did I. I looked over to the sofa, wanting to tell Old Man Mose she was coming. He knew; cats’ ears are better than people’s, too. He’d either dived under or got the hell out of there. I shut the bourbon drawer. Dora would know I’d been drinking anyway, but that didn’t mean I had to advertise it.

  A knock on the door: formal, precise. “Come in,” I said, formal myself. I didn’t know whether she needed a new invitation for a place she’d already visited. In case she did, I gave her one.

  The door opened. She could do that. I’d already seen she didn’t have to. She wore something elegant and expensive looking and a few years out of style. That didn’t matter. Whatever she wore, it looked good on her and she looked good in it.

  She sat down on the sofa. What she sat on was as much cat hair as cloth, but she didn’t care. I suspected the fluff wouldn’t dare cling to her dress.

  Those green eyes focused on my face like searchlight beams. “Ask your questions,” she said. She didn’t tack on if you still remember them, but I heard it anyway.

  “What kind of things have you and your half brother been moving in and out of Hungary?” I said. “Does that have anything to do with why he’s disappeared?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said carefully. “We’ve brought in a few packing cases from the old country, and also a bit of soil.”

  “Packing cases,” I echoed. Wild Turkey or not, I could still think after all. Maybe it even freed up what passes for my brain. “Do you mean coffins? And the dirt from where they’d been buried?”

  “That’s right.” Her voice sounded as calm as if she was undead. Which she was, even if I had to remind myself every so often.

  “Did these coffins have anybody in them?”

  She looked amused. “No one living.”

  Well, I believed that. “The government of Hungary doesn’t have any worries about what you’re doing?”

  Dora still looked amused. “The government of Hungary, no matter what it may be, listens to the concerns of everyone inhabiting the country.”

  She wasn’t just amused. Her word choice seemed as precise as her knock. She didn’t say living in. Oh, no. I said, “Even after everything that’s happened?”

  “Of course. This regime is more Red than the one before, but you may take that in more than one way.”

  How many vampires were running things in Budapest? I didn’t have the nerve to come out and ask. Instead, I tried, “What does Uncle Joe think of that?”

  “It is not of great concern.” She couldn’t have been more indifferent.

  I doubted whether Uncle Joe would agree. But that had nothing to do with me. I said, “You told me your little business was having trouble with the city. Till I poked you about it, you didn’t tell me it was having trouble with the Feds.”

  “They do not understand the situation. If they did, they would realize it is to their advantage to let us proceed. Our business roots folk like us more securely here. How could anyone in Washington think that a bad thing?”

  “Those people wonder whom you’re dealing with,” I said. Are you now or have you ever been? rolled through my head again. I had no idea how old Dora Urban was or what all she’d ever been. Okay, she looked somewhere not far from my age. And what did that prove? She might have talked shop like this with some Greek snoop who was working with Aristotle, too.

  “We deal with familiar folk,” she said. “Politics come and go, as people come and go. We endure. We are the true Reds. The ones who use the name now? Only another ripple on the lake. The wind that pushes it up will blow by, and it will flatten out again.”

  She seemed to believe it. The House Un-American Activities Committee didn’t. Me? I have to tell you, I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t. The Reds—the Reds who take their marching orders from Moscow—don’t look as though they’re going away by next Tuesday. As far as I can see, they’ll last at least as long as I do.

  For me, that’s all that really matters. I won’t worry about what happens after I’m not around to see it. To Dora, I had to seem like Old Man Mose, or maybe more like a mayfly, worrying it was getting old because afternoon had come.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked. “Whatever it is, it grips you.”

  She’d done things like that before. I wondered how she could tell. Smell, like Mose? I didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. Instead, I told her. Why not?

  “People come and go, yes, but they are not cats”—her nostrils flared—“or insects. They do not endure, but they pass memories down through the years, down through the centuries. They bind time, as we do. They would be more dangerous if they did it better.”

  A more serious answer than I’d looked for. She was gorgeous, and she had brains—or enough experience to do duty for brains. Yes, I knew she was a vampire. She’d been around a lot longer than I had. I’d thought that a couple of minutes earlier. I didn’t know how much longer, but a lot came close enough.

  And I’d seen she was a heck of a lot stronger than I was. Just the two of us in the office, unless Old Man Mose was under the sofa. She could do whatever she wanted with—to—me. Somehow, I didn’t care. A beautiful blonde with brains? I could do worse, even if I was more interested in the brains than what color the hair on top was.

  She laughed. “Now I know what is on your mind.” Sure as hell, she smelled it on me. She and Old Man Mose had more in common than either one of them cared to admit.

  I felt as if I could have lit an Old Gold on my ears. “Yeah, well …” I mumbled. If I’d been standing up, I would’ve scuffed one foot against the rug.

  “It is a compliment,” Dora said. “It is a compliment unless you get stupid about it, anyway. I do not expect that from you. For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are wise.” She winked at me. I couldn’t’ve been more surprised if she’d jumped up and turned a cartwheel. While I picked my jaw back up off the floor, she went on, “Yes, I saw the stupid film. How do you feel about movies that show Negroes as clowns or apes?”

  “They make enough of ’em. They make too damn many of ’em.” I can pass at least as well as Marianne Smalls can. Sometimes I do, for work or because I don’t want to waste time on all the trouble that comes with being born what and where I was. The difference between her and me is, I don’t want to do it all the time. I can’t lie to myself that way.

  “I understand. Some of us were finished on account of that film,” she said. I nodded; I believed her. Musingly, she went on, “There was talk of … calling on the star. It came to nothing. We decided that would bring more hatred down upon us. I wonder whether we reckoned wrong.”

  “Chances are you were right. What you would’ve got afterwards ….” If half the country were Negro or Jewish or vampire, it wouldn’t work the way it does. But half the country isn’t, and it does work that way.

  “So it seemed to us, too. All the same, I wonder. Revenge is a pleasure we can enjoy.” Dora paused, considering. “Sometimes, under the right circumstances, we can still enjoy some of the others as well, among our own kind or with yours. Sometimes. Not often.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said. If I’d been wearing a tie, I would’ve wanted to run a finger under my collar to loosen it up. I still had my work shirt on, and my top button wasn’t buttoned. I felt the urge just the same.

  “It is.” She stood up. I did, too, bracing for whatever came next. Whatever it was, bracing myself wouldn’t stop it. I knew that, and did it anyhow. What came next was her saying, “Now you must excuse me. I have other engagements for this time when I may have engagements.”

  As she did the first time she visited me, she walked out through the door without bothering to open it. It didn’t blindside me now. It did remind me the laws of nature aren’t nailed down as tight as we think most of the time.

  Old Man Mose came out and hopped up onto the couch, taking care to stay as far as he could from where she’d sat.

  “How big an idiot are you, exactly?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Big enough, I’d say.” He didn’t try to tell me I was wrong. Unlike people, cats don’t waste time talking nonsense.

  ​VII

  I bopped into Allums at a quarter past nine the next morning and headed straight back to the camera and film counter. Terence nodded from behind it. “Hey, Jack! What do you know for sure?” he said.

  “I know I want to see those pictures,” I said.

  He pulled an envelope from a drawer on his side. “Here you go. Negatives are in here, too. Comes to a buck eighty-five.”

  I gave him a five and waved away change. He’d worked late for me, or else early. Then I opened the envelope. That little camera was the real deal, you bet. The photos were just what I’d hoped they’d be. “Thanks, man!” I said. I took out the negatives and gave them back to him. “Hang on to these, okay? If I need ’em, I’ll ask for ’em.”

  He looked at me. “Like that, huh?”

  “Well, it could be. I try not to take chances I don’t have to.”

  “You old soldier, you.” Terence had fought in the Low Countries and good old Fylfotland. The war was winding down by then, but it wasn’t over. The limp he walked with proved that.

  “Old soldiers. Bold soldiers. Ain’t no old bold soldiers,” I said. He chuckled as if I were joking.

  After I thanked him again and promised to take him to Deacon’s—he’d heard of the joint but never been there—I went back to the office and called Lamont Smalls. I don’t know if I got the same operator or a different one, but, whoever she was, she put me straight through without any back talk.

  “Good morning, Mister Mitchell,” he said when he picked up the phone. “What’s the good news?”

  “Well, I’ve got a couple of things you may want to see,” I answered.

  “I can be there by ten forty-five, if that’s all right with you.”

  “See you then,” I told him. We said our goodbyes and hung up.

  I’d got to Allums early. Smalls knocked on my door a couple of minutes after ten thirty. I called for him to come on in; it wasn’t as if I had clients lined up ahead of him in a waiting room or anything.

  “What do you have?” he asked, direct as a hungry hound hoping for a hunk of ground round.

  An envelope lay on my desk, one that didn’t show where the pictures inside came from. I didn’t open it yet. “Before I show you these, you’ve got to know you won’t like what you’re gonna see. I don’t want you blowing up, you understand me?”

  He gnawed at that scrawny mustache of his. “I hear you.”

  I still didn’t pass him the envelope. “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be good.” He gave me a sarcastic two-fingered salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  Somebody like Lamont Smalls really might’ve been a Boy Scout when he was a kid. I sure hadn’t, or wanted to. But he’d done what he could do. I passed him the envelope. He opened it, took out the pictures, and looked at them one by one. “This is in front of Schmitt’s place,” I said.

  For a few seconds, I don’t think he heard me. The photos hit him hard; I could see that. Knowing what you know and seeing what you know, they’re two different critters. I was glad I’d got as much of a promise out of him as I had.

  After he pulled himself partway back together, he neatly put the prints back in the envelope and remarked, “I don’t see any negatives here.” He sounded almost like his regular self.

  “That’s right. I can give them to you eventually.”

  He made a face, but he didn’t make a fuss. “All right,” he said, even if we both knew it wasn’t.

  “I’ve got some bourbon, if you need it,” I said.

  He shook his head and smiled. It was pretty ghastly, but he made the effort. “Appreciate it. No thanks, though. They’d smell it on me when I got back. Or they’d smell the Sen-Sen.” He tapped the envelope with the manicured nail of his right index finger. “These are good, Mister Mitchell. They’re very good—don’t get me wrong. But they aren’t enough.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I feared I already knew the answer.

  “She’s going to leave me. She’s going to divorce me. For that stinking white son of a bitch, she’s going to divorce me.” No, Lamont Smalls didn’t blow up. He hissed like a venomous snake instead. He was scarier that way, let me tell you. He went on, “She thinks she’s going to take me to the cleaners, too. If you’re a man in Los Angeles, alimony is a four-letter word.”

  He wasn’t the first fellow who ever told me that. I knew he wouldn’t be the last, either. “Those pictures ought to throw a monkey wrench into that little plan,” I said.

  “They aren’t enough,” he repeated. “I want—I need—pictures of her and the goddamn piano man in the sack together. I want to see her lawyer’s face when he gets a look at them. I really want to see her face when he tells her she won’t get one thin dime out of me, but that’s probably too much to ask for.”

  Did he want those pictures for dear Marianne’s mouthpiece or for himself? There are people who cut themselves for the fun of it, for the thrill of it. I don’t get that; pain hurts, dammit. But it happens. I wondered if Smalls was that way. I wondered if he was after the sick kick of lacerating himself with photos of his wife in Jonas Schmitt’s arms. And yes, to a black man the cut would go even deeper, draw even more blood, because her lover was white.

  I couldn’t ask him. Even when a man’s paying you, you don’t get the right to ask questions like that. Slowly, I said, “That kind of picture isn’t as easy to get as you’d think from the stories.”