“That business goes up from him, remember, not down.”

  Now I wished I hadn’t put down enough to slow my wits. I needed to think straight. “Does it have to do with this stuff?” I asked, and wrote VEPRATOGA on some scratch paper one more time. I didn’t even know if I was spelling it right; I’d only heard it. Hastily, I added, “Don’t say it when you answer.”

  “Yes, I can feel the spiderweb they put out for it,” he said. “You’ve almost got gummed up a few times.”

  “Oh, that,” Old Man Mose said. “I wondered what that was. But I can’t eat it, so it isn’t very important.”

  The way cats look at the world will drive you crazy if you let it. I told myself not to let it, and gave my attention back to Eb. “Are they in the business of moving that stuff?”

  “I don’t know. They’re being careful. I guess that’s why there’s nothing in the files, the way I told you before,” the ghost answered. “They sure know people who know about it, though.”

  “Like the ones down at the US Rubber plant?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said, and then, “Are you guilty of assault down there?”

  “Hell, no,” I said, not without pride. “I’m guilty of battery. And I’d be guilty of landing in the hospital if I hadn’t flattened one plug-ugly and scared off the other one.”

  Technically, Eb was part of the LAPD. I couldn’t prove he wouldn’t give whatever I told him to the big wheels he’d been warning me about. But you have to trust somebody in this old life, know what I mean? He’d never done me wrong yet. I could hope he wouldn’t.

  “You know about the fylfot boys, don’t you?” I said, less at random than you might think.

  “Oh, yes,” he answered right away. “Slaveholders wearing a different shade of gray.”

  “You’re aces in my book, Eb,” I said. Yeah, I felt happier trusting him than most live people I know. “This stuff, it comes from their wizards and doctors.”

  “One more strike against it,” he said. I hadn’t been sure he knew about baseball, either, but he did. “Those who make money from it wouldn’t care if it came from Satan’s druggist, of course.”

  He wasn’t wrong, either. We’ve been picking the fylfot boys’ brains since we beat ’em. They say the Reds have, too. Makes you wonder if anyone in the world has clean hands these days.

  “Doesn’t it just?” Eb said, answering a comment I hadn’t made. He’d never shown me he could read minds before. He added, “You watch yourself, you hear?” and left the same way he’d come in.

  Sometimes I wonder why I bother having a door at all.

  Next morning, feeling more chipper than I would have if Eb hadn’t come by, I found out why I had a door. Somebody banged on it, loud enough to make Old Man Mose vanish under the sofa. Nobody I know knocks like that, not even the landlord when I’m behind on the rent. Which probably meant …. “Who’s there?” I asked, on the off chance I was wrong.

  But I wasn’t. “LAPD!” that somebody growled, as loud as he’d knocked. “Open up!”

  “Have you got a warrant?” I asked.

  A pause. They always hate when you make them play by the rules. As far as they’re concerned, there shouldn’t be any rules. Not for them, anyway. “No,” the voice admitted. “But you better open up irregardless.”

  “Forget it,” I said. Before the cop could start whacking the door again or knocking it down, I went on, “But I’ll come out and talk. You still don’t have permission to come in.”

  I opened the door. Outside stood a cop in a suit, not a uniform. More a suit you’d—or I’d—wear to a club than to an office, but a suit. His mug had look how smart I am written all over it. “You’re a cute boy, Mitchell,” he said, sounding like a cop on a radio show—and like he’d practiced sounding that way.

  “Thanks,” I answered. He scowled; that wasn’t the line I was supposed to feed him. I looked him up and down, as if he were the one under suspicion. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Jackson. Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson.” He preened like a peacock.

  I might’ve known. I guess I had. I kept on being difficult all the same. “Let me see your badge, please. And something with your name and a picture.”

  He fumed, but I wasn’t doing anything I didn’t have a right to do. He flashed the tin. I wrote down the number: 714. Instead of anything with a photo, he handed me an LAPD card with his name and telephone number on it. “This okay, your Majesty?”

  “It’ll do.” I stuck it in my inside breast pocket with my notebook. Then I said, “C’mon. Let’s go for a walk. We can talk outside.”

  He fumed some more. He had to think I was trying to pull him away from the office, which I was. But I wasn’t asking anything too unreasonable, and I look white enough so he couldn’t casually blackjack me or stick a .45 in my face. So we went for a walk.

  The zombie was doing his slow-motion alley sweep. Jackson looked at him the way you would if you stepped in warm cat puke in your socks. “Those damn things give me the heebie-jeebies,” he muttered.

  Since I felt the same way, I didn’t answer. He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer me one, so I fired up one of my own. I wasn’t paying special attention to where I wanted to go, but my feet took us down toward Vampire Village. “What’s on your mind?” I asked him, blowing smoke up to the indifferent sky.

  “Vepratoga.”

  I almost asked him whether he was afraid a couple of squad cars would pull up and take him away. Almost. But I didn’t. I said it before: the fewer cards you show, the better. In that vein, I answered, “What? Never heard of it.”

  “Don’t screw around with me,” he said. “You’re looking for a lugosi name of Sebestyen, right?”

  Now I knew what he called black people most of the time, too. “What if I am?”

  “Don’t screw around,” he repeated. “It’s known he was after that shit. And you asked a high-powered mouthpiece if his high-powered client knew anything about it, which of course the high-powered client don’t.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, walking along when I wanted to stop and kick at the sidewalk. Dora was right—I’d been a jerk to yank Victor Howe’s chain the way I had. Wasn’t the first time. Won’t be the last.

  “So you know more’n you’re letting on,” Jackson said. “Quit playing coy with me, awright? Vepratoga, that’s filthy stuff. You have any at all, it’s a Federal crime. You do hard time, plenty of it.”

  “If it’s a Federal crime, how come the FBI isn’t questioning me?” I asked. The FBI would be more honest than Elmer V. Jackson. It couldn’t very well be less honest.

  “Because I am,” he answered. And that just about sums up the way our fair city works.

  Vampire Village by sunlight is a creepy place. It feels so empty, you’d think nobody lived there. You wouldn’t be far wrong, either. At night, the undead come out, and it’s lively if not alive. Not at this time of day, though.

  A tall, skinny fellow with a bushy gray beard and sidecurls watched us from a corner. He wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed shtreimel: one of the Shabbas-goy Jews who kept an eye on VV when most of the folks who resided there couldn’t. I nodded to him. Soberly, he nodded back. As long as Jackson and I kept walking, we weren’t a problem.

  “Big-nosed bastard,” the sergeant said under his breath. As if lugosi hadn’t, that told me everything I needed to know about what he’d think of me if he ever realized I wasn’t everything he assumed I was.

  We hadn’t got out of sight of that first watcher before we came into sight of another—a woman, this time. “What can you tell me about Sebestyen?” I asked.

  “Only that I don’t know what happened to him, an’ I wish I did. Some higher-ups wanna know, too,” Jackson said. That explained why he was interested. If he was telling the truth, it did.

  “I haven’t found anything,” I said: only too true.

  “You’re messing in places where people with clout don’t want you messing. Don’t you know what happens to fools who keep doin’ that?”

  “I’m doing my job.”

  “Uh-huh. Right. If things happen to you, don’t act all surprised, though. Then you’ll think, I shoulda been smarter.”

  “I think that all the time anyway,” I said, and God knows I meant it. “How much would it cost to get you to help me, or even just to leave me the hell alone?”

  Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson laughed in my face. He laughed so hard, he had trouble stopping. “You ain’t got enough for that, Mitchell,” he said when he finally did. “You ain’t within miles of having enough for that.”

  Since we seemed to have said everything we had to say to each other then, I turned around and started back to the office. Jackson came along with me, so I guess he thought the same thing. He slid into one of those new Studebakers with the rocket nose and drove away. I made damn sure he was out of sight before I went back inside.

  Central Avenue, Saturday night. It was chilly, with the air holding the wet-dust smell that promised rain. The avenue was packed anyway. It always is, of a Saturday night. A few worrywarts carried umbrellas. Most folks looked willing to take their chances.

  Like me, for instance. And Dora. Of course, if it came down hard enough to annoy her, she could always ditch me and fly away. I wouldn’t have bet against her dodging all the raindrops when she did it, either.

  “I went up to the blood bank before I came to meet you. I needed to be filled,” she said, talking about herself as if she were Elmer V. Jackson’s Studebaker.

  “Did you see a doctor named Berkowitz?” I asked.

  She shook her head, setting golden curls flying around it. “Doctors are for taking blood out—when one does not do it oneself, I mean. All I need is a nurse or a clerk to give me the volume I pay for.” I wondered whether she used gold coins or paper money (and whether handling silver certificates would pain her).

  Before I could ask, somebody behind us whistled at her. Well, any guy who saw that shape from behind would be tempted to whistle, too. She turned around and drew back her lips enough to give him a glimpse of her fangs. He was a Negro, but he damn near turned white when she did. He found some other direction to go in as quick as he could.

  “And I am not even hungry,” she said. I laughed, but she sounded wistful. You ask me, blood banks are great. They let the undead hang with the living and not feel the need to treat them the way people treat cattle. But Dora Urban sounded as if she missed the chase.

  She paused in front of the windows of the Madras Trading Company, where I’d been, less happily, a few days before. I happen to know Los Angeles is as close to India as the fellow who runs it has ever been; he’s from Puerto Rico. If you want to hex somebody but you don’t care to pay a wizard, he’ll sell you what you need. Or if someone’s doing that to you, you’d better believe he has wards for sale, too.

  Charms, rosaries, sacred oil, John the Conqueror root, lodestones (which sound ever so much more mystical than magnets), floor wash to clean up evil along with the usual grime … and if none of that fills your bill, you can play the numbers in the back room. I can’t tell you whether Señor Javier pays off the cops or the mob, but nobody gives him any trouble.

  That thought made me ask, “Is any of what he sells any good? Or is he just another con man fleecing the marks?”

  She frowned, pointing to a sign. “I don’t know what goes into goofer dust—”

  “I do,” I said. Dora looked a question at me, so I had to explain: “Graveyard dirt, snakeskins, whatever else the hexer making it up decides to throw in to give it an extra jolt.” My family never messed around with magic like that, which doesn’t mean they pretended it wasn’t there. I wouldn’t carry it if I were silly enough to think that.

  “Ah,” she said. “For my kind, graveyard earth helps; it does not harm. But I can see how it might be used against live people. I am not really familiar with this sorcerous tradition, so I should not speak about it. Dwelling here, I ought to know more. What is this John the Conqueror root, for instance?”

  “Well ….” We were lovers, but she’d embarrassed me anyway. A proper John the Conqueror root looks something like a dark-skinned fella’s ball. You can use them to help your getalong if it needs help. Or you can do bad things to one of those roots and aim them at a man you don’t like. Then his getalong will need help. That’s what I hear, anyhow; I never tried it myself.

  The way I didn’t answer told her most of what she needed to know. “Men are strange creatures,” she observed.

  “We think the same thing about women,” I replied.

  “Women are complex. Men are very simple, and they are also strange. I suppose complexity may seem strange to someone simple.”

  So there, I thought. I didn’t try to tell her she was wrong; she was way too likely to be right. She looked smug—complex maybe, but smug. On her, it looked good.

  Music poured out of open doorways. None of it made me want to pay a cover charge and buy a couple of rounds of overpriced drinks to hear it better. I did wonder whether Jonas Schmitt was pounding on a piano in one of those clubs. A moment later, I wondered whether he was still pounding on Marianne Smalls. If I was lucky, I was all done with them.

  “Do you want to go to Deacon’s when it opens?” Dora asked, which paralleled my thoughts without quite following them.

  If we went to Deacon’s, we wouldn’t go back to my office or my apartment. Yeah, men are very simple. But she’d hired me to help her find her half brother, so not all of what she wanted was the same as what I wanted. “We can do that,” I said with as much grace as I could.

  She smiled. Had she been a live woman, she likely would have fallen down on the sidewalk laughing. “Deacon’s is an interesting place,” she reminded me.

  I remembered all the dark little nooks and hideaways in there. “Not exactly the kind of place I’d pick for something like that, but there are worse ones,” I said. She smiled again.

  A police car went by. It wasn’t after anybody in particular, just patrolling. The red light on top wasn’t spinning around; its siren didn’t scream. Both cops inside were darker than I am. But still, a police car. Nobody in a police car meant well for people who enjoyed places like Central.

  When I was in Italy, my company chased the fylfot boys and the local axes-and-rods fellows out of a village south of Milan. The guy who ran a café there had lived in the States for years, then gone back to the old country. Back home, he passed for rich; that was how he’d bought the eatery to begin with.

  He spoke better English than some fellas who wore the same uniform I did. Youse guys don’t know what it’s like when they come down the street every day, checking everybody, he said.

  I nodded along with all the other dogfaces in the place. He was feeding us. What he could do with some noodles, olive oil, and a little garlic made the miracle of the loaves and fishes seem like an exercise from basic training next to a real battle. Yeah, I nodded.

  But I knew what that was like, all right.

  ​XI

  When things on Central slowed down as much as things on Central ever slow down, we went to that dark little side street and worked our way along the boardwalk till we got up to Acolyte Adams. He stiffened when he recognized me. That didn’t stop him from taking my money, though.

  After he had it, he said, “You aren’t going to make trouble, are you?”

  “Not that kind,” I answered. It seemed to satisfy him—he waved Dora and me into the place.

  You never know beforehand what will happen at Deacon’s. You aren’t always sure afterwards what did happen, either. The only thing you can be sure of is that you’ll have bought at least two massively overpriced drinks before you get out. I had a Wild Turkey and Dora chose a Bloody Mary, same as we had the first time we went in.

  Before the drinks came back, a tall white man in top hat and white tie who was working his way through the crowd plucked a silver dollar from my nose and a quarter from Dora’s ear. “That is strong sorcery, considering what I am,” she said, baring her teeth to show him exactly what she was.

  He didn’t panic, the way the guy on the street had. He swept off the topper and bowed, though how he found the room to do it I can’t tell you. His scalp shone in the strange lights; he shaved his head. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I hope the silver didn’t alarm you or endanger you.”

  “It surprised me,” she answered, “and I am not easily surprised. As I told you, strong sorcery.”

  He bowed again. I wondered if I should be jealous. “The strongest sorcery there is,” he said: “No sorcery at all.”

  Dora frowned. For once, though, I knew what he was talking about where she didn’t. “Oh!” I said. “You’re from the Magic Castle!”

  “At your service, sir,” he said, and I got a bow of my own. “Have you visited us?”

  “Afraid not, but I have heard of you. It’s a wonderful idea,” I said. The Magic Castle sits up in the Hollywood Hills. It is what it says it is: they put on magic shows, most of them much fancier than the kind of thing he was doing at Deacon’s. The joke is, there’s no magic in them. It’s all sleight of hand and hidden wires and whatever else they can think of. Some of it, a real wizard would have trouble matching.

  He pulled a card case out of thin air, the way he’d pulled the dollar out of my nose. With a flourish, he opened it and handed me one. I took it warily, half expecting it to burst into flames or something. But it didn’t. It said he was Thomas Rivers, Prestidigitator Extraordinaire. Extraordinaire he was.

  “Use my name if you want to watch what we do,” he told me.

  “Obliged. Much obliged.” I gave him my card, too.

  He did me the courtesy of looking at it before he stowed it away. “I make illusions. You pierce them,” he said.

  “Sometimes,” I answered. “When I’m lucky.”