“Okay,” I answered, and made sure I didn’t laugh out loud. What I wanted to tell her was Yes, Mother, but I couldn’t, not after what she’d just done for me. To me? Take your pick.

  And I did eat something: a can of Dinty Moore beef stew, fresh off the hot plate. Tasted mighty good, too. Hit the spot, they say. That one hit the spot the way a thousand-pound bomb would have. After it hit, the spot was gone.

  Dora watched me eat, something she didn’t usually do. When she saw me watching her, she licked her lips, once. I didn’t quite choke on a chunk of stewed potato, but I came close. Damn close.

  Since I wouldn’t be giving blood at County General, I called Izzy Berkowitz before I went up, to make sure it was okay. “C’mon,” he said. “You can bend my ear, and maybe I’ll bend yours, too.”

  I got there right around lunchtime. “You want to go to that Mexican place? They were good,” I said. As I talked, I waved my hands at the wall of his office, to give the idea some sort of listening sorcery might be there.

  He understood me right away. “Sure. I haven’t been to El Burro Loco for a couple of weeks myself.”

  I ordered tacos stuffed with tongue. I love tongue when I can get it. He chose carnitas. “Isn’t that …?” I began.

  “Pork?” he finished for me. Then he nodded. “Yep. I like it anyway. I like shrimp, too, and lobster. Cheeseburgers I can take or leave alone. You know what? If I eat stuff I like, the world probably won’t end.”

  What was I supposed to say? That he’d burn in hell forever for doing something I thought was perfectly all right? He’d laugh at me. I’d laugh at myself. I said, “Ask you something?” instead.

  “You were going to, right?” he said.

  “Uh, yeah. That stuff the fylfot boys cooked up, the stuff it isn’t smart to name, if somebody put some of that in a flask of—I dunno, bourbon, or maybe scotch—and lets somebody else have a good snort of it, what happens to the guy who doesn’t know it’s there with the hooch?”

  Our food came then; El Burro Loco was quick. Berkowitz frowned as he focused in tighter on me. “You aren’t making up a hypothetical case.” It wasn’t a question. I took a bite from a taco de lengua. It was damn good. He stayed focused. “That’s interesting. That’s mighty interesting. As far as I know, nobody’s tried to mix it with alcohol. Of course, I don’t know how far I know, because I don’t know how much the people who work with that stuff are publishing.”

  “Okay.” I respected his caution. “Take the hooch out of the picture, then. Suppose you slip somebody a dose in water and he doesn’t know it. How does he act?”

  He chewed a bite of his taco, then swallowed and said, “It’s supposed to taste horrible.” I just looked at him. He pushed at the air with both hands: an apology of sorts. After that, he went on, “If it’s a big enough dose to be effective, what happens is this ….” He stared at me. He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. That gave me the creeps, the same as it had with Frank Jethroe.

  “If you’re drugged like that, could the fellow who did it to you take you to a zombie dealer and get you unsouled? Would you be able to do anything to stop him? Would you have enough gas in the tank to sign the papers?”

  Before he answered, he finished his first taco and ate some of the rice and beans that came with the order. “You do find interesting questions,” he answered. “I’d say the answer to the first and third is probably yes; to the second, probably no. You wouldn’t be running on all cylinders, but on some.”

  “If you were running on all cylinders, you’d clobber anybody who wanted to turn you into a zombie with a crowbar,” I said. Izzy Berkowitz didn’t try to tell me I was wrong. I thought about the schoolboy printing on the forms Jethroe’d filled out. And I thought about the people at PERSONAL ASSISTANCE, PERSONAL ASSISTANTS. They’d known. They’d let it happen anyway. Nothing good deserved to happen to them.

  “Is it anything you can talk to the police about?” the doctor asked.

  “You met Sergeant Jackson,” I said. He twisted up his mouth and gave back a sour nod. I went on, “But he’s in trouble now, and so are some of the people who told him what to do and looked the other way when he did it. Things there may get a little better.”

  “Or they may not,” he answered. “I saw this morning that the cop who blew the whistle on Jackson and the higher-ups is facing burglary charges himself.”

  “Is he? Happy day!” I wished I could’ve sounded surprised, but I wasn’t. You try to take down Los Angeles policemen and they’ll hit back with everything they’ve got. And they’ve been so crooked for so long, they’ve got a lot.

  “I wish we had honest cops. This place would be a lot nicer to live in if we did,” Dr. Berkowitz said.

  Wish for the moon while you’re at it, I thought. I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked him, “How easy is it for people who shouldn’t have that stuff to get hold of it?”

  “Easier than it ought to be. The fylfot boys never should’ve made it to begin with—it didn’t do what they wanted. I think we started fooling around with it to see if we could make it do what they wanted. Gotta keep an edge on the Reds, you know.” Berkowitz sounded as disgusted as he looked.

  If I ran with the Are you now or have you ever been? crowd, I could’ve landed him in trouble. But I ran from those people, not with them. Only fair to let him know it: “Of course, the Reds didn’t catch any fylfot boys of their own. They aren’t working on anything like that stuff themselves.”

  “That’s pretty funny. Tell me another one, why don’t you?” Berkowitz got to his feet. We were both done. He set a buck and a quarter on the table. That was plenty for both lunches and a nice tip. I tried to take the tab myself, but he got hard of listening. So I thanked him and we walked out.

  “Y’know,” I said as we went back toward the blood bank, “we aren’t a hundred percent fubar’d, but some days I swear we’re doing our best to get there.”

  “You and me both, man. You and me both,” he said. Then he asked, “You ever find that vampire you were looking for? Sebestyen, that’s what his name was.”

  “Still looking,” I admitted.

  “Ah. I just wonder—I couldn’t help noticing you’ve been hanging around with a vampire.”

  Hanging around with was a polite way to say screwing. He was a doctor. Not only that, he was a doctor who worked with blood. Of course he’d notice the marks on my neck. Of course he’d understand what they meant. “What if I am?” I said.

  He held up a hand. “No skin off my nose. I wouldn’t care if one wanted to marry your sister. Or my sister.”

  I believed him. He might have a carrot top, but he didn’t try to hit you over the head with how white he was. Well, he was a Jew. The white folks who did that kind of stuff probably did it to him, too. I said, “I don’t have a sister. If I did, I wouldn’t want her marrying Sebestyen.”

  “Oh, neither would I. But it’s not because he’s a vampire. It’s because he’s a schmuck.”

  “Can’t say you’re wrong. I still want to find out what happened to him, though.” Schmuck was a good name for Rudolf Sebestyen, or for anybody else who might want to rob a blood bank.

  When I got down to the office, the zombie janitor was policing up the alley behind the building in his usual slow motion. I wondered how he’d wound up the way he had, and how real his paper trail was. I couldn’t very well ask him. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have other things to think about.

  After a week had gone by, I called Wally Baker. He wasn’t one of those hotshot lawyers who were part of a big outfit like Dewey, Beagle & Howe. He was more like me: a guy doing a job by himself. Like me, he didn’t even have a secretary, just an answering service. When he was in the office, he picked up the phone himself.

  “Offices of the Baker Firm,” he said, the way he always did.

  “What do you know, Baker Firm? This is Jack Mitchell.”

  “Jack!” He sounded glad to hear from me, which was nice. He had his reasons, too. “I’ll buy you dinner for telling me to call the Jethroes. Frank’s gonna come into a nice little chunk o’ change—you better believe he is. O’Flannery and Muldoon, they don’t want that story comin’ out. And a quarter of what they pay Jethroe, guess whose pocket that goes into.”

  “Good for you,” I said, and more or less meant it. Yeah, Wally liked money. Well, who doesn’t? He liked spending money, though, I mean, and didn’t make any bones about it. In the old days, he would’ve sold his sword to whomever paid him most. He does it with his shingle now.

  He did think about me, enough to ask, “You’ll get your slice of the pie, too, right?”

  “Fees and expenses, sure.”

  “Fees and expenses?” He sounded as if we weren’t talking the same language. I guess we weren’t, because he went on, “Never mind the chicken feed, son. You got a piece of the settlement money, too, don’t you?”

  “Nope. I never even worried about it.”

  “Oh. My. Goodness,” he said, just like that, and then, “Bless your heart!” It was the nicest way I’ve ever been called an imbecile, no doubt about it.

  “Never mind that. Once you make this deal for Jethroe, he doesn’t tell his story to anybody. O’Flannery and Muldoon are out some money, but they don’t get in trouble for leasing him out from the shady zombie dealers. That’s how it works, huh?”

  “That’s how it works,” Wally agreed. “They’re making the deal to keep Jethroe from going to court and putting it on the record.”

  “So nothing really happens to them.”

  “Don’t say nothing. Money isn’t nothing to a company. They wouldn’t be willing to give him a dime if they weren’t scared of what’d happen if they said no.”

  “Nothing really happens to them,” I repeated. “And nothing happens to the zombie dealer they got Jethroe from. And nothing happens to the bastards at US Rubber who took him to the dealer and got him turned into a zombie. Does any of that sound fair to you?”

  Wally didn’t answer right away. When he did, he said, “I don’t worry much about what’s fair. I worry about what’s possible.” For a Negro lawyer working in a white man’s world, that’s a sensible attitude. But he hadn’t finished. He went on, “I’ve known you a while now, Jack. As your attorney, I strongly advise you not to do anything stupid. Anything at all. You hear me?”

  “Of course I hear you.”

  “But are you listening to your Uncle Wally?”

  “What?”

  I made him laugh. Then, without heat, he said, “Damn you, it isn’t funny.”

  “I never said it was. What happened to Jethroe’s no joke, either. If I didn’t get lucky, he’d still be out there building the goddamn Hollywood Freeway. He’d have no more idea who he is than my desk chair does. And his wife and kids’d maybe never know what happened to him.”

  “Every word of that’s true. What can you do about it all by your lonesome?” Wally had a knack for asking questions you didn’t want to answer. He wouldn’t have been such a good lawyer without it.

  “Who knows?” I said. I wasn’t in court. I wasn’t under oath. He couldn’t pin me down like a butterfly on display in a collection. We both hung up. I don’t know which of us was more relieved.

  After that, I called Izzy Berkowitz. I told him about some of the things that had been going through my head since the last time we talked. He said, “That all fits together better than I wish it did. What do you want to do about it?”

  I told him that, too. Quickly, I added, “I’m not asking you to do anything. It isn’t your problem.”

  “Like hell it isn’t. What helps the bad guys most is when the good guys sit on their hands. That’s how the fylfot boys got to be what they were.”

  “Okay. Thanks. You’re a mensch, you know?” One more word I got from Al Harris. I wonder if he says ofay these days. I went on, “Let me have your home phone number, too, mensch, so we can talk whenever we need to.”

  He gave it to me. That by itself would’ve told me he took the whole megillah seriously. Megillah? Al has a way of rubbing off.

  Once we’d said our goodbyes, I made one more call. I didn’t know whether Rob Grau would want to talk to me. After all, O’Flannery and Muldoon paid his salary. But he’d done solid work summoning Frank Jethroe’s soul back to his body. And that was what I was interested in talking about.

  “Jack! Good to hear from you! What’s on your mind?” he said after I got put through to him. I wasn’t The Enemy because I’d exposed something nasty his company was doing, anyhow. That seemed promising.

  So I said, “When you were working there in the tent, did you notice anything peculiar about putting Frank Jethroe’s pieces together again?”

  “It was harder than I thought it would be,” he answered at once. “Something didn’t want to turn him loose, something I wasn’t looking for. I’ve never seen anything like it mentioned in the grimoires.”

  “I think I know what it was.”

  “I didn’t think you were a wizard.” By the way Grau said that, I was sure he’d had too many people who didn’t know the first thing about sorcery tell him how to do his job. That would be part of what he got, along with the steady paycheck, for working at a place like O’Flannery and Muldoon.

  “I’m not, but I think I’ve run into stuff like this before.” I told him where and when. “If you figure I’m full of it, tell me so,” I finished.

  “Huh,” he said thoughtfully. “That … may be possible. It matches some of what I saw, or imagined I saw, while I was working the spell. I’ve had some odd dreams since, too, dreams I didn’t want. How about you?”

  “You’d best believe it.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” He whistled tunelessly for a few seconds. “Okay, whatever you’ve got in mind, deal me in. Don’t start right away, though. Give me a little time to do the kind of homework I need first. All right?”

  “However you want it, you got it,” I answered. I was grinning when I set the phone in the cradle. Too many things look easy beforehand but turn out not to be.

  ​XVI

  Dora and I sat in the office waiting. Old Man Mose had got used to her to the point where he didn’t always dive under the sofa when she came in. Sometimes he stayed up on it and insulted her. Today, for instance, he’d greeted her with, “Think you’re pretty hot stuff, don’t you, when you can only come out at night?”

  She’d looked through him, not at him. “Dogs say, ‘People feed us and take care of us. They must be gods!’ Cats say, ‘People feed us and take care of us. We must be gods!’ ”

  “Some people have thought so,” Mose said smugly.

  “Some people are fools,” Dora replied. Old Man Mose licked himself in an indelicate place to show what he thought of that.

  Before they could go on squabbling, somebody else knocked on the door. The cat did disappear then; strangers were liable to have cooking up a feline fricassee in mind. “It isn’t locked,” I said.

  In came Dr. Berkowitz. He took Dora in stride. For one thing, he’d already noticed the marks on my neck. For another, he dealt with vampires at the blood bank all the time. In fact, he said, “We’ve met once or twice, haven’t we?”

  “I believe we have, Doctor, yes,” she answered. I wondered how Old World her attitudes about Jews were, and never mind the ones who kept an eye on Vampire Village from sunrise to sunset.

  Whatever she was thinking, she didn’t show it. That’s all that matters, as far as I’m concerned. White people who spot what I am are welcome to hate me as much as they want. When they let me know they hate me, that’s when we start having trouble.

  Five minutes later, we got another knock. “C’mon in,” I said, expecting Rob Grau. And come in he did. I hadn’t expected him to have company, though. His companion was a short, thin, swarthy woman with gray hair. She was darker than I am, in fact, but her features would make people who cared about things like that call her white.

  “This is Maryam Tuama,” Rob said. “She’s a curator in historical thaumaturgy at the County Museum of Natural and Unnatural History. We’ve known each other a long time.”

  I introduced myself, then Dora and the doctor. “Very pleased to meet you all,” the scholar said. I was pleased to meet her, too. If she knew the kinds of things I hoped she did, she might end up saving our necks.

  Izzy Berkowitz had an old Ford. “We’ll all fit if we’re friendly,” he said.

  “If crowding is a trouble, I can fly down and meet you there,” Dora said.

  “I brought Maryam in my Buick,” Rob said. “It’ll hold us fine.”

  He was right. It wasn’t as fancy as Gallagher’s Cadillac, but it was just as big. Rob and Maryam sat up front, the rest of us in back. Rob put it in gear, and away we went. We got where we were going faster than we would have on the Red Line, I will say that. And a car would be better if we needed a quick getaway.

  Rob parked across the street from the US Rubber factory, in a lot that belonged to a restaurant already closed for the night. The tire factory wasn’t closed. I don’t think it ever closed. During the war, people had had to make do with the tires they already had. New rubber went to the Army. The plants had been working around the clock even after since peace broke out, trying to catch up.

  I felt eyes on me before we got halfway across Scrying Crystal Road. I wasn’t the only one, either. “Hel-lo!” Grau said. “This place is alive! It sure isn’t dead, anyway.”

  “This building …” Maryam Tuama shook her head. “I knew of it, of course, but I never saw it till now. I never wanted to. I never dared to. It is not of our time. I wonder if the men who made it had any idea what they were doing. Did they believe they were only ornamenting it when they built it so? Or were the old gods, the old demons, whispering in their ears back then?”

  Even Dora seemed sobered. “This is old and dark and bloody, more so than anything I knew on the far side of the ocean. Older, darker, bloodier than I dreamed anything in this land could be.”