The Dragons of Babel (29 page)

“Luck be a lady, you're a winner! Twenty gets you forty. Woddayagot? Woddayagot?” Cards face up. Cards face down. Nat shuffled them about. “Twenty gets you forty, you're a winner. Fifty gets you a hundred. Woddayagot?”

Will plonked down his entire roll. He could see the hob edging closer, naked avarice on his face. “Two hundred says the queen's in the center.” He pointed at the card with the turned-up corner.

“Sorry, kid, fifty's the limit.”

The crowd
growled
. Nat looked alarmed and threw up his hands. “All right, all right! Just for today, no limit.” He flipped over the cards. “You're a winner!”

Will accepted his winnings and, smirking, strolled jauntily to the edge of the crowd. Nat started up his spiel again, and the hob shouldered his way to the front, shouting, “I got three hundred says I can spot the queen!”

The hook was set. Nat proceeded to reel the trout in.

“You want in? Woddayagot? One hundred gets you two hundred, three hundred six. Pick the queen, you're a winner. Black card, black card, black card. The queen of cards, the queen of night, la reine d'Afrique, you're a winner. One… two… three… you choose.”

The trout confidently jabbed a finger at the card with the turned-up corner.

Nat flipped it over.

Now came that delicious moment when the trout saw it all: He saw the face of the card whose corner Nat had bent while manipulating it, which was of course
not
the queen whose corner he had smoothed flat again. He saw his money disappearing into Nat's vest. He saw that he'd been cheated, outwitted, and made into a fool. Mostly—and this was the best part of all—he saw that he couldn't unmask Nat as a sharper without admitting to his own dishonesty.

The hob's mouth opened in an outraged O.

With practiced skill, Will slid unnoticed behind the trout, his hand closing about a cosh he kept in one trouser pocket. Just in case. But in the event, the hob indignantly spun on his heel and stormed away.

“Woddayagot, woddayagot?” Will went back to scanning the crowd—and saw that a prosperous-looking haint in a three-piece suit was staring at him, smiling softly. He was too expensively dressed to be bunko, he didn't have the vibe for the left-handed brotherhood, and he for sure wasn't a trout. So what was he?

In that instant Will's worried musings were pierced by a shrill, two-fingered whistle. Esme stood atop a trash receptacle at the corner, waving wildly. She pointed at a huaca in the uniform of the City Garda who had just lumbered past her.

All in a breath Nat swept up cards and money, abandoning the folding table, and the crowd, few of whom had reason to love the gendarmerie, scattered. Will made straight
for the patrolman, gesturing angrily. “Arrest that scoundrel!” he demanded. “He's a cheat. He took my
money!”
The bronze-faced huaca tried to brush past him, but Will stepped directly in his way. “I demand satisfaction!”

“Get the fuck out of my face,” the huaca snarled, and pushed Will aside. Too late. Nat had already slipped down the passageway between the Roxy and the paint store next door and disappeared.

The patrolman rounded on Will. But Will was wearing an Uptown suit with a rep tie, so the huaca couldn't tell if he were somebody who could be roughed up with impunity or not. So he was let go with a chewing-out and a warning.

Will gathered up Esme and because his piano teacher was ill and his fencing master at a competition and so he had no lessons today, they spent the rest of the afternoon playing the pachinko machines in the Darul as-Salam Arcades.

T
hat evening they met as usual in the back room at the Rat's Nose, where Nat regularly held court. Hustlers and trolls, pimps, sprets, thieves, spunks, lubberkins, and hobthrushes came and went, backs were slapped, small favors were promised. Information, much of it minor and the rest dubious, was swapped in voices lowered to the edge of inaudibility. Will nursed a small beer and listened to it all.

He had learned a great deal in the past twelve months. Not just the petty scams and cons by which he and Nat scrounged a living, but the ways of the city as well. He'd learned that in Babel “What the fuck do you want?” meant “Hello,” that “I'm going to have to run you in” meant “Give me ten dollars and I'll look the other way,” and that “I love you” meant “Take off your trousers and lie down on the bed so I can grab your wallet and run.”

He'd also learned that magic came in high and low forms. High magic manipulated the basic forces of existence, and even in its smallest manifestations a badly cast
spell could fill every television set for miles around with snow. Hence it was easily detectable by anyone on guard against it. Low magic, however, could be as simple as the ability to deal a card from the bottom of a deck or to pluck a coin from an imp's ear. Done right, it was undetectable. But even if you were careless and got caught, you still had a decent chance of talking your way out of it if your wits were sharp enough. So, in its way, low magic was the more powerful.

Nat was low magic down to the soles of his feet.

But he wasn't exclusively a small-congrifter. Nat was laying the groundwork—or so he swore—for a long con, something big and fabulously lucrative. To which end, Will spent his free time in an endless round of lessons: music, deportment, diction, fencing… This last Will had almost quit after seeing a rank amateur, waving his epee about as if it were a broom, knock the blade out of his fencing master's hand. But “It is a useless skill and therefore valued,” the swordsfey St Vier had explained. “If you want to kill a gentleman, use a gun. If you wish to impress him, best him with the sword. The latter is far more difficult, however, so I suggest you apply yourself to your studies.”

Now, there was a lull and only they three in the room, so Will said, “Three card Monte is getting old, Nat. It's gotten so that it's a job like any other.”

“You've got a point there, son.” Nat leaned over and peered under the table, where Esme was reading through her collection of comic books for the umpteenth time. “How's it going down there, little grandmother?”

“' Kay,” Esme said abstractedly.

“So when do we—” Will began.

A haint walked through the wall.

He was portly in the manner of the affluent, and wore a three-piece suit with a brocade vest embroidered with suns, moons, and zodiacal signs. Gold watch chains looped from every pocket. His skin was purple as a plum. “Tom Nobody,
you old rascal!” He flung out his arms. “I heard you were back in town.”

“It's Nat Whilk these days, Salem.” Nat stood and they hugged each other with theatrical gusto. Then he said, “Will, this is the honorable Salem Toussaint, alderman.”

The politician had a good handshake and a way of not quite winking as he shook that said, We're all rogues here and so we should stick together. Will liked him instantly. But he did not trust him. “I saw you earlier today,” Will remarked.

“I know you did.” Toussaint turned back to Nat. “Reason I'm here is, I need a white boy to run errands Uptown, where my usual runners might be a smidge conspicuous. Somebody with his eyes open. Discreet. Able to think on his feet.”

“Somebody not terribly honest, you mean,” Nat said.

Salem Toussaint smiled broadly, revealing two gold teeth with devil-runes cut into them. “How well you know me!”

“My boy and I are working on something, but it'll take a few months for me to lay the groundwork. You can have him until then.”

Will was by now too much the professional to say anything aloud. Nevertheless, he turned and stared. Nat laid a hand on his shoulder. “You've got edge, son,” he said. “Now pick up a little polish.”

C
hiefly, Will's job was to run errands in a good suit-and-haircut while looking conspicuously solid. He fetched tax forms for Toussaint's constituents, delivered stacks of documents to trollish functionaries, fixed L&I violations, presented boxes of candied John the Conqueror root to retiring secretaries, absentmindedly dropped slim envelopes containing twenty dollar bills on desks. When somebody important died, he brought a white goat to the back door of the Fane of Darkness to be sacrificed to the Nameless Ones.

When somebody else's son was drafted or went to prison, he hammered a nail in the nkisinkonde that Toussaint kept out in the hall, to ensure his safe return. He canvassed voters in haint neighborhoods like Ginny Gall, Beluthahatchie, and Diddy-Wah-Diddy, where the bars were smoky, the music was good, and it was dangerous to smile at the whores. He negotiated the labyrinthine bureaucracies of City Hall. Not everything he did was strictly legal, but none of it was actually criminal. Salem Toussaint didn't trust him enough for that.

One evening, Will was stuffing envelopes with Ghost-face while Jimi Begood went over a list of ward-heelers with the alderman, checking those who could be trusted to turn out the troops in the upcoming election and crossing out those who had a history of pocketing the walking-around money and standing idle on election day or, worse, steering the vote the wrong way because they were double-dipping the opposition. The door between Toussaint's office and the anteroom was open a crack and Will could eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Grandfather Domovoy was turned to stone last August,” Jimi Begood said, “so we're going to have to find somebody new to bring out the Slovaks. There's a vila named—”

Ghostface snapped a rubber band around a bundle of envelopes and lofted them into the mail cart on the far side of the room. “Three points!” he said. Then, “You want to know what burns my ass?”

“No,” Will said.

“What burns my ass is how you and me are doing the exact same job, but you're headed straight for the top while I'm going to be stuck here licking envelopes forever, and you know why? Because you're solid.”

“That's just racist bullshit,” Will said. “Toussaint is never going to promote me any higher than I am now. Haints like seeing a fey truckle to the Big Guy, but they'd never accept me as one of his advisers. You know that as well as I do.”

“Yeah, but you're not going to be here forever, are you? In a couple years, you'll be holding down an office in the Mayoralty. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if you made it all the way to the Palace of Leaves.”

“Either you're just busting my chops, or else you're a fool. Because if you meant it, you'd be a fool to be ragging on me about it. If Toussaint were in your position, he'd make sure I was his friend, and wherever I wound up he'd have an ally. You could learn from his example.”

Ghostface lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “Toussaint is old school. I've got nothing to learn from a glad-handing, pompous, shucking-and-jiving—”

The office door slammed open. They both looked up.

Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, “One of my constituents is in trouble.”

The alderman was spooky in that way. He had trodden the streets of Babel for so many decades that its molecules had insinuated themselves into his body through a million feather-light touches on its bricks and railings, its bars and brothel doors, its accountants' offices and parking garages, and his own molecules had been in turn absorbed by the city, so that there was no longer any absolute distinction between the two. He could read Babel's moods and thoughts and sometimes—as now—it spoke to him directly.

Toussaint grabbed his homburg and threw his greatcoat over his arm. “Jimi, stay here and arrange for a lawyer. We can finish that list later. Ghostface, Will—you boys come with me.”

The alderman plunged through the door. Ghostface followed.

Will hurried after them, opening the door and closing it behind him, then running to make up for lost time.

Ghostface doubled as Toussaint's chauffeur. In the Cadillac he said, “Where to, boss?”

“Koboldtown. A haint's being arrested for murder.”

“You think he was framed?” Will asked.

“What the fuck difference does it make? He's a voter.”

K
oboldtown was a transitional neighborhood with all the attendant tensions. There were lots of haints on the streets, but the apartment building the police cars were clustered about had sprigs of fennel over the doorway to keep them out. Salem Toussaint's limousine pulled up just in time for them to see a defiant haint being hauled away in rowan-wood handcuffs. The beads at the ends of his duppy braids clicked angrily as he swung his head around. “I ain't done nothin'!” he shouted. “This is all bullshit, motherfucker! I'mna come back an' kill you all!” His eyes glowed hellishly and an eerie blue nimbus surrounded his head; clear indicators that he'd been shooting up crystal goon. Will was surprised he was even able to stand.

The limo came to a stop and Will hopped out to open Salem Toussaint's door. Toussaint climbed ponderously out and stopped the guards with an imperious gesture. Then he spoke briefly with their captive. “Go quietly, son. I'll see you get a good lawyer, the best money can buy.” Will flipped open his cell, punched a number, and began speaking into it in an earnest murmur. It was all theater—he'd dialed the weather and Jimi Begood had doubtless already lined up a public defender—but combined with Toussaint's presence it calmed the haint down. He listened carefully as the alderman concluded, “Just don't attack any cops and get yourself killed, that's the important thing. Understand?”

The haint nodded.

In the lobby, two officers were talking with the doorman. All three stiffened at the sight of haints walking in the door, relaxed when they saw Will restoring the twigs of fennel, and smiled with relief as they recognized Toussaint. It all happened in a flicker, but Will saw it. And if he noticed, how could his companions not? Nevertheless, the alderman
glided in, shaking hands and passing out cigars, which the police acknowledged gratefully and stowed away in the inside pockets of their coats. “What's the crime?” he asked.