The Four-Night Run (8 page)

14

D
ONNIE
G
UILLEN

After the Contessa swept back out of the room, Scrbacek glanced up at the girl sitting on the bureau with the gun. “Does she have to be here while I dress?”

“Reggie insists,” said Donnie with a shrug.

“And if Reggie insists, then I guess there’s no—”

“That’s right,” said Donnie with a smile.

“Okay, then,” said Scrbacek as he searched the pile of clothes for his boxers. He slipped them on under the sheets before getting out of bed and starting with his pants. He tried to keep his swollen, purpled arm as still as possible. Even so, and even with the drugs, the pain at first was hard to bear, but the more he moved the arm, the less the pain restricted his movements.

“All these people,” said Scrbacek, gingerly pulling on his jeans. “The old woman with the beard, Squirrel, the Lady Baltimore, Regina, that girl up there on the bureau.”

Donnie looked up at her and smiled. “The Nightingale.”

“Yes. Who are they?”

“Friends. We kind of live together here. Some of us, anyway. Squirrel has a rough operating room in a house on Garfield, and Elisha has a place in the Marina District, but they all help me with my work.”

“What exactly is your work?”

“Same as before. I’ve always been good with my hands. I build stuff for people, fix stuff. Work on my projects.”

“Projects?”

“Hurry up and dress, and I’ll show you.”

“No more guns, I hope. You’re staying out of trouble, right?”

“I live in Crapstown, Mr. Scrbacek. There’s only trouble here.”

“So I’ve found.” Pause. “Thank you, Donnie. For taking me in and finding me that doctor, or whatever the hell he is. I probably would have died there on your stoop if you hadn’t answered the door.”

Donnie looked at the floor and kicked at the splintering wood. “I don’t think I’d have done too well in prison, Mr. Scrbacek. Some of the people there, man, they deserve to be there, they’re, like, dangerous. You did a good thing keeping me out.”

“I was just doing my job.”

Donnie shrugged. “Most court-appointed lawyers wouldn’t have cared like you cared, and that made all the difference. You pulled out all the stops for me. So when I saw you lying there looking half-dead on the front porch, I figured I owed you.” Donnie let out a laugh. “Man, you were a mess.”

Scrbacek nodded. “Someone is trying to kill me.”

“I know.”

“I have to get out of here, get out of Crapstown, get out of the state.”

Donnie turned to look behind him and then back at Scrbacek. “That’s probably a good idea. Especially the getting out of here part. Do you know where you’d go?”

“No idea.” Scrbacek struggled as he slipped a white T-shirt over his lame arm and then a soft white long-sleeved shirt over that, buttoning the buttons carefully. He found he could use his left hand as long as he didn’t need any strength from his arm beyond bare movement. “Thanks for the clothes.”

“Elisha cleaned what we could save, but the shirt, it was totaled.” Then in a hushed tone, like a conspirator, he said, “So what do you think?”

“I think I’m in serious trouble,” said Scrbacek.

“No. About her.”

“Who?”

“Elisha.”

“Baltimore?”

“Isn’t she wonderful?”

“The Lady Baltimore?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. She’s very spiritual.”

“She’s a drug-addicted stripper, Donnie.”

“Well, see, that’s what makes her so special. She’s employed, has outside interests . . .”

“Donnie.”

“She’s more than just her struggle, Mr. Scrbacek. You’re on the run now—you should know that as well as anyone.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “We found the money in your boot. I had to pay Squirrel, and I used some of it to buy the medicine, the new clothes, and to pay Elisha, because, well, that’s what I did with it. And then I had to give some to the Contessa to get her to come. This is what’s left. Fifteen hundred or about.”

“The Contessa must be expensive,” said Scrbacek as he put the wadded bills in his back pocket.

“But she’s worth it.”

“What exactly does she do?”

“She reads the future.”

“Ahh, now I recognize the name. She’s the fortune-teller on the boardwalk.”

“You know her?”

“I’ve passed her shop.”

“She’s got a good sign, doesn’t she? ‘Contessa Romany: The Mistress of Tarot.’”

“Send her home, Donnie.”

“It wasn’t easy to get her to come. She doesn’t like it in Crapstown. I had to almost beg. Though the bills I gave her from your stash helped.”

“Donnie, I don’t want any help from the Contessa. One of my fondest hopes is that I go through my life never having been helped by a contessa. Send her home.” He stopped dressing and looked at Donnie. “I have a lot of questions.”

“I know you do.”

“About the things that are happening. About Malloy. About something called the Inner Circle.”

Donnie spun around and looked behind him and then back, letting out a soft “Shh.”

“But most of all,” said Scrbacek as he put on his socks and slipped on his boots, “I need to find out who’s trying to kill me.”

“That’s why the Contessa is here.”

“Donnie, no.”

“Come on,” he said. “She’s setting up downstairs. But I want to show you something first.”

“I’m not paying a hundred more bucks to have my fortune told by some Gypsy fraud.”

Just then, the Nightingale hopped down from the bureau, moving with the athletic grace of a gymnast. She was short and lithe, pretty in a boyish way, with short dark hair, and she carried an AK-47, the trigger pointing to the sky and the barrel leaning on her shoulder. Fastened to the barrel’s tip was some sort of tube, black and wider than the rest. She didn’t say a word. She just stared at Scrbacek for a moment and then tilted her head toward the exit.

Scrbacek’s eyes widened before he grabbed his raincoat and followed Donnie out the door.

Donnie led Scrbacek through a dark hallway, the noise of the ever-
present television growing louder, and down a stairwell with a rickety
handrail. The Nightingale trailed the two of them, the gun still perched on her shoulder. At the landing, they passed into a hallway to the right and came to a room at the back of the house. Donnie turned a switch, and two hanging industrial fixtures clicked and blinked and finally hummed to life, filling the room with a harsh light that forced Scrbacek to cover his eyes until they adjusted.

“This is my shop,” said Donnie.

The room was large, with workbenches lining one of its walls. It smelled of oil, and solder, and burned and twisted metal. Beside one of the benches was a scatter of large metal tanks, one tank still attached to a torch, heavy goggles hanging from the tank’s nozzle. Scrbacek walked slowly around the room, studying the workbenches, the tools, and the piles of material.

In the center was a table with a sheet spread over something large and irregular that sat flat on the tabletop. And in the four corners were bizarre conglomerations of twisted metal that stood tall on wooden pallets, each about seven feet in height, roughly cylindrical in shape. At first they looked like pieces of junk joined together haphazardly, possibly by chance bursts of lightning. But as Scrbacek examined them one by one, he could see coherent shapes and forms assert themselves through the jumbles, as if each contained something of great beauty struggling to pull itself out of the chaos. They reminded Scrbacek of Michelangelo’s prisoners wrestling to free themselves from their cages of stone.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” said Scrbacek.

“It’s just something I do.”

Scrbacek kept walking, slowly, as if at a gallery, examining everything, and then he stopped at one of the workbenches, where he spotted a pile of steel wool, rows of narrow brake lines with holes drilled through them, a cylinder filled with stiff metal drill rods. He picked up a wide piece of metal tubing painted a flat black and hefted it in his hand.

“What do you make here, Donnie?” said Scrbacek. “I mean, besides the art.”

“Stuff,” said Donnie. “Little things I can sell. I learned metalwork at vo-tech, and I’ve been doing it ever since, but mostly it’s the sculptures. I like it when the metal starts to heat, and then glows hot and becomes soft enough to play with. I like cutting through steel with the torch. I like the feeling of control it gives me.”

“You know, you could get a job doing this. I bet there’s a high demand for experienced metalworkers.”

“Yeah, maybe, but then there’d be some foreman with hairy knuckles telling me what to make and I’d be doing their work instead of my own. Let me show you something else.”

Donnie walked over to the table covered by the sheet.

“This is the main project I’ve been working on,” said Donnie. He stood there for a moment, staring down at the table, gripping the sheet by its edges. “Something new.”

When he yanked the sheet away, what lay underneath glistened with so hard a brightness it took Scrbacek a moment to realize exactly what it was he was seeing.

It was a model of a city—streets and houses, skyscrapers and parks, all hammered and welded from blocks of polished steel. Breathtakingly intricate, random and ordered, primitive and rough, it reminded Scrbacek of the great visionary art of the American South, tinfoil palaces made by men and women who had been touched by the Lord and thereby inspired to make their devotions substantial. And this thing, too, formed of secondhand junk, seemed charged with a divine electricity. It held, this vivid cityscape, a vision of hope and promise and dignity, a vision of Casinoland and Crapstown joined as brothers, a vision of a shining city by the sea. But there was also, suffused in every weld, evident in every surface, amidst all the glittering facets of metal, a sadness, because it was a silver urban paradise that never was and never would be.

Scrbacek stared at this complex metal thing, stunned by its mystery, gripped by sensations that stirred him deeper than he could understand. “This is magnificent,” he said.

“You know what I call it?”

Scrbacek looked up at the grinning young man.

“New Town C-Town,”
said Donnie. “I like the rhythm of the words, don’t you?
New Town C-Town
.”

Scrbacek looked down at the cityscape again, the familiar streets and the shining buildings formed from cast-off metal. He pointed to a large cube of polished steel. “What’s that?”

“That’s a community center. Next to it is a public pool. Then a school, see? Surrounded by homes. Out here is the industrial park, factories and high-rises where everyone works. And there’s the music hall and the basketball arena. We’re going to have a basketball team, D-League only, but still. And when they’re not playing ball, there are going to be shows, rap stars from all over the country, dance concerts. You like Kanye? He’ll come—I know it. And out there, in the park, they’ll be playing touch football in leagues all season long. And softball. And having barbecues. And there’s the playground, the kids scrambling through a fort to get to the slide. You know where I got the idea for doing this?”

Scrbacek looked up again, tilted his head without saying a word.

“From Malloy,” said Donnie. “He saw some of my other stuff and suggested I make a model. So I tried it, and then the dreams started.”

“Dreams?”

“That’s where I got most of it. And you know what? It’s more than just a sculpture, Mr. Scrbacek. It’s a blueprint.”

“Of what?”

“The future.”

“For who?”

“For us.”

“Who is us, Donnie?”

“We’ve got to go now, Mr. Scrbacek. The Contessa Romany, she’s waiting.”

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“I can’t. Not yet, at least.”

Scrbacek looked back down at the cityscape.
“New Town C-Town
.
”
He traced a finger across the edge of one of the steel rooftops. “You ever hear of anything called the C-Town Furies?”

“It’s time to go, Mr. Scrbacek,” said Donnie as he tossed the sheet back over the model. “Really.”

“Some gang, supposed to be nasty as all hell, out to take over all the other gangs in the city. So tough it can even challenge Caleb Breest. Is that what you’re messed up in?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. It’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it like, Donnie? Because I have the feeling my life is depending on it. Tell me what it’s all about.”

Donnie walked to the door and switched off the lights. Darkness fell like a blow. “We need to go, Mr. Scrbacek.”

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“I owe you, Mr. Scrbacek. I know I do. But there are limits to everything. Come on. We don’t want to keep the Contessa waiting.”

15

T
HIS
I
S
T
AROT

“We are almost ready,” said the Contessa Romany to the assembled crew, many of whom Scrbacek had never seen before. “Just one moment please and we begin.”

In a dimly lit room in the front of the house, they perched on a ratty couch covered in ripped batik cloth, they leaned against water-stained walls, they sat with arms around their knees on the rough wooden floor. The Contessa herself presided at a table set in the room’s middle. Behind the Contessa stood a squat young man with features remarkably similar to the Contessa’s, his huge arms crossed. A chair opposite the Contessa was empty, obviously meant for Scrbacek, who leaned against the front doorframe, as far from the table as he could get, now wearing his raincoat, creased wildly from the wash and with a jagged hole in its sleeve. Atop a crimson cloth covering the table were two white candles in golden holders, an intricately worked metal egg with a stick of incense rising from its top, and a wooden box painted with a pattern of leaves and flowers.

A match flared with a hiss. Carefully the Contessa Romany lit first the candles and then the incense. A thick musk floated from the smoldering stick. The Contessa leaned down, and from beneath the table came soft music, something dusky and haunting with a woman’s voice singing notes without words, rising almost loud enough to drown out the television noise from the floor above.

“If someone, please, turn off these lights,” said the Contessa.

The room fell dark except for the thin flickering flames of the two candles and the glowing stick of incense.

“Thank you, darling. And now you,” she said, pointing at Scrbacek. “Please. Yes, you. Come sit. It is you who has the question, am I correct?”

“I’m not sure . . .”

“If you don’t want to,” said Elisha, “I’ll go. Contessa, I bought this stock, and I was wondering—”

“It’s for the beagle, not you,” snapped Blixen. “We can read your future clear enough. It’s in your G-string.”

“Take a seat, Stifferdeck,” said Regina, the gun now in her belt. “It’s time to hear some truth about you for once.”

“Come now, don’t be afraid, darling,” said the Contessa. “I don’t bite. Just a nibble now and then.”

Scrbacek hesitated, and then slowly walked toward the open chair. The musk of the incense floated through him as he approached. When he sat, only the table and the Contessa were illuminated in the soft yellow light of the candles. All else was cast in a deep shadow.

“You are in middle of terrible crisis, is that correct?”

Scrbacek turned to search for Donnie, couldn’t find him in the shadows, turned back, and nodded.

“Good. Now you must know the cards, they do not only read for me your future. If spirit it is with you, they can also tell what it is you must do in this terrible time. Are you ready, Mr. . . . ?”

“Scrbacek.”

“Scrbacek? Strange name, Scrbacek. From where come your people?”

“Egypt.”

“Really? From Egypt? Maybe we are somehow related. Maybe thousand years ago we had same cousins.”

“And he’s got a third nipple,” shouted out Blixen.

The Contessa started. “Is this true, cousin?”

Scrbacek winced and then nodded.

“Show me.”

Scrbacek unbuttoned his shirt and lifted up his T-shirt.

The Contessa raised a candle to Scrbacek’s flesh and peered close. She rubbed a single finger gently over the small hairy protrusion below his left nipple. Her finger was cold and rough.

“The spirits truly are with you, Scrbacek.”

“I told you,” said Blixen.

“Let us begin,” said the Contessa as Scrbacek rebuttoned his shirt. She carefully removed the lid from the wooden box and unwrapped a covering of black velvet to reveal an aged deck of cards, with moons and stars on the backs. She lifted the cards in her two open palms and raised them over her head. The candlelight flickered off her gaudy rings.

“This is tarot,” she said loudly. “Its secrets have been passed in our family from mother to daughter for centuries. This very set of cards has traveled from far reaches of Transylvania, through all of Europe, over great Atlantic Ocean to this place by the sea. This is tarot.”

The others in the room repeated in soft voices,
“This is tarot.”

“This is tarot,” continued the Contessa. “Originated in time of Ra, it is great tradition of our people. We are not owners of tarot, we are its vessels. It is tool for those who choose to see what it can show, an aid for those who choose to believe. This is tarot.”

“This is tarot.”

“Good,” she said as she lowered her hands and offered the cards across the table. “Take, Scrbacek.”

Scrbacek took. Though there were only twenty or so of the yellow and cracked cards, he found them surprisingly heavy, as if the weight of their years had adhered to the thick paper.

“Now, shuffle cards like this, without bending.” She mimed a gentle overhand shuffle. Following her movements, he gave the cards a quick shuffle and tried to hand them back.

“No,” she said. “Keep shuffling. And as you shuffle, I want that you concentrate on what it is you need to know. I want that you empty your mind of everything except of your problem and you keep shuffling, shuffling.”

“When do I stop?”

“The cards, they will tell you.”

Scrbacek gave a snort and thought about how much of a fraud was this crazy Contessa, but he kept shuffling. He would have walked out, refused to be any part of this hoax, except that Donnie had saved his life and it would have been disrespectful just to leave. He wasn’t sure, in any event, that the girl, the Nightingale, would let him walk away. Then again, if the cards were an aid for the troubled, he surely qualified. And the night before, in the casino, he had felt luck and fate intertwine with the playing of cards in his wondrous streak of blackjack. So he kept shuffling as the haunting music and incense floated about him, and slowly, as he shuffled, his mind began to consider where he was and why, and who was trying to kill him. He shuffled and thought, and suddenly a stack of cards he pulled up with his right hand wouldn’t join the others, just banged against the side. Instead of forcing them, he simply put them back and stopped.

“Good,” said the Contessa. “Cut cards into three piles and put together in different order.”

He did as he was told.

“Now one by one, give me cards off top of deck. The first card is your problem card.”

Scrbacek turned over the top card. In the candlelight he could just make out the picture. It was of a castle tower being destroyed by lightning and fire.

“Yes,” she said as she put it in the middle of the table. “This is the Tower, the card of catastrophe. Unexpected reversals and upheavals. This is what you have suffered, no?”

Scrbacek nodded.

“And your question is why all this is happening. But it is not just happening to you. The tower can represent whole cities, whole civilizations. What else is being destroyed? That, too, is part of question. One and other, they are maybe related. But of course, it is also card of fate. Bad things happen. Is there always good reason? Maybe sometimes it is better not to look too hard.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Scrbacek. “Maybe we’ll stop. Thank you for your time.”

“You making joke, cousin? Don’t. Now what is it you need to know most? Tell me, Scrbacek.”

“I need to know who is trying to kill me.”

“Of course you do. Give me next, darling.”

Scrbacek turned over another card. It was a picture of a man holding a wand in one hand and a crystal ball in the other, standing behind a table filled with all manner of strange objects. She placed the card sideways over the tower to create a cross.

“This is your obstacle, what it is that is keeping you from goal. The moosh, he is the magician. A manipulator, a trickster. He controls the events. One person it is behind everything. This person who has caused the tower to fall will also do everything to make sure you fall with it. You have enemy, Scrbacek?”

“Apparently.”

“Find him and you solve problem. But finding him, it will not be so easy. Next card, please.”

A man caught between two very different women, trying to figure which to take, as Cupid floats above them all and aims his bow. She placed this card below and to the left of the center cross.

“This card is your past. The Lover. You would think it deals with sweet romantic love, but that is untrue. Instead it is all about choice. Somewhere in past you made choice that led you here. What was it? Something simple, like where to live? Something complex, like who to be, who to love? Who knows? But this choice, it is root of what is happening to you. Next card.”

Two dogs howling at a large blue moon. She placed it directly beneath the center cross.

“This is your present. The Moon.”

“I told you all,” said Blixen. “The moon is blue, blue.”

“Quiet, we are working here. This card, it is card of madness, of hidden truths, of confusion. Nothing can be trusted, because everything is without sanity. The choice you made in your past has led you to this craziness. Next card.”

A horned and winged woman, with claws for hands and feet, flanked by two men, half-human and half-animal, chained together at the neck. The Contessa tightened her lips when she saw it and placed it to the bottom right of the cross.

“This is your future. Give me next.”

“Wait,” said Scrbacek. “What is that card? What does it mean?”

She looked up at him, her eyes flickering yellow from the candles. “Suddenly you’re interested? Okay. This card is the Devil. It is not good card. Bondage. Bondage to what, we can’t say, but it arises from choice and madness. Maybe that is all for today, maybe we stop. Maybe we should try dice instead. Sometimes . . .”

Scrbacek flipped over the next card and tossed it on the table. A spirit in the heavens blowing a great golden trumpet as naked men and women rose from graves dug into the ground. The Contessa looked at him for a long moment and then placed the card above the cross and stared at him again.

“This position represents way to solve problem. The card it is Judgment. It requires examination of self, of truth. It is difficult card. But look at way our angel, she looks downward, to other cards. The answer to what is happening to you, what is happening to all, it is in past, present, future.”

“Well, that sort of narrows it down, doesn’t it?” said Scrbacek.

“You misunderstand,” said the Contessa Romany. “The answer to all the destruction is not just in past, present, future. It is in your past, your present, your future.”

Scrbacek looked down at the cards and then back up at the woman. “I don’t think so.”

“So maybe it is wrong. Maybe you are not facing great upheaval. Maybe there is not some riffly moosh pulling strings. Maybe there is no choice in past, no madness in present, no bondage in future. Maybe all is well with Scrbacek.”

“Is that it?” he said curtly. “Are we done now?”

“There is one more card if you are interested. It is outcome card. How it all will turn out in end.”

Scrbacek stared at the woman as he turned over the final card. It was of a man, hanging upside down from a rope attached to his leg. The Contessa shook her head sadly as she put it at the top of the spread.

“The Hanged Man,” she said.

“What does it mean?” said Scrbacek.

“It means you should pay me other hundred now before we leave.”

“Tell me,” said Scrbacek.

“This is card of self-sacrifice. To solve your problem, you must give of everything. The result must be either death or transformation. One or other, nothing in between. At the end of this struggle against magician, life for you will never be same.”

“That’s not what I want to hear.”

“That is always problem with tarot,” said the woman.

Suddenly there was a crash from the hallway and a shout, the sound of some sort of blow thudding into the soft part of a body. The next instant, the music stopped and the lights were flicked on, and in the light now appeared the man who had before been standing behind the Contessa. He was in the doorway, holding a cell phone, his head bent weirdly to the side. He took a step forward, and then Scrbacek could see that the Nightingale was behind him, one hand gripping his black hair and pulling down his head, the other holding a huge jagged knife with its point sticking into his thick neck.

The man tried to say, “I was just—”

“Shut up,” said the Nightingale. “I caught him trying to make a call.”

“Who to?” said Reggie.

“Don’t know, but from the way he jumped when I caught him, it was about our guest.”

“No, no,” said the man, “I was just—”

The Nightingale twisted the knife into the neck. Blood spurted, and the man stopped talking.

“Leave him be,” said the Contessa, rising from the table and grabbing the man’s arm. “He is my nephew, Carlo. He did nothing wrong.”

Reggie swaggered over and grabbed the phone out of the man’s hand. “Who were you calling, Mustard Mouth?”

“No one. Just a woman. No one.”

“Get your story straight. Was it no one, or was it a woman? My guess is you were telling someone about seeing Stifferdeck over there. How much you get for selling him out? Who’d you call?”

The man shook his head, his lips shut closed, and the Nightingale twisted the knife deeper.

“Nothing,” cried the man. “No one. I called a woman only.”

“Check the last number dialed,” said Squirrel.

“Shut up, Squirrel,” said Reggie. “I need your advice, I’ll shake your tree.” Then she handed the phone to Elisha. “Check the last number dialed.”

“Nice phone,” said Elisha, looking down at the handset. “There’s just a number.”

“Call it,” said Reggie.

As Elisha thumbed the screen and put the phone to her ear, she said, “Too bad about the Freak. He would have paid top dollar for this baby.”

“Fat chance of that now,” said Reggie.

“Poor Freddie,” Elisha sighed, then turned away with one hand to her free ear as someone answered the redial.

“Wait.” Scrbacek stood up. “Freaky Freddie bought phones?”