Dinner at Deviant's Palace (2 page)

“Damn it,” he yelped, stubbing his toe against the edge of one of the chandeliers and awkwardly hopping over it, “where are you, Mojo? How come these things aren’t lit yet?”

“It’s early yet, Greg,” came a voice from the kitchen. “I’ll get to ’em.”

Rivas picked his way around the wooden wheels of the chandeliers to the bar, lifted the hinged section and stepped behind it. By touch he found the stack of clean glasses, and then the big room echoed with the clicking of the pump as he impatiently worked the handle to prime the beer tap.

“There’s a bottle of Currency Barrows open,” called Mojo from the kitchen.

The edges of Rivas’s mouth curled down in a sort of inverted smile. “The beer’s fine,” he said in a carefully casual voice. He opened the tap and let the stream of cool beer begin filling his glass.

Old Mojo lurched ponderously out of the kitchen carrying a flickering oil lamp, and he crouched over the nearest chandelier to light the candles on it. “That’s right,” he said absently, “you’re not crazy about the Barrows stuff, are you?”

“I’m a beer and whiskey man,” said Rivas lightly. “Fandango or the twins here yet?”

“Yeah, Fandango is—them’s some of his drums on the stage there. He went for the rest.”

There was a shuffling and banging from the direction of the back hall just then, and a voice called, “That you, Greg? Help me with these, will you?”

“Whatever I can carry in one hand, Tommy.” Tucking the pelican case under his arm and sipping the beer as he went, Rivas groped his way to the back hall, relieved the puffing Fandango of one of his smaller drums and led the way back across the already somewhat brighter room to the stage.

Fandango put his drums down carefully and wiped sweat from his chubby face.
“Whew,”
he said, leaning against the raised stage. “Spink was askin’ me this morning when you’d be in,” he remarked in a confiding tone.

Rivas put down the drum he’d been carrying and then glanced at the younger man. “So?”

“Well, I don’t know, but he seemed mad.”

“How could you tell? He probably
sleeps
with that smile on.”

“He said he wanted to talk to you about something.” Fandango avoided looking at Rivas by concentrating on tightening a drumhead screw. “Uh, maybe about that girl.”

“Who, that Hammond creature?” Rivas frowned, uneasily aware that Fandango had been seeing the girl first, and had introduced her to him. “Listen, she turned out to be crazy.”

“They all do, to hear you tell it.”

“Well, most of them
are
crazy,” Rivas snapped as he climbed up onto the stage. “I can’t help that.” He untied the knots that held the vinyl case closed, flipped up the lid and lifted the instrument out.

Though not even quite two feet long, it was said to be the finest in Ellay, its neck carved of mahogany with copper wire frets and polished copper pennies for pegs, and its body a smoothly laminated half sphere of various woods, waxed and polished to a glassy sheen. The horsehair bow was clipped to the back of the neck, and in profile the instrument did look something like a pelican’s head, the body being the jowly pouch and the long neck the beak.

He put the case on the stage floor, sat down on a stool with the pelican across his knees, and plucked out a quick, nearly atonal gun riff; then he swung it up to his shoulder, unclipped the bow and skated it experimentally across the strings, producing a melancholy chord.

Satisfied, he laid the instrument back in the open case and put the bow down beside it. He picked up his glass of beer. “Anyway,” he said after taking a sip, “Spink wouldn’t be bothered about any such crap. Hell, this is the eleventh year of the Seventh Ace—all that chastity and everlasting fidelity stuff left by the Dogtown gate before you and I were born.”

As was very often the case, especially lately, Fandango couldn’t tell whether Rivas was being sincere or bitterly ironic, so he let the subject drop and set about arranging the drum stands around his own stool.

“Say,” he ventured quietly a few minutes later, “who’s the guy by the window?”

Mojo had got several of the chandeliers lit by now, and the kitchen corner of the room glowed brightly enough to show a heavy-set man sitting at a table just to the right of the streetside window. Rivas stared at him for a moment, unable to tell in that uncertain light whether or not the man was looking his way, or was even awake; then he shrugged. “Jaybush knows.”

“And he ain’t tellin’,” Fandango agreed. “Say, is it still gonna be mostly gunning tonight? I’ve been practicing some newer songs, some of these bugwalk numbers, and it seems to me—”

Rivas drained his beer. “Catch!” he called, and tossed the glass in a high, spinning parabola toward Mojo, who looked up wearily, clanged his lamp down and caught the glass before it could hit the floor.

“Goddammit, Greg…” he muttered, getting to his feet and shambling toward the bar.

“Yeah,” said Rivas, frowning slightly as he watched the old man’s progress, “it’ll be gunning. They don’t pay to hear Rivas doing bugwalk.” No, he thought. For that you want those savage kids coming out of the southeast end of town—Dogtown—the kids who rely on the ferocity of their voices and ragtag instruments to make up for their lack of musical skill. “Why?”

“I still can’t get the hang of the beat on it,” Fandango complained. “If you’d just let me bang away in the same time as what you’re playin’, or even the time of what you’re singin’, I could handle it, but this third and fourth layer stuff, all at different paces but having to touch the peaks and bottoms together…”

“We’re going to gun,” Rivas said firmly.

After a few moments, “Are you gonna do ‘Drinking Alone’?” Fandango persisted. “It’s the hardest.”

“Christ, Tommy,” said Rivas impatiently, “this is your
job
. Yes, I’m going to do that song. If you don’t want to learn the whole trade, you may as well grow a beard and beg out on the street.”

“Well, sure, Greg, except—”

“Think I moved back here from Venice working like that?”

“No, Greg.”

“Damn right. Maybe we’d better go through it now, before the show, to give you some practice.”

Before Fandango could reply, a chair rutched back in the corner and the man at the windowside table stood up and spoke. “Mr. Rivas, I’d like to have a word with you before you start.”

Rivas cocked a wary eyebrow at the man. What’s this, he wondered, a challenge over some despoiled daughter or wife? Or just a bid for a private party performance? The man was dressed respectably, at least, in a conservative off white flax shirt and trousers and a dark leather Sam Brown belt—in contrast to Rivas’s own flamboyant red plastic vest and wide-brimmed hat. “Sure,” said Rivas after a pause. “Shoot.”

“It’s a personal matter. Could we discuss it at the table here, perhaps over a drink?”

“…Okay.”

Mojo bumbled up to the stage with the refilled beer glass just as the pelicanist hopped down. “Thanks,” said Rivas, taking it from him. “And a glass of whatever for the citizen yonder.”

Mojo turned toward the stranger, who said, “A shot of that Currency Barrows, please.”

Rivas walked over to the man’s table, holding the beer in his right hand so that his knife hand was free, and when he got there he hooked back a chair for himself with his foot.

Mojo arrived with the glass of brandy a moment later, set it down in front of the stranger, then stepped back and cleared his throat.

“On my tab, Mojo,” said Rivas without taking his eyes off the stranger—who, he noticed, had no hair on his head at all, not even eyebrows or lashes.

“No, I insist,” the man said, “and Mr. Rivas’s beer, too. How much?”

“Uh… one ha’pint.”

The stranger took a bugshell moneycase from his belt pouch, snapped it open and handed Mojo a one-fifth card. Mojo took it and lurched away.

“Never mind the change,” the man called after him.

Mojo slowed to a more comfortable pace. “Thank you, man,” he called back in a voice from which he was unable to keep a note of pleased surprise.

“Well?” said Rivas.

The man gave Rivas a distinctly frosty smile. “My name is Joe Montecruz. I’d like to hire your services.”

Though still a little puzzled, Rivas relaxed and sat back. “Well, sure. You want a backup band too, or just me? It’s twenty fifths a night for me, and for this band it’s seven fifths ha’pint extra. If I put together a better group it’d be more, of course. Now I’m booked solid until—”

Montecruz raised a hand. “No no. You misunderstand. It’s not in your musical capacity that I wish to hire you.”

“Oh.” I should have guessed, he told himself. “What, then?” he asked dutifully, just to be certain he was right.

“I want you to perform a redemption.”

He’d been right. “Sorry. I’m retired.”

Montecruz’s not quite friendly smile didn’t falter. “I think I can make an offer that will bring you out of retirement.”

Rivas shook his head. “Look, I wasn’t being coy. I’ve quit. I make plenty now with the music—and anyway, I’m thirty-one years old. I don’t have that kind of reflexes and stamina anymore.” Or luck, either, he thought sourly. “And it’s been three years since my last one—the country will have changed. It always does.”

Montecruz leaned forward. “Rivas,” he said quietly, “I’m talking
five thousand Ellay fifths
.”

Rivas raised his eyebrows in genuine respect. “That’s handsome,” he admitted. “There can’t be fifty people in Ellay that can even hope to borrow that much.” He took a long sip of beer. “But I’m
retired
. I just don’t want to risk my life and sanity for strangers anymore. There’s other redeemers around, though. Hell, five thousand would buy Frake McAn ten times over.”

“Is McAn as good as you?”

“Infinitely better, since I don’t do it at all now. Thanks for the beer—and now I really should try to show that damn fool drummer what I want.” He got to his feet.

“Wait a minute,” Montecruz said quickly, holding up a pudgy hand and beginning to look a little less confident. “You’re the only guy that ever performed eight redemptions—”

“Six. Two got to the Holy City before I could catch them.”

“Okay, six. You’ve still got the record. The girl’s father wants the best, and listen, this won’t be as difficult as the others. All you’ve got to do is locate her, her family will do the kidnap and breaking—”

“Her family can do the whole thing,” said Rivas, straightening up. “I’m not kidding about being
out
of that game. Hire me as a pelicanist or songwriter anytime—they’re my only occupations nowadays.”

He turned and started back toward the stage, but Montecruz, agile for a fat man, scrambled around the table and caught Rivas’s elbow when he’d taken only four paces.

“We’ll go
ten thousand
!” the man hissed.

Exasperated, Rivas turned back to face him. “I told you my answer.”

For a couple of seconds Montecruz’s face was expressionless, and looked oddly childlike; then, “To
sing
?” he demanded, his voice shrill with incredulous scorn. “You’d stop saving lives—souls!—to sit in a bar and sing? Oh, but you only did it while you needed the money, isn’t that right? And now that you can fiddle for it, everybody else can… can be gutted and skinned, and it won’t disturb your self-satisfaction even as much as a wrinkle in your precious costume would, huh? It must be nice to be the only person worthy of your concern.”

A crooked, unmirthful grin had appeared on the pelicanist’s face during Montecruz’s speech, and when the man had finished, Rivas said, “Why don’t you go home and just deal with things you know something about, sport.”

He’d spoken quietly, but Mojo and Fandango heard him and looked up in alarm.

The insult, especially deadly in view of Montecruz’s hairlessness, hung in the air for several seconds and hardened jaw muscles made Montecruz’s suddenly pale face seem even wider.

Rivas yanked his arm free and took two steps back, the skin over his cheekbones taut and his left hand near his knife sheath.

Finally Montecruz, whose hand had darted for his own knife, took a deep breath, let it out, and then whispered, “I don’t
take
that, Rivas—I’ll just
hold
it for a while.” He turned and stalked out of the building.

When the swinging doors had creakily flapped shut after him Rivas looked at the ceiling and exhaled a long, descending whistle. That, he told himself, was loss of control. Better slow down on the beer, old buddy—you’ve had enough already, at home and here, to keep you oiled for the rest of the evening.

“God, Greg,” said Fandango in some awe as the pelicanist walked back to the stage, “you were
mad
, weren’t you? I just realized, I never seen you
mad
before—just, you know, grouchy about something not being done right. What’d he say to make you call him out that way? That stuff about singing, and your clothes? And whose life did he want you to—”

“Oh, shut
up
, Tommy,” said Rivas wearily. Mojo had got the bright lamps lit at the front of the stage, so he put on a look of only mild annoyance as he climbed back up onto it. “He didn’t make me mad, all right? I’m tired of everybody thinking they’ve got a right to my time, that’s all. And I didn’t mean to call him out.” He picked up his instrument and the horsehair bow, and was embarrassed to notice that his hands were trembling; he lowered them quickly and shot a freezing look at the drummer, but Fandango was shaking his head and tapping out a quick burst on one of his drums and clearly hadn’t noticed.

“But you called him a
sport
,” the drummer said. “I mean, sure, you call me that when I screw up sometimes, but that guy
was
one—I could see from here he was a baldy.”

“I’m going to think you’re a mental one if you still can’t grasp the tempo of this,” said Rivas. “From the beginning now, and make it rattle.” He tapped his foot three times while Fandango frowned attentively, then began playing.

They had to stop a few minutes later when Mojo began turning the noisy, ratcheted wall cranks that hoisted the lit chandeliers up to the ceiling, and in spite of his earlier resolve Rivas put down his pelican and went to the bar for another refill. He came back and perched cross-legged on his stool and then just stared absently into the still dim corners of the ceiling, where long, dusty festoons of paper dolls were draped like huge cobwebs around three of the walls.