A bit of raw material

Here’s the opening couple pages of a project with the working title of ‘doors’. Very rough draft of an unfinished project.

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The back door has been on Budapest so long I was beginning to think it was stuck; it didn’t help that I really don’t like Budapest. The front door has opened onto Detroit for some years now, and given the shape the city is in I don’t expect it to change any time soon. I don’t care much for Detroit, either, but at least its not Budapest. In my line of work you take your comfort where you can.

Gezer came through the front door on a Wednesday evening just as I was thinking of getting something to eat, and he was far from a welcome sight. The Geez plays both sides of the street and if anyone had ever trusted him they were dust long ago. Still, men such as the Geez can be useful from time to time, which explained why he was still around. It doesn’t explain why he was around in the first place so that he could be still around now, but no one has ever really explained anything to me.

He was swaddled in an oversized pea coat with a thick dark watch cap pulled down low on his hairless scalp so that all that could be seen between the dark wool of the cap and the raised coat collar were two dark, beady and slightly slanted eyes, and a falcon’s beak of a nose. He had his hands stuffed into his pockets and taken overall he appeared to be a self-propelled pile of cloth.

If he had hostile intent he would have played merry hell trying to get across the threshold, but at my age you don’t count on things working the way they are supposed to work, which is why I have reached the age I am. I laid a stainless steel .41 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk on the counter alongside the catalogue I had been perusing, and Gezer shuffled to a stop.

“Talk, that’s all,” he muttered into his collar. The Geez claims to have ridden with the Mongols when they hit Burma under Kublai Khan, but if he did I bet it was in the horsemens’ wake, buying slaves and scrounging for overlooked loot. In any case he had a vague lisping accent that make it sound like he was whispering even when he was talking to you from across the room.

“I’m all up to snuff on social encounters.” I didn’t take my hand from the revolver’s butt. I broke in on wheelguns at an early age, back before John Browning and others made self-loading pistols all the rage and the chemists in their long white coats did away with black powder in favor of compounds that generated little smoke and delivered many times the foot-pounds of energy, but old habits die hard. Much like some old men.

“Business,” he snuffled. Gezer always sounds like he’s getting over a head cold.

And that was how it began.

***

You get the shop when you enter the trade, as it were. Small, nondescript, with living quarters upstairs, each some variant of the junk shops that have existed since Hannibal was a corporal. It is home, base, and camouflage-no one pays any attention to such places. Mine hadn’t changed much since I got it; the lighting went electric, albeit staying twenty years or more behind the times, and the stock on the shelves updated on the roughly the same schedule.

My shop has a small sales area lined with shelves displaying the junk for sale, with a waist-high barrier that looks like someone cut short an old mahogany bar for the purpose of sectioning off the back quarter of the room. I usually sit behind the bar, most of whose surface doubles as display space, with a couple old wood file cabinets behind me and the back wall covered with shelves filled with the ‘good stuff’, most of which wasn’t.

To my right is an alcove with an old green curtain screening it from the public view, more or less. It contains the stairs leading up to the second floor and down to the cellar, and the back door, which I’m beginning to believe is permanently stuck in Budapest, much to my annoyance. Dealing with Detroit day in and out, I would really appreciate a back door that led to someplace nice. Somebody has to help cover Maui, or Bermuda, or even Vegas. Especially Vegas. But no, I get twenty years of Budapest, a town that never gladdened a heart nor welcomed a stranger.

My shop is dark, dusty, and always looks like it is hours away from complete economic collapse, which suits my purposes nicely. I even do a little business out of it; the comfortable raised swivel chair I was sitting in being one transaction I particularly enjoyed. Say what you want about these modern times, they make good office furniture and better guns.

Sitting in my modern chair behind the dark battered bulk of the truncated length of bar-turned-counter in my dry, dusty shop I studied Gezer. “You are coming to me with business?”

“Yeah.” The little man shuffled in place, clearly nervous.

“That’s new.”

“Just thought you might be interested.”

“Out of the kindness of your heart?”

“Nah, to get paid.” Gezer shrugged, the movement nearly lost in the mass of his coat.

“You know, times like these the word ‘ambush’ comes to mind. Along with ‘damn fool’, and ‘summary execution’.”

He wasn’t impressed. “Look, if you don’t want it, I’ll go.’

I was torn-this wasn’t how things worked. Gezer and a few like him lived in no-man’s-land, selling information to both sides, staying alive out of their usefulness and the distraction of the major players. But if you wanted him or those like him you went looking for them, and they didn’t make it easy. For him to come hawking his goods like a wandering peddler was a significant breach of protocol, and as I had told him it made me wonder if I was being set up. The opposition isn’t all that innovative in its approaches, but on occasion they will surprise you. Sometimes fatally.

“What do you have?”

“I get paid up front,” he reminded me.

“You also never volunteer,” I countered. “Therefore we have entered into a time of radical change, a time where men’s hearts grow turbulent with fear and uncertainly and their hands turn to mindless violence.”

Gezer still wasn’t impressed. “Rules: there are rules.”

“More akin to guidelines, in truth.” That wasn’t entirely true or entirely false, the fact being that the topics in question were rules for me and guidelines for Gezer.

The Geez sneered. “I stay within the line. You want this or not?”

“Cheat me and you will certainly regret the act. Brief regret, I might add.”

He tried to look bold, but didn’t quite pull it off; for him every day was a hand in a high-stakes game, and every day he went all in on the pot. How he had lasted this long under that terrible pressure was a mystery to me. “My word is good.”

“No, it isn’t. No one in the middle can be trusted.” I frowned at the catalogue on the bar in front of me. “What do you want?”

“You got in some flowers.”

That surprised me; not that he knew I had them, but that he wanted them. I was struck by the suspicion that it was the flowers which had drawn him here unasked, drawn him into making an unsolicited deal. “Yeah. Some.”

“That’ll do.”

“Maybe. What do you have?”

“Something good.”

“So you say.” I was inclined to believe him: this was either an opening move in the other side trying to kill me (again), or he was dealing straight. While I wouldn’t put a penny’s worth of faith in Gezer’s moral code I was confident that if he wanted to commit suicide he would find a better way than burning one of us. Or one of them, either, because both sides played for keeps, but my side has much longer memories. In fact, my side was famous for never forgetting a thing.

“We have a deal?”

“So you expect me to buy a pig in a poke?”

He hesitated, and I became convinced that he was here for the flowers. Reading people is not something you learn easily, but I had had a lot of time to work on my skills. “The Dancer is back.”

That sent a chill down my spine: I had hunted the Dancer twice and both times it had been a very bad business. “That is news. Not worth the flowers, but it’s news. Here in Detroit?”

“Not yet. But that’s not what I got to sell.”

That set the hook, because a heads-up on a deck popping up early was a viable piece of trade. Keeping an eye on the Geez, I leaned down and took a small wood box thickly coated in wax gone orange with age from a shelf under the bar. Setting it on the worn mahogany closer to the front edge than to me, I looked at him expectantly.

He stared at the box for a long moment, standing completely motionless. “It’s true?”

“Yeah, that’s what I have been told. If it’s not, I’ll make it right, you know that.”

He nodded, a single jerky motion. “The Dancer is hunting a girl.”

“The Dancer always hunts.”

“No, the Dancer is hunting a specific girl.”

“OK, now you’re starting to annoy me; go peddle that ‘life essence of the special child’ nonsense to the pagans. The rock-lovers might go for it, but I won’t.”

“Not like that. Not because she is special, but the Dancer is still hunting her. Like a mission.”

“You’re telling me the Dancer is under someone’s orders?”

“Yeah.”

“Pull the other one, it has bells on it.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s nonsense. The Dancer doesn’t take orders any more than a rabid weasel takes orders. It is murder made flesh, not UPS.” That my response rhymed pleased me.

“The Dancer is looking for a girl, and not to kill her, but to find her for somebody else,” Gezer got stubborn.

“The Dancer has no use for anyone other than to kill them,” I shook my head. “It might listen to people in the know, but that is as close as it gets. Even those incidents often end badly for the people involved.”

He didn’t reply.

“Look, if you could give the Dancer orders, why set it to finding someone? The Dancer isn’t a scholar even by the standards of its rather dim tribe.”

“Speed.”

That gave me pause: like any of its kind the Dancer treated distance with a casual indifference. “Fast but not clever.”

“Doesn’t need to be. Just needs to look at a list of people until it finds the right one.”

If it wanted to, the Dancer could do that faster than a corporate headhunter with a Lear jet and an unlimited expense account. It still left a lot of questions unanswered, the chief of them being why the Dancer would want to do something like that.

And it raised a major question as well: if there was someone out there able to give a deck orders, why was Gezer tipping off the opposition? That was not a course of action that was consistent with a lengthy lifespan.

“Keep talking.”

Gezer dragged his right hand out of the coat’s pocket. His hand looked like poor-quality leather that had seen too much sun, with thick, yellow nails. Clutched in his fingers was half a leaflet printed on bold yellow paper, some call to activism intended to be left under windshield wipers or handed out with great sincerity on street corners. On its blank side I could see crabbed handwriting.

“I know where she is.”