Dinner at Deviant's Palace (3 page)

Only a few customers had wandered in and sat down by the time Mojo finished his tour of the wall cranks, and Fandango glanced inquiringly toward Rivas, but the pelicanist seemed to have forgotten his dissatisfaction with the drummer’s playing. More people drifted in, and the chandeliers slowly stopped swinging as the ripple of conversation grew louder and the laughter and clinking of glasses more frequent; but Rivas remained oblivious, and when the pair of typically mute Chino twins who were the steel guitarist and chimes-banger arrived and climbed onto the stage, Rivas’s hand-jive greeting was as unconsciously automatic as the twitch of a horse’s flank when a fly lands on it.

Finally Fandango had to nudge him and hiss, “Heads up, Greg!” when the owner appeared and began threading his way around the tables toward the stage.

Steve Spink and Rivas were of about the same age and build—thirty or so and rangy but tending a little toward plumpness over the belt—but Spink with his ready smile and undisciplined tumble of blond hair fairly radiated boyish cheer, while Rivas’s dark hair and beard and deeply lined cheeks gave his face in repose an almost theatrical look of disdain.

Spink leaned toward the stage as Rivas, looking only startled at the moment, hastily hopped off his stool and picked up his instrument and blinked around in some surprise at the filled room.

“You okay, Rivas?” Spink asked pleasantly.

“Uh, what?” Rivas stepped to the edge of the stage, inadvertently kicking over his forgotten beer glass. The glass broke, and beer spattered Spink’s expensive leather coat.

“Damn it, I asked if you were all right. You don’t act like you are. Can you still perform?”

Rivas scowled and straightened to his full height. “Of
course
I can perform! What do you mean
still
? My God, just because I kick over one cheap beer glass—”

“Since when is glass cheap? There was an old guy in here at lunch talking to me. Said you were a Jaybird once. Any truth to that?”

“Yes,” Rivas said haughtily. “I don’t make any secret of it. I’ve been a lot of things in my life.”

“You talk about all the other things, though. Did you take the sacrament very often?”

For the second time that evening Rivas felt real anger kindle in him. “Just what are you trying to say, Steve?”

Spink let his habitual eye-narrowing smile relax into a frown. “I’m sorry, Greg. But you can understand my concern, can’t you? I can’t have any of the people I rely on going birdy.”

“Start worrying about it when I can’t fill your damn place to overflowing for you anymore.”

“You’re right, Greg. Sorry. I shouldn’t have listened to the old guy.” He turned to the audience, and Rivas glimpsed the smile flashing back on. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Spink said loudly, “tonight once again we’re privileged to have with us Gregorio Rivas, of Venice.”

The applause came right on cue and was satisfactory in volume and duration, and Rivas grinned as arrogantly as ever as he bowed in acknowledgement—but under it he was uneasy. How would the applause sound, he wondered, if I didn’t have a few paid prompters in the crowd to lead it? And how much longer can the dangerous glamor of Venice plausibly cling to me? I’ve been out of Venice for five years, after all, and while it’s true that Steve’s standard intro still gets raised eyebrows and shocked whispers from strangers, old Mojo the other day was actually surprised when I mentioned having worked at the Bom Sheltr Bar in Venice—he said he thought that story was just flash for the tourists, like the fake hooter skulls on spikes on the roof.

As the clapping and whistling was tapering off, Rivas turned to Fandango and the twins and impulsively hand-jived the signal for “Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy,” his trademark song, which he usually saved for reviving an apathetic audience. Fandango hammered out the staccato opening of the song and the crowd reacted with unmistakably genuine enthusiasm, and for the next few minutes Rivas forgot his doubts and let his singing and playing absorb him totally.

During a lengthy alternation between the steel guitarist and the drummer—a sequence Rivas knew they had no trouble with—he took the opportunity to scan the audience—a little nervously, for he was afraid the Hammond girl might have shown up to make a scene. Spink might have liked it, as being evidence of what a genuine Venetian rake-hell the pelicanist was, but Rivas dreaded such encounters, inevitable though they seemed to be. He peered at each face that he could make out by the illumination of the chandeliers and the tabletop candles, and was relieved not to see her.

And she’d be sure to sit where I
would
see her, he thought with a slightly drunken shiver. Damn her anyway. Why can’t a girl grasp the fact that a breakup
can’t
look tragic to the one initiating it? It can only seem tragic to the one being ditched; to the one doing the ditching it’s… fresh air, a load off the shoulders, a spring in the step and a whistle on the lips—the very opposite of tragic.

And hell, he thought, it’s not as if I haven’t drawn that hand as well as dealt it; only once, granted, but I had naively invested so much that time—much more than this Hammond creature ever could have—that I carry the loss with me still, as helplessly as I carry my skeleton, and like the old-time stainless steel it doesn’t rust away with time into camouflage colors, but is always as bright as new, and mercilessly reflective.

Rivas turned to the chimes-banger and hand-jived,
Remind me later
—
stainless steel
—
rust
—
camouflage colors.
The man nodded.

Yes, thought Rivas with some satisfaction, a nice image. Ought to fit well into a song, with some dramatic way of having lost the girl… death, maybe… suicide even, sure…

…Anything but the way I actually did lose Urania….

He shied away from the memory of himself at the age of eighteen, crouched behind a bush, in the ruins of a rented suit that stank of brandy and vomit, and, to his everlasting horror, barking like a dog.

Once or twice in the years since, during unusually objective moods, it had occurred to him that he might someday find the memory funny. It had certainly not happened yet.

In any case he was glad the Hammond girl seemed willing to disappear painlessly. He’d found her interesting for a while, but she was no Urania. None of them ever were.

It was nearly time for the pelican to re-enter, and he had just gripped the neck and poised the bow over the taut strings when he noticed at the bar a well-dressed old man who was watching him; and his belly went cold several seconds before he even consciously realized who it was, and he missed his cue.

The steel guitarist looked up in mild surprise and without a falter smoothly began the phrase again.

He had to begin it one more time, though, and let the more attentive members of the audience catch on that something was wrong, for Rivas had now remembered who the old man was and was staring at him with astonishment and hatred and, even after more than a decade, a bit of fear.

“Greg!” whispered Fandango urgently. “Hop aboard!”

Rivas blinked, returned some of his attention to the music, and then at the correct moment slashed the bow across the strings, and the song continued as usual.

He signaled to the other musicians to drop the time-consuming flourishes from the end of the song this time, and, as Fandango obediently rattled out a quick conclusion phrase, Rivas, much soberer now than he’d been a minute ago, lowered his instrument and stepped to the front of the stage.

“We’ll be taking a short break now,” he said curtly, and leaving the pelican beside his stool, he hopped down and strode to the bar—and he was able to do it fairly quickly, for even the bleariest of the drinkers seemed to sense a dangerous tautness in him, and pulled in their legs and scooted their chairs closer to the tables to get out of his way.

By the time he stopped in front of the old man his shock had receded enough for him to have deduced what must have happened to bring the man here.

“There’s a private room off the kitchen,” Rivas said to him in a voice from which conflicting emotions had leached all inflection. “Wait till we get in there to tell me about it. Whiskey,” he added, more loudly, to Mojo. “Double, with a chaser, now.”

Mojo provided the two filled glasses quickly, and Rivas picked them up and led the old man away from the bar to a door in a shadowed corner.

“Go fetch us a lamp from somewhere,” the pelicanist snapped at the old man as he held both glasses in one hand to open the door with the other. “Hurry now—chop chop!”

The old man’s face had been pinched into the expression of someone who has learned that his dinner will consist of the stable boys’ leftovers, and the change it underwent now was as though he had been told that he’d have to express gratitude for it too; but he silently did as he was told and went back to get a lamp from the corner of the bar.

Rivas stood by the door and shut it behind them when the old man had returned with the lamp and carried it into the little room. All but filling the chamber was a plastic table with half a dozen chairs around it, and Rivas sat down in one of the chairs and set his drinks in front of himself.

“You should have told Spink who you were this afternoon,” he said. “He’d have been impressed to meet the man who distills Ellay’s money.”

The lamp clanked down onto the table and the agitated flame made the two men’s shadows fragment and then reform on the wooden walls. “It would do neither of us any good,” came the rasped reply, “to let people know that Irwin Barrows has business with Gregorio Rivas.”

Rivas took a gulp of the whiskey and chased it with a long draught of the beer. “Right,” he said coldly, “in fact why let even Rivas himself know, eh? Who
was
your touchy negotiator this evening? Some jumped-up vineyard foreman? He didn’t handle the approach in a terribly businesslike way—almost wound up challenging me to a duel.”

Irwin Barrows stared at him speculatively. “I considered not telling you this,” he said finally, “but I will, because I don’t think it will alter your decision. Montecruz can be excused, perhaps, for showing some heat—you see, he’s her fiancé. They’re to be—they
were
to be—married next month.”

Rivas was surprised by the gust of unhappiness that battered at his control—and even shook it, for he could feel the color draining from his rigidly expressionless face—and he realized wearily that the grief he’d been tending like a garden for thirteen years had gradually become domesticated, ceased to be the wild, naturally occurring sort. And then a moment later he was disgusted with himself for having such an obsessive focus on the feelings of Gregorio Rivas. My God, he told himself, that Montecruz son-of-a-bitch was right: for you, everything exists only to the extent that it pleases or displeases your favorite person—you.

Still, I won’t fetch her back for him.

He hastily downed the remainder of the whiskey, but instead of the obscuring fog he’d hoped for, it brought an unwelcome clarity to his thoughts; and he knew, despairingly, that he couldn’t let the Jaybirds have her.

If only I didn’t know, he thought, if I hadn’t been one myself for almost three years, I could probably turn him down. If I hadn’t seen for myself Jaybush’s methodical disassembly of human minds, his consumption of souls as if they were firewood, I could probably spit in Barrow’s face this minute and stalk out of here in a grand gesture of rejection.
You exiled me from her thirteen years ago
—
now I exile you from her. How do
you
like it?
Yes, to rub his hitherto celestially superior nose in it… to send his smug complacency out the Dogtown gate… to let
him
beg
me
for her, and be contemptuously dismissed…

If only I didn’t know!

But when he replayed that last thought and considered the several things it indicated about himself, he had to suppress a shudder, for it had momentarily sickened him simply to be Gregorio Rivas.

Finally he looked up. “You’re right,” he said, wishing his voice hadn’t hoarsened for the occasion. “It doesn’t alter my decision. I’ll do it.”

Barrows inclined his head. “Thank you.”

“So when did they get her?”

“Last night, late. She was at a party north of here, at Third and Fig, and somehow she wound up alone out front, and a gang of them started talking to her—I guess you should know their stinking arguments and tricks as well as anyone—and when her lazy and now unemployed bodyguard finally caught up with her, it was just in time to see Urania climbing into the back of a Jaybird wagon as the horses were being whipped up.”

“It took off in what direction?”

“East on Third.”

“One wagon alone?”

“That’s what the bodyguard said.”

Rivas sat back and drummed his fingers on the table and his eyes lost their sharp focus as, for the first time in three years, he began planning one more redemption. “You should have come to me right away,” he said, “and not wasted time trying to undermine my job here and sending that clown in here this evening. Still, it’s a good sign that it was a single eastbound wagon; that implies the shepherd wanted to recruit at least another one or two people before returning to his caravan camp. They might still be in the area, camped in one of the neglected districts outside the wall.”

“Can you find out tonight?”

Rivas smiled at the naive question. “No way. You don’t just ask the nearest Jaybird where one of their wagons went. And even if they are right outside—even if there were a full moon out tonight, instead of this rainy overcast—do you know how many square miles of ruins there are out there?”

“Tomorrow morning, then. Now as Montecruz evidently started to explain to you, all you’ll have to do is—”

“—Locate her. Yeah, he did say that, but that’s not how it’s going to be. I’ll do the kidnap and breaking too.”

Barrow’s eyes narrowed and his face assumed the stony cast Rivas remembered so well. “No,” he said firmly. “That is simply out of the question.”

Rivas pushed his chair back and stood up. “Frake McAn lives over Mister Lou’s on Sandoval Street. Don’t tell him I sent you—it’ll only prejudice him against you. And don’t waste time,” he added, poking a finger at Barrows. “Some of those recruiting caravans go directly to the Holy City.” He picked up his beer glass and reached for the door latch.