The Blue Blazes (8 page)

 

PART TWO

BLOOD & BRINE

 

8

 

The Underworld in myth has long been associated with the dead – it is in the low places that the souls and spirits of the departed go in many of the old stories, sometimes to be castigated for their earthly ways, sometimes because that’s where the dead must go. It has long been believed that this Underworld, our own Great Below, was not like that: it was a physical place, not a spiritual one. Its walls were granite and quartz, basalt and schist – they were neither slick with spectral ectoplasm nor formed of the non-corporeal dreams of the freshly demised. The monsters of the deep were real, it seemed, and ghosts – if they were real at all – were not part of that place. We were, of course, wrong.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Mookie doesn’t belong in this neighborhood. Upper East Side, Museum Mile, Central Park – it smells of money. It’s all trees and top-shelf condos and mansions crammed next to mansions. It’s restaurants that wouldn’t let him through the front door (much as he might secretly like the chance), people with dogs from breeds he’s never heard of and probably couldn’t pronounce, views of the city and the park that some buyers would literally
kill
for.

The air, fresh, crisp. Like the bite of an apple.

No gangs here. Nobody owns this territory – not the Get-Em-Girls, not the Three-Eyed Jacks or the Switchblade Charlies. The gobbos try once in a while, but neighborhoods like this are well-lit, clean, lots of cops. The gobs and other Underworld beasties can masquerade, but the mask is imperfect. And it’s only skin deep. Besides, the Organization has a strong presence here. The Boss. Couple lieutenants living in the neighborhood. Most they get is some gobbos slinging Blue where they shouldn’t.

Mookie comes up on the Boss’s place – middle of the block off of 5th on 82nd Street. In some ways the mansion looks like a long, lean face with many eyes and a mean, hungry mouth.

Through the front door.

He thinks for a moment he has the wrong house. His heavy boots fall on black marble, kicking up little clouds of powder and leaving behind a small trail of sand, and all of it echoes, and nobody’s here, and for a second, Mookie’s about to back out slowly–

He smells something. A whiff of a scent…

Then: Mookie hears a ding, and crossing the foyer comes Werth, hobbling along on his cane.

Werth, the old goat. Literally so. He with a pair of cracked hooves clomping on the floor and a set of ram’s horns jutting out over his furry, crooked ears. Chin whiskers now more than that – from his jaw sprouts a wispy salt-and-pepper goat’s beard. His face is still human. Hands, too. The rest of him: not so much. All this, revealed by the Blue.

Mookie asks, “What happened?”

“C’mon. Upstairs.”

“Where is everybody?”

“We’re the ones they called.”

“Are we at war?”

Werth pauses. “Not yet. Like I said: upstairs, let’s go, let’s go.”

Mookie feels suddenly raw, like skin peeling off a popped blister. When Cerulean leaves you, it’ll do that. Make you feel restless, listless, tired and wound up all at the same time as if you just pounded a double-espresso right before sucking down half-a-bottle of codeine cough syrup.

The Blazes gutter and go out. Werth goes from
goatman
to
just a man
in the blink of an eye. The Blue is gone. Blindness to that world returns.

Werth asks, “You OK?”

Mookie doesn’t say shit. He just keeps walking.

Upstairs, then.

Werth steps into the elevator. Mookie pulls the wrought iron door across. Inside are old elevator buttons like something off an antique typewriter.

As they go up, Werth looks at Mookie’s side. The shirt soaked through from where the gobbos got him. Arm, too. “You tussle with someone?”

“Gobbos.”

Elevator, top floor.
Ding
.

The smell of blood and human waste hits him even before the doors open.

The body. Not ten feet away.

The hallway is all creams. Walls like cream-in-coffee. Floors like cream before the coffee. A few punctuations of darkness here and there – a black lampshade, a couple dark lines in the wainscoting, the wrought-iron of the elevator.

And blood.

Dark blood. A lot of it.

Casimir Zoladski is face down on the marble. Sticky dark stuff spreading beneath a face smashed too far into the floor, so far that his face must be crushed and crumpled like an empty egg carton.

The grandson’s black jacket lies another ten feet to the left. His white shirt has been cut open. Not ripped, but cut. Delicately. Surgically, Mookie thinks. Like a pig’s belly opened by a careful hand with a sharp knife.
Or a claw
.

Symbols lie carved in the pale stretch of his dead back. Symbols Mookie doesn’t recognize – the rifts in the flesh form an inverted triangle (one point ending at each shoulder blade), and inside that triangle are lines that suggest a maze. And at the center of that maze is something that Mookie can only describe as a mouth. A circle with crude pointed teeth and forked tongue cut in the flesh.

Werth tilts his head toward the body. “Check the hands.”

Mookie stoops down. Knees popping. He grabs the wrist. Already stiffening. Turns it, sees a flash of orange: withered marigold. In this hand, and in the other.

“Two broken links of iron chain in the pockets,” Werth says.

Mookie grunts.

Sees something else, too. The fingertips. Smudgy with – at first he thinks,
blood, his own blood
, but no, it’s something else. Mookie bends down almost like he’s praying. He has to get close to smell it.

He knows the smell. Because he knows food.

“Chocolate,” he says. “Dark chocolate.”

Then, something else. A whiff of the familiar.

He crawls around to the front of the body.

Lifts the head. Hates to do it but has to. There’s the sound of peeling skin, like he’s scraping a car-smashed raccoon off the road–

In the middle of the stink of blood and human waste, he can smell something else.

A smoky, briny stink. Like the wind off the ocean. Like a peaty swamp.

And an acrid tang with it, too. Fruity and sour.

Booze. Like a peaty Islay Scotch. No. Wait. Like the roasted whiff of mezcal, tequila’s stranger, smokier cousin. That’s what it is. He’s about to say as much when two figures enter from a side door.

Haversham and the Boss. Oxygen tank squeaking behind.

The Boss looks a thousand miles away. Like he’s barely there inside his own skin, like what’s here and walking around is just a saggy scarecrow, his mind’s somewhere else, somewhere distant. He barely even notices Mookie and Werth.

Haversham in alarm: “What are you
doing
?”

Mookie swiftly stands, moving his prodigious bulk fast as he can, stammering out, “I was just – I thought I smelled something–”

The Boss, staring off at nothing, whispers, “Fucking tragedy.” The old man’s body trembles, as if cold.

“Fucking tragedy,” Werth echoes.

The kill, Mookie thinks, is ritual. Some of it he understands – if only loosely.
Ofrendas
. Offerings. Marigolds, chocolate, liquor. Day of the Dead-style gifts to those who have passed on: not something you usually find on a fresh corpse. The links of broken chain, though, and that symbol – those are different.

“You want us to get who did this?” Mookie asks.

“We know who did it,” the Boss says. Voice a rattling wind stirring dry leaves. He takes a hit off the oxygen and closes his eyes.

“Who?” Werth finally says after a few seconds of silence. “Point us at ’em.”

“Walk with me,” the Boss says.

He and Haversham walk forward. The old man creeps slow, rasping and wheezing, sometimes coughing and taking a hit from the oxygen. Mookie and Werth share a bewildered, uncomfortable look and follow after like dutiful children. As Mookie walks, his nose catches that same scent from downstairs, a scent suddenly and dreadfully familiar: a perfume of flowers.

 

Nora sits on a park bench just inside Central Park off Fifth Avenue. Her hands shake. People hurry past, laughing, talking, texting.

Every moment feels hyper-real. Part of it’s the Blue. But only a small part.

She turns her palms up on her knees. Sees the blood on her hands.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

A taxi honks.

A siren somewhere in the distance.

Her mouth is dry. The taste of Snakeface magic lingers under her tongue.

She’s afraid to blink because of what she’ll see behind her lidded eyes. So she keeps them open. Tries to regulate her breath. Tries to still her trembling limbs.

Keep it together. This can work.

No time to feel anything, you dumb girl.

Stop! Stop thinking about it!

Everything is an opportunity.

You’re going to text Skelly.

You’re going to tell her it’s beginning.

Then you’re going to stand up, and you’re going to move.

But first, you’re going to stop crying.

She blinks back tears. Wipes her eyes.

Then she texts Skelly.

 

Back downstairs. A small room past the door to the wine cellar, near the kitchen. Inside: a bank of eight monitors next to a shelf full of fireproof file boxes. Surveillance for cameras watching the Boss’ house. The room isn’t big, and it feels like everybody’s having to crowd around and cram in next to Mookie. Which only serves to make Mookie feel awkward, a man in a dress shop, a vegetarian at a slaughterhouse. And all that time, the smell of his daughter’s perfume lingering in his nose.

He suddenly worries about what he’s going to see in this room, on these monitors.

Haversham reaches past Mookie, flips one switch of eight on the wall–

The top left monitor comes to life.

The black-and-white feed shows the front door of the building. Catches people walking up and down the street, but only in periphery: one arm, feet, part of a face, a head. Incomplete shapes, nothing more.

Haversham reaches for a second panel – this one with a set of dials. He turns one of them left – and instantly the live feed starts to rewind behind a curtain of static.

The time on the screen – which Mookie hadn’t even noticed – zooms backward.

“Here,” Haversham says. The feed stops. Then starts playing.

8:30pm.

Ten seconds, fifteen. Nothing.

Then the door opens.

Then closes.

Haversham stops it.

“There,” he says. Like, voila,
I just did a magic trick
, except nobody sees that anything changed. No dove out of the hat, no card from the sleeve.

The Boss looks at them, taps his head: “You need to powder up for this.”

The denizens of the Underworld don’t show up on video, film, even audio – at least, not to those without Blue wrenching open the third-eye. Every once in a while some philosopher gets it in his head to talk about whether or not the powers of the Underworld are mystical or natural – something evolved out of nature or born from occult powers, but Mookie doesn’t know and doesn’t care. All he knows is, you want to see the monsters, you need to play with the peacock. And that’s what the Boss is telling him.

Except, no peacock smear around the Boss’ temples – nor Haversham’s. So how’s he know?

Doesn’t matter. The Boss knows. That’s good enough for Mookie.

Werth pulls a palm-sized tin. It’s an old hair pomade container: “Doan Brothers’ Hair Pomade Dressing Pat Pending”. Rust flakes rain as he screws it open.

Mookie pulls out his own tin. Hands shaking. The Blue is the key to a door he no longer wants to open.
Nora
…

Werth gives him a look.

“You don’t need to jump in on this,” Werth says.

“I want to see.” He doesn’t. But he has to.

“You’re just coming off a high. Your pupils are like pencil points.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Werth lowers his voice. “You’re gonna run yourself ragged.”

“I said I’m
in
,” Mookie growls. And that ends it.

Big thumbs in the blue, back to the temples, smudge one, smudge two. The stuff rolls in rougher this time: like a horse kick to the psychic center. Werth dips a pinkie in, does the same – the true denizens of the Great Below don’t need Cerulean to see their own kind, but a half-and-half like Werth needs to. His eyelids flutter like fly-wings against window blinds and then he’s blazing, too.

Haversham replays the video.

Fifteen seconds in: a shape.

It emerges from the side, as if crossing the road.

The closet suddenly feels to Mookie like an elevator. The floor dropping out. His heart and all his substantial viscera left in the air as everything else falls.

Werth sees it, too. Sees
her
. “That little fucking bitch.”

Nora.

Something big is coming, Mookie.
 

I’m going to change the game.
 

Jesus.

On the video feed, Nora walks right up to the front door. Pulls out a key. Unlocks. Opens. And then she’s gone.

Mookie swallows a hard knot that feels like a baseball in his throat. He shoves Haversham out of the way, grabs the dial, fast-forwards in fifteen-minute increments. The door never opens again. Nora never comes back out.

“Persephone,” the Boss says. He doesn’t know her as Nora. Nobody here but Werth knows that she’s Mookie’s daughter. If they were to ever find out…

But Werth, he
does
know, and he stares icicles right through Mookie.

“I thought the girl was pushed out,” Werth says, his voice barely containing the fact he’s talking more to Mookie than to Haversham or Zoladski. “I thought she was done in this city. And yet,
here she is
.”