Costume Not Included (2 page)

  But now the starburst lingered, a four-pointed star whose downward-pointing lowest projection lengthened and kept on lengthening, so that the image evoked both a crucifix and the star that was supposed to have lured three Persian magi across Mesopotamia to Bethlehem. And then came a little special-effects image manipulation: Billy Lee appeared to step through the starburst from the darkness behind, his hands raised, arms outspread, his contact lens-enhanced blue eyes brilliant beneath the swept-back pompadour of shining hair.

  The sounds of choir and guitars faded away. In the silence that followed, the preacher lowered his arms, looked straight into the camera and said, "He is coming!"

  Chesney groaned. It was a little groan, half suppressed – as if his mother, though miles away, might hear him. "No," he said, more to himself than to the man on the television, "I'm not."

  The Reverend Billy Lee, broadcasting live from a highly automated studio a few miles from his walled estate, ninety minutes by car south of the city where Chesney lived, did not hear the young man's groan or his denial. And Hardacre would not have changed his message even if he could have heard the defiance. He was, as he was now telling the television audience, the bearer of a message from on high.

  "I am the forerunner," he said, his eyes shining, his square-jawed, broad-browed face set in an expression of exalted expectation. "I am the harbinger. I am the messenger who brings the word. And the word is: he is coming. A prophet, the bearer of a new gospel, a gospel for our times. He is coming."

  The camera angle changed, and the preacher turned to meet it. "I have met him. He has crossed my threshold, sat at my table, broken bread with me." Now the wellmodulated voice fell to a breathy whisper. "And he was attended," Hardacre said, "by an angel of the Lord."

  "That's not how it happened," Chesney said. "The angel was there to see
you
."

  The man on the television was pressing on. The glow had faded from his face – camera trickery, Chesney thought – as the preacher began to talk about the world and its current state. He talked about violence in places where violence was not unexpected, about greed and venery in the usual locations, about pride and envy. He cited examples of humanity's lack of humanity, of hunger and want amidst gluttony and excess, of blood for blood and hate for hate.

  "But all this," he said, turning to a new camera angle, one which brought the glow back to his visage and the gleam back into his eyes, "all this will soon come to an end. We will turn a page, begin a new chapter, create a new story – a good news story – to ring down the ages to come.

  "The moment is almost at hand, it marches toward us with every tick of the clock. He is coming. The prophet is coming. And all shall be made new."

  As he was speaking these last lines, an image appeared on a curtain hung behind the preacher. A rear-projected image that moved as the draped cloth rippled in a faint breeze – probably, thought Chesney, generated by a fan on the floor. The image was as of a halo of light surrounding the dark silhouette of a man's head and shoulders. The head was small and round, the shoulders none too wide. Chesney recognized the outline shapes: they were based on his own unprepossessing anatomy – in fact, they were photoshopped from a picture his mother had taken of him, in her back yard, on his twenty-fourth birthday.

  "No!" he said, and he would have said it just as loudly, even if his mother had been in the same room, even if she had been wearing her most severe frown, a downturning of the mouth's corners that made her lips resemble a croquet hoop. If Genghis Khan's mom had ever turned such a glower upon her son, Prince of Conquerors would have straightaway reconsidered his hording and pillaging ways.

  But Chesney had come to believe that he was now proof against its baleful influence. He had, after all, defied Satan, had even bested the Archfiend at a few hands of poker. And he had caused a young woman to make faces, motions and sounds that were far more affecting than those made by actresses in porn films. "No!" he told the voice from the television. "Not me! I'm a crimefighter, not a prophet! You better get yourself another actuary!"

  The phone rang. He snatched it up, pushed the talk button and said, "What?" without modulating his assertive tone of voice.

  "Sweetie?" said Melda McCann. "Something wrong?"

  The young man softened immediately. No one had ever called him "sweetie" before. Melda did it frequently, yet Chesney never tired of hearing it. "It's the Reverend Hardacre," he told her. It galled him that he couldn't just say the man's name without prefacing it with the honorific, but childhood conditioning ran deep. "He's at it again!"

  "Well, screw him and the cloud he came down from Heaven on," she said, which made Chesney laugh, despite himself. He imagined his mother reacting to his girlfriend's view of Letitia's boyfriend – and boyfriend was the appropriate label. He was sure the preacher and his mother were cohabiting "without benefit of clergy," as his mother herself would have put it before she had apparently opted to exempt herself from her own lifelong standards.

  He had to use his imagination because, so far, the two females in his life had not occupied the same room at the same time – a state of affairs that would continue for as long as Chesney could arrange it. Of course, the young man knew that this happy situation could not forever endure; he was not looking forward to that inevitable moment, when the clash of universes must occur.

  Melda was saying something else. Chesney tore his mind away from the delayable-yet-unavoidable and paid attention. She was asking him if he wanted to meet her in the park or have her come to his apartment.

  "Here," he said, without need to think about it, "my place." There were things they could do in his apartment that they could not do in the park, things that were still new to Chesney's experience, and even more delightful than being called "sweetie." He could eat anytime.

  "We'd better make it the park," Melda said. "I'm hungry. And momma always said a girl should eat first, even when she was providing the eats." Chesney made a different kind of groan, and she said, "Don't worry, sweetie. Food gives me energy."

  She lived on the far side of the long river-following park. Carrying the picnic basket, it would take her a while to walk to their favorite spot – actually, it was Chesney's pick – near the amphitheater and the basketball courts. That meant he had some time. He used it to summon his assistant.

  The fiend appeared the moment the young man spoke its name, bringing with it a slight whiff of sulfur. As usual, it arrived hovering in the air, its saucer-sized eyes in a weasel's face at the same level as Chesney's, which meant that Xaphan's patent-leather shoes, wrapped in old-fashioned spats, were about three feet above the carpet. Between the fanged head and the foppish footwear was a pin-striped, wide-lapeled, double-breasted suit, of a kind that had been fashionable among the denizens of Chicago speakeasies, back when
twenty-three-skidoo
was on every hepster's lips.

  "Hiya, boss," said the demon around a thick Havana Churchill that protruded from between two huge curved canines that would have been a sabertooth's pride. The fiend removed the cigar only long enough to blow a complicated figure of smoke into the apartment's air and to lift the glass in its other hand to its thin, black weasel lips. Xaphan drank off a finger of tawny overproof rum, issued a breathy sigh of satiation, and put the cigar back where it had been, breathily pumping the glowing end to a brighter glow. When the Churchill was drawing to its satisfaction, Chesney's assistant said, "Whatta ya say, whatta ya know?"

  "I'm going out to the park for a picnic with Melda," the young man said, "then we'll probably come back here." He ignored the demon's suggestive eyebrow motions and low-voiced "Hubba hubba!" – he'd found that responding to Xaphan's prurience only encouraged more of the same. "But tonight," Chesney went on, "I want to go out and do some crimefighting."

  "Okay," said his assistant, in a tone that implied it was waiting to hear the details.

  But Chesney didn't have any details. "So I need to know what's going down" – he'd heard police officers, or at least actors pretending to be cops, talk that way on TV – "in the mean streets. What can we hit tonight?"

  Xaphan's eyes looked left, then right. It pulled the cigar from its lips and examined the glowing coal for a moment, then said, "I gotta tell ya, not much."

  "What do you mean?"

  Xaphan put the cigar back, shot the linked French cuffs of its silk shirt and gave a kind of hitch of its padded shoulders that always reminded Chesney of Jimmy Cagney in the old black-and-white, crime-does-not-pay films. "I mean," the demon said, "not much. These days, crime…" – it gestured with the hand that held the glass of rum, spilling a few drops – "there ain't so much of it around, see?"

  "Come on," said Chesney, "it's a big city. I've seen the figures." As an actuary, the young man was intimately familiar with crime statistics.

  "Things change," Xaphan said, tilting the glass and draining the last of the rum.

  "What things?"

  "Well, mainly," said his assistant, "you."

  "I haven't changed," said Chesney. "I don't change." Anyone who knew him could have attested to the truth of the remark – although not too many people, apart from his mother and now Melda McCann, could have been said to have really known Chesney Arnstruther. "Does not play well with others," had been a frequent notation on his grade-school report cards, words that could have served as both the young man's life motto and the epitaph carved into his tombstone. The only other phrase that could have given those six words competition as a succinct summation of Chesney's life was the one he had just voiced to his demonic helper: "I don't change."

  "Yeah," said the fiend, "but you've changed the game. At least around this here burgh."

  "You mean crime – major crime – has gone down since I started being The Actionary?"

  "You got it. The serious outfits, they gone and pulled right back. No dope, no heists, no chop shop action. Nobody would look at a bank job even if they had the keys to the front door and the combination of the vault."

  "Hmm," said Chesney. "So what does that leave?"

  Xaphan shrugged again and puffed smoke around the cigar clamped in its jaw. "Little everyday jobs, muggings, burglaries, guys cheatin on their taxes, playin' poker, hangin around in cathouses, kids boostin stuff outta the stores, guys spittin on sidewalks." It drew deeply on the Churchill and blew another complicated smoke-shape. "You wanna tackle some of that?"

  "We've been doing that kind of thing the past couple of weeks. That's not what I became a crimefighter for."

  "Hey," said the demon, "whatta ya gonna do?"

  Chesney had no quick answer. He couldn't see a pool of light to work within. "Wait a minute," he said after a moment, "I play poker."

  "Not for the stakes I'm talkin about," said the demon. "Real moolah. Besides, you never played in the back room of no high-class house of ill repute. A house that takes a percentage of every pot – that's what makes it illegal."

  "Huh," said Chesney, still thinking. "Is there a game like that going on tonight?"

  "It so happens, there is."

  "Are the players hoodlums?"

  Xaphan looked like a weasel weighing things up. "These ain't your ordinary street goniffs," it said, "but ain't one of them as hasn't done a shady deal or taken a kickback."

  "Racketeers!"

  "It wouldn't be stretchin' the point too far."

  "What time does the game start?"

  "Nine, ten," said Xaphan. "They eat, have a few drinks, maybe talk some bizness, go upstairs with the girls. Then they settle in for an all-nighter."

  "Where is this place? What's it called?"

  "It ain't got a name. Too exclusive. Mostly they call it 'Marie's place.' Or just 'the place,' seein' as how Marie's been dead maybe forty years."

  It was sounding good to Chesney. He could see it in his mind's eye: chandeliers and swag lamps, champagne in free-standing ice buckets, velvet-covered plush furniture, cigar smoke, women in frilly corsets. He realized he was back in a pool of light. "Come at midnight," he told his assistant. "We'll let them get right into it. Then… wham!"

  "Wham it is, boss." Xaphan looked into its glass and seemed surprised to find it empty. "Ya need me for anything right this minute?"

  "No, I've got to get to the park and meet Melda." Chesney checked his watch, found he had to hurry.

  "You wanna take the short cut?"

  Technically, according to the contract Billy Lee Hardacre had negotiated with Satan on behalf of the young man, the demon's powers were only to be invoked in Chesney's role as the crimefighting Actionary. But Chesney and his assistant had come to a private arrangement: Xaphan performed some extra duties in exchange for being able to use their way station in the outer circle of Hell, which was well stocked with overproof rum and fine Cuban cigars – the demon had developed a taste for the latter during his Capone years, and for the former when he was attached to the scourge of the Spanish Main.

  "Let's," said Chesney. Instantly he was no longer in his apartment, but in a warm, comfortable and spacious room whose thick stone walls, oak-beamed ceiling and plush carpeting kept out the howl of the ice-charged winds that blew foul, stinking air in a ceaseless gale through Hell's outermost region. Xaphan used the stopover to recharge his tumbler of rum and immediately drain it. Then the room was gone and Chesney was in the park, near the bench where he was to meet his girlfriend.

  "Girlfriend," he whispered to himself. Saying it was almost as good as being called 'sweetie.'

  "She's comin," said the demon. "I'm just gonna fade you in."

  To avoid startling the citizenry, they had arrived invisible, as Xaphan would remain. The demon looked around, saw a teenager on the very edge of the riverbank. The kid was trying to impress his girl by holding out a fragment of bread and encouraging a floating Canada goose to take it from his hand. The fiend made a slight motion of its own stubby fingers, and now the goose lunged upward, caught both the bread and the youth's fingertips in its beak and turned its neck into an ess-shape as it yanked down hard. The teenager, pulled toward the water, tried to keep his footing, knees bent, free arm windmilling. His girl grabbed the flailing limb, but she was too late to pull him back. Instead, he grabbed her wrist and they both toppled into the shallows, where the goose beat its wings at them and honked in outrage.