Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (69 page)

He used to love to dance. He remembered that. He loved to move with someone's arms around him, loved the sweet scent and the pressure of a woman's hands, loved grace and fire and dawning need — whoever she was. They were all beautiful, whether they were pretty or plain. Dancing made them beautiful. And in jazz anything was possible.

Almost anything.

Mitch leaned against a wrought iron railing, listening to each note washing over him. Cold iron, cold as disappointment, cold as forgetting. In New Orleans you could forget anything. He crushed out a cigarette on the pavement and went on.

L
ewis, Alma and Jerry rushed along the hotel hall.

"Where the hell could he have gone?" Alma demanded. "Did he say anything to you, Jerry?"

"Not a word," Jerry said, leaning heavily on his cane and hitting the button for the elevator. "The last thing he said was that he wanted to clean up. That's all."

"Where would he go? Does he know New Orleans?"

"I have no idea," Jerry said. "He never talked about it if he does."

"Wait," Lewis said, catching Alma's arm. He put his finger to his lips and pulled her away.

Jerry's eyebrows rose, but he followed after as quietly as possible.

Lewis held up one finger. Wait. He quietly backtracked a few steps to a door marked "Linen". Alma stood to one side as Lewis reached for the handle and whipped it open.

A woman fell out. She'd been leaning against the door, and now she stumbled out onto the carpet. She was wearing a smart gray silk dress and strappy heels, but the finger waves were unmistakable, even before she picked herself up from the floor.

"You," Alma said, advancing on her. "What have you done with Mitch?"

"I thought we left her in Flagstaff," Jerry said. "The countess, or whoever she is."

"So did I," Lewis said grimly.

Alma dragged her to her feet, shoving her back against the wall roughly. "Where is Mitch?"

"Darling, how should I know?" the countess gasped.

"Don't darling me, and don't play stupid," Alma said. "You know perfectly well that necklace is a cursed article of malevolent power, and you've done something with both it and Mitch. Now you'd better start talking before I lose my temper. These gentlemen may be too well bred to sock you, but I'm not."

"I know what it is," she said. "But I don't have it!"

"Where is it?" Alma gave her another shove. "Where is Mitch and what have you done with him?"

"I haven't any idea where he is," the countess said. "I haven't laid eyes on your Mr. Sorley since the speakeasy in Flagstaff!"

"What speakeasy in Flagstaff?" Lewis demanded.

Jerry let out a long breath. "The one Mitch went to after we all went to bed."

Alma shot him a sharp look. "You let Mitch go to a speakeasy by himself?"

"He's a grown man!" Jerry snapped. "I'm not his chaperone! He wanted to go get a drink. He went. He came back forty-five minutes later and went to bed. Why would I do anything about that?"

Alma tightened her grip on the countess' arm. "What happened in the speakeasy?"

"Nothing. We had a drink. We talked for a few minutes. I swear I didn't do a thing to him," the countess squeaked, her voice going up with injured innocence that Alma didn't believe for a second. "He loaned me a few dollars for the train back to LA."

"And yet here you are in New Orleans," Jerry observed. "In a very pretty new dress that you didn't seem to have on the plane in Flagstaff. And here Mitch isn't. And oh, coincidentally the necklace is missing again, which it seems to be whenever you're around."

"And I mean to search her," Alma said. "To the skin." She dragged the countess down the hall to her room, Lewis at her shoulder. "You can let me search you. Or you can let Lewis do it. Your pick."

The countess tossed her head. "As if that were a choice."

Alma gave Lewis a nod and closed the door, hearing the comforting familiarity of him leaning against it. "Strip," she said.

The countess started unfastening her dress. "Why are you so worked up about it? It's not your necklace."

"Because that thing kills people," Alma said. "Innocent people. And one of my men is missing."

"Your men." The countess pulled her dress over her head and stood in her slip. "They're all yours?"

"They're my responsibility," Alma said.

"As if you were a general?"

"Something like."

The countess' brow wrinkled. "Just what do you think you are?"

"The Magister of their lodge," Alma said sharply. Yes, it was probably unwise to say, but the worry for Mitch crawling inside her loosed her tongue. "Now raise your arms and turn around."

"Okey-dokey," the countess said, and jabbed out with her elbow, catching Alma in the stomach.

It hurt. A lot. For a moment she couldn't catch her breath. I've had worse, Alma thought. A lot worse. It's not that bad, not that much. She looked up at the countess, eyes watering, her left arm coming up in a vicious sideways blow that caught the countess in the side of the head and knocked her over, crashing against the dressing table.

"Ok in there?" Lewis called through the door.

Alma kicked the back of her knees, dropping her onto her butt. "Fine," she called back. She looked down at the countess. "Now. Cooperation?"

L
ewis winced at every thump. "Think we should go in?" he asked Jerry.

"Give her five more minutes," Jerry said, glancing at his watch. "Unless someone screams."

Lewis nodded. "Sounds good."

In two minutes the door opened. The countess had a bleeding cut at the corner of her mouth and Alma looked like she was getting a black eye. Both of them seemed decently dressed and reasonably sedate. "Come in," Alma said. "Stasi was just about to tell us about the necklace."

Lewis looked at Jerry and Jerry shrugged. "Let's hear it, then." They came in and sat down side by side on the bed. The countess had the chair, and Alma prowled around the room barefooted. One of her new shoes seemed to be missing its heel.

"Can I have a cigarette at least?" the countess asked.

"Sure," Lewis said, and lit one for her.

Jerry looked at her cynically. "So, is the necklace your family heirloom from the Old Country that you had to get back to comfort your dying grandmother?"

"No," she said shortly. "I was hired to steal it."

"By whom?" Alma asked.

"By a client here in New Orleans, a man named Lanier."

"You really are a professional thief," Lewis said, with interest. He'd never met one outside of the pages of a magazine.

"I do odd jobs." The countess took a draw from her cigarette. "A girl has to make a living."

"Lanier," Alma said. "Who is he and why does he want it?"

She shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "He's got money. He said it was valuable to him, an antique. It's not worth that much on the open market, and he paid me $500 to get it for him. That's good money. There's a Depression, you know."

"We know," Lewis said.

"It was supposed to be a very simple job," she said. "Go to LA, break into Kershaw's safe, and walk out with it. Kershaw wouldn't even notice for a couple of days, and by then I'd be in New Orleans delivering it to Lanier. Only I didn’t want to be walking around with it all night, so I stashed it. And then somebody called the police and I had to leave it there, because if I'd tried to walk out with it I would have been caught."

It couldn't have been that simple, Lewis thought. The office was warded. Which meant the countess knew a few occult tricks of her own, beyond the business with the cards, enough to baffle Henry's wards.

"You hid it on the plane," Jerry said. The color was high in his face. "And then sneaked on the plane the next morning to get it back. We know that part. What about the part with Mitch and the speakeasy?"

"I was trying to get one of the other teams to give me a ride to San Angelo," she said. "Your Mr. Sorley came in and we had a chat. He loaned me money to get back to LA. Instead I wired for more cash and took the train to New Orleans." She shrugged. "I knew that you had to fly a longer route. A direct train would beat you here. It's easy to find out where the contestants are supposed to stay, so I checked in as Mrs. Sorley and I was hiding in the linen closet waiting for you to go to dinner. As soon as you did I'd just use the key to let myself in." She took another long draw. "Then I'd nip in, grab the necklace, and be gone before you knew it."

Alma looked at Lewis. "What do you think?"

There was no cloud around her, no sense of deception, though whether hewas good enough to tell was the real question. Still, Alma was asking and he shouldn't second guess his abilities. He should rely on them as she did. Lewis shook his head. "I don't think she's lying," he said.

The countess snorted. "And what are you? A lie detector?"

"A medium," Alma said.

"What a coincidence! I'm a medium too!" She gave Lewis a brilliant smile.

"Can we stay on the subject?" Jerry asked.

"I have no idea where the necklace is, or where your errant knight has gone," the countess said. "What's the big deal anyhow?"

Alma leaned back against the dressing table. "I meant it when I said the necklace is cursed," she said. "Every woman who puts it on dies soon, and by violence." She met the countess' eyes. "So if Lanier didn't warn you about that, he certainly put you in a nice spot. Did you put it on?"

"No," she said slowly. "I never had a chance."

"But you wanted to," Lewis said. He knew that suddenly, as clearly as if she'd said it. He leaned forward. "You felt it too, didn't you? The way it draws you."

She nodded. "I wanted to on the plane. But I didn't. I didn't for some reason."

"The plane's protected," Lewis said. The sigil. His own protection, painted on the tail, protecting everyone aboard, even the stowaway.

The countess looked at him sharply. "Yours?"

Lewis nodded.

"That's a nice piece of work."

He felt his face heat. "Thanks."

Alma crossed her bare feet. "The necklace exerts a powerful and malevolent draw," she said. "As I'm sure you noticed. It wants to be worn… It wants women to wear it and die.”

“And it wants men to kill,” Jerry said. “That’s what it wanted from me.”

Lewis looked up. “And — from Mitch?”

“Oh, yes,” Alma said, her voice grim

“The dream,” Lewis said. That had to be what it was about, murder in New Orleans, warning him of what might happen.

"Oh yes," Alma said, not taking her eyes off the countess. "It's a very dangerous thing. And now it's on the loose with Mitch, who, given the draw it exerted on the rest of us, is probably snared. We have no idea where he is or what he's doing, but we have to find it before it carries out the things it's cursed to do. Before it kills again."

The countess' face was white, and Lewis thought her expression of shock was genuine. "I had no idea."

"Well now you do," Alma said. "So I suggest you get out of here and keep your head down and avoid your friend Lanier. I don't expect he'll be pleased with you."

The countess stubbed her cigarette out in the glass ashtray. "What are you going to do?"

Alma stood up. "We're going to find Mitch." She glanced at Jerry. "And then we're going to get the necklace back before anyone gets hurt."

"Why is it your problem?"

Lewis knew that expression. He must have worn it himself, not long ago, when Alma told him what the Lodge did. He knew how unbelievable it sounded. It still did. But it was true, and he knew the rightness of it in his bones. "Because it's our job," Lewis said.

"I thought your job was to win an air race."

"Our job is to preserve the world," Lewis said gently. "If we don't, who will?"

Something moved in her eyes, something that half wanted to believe, something real and tender as new grass. "And Mitchell Sorley is part of your Lodge?"

"Yes," Alma said. "And we're going to find him before anyone gets hurt. Thank you for telling us the truth. You're free to go." She got up and rummaged in her suitcase for her old, comfortable shoes.

"I can help," the countess said.

Jerry snorted.

"No, really. I can," she insisted.

"You just want to tag along while we find the necklace for you," Jerry said. "Thanks but no thanks."

"I'm a medium," she said. "I can hear the dead."

Lewis looked at Alma, who shook her head. "I think we're fine with just our own wings. And you understand why we can't trust you."

"Of course, darling." The countess got to her feet. "Well, it's been lovely. I suppose I'll see you around." She gave Lewis a brittle smile. "Ta and all that."

"Bye," Lewis said, feeling that it was rather inadequate.

The countess swanned out the door. After a second Jerry went and opened it. "She's gone," he said.

Alma was already changing into slacks and a blouse. "Ok," she said. "We need to find Mitch."

A
woman was singing the blues. She was tall, with tawny skin and a rhinestone clip in her hair, leaning against the piano while the notes floated out into the night. He looked in through the window of the bar, watching her, watching the way her hand rested on the piano, so graceful and so light.

He'd heard this song before. Or maybe he'd heard her sing before, twelve years ago. He couldn't remember which. He couldn’t remember the name of the bar either, but his feet had found it. He'd found it. It was still here, packed and busy.

The blues were songs about death or about lost things that could never be found — youth or love or pride. The blues were true songs. She had red, red lips and her voice purred on the low notes, a jazz diva holding court for a room full of jesters, true as if they'd worn Mardi Gras costumes, harlequins all. A harlequin, a devil, a prince… Who could tell who anyone truly was? Sometimes the prince is a devil in disguise. And sometimes he's nobody at all.

Mitch stood under the awning, listening to the blues. He might as well listen one more time before the end.

Chapter Fourteen