The Blue Blazes (10 page)

“I’m too old for a girl. I need a woman.” He frees his palate with the culatello and melon. Soft mild fruit with what for many is the king of charcuterie – meat from the best part of the leg preserved in the pig’s emptied bladder and hung in a dark cool place for upwards of a whole year. Real-deal culatello hangs in musty old caves. Karyn hangs it in the basement of her Brooklyn joint, which is itself dark, dank, cavernous. The idea once struck Mookie that the Great Below would be a helluva place to hang meat – it wasn’t. The air has something wrong with it. The meat came out bulging with fungal pods like tumors. Smelled like sour, sun-warmed death.

“Oh, hey, I got something you might wanna see,” Karyn says.

She goes toward the back, grabs something from a metal table.

She lays it down in front of Mookie.

It’s a cleaver. Inside a brown leather sheath.

He grabs it. Holds it. Likes its weight. The carving blade fits inside the sheath snug as anything – it slides in like a hand inside a pocket. A dark wooden handle with two inlaid brass stars encompassing the heavy pins affixing it to the blade. The handle is long. “It fits me,” he says. The wood, polished to a gleam. Mookie draws it from the sheath.

The blade is bigger than a hardback book and almost as thick at the back – perfect for smashing garlic or, in Mookie’s world, cracking heads. The blade itself is serrated, not on purpose but through what must be years of use – the edge a crass line of crooked razor teeth. But when Mookie slides his thumb across it, he sees how sharp it is just the same. The flesh parts like soft whitefish and a bead of dark blood draws to the surface.

He wipes it on his shirt.

“Classy,” she tells him.

He gestures to her apron with his chin. “Hey, we’re used to blood.”

“You’re maybe used to a different kind of blood.”

A cold moment between them. Her eyes flick away from him. Is that fear there? She knows who he is. Maybe some of what he does.

But she pulls away from it, says, “That cleaver does me right. Not just for tenderloin or chicken bones. That’ll get me through the skull of a bison if I want it to.”

“Yeah, nice, nice.” It fits like it belongs to him already. “What do you want for it?”

“Cost me fifty, so I’ll take fifty.”

“I’ll pay more.”

“Nah. Just next time you come into the city, bring me some of what you been making lately. Hook a lady up.”

“Man, I’ve been busy.” He folds a trio of twenties, hopes she doesn’t notice as he slides the folded bills toward her. “Made some lardo I’m pretty proud of. Nowhere near like what you’re bringing to the table. But it’s… OK.”

“Like I said. Bring some in next time you come.”

“That’s like a four-year-old bringing in his fingerpainting to, uhh, ahhh–” He tries to think of some kind of masterpiece painter, but nothing’s coming to mind. “One of those old artist guys. But yeah. I will. Just so you can tell me what I’m doin’ wrong.” He stands. It’s time.
Get it over with.
“I got a favor to ask.”

“Favor. OK. Anything.”

“I need to talk to Lulu.”

Karyn bristles. She takes a step back.

“What? Why?”

“I…” He doesn’t want to say too much. Karyn can’t know. Can’t get drawn in. “I just got some questions to ask her.”

“That sounds bad.”

“It ain’t. It’s fine. Please.”

“I’m not…” She takes a deep breath. “I can’t. Your world. Her world…”

“I’m not gonna hurt her.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You know me.”

“Do I?” She laughs. “You come in here, I offer you food and cut you a deal on that cleaver – I think it’s a Richter Brothers cleaver if you care – and, and, and most of the time we just shoot the shit like two friends catching up on the day’s… the day’s whatever. But I know who you work for. I’m not stupid. And now you’re asking me about my girl? My girl who belongs to a gang? I won’t. OK? I won’t.”

“Karyn, c’mon, this is important–”

“You need to go.”

He thinks for a half-a-second: I could make her talk.

That’s what he does. Makes people hurt. Sometimes so they spill.

He’s good at it.

It’s a horrible thought. And he can’t do that. Not to her.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“Good.”

“Thanks for…” He doesn’t even have to say.

“Get out.”

 

10

 

Man will never colonize the Great Below. It is too wild. Too unreal. The chthonian labyrinth is a place of madness and I have seen it warp the mind of man the way a long damp warps a wooden beam. I myself have become twisted by the space but never enough to fool myself into thinking that we can or should stake a claim here. Yes, the Great Below has its villages and outposts – the marketplace of Yonder, the rat’s nest of addicts and madmen in the Freedom Tunnel, the temple of the People of the Turning Worm, the living graveyard of Daisypusher. And, of course, they have colonized us: the denizens of the Great Below have carved out territory in the Infinite Above – warehouses and nightclubs, restaurants and abandoned houses. The Chinatown block between Mott and Elizabeth is a known haven for starry-eyed monstrosities who care little for the Great Below and who hope to give it a go in the world above. Were you to ask me, I’d again reiterate that man will never properly colonize the Great Below. But give the monsters half a chance and they will most certainly colonize us.

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

 

They’re gonna kill her.

That thought keeps running laps through his head. They’re gonna find her. They’re gonna kill her. Because of what she did. Or what they
say
she did.

Mookie needs to find her, but he’s going nowhere fast. Karyn wouldn’t give up her girl. He shoulda known. Shouldn’t have even
asked
her to do that, and now here he is, heading to deal with the Devil to see if he can’t get a lead on his babygirl.

Shit.
Shit
.

He comes up out of the subway on Canal Street. Heads into Chinatown. Three-thirty in the morning. The Blazes are no longer a warm fire but a cigarette burn at the edges of everything, sizzling and searing him with a nicotine char.

Which means he’s gotta get
in
quick, get
out
quick. Doesn’t want to go in blind. And he knows that dipping into the Cerulean again so fast before he’s had a chance to sleep could be trouble. (But here a little hungry monkey in the back of his brain screeches and hoots and rattles the bars of its cage, desperate to feed, feed, feed.)

Mookie hoofs it. Heads toward Mott and Elizabeth, where Elizabeth ends at Bayard – that last block, deep in the heart of Chinatown, that’s where some of the monsters are. Monsters who play nice – or, nic
er
, at least – with the people above ground. You got Lei-Lei, the half-and-half mer-girl who runs a killer dim sum joint from her tank of ocean water in the back room. Across the street on the Elizabeth side is an antiquities shop run by another halfsie – actually a pair of them: conjoined twins, Jim and Judy, both white and blonde as the sand on a Florida beach. You look at them with a Blind eye, you don’t see them conjoined – you just see a brother and sister who always stand shoulder-to-shoulder. You go in Blazing and you see the way the flesh reaches out like gooey bread-dough, her ropy flesh intertwining with his, both of them looking like each is melting into the other.

They sell
tschotschkes
to the tourists – lucky kitty clocks and Buddha statues and the like – but to those in the know, they sell artifacts found down in the deep. Strange rocks. Gobbo weapons. Above-world items dragged into the depths and infused with the magic of the Underworld, sucking it up like a kid with a straw.

It’s not them that Mookie wants to talk to. Not tonight.

He wants to talk to Mr Smiley.

Smiley’s a Snakeface. Runs a “teahouse and cocktail bar” at the corner. Also runs a whole stable of prostitutes. And buckets of drugs. And guns.

And, most important of all,
information
.

On the way, Mookie grabs his cell. Thinks to dial Jess, his ex. Nora’s mother. It’s too late – er, early? – to call. Right? He’s suddenly not sure. Nora’s in danger. He knows that much. And if Jess knows anything…

Then again, Mookie’s the last person Jess wants to be talking to. Particularly at asshole-o’clock in the morning. That’s all it is. It’s late. Right?

He quickly pockets the phone.

Mookie spies the alley between the Xinhua fish market and the Golden Sun dry cleaners, ducks into the shadow between the two buildings. Back here, it smells like old fish and cleaning solution – soap and seafood in troubling combination. Mookie pushes past it, past a couple rust-eaten dumpsters, feet splashing in old puddles–

A figure steps out in front of him. Twenty feet away. Rises up from behind a small mound of black trash bags. Rats scatter.

It takes a second for Mookie’s eyes to adjust – but he sees the skinny, lanky frame and what at first looks like a square head. But the head isn’t square: it’s just the brown paper bag
over
the head. A bag painted with a Jack-o-Lantern mask, the orange pumpkin with the triangle eyes cut out, the jagged mouth, too.

Jack-o-Lantern mask.

That means it’s one of the Lantern Jacks.

They’re one of the city’s old-school gangs. New York isn’t like other cities. The big gangs – M13, Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, Triads – aren’t here. The Organization rose up in the 1970s, made friends with the gangs that existed at that time: the Black Aces, the Black Sleeves, the Battery Park Bruisers, the Railroaders, the Majestic Immortals, the Sinner Kids, and of course the Get-Em-Girls and the Lantern Jacks. The bigger gangs never got to make a foothold because the smaller ones made a deal with the Organization – a deal that let them survive here long as they kept to the truce. Each has territory. Each does their thing.

In theory.

Chinatown belongs to the Lantern Jacks. Used to be Majestic Immortal territory but those dumb fuckers imploded about ten years back – of all things, it was family that set them on a course for self-destruction. Head of the gang, Big Chang, was married to this ball-buster, Lirong. Chang got around: had a thing for some dominatrix named Orchid on the Upper East Side. Lirong got tired of it, fucked Big Chang’s brother, Little Chang. Big found out. The Chang brothers got into a very public pissing match, broke the gang in two, huge fight in the street – and Lirong was the one who ended it all. Walked into the fray, shot both of them, then walked back out. Never seen again. Gang fell apart. Lantern Jacks – white boys, not Chinese – strolled in with their pumpkin masks and their scarecrow rags, took the place over.

And now one of them stands before Mookie.

He hears footsteps behind him.

More creeping in. He glances over his shoulder, sees three of ’em back there. One of them has a thick chain ill-concealed behind his leg, the end of it draped on the ground like the head of a dead python.

“Outta my way,” Mookie says.

“You Blazing?” the Jack in front of him says, then cackles. These assholes, always with the theatrics. “You carrying the Blue? Huh?”

Behind him are snickers and hisses. The chain rattles.

“You know who I am?”

From behind him, one whispers, “Mookie Pearl.”

“Good. So you know to get the fuck outta my way.”

“Give us what you got, Pearl.”

The skinny Jack in front of him flicks his wrist – a straight razor gleams.

“We got a truce,” Mookie says.

“Do we?”

More cackles.

“Last I checked. You want to throw it away?”

The razor flashes in the air. Slicing a figure eight. The skinny Jack’s bag makes a crinkle-noise as he thrusts his tongue out of the mouth slit, waggling it.

Footsteps behind him. The Jacks are moving in.

Ballsy. Real ballsy. And stupid. And with the next thing the skinny Jack says, it makes sense–

“Sure glad I don’t have cancer.” Way he says that last word, it’s a droning weasel-whine:
caaaaanceeeeeeer
. Another happy cackle. “We heard the word. Persephone’s telling everybody.”

Shit.
Nora.
“So that’s what this is. Boss is fine. Healthy as a champion horse.”

Hesitation. The skinny one lets the razor hang. Takes a half-step back with one foot.

“You’re lying.”

“And you’re about to be lying, too. Lying
dead
.” Not his best line, but Mookie’s not real good at the banter. For extra spice he adds, “You little shit.”

Skinny Jack screeches like an owl.

It’s on. He rushes at Mookie, razor out at the side like a Samurai making a charge against a mounted soldier–

Mookie hears the three behind him close in and close in fast, feet on cracked pavement–

The chain loops around his neck.

The razor comes for his face.

His big hand catches Skinny Jack’s wrist before the blade can cut him.

He wrenches the hand sideways. The arm breaks at the elbow. Sickening crunch. Bone out of skin. White bone. Red blood. Skinny Jack howls as the chain pulls tighter around his neck. The razor clatters.

One down, three to go.

Mookie tilts his body at the waist, lurching forward and down. The Jack with the chain goes launching up over him and down on top of his compound-fracture buddy – he scrambles to get up, trying to find the chain, the razor, something–

But it’s too late. Mookie drop-kicks his head. Hears the jaw give way.

Mookie spins.

Gun in his face. Big fucking gun, too. Some kind of Dirty Harry revolver. Makes it all the easier to grab, which is what Mookie does – he snatches it with a twist, bashes the paper bag pumpkin mask hard enough to tear it down the center. Brown bag stained with red.

The fourth Jack – a dumpy, pudgy dipshit in baggy pants – just runs.

Mookie throws the gun.

It’s heavy. It clocks the fat shit in the back of the head. He drops, face forward, into a scum-slurry puddle. Mookie stomps over. Bends down and growls in the kid’s ear:

“I got my own message to send out. The Boss is alive. The Organization is strong. And Persephone better watch her back.”

Then he kicks the kid in the ass as he scrambles forward on all fours.

Mookie picks up the gun, chucks it in a dumpster.

He hopes they heed his warning.

But this is a warning for Mookie, too. They know.
They fucking know
about the Boss and his cancer. If these piss-ant pumpkin-heads know, that means the other gangs know, too. And it won’t be long before those big gangs outside the city like the Latin Kings and the Triads find out. The Boss is right: they’re gonna smell the blood in the water like so much frothy chum. Blood begets blood. A little now. A lot later.

Shit. He can feel the edges of his world start to give in a little – it’s suddenly claustrophobic here in the alley, like the walls are going to topple and crush. Mookie’s world is the Organization. If that falls, what does he have?

The thought makes him feel small and weak like a starving dog. A starving
old
dog.

Then he realizes: part of it is the Cerulean. The Blazes suddenly gutter and spark and go dark – it feels like something’s taken from him. Breath from his lungs. Bones from his legs. He steadies himself. Shudders like it’s suddenly cold.

He hoped to have eyes on when he went to see Mr Smiley.

So – now what? Go in Blind? Or dose up and keep push-push-pushing?

Inside, the chattering voice:
Go blue! Go deep! Blaze, motherfucker, blaze! Can’t hurt. Feels good! Makes you strong like ox. You’re already stupid, why be stupider? Open your eyes!
 

A reiterative chant:
Blue! Blue! Blue! Blaze! Blaze! Blaze!
 

Without even realizing it, he’s got the tin of powder already in his palm and open.

Damned if he does.

Damned if he doesn’t.

Mookie dips a thumb into the powder and smudges his temples.

The ravening fire takes him, hot and cold all at the same time.

 

The “teahouse” has a bouncer. Mookie knows him. Trogbody named Gorth, goes by the human name of Gary. Shorter than Mookie, but not by much. Bulky stone body shoved into a black T-shirt and cargo pants. Eyes are glittering quartz deposits tucked into a pair of craggy hollows. Mouth full of stalactite and stalagmite teeth.

“Mookie Pearl,” Gorth says by way of greeting. Whenever he speaks – really, when any Troggo speaks – you hear something in the back of his throat that sounds like a couple loose rocks bouncing down a mountain slope.

“Gorth,” Mookie says. The Cerulean’s starting to wear him down. He feels his neck tendons pulling tight like piano wire. He’s gotta chill out. Focus up. His daughter’s life is at stake here. Mookie takes a deep breath. “I need to see Smiley.”

“We’re shuttin’ down for the night.”

“Hell you are.”

“Almost four in the morning. Sun’ll be up. Smiley doesn’t like the sun.”

“Sun ain’t up yet.”

“I know, but–”

“I’m tired. I’m burning too long and too hard–” Here Mookie taps his temple. “I just need some info. Ten minutes. Tops.”

“I dunno–”

Mookie’s nostrils flare. “Got two ways to do this. First, you move aside, open that door. Second, I gotta find my own way in. And I’m not that smart. So that means I go through you. We’ll fight. It’ll be ugly. But I’m tired. And cranky. And Blazing hard. So I’ll send you home with a couple cracked fingers. An arm broken off at the wrist. Head split like a geode. And I’ll be beaten into mashed potatoes, too. That sound like a good way to end your night? I don’t think it sounds too goddamn good.”

The golem’s quartz eyes flicker and flash. “That sounds bad.”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Go ahead in.”

Gorth steps aside, his rock joints clattering.

 

The teahouse. The first floor is all dark wood, so dark it might as well be black. Trim the color of matcha powder. Rice paper screens the color of red poppies.