The Dog Said Bow-Wow (25 page)

She pressed the gun into his hands.

“If I mean so little to you,” she cried histrionically, “then kill me!” She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. “I will die beside the man I love!”

“Yes…” Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. “The man you love.”

He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

It went off again.

He collapsed dead upon the carpet.

The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an
accident d’amour
, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. “What a horrible little man he was!” he exclaimed. “You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health.” He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, “Will you be returning for Madame d’Etranger’s body?”

“No,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation.”

Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. “Consider how tenuous our position is here,” he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. “Anyway — what body?”

Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone.

“Between the money I had to slip to
les flics
in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did,” Surplus told his morose companion, “and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better off than we were when we first arrived in Paris.”

This news roused Darger from his funk. “You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?”

“
Ci, Ça
, and
l’Autre
. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were.”

It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.

They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. “Talk,” he said.

The gun said nothing.

He nudged it ever so slightly with one fmger. “It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim.”

“All right, all right!” the pistol said. “How did you know?”

“Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook which gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance—unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you.”

“You are a more intelligent man than you appear.”

“I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me — what was this ridiculous charade all about?”

“How much do you know already?”

“The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now I know all that occurred. What I do not understand is
why.
”

“Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette.”

“On this we are as one. Go on.”

“But, as he had her made, he owned her. And as she was his property, he was free to do with her as he liked.” Then, when Darger’s face darkened, “You misapprehend me, sir! I do not speak of sexual or sadomasochistic practices but of chattel slavery. Monsieur was, as I am sure you have noted for yourself, a possessive man. He had left instructions that upon his death, his house was to be set afire, with Mignonette within it.”

“Surely, this would not be legal!”

“Read the law,” the gun said. “Mignonette determined to find her way free. She won me over to her cause, and together we hatched the plan you have seen played to fruition.”

“Tell me one thing,” Surplus said curiously. “You were programmed not to shoot your master. How then did you manage…?”

“I am many centuries old. Time enough to hack any amount of code.”

“Ah,” said Surplus, in a voice that indicated he was unwilling to admit unfamiliarity with the gun’s terminologies.

“But why
me?
” Darger slammed a hand down on the stone rail. “Why did Madame d’Etranger act out her cruel drama with my assistance, rather than…than…with someone else’s?”

“Because she is a cold-hearted bitch. Also, she found you attractive. For a whore such as she, that is justification enough for anything.”

Darger flushed with anger. “How dare you speak so of a lady?”

“She abandoned me,” the gun said bitterly. “I loved her, and she abandoned me. How else should I speak of her under such circumstances?”

“Under such circumstances, a gentleman would not speak of her at all,” Surplus said mildly. “Nevertheless, you have, as required, explained everything. So we shall honor our implicit promise by leaving you here to be found by the next passer-by. A valuable weapon such as yourself will surely find another patron with ease. A good life to you, sir.”

“Wait!”

Surplus quirked an eyebrow. “What is it?” Darger asked.

“Take me with you,” the gun pleaded. “Do not leave me here to be picked up by some cutpurse or bourgeois lout. I am neither a criminal nor meant for a sedentary life. I am an adventurer, like yourselves! I can be of enormous aid to you, and an invaluable prop for your illicit schemes.”

Darger saw how Surplus’s ears perked up at this. Quickly, and in his coldest possible manner, he said, “We are not of the same social class, sir.”

Taking his friend’s arm, he turned away.

Below, at the landing-stage, their barge awaited, hung with loops of fairy-lights. They descended and boarded. The hawsers were cast off, the engine fed an extra handful of sugar to wake it to life, and they motored silently down-river, while behind them the pistol’s frantic cries faded slowly in the warm Parisian night. It was not long before the City of Light was a luminous blur on the horizon, like the face of one’s beloved seen through tears.

IRONBECK WAS
a weary old redbrick factory town located on the west bank of the Porpentine up in the northern marches along the border of Faerie. Ned Wilkins was an Ironbecker bred and born and, like everybody he knew, had graduated from school at age twelve and gone immediately to work the day after. He’d been a breaker boy at the colliery, a scrap sorter at the boiler works, a grease gunner in a machine shop, and a shit laborer more places than he cared to remember, and the one constant in his life was that if there was no other work for him to do, somebody would hand him a broom to keep him busy. He had a thick head, no imagination to speak of, and he could handle himself in a fight if the need arose. He considered himself one of the lads, and took it for granted that they accepted him on those same terms.

So it was a shock when, having come of an age when such knowledge suddenly became urgent, Ned discovered that no one would tell him the location of the bordello across the river.

The bordello was one of those things that nobody spoke openly of yet everyone made smutty slantwise reference to, like the men who hung out at the quarry and would suck the dick of any boy who let them or the clapped-out whore at the Bucket of Nails who’d do it for a beer. Ned had never actually laid eyes on the Bucket of Nails doxy and rather doubted she existed, but almost every night at sunset, once he knew to look, he could see the dim figures of men furtively slipping across the trestle railroad bridge to Faerie, where no honest business awaited.

“You’ve not got experience enough,” Boyce told him, though Boyce had barely two years on him, and they’d shared the same sixth grade. Boyce was an apprentice steam fitter at the turbine factory where Ned was little more than a gofer. “Wait a bit, and when you’ve gotten your stick wet a few times…well, we’ll talk about it.”

“Bastard!” Ned cried, and punched Boyce so hard the cigarette flew out of his mouth. Which, given the size of Boyce, meant that it was inevitable Ned would be in no shape to go to work the next day. But there are things a man must do regardless of consequence. Just to keep his self-respect.

That spring, Ned took up with a girl named Rosalie who worked in the canteen at the wire-works. One astonishing night, she took him and a blanket to the woods out beyond the commons and taught him everything he’d been most desperate to know. For a season they lived together, coupling at every chance, and then, after two weeks in which nothing he did pleased her and everything he said provoked an argument, she moved out.

When he learned that Rosalie had gone directly from his flat to that of a mechanic’s apprentice named Rusty Jones, Ned sharpened up his biggest knife and went hunting for him. But rumors flew faster than birds in Ironbeck, and when he finally located his rival’s place, Rusty and four of his mates were waiting there. They took the knife away from him, blackened his eye, and spoke a few calm words of reason into his ear. All things told, they were decent to him. There were men who’d had their nuts crushed for less.

In the aftermath of which, Ned found himself thinking again of the bordello in Faerie. So, of a warm summer night, he waited in the woods by the tracks on the far side of the river. In the distance a signal light glowed red and green. Overhead, three moons shone. When finally Boyce came striding up the tracks, jauntily whistling “The Continental Soldier,” Ned stepped out into the open and quietly said, “Yo.”

Boyce stopped. “Yo,” he said warily.

“I’m taking you up on your offer. Show me the way.”

“How much money d’you have on you?”

“Enough.” Ned had brought along his entire week’s pay, knowing it was far too much but not wanting to risk the humiliation of being caught short.

“More than you need, in any case. Give me a bank note and I’ll show you the way there and back again.” It was extortion, and they both knew it. Knew, too, that the wisest thing was for Ned to pay without argument. Which he did.

Boyce grunted and turned away. Ned followed him down the gentle curve of the railroad tracks a quarter-mile or so and into a silvery stand of aspens. There, a trodden path took them down the verge and into the woods. “So what’s the big secret about this place?” Ned asked, trying to hide his nervousness with conversation. “Why all the mystery?”

“Shut your hole. You’ll know soon enough.”

By twisty ways they went deep into the moonlit forest, across one creek on a red lacquered Chinese bridge and over another on a fallen log whose top had been trod clean of bark by travelers. A mossy road of timbers laid down in the mud took them though a sulfur-marsh where night-haunts beckoned and corpse-lights burned blue in the water. Up slope then they trudged into a dark grove of oaks where fireflies gently sifted upward through the leaves. Ned was far from certain he would remember the path in all its intricacies. He worried that perhaps Boyce had taken him by roundabout ways, so as to demand more money on the return trip. “How much farther is it?”

“We’re here, asswipe. Look.”

At Boyce’s gesture, Ned lifted his gaze and saw a massive darkness beyond and among the oaks, the silhouette of a great house, impossible to make out in any detail and relieved only by the occasional glint of candles in its windows like so many distant stars.

“It’s enormous.”

“It’s the World. That’s what it’s called. There’s only one bordello to service all of Faerie and its entrances are everywhere and its name is the World. You take the left-hand path here. When you’re done, return to this spot, and I’ll guide you home.”

“Aren’t we going in the same way?” Ned asked, surprised.

“Every man enters by a different door. House rules. It’s that kind of place.” Boyce threw his cigarette down, ground it underfoot, and strode away.

Heart pounding, Ned let the path carry him to his entranceway.

The door was ordinary enough, but the frame it rested in was carved in graceful curves, like the lips of an enormous vulva. Wonderingly, Ned reached up his hand to touch the clitoris. Even by moonlight he could see it had been polished by many such casual rubs. The instant he touched it, the door flew open.

He went in.

The reception room was paneled in oak and lit by brass lanterns. Leather chairs were scattered here and there. It was posh, but surprisingly mundane. The only otherworldly touch to it was the imp who sat at the reception desk, his nose buried in an issue of
Mythology Today
while a barbed tail lashed back and forth behind him, as regular as a metronome.