Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille

by Steven Brust

  Yeah.

  The temperature was just above freezing, and I’m told that in New Quebec this was pretty much as cold as it ever got, which was nothing compared to Jerrysport, with its incomplete terraforming, but pretty horrid compared to the tightly controlled conditions in Ibrium City.

  I said nothing as we walked in toward the main drag, Souci’s hands wrapped around my arm. Her hair was blown back off her face. There was that slight pout to her lips that may have been accomplished with lipstick. There were two bicycles in front of the bakery, probably the same bicycles, but I didn’t see the kids. A middle-aged woman dragged groceries behind her in a small cart. A fat man sat on a wire chair outside an outdoor café it was too cold for everyone else. Our conversation as we walked consisted of, “Where should we eat?” “How about Cecil’s?” “Fine.” We didn’t have to talk.

  There was plenty of light in Cecil’s so I could keep watching her. I never got tired of looking at her. The bones of her face were not so much perfect as perfect for her; the feline curve around the edges of her eyes, the hollow of her cheek, like a work of sculpture. I thought about what I had to ask her and grimaced.

  Cecil’s? It was a small place with a lot of mirrors and chrome and a little bit of an antiseptic feeling. The food was good, though. We had something that tasted like oyster soup and almost was, then she had a small salad and I had something with beef and mushrooms in a sherry sauce. No complaints.

  She said, “You’re pretty quiet.”

  “I’m eating.”

  She said, “Ahh,” which meant, “I don’t believe you.”

  I said, “Well, yeah.”

  She said, “What is it?”

  I said, “The bunch of us had a talk last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “We need to know what you know about Sugar Bear.”

  Everything in her body seemed to tighten for a moment and I was suddenly sure she was about to leave, but then that moment passed and she just looked at me. Her eyes never left mine. She said, “Is that right?” I wish I could describe the tone of voice she used for that: the cool, distant, uninterested tone that cut like a razor and raised welts like a whip. Maybe, if I could describe it, you’d understand just how hard it was for me to continue the conversation. If you think this is a plea for sympathy, you got it, bub.

  “We need to know,” I repeated.

  “Who is we?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Jamie, Rich, Eve, Tom, Rose—”

  “These people sent you to ask me—”

  “Not exactly. We need to know about Sugar Bear, and I know you know something about it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s important.”

  “To whom?”

  “To all of us. Maybe to everyone in New Quebec. Maybe to everyone in the world.”

  “Shit,” and the scorn in her voice cut me again, raised more welts.

  “Maybe I’m wrong about that,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “If so, you can tell me why. I need to know.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Doesn’t it matter what happens to me?”

  “What will happen to you?” She turned her head from me and didn’t say anything. I said, “I don’t understand. Would something happen to you if you told us about it?”

  She didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell if her shoulders were shaking or not. The idea that I might be making her cry made me physically ill. I said, “Are you all right, babe? Is there something I can—”

  “Leave me alone, all right?”

  She got up and walked out of the place. I sat there for two hours hoping she’d come back. When she didn’t I went back to the apartment, but she wasn’t there, either. I sat up in the living room with my back against Tom’s pillow for an hour or so, then I went into my room and slept.

  Jamie woke me up the next morning with coffee with cream and sugar and cocoa. “Thanks,” I said, sitting up.

  He sat down against the wall opposite me. “How did it go?”

  It came back to me then. I studied the wall for a moment, just to see if there were any cracks in it. I cleared my throat and turned back to Jamie. “Not well,” I said. “She got upset and took off.”

  “You didn’t get an answer, then.”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. Maybe after she’s thought about it.”

  “Okay,” he said, and left me to finish my coffee in peace.

  Later the four of us plus Carrie trooped over to Feng’s for breakfast. I had an omelette with green pepper and onions and sausage and garlic and cayenne, and a side of French toast. I had a local tea that was maybe a bit milder than the Irish Breakfast I was used to.

  “Well,” I said as I was finishing up. “We struck out with Souci. Now what?”

  “What was the problem?” asked Tom.

  “She didn’t want to tell me anything,” I said.

  Tom said to Carrie, “Could you ask her?” Her eyes grew very wide and she shook her head.

  “Guess not,” I said.

  “I could talk to her,” said Jamie.

  I looked at him. Yeah, he could be pretty persuasive. I remembered once when he convinced me to start an Irish band with him and Rose and Tom. I said, “If you think you can talk her into telling us something, go for it. I just don’t want to get her any madder at me than she already is.”

  “This is so weird,” said Carrie. “It’s like you’re plotting against her.”

  “Not against her,” I said, maybe too quickly, because the same thought had occurred to me.

  “What,” said Tom, “for her?”

  “We need to know what she knows,” I said.

  “I was joking,” said Tom.

  “What I’d like to do,” said Jamie, “is go stir up trouble somewhere until someone does something.”

  “Robert B. Parker,” said Tom.

  I said, “When you find a good writer, you stick with him.”

  “It’d work,” said Jamie.

  “Where do we do that?” said Tom.

  “Ummm. I don’t know.”

  We sat there a bit longer, then Jamie shrugged and stood up. “I’ll go talk to Souci.”

  “Good luck,” I said. The rest of us sat and drank coffee and tea, saying very little, for the better part of an hour. Then Fred came in, saw us, and headed straight over. He had a camera case slung over his shoulder, and a manila folder in his hand.

  “Any news?” I asked him.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said. “I happened to see someone who matched one of the descriptions going into a building not far from here, so I took a picture of him, and Mr. Carob agreed that it is him.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “What building?”

  “It’s just a few doors down,” he said. “It’s called Le Bureau Théâtral du Nouveau Québec.”

  “That’s the agency Souci works out of,” said Carrie.

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  “I talked to her,” said Jamie a few hours later, back at the apartment. “I tried, anyway.” I waited, watching him, wondering how he’d react to the latest news on our end. Tom and Carrie were out watching TV or something at Carrie’s and Rose was in the back room running through scales on her fiddle. Jamie said, “She doesn’t think it’s any of our business what she knows, and doesn’t feel like talking about it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Was she mad at you?”

  He shook his head. “Not as far as I could tell. She hardly looked at me, though. She just kept packing.”

  My stomach did a one-and-a-half gainer into my small intestine. I said, “Packing?”

  “She said she was flying out to Derniérebale for a week or so, to get away from things.”

  “Oh,” I said. My voice sounded very small in my own ears. “When is she leaving?”

  “Today or tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I should walk over there.” Jamie didn’t answer.
I said, “She’s pretty mad at me, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. Your name didn’t come up.” He didn’t look at me while he said it.

  I said, “Oh.”

  A moment later I felt Jamie watching me, and realized that my eyes were closed. I opened them. Jamie said, “Want to play a song or two?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “I think I’ll take a walk. I’ve got news for you, but it’ll wait.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want company?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Thanks. I’ll be back in a few.”

  It took a long fifteen minutes to get to Souci’s apartment. She lived in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets, interrupted by little half-block parks and wading pools and such. She lived in the bottom unit of a new-looking duplex with a roommate whom she never saw. “That’s the only way I can stand to have a roommate,” she had explained. I could hear her voice when I thought about it. I remembered the inside as clean and orderly, with a couch, an entertainment console, a fibrawood table and chair set, and not much more. “The furniture is all Annie’s,” she had explained. “I don’t have much of my own. I don’t stay in one place long enough to keep much furniture.” I heard her voice again.

  No one answered when I rang. I thought about camping on the doorstep and decided that would be pretty stupid, so I went back. Jamie had left. I sat in the living room, hauled out the banjo, and played through “Sailor’s Hornpipe” and “Arkansas Traveler,” then settled down to work on “Tennessee Rag” for a while, to see if I could finally get it clean. This required a great deal of concentration, leaving me no room to think about anything else.

  That evening I went to a club where Les Sons Magiques were playing. I hoped Souci might be there. She wasn’t. Between sets I spoke to her friend, Christian, the lead guitarist. He confirmed that she’d gone out of town. “I’m not sure why,” he said. “She seemed really weird when I talked to her. Do you know what’s going on?”

  I shook my head. “I wish I did.”

  He nodded, distracted. He put his feet up on a chair and sipped a beer. “Are you guys playing tomorrow? I should hear you sometime, and we don’t play again until Saturday.”

  “No, we’ve got the weekend off. Want to get together and do some tunes?”

  He gave me a sort of appraisal. “That’d be fun,” he said, surprising me. “Feng’s?”

  “How about my place? It’s just off Dupont, toward the river.” I gave him the address. We agreed to make it about noon and I’d whip us up some food.

  It didn’t occur to me until I was walking home that Christian was a friend of Souci’s, and Souci was tied into Le Bureau, which meant I ought to be at least a little more suspicious of him. I sighed. I wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing.

  Back home I brought Jamie up-to-date about Souci’s possible connection with Sugar Bear. Since Rose and Tom were there, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I suggested we practice.

  We tried to reconstruct a couple of verses to “The Work of the Wavers,” failed, and ended up learning “Chesterfields,” with three-part harmonies (four, if you count the fiddle). We slapped a typical (for us) opening on it: about one-quarter speed, drawn out, overdone, and very silly. That was fun, and we got it worked out pretty well kicking into the fast part until Rose announced that she didn’t want to play fiddle on it.

  “Why not?” I asked, trying not to sound irritated.

  “It doesn’t need it.”

  “I think it sounds great,” said Jamie. Tom was smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling.

  I said, “What would you rather do?”

  “How about bodhran?”

  I said, “I think the fiddle is better.” I almost said, “Why don’t you learn to play the fucking bodhran before you go wanting to play it on every song?” but I didn’t.

  Jamie said, “I agree with Billy,” but he looked uncomfortable.

  Tom got up to take a walk. I don’t know why that annoyed me, but it did. I decided I was developing another attitude problem. I said, “Let’s can this until tomorrow, all right?”

  “Good idea,” said Rose.

  Jamie shrugged and nodded, but looked unhappy. It was pretty late by then, and I was very tired, so I had no trouble falling asleep in spite of everything.

  Christian showed up at half past noon the next day. I made some egg salad with onions and celery and peppers and stuff and he seemed to like it. Everyone else was out somewhere or another.

  Seeing Christian in a well-lit room made me realize that he was younger than I’d first thought. His hair looked like he really honest-to-God never combed it, as opposed to those who spend hours every day making it look like they never comb it. His walk went with the hair: a relaxed shuffle accompanied by a bobbing, head-turning movement as if he were checking out the area to see what fun could be had, the whole overlaid with a more or less permanent smile. He swore frequently and well in French and English.

  I got out my banjo, and he turned out, to my amazement, to know “Cumberland Blues.” Well, if he knew that, he must know “Stealin’,” right? And “Mama Tried”? We had a grand old time teaching each other songs and discovering which ones we both knew. I almost got him broken of the habit of running through blues progressions when he didn’t have anything else to do. Not that I inherently object to blues progressions, you understand, but I’m fairly limited in how much blues I want to play on the banjo.

  Later we sat and talked, and I asked him questions about Souci, and he either evaded them or didn’t know the answers. We got hungry, so I cooked something while he went out for beer. Tom and Carrie showed up, so I added some water and onions to the soup. After we ate, Tom and Christian and I played some more. When we’d exhausted all the music in the world, Christian crashed in the living room, right where the couch would have been if the place had been furnished.

  The next morning I woke up to a knock at my bedroom door. I yelled, “Come in,” and it turned out, to my surprise, to be Rich, looking worried.

  “I’m worried,” said Rich.

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I got up and threw some clothes on, trying to wake up. I stretched and said, “What is it?”

  “This whole business, I don’t know. It’s—”

  “Got you worried?”

  “Yeah.”

  I rolled my eyes and gestured aimlessly around me. “I can’t, for the life of me, imagine why. We have reason to believe there’s a conspiracy which probably succeeded in wiping out all life on Earth, from which disaster we were only saved by being in a restaurant that goes shooting around the galaxy, and in which someone was murdered and which someone has just tried to blow up, which even if it didn’t kill us outright would leave us stranded here when the bombs come down, as they probably will within another month. That’s all. Why should you be worried?”

  When I turned back to him, he was shaking his head sadly. “For one thing,” he said, “because someone had been following me.”

  “Oh, great. That just figures, doesn’t it?”

  “And for another, because you’ve just told everything about us to whoever it is who’s been sitting there in the next room during your whole speech.”

  “Did I hear myself referred to?” asked Christian from the door.

  “It’s going to be another great day,” I said. “I can see that already.”

  Chapter 7

  Look at the coffin

  With golden handles

  Isn’t it grand, boys,

  To be bloody well dead?

  “Isn’t It Grand, Boys?”

  Traditional

  I said, “Would you believe we were just kidding?”

  “Ummm.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Let’s find some breakfast,” said Christian.

  “I’ll go along with that,” said Rich. “And we can keep an eye out for whoever was following me.”

  Right. I’d forgott
en about that. “Are you sure someone was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he wasn’t very good.”

  “Should I be insulted?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Where’s Eve?”

  “The library.”

  “Of course.”

  I finished my morning business and we went out in search of adventure and breakfast, not necessarily in that order. We walked, or rather strolled, along LeDuc, with its wide bicycle paths and dwarf maple trees, toward Feng’s. Christian was in the middle between Rich and me. Christian said, “So, is all that really true?”

  “Is what true?” I said.

  “Heh.”

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “I guess you can believe as much of it as you want to.”

  “That’s some shit,” said Christian.

  I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry you overheard what you did, but it wasn’t any part of my plan. I was tired. Forget it, believe it, or think we’re nuts, but don’t expect me to answer questions about it.”

  He said, “Just tell me this: Does it have anything to do with why Souci left town?”

  I winced. “Probably. Or maybe only indirectly. I don’t know.”

  Half a block before we reached Feng’s, we stopped. Rich pointed to a low brick building. I stopped, and the others stopped, and we studied it for a moment. The lettering on the small, hand-painted sign said, “Le Bureau Théâtral du Nouveau Québec” in stylized script. It was an interesting building, all of an odd blue brick, and only waist-high above the ground. The roof formed a gentle arc, and the stairway down to the doorway had the same arc, smaller and in reverse. I guess it was an earth-sheltered building that was not embedded into a hill, and it gave the impression of a sort of quiet efficiency.

  “So that’s the place,” I said.

  “What place?” asked Rich.

  “Souci’s modeling agency,” said Christian before I could.

  “Ah.”

  The door opened and two women I didn’t recognize came out, unlocked a pair of bicycles, and rode off up the street. I watched them carefully in case I might need to identify some portion of them in a police lineup later.