Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  And this pestilent French girl had my leash.

  Mme Vulcaine commanded, “Be there when I arrive.”

  I clenched my teeth. “When?”

  “I think no more than eighteen hours. Do you have the herbs?”

  “Yes.” Jake had had everything. For a man who practiced a community-based religion in solitary, he had been extraordinarily well-equipped. He’d never tried to compel me to share his observances.

  I’d always known that avoiding them would bite me someday.

  This must be the day.

  In the silence over the phone, I heard clicking. “Bon. I have a seat tomorrow on a five p.m. flight from Louis Armstrong Airport, but it is not direct, so I land at O’Hare at nine p.m.”

  “I have no car to meet you.”

  “I’ll come to you,” she said drily. “Be there when I arrive. You have much to explain.”

  My heart rammed up into my throat with every beat. “I know it.”

  She hung up.

  I set my forehead down on my arms and started to tremble.

  Then I went into the back to find the herbs and perform the first of my final obligations to my cousin and my oldest friend.

  YONI

  “There’s an Ong Ree Feeleep Clay Ronce Dee Turbong wants to see you,” my cousin Verlette said over the hotel’s house phone.

  After two hours of dance rehearsal and a press conference, I was fried. I wanted a shower and a nap before the first show. “What does he want?”

  “He says his daughter is stalking you.”

  “What?” I massaged my temples with one hand. “Is he a crazy?”

  “I doubt it,” Verlette said. “He’s a lawyer, and his shoes cost about as much as my car.”

  Remembering unpleasant incidents involving my cousin Joe and his ex-wife, I said, “Process server?”

  “He says not. He doesn’t have a briefcase on him.”

  That didn’t mean anything. “Frisk him.”

  “Ooo. Can I get a cup of coffee to thaw my hands on afterward?”

  I made a cowardly wish that my protective stagehand could appear and chase this fancy-shoes lawyer clean out of the hotel. “Send him up.”

  “Oh, and that rigger is here with the new flying harness,” Verlette said.

  “What?” Speak of the devil. “Send them up together.” Okay, I was a wussy, but I would be a smart wussy. I remembered the rigger kicking Uncle Chester off the stage and relaxed a little.

  They were shoulder to shoulder in the doorway when I answered the knock: my rigger stagehand with the new harness over his shoulder and his skanky white dreads and his kind blue eyes, and a lawyer type wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and an icy expression. Verlette hadn’t been kidding. Glacier-cold. I bet he hadn’t liked sharing the penthouse elevator with the stagehand.

  They literally tried to go through my hotel suite doorway at the same time, grunting as their shoulders jammed.

  I laughed.

  The lawyer glared at the stagehand.

  The stagehand smiled at me.

  Once they were inside, I shut the door behind them and led them into my suite’s living room. Then I looked at the stagehand. “Another fitting?”

  “You want privacy for that.” He pointed at the lawyer. “Him first.”

  “My business is private as well,” the lawyer said. His accent gave me warning prickles, that smooth, super-perfect English of the wealthy Western European. He handed me his card. Henri Philippe Clarence de Turbin, Avocat. I recognized the name. I’d had his daughter arrested before.

  “But I trust him and I don’t trust you,” I said. “So he stays.”

  The lawyer gave my stagehand rigger a very long look. Then he turned to me. “Mademoiselle, my daughter is your ardent admirer. She is very young.”

  “And she’s stalking me,” I said with less than my usual tact. “I apologize if I seem abrupt, but it’s time for my nap, and I have a show today.” I learned long ago not to waste courtesy on lawyers.

  I didn’t like how this guy had his right hand in his pocket. Verlette always wanded strangers for weapons, but some things don’t show up with a wand.

  He glared at my stagehand and then smoothed his face out before looking back to me. “I am quite sure that she means you no harm,” he intoned, like Obi Wan telling the stormtroopers that these weren’t the droids they were looking for.

  “That’s nice. Why are you keeping me from my nap?” And why had Verlette let him through? He was creeping me out.

  “She is in the city now for several days. I have reason to suppose she will appear in your vicinity during your tour, here in Chicago. I would regard it as a great kindness if you would—should she appear—if you could perhaps—if you would find a way to—to detain her—perhaps your security staff—” His elegant sentences were falling apart. He sounded more like an ordinary worried daddy. “She means well. But it is her nature to seek attention at any cost.”

  Well, that was pretty serious. “How old is she?”

  “Just eighteen.” Old enough to go to jail for real. No wonder he was worried.

  With his left hand, he took a photograph out of his breast pocket and held it out. His right hand moved inside his suit coat pocket.

  I didn’t take the photo or look at it. “It seems to me you should call the police.”

  He made a face and the ice came back.

  Okay. He wouldn’t go to the police because he was too important to let his name—I saw where this was going—get into the news.

  I could relate. I spent a huge amount of energy making sure that the news about me was upbeat.

  He didn’t look famous to me, but what did I know? It was all I could do to keep on top of my own media profile.

  He laid the photo on a table.

  I ignored it. “Mister lawyer, I have a very good security staff. What makes you think an eighteen-year-old will be able to penetrate that?”

  He pulled some words up out of his expensive shoes, along with a big sigh. “She is a foreign national here. She has a credit card, a passport, a driver’s license. She is old enough to make all the trouble an adult can make, and young enough to believe that no harm she can do might be permanent.” He paused. “Her ingenuity is remarkable.”

  That cost him something to admit. I was sorry for the kid, sight unseen. “Smart, rich, young, fearless. She could be a rock star.”

  Now the lawyer came out in him. “If I find she has surfaced in your vicinity and you have not notified me immediately,” he said, “there will be litigation.”

  Oo, I’m afraid. If he’d said publicity, I would have cared.

  I leaned forward and said gently, “If I find she has surfaced in my vicinity because you have not adequately controlled your eighteen-year-old foreign national offspring, there will be an arrest, a police record, and full publicity.”

  Threaten them with the thing you’re afraid of, Uncle Chester always said.

  He stiffened. “I am sorry to find you unsympathetic.”

  “I’m not sorry you threatened me. For a moment there, I almost had sympathy for a stalker.” I turned away and said to my rigger. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  I went to the bar for a glass of water. The lawyer left. He still hadn’t taken his right hand out of his pocket.

  My stagehand followed him, opened the door for him, and shut it behind him. On his way back to me he picked up the photo.

  “Cute kid.” He tossed the photo down.

  “They all are, until they jump out of your bedroom closet with a camera.” I drained my water glass and flopped on the couch. My temples ached. I rubbed them, then, realizing how soon I’d be in full makeup, I covered my face and rubbed it all over while I still could. My chest was tight. “You showed up at the right moment.”

  “You called, I came.”

  What? In the darkness behind my hands it was easier to breathe. “When you leave, could you take five minutes and tell my assistant and the security guard downstairs what you j
ust saw and heard? And bring the theater security people a copy of that photo? Verlette will copy it for you. I should have had them in here the minute he started talking.”

  “You handled it fine.”

  I looked up at him. He stood there as if he could stand forever, slumped but watchful, with my new harness slung over one shoulder and his big hands quiet at his sides. As if to say, No pressure.

  Right. I almost laughed hysterically at the thought.

  “All right,” I said, “Let’s do this.” I hauled myself upright and went to stand in the middle of the room, holding my arms out.

  Quickly and impersonally he draped the harness over me, showing me each fitting again and clicking them together in short, sure movements. He murmured the names of all the parts as he worked. He barely touched me. Someone had trained him how to work with celebrities. He could have rigged Hillary Clinton to fly, and left her comfortable too. I was beginning to learn the names of all the bits.

  Someday I might go up in the air and not feel like I’d left my bowels on the stage.

  As he unclipped the whole thing again, he said, “I’ll be there to get you in and out of it, and I’ll be manning the main cable, both shows.”

  I met his eyes. They were weirdly gentle. It was like being patted on the head by Hannibal Lecter. “Promise?”

  He almost cracked a smile. “I promise.”

  As he made for the door I said, “Remember to talk to my staff about that lawyer and his daughter.”

  He waved and then he was gone.

  I was so tired, I flopped onto the couch again instead of going to bed. My eyes closed. You called, I came. In the moment, that remark hadn’t seemed odd at all. I smiled myself to sleep.

  BAZ

  I don’t say it didn’t surprise me when, one minute, I was on the stage, assembling Yoni’s new flying harness, and the next minute I was standing in a hotel elevator lobby with her harness in my hand. Like my ex-roomie Archie, I’ve gone too far with a woman once or twice and found my powers rubbing off on her.

  But it had never happened before I had sex with her.

  And it had never happened that I turned up wearing clothes.

  I could see what Aphrodite meant about this skinny little black rock star. Her powers were coming in fast. Waves of command emanated from her.

  What amazed me was that she hadn’t tried to use them on that French lawyer. In my kinging days, I’d have had him on his knees with a red-hot poker up his butt in two minutes.

  Not that that hadn’t been tried. From his manner, I guessed that the poker had been frozen.

  I took the elevator down and stopped to warn the singer’s door dragon about the lawyer guy and the stalker chick. The door dragon ran the girl’s photo and her father’s business card through a scanner-printer and gave me copies for theater security. Then I picked up a sandwich at the lunch counter across the street and headed back down to the Arie Crown Theater on foot, lugging Yoni’s harness.

  On the way I called Veek.

  Miraculously he answered. “Jake is dead, Baz,” he said.

  “Yeah, got your text. Shit, I’m sorry, buddy.”

  “It was coming. His mambo will retrieve the corpse.”

  A crowd of pigeons squabbled over a still-smoldering cigarette butt on the grass by the rose garden. I kicked my way through them. “You don’t sound too happy about that.”

  “I must help with the burial. She will despise my ignorance. Also, she will ask many uncomfortable questions to which I have no adequate answers.”

  “Need a bodyguard?” I said.

  He was silent. This shit is serious, I realized. I often offered to help Veek, and he hardly ever let me.

  At length he said, “There is an object. If I had it, I would have no fears. If I could give it to you, likewise.”

  “But somebody else has it, no, huh?”

  He hesitated, as if trying to remember his English. “Eh, yes.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Woman.”

  “No problem. I’m on it.” I’d have walked through fire for Veek. He was all I had left of the slacker demon posse who used to room with me. At ninety-something he was not even out of mortal range, but he was a lot closer to immortal than anyone else I could bear to bunk with.

  More silence.

  “I’ll get it off her,” I assured him. “No worries.”

  He sighed. That sigh said, As good as it’s gonna get.

  A bunch of charity jog-a-thoners in matching pink tee shirts came at me. I slipped through them under the Lake Shore Drive overpass toward the museum campus.

  I thought of the photo in my pocket.

  I said, “And in return, you can cover some off-the-docket security work for me. Yoni’s doing three shows at the Crown and a club date. Some freaky French chick is supposed to be stalking her. The French chick’s cute. Seduce her for me and I’ll tackle the woman who stole your object. The stalker’s poppa is offering a bounty if you can keep her out of Yoni’s hair.”

  Her poppa didn’t know that yet, but I would see to it that he paid. Plenty.

  “Done,” Veek said.

  I hung up and went into the theater and did the eight-o’clock show.

  Our flight-phobic rock star did fine.

  The stalker didn’t show up.

  At eleven-thirty, I went home.

  o0o

  Veek came home at two a.m. looking like shit. I handed him the margarita pitcher and put a big bowl of chorizo and cheese in front of him.

  “Tortillas in the steamer.” I hooked two for myself and handed him two. “What took you so long?”

  “Tidying up the botánica. Also, I had to wash my kouzen for burial.”

  I paused in mid-tortilla-dip. “Did you wash your hands?”

  He flicked me a perfunctory smile. “Now this mambo comes to take the body. She’ll want to pray over it for nine days. I have to be there, at least for some part of it.”

  “And you don’t want to.”

  “I promised Jake.” Veek gave a fatalistic shrug and drank from the pitcher.

  I had an unpleasant thought. “This changes things for you, doesn’t it?” I said slowly. “You’re not stuck in Chicago any more. You could go back to France.” I wasn’t eager to lose my last slacker demon roomie. But I’d watched him stifle himself and do whatever Jake said for twenty years now. “Right?” My heart sank.

  He was guzzling margarita, but he lowered the pitcher at that. “I had planned to.” He gulped again and passed it. “Jake has—Jake did something.” With a broody look, he said, “I wonder if he was trying to stop me.”

  “Stop you from going to France?”

  “At this point I am wondering if he always meant to do so. Yet,” he murmured as if to himself, “he spoke of one who would help me to find my place. Was he misleading me?”

  I wouldn’t have put it past Jake, but I didn’t say so. “Tell me about this object you lost.”

  He assembled queso fundido con chorizo in a double wrapping of hot corn tortillas, took a quick, fastidious bite, chewed, and swallowed. “Jake gave it to her.”

  “He gave it to her? What was the big idea there?”

  “She can control me with it. He said I was to learn love from her, but I suspect he had another motive.”

  “What the fuck is this thing he gave her?”

  “My cordon ombilical. My navel string.”

  I whistled. “That’s big juju.”

  “I hope she doesn’t know what to do with it.” He shook his head. “These days, in Europe, they are more used to the magic, how it is changing the world. She may know.”

  I burst out, “What the fuck did he think he was doing?”

  “It might be that Samedi was within him when he did it. The Baron has a sense of humor.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Veek agreed.

  We wolfed queso fundido until we were stuffed and washed it down with a pitcher of margaritas apiece.

  Fed,
Veek looked a lot more optimistic. “There’s more,” he admitted, when we were lying back in our La-Z-Boys and passing a joint.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “This mambo may wish to exact a price from me. For departing her house without leave. Also, I—misbehaved while I was there.”

  I wondered what misbehavior my prissy roomie could have gotten up to at a vodou house. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Eighty years. They don’t forget.”

  “Sheesh. Don’t you get points for turning Jake’s body over to her?”

  “This is my hope.”

  We smoked for a minute in silence.

  I said, “Want me to seduce her, too?”

  Veek rolled his shaved black head on the headrest and assessed me with his small, skeptical hazel eyes. “Sure. Knock yourself out of it.”

  I always smiled when Veek tried to talk American. His cob-up-the-butt, French-taught, antique English made a mess of it. I took the joint from his fingers.

  He changed the subject. “Tell me about Yoni’s stalker.”

  “This is her,” I squeaked, holding in smoke. I handed over the photo. He did a quick-take-um. “She’s liable to turn up around Yoni’s hotel, the Hilton, or at the Crown during the concerts.”

  “She is French, this one,” Veek said. “Well-born.”

  “I know. Poor little rich girl. Thrill seeker. According to her daddy, if you act impressed with her, she’ll roll over.”

  “I can do that,” he said slowly. He held the photo between his fingertips, studying the vivid little face, all blue eyes and black hair and born-straight teeth.

  “First you gotta catch her,” I reminded him.

  He held up the photo. “She will come to me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It is she who has my navel string.” He laughed without humor.

  I laughed the same way. “It’s just raining shit for you today, isn’t it?”

  “That it is.”

  VEEK

  Baz had given me one of his last-minute passes to the concert at the Arie Crown Theater. At about the hour when Mme Vulcaine must be touching down at O’Hare, I entered the theater, appalled at the size of the crowd.