Annoyingly, the cylindrical thing continued to press into his back. He wiggled around to try and dislodge it, but it only seemed to roll from one flank to the other. Then he leaned forward and reached behind, and when he did he almost fainted with shock for the second time. The weasel in the portrait had moved.
Frozen, he kept staring at the toga-clad weasel. Likewise, its arm was now behind its back. That was the movement he had caught out of the corner of his eye. Louis didn’t dare move. Couldn’t move. He had heard of people petrified with sheer terror, like rabbits caught by headlights in the middle of the road, but not from simple disbelief. His jaw hadn’t even dropped. His eyelids, too, were stuck half-open in the act of blinking, like shutters jammed on rusty hinges. They hadn’t so much as fluttered.
Unable to take his gaze off the weasel, his mind whirred with possible explanations as to what in hell was going on. Not for the first time he wondered if he were being set up, if this was just one big joke. Someone was having a goddamn laugh at his expense. Nonetheless, there was really only one explanation, wasn’t there? And if that was a mirror in the center of the frame and not a portrait Epstein had arranged for his amusement, and somehow, somewhere between blacking out in his office and waking up in this gray sauna-cave, he had been resurrected as a goddamn weasel, then he would rather find out sooner than later. The proof, he figured, was on top of his head. If the laurel was there, he was a weasel. If it wasn’t, he was still good ol’ Louis Hugo DeVille, CEO of Global Resolutions Network, suffering husband to Lady Di, and there was nothing to worry about. Goddamn simple as that.
Slowly, he began to reach for the laurel, then stopped, keeping his arm wedged behind his back. Maybe this wasn’t really happening. Maybe this was one of them watchamacallit dreams, the ones where you were awake but not awake. Lady Di had had one a year or two ago, about the same time she started yoga classes and mumbling “aum” around the apartment to the point it drove him half-mad. She didn’t listen when he had told her to shut her goddamn trap, of course. She kept on doing what she damn well pleased, chanting “aum” here, there and everywhere until he had no choice but to ignore everything she said, which wasn’t exactly a new course of action. But he hadn’t been able to ignore entirely everything, as he had wanted.
One thing he remembered was the conversation she had had with her good-for-noth’n sister. Something about a dream she had had. “Lucid dreaming,” she had described it. He was at the kitchen table reading the Sunday paper trying to ignore her. Lady Di was in front of the TV in the lounge room with the portable handset nestled between her ear and shoulder, shrugging it tight so that it wouldn’t fall to the carpet while she exercised on the Ezy-Cycle. She and her sister had been gasbagging since the crack of dawn and he was about to blow his top. Nothing he had tried could block out her constant prattle. Closing the kitchen door. Turning on the radio (even though he couldn’t stand the weekend breakfast programs). Not even the TV could drown out her whine. She was just so goddamn loud. He was about to get up and go to the bedroom when he heard her mention the dream she had had.
“I tell you, Jennifer,” she said, still pedaling on the Ezy-Cycle and watching the Home Shopping Channel, “it was a lucid dream. What? … Oh, don’t you know? My yoga teacher has them all the time. It’s really strange, you know… Hmm, what? No. Not that kind of strange. More like you know it’s a dream but it’s as real as when you’re awake.”
Louis scoffed into his coffee, flicked the newspaper and tried to ignore his wife for the rest of the day. Only people who had nothing better to do with their time would believe that yoga-dreaming claptrap. Except now, believe it or not, he was having the same kind of experience that his wife had had. Maybe he was still unconscious in the office on Broadway and having this god-awful dream about reincarnation as a weasel. Maybe he was laying face down on his desk next to the bottles of Kwel-Amity and the yellow Stick-It note…
Goddamn it, he mumbled, snapping out of his train of thoughts. I completely forgot. The stupid cow’s taken an overdose again. He hadn’t dreamed that, or if he had everything in his goddamn life had been imagined and no more real than Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
Daring to return to the weasel in the mirror, he hoped the reality he had once taken for granted and felt so comfortable with wasn’t about to take on a horrifying new dimension. His arm was still wedged behind his back feeling for the lump, which, if this wasn’t a goddamn lucid dream but a real life nightmare, he had a pretty good idea what it was. If he grabbed it and twisted it, he would feel pain shooting up his spine into his brain as if he had done the same thing to his big toe. Which now he was beginning to doubt he had. Big claw was probably more to the point, or whatever a weasel had for digits on its feet.
He decided there was no point in hanging around and waiting for something to happen. He had always considered himself a go-get-it, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of guy; if something needed doing, he would do it. He had no time for pussyfoots and cowards who couldn’t make up their mind, who froze to the spot when a decision needed to be made. No time at all. So he went for it.
When he grabbed the thing pressing into his back, he flinched.
It was exactly as he had suspected. He had grabbed his tail.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Weasel
LOUIS let go of his tail and put his hand (did weasels have hands?) – his paw – on his head. The weasel in the mirror copied everything he did, including removing the laurel and putting it on his lap. He was a goddamn weasel all right. The evidence was plain enough. He was even wearing the toga he could see adorning the reflection, and when he ran his paw over it he was reminded of the silky sheets the maid fitted to the beds at the penthouse. He felt like some idiot at a fancy-dress party that nobody else had turned up for.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps this was a surprise fancy-dress party in honor of good ol’ Louis DeVille’s birthday. Perhaps Lady Di, her sister Jennifer, Sarah, Jew-boy Epstein and the whole crazy gang from Global Resolutions Network were going to burst through the door and start singing For He’s A Jolly Good Weasel.
“That’s the surprise, Mr. DeVille!” Epstein would say. “Your really are a despicable little critter.”
Lady Di would probably add: “Told you, Louis, didn’t I?” and she would call him Lewis, not Lewey, in her smarmy, know-it-all tone of voice. “Always said you’d find out who you really were.”
Louis snorted and briefly examined the laurel. It wasn’t the real thing. Fake plastic bay leaves that looked dull and lifeless in the grim, gray light. He put it back on his head, figuring he couldn’t look any more ridiculous than he already did, and glanced beneath the chair at the floor. The six-hundred-page contract was there, next to a pile of tangled bandages. He wondered who had stripped them off and dressed him in this goddamn costume. Nurses? Medics? He doubted it. He no longer reckoned he was in a hospital. He was beginning to suspect he was somewhere else. Somewhere much worse.
For the moment though, he pushed that thought to the back of his mind and jumped off the chair to get a better look at his “new” self. He went to the mirror and stood in front of it, more in resignation to his future as a small carnivorous mammal than in genuine interest with his unplanned metamorphosis. His body seemed long and out of proportion with his arms and legs; and he had fur, goddamn it, the kind of russet all-over-body stuff that his wife would have paid a fortune to drape around her neck or made into a coat. Probably why he felt so hot and sweaty. What’s more, he also had a snout with whiskers, which he could twitch with his pointy ears.
All the better to smell you with, little red DeVille! he thought, and sniffed at the reflection a couple of times in jest. To his revulsion, he caught more than he had expected of the stench that lingered in this god-forsaken place. Just your luck to end up in a place that stinks of goddamn horseshit, Louis.
He smirked, and was surprised to see the amount of teeth beneath the curl of his upper lip. There were hundreds of the pointy little buggers. Well,
maybe not hundreds, but a hell of a lot more than he was used to. He ran his tongue over them, thinking he could do some serious damage with a mouth like this. All the better to eat you with! he growled at his reflection, and chuckled.
If only he had his rifle. He looked just like something he would take a shot at in the woods and have stuffed and framed. If he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes (if these beady brown things on either side of this feral cranium were actually his), he would never have believed it; and that wasn’t the half of it. Besides the laurel and toga, the thing that really pushed this entire goddamn shenanigans to the edge of lunacy was his stance. He didn’t even walk like a weasel, or like any goddamn animal he knew. He was upright! Standing on his back two legs like some goddamn circus bear, or a human in a…
That was it! He was wearing a goddamn suit. Had to be. It explained everything. Absolutely everything. He yanked the hem of the toga up and splayed the fur of his belly in search of a zip, but to his frustration there was no sign of anything remotely close to one, not even a stitch line or buttonhole. Neither was there anything on his back, as far as he could see in the reflection, just a tail that wagged as easily as he could wiggle his toes. Claws, Louis, he sneered. They’re not your toes anymore. They’re your goddamn claws.
He sighed and let go of the hem of the toga. It fell over the lower half of his body and upper thighs. Who was he kidding? This was for goddamn real, if real meant anything any more, and he had better get his head in order if he wanted to do something about fixing the situation and returning to some kind of normality. He didn’t know if getting back to normal was possible, but he wasn’t going to give up on the idea just yet. What did his grandfather used to say? “If you don’t pull the trigger, you’ll never hit the target.” He guessed it was the old fella’s version of You’ve got to be in it to win it.
While he stared at his reflection wondering what in hell he should do next, he detected someone (or something) outside the door. More precisely, he had smelled it. The stench of horseshit had dramatically increased, alerting him before anything else, which surprised him. His sense of smell was usually the worst of his five senses. Let’s face it, he thought, sixty-six years of living with the fumes and garbage and grime of the Big Apple had dulled his sense of smell to something he barely knew he had. Except now, this new elongated snout with whiskers on the end was a highly sensitive organ that could detect aromas many times fainter than he had ever thought possible. The jury was out on whether that was a good thing or not. What was better, having virtually no sense of smell at all or being able to sniff horseshit from a mile away?
He faced the door, pricking his ears. Scuffling footsteps, faint at first, were getting louder, echoing down some sort of corridor or passage. There was more than one, as well. Two pairs, maybe three; and as the scuffles neared, the stench of horseshit got worse. Then they stopped outside the door. He could hear whispers, followed by sniggering.
Louis braced himself. “Who’s there?” he asked, though he reckoned he already knew the answer. The whispering got louder. “I know you’re out there. I can goddamn smell you.”
The whispering continued to ignore him. Louis could definitely hear two distinct voices now (along with his sense of smell, his hearing was a hell of an improvement on what it had been). One of the voices was the high-pitched whine he had had the misfortune of encountering before. The other was unfamiliar: deeper, more masculine. They seemed to be quarreling over who was going in first. Neither of them seemed to want to do it. He pricked his new weasel ears even more. Without them he wouldn’t have heard much more than broken syllables and disjointed sentences, TV chatter in a hotel room down the other end of the corridor. Then the unfamiliar voice said, “All right. I’ll do it. But you owe me.”
Louis considered rushing the guy and pinning him to the floor, then thought better of it. He didn’t have his two hundred and fifty pound frame to throw around anymore, just this pathetic lightweight thing of fur and bones without an ounce of fat on it. Plus, the guy about to waltz through the door might be a goddamn monster. Then again, he might also be as scrawny as a mouse. Still, though he hated the thought of being physically weaker than someone else, he wasn’t about to take the risk of making a fool of himself. This was a time to be cautious, not reckless.
When the door opened, he was glad he had held back. The guy turned out to be a good head taller than him; and if the goddamn stench didn’t stop him in his tracks, then he was sure he would’ve fallen over laughing anyway. As it was, he had to do all in his power to stop rolling over in fits of laughter now. “What the hell are you?” he asked.
Like Louis, the guy was walking unnaturally upright. He took several steps in and stopped, leaving the door open. He hooded his eyelids, as if he had heard worse a million times before. “What does it look like?” he said, his voice cool and calm. “I’m a lizard. A monitor lizard to be precise. From the genus Varanus Niloticus.”
“In a suit and tie?” Louis didn’t bother mentioning the leather briefcase he was carrying, or that his tail was poking out from the seam of his trousers.
“Taken a good look at yourself lately?”
Louis glanced at laurel and toga in the mirror. He figured the lizard had him on that point. “It’s not my fault. I woke up like this.”
“It never is our own fault, is it Mr. DeVille?” The lizard flicked out his tongue, licking his lips. “Sometimes we just don’t have a choice what happens to us.”
Louis was certain the freak was laughing at him behind those dark eyes. Like his first encounter with the sniggering stranger, he wasn’t too sure he could warm up to this guy. “How do you know my name?”
The lizard removed what looked like a bottle of Kwel-Amities from his inner suit pocket, but whatever lizards had for hands – Louis decided on claws – it was obscuring the label. “Your reputation precedes you,” he said, opening the lid. “The Boss has had his eye on you for quite some time.”
Louis glanced at the wad of papers next to the pile of bandages at the base of the layback. “Who the hell is The Boss? The CEO of LeMont International Enterprises?”
He heard a snigger from the doorway, but couldn’t see who had made the noise. Outside the room was a passageway or tunnel with rough-cut walls that appeared to have been bored through a mountain. Like the room, it glimmered with dreary gray light. He was beginning to get some sort of picture of where he was. Somewhere underground. Which explained the artificial light and lack of windows, but not exactly where he was. Probably not Manhattan. Probably not even in the state of New York. He would get to the bottom of it though. Good ol’ Louis DeVille always did. One step at a time.
The lizard popped a pill into his mouth. “Why does The Boss want me to work for him?” Louis said. “And keeping me locked up against my will is no way to start a working relationship. I want a lawyer before I do anything.” He pointed to the wad of papers on the ground. “I’m not signing the contract until I have legal representation.”
Still holding the briefcase, the lizard snapped the lid back onto the drug bottle and returned it to the inner pocket. Then he stepped forward, holding out his claw to be shaken. Louis was no reptilian expert, but the back of his claw seemed excessively scaly, almost dry and flaky, like a bad case of all-over dandruff. “That’s where I come in,” the lizard said, and flashed what Louis thought only as a salesman’s smile. Louis wasn’t having a bar of it. “Frederick Spank. Spank’n rich and spank’n good look’n. But you can call me Flash, or Freddy, or even Flash Freddy. Whatever takes your fancy.”
Louis reckoned the lizard had probably delivered that line a million times or more. Probably didn’t even realize how goddamn cheap and sleazy it sounded. He shook the scaly claw in any case. “You’re my legal representative?”
Flash Freddy kept his flashy grin. “At your service. The Boss has specifically asked me to take care of all your concerns regarding the contract.”
“And your expenses, too, I hope,” Louis said.
/> Flash Freddy winked, and said, “Naturally. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
The gesture was supposed to have put him at ease, but all it did was send a shudder down Louis’ spine all the way to the tip of his furry tail. He drew his paw away and absently wiped it on his toga.
Flash Freddy didn’t seem to notice. He opened his briefcase, picked the contract off the ground and put it inside, then snapped the briefcase shut. “You must be pretty special to have The Boss take such an interest in you,” he said. “I’m one of LeMont’s most expensive attorneys, you know.”
Louis heard the lizard’s colleague sniggering from the passageway again. He motioned toward the open door with an upward nod. “Why’s your friend hiding?”
The lizard glanced over his tail and said, “Smiggins, show yourself to our new friend. He’s not going to bite you.” Saying nothing, he turned to Louis and shook his head, as if to quell any notion Louis might really have had of taking a bite out of his colleague.
Louis heard a hiss and a shuffle of feet. Flash Freddy hooded his eyes and told Smiggins again to show himself. Then again. Finally, after the fourth time of asking, Smiggins appeared in the empty doorframe. “Louis DeVille,” Flash Freddy said, now beaming. He even pronounced his name correctly. “This is Warren Smiggins. Your personal assistant.”
Louis took one look at him and for some reason licked his upper lip. He almost did have the urge to rush over and sink his pointy teeth into his neck.
Smiggins was a goddamn rat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DeVille's Contract Page 6
