“Uh, I came fast as I could, Scamp. Where—where’s Gla-gla-Glasya…?”
Scamp’s shriek of laughter made the dome of the Throne Room rain down cement dust.
“OH, I KEEP HIM CLOSE BY SINCE I TOOK OVER! LEMME SHOW YOU!”
I don’t get grossed out that easy. But when Scamp reached down into her furry crotch and pulled Glasya-Labolas outta her twat like a tampon, I came nigh to puking.
Scamp swung the soggy comatose demon by his tail like a pendulum.
“COME JOIN ME, JAD! I GOT AN OPENING JUST FOR YOU!”
It’s plumb amazing what tricks an abused memory can play on a person. How we got back to the Shadows I cannot say, right up to this day. I was bloody, covered with welts and scratches, and had lost most of my clothes. But I was still alive. Or after-alive.
And there was Jad beside me, in a similar condition.
I guess Scamp really couldn’t be bothered with such small fry as us, given her new exalted rank.
After we had partially recovered our wits and gotten cleaned up and launched the ferry away from Dark Epcot, with Cheb Moussa at the helm, Jad and I sat on two deck chairs partaking of some well-deserved drinks.
“What next?” asked Jad.
“The Styx is a mighty big river, dude. Let’s just see what’s round the bend.”
A NIGHT IN THE THIRTEENTH AVENUE MISSION
Bright cutlery lay on clean white linen. The tines of the large and small forks curved with wordless elegance. The spatulate butter knives with pistol handles promised perfect heft. Serrated steak knives seemed eager to slice and cut. The polished bowls of the soup spoons captured the perfect interior of the restaurant in unattainable miniature.
Pastel-pink cloth napkins stood folded at the top of each sparkling plate, beside gleaming crystal wine glasses, half-full of blood-dark wine.
“So in the end,” Harry Scoon said to his dining companion, “they sold the place for twice what they paid, after holding on to it for less than eight months.”
Scoon sat back in his padded chair, evidently exhausted from rendering his complicated tale of high-finance intrigue. He rested one hand across his vest-covered paunch, as if to appease a stomach that had gone untended for more than four hours. With the other hand he reached for his glass, lifted it to overripe lips, and drank.
Mark Chambliss smiled with an insincere show of appreciation. At times, Harry could be so boring—especially when talking of these legendary big deals made by people Mark never knew—that he was painful to be with. If they hadn’t attended law school together, and formed a kind of businesslike, forced friendship under the pressures of the place, Mark doubted they would have had anything in common. And look at that gut Harry was developing— It was eating in places like this every day that did it. Mark reflexively placed a hand on his own trim waist, calculating how much extra workout time this meal would cost him later tonight.
The two men sat amid the supper crowd at Streets of Gold, a popular spot in the renovated South Street Seaport, not far from the east end of Wall Street. Waiters dressed nearly as expensively as the customers moved with grace and precision among the close-packed tables. Overloud laughter, the clink of glass and silver, and the almost palpable tension generated by a frenzied scramble for conversational points created an atmosphere that made rational thought impossible. Outside the restaurant’s windows, immaculate, purposeful men and women crossed the quaint cobblestones.
Scoon set down his glass, now nearly empty. He motioned toward Mark’s. “What’s the matter? My taste in vintages no good? Drink up, boy. We’re not in our offices now.”
“No, we’re not,” Mark agreed. “But I do have to return later and get some work done.”
“Ah, I forgot,” Scoon said melodramatically. “The probity of a public servant. How is life under the eye of our illustrious DA these days? Prosecuted any good sex offenders lately?”
Hot bile filled Mark’s throat. What right did Harry have to make fun of his work? Sure, it wasn’t so glamorous or so lucrative as working for a national firm with four hundred sixty-two other unscrupulous threepiece-suited sharks. But didn’t conviction and a desire to do good count for something?
“As a matter of fact,” Mark said with restraint, “we’re handling a very interesting corruption case now. Some big names are going to take a fall on this one.”
Scoon perked up, sensing blood. “Among whom are—?”
Mark briefly enjoyed the uncommon feeling of power, then immediately felt guilty over even such an innocent bit of boasting. “I can’t say. You know that. I couldn’t risk jeopardizing the investigation.”
Smiling superciliously, Scoon relaxed his alertness, toyed idly with a knife. “Still the Boy Scout, I see. Well, perhaps one day you’ll learn. Altruism is a dead-end, Mark. No payback from it. Eventually, you’ll stop wasting all your energy in futile do-gooding and make something of yourself. You know that with my recommendation, Wharton, Kline and Lambert would take you on anytime.”
Mark was stopped from spilling out a scathing dissertation on the pedigree of Messrs. Wharton, Kline and Lambert—which wouldn’t have really damaged his friendship with Scoon, who frequently said worse things about his employers, in a way that revealed pride and envy in their perfidy—by the approach of the waiter with their meal.
The polite silence which ensued allowed time for Mark’s anger to bleed away, and afterwards Scoon was too busy eating to respond to talk.
At meal’s end, Scoon sat back with a suppressed belch followed by a deep sigh. He took a pack of Dunhills from his inside jacket pocket, searched for matches and came up empty.
Mark, who didn’t smoke, nonetheless patted his pockets automatically. Before he could disappoint Scoon even in such a small way, their observant waiter had come forward with a lighter. But the unintended search of his coat had turned up a folded piece of paper, and Mark recalled that he had meant to show it to Harry.
Taking out the grimy sheet of paper, Mark said to Scoon, “Here’s a curiosity for you. A cop I know found it on a poor bum who died of exposure. He was going to throw it away, but it caught my interest, and I asked him if I could keep it.”
Mark unfolded the quartered sheet and proferred it to Scoon, who took it with evident reluctance between two fingertips. He read it quickly, then tossed it to the tabletop, where it lay like a macroscopic piece of New York soot. The paper bore this message:
HOMELESS IN MANHATTAN?
COLD? TIRED?
NO PLACE TO SLEEP’?
COME TO THE
THIRTEENTH AVENUE MISSION
FOOD—CARE—SAFETY
NO CATCHES
NO QUALIFICATIONS
NO DEMANDS
“So what?” Scoon demanded. “Just another soup-kitchen of some sort. Evidently the bum who had this paper never made it there. Why’d you even bother to save it?”
“You don’t see anything strange about it? For instance, where’s the address?”
“All right, so there’s no address. These things spread by word of mouth. I’m sure every baglady and wino in the city knows where this place is.”
“What about the name?”
“What about it?”
“There is no Thirteenth Avenue in Manhattan.”
Scoon paused a moment, as if checking the internal map of the city that every resident possessed. “Okay. There’s no Thirteenth Avenue. I repeat: so what? It’s a fanciful name, dreamed up by some preacher or social-worker. You know, like Stone Soup or something.”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s been no publicity about this place that I’ve seen. Isn’t news coverage the first thing a mission like this would go after, to get funding and volunteers? No, I get a feeling there’s more to this than what we see on the surface.”
Scoon laughed like a sick crow. “Don’t you have anything better to occupy your mind? Don’t waste your time thinking about it. Listen, this city is full of unexplainable things that could drive you nuts if you let them.
Try concentrating on the important issues: women, money, real estate.”
As Scoon sucked in an enormous lungful of smoke and immediately released it in a noxious cloud, Mark took up the paper, refolded it and stowed it away.
If he had ever considered leaving the mystery of the creased and spotted broadside unsolved, Scoon’s words and tone had irrevocably committed him to finding the answer.
Outside, the happy, well-fed, clean-clothed citizens strolled.
* * * *
Forty-second Street exuded a tawdriness more clammily repellent than the cheapest carnival that had ever crept into town under the cover of dusk. The once-grand theaters reduced to showing sex-films and karate-flicks; the peep-shows and live-sex acts; the filthy fried-chicken restaurants with their shapeless batter-crusted lumps cooling on grease-stained paper. And the people who thronged it: shuffling old men wearing two or three shabby overcoats apiece; kids offering “coke-hash-smoke” as if it were one item; epicene dollboys and fat black whores in torn nylons and vinyl miniskirts; the disaffected, the abandoned, the unloved.
The very sidewalks seemed stained with the oily perspiration of human suffering. Pairs of cops patrolled with hardened intensity.
Mark strode quickly down the Deuce, a member of the suited and shoe-shined minority. Work was over, and he was determined to spend some time investigating the curious paper he had shown Scoon at supper.
Why he should be so intrigued by the puzzle, he couldn’t say. Scoon’s scorn had been only the catalyst that had firmed up a resolve that had been steadily growing since the message came into his hands.
He had always been a sucker for lost causes, though. Even his unconscious choice of Forty-second Street as his path west, he realized, reflected his fascination with the down-and-out in society, the losers and hard-luck cases. And his choice of careers—well, there was material for a year’s worth of psychoanalysis. Why did anyone chose to labor in the masochistic vineyards of public prosecution, after spending all that money and time and energy on an education in law? Was he really still guilty about his parents’ wealth? Must every summer spent in Martha’s Vineyard be repaid by a season in hell?
Who could say? Certainly not the man most closely involved.
Shrugging his shoulders, Mark continued down the strip.
Once he crossed Ninth Avenue, he left the worst of the sleaze behind. Now he was surrounded only by raw poverty and desperate entrepreneurial struggles to stay afloat: mom-and-pop groceries, furniture stores where all the goods looked excavated from Ur, resale clothing shops. Here too, human misery was evident in the people: homeless crones shouting obscenities at the uncaring sky; bored teenagers feeding videogames; sidewalk vendors peddling secondhand household trash spread on dirty blankets.
After three more long blocks, he found himself down by the Hudson, on Twelfth.
The last avenue before the water.
Mark stopped.
Where was Thirteenth Avenue, and its mission?
Before him the Hudson surged, an oil-slicked, litter-flecked moat separating the relative greenery of Jersey from the grey of Manhattan. A couple of blocks north, to his right, the West Side Elevated Highway began, running north above Twelfth like a concrete canopy. Nowhere, however, was there sign of an avenue on the far side of Twelfth.
Where should he turn now? He knew that south of his position, Twelfth petered out and Eleventh became the westernmost street. Surely the mysterious Thirteenth could not be there. No, if it existed at all, it must be north of him.
Mark crossed Twelfth, putting himself on the far side of the Elevated, to be as close to the waterfront as possible, and headed uptown. He passed the USS Intrepid, looming at its museum dock like a steel bird of war. He idled by the Pier Exposition center, where a trade-show had attracted buses and crowds of jewelry salespeople. He watched the tourists lined up to ride the Circle Line boats around the island. Before burned-out and devastated warehouses he paused, wondering at the secret wars of commerce, the shifting tides of trade, responsible for wreaking such casualties. The Sanitation Department garages hummed with activity, huge garbage trucks lumbering in and out of the gates like scabrous white elephants.
All along his route, the Hudson slopped among its piers and pilings like an uneasy beast.
Eventually, at Fifty-ninth Street, he reached a dead-end. A tall chainlink fence, topped by barb- and razor-wire, surrounded the Conrail yards, a vast desolate weedy tract slated to become housing and stores at some indefinite future date. Mark knew the geography north of these yards: Riverside Park, the Cloisters, Fort Tryon, Inwood Hill Park… No Thirteenth Avenue lurked there.
Baffled, he turned up Fifty-ninth, which ran under an arch supporting the Elevated. The arch was the elaborate product of another era, proclaiming itself with cement inscriptions and decorative motifs as if it were still a proud portal to a bustling waterfront, instead of a dismal gate to nowhere.
Mark felt it mocked him somehow with its witless pride.
* * * *
It was going to be a hard autumn and winter for the homeless. Already, in October, a cold snap had caused the various private and public shelters around the city to become overloaded, forcing them to turn people away. Every morning, during his jog in Central Park, Mark saw men and women lying on benches, rolled up in ragged sheets of foam, like that used underneath wall-to-wall carpeting, only their heads and feet protruding. On the way to work, he saw more of the destitute huddled in his subway stop, glad for the warm stenchy air. On the streets at lunchtime, he noticed them in plazas and parks, soaking up the pale autumnal sunlight as if to hold it through the long night to come.
Of course, all this was nothing new. There had been unhoused souls in the city as long as the city had existed. One could not help but be confronted with them every day. The fellow shaving himself with a disposable razor, a shard of mirror and a coffee can of dirty water; the woman pushing her shopping-cart full of worthless possessions and rehearsing affronts she had suffered; the old man without shoes scavenging cans from the trash for a nickel apiece.
Institutions and charities struggled valiantly but futilely to help the tide of wanderers. But it was like trying to drain the sea with a straw. More surged in than could be handled. And the average taxpayer cared too little about them to be bothered funding institutions at the necessary level.
Mark, with his particular bent of mind, had always had more of an eye for these hapless men and women than most people did. He carried pocketsful of change for handouts, kicked in sizable amounts to the United Way, and had spent a month of weekends helping renovate a church hall to dormitory housing. But even so, since he had chanced upon the flyer for the elusive Thirteenth Avenue Mission, his attention had focused on the homeless to an unnatural degree. Unable to find the Mission, and its attractive promise of FOOD—CARE—SAFETY (and why did this promise seduce him so; did he not have these things in abundance already?), he had fastened on those who surely must patronize the Mission regularly, assuming that it even existed.
Which assumption he made with an unwavering force that was beginning to border, he feared, on monomania.
So far, Mark had not found the nerve to actually question any of the homeless as to the whereabouts of the Mission. Used as they were to being harassed and ripped-off, they would be suspicious and reticent. Instead, he mulled over vague plans of following one of them at the start of chilly dusk to the hidden Mission. But which of the many shambling figures would lead him there? Surely not everyone ended up on Thirteenth Avenue. The full-capacity load of the other places told him that. And what would he do when he got there? Ask to be admitted? Why? Had his identification with the luckless progressed so far?
Only when the second Mission flyer was thrust upon him by the dying bum did Mark realize he had to act shortly, or simply fail to ever solve the mystery.
* * * *
Early morning in the fresh-smelling Park. Gravel crunched beneath Mark’s sneakers and his breath came hard. Soon sunlight would s
lant through the colored leaves, fall in cool lozenges upon the path. Mark rounded a curve and saw the Carousel, closed at this hour and season. Its gaily painted doors with horse bas-reliefs were a welcome sight, halfway point of his run.
A gaunt apparition appeared from nowhere, stumbling into Mark’s path. Unable to stop in time, Mark ran into him, and both crashed to the ground.
Mark recovered quickly, and came to his knees. The other man lay still, as if afraid to move. His wild eyes were open, staring into the leafy canopy. His bristled face was emaciated. He wore a ragged assortment of castoff clothing, caked with streetgrime, twigs and soil. The soles of his shoes flapped open with unintended comicality. He smelled of urine and wine.
“Are you okay?” Mark asked. The question seemed to free the man from his bondage. His limbs flapped around in an ungainly fashion, but failed to aid him to rise. His thick tongue protruded and wet his cracked lips.
“Gotta get there,” he croaked. “Gotta get there, just found out, gotta get there, can’t miss it—” His broken litany suddenly ceased. A grimy hand came up and clutched Mark’s sweatshirt. The other sought to push a crumpled paper into his face.
“Take me there—” the man urged. Before Mark could reply, the man stiffened, then began to thrash in an epileptic fit. His wild buckings tossed Mark off. When he finally stopped, Mark sought with trembling fingers inside his mouth to insure he hadn’t swallowed his tongue, then went to find an emergency phone. The man’s breathing was shallow and rapid.
By the time the rescue squad came, the man was dead.
Mark had pried the paper from his fist before the medicos could find it. The message read:
ANNOUNCING THE CLOSING
OF THE
THIRTEENTH AVENUE MISSION
LAST FIVE DAYS
NOVEMBER 8-12
* * * *
Mark finished relating the disturbing event in the Park to Harry Scoon. His mouth was excessively dry, and he drained his glass of water, waiting for Scoon to give his opinion.
Scoon’s expression was unusually solemn. Hardly a trace of his natural cynicism showed through. He regarded Mark quietly for a moment before he spoke.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 40
