Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  The exclamation didn’t have his usual ring of humor, and it didn’t seem worth trying to explain what had happened with the other Nacari today. I hobbled away to my office as fast as my knee allowed. I got fresh clips for the Wardbreaker, fumbled with the phone and my wallet, and found Crina’s card. It was plain red, matte, with her name and number embossed in black. It smelled of Charlie Gold perfume and clove cigarettes.

  “’llo?”

  “Crina, it’s Alexi.” I leaned on the ledger with my hand in my hair. “I apologize for calling you at this hour, but I was wondering if I could cancel your visit for tomorrow—”

  “Oh, Alexi. That’s fine, no problem.” She cut me off, a little breathily. I wasn’t certain, but she sounded disappointed.

  “No, wait. I was wondering if you’re free now.” I exhaled thinly through my nose, massaging my scalp. “We’re going to Atlantic City tonight.”

  “Atlantic City? I’d love to. I’m just eating breakfast… what time is ‘tonight’?”

  I winced. “In about forty minutes.”

  She laughed, a bright burst of yellow sound. “Forty? Alexi, my goodness. You really don’t date, do you? Okay, I’ll do it. But not for free.”

  “All expenses paid,” I said. “And you can borrow as many books as you can carry.”

  “Deal.”

  Thank the Universe for small mercies. “I’ll arrange to drive by and pick you up. Where should we meet you?”

  “Outside Sirens. We all know where that is.” I could hear her grin.

  Forty minutes might be pushing it for her, but it was usually enough for me. I looked over at the hammer ruefully. I wanted to take it. After watching a gun eat a man alive, I was beginning to feel a bit superstitious about carrying one.

  I reached out and pulled down my dictionary of Kabbalah, taking it with me on the way back to my closet. Nothing in there could stop car bombs, demonically possessed golems, or a hopped-up super-Guido and his pet hellhounds, but at least I’d look suitably wizardly while I figured out how, exactly, I was going to live out the week.

  Chapter 17

  Mob drivers are generally willing to do pretty much anything, provided you tip freely and well. Stopping by Sirens to collect Crina added an extra twenty minutes and twenty bucks to the three-hour trip to Atlantic City, but her presence was priceless. She was the only sane person in the car, as far as I was concerned. Kutkha was there in the back of my mind, which also helped. Even without a verbal reply from my Neshamah when I sought contact, his secret presence was reassuring.

  I was seated to one side of the car. Vassily was in the middle, and his escort for the night to his left. Mikhail had the other door, chewing gum like a Jersey cow, while Crina was pressed in knee to knee with the blonde Russian girl from Vanya’s place, the one who had answered the door naked. She was already drunk, braying with laughter at everything Mikhail said, while the other two women shot each other sympathetic glances. Crina had one of her PhD texts out, a first edition copy of Kolyma Tales. A fine pair we made, withdrawn from the conversation, books in our hands.

  For my part, I focused on creating an impenetrable shell of concentrated brooding, trying to study words of power from the grimoire. Books are useful things for spooks. If someone looks over and glimpses a dense wall of text and unfamiliar symbols, they tend to lose the itch to make much chitchat. Maybe it was the added weight of my Neshamah’s subliminal presence, but it seemed to work better than usual. Vassily’s eyes shot across now and then, but he quickly looked away.

  We skimmed two and a half hours of the finest scrubby pine barrens New Jersey had to offer on our trip down the parkway. The only good thing about Atlantic City was that it was neutral ground. Atlantic City gangs were small and localized, the Mob nearly nonexistent. No one faction controlled the powerful casino union, and the only guys running rackets were the Chinese. They were good hosts. A polite call ahead to one Mr. Leung and an expression of willingness to spend money at “his” casino was more than enough to grease those particular wheels.

  I put the book away in my briefcase after we passed under the white-and-blue sign welcoming us to my least favorite city in the world. I had been here once before, back in the early 80s. Now, it was as if the whole place were addicted to crack and coke, skinned to the bone by addiction. While the others drank and chattered, I watched the streets go by, noting just how wasted and broken they looked. It had always been the most miserable playground in America, but now, the streets around the casino were some of the most desolate on the East Coast: a wasteland of broken lots, stripped cars, unconscious crackheads, and nervous streetwalkers. And it was our fault. We were one of the groups that had brought this drug to the USA. It was what Semyon had died over, maybe what I would die over, if Jana’s intel was good. The truth of it—and the faint, clinging ammonia reek that seemed to hang around the cabin of the limo—settled into my guts and wouldn’t let go. Yuri's spiel might have been a metaphor for all this... I'd heard Edenic terms used to describe Colombia before.

  “Maybe he got the same offer. Maybe he said ‘yes.’ He was tired of being somebody’s bitch. What about you?” Despite my best efforts, Yuri's words stuck with me. There was no way he had literally been offering me an actual fruit from the tree of Genesis. It was a myth, at best. But when I searched back to solicit Kutkha's opinion, I encountered only a wall of silence. This was something he wanted me to work out myself.

  If there was a Hell, I always suspected it would be a dark mirror of the Earth without beauty or life. In that hell, the Taj Mahal casino would replace the actual Taj Mahal. It was an insult to the beautiful Mughal mausoleum for which it was named, a tawdry mockery built for love of money instead for the love of a dead Sufi princess. The smell of the place hit me as soon as I stepped out into the muggy heat and flashing red and orange lights, a nauseating, sweet, fake cloud of perfume that bore into my sinuses. Underlying it was the scent of the city itself, metallic and unpleasant.

  The other car was already waiting for us. Lev and Vanya waited inside the entry, smoking together with another pretty girl with no name. Vanya hadn’t brought his wife, of course, that poor woman. Lev was alone, and he glanced archly at us as we approached in a gaggle.

  “Vassily Simeovich, Alexi Grigoriovich.” Lev greeted us by first name and patronymic with reassuring handshakes, the women with a kiss to the back of the hand. “And the lovely Katerina and Crina Pavloevna.”

  Crina was lovely, I thought. She had decided on a Chinese-style black-and-red silk dress which was both modest and deeply flattering. For all that I felt more like her brother than her boyfriend, I found myself assuming the postures of chivalry. When I caught Vanya staring at her chest, I stared back at him until he looked away.

  “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t here when I left,” Vassily said to no one in particular. He arched his eyebrows at the overhead displays and fountains and alabaster onion domes. “Looks new.”

  “Yeah, it’s somethin’, ain’t it? Thank Mr. Trump for that, haha.” Vanya never seemed to talk without laughing. He was both fat and beaky, like some strange cross between Jabba the Hutt and a bald eagle. I’d said so once, while Vassily and I played chess at Mariya’s. He laughed so hard then that he’d choked his milk tea over the chessboard.

  I tuned out as Vanya began to extol the virtues of the place to Vassily on our way inside, breathing in a cloud of cold artificial perfume from the threshold. I surveyed the high ceilings and the narrowing entries to the main gaming floor, where the endless tinny ringing of the slot machines danced like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Vanya could coo all he wanted over the German crystal chandeliers, but all I saw was artifice. My eyes picked out the slightly uneven joins in the carpet, the chips and variances in the thin marble cladding. The whole thing was a confidence trick. Under the thin veneer of luxury was a well-greased, artfully constructed scam. The only authentic features were the hundreds of cameras that dotted the ceiling and walls. Every single one was able to zoom in on our faces, and the p
eople behind them? They were a button away from dispatching the police, who would no doubt be delighted to find Vassily—a convicted felon put away for tax evasion and suspected money laundering—shaking hands with George Laguetta.

  I also took some time to watch the bouncers. There were lots of them: patrolling, chatting, standing around, boredly loitering by banks of machines. I had a rough mental approximation of their procedures and personas. A minority of the guys who did security at places like this one were real hardcases, former club bouncers, ex-cops, and veteran soldiers who treated the gig like a retirement resort. The rest were mall cops at best, men and women who’d done two weeks of training and hoped they never got into anything the other guys couldn't handle. They did a whole lot of customer service, while the old soldiers trounced the troublemakers. Straggling behind Vassily, I idly played out various scenarios in my mind, from the most extreme ones where someone ended up shooting someone else, through to the mildest, where one or more of my party was asked to leave for being too drunk. In all scenarios, I concluded that resistance would lead to disaster. There were too many guards here. The cameras would be linked to a communications center, and every single bouncer could converge on the same location within a few minutes. I hoped the Laguettas were as steady as gossip made them out to be.

  Lev fell back, and before I knew it, he was walking close to my other elbow, his mouth lifted in a secret smile. “How are things going, Alexi? We haven’t had a chance to catch up since you fell down the stairs.”

  He had to know about the attempted hit today. I considered asking him about Vincent. My hand tightened on Crina’s forearm. “Things are certainly going, Avtoritet. It’s been an exciting few days, but I’m… confident things will settle down.”

  “Excellent,” he replied. "Have you made any progress?"

  My stress ratcheted up another notch. "Of course. I'll talk with you later."

  Mikhail had fallen into line with him like a ghost, Katerina chattering to Vanya from his other arm. For a moment, I was reminded of Carmine’s hounds.

  “Chet,” I said to Kutkha, mentally. “That’s the word I want to master. The barrier. Some kind of energy shield.”

  “It isn’t the word so much as the intent, my Ruach,” Kutkha replied. His presence was a low rustling of feathers and dark, cold water. “Master the intent. Use the word to gain mastery.”

  Chet. I tried to focus on the meaning of the word as we walked, but there was too much distraction. The machines, the lights, the murmuring crowds, the heat of the gaming floor, the pistol tapping my ribs under my suit’s jacket. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t help but think about Nacari’s face being ripped off. Just like his brother’s.

  “Are you all right?” Crina said, keeping her voice low.

  “Can’t you smell it?” Her voice shook me out of my reverie. We were passing the slot machines with their scattered patrons. One here, one there—old men and women gambling their pensions, hookers on their breaks trying to win the next hit of crack. “The whole building smells like desperation.”

  “Mein Gott,” she said and huffed. “Tell me about it.”

  That wasn’t all that was troubling me. Vassily had barely said a word to anyone, though he was examining his surroundings with interest. I nudged Crina’s elbow and pointed at a figure tiled into the ceiling. “You see that image of the woman and the five-pointed star? That’s an embedded invocation to one of the faces of Venus, Lakshmi. This whole room is enchanted.”

  “Lakshmi? The Indian goddess of money?” She squinted up at it. “That seems quite blatant. What’s it for?”

  “Luck,” I said. “But luck for the casino, not the patrons.”

  Lev was our ticket to the Chairman Club, where we’d be laundering Nic’s money in irregular quantities, buying chips one, three, seven thousand at a time, and then changing them back in. We had to take an elevator up to get there. The Club was screened off into semi-private smaller rooms for poker, blackjack, roulette, and baccarat. It had a restaurant and gaming table service, lounges, a bar, a nightclub. The reception to the gaming area was a seashell-shaped hall with a marble desk and a mirrored ceiling strung with sharp crystal decorations. If the flimsy-looking bolts ever gave way, the stylish receptionist would look like an elegantly dressed possum kebob. She flashed a magazine-perfect smile at our group, and if she was concerned about working under an armory’s worth of dangling swords, it didn’t show. “Good evening, Mr. Moskalysk. A pleasure to see you.”

  “And you, Yulia. You are as lovely as dream, as always,” he replied in heavily accented English. It was the first time I’d heard Lev speak English in years. He already had his wallet in his hand and discreetly showed her the black card and his ID inside. “Do you happen to know if the Mr. Laguetta is waiting for us yet?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s already checked in to the Salon Privé,” Julia said. She didn’t even have to check her logbook.

  “Ah, kharosho, excellent. Then please arrange for us one bottle of Coche-Dury Meursault, and one of eighty-four Dom Perignon Rosé?” Lev’s English was thick, but his French was perfect.

  “Of course.” The woman replied as if the bottles of wine Lev had just ordered weren’t worth more than her entire week’s paycheck. “Anything else?”

  “No, no, is all I could ask for from such a beautiful woman. Thank you.” Lev smiled gracefully, polished polite as he split from the desk and led the way forward.

  Mikhail tracked Julia wolfishly on the way past, and Vanya whispered something into Vassily’s ear that made him laugh. I was the one who looked back to see the smile gone in an unguarded moment while Julia wrote her reminders on a well-used jotter. The brief exchange, in all of its formal artificiality, left me strangely cold on the trip upstairs.

  “Someone walk over your grave, soldier?” Vassily’s low voice disrupted my reverie.

  I hadn’t even noticed him, but he had fallen in by my elbow just outside the elevator while the others walked ahead. Crina was talking about something at Sirens with Katerina, just ahead of us.

  “It doesn’t feel very real,” I replied uncomfortably. I wasn’t certain Vassily understood, but I wanted him to. “This place.”

  There was a thoughtful pause between us. I glanced over and found Vassily looking off into the distance.

  He nodded. “Yeah… I know what you mean.”

  My mood lifted a little. “That, and there’s too many cameras here. Approximately one every three feet, not counting each gaming table.”

  “Don’t worry, man. We’re just here to play.” Vassily grinned, flashing teeth, and for a moment, the old sly light came back to his eyes. “It’s Lev’s chips, anyway.”

  It was technically Nic’s, but who knew? The gracious concierge who offered to take our luggage, the gaming host who greeted us at the door, the cage cashiers—everyone there had a vested interest in us changing and spending their money. They didn’t give a shit where it came from, as long as we kept playing and tipping.

  We emerged into the orange-lit parlor at the end of the corridor and immediately beheld the well-dressed Laguetta entourage, who had taken the tables and sofas that commanded the best view of the door. Eight men, three of them already tipsily playing roulette with whoops and laughter. Only one man was under forty. When they saw our group enter, the seated men rose and turned to face us.

  “Well, look who it is! Old Sly himself, and our young Mister Lovenko. Welcome back to the free world, Vassily.” George Laguetta was an old grizzled lion of a man with a slow sloping grin, and he pronounced Vassily’s name like “Vazli.” He held out a ringed hand as we closed in: Lev shook first, and then Vassily. Vanya hung slightly back, obviously keen for attention, but only getting it after the Avtoritet and the nominated heir of the leadership had their turn. I watched wryly from the back, hanging behind with Mikhail. We were the bulldog and the doberman, nameless unless introduced.

  There was no house security was in here, just me, Mikhail, and George’s bodyguards. The youngest ma
n had a curly mullet and was cut and tanned like a competitive bodybuilder, and he was definitely on duty. The other soldier was a sallow, black-eyed wiseguy with a heavy five-o’clock shadow and a sagging Saturnine face. His smiles were dark and fleeting, placidly masking great attentiveness. I marked him as a good shot and a fast draw. He wore an open suit jacket that was a size too large, the lining weighed down with spare clips of ammo.

  Besides us and Georgie’s crew, the salon had other guests. A tired-looking Chinese man walked back and forth between tables eight and six, chain-smoking cigarettes from a red pack as he checked his bets on baccarat. A group of young women decked out in Gucci laughed and talked around one of the rear blackjack tables.

  “…no, I’m telling you. Alexi back there kicks my ass at poker.” I tuned back to the assembled when I heard my name, just in time to see Laguetta and his friends look over at me and Crina interestedly. “And he’s totally playing baccarat tonight. I bet he’ll be up ten thousand before the first hour’s out.”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, you got the eyes for poker. Shark eyes.” George grinned broadly. “What d’ya think, Alexi? Reckon you can up Vassily here by ten grand?”

  Everyone from the Organizatsiya laughed. Vassily was the best gambler out of the entire Yaroshenko crew, and they knew it. Beside me, Crina flashed an exaggerated cat’s smile. I almost turned him down, demurred, and bought into the joke at my expense, but I spotted something bright and real in Vassily’s eyes. His fingers moved by his thigh in a wave pattern. With a shock of pleasure, I recognized the old signal. Vassily wasn’t making fun: he was giving me an in. It was as good as an apology, and I smiled as I was meant to. “Eleven thousand.”

  “Ohoh ohhh!” Laguetta clapped Vassily on the arm. “That sounds like a challenge to me. I’ll wager on it.”

  “You’re on.” Vassily’s face suffused with a wicked smile.

  Mikhail and Vanya stirred restlessly at this sudden re-inclusion. They didn’t look pleased as I left Crina and took my place at Vassily’s right side, where I hardly came up to his jawline. He clapped me on the shoulder, and we got started on the game.