“Say what?”
“The last payment you made to your municipal tax account was short.”
“By how much?”
“As I said to your assistant, Zephyr, earlier—the shortfall amounts to one penny.”
“A penny,” said Zephyr. “How silly of me to forget. You know, I think I’ve got one right here.” She delved into her pocket.
“No!” I shouted. I pushed in front of her, grabbed a handful of loose change from my coat and held it in front of the scarab. “Here—take what you want! Take it all!”
“I don’t want it all—only enough to settle the account,” said the beetle amiably. It poked its antennae through the coins, picked out a scuffed coin. “This is all I need. Thank you. I will bid you good afternoon.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“What was that all about?” said Zephyr after the scarab beetle had gone. “I never saw you try to throw away money before.”
“It’s a complicated story.”
She threw up her hands. “With you, it always is!” She turned on her heel, went back to her desk and threw herself into the chair, shaking. I stood in the doorway, feeling like she was holding the script and I knew none of the lines. Eventually she stopped shaking and started stroking the zoetrope again.
“So where’s Bronzey?” she asked.
“The robot decided to stay behind.” This felt like safer ground. “I think it’s worked out some things in its head. Figured out what’s important, know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.” Her voice was too quiet for my liking.
“What’s going on here, Zephyr?” I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “You were weird earlier. Even weirder on the phone. Now you’re weirder still.”
She stared at the zoetrope. “It’s just so fragile, isn’t it? All of it. All my hard work, everything I did to fix things between me and Raymond—if this thing got smashed, it would all be for nothing.”
“The zoetrope’s fine,” I said.
She ran a hand through her hair. Her cheeks burned red. “After you’d gone, I realised I’d been a bit mean to you. When you got back I was going to apologise, say something lame about getting out of bed the wrong side. But then...”
“Then what?”
“The beetle came up to me all serious and told me there was a shortfall. When it told me it was just a penny, I laughed and went straight to the petty cash box, but there was no loose change. The beetle said it didn’t mind waiting until you got back, but I wanted to have everything squared up for you. I wanted to do a good job. And it was only a penny.” She faltered, went on. “I remembered I had a few coins in my pocket, so I dug them out. That’s when I found this.”
Zephyr held up a penny. Just a penny, slightly tarnished, with a nick on the edge.
“So?” I said. My blood was running like cold treacle.
She hardly seemed to hear me. She was focused on the penny. “I remember it—this exact coin. I remember the nick, just here. I kept catching my fingernail on it. But the thing is—I also remember the moment I found it.” Her eyes locked on mine. She spoke slowly. “This is the same penny I picked up when I got off the bus. I got off the bus and put down the shopping bags to balance out the load before I climbed the stairs to the apartment. That’s when I saw this coin lying on the ground. Just a penny. It caught the moonlight, and that’s when I remembered the old rhyme: ‘See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.’”
“Honey,” I said, “about that rhyme...”
“Shut up. This is the same penny I picked up that evening. The exact same one. But... but I changed all that. When I was using the zoetrope, cutting out all those scenes, the moment I found the penny was one of the moments I cut out. All I was interested in was me and Raymond dancing in the apartment. I cut out all the rest. Including the penny.” She angled the coin into the light. It flashed in my face. “When it comes to strange dimensions and time travel and all that stuff you take for granted, I’m no expert. But answer me this: if I really did erase that scene from reality, why is the penny still here?”
“Honey...”
“Don’t ‘honey’ me! Something’s wrong! I’ve thought and I’ve thought and there’s only two reasons I can come up with to explain why I’ve still got this penny. Either the zoetrope really is just a cheap trick.”
“Or.”
“Or that deleted scene never actually got deleted.”
Her eyes drilled into mine. The coin flashed.
From my pocket I pulled the deleted scene—the one she’d dropped in the crater, the one I’d picked up and hidden away. The one that had scared me halfway to death and back. And still did.
Tears crowded the corners of her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Zephyr, there’s something you need to know about the pennies you find lying in the street...”
“I don’t care about pennies! All I care about is this!” She snatched the deleted scene from me, waved the little square of cardboard in my face. “I care that you lied to me, kept this behind my back! How many other scenes did you keep?”
“I didn’t...”
“Don’t tell me! I won’t believe you! Why did you keep them? I suppose you keep them stashed under your mattress so you can flick through them before you go to sleep. I’ll bet you get a real kick from watching that one of me and Raymond in bed together! Or the one where I’m making breakfast in nothing but my knickers! Or maybe you’ve got a zoetrope of your own. Maybe you were planning to stitch all these deleted scenes together, make yourself your own director’s cut of my life. My life! Do you get what this is about? Do you get how mad I am at you?!”
“It was only this one,” I mumbled.
“I don’t believe you!” She crushed the scene in her hand. The sharp corners drew blood from her palm. She threw the crumpled cardboard at me. “Here! Do whatever you want with it! Plug it back into my life—plug them all back in. Make me a murderer again! Because that’s the truth, isn’t it? Whatever tricks you play with your fancy gadgets, you can’t change the truth, can you? I killed Raymond and there’s nothing I can do about it!” She stopped, choked in her breath. Picked up the zoetrope. “The way we are in this globe, dancing like this, it’s just a dream, isn’t it? That’s all it ever was.”
She stumbled to the doorway.
“Let me explain,” I said.
“No. It’s over. The whole thing’s over. Thank you for trying to help me. But you can’t change what I am, any more than you can change what you are. You reached the truth in the end, and here it is—this is the real me, here, standing in front of you with tears on my cheeks and nothing on my feet. The Zephyr inside this little glass bubble... she doesn’t exist. She never did.”
“Don’t go.”
“Goodbye.”
“But I’ve got to tell you about...”
“Don’t tell me any more about anything. I couldn’t bear to hear it.”
“You won’t get half a block before...”
“It doesn’t matter how far I get. I never belonged here in the first place. I’m going, and that’s all there is to it. Don’t follow me.”
Clutching the zoetrope to her thin chest, she slipped through the hole in the wall. The instant she stepped outside, rain began to fall. It made a blanket around her, then turned her to something flat and two-dimensional, just a cut-out of a distraught dame stepping out into a world where she didn’t belong. One step, two, three, and the rain came down heavier and she just melted away.
I stood rooted like a hamadryad. Ten seconds passed. Finally my feet came unglued and I followed her. By the time I got outside, she was nowhere in sight.
It was getting dark. A few streetlamps flickered on; most were dead. The street looked like an open wound. In the spot where I’d parked Jarrett’s automobile was a fresh crater, rapidly filling up with rainwater; the car itself had already gone under. Smoke rose from somewhere near the river. The refugee camp, going up in flames. The
rain beat against me.
Zephyr was gone.
75
SEE A PENNY, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.
If only it were true.
Here’s the thing. Most folk, when they see a penny lying on the ground, they assume it fell out of some other person’s pocket. They see it as a windfall—a little one, to be sure, but like the saying goes, you look after the pennies and rest looks after itself. Besides, everyone can use a little luck, right?
So most folk, when they see a penny lying on the ground, they pick it up. It never occurs to them it might be better to ignore it and walk on by. On the other side of the street. Better, a completely different street.
And they never wonder who it was put the penny there in the first place.
Or why.
76
I COULD HAVE picked up Zephyr’s trail. After all, I’m a private investigator. But you need more than gumshoe skills and fancy gadgets to find a person. You also need heart. That was something I was fresh out of.
I sat in her chair. It was still warm. I kicked the ledgers aside, parked my boots on the desk. I wasn’t comfortable. It didn’t matter. Sirens screamed in the distance. Somewhere, bombs were going off. The wind howled. There was a pervasive smell of dung.
I wondered how long String City would last. A day? A week? No way to tell. I figured the Still Point must have a lot of moving parts—it would take the Fool a while to dismantle it. But taking things apart was its speciality. Maybe the end would come soon.
I hoped so.
I thought about the Scrutator, fixing up the wind factory. When the cosmos finally collapsed, the factory would collapse along with everything else. So it was futile work. But the robot didn’t seem to mind.
I thought about Zephyr, barefoot and alone on the shattered streets of String City. She needed help, someone to hold her hand. Someone to guide her home.
I couldn’t think of anyone qualified.
I thought about the business. The office looked smart—apart from the wall of fresh dung—but suddenly too full of furniture. I got up, opened the trapdoor and heaved the two spare desks into the cellar. They crashed down the steps and smashed to matchwood on the cement. I slammed the trapdoor shut. Slumped in my chair. The heap of unsolved cases looked bigger than it had for a long time. I figured it might as well stay that way.
I took out the Dimension Die, turned it in my fingers, dropped it into the desk tidy in disgust. Even that couldn’t solve this one. I opened the drawer and pulled out the bourbon. The bottle was nearly empty. I slugged it back until there was no nearly about it. Then I cracked open a fresh bottle, starting slugging that back too. Wind and rain lashed against the dung. Suddenly I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. I stepped out into the darkness, the bourbon bottle hanging from my hand. I walked and drank, drank and walked. The night was full of sound. The streets creaked. People screamed. The air hollered, the constant moving breath of destruction.
The Case of the Missing Ambrosia
77
I GOT ROARING drunk and dreamed my way back in time to the day I’d become a private investigator.
78
I’D JUST BURIED Laura, my second wife. That marriage had ended like the first—all shouting and tears. The big difference was, I’d loved Laura more than the world. And she’d loved me the same. That was what the shouting and the tears had been all about.
Astrid, my first wife, she’d been a viper. I’d fallen into love with my eyes shut and just kept on falling, all the way through the good times, right out the other side and into the bad. Astrid didn’t understand love. Hell, she barely understood people. A week after the wedding we both knew the marriage was dead. Took us a whole year to bury it though. We tore ourselves to shreds digging the grave.
Laura was different in every way. Laura was sweet and pretty and gave more than she took. I never understood what she saw in me. But she saw it all the same.
After we married, we bought a clapboard house on Nukatem Street and things were good. Strike that, they were great. Laura was studying for a college degree in metaphotography. She had this dream about owning her own studio. Me, I was an old soldier. There were thousands of us on the streets of String City back then, aimless and lost after the battle that ended the Titanomachy. I’d joined up right after the the end of my marriage to Astrid, filled with dreams of fortune and glory. By then, the war was in full swing. Six long years later, like all the rest of the enlisted, the army spat me out like an empty shell casing, tired to the bone and ready to forget everything I’d seen.
After the war ended, I spent a couple of years pinballing from one odd job to another. When I took up with Laura, I was stacking boxes at the wharf. The money paid Laura’s college fees and just about kept us in cold soup and crackers. Nights we did piecework stuffing envelopes for charity. We were poor but we got by. Then Laura got sick.
The doctors gave her a month.
Almost immediately, she started pushing me away. She said it was for my own good—I should let go early, before she dragged me down. I pushed back, told her we were in this together.
“You’re still going to college,” I said. “Still taking your pictures. You can still be my wife.”
“I can’t,” she said. Her eyes were misty. “I can’t be that any more. It’s tearing me up, in here,” she pressed her hands to her belly, “but it’s already over. Don’t you see?”
I didn’t, and I told her so. Despite all her protests, I stayed. She went to college for one more week, finished whatever project she was working on—I never found out what it was—then quit. She got sick, then really sick. I nursed her. We spent long evenings crying together. When she got worse, String City General sent in a specialist carer and I went for long walks. One day, I came back to find the carer gone and my bags packed. Laura was sitting up in the bed, red-faced and flushed.
“Please go,” she said. “I have to do this on my own. Please.”
I said no. She begged me, told me it was just for a night. She needed time to gather herself, set herself right with the world. Just her. Then I could come back and say goodbye.
I told her no way. She told me it was her dying wish.
What else could I say?
I bummed a room off Tony Marscapone. I spent the first half of the night making and remaking the bed. I spent the second half not sleeping in it. When morning came, there was a cop at the door. His face told me everything I needed to know.
I went to the morgue. Laura’s face was blank, serene. I touched it and it was cold.
Twenty minutes after I’d left her, she’d called a cab. She told the driver to take her to a jetty on the Lethe, just downriver from where Jason moored the Argo. She paid the driver and stepped on to the shore. After that, nobody knows. There were no marks on her body. All the evidence suggests she just walked out into the river until her head was under the waves. The instant her feet touched the water, the power of the Lethe would have started to wipe her memory clean. By the time it was up to her knees, she’d have forgotten all about her illness. Waist-level, she’d have forgotten me. Up to her neck, she wouldn’t even have known her own name. The only thing left in her head would have been the imperative to keep walking, the memory that at some point, for some reason, she’d decided that this was the right thing to do.
They found a note in the pocket of the jacket she’d left on the riverside. The note said she was sorry, and she loved me, and she hoped I could forgive her. It said she’d left something for me in a box at the house. Something to remember her by. I screwed up the note and stuffed it in my pocket. All I could think of was that I’d never get to see her graduate now.
Instead of going home, I walked the city in a big circle. Eventually I wound up at the other end of the street where I’d started. I was heading back to my room at Tony’s when someone called my name.
I turned to see someone standing outside the door to a shabby office. Odd as he looked, he seemed familiar.
79
HE WORE A natty green suit and had grey hair down to his ankles. As I watched, his hair got short and black, whizzing back into his skull like some wacky time-lapse movie. He grinned, revealing empty gums. Suddenly the gums filled up with teeth. He shrank inside his clothes, shedding years until he was an eight year-old boy. He blew a raspberry, then got older again. He stopped somewhere in his mid-twenties, held steady there. All around him, the air buzzed with temporal static.
“Jimmy?” I said. “Jimmy the Griff? Is that you?”
“Long time no see,” said Jimmy. He now looked fifteen years younger than when I’d seen him last. Fuzzy round the edges too, like he wasn’t set to stay that way.
“What are you doing here?”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Been working here these past years as gumshoe.”
“I never realised.”
“I don’t advertise.”
He was right about that. There was nothing on the office front that said what went on inside. I wondered how he found any trade.
Jimmy’s hair started growing again. Wrinkles gathered round his eyes. One at a time, his shoulders sagged.
“What happened to you, Jimmy?”
“Come inside, I’ll tell you. I’ve been waiting for you to come along.”
“Waiting... but how did you know I was...?”
“Come inside. Coffee’s on. I’ll explain everything.”
He was right about the coffee, wrong about the explanation. Even Jimmy the Griff couldn’t explain everything.
Or else he just wanted me to work it out for myself.
80
THE OFFICE WAS as shabby inside as out. Jimmy poured coffee from a cracked urn and pulled up a couple of battered chairs. By the time he sat down, he’d aged about two hundred years.
“How long’s it been?” he said. His flesh sloughed off until he was mostly bone.
“I don’t remember.” I knew intellectually that Jimmy and I had fought side by side in the trenches, but the memories themselves I’d tamped way down into the pipe of my mind. They were cold embers, and I had no intention ever of reigniting them.
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