Noir Fatale

by Larry Correia

  Some people looked oddly at me, but since I didn’t know them, I assumed they were new. I pulled my fox stole up over my shoulder, as though to protect myself from stares. It hit me that I’d neither eaten nor drunk in a long time, and I was dying for a drink.

  I was skirting the dance floor towards the bar when from the other side, the dark space next to the bar, a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist at the same time a voice said, “Honey.”

  I turned, ready to freeze with a look whoever had dared touch me, and stopped. “Arty!” I said, half in a shriek.

  He let out a surprised chuckle. “That revolting nickname!” he said, as I reached up to save the fur my startled movement had unsettled.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled and said, “I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “I wasn’t till yesterday,” he said. “I arrived by train yesterday morning.”

  “Oh. From California?”

  “From Los Angeles, yes.”

  “For…you’re coming back?”

  He shook his head but shrugged a little, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I thought maybe he hadn’t made a decision yet. “I’m parched,” I said. “You must buy me a drink.”

  The back of my mind was telling me to let him know everything that had happened since I’d woken up, but I thought I was just going mushy and wanting to unload all my troubles on Arty’s very broad shoulders.

  He put his arm over my not-so-broad shoulders and led me to the bar. It was Steven serving the drinks. He gave me an odd look, then seemed reassured by Arty’s presence, and when Arty ordered a bourbon for himself and a Cosmopolitan for me, he just gave us the drinks. Arty paid, then led me, with his arm still over my shoulder, to one of the booths.

  I sipped at my Cosmo, which was precisely how I liked it with the right proportion of lemon and grapefruit, and wondered if I should eat something or if I was going to get sloppy. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten.

  Arty took a sip of his drink and made a face while looking very attentively at me. He’d gotten older. He was always older than I. When I met him, I was seventeen and he was twenty-five. He’d been in the fourth year of med school when they’d called him for his brief war service as a flyer. Because the moment that John Whiteside Parsons had discovered magic, the army had searched for men who could use it, before the Krauts found it too and used it first. We’d gone into the war on the Allies side, as magic flyers. And it turned out that Arty was chock full of magic, as well as whatever natural brilliance had propelled him into medical school.

  He was still looking at me as if I were a very difficult problem he was trying to solve, even as he reached in his coat for his cigarette case and extended it to me. I was happy to see that it was the one I’d given him, silver, engraved with his initials, as I took a cigarette. I let him light it and blew two puffs before taking another sip of my drink and returning his serious look.

  “I came to Denver,” he said, “because I got this.” He reached into his jacket again and pulled out a postcard. It was one of those they sell at the train station, advertising the newest trains. He turned it over and slid it to me.

  The handwriting was crabbed and irregular, and it had been written with thin ink that looked brownish, but it was perfectly legible. “Art, I am in a spot of bother involving the D’Orio family. I don’t know what to do, and I can trust no one. It seemed like a good time to call in a favor.” It was signed, in a shaky hand, Don Griffin.

  “My family?” I said. And to his shrug, “And who is Don Griffin?”

  Arty toyed with the corner of the postcard. “Old friend from the war. Same corps. Saved my life. That’s the favor he talks about.”

  “A flyer?” I asked.

  Arty shrugged then seemed to think better of it. “I was never a flyer, Honey. Didn’t it strike you as peculiar that I would go to California to work in Hollywood? No. My specialty was always illusions.”

  Illusions. Look, I’m no strategist and, sure, I don’t read all those super important accounts of the war and analysis of “how we won.” But I do read the pulps. I know what illusions mean. They mean spies and assassins. “And Griffin was in the same corps?”

  “Stronger than I. He could create simulacrums.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Simulacrums. Creatures called up by magic, who move and live like the real thing, sometimes for months. Useful when, say, you killed a high-value target but you didn’t want the enemy to know it was dead or that it had been compromised. Anyway, too long to tell you and too technical a story, but he saved my bacon once in the war. And then he came here, to Denver, partly because I’d told him about it, to make a living as a magician for hire.”

  “And you kept in touch?” I said, wondering why I’d never heard of Griffin, not once. At least not that I could remember until I woke up in his pad.

  “No. We lived in very different worlds. I met him once or twice when I—when we were keeping company, Honey, and I told him about you.”

  Well, there was a connection between us, though I was not at all sure what it meant. However, this was Arty, and he obviously knew Don Griffin, and the feeling I should tell him everything and fast was powerful enough that it would be hard to stay quiet. So I smoked my cigarette and drank my Cosmo, while around us jazz wound like a cool wrap, masking our words as I told him everything that had happened to me today. A woman and a man danced by, her head on his shoulder. Arty and I had looked like that once.

  Perhaps it was the Cosmo making me tipsy, as I found myself walking to Arty’s car—he’d rented one this morning he said, and smiled when he told me he was doing well in L.A. though I didn’t understand how well he could do in just six months—and driving back to Griffin’s place.

  It still wasn’t locked and looked exactly as I’d left it, except that the rat had stopped gnawing at the wand.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked. I still had the sense of urgency, and it remained unfocused. I’d needed to get to Arty. No. I’d needed to get to someone who could help Griffin, and Arty was one of those people. But other than that, I had nothing except the feeling I should…yes, I should be helping Griffin.

  “Anything,” Arty said. He was going over Griffin’s workbench, inch by inch, moving dubious flasks and rearranging various objects I couldn’t identify. “Anything that tells us what he was doing or for whom he was making simulacrums.”

  “Was he making simulacrums?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I recognize the materials. Would your family buy simulacrums?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. You know I don’t know anything about Pater’s business.”

  “A wise move, since people who do tend to end up dead.”

  “Arty, Pater just does what he has to do to—”

  “Survive and keep the family safe. Yes. Forgive me, Honey. I didn’t mean to start the argument again.”

  He was still giving most of his attention to the workbench and its paraphernalia, so what could I do? I started looking through the bedclothes, to see if there was anything else there. It seemed weird that Griffin had disappeared leaving behind his wallet and his keys, but there was nothing else on the bed, so I started following the path to the door, which is when I saw it.

  Look, there were other things on the floor, so I might easily have missed it. It was obvious that Griffin was not one of your natural housekeepers. But there, against the far floorboard, near the rat hole was Ale’s pen.

  I’d have known it anywhere.

  Back when Ale was in school and father still had illusions about being the patriarch of scholars, Father had given him a distinctive silver pen, a thing worked by hand by some craftsman from the old country. It was slick and slim, and it had—I confirmed this as I got closer—Ale’s name engraved on it: A. S. D’Orio.

  I didn’t know what Ale’s pen was doing in Griffin’s pad, but my first impulse was to hide it and pretend I’d never seen it, because…

  I paused. Because I’d cover
ed for Ale all his life, at first hiding his bad behavior from Pater so Pater would not be grieved, and eventually just hiding his behavior from everyone because I didn’t want to be associated with a man who had turned out to be a common thug. Yeah, I know. You could say the same of Pater and the family business. But it wasn’t precisely that way. The family business had its roots in the old country. It was both vocation and obligation. Sure, Pater lived by crime too, though you might have trouble tracing all his criminal enterprises to him. They were done through flunkies and managers to such an extent that, in the end, even the IRS itself couldn’t find the connections needed to bring the business down.

  Did Pater’s enterprise create misery and loss? I didn’t know. Ever since I had realized what Pater did when I was twelve or so—and I can’t tell you how, except through adding up the hints and stray words dropped over the years—I’d tried to think of it as little as I could. Pater had certainly broken the law during Prohibition, and I knew there were other things in which he defied the might of the United States of America.

  But was it worse than it would have been without him? It would take a better woman than I to know. Arty thought he knew, which was why he’d left me and Denver to go to L.A. and pursue his idea of using his not inconsiderable magic to create movies. He wouldn’t sully his hands with Pater’s business.

  Still, the one thing Pater wasn’t was a cheap thug. He didn’t knock women about, abuse prostitutes, or plan hare-brained enforcement expeditions to knock out the teeth of some random man he thought had looked at him funny at a bar.

  The thought of hiding Ale’s pen, and therefore Ale’s potential involvement in this, came and went. “Arty,” I said, and I walked over and pointed at the pen. I had some idea he might be able to get some sort of emanation or feel from the thing if I didn’t touch it. “This is Ale’s.”

  Arty looked over from the workbench, and his eyebrows went up as he stared at the pen on the floor, amid the debris. He flashed a feral grin, “Well, we did know your family was invol—”

  “Completely different thing,” I said. “If it was Ale. Completely different thing. Ale was a wrong ’un from the beginning, Arty.” I looked at his face and explained about Pater breaking the law but being disciplined and an adult. “Ale is just wrong. He beats women and sends thugs to beat men who best him at anything, from a bet to romancing a girl. My father doesn’t know. At least I don’t think he knows. I’ve kept it secret from him as much as possible, but Ale couldn’t keep it secret from me, not when we went to the same schools and later had the same friends.”

  Arty took out the cigarette case and offered it to me first. We smoked in silence a long moment.

  “I see,” he said. “But you’re not holding your peace now?”

  “I—I don’t know why but I have a really strong feeling that it’s important we save Don Griffin.”

  He nodded. “Well, I certainly think so.”

  He threw his cigarette butt on a clear bit of floor and stomped on it. I put mine out in an overfull ashtray. I noted with interest that some of the cigarettes had exactly the color of my lipstick around the end. I wondered if I’d known Don Griffin. And why didn’t I remember?

  Arty had picked up Ale’s pen with his handkerchief, put it on the workbench, and frowned intensely at it.

  I don’t know what I expected. Fire or stars, passes or arcane whispers. I’d seen magic on the stage before. I had some idea what it was supposed to look like.

  Instead, what came up was a scene. It was foggy or perhaps just distant. Kind of like what it would look like through a window with condensation on it. Behind the workbench, against the wall, a replica of this room formed. Ale, in his brash finery, expensive suit spoiled by a big, yellow-and-white checkered tie held down with a diamond tie pin—that boy never did have any taste—was talking to a thin, dark man with sparse hair combed back from his forehead. I knew without being told that the man was Griffin, which made me wonder what exactly had happened between me and him, and why I recognized him.

  He was not what I’d expect, not at all. Not my type. And when one thinks of a spy, one doesn’t think of a thin, tired-looking man. Someone like Arty maybe, but not him.

  Ale was giving Griffin a picture, “As close as you can, okay? As close as humanly possible.”

  Griffin mumbled something about time and materials and how expensive it would be. “And then, you know,” he said. “She won’t be the same. She won’t remember the things the original knew. She won’t fool anyone who knew her, not once they have a good look. She’ll walk different, she’ll talk different. She’ll be a different person for as long as she lives.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ale said. “Not for what I need her. Just being seen around town and confirming rumors, that’s all.”

  “Well, that…that should be possible.”

  They were setting a date for delivery. And it was the day after my birthday, on the fourth of July. This confused me for a moment. I thought it was May, maybe April. Suddenly I didn’t know what month it was. I’d realized part of my memory was missing, but I didn’t know how much of it or what had happened. You know, if I’d used that lost time to take up with the likes of Don Griffin, I needed mental help and would seek it as soon as possible.

  “So,” I said, “Ale hired Griffin to do a simulacrum, and if I know Ale, he probably welched on payment. Chances are that he took Griffin out to the edge of town and had his thugs beat him, and Griffin is now trying to find his way back, footsore and bruised. What do we do now? How do we find him?”

  “We,” Arty said, going all of a sudden as solemn and serious as a judge, and one of those judges you couldn’t buy for love or money, “aren’t going anywhere, Honey. You’re going back to your apartment and beddy-bye. And I’m going to get some old friends from the corps and figure this out.”

  “Arthur Arcana, you rat,” I said. “You can’t do that. This is my case. This is my story. I’m the one who woke up with the feeling I had to help Griffin. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I’m sure I’m supposed to do it.”

  He smiled a little at my calling him a rat, that weird quirk of the lip he used to give when I railed at him or teased him, but his eyes were dead serious and shading to sad. “No, Honey. You have helped him. You told me the whole story. You brought me here. But this will be dangerous, and there is no way I’m going to drag a dame on this kind of errand.”

  “But, Art, Ale is my brother, and I know his tricks better than you. I know his tricks better than anyone. You need me.”

  And yet he wouldn’t give. He kept looking at me with those infinitely sad eyes. I thought that once more he had seen me as a D’Orio, someone who wasn’t fit to keep company with him. He didn’t want anything to do with me.

  He started to the door, then surprised me by walking back into the room, kissing my forehead with a butterfly kiss, his lips barely touching. “God bless you, Honey,” he said. “You’re too good, too fine for this. Stay away.”

  What is a woman to do with that? Once he’d told me I was good and too fine for my family, and he’d walked away and to California, and if this was July or later, he’d been gone for nine months at least. And I still didn’t know what to do with that, except one thing: I couldn’t let him go. Not now. Not again. Nor could I let him go off to look for Don Griffin, and maybe die alone. I wouldn’t lose Arthur James Arcana again.

  I should have told Pater that I was out, and endured his temper tantrum, and told him if he sent anyone after Art, I’d go to the police with a lot of things I’d deduced about the family business. And then I should have left. By now we’d have a little house in the hills in California, and maybe a kid on the way.

  “Well, there is no time like the present,” I told myself. I took a cigarette from my own case and smoked it down to the nubbins, before stubbing it out on the ashtray with all the other ones with the same lipstick color smeared on them.

  By the time I stepped down to the street, there was no sign of Arty’
s car. I walked in the rain, thinking, to a busier part of the street, where I flagged a cab. I used some of Griffin’s money to get back to the Magic Cat and Griffin’s car.

  Me, I don’t use magic. Never have. But everyone knows a magic practitioner or two these days. Basic life necessity, right? Even a girl needs antiwrinkle magic now and then, not to mention getting someone’s claws off her best boy’s back. If you don’t enter in the love philter war in junior high, you’re a fool. And if you continue it much after twenty, you’re a worse one, I understand. Not that there was magic when I was in junior high of course.

  But I knew magic practitioners and had heard of others. The one I decided on, more blind instinct than anything else, was Mother Turner, down by the Cathedral.

  There’s a welter of little houses down there, a colored neighborhood, and Mother Turner was colored. A middle-aged woman of vast proportions, she was the matriarch of a large and respectable tribe. It was a point of pride to her that one of her sons was a bellman at the Brown Palace, and two more worked for the railroad. But she’d run her foretelling and fortunes business long before Parsons had made magic a scientific reality. I’d consulted her now and then. Nothing much, mind. I knew better than to use magic in love. Except when it came to Arty. I had no brain at all when it came to Arty. Just a blind yearning to be with him, a blind feeling I belonged to Mr. Arcana.

  Mother Turner had been straight with me about that too. I remembered the talk after Arty had left, about how I had to choose, how it wouldn’t do to run after a man, and she’d refused to bring him back to Denver and particularly into Pater’s business. “No, missy,” she’d said. “That I won’t do because making a man come back against his will is worse than killing him, and making a man participate in crimes against his will is against God’s law.”