Mummers' Curse (17 page)

“Why?”

“It’s a matter of honor, and I would make it worth your while.” He handed me a card on heavy ivory stock with ARTHUR in raised gold script against an embossed gold crown. Below was a telephone number, also embossed and gilded. No last name, no company, no occupation, no address. I had the sense I was supposed to know who he was without being told, but I didn’t, and I wasn’t going to admit it. “I’ll know if they give it back,” he said, “so you might as well benefit. A look, that’s all I ask.”

And with a courtly nod, his hair catching moonglow that was evident nowhere else, he walked off.

I didn’t stop shaking until, swamped with a primitive sense of relief, I reached home. I took a deep breath, rode up the elevator, and let myself relax, inch by inch.

To my surprise, Mackenzie was there, eating Chinese food out of containers, surrounded by the day’s mail which he mostly tossed into a nearby wastebasket. He looked near exhaustion, and none too happy.

I was learning that timing was as important in the everydays of a relationship as it was on the dance floor, and I decided that it might be best to let him get his day out of his system before introducing my encounter with Arthur.

“For you, Man,” he said, sounding too tired even for my full nickname. He pushed forward a plain white box, the sort you can buy flattened out at Christmas time. This was the small
objet d’art
size, sealed with clear tape and tied with curly gold ribbon.

I smiled for the first time in hours. Mackenzie had anticipated what a bad back-to-school day it was going to be and had gotten me a no-occasion gift. A sorry-I-was-so-suspicious-last-night kind of gift. What a guy.

“It was outside the elevator when I came home. Messenger must have delivered it.”

End of elation. Now I was afraid to touch it, so instead, I ripped open the envelope that had AMANDA PEPPER printed on it and read its contents out loud. “It says ‘When you wake up and smell the coffee, this might be appropriate. But please be aware that it, like many other things, is perishable.’ I don’t like the sound of it,” I said. “And there’s no signature.”

Mackenzie leaned over. I turned the card toward him while I sniffed the box and shook it, then passed it to him for further inspection.

“You can leave it and I’ll take it in later,” he said, “but it doesn’t have any earmarks of a letter bomb or anything dangerous.”

So I untied the ribbon, tossed it to Macavity, and the box flaps opened. I gasped.

Sealed inside clear wrap on a bed of green tissue lay a single bloated, mottled cylinder, looking like a short salami.

“Sausage,” Mackenzie said. He looked at it more closely. “Blood sausage, of all things.”

The Doomsday clock sat, showing me, graphically, that with every breath, I had less and less time left.

Ten

WE STARED AT THE SAUSAGE.

“Odd thing to send,” Mackenzie said. “Think maybe it’s a late Christmas gift? Somebody signed you up with those food guys—Tom and Jerry? Dave and Harvey? Whoever’s sausage-of-the-month club?”

I closed my eyes. He was trying to be sweet, to jolly me out of a severe case of the willies, but I felt patronized.

“You must be hungry,” he said, “and I’ve eaten everything I bought.”

“I had popcorn.” The sight of the fat sausage took whatever residual appetite I had away. Amazing what the overtones of a single cylinder of processed meat could do.

“How about I scramble you some eggs and brown this up with it?” he asked.

“What is blood sausage, anyway? Why is it called that?”

“Because it has a lot of blood in it.” He retrieved a dog-eared sheaf of recipes his mother had given him when he went off to college. “Of course, we called it
boudin noir
. Other people call it black pudding. Ancient dish, served to Odysseus according to Homer. Aside from onions, salt, pepper, and spices, it’s a mix of pig’s blood, lard, pork fat, whipping cream, and eggs.”

“I’ll pass. It’s probably poisoned.”

“It doesn’t need anything but its own ingredients—it kills with cholesterol.”

“Blood sausage,” I said. “Don’t those words have an all-too-familiar ring?”

“Coincidence.”

“I think not. And that note—I’m supposed to wake up and smell the sausage which is, like many things, perishable?”

“You’re paranoid. Those are expressions, and a reminder to refrigerate it. You have no earthly connection with the disappeared Serfi. Or did you meet him, too, when you were doing your…research?”

His tiny but deliberate pause galled me. I could almost hear him reluctantly snipping out the words
so-called
. So-called research. Just because I was still formulating ideas and really didn’t have time to write.

“I’m not sure it matters what I actually know or knew or connected with or not,” I said. “If people believe I know something, that’s enough.” Time to tell him about my encounter with Arthur. “I saw
Featherbreath
after school, and when I—”

“Was it as bad as its reviews?”

“Worse.”

“Why waste your money?”

The fact that it had been a worthy investment, cheaper than mood elevators or psychiatric care, and that I’d appreciated the film’s dreadfulness to the hilt involved lengthy discussion. Besides, I worried about Mackenzie at times like this when he lost hold of what was relevant and what was not. Mired in trivia as he tended to be, I didn’t know how he ever tracked down a killer. He certainly didn’t have a bloodhound style, nose to the ground, single-mindedly following a scent. “Later,” I said. “The thing is, when I came out of the movie this man—”

“What man?”

“No, wait.” I put my hands up in a referee’s time sign. “This is when you
listen
, Cisco. Later on, I listen and you talk. Got that?”

“Cisco!”
he shouted. “Cisco! I never thought—arrgh!” And he flopped off his chair, onto the floor, one hand clutching his throat, the other covering his eyes as he rolled hither and yon, continuing his
arrghs
. Precisely as I’d always envisioned Rumpelstiltskin when his name was guessed.

I’d actually gotten it. I leaped up. “
Cisco? Cisco K. Mackenzie
! I got it, I got it! I can’t believe that after all this time, all those guesses, I actually—this is incredible! I hardly—”

He stood up and brushed himself off. “Apologies, Miz Pepper, but tha’s not it at all, not even close. But after all this time, an’ all those clever guesses, I thought you deserved the thrill of accomplishment, of triumph. Even if short-lived.”

I took a deep breath, then I shrugged. He’d listened, which was all I’d really asked of him.

We both sat back down. “Anyway,” I said, “this man I’d never seen before stopped me. He knew my name.”

Mackenzie looked wary, ready to spring, ready to react, but he kept his silence.

“Turned out his name’s Arthur. That’s all I know.” I fished in my purse, then in my pockets until I found the engraved card, and I passed it over to C-not-for-Cisco. “He was carrying a leather-bound copy of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, and he warned me not to be an investigative reporter, and let me know he’d been in the movie.”

Mackenzie frowned. “He’s an actor?”

“In the movie house. With me. The whole thing gave me the creeps.” I wasn’t being clear, wasn’t able to communicate the negative force field around Arthur, the fear I’d felt—even if it did not seem justified.

“Which aspect gave you the creeps?” Mackenzie asked. “His moviegoing, his taste in reading, or this pompous business card?”

“He’d followed me.”

“When you say he stopped you, what precisely did he do?”

“Came up beside me, said my name, talked to me.”

‘Talked. In a normal voice?’

“Okay, right, yes—but that’s not the—”

“Did he touch you?”

I shook my head. “Not then. Later, he touched my forearm.”

“Touched or grabbed or held?”

“Touched, but I felt as if—”

“Did he threaten you?”

“We were alone. Nobody else around.”

“Yes, but did he threaten you? Do anything intimidating?”

“He laughed at me, kind of.” I was not going to admit I’d screamed “Fire!” in the middle of the street. Mackenzie continued to wait. “He said investigative reporting wasn’t a
healthy
occupation.”

“Luckily it isn’t yours.”

“The article, C.K. That’s what he meant.”

“The one you haven’t written?”

I hated this. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t care and didn’t care, it was that I wasn’t giving him any reason to care. “I was upset!” I said

“Obviously. How can I help you? I’m not clear on this.”

There was one part he’d be clear on. “He knew about the gun.”

And indeed, Mackenzie sat up straighter. “
The
gun? The derringer in your bag?”

I could hear the lyrics of the new hit tune: “The derringer in Mandy’s bag was a heavy, heavy load, oh, oh…”

“Is that what you mean?”

I nodded.

“Damn,” he said. “That’s weird. How’d he find out? Unless…”

“He wanted me to let him know if you returned it to me. He wanted to look at it, and he offered to pay.”

“Thought it wasn’t yours in the first place,” Mackenzie said. “You acted like the sight of it gave you hives. Why would we give it back to you unless we were sadists?”

“You know what I mean.”

He scratched his head, stood up, and stretched, a sight I usually enjoy watching, but the man’s logic was getting on my nerves and the taller and longer and leaner he made himself look, the more of him there was to annoy me.

“Unless what?” I asked.

“Unless what what?”

“You wondered how Arthur found out about the gun and me, unless. You stopped there.”

“Oh, right. Unless that’s what—somebody mentioned that Dr. Reed On the Air’s first ‘true story’ last night was about a high school teacher who taught in a privileged private school, insulated from the real world, but who identified closely with the armed, more violent segment of society—that’s me—and got involved writing about a ‘colorful subculture of the city’ through a colleague, and through that activity, with a murder of her own. That’s how she put it—seems I’ve got my murders and you’ve got yours. And this teacher-writer—Gladys, she called you—was named as an accomplice—”

“I never was!”

“That’s what On the Air said—and a gun had been found on her person, but she still said she knew nothing, yah-ta-ta. Suggested all kinds of mental deviations, like multiple personalities, dissociation, pathological identification with bigger, braver folk—that’s me again, I take it. Anybody interested, given enough brains to recognize which colorful subculture has recently had a murder, that person asks a few questions in that colorful subculture about who was writing something, that’d be it. The guy who mentioned it to me had figured it out. On the Air seemed to feel that your ‘intimate relationship with a law-enforcer’ and ‘intimate knowledge of the seamier side of urban life’ had so frightened you that you no longer were in touch with your own actions.”

“I’m crazy? Is that what she said?”

“She said you found a gun in your purse that was most likely involved in a murder. Bet that’s how Arthur tracked you.”

He came around to my side of the table and massaged my neck. It felt too good and too necessary for me to cry halt even though I could feel myself being not only literally but figuratively manipulated. He wasn’t taking my encounter seriously enough, wasn’t even taking Arthur’s tracking of me via the radio shrink as potentially frightening. If I hadn’t been so upset by him, I might have even sunk into the pleasant twilighty grogginess his hands encouraged.

“Let me ask you,” he said as he carefully kneaded. The muscles of my neck and upper back had been replaced by high tension wires at some point today. “Say you weren’t such a city girl. How did this encounter differ from somebody passing the time of day with you?”

“He—I—there are rules about how people approach—the man knew I’d be frightened. He meant me to be. He’d been in the movie with me! He told me to stick to teaching!”

I could hear Mackenzie’s deliberately slowed-down breaths. “I know teachin’s hard and all, but I guess sticking with it is scarier than I am capable of understandin’.”

“Never mind. You know he was creepy, and so do I. And that it had to do with this. These—because he referred to murders. Plural. Mummers. Plural. So Ted Serfi is somehow involved. He mentioned blood sausage.”

“How?”

It was much easier to remember the fear, the uncertainty, the effect of the words than the precise order of what he’d said. I tried to reconstruct the moment. “He asked if I thought Ted Serfi had been turned into blood sausage the way people said.” I did a double take. “You don’t think that thing on the table could be—”

“I think Serfi’s at the bottom of a river with weights on his feet. He ran with a fast crowd. Probably didn’t run fast enough.”

Still and all, I didn’t want to look in the direction of the white box.

“I know it frightened you.” Mackenzie’s voice floated down to me serenely as his hands kneaded my knotted muscles. “Don’t mean to dismiss that. But there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it. I could call him and say, ‘Hey, Artie, stay away from my girl.’ ”

I revved up for more precise objections, but he talked right over my hostile pfuts.

“I could challenge him to a duel, but that seems archaic. I could check him out, which I fully intend to do, an’ whatever I find, I will heartily use against him for scarin’ you. I will scare him back, I promise. But meantime, doesn’t sound like a single thing he did’s illegal, an’ I’m sure he knew that. Creepy, impolite, not usin’ city etiquette. But the rules say he has to break the law before I bother him.”

“I wish I knew what’s going on.”

“He wants to
see
the gun, that’s all? Didn’t want to buy it or take it?”

“He said he’d pay to see it.”

“He might well be involved in Jimmy Pat’s murder, and he hid his weapon and can’t figure how it turned up—in your bag, and he has to see it to verify it.”

“Unless he has to see it to verify it belongs to somebody else. He asked me what it looked like, as if he’d recognize some marking or whatever the police couldn’t.”