Chapter 6 (p.3) (1)
I'm tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck, her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved. There was a dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her.
“You call me Mama-ji,” she said.
“I am Shadow, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.
“And what do you think of your employer's plans, Mister Shadow?”
He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don't ask, he don't tell,” he said.
“If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That's what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”
“It's not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.
The man in the back seat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.
The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic, bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.
The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree-trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham-hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoe boxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.
“That's some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver's seat.
“Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.
“No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don't stop.”
The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”
Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.
Shadow pulled up at the restaurant and he let his passengers off by the front door, then he got back into the car. He would park it at the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant on his own, in the cold, to clear his head.
He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier.
He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.
Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back…
“Hey, bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half-familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn't have a match, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.
Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.
“The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone in position?” A crackle of a voice, half-audible through a radio. “Let's move in and round them all up.”
“What about the big guy?” said another voice.
“Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.
They put a bag-like hood over Shadow's head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away.
There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn't know and didn't care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door.
He was hungry.
The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after they'd ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.
He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached.
The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls.
He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant.
His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.
He sat on the chair, at the card-table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick.
He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.
The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow's head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with no possible use on its own—consider, he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear.
He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, held between the tips of his forefingers, the other hidden horizontally in the fork of his thumb, a Downs palm. He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the coin, while slipping the visible quarter onto the tip of his third finger and pushing it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out of the Downs palm and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.
He did it over and over and over again.
He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table.
And then, because he just couldn't do it any more, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held on to it tightly, and waited.
At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails, the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that, on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him.
“How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.
“I don't know what that is,” said Shadow.
“He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You've been seen with him, sir.”
“I've been working for him for three days.”
“Don't lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.
“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won't. But it's still three days.”
The clean-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow's ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.
Each of the spooks had a gun-bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not hit the man back. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. Don't tell them anything they don't know already. Don't ask questions.
“These are dangerous people you're palling around with, sir,” said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by turning state's evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically: I'm the good cop, said the smile.
“I see,” said Shadow.
“And if you don't want to help us, sir,” said the clean-jawed spook, “you can see what we're like when we're not happy.” He hit Shadow in the stomach again, with his fist. It wasn't torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I'm the bad cop. He retched in pain.
“I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he could speak.
“All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”
“Can I ask…” gasped Shadow (Don't ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I'll be cooperating with?”
“You want us to tell you our names?” asked the clean-jawed spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”
“No, he's got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I'm Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister Wood.”
“Actually,” said Shadow, “I meant, what agency are you with? CIA? FBI?”
Stone shook his head. “Chee. It's not as easy as that, any more, sir. Things just aren't that simple.”
“The private sector,” said Wood, “the public sector. You know. There's a lot of interplay these days.”
“But I can assure you,” said Stone, with another smiley smile, “we are the good guys. Are you hungry, sir?” He reached into a pocket of his jacket, pulled out a Snickers bar. “Here. A gift.”
“Thanks,” said Shadow. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and ate it.
“I guess you'd like something to drink with that. Coffee? Beer?”
“Water, please,” said Shadow.
Stone walked to the door, knocked on it. He said something to the guard on the other side of the door, who nodded and returned a minute later with a polystyrene cup filled with cold water.
