BAZ

I don’t say it didn’t surprise me when, one minute, I was on the stage, assembling Yoni’s new flying harness, and the next minute I was standing in a hotel elevator lobby with her harness in my hand. Like my ex-roomie Archie, I’ve gone too far with a woman once or twice and found my powers rubbing off on her.

But it had never happened before I had sex with her.

And it had never happened that I turned up wearing clothes.

I could see what Aphrodite meant about this skinny little black rock star. Her powers were coming in fast. Waves of command emanated from her.

What amazed me was that she hadn’t tried to use them on that French lawyer. In my kinging days, I’d have had him on his knees with a red-hot poker up his butt in two minutes.

Not that that hadn’t been tried. From his manner, I guessed that the poker had been frozen.

I took the elevator down and stopped to warn the singer’s door dragon about the lawyer guy and the stalker chick. The door dragon ran the girl’s photo and her father’s business card through a scanner-printer and gave me copies for theater security. Then I picked up a sandwich at the lunch counter across the street and headed back down to the Arie Crown Theater on foot, lugging Yoni’s harness.

On the way I called Veek.

Miraculously he answered. “Jake is dead, Baz,” he said.

“Yeah, got your text. Shit, I’m sorry, buddy.”

“It was coming. His mambo will retrieve the corpse.”

A crowd of pigeons squabbled over a still-smoldering cigarette butt on the grass by the rose garden. I kicked my way through them. “You don’t sound too happy about that.”

“I must help with the burial. She will despise my ignorance. Also, she will ask many uncomfortable questions to which I have no adequate answers.”

“Need a bodyguard?” I said.

He was silent. This shit is serious, I realized. I often offered to help Veek, and he hardly ever let me.

At length he said, “There is an object. If I had it, I would have no fears. If I could give it to you, likewise.”

“But somebody else has it, no, huh?”

He hesitated, as if trying to remember his English. “Eh, yes.”

“Man or woman?”

“Woman.”

“No problem. I’m on it.” I’d have walked through fire for Veek. He was all I had left of the slacker demon posse who used to room with me. At ninety-something he was not even out of mortal range, but he was a lot closer to immortal than anyone else I could bear to bunk with.

More silence.

“I’ll get it off her,” I assured him. “No worries.”

He sighed. That sigh said, As good as it’s gonna get.

A bunch of charity jog-a-thoners in matching pink tee shirts came at me. I slipped through them under the Lake Shore Drive overpass toward the museum campus.

I thought of the photo in my pocket.

I said, “And in return, you can cover some off-the-docket security work for me. Yoni’s doing three shows at the Crown and a club date. Some freaky French chick is supposed to be stalking her. The French chick’s cute. Seduce her for me and I’ll tackle the woman who stole your object. The stalker’s poppa is offering a bounty if you can keep her out of Yoni’s hair.”

Her poppa didn’t know that yet, but I would see to it that he paid. Plenty.

“Done,” Veek said.

I hung up and went into the theater and did the eight-o’clock show.

Our flight-phobic rock star did fine.

The stalker didn’t show up.

At eleven-thirty, I went home.

o0o

Veek came home at two a.m. looking like shit. I handed him the margarita pitcher and put a big bowl of chorizo and cheese in front of him.

“Tortillas in the steamer.” I hooked two for myself and handed him two. “What took you so long?”

“Tidying up the botánica. Also, I had to wash my kouzen for burial.”

I paused in mid-tortilla-dip. “Did you wash your hands?”

He flicked me a perfunctory smile. “Now this mambo comes to take the body. She’ll want to pray over it for nine days. I have to be there, at least for some part of it.”

“And you don’t want to.”

“I promised Jake.” Veek gave a fatalistic shrug and drank from the pitcher.

I had an unpleasant thought. “This changes things for you, doesn’t it?” I said slowly. “You’re not stuck in Chicago any more. You could go back to France.” I wasn’t eager to lose my last slacker demon roomie. But I’d watched him stifle himself and do whatever Jake said for twenty years now. “Right?” My heart sank.

He was guzzling margarita, but he lowered the pitcher at that. “I had planned to.” He gulped again and passed it. “Jake has—Jake did something.” With a broody look, he said, “I wonder if he was trying to stop me.”

“Stop you from going to France?”

“At this point I am wondering if he always meant to do so. Yet,” he murmured as if to himself, “he spoke of one who would help me to find my place. Was he misleading me?”

I wouldn’t have put it past Jake, but I didn’t say so. “Tell me about this object you lost.”

He assembled queso fundido con chorizo in a double wrapping of hot corn tortillas, took a quick, fastidious bite, chewed, and swallowed. “Jake gave it to her.”

“He gave it to her? What was the big idea there?”

“She can control me with it. He said I was to learn love from her, but I suspect he had another motive.”

“What the fuck is this thing he gave her?”

“My cordon ombilical. My navel string.”

I whistled. “That’s big juju.”

“I hope she doesn’t know what to do with it.” He shook his head. “These days, in Europe, they are more used to the magic, how it is changing the world. She may know.”

I burst out, “What the fuck did he think he was doing?”

“It might be that Samedi was within him when he did it. The Baron has a sense of humor.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m not laughing,” Veek agreed.

We wolfed queso fundido until we were stuffed and washed it down with a pitcher of margaritas apiece.

Fed, Veek looked a lot more optimistic. “There’s more,” he admitted, when we were lying back in our La-Z-Boys and passing a joint.

“Of course,” I said.

“This mambo may wish to exact a price from me. For departing her house without leave. Also, I—misbehaved while I was there.”

I wondered what misbehavior my prissy roomie could have gotten up to at a vodou house. “That was a long time ago.”

“Eighty years. They don’t forget.”

“Sheesh. Don’t you get points for turning Jake’s body over to her?”

“This is my hope.”

We smoked for a minute in silence.

I said, “Want me to seduce her, too?”

Veek rolled his shaved black head on the headrest and assessed me with his small, skeptical hazel eyes. “Sure. Knock yourself out of it.”

I always smiled when Veek tried to talk American. His cob-up-the-butt, French-taught, antique English made a mess of it. I took the joint from his fingers.

He changed the subject. “Tell me about Yoni’s stalker.”

“This is her,” I squeaked, holding in smoke. I handed over the photo. He did a quick-take-um. “She’s liable to turn up around Yoni’s hotel, the Hilton, or at the Crown during the concerts.”

“She is French, this one,” Veek said. “Well-born.”

“I know. Poor little rich girl. Thrill seeker. According to her daddy, if you act impressed with her, she’ll roll over.”

“I can do that,” he said slowly. He held the photo between his fingertips, studying the vivid little face, all blue eyes and black hair and born-straight teeth.

“First you gotta catch her,” I reminded him.

He held up the photo. “She will come to me.”

“What? Why?”

“It is she who has my navel string.” He laughed without humor.

I laughed the same way. “It’s just raining shit for you today, isn’t it?”

“That it is.”