The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Read online

  “Let’s see it!”

  The man reached with his free hand under the counter and pulled out a long plastic submarine, its nose dish-shaped. On its underside were four wheels. “I stuck a motor in it,” the man explained. “Nickel-cadmium batteries, probably still runs. Let’s check—”

  “I don’t care if it runs, you asshole. How much?”

  “With an attitude like yours, asshole, two hundred bucks, firm.”

  Max pulled out his wallet and tossed down one of his many credit cards. “Fine.”

  “We don’t take credit cards,” the man smirked. “Cash. No check, either. Cash.”

  “Scumbag, I’m a Nacht—recognize the name?”

  “No.”

  “The Nachts are in lingerie. Filthy rich.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m outa that phase. I still want cash.”

  “Fine!” Max pulled out a wad of bills. “You just fucked up my supper, prick.” He counted out ten twenties, slapped them on the table, then had to wait while the man counted them again, all with one hand. “Got a gun back there or something?” Max asked.

  “I wish. Sometimes my anus closes right up. I gotta work it loose again, or everything backs up, if you know what I mean. You want me to wrap it?”

  “Uh, no. A box will do.”

  “Yeah but there’s some highly breakable protuberances—”

  “Do I give a shit? I paid for it. It’s mine. I can do what the hell I want with it. Now, hand it over.”

  The man had found a long flower box, but he now draped his arm protectively over it, his eyes wide, dribbles of sweat running down from his greasy hair. “I made it,” he whined. “You’re not supposed to break it.”

  “Just a joke, friend,” Max said, smiling. “Honest. I’ll take good care of it. Now, can I have it, please? I’ve got a dinner date with a table.”

  “You’re dating a table? Cool.” The man pushed the box toward Max, who snatched it up. “Hey!” the man shouted as Max rushed to the door. “I’m loosening up!”

  Six minutes later Max reached the door of Culture Quo. The restaurant was packed with pre-Awards patrons, and the air was humming with feigned excitement. Max pushed through the lineup, jabbing recalcitrant SOBs with the flower box until he stepped clear.

  And there it was. The table. Where he’d dreamed of sitting, there in the company of greatness, or at the very least self-importance. And the empty chair—two of them, in fact—and Brandon Safeword gesticulating as he pontificated to his adoring audience consisting of his wife, Penny Foote-Safeword, and Lucy Mort. Max blinked uncertainly as he approached. Brandon’s head looked too big, and Lucy’s too small, as if someone had been messing with the camera lens through which Max observed—not that he was observing these details through a camera lens. Even so, what met his eyes seemed strangely skewed.

  “Ahh, Maximillian!” Brandon called out. Many heads turned, the conversations at the other tables stilling for a brief moment as eyes fixed on Max, who arrived at the table and pulled out a chair and then sat down. “Excellent timing, my boy,” Brandon said. “We were just about to order.”

  Penny thrust a menu into Max’s hand. He set down the flower box, edged it with a foot under his own chair, then turned his attention to the menu.

  Lucy’s voice came out as a tiny squeak. “I’ll have the feral garden salad, wheat stir-fry with birch bark plain on the side, and a double lite alcohol. Thanks.”

  Smacking her lips, Penny said, “Were the scampi harvested in dolphin-safe nets? Excellent. I’ll have that, and brown rice plain. No, no appetizer—I’d be stuffed! And a triple lite alcohol plain. Marvelous. Brandon, darling?”

  “Oh no, Maximillian first, by all means.”

  “Uh, thanks. I’ll have the thirty-six-grain toast, the triticale quiche, and a lite ale, please.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Brandon said to Max. “Of course,” he added, leaning over to nudge Max with an iron-hard forearm, “as emcee tonight, the last thing I’d need is all that roughage ringing the old bell below, eh? Hah hah! Ho ho! No, instead, I’ll have the soya prime rib, with wild rice, and wheat milk to preserve my elocution. Wonderful, we’re all set!”

  “Where’s Professor Palmister?” Max asked.

  “Vanished,” Brandon intoned. “A cause for great concern. Left not a trace of his whereabouts, and believe me, it’s not like him to miss this of all nights. Nine out of the ten incipient award winners come from his class, after all.”

  Max glanced at Lucy, who taught at the rival university. Her minuscule face was bent down toward the glass of mineral water in her hands.

  “Next year, of course,” Brandon drawled, “the balance will shift, right, Lucy?”

  She nodded mutely, not looking up. The purse on her lap was inordinately large, long, bulky, and she reached down with one hand to stroke it a couple times, then reached back up to her glass.

  The appetizers arrived. Max had hoped to add to the conversation somewhat, but the thirty-six-grain toast swelled into a glutinous, doughy ball in his mouth, and he was left chewing on his first bite until the main courses arrived. In the meantime, Brandon spoke, “Ever been to the Pyramid, Max? Thought not. A wonderful work of art in itself, housing the city’s finest publicly owned collection of fine art. Well, publicly owned is something of a misnomer, we’d all not hesitate to admit—at least in private, hah hah! The galleries are sealed against pollution, and that includes uninvited people across the board, and the wonder of it is, the Board of Directors ensure that few—very few indeed—are ever invited to peruse the collection. I, of course, have been many times. Truly remarkable. Brilliant work, all of it, packed chock-full with seminal meanings, dire significance, cultural value. There’s even a copy of Penny’s book, stored in an airtight, alarm-fitted cabinet, in a room all its own.”

  The main courses arrived. Max managed to swallow down the mouthful of toast and, greatly relieved, permitted the waitress to remove the rest. “Is the collection very large?” he asked. “I’ve seen the building from the outside. It’s huge.”

  “There are seven works of art in the Pyramid,” Brandon said. “Each a treasure in its own right. Most of the lottery funding went into constructing the edifice, naturally, and these days into the salaries of the two hundred staff members. A triumph of city planning, the envy of cities the world over.”

  There followed five minutes of nonverbal utterances as everyone tucked into their suppers: crunching, slurping, gnawing, nibbling, chewing—mostly chewing, although the loudest sound assailing Max’s ears was the twin cavernous whistles issuing from Brandon’s enormous nostrils. His head appeared to have grown larger since Max first sat down, and each breath Brandon drew in seemed to create a momentary vacuum in the center of the table, followed by a hair-flicking gust. No one else seemed to notice, even though Lucy’s head was pulled and pushed with alarming force, giving her trouble in matching her forkfuls of food with her mouth.

  Desserts were then ordered, and when the plates were scraped clean, Brandon leaned back with a loud, atmospherically traumatizing sigh, and said, “We’d best be off, ladies and gentleman. The Pyramid beckons, the Awards await our surprise and delight, and the day’s light fades.”

  “Do you think Don’s all right?” Penny asked.

  “Oh, I imagine so,” her husband replied as he and everyone else at the table stood. A moment later the patrons at all the other tables also stood. Max retrieved his flower box—he wasn’t sure if he’d need to show an actual sample of his work, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Well,” Penny said, “he’s awfully absentminded. But on Awards Night?”

  “Perhaps just another case of acute constipation,” Brandon said.

  “But it’s been days!”

  “Just like last time, if I recall. Shall we proceed?”

  Max reached for his wallet, but Brandon waved a hand. “Nonsense, we have dined on my account. After all, an artist must watch his coin, eh? Hah hah! Ho ho! By God, I’m feeling much better!”
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  4.

  the dance of dances

  Sool Koobie kneeled close to a wall of his cave, a bone tube in one hand, the fingertips of the other red with paint, his mouth full of spit and charcoal. The wall’s red bricks were smooth with age, shiny with the greasy smears of Sool’s shoulders in constant passage, and now crowded in painted images of the various spirits Sool had freed over the years—freed being Sool’s unconscious euphemism for murdered in cold blood. Overhead, the cave’s roof, consisting of woven detritus and misshapen pieces of corrugated aluminum, drummed and rustled beneath the night’s light rain. The occasional rivulet dribbled down onto the smeared cobblestone floor, pooling close to the manhole cover, which led down into Sool’s own private world of nether spirits and odd, bloodstained tubes of gauze that Sool threaded together to make his dancing cloak of death, which he now wore in homage to the god who was art, the gifts that were red ocher and charcoal paint, and the demonic angel who raced inside his head and gave painful birth to the images he now fashioned on the wall of his cave.

  His was a world of magic, of gestures that were sacred, of dreams that were stories, and memories that were truth. In his propitiations before the hunt, and in the images he painted now the hunt was done, Sool had no sense of past or present, for each belonged to the central, tactile, physical truth that was the hunt itself.

  Setting the tube to his lips, Sool leaned close to the wall and softly sprayed the wet charcoal, outlining the curving sweep of Don Palmister’s back, then the heart-line—the perspective a perfect rendition of what had met his eyes moments before he’d driven the spear home. With the red ocher paint in his other hand, he daubed on the flesh, the hint of muscle beneath the corduroy hide, the color that was life and earth. In moments he was done. He spat out what was left of the charcoal, wiped the paint from his hand on his thigh and buttocks, adjusted the gauze-tube cloak, then cocked his head with a tense, febrile motion.

  In the air, in the wet wind that drifted in from outside! A herd of vegetarians! A herd so large, so close! Sool Koobie’s flesh quivered. A low whimper escaped his blackened lips. He spun into a flurry of gauze and beads and braids, the world in his perfect mind plunging into a dance of exaltation, communal propitiation, perfunctory mass extermination. The dance carried him into ecstacy, as he felt the spirits gathering, joining his flesh, surging through his veins and arteries.

  And the sky blackened overhead, and thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed, and a Neanderthal turned his glittering, narrow, red-rimmed eyes upon the world outside, and thought of death.

  5.

  discoveries

  Annie waited below with her three bodyguards and the limo, but Andy “Kit” Breech gave little consideration to their likely impatience with this delay. He kneeled in the closet, the door open, the shoes flung out and lying on the living room rug behind him, the secret trapdoor pried open, and the strange, mysterious electronic array spread out before him. Headphones, with an impossibly long headband between the speakers … Who the hell makes headphones for octopods!? A flat box, a round keyboard with strange symbols imprinted on each key, dials, switches, VU meters, frequency-finders. An aerial, wireless, made and sold by Radio Shack. A calculator, Texas Instruments, with trig functions and expanded memory, a diagram with penciled arc calculations, tensile strengths, velocity projections, angles, stress factors for some kind of mineral. Jottings, obscure notations, my God, what is all this?

  “ASAP, give me a memo, please, help,” Andy babbled, pulling at his lower lip. He found a second diagram, illustrating—with a precise hand—no, tentacle—a condom. What? Stress calculations, elasticity factors, probability curves. He clambered out of the closet, realizing he was gibbering wordlessly but not caring, and crawled up to the aquarium. Kit wouldn’t meet his eye. The octopus lounged under its rock, glutted with a half pound of calamari, and slowly twirled one tentacle tip with another; still another tentacle tapped slowly in time on the gravel bottom, and still another held up its huge … head, or body, or whatever that blob’s called. I used to know. I used to know everything about octopods. I used to ooze confidence when detailing my wonderful pet to each and every woman I brought up here—they’d see the incredible sensuality octopods exude, the strength of their sinuous limbs, the quiet awareness in their eyes, their startling explosiveness when they pounced—and they’d all damn near drag me into bed, wrapping themselves around me and grunting and gasping and begging—but now, but now I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything. I feel weak, sucked clean, impotent. What can I do?

  Then suddenly he knew exactly what he was to do. “Kit,” he hissed darkly. “When I get back, it’s down the toilet with you. You brought it on yourself, Kit. You’ve left me no choice. You’re pike-meat, Kit. Sorry, old friend, but this is what it’s come to, after all these years.”

  The intercom buzzed again, and Annie’s tinny-squeezed voice called out, “Andeee! Please, lovemuffin! We’ll be late! And Stubble needs to pee! Why didn’t you go with the minister? We weren’t expecting this detour, Andeee. Hurry down, please!”

  The minister. Ride with him? With those pigeons trying to nail him every minute? You must be insane. Oh no, no way. He scrambled to his feet and stabbed the intercom button. “On my way, darling,” he said.

  At the door he paused one last time to glare at Kit. The octopus had edged to the corner of the aquarium and was watching him, waiting for him to leave. It’s all connected. I know it is. I just thought my underwear were stretching, but that wasn’t it. My penis is shrinking, my testicles are withdrawing, the hair’s all falling out. I think you’ve been poisoning my condoms, Kit. Is it jealousy? Are you, uh, gay? This can’t go on—I didn’t even notice the last time I had a hard-on—I can’t keep making excuses, my answer-phone’s full, the bitches are getting nastier with every message they leave. I just hide in here, staring at you. I can’t think. I can’t do anything. You’ve got to be … removed, Kit. I never thought you’d be the one to betray me. The fatal kiss, the taste of your salty beak on my lips. E tu, Kitay?

  Heartbroken but with a new resolution, Andy left the apartment.

  6.

  escape!

  Jojum was the biggest bruiser Joey “Rip” Sanger had ever seen. Of course, size was irrelevant, but it looked like the man could back it all up—he had fists that looked like stone mauls, and damn near the same color, too. And yet, there he stood, delicately, beautifully guiding the steam engine through the darkness, his touch a caress on the controls, his piggy eyes squinting into the darkness ahead.

  Joey had been tied to a grab rail opposite the control station where Jojum sat. The knots were secure, the ropes unyielding. Gully and the other two scrubs had gone back to one of the other cars, leaving Jojum, just Jojum, but Joey knew it’d be enough. In any case, he was trussed up so tight, he could barely breathe.

  Joey tried talking. “Ain’t no point in holdin’ me, if ya think about it. Gully’s got a problem, and it’s me, and sooner or later he’ll have to drop the black glove at my feet, and then the short straw will need picking. But I know Gully—I know people just like him. All heart and fairness to keep you sops in line, nodding your heads to whatever crap he delivers, but picking that straw won’t be blind chance, Jojum. He’ll have squirreled the whole thing, and it’s my guess he’s already picked you out to do the job. You’re big, and dumb—as far as he’s concerned. He’s the brain and you’re the meat, and the meat does what the brain directs. You’ll end up with a murder rap, Jojum, and Gully will be clean grease sliding off into the sunset. You’re young, boy, but I ain’t. I seen enough in my day to know what I’m looking at—this here cozy world Gully’s devised, well, he’s the emperor, ain’t he? King Shit of Turd Mountain, right? You’re here to stroke his ego, all of you, and t’make him feel virtuous. So he’s cleaned the homeless off the streets—that’s exactly what the powers that be want—to not see you, so they don’t have to think about you, so they don’t have to do anything about you. If Gully’s rich, it�
�s cause he’s being paid outa the premier’s pocket, mark my words.”

  Jojum slowly slid his flat gaze over at Joey. He blinked. “You say something, bud? My hearing ain’t too good. Say, that’s two nice shiners you got there, bud.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Joey swore.

  There was a shout and all of a sudden Wild Bill Chan was clambering up Jojum to batter at the man’s head, and the redcap was clambering in through the entranceway, knife in hand, and slicing at Joey’s bonds.

  “Hot damn!” Joey laughed.

  Jojum and Chan were having a real set-to, grunting and grimacing and clobbering at each other, staggering back and forth, crashing into things, breaking things.…

  The ropes fell away and Joey leapt to his feet. “Hey!” he yelled at the two fighting men. “You two! Cut that out! Quit it, or you’ll—”

  Jojum slammed into the controls, snapping the handles at the far forward position. The train jolted, its wheels screaming, the dark scene outside quickly sliding past in a blur. Then Jojum, Chan clinging to him, caromed into the redcap, then Joey, and the fight got interesting for a while. Eventually Joey managed to pull himself away—he looked at the broken controls, then out the window. The redcap crawled to his side.

  “Now we’ve gone and done it!” Joey swore. “We got ourselves a runaway train, and we’re all dead men!”

  Jojum and Chan stopped fighting briefly to look over at Joey and the redcap—the boy’s face was white with fear, since the train was already going too fast to jump off—then the two men resumed their battle royal. Joey thought about joining in again, but Chan and Jojum seemed perfectly matched, and looked to be having fun besides.

  Joey sighed. “Cheer up, redcap,” he said, patting his pocket. “You’re as close to earning your fiver as you’ve ever been.”