Part 29 (1/2)
”Take your gun,” Walter tells her, and he reaches for the pack of cigarettes she's left lying on the bed.
”Yeah. Just get her out of there, okay?”
And then their eyes meet, not something that happens as often as it once did, and for a long moment all the secrets they've shared and the secrets they will always keep from each other hang heavy between them.
260.
”I haven't come all this way to fail,” she says and turns away. The first one to blink, and she steps into her jeans, left foot first, then right, trying to hide the doubt she wears like a murdered albatross around her neck, the misgiving he sees every time he looks at her. ”I didn't choose exile just so I could watch the Weaver's handiwork from this side of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned gate.”
”Be careful.”
”Clean her up, Walter. I'll be back in fifteen minutes,”
and she hands him the rest of her cigarette.
”Just be careful,” he says again, and then Archer Day leaves the motel room without another word, shoes in one hand and her leather wallet in the other, her .38 hidden beneath the bulky sweater. And he sits on the bed while the monster dressed up in a girl's skin sits in the bathtub, talking to herself and picking spiders from her hair.
”Have yourself a good little nap, Vietnam?” Scarborough asks, and Niki looks up at him and the oil lamp on the chest of drawers, and then she rolls over so she can see the small stained-gla.s.s window on the other side of the bed. Shards of orchid and sapphire, cobalt and chartreuse, st.i.tched together with lead solder to make some flower that she's never seen before. The gla.s.s is dark, the design difficult to discern, no sunlight to bleed through the window and set the colors ablaze, and so she knows that it must still be night, or night again, and she's slept through an entire day.
”How long have I been asleep?” she asks.
”Just a few hours,” Scarborough replies, and the chair creaks when he s.h.i.+fts his weight.
”But it's still night-”
”You'll get used to that after a while. Long nights, longer days. You'll adjust.”
”Where's Spyder?”
”So, how you feelin', Vietnam? The doc, he said the wooziness should pa.s.s.”
”I asked you where Spyder is, and please stop calling me that.”
261.
Scarborough Pentecost leans back in his chair, lifts the front legs off the floor, and rubs at the side of his nose.
”Stop calling you what?” he asks.
”Vietnam. My name's Niki.”
”All I've heard anyone call you is Hierophant, and I figured just about anything would be better than that. And Vietnam isn't so bad. There was this great bar in Nah Trang, the Truc Linh-”
”I've never been to Vietnam,” Niki says, lying down again because she's too dizzy to sit up any longer. ”I'm from New Orleans.”
”Is that so?” and Scarborough leans forward so that the front legs of his chair b.u.mp loudly against the floor. ”I'm from Boston, myself. But I spent a little time in New Orleans, on business.”
”So how did you get here?”
”Long story,” he replies. ”Wrong place, wrong time.”
”Scarborough, where's Spyder?”
”The Weaver,” he says and thoughtfully rubs at his nose again. ”Right, well, she's with Esme, down on the rampart above the eastern docks. I wouldn't expect them back any-time soon. A wars.h.i.+p showed up a couple of hours ago and dropped anchor in the harbor.”
”A war s.h.i.+p,” Niki says, and she looks fretfully back at the darkened stained-gla.s.s window again.
”I get the impression you don't really know what's what around here, Niki, or what sort of hornet's nest you've been plunked down in.”
”I don't even know where here is.”
”Are you hungry? Eponine always has a big pot of something on the fire. Her cooking's not half bad, most days, if you don't mind the taste.”
”Thanks, but maybe later. I need to talk to Spyder.”
Scarborough Pentecost stands, and now he's looking at the stained-gla.s.s window, too. His face is filled with a hundred thoughts that Niki can't read, things that she can only guess at, but she guesses that he's afraid and tired of being afraid.
262.
”It's probably going to be a while before you see her again,” he says. ”She told me to tell you that.”
”That figures,” Niki whispers. ”She just left me here?”
”You're to stay put, Vietnam, unless this thing with the s.h.i.+p gets too hairy, and then I have orders to take you and head for Auber and don't look back.”
”And where's Auber?” Niki asks him. She vaguely remembers hearing the name pa.s.sed between Spyder and the fish augur, Auber and a Madame Tirzah, but it's only a word without meaning, two syllables signifying nothing at all. She thinks about shutting her eyes and going back to sleep.
”It's a city, a city on dry land, mind you, about three hundred kilometers northeast of here.”
”And how are we supposed to get there?”
”There's a boat waiting for us. With a little luck, we'll slip out of Padnee right under their noses.”
”Padnee? Is that the name of this place?”
Scarborough walks over to the window and opens it, cranks a bra.s.s handle and the pane slides up a foot or so, letting in cool night air and the faint smell of salt.w.a.ter.
”You're starting to get that not-in-Kansas-anymore feeling, aren't you, Vietnam? Maybe Narnia or Earthsea or Oz, but definitely not Kansas.”
”I told you, my name's Niki,” she says and sits up, moving slowly because she doesn't have the strength to move fast; her head aches like she's been drunk for at least a week.
”h.e.l.l, you were lucky. I woke up at the Palisades all by my lonesome. Spent f.u.c.king days wandering through those rocks before I found the road to Padnee.”
”Did you jump off a bridge, too?” Niki asks, and he shakes his head.
”No, some stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h who didn't know a gun from his d.i.c.k put a bullet in my head,” and Scarborough makes a pistol with thumb and index finger and thumps himself smartly between the eyes. ”Like I said, it's a long story.”
Niki puts her pillow behind her back, and when she 263.
stops moving around the dizziness begins to subside again.