The World House (8 page)

  "If that doesn't kick away the pole-riding blues then nothing will. Thanks, Tom."

  "No problem at all. So how were things this evening down at that most esteemed of all skin joints?"

  "I shook and rolled, while the pasty-faced and well-heeled steadfastly refused to notice anything above my nipples. Same old same old…"

  "The damn fools missed your eyes," slurred Tom, then immediately wished he hadn't. The problem with fancying a stripper was you felt a heel hitting on them. Just another purveyor of corny chat-up lines.

  Tom worried too much. Elise gave him a genuine smile. "You're a sweetheart, Tom," she said.

  "Hell, Elise, I don't know much but there's two things I can swear to: I know beautiful eyes when I see them, and I can mix a Martini." He took a big mouthful of his own, just to shut himself up.

  "I shouldn't complain," said Elise, tucking into her patty melt, "a few years of tips and I can pack it all in for a job that allows for more than glitter and tassles. Having said that…" She dug into her coat pocket. "What do you make of this?" She handed him a small wooden box.

  Tom lit a cigarette – as he was wont to do when thinking was required – and turned the box over in his hands. "Looks like the kind of thing you stash your dope in when you've got visitors."

"Trust you. Try to open it."

  Tom did but, no matter how he ran his fingers over the box's edges, he couldn't find an opening. "Weird."

  "Damn right." She tugged at a stray strand of melted cheese that ran from the corner of her mouth like tacky spider's web. "Some guy gave it to me as I was leaving. 'A sign of my immense appreciation', he said."

  "Did you tell him you preferred foldable appreciation?"

  "I was just glad to get the hell out of there."

  "Was he Chinese?" Tom pointed at the writing on the box's surface.

  "Nah, some old white guy, not the sort of clientele we normally attract. He had his pants done up for one thing. Dressed like out of some old movie… hat and coat, you know, 'The Shadow knows…', that kind of thing."

  A bell of recognition rang in the back of Tom's head but Elise licked her lips and he lost his train of thought. "The Shadow knows…" he murmured, to stop anything more provocative spilling over his vermouth-soaked lips.

  He went back to looking at the box, sure he must be blushing. "So what you going to do with it?"

  "Damned if I know. Think it's worth anything?"

  "Oh yeah, a box that doesn't open… There'll be a line around the block for the chance to own it."

  "What I thought…"

  Tom looked out the window, hoping the sight of rain would wash his numb brain.

  "Marlowe's back," he mumbled, sucking down the final dregs of his Martini in case the answer to Elise's problem was hiding under the olive.

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing." Tom nodded towards the window. "Guy stood out in the rain, thinks he's a private detective or something."

  "That's him," Elise said. "That's the guy…"

  "He's coming over." Tom started to get to his feet. "Think he wants his box back?"

  The man reached into his raincoat as he strode towards them, and pulled out a large handgun. With no hesitation he opened fire and the large plate-glass window cracked like river-ice in spring.

  "Jesus!" Elise dropped to the bench. Tom, quicker than he would have ever given himself credit for, grabbed her arms and pulled her down to the floor next to him.

  "What the
fuck
?" Terry shouted. He looked in a mood to argue until a second shot knocked the window through in a waterfall roar. That took all the fight out of him and he decided that crouching behind his bar was the only sane response to the situation.

  Tom hugged Elise hard, burying her head in his chest, the hard corners of the box pressing between them.

  Terry worked his way along the floor to a strongbox he kept stashed beneath the till. Swearing repeatedly, he yanked the strongbox on to his lap and fished in his pants pocket for his keys. "What's the goddamn point of having the thing if you end up dead trying to get the fucker open?" he whined. He rifled through the keys on his bunch. "Fucking thing, fucking thing…" He picked the smallest out and tried to force it into the strongbox lock. It wouldn't fit. He heard the sound of shoes grinding glass to powder on the sidewalk outside. Panicking further, he emitted a high-pitched whine and started punching the lid. He picked another key and tried it. It turned the lock and opened the box. He grabbed the .45, stood up and pointed it at the man climbing through the window. Then he noticed the live rounds rolling out of the spilled strongbox at his feet. "Dumb fuck…" he whispered before deciding to bluff the situation out. "Drop the gun!" he shouted, "or I'll drop
you
." That sounded so embarrassing he'd have turned the gun on himself were it loaded.

  The man clambered over the booth table and on to the floor. Terry was surprised to see how old he was – in his late seventies at least.

  "There's no need for anyone to shoot," the old man said, holding up his own gun. "I just want the box." He gestured to a small wooden box on the floor and Terry was baffled to see there was no sign of Tom or Elise. Maybe they'd got out somehow?

  "Take it and leave, real slow…" Terry said.

  The old man sank to his haunches, picked up the box, dropped it into his coat pocket and stood upright, keeping his gun levelled on Terry throughout. He looked at Terry's gun and smiled. "That ain't loaded," he said. To prove his conviction he turned his back on him and walked slowly out of the front door.

  Terry dropped quickly, grabbed a couple of rounds off the floor and loaded them into the Colt. By the time he'd stood up again he was alone in his bar. No sign of the old man, Tom or Elise. "Well…" he scratched at his baffled face and stared at the Thursday night pouring in through his broken window "…fuck me sideways."

 

As far as Tom was concerned, he and Elise had fallen through the floor of Terry's bar. The impossibilities of that didn't occur to him; he was just glad to be away from mad bastards with guns. They tumbled through utter darkness for a couple of seconds before landing on what felt like a stack of rough pillows. Tom coughed as a cloud of dust erupted from under them. He pulled himself away from Elise, knowing he was going to be sick. His hands grabbed at rough hessian and he guessed they had landed on a pile of sacks, flour by the feel of the powder all over his face. He rolled off the sacks on to a cold floor and got to his feet just as he started to throw up. Blind to his surroundings, he hoped he wasn't upchucking all over his shoes.

  "Elise?" he asked, once done. There was no reply. Spitting his mouth clean he retraced his steps up the pile of sacks, pulling his cigarette lighter out of his jacket pocket to give him some light. "Elise?" he asked again, feeling her limp arm and starting to worry. He brought the light to her face to see a panicked look in her eyes that at least meant she was conscious. Conscious but unable to move… it occurred to him that wasn't a good thing at all. "Elise? Can you hear me?" Her eyes flickered but that was all the response she could give. Tom started to panic. It didn't help that his head felt strange… airy and brittle. He realised it was because he was sober, not an experience he had had recently.

  He needed to find some light. "Don't worry, Elise," he said, an empty promise and he knew it. He climbed back down, let the lighter go out and waited for his eyes to adjust. As the blue and yellow afterglow of the lighter flame faded from his eyes the darkness moved in. Turning around he saw a thin beam of light ahead and walked towards it. He stuck out his hands to stop himself bumping into anything. After a few seconds, his palms hit the far side of the room. Rubbing the surface he decided it was wood and therefore, as hoped, a door. Moving his hand down he groped for where he would expect a handle. His hand gripped metal, he turned it and the door swung open bringing the light from outside with it.

  On the other side of the door was something completely unexpected: a large oldfashioned kitchen, filled with wood and tile, large dressers and stone work-surfaces. It was the sort of kitchen you saw in old movies, where fat cooks wore white hankies over their hair as they chopped up meat and vegetables. The sort of kitchen that really shouldn't be in the basement of a New York bar.

  "Bad jive, daddy-o," Tom whispered, before deciding that there would be time enough to worry about where they were once he had seen to Elise. They had landed in the kitchen's larder, sacks of flour perfectly placed to offer a soft landing. Except… the ceiling above was intact, no sign at all of where they might have fallen in. He propped the door open with a clay bottle of oil and – trying not to look at where he had been sick – grabbed Elise and carried her out of the larder.

  As soon as he'd lifted her on to his shoulder he realised this was the wrong thing to do. You weren't supposed to move someone who had been in an accident, just in case you made things worse. He paused, not knowing what to do next. He wasn't a man used to making executive decisions, definitely a "go with the flow" kind of guy. Well, there was little point in worrying about it now; he'd picked her up, the damage – if there even was any – was done and there was no going back from it. He lay her down as gently as he could on a large marble-topped preparation table. He brushed her hair from her face and gently unbuttoned her raincoat. He felt her arms and legs delicately. She seemed OK, nothing obviously twisted. Elise mumbled something… Tom, hyper, had his ears to her lips in seconds. "What was that, Elise, honey?"

  "
Cnt muvve
," she repeated.

  "I know that…" he replied, trying not to sound exasperated. "You'll be fine, it's probably just…" he had no idea what it might be "…shock or something." That was lame and he knew it. "Just relax, everything's going to be fine." That was somewhat overconfident too, wasn't it? At that moment though, her hand twitched and grabbed his, which made him so stupidly happy he was willing to continue thinking positive. Then it occurred to him that if they were beneath Terry's bar –
Except you know it ain't so, don't you,
Tom? We ain't in Kansas no more and the sooner you admit
the fact the better
– perhaps the gunman was going to follow them down to finish the job? In a surge of panic he moved around the room hunting for the door so he could block it, get some kind of barricade going.

  There was no door.

  A large stove took up one wall, several thick chrome pipes leading off it and into the bricks behind. It made him think of a church organ. Thin wisps of smoke were escaping from its various hatches and seals, like a steam-trawler boiler ready to blow. There were rows of saucepans hanging from a rack on the roof, old and beaten like a wardamaged knight's armour. A heavy porcelain sink took pride of place on another wall but where, above it, you would have expected to see a window there was nothing but red brick. The wall was painted with dust and cobwebs, suggesting the kitchen hadn't been used for some time, though the fire in the wrought-iron grate said otherwise. Logs crackled and spat their disapproval as Tom moved around the preparation table, checking out every part of the room. A large hatch in the wall to the left of the fireplace was probably a dumb waiter, he decided; certainly it fitted the period. But no, other than the larder they had fallen into there was no door. He checked the larder, climbed up on to the sacks and shone the flame of his lighter on to the ceiling, it was completely intact. They could not have fallen through it.

  But they had.

  "Do not adjust your
goddamn
set," he mumbled to himself, talking nonsense as he did when in need of a morale boost. He went back to Elise and rubbed her arm gently, pleased when it began to twitch.

  "Pins and needles," she said, "feeling coming back." Her speech was still slurred but clearer than it had been, another sign she was recovering. "Where the hell are we?"

  "I just don't know," Tom replied. "It's freaky shit, I have to tell you. We, like, fell through the floor, yeah?"

  "I've no idea what happened… that guy was shooting at us and then, I don't know, I blacked out or something."

  "It felt to me like we were falling but…" he looked towards the larder and decided not to think any more about it.

  "Are we still being shot at?'

  "No."

  "Then, for now, it's all good."

  "Yeah… copacetic…"

  Tom couldn't stand still, he was feeling too damned twitchy. He squeezed her hand and began to pace, sure at any moment that something hostile and terrible was bound to descend on them. "Just makes no sense…" he muttered, beginning to open the cupboards around them. "Completely whacked…" He opened a large cupboard to the left of the oven and stumbled backwards in surprise at the sight of the small man who stood inside.

  "Hello," the man said, pulling a puffy white chef's hat from the pocket of the stained smock he was wearing. "Who's hungry then?"

 
 
 

Pablo hit the stairs rolling and if it weren't for his boot getting caught between the uprights of the banister he would likely have continued for some time. He hung there upside down, hanging loose and fearing the worst. He couldn't move. Had the old man shot him? Or maybe he had landed badly? A year ago he had seen one of his father's crew fall from the mast of the ship. It was his own fault, he'd been playing the fool, making the others laugh. The man had lost his grip and plummeted to the deck, his spine snapping audibly as he bounced off the wooden planks. Nobody had laughed at that. The man had survived but lost all mobility from the neck down. He was now angry and fat, pushed around the harbour by his son when he wanted to sharpen his anger on the sight of the ships. Perhaps that was what had now happened? Was his spine broken?