Uptown Local and Other Interventions (7 page)

Here are two stories that are connected, and an interesting example of what can happen when a writer hasn’t fully worked out an idea in the first pass at it.

In 1991 the new Murdoch newspaper
The European
did a short story contest, the only restrictions being that the stories could not be more than 2000 words long and had to have a European theme. So I did a little story, a riff on a theme from mythology, and sent it along. It didn’t win, but I got a very nice letter back from one of the editors saying that if they’d been considering publishing a fantasy story, it would have been a strong contender…

            Barbara hated Ron. She had told him so at the farewell dinner they had planned for the night before he went away to finish his doctoral work on the Continent—the dinner at which he was going to give her the ring. Ron had caught his plane and train as scheduled, but without the scheduled elation—shattered, instead, feeling it was probably all true, and that she had good reason to despise him. In his misery he had planted himself in the train’s dining car and eaten his way from Amsterdam right down to Basel. Besides scholarship, food had always been Ron’s great love and Achilles heel, the heart of much of his life’s sensuality, comfort and consolation: and now that he and Barbara weren’t talking,  he had definitely been eating for comfort and distraction. But it hadn’t worked. Everything on the train had tasted like wallpaper paste, even the
gulaschsuppe
, and Ron had been left with nothing but the calories, and heartburn of both kinds.

            It should have been delightful, this most hands-on part of his doctoral research on the effects of Etruscan languages on the Sursilvan dialect of Romansh; but it had all gone dry as dust. Not even strolls in the cobbled back-streets of Chur’s old town, and much red Veltliner drunk with his friends from the Ligia Rumantscha, had been able to jar him out of his dolefulness. Ron deplored it, as well as the pity with which his academic interviewees looked at him—somehow immediately sensing his sorrow and treating him with dreadful gentleness. He resolved angrily to do something definite to shake himself out of this mood. On his first free weekend, Ron took the narrow-gauge railway over from Chur to Andermatt, then the shuttle to Goschenen, and fell willingly down the Gottardo tunnel, the thirty-mile rabbit-hole, into the warmth and light of the South. Or so he had thought. Instead, all he got in Rome was humidity and smog, and Ron found himself praying for any wind to stir the brown air. But no breeze came. And here he was eating again, and getting no good of it, in this prosaic cafe by the Piazza Santa Maria. The sidewalk was grimy, the pasta was sodden, the sauce was tasteless, the Orvieto was flat. And it was all his fault: he knew it.
Barbara—

            A whirl of early dry leaves went by, etched with the scarlet and golden vein-scribbles of premature autumn. It had been very cold here at night the last week, they told him at the hotel. Ridiculous weather for the beginning of September. Global warming, the El Niño, who knew the cause? Nothing was working right any more. To Ron it all seemed a symptom of the emptiness inside him, in the chair across from him, where
she
should have been, laughing.

            That was when he looked up and saw the old woman standing there staring at him, seeming slightly like a bag lady at first glance, all in sober, rusty black, and scuffed, "sensible" shoes. The bulging bag, though, was from the Rizzoli bookshop in the Piazza Colonna, and was that-morning new.

           
"Bien di,"
  the old woman said.

           
"Bien onn,"
  said Ron, without thinking, and glanced away—then looked up in shock. No reasonable person expects to be addressed in Romansh in Rome.

            She came right over and sat down across from him, businesslike. He stared at her face as she signaled the passing waiter for another glass. It was old, but surprisingly unlined. Those eyes were where where the age lay couched, serene and amused. "You’ll want to look at these,"  she said, and lifted the purple-and-gold Rizzoli bag onto the table.

            Bemused beyond reaction, he pulled it to him and peered in. Rolls of white paper, the kind that you might see feeding into old-fashioned telex machines: nine of them. He pulled one out, unrolled it slightly. The inner surface was closely written in an exquisite copperplate hand, in a very old- fashioned Italian which caused him some trouble until he worked out the abbreviations and the peculiar grammar, more typical of medieval vulgar Latin.
Vitello alla salvia,
he read, and lifted his eyebrows, scanning along further.
...filetto all’ uva...

            "Forty-six million lire,"  she said.

            He looked up again and did the math in his head, dropping three zeroes and dividing by two.
"What??"

            She had poured out wine for herself, was now drinking it, smiling at him. "Too high?"

            "For
recipes?
Madam, I don’t know what kind of joke this is, but— "

            She upended the bag onto the table, picked out three of the rolls of paper, apparently at random, and pitched them into a nearby wire-mesh litter bin: then took the matchbook from the ashtray, lit a match, and tossed it in after them. The rolls went up in flames with ridiculous speed, as if made of flash paper. People at nearby tables glanced over, then away again, hurriedly.

            Ron shook his head and took a drink himself, pushing the roll of paper further along the table and winding up the slack onto the stick attached to the leading edge.
Risotto con pernici—
He glanced up at the old woman. "I suppose I get a discount now for the ones that you burned?"

            She shook her head. "Forty-six million lire,"  she said, and drank her wine again.

            In the litter bin, the flames were sinking. Ron shook his head as he wound the roll along. "I don’t—"  he said, as she picked up three more of the rolls. Into the bin they went, one after another, and flashed enthusiastically into fire, like logs soaked in petrol. The people at surrounding tables were beginning to get up and edge away.

            Ron stared at the woman. She simply smiled back.

            "Still forty-six million lire?"  he said.

            She nodded.

            Ron reached for another of the rolls, laid it down on the first-opened one, wound it out too. It was like the first one: recipes.
This has to be a con of some kind—
But very shortly he put that thought aside. They were really astonishing recipes: just reading them, you could taste them as if the dishes sat steaming before you with one bite just taken. This slightly mad mushroom dish, for example—and the chicken recipe after it—they were examples of a cuisine with sheer intense flavor at its heart; and the hunger that had died at the sight of the lunch put in front of him, now woke up and raged in Ron as he read. This last one, who would have ever thought of doing that to a chicken? Even the wretchedest watery battery hen would become something noble—

            He looked up at the old woman again. She sat, patient, while in the cafe a small flurry of people went around in circles like those leaves in the sudden wind, and shouted about fire extinguishers. Ron swallowed, tasting the chicken and its sublime sauce, though his mouth was empty. This was, of course, a scam, and his response to it was madness.            

            "Lire,"  he found himself saying. "Would you take a Eurocheque—” He stopped himself. The amount was ridiculously over the daily limit.

            "A sterling cheque will do,"  she said, with a look of gentle humor. "It’s two thousand one hundred thirty-four lire to the pound, today."

            Ron got out his calculator and tapped at it hurriedly, while the manager rushed by and began spraying foam in the bin. It was, of course, exactly the amount that should be in his current account, rounded up to the nearest pound, plus an amount exactly equal to his overdraft facility. Madness, of course: but this craziness was strangely invigorating, the first thing he had really felt since the terrible night with Barbara, and he was beset with the feeling of a chance that had to be taken swiftly, for it would not be offered again. Ron wrote out the cheque, while the manager shouted about the police, and the old woman took the cheque from Ron graciously and finished her glass of wine. She rose, said "Scusi" to the manager, slipped past him. The manager turned to yell at her, and found himself shaking his fist at nothing but sunlight in empty air, and a couple of blotchy, bobbing pigeons on the pavement. Ron gathered the three remaining rolls back into the Rizzoli bag, and said in his best phrase-book manner,
"Posso avere il conto?"

            He was brought the bill with indignant speed. It included the cost of recharging the fire extinguisher. Ron paid and got up, pausing only to glance at another of those early dry leaves, inscribed with lines of gold on its scarlet, which had blown across the table and lodged against the milk-glass Cinzano ashtray. Instantly recognizable in the elegant vein-pattern was the Etrurian letter-syllable
si.
It had the look of a signature.

            Ron immediately became busy translating the books. They were cookbooks, and more; they contained instructions for an entire new cuisine of flavor, as he had thought, utterly original (especially the beguiling vegetarian recipes), surprisingly healthy, occasionally downright therapeutic; and mostly delightfully inexpensive. There was a whole future of food in the books, complete with hints on how to bring it about. Ron got on with it, taking out loans. The first restaurant he opened in Rome, near the cafe, with some obscure idea that the location might be lucky for him. The city went mad for it. The second location he opened in Zurich four months later, the third in London two months after that; and more all over the continent and its attendant islands. Quite early on, Barbara started talking to him again—genuine regret or mere  pragmatism, who knew or cared? He was happy now. In the matter of a couple of years, his restaurants, too individual and original ever to be considered a chain, made him rich beyond even the most imaginative dreams of avarice. His charities of food, and the expertise he expended to get it where it was needed, became famous. Crowned heads delighted to honor him, and didn’t mind if he slipped into their kitchens afterward.

            When he worked out who she was, the woman who wrote her advice on leaves, and also in books, Ron had initially been confused at what she had brought him. It was books prophesying future history she had brought, the last time she was seen; the fathers of Rome had locked them away and consulted them only at great need, until eventually fire, or time, ate them
. But who listened to advice on the future from books, these days?
Ron thought. Enough had been given, and ignored. And were prophetic history books even needed, any more, when history was so busy blatantly repeating itself on this continent, in the same old places, for what seemed an insensible and enthusiastic audience?... No, this was a different tack the Sibyl was trying: possibly wiser than mere prediction, which men would only try to twist, exploit, or evade. Better to try to make another kind of difference: to cook with joy, to feed the hungry who could afford it, and as many as possible of those who could not, to make at least one of life’s necessities as glad as possible.
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow—

            In the kitchen of the Moskva branch, Ron smiled: for what really counted was today. The happy noise of the front of the house, and Barbara’s voice riding above it all in laughter with some customer, drifted back to him as one of the waiters came in, shouting an order. Only one regret was left to Ron now, one slightly sad, recurring thought. If these recipes were so wonderful, cooking that truly could change the world, and did so—
what was in the other six rolls?

            Ron sighed, then turned back to the stove and started making the chicken recipe again.

…But the basic conceit of
The Rizzoli Bag
kept coming back to haunt me now and then. Whenever I thought of the story, I kept getting the feeling,
There’s more you could do with this…
  When I was asked to do a short story about a character who works in a shopping mall that caters to the needs of humans and parahumans alike, suddenly the old  theme jumped up out of the back of my mind and said,
Now here’s your chance: here’s where you can start to work this theme out more completely.
I ran with the idea… and when I was finished, Peter then took the baton and ran with it for another “mile” in a sequel/companion story called “…And Into The Fire”.

            She was arguing with a werewolf about the price of saffron when the veiled woman wandered in.

Veils were presently having one of those small renaissances that the fashion features of bygone years sometimes have, so the shoulder-length sweep of dark gauze by itself wasn’t enough to seriously distract Annabelle from the ongoing disagreement. She turned back to Harl and said, “Look, you can’t expect to pay supermarket prices for this stuff, especially since
this is not a supermarket!
In case you haven’t noticed. When you consider what my saffron goes through before it gets here—”

“I know what you
say
it goes through,” Harl said, leaning on his elbows on the counter and absently twirling one side of his mustache, “but the prices you’re discussing are insane!  Only the fact that you’re the extremely nice lady that I know you are—for a one-skinner—has kept me from complaining about the markup until now…”

Oh boy,
Annabelle thought,
here we go, the Witch With A Heart of Gold ploy. Why is it we’re all either Good Mommies or Crone Mothers and never anything in between? And next, I bet, comes the not-so-thinly-veiled request for a discount. How many seconds will it take?
She decided not to wait—possibly since Harl had arrived in a middle transitional stage, and his studded biker leathers were starting to come across as increasingly incongruous when taken together with his burgeoning ear hair and the muzzle that Annabelle could swear was lengthening as she watched. “Smile when you call me that,” she said. “How would
you
know how many skins I have hanging in the closet?” She pushed some of the small impulse-buy merchandise off to one side of the cash register and leaned on the counter too, while the veiled lady in the dark amber kaftan ambled around the far product island, apparently intent on the cookware. “Harl,” Annabelle said, looking up at him, “my markup has a whole lot to do with what my suppliers charge me. We’re not talking about scamp short-stigma saffron grown on some vacant lot outside Marbella! We are talking about prime violet-petal
sativus-
x corms containing back-patched genetic material from the original Akkadian
azupiru
heritage strain, and planted on a particular south-facing hillside outside a village in the Cevenne hills in the department of Gard in southern France. And it’s
not
,” and she held up a finger as Harl started drawing breath to say something, “just the corm stock at issue. Before the saffron was planted, that hillside had to be certified safe by the
Institut Nationale des Thaumatoxisme
, a government regulatory agency which, at great expense which you’d better
believe
gets passed down the line, first cleared the ground of piled-up malign influences. Kind of like dealing with toxic waste, except that toxic waste doesn’t normally leap out of the ground in the shape of a blood-colored dragon and twist your head off.”

Harl idly picked the lid off the bowl of lollipops by the cash register: Annabelle slapped his hand, took the lid out of it, and replaced it on the bowl. “Do you want to rot your teeth? Stick to Milk-Bones.
Then
the detoxed ground in question got checked over by not one but
two
feng shui agencies, one hired by the grower and one commissioned by the distributor, each of them checking the other, and trying hard to find details about the topology that the other geomancer has missed. And that cost got passed down to me too. Along with the labor costs of the nice local people who break their backs picking all those fiddly little stamens out of the flowers on Samhain Eve every year.” She sighed, picked up the lid off the bowl, and went burrowing among the lollipops, hunting for one with a chocolate center. Unfortunately she had eaten them all: she dropped the lid back on the bowl. “So you should
not
be complaining to me that this stuff costs eighty bucks a gram. Because the price means that when you and some nice lady friend who’s also in her second skin and also in the mood for luuuuuuve get together at the full of the Moon and stick it up your noses, you’ll get the desired effect…and
not
find yourself stuck in your skins the next morning when you need to change and go to work. Nor will you fail one of those embarrassing random mana tests later in the week. So if you want to pay less, sure, go on, go down the street to Dominick’s or the Jewel and pay twenty bucks a gram. What you get’ll be either the Marbella vacant-lot saffron, or maybe dyed safflower stamens, and you’ll deserve it.”

Harl rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Annabelle, they have to be ripping you off somewhere along the line. If you go online there are bulk-order places that’ll cut you a much better deal, all you have to do is…”
Blah, blah, blah,
Annabelle thought, doing her best to look courteously interested, but feeling less inclined by the moment to indulge Harl’s pouting. This was the third or fourth time this month he’d started giving her grief about prices. The first couple of times, an insufficiently clued-in customer might be allowed to get away with it: but Harl knew perfectly well that the special needs of weres called for a much higher-grade spice than “single skinners” or other varieties of just plain mortal could get away with.
I may lose him as a customer…
 

But Annabelle was finding it harder to bring herself to care. Harl had never referred anyone to her, as far as she could tell, and he frankly didn’t buy enough stuff in the course of a month to make it worth her effort to try to hang on to him. Getting more weekday traffic in here was a much bigger issue. She flicked a glance at Mrs. Kaftan-and-Veil, who was still eyeing the cookware, and now reached up a thin wrinkled hand to touch a pot; cast iron clonged faintly against iron in her wake as she moved away and headed around the far side of the island toward the generic spice racks.
If I could please have about fifty more like you every morning,
  Annabelle thought.
More plain-vanilla mortals who can touch cold iron and don’t make me order in high-end nonferrous utensils at high-end prices and low-end profit margins…  I’ve got to find ways to leverage our advertising to a wider customer base without alienating the supranormal market.
It was just one more aspect of her ongoing problem. The overhead involved in keeping this place going was proving to be higher than she’d thought it would be at first, after the rent increase last year. In fact, after this morning’s jolly little visit to from the shopping center’s unit management agent, who after a look at the store’s books had started sweetly insinuating to Annabelle that she really should move downstairs into a smaller unit—
Yeah, off the main drag where I’ll get even less walk-in than I get now.
She looked up at Harl again.
Oh, come on, the phone’s been ringing all morning with bad news, can’t I have a little more, please, just to shut this mouthy wolf up?...

But the phone would not oblige her.
I’ll throw a cantrip at it,
Annabelle thought.
Or
him.
And the Threefold Rede can just go chase itself.
The thought was tempting.
But no.
“Harl,” Annabelle said, “the heartbreak of mange is a
terrible
thing. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog…”

He gave her a sudden horrified look.
See, that’s all it takes: I’m the Crone Mommy now. And ask me if I care!

“Oh, all right,” Harl said, checking his watch. “I have to get going or I’ll miss my train. Just give me a gram to hold me over.”

Train, shmain,
Annabelle thought as she pulled out the electronic scale pad and set it on the counter.
Around the curve of the world, the moon’s going full, and you have a hot date waiting…
   She slipped out from behind the counter and made her way to the spice cabinet at the back of the store. It looked very rustically domestic, all distressed oak and diamond-paned glass: but it had better security on it than the cash register did, and a more advanced alarm system than some drugstores. Everything in it would bring street prices in the hundreds of bucks per gram: the saffron was not the most expensive thing in there by a long shot. Darkmoon asafetida, wattleseed, chokepard aconite, king basil, melegueta, calamus, double-detox nightshade, whiplash galangal, pepperbush, forest anise, the usual range of psychotropic mushrooms and chiles, and even the wolfsbane that Harl would probably be scandalized to see sitting in carefully measured sachets right underneath the saffron that was a were’s preferred aphrodisiac—they were all here, and dozens more: some genetically tailored for supranormals’ use, some for spellwork, some just the best of their kind for whatever purpose. Annabelle prided herself on having the best spice selection in the center city: since she opened up, no practitioner of the Art had to go outside the Loop for that special potion ingredient, for a really good
hiera picra
or the sixty-six ingredient mithridatium that had won her the silver medal in the
Esoterica
Magazine “Compound Interest” competition last year. Or, for that matter, for tyrannosaurus garlic, or a decent pair of oven mitts that went all the way up to your elbows: you couldn’t be expected to spend your day muttering protective spells over
everything.

She put her right thumb to the particular spot on the woodwork that her witchery had sensitized to her aura, and said three words under her breath. The door unlatched, and Annabelle took the precautionary look around her before reaching back for the saffron: she’d had snatch-and-run jobs done on her before. But Harl was leaning on the counter, looking more bored by the moment, and Mrs. Veil-And-Kaftan was flipping through a pile of screen-printed Irish linen dishtowels, and nobody else was in the place.

Annabelle picked up the saffron container, checked it the regulation three times, and locked the cabinet up again. Back at the counter she paused a moment to rummage underneath for a shopping bag and a slip of measuring paper. “Harl, how do you want this today?” she said. “Envelope? Capsule?”

“Capsule will be fine,” Harl said. Now he was fidgeting and looking eager to be out of there. Annabelle busied herself with the scale, carefully tipping out the little golden threads onto the white measuring paper. The scale spun up to .998 gram, then to 1.004: Annabelle looked at the tangle of saffron, then pulled out a couple of extra threads to bring it up to .005, sealed the service container and put it down.

Harl raised a quizzical and increasingly furry eyebrow at her. “Four’s a death number,” Annabelle said, and tapped a button on the scale to bring up the total. “Call my part of it eighty even,” she said. “Eighty-six seventy after the City’s  cut.”

“I think we need a new mayor,” Harl growled, doing a little shimmy to get his wallet out of the pants pocket of the very tight leathers.

“Always thought one more Daley was one too many,” Annabelle said. “Especially one who’d just come back from a council-sponsored junket to Haiti. At least for a change
this
politician can’t sue when the papers accuse him of being a zombie.” She folded the measuring paper scoop-fashion, tipped the saffron into the capsule, snapped its top shut, wrapped the paper around it, reached down and snapped off a length of red anti-demon thread from the spool, wound it around the paper and capsule, dropped them both into the little shopping bag. “There you go, Harl. Enjoy!”

“Will do. Thanks—” And he was out the door.

“And in Hecate’s name
don’t use it in risotto!”
she called after him: but he was already around the corner.

Annabelle sighed. It wasn’t as if every word she told him about the production of the saffron wasn’t true. Somehow, though, he still thought she was cheating him, and she felt wounded.
This is not the job for me,
Annabelle thought for the hundredth time recently.
I’m too thin-skinned for retail. I should be doing something creative—
  

The phone rang. “
Now
you do it,” Annabelle said under her breath. “Thanks so much.” She picked it up. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”

A busy signal blatted into her ear. Annabelle frowned and hung up a lot more gently then she wanted to. It was one more of what seemed like an endless number of hang-ups that were the legacy of the phone company having typoed her number in the new directory: the swapped digits meant she kept getting calls meant for one of the local massage parlors.

The phone rang again: she picked up. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”

“By not using your I-am-a-stern-mommy-and-
not
-a-dodgy-masseuse phone voice on me?” George Dimitri’s voice said.

She grinned and leaned on the counter again, watching Mrs. Kaftan turn away from the towels toward the cookbooks. “It was an accident,” Annabelle said. “How’s business this morning?”

“Three divorces, two injury suits and a C&D letter,” George said. He was an old college buddy of Annabelle’s, the only one of her fellow freshman biochemistry students who had been completely unfreaked to finding that there was a witch in the class. They had dated briefly, then stopped dating, but remained fast friends even when their university tracks had wildly diverged and George had dumped his humanities major and gone pre-law. Now he was a paralegal working out of a shopfront community-services operation in Humboldt Park while he worked on his Masters. His daily pre-lunch phone call was always a breath of fresh air to someone whose personal universe often seemed bounded on three sides by cookware and on the fourth by mulish rare-herb distributors.

“Busy morning,” Annabelle said, watching idly as Mrs. Kaftan got down a copy of
The Kitchen Minimalist
and started going through it, head bent.
The problem is that the veil makes it impossible to see what she’s thinking. Or looking at. And now that I think of it, there’s the kaftan, too…

“You have no idea,” George said. “The cease-and-desist was for a ghost.”

Annabelle started wondering about that kaftan as she watched the woman wearing it page through the cookbook.
You could hide a lot of things in a kaftan’s sleeves…
  she thought.
“For
a ghost,” Annabelle said, “or
to
a ghost?”