City of Corpses Read online

  3. Misdirection and Deception

  Yumiko stepped into the kitchen for her next order up, and, as she was passing the settings trolley, where spare silverware, roses, and napkins were kept, Yumiko slipped pepper from a shaker into napkin and pulled a button off her uniform.

  She then found Plaksy the Lithuanian, slinky and blonde, who had a tray in either hand. “Hsst! I have to go change! Can you cover my tables for a few minutes?”

  The rule that uniforms must be spotless and in good order or changed immediately was one that had been drilled into all the girls: Plaksy could hardly tell Yumiko to stay where Plaksy could watch her without giving away that she was watching her, so she merely nodded, smiling a false smile, and said, “Yes, I am covering. Yes.”

  Now, Yumiko left and made for the stairs. Krisky, slinkier and blonder than her sister, intercepted her at the landing. “To where is you going, please? Yes?”

  Yumiko hid her nose in the napkin as if it were a handkerchief, inhaled the pepper she hid there, and sneezed. “Cum-big due zee you,” Yumiko said. “God a tewwibel gold in ma noze. You haf any stove I can tag for it?”

  Had she said it without pepper up her nose, it would have sounded more like this: Coming to see you. Got a terrible cold in my nose. You have any stuff I can take for it? But Krisky understood the language of the sick.

  Krisky shrank back in horror and covered her own mouth with a hanky. “I have a crate of vitamin C tablets in the chest. And ginger root! Boil it into a tea, and take it with honey and lemon!”

  Yumiko started to explain that she could not leave the wait staff shorthanded, not tonight of all nights, but Krisky, eager to play the role of advisor, healer, and life-saver, shooed Yumiko as if she were a plague victim away from the lounge floor and told her to go to the dorm room they shared.

  Yumiko explained that Krisky had to cover Iele’s tables if Iele got invited by the VIP to sit at his table. Krisky, alarmed, apparently forgot the rule that Peach Cobbler Girls had to be pulled off the floors in pairs, and she simply scampered away.

  Yumiko trotted upstairs as fast as her high heels would allow. She entered the dorm room, which was empty at the moment. She warily eyed the pumpkin perched at its high window. The flickering candle was inside the hollow gourde, and Yumiko was aware that unseen eyes were watching her.

  She did not know where in the room the ghost was standing or from what point of view it observed. For that matter, she had no idea whether the immaterial eyes of an unquiet spirit could be deceived, distracted, or blocked. The woebegone thought occurred to her that the young man she had seen, Matthias Moth, would have known exactly what to do.

  But she had no choice. Yumiko knelt down before the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, reached in, and unlocked her suitcase. Inside, her fingers found the all-important sash. She glanced up at the pumpkin. It was still turned away, nonchalantly stareing out the window at the street. She rummaged around inside the sash, palmed a tracer, and then drew out from the chest one of Krisky’s many bottles of vitamin C. Yumiko ostentatiously swallowed a tablet, hoping the ghost saw only that.

  Closing the chest, she trotted quickly out of the room. Almost immediately, she ran into Licho and Kudlac, who were patrolling the corridor.

  “Halt!” said Kudlac. “What the heck are you doing here, Sorry?”

  Licho, his gaze invisible behind his dark glasses, said, “On-duty girls are on the floor. Any girls pulled off the floor must go in pairs.”

  She felt as shy as a deer caught in headlights. Yumiko took a deep breath, frightened, and she felt the heat in her cheeks of a blush. Her tight costume creaked inaudibly, not allowing her to draw a very deep breath. Both men stepped closer, leering down at her. With the top button of her bustier missing, her skimpy outfit covered even less than normal. Their expressions turned hungry, so different from the disciplined and modest eyes of the Moth boys.

  The thought of the Moths allowed her to recover her poise. She favored the two bouncers with her warmest smile. “A big tipper just bought a round for the house. I thought of you poor boys up here, thirsty and alone, and came up to find out what you wanted from the bar.”

  Licho said, “Did the boss say we could drink on duty?”

  Yumiko looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. “Well, I don’t know. I just assumed…” And she shrugged an exaggerated shrug.

  Kudlac said, “Lager.” He looked at scowling Licho and shrugged. “My brother Kresnik is a monk. He says I should drink more.”

  And Licho’s hard expression vanished. He smiled and said, “Fine. Kvass. Nothing too strong this night.”

  Yumiko smiled flirtatiously and swayed away flirtatiously, just as she’d been taught. Once around the corner, she trotted as fast as she could.

  She reported to Leshenka, who fussed and clucked in her dry, whispery voice. “No need to switch to your spare, duckie. I have thread and needle here in the button drawer. Just take a mo’.”

  Yumiko gave a small shriek and pointed at the window behind Leshenka. “What is that dreadful, black-cloaked figure dressed like a raven?”

  Leshenka whirled with a speed that belied her apparent age. “Where? Where?” Her voice was like a foghorn.

  Yumiko said, “It might have just been a passing shadow, but it looked like an implacable avenger of evil, bent on some terrible vendetta, passing by on a dark wind. But that is impossible, is it not? Men cannot fly.”

  Leshenka drew a handkerchief and mopped her brow. “Of course, duckie. Quite impossible…” Her voice had dropped once more into an arid murmur. She bit off the trailing end of the thread. “There you are. Button up.”

  Yumiko thanked her and skipped away, leaving Leshenka peering avidly out the window, craning her neck.

  Hala the Serb was manning the hat-check booth. This booth faced the atrium across a counter and had a clear view of the lounge a few stairs below into which the atrium led. Behind the counter was a walk-in closet. Yumiko entered it from behind, from the service corridor. With no customers around, Hala was leaning on her cheek, elbow on the counter, legs crossed at the ankles, fidgeting and looking pensively toward the lounge floor, from whence came loud music and the laughter of happy, hence generous, customers.

  Yumiko had been going through several ploys which might lure Hala away from her duty station, but, seeing that look on her face, Yumiko knew exactly what to say. “Hala! Do you see the gorgeous man in green and black, sitting at the VIP table?”

  Hala rolled her enormous eyes. “How am I not to see? He just tucked a C-note into Plaksy’s garterbelt. Iele is in his lap! He puts a bracelet of fine pearls on her wrist, as if this is a trifle. Two semester’s tuition for such a bracelet, easy. It is raining wine, and I have no bucket.”

  Yumiko said, “I’ll take over here. Krisky needs help covering Iele’s tables for me.”

  Hala eyed the lounge floor with a quick but calculating gaze. Iele’s tables were near enough to the VIP table for a passing waitress to be flagged. Hala turned a narrow stare at Yumiko. “Why do you do this for me? We are not friends.”

  “This will make us friends!” Yumiko said. “Besides, Krisky thinks I have a cold. She does not want me sneezing on the customers.”

  Hala brightened. “Very well, we swap!”

  “One other thing, when you get the chance—please carry a kvass up to the fourth floor for Licho and a lager for Kudlac. Here!” And Yumiko pulled some bills out from her gathered tips, enough to cover the two drinks, and pressed them into Hala’s hand. Hala looked down at the bills, puzzled. But at that moment, there was a burst of laughter from the VIP table, and one of the men with Sir Garlot was calling, “Miss..? Miss..?” and he was waving a banknote in the air to encourage swift service.

  Hala asked no more, but rushed away, smiling eagerly.

  Yumiko was alone in the snug and dimly lit alcove, half booth and half closet, with the silent shelves and hangers of hats, mantles, wraps, furs, and coats.

  4. The Cloak of Cornwall


  Yumiko, like all the girls, had worked hat check before. Wilcolac did not have a computerized system. The hats and coats stubs were kept in a small brass Rolodex, with the check-in time logged and the owner’s name written in a guestbook.

  Yumiko pointed the green-shaded gooseneck lamp which hung over the guestbook down at the page. Garlot was number 11. Hanging on hanger 11 on the coat-rack behind her was a garment like she had never seen.

  It seemed at first to be a gray cloak with arm slits and a hood. Then, she saw silver, blue, and dark gray threads that seemed to come to the surface of the fabric and disappear as the light played over it.

  It was as beautiful as sailing cloud-banks seen underfoot from a high vantage by moonlight.

  Strangely, the longer she looked, the deeper in the fabric these drifting dark and light threads seemed to be, as if the cloak were a fog bank taking the shape of a cloak, and parts were drifting almost to touch her nose, but others were yards away, reaching ever further away, drifting…

  Fascinated, mesmerized, Yumiko reached out and touched the material.

  …for a moment, the cloak seemed not to be there are all, but merely an afterimage… and then in the next moment, it appeared to be a cloak-shaped hole in the world looking out into a larger, emptier, darker world…

  A coldness, a sense that eyes were watching her, passed over her skin, leaving her tiny hairs prickling. Yumiko yanked her hand back, alarmed.

  She blinked and turned away. There was a strange throbbing in her head; she could feel the pulse of veins in her brow. For a moment, she feared she had damaged her eyes. And yet her eyesight returned to normal when she blinked. It was almost as if the fabric did not wish to be inspected too closely.

  This cloak was made of mists, the same mists her ring summoned. Somehow the ethereal substance had been solidified, spun into thread, and woven. It was like seeing a cloak woven of fire, or falling water, or notes of music. It was impossible.

  It was magic.

  As the possessor of a magic ring, perhaps she should have been less intimidated. Perhaps. But she felt the same as if she had been walking past a wax manikin, or a statue of a lion on library steps, but then, a pace beyond the unblinking, unliving face, had overheard a quiet sigh of pent up breath released.

  Perhaps some form of magic somewhere in the world was kind and safe. Not this. The crawling motions deep in the fabric were unsightly and unnatural. It seemed malign.

  Fearful of being seen, she moved the cloak to the lower shelf underneath the counter. Removing her costume top hat, Yumiko ducked her head beneath, bringing with her the gooseneck reading lamp. Now, she took out the scissors, needle, and thread she had lifted lightly from Leshenka’s button drawer when the seamstress’ head was turned.

  There was a brocade of silver, gray, and white thread in convoluted Celtic knots around the hems of the garment. To her relief, she found these hems to be made of normal, worldly matter, whose threads did not drift simultaneously closer and farther from the eye.

  She snipped the tiny, sparkling threads of the brocade, pried open the hem at the rear of the garment, inserted her tracer, and began to sew it up again. But the nearness of the otherworldly fabric made her fingertips numb, and the sensation of misty threads receding while advancing made her eyes water, even when she was not looking directly at the foggy substance.

  But she gritted her teeth, persisting until she made the last stitch. She scowled at the work, unhappy with it. Her human-sized fingers could not match the fineness of the stitches. It looked too delicate for machine work, for the spaces between stitches were greater or lesser on different swirls of the brocade curves, giving it a pleasing, living look. She wondered whether Elfine’s people had made this…

  “Miss?”

  She heard no footfall of a man approaching. When he spoke, she was startled and banged her head on the underside of the counter.

  Yumiko bounded to her feet in panic, clutching the sore spot on the back of her head with one hand, but she smiled and laughed, hoping panic would look like no more than flustered embarrassment to the customer.

  Her laughter died on her lips.

  5. Hat-Check Girl

  A tall, dark man in a black topcoat and black hat leaning on a walking stick stood looking down at her. His cast of features was oriental, his eyes were slanted, deep, penetrating, and magnetic. An aura of dark majesty surrounded him like warmth from a black oven.

  His eyes traveled with evident pleasure up the shapely length of her young legs and hips to the sharply narrow waist, the generous curves above, the delicate collarbone, her swanlike neck. And then when he saw her face, his expression turned to shock and shame.

  The light here was dim, and her eyes were still smarting, so that even as it happened, she was not sure that it had. She blinked. But now his expression was impassive, cool, and collected.

  With a quick but curiously formal gesture, he snapped the top hat into his gloved hand and proffered it to her.

  She said, “You know who I am.” She spoke in Japanese.

  He said, imperturbably, “But of course.”

  He answered in the same language, but he spoke in the Kamigata dialect, which was softer and more elegant than her Tohoku accent from the mountainous northeastern part of Honshu. Her voice suddenly sounded unbearably rustic and unrefined in her ears.

  “Who am I?” She switched to English.

  “Why, the hat-check girl, of course.” He answered in English. He had an Oxfordian accent. He cleared his throat, rolled his eyes down at his hand, which was still extending his hat toward her, looked back up, caught her eye, and raised one eyebrow.

  She could not stop staring at his face. If he had known her before her memory loss, why did he say nothing? If he had not, why did he look so familiar?

  He said, “When did you start working here?”

  The tone of voice made her aware of how overly familiar she had been in addressing a superior. She said, “Sir! The second of this month, sir.”

  “I was wondering how long it takes Mr. Cobweb to instruct his staff. Here is my hat. You are supposed to check it.”

  To her shame, a giggle welled up in her and came out her mouth. This was very different from the times she had pretended to be giggly. It was rather horrible to have her pretense overtake her and become real.

  She bowed carefully in her low-cut corset and took the hat. He proffered his walking stick, and also doffed his topcoat in a great circular flourish, to lay it on the counter as well. He wore a severe formal suit of expensive dark wool beneath, with a bow tie as white as hers.

  She thought furiously while she tagged, hung, and shelved the coat and hat and placed the jade-handled cane in the numbered pigeon-hole of the umbrella stand. Yumiko pulled the guestbook up to the counter, smiled a broad smile, and said, “Sir? We are also required to take down the name and address if you would, please?”

  “My name?” He looked skeptical.

  “In case you forget something. This allows us to run it back to wherever you are staying. It is a free service. As a courtesy.”

  She tried to adopt the same alluring look she used to mesmerize Blud, but under his cold and regal gaze, her face faltered. He was repelled, not allured. The lie stumbled leaving her mouth and sounded unconvincing.

  “Gladly,” he said. He wrote in a rapid, perfect cursive of Roman letters. It was the type of polished handwriting no native English-speaker was likely to match.

  As he wrote, she spoke. “Are you related to the Cobwebs, sir?”

  “Why do you ask? Because Wilcolac and I are the only ones who know how to wear a tux? Next you will ask me if I am related to Fred Astaire.” Then, looking up, and seeing the puzzlement in her face, he said, “Ah, so. He is an American dancer.”

  She licked her lips, wondering how openly she could ask anything before provoking trouble. “Is your family… uh… a large one? Because sometimes traveling to a strange place… ah…”

  He said, “I am, in point of fact, a parti
cularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I was born sneering.”

  She stared at him in confusion, understanding that she was somehow being made light of, but not understanding how, or what he meant.

  “I, um, sir, um…” She stammered softly, trying to regain her professional composure, “…sure you will have a delightful evening… our staff is… aim to please…”

  His voice dropped to a colder and quieter note. “I had a half-sister once. She died under tragic circumstances. Committed suicide, actually. At times I almost seem to see her still. But I know when visions are false! My other relatives disown me and call me dead. I am as alone as no man since Adam was, in that hour when all his ribs were still his own.”

  The small, scowling vertical line between his brows deepened. Perhaps he would have said more, but at that moment, Joan the Wad came bustling up, smiling. Joan was on hostess duty, to greet and seat the customers, but some minor emergency had called her away from the lectern, which was the normal hostess post.

  Joan gave Yumiko a glance. Perhaps she had been expecting to see Hala behind the counter in the coat closet. Clearly, in the bustle and confusion of the evening, Joan had forgotten whom she had assigned to which part of the work roster and floor roster, which was unusual for her. But she said nothing, for she had kept the tall and stern Japanese gentleman waiting. She led him out onto the floor to seat him.

  Yumiko, her brain pulsing with questions, was dying to look at what name he had written in the book. But first she carefully put the misty cloak of Sir Garlot back on its hanger. She saw the party at table five was getting ready to leave, so she had to pass hats, coats, and mink stoles over the counter with many a polite smile, collect their stubs, and note the numbers in the log. Then two customers, one entering and one leaving, came. And then more.