Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital semitone shy of its intended target-a perfect testament to imperfectibility-rendering Verdi's high art laughable even as it came within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him closer to tears that he'd been for months; and he liked to weep.
Harry stood across Third Avenue from Axel's Superette and watched the watchers. They had gathered in their hundreds in the chill of the deepening night, to see what could be seen; nor were they disappointed. The bodies kept coming out: in bags, in bundles; there was even something in a bucket.
"Does anybody know exactly what happened?" Harry asked his fellow spectators.
A man turned, his face ruddy with the cold.
"The guy who ran the place decided to give the stuff away," he said, grinning at this absurdity. "And the store was fuckin' swamped. Someone got killed in the crush-"
"I heard the trouble started over a can of meat," another offered. "Somebody got beaten to death with a can of meat."
This rumor was contested by a number of others; all had versions of events.
Harry was about to try and sort fact from fiction when an exchange to his right diverted him.
A boy of nine or ten had buttonholed a companion. "Did you smell her?" he wanted to know. The other nodded vigorously. "Gross, huh?" the first ventured. "Smelled better shit," came the reply, and the two dissolved into conspiratorial laughter.
Harry looked across at the object of their mirth. A huge overweight woman, underdressed for the season, stood on the periphery of the crowd and watched the disaster scene with tiny, glittering eyes.
Harry had forgotten the questions he was going to ask the watchers. What he remembered, clear as yesterday, was the way his creams conjured the infernal brethren. It wasn't their curses he recalled, nor even the deformities they paraded: it was the smell off them. Of burning hair and halitosis; of veal left to rot in the sun. Ignoring the debate around him, he started in the direction of the woman.
She saw him coming, the rolls of fat at her neck furrowing as she glanced across at him.
It was Cha'Chat, of that Harry had no doubt. And to prove the point, the demon took off at a run, the limbs and prodigious buttocks stirred to a fandango with every step. By the time Harry had cleared his way through the crowd the demon was already turning the corner into Ninety-fifth Street, but its stolen body was not designed for speed, and Harry rapidly made up the distance between them. The lamps were out in several places along the street, and when he finally snatched at the demon, and heard the sound of tearing, the gloom disguised the vile truth for fully five seconds until he realized that Cha'Chat had somehow sloughed off its usurped flesh, leaving Harry holding a great coat of ectoplasm, which was already melting like overripe cheese. The demon, its burden shed, was away; slim as hope and twice as slippery. Harry dropped the coat of filth and gave chase, shouting Hesse's syllables as he did so.
Surprisingly, Cha'Chat stopped in its tracks, and turned to Harry. The eyes looked all ways but Heavenward; the mouth was wide and attempting laughter. It sounded like someone vomiting down an elevator shaft.
"Words, D'Amour?" it said, mocking Hesse's syllables. "You think I can be stopped with words?"
"No," said Harry, and blew a hole in Cha'Chat's abdomen before the demon's many eyes had even found the gun.
"Bastard!" it wailed, "Cocksucker!" and fell to the ground, blood the color of piss throbbing from the hole. Harry sauntered down the street to where it lay. It was almost impossible to slay a demon of Cha'Chat's elevation with bullets; but a scar was shame enough amongst their clan. Two, almost unbearable.
"Don't," it begged when he pointed the gun at its head. "Not the face."
"Give me one good reason why not."
"You'll need the bullets," came the reply.
Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him. "There's something going to get loose tonight, D'Amour," Cha'Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. "Something wilder that me."
"Name it," said Harry.
The demon grinned. "Who knows?" it said. "It's a strange season, isn't it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don't you find?"
"Where?" said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha'Chat's nose.
"You're a bully, D'Amour," it said reprovingly. "You know that?"
"Tell me..."
The thing's eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur.
"South of here, I'd say..." it replied. "A hotel..." The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry's trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn't afford to interrupt its flow. "...on Forty-fourth," it said. "Between Sixth...Sixth and Broadway." The voice was indisputably feminine now. "Blue blinds," it murmured. "I can see blue blinds..."
As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry's feet.
"You wouldn't shoot an old lady, would you?" she piped up.
The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry's hesitation was all that Cha'Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He'd lost the creature, for the second time in a month.
And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow.
The small hotel that Cha'Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm.
"There's nobody here," he informed Harry.
In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, "Well, I'll find another hotel then, eh?"
Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry's hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl's chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy's face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood.
As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, "Darrieux!" from below.
Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry.
As he started along the landing a woman's cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn't end well, Harry suspected.
Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a gray suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he'd heard Kiss Curl call his employer's name. This was Darrieux Marchetti; also called the Cankerist; one of the whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.
"D'Amour," he said.
Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered.
"What happened here?" he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door.
"Private business," the Cankerist insisted. "Please, no closer."
Candles burned in the little room, and by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency.
"She protested," said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. "All I needed was the child."
"What was it?" Harry demanded. "A demon?"
Marchetti shrugged. "We'll never know," he said. "But at this time of year there's usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those-I number myself amongst them-that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs-"
"Messiahs?" said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body.