On a nearby stuffed chair sat Jean-Pierre, his tuxedo jacket off, a blue bruised spot on his jaw the souvenir of their meeting; he looked irritable. Nearby, curled up in a corner of a divan, sat the woman who’d clobbered Harris. From ten feet away, she seemed tiny, even more dainty than most of the women he’d seen earlier. She wore some sort of pantsuit cut from burgundy silk, the jacket sleeves full and flaring; her expression was serene. Next to Harris, the man with the nut-brown skin sat on a sturdy high-backed wooden chair.
Jean-Pierre rubbed his jaw and the bruise Harris had given him, then narrowed his eyes. “Awake, are we? Then it’s time to answer a few questions.”
Harris ignored him for the moment; he struggled to sit up and pulled himself back so that the high arm of the sofa supported him. Only then did he realize that under the blanket they’d thrown over his legs he wore only underwear; his pants and shoes were gone. “Hey!”
The moon-faced doctor grinned. “Sorry, son. Had to tend your wound. Your breeches were a loss, torn and bloody.” He reached down behind his chair, where a pair of gray trousers lay folded across an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. He handed the pants over to Harris. “Try these.”
“Thanks.” Harris hurriedly pulled the trousers on, barely glancing at the white bandage wrapped around his thigh. His injury wasn’t giving him much trouble; the doctor must have given him something for the pain. “Okay. Where am I?”
“The Monarch Building, up ninety. I am Alastair Kornbock. I hear you have already met Jean-Pierre Lamignac and Noriko Nomura; formal introductions are probably moot.”
Jean-Pierre picked up something from his lap, a wallet, which he flipped open. “Is your name Harris Greene?”
“Yeah. Hey, that’s my wallet.” Harris tried to stand, but weariness tugged at him and he thought better of it.
“Yes, it appears to be.” Jean-Pierre flipped it shut and negligently tossed it to Harris. “I gather from the way you defended yourself that you really weren’t trying to harm yourself on the bridge. So what injured you?”
Harris actually felt himself flinch away from the memory of Adonis. “You’d never believe it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“No, you tell me. Tell me what the hell is going on. What all this crap is about Neckerdam. What happened to the Brooklyn Bridge. The streets. The cars, for Christ’s sake. Barefoot truck drivers and dwarfs who’ve filed their teeth. Because, believe me, I was knocking down some pretty good vodka before all this started happening, and I don’t want to waste time talking to you if you’re just DTs.” Harris glanced through his wallet to make sure everything was in place, then pocketed it.
The three of them looked blankly from one to the other before returning their attention to Harris. “So,” said Jean-Pierre, his pleasant tone not quite concealing his irritation, “what injured you?”
“You know, that was just about the worst attempted tackle I ever saw. If that’s the way you normally try to rescue people, I’d be amazed if most of them didn’t make it into the water.”
Jean-Pierre flushed red and stood. He grabbed at something on his belt—something that wasn’t there, but just where the handle of a hunting knife might protrude under other circumstances. In spite of his exhaustion, Harris stood up and readied himself for the attack he saw in the other man’s face. The doctor merely scooted his chair back and got out from between them; he looked from one to the other with interest.
The Asian woman spoke; her speech bore a faint accent that was exotic and appealing to Harris’ ears. “Jean-Pierre. Sit down. He is correct; the attack was clumsy. He has suffered more than you today.” Harris didn’t miss the extra stress she put on the last word, nor that she was communicating something else, but he couldn’t read the extra meaning in her statement.
At least Jean-Pierre got himself under control. He sat and angrily drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair. Alastair assumed the same pose and drummed his fingers the same way, a cheerful mockery of Jean-Pierre’s motion. Harris sat too, but did not relax.
“Now,” Noriko said, “please. We don’t know the answers to your questions. We don’t even know what they mean. If you tell us the story of how you came to be on the Island Bridge, perhaps we can puzzle it out.”
“That’s . . . reasonable.” For the briefest of moments, Harris saw himself through these peoples’ eyes, as he sometimes saw himself from the perspective of his opponents; and this time he was an inexplicable creature, a wounded man who was too big and strange, possibly also dangerous and insane. He didn’t like that image. “I guess it started at tonight’s fight.”
When Harris reached the encounter with the pointy-toothed dwarf in the street, Jean-Pierre jumped up again. Harris tensed, but the other man wasn’t angry this time. Even paler than before, he stared in disbelief at Harris. “Angus Powrie,” he said.
Alastair shook his head. “There are a lot of redcaps out there, Jean-Pierre. And a lot of hooligans from the Powrie clans.”
“Maybe.” Jean-Pierre dug around in a jacket pocket and brought out his own wallet. He flipped it open, pulled free a piece of cardstock and shoved it at Harris.
It was a black-and-white photograph, blurry and grainy; it looked like a police photo. The man in it was a little younger than the one who’d chased Harris earlier, but recognizable. Harris nodded. “That’s him.”
Jean-Pierre took the photograph back and looked numbly at it. “What have you been doing all these years, Angus?”
“Mind telling me why you carry his picture around?”
Jean-Pierre ignored the question. He retreated to his chair and sat, still looking dazed. He fingered the bruise on his jaw. “Kick-boxing, eh?”
“Yeah. It’s the professional form of a whole bunch of martial arts.”
“Well, I certainly feel as though I’ve been kick-boxed. Noriko, I know some of the people of Wo and their descendants in the New World fight like that.”
Noriko nodded. “Not so much Wo, but Silla and Shanga. I do not think I have ever met a westerner trained in the arts.”
Alastair said, “There’s more to him than that. He’s got an aura. All-asparkle. I see it with my good eye. But it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. I’d love to test his Firbolg Valence.”
Harris sighed. “It sounds to me like nothing I said means a thing to you. Jesus.”
“To speak the truth, it doesn’t,” said Noriko. “Except one thing. Are you of the Carpenter Cult?”
“The what?”
“I have heard you invoke the Carpenter twice. Once just now.”
“Who the hell is the Carpenter?” Then Harris had a sudden suspicion. “Wait a minute. Jesus Christ.”
“Yes. Though his followers hesitate to name him as . . . freely as you do.”
“Oh.” Harris had to think about it. “No, I guess I’m not. I’m not anything that way. My parents are, though. Of the ‘Carpenter Cult’.” He sat back frowning as it came home to him that one of the world’s largest religions had suddenly been reduced to the status of cult. But there was a little comfort to that, as well. Noriko had heard of something he knew about. One lonely point in common.
The other three looked helplessly among themselves. Alastair said, “I think we need Doc.”
“Who’s Doc? I thought you were a doctor.”
Alastair beamed. “I am. But I’m not Doc. Doc is Doc. And Doc is due . . . ” He reached inelegantly under his shirt and pulled out a large pocket watch. “Two chimes ago. Late, as ever.”
“So this Doc can get me figured out?”