“What?”
“ID, pal. You look over-age to me.”
I showed my license. He took it and shut the door, and I heard the bolt slide back into place.
After a couple of minutes it occurred to me that I’d just given away the same piece of paper that last night I roughed up an inquisitor to keep. I knocked a few times with my knuckles, then slapped at the door with the flat of my hand, and then I started kicking it.
I was getting ready to bust it down with my shoulder when the door opened again. A different babyhead appeared in the space and said: “You ought to cut that out.”
I grabbed the edge of the door and forced myself past him, into the gloom of the babybar.
A row of shiny heads at the bar turned as I stumbled in, and clusters of them bobbed at the table. The place was lousy with babyheads, more than I’d ever seen in one place at a time, more than I really wanted to believe existed. The interior of the bar, like the window, was draped with dusty, out-of-date holiday decorations, obviously leftovers from the bar’s previous life: a red-faced Irishman guzzling a mug of draft which never emptied, a winking, leering Santa with an unhappy reindeer in tow, and a New Year’s banner that read 2008! LOVE IT OR DRINK AT AL’S. The fluorescent fixtures were carpeted with dust, and the one behind the bar flickered lazily, scattering flashes of light and shadow across the ceiling like an ambulance parked in a narrow alley. Music oozed out of the back room.
I scanned the place for the babyhead who’d made off with my license, but he wasn’t in the room, or if he was, I couldn’t pick him out of the crowd. The kid I’d bowled over coming in was back on his feet, and he scooted around me from behind like I was a pylon in the middle of the road, and disappeared into the back room.! went and sat down at the bar. Conversation in the room hadn’t been impressive; now it stopped completely.
“Whiskey and soda,” I said.
The babyhead behind the bar was elevated to my level by a crudely constructed ramp, and he moved over to where I was sitting and put his face in front of mine.
“You’ve got no business here,” he said sneeringly, his smooth, elongated brow wrinkling in exaggerated disgust.
“If I didn’t before, I do now,” I said. “One of you kids took my license. I need it back.”
“What type of license?”
“Private inquisitor.”
By now the whole room was listening. I could hear the stirring of little feet behind me. I considered the possibility of a physical confrontation with a roomful of babyheads all clinging to my legs and climbing on my back, and decided I wanted to avoid it. The image of piranhas kept coming up.
“A question asker,” said the bartender. “That’s delicious. We don’t need your license, Mr. Inquisitor. Take it somewhere else. We don’t need a license to ask questions. We ask questions any time and any place we like.” The kid smirked, and his eyes bugged under the hood of his forehead.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Big fucking deal.”
There wasn’t any answer. I took another one of Angwine’s hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and tore it in half on the counter, then put half back in my shirt pocket, but slow, making sure everybody got a good look. Then I wiped my brow with my sleeve and crossed my legs, to draw the moment out. “That’s for three things,” I said. “I want my license back, and I want to talk to a kid named Barry Greenleaf.” I paused. “And I ordered a whiskey and soda. Then you’ll see the other half.”
I must have made an impression. The bartender turned and began fixing me a drink. A couple of the babyheads behind me scuttled nervously into the back room. I guess the babyheads were short on cash this week. I heard a couple of quietly muttered conversations resume under the music.
A drink appeared on the counter in front of me, and I tilted it back and poured some past my teeth. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good. The whiskey was real, but what should have been soda was more like effervescent dishwater. I drank about half, then set the glass on the bar. The bartender came over and plucked away the ripped half hundred. I felt in my pocket to make sure the other half was still there, and then I knocked back the rest of the whiskey, doing my best to keep my tongue to one side as it passed through my mouth.
Another babyhead came out of the back and waddled purposefully to where I was sitting. He was dressed in a sheet pinned up like a Roman toga, high-top sneakers without any socks, and a plastic digital wristwatch. He vaulted in one motion onto the seat beside me and put his hands on the bar, fingers spread, as if he were feeling for vibrations in a Ouija board. After a minute like this he turned to me and reached under the sheet, pulled out my license, and slid it to where my hand was resting on the bar, running it through a pool of spilled drink in the process. I took it and put it in my pocket without saying anything.
“Barry’s upstairs,” the babyhead said. “You mean to take him away?” His voice was high and inquisitive—almost like a child’s, come to think of it. I could smell the liquor on his breath. Despite that, and despite the way he was dressed—or maybe because of it—I had the feeling I was in the presence of the baby-boss.
“No,” I said. “I just want to ask him a few questions.”
“He doesn’t want to come downstairs.”
“I’ll go up.”
“What do you want?”
An idea occurred to me. “I’m working for an inheritance lawyer Barry may be due to come into some karma, plus a house and cash. If he’s not interested, he can sign a waiver and it’ll go to his little sister. She’s a cat.”
“Let me see.”
“Don’t waste my time. If Barry isn’t here—”
“He’s upstairs. Give me the money.”
“Take me upstairs.”
The bartender came over and showed the babyhead in the toga the ripped half of the hundred. “Take him upstairs,” he said. “Let Barry decide.”
The babyhead looked down at his wristwatch and then back up at me and nodded, as if the time was a factor in his decision. Maybe it was. “Okay,” he said. “Come on.” He hopped off the stool, gathered his skirts up around his ankles, and scuttled quickly into the back I followed.
The babyheads had the back room converted into a dark, musty-smelling conversation pit, and a group of them were seated there in a circle, passing an enormous fuming pipe back and forth across a low wooden table with peeling veneer and a cinder block in place of one of the legs. A radio hung from a nail on the wall behind them, and music came out of it shrouded in static. I almost gagged on the sweet, humid smell of the smoke from the pipe.
“I’ve got a full house: three questions and two answers,” one of them was saying.
“A dunce cap is just an ornamented cone,” came the reply.
As we passed through the room, the talk halted, and they looked me over with jaded, indifferent eyes. I couldn’t make sense of the conversation from that one little snippet, but I didn’t let it bother me. I probably couldn’t have made sense of the stuff from a big fat dictionary full of it. The babyhead in the toga led me through a service door in the back of the room, and as he closed it, I heard the conversation pick up again.