“Got it?” says the cabbie.
“Got it.”
The cabbie turns to face the man at work upon the ladder. She glances at Niko with a mischievous look and cups her hands beside her mouth and calls, “Bonjour, Auguste.”
The man on the ladder nods but does not look. “Bonjour, bon-jour.” His mild voice faint with distance and drained of character in this cavernous space.
“Comment ça va?”
A shrug. “Ehh, bon. Trés bon.”
The cabbie grins at Niko. “Quand finirez-vous?” she calls. “Quand t’est finis.”
She slaps the cab and laughs. “Sorry,” she tells Niko. “He just cracks me up.”
Niko frowns at the Frenchman on the ladder tapping away. Tap tap tap. The seething multitude in deep relief in the walls around the iron gate, red-edged chiaroscuro figures writhing in the stroboscopic light. Tap tap. Straining marble flesh toward the archway. Their hands the living stone incarnate yearning to escape the very structure of their being, tap. Beyond Auguste the wall is flat and blank and stretches off as far as can be seen. How long has this man been working on the dozen yards of figures that have been completed?
Niko feels awkward and inadequate as he regards the cabbie. “Thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
She pops a match alight against a nail and lights another cigarillo. “Get outta here. I oughta thank you. All I ever get is milk runs. It’s nice to stretch my legs.”
Niko laughs mirthlessly. “Well, I guess it’s my turn. To stretch my legs, I mean.”
The cabbie glances at the paladin dog. “Well. Knock em dead, huh.” She holds out a hand.
Which Niko clasps. “Too late.”
She laughs. “That’s good.” And lets go.
The cabbie gets back in the cab and shuts the door and turns the headlights on. She pats the side of the cab as if it’s a good horse and nods up at Niko. “Break a leg.”
“I’ll probably break a lot of them.”
Crow’s feet bracket her ageless eyes. “You do that.” And she slowly drives away.
Niko is just turning toward the Black Taxi when the Checker Cab’s brakelights flash and the backup lights come on. The cab whines toward him and the brakeshoes grind as it pulls up beside him and stops. The cabbie leans out the window. “Here.” She tosses the half-empty cigarillo pack. “Who knows when you’ll get hold of any more?” Then she’s driving off again toward the tunnel and the daylit world.
Niko puts the pack in a jacket pocket and watches the receding taillights until the engine sound has faded out and the ensuing silence makes him feel despairing and marooned.
Alone now Niko feels the tension in and past the marble walls, a carnival charge in the whipcrack air. It’s more than just the presence of the monstrous dog. It’s a quality of the walls themselves. As if the living stone has absorbed the pain and fear and tyranny of all that they surround.
A small metallic ping gives Niko’s heart a little kick. Not Auguste and his irregular hammering. A distinctive sound that he’d know anywhere. The crackle of a cooling engine.
BEFORE THE WALL’S pale marble the Black Taxi looks like a shadow of itself. As if abandoned by the thing that cast it.
Niko sets the hardcase on the ground, which seems to be a flat expanse of ochre stone, and walks around the huge sedan.
It truly is magnificent. Lacquered and curved and pristine like something poured or grown. Niko looks but does not touch. Not yet, not yet. The dog behind him watching. Niko cannot help but wonder if the car itself knows he is here.
There’s barely room to sidle between the Franklin and the wall. Niko doesn’t want to touch either one. The stone wall crowded with huddled figures beautifully rendered in marble agony, damned souls locked in stone who huddle and teem and yearn toward the unfelt space denied them, groping from their anhedonic orgy for some dimly conceived paradise of emptiness. Though motionless they suggest motion, a surging wave of sculpted humanity impeccably rendered. The alabaster snarl carved on one wide-eyed face with crooked teeth. The flaring nostrils on one reaching figure always at the onset of a scream. Tension in the tendons of a reaching wrist. Niko remembers viewing Rodin sculptures at the Louvre and at the Norton Simon and remembers thinking that the figures did not look like sculpture at all but like human beings made of stone, moments frozen by a loving hand. He starts to turn away from the beautiful horrible wall, then stops.
Rodin. Auguste Rodin.
He shrugs and turns away from the basilisk stares, certain they are aware of him. As the Black Taxi seems aware of him. He cannot help but feel the car holds some kind of awful coiled potential waiting to be sprung like a warhead silent in its housing.
Something grabs his jacket when he tries to move on. He jumps back and whirls, raising an elbow against whatever holds him. A faint rip as his jacket tears.
It’s an arm. A lifesized alabaster-muscled arm, marble fingers clutching frozen, leading toward a rounded shoulder eclipsed by a contorted blindeyed face halfdrowned in unformed stone.
Niko nearly laughs. You just snagged it, buddy pal, that’s all.
Still. He didn’t remember that arm being there when he’d started walking round the car.
Niko crabwalks out from between the wall and the monolithic car. Thinking as he looks upon the Franklin’s dreaded form, What are you?
Impulsively he grips the gleaming doorhandle and then jerks away as if shocked, though he hasn’t been. The handle is unblemished. He grabs again more firmly but the door is locked.
From behind him comes a growl so deep he feels it through his shoes. Niko glances back at the gate. The dog is up on all fours now and bristling. No question it could stop a truck.
Niko tries to ignore the dog as he bends and hoods his eyes and peers into the driver’s window. The mason jar’s not there of course, but how utterly damned he truly deserved to be if it had been and he hadn’t looked.
Now the growl is multiple and Niko feels it in his chest. He straightens. Okay, we’re in for the long haul, buddy pal.
He glances again at the gate. Takes a deep breath. Turns from the dark car to face the foaming dog strangling itself as it strains forward, restrained by that divided anchor chain attached to three humanleather collars big as weightlifter’s belts. Chainlinks thick as Niko’s thumb but Niko doesn’t trust them. They’ve been there a long time. And it’s a really big dog.
Past the dog the bearded sculptor on the ladder does not heed the monster’s histrionics but continues working, mallet tapping chisel, the tinking sound subsumed now by the worldconsuming frenzy of the guardian and multiform dog.
Niko pats his jacket pocket.
The dog barks in threepart discord and trembles before Niko like a bowstring drawn and held too long. No limb of him is still. The creature angles forward at the rusted leash’s limit, struggling, bulge-eyed, straining.
Niko says Nice doggy.
At the sound of Niko’s voice the dog goes absolutely mental. Three wet snarls reveal huge fangs of yellowed ivory rotting at the gumline. Three spiked humanleather collars each a handspan wide stretch creaking.
“Got a present for you, Sparky.” From his jacket pocket Niko pulls the jumbo milkbone taken from the kitchen of his worldgone home. He waggles it chest-high, eye-level with the furious bristling dog. “You want this, boy? Huh? You like that?”
The dog’s mad eyes glaze over and foam runs down its muzzles thick as the head on a beer. It rears up on muscled hindlegs now, thrashing and gnashing like something sleeping a thousand years on the ocean floor snagged on some hapless fisherman’s marlinhook.
“Come get it, sport.” Niko fakes an underhand. “Cmon, come get it, Rex.” The dog is fighting amongst itself as if contending for the chance to rage into Niko first. The wasp-nest tension, the rising note on the vibrating air.