Jemma is dead. Abandon your hope. Let it go. Let go.
Hope falls from him like a scab.
HALF AN HOUR later Niko lifts his face from the plain and rubs his swollen eyes. A certain calmness wells from deep inside and spreads across him. He shuts his eyes again and rubs his throbbing forehead and then looks around the plain. Just the darkness, just the darker duolith rearing entangled before him. He notes his steady breathing. Sees his hand grab up the guitar case. Sees his body stand. Rides along as it limps to the statue’s base. He turns his back on the lovers and slumps against them and blows his nose on his ragged coatsleeve. Counts ten deep even breaths. All right. Okay. Well what now? Turn back?
Niko laughs. And fight your way back as far as you have come with not a thing to show? The old riddle, what’s the farthest you can go into the forest?
Halfway.
I’m so tired. God I’d love some coffee. Hell, I’d sell my soul for a cup of—
Tortured stone begins to creak against his back. Niko scrambles to his feet and cranes upward to see the giant forms elongating, stone like taffy stretching. For a dizzy moment Niko feels that he and the plain are sinking and he falls backward and lands on his tailbone. The stretching stone splinters and branches out to angle and stab down like spiderlegs. Niko backpedals and gazes up in awe and fear. The warm ground rumbles and the blighted air aches with moans of stretching stone. A vast shape rises on the barren plain. The fossil skeleton of some unimagined beast long dead now being given up by the very earth that housed it across the countless centuries. For a gibbering insane instant Niko thinks it is a living creature, some mindless voracious thing sent forth to fetch him to his long appointed doom. But as it coheres he sees it is the solid and imposing framework of a building extruding from the ground like something loudly growing from a magic beanstalk. Rising dark before him it joins growing bone to growing bone to form girder and arch and joist and wall, ledge and window and column and door. It settles creaking with its own weight like a wooden ship and for a moment it sits whole and still and blank and hollow before him, a gaunt dark cathedral. Then from out the formless darkness beaded colored lights rain upward in entwining strands that swirl across the building’s face. A steady hum grows with the flashing light. Machinery. Electricity.
Now across the stone facade are coruscating lights that flash a spade, a club, a diamond, a heart. Motion on the glass entryway is no longer reflected light but activity within.
Niko turns to look behind him. Black air and empty plain, lidded sky and no horizon. He turns back.
A casino stands complete before him. Light smears the entryway as a door opens and a uniformed valet comes out to take up station in the empty driveway. He adjusts his ridiculous little cap and stands with hands clasped before him, dignified and patient and absurd.
A carhorn blares and startles Niko nearly senseless. He whirls, fists raised, and squints at approaching headlights. A white slab-sided 1968 Cadillac DeVille fourdoor hardtop sedan roars toward him and swerves at the last second and shoots past. Glimpse of fat man grinning lewdly as he gestures with a fat cigar while a jowly woman holding his arm laughs meanly. The Caddie pulls up to the casino and the valet helps the corpulent woman out. The driver joins the woman and blows cigar smoke in the valet’s face. The valet drives the car away as the casino door opens for the couple and they enter and do not look back. As the Caddie pulls away the valet’s exact twin walks out of the casino and stands at the curb with hands clasped before him, dignified, patient, absurd.
Niko heads toward the island of light here in the middle of nothing. The valet flicks his gaze at Niko’s weary impoverished approach and his posture stiffens. He does everything but say Hmmph.
Niko doesn’t give a ratsass. All he wants to do now is see this thing through and make the motions and say his lines and let the curtain fall. He makes for the entrance and has every intention of pushing on into the final stage of his little drama without a backward glance, but
filling the view before him
oozing across the entrance glass
like a timelapse film of growing cancer
on distorting panes and metal frames
a black reflection slides
a black reflection of a car
a black reflection of a 1933 Franklin Model 173 seven passenger sedan.
Niko turns in time to see it glide up to the curb like a docking submarine. To hear the purring engine die and see the lights go dark. Niko turns and always turns to see the brakelights die as a leather wingtip shoe lifts off the pedal, always turns to fight the story he enacts, turns to thwart the hammer of tyrannic myth that nails him to his fate, turns to see a driver’s door open and close with a solid heavy chunk, to see a black cap with a glossy bill over evershadowed eyes deep in a paperskinned and jaundiced face, turns to see a pale thin hand hold up a sealed glass jar.
XX.
HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN
DUMBLY NIKO WATCHES the Driver approach. It can’t be this easy. Not after all this.
And of course it isn’t. Weary and heartsore as Niko is he braces himself for some conflict but the Driver heads toward the casino entrance cradling the mason jar and spares him not the slightest glance. As the Driver passes by him with that tightly lidded jar in bony hand he sees that held within and glowing not at all is not a blacktipped feather but a lump of coal. Not Jemma but some other purloined soul.
Niko stays whatever provocation or obstruction might have welled up from within. However much he loathes and fears the sallow son of a bitch the Driver is still just a delivery boy. Do you want to spend what little you have left in you on the thing that brought Jemma here or on getting Jemma herself?
Follow him then. See where our delivery boy delivers.
The valet nods at the Driver but makes no move to park the Black Taxi as his twin had parked the Cadillac. No one but the Driver drives the Black Taxi. The Driver ignores the valet and strides past the huge glass doors that open before him and pulls the jar a little closer as he enters the casino.
Niko takes a deep breath and starts after him but then he stops. Looks back at the car. Oh no way. It’s too obvious.
Nonetheless he follows his hunch and walks to the Black Taxi and hoods his eyes and peers through the driver’s side window. Nope, nothing there. Niko gropes beneath the left front fender. Nope. He tries left back and right back and right front and son of a bitch there it is. A rectangular magnetic keyholder stuck to the underside of the fender. He shakes it and a key rattles.
Niko laughs bitterly and looks up at the godless sky and spreads his arms. Almost a parody of crucifixion. If he’d thought to look for a spare key outside the gate however long ago he might have simply driven here.
He drops the keyholder into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and then turns toward the coruscating light and glitter of the big casino, astonished that his heart is not pounding, that his hand is dry on the hardcase handle, that his breathing’s even. Either he’s too numb to care any longer or there’s nothing left inside him that will risk it.