Look, you donkey, why do I have to give you a big selling on this boondoggle? It's an assignment. Get busy." Qwilleran gritted his teeth. "All right. Give me a taxi voucher. Round trip!" He took time to have his hair trimmed and his moustache pruned-his standard procedure before tackling a new beat, although he had intended to postpone this nicety until Christmas. Then he hailed a cab and rode out Zwinger Street, not without misgivings.
Downtown it was a boulevard of new office buildings, medical clinics, and fashionable apartment houses. Then it ran through a snow-covered wasteland where a former slum had been cleared. Farther out there were several blocks of old buildings with boarded windows, awaiting demolition. Beyond that was Junktown.
In daylight the street was even worse than it had appeared the night before. For the most part the rows of old town houses and Victorian mansions were neglected and forlorn. Some had been made into rooming houses, while others were disfigured with added storefronts. The gutters were choked with an alloy of trash and gray ice, and refuse cans stood frozen to the unshoveled sidewalks.
"This neighborhood's an eyesore," the cabdriver remarked. "The city should tear it down." "Don't worry. They will!" Qwilleran said with optimism.
As soon as he spotted antique shops, he stopped the cab and got out without enthusiasm. He surveyed the gloomy street. So this was Christmas in Junktown! Unlike other shopping areas in the city, Zwinger Street was devoid of holiday decorations. No festoons spanned the wide thoroughfare; no glittering angels trumpeted from the light poles.
Pedestrians were few, and cars barreled past with whining snow tires, in a hurry to be elsewhere.
A wintry blast from the northeast sent Qwilleran hurrying toward the first store that professed to sell antiques. It was dark within, and the door was locked, but he cupped his hands to his temples and looked through the glass. What he saw was a gigantic wood carving of a gnarled tree with five lifesize monkeys swinging from its branches. One monkey held a hatrack. One monkey held a lamp. One monkey held a mirror. One monkey held a clock. One monkey held an umbrella stand.
Qwilleran backed away. Nearby was the shop called The Three Weird Sisters. The store was closed, although a card in the window insisted it was open.
The newsman turned up his coat collar and covered his ears with gloved hands, wishing he had not had his hair trimmed. He next tried the Junque Trunque — closed — and a basement shop called Tech-Tiques, which looked as if it I had never been open. Between the antique shops there were commercial establishments with dirty windows, and in one of these — a hole in the wall labeled Popopopoulos' Fruit, Cigars, Work Gloves and Sundries — he bought a pouch of tobacco and found it to be stale.
With growing disaffection for his assignment he walked past a dilapidated barbershop and a third-class nursing home until he reached a large antique shop on the comer. Its door was padlocked, and its windows were plastered with notices of an auction. Qwilleran, looking through the glass door, saw dusty furniture, clocks, mirrors, a bugle made into a lamp, and marble statues of Greek maidens in coy poses.
He also saw the reflection of another man approaching the store. The figure came up behind him with a faltering step, and a thick voice said amiably, "You like 'at slop?" Qwilleran turned and faced an early-morning drunk, red-eyed and drooling but amiable. He was wearing a coat obviously made from a well-used horse blanket.
"Know what it is? Slop!" the man repeated with a moist grin as he peered through the door at the antiques.
Relishing the wetness of the word, he turned to Qwilleran and said it again with embellishments. "Ssssloppp!" The newsman moved away in disgust and wiped his face with a handkerchief, but the intruder was determined to be friendly.
"You can't get in," he explained helpfully. "Door locked. Locked it after the murder." Perhaps he caught a flicker of interest in Qwilleran's face, because he added, "Stabbed! Sssstabbed!" It was another juicy word, and he illustrated it by plunging an imaginary dagger into the newsman's stomach.
"Get lost!" Qwilleran muttered and strode away.
Nearby there was a carriage house converted into a refinishing shop. Qwilleran tried that door, too, knowing it would not open, and he was right.
He was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about this street, as if the antique shops were fakes — stage props.
Where were the proprietors? Where were the collectors who paid twenty-eight dollars for an old tin box? The only people in sight were two children in shabby snowsuits, a workman with a lunchpail, an old lady in black, who was plodding along with a shopping bag, and the good-natured drunk, now sitting on the frozen sidewalk.
At that moment Qwilleran looked up and saw movement in a curved bay window — a clean, sparkling window in a narrow town house painted dark gray with fresh black trim and a fine brass knocker on the door. The building had a residential look, but there was a discreet sign: The Blue Dragon-Antiques.
Slowly he mounted the flight of eight stone steps and tried the door, fearing it would be locked, but to his surprise it opened, and he stepped into an entrance hall of great elegance and formality. There was an Oriental rug on the waxed floor and delicate Chinese paper on the walls. A gilded mirror crowned with three carved plumes hung over a well- polished table that held chrysanthemums in a porcelain bowl. There was a fragrance of exotic wood. There was also the hush of death, except for the ticking of a clock.
Qwilleran, standing there in amazement, suddenly felt he was being watched, and he turned on his heel, but it was only a blackamoor, a lifesize ebony carving of a Nubian slave with turbaned head and an evil glint in his jeweled eyes.
Now the newsman was convinced that Junktown was something less than real. This was the enchanted palace in the depths of the dark forest.
A blue velvet rope barred the stairway, but the parlor doors stood open invitingly, and Qwilleran advanced with caution into a high-ceilinged room filled with furniture, paintings, silver, and blue and white china. A silver chandelier hung from the sculptured plaster ceiling.
His footsteps made the floor creak, and he coughed self-consciously. Then he caught a glimpse of something blue in the window — a large blue porcelain dragon — and he was moving toward it when he almost fell over a foot. It looked like a human foot in an embroidered slipper. He sucked in his breath sharply and stepped back. A lifesize female figure in a long blue satin kimono was seated in a carved Oriental chair. One elbow rested on the arm of the chair, and the slender hand held a cigarette holder. The face seemed to be made of porcelain — blue-white porcelain — and the wig was blue-black.
Qwilleran started to breathe again, thankful he had not knocked the thing over, and then he noticed smoke curling from the tip of the cigarette. It — or she — was alive.
"Are you looking for anything in particular?" she asked coolly. Only the lips moved in her masklike face. Her large dark eyes, heavily rimmed with black pencil, fixed themselves on the newsman without expression.
"No. Just looking," said Qwilleran with a gulp.
"There are two more rooms in the rear, and eighteenth century oils and engravings in the basement." She spoke with a cultivated accent.
The newsman studied her face, making mental notes for the story he would write: wide cheekbones, hollow cheeks, flawless complexion, blue-black hair worn Oriental style, haunting eyes, earrings of jade. She was about thirty, he guessed — an age to which he was partial. He relaxed.
"I'm from the Daily Fluxion," he said in his most agreeable voice, "and I'm about to write a series on Junktown." "I prefer to have no publicity," she said with a frozen stare.