It was the smell that woke me up.
My skull was clanging "The Anvil Chorus" and there was a red film over my eyes, but the smell pushed its way through. It was a sharp smell, but not fresh. It was a smell I hated.
I'd been lying facedown on the polyester carpet, and the blood from the cut on the back of my head had run down over my face. I had to wipe it from my eyes before I could focus.
What I saw was a two-year-old's view of the world: carpet, table legs, and the bottom of a pumpkin-colored bedspread. Fighting the gravity of Jupiter, I lifted my head and saw a pair of black shoes dangling over the edge of the bed.
I laid my head back down on the carpet and said, "Shit." Sleep seemed like a good idea. I closed my eyes. Then whatever obscure corner of my brain was still up and about sounded the alarm to let me know that sleep was, all things considered, not really such a good idea. A fragment of Jack London pushed itself in front of me, something about people dozing off happily in the snow.
It took me maybe two minutes to get to my hands and knees and another minute, with some help from the table, to stand up. I had to wipe my face again before I could look around. Scalp wounds bleed ambitiously.
Ambrose Harker or Ellis Fauntleroy lay on the bed, clutching a pillow to his middle. He looked startled. The pillow had a couple of little black holes in it. The smell in the air was cordite, the stuff that makes guns go bang.
I held my head in one hand and picked up the pillow with the other. It was heavier than it should have been because it was saturated with blood. The pillow had functioned as a silencer and Harker's stomach had functioned as a target. Both had functioned flawlessly.
I let the pillow drop, and Harker made a rasping sound that trailed off into a gurgle. It was the last sound he ever made, and like all the others, it was louder than life.
My gun was gone. I should have known it would be gone. It didn't take an advanced degree in ballistics or an I.Q. much higher than room temperature to guess whose bullets had made such a travesty of Harker's viscera and whose prints were all over the gun.
After I washed the blood from my face I wiped everything I remembered touching and locked and closed the door behind me. A lot of good it would do. Somebody had the gun, and it wasn't anybody who wished me well.
On the drive home I had all I could do to turn four oncoming headlights into two and wonder where I'd put the iodine. By the time I'd scaled the driveway on all fours my head was slamming alarmingly and I was beginning to get mad.
The door to the house was open.
The message light on the answering machine blinked accusingly, but there was no way to know whether it had been Al Hammond or Mrs. Yount who'd called, because the cassette was gone. II — Judgment
Chapter 10
"If God doesn't want us to get drunk, why did He create alcohol? That's a good question," Dixie Cohen said, as though someone else had asked it. He was coasting into the final third of a sixteen-ounce bottle of Singha. I was lagging behind his pace while his ex-wife, Chantra, and my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor, sipped white wine together in the far corner of Eleanor's Venice apartment.
"Look at this group," I said. "The evening is rated double-ex."
"Dream on," Eleanor said without looking up. She and Chantra, who was an ex-Charlene, were looking over galley proofs of Eleanor's most recent book, Two Fit. Its literary aim was to help weight-conscious couples support each other in their fight against flab. Its publisher, an ultra-fit New Age vegetarian who, I'd been delighted to see, was losing his hair faster than most people lose cheap sunglasses, had proclaimed it an Important Book. Even more Important, he'd suggested in hushed tones, than her first, Creative Stretching, the third printing of which was selling briskly in better coed gyms and running stores from coast to coast. She'd already received an advance for her third work, The Right-Brain Cookbook, a new look at the old idea that some forms of nourishment qualified as brain food. I'd suggested it as an unpleasant joke and she'd taken it seriously enough to get a large number of dollars as encouragement from her publisher. Some joke. This was one of a number of social events designed to test what I sourly regarded as a completely spurious collation of creativity-enhancing recipes.
Dixie hefted his bottle and knocked back most of what remained. Chantra was going to be driving. "The first drunk," he intoned, warming to his subject as his blood alcohol rose, "after the Flood, of course, was Noah."
"The Flood," I said politely, picking for the thirtieth time that evening at the large bandage decorating the back of my head.
"Aha," Dixie said, eyeing my half-full bottle with more than a trace of envy. He rapped his own bottle with his signet ring and it made a hollow noise. "The Flood, indeed. Indeed, the Flood." From across the room Chantra said to Eleanor, "But what about complex carbohydrates?" I took Dixie's bottle away from him, poured three fingers of beer into it, and handed it back. "God had two chances to prevent the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous," Dixie said, drinking, "before and after the Flood. He blew it both times." He burped. "Good thing, too."
"Carbohydrates are in chapter thirteen," Eleanor said.
"Are you going to explain, Dixie, or do you want someone to ask you?" Chantra said. "Volunteers? Is there anyone in this room sufficiently immune to boredom to ask Dixie why God allowed alcohol to survive the Flood?"
"I think you just did," I said, getting up and going into the tiny overheated kitchen to grab a couple of fresh beers.
"Unless I'm deeply mistaken," Chantra said, "I've heard it before."
"According to Rabbi Eliezar-" Dixie began happily.
"No less," Chantra interjected.
"Woman, hold thy tongue. According to Rabbi Eliezar, no less, Noah took onto the ark a vine that had been cast with Adam out of Eden. Adam had his own problems with the grape, as you may recall. The oldest profession, actually, is probably that of wine-maker."
"No whores in Eden." I popped the bottle caps. "No money. Nunc die gelt, ergo nunc die bimbos," I said in Latin and several other languages.
"Noah took the vine with him because he liked to eat grapes," Dixie continued as though no one had spoken. "Anyway, that's what he told everyone."
"He could tell everyone, too," Chantra said. "There were only twelve or thirteen people after the Flood."
"And that's just about the right number," I said, putting the bottles on the table. "Everything that's wrong with the world today comes from the fact that there are more than twelve people." My head hurt, and I rubbed the bandage again.
"Simeon," Chantra said, ''what happened to the back of your head?" She'd been trying not to ask all evening.
"I cut myself shaving."
"When it came time to plant the grapevine," Dixie said doggedly, "Satan came along and offered to make sure there'd be a good crop. He suggested a sacrifice."
"Blame Satan," Eleanor said. "If he didn't exist, we'd have to invent him."
"These people were crazy about sacrifices," Dixie said. "They butchered a sheep every time they hiccupped. So Noah and Satan together, according to the rabbi, sacrificed a sheep, a lion, an ape, and a hog, using the blood as fertilizer."
"Blood is high in nitrogen," Eleanor said, sounding interested for the first time.
"Nitrogen, schmitrogen," Dixie said.
"He shaves the back of his head?" Chantra asked Eleanor.
"Only when he's going to meet someone behind him," Eleanor said.
"So Satan and Noah," Dixie plowed stubbornly along, "slaughtered all these poor stupid animals. And their blood fertilized the grapes. And that's why, after the first drink, one is as mild as a sheep, and after the second, one is courageous like a lion. After the third, one is stupid like an ape."