“Don’t forget your bucket.”
“Have I ever?”
“I just don’t want a first time.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s already diving into Carlos’s spicy tamales, working a plastic fork with two of his front legs. After each bite of food, a glob that looks like white-orange putty oozes from the bottom of his neck, through the hole I drilled in the magic carpet and into a blue kid-size plastic beach bucket. There’s a pop-top trash can at the end of that table. Kasabian is good about dumping his scat when he’s done, but he’s short, so he needs me to step on the pedal to open the top. It’s nice to be needed.
I’m not in the mood for Cirque de Puke right now, so I find a pad and pencil and try to remember what Eleanor’s monster belt buckle looked like. Alice was the artist in my family. Even my handwriting made my teachers weep. When I’m done, I have a sketch that’s pretty good if I was a half-blind mental patient in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. I hold it up so Kasabian can see it.
“You recognize this?”
“I’m on my lunch hour, man.”
“Just look at the goddamn paper.”
He doesn’t move his head from the food, just swivels his eyes and squints at the image.
“Nope. Never seen it before. What is it, some monster you’re supposed to kill or have you started dating again?”
“It’s something I saw today. Like a belt buckle or an icon or something. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it’s been bugging me.”
“I don’t recognize it.”
Plop goes the tamale putty.
“Can you check it out in the Codex?”
Now he turns to look at me. He hates it when I ask him to look things up. I’m not even supposed to know about the Daimonion Codex.
“I don’t think so. Someone’s using it. Occupado, you know?”>Good for her.
“Call me Stark. No one calls me that other name.”
“I’m sorry. It’s the only one I knew.”
“No problem. Why are you looking for me?”
She takes a picture from her purse and sets it in front of me. It’s a young man, about my age when I went Downtown. He’s broad across the shoulders, like a football player. He has her eyes.
“This is my son. His name is Aki. It’s Finnish, like his father.”
“He’s a nice-looking kid. But I don’t know him, if that’s why you’re here.”
“You don’t know him, but he knows you. Your kind, I mean. He’s Sub Rosa, just like my husband’s family. Eighteen years ago we lived here, but we moved to my mother’s property in Lawrence, Kansas, when Aki was born. We weren’t sure we wanted him growing up here …”
She trails off and looks around the room. A bald man in a white silk suit takes what looks like a whiskey flask from his pocket and snaps it open. Inside is damp soil and pale, gray worms. He picks a worm up by its head and blows on it. The bug straightens, and when it’s rigid, the man lights one end with a cigarette lighter and smokes it.
“Aki just had his eighteenth birthday and wanted to come back to where he was born. Alone, of course. A young man wants to feel independent. How could we say no?”
A corn-fed Kansas farm boy full of bumpkin magic loose in L.A., what could possibly go wrong with that?
“My husband still knows people, Sub Rosa, in the area. He asked them to keep an eye on Aki, but it’s a big city. We haven’t heard from him in weeks. I know he knew people out here. He was corresponding with a Sub Rosa girl. I forget her name.”
“Do you have the letters with you?”
“No. They’re gone. He must have taken them with him.”
“Have you talked to your husband’s friends?”