Comeuppance Served Cold, page 4
Philippe helped with deliveries and finally found work delivering hooch for a local bootlegger. He got quieter, and his body got tighter, coiled almost. He still moved like a puma but without the looseness, without the smile. Philippe could not change easily in Seattle. Most of the other shape-shifters in town were white, and many were wolf families, and they didn’t like other predators. The ones like Farrell, who shifted into deer, didn’t like pumas either.
It was the only fly in the ointment at first. As she and Pedro worked and saved, though, they noticed a change in the attitude toward magical practitioners. The neighbors muttered about the Order of Saint Michael the Protector. They made Violet uneasy, but Pedro didn’t worry. Like everyone in the neighborhood, they paid a fee to the local councilman, to protect them from burglary, arson, or holdups. “We’re safe here, querida,” Pedro told her, and gave her a pair of small emerald earrings for her birthday. She knew from his face whenever he came home from confession that the priest was scolding him to marry her, but she wasn’t worried. Their savings account grew, and it would happen soon. Violet imagined the future, with the sounds of children’s laughter filling the little Queen Anne Hill house.
* * *
Some neighbors said the blind tattooist was Irish; some said he was from Norway. One thing everyone agreed on: He’d traded away his sight for a set of magical tattoo needles. He worked out of the shop next to theirs, and Philippe was smitten.
Philippe always had a yen for the gorgeous boys who crewed the rich folks’ yachts wintering in Saint Augustine, but Violet was surprised when he took up with a blind white man at least ten years older than him. Not that Gabe wasn’t charming—he was. It was the only thing she couldn’t discuss with Pedro. Pedro loved Philippe like they were brothers, but he pretended he didn’t know how Philippe was. He could never find a way to embrace his Catholic faith and accept Philippe. It gave both men in her life pain, and there was nothing she could do about it.
One morning—while Philippe was sweeping the boardwalk out front and Gabe walked back from the diner on the corner, his polished cedar cane swinging—a car pulled up and parked. As Gabe passed in front of the botanica’s windows, four men got out and made a semicircle around him.
Violet went to the door, barely able to breathe. Pedro was up at the house. She was alone in the shop. Philippe had set aside the broom and stood tense and straight. As she cracked the door, she heard the unmistakable thud of a person falling.
Her brother lunged forward like a springing puma.
“Philippe, don’t!” she said. He jerked to a stop, shaking. He never looked away from where Gabe lay prone, his legs on the boardwalk, his torso in the dirt. Her brother reached for the broom again, gripping it in one hand but not moving.
The white man closest to them looked sideways at Philippe and the broom and let one hand slide under his jacket.
She wasn’t sure she could stop her brother if they hurt Gabe worse. And she couldn’t stop four white men from killing Philippe if he went after them. It seemed like that was what they were waiting for.
“Don’t!” she said again.
Gabe groped for his cane. One of the men shifted it out of reach with his foot.
“I guess you really are blind,” said the man standing closest to the car. Violet studied him. He wore a light-gray suit, and the sun turned his hair to a golden helmet. A red stone glinted in his tie. “But you don’t mind pushing needles full of colored muck into decent people. How do you sleep at night?”
Gabe levered himself to a sitting position and reached out again for his cane. The blond man shook his head, and this time the man close to it didn’t move it. “I’m a licensed tattooist,” Gabe said, getting to his feet. He sounded as calm as he always did.
The blond man shot her brother a frowning glance as Philippe leaned forward. “Go back to shining shoes, boy.”
Philippe did not answer. He took a step toward Gabriel. The man with his hand under his jacket pivoted so he half faced Philippe.
Gabriel said, “I think there’s a misunderstanding. I pay my registration every year. Check with the Commission of Magi. Talk to Councilman Cahill at city hall about my other fees. He’ll tell you.”
The man close to Philippe said, “We don’t care what some stuffed shirt down at city hall thinks. We’re here to protect the decent people of the city from the scum who prey on them.”
Gabriel’s head swiveled as he turned his ear toward the man.
The blond spoke again. “We’re here to protect.” He nodded, and one of the men took a folded slip of paper from his pocket. He stepped up to Gabriel and tucked it into the front of Gabriel’s shirt.
From where she crouched, Violet saw Philippe shudder. He wasn’t going to change, but he was struggling with it. If he didn’t put the broom down, he might do something just as bad. For all of them.
The blond man said, “Get your darkie protector there to read that to you. Or, if he can’t, maybe Cahill can.” He turned and strolled back to the car, and the other three followed. They drove away.
Violet threw open the door. “Come inside. Please, Gabe, come inside and sit down.”
He did, and Philippe followed him. Gabe sat and tilted the cane against the back of the chair.
“I’ll get us tea,” Violet said. “Unless . . . something stronger?”
“Tea is fine. Thank you. And Philippe, don’t endanger yourself for me.”
Philippe put his hand on Gabe’s heart, and Gabe covered that hand with his own.
“You should let me give you a protection tattoo,” Gabe said.
“They weren’t watching me,” Philippe said.
“They sure were,” Violet said. “Gabe, what’s on the paper? May I look?”
Gabriel gave a nod. Philippe drew the paper out, unfolded it, and handed it to her.
“It says fifteen. And a date. Three days from now.”
“More fees? But you pay already.” Philippe stared down at the paper. “And . . . fifteen?”
Violet handed her brother the paper and went to start the tea. Behind her, Gabe said, “I’ve heard the rumors. Philippe, Violet, the man who spoke. Can you describe him?”
Philippe shut his eyes and concentrated. “Blond hair, wavy gold. No hat.”
Violet said, “A red tie tack, a garnet or a ruby. Dressed rich but not flashy like a gangster. He looked like money. Tea, Gabe, right in front of you.”
“Thanks.” He reached out for the cup. “I didn’t know that one’s voice. I recognized the other one’s, though. He came into the shop a few days ago, acted like a guy who hadn’t quite made up his mind to take the plunge.” He sipped his tea. “Do me a favor, Violet? Send a telegram for me, to the councilman?”
“Of course.” Violet found a pencil, and Philippe jotted down the words Gabriel gave him.
* * *
Councilman Cahill never replied to the telegram.
Two days later, a man came to the botanica, asked for Pedro, and handed him a sealed envelope. Violet stopped what she was doing as he opened it. He scowled. “I don’t understand,” he said. “They say I have to register and pay fees for the shop, and they’re imposing a fine because I didn’t declare it before.”
“We don’t do magic here,” Violet said.
“I’m already licensed as a botanical magician. All we do here is sell and start some seedlings.”
“What?” Philippe stood in the door, one hand reaching for the back of his neck. His fresh protection tattoo must be itching. Violet didn’t love magic any more than she loved those defiant tattoos on his cheeks, but anything that would keep her brother safer was all right in her book. At least the sigil would protect him from hexes and bad spells.
She filled him in. “It’s a mistake,” she said.
Pedro rubbed his top lip with his index finger. “I’m not sure it is. Commissioner Earnshaw is calling many people ‘magical’ even though they have no magic and then squeezing registration fees out of them. They’re saying herbalists and botanicas facilitate magic now.”
“That’s ridiculous. Does a wood-carver who sells a figurine to a magus ‘facilitate’ magic if the magus charms it later? Are glassblowers facilitating magic? Weavers?”
“Amulet makers register,” Philippe said.
Violet stabbed the counter with her finger. “Amulet makers are so specialized, they practically are magicians. They’re the exception. They’ve always been the exception.”
Pedro straightened. “It’s just like Prohibition, maybe? Washington passed dry laws years before the rest of the country did.”
“They want to make magic illegal?” Violet couldn’t believe that. The Commission and its commissioners grew fat off the fees they charged for magic. They wouldn’t outlaw it.
“They want to decide who uses it and how,” Philippe said. “That’s worse.”
“I’ll go talk to Councilman Cahill.”
“He never answered Gabriel,” Philippe said.
“What are you saying?”
“He’s gotten awfully quiet.”
Pedro laced his fingers through Violet’s. “I had nearly enough to buy the house for us.”
“You know I don’t care about that.”
He pulled his hand away. “I contributed to Cahill’s campaign, and his daughter’s wedding was the only one in the city boasting orange trees with ripe fruit, in November, because of my greenhouse and my generosity. He’ll talk to me.” Pedro looked around. “Where’s my hat?”
* * *
Pedro never spoke about how his meeting with the councilman went. Gabe didn’t pay the fifteen dollars. For about a week, things seemed normal. She and Pedro stayed late one evening working on a large shipment of a pain-killing lotion Violet made. By the time it was all packaged, the last streetcar had run. They decided to sleep in the back room, surrounded by the smell of fresh seedlings. It wasn’t the first time they’d done it.
She woke up, choking, surrounded by smoke. “Pedro!” She rolled over, shaking him. “Pedro, wake up! Get up!” The room was gray; each breath rasped her throat. He snorted, half sat up.
“Fire!” she shouted.
He staggered to his feet. With her arm around his waist, she guided him toward the door. The room felt like an oven. When she could get enough air, she called out, “Help us! Somebody, help us!” hoping Gabe would hear her in the shop next door, where he also lived.
Glass shattered, and a human shape wavered in the clouds of smoke in the main shop. Above her head, a loud creaking ran in a line across the ceiling, and something slammed across her back, knocking her forward and down onto the wooden floor. Pedro grunted. She lay stunned.
Hands grabbed her arms.
“No! Help him!” She turned her head. Pedro lay facedown in the doorway. At first, she thought she only needed to drag him across the threshold, but as she reached out, she screamed, seeing the beam pinning him to the floor and the inferno behind him.
“Violet.” Philippe grabbed her and tugged her away from Pedro.
“No! We can save him! We can—” She pushed against her brother, but he dragged her back and back, away from Pedro. She lowered her head and bit his arm, and he cursed. A shudder ran the length of his body, but he didn’t change, and he didn’t stop.
“Philippe! We can save him! We can—”
More glass shattered, and a hiss like a hurricane filled the room—steam, as neighbors threw buckets of water through the broken window. She heard later they broke down the door and that it took two men besides Philippe to hold her, to keep her from going back in. She remembered nothing else of that night beyond the image of her beloved pinned by the beam, the flames roaring behind him.
They buried his bones and had a Mass said for him.
She and Philippe stayed at the Queen Anne Hill house through the end of the month, the house that would never hear the laughter of her children.
The fire had started in Gabe’s shop, along the wall it shared with the botanica. Once it reached the attic, there had been no stopping it. Everyone knew Pedro, Gabe, and two other shopkeepers hadn’t paid the Order of Saint Michael. Half the block had burned. Since the war, they all knew about ways to start fires without being present.
For a while she only touched scraps of her life. At Pedro’s funeral, a man came up to her as people filed out. He wore a wore a dingy black suit, a bowler, and a Saint Christopher lapel pin. “Miss Violet,” he said, holding out his hand. “Lazlo Penske. That Lopez y Avila, he was a competitor. We weren’t friends, but I respected him.”
Lazlo Penske was a greengrocer in a neighborhood right on the water. He bought some special herbs from Pedro for his elixirs, and Pedro trusted him.
Penske took a slip of paper from his pocket. “I know this isn’t the time, but I think you’ll want to sell his stock. He had some rare herb seedlings. When the time comes, see me first. Unless you’re going to run the business now?”
She shook her head. “I’ve got no plans to.”
“I’ll give you a good price.”
She took the paper and tucked it into her purse. “I’ll call you.”
In his will, Pedro left half his savings to his mama and the rest to her. He requested she sell his seed stock to Penske, with whom he had a handshake agreement. There was a hundred-dollar life insurance policy, and she was the beneficiary.
“A hundred dollars,” Philippe said. “It seems like a lot.”
“What Mama said to him that last night, it stayed with him.”
Gabe helped them find an apartment on Jackson Street, not as close to the waterfront as the shop had been. He rented a place across the street and down the block, with a big front room where he could work.
Violet knew they’d moved, but she had lost herself by then. In her mind, she thrashed in a night river, no difference between the starless sky and the water that sucked her down. Voices howled in the distance, and more than anything, she just wanted to stop fighting, to sink and sink. Sometimes, just as she was about to let herself do that, Philippe’s voice reached her. It was the only thing that kept her thrashing.
One night she came back to herself as Philippe yelled at her from the doorway. “What are you doing? Are you even in there?”
“I’m here, little brother,” she said.
Tension flowed out of him. “I thought you were hexed or something,” he said.
“Not hexed,” she said. “Just . . .”
“Not alone,” he said. “Never say alone. You aren’t.”
She looked at him. Sometime, while she’d been in the night river, she knew she’d seen newspapers and pictures in the society page. She’d seen the man who’d shaken down Gabe, the leader of the Order of Saint Michael the Protector, and she knew there would never be justice for Pedro. For a moment, she yearned for Saint Augustine so strongly, it hurt. She wasn’t going anywhere. The man she loved was buried here.
She’d never get true justice for Pedro, but even a rich man could have certain problems. She had a way to watch and maybe help those problems along.
They would not drive her out, she decided there and then.
She made her voice brisk. “No. Just grieving. And I know what we’re going to do, but I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
She drew a set of keys out of her bag. “I need you to go to the central station and the bus station and empty out my lockers,” she said. Like Mama, Violet never completely trusted banks.
Philippe took the keys.
He brought back the bundles filled with her jewelry the next day—and watched with curiosity and some concern, she thought—as she went out several nights in a row.
“What are you doing?” he said, standing in front of the door one night.
She tweaked the bright scarf she’d wrapped around her head. “I’ve got a meeting.”
“This time of night? What are you doing?”
She laughed. “Not that, Philippe. No, I’ve got a plan. You and me, we’re opening a club.”
“A club? You mean a speak?”
She nodded. “We’ll have good hooch and velvet booths and a piano player.”
“Violet, that takes money. There’s people to pay off, and bootleggers . . .”
“I know. I’ve already rented the shop below us. It used to be a hat shop. Underneath is a basement with an opening into the underground. I’ve talked to the right people. And tonight I’m getting the final price on a few things, and then I’ll sell my jewels, and we’ll be good to go.”
“A hat shop . . .” Philippe tipped his head. “That could work. Gabriel knows a woman who makes hats. She could even sell you a few so it looks like the real thing.” He stepped away from the door and reached for his hat. “I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I think I do. I’ll be quiet, don’t worry. And . . . Violet? Don’t sell the emeralds.”
“Why?” She never thought her brother was sentimental.
“They make you look regal,” he said.
She snorted. “Regal?”
“Yeah. You’re a colored woman opening a business on your own. Let them know you’re someone to be reckoned with.”
For a moment, she faltered. “Am I?”
“Oh, yes,” Philippe said. “You are.”
* * *
The three of them finished their meal. Violet looked across the table. At least everyone was safe for now. She stood and began to clear the plates. “I’ll do that,” Philippe said, rising. Between them they soon had the dishes stacked. Violet ran water in the sink.
Gabe came to her side. “I can dry.” Once she lay a clean dish on the counter, he would pick it up. They had a system now.
“Good,” she said. “Thanks.”
He lowered his voice, his face aimed toward the sink. “I don’t like the shape-shifter business,” he said.
“That makes two of us.”
Chapter Three
NOVEMBER 7, 1929
(TEN DAYS BEFORE)
DOLLY OPENED HER EYES to darkness; midnight or a little bit later, most likely. Once again, sound carried to her from across the hall. She threw back the covers, pulled on her dressing gown, and went to Fiona’s room. As she reached for the doorknob, she heard the squeak of a window opening.
