Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Read Free Book Online Page B

details, ’cause they don’t matter, but what it comes down to is Eugene wants his own way into the game. Once this punk is put in the ground, he wants to keep this market alive. We happen to know Tobias has a book that he uses for this set-up. An atlas that tells him how to access this shit. We want it, and we want to know how it works. And that’s
your
thing, Jack.”
    I feel something cold spill through my guts. “That’s not the deal we had.”
    “What can I tell you.”
    “No. I told . . .” My throat is dry. My leg is bouncing again. “Eugene told me we were through. He told me that. He’s breaking his promise.”
    “That mouth again.” Patrick finishes his drink and stands. “Come on. You can tell him that yourself, see how it goes over.”
    “Now? It’s the middle of the night!”
    “Don’t worry, you won’t be disturbing him. He don’t sleep too well lately either.”
    I’ve lived here my whole life. Grew up just a regular fat-white-kid schlub, decent parents, a ready-made path to the gray fields of middle-class servitude. But I went off the rails at some point. I was seduced by old books. I wanted to live out my life in a fog of parchment dust and old glue. I apprenticed myself to a bookbinder, a gnarled old Cajun named Rene Aucoin, who turned out to be a fading necromancer with a nice side business refurbishing old grimoires. He found in me an eager student, which eventually led to my tenure as a librarian at the Camouflaged Library at the Ursulines Academy. It was when Eugene and his crew got involved, leading to a bloody confrontation with a death cult obsessed with the Damocles Scroll, that I left the Academy and began my career as a book thief. I worked for Eugene for five years before we had our falling out. When I left, we both knew it was for good.
    Eugene has a bar up in Midcity, far away from the t-shirt shops, the fetish dens and goth hangouts of the French Quarter, far away too from the more respectable veneer of the Central Business and the Garden Districts. Midcity is a place where you can do what you want. Patrick drives me up Canal and parks out front. He leads me up the stairs and inside, where the blast of cold air is a relief from a heat which does not relent even at night. A jukebox is playing something stale, and four or five ghostlike figures nest at the bar. They do not turn around as we pass through. Patrick guides me downstairs, to Eugene’s office.
    Before I even reach the bottom of the stairs, Eugene starts talking to me.
    “Hey fat boy! Here comes the fat boy!”
    No cover model himself, he comes around his desk with his arms outstretched, what’s left of his gray hair combed in long, spindly fingers over the expanse of his scalp. Drink has made a red, doughy wreckage of his face. His chest is sunken in, like something inside has collapsed and he’s falling inward. He puts his hands on me in greeting, and I try not to flinch.
    “Look at you. Look at you. You look good, Jack.”
    “So do you, Eugene.”
    The office is clean, uncluttered. There’s a desk and a few padded chairs, a couch on the far wall underneath a huge Michalopoulos painting. Across from the desk is a minibar and a door which leads to the back alley. Mardi Gras masks are arranged behind his desk like a congress of spirits. Eugene is a New Orleans boy right down to his tapping toes, and he buys into every shabby lie the city ever told about itself.
    “I hear you got a girl now. What’s her name, Locky? Lick-me?”
    “Lakshmi.” This is already going badly. “Come on, Eugene. Let’s not go there.”
    “Listen to him now. Calling the shots. All independent, all grown up now. Patrick give you any trouble? Sometimes he gets carried away.”
    Patrick doesn’t blink. His role fulfilled, he’s become a tree.
    “No. No trouble at all. It was like old times.”
    “Hopefully not too much like old times, huh?” He sits behind his desk, gestures for me to take a seat. Patrick pours a couple of