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As usual, the front door is locked, but the side door, by the loading dock, is wide open. There’s a freight elevator to the right of the entrance. I pull down the upper gate, which closes the elevator’s wooden jaws, and hit the third-floor button with the side of my fist. The elevator jerks and starts to climb.
I could have stayed across the street and walked in here through a shadow. I could have walked through a shadow straight into my apartment. Fuck that. This is my home. I’m going in through the door.
When the elevator hits three, I roll up the gate and sprint right down the central corridor, then cut left. My place is at the end of a hall just long enough to let me get a running start. The door is the original, solid steel and balanced perfectly on two heavy metal hinges. I wouldn’t have thought about doing this before, but I’m a bit stronger now. I take a few long, running steps, swing my leg up, and slam my heel into the door. It pops open, the rusty lock mechanism spinning through the air like a metal Frisbee. I have the .45 up and in front of me, ready for anything.
“Well,” says the two-hundred-year-old Frenchman from his easy chair. “It fucking took you long enough.”
HE STANDS UP from a battered, green recliner. He’s a little taller than I remember and a little heavier, but he still has the same salt-and-pepper beard and close-cropped hair, the same impressive Roman nose and dark eyes that, at different times, might belong to your favorite uncle on Christmas morning or to the pissed-off ex-thug who’s about shove a power drill through your forehead.
I just look at him. Normally, I like hearing Vidocq shout “fuck” because he pronounces it “fock.” On the other hand, of the top ten people I didn’t expect to find here, he’s the entire top five. I stay put, not moving to the right or left, orienting my body so that, if I have to, I can make it out the door without looking.
“Vidocq? What are you doing here?”
“That’s how you greet a friend after all these years?” he asks, setting the battered book he’d been reading on the floor. “I’ve been waiting for you, keeping your home safe. You think I wanted to squat in this concrete shithole?”
I raise the .45 and aim it at his head. “How did we meet, old man?”
“Ah, you don’t think it’s me, no? You think this is some trap. I might, too, if I were you.” He picks up a tumbler filled to the top with wine so red it looks black.
“You and I met at a saloon. It’s closed now. Blood Meridian. This was before you met lovely Alice. We were both at the bar, each chatting up the same pretty girl, who stood between us. Neither of us had more than a few dollars then, so we’d employed a small memory charm on the bartender so that we could pay for drinks with the same money over and over again. When we realized what the other was doing, we forgot the pretty girl and talked about what and who we were, what and who we knew, paying the poor bartender with the same few dollars all night.”
“No great loss, from what I remember. The girl was pretty, but kind of wasted.”
“So were we, as I recall. Our sudden loss of interest offended her.”
“Next lifetime, I’ll buy her drinks and listen to her all night long.”
“Next lifetime.”
The gun suddenly feels heavy in my hand. I lower it. Vidocq, a head taller than me and half again as wide, comes over and crushes me in a long bear hug.
“It’s good to see you, boy,” he says.
Like the building, Vidocq hasn’t changed a bit. He looks about forty-five, but is old enough that he can tell you what guillotines sounded like offing the aristocracy during the French Revolution.
I look around the room. It doesn’t look right. Where’s all my stuff? Where’s Alice’s?
“How long have you been living here? Where is everything?” I ask.
“Alice moved out a few months after you disappeared. I saved your things and the things she left in the bedroom.”
“Where did she go?”
“She moved in with a friend in Echo Park. That’s where she was when the terrible things happened.”
“Mason murdered her. You can say it.” I feel stupid, but I have to ask him. “The friend she moved in with, was it a girl or a guy?”
“No, a girlfriend,” he says. “Alice had lovers after you were gone, but none of them were very serious. You broke her heart. She wasn’t the same girl.”
I go over to the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. The teakettle on the stove looks familiar, but not much else. And I’m not sure about the kettle.
“You checked up on her?”
“As much as I could. She didn’t really want to see anybody from your old days together. Certainly, no one associated with magic.”
That sounds like her. She didn’t like Mason or anyone else in the Circle. After I was gone, she’d want to get as far away from magic as she could. But she didn’t run far enough. I should have told her to leave town if something happened to me. I should have given her an escape plan. But what could happen to me? I was a golden boy. I was bulletproof.
I say, “Thanks for trying. And thanks for keeping the place. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d come in and found some asshole stranger sitting here.”
Vidocq picks ups the bottle of red wine from the coffee table, gets a glass for me from the kitchen, and fills it to the rim. He fills his glass, raises it, and we both drink. I sit down on the couch.
“So, how are you? What have you been doing since I’ve been gone?”
“I’ve been working. These days, the work is all I have,” he says. “Thievery pays for the tools, and the work shows me the mind of God. Stealing is a lot like alchemy, you know. In each, we each try to find what is beautiful and hidden and make it ours.”
“This is funny. The whole time we’ve known each other, I don’t remember you staying more than a few weeks anywhere. It’s hard to picture you here as a rent-and-electric-bill guy.”
“Don’t insult me. I wouldn’t pay a penny for this hovel. I used an old gypsy potion, a vin de mémoire manquée. I painted the walls, the windows, floor and ceiling, et voilà! Your home no longer exists. It is not seen or remembered, except, of course, by our funny sort of people. The Sub Rosa.”
The Sub Rosa. I haven’t thought about the Sub Rosa in a long time.
Vidocq is Sub Rosa. So are Kasabian, Mason, and the rest of the Circle. I’m Sub Rosa, too, though back in the day I never thought of myself that way, even though there are maybe a few thousand of us walking around Southern California.
Sub Rosas are the secret people who look just like you, but are different. They bank where you bank. They stand behind you in line at the coffee shop. They panhandle you for the money that you suddenly and inexplicably have to drop into their grimy hands. Some of us also talk to the dead. Some see the future, trade souls like baseball cards, or bribe angels for a peek at God’s to-do list. Mostly, Sub Rosas are the people regular people aren’t supposed to know about. It’s not that we don’t like you; it’s that you have a habit of burning us at the stake when you notice us.
Vidocq’s alchemical supplies and burglary gear cover nearly every surface—racks of potions, books and scrolls in Latin and Greek, alembics, test tubes, and grinding stones. On a table in a corner are the baubles he’s stolen on commission—netsukes, loose diamonds spilling from courier envelopes, passports, and computer discs. It was one of his less successful experiments that turned him immortal. He’s spent the last hundred and fifty years stealing things to fund his research for a cure.
“Thanks for watching the place. I’m glad you have it,” I tell him. “I couldn’t live here without Alice.”
He nods solemnly.
“Where will you live?”
“I’m crashing at a friend’s place. There’s a bathroom, a comfy bed, and all the movies you can eat. You should come by and see it.”
“It sounds charming.”
“I’m back here to kill some people, you know.” I blurt it out, trying to get the words out fast. “I’m going to take out the whole magic circle.”
“I knew that when you walked in. And I understand. I won’t even try to talk you out of it, but there are things you should know before you start.”
I can tell this is going to be a Real Talk. I light a cigarette as Vidocq pours more wine.
“I did something much like what you’re doing, many years ago. Long before you or your grandparents were born. Revenge is never what you think it’s going to be. There’s no pleasure and glory, and when it’s done your grief remains. Once a man does the things you’re talking about, he will never be the same, and he can never go back to who he was before. Worst of all, no matter how many enemies you kill, you are never satisfied. There is always one more who deserves it. When it becomes too easy to kill, it never ends.”
“You stopped.”
“The desire is still there, even though all the men are dead, the ones I killed and the ones who passed away during the many years I restrained myself. Worse, when it was over I had to leave Paris, get on a ship, and come here to the land of cheeseburgers and cowboys. You are starting down a bad road, my friend.”
“I appreciate the advice. Don’t worry. I’m not here to ask for help.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll help you. We must always look after our friends, even when they are foolish. Especially when they are foolish.”
“Thank you, old man.”
“Salut,” he says, and holds out his glass. I clink mine into his.
When I finish the cigarette, I take out the knife I used on Kasabian and pry up some boards under the coffee table. The oilcloth wrap containing my father’s guns is still there. I pull out the bundle and set the guns on the table, one by one. A good copy of an 1861 Navy Colt revolver, modified for modern .44 caliber shells. A heavy Civil War–era LeMat pistol. A Browning .45 semiauto my granddad used on D-day. And a Benelli M3 shotgun. They all need a good cleaning before I can use them.
Something flashes through Vidocq’s mind. I only catch a fragment of it before he pushes it away. Seeing it feels like a migraine coming on, a knife behind my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” asks Vidocq.
“There’s something funny going on with my head. I keep feeling and hearing things I shouldn’t. Like right now you’re sweating and your heartbeat is going up. Like maybe you’re a little afraid.”
“You’re back here from Hell, talking about murder, and you’re pulling guns from under my floor. Shouldn’t I be a little frightened for both of us?”
“There’s other things, too. I’ve turned kind of death-proof. I can get shot, ripped apart, dropped in a Cuisinart, and I just get up and walk away. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.”
“You fall into the Abyss a young magician and you emerge as Superman. How is that possible?”
“You’re the one with the all the books. You tell me.”
“Perhaps, like me, you were cursed with an inability to die.”
“What happened to you wasn’t a curse. You just decided it was. Besides, if anything, those Downtown demonfuckers would make me easier to kill so I’d get back there quicker.”
“Perhaps it’s simple biology. You’re the first living man to have entered Hell. Your condition might be a natural biological response. A side effect of having been in that awful place. Perhaps you should be grateful that you have this new gift to accentuate your natural magical abilities.”
“I don’t trust it. It means something I can’t figure out. Or it’s a setup. Nothing that happened down there was for my benefit.”
“We’ll know in time, then. Your friends in Hell will be after you soon, I suppose?”
“Eventually, but not now. There’s a war going on down there. It’s fucking chaos.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me.”
I get a dish towel from the kitchen, bring it back to the living room, and use it to wipe the dust from each gun. Even though I had them in the oil wrap, I can see traces of rust. I’ll have to clean them for real later.
“So, what was it like in Hell? Did you try to escape? You were always such a clever magician.”
“Clever magic doesn’t get you much down there. Even when I got stronger, I couldn’t cast the simplest hex until I started learning Hellion magic.”
“Is that how you got away?”
“No. I was the property of Azazel, one of Lucifer’s generals. He made me his designated hitman. He said that Alice would be all right, as long as I played along.”
“And then she wasn’t all right.”
“I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It’s like these new things I can hear and feel.” I gulped some wine. “Before I left, I cut out Azazel’s heart and left it on his altar.”
“How did you get out?”
“A key. A key to anywhere in the universe I want to go.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“It’s right here,” I say, putting my hand on my chest like I’m about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Over my heart. I took his knife, cut myself open, and put the key inside. Now I can walk through shadows to the Room of Thirteen Doors. Go anywhere I want, anytime I want. Back to Hell. Maybe Heaven, too. I don’t know. I haven’t opened all thirteen doors.”
“You put the key inside you? And it was made with Hellion magic? It will poison you.”
“Everything that happened to me for eleven years poisoned me. You think one little key is going to make a difference now?”
“This isn’t good, Jimmy.”
“Please don’t call me that. I don’t have that name anymore.”
“So, you are still afraid of them. Afraid they can find you through your name?”
“Not if no one uses it.”
“Your name is who you are. It’s your family. It connects you to this world. You can’t give it away so easily.” He took a long gulp of wine and said, “Wild Bill.”
“Especially, don’t call me that.”
Vidocq is one of the few people who know that my full name is James Butler Hickok Stark. That’s Wild Bill Hickok’s name, except for the Stark. I learned to shoot and appreciate guns young because we’re supposed to be direct descendants of Wild Bill, the greatest shootist of the American West. “Stark” was tacked on sometime after those prairie towns became cities to keep idiots from showing up at the door wanting to touch great-great-granddad’s legend. Or worse. There were more than a few fights and even some gunplay. The funny thing is no one knows for sure if we really are connected to Wild Bill. Supposedly, he left a few little bastards behind in Kansas and Missouri, so it’s possible. But it might just be a tall tale. My family never let facts get in the way of a good story.
“Wild Bill is dead. I’m just Stark.”
“That is your family, your identity. You can’t just walk away from your name.”
“I can and I have. I’m looking for Mason. He gave me to the Hellions for power and now I’m here to pay him back. Do you know where he is?”
“No one sees Monsieur Faim anymore. Like God, he is a great mystery. What will you do if you find him?”
“Kill him.”
“And then what?” Vidocq sets down his glass and steeples his fingers. “What you want may not be possible. Mason is a very powerful man these days. Very well protected.”
“I’ve gotten through to plenty of well-protected Hellions. And I learned a few things along the way. Want to know what the first lesson was?”
“Tell me, please.”
I pick up a little vial of mercury sitting on the coffee table and shake it, watching the light glint of its silver surface.
“Up here in the City of Angels USA, magicians worry about good and evil. White magic versus black.”
