'I doubt that. Now, let's get back to the matter at hand. You were trying to convince us that you know nothing whatsoever about this Tesserax business.'
'But I really don't!' the demon wailed. 'That's the truth, my old canine buddyboy, the bitter truth. I was approached by Mr. Willard Aimes and Mr. Holagosta Mur, the chief of the maseni embassy in Los Angeles; they solicited my aid in waylaying Mr. Blake.'
'They didn't tell you why they wanted this done?'
'No, they didn't. I assumed that it had to do with the Tesserax affair, considering what they had already done to Gayla.'
'She really was transferred to Japan?'
'Yes.'
Brutus thought for a moment, then said, 'Okay, I'll believe you, so far as the Tesserax business is concerned. I doubt they did tell you anything. But you must know what they've done to Jessie, since you helped to engineer it.'
'My job was to get him into the bathroom,' the demon said. 'I arranged that by buying the first bottle of wine at dinner and by being sure that, beforehand, it was doctored with a bladder exciter.'
'Who was waiting for him in the men's room?' Brutus asked.
Kanastorous hesitated, then said, 'I don't know, Brutus. They didn't tell me about that; they only wanted me to be sure he went in there.'
'You're lying.'
'I swear I'm not!'
'A demon's word…'
'My part was to serve the doctored wine, which would not affect me or you, but which would send Jessie to the urinal.'
The hound walked across the large circle again and blew out a second candle, watched as the demon jerked back and forth, clutched his head and chest and stomach…
'I'm glad you did that,' Helena said. 'I was about to take the initiative myself.'
Kanastorous went to his knees inside the smaller circle and, in a few minutes, had recovered sufficiently to speak, though he could not regain his feet. 'This is despicable,' he hissed. 'This is the most barbaric thing I can imagine.'
'Come, come, Zeke,' Brutus said. 'We worked together in Hell for fifty years, remember? I've seen you perform more barbaric acts a thousand times — and usually on defenseless virgins.'
'That was before the laws!' the demon groaned.
'Five black candles and seven white,' Brutus said. 'Now, if you don't tell me what I want to know inside the next minute, I'll blow out a third black taper.' He paused for dramatic effect and said, 'Who was waiting in the men's room for Jessie?'
'Medusa,' Kanastorous said.
'Come again?' the hound growled.
'The woman who has snakes on her head, instead of hair, the one who can turn a man to stone with her gaze. She lives here in L.A. now. Haven't you heard of her?'
'I have!' Helena said. 'She's the one with the awful taste in clothes — and she always wears those mirrored sunglasses to keep from turning all her friends to stone.'
'That's the woman,' the demon said.
'She's always at some art show or concert,' Helena said. 'You see her picture in the papers and on television, usually on the arm of the maseni embassy big shots.'
'Yes, yes,' Kanastorous said, eager to please them. 'The maseni are fascinated by those snakes she has for hair — probably because the snakes are so similar to their own tentacles.'
'This Medusa woman was waiting for Jessie in the men's room of the Four Worlds?' Brutus asked.
'She was, yes.'
'And she turned him to stone?'
'Yes.'
'Isn't that as good as killing him?'
'It was only a temporary transformation,' Kanastorous said. 'As I understand it, there are ways to bring him back to life.'
'Well, when I went in that restroom,' Brutus said, 'there wasn't any statue that looked like Jessie. Where'd they take him?'
Kanastorous looked up beseechingly, not unlike a Christian in the act of prayer, gazing to the expectant heavens as he kneels. 'You must believe that they didn't tell me.'
Brutus shook his burly head slowly back and forth. 'No, I don't have to believe anything of the sort.'
'But they really didn't!'
The hound got off his haunches and moved slowly back to the row of candles. 'What will it be like for you, Zeke, if I extinguish yet another of the black ones?'
'You wouldn't, my old hairy-muzzled friend.' The demon grinned a sickeningly pleading grin.
Brutus sighed and leaned toward the nearest of the flames, sucking in new breath with which to blow it out
'I'll tell! I'll tell!' the demon cried.
'No tricks.'
'No tricks,' Kanastorous agreed.
'Where'd they take Jessie?'
'To Millennium City,' the demon rasped.
'That new shopping mall over in West Los Angeles?' Helena asked, getting to her feet.
'That's right,' Kanastorous said.
Brutus grunted. 'Why take him there?'
'It had a perfect hiding place,' the demon said.
'But those stores are open twenty-four hours a day,' Helena said. 'They're robotically operated; they have customers at any hour. I don't see how they could have carted Jessie in there and hidden him.'
'Millennium City is a fancy place,' the demon said, still on his knees, black sweat on his scaly brow. 'It has an art museum, a legitimate theater, fountain displays and a sculpture garden for the enlightenment of the patrons.'
'So?' Brutus asked.
'They put Jessie in the sculpture garden, with the other statues. They intend to keep him there until the Tesserax crisis — whatever it is — passes.'
Chapter Eight
Millennium City was a 200-store shopping mall, most of it under a single roof, with indoor pedwalks, indoor and outdoor parks, fountains, convention facilities, hotels, more fountains, amusement centers, free theaters and museums, robot guides to help you find your way, a three hundred million credit wonder that had been completed only a year before. It was staffed exclusively by robots and was efficiently run, enormously profitable.
Only ten years earlier, it could never have been built — and not only because maseni technology was required to construct it. Ten years ago, the city of Los Angeles simply would not have had the room, in the heart of its west side, to contain such a lavish, three-hundred-acre structure. Then, there had been too many people, too much crowding. Now, a decade after the maseni landing on Earth, the city was only half as populated as it had been. Forty-five percent of the city's people had gone starkers and ended up in homes for Shockies. Many of these, in the following ten years, either took their own lives or died from too long in a catatonic trance. For the most part, the Shockies were those who were already hopelessly at odds with their times; they were, in many cases, those who ignored the warnings of ecologists and continued to have large families, polluting the Earth with excess flesh. Removed from the mating cycle, they no longer contributed to the population boom. Those who adapted to the
