“What I don’t like,” Cicereau said—leaning forward and pointing at me with the kind of big, dark, stinky cigar familiarly called “a wolf turd”—“is that girly high-pitched yammering whining like a bitch in heat all through my hotel. Her you get rid of, and I don’t care how. Right?”
“Cicereau seems a bit confused about his CinSims,” I pointed out after I’d washed off the cigar stink in the entry-area powder room and joined Sansouci in the hall outside the kingpin’s suite.
“Cicereau hires people to know about things that confuse him.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked.
“Only after sex,” he joked. “Listen. Just do the job and don’t overthink ole Cesar. He doesn’t.”
“Listen,” I answered, leaning my hands on a brass railing related to the one I’d almost been tossed off earlier. “That woman has the purest, clearest vocal tone I’ve ever heard and is on perfect key. You can’t say it doesn’t move you. If I could sing like that—”
“If you could sing like that you’d be on Cicereau’s death list.” Sansouci looked up. “Besides, your job is to send her back where she came from. She’ll still be singing somewhere.”
I sighed. “I probably can do that, but something’s wrong about Cicereau’s SinCims purchases. Can you get me some info off Groggle?”
“Me? Look up something for
“I’ll write it down for you. If you can read.”
“I can read you. You’re pretty desperate.” He handed me a pencil stub and a Gehenna matchbook from the Hell’s Kitschen Lounge.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I need a full report—pronto, puppy—from you on these two names, just like you were a private dick.”
“I sort of am,” he said with a gigolo gleam.
“I’ll warn you that they’re dead guys.”
“Bros.” The undercover daylight vampire nodded sagely as he pocketed his makeshift notebook. “This’ll be an intriguing change of pace.”
“And I’ll need to know all about who they were, on and off the silver screen.”
“You want a freaking book?”
“I think I’ve read part of it, but I need more. You know how to print out from online, don’t you? You just flex your fingers and hit PRINT .”
“Five-finger exercises are second nature to me. Where’ll you be?”
“In the deepest pit backstage of the hotel theater, entertaining the creep who set
Was I aching for a reunion with the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hell, no! I was hoping for a rendezvous with the Phantom of the Opera, though.
That was who had drawn the mysterious voice down from CinSim heaven.
I might welcome a bit of Internet intervention and detailed info from Sansouci … who would make an admirable private secretary, but I’d basically determined that the Gehenna’s troubles were due to the eternal triangle. Man, woman … man.
You just had to picture the key elements as monsters, movie monsters.
Meanwhile, I was developing as extreme an allergy to sopranos as Cesar Cicereau. That we should have something in common was disgusting.
I had barely arrived back on the main floor, when Sansouci put the make on me again.
“Your printout, madam.”
“That’s an iTouchOften screen.”
“Works for me.”
I reached for it, but he held it behind his back, as if in a game.
“This really means something to you,” he charged. “Not just the what and the how, the assignment and the pay, but the who and the why.”
“Maybe. I doubt an ancient vampire like you could understand.”
“Maybe if you knew my what and how and who and why, you would.”
“Maybe that’s a too unhuman place for me to go.”
He considered, then shrugged.
“How do exploring the dark, deep crevices of the human heart, soul, and mind work for you?” I asked.
“My ’hood.”
“Forgive me if I don’t think that you have the depth.”
“Try me.”
I needed an assistant. I could use some muscle and I could provide the missing “soul.”
“Is that main-floor maze through the woods populated by anything but naive tourists?” I asked.
“Cicereau was aiming at a walkway of fairy-tale victims.”
“Fairy-tale victims?”
“You know. Toothsome females in supine positions, like Sleeping Beauty.”
“And Snow White in her crystal coffin?” I wondered.
Sansouci grimaced. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad on him as it did on the Hunchback. “She had that Lilith look he likes.”
“My double. Right. That’s why he hires me: look, but no need to touch. Just use me to save his ass.”
“It’s a job,” Sansouci consoled. “Like mine.”
“There are jobs and there are jobs. Are you willing to walk Little Red Riding Hood through the woods?”
“This hokey ‘attraction’? If it will stop that woman ghost upstairs from howling, sure.”
“She gets to you too?”
“Nothing gets to me.”
“We’ll see.”
The woodland walk was too new to attract many tourists. No gaming, no glitz. We were alone.
“You realize,” Sansouci said after a while, “you’re Little Red, and I’m the Wolf.”
“Not this time. And don’t let my devoted wolfhound know that.”
“He’s not here.”
“He could be in two seconds flat,” I said with a grin.
Just then we heard a fierce canine growling in the woods. I shrugged complacently before rushing toward it. Sansouci held back a bit.
The growling ended with a piercing wail of surprised pain that rose up in a weird chorus with the ghostly soprano.
I crashed thorough the carefully planted underbrush to find a blunt-featured, perfectly respectable middle- aged man writhing on the forest floor.
“It bit me!” he cried. Then he spotted me. “Oh, are you all right, miss? You haven’t been bitten too? I tried to divert the wolf from hurting you.” He glowered over my shoulder at Sansouci.
I was no longer the accused witch Esmeralda outside of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, but the werewolf-threatened young woman Larry Talbot had saved from a werewolf bite in the forest, making himself the werewolf-to-be.
I knelt beside him, another CinSim, yet still wounded in spirit and fact. “I’m fine,” I told him. “You saved me. What’s your name?”
The distant trills above made him gaze up through the canopy of leaves. “What beautiful music I hear. It’s like a lullaby.”
“You mustn’t fall asleep,” I said, shaking him. “Concentrate. What’s your name?”
“Name? Creighton. No, Larry now. Not Creighton. I was walking in the wood to visit the Gypsy camp and saw you. An enormous wolf was threatening to bite you.”
“You stopped it,” I reassured him.
