Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

“I will do you the honor of not pretending I don’t understand you,” Eli Powers said through his grandson’s mouth. “You’re the Genii of Las Vegas.”

“And you used to be Eli Powers,” Stewart said, and stuck his hand out.

With apparent equanimity, Powers shook it, then let his own hand fall to his side. “For my own use, later on —what gave me away?”

“Logic,” Stewart answered. He stepped forward, not close enough to impinge on Powers’s personal space but close enough to demand his attention. Making himself the spokesperson, taking the focus off me. That meant that he expected me to figure out what to do about Powers.

Did I mention that Stewart is the smart one?

He folded his hands in the small of his back, tipped his head like a saucy girl, and continued, “You’re a mnemophage. You’ve kept yourself alive all these years by eating up the memories of anyone you could trick into giving consent—and the memories of the city itself. Wives, children—you have a legal claim on them, don’t you, Eli? It’s enough to get a grip on them with sorcery. And Las Vegas itself—how much of it do you own, in your own name or through proxies?”

“Enough,” Eli said, smiling tightly. He looked interested—wouldn’t any narcissist, confronted with someone enumerating his accomplishments?—but unconcerned. I hoped that was dangerous arrogance on his part and not justified confidence.

Stewart didn’t glance at me. He took a step to the left, further dividing Eli’s attention. But I couldn’t rush him. Nothing physical would work under these circumstances; it would only earn us each a bullet.

Stewart clicked his tongue. His left hand, as if without his attention, made a dismissive flip. He said, “So did you just eat up Martin totally and move into his head like a hermit crab switching shells?”

The turn of phrase conjured up a horrible image, a pincered brain heaving itself from skull to skull, slimed with cerebrospinal fluid. I flinched, hard, and had to bite my cheek to get my face under control again. I edged my head sideways to catch Branka’s eye, hoping for inspiration, but she had her hand pressed against her mouth, gaze fixed on Powers. Her lips moved, shaping words. I don’t remember.

Eli smiled. It was a good smile—honest, interested. I would have voted for him.

“Martin made a very great sacrifice on my behalf,” he said, making it sound for all the world as if his grandson had given him a kidney or something. Branka’s hand reached out, clutched on my wrist. I can’t remember anything.

I cleared my throat, which was pretty dry right then, and said, “Let them go, Eli.”

Stewart started, so caught up in his performance he had forgotten what he was stalling for. He and Powers both swiveled. I squared my shoulders and said, “What you want from me is the city, isn’t it? You want Vegas to forget why it’s angry. You want it to remember only what’s best about you.” I breathed. “You want the love back, don’t you, Eli?”

He stared for a moment and then his lips pressed thin and he nodded. “We only want the same thing,” he said. “What’s best for Vegas. I’m glad you see that, Jackie.”

“Let them go,” I said. “And I’ll let you have it all.”

“You have my word of honor,” he said. “But you give me what I want first.”

I had to pull my hand out of Branka’s, though she clutched at my fingers like a child. Despite the air- conditioning, I rubbed slick palms on my trouser legs before I came forward to meet Powers. “Jackie,” Stewart said, “don’t—”

“Stewart. I got this. Really.”

He didn’t want to back down. Branka rocked on her heels, moaning softly, but I couldn’t help. There was no way to give her back what she’d lost, no way to make it easier for her. In the real world, there are no reset buttons, no epiphantic healings.

If I were a decent human being instead of a city, I’d have noticed her pain and done something about it years ago. But that’s not the way I operate, and I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do to make that change.

“What’s the deal?” Powers asked.

“I give you my memories of you,” I said. “And you let my friends go.”

“He won’t stop,” Branka insisted. I put the back of my hand against her upper arm.

“No tricks,” Powers said.

“No tricks,” I answered. “I have too much to lose.”

Odin got more for his eye than I did. But I got more than I deserved.

I lifted my eye patch up.

He didn’t recoil. I guess Eli Powers had seen worse things than a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He leaned forward, staring into my eye socket.

I saw him doubled, Martin’s face overlaid by the ghost-visage of Eli in my otherwise sight. He reached out and laid fingertips against the side of my face like Mr. Spock setting up for a mind meld. Branka pulled back, two wobbling steps, and I think Stewart would have grabbed Powers’s wrist if I hadn’t stopped him with an upraised hand.

“Take it,” I said, and waited to see what would follow.

There was no sensation, except where manicured fingernails scratched my cheek and the orbit of my eye. He squinted at me, and as he did so, I thought of Eli Powers, everything I knew about him, the names of his wives and children and casinos, the racketeering charges against Martin, the rumors of infidelity and Mafia involvement, the newspaper articles and photographs, the dog he had back in the sixties with the one lop ear.

The dog.

The dog with the white patch on his head.

Whose dog was that, anyway?

And then the churn and bubble, and I felt something else slip out of me. Jeff Soble, what was left of him, jumped between us like a bridging spark. When he hit, I saw Powers jerk, start for half a second before he recovered himself and gagged Soble down. The Babylon Casino. And then unrelated things. The Mirage tigers. The Zane Floyd shooting. Endless construction. Airplanes stacked twelve deep across a fight-night sky. A Sting concert with three-hundred-dollar tickets. What’s-her-name, the one who sang the theme from Titanic.

I fed him everything, everything I was, everything I knew. Everything about Las Vegas, city at the bottom a dead Ordovician sea. More than he could withstand. More than anything mortal could withstand, knowledge I had to die to contain. A kind of metaphysical judo, using his own strength against him, until I felt him try to pull away and fail, thrash like a gaffed fish.

Eli Powers was not used to fighting anything as old and deep and nasty as himself. But holding the deed to a dragon’s cave is not the same as owning the dragon. I clutched him and fed him my city until he choked on it. I made him Las Vegas. I made him me.

I fed him more and more—a kind of spiral, scraping, dizzying—and then when he could swallow no more, I reached down into him and made a fist and dragged it all back out again.

Stewart grabbed Powers by the hair and shoved him away.

“Stewart—” I moved to jump in front of him, to get my body between the men with the bullets and Stewart’s body. Suicide by gunman might be far enough from the intent of his gift to kill him outright. And I’m the one with the faultless luck. If one of us was going to be shot, I wanted it to be me.

He grabbed my shoulder and held me still. “Shh,” he said. “Look.”

I looked.

There was a man I didn’t recognize, pushing himself off the expensive carpeting with rug burns on his hands. Branka, arms wrapped over her cardigan, was still swaying side to side.

And a whole bunch of security guys, standing in a huddle, one gesticulating while the others listened. The quarterback glanced up, cut himself off, and at his gesture, the rest broke away. They approached sternly, but a little sideways, and I realized that they didn’t know where we had come from.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the one in front of me said, “but you can’t be here.”

Another man picked the strange guy up, stared at him with furrowed brow for a moment, and said, “Excuse me, may I see some identification, please?”