He seemed startled. “None that I am aware of. Except, what you were saying-in hand-to-hand combat, one does not have the advantage of distance.” He smiled again, eyes warming. “Ah, you thought I was lecturing you, yes?”
“No, I … Okay, yeah.” Fibbing to Doc was a waste of effort.
“Do I need to lecture you about such things, boi baba?” “Trust me,” I said, “you don’t.”
His smile vanished. He nodded and turned his gaze back up to the rooftops, leaving me to wonder what the hell I’d missed.
Enid led us now, working us toward Howard Russo’s offices on Polk Street. He pointed out landmarks along the way. Everything he said began with the words “That used to be.” It was weird. Everything used to be; nothing was now.
As if he picked up my train of thought, Enid wondered aloud where all his musician buddies were now, and what had happened to all the blues clubs. “The New Checkerboard Lounge,” he said, as if the name tasted good. “That’s where I met Howard. That was my first real solo gig. My whole family’s musical. Pop was a lead guitarist-a session man; Mom was a singer; big brother Carson’s in New Orleans now. I gotta wonder…” He didn’t finish the thought, but we all knew what he wondered.
“Sounds as if you were born into a ready-made band,” said Cal.
“It was that. We was all into session work. Pop got me my first paying gigs. Backup, mostly, for pros. Man, I just sat there and made like a sponge, soaking up everything they did. I even got to sit in at the CBF a couple of times.”
“The CBF?” Cal repeated.
“Chicago Blues Festival,” said Goldie. He was dressed head-to-toe in black today, except for the paisley vest. Looked kind of like a cartoonist’s idea of a Wild West gunslinger-without the gun. We were all watching him pretty closely, but if he’d gotten any news from Source Radio, he wasn’t telling.
“Yeah,” said Enid. “I didn’t get to strut or nothin’-side-men pretty much got to stay in the pocket-but I promised myself I’d go back someday as a headliner. That Checkerboard gig was my first step down that road. Dead-end road now. Anyway, Howie was there that first night. We hooked up and he started getting me gigs. Kinda weird, actually. When you meet Howie, you’ll see what I mean. He don’t come across like he’d be that jazz savvy. He’s more like a- like a lawyer or something. No offense,” he told Cal, grinning.
“Oh, uh-none taken.”
“But I gotta admit, he knew his way around the scene.” He shook his head, dreadlocks swinging. “I sure can’t feature him doing this to me. Trying to control my music and all. Trying to twist it.”
“People change,” Cal said.
Big T chose that moment to step on a manhole cover, his hoof sending up a dull clang that made me jump in the saddle. I thought of Rory and wondered whose front door I’d just knocked on. Nervous, I checked the lengthening shadows between the buildings. Things scurried back there. Things larger than the average rat. The sky was a dull orange-red where the sun hung. I wondered if maybe the Change went all the way out to the sun, all the way to the stars, all the way to heaven.
I dragged my mind back to where and when we were. The diamonds on the sidewalks had turned to topazes, and would soon become garnets. “How much farther, Enid?” I asked. “Are we going to make it by sunset?”
“Well, we’re on Division,” he said. “If we get up on the Kennedy, we might be able to move a little faster.”
We’d been avoiding the major thoroughfares up till now. I looked to Cal. “What do you think?”
He glanced around at the littered streets and the shadows that crawled across them. The hand that rested on his sword hilt looked relaxed only at first glance. “This isn’t a place I’d like to be when the sun goes down. Up there we’d be pretty safe from ambush, theoretically.”
“Except from the air.” Leave it to Goldman to remind us of how impossibly weird our situation was.
“Here there be dragons?” Cal asked, echoing his skyward squint.
“I haven’t seen any,” said Magritte. She’d been flying point about seven feet up, but now dropped onto Jayhawk’s burnished rump. Not taking any chances.
“It’s hard to see anything with this haze.” Cal turned to Enid. “How do we get onto the freeway?”
We fell in behind our Bluesman again, our horses moving up Division at a brisk walk, their unshod hooves making a muted clatter on the weather-rough asphalt. Checking back along the line, I saw we had a straggler. I swung Big T around, slipped up behind Doc’s mare, and smacked her on the butt with my reins. She snorted and moved out smartly.
Not a peep. Doc merely took the horse a little more in hand.
“You’re awfully droopy,” I told him. “What happened to the old ox?”
He glanced at me, met my eyes for all of two tenths of a second, then looked away to scan the alleys and empty cars. “I’m introspecting.”
“Sounds serious. Are you sure it’s good for you?”
His smile was weak. “Probably not.”
“And what are we introspecting about?”
He just shook his head. A private man, our dear Dr. Lysenko.
“My daddy told me that the ‘Russkies’ had raised pessimism to an art form. ’Zat so?”
He shot me a startled look, then laughed. “Do not judge all ‘Russkies’ by this one.”
“Why not? If all Russians were you, my elementary school wouldn’t have come equipped with a bomb shelter.”
He ignored that. “Your father seems to have had strong opinions about Russians.”
“My father had strong opinions about a lot of things.” “Like father like daughter.”
I grinned at him. “Thank you. Now, just so you know, my opinion about this particular ‘Russkie’ is that he ought to stop introspecting and…” I hesitated, looking for some nice safe words. “… and start paying attention to what’s going on around him.” (And if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black…)
A smile deepened the creases at the corners of his mouth. “Da, glavah,” he said.
Oh, joy, another nickname. “What’s that mean-gla-vah?” “I said, ‘Yes, Chief.’ ”
Oh, don’t go there, I thought. “My father called me that, Viktor,” I told him. “You’re not my father.”
He looked as if I’d slapped him.
Damn. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it-” He raised a hand to stop me. “I understand, Colleen,” he said, and kicked his horse into a trot.
“No, you don’t,” I murmured, then clucked at Big T and hurried to rejoin the train.
The Kennedy Expressway was clotted with abandoned cars, many of which had been stripped of tires, hubcaps, even window glass and seats. Fortunately, the Change had struck before the Chicago rush hour, or the road would have been an impassable maze. As it was, we were able to move at a trot or better if we single-filed it down the center line. It was windier up here, which wasn’t dangerous in and of itself, but made the horses a little crazy.
We’d been on the freeway for a while and had just swung southeast into an intricate cloverleaf when Magritte let out a cry of alarm. We all looked up at her, then followed the thrust of her arm eastward.
“Oh, God,” said Goldman. “What’s that?”
That was a filmy bubble of something rising over what I took to be downtown Chicago. It looked like a dome from one of those futuristic movies about the colonization of Mars, but it seemed semiliquid, like a soap bubble. A rainbow of color oozed over the scarlet-tinted surface.
“Man, that wasn’t there when we left,” said Enid. “Looks like it’s sitting right over the Loop.”
Magritte had floated upward again, bit by bit. Now she settled onto Jayhawk behind Goldie, rubbing her upper arms and shaking her head. “That don’t feel right. That’s bad.”
Cal reined Sooner closer-intense, face all angles, eyes bright and sharp. “Goldie, talk to me. What’s happening? What are you hearing?”