I have to stay cool and not jump up in a panic, which isn’t easy. I just have to look like I don’t have a clue.
“What’s this clown want?” Anthony grumbles, and all his boys go stiff, perking up like hunting dogs at a duck pond.
And just then the singer hits a high note, crazy high, rattling the glasses on the tables and setting my heart pounding. We all can’t help but look on in admiration as she holds that note with full lungs, arms wide, eyes closed, and head tipped back, like she’s singing the world into being.
The Fed stops, listens, drifts to a table close to the stage, sinks into the chair like he’s caught in quicksand. The singer’s voice falls back into the chorus and she smiles sweetly at her brand-new greatest admirer.
I catch M winking at the singer. Yeah, M always knows what she’s doing.
The game continues. Anthony’s boys relax a notch, except for the cigarette girl’s guy, who’s still watching the door, and Anthony just shakes his head. Not too much longer after that, M touches her earring, adjusts her headband, and strokes the plume across her hair. Time to light the fuse. So I slip a couple of extra aces into my hand. Which I fold. When the hand ends, the dealer sweeps up the cards, shuffles, and deals them out again.
No one ever thinks to accuse me of palming cards, because where the hell would I hide them in this outfit, with all this bare skin?
“Boys,” I say, gathering the rest of my winnings, arranging them neatly, fastidiously, “I want to thank you for a lovely time of it, but I’ve got to go. I hope you’re not offended.” I blush and bat my eyes, and they can’t argue because I haven’t done anything to offend them. I haven’t cleaned them out. I haven’t damaged their pride too terribly much.
“Pauline. Darling. You are welcome at my table anytime.” Anthony spreads his arms like he always does. I lean in and kiss his cheek, and his compatriots at the table glare bullets at him. Smiling sweetly over my shoulder, I return to Madame M.
“Well, I was starting to wonder if we could pull this off,” she says.
I scowl. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re both on the same page now.”
“You’ll thank me for putting the whammy on the Fed, just wait.”
She nods at the card game. “About five minutes, before they figure it out?”
“About.”
“I’m going to go powder my nose. Hold down the fort?”
“I always do.”
In about five minutes, right when we called it, the first of the players shouts, “Hey, what are you trying to pull?” Loud enough that everyone in Blue Moon looks over.
“What do you mean, what am I trying to pull, what are you trying to pull?”
“You can’t have three aces, because I have three aces!”
“Boys, boys!” Anthony hollers, but it’s too late. Anthony follows the rules, so they’ve left their guns outside, but that doesn’t stop one of the players from tipping over the table when another guy takes a swing at him. Cards and chips and bills go flying, then skitter across the floor. The bodyguards and hangers-on rush in, trying to protect Anthony, who’s already taken one on the jaw.
All except Tommy, who’s smarter than he looks because he’s gotten out of the way. M moves to his side and whispers in his ear. He follows her to the front of the club, and I might have been the only one to see them go.
I move to the back of the club and try to be invisible, but I’m not as good at it as M is. A dancer screams as the fight spills onto the floor, and the band is back, playing in an only partially effective distraction. A couple of guys look on eagerly, crack their knuckles, and smile wide enough to show inhuman fangs. They’d enjoy a fight, and they’d win, oh yes.
I know better than to ask for trouble, so I sit on the bar, out of the way. But I have to move when the zombie bartender starts wiping down the surface around me.
M joins me, and we’re watching the proceedings, along with a few other creatures of the night. I’ve got a bottle in hand, an empty that the zombie bartender missed, just in case.
“Everything cool?” I ask M, and she smiles, and I imagine the cigarette girl and Tommy are on a bus for the coast. Good luck to them.
“Nice bit of entertainment,” she observes, and I beam.
The Fed only has eyes for the singer and doesn’t seem to notice the whole place falling into an uproar around him. The singer has moved to sit at the edge of his table, still crooning, and twining a strand of his hair around her finger. She’s somehow gotten a drink in her hand and offers it to the Fed, who takes a grateful, enamored sip. We won’t have to worry about him for the rest of the evening.
“You know she’s a siren, yeah?” M says, watching this play out.
“I sure do,” I say.
She grins. “And that I wouldn’t trust that drink as far as I could spit it?”
“Oh, I know.” The Fed’s sipping down his bootleg whiskey like he’s in heaven and thinking the siren’s singing just for him.
“He wasn’t going to cause any trouble, you know,” she says. “Not tonight, anyway.”
“No, I didn’t know.” She just shakes her head.
One of the heavies slams up against the bar, and I crack the bottle over his head because it’s a classic move and I can’t resist. The bottle breaks, pieces of glass rain down like bells, and the lunk of a guy slides to the floor, unconscious. Very satisfying.
There’s a wrestling mob in the middle of Blue Moon now, accompanied by otherworldly growls, and a few more people seem to be sporting fur than did before, and some of those fangs might be dripping blood now, and it’s a bit more than I’d anticipated, and I’m thinking it’s time to get M out of here.
Then, a glass chiming like the sound of icicles rings over it all. The sound should be subtle, but it’s rattling, and the whole place pauses, time stopping. The fistfights cease, the punches stop landing, chairs are raised over heads but don’t come down, and everyone turns to the beaded curtain. A woman stands there, pushing back the strings of beads with an ebony cigarette holder, studying the place through long lashes. She’s wearing a red silk dress like a second skin, her hip cocked out, arms crossed, and she’s got a thing about her, like once you see her you can’t look past her. And once she sees you, you’re trapped because she knows everything about you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And everyone, even the singer, even Anthony, even me, looks away, chagrined, knowing we’ve stepped out of bounds. Everyone looks away but the Fed, who’s put his face down on the table and seems to be weeping, and M, who looks right back at her.
It’s all over. At some signal, the gorilla bouncer and a couple of his buddies wade in and start throwing people out, including Anthony and his boys. The gangster is shouting that he doesn’t know what happened and he had nothing to do with it, but it doesn’t matter. He never even notices that his kid Tommy is gone. When he does notice, he might even figure out that me and M had something to do with it. But he won’t be able to do a thing about it. Besides, there’s a hundred kids where Tommy came from and revenge isn’t good for business.
Once the trouble is gone, the waiters rush in to sweep up glass and set tables upright, and I realize why I’ve had such a hard time keeping track—there are three, identical triplets or something else. They move in a coordinated routine without speaking, like they can read one another’s minds, zipping through the place, so efficient because they can do triple the work. How do you like that?
Across the tables and past the waiters cleaning up broken glasses and spilled drinks, the woman in red meets M’s gaze, and a long moment passes. I hold my breath and wait, heart thudding, because I don’t know what’s going to happen, how this is going to play out, who’s going to look away first and what it’ll mean. All M wants to know: Will Gigi talk to her? Gigi isn’t giving anything away.