“Those are very abstract words.”
M says, “We can pool resources, double protections around us and ours, and the vultures—like Anthony Margolis and that Fed—won’t be able to touch us. How’d that Fed even get in here tonight, hmm? It isn’t like you, Gigi, to let a crack open up in your armor.”
Gigi tries not to fidget, but her legs straighten and recross, and she looks at M with such contempt. “He’s nothing. Didn’t take much to take care of him, did it?” She looks at me, her smile cruel.
How hard it is to keep quiet. I bite my tongue and try to watch every square inch of the room for the thing that will leap out and bite us.
There’s a phonograph in the corner, sitting on a little mahogany table. Its scalloped bell is turned out to the room, like it should be, but there’s no record on the platter, and no needle on the arm, which means it’s doing something else other than playing records. The skin on my neck crawls a bit, thinking of what else it might be doing.
“This thing that’s coming,” M says, trying one more time. “It’s not magical. It’s not the vampires or the sirens or anything. It’s economic. It’s the businessmen, the bankers and stockbrokers and money people who’ll bring it all down. People like you, who think you’re safe, and that nothing’s ever going to change. What’ll you do, Gigi, when everything changes?”
“Why are you so worried about me?” Gigi says, as if amazed.
“Why not?”
“I can take care of myself. You should take care of yourself, instead of worrying about people who don’t need your help.” She takes another drag on the cigarette, lets it out in a cloud through her round mouth. Just like M might do. M studies the woman in red for a long moment, and Gigi won’t notice the sadness there because she isn’t looking. She leans over to tap off her ashes into a glass dish.
Then suddenly she looks up, concerned for no reason that I can see. M hasn’t done anything different, and I haven’t moved an inch. But she’s looking over M’s shoulder, through the beaded curtain to the dining room, which is silent. The band’s stopped playing, voices have stopped humming, not even glasses clink against each other, and now I’m worried too. I don’t need any extra sense to tell that the whole pattern of the place has changed, and it’s got to be worse than I think for Gigi to be looking like that.
There’s a gunshot, a body falling to the floor with a thud.
M rushes to the curtain to see, and I follow, ready to push her back into safety. It should be me walking first into the trouble, and why does she always have to see what’s happening? Gigi pauses a moment to pull back the slit panel of her skirt and retrieve the pistol held in a garter, and that’s when I know it’s bad, worse than bad.
M pushes back the curtains and we all see the tableau as it happens, the five or ten guys in suits and fedoras pulled low over their heads storming into the place, all armed and ready for battle like soldiers in the Great War. Some with tommy guns, some with shotguns, one guy with a revolver. All led by him, the arrogant Fed who’s got his raid, just like he promised. Must have sobered up after he got thrown out—and he remembered, too bad. Must have stuck wax in his ears to get past the siren, and sure enough, I see them all with cotton sticking out of their ears. Had to hand it to the guy, he might not have held all the cards but he was figuring out the game all the same. But he should have waited until he had the whole thing figured out, and not just part of it. Footsteps pound, a woman screams.
The gorilla manning the door is lying dead on the floor, and the Fed must be using silver bullets to be able to kill him. That’s why no one’s taken him out.
“Everybody freeze!” the Fed hollers.
It’s like some scene out of a moving picture, and I imagine everyone’s getting shot and dying, reaching up, trembling dramatically as the bullets hit them, collapsing in ways that no one ever does in life but people in the pictures must think looks good. Can’t see the blood splatter in the pictures, or maybe they just haven’t figured out how to fake that yet.
I grab M’s arm to pull her out of the way, just as Gigi pushes past us, maybe to get a better look. I don’t care if she gets shot, but I have to get M out of here.
Everyone’s staring, frozen just like the Fed asked. Gigi and all her people all stare, the band and singer, and even the zombie bartender, because this isn’t supposed to happen. Blue Moon is supposed to be safe, and if Feds can raid the place that’s supposed to be invisible, then what else can they do? It’s like a little bit of magic going out of the world.
M puts her hand over mine, smiles at me, with an unspoken command: Wait. She’s crazy, or she’s got a plan, and because it’s M, it’s got to be a plan, so I wait.
“Everybody, down on the floor! Flat on the floor! This is a raid!” He sounds so pleased, like he’s won a battle. His men spread out through the room.
From across the room, the Fed looks right at me like I’ve done him some specific wrong. He’s too far away for me to reach, for me to do anything but frown at him. I’ve got all kinds of thoughts, though, about snatching that gun right out of his hand and maybe kicking in his kneecaps. I clench my hands and glare, for all the good it does.
M leans close to Gigi and says, “Didn’t see this coming, did you?”
“Did you?” Gigi spits back.
M looks at me, and I smile.
She walks past Gigi onto the dance floor. Now all gazes fall on her. She has drawn every last bit of attention just by moving, and I want to scream, because here and now attention isn’t a good thing—every Fed in the place turns his gun to her, and fingers move to triggers. But she knows what she’s doing, she always knows.
Raising her arm, she makes a gesture, fingers bent in a pattern that looks simple but no one could ever replicate. Looking right at the Fed, she waves her other arm to encompass them all, and it’s like the air goes thin and sound fails. There’s a pop in my ears, like sinuses clearing after a bad cold, and the Fed’s rage-filled snarl freezes. Trigger fingers are still, the gunmen stand still, and no one even blinks. They are more still than stone because the stillness of stone is natural, and this is something else.
The others in the room, the band and singer, the waiters and patrons and gangsters look at one another as if confirming this is a dream, and brush themselves off like they’ve been in a storm. They start moving around, studying the gunmen, who are nothing more than obliging statues.
“I’m just doing what the guy asked.” M brushes her hands like she’s wiping off dust, but I know they’re spotless. The Fed can’t do a damn thing now, when she walks up to him and starts patting down his jacket and trouser pockets. I can almost see the protest in his watering eyes, though.
It’s the jacket’s inside pocket where she finds the spell book, a drab little thing with a red cover, worn edges, and a broken spine, like it’s been sitting in some attic for a century or two, just like you’d expect an old lost spell book to look. M scans the first couple of pages, smirks.
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “You had talent, to get this far. You could have made something of yourself. But you thought you could pick this up and aim it like a gun. Well, it doesn’t work like that. Pauline?”
I step forward at her call. She hands me the book, and I put it in my clutch. We’ll get rid of it later.
“You can clean this up?” Madame M asks Gigi.
Gigi purses her lips. She might be thinking a million things and won’t say any of them. She might be shocked at what M could do on Gigi’s own territory, but she won’t show it. Even after this, Gigi still doesn’t know how much power M really has. She so rarely shows off.
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll clean ’em up and throw ’em out.” She nods, and the triplet waiters go around to all the goons, depriving them of their weapons. However much we all might want to make the whole crowd of them disappear, most likely Gigi will just obfuscate their memories and throw them in some far-off alley where they can’t bother her anymore. She’ll find a new guard for the door.