Whatever its original inspiration, though, the Museum of the Arts had been thoroughly revamped a few times, like in the nineteen-thirties and the early seventies, but only once since Yours Truly appeared on the scene in San Judas. That refurbishment of ten years or so back, which included the new wing so important to Donya Sepanta, had added an entire section on Western Asia to the Asian Arts display, including a huge Persian exhibit. I’d been to the place once or twice myself, before all this Anaita stuff came along, but had never noticed anything unusual about any of it, although the sculpture garden was famously odd—full of grotesque stuff Elizabeth A. Stanford brought back from Europe in the twenties, a modern-day magnet for goth tourists and other seekers of the weird.
• • •
I had been waiting in my cab in a parking lot on Bloch Drive for almost two hours, scribbling notes to myself and reading when I got bored. (It was a Jim Thompson book, in case you wondered.) I waited so long that I began to get worried visions of the Amazons and little Edie Parmenter being interrogated in some kind of sub-museum dungeon. I was about two minutes away from crashing into the museum like the U.S. Cavalry when I saw them trotting toward me along Campus Drive. They piled into the cab. Edie was the last and she looked a little pale.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Just drive, Mr. Dollar.”
Halyna opened her bag and spilled a bunch of maps and other tourist information onto the front seat beside me. “The guards don’t like us. They always watch us. We had to stay so long because then they think we are serious about being there.”
“Yeah, but did you find anything?”
“There’s something in there, Mr. Dollar,” said Edie from the back seat. “Something super strong! It kind of made me feel sick.” She made a face. “I can still almost taste it!”
“Taste it? What are you talking about? Did you guys spend the whole day in the food court?”
“There was food court?” asked Oxana.
“No, that’s just how it feels when I get near something powerful.” Edie rolled down the window, although it was getting dark outside and pretty cold. “Like . . . I don’t know, have you ever licked a battery?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss that with a minor,” I said. “Court order. Now, this powerful thing, Edie, did you see it?” I waited, engine idling, until the bored guard at Teller Gate finally decided to wave us through. “Is it in a case or something?” I was getting excited—maybe I wouldn’t have to arrange anything more complicated to recover Eligor’s horn than a smash-and-grab raid.
“ ’Fraid I can’t say, Mr. Dollar. I didn’t actually see anything. But I can tell you, there’s something down at the end of the Asia wing, and the energy is so scary. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that strong. I still feel like I kind of have a fever.”
On the way back to Edie’s place, north of downtown, she and the Amazons told me how they’d wandered around for a long time on the main floor, drawing pictures and making notes of various exhibits. When one of the guards had stopped to make conversation, they’d told him they were doing it for their college art history course.
“But it was in the Asia part on the third floor that I really started to notice something,” Edie said. “What is it, exactly, Mr. Dollar? I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
No, you probably haven’t, I thought. Even a sensitive as talented and in demand as our Edie wouldn’t have run across many authentic grand-ducal devil horns. “Better you don’t know. What did it feel like?”
“I’m not sure. Just . . . strong. The farther we went in that part of the museum, the stronger it got. I even asked Halyna and Oxana if they felt anything. I thought maybe somebody was, I don’t know, drilling the street outside or something. It made my teeth hurt.”
“And that’s all you could tell? Just that it was strong?”
“It got a lot stronger in the West Asia part, down at the end. That’s where it was so bad I couldn’t even stay there for long, but I couldn’t locate a source. I mean, there wasn’t anything that made the feeling, it was, like, all around.”
Which probably meant that, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the horn was hidden somewhere, maybe in one of the back rooms.
When we dropped Edie off, I slipped her an extra fifty as hazard pay. Bad enough exploiting a kid’s supernatural gifts without compounding the sin by underpaying her.
• • •
So, the museum. Donya Sepanta, aka Anaita, Angel of Moisture, was a regular visitor. She’d apparently met Eligor there when they were beginning their partnership—the partnership that led to all the crazy, dangerous stuff that had been happening to me in the last year. That partnership had resulted in the exchange—her feather for his horn. And now Edie Parmenter had told me that something extremely potent was hidden in the Asia Wing that Anaita had helped build. That meant the boring part was over. Now it was time to start thinking about how to rob a powerful angel of something she very much did not want to lose.
The thing was, though, after taking days to lay the groundwork properly, I really couldn’t afford to wait much longer, and my hurry didn’t have anything to do with the Christmas shopping season that had descended upon us, or the red, black, and green Kwanzaa banners hanging over the main streets of the Ravenswood district near Caz’s place. I’d started the snowball rolling and now it had a momentum of its own. I didn’t know how much longer I could stall my bosses with my “leave of absence”, and I had already alerted Anaita that I was onto her. Not to mention that the Black Sun Faction, if they’d been the ones who burglarized George (as I was pretty sure they were) knew that I was interested in Donya Sepanta and her doings and holdings. So it was now only a matter of time until one of these houses of cards I’d built caught an unexpected gust and collapsed.
• • •
I initiated Phase Two the day after the museum visit.
The Amazons had brought back Junior Burgers and onion rings, two things they had both developed a passion for, so I let them finish their lunch before announcing, “Okay, folks. We’re going out shopping again.”
“Frozen pizza,” said Halyna. “Here in America the frozen pizza is good. In Ukraine, only frozen, not really pizza.”
“I’m a little worried about you two and your dedication to the Scythian cause,” I said. “You seem to be spending a lot more time trying new kinds of junk food than recruiting little American Amazons.”
“We not recruit,” said Oxana seriously. “Only take who come to us.”
“And it is a long walk to our camp in the mountains,” said Halyna, chomping on an onion ring. “Most turn back. That way we know they are not true Scythians.”
I wasn’t sure I’d want to hike through the cold, snowy Carpathians with only a vague hope that there would be friendly folk waiting for me in the woods somewhere, but I wasn’t going to argue with them. “Anyway—no, we are not buying more frozen pizza already. It’s not my fault you bought those horrible yuppie ones you don’t want to eat now. There are many things that do not belong on pizza, and Kung Pao chicken, squid, and tandoori lamb are three of them. No, don’t argue. Today we’re shopping for weapons.”
This proved to be even more popular than buying pizzas. Since we were going to Orban’s I didn’t even bother to suggest the Amazons change clothes. In fact, I was interested to see what the bearded militia-types who worked there would make of my young Ukrainian friends and their lesbian-anarcho-feminist punkitude. After I’d loaded the stuff I wanted to take with me into the trunk, the women piled into the back seat of the taxi. I sat in the front. For the fortieth or fiftieth time, I refused to play Lady Gaga—I’d finally found a jazz station I could get on the cab’s ancient radio—so they sang “Poker Face” the whole way, loud enough to drown out Oscar Peterson and the rest completely.
Because Amazons are assholes.