Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

“All I can think of, Dan, is that he was talking about your father.”

A staticky silence filled the line.

“I think he meant that he’ll be waiting for your father in the next life.”

Dan cleared his throat. His words trembled. “He doesn’t have to wait. Pop died last night.”

My heart fell. “I’m sorry, Dan.”

“It’s like they decided to leave together. And they hadn’t said a word to each other in six years.”

We signed off shortly after that. Dan thanked me and offered again to pay for my services. Like the sap I’d become, again I said no.

The Pope came in with a bowl of beer nuts. “This is the only breakfast I can rustle up.”

I thanked him and tossed a couple into my mouth. I’d been up all night. The cops had found Baird in a Panther Room booth, unconscious, blood from his nose spilling down the front of his red gambling-house suit, both eyes swollen shut. When I’d found him there half an hour before the cops, spending the forty bucks — my forty bucks — that he’d taken off Tommy as Tommy lay dying, he’d been celebrating like it was his first day of freedom. Instead, it was his last. None of the patrons in the Panther Room could recall seeing who had given Baird such a beating. It turns out that on skid row the price for silence is a round of drinks. And I still managed to walk out with ten bucks and change.

But I can’t shake the fact that Tommy’s death was my fault. When Reason had left me behind on the sidewalk in front of the Palms with Lana, it hadn’t walked away alone. It had taken a life with it. I’d had the sense that Tommy had needed some time, but I was convinced he was coming around. Had I stuck to my job, I would have been with Tommy when Baird knocked on the door, or we might even have already been on our way to the depot and the next train to Glenwood. To his father. I would have at least been in a position to intercept Baird’s knife. Maybe even to have taken the fatal blow.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

I never told Dan that I’d been ten minutes late.

The Pope walked over to the Lost Wall and pointed at the picture he’d taken of Tommy Parrish five years ago.

“I guess I can take this one down.” He started to pull out the thumbtack that pinned it to the wall.

“Wait,” I said as I got to my feet and came up next to him. “Leave it up.”

The Pope looked at me.

I looked at Tommy’s picture, his eyes the color of slate. The color of hope that has died. “I don’t think he was ever really found.”

The Pope lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Fair enough.” He looked at Tommy and the rest of the faces on the Lost Wall. “Wordsworth.”

Then he headed back out to the bar to a jukebox that was stuck repeating the same two notes like the incessant chirping of an early morning bird. I heard the Pope give the machine a kick. The song picked up again several notes later.

I stared at the Lost Wall. Stared at all the skid-row faces. So different from the ones that haunted me from Dachau, yet so much the same.

Hollow faces with leaden gray eyes.

Lost faces.

The kind that can only be found in dreams.

© 2008 by C. J. Harper

Simon Levack’s writing career was launched when he won the Crime Writers Association of Britain’s Debut Dagger Award. The book introduced his series character Yaotl, an Aztec slave. Yaotl now appears in a fourth novel entitled Tribute of Death , published in 2007 by Lulu Enterprises UK. What a treat that this series, which the Guardian calls “always gripping and surprising,” now includes short stories.

* * * *

The Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits was a part of the midwinter Festival of the Raising of Banners, a time when we Aztecs honoured our war god, Huitztilopochtli, the Hummingbird of the South. While warrior captives were having their hearts torn out in front of the war god’s temple at the top of the Great Pyramid, a more genial ritual was being enacted nearby, in honour of the gods of sacred wine.

The priest named Two Rabbit presided over the temple of the god whose name he bore. He called together dancers, young men from the Houses of Tears, the priests’ training schools. Each dancer represented one of the four hundred lesser gods of sacred wine, the Four Hundred Rabbits.

The task of organising the proceedings fell to Two Rabbit’s deputy, Patecatl. It was his job to set up the jars of sacred wine that were at the heart of the ceremony and to lay out drinking straws ready for the dancers at the end of their performance. For the climax of the dance was the moment when their graceful, sinuous movements broke up and they fell greedily upon the jars and the drinking straws, every man jabbing his neighbour with knee and elbow and fist in his eagerness to be first.

There were four hundred dancers and fifty-two jars. But there were only two hundred and sixty straws, and of those, only one was bored through. Among the four hundred young men who had been picked for this ceremony, one alone would stand with a hollow reed at a jar of sacred wine, happily drinking his fill.

It was a game of chance, but also a ritual, watched closely by Two Rabbit and Patecatl for clues to the will of the gods. Two hundred and sixty was the number of days in our sacred calendar, and fifty-two the number of years between the ceremonial kindling of one new fire and the next. To see which young man seized the right straw and which jar he drank from might give the priests a clue to what lay in the future for our people.

Unless somebody tried to shorten the odds.

“Move yourself, slave!”

I scrambled to my feet, narrowly avoiding the kick my master’s steward had casually aimed at me while I bolted what was left of my warm tortilla. The sweet girl from the palace kitchen who had passed it to me fresh from the griddle backed away into a corner, her eyes wide with sudden fear, but the big bully did not berate her for wasting bread on me. Nor did he demand to know what I was doing or hurl some witless insult at me, which was unusual. Instead, with a curt “Come with me!” he turned and stalked away.

“Thanks a lot, Huitztic,” I grumbled. I glanced over my shoulder but the girl had fled. “We were getting along nicely there, too...”

I hung back, preparing to dodge the kick that a remark like that would normally provoke, but all the response I got was, “This is no time for jokes. His Lordship has something to show you.”

That was restrained by the steward’s standards. Intrigued, I caught him up, and noticed that he was sweating. It was a cold, clear morning, when the frost lay late on the earth and the sky above the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was a blue so bright it hurt the eyes, yet his brow was beaded with moisture, glittering in the sunshine.

“In here.” He led me into a courtyard. “Your slave Yaotl, my Lord!” he announced in a loud whisper.

The enclosure was dark, surrounded by high walls the Sun had yet to clear, and the only warmth and light in it came from a squat brazier at its centre. I paused, squinting into corners while my eyes adjusted and I tried to make out what it was I was meant to see.

The feeble glow of the coals set off my master’s features perfectly, picking out every line and wrinkle in his gnarled old face, but making his bright, ferocious eyes shine. Lord Feathered in Black, the chief minister, chief justice, and chief priest of the Aztecs, the second most powerful man in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and perhaps the most dangerous, did not trouble to greet me. Instead he leaned forward in the high-backed wicker chair that was an emblem of his rank, clutching his jaguar-skin mantle around him, and snarled: “Look at the boy — the rabbit, here. Tell me what happened to him.”