Supernatural Noir

A little later I came to and found myself in a movie. The light was dim and this woman and guy, tall and slim, who looked like the stars of this movie, crouched over me, elegant and seeming to flicker slightly around the edges.

As that came into my mind, they looked at each other and smiled. I realized they knew what I saw and thought. Her name was Bertrade and his was Darnel. I knew all that without being told. Still being mostly numb probably made everything easier to accept.

“You’ll be well,” she said. There was an accent I couldn’t place. “We have taken care of your friend.”

Bertrade turned her head, and somehow I had a glimpse of what she saw. The one who’d attacked me, a tall guy with his head shaved, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, glassy eyed. I understood they had him under a kind of spell.

“An elf on a mission,” Darnel said, “and a mutual enemy.” I knew without them speaking that they were Fey, loyal subjects of the King beneath the Hill. They were lovers, tourists in the city. Even half in shock I knew that the first was true and the second was a cover. They were operatives.

Things weren’t good between their people and the King of Elfland. My city, my world, was a kind of buffer between the two countries. Elfland favored Germany in the war going on in Europe.

They’d been watching our elfin friend when I showed up and they nailed him as he smothered me. From thinking this was a movie, I gradually decided it was a dream, and a crazy one. I tried to push myself up.

As a kid I’d thought I was right handed. Then I broke some fingers when I was maybe twelve and learned I was better with my left. Now it was like the left arm was gone. I fell back and banged my head. “I’m useless,” I said.

They touched my memories of my short, bad war and long, lousy marriage. She frowned and shook her head at my misfortunes. “I’d want you to be in any unit where I served,” he said. First Darnel and then Bertrade touched my dead arm, quietly spoke words I didn’t understand. The two said goodbye and that we’d meet again. Then they were gone, and the elf with them.

Feeling came back, and my arm was better than new. I never told anyone else what had happened that night. Walking up Sixth Avenue to the Bigelow Building ten years later, it felt like a movie and a dream.

I let myself into my office, sat down, and called the answering service. It was night now and Gracie was off duty. The young lady who answered gave me a few messages. A call about a case that was going nowhere, one from somebody who wanted to sell me things, a couple of calls from people who wanted me to pay them: all calls that were going to wait.

Then there was a message from A

Instead I went out and had a bite to eat, and a drink or two, at McNulty’s, where the cops go. After that I spent some more of the Beyers’ fee at Moe’s on Third Street, where the cops and the hookers go. I finally settled in at the Cedar Tavern over on University Place, because Lacy Duveen, who tends bar there, would rather talk to me than listen to painters arguing.

Lacy got his nickname for working over Tiger Shaughnessy’s face with the laces of his gloves after Tiger hit him in the groin during a preliminary bout at the Garden. He and I go back to when we played pickup ball games on the East River as kids.

We talked about the time he was catching, and all the way from deep center I tossed out a ski

——

Next morning I woke up in my room with that throw on my mind. I’ve awakened in worse shape, and there was still a bit of the morning left. I’d had a dream of Bertrade that got away from me as I grabbed for it.

Out the window I saw it was a chilly, drizzling day on Cornelia Street. When I had washed and shaved and dressed, I put on my trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora.

When I came downstairs, Mrs. Palatino, the landlady, had her door on the first floor open and her television on as usual. She liked to show off that TV. Some guy in a chef’s hat was chopping celery and talking in a French accent.

Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church, and that’s why she rented to me, even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.

“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.

On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.

For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.

They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from A

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. A