Supernatural Noir

I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t come yet, and I’d given it several very good chances.

In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue, the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.

About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife, I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge. I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?

Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west, and I followed them.

A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more, I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter the Gentry.

As we crossed Eleventh Avenue, a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light onboard shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner, and then, for an instant, I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly, and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.

Approaching Twelfth Avenue, I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the oceangoing yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through someone else’s eyes.

At certain moments, time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pi

The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was ratlike little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.

I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with the grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.

As I dove for cover, I was knocked flat, and a cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine-gun fire stopped, and my war was over.

Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.

Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and A

Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them, the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.

A figure, tall and thin, wavering slightly, stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a handgun. I wished I had a grenade.

A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded, but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.

A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.

The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.

But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.

Figures moved in the darkness beyond the lights. Fair Folk were out there. For an instant I caught an image of long, thin figures on a small powerboat.

The lights on the yacht flickered for a moment. The tall elf on the deck looked my way. He seemed amused. Bertrade’s image telling intruders to stay out got knocked aside like it was cardboard. He was in my mind. My feet moved without my willing them and my body shambled forward to the foot of the gangplank.

I saw myself through his eyes, an old man stu

Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me: “My left-hand man!”

Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. That left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him, but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.

For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.

Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank, the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart, but I blew his jaw off and it started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.

——

The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes, and was headed out to Thursday-afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.

I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them. Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.

We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry had come out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends. Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.

That dream I’d half remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.

“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”

It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.

Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.

It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone, that’s all I remember.

But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.

Tomorrow evening, Jim and A

My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps, I’ll see Bertrade again.