Before Matt could decide whether it would be worse for the elevator to get stuck for six to eight hours or just crash to the bottom, ending all suspense, they had reached the lobby. Ada. Who had spent the trip considering her ponytail in the mirrored walls of the car, glanced at his glower and dimpled.
“If you don’t behave, I’ll tell you what I dreamed last night,” she warned him, beaming at Gaston, who opened the door for her and escorted her ten feet to the outer door.
Matt’s expression deepened. “Perfect,” Ada told him. “Hold that thought.”
From a pocket in her coat she drew an envelope. “And hold onto this.” Matt took it automatically. At first touch he hated the way the contents cushed together.
“That’s right,” said Ada, admiring the shift in his face. “You might sneer a little, too. Put it away somewhere. It’s more money than you ever paid to have a tooth pulled.”
Matt had been in the process of folding the envelope into his own coat pocket, but now he froze. From its heft, this envelope contained way too much currency for an outside pocket. He crunched the envelope farther, jamming it into his pants pocket. He shook his head.
That was the pocket he’d had picked once. He pulled back, but his hand wouldn’t come. The envelope was stuck against the coat lining; he couldn’t fold it small enough to pull free unless he went at it with both hands. After more mental cussing than thought, he shoved it back down into the pants pocket. If a pickpocket could get it out through all that without him feeling it, it was earned money.
That resolved, he looked around for Ada’s little purple bombshell. It was not there; the self-appointed heroine of this little adventure was skipping across the street to the bus stop. “The eleven still run on Sundays?”
Matt strolled casually over to join her. If she was planning to catch an eleven on a cold day, they’d have a while to talk things over. “Where are we going?” he inquired, sliding his hands into his pockets in a way he hoped was nonchalant.
“Trust me.” Her smile was dazzling, and her laugh was crystalline as she studied his expression.
A bus pulled up and opened its doors; it was a twenty-two. “This is such fun!” said Ada. “I haven’t been on a bus in years! What’s the fare nowadays?”
The driver told her, and she let the sum clatter into the cashbox, proclaiming, “We ride on a CTA bus: there’s no la-di-da about us! We drop in our fare as if we don’t care and sit down to grumble and cuss.”
Everyone on the bus heard this; Matt could tell by the way they hunkered down in their coats and fixed their attention out the windows. Maybe if he walked far enough behind her, they would all assume he had just happened to board the bus at the same time as a complete stranger.
The bus, going the wrong way for serious Christmas shopping, was only about half full, s his hopes were dashed. “There are two seats together in the back!” she called to him, and hurried off as if afraid someone would claim these before Matt could join her. One or two people chuckled. The seats were not all the way at the back of the bus; they were in front of a large elderly man with round cheeks to color of good lard and tiny, tiny eyes. He didn’t look terribly clean, but when he ventured on comment, Ada reached around the seat and patted him o the shoulder.
Soon the two of them were engaged in an animated conversation dealing, as far as Matt could follow it, with a dog named Alphonse Beauregard III. Matt maintained his dignity and a gaze focused straight ahead. For several blocks he kept his hands in his pockets. Then he decided that might be an unmistakable sign he had something else in his pockets. He took his hands out and tried to look poor. From time to time he glanced out the window to get his bearings, but he seldom rode the CTA I this direction.
He realized he had brought his bus token out of the pocket with the envelope in it. Had the envelope come a little loose? What if it was still sliding even looser? Could anyone see a corner of it sticking out the coat pocket? Suppose it had slid completely loose back at the bus stop, when he was groping for a token. Matt didn’t look down: that would give him away. He slid his right hand slowly up the side of the coat. That looked totally suspicious, so he plunged his hand suddenly into the pocket.
The envelope was still there. Touching it made it bend with a little crunkle that Matt felt anybody within hearing distance could tell was that of a large amount of currency being compressed. He slid his hand free, and bumped Ada with his elbow. She slid closer and threw an arm around his neck without pausing in her conversation Matt wished she hadn’t. he couldn’t reach into his pocket now, and what if the envelope really had started to pull free when he jerked his hand out?
“Oh, this is our stop, Clive,” Ada told the old man. “We must do this more often. Come along.”
The arm around his neck gave Matt any cue he needed, and they marched through the side exit. She waved to the old man as the bus pulled away. Matt read envy in Clive’s eyes.
“An old buddy of yours?”
“He is now.” Ada stepped up on the curb and looked across the street. “I do like older men. They’re so intelligent and understanding and everything, and if you ask them for advice, they’re always willing to help.”
“If they help you,” Matt told her, “They’re not that intelligent.”
She dimpled at him. “Oh, they’re thinking all the time.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Ada curtsied to him and then ran into the street, an arm in the air. A blue and white taxi pulled up next to her.
“Now what?” Matt demanded, following.
“Part of my fiendishly clever plan.” Raising one end of her scarf mysteriously in front of her face, she told the driver, in a hoarse whisper, “35410 Crawford Street.”
The cabbie laughed an uncertain laugh, and glanced at Matt for confirmation. Returning Matt’s shrug, he started the meter and then the cab.
Matt checked his pocket four times in the course of the ride; he might have done so more often, but noticed the cabbie checking him out in the rearview. The scenery outside the window was unedifying; he was utterly out of his neighborhood. Not they passed the “Soon-To-Be-Famous Inn”, now they passed a row of bright red houses with lacy white ironwork out front. Matt recognized nothing.
He looked at Ada just once, and started to ask where they were headed. She leaned toward him and murmured, “The bluebird on the schoolbus saw the blackbird on the bank.”
The cabbie’s eyes widened. Matt cleared his throat and checked out the window some more.
Way out on Crawford Street the neighborhoods were getting lonelier. There were broad buildings, high chainlink fences, and no sidewalks. Few cars and fewer people were abroad. The address Ada requested turned out to be that of a tall electric security gate. He looked at her, but she already had the door open and was handing a folded wad of currency to the driver.
“Private garage,” she told Matt as the cab sped off. “Really just car storage.” She fished a little card out of an inside pocket and inserted it into a security box.
“Is that what they turned the Hot Shots Motel into when the new owners got it?” Matt was feeling a bit relaxed at last. The place was quiet and there was a good, solid gate sliding through windswept snow. They could watch anyone who tried to get in.
“They might make more money.” Ada stepped over in front of a security camera and smiled up at it. “How clever of you to deduce we’re going to ‘The Hot Shots’. But this isn’t it.”
“Oh.” Matt followed her inside, and made no further comment, following her to a small garage that looked like all the rest, inserted her card again, and stood back next to him as the door slid up. A little red Crosley waited among the shadows inside.
“I’d like to see them follow us now,” she said, stepping in to unlock the passenger door.
“Who?”
“Miss Skull, of course. I bet it is Walter Prince. But anybody in Miss Skull’s line of business might be following. After all, we don’t want him to think it’s a trap because I’m bringing someone else tour assignation.”
Traps were on Matt’s mind, too, but Walter Prince was not a large part of the thought. He did not get into the Crosley.
“Are you sure you didn’t write those other letters, too?”
Ada leaned on the car. “Now, why….” She looked at the ceiling of the garage. “Oh. No, see, this is just a little plan Marshall and I made for when we want to go someplace without anybody knowing: little visits and weekends his kids and the media would never approve of. You wouldn’t either. I can tell.”
She unlocked the driver’s side door. “You know, you’d be a lot more fun if you’d let yourself go once in a while.”
Matt yanked on his own door. “Only when I’m sure I can get myself back,” he muttered.
She threw him a grin he was meant to join, and didn’t, and then started the Crosley. She backed out; the garage door came down with a thump. They proceeded to the gate, where she stepped out to use her security card, smile at the security camera again, and throw loose snow at Matt’s window. Returning to her seat, she set off down the lonesome road.
“Do you know,” she said, after several minutes of solid silence, “You have never once called me by name?”
Matt cleared his throat. “Well, Mrs. Silberwetter….”
“I knew it! I knew it!” Compulsive laughter, like a child’s, rolled from her. She swerved to avoid a man o a motorcycle. “I wish I’d had money on it! Oh, you’re so cute I wish you were real!”
This did not encourage conversation. Matt sank back against his seat, sullenly surveying gray heaps of snow plowed up along the roadside.
“Never mind.” She patted the thigh nearest to her. “You’ll like this place. You’ll learn about life.”
There wasn’t enough room on the seat to pull away, but Matt did his best. When he wanted to learn about life, he’d read about it in a book.
Ada paid no attention to this case of the sulks, and started to sing, probably deliberately pfgf key, the theme from “Beany and Cecil”. Matt glared out the window.
Did Ada Silberwetter have any concept of being nervous? To have that little pain like hunger in the webbing between your thumb and forefinger, to feel your arms rendered inert by not quite physical spasms shooting along the muscles?
This feeling did not relent as the car barreled along the fringes of the city. Like any fringe, these fringes were loose: open empty lots with snow frosting the garbage dumped there, separated by neighborhoods of boarded-up houses and half-dead gas stations, drive-ins, and malls. Some of these had, in fact, died, and been transmogrified into used-car lots, discount grocery stores, and churches. One or two people wandered along the snow in front of these, headed for no apparent destination in no great hurry.
Ada turned right at a motel whose sign advertised ‘WELCOME TO PSIRLOIN”. Some blocks later, she took a left around a defunct restaurant. This sign had once featured a woman in some kind of waitress costume, but wind and weather had whipped away most of the paint, leaving only the head and cross-straps of the uniform in high relief, a long-haired skull and crossbones.
The sign caught the attention of Matt-the-Writer to such an extent that Matt himself took some seconds to realize they had stopped, and sitting in a half-filled parking lot crisscrossed by cracks and patches of ice.
Ada shut off the ignition. “This is the place.”
The place was a long low building sided in brown vinyl. No word anywhere on the brown background indicated ownership or function: always a bad sign. Matt leaned forward, seeking any clue. Then he sat back again, the nervous aches abating a bit. A portable plastic signboard on wheels was tucked just behind a Toyota, not far from the door: black letters on the yellow background announced ‘INDIVIDUAL TANNING BOOTHS”. A cut-rate salon: nothing so sinister about that.
Ada heard his sigh of relief, and followed his gaze. “Ah. Yes, indeed. This is a place people come to get tanned.”
“I figured that out,” Matt told her.
“No, you didn’t. You figured this was a place people came to get a tan.”
Matt had no time to Watson this out. The driver suddenly dropped, her head almost in his lap. He scrambled for the door handle but hadn’t found it yet when he realized she was reaching into the glove compartment.
“Perfectly respectable place,” she said, from her horizontal position. “They take all the major credit cards.”
A lump of something was drawn from among the road maps and first aid kits. She sat back and unfolded a black leather mask with a blue ruffle around it.
This was too much for Matt, who opened his mouth to object. She went on, “And they like their customers to be discreet. Members get blue masks. The hostesses wear green ones, attendants get yellow, and guests….” She handed a second mask to Matt and tossed a third back into the glove compartment. “…wear red.”
That was more reasonable. She hadn’t, after all, bought a mask to match her outfit just for the drama of it. She had dressed to match her mask. Matt took the mask and shoved it into his coat pocket, nudging the fat envelope beyond to make sure it was there. Ada was similarly tucking her mask into her….
“Member?” he demanded.
But Ada had already hopped down from the car to trot across the parking lot. Matt quickly followed. “Member?” he repeated, on reaching the door.
She opened this and led him into the vestibule. “Promise you won’t embarrass me, okay? Put on your mask.”
A tiny door high on the wall opened and a pair of eyes surrounded by black leather peered out. “Me,” said Ada, holding a card up to the eyes. “And I’ve got one of the Johnsons with me.”
A latch clicked, and a larger door around the tiny one swung back. Matt set his glasses over his mask. He wasn’t convinced he wanted to see what he was getting into, but this would at least give him a chance to duck.
But it was a perfectly ordinary man behind the door, dressed in perfectly ordinary street clothes And a yellow mask. Behind him stood a strictly standard adult bookstore: linoleum floor pegboard walls with racks of reading material (well, gawking material), and three blue-masked customers studiously ignoring each other. It was not a place Matt would have chosen for any rendezvous, but it was no weird lair of villains, either.
Ada, all business, shucked off her coat. “Wait here, Watson,” she said, handing it to him. “I have to go chat with the manager and see if any skeletons left messages.”
All eyes followed her as she sauntered across the room to the cashier behind one display case. As long as those eyes weren’t on him, Matt didn’t mind. He eased toward a rack of books under the sign “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of Smith and Wesson Law” and tried to look inconspicuous.
They had quite a variety of material, a veritable library of congress. Classics like Claremont and Wood’s “Suicidal Sluts of Saturn” rubbed shoulders (so to speak) with squarebound volumes whose covers featured photos of athletic men and women wearing nothing but their glasses. He had never heard of “Sex With Specs” and here they were, already up to Volume XIV.
Matt-the-writer could hardly be denied in the face of such artifacts. What if a place like this was discovered a thousand years from now? How would archaeologists deal with it, and what would they learn about Ancient Fertility Rituals? And, more important, how could this be worked into “Ascent”? The Red Section? He wished he could take notes, but just before he reached for pen and paper he decided this might not suit the establishment’s concept of discretion.
“I didn’t even know they MADE UD skirts!”
Only one person would raise her voice this way in a library. Ada Silberwetter stood before a high glass case of devices Matt had read about but never seen in real life (if that’s what this was.) Curious, he joined her at the case, but kept his eyes moving as his driver’s ed instructors had commanded—up, down, left, right—in case she thought he was really interested. It was an interesting display. The customer could purchase accessories for any possible pravity, but the main display seemed to be dedicated to the rougher forms of instruction, from soft nylon whips to Stanley hairbrushes to rather lethal-looking lashes.
Ada looked up at him from under her own lethal lashes. “We got here first,” she murmured. “Did you want to browse some more, or shall we wait in the lounge?”
An inflatable doll was winking at him from the right, and Ada was studying him from the left. Matt felt no desire to stand there and study.
“The lounge,” he said.
Ada turned to a green-masked woman. “Add it to the tab.” The woman nodded.
“This way,” Ada told him. “Better take off your coat. They keep it hot back here.”
The hostess brushed aside a rack of leather bikinis to reveal another door. It was thickly padded with leather on the other side, and led to a long, narrow corridor hung with mistletoe, which Matt sidestepped.
Another hostess in a green mask met them halfway through, and led them forward. Matt, busy removing his scarf and coat without dislodging his mask, AND making sure he did not dislodge the thick envelope in his pants pocket, did not notice at once that this hostess was much less formally clad thn the one in the store. The muscles of her back shifted the leather of her corset as she strode forward on impossibly tall stiletto heels.
This explained at last what sort of establishment he was strolling toward. He had naturally associated “lounge” with the one at Down: tables, ashtrays, vending machines, restroom doors. But a “lounge” could also be a bar filled with smoke, expensive mixed drinks, and a floor show that would send Ada into giggles and reduce him to blushing incoherence.
Miss Skull or no Miss Skull, this had to be Ada Silberwetter’s idea. Matt’s breath came in long, seething hisses. How much did the implements in the glass case cost, and how much would it cost an amateur to rent them for just ten minutes, to teach someone a badly needed lesson? Some people might be a little less chirpy as they drove home if it were harder to sit down.
Fierce, fearsome, Matt stalked along behind the two women who could not see from their angle that he was a juggernaut of righteous indignation. His eyes burned into the unflinching backs of his shameless guides. Which was why he never noticed the end of his scarf was dragging on the floor until he stepped on it.
Growling, feeling his face burn, he rubbed his knees and then scooped up all the coats and scarves. The ladies waited patiently at the next door. Behind the masks, one pair of eyes was neutral and bored, while the other pair blazed with entertainment.
This pair dipped as their owner gave him another curtsey. “’Will you walk into my closet?’ said Francisco to the guy?”
The other woman unlocked the door. The room beyond was dim, and exuded an unsubtle odor Matt recognized before he knew it. He pulled up short.
He’d expected to smell beer. That was sweat.
